Once upon a time, Tyler releases were bold explosions of colour and anticipation over what Hip Hop’s most stylistic voice was about to unleash next. Farewell to that era. Chromakopia throttles with the realisation and urgency of getting older, what it means to have a life beyond just what you create, and whether or not we’re all entrenched by our formative experiences. Masked on its cover, all drenched in a muddied sepia tone and strung up by claustrophobic military dress in the video for ‘Thought I Was Dead’. We’re not in Golfwang territory anymore, Toto.

Of course, however, nothing is ever a simple open-and-shut case with Tyler. Chromakopia is deliberate in its linkages with his wider discography, continuing a story that has dramatised the stages of his life with an artistic vision he has deservedly become synonymous for. Some aspects never change – arpeggio synths; stomping, fuzzy beats; pitched-up ad libs – and I’d never want them not to be his calling cards. But this time, the anxiety, mental muddle and outright stress that pervades his lyricism directs his work to new territory. The wild, implacable realisations that growing up is coming to terms with how much your parents have imprinted on your decision making ability runs like a telegraph wire along every road the album takes. Tyler’s mum narrates in splendidly charming, honest and moving snippets, and there’s no getting away that mother stands for comfort.

His mystique remains, and the conventions with which he’s mastered are still utilised in a familiar format. Fans will still be dissecting the lyrics of this one for years to come. The difference, however, is that he’s now joined the roster of artists whose characters and stage personas we loved in the 2010s who are now in need of revealing more about what keeps them up at night. Tyler’s greatest appeal has been how forthrightly his personas have come from the man behind the music – Flower Boy the romantic, Igor the monster, Sir Baudelaire the former deviant attuning to being more worldly and cultured. Chromakopia nearly inverses the whole operation, no longer seeking to project, but rather urgently trying to break out from within. Such is the panic that he finds new love, new levels of creativity in the beats, and new strength in doubling down on maturity. HIs wild side remains, more weathered but no less polished, driven now by an emotionality more adult than ever.

Get Together festival, 2022. Wunderhorse first wandered onto my radar during an early day set at Sheffield’s gathering of all things alternative, loose fitting clothes making them look like extras in an episode of Buffy. They got the hook in me immediately – slacker rock done with new zest, vocalist Jacob Slater as their figurehead and driving force. Midas makes remarkable use of what he offers. His plaintive register sits in just the right spot between soothing and gruff to make for the perfect focal point of an album that happily waves between the slow and the harsh. I had the gall to only check in on them occasionally since Sheffield. In the meantime, they managed to cultivate an energised and dedicated following.

Their second album amalgamates many of the sensibilities of Nu-New Wave’s appeal. But it’s clear from its execution and from the band’s popularity that there is a desire for the dynamic of Post Punk to be explored beyond social and political placings. Midas is firm proof that we still want interesting guitar-driven albums, a new member of a select group of releases of late that run on the same strengths. Their instrumentation bounds with thrust and confidence, a metallic ring chiming their higher frequencies and a stolid mix of rhythms churning underneath. Those old enough will recall early Doves in their muted fuzz and underlying profligacy. 

Some will want for lyricism with a little more depth, but it’s difficult to argue how anyone with a penchant for moody arrangements and oversized t-shirts won’t find this supremely enjoyable. What with their well-honed choruses and melodies, you do feel that many of these tracks are well on their way to becoming beloved fan favourites.

Remember that line on ‘Baby Boy’ by Beyoncé and Sean Paul where Bey sings “The dancefloor becomes the sea”? Yeah, well imagine that, but instead of tropical Caribbean waters, it’s a grimey day on Scarborough or Camber Sands. There is something unapologetically Bri’ish at the core of Tidal Memory Exo, musing on images of boredom-laden coastlines, massive beaches and the decay of the items washed up on them. What lurks around it takes on a more primordial character, as noted on the album’s Bandcamp page, every sonic element surfacing itself out of the mire before disappearing beneath the waves once more. 

Into the riptide go Drill, UK Bass and Dubstep, amongst a wealth of dial-up tones, liquid synths, and the sort of bleeps calculators use to talk to one another. Out of the wash comes head-bopping, gurn-worthy cuts that don’t require any extra substances to hit. This thing is a production marvel, signals bouncing against rust and brass down outflow pipes and oil drums. In spite of the record’s Deconstructed Club origins, this thing is definitively an outdoor album, practically begging you to grab your goretex coat and head coastwards. 

I’ve been fascinated by that album cover right from the get-go. Igloo takes a grey day at the seaside and turns it inside out. Yet, in not being totally reality-distorting, the end product is anchored by a deeply grounded quality, expressing the disorientation of our present age in an inspired, extra-political manner. 

It’s not often that you see a Metalcore album getting mainstream coverage in the way Knocked Loose’s 3rd studio release has. A five star review from The Guardian isn’t just huge praise, it’s almost an emancipation. 

If scream metal has become trendy, the Kentucky five piece haven’t softened it in the slightest. You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To doesn’t start so much as it appears out of your speakers in an instant, drums throttling the hyperactive, staccato production. As loud as it is, it’s surprisingly unaggressive as far as metal albums go. Save for the harsher lyrics, you’re more compelled to grit your teeth and bop your head than get riled up.

All bends to the phenomenon that is Bryan Garris’s voice. When the band first came into my life back at 2000 Trees in 2022, it stuck with me like a core memory. Indescribably pitched, breathy yet emotive; there really isn’t else like it that I’ve come across. He speaks, and the instrumentation follows suit, with the same vigour and agility. Only the legendary Poppy holds a candle, and her feature on ‘Suffocate’ is one of the record’s most thrilling moments.
Decriers of this sort of music will be very glad to know that you can make out the band’s lyrics. Indeed, everything on the album has a glistening crispness to it, thundery in its bass tones but bright and biting at the other end. Such viewpoints will also be glad to know that this is something far less destructive and far more a cleansing experience than anything else, bathed in the empyrean woodland clarity of that album cover and aided by that melodic underbelly. Even with how intense the pacing is – 27 minutes vanishes on this one – You Won’t Go is half an hour of therapy, miraculous and astonishing in form, total and lucid in its results.

There is a lot to like about The Last Dinner Party. Their aesthetic is defined. Their artistic voice is engaging. Their ambition is energising. Their statement of femininity and gender is relevant and urgent without being flag waving and campaigned. A debut record with artwork and song writing that begs to be read into. Thank fuck too that they weren’t swallowed up by the waves of anonymous internet voices trying to reduce them to a marketing ploy. If the people annoyed that at a new female band being successful want to do something helpful, they could redirect the energy they waste calling new artists ‘industry plants’ and criticise the fact that labels make so much fucking money from other people’s work.

Funny, too, when Prelude To Ecstasy is in many ways a real take-it-or-leave-it record, holding no qualms in what you choose to do with it. Certainly destined to be one of the iconic indie albums of the era, very much a snapshot of the aesthetics of the time rather than an assessment. A perfect slice of baroque wallowing, happy to be just a little bit pretentious to annoy some and satisfy the rest. Tapered orchestration sits just below the threshold of decadent, wafting the record with an apt sense of grandeur. James Ford, you beautiful bastard, once again proves that he is the sound of our times with the wonders he pulls here on production.

We all grew up looking up to contemporary, engaging records like this, and to have watched another one be birthed has been beautiful. The Last Dinner Party want drama and theatricality over definitive substance, and they’re very good at delivering it. Perhaps best of all, then, is that the months since its release have revealed a slow emotional sucker punch to me that is going to make this a favourite of mine for years to come. In an era when hype is seen as the only to cut through, it’s refreshing to enjoy something new and pop-oriented that’s more than capable of standing on its own two feet despite how much the marketing execs wanted you to swallow it all. Let’s all try not to eat this band alive for album two, eh?

Debut of the Year

Drop the vague descriptors of ‘emotional release’ coyed by some reviewers, and experience it for real. Listening to I Got Heaven engages the fuzzy, immaterial sides of your brain and deals in the feelings you can’t put into words. Not a moment of Mannequin Pussy’s spellbinding fourth studio album doesn’t come from the heart, a magnanimous reaffirmation of what’s possible with guitars, and proof that alternative rock’s most exciting facets right now are coming from the bands willing to blend genres. Not only do the band find new light in their mixing of punk and indie, the dynamism achieved borders on the astonishing. ‘I Don’t Know You’s admonishing tenderness is replaced by the thrash of ‘OK? OK! OK? OK!’ barely two cuts later, and if that wasn’t enough, they make ample room both for supremely catchy hooks and out-and-out mosh pit fare.

But ultimately, it is those indescribable elements that stay with you longest. If their rage at the consequences of gender stereotypes doesn’t get you, their wry, unabated depiction of grief certainly will. John Congleton’s tremendous production work brings wild pace and life to their words of disjointed romance and trauma. Low, grumbly basses that meet sharp high frequencies, and a thumping amount of energy for everything in between. Full-bodied in construction and in effect, creating a record that takes far more pleasure in your reading of it than something intended to decree how you’re left feeling. Every listen is an exorcism, more often than not of things you didn’t even realise you were thinking of. That, for me, is true catharsis via guitars.

Personal favourite

A city is made by its people, and if New York ever seems like too much of a trope for its own good, then Vampire Weekend are surely testament that it’s far more than just a stereotype. Even so, that undercurrent which has maintained throughout their discography hasn’t felt as emphasised as it does on Only God Was Above Us. Migration, ever the lancet of the uninformed, is not just a positive here, but a necessity. “What is a big city like New York? It’s wave after wave of ambitious people … the waves keep crashing, new people” as Koenig described on a episode of his Time Crisis radio show when talking about ‘Mary Boone’, one of the many sparkling pinnacles of the record. The contemporary urgency that means we sometimes forget humans have always been trying to solve problems related to cities and the sheer inevitability of history drive the band to a point of celebration over the fact that any of it has happened at all.

Only takes the form of a springtime traipse from block to block. Less a romanticisation, more a daydream, strained with irreverence through the fuzz and grime of the most iconoclast urban space on earth. A diverse and liberating sonic palette, matching the melting pot that The Big Apple is for music as a whole. Some connections are obvious – the Hip Hop beats, Post Punk inflections and Jazz tailorings, for which the city has been a bastion for all at one point or another. Others are less so, and all the better for it, whipping you along on something experimental without it being pretentious. The fresh humidity of its atmosphere is only tempered by Koenig’s melancholia, something that makes this an incredibly rewarding and pertinent listen. Wide-eyed wonder is fun, especially in music as zany as those thoughts are. But this, on the other hand, is a real statement of taking feeling by just being in a world you enjoy. Experience is a victory in itself, and the sublime is there to be lived within.

Every cut rattles with a crashy echo, imitating the concrete and bustle of urban spaces and the constant rush of city living. All of which builds these places, in their often incomprehensible magnitude, is singled down into a digestible perspective. The greater forces that drive the ebbs and flows of the movements of people, the sparks that create cultures and scenes, the amalgamation of them in one great reaction; all resonate within the resolute songwriting. Only is firmly about New York, and written so deeply out of love for it despite the anger with its injustices. But in many ways, it is a greater reflection of the functioning and formation of all conglomerations, and the powerful emotions they evoke. When politics is employing dividing lines by the hour right now, it pays to remember that there’s always a bigger picture.

Personal favourite

You’re not the only one who’s probably asked themselves what an ‘imaginal disc’ is. In biology, they’re parts of holometabolous insect larvae that will form portions of the outside of the adult insect during pupal transformation. Or, in plain English, the stuff that caterpillars go through in order to become butterflies. As the visible elements of the fully formed insect are quite literally drawn from the inside out, the only explanation for where the fuck the driving forces of Imaginal Disc come from fall down similar lines. Both band members feature on the sleeve of the record, having the music literally pulled out of them by the hand of the omnipotent, one of countless inexplicable aspects of this near astounding record.

That’s because much of what Magdalena Bay are dealing with is firmly beyond the tangible. It’s not a cop out to call this ‘pyschedlia’, but it’s certainly underselling the full experience, not least because a hundred billion genres and inspirations make up the quilt of its sounds. Their songwriting sits wholly within the indiscernible, charged by the same electricity that petters your skin with goosebumps from the runoff of their exceptional arrangements. Its motions can’t be charted by relative physics, so crisp, airy and overexposed that it’s impossible to decipher if you’re sat somewhere or floating on ethereal currents at any one point. Trust me when I tell you it entangles with the feelings you’ll never be able to put into words, and works on your psyche like a massage.

The inferences, references and links are all there to tie this at least somewhat to our world. Little snippets sound like things you’ve heard elsewhere – the menu music from an old Gran Turismo game, a lost recording from Paisley Park, a synth tuning The Flaming Lips would have signed off on, the hold jingle for an insurance company. But such moments evaporate just as soon as they’re observed. Any objective element is almost impossible to pin down, with the only part that genuinely exists in the third dimension being the physical copy of the record itself. Imaginal Disk is abject, abstract, pure creativity – as cheesy as it sounds to say. It’s not even that the duo are committing to a bit, it’s the trust they imbue that every moment of this is intentional and worth sticking around for, and that everything it’s making you feel is genuine.

If there was a summation I could give to it that actually translates into words, Imaginal Disk is a story of life, love and our connection with the 4th dimension. Space, time and the quantum realm are visited in equal measure, more often than not all once. The impossible forces of what births us, what makes us, what realises us are its currency, from which it draws out of the listener the reason we listen to this damn format. Existsence is pretty fucking insane, isn’t it?

If the trajectory that we’ve been on with Pop’s recent explosion in new forms has told us anything, it’s that what’s around the corner is never clear. Magdalena Bay have created an album that truly sits out of the bounds of what anyone could have anticipated from music this year. It’s an entirely unique expression that exists on its own plane, only quantified by the minute parts you can attempt to say it sounds like. I suspect on certain substances, listening to this might be like being shown the centre of the universe.

Personal favourite

The achievement of a band once inseparable from the label of Post Punk to embrace an almost whacky attire, both in real life and on that striking album cover, is not to be underestimated. Now that everyone’s sat with Romance for a good few months, it’s clear that the abstractness is a reflection of the most evolutionary record to date for Fontaines. The depth and riveting imagery we know them for remains, but it’s burning brighter and more weirdly than ever, thus making the record logical, essential and totally moving.

New rhythms, new structures, new tones; Chatten’s immutable voice is one of the few aspects that hasn’t been upended. Even then, his hooks are catchier and more plentiful than ever. Add to that: strings, sampling and a lovely serving of pianos. Exaggeration at every turn heightens the deep need that fires out their words, centred on the toll being in the industry has done to the band, and their undying commitment to finding the love no matter an ill will or struggle. To hear that a band who have achieved so much still feel imposter syndrome speaks less of asking for pity and does more to confirm that they haven’t lost themselves.

James Ford’s involved? Of course James Ford’s involved. He always fucking is, and the work he’s done to translate the rasp and reverb of their previous work into a more contemporary casing is outstanding. An iridescent, metallic pang bastes every cut, matching the state of a world broken in so many countless ways that somehow still finds ways to be indescribably beautiful. Even when they’re not trying to, it’s as if they can’t help but capture the times. Ireland is always mixed in by their brush, but their relationship is extracted almost completely from contemporary placings, save for the rushes of innocent nostalgia that burst through on occasion. 

Romance’s confidence to go further than ever before into the nuanced and inferred for one of the most articulate and incisive creative voices around proves the five piece to be a band far more capable than just their outstanding representation of Irish culture in the modern age. Fontaines have always been one of the better bands that arrived in the post-Brexit Post Punk wave. But where their stablemates have somewhat struggled to catch the breeze again, D.C. have successfully broken away, and landed in terra nova. If this is what they can do when they feel like it, it would be remiss not to call them Ireland’s greatest living band at this point. And when they’re making alternative rock that speaks so truthfully to the love we all desperately want to find in our mad times, it would be remiss for them not to be the figureheads of all those who wear their hearts on their sleeves. “Each new day I get another year older”, and yet another Fontaines album delivers a lyric I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Personal favourite

Before anyone even tries to suggest otherwise, this blog has been lime green long since Brat was even conceived. Then again, who am I kidding. We don’t give out an ‘Artist of the Year’ award on this blog, but if we were to, 2024’s recipient would be Charli. It couldn’t be anyone else. From start to finish, she has been at the maxim, and all of it has been built on an album that is urgent, incisive and addictive.