And it all comes down to the knowledge that we’re gonna die/Find comfort in that or be scared for the rest of your life”
Camp Cope – “West Side Story”
Games can’t help but teach.
You do a thing, another thing happens and you know a bit more than you did before you did a thing. Sometimes you do a thing and something happens that surprises both you and the game. Those moments are wonderful and silly, but sometimes the game just stops.
Games are entirely, enthusiastically, irrepressibly arbitrary and in spite of themselves they say things about the world. Lots of things say things about the world even (and especially) when their creators claim to not want to. Some games model the world (or a different version of the world) they’re one way to gain access to other experiences. They’re ways to experience pain and hardship and emotional strain in a space that you can control. They’re ways to learn processes and understand carefully constructed, simple causal chains.
Games are an unwieldy, struggling, squirming, imprecise way to teach things, access truth, and challenge yourself or others.
Games are tiny.
Even the biggest, sprawlingest, most expensive games are only a tiny slice of our imaginations, over-colonized and crowded. Yes, even the games that contain whole worlds all packed into their algorithms, trembling like a dog that’s anxious to please, they barely render a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the exhilarating welter of our worlds, of emotion, of compassion.
They are sometimes tiny in scope out of necessity. Games are hard to make and this means they are tiny out of raw necessity. They are tiny because they require a catastrophic amount of time and patience and it is difficult to justify that cost when you have to make rent, to make food, to take care of yourself and others.
Big publisher games are tiny because they are afraid of saying difficult or profound things and not making money. Competition does not produce better games. Say it out loud with me: competition does not produce better products: it produces safer products.
Games are weird: they stir and shift.
Every year, whole genres are transmuted into spice, whole assemblages of mechanics tossed into a bubbling mulligan stew. Familiar but demonstrably different.
Games aren’t ours (however you define the us necessary to get to ours). They predate our species. When you take on the temperature of the room, games will still be here. They will change over time, they will take on new meaning along unthinkable timelines. Whole swathes of the industry can disappear in a month or a year.
This is the biggest problem with games: attached to them is a churning Moloch that feeds on precarity. The thing you do for fun is often made by teams of talented, brilliant humans like you that are caught between the thrashing jaws of an always-hungry beast and it will consume more of them than it will spare. If they’re lucky, they will simply change careers and not think about that lost time as wasted. If they’re not, well, that’s a lot of life to lose so that some stranger can pretend to shoot whatever looming spectre the West has conjured up that year.
The cost of big publisher games, these strange arbitrary boxes of rules is such that they shy away from saying anything particularly challenging. They exist as hard armature, smooth and shiny and clean. When they do say something even vaguely profound, it’s almost always an accident: someone getting something through, a missive from within the whale.
Games push and press; they coalesce with our always already infolding flesh.
Games are inseparable from our lives and our ability to imagine new and different worlds. As such, they are inseparable from death.
Every day, we leave. Every day, we realize–and desperately try to forget–a departure that lurks and skulks ever closer. We have a vested interest in forgetting how tiny, pale, and insubstantial these shuddering juggernauts of capital and technical fuckery are.
Death galvanizes. It can make us do selfless, amazing things. It can lead a person who has lived their life as an open hand close on themselves like a fist. If we die and there is no “yes, and“ that is to say: if our last breath is a period, a full-stop. It can lead some to the conclusion that nothing in particular matters. Not kindness, not compassion, only the raw relief of transient power through violence and domination.
Some games are shining digital armature that keeps our thoughts of death away with spectacle and novelty, like waving a burning branch at the hostile night. Effective in the short term, but doesn’t solve the darkness, and only lasts so long.
Some games are dirty and messy. Broken but still living, whirling in the muck just like the rest of us. These filthy machines, these living weird things that teach us, they’re striving farther than those shining spectacles.
The Moloch that churns out these safe spectacles will turn on those filthy mucky farting messes and will scrape just enough dirt off that they can sell them for parts. To flavour their tasteless broth with that earthen tang. This can be a necessary exchange, but if that exchange does not come with material support for the original creators, it is violence.
Dictums
To steal from the Arcane Kids manifesto: stop imposing the label “punk” on weird, filthy games. Punk is a signifier rendered toothless by years of corporate intervention and suburban cishet white boys. (If you want to call your own work ‘punk,’ feel free.)
Once more for those in the back: competition does not produce better games: it produces safer games.
The status quo maintained by major publishers is a long slow swan dive into an e-waste landfill. Games have bodies and live in the world, and their graveyards are in landfills everywhere.
Make messy, filthy things.
Play Robert Yang’s games and then demand better fucking in your horny Steam games
Fuck with causality. Break the world. Break your games, break other peoples’ games. Make impenetrable monoliths to your grief and send them into the world.
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.
Peggy comes across like someone who is both poisoned by the internet and deeply uncomfortable with how they’re situated in the world, so, uh, extremely relatable content. I dug Veteran and eventually did get around to exploring their back catalogue this year, but there’s something welcoming about All My Heroes are Cornballs. It’s a bit like following someone on Twitter because you like their weird jokes and then also following their private account where they’re more relaxed and just kinda bullshitting with their friends and watching in real time as they switch between a persona and just vibing.
It’s an album that seems uncomfortable in its own skin, but also weaponizes that discomfort, champions it, even: The frequent interludes and interjections, where Peggy is just chatting amiably with their collaborators; the way the beats always seem to be on the verge of falling apart, as likely to stop on a dime as they are to transmute into something wholly different in tone and cadence; Peggy’s absolutely stunning vocal performance that vacillates wildly from pop ditties to shouted chaos. No other album I listened to this year has gotten close to capturing turmoil without losing sight of hope within the maelstrom. (Though, goddamn that 100 Gecs album comes close.)
Albums that got me the most in my feels
Up until All My Heroes are Cornballs came out, I figured Charly Bliss’ Young Enough would have been my album of the year. Their last album was almost pure uncut grungy pop punk throwback, while Young Enough sees them expanding their sound to more fully incorporate their pop leanings. There’s an earnestness here and a thoughtful interrogation of love and gender politics that never failed to cut me to the quick.
I loved Some Rap Songs from last year. My buddy Axel called Feet of Clay “funeral rap,” which is incredibly apt (and also why it’s been difficult to listen to this for any length of time). The way Earl has started experimenting with loops is hypnotic and extremely claustrophobic. Even as the samples shimmer with clarity and beauty, the density of imagery and Earl’s delivery makes it feel less like someone opening a window and more like air seeping into a tomb.
The album I woke up to the most in 2019
I always dig Aesop Rock’s willingness to experiment with his sound and work with unexpected collaborators. While the final product isn’t always as consistent as his solo work, these collaborations always yield some interesting work. Anyways, Aes seems a bit lost in some of TOBACCO’s rangy production in some parts, but tracks like “Corn Maze” and “Tuesday” really shine.
The Carly Rae Jepsen Award for Newest Carly Rae Jepsen Album in 2019
Dedicated is absolutely the most recent Carly Rae Jepsen album to come out in 2019 and it has been in heavy rotation since the day it came out. I was also lucky enough to see her live show this year and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Her work has been a source of unalloyed joy in a year when I desperately needed it.
Aw yeah the noisy shit
If you had told me at the start of the year that I would spend a good chunk of 2019 listening to and unironically enjoying a Slipknot album, I’d have been very confused. At this point, the band has shed a lot of the original members but god help me if they haven’t produced some of their strongest material in their entire career. This is probably the first Slipknot album where Corey Taylor has consistently turned away from penning tropey as shit horror film serial killer lyrics and instead focused on articulating a larger, more collective pain. There’s still just enough insularity that I’d struggle to call this a full-on political album, but it makes me curious to see what Slipknot is going to do next – something I honestly didn’t think was possible.
Chris Colohan and crew continue to put out some excellent brassed-off hardcore. That’s it.
I’m so glad that Caina is back and recording new music. Their work is always difficult and uncomfortable. I had to be in the right headspace to listen to it. But every time I did make a point of ensconcing myself in their particular brand of despair, I felt my time was rewarded.
This wasn’t quite the breakout smash I was hoping it might be after listening to their incendiary split with Vein from a while back. Chaotic screamo from the early aughts seems to be having a bit of a renaissance right now, and I’m hard pressed to find a band that’s doing it with more heart and creativity than .gif from god.
The album I wish I spent more time listening to
1000 Gecs was in rotation for most of the year, but it’s not until I really made a point of sitting down and listening to the album from beginning to end that I really found myself latching onto it. Should have done that way sooner.
