The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2022

Nothing To Declare, 700 Bliss’ debut album proper, is 2018 record Spa 700 brought to its sonic and semantic extreme. To lazily label the album as ‘noise rap’ would be a reductionist view of inventive music ardently brought together from multiple traditions. But it’s not just Moor Mother’s poetry and inflection that feels uninhibited here. DJ Haram ventures farther with her productions than demonstrated on her 2019 EP Grace, leaving behind the elegant safety of her globetrotting dance music. Here, she embraces cacophony, minimalism, and avant abstractions, meshing together styles plucked from disparate spaces and times. Techno, grime, synth-pop, and lo-fi hip hop productions come together at the same moment only to be mutated into monstrous new things.

Film, television and theatre-scoring have long been parts of Eiko Ishibashi’s practice, coexisting with her solo work that’s often improvisatory and electronics-based. She brings those experiences to Drive My Car OST, letting car door slams seep into heart-wrenching strings and eerie electronics. The score draws on a range of sounds, colouring recurring motifs with a blend of smooth, jazzy instrumentals, place-setting found sounds, romantic strings and lush electronics.

Something must be happening in Chicago. Maybe it always has been. But when I listen to this album by 27-year-old West Coast rapper-producer Saba, what I’m reminded of first is not so much any records by his immediate contemporaries in the US hip hop scene; more moments from recent albums by Jeff Parker and Ben LaMar Gay. It’s not so much the sounds you can actually hear on the record (although, every now and then…), but rather something about the bounce of it, that certain lilt it has, the feeling of light gleaming through the cracks between the notes. But no matter how many blocks of real estate might separate them on a map of the Windy City, isn’t it odd that two scions from such a venerable, half-century old jazz institution as the ACCM and the hot kid from the cool young hip hop collective across town should seemingly be taking notes over each other’s shoulders? Things ain’t like that in London, at least.

Brian Leeds’ debut on Anthony Naples and Jenny Slattery’s ever-reliable Incienso label, Plonk, is something of a departure from the ambient music explored on his last album. It’s also certainly not a return to the dubbed-out, lo-fi house music, infamously tagged as ‘outsider house’, that came before it. Frequently eschewing easily definable 4×4 rhythmic patterns, or any kick drums at all for that matter, Plonk‘s ten tracks intersperse thrilling nods to trap and drill music with more placid moments, such as the helter-skelter, clanging synths of opener ‘Plonk I’. Plonk is the most wide-reaching entry in Leeds’ discography yet.

CAPRISONGS is a testament to twigs’ voice, which has long broken out of that one mode of eerie breathiness. Here she’s almost spitting alongside Pa Salieu on ‘honda’, and bouncing around the dancehall chaos of the Shygirl-assisted ‘papi bones’ like she was born to be there. Plenty of twigs songs build to ecstatic melodies, as on ‘oh my love’, but only on CAPRISONGS can that climax arrive at something akin to The Ting Tings. That being said, it seems that even when cutting loose, she has a hard time not committing something of poignancy to tape, like on ‘meta angel’ where she sings softly, “I’ve got a love for desire / I’ve got a pain for desire.”

There’s a feeling in Bucked Up Space of pushing close to the edge, of risking going out of sync or letting the music collapse or decay, a tension that becomes at times exhilarating, as if Nik Colk Void is somehow constructing the mountain she is slaloming down. What unites the variation throughout the record, aside from Void’s idiosyncrasies, is a feeling of world-building and an attendant sense of exploration, as if the creator is not entirely sure where it is all going. It gives the album the sensation of a live improvisation, however intentional it actually is, and it makes for a thrilling listen, full of surprises, ingenuity and left turns, as you’d expect of a member of Carter Tutti Void.

Formed by guitarist Drew St. Ivany, bass player Ben Armstrong and drummer Blake Fleming, and later joined by Marcus DeGrazia on horns, Laddio Bolocko spent much of their existence, from 1996 to 2000, in near-hermetic isolation in their rehearsal space in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, and later in an abandoned ski lodge in Elka Park in the Catskills. St. Ivany and Armstrong (who would later form Psychic Paramount) met Fleming when their band Chalk 22 supported his math/jazz rock outfit Dazzling Killmen. Fleming, who founded Dazzling Killmen at the age of 15, played on early The Mars Volta demos and later formed Electric Turn to Me. Laddio Bolocko, however, represented a pinnacle of achievement for all musicians involved, as well as being that rare thing from a critic’s perspective – a band that could be most easily described as sounding like Can and This Heat who made music that was actually deserving of such an epithet.

Much has been made of the way caroline’s sound draws on Appalachian folk, Midwestern emo, noise rock and choral singing, but it is important to note that they don’t simply mash those influences together. The chiming guitar on ‘IWR’ might recall an old folk song, and the opening vocal line on ‘Skydiving’ might conjure a church chorister, but the references feel subconscious. caroline primarily write their songs improvisationally, first in sessions with core trio Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes and Mike O’Malley, and then in a developmental period with the full eight-piece band. In such a long and layered process it is inevitable that references might arise. What’s most important is that they are presented as incidental; their songs feel delicately ordered with whatever sounds they find appropriate.

As Valentina Goncharova admitted in an interview with Lucia Udvardyova, she aimed to energise music not through volume but through changing the music itself on this record: looking for new structural possibilities, new colours and rhythmic combinations. Ocean illustrates this idea brilliantly as she moves with ease between classical music, experimentation, minimalism, drone music and improvisation on standard and non-standard instruments. This outsider, outlandish effort seems very modern even today.

The Portrait You Painted Of Me more than meets the exceptionally high standards Alison Cotton has set for herself. Her work can be compared to conceptual art, consisting of pieces that seem complete in themselves but acquire a whole new meaning when their purpose is explained. If this makes her music sound dry, it is anything but. She expresses visceral emotions through her viola, which cries in sympathy, whispers secrets, and groans in pain. Her voice has epic qualities, rising to fill a vast soundscape on ‘The Last Wooden Ship’ and closing in with the walls on ‘The Tunnel Underground Seemed Neverending’.

Her music is also psychedelic, both because it sounds incredibly trippy, but more specifically because it uses a distorted perception by gazing at the present and seeing only the past beneath it. Precise definitions seem important in pinning down work that is meticulous and crafted, as well as enveloping and beautiful. Cotton’s talent is special, and her latest music will send you to places you never knew existed. The only problem will be finding a way back.

The lack of connection over the last two years has clearly marked Iceboy Violet’s debut mixtape. The unsettling distortion and death-like tempo on ‘Atone//Blankface’ is drenched in desolation, as is the skittering and minimalistic, Space Afrika-produced ‘Urban Ambiance’. The isolation goes much further back than the pandemic though: the mixtape delves into issues of race – like the loneliness of growing up in a predominantly white area as Violet did as a teenager in Halifax – and art too: when you’re making music the mainstream can’t define or describe yet in a hinterland of rap, electronica, grime and noise, where is your place?

That place is still undefinable and, as you’d expect from Violet’s work to date, that’s just how they want it. There is no overriding genre or style on a work that is fiercely experimental. Single songs venture into wildly disparate genres, often simultaneously, from electronica to metal, rap to noise, grime to dance in a flick of a BPM. ‘Urban Ambiance’ is a good example: a deeply introspective song whose lyrics recall Milton and Blake as they speak of heaven and hells, paradise and prisons, grime blends seamlessly with electronica as Violet finds euphoria with others. "We’ll be dancing through the night… dance to it," they urge, desperate for connection with their audience.

“Done with the black and the white, the wrong and the right,” raps Kendrick Lamar on the stunning opener to his long-awaited fifth album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, ‘United In Grief’. It sums up the record’s philosophy, an embrace of the chaos of the inbetween, the war between ego and vulnerability, human nature as contradictory thoughts and opposing urges; Lamar’s refusal to buy into simplistic binary thinking and to embrace the messy multiplicity of human experience instead. It’s a record that offers no easy conclusions and is all the better for it.

The crown of thorns that he has worn in promotional imagery, the album’s cover, and indeed his generational Glastonbury headline set, might be interpreted as a sign of the megastar messiah complex trope, but as he revealed onstage at Worthy Farm, "I wear this crown as a representation, so you never forget one of the greatest prophets that ever walked this earth. They judge you, they judge Christ." If Mr. Morale does have a message, it’s one that Lamar allows a higher power to provide. As he raps on ‘Worldwide Steppers’, in the time between this album and his last one, DAMN., he had "writer’s block for two years, nothin’ moved me / Asked God to speak through me, that’s what you hear now."

On Everything Perfect Is Already Here, Claire Rousay uses a mix of field recordings, electronics, piano and strings to create two dreamy pieces that harness both the darkness and sparks of life. The San Antonio-based musician has become known for her work that celebrates the minutiae of day-to-day life in home recordings and delicate melodies. Everything Perfect Is Already Here continues along that path, highlighting casual conversations, the sounds of her surroundings and straightforward melodies while balancing deeper questions about how to appreciate being alive.

Rousay layers, but never melds, each of the sounds she brings together on the album. Instead, each sound intertwines and then falls apart. On ‘it feels foolish to care’, a backdrop of uncertain "ums" gives way to slow, melancholic piano and harp; those "ums" are eventually replaced by distant laughter as the piano and harp become more effervescent. By the end of the piece, the music reaches a boiling point and bubbles over, fading away in emphatic rhythm. In this fluidity, and constant coalescence that never quite becomes one, Rousay highlights how a plethora of emotions exist at once, and how it isn’t always easy to pick which one to live by.

The Ephemeron Loop is the latest project born from the mesmeric inner-world of Vymethoxy Redspiders, better known as Urocerus Gigas from Leeds-based xenofeminist rock duo Guttersnipe. Born in Bangor, North Wales, Redspiders has been based in Leeds since 2013, where she has established herself as an underground powerhouse. Debut release Psychonautic Escapism is a “synaesthetic acid bath that cracks open the doors of perception,” tracing Redspiders’ break through her pre-transition life of black metal into a new life of shoegaze music, psychedelic drugs and raves in the Leeds queer underground scene.

Redspiders’ realities of autism, ADHD and trans identity shapeshift through languid flashes of dream pop ambience, doom and hardgrind. Guitars, drums and vocals interlace, darting between hyper-speed death metal, psychedelic dub and breakcore in this stunning solo release. Psychonautic Escapism, an album full of continual sonic and poetic transformation, took 14 years to make. Redspiders describes The Ephemeron Loop as coming into existence at a crucial juncture in the formation of her identity, including "my becoming as a trans woman, my understanding of neurodivergence, and my experimentation with mind-altering substances."

Oren Ambarchi’s guitar-playing is on wonderfully nuanced form here, but the rhythm section hits quantum mechanical levels of intrigue. Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin’s unique interaction is clearest on ‘III’. The album’s longest piece, it affords them the duration needed for the cumulative effect to take hold. Berthling’s bass is a knotted loop of notes, full of constantly resetting momentum. Werliin’s drums scatter and skip through the tangle, growing in intensity as they find ever more microscopic gaps to shape with rhythm.

I read somewhere once that as maps get more accurate, borders get longer; the once comparatively straight lines getting more convoluted as detail increases. I don’t know if that’s true, but something similar happens here as the trio stretch grooves and find new spaces to fill. Ghosted is a record which depends on its cumulative effect. And in doing so, it reveals there’s the potential to find endless movement in even the most rigid structures.

Wojciech Rusin is an artist and musician who makes bright and wiggly 3D-printed pipes and flutes (for sale at the Pipe Shoppe). His previous album, The Funnel (which I absolutely loved), was the first in an alchemical trilogy, containing a menagerie of gnostic creatures (tag urself): the ‘eagle of arrogance’, the ‘horse of impatience’, and the ‘dolphin of lust’ among other disastrous personality types. Syphon, the second in his trilogy, comes from the same sonic cosmos.

Soprano Eden Girma opens the album, singing in Latin of ‘the mirror of truth’, and Emmy Broughton sings a story of burning camps, blood waters rising and a man doing a litany of beastly things, one of which is lowing like an ox. Elsewhere, synthetically generated harpsichord and Rusin’s own pipe chanters rub up against digital glitches and whirrs, which are broken up by field recordings of woodland birds and sploshing water. He describes it as ‘speculative medieval music’, and its sonic imagination is that of science-fiction set in alternative pasts or regressive futures – this might be music for Strugatsky’s Hard To Be A God, or compositions performed by whatever mad composer remains in residence at the cathedral at Cambry in Riddley Walker. It comes from a place where glass, chrome and computers are sunk in the iron, mud and architecture of a century past that might rise again.

Everything Was Forever marks Sea Power’s first work with Graham Sutton as producer in over a decade, and it shows. The band are always in fulsome praise of the Bark Psychosis man’s ability to conjure out their best work and, as a listener, it’s clear he has an uncanny knack of trimming the fat that prevented the albums since Do You Like Rock Music?, decent though they were, from reaching their full potential. He and the band have worked wonders on a record shared between fire-cracking anthems and reflective moments, a refining of the established Sea Power palette. Abi Fry, Phil Sumner and drummer Woody lift the record not just through their by now trademark augmentation in brass, viola and sturdy rhythms, but the delicacy with which tracks slip in and out of view.

Though it’s not one of the most obvious songs on the album, ‘Lakeland Echo’ is the key that unlocks it. It starts with just a quiet vocal from Hamilton, seemingly echoing the voices of his late parents: "Turn the tape on / That’s a grand track / That’s a good one." It builds and builds to hover in a beautifully poised moment, emotion that is no less tender for its restraint. The song becomes even more poignant when you watch the video that features footage of the Yan and Hamilton’s late parents intercut with shots of the area the family grew up in. At the end, their old man disappears into the distance over a rise in the road, raising his arms in triumph, as if in celebration of his sons. It’s incredibly touching. To think upon loss, to look to the past, to venerate our forebears, does not have to be nostalgia as the reductive, negative energy that holds so many (by ‘so many’ I mean ‘our nation’) back, but as reflective, emancipatory and, curiously, realistic. "It’s not for everyone," Hamilton sings, perhaps again channeling Ronald’s views on Sea Power’s music. That’s at the crux of things for me – "it’s not for everyone" doesn’t have to be an admission of failure, but a comfort that some precious things are going to be beloved by a devoted few.

The eight tunes of Intimate Publics throb and tremble like overloaded white goods. Right from the start of the album, the martial, malevolent ‘Edging’ has Venetian Snares-y metallic trills that seem to rattle their cages, a squeaky vocal line processed into puny rage, and a juddering, 3D bass quake that’s just there. Likewise, the strange (and wonderful) staccato flow in ‘Thrall’ seems boxed in by the nervy, syncopated kick and hi-hat combo, and airless vocal treatments. Indeed, among all the churn and burn, some moments of beauty can happen almost accidentally; you admire the mechanical seethe in the way you admire the brushed chrome of a brand-new skyscraper.

But what exactly is creating these witching hour electronics, and what are the disembodied voices saying? Intimate Publics also revels in this thrill of the unknown, such as the yowls in ‘Usually Never’ (courtesy of an angry cat? A shorting strimmer? A broken bandsaw?). With the panic-inducing white noise backdrop of ‘Being Online’ and creepy door squeaks in ‘Piecemeal’, there’s something almost Gothic about the eldritch mystery of this album – Castle of O-trance-to… anyone?