ive prolly posted about all of these throughout the year but figured it'd be fun to compile them in one blog. it's not ranked, i don't think of music that way really, but i do have a stand-out favorite and i'll keep that for last.
Skrillex - Quest for Fire
dance, electronic
I went from being sorta cold to real hot on this album in record time. I feel pretty confident with most listens of stuff that I sorta know out of the gate if I fuck with something or not and for whatever reason Quest for Fire didn't click on my first listen. I was probably still trying to see an album that wasn't there. Thankfully, I gave it a couple more listens and it quickly grew on me to make that early apprehension a distant memory. The production on it is unreal and some of Skrillex's strongest bangers in his career exist on here, like the infectious "RATATA" or the truly insane soundscape of "XENA", linked above.
Get it where you listen to music here.
Paramore - This Is Why
pop, alt rock
There's not much for me to say about This Is Why that isn't sorta gushing about how wonderful it is that Paramore has never had a slump. Every release of theirs has simply been better than the last one and this album is no exception. Catchy, thoughtful, incredibly well produced. I'm incredibly thankful that Hayley Williams' vocals still make my heart skip a beat.
t+pazolite - FAKE CIRCUS
j-core, hardcore
Couple tracks on here that are previously-released singles but this is definitely t+paz's strongest album release to date. The new stuff on here fucking floored me. "MAXIMAL TECHNO" (linked above) is an insane love letter to late-90s/early-2000s hard techno stuff you'd hear in Bemani and would be lucky to have experienced shaking the walls of a basement rave back in the day. The rest of the album comes in the more standard J-core flavor but it's all terrific. There's simply no one in hardcore making sounds like he makes em'.
Jacek Paciorkowski & P.T. Adamczyk - Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Original Score
electronic, orchestral
I had a brief moment where I was like "Hmm should I include scores on this list because that could be weird they're not 'traditional' albums, right?" but that's fucking stupid why would I ever ask that, let alone for a score I've put on dozens of times as just an extremely sick thing to listen to. Phantom Liberty is a triumph in a number of ways and it would be criminal to overlook the original soundtrack when listing out why. The score was made for a game that's unreservedly cinematic at times but none of the songs suffer for it and the score, as released on album, is edited in a way to make every track feel like incredibly satisfying music to listen to. It'll come as trite to bring this up I'm sure but I also love how much of an identity it captures on its own? There's clear influence from seminal sci-fi scores like, obviously, Kenji Kawai's Ghost in the Shell work but sooooo much music in this area of cyberpunk fiction can't resist just doing that in a way that makes such a blockbluster game's score carving out a voice of its own that much more enjoyable.
I didn't link it because it's the end credits theme and I know some folks are still making their way through the game itself but the end credits song is one of the best songs I've heard bookend a piece of media maybe ever. I don't mean this as, like, a "this song makes me emotional because I remember the end of a story" (although it's that too!) thing, I mean it's genuinely an incredible song that's beautifully written and immaculately orchestrated and produced. I embarrassed myself on a voice call with friends once because I had it playing in the background and started humming it to myself without realizing I wasn't muted and I got pinged for it and that was a whole thing but I also don't ever ever do that not even with my favorite songs. It's something really special, much like the rest of the score is.
Getty - Brevkin
j-core, hardcore
Who knew that the guy who has the hardest track in every J-core mix you've heard would put together a fucking banger of an album! No surprises on the album, it's solid collection of new stuff and album edits, but it slams from start to end. I miss going to raves, man.\
Sleep Token - Take Me Back To Eden
alt metal
This was actually the first Sleep Token album I listened to! It was honestly pretty jarring at first to have them come up in conversation with friends alongside names like Ghost and Between the Buried and Me because, I mean, aside from some sorta surface-level similarities they're pretty different. Not just in overall style but Take Me Back To Eden specifically has such a wide variety of sounds track-to-track that I sorta never knew where it was gonna go next and it made every subsequent listen a real treat.
Alan Wake II - Chapter Songs
dude like every song is a different genre
I don't know how I'd talk about the music I enjoyed the most this year without also talking about the original songs made for Alan Wake II. It would spoil too much to talk about each track, their meaning, their place in the game, and their strengths as individual songs that contribute to a greater piece of art. I'll just link the first track and say that it's batshit they worked with a music label to create not a score but original proper-ass songs specifically for thematic use in a game. The AWII Chapter Songs, imo, are some of the most important musical works of recent memory.
I feel hyperbolic to talk about the album this way but it gives me hope for how there's still people who value art and the many forms in which it exists. Remedy could have spent the money it took to make these songs and just, idk, licensed a bunch of shit you'd recognize and make you go "haha this one line in the song sorta matches what just happened!". But they didn't. They sought out local musicians and funded them to let them loose. No genre restrictions, no limit on their creativity other than a leading pointer on where in the game it would take place. It's phenomenal. I would kill for it to happen more across every media industry.
Darude - Together
trance, dance
I posted about this, like, days ago so it's probably weird to see it on here again but I also haven't been able to stop listening to it because it's terrific. The last album Darude released was eight years ago and you'd think that a guy's music that is still mostly remembered for one song would maybe not have the kick it once had but it absolutely does. Even the sorta-standard club anthems of "Nobody Listens" and "In My Dreams" still hit plenty and carry the album's energy forward into its true bangers.
Romy - Mid Air
house, pop
Romy's solo debut is probably up there in conversations for like, album of the year if I had to guess? It's not like they're new to the block or anything they've long been one of the best things about The XX but Mid Air is a really incredible effort. One of the breeziest listens you'll have and "Enjoy Your Life" might be one of the best album closers I've ever heard.
My fav release of the year is
Wednesday Campanella - RABBIT STAR ★
j-pop
GOD I AM SO GLAD THAT I LOVE THIS ALBUM
I've talked about this before on here I think but: Suiyoubi no Campanella is my favorite band. Like, not even close. I found out about them from their first release, Crawl to Sakaagari, through a random upload on Jpopsuki and I was just immediately smitten. KOM_I's voice, her incredibly rough delivery, Hidefumi Kenmochi's experimental production, their absolutely bizarre songwriting, and Dir.F's incredibly low-budget but tremendously endearing MVs. They were my ideal band and every release that came afterwards just precipitated me forward in getting as many people to listen to them as I could. WHICH NO ONE DID. UNTIL THEY COLLABORATED WITH CHUVURCHES. YOu'rE ALL bASTERDS.
Anyway. They skyrocketed to popularity in Japan around the release of their album Zipangu, which I adored, and spent the next two years making collaborations I was sort of shakey on that culminated in the release of Superman, an album I really do not like. Which sucks! The album was a lot safer, the vocals were a lot cleaner, and the things I loved about the group that were ever-present in each release was just wholesale gone. KOM_I would leave the band a few years later, Kenmochi released two solo albums in that time, and it felt like the band that I loved the most would probably have met its fate. Until they met their current vocalist, Utaha, and released their first single with her that I also... really didn't like. It was the same problem. Just... it was pop music. I didn't like SnC because they made pop music, I liked them because they used pop music as a field to experiment with the creative sparks in them that resulted in some truly weird shit that was poppy. I stayed pretty solid in my thought that yeah, ok, I think my time with this band is over, and that's OK. The old albums are still there, and they will never go away. I own them! All of them! On CD! THEY'RE MINE.
RABBIT STAR released early this year and it was a six-track EP so, you know, I don't lose much if I listen to it and don't like it. And then I spent the entire day listening to it on repeat because it's everything I'd wanted out of them for the last six years. It's varied, it's bizarre, it's all over the place, the production is off the wall, the vocals are fun and weird--my band is back?? Even with a different vocalist, the energy is still there?? "HOT POT COMMANDER" (linked above) is one of the weirdest tracks they've produced and it's fantastic!
Mostly it was an important reminder that the things I hold dearest are not automatically worse for not being the same. Utaha's vocals on the EP are terrific top to bottom and she brings her own vibe to Kenmochi's production that maybe they just needed time to work through or something to really click on a release? I'm in nothing but conjecture territory here but I don't know. I'm just happy my favorite band is still my favorite band and that they put out a thing I really like and I can take it for The Good New Thing it is instead of It's Like The Old Thing. The degree to which it's the former is really exciting.