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50-41
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50
Nourished by Time – The Passionate Ones
Marcus Elliot Brown, AKA one-man project Nourished By Time, has a classic R&B singing voice in the style of Freddie Jackson or Luther Vandross: warm, earnest and with every word enunciated as if to express his keenness of feeling. But his music is quite different: a slippery layer cake of samples, multitudinous keys and lo-fi pop production, with Brown singing of a world where “the ebb and flow isn’t ebbing right”, be it in love or civic life. There is still room for an instant-classic R&B ballad though, in Tossed Away. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
***
49
Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
Everything is just so on the British Canadian producer’s sixth album: expensively plush deep house suggesting club lights low, gleaming mirrors, potent looks igniting across the dancefloor. As much as the cold beat and ballroom flow of Ladida or the slapping “body, body, body” incantations of On 2 Something suggest a steadfast commitment to abandon, Jordan maintains impeccable poise and control throughout, whether in diva mode on Words 2 Say, breaking hearts on Bite the Bait, standing up for her needs on Doing It Too (“I’m not too much / You just give too little”) or patiently waiting for a frustrated lover to see the light on Ladida. Commanding, wise and committed to atmospheric excellence, party hosts don’t come better. Laura Snapes
***
48
Jerskin Fendrix – Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire
Jerskin Fendrix’s high-profile scores for the last three Yorgos Lanthimos films can’t really help prime you for the Midlands composer’s eccentrically beautiful second album, which pairs pristine musical theatre with the harebrained prog cabaret of Faith No More and (particularly) the under-sung Morphine. At first, Once Upon a Time … casts the rural bliss of growing up in 00s Shropshire in a golden light, a haven of getting ratted on Baileys and listening to Kanye on a farm, then having a lovely hungover group breakfast in someone’s kitchen. But the unexpected deaths he has experienced in recent years intrude to spoil paradise, eliciting feverish, absurdist expressions of grief – Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle is a bravura wig-out – and fathomless devastation from his camp, craggy voice. It demands a full theatrical production. LS
***
47
Clipping – Dead Channel Sky
Clipping frontman Daveed Diggs is best known for being in the original cast of Hamilton, and for all that this album is filled with noisy industrial rap, you can easily imagine it being successfully adapted for the Broadway stage. Dead Channel Sky is set in a cyberpunk dystopia not dissimilar to the scorched-sun “real world” of the Matrix, humming with janky tech and populated with fascists and freaky hedonists. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes render it in acid squiggles and revving breakbeats, while Diggs delivers his mutoid poetry like a prophet jacked up on some amphetamine he’s synthesised in a backstreet lab. BBT
***
46
The Tubs – Cotton Crown
In different hands, the Tubs’ second album might be a crushing listen, and understandably so. In 2014, frontman Owen Williams’ mother, the songwriter and author Charlotte Greig, died by suicide. Grief, as these songs detail, made him a rubbish boyfriend. But Cotton Crown is often funny and ardent, and especially self-aware about how new love might feel like a life raft to a depressed mind ill-equipped to reciprocate: “Know it’s all in my brain / Caught in the middle of loving you and being insane,” Williams sings on Fair Enough. His striking voice, somewhere between Richard Thompson and Bob Mould, bolts through the band’s joyful jangle-pop. Clear students of the form, they’re virtuosos with zero patience for perfection, their riffs hurtling and plundering like seagulls going at a spilled catch as they vigorously rough you up with profundity. LS
***
45
Smerz – Big City Life
Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt feel like the pop girlies of the incredibly prolific and off-kilter Copenhagen Rhythmic Music Conservatory scene, making music that’s more outward-facing and arch than some of their insular and traditional (and equally great) classmates. Their second album lurches between throwing yourself at life – “you’re a girl in the city and you shouldn’t think twice”, they chant in deadpan harmony on Roll the Dice – and actually thinking twice quite a lot in existential spirals about purpose and desire. The dissonance between confidence and anxiety comes through in the album’s stilted beauty: one minute, their whorls of prepared piano carry you along like clouds amid perfectly turned pop-R&B and balladry; then they stab and stutter, like cracks in the pavement destined to trap your heels. In 2023, K-pop’s brightest hopes NewJeans hired them as co-writers: more pop bearing their imprint can only be a good thing. LS
***
44
Sabrina Carpenter – Man’s Best Friend
Released almost exactly a year after her superstar-minting breakthrough Short n’ Sweet, and using a palette of soft rock, 80s pop, light disco and yearning country melodies, Carpenter added rich colour to one of pop’s most distinctive self-portraits. Her blatant sexuality is offset by an ironising sense of camp and a deep streak of cynicism, as she wonders whether to wrap her little finger round a series of hot but useless men. But whether dialling her exes while hopped up on “go-go juice” or being toxic for the sport of it (“you think that I’m gonna fuck with your head / well, you’re absolutely right”), Carpenter knows she’s part of the problem. Her fake helplessness at her own worst impulses is just one part of a formidable screwball comedy arsenal – she’s a Rosalind Russell for the dating app era. BBT
***
43
Jennifer Walton – Daughters
This Sunderland producer’s previous work included one EP of power electronics, one of antic club tracks, collabs with Aya and 96 Back as Microplastics, gigging with Kero Kero Bonito and a smattering of other credits. So her staggering, fully formed songwriterly debut was a total bolt from the blue. A swarming orchestral epic with shades of Julia Holter and Phil Elverum, it addressed her grief for her late father in serenely surrealist images – hitting a deer with a car in the middle of the night – and the painfully mundane realism of sitting in hospital corridors together. The standout Miss America combined both to stunning effect, a numbed incantation of everything Walton had seen on the US trip where she learned of her father’s diagnosis, the familiar now remade horribly mythic. LS
***
42
Erika de Casier – Lifetime
Erika de Casier’s fourth album updates the Y2K R&B template that fought for body-to-body sensuality in the face of rising digital creep. The old-school dial tones that pierce Lifetime’s rapt, liquid atmosphere work both as Janet homage and ironic sigh at how good those forebears had it when emotional warfare could only be conducted via pager: “Took a screenshot so / I could look at your pretty face all the time now / Without a sign that I’m online,” de Casier sings on earworm Delusional, a low-slung anthem for contemporary dating anxiety. “Hit midnight / Not even a text to hold me warm,” she rues on The Chase. That’s one of the most inviting things about Lifetime: its seductively cool surfaces conceal de Casier frantically kicking her feet below the surface, just like the rest of us. LS
***
41
Danny Brown – Stardust
The Detroit rapper’s first post-rehab record totally disproved his fears that sobriety makes artists boring. On Stardust, Brown is still hard-wired with cartoonish verve, coupled with a genuinely touching sense of gratitude: “Sleeping real good at night ’cos I’m proud of myself,” he raps on Book of Daniel. While you probably wouldn’t describe someone who ponders “going bonkers and knocking out your chompers” as a wise elder, his hunger for life, opportunity and unmediated sensation blares through in how evidently gagged he is to centre younger producers from the digicore and hyperpop undergrounds: his unruly kids 8485, Jane Remover, Underscores, Frost Children and more make Stardust trip with glitch, rave, squealing riffs and overdriven noise. The rare record that makes you want to riot and shed a smiling single tear emoji. LS
***
40-31
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40
YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds
In 21 minutes, the New York band’s debut chews you up and spits you out the other side in a tentacular whirr of rototoms, guitars that shriek and whine like neglected machinery, erratic tempos and frontman Zack Borzone’s choked-out vocals. The way the record lurches and reels brings to mind the classic horror film scene in which a human undergoes a violent, magnificent transformation into some sort of beast: much like Gilla Band’s Most Normal, 45 Pounds is a font of mutant rock pleasures. LS
***
39
Sudan Archives – The BPM
The title refers to the beats per minute of dance music, but for an album that is so totally alive, it surely also refers to a pounding heart. Sudan Archives (AKA Angeleno producer-singer-songwriter-violinist Brittney Parks) announces that “life’s a game and I got VR goggles” as she revels in the epicurean joys of sex, dancing, travel and music itself with an almost superhuman appetite: “The rest are cowards / They choose to eat and we devour.” It’s all done with breezy good humour but there’s something inspiring, even quietly political about this mindful rejection of the straight life. Her backings – full of pop-R&B and ethereal electro – also dart away from obvious mainstream paths. BBT
***
38
Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
It’s easy to see why US singer-songwriter Cain has become so adored. This album further sketches out the kind of storytelling universe that attracts footnote-writing fandoms: it’s a prequel to the events of her debut album Preacher’s Daughter, deepening the tale of Ethel and a cast of young peers as they fumble towards connection and understanding. Her moody, romantic slowcore is also perfect music for listening to on headphones as you walk around boring suburban streets wishing you could leave for bigger things. It’s also great for road trips: songs between five and 15 minutes that seem to make a long, slow blur of the pell-mell world outside. BBT
***
37
Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving
The British breakthrough of the year, as Dean – already doing decent business with her pleasant but rather neat debut Messy – reached a completely new level of songcraft. Bossa nova, folk and soul (classic and neo) are warmed together with beautiful production, evaporating any sense of pastiche to make a sound that’s both easy on the ear but distinctly Dean’s. Every song has a superb top line, Dean stretching them into loose jazzy shapes (Let Alone the One You Love, Lady Lady) or tightening them into brisk pop (Man I Need, Something Inbetween). But it’s the lyrics that make these songs so red-blooded: every stage of love, from the first flutter of flirtation to the adrenal shock of rejection, is made so true to life. BBT
***
36
Anna von Hausswolff – Iconoclasts
Anna von Hausswolff is no stranger to a monumental statement: her primary instrument is the pipe organ, a towering edifice of tin and arsenic that offers her an ever-renewing sense of awe. But the Swedish composer’s sixth album goes bigger than ever, grappling with mortality, transcendence and evil in a series of stormy epics that also lash a little pop structure to her prow. “Oh, I’m breaking up with language / Oh, in search of something bigger than this,” she screams on Stardust, an exhilarating co-pilot on the path to absolution. LS
***
35
Bon Iver – Sable, Fable
If, as Justin Vernon recently suggested, this is the last ever Bon Iver album, it’s a beautiful redemption arc: a loving send-up of his anxious, myopic sad-sack self blossoms into a radiant appreciation of possibility, sensuality, risk. Everything Is Peaceful Love has one of the year’s best refrains: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now!”, giddy with thrill and absolutely no idea of what to do when you get up there other than enjoy the view. And while there are gorgeously passionate songs here, it’s the ones about gracefully letting go of an unviable love that really underscore the admirable humility in Vernon’s bowing out. LS
***
34
Snocaps – Snocaps
Katie Crutchfield’s full-throated transformation into country doyenne on her last couple of albums as Waxahatchee almost makes it easy to forget her indie-rock origins. Fourteen years since she and twin sister Allison wound down their teen band PS Eliot, the DIY stalwarts got back together – with a little help from MJ Lenderman and producer Brad Cook – and went back to brass tacks for their surprise album as Snocaps. What a treat it was: full of punchy indignation – “I could never just … coast!” they exclaim on Coast – crunchy ruminations and sing-songy contemplations of what it means to depend on and grow alongside one another. You’d follow them anywhere. LS
***
33
Amaarae – Black Star
We all need an Amaarae in our lives: the person who, when you weakly protest that you’re a bit tired to go out, will soon have you holding a bottle of decanted rum in the back of an Uber, while alongside you she looks quizzically at a series of resealable plastic bags. “Ketamine, coke and molly,” she chants on Starkilla; “I spiked this drink so please open your mouth,” she tells her lover on Fineshyt. And this club-ready album from the irrepressible Ghanaian-American pop star ends up being a sensual body high, as she chases sex and glamour into the ends of the night. BBT
***
32
Perfume Genius – Glory
With typical grace and humour Mike Hadreas sends up his self-defeating tendencies on his seventh album, and wonders how old you have to be to escape those lifelong patterns: like the contradiction of struggling to face the world while also fantasising about violence and romanticising “all the poems I’ll get out” of it. It feels apt that Glory starts with the western twang of It’s a Mirror, suggesting a fixed, brawny masculine archetype – then breaks it down over the course of the record, a gothic, celestial voyage into the interior, and the latest addition to a uniquely beautiful American songbook. LS
***
31
Horsegirl – Phonetics On and On
Spindly rock à la the Velvets and the Raincoats is as spartan in its constituent parts as it is high on reward, and Chicago trio Horsegirl demonstrated the inexhaustible pleasures of this 60-year-old form on their second album. With production from Cate Le Bon, they wove magic from just a few thrumming guitar and bass notes and Nora Cheng’s nonchalant, near-spoken vocals, as well as a knack for melodic hooks as finely turned as intricate woodwork: the bittersweet, skipping chorus of Information Content is an all-timer. LS
***
30-21 coming soon
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Come back tomorrow for the next 10 albums in the countdown! Comments will be open on weekdays from 2-5pm GMT
