The Demise of Planet
Sleaford Mods
January 16th
Rotten, dirty and not at all imbeciles, in The Demise of Planet the Sleaford Mods describe our brains crushed by shaking and our miserable lives, there in England but also here in Italy. We needed a record like this in which frustration, anger, one are sung way of life increasingly grey, increasingly sad. If John Lydon had been born in the 70s and grew up in Nottingham, perhaps he would make songs similar to these. We reviewed it here.
My Days of 58
Bill Callahan
February 27
Bill Callahan's eighth album, and first since 2022, is the diary of a man at 58 coming to terms with fatherhood, faith discovered in old age and what he will leave behind. Recorded with the band of Reality (Matt Kinsey on guitar, Dustin Laurenzi on sax, Jim White on drums), in My Days of 58 we listen to the most exposed Callahan ever, suspended in a warm and melancholy calm, with a light aftertaste of sand that the wind raised from the past and which settles on the lips of the listener. They are 12 great little songs, unpredictable (“improvisation and the unknown keep me alive”, he declared) as always, and for this reason necessary and admirable. Here is the interview.
TheMountain
Gorillaz
February 27
The Gorillaz are the Gorillaz again. Born between Mumbai, New Delhi, Rajasthan and Varanasi, where Damon Albarn cremated his father according to the Hindu rite, while Jamie Hewlett spent months in Jaipur at his mother-in-law's bedside, TheMountain he doesn't evoke death, he invokes it through the voices of his deceased friends, Tony Allen, Mark E. Smith, Bobby Womack, Proof, Dennis Hopper. “To talk about death we needed dead people who know more than me,” Albarn explained. Around, sitar, sarod and bansuri and a line-up of collaborations ranging from Idles to Omar Souleyman, from Bizarrap to Black Thought. It's not a hit record, there aren't any Stylo or Clint Eastwood: but we are faced with the most coherent album since Plastic Beach. To be reborn you needed to climb a mountain.
Nothing's About to Happen to Me
Mitski
February 27
Misery and humanity, discomfort and catharsis. It is the album in which Mitski sings about deep America and does so with his most traditional songs, treatises on loneliness and pain among the small houses of a provincial town interpreted with a mixture of grace and restlessness. The review.
Play Me
Kim Gordon
March 13
Kim Gordon doesn't care about nostalgia. It could take refuge in its own myth, of course, but no: it pushes sonic research ever further. Between crooked beats, electronics and no wave intuitions, the album transforms the anxiety of the present into a vital musical language. But above all it is a record that sounds contemporary without chasing trends, confirming Gordon as one of the few artists of her generation still capable of reinventing herself with authentic urgency. Very good.
U
Underscores
March 20
Hyperpop is dead, long live hyperpop. This must have been the thought of April Harper Grey, the artist behind the Underscores project. The young American artist thus decided to take on her shoulders a genre that seemed to have disappeared after its proclamation as a pop phenomenon with Brat by Charli XCX, starting from the origins and building around them Uan excellent record of futuristic ultra pop. Inside we can hear the rhythms of 100gecs, the delicacy of Oklou, the rubber melodies of Charli XCX. Gray defined the album as a project designed to set “a fluorescent and consumerist architecture” to music, combining hyperpop maximalism with more dancy rhythms (the inspiration, he says, is to be found in Justin Timberlake and Timbaland). In Italy the name is still rather unknown: a great way now to make a good impression with the coolest friends.
Honora
Flea
March 27
It is on this list not only because it is Flea's first jazz album (in the broadest sense), but because it reflects his idea of the trumpet as imagination rather than technique. Accompanied by great musicians (he feared they would consider him “an incompetent, charlatan and poseur asshole”), he made a creatively messy record, but alive, poetic and political, freak and funk. Basically the self-portrait of a 63 year old looking for new ways to stay alive.
Sexistential
Robyn
March 27
Eight years of silence. This helped Robyn to put therapy, a finished story, single motherhood into a pop record. Sexistential comes from all this. The title thus becomes the thesis of the album: sexuality and existence as a driving force. Robyn does not talk about desire or motherhood in the canonical sense, but about the contradictions of adulthood: the body that changes, the freedom that negotiates with responsibility. A minimal work made of dry drums, essential melodies, in which space spoke because “the space between the sounds is as important as the sound itself”. It is assisted reproduction – thanks to which Robyn had her first child – that enters club pop. Sexistential it is proof that pop, when treated as a territory of research, can still say something true. The mother of contemporary pop is back.
Vol. II
Angine De Poitrine
April 3
After the video of the performance at KEXP which for a few weeks transformed the duo of papier-mâché, microtones and loops into the most talked about group on the Internet, Canadians Angine De Poitrine have released their second album. It's not a laboratory, but a playground in which they transform math rock into a joyful experience, with a hint of nonsense and a wrong-but-not-all-the-way feeling given by the use of quarter tones. It's not on this list because of the hype, but because it's well made and fun. Utzp!
Fenian
Kneecap
May 1st
We had understood for some time that Kneecap were much more than a phenomenon defined by controversy. Fenian raises the bar further and in every aspect. It's an ambitious, multifaceted album, fusing hip hop, rave, punk and electronica without losing cohesion. Political anger coexists with moments of irony, but also of vulnerability. Dan Carey's production then gives further depth to a work that already in itself sounds urgent, and above all perfectly in focus for these times. So yes, Kneecap is a great band. The interview is at this link.
The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy
The Lennon Claypool Delirium
May 1st
Could a record made by Sean Lennon and Les Claypool be normal? Obviously not. We really love this crazy and wacky, pop and psychedelic concept, about a society endangered by an artificial intelligence that produces paper clips and a hero who must save the world. If it seems like a comic to you, it is and you can find it on the album. Long live the freaks.
The Afterparty
Lykke Li
May 8th
The moment of day after it becomes an existential reflection on the end of illusions. All without giving up the great melodic taste that has always distinguished her. So with The Afterparty Lykke Li manages to create a short album (about 25 minutes) but still emotionally dense, between disenchantment and melancholy. It is the work of an artist who continues to evolve, finding a rare balance between vulnerability and ambition. It couldn't be missing from this list.
Look for Your Mind!
The Lemon Twigs
May 8th
Melodic geniuses, rock counterfeiters, lovers of 60s and 70s music, speleologists of the musical past, retromaniacs. However you want to define them, the D'Addario brothers make decidedly retro and always spot-on records, particularly hitting Look for Your Mind! on the pedal of immediacy. We interviewed Brian.
Train on the Island
Aldous Harding
May 8th
One of those albums for a few but good ones, which however deserve to be on this list. A unique, enigmatic, fascinating artist, Aldous Harding uses a folk aesthetic (in the broadest sense) outside the box, transforming its peculiarities into a subtle weapon of seduction. The producer is his friend John Parish, the arrangements are essential, the images mysterious, the lyrics open to various interpretations, the vocal style splendidly eccentric. You can't say what certain songs are about, yet you like them and you want to listen to them again.
American Stories
Rostam
May 15th
He is the former producer and former member of Vampire Weekend, American Stories it is the album in which he mixes American and Iranian roots, folk-rock and the many references of a musician who worked with both Haim and Frank Ocean. Author's song with a perfect political subtext for this era in which the boundaries between genres have dissolved. Here is the review.
Everyone for Ten Minutes
Bleachers
May 22nd
One of the best albums by the New Jersey group, the story divided into three parts and singular, as it is rooted in Jack Antonoff's experience, of the attempt to set up a small offline community in a time of disintegration and after the spectacular failure of the Internet as a place to build solid bonds and authentic conversations. In the first part the story of when Antonoff played in a small hardcore band, in the second the story with Margaret Qualley, in the third stories of loss and death. At this link Antonoff tells everything.
Hell
Boards of Canada
May 29th
Thirteen years of silence. Yet the return of Boards of Canada has nothing nostalgic about it. Hell takes the language of the duo – analogue haze, worn samples, melancholy for things that never happened (thehauntologyas Fisher wrote) – and immerses him in the contemporary apocalypse: voices from the afterlife, anguishing bass, prayers in arcane languages. Of the project's entire discography, Hell It's definitely the least welcoming job. It's rigid, disturbing. But it is precisely this irregularity that prevents it from being a pure exercise in style. The past fades, the signal remains. This time it comes from reality. Do you want to know what's after the end?
The Boys of Dungeon Lane
Paul McCartney
May 29th
An album of memories, but not nostalgic for this. Of course, in the songs of The Boys of Dungeon Lane there is the thread of melancholy that is expected from an 83 year old man (he has since turned 84) and a more than consolidated style, but Paul McCartney does not sing about the past to regret it. The stories he tells are the result of his typical joy of life. Andrew Watt did well to distill the typical Macca sound, making it sound good in the streaming era and giving it back its classicism. Our review.
I Built You a Tower
Death Cab for Cutie
June 5th
It is true; often, very often, men don't know how to talk about feelings. But this doesn't happen with Ben Gibbard, the voice of Death Cab for Cutie for almost thirty years. The band's new album, I Built You a Towerwas born in the midst of his divorce and celebratory tours of Transatlanticism And GiveUp (the little masterpiece of Gibbard's side project, the Postal Service). Inside the album, whose tower of the title is a sort of monument to pain, there is everything we have always loved about the band: well-written songs, emotional passages, heart-rending lyrics. If indie never dies, these no longer young kids are one of the reasons for its survival.
You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
Olivia Rodrigo
June 12th
One of the pop records of the year. Having put the post-adolescent pop-punk phase behind them (more Avril Lavigne than Green Day, so to speak), Olivia Rodrigo and her producer and co-author Dan Nigro hit on one bittersweet piece after another in which she sings about love with irony, rhythm and talent starting from the nursery rhyme of Drop Dead and passing through the duet with Robert Smith of the Cure What's Wrong with MAnd. Under the baby-doll that has raised so much controversy, an author.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
