2021! What a year it’s been! Covid! Vaccines! Screech died! Betty White is still alive! Dipshit billionaires launched themselves into space!

I also listened to about a trillion new albums. Here are the 25 I liked the best right now, at this very moment in time, until I change it again in two months. See you in 2022, unless we all die.

#25 – Frost* – Day and Age

I suppose this is my Token Neo-Prog Rock Album of the Year™. Not simple enough to be boring. Not complex enough to be obnoxious. Not tacky enough to be insufferable. Not elegant enough to be…insufferable. Perfect! #25 it is!

#24 – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – CARNAGE

Nick Cave needs no introduction, but maybe Warren Ellis does? A longtime collaborative partner for Cave on soundtrack and theatre score projects, the two of them decided to combine heads for a fucking excellent studio album. As if a regular Nick Cave album doesn’t have enough surprises, Warren Ellis adds his own arrangements of breathtaking keyboards, pump organs, strings, flutes, and percussion, mixing the sound to unearthly levels of haunting beauty. It’s good shit, man. It’s nice to see old bastards like these two who get a genuine kick out of experimenting and playing off each other’s strengths. They probably hug at the end of every studio session like real men.

#23 – Aborted – ManiaCult

Aborted had the best brutal death metal/grindcore record in 2021. For a genre governed fairly strictly by speed and aggression, ManiaCult is nuanced and varied in its presentation. It’s hard to be deliberately experimental within your limited genre confines and still manage to be swampy and gross! My hat is off to you, kind sirs.

#22 – Veilburner – Lurkers in the Capsule of Skull

More time spent with Lurkers in the Capsule of Skull would almost certainly shoot it farther up the list, since all the good metal I’m searching for in this world needs to be weird. And not, like, “we threw in a saxophone!” weird. More like “this sounds like a fever dream” weird. Veilburner is able to bend and twist their riffs into inhuman, horrific, alternate realities. Ghostly realities that have exponentially more dimensions than the one I’m used to. I’m very pleased.

#21 – Steven Wilson – THE FUTURE BITES

I’ve liked Steven Wilson for years and, in my eyes, he can really do no wrong. Even if he’s getting even more schmaltzy and obnoxious in his later years, he’s still very good at what he does: brooding pop/prog with immaculate production. Progressive rock fans hate this album because it’s not progressive enough, but they can go fuck themselves! I’ll swallow anything this man shoves down my throat!

#20 – Sunless – Ylem

I listened to Ylem for about a month straight thinking it was twisty-turny black metal, but guess what? It’s actually twisty-turny death metal! I KNOW, RIGHT?? I had accidentally sullied my cochleas with trashy, bourgeois, gutter-slop such as this. But, hey, there’s not much difference between ultra-dissonant death metal and avantgarde black metal anyway. It’s all just sounds in your brain, man, and this album is loaded with tons of crazy sounds for my brain. If you like Deathspell Omega, try it out.

#19 – Genesis Owusu – Smiling with No Teeth

This is the most diverse hip hop / R’n’B album I’ve heard all year. So diverse, in fact, that calling it a hip hop / R’n’B album is a misnomer. It’s more of a hip hop / R’n’B / new wave / nu-metal / rap rock / synthfunk / jazz / shock blues album! And even that doesn’t do it justice. Just listen to this goddamned monstrosity of an album and you’ll be smiling with no teeth soon enough with the best of them.

#18 – tUnE-yArDs – sketchy.

Oh man, remember tUnE-yArDs? They were one of the biggest indie names for about six minutes back in 2011 and then no one gave a shit anymore? I didn’t give a shit anymore either! But after listening to sketchy., it was tough to think of anyone doing anything similar this year and hitting the mark quite as well as Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner. Groovy, jazzy, blue-eyed soul indie pop with topical sociopolitical subject matter. Also, bonus points for not wrapping up frustration and incredulity into barely-emotive laconic vocal delivery (like other nameless sociopolitical indie acts that I didn’t like as much this year). So there you go. Good job.

#17 – TORRES – Thirstier

I’ve never given TORRES too much of a thought in the past, and the one or two previous albums I had listened to before didn’t grab me, but I love her fifth album. It kind of got lost in the shuffle and forgotten among the stalwart publications this year, but I think Thirstier rivals Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee as 2021’s most upbeat singer-songwriter record. In Mackenzie Scott’s case, though, she’s probably getting laid a lot these days. Good for her! It’s working.

#16 – Django Django – Glowing in the Dark

Surprise! No one cared at all about this album! But I liked it, and Glowing in the Dark reminded me of why I liked Django Django so much when their debut dropped in 2012: seamless, dreamlike, catchy, genre-bending desert indie rock. Django Django are one of a kind, they’re good at what they do, and this album is good too, and ok I’m done.

#15 – Amyl and the Sniffers – Comfort To Me

This was a late addition to my Top 25 list, but I spent a lot of time with Amyl and all her various Sniffers throughout December. Australian melodic punk rock with a singer who sounds like a modern Joan Jett? Yes indeed! In a year littered with “hardcore” acts that are nothing more than a bunch of whining white emo kids, feminists songs with names like “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)” and “Knifey”  breathe new life into an otherwise chaff-ridden genre of loud I-don’t-give-a-shit music dominated by Twitch dorks.

#14 – Carcass – Torn Arteries

Fuck yeah, Carcass. No other death metal band has beefy riffs quite like them. BEEFY, son. Torn Arteries is so damn beefy that the heart on the album art is made out of vegetables. Peppers, mostly. There’s a cucumber slice in there. At any rate, making the heart out of meat wouldn’t have made the album any meatier. This is only the second album since their reformation in 2007, but I don’t care if their next one takes them until 2028 if it means more top-notch, quality, addictive, memorable shredding and down-to-earth hard-rockin’ attitudes from these old fucking dinosaurs. I promise I won’t say the word “beefy” again in this post.

#13 – Backxwash – I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES

Backxwash has my hip hop album of the year. What a shock, huh? clipping. had my hip hop album of 2020. I guess I like my hip hop to be enveloped in a thick coating of industrial nonsense and aggressive metal sensibilities. Also, Ashanti Mutinta is a Zambian-born transgender woman, so that’s pretty badass too. The whole 33-minute record is one tense, aggravated, moment after another, with the world-weary pain and anguish at the forefront. Hmm, that sounds familiar. I wonder if I awarded a #3 spot to a similar album. Perhaps I awarded a #3 spot to a duo who APPEARS ON THIS ALBUM TOO! WHAT! WHAT! ok, that’s enough of that.

#12 – Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp – We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway.

Completely underrated stuff. Soft shoegaze vocals over cacophonous high school marching band percussion! Spoken word satire over tribal bongos? Trance-like rhythms that skirt the line between playful and foreboding! It’s like the Orchestre de Paris got drunk at the bar 40 minutes before showtime and decided to get skronky and dark with it. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then go pour a cup of go fuck yourself instead and I’ll take all my OTPMD records elsewhere.

#11 – The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore

I didn’t want to like this one as much as I did, but I do, so here we are! It’s like Adam Granduciel took everything I like about his band and then remembered, this time, to leave out almost all the stuff that I don’t like about his band! It’s a good thing that Adam and I spent a lot of months on the phone going over those details before he released I Don’t Live Here Anymore. You already probably know about this album so I’ll spare you more of my own blathering about it.

#10 – Calva Louise – Euphoric

Calva Louise stepped it up since their debut. Euphoric is an incredible combination of experimental power pop, hardcore punk, and noise rock. Built around a heady philosophical concepts of human identity and perceptions of reality, the album’s story is intertwined with a companion graphic novel and a 45-minute album film. That’s more ambitious than anything I’ve ever done in my life, and I prepared an entire astrophysics senior thesis (i.e. I procrastinated by playing a bunch of flash games instead for months).

#9 – Rivers of Nihil – The Work

BEEFY PROGRESSIVE TECHNICAL DEATH METAL! Sorry, I couldn’t resist droppin’ the B-word again. The Work takes the foundation that Rivers of Nihil has built upon for the last decade and refines it with a smorgasbord of melody-driven, well-paced technical songwriting. The music is at all times harsh and soft, fast and slow, brutal and delicate. There is an endless breadth of beauty and splendor from this challenging music, but what does this challenging music demand from you, the listener, to draw them out? THE WORK. And there you have it. *golf clap*

#8 – Squid – Bright Green Field

More than any other album in 2021, Bright Green Field grew on me tremendously. At first I was put off by the Mike Watt from Minutemen vocalist and the sparse passages of meandering minimalism tacked onto the ends of a few songs, but I’ve come to appreciate the project as a weird, unified whole! A big mess of punk, ambience, rock, some jazz, all brought together in a way that attempts to be unique and ultimately satisfying. They succeed on both counts. Thanks, Squidbama.

#7 – Andrew Hung – Devastations

Devastations was the best combination of “immediately accessible” and “endlessly rewarding” that I discovered in 2021. With its deliciously infectious retro-future dance rhythms, warm synthesizer-driven ’80s love letters, and the optimistic, out-of-this-world concepts, Andrew Hung’s second album was a slam-fucking-dunk. A truly timeless effort. More people should know about this one. If we’re never getting another Fuck Buttons record, then Hung’s solo output will do just fine.

#6 – Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg

What I liked right away about Dry Cleaning’s first album is the unprecedented combination of fuzzy, non-keyboard driven post-punk with completely deadpan female vocals. I can’t believe it really hasn’t been done before, and if it has, it hasn’t been done for a full album. The only precedent that comes to mind is Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth, but even she emotes. And that pesky Thurston Moore gets in the way! Florence Shaw doesn’t emote. Every lyric is delivered with bored exasperation. My favorite line: “If you like a girl, be nice/It’s not rocket science“. This is certainly my pick for the best album in 2021 featuring a bored robot.

#5 – Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz

Don’t let the name fool you, these horny boys don’t really need any Viagra! Now that that’s cleared up and out of the way forever, Welfare Jazz brings to the table a scuzzy, self-deprecating brand of rock music, overflowing with parodies of machoism and toxic masculinity as far as the eye can see! The high point on an album loaded with high points is the slightly-off gothic alt-country ballad “To the Country”, which features concussive blasts of saxophone while an excessively-tattooed Sebastian Murphy sings lines like “Out on the country, we’d be real nice to each other/I wouldn’t scream and yell and ramble ’bout my problems“. Welfare Jazz is better than their debut Street Worms, and even though co-founder Benjamin Vallé died in October, I hope the band continues to press on.

#4 – Richard Dawson & Circle – Henki

I gave the Quietus shit for ranking this album at #7 on their Top 100 write-up only five days after its release, but, honestly, Henki is pretty fucking great. Just a cool, unique, interesting, and unlikely collaborative effort between a weirdo British singer-songwriter and a weirdo Finnish krautmetal collective. There’s music here that sounds fresh, familiar, important, unpretentious, and legitimately genre-defying. I can’t speak highly enough about it.

#3 – Black Dresses – Forever in Your Heart

Oh hell yeah! Black Dresses reminds me of why I like Ween so much: it’s two friends who really get each other. But while Ween is silly, Black Dresses is horribly morose, morbid, nihilistic, and angry. Still though, behind all those genuinely strained aches and pains, you can catch glimmers of Ada Rook’s and Devi McCallion’s friendship. It’s not like those fuckin’ Beatles who all hated each other! What did the Beatles ever do for music anyway?

#2 – Fucked Up – Year of the Horse

Fucked Up barreled through my rankings to nab the silver medal this year. Year of the Horse is 90 minutes of progressive rock, metal, folk, punk, spaghetti westerns, big band, and everything else, mixed perfectly with breathtaking production and vocals. Broken into four 20+ minute movements, it’s like an honest-to-God hardcore symphony. Crank up the volume and lose yourself in orgasmic bliss while Damian Abraham growls like a neutered baboon over pretty folk piano arrangements.

#1 – Black Country, New Road – For the first time

Black Country, New Road’s debut was firmly slotted at #1 on my list ever since I laid ears on this six-track, 40-minute masterpiece. I was like “fuck everything that I’m going to hear for the rest of the year, this one is it”. I know this because I said that in May and I still stand by it in December. I haven’t been this enamored with an album, let alone a debut album, for as long as I can remember. I liked it so much I wrote a full review about a week after I first listened to it. I feel like a kid again! And I’m already excited for their sophomore release in two months. These guys are such the shit, I have nothing eloquent at all to say about them! They rock my socks. Eat a whole tin of cannabis mints and listen to “Science Fair”. You’ll thank me later.