The Quietus Albums of the Year So Far 2024 (In Association With Norman Records)

Umbilical is as aggressive as Thou have sounded. Gone are the melodious, grandiose ten-minute-plus songs that put them on the doom metal map with 2014’s Heathen. It’s like being trapped in a killing cage with the band. The songs are shorter, faster, sharper, full of straightforward, hard-charging riffs that still retain the layers of texture the band have developed with engineer James Whitten over the years. The (anti) philosophy of Umbilical is clear throughout its running time. Crush the chuckleheads by giving them the ferocity they want. Fight back through self-abuse. It’s an avowedly counter-intuitive solution, perfectly in line with Thou’s ironic, sometimes hard-to-fathom, attitude towards themselves.

While Dali de Saint Paul sings expressively in a combination of languages, there are moments throughout Penumbra where her voice explores non-verbal, animalistic sounds: smacked lips, clicks, chirrups, grunts and hisses. On ‘5’, she layers whistles in different patterns and pitches, conjuring a forest teeming with birds. A sense of the pastoral is felt on ‘Interlude’. De Saint Paul’s emulation of a babbling brook matches Maxwell Sterling’s plucked strings, which nod to the world of folksong – even if it’s the same strange corner frequented by Lankum and Shovel Dance Collective.

Anastasia Coope’s debut album will no doubt be labelled freak folk, though perhaps vibrational frequency folk might be more suitable given how ghostly it all is. Darning Woman is quaint and pleasingly unusual in its execution, with songs like ‘Sounds Of A Giddy Woman’ and ‘Women’s Role In The War’ seemingly plucked straight from the 1940s thanks to Coope’s uncanny antenna to the spirit realm. Transposed then onto an acoustic guitar and recorded in achromatic lo-fi, it’s the missing link between R. Stevie Moore and Doris Stokes.

When I interviewed Diamanda Galás, frequently she gave an audible eye roll at those who criticise her for releasing quite so many live albums. I agree with her that these people are missing the point – with her roots firmly in the jazz, blues, improv and musical traditions of the eastern Mediterranean, the boundary between performance and studio recording is gloriously blurred, as is the case in this elegantly intense follow-up to 2022’s masterpiece, Broken Gargoyles.

It is easy to forget how fundamental the idea of home is and the emotions that this idea can evoke in times of distress. “Clouds moving on the sky / My heart has never stopped missing home”. We can hear the voice of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru singing these words on the opening track of Souvenirs, a selection of home recordings she made while still home in Addis Ababa during the 70s and 80s, but reflecting on a dangerous period of exile which was bound to come. Later, she wonders, “Crow of the sky / …Let me ask, have you returned / from my beloved country?” The feeling of longing is immense. Her work exists on a threshold between ‘running away’ and ‘aiming towards’. 

On The Obsession With Her Voice, Erika Angell creates her own universe out of her ever-changing voice. The Montréal-based artist cloaks her vocals in mystical haze, transforming them into alien reveries; she speaks poetry with scalding clarity; she sings melismatic songs that swirl around lush instrumentals. With this music, she seeks to create not just one world, but a constellation of planets and stars made of glimmering words, electronics and strings. No matter where the music goes, at the heart is Angell’s voice in all its different forms, in the process of being discovered and rediscovered as each phrase passes.

To All Trains is Shellac’s last album. One can employ a certain amount of confidence in the fact. Even in 2024 – a year of holograms on tour, ensembles who exist well across the Ship Of Theseus threshold, and AI being trained on lucrative back catalogues – it would seem certain there will be no cash in posthumous demo collection, no half-finished anthology of songs with a firmament of celebrity friends stepping in on guitar and vox, no banging remix collection. Shellac has reached its terminal station now that Steve Albini is dead; and it feels like much of their music – on this album especially – was ominously predictive of this calamity. Yet their work seems to be saying there is much left to do, like a call to action: make hay while the sun shines, which actually means work while the sun shines, produce good work while the sun still shines. Let us take this opportunity to celebrate a genuinely peerless band who applied the rigorous aesthetics of Adolf Loos’ Ornament And Crime to rock & roll, only to leave it – somehow – more entertaining, more powerful and more life-affirming than ever before. 

Professionally and creatively, Kavus Torabi is living something close to his best life. A disciplined and radical figure who methodically works at his music, writing and visual art; he no longer needs to have a day job to keep body and soul together. He’s based in Glastonbury, where he goes for walks up the Tor. And yet, as his remarkable second solo album The Banishing documents, he’s arrived at this point in the wake of a turbulent time. He has lately experienced schism, loneliness and (his word) psychosis. Underlining just how bad things became, a working title for the LP was Now I’m The Antichrist. If all this gives the impression The Banishing is a confessional album, that’s true, but it’s by no means the whole story. For a start, that description doesn’t map easily onto the album’s sonic palette, which moves from nodding mischievously to In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis on opener ‘The Horizontal Man’ through angular math-rock and swirling psychedelia.

As well as the uncertain technological situation we find ourselves in, Celestial Devastation is also about growing older. As far as kitchen-sink accounts of existential dread go, ‘Hard-Coded In The Souls Of Men’ is one of the bleakest that’s ever been committed to tape. It haunts the psyche from first exposure, thanks to the vividly miserable descriptions in its verses, combined with an irresistibly infectious chorus.

In the process of developing his debut LP, Guatemalan producer Fer Franco described feeling “very detached from expectations,” choosing, instead, to simply enjoy the act of making music. Following his instincts, Franco conjures an endearing listening experience as the sonic sensibilities and structures of Ritos de Paso (which translates as ‘Rites of Passage’) are steered by loosely controlled and masterfully produced explorations that venture towards techno, kosmische music and gorgeous ambient arrangements. There’s an undeniable assurance displayed in Franco’s production on this impressive debut. His attributes as both composer and producer are heard in the unhurried pacing and gradual expansion of the calming ‘Eliminar Lo Innecesario’ (an immediate highlight of the LP). The track effectively foregrounds the brilliant tonal dexterity of the LP, sitting between the compact sci-fi infused ‘Tu Señal’ and the atmospheric pulse running through the dark instrumental ‘Asumir Forma’.

On Jlin’s Akoma, music is continuously evolving. The Indiana-based composer carefully crafts her works, sculpting and chiselling them like a sculpture from marble. As they unfold, they grow into sprawling webs, getting more intricate with each phrase. Meticulous detail has always been the throughline of Jlin’s compositions, and throughout Akoma, she lets the fluidity and ease of her shape-shifting patterns drive her music, exploring the smooth transitions she can make between a variety of different polyrhythms. 

On Perpetual Musket, Elijah Minnelli has ostensibly arranged four folk songs to be performed by reggae vocalists on the A-side, with dub tracks on the flip. The anti-war song ‘Vine And Fig Tree’, which originates in the Old Testament, is handed over to the legendary Little Roy. Contemporary dancehall star Shumba Youth transforms ‘Soul Cake’ – a song from an All Souls tradition once common in the British Isles, where poor people would go door to door, singing and praying for the dead in exchange for food – into a nimble earworm. Earl 16’s stark version of ‘Lifeboat Mona’ – Peggy Seeger’s composition commemorating the sinking of a lifeboat in 1959 and the death of its entire crew – comes with a stamp of approval from Seeger herself, who calls it, in all caps, “JUST RIGHT”. Bristol newcomer Joe Yorke’s brings a sublime falsetto to ‘The Wind And The Rain’, from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

In Jürg Frey’s world, stillness is motion. Throughout the Swiss composer’s String Quartet No. 4, Quatuor Bozzini pull their bows so gradually that it feels as if each note is stopped in time. Yet they aren’t: with each reiteration, these tones gradually expand, taking up every inch of the quartet’s wooden instruments. Each slight change feels faint, but they accumulate; it’s like the shifting of a glacier over many years. This is the world Frey has come to embody across his career, and his fourth string quartet continues to explore the engulfing atmospheres he crafts out of thin air. 

There is a lot of colour crammed into this compilation. Just listen to ‘Qoçəlı̇’, an escalating dense cascade, a display of virtuosity; he plays spasmodically over synth lines and then erupts into a percussive trance. Faster ‘Yanıq Kərəmı̇’ has the rhythmic freneticism of singeli, but in the accumulation of synthetic primitive beats, the guitar cuts through clearly, in jazz scales, to the fore. ‘Xarı Bülbül’ is more march-like; the guitar does not attack so vigorously; instead, it weaves expressive phrases, distorted until it starts to resemble an entirely different instrument. ‘Qoca Dağlar’ and ‘Uca Dağlar Başında’, are arrangements of repeatedly performed Azerbaijani songs, while in ‘Leylı̇can’, the musician jumps into higher registers, where his grandstanding soloing impacts more decisively.

Arriving off the back of a majestic, prolific run in recent years that took in, among other releases, 2023 standouts Burning Desire and Wiki and The Alchemist collaboration Faith Is A Rock, MIKE is at his breezy best on this link-up with Brooklyn beatmaker Tony Seltzer. It helps that the producer serves up a set of brilliantly buoyant, almost psychedelic trap beats for MIKE to let loose on, but there’s a palpable sense of fun running right through the record’s nimble 21-minute runtime as the rapper switches between various flows that are equal parts reflective and self-aggrandising, while also welcoming the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Jay Critch into the fold.

Yes Indeed is the duo of Laurie Tompkins and Otto Willberg, and King Of Blue is their second release. Some abstract funk theorising takes place in a compact space here, sketch-like at times but never stuffy or hifalutin. Willberg is a double bassist and Tompkins a man for the electronics by reputation, though there certainly seems to be some frazzly guitar clamouring for position here on ‘Double Doors’ (Brian May goes funk, alarmingly) and the title track, whose four minutes are also marked by gaseous space shimmer and keyboard chords which are possibly being played by nature, like windchimes. It’s a great release all round for fans of synths getting put through the wrongness mangle, what with the haunted-house vaporwave stylings of ‘Dream Spot’ and the spandex-stretchy heroic jamming of EP closer ‘Fudge Sun’.

From the opening few seconds of Something In The Room She Moves, there is an inquisitiveness, a playfulness. The disparate sounds of ‘Sun Girl’ are strewn around the room and the voice acts like a magnet gathering treasures together, drawing them closer until they form twinkly ornaments over the strong bodied voice, synth, drum and bass. A dreamy vocal floats around at head height like layers of beach bonfire smoke at dusk. Then back to glissando sliding bass interlude with avant-jazz vocalised flute. The voice-magnet pulls in improvised calls, in and out of focus the gravity gives way to end somewhere new: a lullaby. Muted brass on ‘This Morning’ sits with a soft intimate voice and ethereal piano, conjuring a space somewhere between a sunlight-dappled forest clearing and an underground piano bar. Each move feels like a final cadence, slow and deliberate.

If you’re expecting noise and provocation à la Sonic Youth and Kim Gordon’s trademark deadpan drawl, you’d be right. But The Collective goes so far beyond this. In a way, it’s dumb to expect the Kim Gordon to simply give us more of the same. In the follow-up to her 2019 debut solo record, Gordon continues her partnership with producer Justin Raisen, known for his work with the likes of Charli XCX and Lil Yachty. And in this unexpected collaboration, we get a record that flirts with trap and alternative hip hop, grinding, twisting and contorting Gordon’s wordplay and hooks to echo the brutality of our everyday.

Changing landscapes and our relationships with them are at the heart of Shelter Of The Opaque: as places evolve, where do we fit into those, and how does it affect both our sense of self and our relationship to the past? The passage of time also runs throughout the album. The start of the unsettling track ‘Castling’ recalls Gareth Smith’s roots in Hull, the call of home feeling ever present as he seeks to understand his past in the context of the present. The song is also one of several on the album that explores climate change too: the drones on the track sound like an electronic sea of sorts, and one that threatens to subsume its surroundings at any moment. An underlying ticking beat stresses how time is running out for the planet.

There are moments on Ficar Vivo which sound like pure electricity, buzzing through wires. It’s just electric guitar, bass, drums and sax, but it feels like you’re being sucked in, past the microphones and the instruments and their pick-ups, deep into the cables and the circuitry, as if the current itself ran straight into your auditory nerve. Rattling around with the capacitors and the diodes, these tiny little components, somehow this impossibly vast soundstage opens up. It’s like Ant-Man in the Quantum Realm. The tiniest spark becomes a forest fire, raging across the landscape, the earth left scorched and ruined in its wake. Time and space lose all meaning here.