2021 Music: Top 25 Albums of the Year

 It's with great delight and a kind of weary accomplishment that I sign off on another 1000 albums' worth of music listening this year, with this my top 25 albums of the year. Of course any and all of these are highly recommended but hopefully my little blurbs will give you a good sense of why each is recommended and therefore whether it's really recommended for you, or your third cousin who likes Italian comedy metal more than you (note: no, there is actually no Italian comedy metal in this list).

 

25) All The Unknown - Grandbrothers (Classicaltronica)

Kicking things off with the album that won my album of the week in only the third week of the year (traditionally known as the first ‘good’ week of the project, after working through the dregs of December when artists actually start releasing stuff in earnest). This album only really suffers at all from its length and the fact that through that length it delivers solid but similar stuff throughout. Evoking very much the same kind of complex piano rhythms that my beloved GoGo Penguin do, Grandbrothers bring a more simple and elegant combination of piano playing and electronic beats that’s mostly effective as background working music but is indeed very effective in that milieu.

 

24) The Clearing - JJJJerome Ellis (Spoken-Word/Ambient Jazztronica)

An odd one to include in my albums write-up, this really contains very few ‘bangers’ but in actual fact the music is very much secondary to the main event. Ellis is a poet and a thinker but primarily he is a stutterer, and in this album he explores themes surrounding his identity as a stutterer and especially as a black man who stutters. His musings on linguistics, philosophy and politics are fascinating and thought-provoking, but where he takes the album is ultimately a place of uplifting self-affirmation and belonging and it’s quite beautiful.

 

23) Charge It To The Game - Tash Neal (Funk Soul)

Featuring my #10 song of the year, Tash Neal’s album of provocative and enlightening funk manages to be as lively, impeccably produced and entertaining as great funk music usually is, while maintaining a lyrical depth that funk would usually dispense with (by design). This is not of course to denigrate other funk music, but is a particular point of differentiation here that it contains an undercurrent of rage and injustice while it’s grooving along its way.

 

22) Phantom Cabinet Vol. 1 - Pepe Deluxé (Finnish Experimental Rock)

These guys also made my top 30 with “22^nd Century Dandy” which simultaneously manages to be the most driving and accessible ‘pop’ track on here as well as one of the most inscrutable. But that’s a nice typification of the entire album, which is replete with interesting electronic production and instrumental arrangements, an array of vocalists using a myriad of styles including a voiceover narration tour guide style for “Halls of Kalevala”, and a deconstructive view to putting songs together. All of which makes for an experience that’s quite fascinating even while it can also be disconcerting.

 

21) Stave - Osi and the Jupiter (Pagan Folk)

This is another album that’s already been represented in my songs write-up (#17 for “Folk of the Woods”) and really everything I said about that song applies to the whole album. It’s just an extended piece of rustic Americana that goes through a few different paces and moods but ultimately manages to consistently deliver dark-hued guitar work that seems to float above the usual plane of musical existence but is also extremely evocative of a place and time all of its own.

 

20) Get Up Sequences Part One - The Go! Team (Vaguely Alterna-J-Hip-Poptronica)

I’ll be honest, I’d kind of forgotten that one of my favourite bands put out a new album this year. Possibly it’s due to the “part one” of the title that makes me think the main event is still yet to come, but of course The Go! Team doing what they do was good enough to earn a spot on my top albums list. Another eclectic mix of sassy hip-hop, bouncy electropop and manic Japanese-inspired energy, it’s a perky album bursting with technicolour fun.

 

19) All The Colours Of You - James (Indie Rock)

James is another alumnus of my top albums (#12 of 2018 with “Living in Extraordinary Times”), and they came back this year with an album that didn’t quite blow me away like their previous work but confirmed that they have learned a thing or two about doing thoughtful and compelling rock music in their near-40-year career. Yes this album contains my son’s favourite song, “Zero” (he asked for it in the car again on the day of writing this), but there’s no shortage of deep and memorable songs on here.

 

18) La Marea - Lolaa (Latin-infused Pop)

I’ve already talked about Lolaa twice in my songs write-up, them having made both my #37 and #7 songs of this year. As an overall album this definitely has the feel of a ‘pop’ album in that it’s a collection of great, catchy songs rather than a broader statement about the future of music. That’s only a limitation though if there are fewer absolute bangers than there are on here. Using their Latin heritage just sparingly enough to make this a compelling melange of sounds without falling into some pigeonhole of ethnographic curiosity, it’s just a lovely, toe-tapping good time.

 

17) Half Drunk Under a Full Moon - The Fratellis (Alt Rock)

Another alumnus of my top of the year lists (#11 song and #8 album of 2018, #12 song of last year), the Fratellis continued their winning run this year with another collection of diversely affecting pop rock. The funny quandary I had about this album is the fact that “Six Days in June” – the afore-mentioned #12 song of last year – was released as a lead single in 2020 and is by far and away the best track on here, and it just makes me wonder how much of an impact this album may have had if I’d heard that song for the first time in the full experience of this. The question is interesting because it’s at a crucial point on this album following what is to me the dullest and weakest song on here, and that injection of bright vibrancy is a huge pep-up. The question’s obviously moot because here’s the album in my top 20 anyway, but if that impact hadn’t been tempered a little, who knows.

 

16) The Million Masks of God - Manchester Orchestra (Alt Rock)

I seem to have grouped all of my “alt rock stalwart bands” albums all in a row starting with James, then the Fratellis and now Manchester Orchestra. These guys put out a great album we listened to in 2017 that failed to make my end of year list I think mainly because it was a little too dour in tone throughout. Almost as if they’d taken that feedback on board, this follow-up retains the brooding mood (Andy Hull’s vocals can’t help but render the music a little sad) but brings a lot more focus and drive to the rock compositions, combined with an interesting production design that allows a lot of the songs to lead into one another. That gives this whole album a bit of a singular and progressive feel that helps the transition between the slower, more introspective tracks and those more plaintive songs – like “Bed Head” and “Keel Timing” – feel like a logical stream of consciousness.

 

15) Ocean to Ocean - Tori Amos (Art Rock)

This one was a big surprise packet for me. We’ve heard at least one early Tori Amos album as a ‘throwback’ but I didn’t go much above just appreciating it objectively, and this was the first time her music has really hit home. I describe the music on this album as somehow ‘druidical’ (yes the fact that one song is called “Speaking with Trees” probably gave me the prompt for this) but it’s the feeling of it being both magical and otherworldly while also being very much grounded and part of this environment. Amos’ voice has by this stage in her life developed a wonderful husk to it while her songwriting and piano work are as good as they’ve ever been.

 

14) From Dreams to Dust - The Felice Brothers (Heartland Rock)

Another new discovery for me this year – along with Pepe Deluxé – who have a vast back catalogue to explore, the Felice Brothers announced themselves to me quite emphatically with their unique blend of surrealism, satire and down-to-earth Americana. Musically this very much brings to mind Craig Finn and the Hold Steady in their style of storytelling folk that’s full of biting wit and poignant indictments on modern America, but these guys take it a step further by ramping up the eccentricity. From the pitch-altered job interview intro to “Money Talks” to the complex web of intermingling unnamed celebrity gossip in “Celebrity X” it’s a pseudopsychedelic trip through an America that doesn’t really exist but also feels painfully familiar.

 

13) Collapsed In Sunbeams - Arlo Parks (RnB)

Yes, not content with winning the Mercury Prize, Arlo Parks can now at last add “some nobody from Australia’s #13 album of the year” to her list of accolades. My own praise may or may not be redundant (as if I read what other people write about music), but this album - to me - provides a crucial counterpoint to a lot of the sassy and/or over-produced RnB that dominates the market. Parks’ lyrics are deeply personal, vulnerable and even tragic, while the music is surprisingly spare and simple most of the time. She has some fire when she needs it, but most of the time these songs are about her trying to make a difference in the lives of those around her, for better or worse, and the result is a strikingly intimate portrait of an artist making sense of a nonsensical world.

 

12) Genesis - XIXA (Psychedelic Desert Rock)

XIXA’s musical style of sort of Latin-tinged outlaw country is very much in my wheelhouse, but in 2019 I was enamoured of the title track of their 4-song EP but otherwise found it rather forgettable. So in that state of lowered expectations, this album was primed to knock it out of the park and that’s pretty much what it did. The fact is that although desert rock is something I love, it’s mainly something I love because it’s rare enough, and it’s potentially hard to maintain interest across the length of a full album. XIXA manage that here by exploring all of the depths and territories of the sub-genre, incorporating outside influences (as in my #33 song of the year, “Eve of Agnes”) to augment the inherent deftness, and utilising the psychedelic undertones to their fullest so it’s expansive in more ways than one.

 

11) Hyperdialect - Hacktivist (Grime Djent)

Although there’s more ‘angry in various ways’ music still to come, this album absolutely fits the bill as my big cathartic fix of the year. Hacktivist surprisingly were not new to me this year although their previous album passed me by without even a blip on my attention, and this time around it was exactly what I was looking for. The combination of complex rhythmic hardcore punk guitars with fast-flowing and deeply furious grime rap was an absolute godsend. Although there’s undoubtedly an unhinged chaos to the overall composition here, it’s also absolutely key to its success; it’s a discordant clash of different aggressive energies but through that discordance there becomes a weird synergy as a mutual disdain for the machine that runs us all.

 

10) Fleuves de l'Âme - Houeida Hedfi (Tunisian Psychedelic Orchestral)

We’ve started talking about this album as a late gift from Jez to me. I hadn’t come across this at all but Jez threw it into the mix knowing full well it’s not really his kind of thing but absolutely my ‘jam’ in the sense that slow, stirring music can ‘jam’. This album has a bit of a slow burn to it on first listen, but on relistening for this list it absolutely solidified itself as a worthy top ten entrant, once I’d gotten accustomed to the different cultural influences at play and the reason for the often slow builds (the river imagery of the title carries through all the tracks and their music), but the diverse instrumentation (Hedfi herself is a tuned percussionist by training) is wonderfully arranged and executed for a fascinating and deliberately-paced journey.

 

9) Brushfire - G. Brenner (Art Pop)

Another slow-burn album and the traditional spot for my sad, brooding album pick. G. Brenner’s operatic-style album about the double whammy of brushfires sweeping across California while he dealt with his mother’s death from cancer recalls to me the best of ANOHNI and her former work in Antony & the Johnsons, as he works a deeply personal meditation into byzantine electronic compositions with huge rises and swells for dramatic impact. Brenner understands and aptly demonstrated the value of quiet, ruminative moments but also those big crescendos that summon up the blood. It’s an intense listen but a hugely rewarding and moving one.

 

8) The Woman You Want - Eliza Shaddad (Folk Rock)

This album was kind of a funny one; we’d heard Eliza Shaddad’s full-length debut “Future” in 2018, and I liked it then but found it didn’t have much staying power. So I went into this album with lowered expectations hoping to be proven wrong. It’s further funny though because the first three tracks here have a kind of middling 90s alt rock singer-songwriter kind of quality to them, but then something just clicks in the title track and suddenly the album roars with intensity. The production quality across these songs is one I described as having “expansive interiority”, this feeling of it being an intimate personal portrait but one that expands and envelops the listener’s complete attention so we’re exploring all the multitudes of her personal space. In an overall sense then and my particular impression from my second round through is that it starts humbly and small but always has a keen focus on where it’s going and it takes us along for the ride.

 

7) The Battle At Garden’s Gate - Greta Van Fleet (Hard Rock)

Here it is, the album that managed to divide the modern music world into people who get their scrotums (oh and yes, they all have scrotums believe me) twisted about people who dare to resemble other great bands no matter how well that sound their own, and people who have lives, and taste. I was always predisposed to love this album since of course I’d heard the opening track “Heat Above” as a lead single and already knew it was destined to be my #1 song of the year (reminder: it is) but also knowing from listening to an earlier album of GvF’s that they do have a striking resemblance to 70s-era Led Zeppelin in their pure form (“Heat Above” less so). Josh Kiszka’s powerhouse vocals lead an impressive gallery of rock guitar work here, that’s epic and sprawling and complex. As much as it invokes a throwback sound from a band who aren’t making new music anymore, it’s richly rewarding to get vibrant oldskool hard rock like this from a young band in complete control of their music.

 

6) Fortitude - Gojira (Technical Death Metal)

This album was an absolute bolt from the back. Initially rejected by me upon release because it bore an immediate resemblance to 80% of the sludgey metal that gets released everywhere, I gave it a second chance after Revolver magazine named it their #1 metal album of 2021. And they were correct. What’s more, it really didn’t take a great deal of my first listen through to realise how correct they were. Superficially this has a lot of the sound in common with Sepultura, including some of the first nations instrumentation and folk grooves, but Gojira are as inventive as anybody with their guitar work, exploring unpredictable rhythmic shifts and broken riffs that are constantly surprising while always having a huge amount of punch and bite to them. This is like a buffet of all the best parts of different metal traditions – groove, death, doom and sludge – but all delivered with complete aplomb and flair.

 

5) The Metallica Blacklist - Various Artists (Eclectic Heavy Metal Covers)

From the moment I knew this album existed, it was always a surefire chance to make this far up my end of year list – provided the artists involved delivered. The original “Black” album from Metallica was one of my formative albums growing up, and the idea of listening to more than four hours of different artists exploring each of its tracks in different ways was a daunting task, but the fact is that almost every one of the artists invited to take part delivered with absolute panache. The first track we heard from this was Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit completely transforming “Sad But True” into a bit of upbeat country folk, and working from there through the likes of Ghost and Rina Sawayama owning “Enter Sandman”, to new discoveries like Mon Laferte and Tresor bringing their own passion into “Nothing Else Matters” and finishing late of course with my #2 song of the year, Kamasi Washington’s revolutionary version of “My Friend of Misery”. Yes, there are weak points; I would point to Weezer’s (who I otherwise like) and Corey Taylor’s respective lack of inspiration as holes in the framework here, while Moses Sumney’s version of “The Unforgiven” is transformative but ultimately pretentious like I find most of his work. But if you have the time to sit down with this, it’s a mostly revelatory and fascinating exploration of how different musical sensibilities can inject new kinds of life into the same familiar formulas.

 

4) The Turning Wheel - Spellling (Art Pop)

So there’s a maybe interesting, probably long-winded, but completely dumb reason why this album is my #4 of the year. There’s another reason too, which I’ll get to later. To begin with, there’s a Hungarian avant-garde metal band called Thy Catafalque, whom we first heard in 2018 with an album called “Geometria”. The album was pretty good, but the noteworthy thing was it was released the same week as Funke and the Two Tone Baby released “Denizen,” which would go on to become my #4 album of that year. Fast forward to last year: Thy Catafalque put out an album in early 2020 called “Naiv” and that same week, Israeli duo Lola Marsh released “Someday Tomorrow Maybe” which would then go on to become – yes, my #4 album of last year. For some reason I noted that coincidence this year when Thy Catafalque put out a new one, “Vadak”, and I said to myself, alright we’re going to hear my #4 album of the year this week. Absolutely nothing put its hand up to be considered (in fact Thy Catafalque themselves ended up winning my runner-up album of the week), until I heard this album at the very end of the week. And it’s fair to say that it blew me away. Spellling’s vocal style resembles Björk at the very height of her powers but it’s fair to say that her pop compositions hold the exact same kind of artistic power: it’s exciting and envelope-pushing, avant-garde first and foremost in that its key interest is in surprising and exploring new directions. But the trick she pulls is being able to rein that in to be infectious, likeable and even catchy pop at the same time as it’s brave and provocative music. So yes, at the end of the day, I liked that dumb coincidence enough that my mind was already made up with this at #4 (even if I liked it more I would have bumped it down) but the strange fact remains that this is absolutely worthy of the #4 spot and there’s no way now to determine if it wouldn’t have been here organically. It deserves to be.

 

3) Annie - Pale Ramon (Psychedelic Rock)

I had quite a treat this year to have follow-up albums from two former album of the year winners, these guys having done my #1 album of 2019 with their self-titled debut. It felt a little bit dicey to wonder if this could possibly improve on that brilliant piece of work, but despite having dropped two spots in the rankings I absolutely believe they pulled it off. What struck me so deeply in 2019 was how controlled these guys are in their complex, progressive electronic-infused psychedelia, and this album continues in that adroitness while maintaining a singular musical vision for its length. I describe their music as ‘kaleidoscopic’: the elements are quite simple to begin with and what they’re working with, but from there they seem to spiral outwards and expand in this elaborate soundscape that relentlessly changes and transforms itself. They understand the value of quiet moments too, so that when the big drops happen and the song shifts into another gear it has so much more impact. These guys somehow seem to be still playing mostly smaller venues around Brooklyn but I genuinely think they have a unique and innovative sound that deserves to be heard by more people.

 

2) I Don't Live Here Anymore - The War on Drugs (Indie Rock)

The other former album of the year winner, this album is the follow-up to my #1 album of 2017, and the War on Drugs have a tendency to spend a long time between albums to perfect their songwriting and fine-tune every little aspect, and it definitely shows here. The whole band is completely on song delivering engaging alt rock music while Adam Granduciel’s thoughtful vocals give it an emotional depth and clarity that’s touching and reassuring. The remarkable thing though about their compositions – and I think this shows the care that goes into them, given I’ve been waiting more than four years for this album – is that there’s always surprising things that they can do with very familiar guitar-drum-keyboard work. Never really satisfied with musical status quo, they’re always taking the familiar sound into new and interesting territory so that it’s compelling while it’s also comforting and simply entertaining. There is only one weak spot of this album, and I don’t really understand why I find it a weak spot but the title track featuring Lucius just falls very flat to me, and the fact of it being the title track also then really makes it stand out as a weakness. But that weak spot aside, the main reason it misses out on another top spot is largely just sentimental.

 

1) A Billion Little Lights - Wild Pink (Synthfolk)

Another album that was hugely anticipated and always a strong contender for the top-end of my year, Wild Pink’s follow-up to my #3 album of 2018 has been my sentimental favourite all year, and that was enough to catapult it into this spot when I came back to relisten to these all. The fact is that my #1 album of last year, Will Wood’s “The Normal Album” was a perfect album for the craziness that 2020 felt like: manic, biting, pointed. 2021 has, by contrast, felt like a much harder and less pleasant year: we’re not all shaking our heads at the absurdity but are instead arguing, defeated, deflated and in need of some beacon of hope. To that end, this beautiful album feels like the antithesis to last year’s winner: John Ross’ calm, sweet-natured vocals, the enveloping softness of the synth and the expansive and evocative guitar work (plus occasional tintinnabular chimes) make this whole album feel like a warm hug that keeps on giving. It is of course also impeccably crafted and produced, with the tapestry of sounds providing smooth harmonies between layers and the tracks flowing on from one another to give a seamless transition between paces and moods. It’s a warm hug that I’ve returned to throughout the year; every time I’ve felt my heart swell throughout and it’s something I know I can rely on whenever I need inspiration, reinvigoration or certainly reassurance that things will work out OK. It’s just a reminder that there can be so much gentle beauty in the world especially in wonderfully constructed music.

 

And of course some honourable mentions if none of those sound like your cup of tea, or just in case you were hoping I'd have listened to one of your absolute favourites this year and are gutted you didn't see it in this list (sorry, we didn't get around to André Rieu's Christmas album). This year honourable mentions are sorted alphabetically but starting from the second word in the band/artist's name but these are also basically my #26-40 albums in another order.

Hard Up - The Bamboos (Neo-Soul)

Oh! Pardon tu dormais… - Jane Birkin (Chanson)

Kindred: Act II - Red Cain (Groove Metal)

Moments of Impact - Small Calamities (Emo Power Pop)

The Myth of the Happily Ever After - Biffy Clyro (Indie Rock)

Deja - Bomba Estéreo (Colombio Cumbia)

Burn - Lisa Gerrard & Jules Maxwell (Ethereal Wave)

A Seafarer and the Infinite Dream - The Hip Abduction (Reggae Rock)

A Song is Way Above the Lawn - Karen Peris (Children's Indie Folk)

Promises - Misty River (Bluegrass)

Heights - Walk The Moon (Power Pop)

Stigmata Itch - Rave The Reqviem (Spiritual Industrial Metal)

Turbo - Cory Wong & Dirty Loops (Funk)

Somewhere Different - Brandee Younger (Harp Jazz)