Fall’s Album of the Year Contenders
ISSUE #255
It’s tailgating season, which means it’s fall album season, which means it’s time to start encouraging people at the game to listen to Mitski. This year’s album autumn has some exciting heavy hitters on deck, from Sufjan’s upcoming return to form to Marnie Stern’s first album in ten long years. Already we’re dancing in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s juggernaut GUTS, and coming soon are what promise to be great releases from Slow Pulp, Armand Hammer, Lilts, Sampha, and L’Rain. And if you have four hours to kill under the falling leaves, don’t miss DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s Destiny.
Check out these cuts from the fall’s most promising and place your bets on who crawls out of the rubble with the pennant.
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Chances are, you’re going to a Halloween party this year. Maybe you’re even throwing one. In either case, should you find yourself with the AUX, I bestow to you this gift—a six-and-a-half-hour mix of the best electro-goth and industrial dance music the 80s had to offer.
Two years after our first maddening descent into dungeon synth—the haunted, medieval, dark ambient subgenre born from side projects of Nordic black metal stars—and we’ve already seen a swell of scholarly literature on the genre from dark-corner music nerds and fantasy-flecked weirdos (both me) alike.
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
Irv Teibel, who released the influential Environments records over ten years from 1969–79, was a pioneer in putting field recordings (i.e., nature sounds) into the hands of stressed-out college students and, eventually, anyone who needed to drown out all the noise. Turns out that was a lot of people.
MJ Lenderman is one of the greatest guitarists. A supreme pleasure I get out of listening to his latest album is the sick guitar. He makes it talk, baby! I hear Dinosaur Jr. and Zappa’s best; I hear chapters in a book that switches narrators.
The opener to Mitski's latest album, “Bug Like an Angel,” starts as many songs do: with a single strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s not long before her voice becomes a choir, and the effect is that of intoxication, a blossom in the bloodstream, sinking at first and floating toward the end. Iggy Pop has described her as “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know.”
I may have mentioned last week that 1984 did not turn out to be Orwell’s dystopia—but there was one consequential act of censorship that occurred. It was no panopticon, no ever-present Big Brother, no. Instead, it took the form of a tiny sticker—one that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” and has adorned nearly every heavy metal, punk, and hip hop album since the mid-1980s.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
Yet these are often sophisticated and complex compositions. They’re designed at first provide stimulating play, but there’s artistic meat there nonetheless. It’s a hyper mix of classical, breakcore, bubblegum pop, and progressive rock.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
“Yup! Like it or not, Creed is back on top of the chart.” This is the caption that greeted me when I opened this month’s issue of my new favorite publication, The Cabbagetown Neighbor.
It’s hot out there folks, so you know what that means—fight fire with fire, crank up the heat, love your blisters till they callous. Just grab onto whatever you can.
The best song of 2024 isn’t on Spotify. It’s called “24/7 Heaven,” Diamond Jubilee’s closer. It comes drenched in strings and draped in blue light, at the end of Cindy Lee’s two-hour album. It’s the epitome of sublime, if you ask me—a sweet and perfect fruit, an apple at first sight.