Every year I complain that I didn’t really listen to as much music as I wanted to, and every year I manage to scrape together some sort of list of music that I did listen to. This year was not different except that I was even more distracted than usual for most of the year and I often found that I was not in the mood, or did not have the opportunity to really explore new music. Work and some personal matters were kicking my ass, and when I was in the proper headspace a much more important project took my focus. Somehow though I ended up with a long list of about two dozen albums, so I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
However, I have to say that I found this year’s crop of releases less than compelling. Nothing really blows me away. This is not to say that there aren’t good albums on the list, but overall The Year in Music feels a bit underwhelming. However, it is also The Year of the Vocalist: man, there are some great singers on some of these albums! Manuel Gagneux, Yann Ligner, Patryk Zwoliński… you guys killed it.
In terms of genres: 2024 has made up for last year’s dearth of metal. I heard quite a bit of it this year, along with prog and prog-related, industrial, and some art-rock. There was no Steven Wilson this year, so no pop. (/jk)
I have nine solid contenders, and if I had to pick one more to make it an even 10… well, there are four leftovers of roughly equal merit so I might say something about those, too. I’m still not real sure about the order though, or which album I would make “Number 1”. There are two or three that could take that spot.
To Start:
There are a few odds and ends: singles, a long-awaited live release, and books. I read a bunch of music bios this year (call it “research”), but only one of them was published in 2024.
Bill MacCormick: Making It Up as You Go Along: Notes from a Bass Impostor. Iona Books, 2024
A breezy and incredibly detailed memoir from one of the leading (if sadly underrated) bass players of the progressive/psychedelic/’Canterbury-scene’ era in the UK. MacCormick has an intricate, up-front bass style that has always been my favourite kind of bass playing (so maybe I’m biased…). Occasionally he wrote lyrics and sang. In this autobiography he recounts his relatively brief but active career in music: the bands, the tours, the albums, the hits, misses, and frustrations of being a musician in what were outfits on the musical fringe: well-respected, but never breaking through in any major way.
MacCormick attended school and played in a fledgling band with a fellow called Philip Geoffrey Targett-Adams (aka Phil Manzanera), and would drop in at the house of his mum’s friend Honor Wyatt, where he made the acquaintance of her son Robert. He subsequently became a member of Wyatt’s band Matching Mole, a member of Manzanera’s band Quiet Sun (who released a great psychedelic/fusion album called Mainstream – check it out) and played on Manzanera’s solo albums (Diamond Head, Listen Now, K-Scope). As a member of that outfit MacCormick appeared on one of the best live albums ever, 801 Live: it’s his bass head and hand that graces the cover. He knew all the top ‘Canterbury’ musicians of that era, and played or worked with most of them. For all that, his music career was relatively short—a little more than a decade, before he gave it up and turned to politics. If you are interested in an intimate, witty, and detailed account of those musical days and musicians (sadly many of whom are gone now), you should definitely read this book.
Riverside: Woodstock Festival Poland 2011. Released January 15th
In 2011 the band played half a dozen songs in front of what is probably the biggest crowd they’ve ever faced during one of the biggest music festivals in the world. The gig was recorded but then it disappeared into rumour and limbo and all we knew was that it was out there somewhere but would anyone ever see it? As the years passed it gained almost mythic status.
It was finally released this year on the private Vintage Vinyl label, and it really is a stomper of a performance. Crackling with vitality and excitement, the guys pound their way through a classic (for that time) set list, Mariusz Duda damn near incandescent with energy and enthusiasm. Well worth the wait.
Sisters of…: “Marie” (single)
Sisters of… is a post-metal duo out of Missouri, and their music is dense, doomy, and powerful. “Marie” was released in early December, so far only on streaming services (although they do have a Bandcamp presence), and I think it is portending a new album. It’s been a while: their last one came out a decade ago. I do hope we see something from them this year.
The Albums
I’ll start with the four honourable mentions.
Oranssi Pazuzu: Muuntautuja. Released October 11th
Doom-laden sludge metal, dark and densely atmospheric, these tracks grip you by the throat, impelling you forward into void and chaos: either a perfect end to the past year or a terrifying glimpse into the next, whatever you prefer. It does get a bit much after a while, but whatever these guys are doing, they do it well.
Airbag: The Century of the Self. Released June 14th
Back in April, after the first single, I wondered whether I would bother getting the album. Well, I did—at least a download version—and yep, it sure sounds like Airbag. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: they’ve really locked down that sweeping Nordic melancholic prog sound, and there are times when it suits the mood, but…yeah, one doesn’t really need more than one album of it. The song titles change, but the songs don’t, at least not in any fundamental way.
The Quill: Wheel of Illusion. Released March 29th
I really wanted this one to be higher because I really love these guys and their great stoner rock sound, but somehow while it’s good, it didn’t grab me like the last couple albums did. I’ll just re-iterate what I wrote back in April, since my opinion hasn’t changed all that much: Most of the tracks seem a bit conventional; as well, the mix emphasizes the massive bass/drum rhythmic core, but dials back the vocals so deep they are almost buried. It’s too bad: I happen to like Magnus Ekwall’s rock-vocal stylings and would prefer to hear him more up front. The standout tracks are “Elephant Head” and “Wild Mustang”, with its nice guitar solo and a beautifully anthemic wind-up.
The Cure: Songs of a Lost World Released November 1st
I won’t pretend to have followed The Cure at all since their 80s heyday, and I didn’t even follow them all that closely back then, so I have no excuse for being surprised that they are still around. It turns out that this is their first new album in 16 years. At any rate, I like it. Dark and lush, and no mistaking Robert Smith’s distinctive voice. Some tracks are a bit too orchestral for my taste (i.e. “And Nothing is Forever”), but then it gets very atmospheric, even edgy with the thick and stately duo of “Warsong” and “Drone:Nodrone”, all wailing guitar and dense chugging bass. It’s not the most upbeat album ever, but it’s worth adding to the collection.
Okay, now on to the top nine.
I never could settle on a strict order, so I’ll go roughly in reverse and you can just assume any of the last three could easily be number 1, depending on my Mood of the Day. Or yours. Maybe even any of the last four.
Wretchgod: Suffering Upon Suffering. Released September 6th
There is always a danger in listening to music put out by friends (or in this case the offspring of a friend): you really really don’t want it to suck, because if it does, that leaves you with some uncomfortable choices. Do you say so, even as gently as possible? Do you lie? Do you say nothing at all (which is kind of the same as the first choice)?
Happily, I do not have this problem with Suffering Upon Suffering. I’ve known of Wretchgod for a couple of years: the drummer is the son of a long-term Facebook friend, and they put out a decent EP back in 2022. This is straight-up blackened headbanging hair-whipping death metal, thunderous, inexorable, four tracks that move nicely along and don’t wear out their welcome. I hope these guys do well.
Bill Leeb: Model Kollapse. Released September 13th
Leeb is an icon of the industrial music community: starting out in Skinny Puppy, he left to form Front Line Assembly, and then created several other projects: Cyberaktif, Noise Unit, and Delerium. Over the past few years he has been crazily prolific, releasing material from all these projects save Delerium. Ironically, Model Kollapse is his first solo album in his forty-year career, and it seems that he kept all his latest best stuff for it.
It’s an album that sounds a lot like FLA, but I guess that is no surprise. Leeb does one thing, and he does it well. Model Kollapse is heavy industrial electronica/dreampop, chugging along with relentless forward motion, intricate and musical, bringing together most of what I like of FLA and Noise Unit. It is a bit overlong, but it has some good stuff, such as the incandescent “Pinned Down”. Lyrically it seems to have something to do with the collapse of society and the subsuming of humans to “the machine”: the title refers to the way AI models fail. Basically, listening to Model Kollapse is like playing some bleak post-apocalyptic video game, and I think that’s the point.
Leech: Sapperlot. Released December 15
I don’t know what it is with these post-rock bands, suddenly releasing new albums so late in the year, almost out of nowhere. And good albums, too. Tuber did it last year, and Leech has done it this year – although to be honest they had released a few singles at random times; the thing is that there was so little fanfare. The stuff just showed up on Bandcamp.
Anyway, Leech are Swiss, and have been around for thirty years at this point, devoted to instrumental rock for pretty much all that time. I found them via their 2012 album If We Get There One Day, Would You Please Open the Gate; I was deep into a post-rock-discovery phase back then which I have mostly left behind, but a few bands have stuck with me, because I like what they do. Leech is one of those. They create very atmospheric guitar-and-keyboard-driven music, with enough melody and heaviness to avoid that all-too-common bane of the genre: repetitious tedium. “Knock Knock” hits right away with a throbbing drum/synth beat that transforms into the heavy orchestral sound that is Leech’s signature. “Crown Me with Whispers” is another powerful, stately track, followed by a couple of songs that slow the album down to contemplative speed. If you happen to like post-rock, you might be surprised by these guys.
Klone: The Unseen. Released November 8th
The French proggers are back with a new album, a bit of a surprise considering that their last one was out in 2023, but here we are.
Klone create a distinctively rich and orchestral soundscape, guitar-heavy, sweepingly melodic, anchored by Yann Ligner’s soaring voice. We get lots of that here, and I think there is a bit more variety in the songs than there was on the last album.
The first two tracks on the album, “Interlaced” and “The Unseen” were released as singles in advance of the album, and they are fine songs, showcasing the heavier side of the band—and make no mistake, Klone can get very heavy. They started out as a metal band, after all. The first one features saxophone and the second gives Ligner a chance to showcase the powerful but controlled metal side of his voice. The best track on the album though is the third, “Magnetic”, a beautifully evocative song that features shimmering guitars and bass line, and it’s just way too short.
After this the album slows up considerably, with the last three tracks dialing back the pace and intensity, and honestly I don’t think this does The Unseen any favours. I don’t understand the last track at all: “Spring” starts out as a typical Klone heavy track, but halfway through fades into six minutes of instrumental ambience, as if they had to fill up the time and this was all they could think of to do. It does drag the album down.
Zeal & Ardor: Greif. Released August 23rd
Once in a while a Zeal & Ardor track would appear in a Spotify Release Radar playlist or elsewhere, and I’d listen and say “Hm this is interesting”, and then listen to something else by them and go “Hm well whatever” and move on. This time though when a track from Greif came along, I found that I kept listening. Then I saw that they were coming to town and grabbed a ticket to see them. The gig was great and cemented my interest in the album, which I have come to like a whole lot.
Zeal & Ardor started as a solo project by Manuel Gagneux, a Swiss-American who took southern blues and gospel and turned those messages into angry social-justice black metal tracks with guest musicians. In 2016 the project became a full-fledged band, and Greif is their first album in that incarnation.
Interestingly, they have three main vocalists: Gagneux himself as lead singer (also on guitar), and two other guys only on vocals; as one might expect, strong harmonies and vocal interplay are a feature of the songs, especially live. The songs run the gamut from delicate gospel and blues-based near-ballads (“The Bird, the Lion, and the Wildkin“) to fierce metal monsters (“Clawing Out”, “Hide in Shade”), with chugging bass/drums and synth underpinnings. The album is ambitious and confident with a lot of sonic variety. However, some of that variety comes across as filler; overall the album feels a bit unfocused. Still, there are some great individual tracks and it is one of the more interesting albums of the year.
Loma: How Will I Live Without a Body? Released June 28, 2024
Loma is a Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) project, begun around 2018, I think, and this is their third album. It is the first one I’ve liked enough to listen to all the way through, and then I found I liked it enough to listen to it again. And again. Which surprised me because I’m generally not a fan of this genre.
They have a sound very much like Shearwater, or at least the art/indie-rock sedate style of The Great Awakening, but with wispy female vocals instead of Meiburg’s (sometimes) wispy male vocals. In fact, the song “Unbraiding” could have been lifted directly from TGW. Loma is a three-piece, and so the instrumentation is spare, but the sound is airy, open, very clean and with some powerful moments. There is a fierce but understated intellectualism that imbues many of Meiburg’s projects that can really draw you in. Standout tracks include the opener “Please Come In”, and the poppy, slightly askew “Pink Sky”, but there are fine moments throughout. I like this album a lot.
New Model Army: Unbroken. Released January 26th
I think this is the earliest album on my list, which means of course that there is plenty of opportunity to forget about it. I was pretty happy with it in April, so let’s see if I still am.
<plays>
Yep.
The nice thing about albums like this: you may not get the urge to play them a lot, but when you do put them on, you remember why you liked them in the first place. In terms of a review…well, I’ll just repeat most of what I wrote back in April because not much has changed.
Unbroken is a short, fiery album, Justin Sullivan demonstrating that he is still one of the best lyricists working today, that ragged voice delivering a focused and tinder-box anger about injustice, governmental complacency, reactionary blindness: “…and all we feel is rage, and all we hear is rage, we’re only fuel for them to burn, we’re only fuel for them to burn…” (“Reload”), yet still digging for hope for all that: “We all are stronger/than they would lead us to believe” (“Cold Wind”). The music carries these sentiments along: spare and jagged one moment, thick and heavy with bass, drums, even strings the next, rich in melody and texture.
The best song on an album of gripping, compelling songs has to be “I Did Nothing Wrong”. This is an incandescent track, an emotional tour de force clearly inspired by the Royal Mail scandal, ordinary people going about their ordinary business, bewildered and uncomprehending as their lives are upended–even destroyed–by faceless algorithms and bureaucratic indifference. This is as harrowing a song as I’ve heard in a long, long time.
Body Count: Merciless. Released November 22nd
Guests: George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, Joe Bad, Howard Jones, Max Cavalera.
Ice-T and his crew have really upped their game on this album. I mean, you know what you are going to get with Body Count, so there are no surprises, but they’ve (mostly) done it so much better this time around. Lyrically, Ice-T isn’t saying anything that he hasn’t said on other albums, in fact some of the tracks are almost identical in message, but musically–I am astonished at how good this record is! The band is as tight as I have ever heard them, heavy and smart and relentless.
I find it starts a bit slow: the first three or four tracks are linked by some kind of psychopathic violent fantasy based on The Purge movies and are conventional rap metal. Then we get to “F*** What You Heard”, an utterly thunderous, compelling monster of a track, Ice-T decrying the huge political divide in America, couched in the language of gang violence, (“Democrips and Bloodpublicans”…), a propaganda war almost for the sake of it, and it’s hard to argue. The album just does not let up after that, the band channeling pure heavy metal and cranking it relentlessly, the whole thing anchored by the behemoth duo of Will Dorsey (drums) and Vincent Price (bass). I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it (because they just keep proving it), these guys are some of the best in the business. Other outstanding tracks include “Live Forever”, and the blistering “Mic Contract”, a metal redo of a very early Ice-T rap track.
The band hit the news earlier in the year when they announced that they were covering the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb”, and had achieved the miracle of getting David Gilmour and Roger Waters to actually agree on something (hell, maybe they’re both L&O:SVU fans). Not only that, Gilmour also plays on the entire track. Ironically though, most of the album is so face-meltingly heavy that the song slows it down, and almost seems out of place.
Blindead 23: Vanishing. Released September 27th
In former incarnations (when they were called Blindead) these guys put out heavy thoughtful sludge metal, noted for albums such as Affliction XXIV II MXMVI and the remarkable Absence (based on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”). Then they lost some members, changed directions, and released albums that were entirely forgettable. In 2023 they became Blindead 23, and this year released a three-track EP called Vanishing.
This new version of the band has long-term member Mateusz Śmierzchalski on guitars and has brought back original vocalist Patryk Zwoliński; the rest of the band is new. Vanishing heralds a return to the sound and feel of those earlier albums, largely driven by the dark intensity of Zwoliński’s vocal performance. The EP consists of three tracks that move seamlessly from one to the next, making it feel like a concept album. Melodic and poundingly muscular in parts, dark and drony and downright orchestral in parts, with Zwoliński slipping effortlessly from clean to growl to clean vocals, Vanishing is a powerful doom metal album that deserves way more attention than it has gotten. Perhaps it is a touch more ambitious than it needs to be, but the more I play it, the more I like it.
