Alright, a little late on this one, but since 2021 feels like 2020 mk. II, whatever. I didn’t realize how burnt out I was until I had a week off work and couldn’t even bring myself to do the minor stuff I work on through the holidays most other years.
I’m just going to borrow the structure I used for the 2019 list rather than labour over a new one.
Actual-ass albums of the year
It’s pretty much a given that any year in which Aes puts something out, it’s going to land somewhere on my list. Dude’s just been completely on top of his game for the past few releases and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. While Spirit World Field Guide didn’t hit me as hard as The Impossible Kid or Skelethon, 2020 was a year where I just needed something that would keep me on an even keel. That this thing is a meandering 21 track meditation on life, death, and the porous boundaries between means it was the perfect companion for my already wandering mind. That said, this was a relatively late release in the year, which is why I had to absolutely give a nod to illuminati hotties.
If Aes is how I wrapped up the year, FREE I.H. is what kept me balanced through the summer. It only came out in July but for some reason it feels like it’s been with me since the start of lockdown. I’d listened Kiss Yr Frenemies and dug it in 2018 but it didn’t really make a huge dent in my regular rotation. In the intervening years, Sarah Tudzin has gotten more playful and (I’d contend) sincere in her songwriting. At the start of November 2019, she released the absolute earworm “ppl plzr,” a track that confidently flitted between a tongue-in-cheek diagnosis of a relationship in distress and genuine end-of-the-year melancholia that absolutely primed me to devour whatever came next.
It also came out as her label was getting into some pretty public fights about unpaid royalties. A subject that looms heavy over FREE I.H. as Tudzin was still on the books to produce another album to fulfill her contract.
Reading some interviews with Tudzin, it sounded like she wanted to produce a noisy mess to get out of her contract and save her “proper” second album for a later release. What happened instead is that she produced what felt like a soundtrack to the world burning. For one, everything is way more jangly and distorted than what anything she’d put out before.
The lyrics veer wildly between nonsense that just sounds good/would be fun to yell into a microphone (“content//bedtime”) to deeply poignant. In particular, these lines from “free dumb” came to mind frequently through the year:
while the world burns, how could you care about a fucking record?
there was no love lost until you deemed that I was nonessential
I guess it’s my fault for being good at something sentimental
It’s telling that the two albums that came to define 2020 for me are ambitious, confrontational, deeply melancholy, and messy as all hell.
Albums that got me the most in my feels
Shrines dropped at the height of the George Floyd protests through the summer. If Aesop Rock has streamlined his bars, opened them up a bit, Armand Hammer is the other direction, writing lines that curl in on themselves like a fist, each syllable a punch. With production that veers between echoing and minimal to gorgeous loops, Shrines has a density and heft to it that felt right for the moment. It’s the sort of album I couldn’t put on while I was working but would put on when, overwhelmed with stimuli, needed something that demanded all of my attention. I lost track of the nights I’d have a couple drinks and would just sit on the floor (or sit at my desk) listening to “Dead Cars” on repeat, nodding.
There’s plenty of noisy stuff in a later section of this list, but this is the album that straight up made me pissed that I’m probably not going to be able to go to a live show any time soon. My stage diving days are over but goddamn did this make me want to go jump into a crowd of screaming strangers. I can smell the sweat and feel that unique oppressive heat that can only come from a supremely brassed off punk act playing at the peak of their abilities in a shitty dive bar, just blowing the roof off like they were in the middle of a roaring stadium. That they can just casually drop a banger of a hip hop track in the middle and have it fit in so seamlessly is a testament to their skills. Can’t wait for more.
The album I woke up to the most in 2020
Continuing my trend of picking basically one song to play when my alarm goes off in the morning, I had to go with “Good to Be Alive” by PVRIS. It might seem a little maudlin to wake up to a song that makes “feels good to be alive/but I hate my life” into a hook but fuck it, do what you gotta do to get through, y’know?
The Carly Rae Jepsen Award for Newest Carly Rae Jepsen Album in 2020 (Sponsored by Carly Rae Jepsen)
CRJ hit us with the Dedicated B-sides just a couple months into lockdown and for a blessed few weeks, I felt alright.
SOME GOOD GRISELDA SHIT
It turns out a lot of great hip hop came out this year. For me, though, it was all about Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris and Conway the Machine’s No One Mourns the Wicked. If you’re looking for something that feels like a bit of a throwback to the 90s but isn’t, y’know, fucking weird about it, there’s a confidence and craft to these albums that kept me coming back.
Aw yeah the noisy shit
Not a lot of grindcore bands stick around. There’s a whole host of reasons, but I think it’s telling that the ones that do inevitably start experimenting with their formula. Latter-day Napalm Death manages to balance the heavy shit I’ve come to expect from them with forays into more industrial-based, slower jams and, *gasp* even some melody. Another band I absolutely hope makes it out of this pandemic with the support to keep touring. It’s been too long since I saw them.
Uniform found their way on my radar after the release of The Long Walk in 2018. That they went on to put out some really dope collaborations with The Body only cemented them as one of the better industrial-adjacent acts out there. Adding a live drummer for Shame has only improved their craft, as far as I’m concerned. This might piss off some industrial purists, but I think there’s a dynamism to their tempos now that just makes for a more varied album. Dropping a straightforward punk banger toward the end is the perfect “hey, you still fucking there?” wakeup call.
The old-school screamo renaissance continues with uh, okay well this is mostly a Minority Rule release with Maha Shami on vocals. Is it still a renaissance if it’s 90% of the original band?
Whatever, I’m asking absolutely no questions. This shit just hits hard as fuck.
Fuck the Facts continue to low key one of the best “fake” grindcore acts out there. It’s wild to me that they don’t get more hype.
Killer Be Killed seemed on track to go the way of most other metal supergroups: released one album (of pretty surprising quality) and then nary a mention from any of the other participants afterwards. With Puciato working on his arty solo stuff and The Black Queen, I figured this project was as good as dead. Colour me surprised when he managed to release his arty solo project *and* absolutely dominate the vocal duties on this album. Anyways, I didn’t have super high expectations here but Reluctant Hero is some pretty solid radio-friendly metal that occupied way more of my attention than I ever expected.
Okay, I’m biased here but I’ve been waiting for a first proper full-length from Mil-Spec since 2016 and boy did they deliver. It’s also pretty dope that any purchases made on their bandcamp will be donated in perpetuity to Black Lives Matter Toronto and Unist’o’ten Legal Fund. If you’re into melodic hardcore with an overtly leftist bent, uh, I have good news for you.
The first time I ever went crowd surfing was during Sevendust at Edgefest 2001. Some huge biker dude asked me if I wanted to go up and just picked my skinny teen ass up and threw me into the crowd. When I came down, a dude I’d known most of my entire life but hadn’t talked to in years helped me back up. Since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for Sevendust. Anyways, if you’ve never really liked their work in the past, this isn’t going to move the needle. Some pretty solid jams on here, though.
In a year where Ulcerate released a new album, it was a mild surprise that this was easily my most-listened-to brutal death album. Thanks for the moment of self-reflection, Last.fm!
There’s not much I can say here except that there’s a willingness to play around with the sonic palette that has really stuck with me as far as this album goes. It didn’t quite set me running off to listen to more Afterbirth, but I gotta give credit where it’s due.
Man, I wish I liked this more. I feel like I maybe need to spend more time with it, but honestly this comes across like Greg was just trying to stretch his creative muscles in as many directions as he could and the album isn’t super cohesive as a result. Given my appetite for weird/wide-ranging/incongruous work this year, I’m a little befuddled as to why it didn’t click with me. Keeping it on this list to remind myself to keep coming back to it.
Hot damn, the Deftones still got it. Not much to say here but that I was definitely worried I wouldn’t get into this. I’ve been kinda cool on them since Koi No Yokan.
Howls of Ebb was one of my favourite new-ish metal acts in recent memory and I was completely gutted that they broke up. They wrote this bewildering, textured, and weird-as-hell brand of death metal with song titles and lyrics that look like they were written by an AI force-fed Dark Souls lore wikis. Anyways, Herxheim is one of the folks from Howls of Ebb and while it doesn’t have the same vibe, there’s still some of that magic glimmering in the background.
Also on that old school screamo tip, I haven’t been able to spend as much time with this one as I’d like, but there’s some really promising work here. It doesn’t just feel like a band going “hey remember good screamo? We can do that.”
YOTK got on my radar as some super solid hardcore punk with an immaculate low end. It’s super easy to forget that most hardcore bands even bother with a bassist, but when Madison is given the space to ply her trade, the whole band benefits. While this isn’t a quantum leap forward from Ultimate Aggression, there’s more polish and direction to the proceedings that’s really promising to me.
Yo, lotta EPs this year
Peggy’s keeping on the trajectory they laid out with All My Heroes Are Cornballs. It’s so rewarding to see JPEGMAFIA continuing to experiment with melody, texture, and random pop covers. Sounds like a second EP is in the pipeline, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long into 2021 to hear more.
PUP has low key become a pretty consistent staple on my playlists over the years and this EP continues to deliver. Stefan Babcock has a knack for just dragging some nightmarish intrusive thought I’ve had into the light and crystallizing it long enough to shatter it with a sledge hammer. I initially dismissed PUP as a more radio-friendly take on what Single Mothers was doing, but at this point it feels like they’ve really mastered their voice in a way that puts them in their own league.
Man, I don’t know. It’s Pig Destroyer. I’m glad they properly released this track, even if the others they paired it with are fine-to-good in quality. Still feel weird about this act after their pretty acrimonious split with Kat Katz.