When I think of 2024, I think of music. Throughout the past year I was not writing nearly as much as I would’ve liked to, but in that time I was completely focused on music: on trying to join the project I love and play in the sorts of rooms I love to mosh in. All those wonderful things came true this year, and I could not have done it without these albums.
Warning: this list is composed of albums I listened to mostly in 2024 itself, I missed a lot of great stuff which I’m just digging into now, including all of these:
Imaginal Disk - Magdalena Bay: Emotional and fantastical synthpop dreamscape.
Forces of Nature’s Transformations - Lifeless Dark: simply some of the thickets and darkest metal to hit the world in years.
Charm - Clairo: My new sadgirl queen, so much incredible texture, has a vocal cadence similar to IU but I’m not sure if that’s a direct reference.
Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii: This was Doechii’s year and she made it work for her, she’s an intentionally provocative artist and has the insights and talent to satisfy the curiosity she inspires. I love her flow, I love the instrumentation she uses, I love the vocal effects, this is excellent female fronted hip hop in a way which is very different from Meg the Stallion and Cardi B but is no less feminine.
All of those albums came out later in the year or I just missed them entirely, but they’re all great. The below list of honorable mentions is also great, they simply didn’t dominate my listening like those in the top did:
Brat - Charlie XCX: Hyperpop insanity, dripping with emotion attitude and style, I’ll always remember brat summer.
Sundial - Noname: One of the best thinkers and lyricists in hip hop right now, namesake is still on repeat for me.
Dark Superstition - Gatecreeper: Loved this band for years, some of the crunchiest and most pounding death metal out there, these guys are real students of their subculture.
Like All Before You - Voidz: An ecclectic blend by any metric, got into the Voidz through a friend this year and there’s a lot to love in their catalog. A lot of the best cuts off this have been available for a while but I heard them all this year so this album at least gets a mention.
Feeling Not Found - Origami Angel: regret not taking the time to dive a little more into this one, feels like a real sequel to Somewhere City, one of my all time favorites. These guys continue to expand their sound and I continue to love everything they do with that special love we reserve for the goofy and determined.
Much love to all those albums and artists, all of them are worth checking out and some of them are objectively superior to the albums I’ve listed below. But that’s not the point of this list.
It’s common place to clarify that opinionated work is subjective but this list is particularly subjective, its even subjective within the context of my own mind. These are not the albums I think should have won grammy’s, these are the albums that dominated my listening over the 12 batshit insane months that were 2024. I’m going to start at the top because that’s what I’m most excited about.
1. You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To - Knocked Loose
This may be a hot take to some, but I love it when heavy music is popular. I think the entire subculture benefits not necessarily from commercial success but from a flag bearer who can carry the traditions of heavy music not just on tour or on the radio but onto television. And we could not ask for better flag bearers than Knocked Loose.
Full disclosure, this is the first year I got into Knocked Loose or honestly hardcore in general. I am not on TikTok so I did not hear about the arf when it first popped off a few years ago and I didn’t even hear about them through cochella, I heard about them because when Suffocate came out, everyone I knew who was into heavy music was urging their friends to check it out.
Suffocate is just one those songs. An absolutely blistering track which kicks from a short intro straight into a thundering double bass groove and a compelling lyric about being trapped under the weight of your own mistakes. Everyone in Knocked Loose is insane at what they do, Pacsun is one of my favorite drummers working right now, but I think Bryan Garris’s vocals are a huge reason the band has so much reach. He’s very angry and very audible at the same time, he ennunciates really well and his vocals are cleaner than a lot of other people in his genre. His vocal talents here are aided and enhanced by a feature with Poppy, who I’m not really familiar with personally but who adds a lot to this track. Her screams feel desperate, there’s a ton of deep emotion in her delivery, and she stands toe to toe with Bryan which is never an easy thing to do.
Often when you hear a new single from a band, it can be hard to know where to dive in and how to start approaching the rest of their discography. Lots of bands have a breakout earlier record which their later work responds to, lots of artists have been developing core themes in their music throughout their body of work, and sometimes people just keep getting better and better at making music and expressing themselves. Knocked Loose kind of hit all of those things. They’re responding to their own success certainly, and they’re continuing to develop core ideas about isolation and living a post catholic life while trying to maintain some kind of spiritual attachment to god and those around you which are present in a lot of their music, but they also just keep better and better at what they do.
I won’t go track by track but the songs from this album do a fantastic job of blending into each other while feeling distinct and memorable as individual ideas. Almost like a puzzle made of pieces which are each beautiful enough to behold on their own. The songs are heavy and punishing, but the hooks are honestly just as compelling. And those hooks can come from anyone in the band, frequently they’re done by Bryan, but Isaac Hale also writes amazing riffs which manage to be both raw and catchy, and Pacsun’s drumming has a ton of melodic flourishes, especially when the rest of the band drops out and he’s responsible for bringing the band into the next breakdown or section. Nicko and Kevin Parker don’t seem to get as many individual opportunities to shine, although I do live Nicko’s screams on the new record, but the parts they add support everything which is going on around them while leaving enough space for the music to breathe.
All in all, You Won’t Go before you’re supposed to is a brutally beautiful album. In a short 25 minutes it manages to say a lot both to its audience and also about the world its being produced in and the people who are producing it. While its certainly still a hardcore album with all the screaming anger blast beats and breakdowns you could hope for, but its also one of those heavy albums which I think has the ability to pull more people into the wonderful world of heavy music.
2. A La Sala - Khruangbin
Khruangbin are an extra dimensional anomaly and I dread the day they find a way to get back to their home planet, because they sure are making this one a lot more pleasant to live on.
Maybe this is a weird call to make in the moment, but Khruangbin feels very of its time. They’re the sort of band which fits something about the current culture that we live in, and that’s evident in the way people respond to the band. Khruangbin offers a strange mix of an extremely solid and tight feel with the sort of ethereal melodies that made the Dead so great. Its also notable to me that this is a mostly instrumental band who often sing in other languages when they do sing, and somehow that’s only ever worked in their favor.
Personally, I’ve been a fan of Khruangbin for about two or three years now, so this was the first album of theirs which came out while I was already a fan. Ali did come out when I was already a fan, but that was a collaborative album, I think it belongs in a slightly different category. In terms of solo studio releases, A La Sala follows up on Mordechi, which catapulted them into a new level of success through modern classics like Time and So We Won’t Forget.
During the lead up to this album, I was extremely curious what direction they would move in, and silently a little afraid that they would let the hooks ground the music too much, but those fears turned out to be severely misplaced. I was in love with the album long before it came out, because May 9th, one of the singles, was one of my most listened songs to songs last year. A wonderful song with a lilting melody of pure memory, it makes me both yearn for the past and the future, while also creating a beautiful moment right here and now to be enjoyed. As I sit here now in a cold apartment in Cleveland in January, I certainly am waiting for May to come, hoping for rain in place of this snow.
While the album certainly goes a lot of different places and says a lot of different things, those themes do speak to the intent and content of the album as a whole. According to their Spotify bio at the time the album came out, its about returning home in order to find who you are, and allowing that to tell you how to move forward. That message really struck a chord with me, possibly just because I’m personally in my mid 20’s and am constantly revisiting some of the things which helped to defined me when I was younger and exploring how to respond to them moving forward, what I want to take with me and what’s better left behind.
Even as standalone music though which says more with its music than it does with its words, Khruangbin managed to craft another beautiful landscape of driving laid back melodies and solid as hell grooves, inventive and fun baselines, and guitar parts which are simultaneously melodic and abstract. Khruangbin has a very specific appeal and a very specific vibe, and I’m delighted to see them continue to refine it as their musical journey continues.
3. Fission - Dead Poet’s Society
Of all the albums on this list, this is the only one I would play front to back for a party, and that’s far from the total extent of its quality.
It is a good place to start though. From the opening track to the final song, this album crunches and crackles out the melodies of a heart which may not be broken but is struggling to form permanent bonds, a love story for people who have lived through a few love stories.
Those stories are themselves supported by the tapestry around it though: the guitars are distorted in a washed out way which wouldn’t be out of place on a shoe gaze song but the riffs they play are much more melodic and don’t drone much at all. The bass tone on this album simply fucks, its deep and heavy so it works super well as a percussive instruments but the bass lines also support the core melodies very very well. Laying underneath all of this though is a bedrock of solid pounding drums. The overall drum sound is kinda dead and muted, the snare doesn’t crack so much as it thumps and the cymbals also wash a lot. And call it drummer’s bias but it does feel like the grooves being played give this album a lot of its x factor, they feel like dance beats and rock beats at the same time, almost like if Stewart Copeland was an emo kid.
But what makes this one of the few albums you can put on with no skips for other people is the pacing of the songs across the album. The songs build on each other not just in terms of lyrical themes but also in terms of energy and aesthetics. Its not like a concept album or anything, but I do think it has the cohesion which gives those albums a lot of their weight. So put it on at your next friendly function, you won’t regret it.
4. What Now - Brittany Howard
Of all the albums on this list, I believe this one came out first, in February of last year. It was also the first Brittany Howard album I listened to, I had heard about Jamie when it came out and only listened to it this year. If you haven’t heard that album I urge you to go listen to it, its that amazing kind of pop music which makes beautiful something already beautiful and true within the artist creating it. But when you’re done, come back to this one, because it is a follow up in a way which I never experienced before.
Not to say it doesn’t exist, but I have never before experienced an album which was so aware of its own status as a follow up to another album. The album is called ‘What Now,’ and it does a lot with that core concept. Its clear that that’s where Howard is coming from as an artist, trying to stretch herself both lyrically and musically to craft something true to herself even in the wake of her recent experiences. The entire metaphor sort of exists on two different streams, on one hand its very easy to read songs like Red Flags and Prove it to You as songs about dating bad people, committing to people despite knowing its not a good decision overall and then trying to prove something about yourself which was always within you. But those same ideas could also very much come from Howard’s experiences with being a Grammy winning artist, with being plucked from a larger project and suddenly being the focus in a way she’s not used to. It’s impossible to know for sure but its easy to read that into what’s in front of me.
Even removed from a pop cultural context though, there’s so much here. The first thing I appreciated about this album was the drumming, shoutouts to Nate Smith, but the second thing I appreciated was the absolutely sublime texture of this entire project. Concurrently delicate and violent, beautiful and strange, vulnerable and powerful. The instrumentation varies wildly from windchimes and recited Maya Angelo poems to jazz inspired swing to driving dance beats, and uses all of these different moods to tell a dynamic story. This is also not really a concept album but the sense of cohesion allows Howard’s songwriting persona to spend the progression of the album growing into a more confident version of who she was before. The front side of the album has a lot of tracks which center around struggling to confront weakness, like the perpetuity to run through red flags which I mentioned earlier in addition to songs like the title track, in which Howard both accepts blame for the dire state of the central relationship (again, could be to another person or to music / fame) while also longing so dearly longing to be free. While she’s not denying blame in any of these songs, it seems like she’s still pushing a simpler narrative just because emotionally its often easier to shoulder blame rather than valuing yourself enough to ask where the hurt is really coming from.
The second half of the album is where Howard seems to confront the problem more honestly and more holistically. The Maya Angelo poem I mentioned is actually the interlude of the album, and serves as a turning point both for the mood of the album and for the growth of Howard’s persona. After it concludes the rest of the album tries to move forward, tries to pull some kind of pieces together and do a better job of admitting what’s wrong if nothing else. First in Another Day by simply asserting that she believes in some kind of better world, both for herself and for the world around her. Next in one of my favorite songs from last year Howard admits that she’s still trying to prove something in the song I mentioned earlier, Prove it to You. Rather than trying to blame herself for making this relationship bad, the song opens with the line “I’ve never been good at saying what I mean,” seemingly an admission that the blame she was taking on the first album was emotionally easier than the truth but also served as some kind of self deception.
There’s so much to say about this album, of all the ones on this list I think this is the one I’m most tempted to do a full track by track breakdown of. All I’ll say for now though is that the rest of the album continues through a journey not of getting better and “feeling good” but about confronting herself and her shortcomings more honestly. Admitting when your strength has been taken from you rather than running from it. Admitting when someone has power over you rather than trying to always put yourself down in front of them. Admitting when we only want someone or something to be good for us.
So yeah. This one really resonated with me. I have it on vinyl, I love her whole body of work now, thanks to Nate Smith for introducing me to her, I hope Howard’s persona gets the healing she needs and finds her own strength on her next project. Apparently she performed earlier this year as a hardcore punk band called Kumite, so maybe that’s the form her power will take.
5. GNX - Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar had quite a year last year, a better 2024 than anyone else on this list all things considered. He’s managed to bask in the spotlight of a whole new level of fame while also growing more articulate about who he is and what he wants for hip hop. And more specifically, who he doesn’t want in hip hop.
For context I’m a longtime Drake hater: all the worst people I went to high school with loved that dude and I never found anything in his music that really spoke to me or even just hooked me, so it was glorious to see him lose and see a guy who I think does and says a lot more with his art prevail in the most one sided rap battle of all time.
That said, this album feels different from a lot of Kendrick’s other work. I had kinda wondered how it was possible to follow up an album like Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, since that album says a lot of optimistic things about the person writing it. Its been said that the album is essentially one long therapy session, and I mostly agree with that assessment. So the hope for anyone writing an album like that is that they’ve made a lot of progress on their healing and have a good enough handle on their journey that they’re ready to move forward past their demons into something else, something new. Kendrick’s demons have been near the center of his work since the beginning, so I wondered what new love or passion would shine through on Big Stepper’s follow up.
The answer, the thing the album focuses on, is hip hop itself. I’m not a big enough hip hop fan or historian to understand all of the references and cultural moments, but the album is clearly steeped in a rich history which it is simultaneously in love with and trying to steer in a new direction. If the rap battle proved anything, its that Kendrick Lamar really does have a lot of sway over the world of hip hop, and has for a long time now. And it seems to me like on this album he’s presenting a platonic ideal of what hiphop should be; textured and layered instrumentals with impactful and creative bars. On GNX, Kendrick takes time to respect hip hop’s heritage while also roping in new artists and giving them the opportunity to stand on his platform and say their piece.
But outside of any of that, removed from the context of Drake and the Super Bowl and the cultural idea of kendrick Lamar, the album is just really good. Kendrick is flexing his talents all over this record, painting a beautiful new piece onto this canvas made from the history of a culture he’s now trying to lead forward. He goes for a lot of different styles, flow changes, and moods across this album, all to great success.
The standout track though is easily Turn this Tv Off, which uses a beat very similar to Not Like Us to instead talk about the importance of disconnecting from narratives which can surround and consume our lives. Its a powerful track in part because it encourages people to turn away from the media circus which Kendrick deliberately created early in the year. To me the idea of this song is that even though Drake sucks in a lot of different and genuinely despicable ways, he is not the final boss of bad hip hop, and as has been said if we treat him like that we will play directly into the hands of the system who enables and in a lot of ways demands a Drake to exist in order to pacify people. The song is also just a straight up banger though, and the mustard chant will live on for years to come.
And that’s hardly scratching the surface of what this album goes through, reincarnated squabble up dodger blue, all these songs have a lot to say for themselves and to their audience, both to people within hip hop and also those outside of it who are looking at this man as a representative of so much. Ultimately its inspiring to see such a turned up and focused Kendrick Lamar engaging so fully with the culture that made him. We certainly have not seen the last of him, his Super Bowl performance was the most watched of all time and its rumored that GNX was created with some kind of part 2 in the works. But whatever Kendrick decides to do next, all I know is that I’ll be listening.
6. Afraid of Tomorrows - The Mysterines
Continuing back into rock, the Mysterines really impressed me with their new album Afraid of Tomorrows. This is a dark album both in tone and subject matter, but in comparison to other projects which trade in sadness in melancholy, I think the Mysterines have a lot of dynamism and a unique pulse which makes the listening experience something like a beautifully shot black and white horror movie. \
Some context, I am a self professed sad girl, I love Bon Iver and Phoebe Bridgers and Arlo Parks, and have since I was first an edgy and emotional teenager. I mention this because I think The Mysterines have some overlap in their appeal with those sorts of projects, but in a new idiom with a new set of strengths.
What I love about sad girl music is the writing, production, and especially the emotion in the delivery. Normally these sorts of artists work alone (which is part of what made it so exciting when Boygenius combined some of the best and brightest in this genre) but there’s a good reason for this tradition of independence: normally the genre’s typical themes of loneliness and isolation work best when it comes from one person with an acoustic guitar. You kinda can’t make music like that to a traditional rock riff and have it sound normal. I think that’s why emo has such a distinct vocal approach, you need to put the emotion of your voice into everything you’re saying it to marry, in MCR’s case, the lyrics of a sad boy comic book nerd to the riffs of a dude who grew up playing along to Metallica records.
So I guess with all that said the first thing I need to clarify about the Mysterines is that they are in no way an emo band. I would recommend them to a lot of emo fans, but I think they’re much closer to Joy Division than MCR, there’s no pop punk blood in their veins. They feel much closer to those post punk aesthetics of decay, lots of reverb and compression on all the instrumentation (though it varies a lot by track), some elements and affects which feel a bit closer to industrial music, and a singing style which feels less like crying and more like wailing, its the sound of a haunted banshee who roams the streets of Birmingham seeking to avenge the tears and sweat of workers ground into dust and shoved into the cold fire of the furnace.
With this one I’ll avoid any direct song analysis, but I do love how they’re all unified by the title. There are so many reasons we might be afraid of tomorrows, either because we’ve been hurt or because we know a little too much or because the world as a place should terrify, full as it is of stray dogs and foul beasts. Give this album a listen the next time you’re feeling any kind of mixture between sadness and anger, I’m sure you’ll find something for your heart to latch on to.
7. Absolute Elsewhere - Blood Incantation
The next entry takes us back to extreme music, but this time with me in the position of knowing about the band for years and convincing all the extreme music fans in my life to give it a listen. Absolute Elsewhere feels like one of the more exciting releases there’s been in some time within extreme music. Actually last year was a really great year for extreme music overall, Knocked Loose was nominated for a Grammy and Gojira won one, but even amongst that stacked field of exceptional peers this album and this band managed to stand out.
As referenced, I’ve been a blood incantation fan for quite a few years now. I found their second album, Hidden History of the Human Race, not too long after it came out in 2019 and then quickly went through the rest of their catalog. I may have found it via Anthony Fontana, I think I watched that review after I heard it because I was looking for alien death metal and not really fucking as heavy with like Rings of Saturn, but shoutouts to him for covering these guys regardless. Because this is a death metal band through and through, they play blisteringly fast and their riffs are insane, but they also use quite a few other sounds and tones which I had not heard in death metal before. Death metal has been pretty kind to quite a few more experimental and stronge sounds in recent years, Rivers of Nihl came into the scene with their fucking saxophone years and years ago now and they were very well received, but Blood Incantation alters their sound in a different way. Even though they adhere to the Death Metal conventions in a lot of ways, their intentional deviations and twists on the formula persist not just through entire songs, but across entire records.
When I first listened to Hidden History, what really struck me was the way they used a sort of droning sound to symbolize some kind of take off or departure. In a lot of ways it reminded me of a darker take on Rush’s concept in Hemispheres, where a being is ripped apart by the sheer force of space travel. But Hidden History was still a traditional death metal album in a lot of ways, at the time Fontana criticized it for being a little too safe in that respect.
Then, over the course of the pandemic, they released an album called Timewave Zero. Metal as a subgenera relies a lot on touring, so lots of bands were not releasing anything during this time because they would not have been able to promote or celebrate it properly. Some bands took the time to do some other interesting things though, and Timewave Zero was one of those. It was entirely ambient electronic music, something like an evil Klaus Sheulze. I loved it, but to be honest what I loved the most about that album was what it promised. Could a band marry those two streams?
The answer is Absolute Elsewhere. Not only does it marry these two disparate streams, but it also incorporates a whole bunch of other influences which I did not see coming. Ultimately we got not just a death metal album with some unique qualities but a truly progressive death metal album which both respects the past of this genre and others while daring to ask what could be on the other side of our doubt over how to move forward. If this album has been recommended to you, its probably been with a statement like “listen to this album, its like if yes or genesis made a death metal album.” And I’ve said this, I broadly agree with this assessment, but this is only the beginning of what the album achieves.
Those elements aren’t just there to sound cool, but they legitimately contribute to the feeling of flying through space through a portal to an unknown world where things both strange and wondrous lie. Not only are they well executed and fun to listen to, but they also serve as some much needed contrast to the heaviness of the rest of the project. I dont actually think the riffs on that album are that insanely heavy, compared with their peers or even just their other work, but you feel it so much more because the album has much more variety and a sense of pacing.
That sense of pacing is paired with a sense of musical progression as the story of this thing unfolds, making the album a compelling listen from about four different angles. I won’t say too much more because I don’t want to color any reading of the album you may have with how I feel about it or what I think it says, but I hope that if you like heavy music you’ll give this one a listen. Even if this is outside of your typical wheelhouse, Absolute Elsewhere is the closest thing to “meeting you halfway” you’re ever going to get from metal or especially death metal.
8. Parallel Realms - STRFKR
One more band in the new favorites category, Strfkr exists not just on their own planet but in their own dimension. They create an entire ozone with dense layers of textured synthesizers, warm guitars, and varied deep grooves. The closes comparison I could think of would be if the Strokes were a synth pop band, but even that feels like its a mile off the true marker of where these guys are at.
Their music is both laid back and energetic, something you can truly either dance or cry to, or both at the same time I suppose if you’re a multitasker. The production sounds like its coming from outer space, not ephemeral but ethereal, they really feel like an alien approximation of human music in a lot of ways. Obviously there’s a lot of reverb on a lot of the synths and almost all the vocals, but this is combined with an outlandish and otherworldly tonal pallet to create a sound which can’t even be believed when it’s heard.
And to be clear, I like a lot of music which is comprised mainly or even entirely of these sorts of synthesizers, such as Timewave Zero from Blood Incantation which I was just discussing. But Starfkr takes this sort of pallet and then also adds really incredible dance beats which all feel natural and move the music along really well while also providing it with a lot of lift. I haven’t been to one of their shows yet but my brother and bass player Gus informs me that there’s a ton of dancing and the band even hires professional dancers who do their thing in space suits during the show, and its easy to hear how even just listening to their music
Because the drums are not the only element which help to both ground and lift Strfkr’s music. The guitar part manage to contribute to this as well, with a lot of warm and pleasant chords voiced on the already warm and pleasant Stratocaster. Also, in a sound pallet like this, the metallic feel of the guitar strings themselves help to ground the sound in a lot of ways. The bass helps to do this too, and indeed the bass playing on this album glues all of these sounds together while also containing a lot of that spark in its playing which makes funk so much fun to listen to.
The lyrics are also really grounded, especially compared what you might have infered from the rest of my descriptions so far. This is still a synth pop band, so most of the subject matter can be read as love songs, but there’s a bit more to them than that. Without diving too deep into any specific track, many of these songs deal with opposites which just cannot coalesce, no matter how much we want them to. Always / Never, Under Water / In the Air, Feelings, all these songs describe alternate places which are always aware of one another but cannot exist at the same altitude.
Ultimately though, at all altitudes, this album just hits. Its an incredibly engaging listen which you can also put on for your friends to enjoy casually, its a beautiful mosaic of textures and colors which come together to express the alienating nature of existing on all the parallel but interconnected realms which populate the world inside and outside the music.
9. Super Mega Ultra - Wine Lips
Another band I fell in love with this year whose entire discography I know now, Wine Lips simply rip. They’re been a band for a while now, not as long as some of the others on this list, but they’re on their fourth album now and have already developed a very unique voice as a band.
I’m not sure if this is an entire subgenera and Im just uneducated, but they seem to be doing some kind of psychedelic punk. Its a fun mix, the production is very spacey and ephemeral, the riffs are razor sharp, and the lyrics are often very biting. I also need to give a shoutout to their drummer Aurora Evans, she plays with a ton of feeling and her parts are really cool. They serve the song well but they also have their own voice that stays present though layer upon layer of heavily distorted guitar and bass. The drum part in Killjoy in particular is a standout for me, its really creative and fun, one of my favorite grooves from last year for sure.
The album is full of standout songs like that though. Derailed, Killjoy, and Six Pack are some of my favorites. This is another band I can put on whenever people are over, even when you can’t take the time to sit down and read the lyrics its a super enjoyable listen, it goes to many different zones of interest and examines them quickly and honestly before moving into a different feeling entirely. We have a lot of banging rock songs but also some more laid back tracks, especially New Jazz, which feels like a Grateful Dead song out of its time and place.
It’s worth noting that album in particular had a very hard act to follow, 2021’s Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party. That album is still maybe my favorite from the band but I do think that Super Mega Ultra feels like a good next step, and I can’t wait to see where this band will continue to grow and develop. I would love to see them experiment with some slightly heavier sounds, elevate the punk elements into some hardcore and metal while also making the other side of the dial more extreme, with more stuff like New Jazz to balance it out. Those are just dreams though, and its not my ship to steer, either way though Ill be waiting to see where it goes.
10. Exhibition of Prowess - Kublai Khan
Feels only right to end this list as it began, with hardcore and another one of my new favorite bands. I’ve been listening to a lot of their stuff recently as I’ve been (trying) to go to the gym, and the further into his band I venture the more impressed I am both by the band as a whole but also this album in particular.
Kublai Khan is one of those bands that’s been a band for more than a decade, since they got a lot more popular this year there’s been videos floating around of them playing little basement shows and like weird little dance halls a full ten years ago. And that passion for the music totally shows through on everything they do. Their music is not as musically complex as some other hardcore bands, they lean a little more into almost like an ACDC approach of making simple riffs with really simple beats that just get their hooks in you.
And make no mistake, this is simple but by no means lazy. Its rock solid, just a solid unyielding mass of hardcore intensity that makes you feel like you can run through a brick wall.
Exhibition of Prowess is not necessarily the most intense album, they’re not a metal band who feels the need to get more intense with each release, rather this album is precisely what it says in the title. An Exhibition of Prowess, just a bunch of guys who are at this point in their prime as musicians showing just how much they have to say for themselves and how much they have to bring to hardcore. And that’s really come to fruition this year, they’re getting a ton of attention and frankly they deserve it. Hope I get the chance to see them soon.