Sub-Ed’s Albums & EPs Of The Year 2017
Here, simply, is what I consider to have been the best albums and EPs of the year – those that have stood out most from that which I’ve listened to. As usual, there’s been plenty of good-to-downright-great releases, each and every one of the below worth recommending in their own way. The overriding themes of those at the very top tend to lean towards the loud, the genre-mashed and the out-and-out experimental … an insight, perhaps, into my current mental state. Once again studded with gloomy singer-songwriters too, the listening wasn’t all bleak, some lighter moments shining through the clouds in places, all be them sporadic.
Particular credit this year goes to [sic] fixture Castle Face, a label that can count six entries in this list and similar, if not more, plaudits also go to another [sic] ever-present, Sacred Bones, from whom five artists also feature (for the sixth year running and four of whom are in the top 20 this time around!). A truly staggering achievement! Special mention goes to the rejuvenated Sub Pop and to Agitated for having a hand in four each and only slightly lesser mention should also be made of the 4AD, Tough Love and Cardinal Fuzz imprints for not being far behind!
Other statistical analysis interestingly shows that, while I consider myself an open-minded globetrotter when it comes to music, 89% of the artists in this top 100 still entirely or partially call either the US, UK, Canada or Australia home. Two of the top ten do buck the trend, though, so it’s not a question of quality, but one of quantity. Turn over enough rocks though and great music abounds almost everywhere.
It must be said though that, as per every year, I have only one pair of ears, a set number of hours in the day and a bank balance that is far from inexhaustible, so there are, perhaps, certain notable omissions from the list below. In any case, who knows what may have been, but here is what definitely was (linked where reviewed – rough genre given in brackets):
1. Ho99o9 – United States Of Horror (Hip Hop/Hardcore) [Toys Have Powers/999 Deathkult]
Though its colourful and overtly sexual language may be too much to stomach for some, United States Of Horror may be the best album Death Grips haven’t written yet. We say album, but we mean mixtape for Ho99o9 (pronounced “horror”) are an explosive hybrid of trap, militant hip-hop, jungle and hardcore punk. Highbrow it ain’t. Noisy it is. Shred and beats side by side, it’s a real gatecrasher of a record, arriving uninvited, drinking all the booze, breaking shit and leaving with the girl you’ve been working for months.
2. Sonic Jesus – Grace (Post-Punk/New Wave) [Fuzz Club]
Man’s best friend bounding over to you after a hard day’s work is pretty great, but there’s something in a dog’s big eyes that seems almost too easy to please. Grace is similarly satisfying despite this same nagging concern. Back in 2015 the band swung freely from excellent industrial post-punk to heavy psychedelic rock; pivoting now in the direction of catchier, new wave post-punk courtesy of a comically inflated vocal, Grace is an album comprised front to back of some of the truest songs this year.
3. Julien Baker – Turn Out The Lights (Singer-Songwriter) [Matador]
Talk about stepping it up for your sophomore LP! Memphis songwriter Julien Baker hasn’t just built on Sprained Ankle’s decent foundations, she’s built a spine-tingling palace on top of them! Butterfly-like, she’s now emerged as pin-drop piano artist of the highest calibre, her voice having come on leaps and bounds these last two years to the point of jaw-dropping beauty now. Stately strings tug at the heartstrings, but it’s the tender lyrics that rip them free of their moorings. Grab the Kleenex; you’ll need a big box.
4. White Dog – Sydney Limits (Hardcore Punk) [Agitated]
An early bone-headed favourite from as far back as January, White Dog’s blistering Sydney Limits channels the likes of Suicidal Tendencies and Black Flag and is also much smarter than it may first appear. Brief concessions to mathy complexity thus share the platter with nuanced near-metal and marauding drum parts, razor-sharp guitar cutting clearly through the maelstrom. A track like “Hard For You” might consequently be about life’s struggles or it might be about boners and it doesn’t matter one jot.
5. Arca – Arca (Electronica/Singer-Songwriter) [XL Recordings]
Trust Arca to make a Mulholland Drive kind of album when everything else is Twin Peaks. His composition to date has largely eschewed vocal accompaniment, but tellingly this S/T album is full of producer Alejandro Ghersi’s creepy Spanish-language contributions. His Club Silencio is a far more minimal place than his usual haunts: a world of glitch and echoes, scrambled electronic chatter and dynamic strings. It’s an achingly intimate portrait of the artist and yet somehow still feels as old as time.
6. Uniform – Wake In Fright (Thrash/Noise) [Sacred Bones]
Combining the holy trinity of industrial, noise and thrash, Uniform’s Wake In Fright LP is a real bulldozer of a record and you have our sympathies if you had to endure anything more brutal these past twelve months. A violent riposte to societal break-down, riffs and drum machine dug straight out of Satan’s toilet keep the album from imploding in on itself, Michael Berdan’s ferocious vocal a real weapon of mass destruction these days too. It’s provocative sure, but it still won’t sell half as well as sex does.
7. Show Me The Body – Corpus I (Hardcore/Hip-Hop) [Loma Vista]
Hard as it is to imagine, Corpus I is even more out-there than last year’s utterly magnificent Body War. Supported by a large cast of noise terrorists, NYC residents Show Me The Body retreat further into the shadows, the antithesis of Ho99o9’s party tape, most traces of Body War’s relative catchiness completely obliterated. Various MCs thus hold court over power electronics, sludgy thrash blasters rubbing shoulders with industrial EDM and the switch-ups are truly whiplash-inducing.
Listen: Cyba Slam Fif World Dance Party
8. Jesu & Sun Kil Moon – 30 Seconds To The Decline Of Planet Earth (Singer-Songwriter) [Caldo Verde]
Mark Kozelek has hit upon a divisive, unique yet prolific lyrical style in recent years and Jesu’s unobtrusive backing again proves a winning formula here after the pair already took home [sic]’s 2016 AOTY award. Kozelek also tabled a second album this year, yet this edges it via spellbinding storytelling, invention and sheer post-modernist gall. Listening to Sun Kil Moon can, of course, seem like a stream of inside jokes at times, but spend some time with his tales and they do begin to blossom.
9. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys – Rot (Punk-Rock/Slacker) [Agitated]
The sound of best buds making the best pub-rock you ever heard and miraculously doing it without coming on too laddish, BWBBs are the sort of fellas you need in your life both literally and musically. Their age is irrelevant yet these are tales of youth: eyes bloodshot, the wrong side of dangerous, but the right side of cool. Rot is exactly the sort of record you would only ever expect to find battered and beer-ringed and definitely not from a smoke-free home, if you were to ever find a copy at all.
10. Institute – Subordination (Punk) [Sacred Bones]
Getting to the point fast and ferociously, Subordination doesn’t last long but neither would you want it to for it’s a true punk hazing: fists flailing, tools out. The Texans’ second studio album sounds neither exclusively vintage nor modern; it just is. Post-punk scales and Gothic tones add depth, but Moses Brown’s serrated snarl ensures these scars are for life. Master of puppets, Institute are ironically a band in search of insurrection yet equally one too smart to be caught seen as the ringleaders.
11. Cigarettes After Sex – Cigarettes After Sex (Dream-Pop/Slowcore) [Partisan]
A record seemingly made for lazy Sunday mornings in bed, Cigarettes After Sex find slow-burning success in the noir cracks between Mazzy Star and The xx. Often downbeat to the point of a shuffle, time-worn tales of love and loss lock fingers under the sheets with intimately modern observation for these lovers reside in a world of dick pix and Tinder. Just like real life, expect triumph and tears.
12. Akranes – Takeover Me EP (R&B/Balearica) [Ramber Records]
A year on from the top-drawer Shadows EP, producer Liam Gaunt’s Takeover Me EP is another stellar EP on which he’s swelled his contributing vocalists by one. Featured once more is the impressive Ooni Staerck, so too now the equally stand-out Sabira Jade. An embarrassment of riches consequently at his fingertips, Takeover Me is electro music for the hopelessly, helplessly romantic.
13. Cayetana – New Kind Of Normal (Indie/Punk) [Plum Records]
Philly trio Cayetana make fuzzed-out punk in the style of [sic] favourites White Lung and Japandroids, but they do so in softer and less obvious tones, even though they’ve expanded their sound this time around. A DIY celebration of what it feels to be downtrodden, depressed and released on the band’s own label, New Kind of Normal is not quite catharsis, but it’s definitely a survivor’s group.
14. Forest Swords – Compassion (Electronica/Beats) [Ninja Tune]
Producer Matthew Barnes, aka Forest Swords, appears to have been on a massive DJ Shadow trip since last our paths crossed way back in 2013. His spacious Morricone dub remains intact, but now the supporting instrumentation is busier, filled out in part with percussive clicks, corrupted vocal clips and otherworldly melodies. It’s a process that opens doors, what lies beyond them always a surprise.
15. John Moreland – Big Bad Luv (Singer-Songwriter/Alt-Country) [4AD]
Despite countrified songwriter John Moreland being done playing the loner on account of finally being in love, Big Bad Luv still literally hurts in places. Amongst these old-world warnings of fire and brimstone now come moments of flickering peace though. These remain songs of battered redemption all the same, ones nonetheless meant to be enjoyed with a large whisky in hand. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
16. Zola Jesus – Okovi (Singer-Songwriter/Gothic/Industrial) [Sacred Bones]
The last couple of Zola Jesus albums have been ok, but nothing more. Atmospheric but lacking, they’re quickly blown out of the water by the punishing Okovi, a shell for several absolutely lethal concoctions. There’s a big-beat stranger-in-the-camp at its middle, more Austra than austere, but returning to Sacred Bones has clearly done Miss Danilova’s classically-trained pipes the world of good/evil.
17. Autobahn – The Moral Crossing (Post-Punk/Goth) [Tough Love]
Killer EPs. OK debut LP. Poor second. Disappear. You know the drill. Autobahn don’t. They’ve upped their game, switched around their influences and landed a pretty special sophomore after their decent debut. Consequently The Moral Crossing experiments with post-punk, synth, strings and spoken-word, throwing up some interesting narratives and with them Autobahn may just have become unputdownable.
18. Chelsea Wolfe – Hiss Spun (Singer-Songwriter/Doom-Metal) [Sargent House]
2015 [sic] magazine AOTY winner Chelsea Wolfe is back and she hasn’t got any cheerier, but somehow she has got heavier still. Growling once again with the extreme low-end of doom-metal, producer Kurt Ballou of Converge now adds sludge metal into the mix as Wolfe continues to float around frostily like a lost soul. The result is a skilfully balanced album that soothes more than it stings.
19. Moon Duo – Occult Architecture Vol. 1 (Psych-Rock) [Sacred Bones]
Volume 1 of the 2-part Occult Architecture series, Moon Duo’s first LP of the year was also their strongest. Part 2 showcased the band’s sunnier side, but we’ve always preferred the dark side of the moon. Ripley Johnson and co. thus drone their way through knock-out kraut grooves, apocalyptic synths throwing their hat into the ring should the Black Mountain-soundtracked Year Zero ever require a sequel.
20. Jupiter-C – 001 EP (Darkwave/Electro-Pop) [Invada]
Cruelly still unknown to many, Jupiter-C remain the best band you haven’t heard, unless of course you have. Their debut EP of roboticised post-punk on Invada comprises three original tracks and two heavyweight remixes and it’s a dark delight from start to finish. A hypnotic listen, Ashiya Eastwood and David Kane’s svelte craft is now speeding past event horizon, inextricably drawn to oblivion.
21. At The Drive-In – in•ter a•li•a (Emo/Punk-Rock) [Rise Records]
Back to show the young guns how it’s done, cult emo-punks At The Drive-In have pulled off a master stroke with in•ter a•li•a. No, it isn’t Relationship Of Command II, but neither does it suck, which frankly is very surprising. There’s real bite to their delivery, a dynamic playfulness and that trademark sense of invention. ATDI haven’t gotten better with age, but they have matured well.
22. Conor Oberst – Salutations (Singer-Songwriter/Alt-Country) [Nonesuch]
Last year Conor Oberst treated us to the acoustic Ruminations LP, his best album under any guise in forever. Salutations re-records all 10 poetic songs with a full band and adds 7 new tracks making Ruminations now seem like a demo tape, only Oberst’s inimitable lyrical flow and imagery remaining intact. Be it folk, country, rock or straight-up song-writing, nobody does the whole troubadour thing better.
23. Feral Ohms – Feral Ohms (Rock/Proto-Punk/Biker-Psych) [Silver Current]
Feral Ohms (or Ωhms, if you prefer) are frontman and guitarist Ethan Miller of Comets On Fire fame (and, more recently, Howlin’ Rain infamy) and others and together they’re an “all guitar, all of the time”, proto-metal, psych-punk, biker-fuzz kinda band. If they only were as vintage as they sound, they’d probably have been emblazoned on one of Beavis or Butthead’s shirts back in the day.
24. Aye Nako – Silver Haze (Punk-Rock/Grunge) [Don Giovanni]
Getting to grips these days with the indie/grunge of bands like Speedy Ortiz, guitarist Mars Dixon continues nevertheless to sing “sad punk songs about being queer, trans, and black”. His is a life of constant change: his music, his band members, his transitioning voice. With biting fuzz-pop now at his disposal though, he’s starting to sound like someone who’s finally comfortable in their own skin.
25. Julie Byrne – Not Even Happiness (Singer-Songwriter/Folk) [Ba Da Bing!]
Drawing a huge amount of admiring glances this year, honey-voiced Julie Byrne breathes heavenly harmonies onto her stark finger-picking and swoons her way around a beautiful collection of romantic poetry that, almost surprisingly, just so happens to be set to blissful backing music. Nymph-like, she barely seems real at times, a fleeting memory that’s frustratingly – but magically – illusive.
26. Radiation Flowers – Summer Loop EP (Space-Rock/Neo-Psych) [Cardinal Fuzz/Sunmask]
Shoegaze, neo-psych, indie, kosmiche, stoner-rock and even a little bit of country, Summer Loop’s varied run-time makes for a dark and confusing day-dream, but a day-dream all the same rather than a nightmare. Guitar textures shimmer blackly throughout though, vaguely threatening but just too spaced-out to really do anything about it. And it all makes for a surprisingly seductive combination.
27. Bing & Ruth – No Home Of The Mind (Post/Avant-Classical) [4AD]
At the crossroads of David Moore’s New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music education, the experimental drones of Tim Hecker and the organic beauty of an act like Sigur Rós, the elemental No Home Of The Mind is a sustained-piano lover’s delight because it both uses the instrument’s traditional percussive palette as well as transcending the popular/classical divide so effectively.
28. Pissed Jeans – Why Love Now (Sludgecore) [Sub Pop]
Cast your eye around and there are many blots on the musical landscape, but few quite so ugly as Pissed Jeans. Theirs is a brand of particularly nasty punk-noise, yet it’s the way they’re tuned in to current events and Matt Korvette’s withering sarcasm that really set them apart. Witness, e.g., just how prescient and playful a track like “I’m A Man” is, neatly having anticipated the #metoo movement.
29. Mario Batkovic – Mario Batkovic (Neo-Classical/Experimental) [Invada]
Every so often an artist comes along that’s utterly unique. Sure, you can roughly throw Bosnian-born accordion virtuoso Mario Batkovic in with the likes of Yann Tiersen and Colin Stetson in terms of his revelatory use of instrumentation and its cinematic results, but the unfettered thinking that leads to this kind of break though is the preserve of the mad and the brilliant only. Batkovic is kinda both.
30. EMA – Exile In The Outer Ring (Experimental/Noise-Pop) [City Slang]
A timely reminder of just how good Erika M. Anderson is when her albums are far from frequent, Exile In The Outer Ring is both her most accessible album and yet also her most experimental under the name. She consequently flits between the dark political brooding of Middle America and big-beat melodies, industrial wastelands, feedback, and bone-rattling percussion all left trailing in her wake.
31. Pharmakon – Contact (Power Electronics/Noise) [Sacred Bones]
It’s official; Margaret Chardiet has unquestionably dredged Contact up from the screaming depths of hell. Her work has always been closer to extreme performance art or installation than what most people would consider music, but this is some seriously next-level shit. It’s a fascinating experience in more than just a macabre sense though, but it should still come with a public health warning.
32. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Feed The Rats (Psych-Rock/Sludge Metal) [Rocket Recordings]
Feed The Rats is to psych-metal as Phil Taylor is to darts … Power! Awkward metaphor aside, there’s no subtlety on display at any point here, the album made of just three mega-statements on which the Newcastle five-piece rip through heavy sludge and leaden grooves with wild abandon. There’s a small subsection of society for whom this total blaster will be album of the year. You know who you are.
33. Flat Worms – Flat Worms (Garage-Psych/Rock) [Castle Face]
Doing the simple things right is hard and garage-rockers Flat Worms make it look easy. That they also have at their disposal a tumble of ten flawless hits that always seem to know how to find the next level is a total bonus. This is the sort of perfectly formed rock that made The Strokes super-stars back at the turn of the millennium; it’s just a shade less polished, which is better obviously.
34. Widowspeak – Expect The Best (Dream-Pop) [Captured Tracks]
Out of nowhere, Expect The Best is – aptly – the best Widowspeak album so far and it’s a bit of a switch-up in terms of sound too. Much more confident that the band’s folksy beginnings, the unassuming Brooklyn band now make swooning, heart-breaking first-wave dream-pop of such calibre (again think Mazzy Star) as to make you immediately revisit their back catalogue for full reassessment.
35. Kedr Livanskiy – Ariadna (Dream-Pop/Techno) [2MR]
Like or it not, music is increasingly blurring the lines of cardinal genre as we edge ever closer to a Bladerunner reality. Moscow’s Kedr Livanskiy is further along the evolutionary scale than most, her fusion of sometimes-Russian-language dream-pop and techno frequently as arresting as it is brilliant. Hers is a garbled future just out of reach for most, but one that’s still tantalisingly close to many.
36. Grace Sings Sludge – Life With Dick (Singer-Songwriter/Freak-Folk) [Empty Cellar]
There’s just something about bewitching, spidery freak-folk that stands the hairs up on the back of your neck and only doubly so when it comes courtesy of The Sandwitches singer Grace Cooper. You could yammer on about Life With Dick’s spectral ethereality and downright strangeness for hours, but this is a record best lived. Strap on a pair of headphones on a lonely day and let it work its magic.
37. espher – ULTRAVIOLET (Ambient Techno/House) [Ramber Records]
Manchester producer espher, aka Ben Pearson, rolls out the red carpet with his luxurious ULTRAVIOLET LP, a beautiful melting of piano-line tech and house into aquatic synth-work and MIDI strings. It’s a truly crystalline statement ripe for the crossover market, its precise beat palette never threatening to rip up his template yet, at the same time, showing every intention of bettering it.
38. Spectres – Condition (Noise-Rock) [Sonic Cathedral]
Bands like Spectres never seem to be in fashion, but that plays to their favour more so now than ever. Away from much of the hype-machine’s glare, they’re getting tighter and louder over time, simultaneously expanding their niche and perfecting their own sound too; their pedals now come from shoegaze, the grooves from heavy psych and the glorious, grinding guitars straight from industrial noise.
39. Grandaddy – Last Place (Indie) [30th Century/Columbia]
It’s long been an outrage that Grandaddy were no longer with us and yet many a lesser band still was. Come-back LP, Last Place, therefore immediately rights that wrong and – in parts at least – it’s like Jason Lytle and co. never went away. Trademark indie nagging and gentle psychedelia swell the heart and mind accordingly in what amounts to a grand farewell for the late bassist Kevin Garcia. RIP.
40. Protomartyr – Relatives In Descent (Punk-Rock) [Domino]
Relatives In Descent is certainly not the best Protomartyr album to date; it’s one that instead wins ugly, Joe Casey’s unique points of view unspooled in his usual snarl, his unease with today’s America unabated. His arguments are equally well made too, but they and his band’s guitar hooks are just fewer and more disjointed – an accurate product, therefore, of the society from which it comes.
41. White Manna – Bleeding Eyes (Psych-Rock) [Agitated/Cardinal Fuzz]
Following on from 2016’s cosmic biker-brawl of an album Pan, Bleeding Eyes’ opening title-track both picks up where that record left off and yet still manages to surprise. White Manna usually assault the ears with feedback and fuzz, but now the band go for the eyes too, strutting proto-punk rooted in tight rock rather than psychedelic meandering, the vocal cleaner too and quite revelatory.
42. Ben Frost – The Centre Cannot Hold (Post-Classical/Noise) [Mute]
Experimental Australian composer Ben Frost has come a long way since his organic break-out LP, By The Throat. Eight years on, The Centre Cannot Hold is inspired by his time aboard the USS Theodore in its efforts to down ISIS by blazing missile fire. Ostensibly there to soundtrack a different project, Frost evidently also came away with a head full of devastating sub-bass and the irradiated noise of the apocalypse.
43. Sheer Mag – Need To Feel Your Love (Punk/Classic Rock) [Static Shock]
F O R R E A L. There’s no need to go carving it into your arm when you’re Sheer Mag for the Philly band live and breathe classic rock and continue to do so without sucking. They’re a modern-day miracle led by one of the most magnetic singers currently in the game. That they also have some of the best melodies going confirms their status as one of this year’s primary reference points.
44. Ian William Craig – Slow Vessels (Singer-Songwriter/Ambient-Drone) [130701]
We don’t include remixes in the [sic] AOTY list so Slow Vessels only scrapes in by the skin of its teeth by virtue of being an acoustic reworking of 2016’s Centres LP and the result is so different for it to count in our book as entirely new material … oh and for being brilliant too! The move simply lets William Craig’s song-writing and playing shine and, out in the open, they shimmer together quite wonderfully.
45. Girlpool – Powerplant (Punk/C86) [Anti-]
With nowhere to hide, many bands struggle when stripped back. Minimalism turned masterpiece, however, on Girlpool’s hyper-vulnerable debut. Expanding not retreating, Powerplant adds percussion and with it an extra dimension. Knowing the risks of it making them less distinct as an act, the girls double down instead on wry lyrics and eerie harmonies. There’s still no-one quite like them.
46. Loom – Loom (Grunge/Psych-Rock) [Silent Cult]
When does pastiche become plagiarism? The opening tracks on Loom’s debut LP are downright identikit, Nevermind-era Nirvana karaoke and – trite as they are – they’re also rollicking good fun. Loom is Faris from The Horrors’ two brothers and luckily they also have more in the tank, latter cuts, reminiscent of their brother’s band, spinning off too into pulsating psych in the style of Hookworms.
47. Trementina – 810 (Dream-Pop/Shoegaze) [Burger Records]
Having scored the #3 spot on last year’s [sic] AOTY list, powerful Chilean shoegazers Trementina returned earlier this year with a mellower sound much closer to dream-pop. Then they were warped from too much time under the desert sun, whereas 810 comes from a more equatorial shore, crystalline waters lapping at your toes. Mad dogs no longer, 810 is as pleasing as happy hour.
48. The Janitors – Horn Ur Marken (Psych-Rock/Stoner-Doom) [Cardinal Fuzz]
Swedish gloom-rockers The Janitors call their brand of heavy doom “stökpsych”, which we’re translating to mean “single-minded psych” as Horn Ur Marken has no real concern for anything except deep stoner meditation, tenebrous dirges and all-encompassing fuzz. It’s consequently black to the point of Goth and Scandinavian metal, these Janitors seemingly having found the keys to hell.
49. Tim Darcy – Saturday Night (Singer-Songwriter/Punk-Rock) [Jagjaguwar]
Who’d have thought that indie-looking wordsmith from Ought was also a bit of crooner? Sure his louche song-writing when solo still sounds like Ought, but that’s only because any kind of punk-rock fronted by him would. Here he’s intimate and yet also odd, precise and simultaneously ramshackle – an unsupervised artist running amok with his medium. Saturday Night has rarely looked so colourful.
50. Dion Lunadon – Dion Lunadon (Garage-Punk/Noise-Rock) [Agitated]
Bassist for two of the millennium’s best bands in The D4 and A Place To Bury Strangers, Dion Lunadon has nothing to prove and yet his S/T solo album still burns out of necessity. A varied LP unified by ever-present fuzz, garage-punk ragers consequently howl in the face of blown-out noise, bluesy sludge and spicy thrash – icing on the cake, even kraut is treated to his trademark pedal abuse!
The best of the rest (no particular order):
Meatbodies – Alice (Garage-Psych/Fuzz-Rock) [In The Red]
Priests – Nothing Feels Natural (Punk-Rock) [Sister Polygon]
Tittingur – Lavina (Electro/Techno/Industrial) [Exitab]
The Courtneys – The Courtneys II (Punk-Rock) [Flying Nun]
The Proper Ornaments – Foxhole (Indie/60s Psych) [Tough Love]
Damaged Bug – Bunker Funk (Synth-Punk/Kraut) [Castle Face]
Former Bullies – Stranger (Psych-Folk/Pop) [Towed By The Ghost]
Methyl Ethel – Everything Is Forgotten (Pop) [4AD]
The Flaming Lips – Oczy Młody (Psych-Pop) [Bella Union]
Meat Wave – The Incessant (Punk-Rock/Post-Punk) [SideOneDummy]
Ty Segall – Ty Segall (Garage-Rock) [Drag City]
Dirty Projectors – Dirty Projectors (R&B/Pop) [Domino]
Cherry Glazerr – Apocalipstick (Garage-Rock/Pop) [Secretly Canadian]
Woods – Love Is Love EP (Psych-Folk) [Woodsist]
Pile – A Hairshirt Of Purpose (Post Hardcore/Math-Rock) [Exploding In Sound]
Lydia Ainsworth – Darling Of The Afterglow (Synth-Pop/Singer-Songwriter) [Arbutus]
The Big Moon – Love In The 4th Dimension (Garage-Pop) [Fiction Records]
Father John Misty – Pure Comedy (Singer-Songwriter/Alt-Country) [Bella Union]
Web Of Sunsets – Chaos Waltz (Slowcore) [Moon Glyph]
Dusty Mush – Cheap Entertainment (Garage-Psych) [Howlin’ Banana]
Cobra Family Picnic – Magnetic Anomaly (Kraut/Psych-Rock) [Cardinal Fuzz / Sky Lantern]
The Black Lips – Satan’s Graffiti Or God’s Art? (Southern Rock/Garage-Psych) [Vice]
Strand Of Oaks – Hard Love (Singer-Songwriter/Rock) [Dead Oceans]
Colin Stetson – All This I Do For Glory (Avant-Classical/Experimental) [52Hz]
Rips – Rips (Punk-Rock) [Faux Discx]
Ulrika Spacek – Modern English Decoration (Indie/Psych/Shoegaze) [Tough Love]
Roe Enney – Glare (Darkwave/Post-Punk) [Root Strata]
Kelley Stoltz – Que Aura (Power/Psych-Pop) [Castle Face]
Wolf Parade – Cry Cry Cry (Indie/Rock) [Sub Pop]
Dasher – Sodium (Psych-Rock/Post-Punk) [Jagjaguwar]
Shannon Lay – Living Water (Singer-Songwriter/Folk) [Mare]
Duds – Of A Nature Or Degree (Post-Punk) [Castle Face]
John Murry – A Short History Of Decay (Singer-Songwriter/Folk) [Tenor Vossa]
Molly Nilsson – Imaginations (Synth-Pop) [Night School / Dark Skies Association]
Oh Sees – Orc (Garage-Psych) [Castle Face]
Breakfast Muff – Eurgh! (Indie-Punk) [Amour Foo]
ORB – Naturality (Garage-Psych) [Castle Face]
Circuit Des Yeux – Reaching For Indigo (Synth-Pop/Experimental/Folk) [Drag City]
Downtown Boys – Cost Of Living (Punk-Rock) [Sub Pop]
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Luciferian Towers (Post-Rock/Drone) [Constellation]
Big | Brave – Ardor (Metal/Post-Rock) [Southern Lord]
Daddy Issues – Deep Dream (Indie/Grunge) [Infinity Cat]
Pumarosa – The Witch (New Wave/Synth-Pop) [Fiction]
Alvvays – Antisocialites (Indie-Pop) [Transgressive]
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile – Lotta Sea Lice (Singer-Songwriter/Folk) [Matador]
Grizzly Bear – Painted Ruins (Dream-Pop/Indie-Folk) [RCA]
Iron & Wine – Beast Epic (Folk/Singer-Songwriter) [Sub Pop]
The War On Drugs – A Deeper Understanding (Heartland Rock) [Atlantic]
Bully – Losing (Singer-Songwriter/Grunge) [Sub Pop]
Vagabon – Infinite Worlds (Indie/Rock) [Father/Daughter]