30
Yard Act
Where’s My Utopia?
(Island)
Bucking the sophomore slump, Yard Act dramatically expand their minimalist post-punk grooves, overlaid by frontman James Smith’s observational reflections. Where’s My Utopia? has funky tones, hints of Afrobeat and EDM, and snippets that mimic a James Brown intro, sterile newsreels, and vaudeville-esque melodies, all bookending the songs within. The album has quirks, surprising genre twists, and breezy to semi-profound philosophical self-reflection.
Self-aware and self-deprecating, Yard Act own up to wanting commercial success (“We Make Hits”). Once the hook has you on the dance floor, you discover mid-gyration that you are considering the traumas we carry and inevitably inflict. The awareness is jarring, but before you can catch your breath, the band move into hypnotic, nostalgic narrations that expose our compulsion to mix fact with fiction and settle for illusions of utopia over presence. Clubbing in the face of nihilism never felt so light nor so crucial. – Rick Quinn
29
Yasmin Williams
Acadia
(Nonesuch)
Guitarist Yasmin Williams‘ proficiency was immediately evident, as was her inventiveness in adding an array of influences (not to mention tap shoes and kalimba) to her technical skill. Since her breakout in 2021, Williams has continued to improve, now bringing in a stellar collection of guests to help define a very personal style. Acadia remains distinctly Williams’ vision, typically acoustic guitar work incorporating various styles without sounding indebted to any of them.
Artists like Don Flemons, Allison de Groot, and Tatiana Hargreaves appear not so much to add rootsiness to the music but to enhance the specificity of Williams’ trips. The fingerpicker grabs an electric guitar for “Dream Lake”, moving into truly psychedelic territory, the touches of jazz further developed in “Malamu”, although neither Williams nor her saxophonist leaves the strange world of Acadia.
It’s a joy to see Williams grow as a composer and collaborator without any sacrifice of the twists that gave her a distinctive voice from the start. She might float near Americana on “Hummingbird” or drift into space at other times, but she sounds perfectly grounded in defining her own territory, with a growing level of artistry. – Justin Cober-Lake
28
The Last Dinner Party
Prelude to Ecstasy
(Island)
With a band name that simultaneously evokes a bacchanal feast and an upper room meal cut by betrayal, the Last Dinner Party stake a claim as a band to watch with the release of their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy. The art rock and baroque pop of this five-member group of LBGTQ artists flow from a mesmerizing record full of genre shifts, tempo changes, and swings in tone and mood—sometimes within the same song.
The Prelude to Ecstasy brims with echoes of ABBA, Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks, and Florence and the Machine—a sonic palette from which the Last Dinner Party paint razor-sharp images of the peril and promise of both female and queer existence. The metaphor within “The Feminine Urge” of the cultural expectation to be a “dark red liver stretched out on rocks”, converting poison to love haunts and convicts. It is The Second Sex as dream pop. – Rick Quinn
27
The Smile
Wall of Eyes
(XL)
Radiohead seem to have painted themselves into a corner. Over 30 years of defying norms and bucking convention finds the band less willing or able to generate genuine challenge and surprise, yet their glacial release schedule creates an expectation for every note to be polished and perfect. In a sense, they’re raging against the machine, yet they are the machine. The only answer comes from doing what they want when they want. Sometimes, that means rocking out. Other times, it means dissolving gentle, subtle folk into a glitter shower of ashes and steam.
Wall of Eyes is made from the same base matter as Radiohead–epic guitar rock, knotty prog, mind-bending kosmische music, and modern classical music, all used to reflect, refract, and critique politics and our modern paranoid technocratic society. They weave them together in less apparent ways. The ghostly soul of the title track evaporates into a digital ether of fax sound and random noise. “Read the Room” starts as a proggy King Crimson outtake before lumbering into a moody, doomy half-step breakbeat.
“Under Our Pillow” rides on a percolating popcorn rhythm before dissolving into an icy meteor shower of glistening guitars, only to recrystallize with a sleek, propulsive motorik pulse. They keep you guessing constantly, and if you’re a fan of artful, adventurous, avant-garde guitar rock, you can’t wait to see what happens next. Johnny Greenwood may joke that his goal with the Smile is to release music that’s “90% as good, twice as often,” but we’ll take those odds. – J. Simpson
26
SUMAC
The Healer
(Thrill Jockey)
SUMAC, like death, are coming for us all. Their new album, The Healer, is their longest to date, a cavernous maze of noise, an ocean of cathartic doom, and a meditative drone that packs it all into four tracks that bring the album to a whopping hour and 16-minute runtime. The result is one of the best metal records of the year. Its feature film length runtime is fitting in that the whole sit-down experience (emphasis on experience), while daunting and perhaps foreign to some listeners in the current era of 20-second content (not to be an old geezer about it), is a rewarding thing to be weathered.
As The Healer reaches an unashamed headbanging close, you may be unable to help yourself from dancing in the wreckage of it all. It feels like the culmination of a sort of trilogy for SUMAC that began with 2018’s Love In Shadow and continued with the equally stunning May You Be Held in 2020. It’s a much-earned (that word again) moment where SUMAC freely channel their visions to become who they are. The results are overwhelming. You won’t believe your ears. – Seth Troyer
25
Sierra Ferrell
Trail of Flowers
(Rounder)
Sierra Ferrell‘s music comes with risks: the old-time music and odd storytelling could turn into something more theater than anything. So far, she’s avoided that trap, but with Trail of Flowers, she completely avoids it, fully realizing a variety of sounds, exploring heartfelt longing, and pinning down unforgettable melodies. Whether using Appalachian traditions or bluegrass, or updated honky tonk, Ferrell knows how to find a sound, even as she expands it for this album.
The folk of “American Dreaming” provides one of the year’s highlights, and Ferrell uses it as the perfect opening. She can be lonely, bored, funny, desirous, or murderous, sometimes within a verse, and her vocal delivery gives her often straightforward songwriting the impact the underlying emotions deserve. As she moves through a long thread of American roots music, she builds her world of cowboys and travelers, sometimes with almost hidden insight into that history (as in “Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County”).
The record ends with “No Letter” and a dive back into old-time music with a singalong. It’s simple, direct, devoid of costumes or theatrics, and still completely effective. Ferrell discovered the right place for her with a mix of big and small moments, various styles, and an exceptional ability to get it across in a manner as unique as traditional. – Justin Cober-Lake
24
Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown
(Domino)
Releasing a solo debut under your own name over 30 years into a music career will give people pause. It’s nearly impossible not to read it as a personal statement, declaring, “This is me, this is who I am,” which is especially tantalizing with a figure as shadowy and enigmatic as Portishead‘s Beth Gibbons.
Lives Outgrown is less of a departure and reinvention and more of a consolidation of everything Gibbons has done since releasing Portishead’s defining two LPs in the 1990s. Sonically, it’s closest to the last album released under her own name, 2002’s Out of Season with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, contributing under the name, but with a hint of the challenging modern classical she explored on Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Like Out of Season, Lives Outgrown is opulent with strings, woodwinds, and an honest-to-goodness children’s choir, creating a gorgeous jeweled setting for Gibbons’ spectral folk transmissions while ghostly choruses murmur and wail in the wings. It’s a haunted garden that’s twice as lovely for its poison and shadows. It’s also a stunning achievement in one of the most interesting and uncompromising careers of the last 30 years. – J. Simpson
23
Arooj Aftab
Night Reign
(Verve)
The Saudi Arabian-born Arooj Aftab offers a dark, mysterious, and intoxicating blend of slow-burn jazz and her Pakistani roots. True to its title, Night Reign is an album best experienced in the late evening hours, with guest appearances from Moor Mother and Elvis Costello, among others. Coming off the heels of 2023’s Love in Exile, Aftab’s collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, that record’s jazz feel may have at least partially inspired this new release.
Highlights include the torch song elegance of “Raat Ki Rani”, and the gorgeous, layered ballad “Whiskey”, about the end of a night as Aftab’s companion has been typically over-imbibing. Whether she’s infusing her own songs with the Urdu language poetry of 18th-century Indian poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda or bringing a fresh take to the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves”, Aftab has created a compelling musical world unlike anything else you’re bound to encounter. – Chris Ingalls
22
Heems
VEENA LP
(VEENA)
VEENA LP, Queens rapper Heems‘ newest album, is an elegant, thrilling, and hilarious tightrope act. This is Heems’ second album this year. While listening to him rap on this project, I get the impression that he is a different person from the one I heard a few months ago on Lafandar. In a subtle way, with the release of VEENA LP, Heems as an artist has been reborn.
VEENA LP is Heems’ best record as a solo artist. I see my immigrant story here. One hears of his family’s struggle before arriving in the United States before he was born. That is a significant impetus for Heems as an artist. You can hear Heems triumphantly coming out of the other side. Yet, I also haven’t laughed this hard while listening to a rap album since Quelle Chris’ vaudevillian macabre spectacle DEATHFAME. – Luis Aguasvivas
21
Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch
(Mexican Summer)
Jessica Pratt‘s Here in the Pitch possesses a dark beauty. The songs quietly disturb. Something seems off, yet this unsettling nature makes one pay close attention. The internal contradictions suggest the complexity of seemingly simple feelings of attraction. One can be simultaneously enticed and repulsed; the two aspects are inseparable.
Pratt has said the production was influenced by records such as the Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds. That can be heard in the mix of quiet, strange, and fussy elements, where each instrument carries equal weight with the silence. In songs such as “Empires Never Know”, “Nowhere It Was”, and “Get Your Head Out”, the music slowly builds and falls in layered ways. The swaying rhythms are magnetic, but one never knows when they will drop out or what is next. Is that raindrops or a metronome? The mystery of what one hears and when and if the sound will reemerge offers auditory pleasure. – Steve Horowitz