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

As well as growing lusher, Fat White Family’s sound has become denser on their latest album thanks to several layers of carefully constructed multiple instrumentation, so pieces like ‘Polygamy Is Only For The Chief’ sound like a Prince impersonator fronting Depeche Mode. “Did you ever get the feeling that nobody’s listening for a very good reason?”, it asks. More people than ever might be drawn into listening now that, for instance, ‘Feed The Horse’ has a soaring chorus that would be suitable emanating from the mouth of Charlotte Church. The equivalent on ‘What’s That You Say’ is the catchiest earworm they’ve ever created.

Um was not created in a vacuum and Murphy does not project the callowness of a debutante or arrive half-formed exhibiting potential. It’s a record made by someone who sounds like she’s been making records for years and, in a roundabout kind of a way, she has (and not just with any ragtag and bobtail, either). Moreover, her remarkable, fragile soprano, offset with bursts of operatic ululations, is tempered by the extraordinary production on the album: a combination of herself, Ethan P. Flynn, and the mixing nous of Marta Salogni. The sonic evolution of ‘Kind’, which toys with abstraction before bursting into a chime-garnered ball of combustion, best exemplifies the talent on offer.

There is a fine line to tread in any creative labour when opening up about your personal struggles. It’s delicate work to find how much honesty resonates with an audience and what becomes alienating. Nadine Shah navigates this rough terrain on her fifth album, Filthy Underneath, a record which deals with how, in a few very short years, she coped with the death of her mother, substance abuse, a suicide attempt, recovery and the end of her marriage. Any one of these topics could be completely overwhelming for listener and artist alike, but Shah’s control of the narrative makes her songs sound more confidential than confessional. She exercises the same incisive observational skills that she applied to songs about social unease and toxic relationships when she turns the lens on herself, as willing to be cutting, critical and humorous when she is her own subject.

Who Will You Love is Owen Lawrence’s sixth release as The Dengie Hundred; all sound somewhat different, but – invariably – deeply spartan and shiverworthy. That sensibility has precedent in certain pockets of 90s slowcore and post-rock, 80s peculiarities like Deux Filles, and various musicians who carried the dub torch while not making dub music per se. With The Dengie Hundred, a name taken from a small quasi-coastal community in Essex, there is something like a psychogeographic element: Lammas Land, an album of two side-long tracks released only five months before Who Will You Love, is inspired by the Walthamstow Marshes near Lawrence’s house. An A4 insert with the LP features writing, also on the Marshes, by Gemma Blackshaw, an art history professor specialising in Vienna; Who Will You Love expands on this by enlisting Blackshaw as the album’s vocalist.

For Delights Of My Life, Eric Chenaux is joined by fellow Canadian musicians Philippe Melanson on electric percussion (Bernice, Joseph Shabson, U.S. Girls) and longtime collaborator Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ, as the trio expand the palette of the lead musician’s oddly welcoming strangeness with loose, wandering experimentations and open-ended structures, holding time in newfound ways. Often bleary-eyed, slow and sleepy, it’s the audio equivalent of hitting the snooze button on your phone’s alarm clock as you slip back into a dream state, drifting into a world beyond temporal constraints where that precious thing – time – is immaterial, giving yourself permission to just be.

Like its predecessors, Iechyd Da is thematically centred on The Wirral, and because it was made during the pandemic, when he rarely left the town, the relationship between it and his work became even more tightly intertwined. It contains ‘A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart Pt. 3’, a sequel to the two-part composition Ryder Jones’ 2013 debut album proper was named for, and a number of more subtle lyrical easter eggs. Specific characters who he wrote about on the first album reappear on the second – such as the Anthony of Iechyd Da’s ‘Thankfully For Anthony’, the same as the earlier LP’s ‘Anthony & Owen’.

Folklore 1979‘s lyrics are lifted almost entirely wholesale from an issue of The Folklore Society’s academic journal, which Milkweed came across when a fan – who, incidentally, makes wands for a living and who they’ve never seen since – dropped a tote bag full of issues round their home. They picked one at random, chopped it up and put it to weird earworm melodies, fed it through a meat grinder of experimental production, and ruthlessly edited it down to just over ten minutes of running time. Occasionally, the album evokes experimental hip hop as much as it does folk music, although they outright reject any comparisons. They, for now, have coined the term ‘slacker trad’.

If Einstürzende Neubauten were waging a war against sleep back in the 1980s, then on their latest studio album, they’re waging one against brevity. Rampen (apm: alien pop music) is a double album that’s almost prog-like in its dimensions. 2020’s Alles in Allem was compact and punchy, whereas here we have something sprawling and cosmic – or even kosmische – with a sense of stately grandeur that comes from hanging around for 44 years and defying incredible odds. If albums can be likened to novels, then Rampen is a bit like Ulysses in that it’s nourishing, complex, thrilling and frustrating, and an absolute bugger to finish in one go.

While typically brilliant, Ghana Special 2 is unusual for a Soundway African music compilation in that most of the music contained on it wasn’t actually made in the country name-checked by the title. After earlier anthologies focused on Ghanaian innovations and developments in rock, highlife and funk, this essential release looks in part to the diasporic Ghanaian communities to be found in Germany during the 80s and early 90s. The amazingly titled subgenre of burger highlife – from the German for citizen, rather than the tasty, corner-free circular slab of food – is a delicious revitalisation of an entire sound, a document of a well established West African form synthesising seamlessly with disco, boogie and new wave. 

Quietness is a key part of BIG|BRAVE’s latest LP, A Chaos Of Flowers – the sparse ‘Chanson Pour Mon Ombre’ is the first time the band have employed acoustic guitar, and drums are more often scuttling brushes than big thumping stomps. As with their The Body collaboration, Robin Wattie’s vocals are clear and deliberate. There’s still plenty of loudness too, however. The songs swim among big dark waves of rumbling, lurching guitar.

What’s ultimately changed is what BIG|BRAVE are doing with sonic extremes on A Chaos Of Flowers, rather than the existence of those extremes at all. The record’s most intense moments are often its quietest – the largely ambient ‘A Song For Marie Part III’, for instance, where a sparse melody sweeps wraith-like above deep bass, and which was actually recorded during the sessions for previous record Nature Morte. It’s a record that twists the listener’s expectations from high and low volume.

Springs Eternal arrives ten years after William Doyle’s breakthrough under his East India Youth moniker. If his restless approach to influence has become a constant signature, and exhausted its initial thrill, then try not to be surprised by the start of the album’s second track, ‘Now In Motion’. Out of a beat-machine click rips a brash blues riff, Doyle’s guitar and voice clearer than ever while chanting the song’s title like a mantra. The coda slides into a funkier shuffle, crescendos in strands of distortion, then plays straight into ‘Relentless Melt’, all sliding riffs and wandering bass lines as if written by an introvert Josh Homme.

Perhaps this is a more immediate record than past Doyle efforts. It’s certainly more earnest (and his work has been increasingly so since 2021’s Great Spans Of Muddy Time). Vocals sit higher in the mix than ever, instrumentation is bright and forthcoming rather than buried within itself, and there’s an emboldened feel to his lyrical tone. “You could have it all if you want,” he teases on ‘Surrender Yourself’, a mathy lump of 00s indie rock that imitates an advert for an off-world escape plan (“Do you want to augment it with us?”) as bending guitar notes scrape the bottom of the song. ‘Eternal Spring’ opens like the nightmare-funhouse bounce of Billie Eilish’s ‘Ilomilo’, but swaps its sense of submersion for a more reserved new wave bop, with straight acoustic strumming patterns and a pretty hook floating above Doyle’s strut. 

If I don’t make It, I love U, Still House Plants’ third album, often resembles This Heat’s Deceit via Hyperdub compilations and Tilt-era Scott Walker. The pitch-black industrial drumming and fractious guitar clangs elicit the measured brutality of Swans and the totalism of Glenn Branca, underpinned by the metallic hypnosis of New York no wave group Ut. It’s all these things rolled precariously into one, dismantled and reassembled by virtue of instinct and genuine emotional release.

But the playful polyrhythms sound like an accidental scratch in the groove from Jeff Buckley’s Grace. You can feel a subconscious assimilation of early 00s R&B mixed with slowcore and Midwest emo. It’s comparable to a no-wave D’Angelo or Lauryn Hill. Here, Still House Plants embrace, rather than shun, sounds absorbed from childhoods spent in working-class environments.The record integrates skeletal post-rock with soul and jazz, all of it deconstructed by a presiding impulse to blur lines between terms or genres, allowing it all to collapse and collide. It’s harmony clashing with disharmony, the musicality of concrete sound.

For those who know Gnod as purveyors of the sort of music that suits getting blasted and waving your arms around, latest album Spot Land might at first come as something of a shock. 2022’s Hexen Valley was a trans-Pennine bad trip with hints of the later Fall-era’s sludgy intensity but with (given the title, appropriately) bad-vibes murk, as if Mark E. Smith and co’s Salford Van Hire transport had veered off into the brown gurgle of the River Calder after a gig at the Trades.

Its successor is an almost bucolic contrast, a wander up to the Tops on a rare bright May spring day. Yet this isn’t a radical departure based on being bereft of ideas, but a dramatic evolution of Gnod’s sound that retains every ounce of their inquisitive nature and desire to progress. This richly textured album is an exercise in refinement; perhaps not minimalism, but certainly distilling the essence of Gnod to five tracks that within their quiet oddness lies as much (and perhaps even more) power as when the band are at their glorious noise rock biker-gang full-throttle excess.

The title of Arooj Aftab’s latest album might suggest we’re about to plunge down the tenebrous spiral staircase of the soul. But there’s also a lightness of touch that infuses Night Reign, even lifting us up at times. These are deep, emotional, sometimes bruising songs, though the insinuation of total darkness belies the exquisiteness of its spiritually rigorous forty-eight minutes.The darkest hour is just before dawn, goes the old proverb, and at the conclusion of songs like ‘Last Night (Reprise)’ or ‘Na Gul’, there’s a sense of emerging into a new day following a passing storm, where the senses are awakened and everything feels fresher and more alive. That’s not to say there’s no mournfulness. ‘Saaqi’ is a soundscape rendered almost funereal with Aftab’s rich, dolorous tones stretching it out into infinity, but Night Reign is more crepuscular than anything, where night and day come together, and sex and death are never far removed from one another. Her cover of ‘Autumn Leaves’ exemplifies that smoky, jazzy, sensuous danse macabre.

On What Is Not Strange?, Tashi Wada’s music curves, steepens and plateaus like a trail on the way to a vista. The Los Angeles-based composer’s drones continuously evolve; his fractured melodies stop before they’ve started or swerve into unexpected directions, collecting surprises along the way. Throughout, Wada uses an 18th-century tuning system developed by music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, which coats his glistening drones and broken-down songs in dissonance, and he works with vocalist Julia Holter, percussionist Corey Fogel, violist Ezra Buchla and bassist Devin Hoff. The alternate tuning allows for his music to expand beyond just the conventional stylings of his keyboard, while his collaborators help each track grow into kaleidoscopes built from the shards of each musical phrase. More than anything, though, What Is Not Strange? is an album about choosing one winding path and following it – even if it ends up somewhere previously unknown.

Wada wrote the music for What Is Not Strange? while processing a time of life transition, during which his father, the artist Yoshi Wada, passed away, and his daughter was born. The resulting music embraces the cyclical nature of life: its darkness, its light and everything in-between. The album itself operates in a broad loop. It begins in a space of wonder, flows into the shock of grief, plunges deep into the pain of uncertainty and re-emerges at last with a sparkle of hope.

Jacken Elswyth’s new solo album comes from a space somewhere on the borders of reality. A banjo player and, just as importantly, an instrument maker, Elswyth’s solo work has developed alongside her role in the nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective, undoubted folk stars of the 2020s. The Shovel Collective’s music is riotous, joyful and haunting, made within a collaborative framework that creates room for looseness, spontaneity and happenstance. Elswyth’s solo work has the same characteristics. Her playing is commanding but open and relaxed, resulting in some startling accounts of traditional music, and improvised tracks that explore the character and feel of the instruments Elswyth constructs.

At Fargrounds brings together music from across the Western folk tradition, from bluegrass to the Scottish tune ‘A Fisherman’s Song For Attracting Seals’, to ‘The Sussex Waltz’. But the banjo has wider associations, originating in West Africa and brought to the USA through slavery. The instrument is a powerful cultural tool, entangled in the dark roots of American society. Elswyth’s playing expresses a history of connection and consequences, where music cannot be seen as local, or played as parochial heritage, but can only be understood through its links to global injustice. Elswyth’s album is sophisticated and accomplished, a folk thesis for our times. It is a significant achievement, clever and thoroughly enjoyable, brimming with atmosphere, energy and fantastic tunes.

Spectral Evolution is the nature fixation of nineteenth-century Romanticism updated for a time when soundscapes can seem increasingly surreal: when rainforest sounds can come from phone speakers and birdsong can be heard over traffic. Rafael Toral’s music is wide, it’s huge, it’s environmental. But it’s not about the sublime – at least not as it’s typically thought. Spectral Evolution doesn’t reflect the awe in canyons, mountains and wide-open spaces. It doesn’t evoke huge things, but the inundation of little things. A world that can seem clearly demarcated visually, getting blurry when you only hear it.

“You can look at seeing, but you can’t hear hearing,” wrote Marcel Duchamp on one of the notes in his Box of 1914. The aphorism gets at the peculiarity of sound. You can see someone hearing something, perhaps startled, headbanging, blocking their ears. You can even listen to the same sound. But can you ever hear what someone else heard, how they heard it? On Spectral Evolution, Toral bridges that gap through a beautifully harmonious cacophony.

Mohammad Syfkhan’s impressive debut solo album, I Am Kurdish, was recorded in County Wicklow with musicians including County Sligo saxophonist Cathal Roche and Cork-based cellist Eimear Reidy. The record takes his domestic influences and fuses them with music from beyond those regions, from North African folk rhythms to Turkish psychedelia. It’s a glorious alembic not bound by borders, where Syfkhan himself brings a cultivated exuberance to his playing that belies his vintage.

The title track, of course, deals with identity, and I’m reliably informed that Syfkhan writes about the tragedy he and his family experienced when war broke out in Syria, while also using the song to give thanks for having come through the horrors of a decade ago. Though more importantly perhaps – given that so many of the people who hear it won’t understand it either – ‘I Am Kurdish’ bangs (albeit in a dignified, upstanding kind of a way – these songs rarely exceed 120 BPM, though that doesn’t mean they’re not engineered to make you dance). Rooted to a sonorous bass drum, the chords of ‘I Am Kurdish’ or ‘Az Kardam’ levitate around the same bass note, as Syfkhan’s vocalese alternates with the bouzouki, breaking out all by itself and striking up a memorable motif. Opener ‘Do You Have A Lover Or Not’, a song written by Radwan Abdullah, should almost certainly inspire people to rise from their seats and move to the Dabke rhythms regardless of their relationship status.

On their previous, highly rhythmic album, Twenty-Two Strings, Ex-Easter Island Head pushed their musical boundaries, creating polyrhythmic structures and rushing motorik compositions. This evolution in their sound, reminiscent of the Glenn Branca Ensemble, among others, is further showcased on their latest release, Norther. After eight years, the band, now a quartet with the addition of Andrew PM Hunt (AKA Dialect), continue to draw from their unique methodology of playing guitars with mallets and sticks, painting sonic palettes at the intersection of minimalism and ambient music.

Across the record, they show how single and simple patterns repeated ad infinitum offer the potential for highly developed suites. One idea is soaped up into infinite layers creating sonic forms; poignant pieces brilliantly played by eight hands. Standing, as it were, in opposition to rock’s impetus, the band concentrate on individual phrases, which gradually develop, demonstrating the incredible beauty and possibilities of the electric guitar sound stripped of its rock ethos. They delve into the subtleties of sound exploration by attaining exceptional levels of sensitivity combined with fractious arrangement in order to showcase emotional beauty in a post-minimalist way.