10. First Aid Kit – Stay Gold
We said: “First Aid Kit have crafted an album that seems to reflect their personal battles with those niggling feelings of nostalgia and sense of not knowing what the fuck you’re doing. The musical arrangements build on those ideas, pressing the listener to hark back to their own melancholy memories.”
Key track: My Silver Lining
9. St Vincent – St Vincent
We said: “Annie Clark didn’t just hold her own alongside David Byrne on record and on stage, she outshone at times, belying any perceived gravitas of legacy. Stoic beauty confluences with brash, unhinged guitar noodling and gritty effects. St Vincent carries that through, along with a fetish for the mundane.”
Key track: Birth In Reverse
8. FKA twigs – LP1
We said: “Soothing waves of percussive glitch somehow generate lushness through crispness. For a voice that invokes fragility, Twigs demonstrates nothing but sheer power”.
Key track: Two Weeks
7. Perfume Genius – Too Bright
We said: “Too Bright might be unsettling at times, but it’s not disjointed. Much like taking an acid trip or getting a restyled hairdo, once you take the plunge, sensory thrills and enriching satisfaction awaits.”
Key track: I Decline
6. A Winged Victory For The Sullen – Atomos
They said: “The process was pretty much a reverse of anything that we’ve done before. When we were working on the piece we were playing things almost immediately after we wrote them. That never happens. Generally you always write something, you record it, then you figure out the live process. Everything happened so fast. We didn’t even have anything recorded until after the premiere. It was a very interesting process, but it worked.”
Key track: Atomos VII
5. Angel Olsen – Burn Your Fire For No Witness
We said: “Olsen draws from subjective hurt to depict feelings that encroach upon all of us. There’s no reliable safeguard against loneliness; whenever we sink back into our thoughts or lucidly grasp our being, it’s a stubbornly isolated experience. But this certainly isn’t enough reason to stop searching for redemptive unity.”
Key track: Forgiven/Forgotten
4. Graveyard Train – Takes One To Know One
We said: “Though this record is similar in many respects to their previous work, it is every bit as listenable and every bit as engaging.”
Key track: She Likes To Eat The Skin
3. Total Control – Typical System
We said: “Typical System is the sound of a band positively subsumed under the songs it’s playing. The update in fidelity isn’t an attempt at crossover success; it’s done out of commitment to the ideas being expressed. And if anything, it will allow Total Control to burrow further into the collective psyche.”
Key track: Flesh War
2. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – I’m In Your Mind Fuzz
We said: “I’m In Your Mind Fuzz has a very fluid, stream of consciousness feeling to it. Each song moves seamlessly into the next, the tone is warm, and the beginning of each track is invited in by the conclusion of the one before it.”
Key track: Am I In Heaven?
1. The War On Drugs – Lost In The Dream
We said: “Lost In The Dream, the fourth release from Philadelphian four-piece The War On Drugs, is an odyssey of reverb-soaked Americana laced with electronic tones and underpinned by a subtle but inescapable sense of sorrow.”
Key track: Suffering
