—Max Freedman, Margaret Chardiet has made a career out of exploring the body’s scariest secrets. —Austin Jones, Compared to the rest of Andy Stott’s 15-year career, the palette used to paint It Should Be Us is distinctly matte.

It isn’t even the first time she’s deployed that exact play-on-words on the mixtape. 16 SHARON VAN ETTEN Instead of drifting through momentous and downtrodden “sections,” the entire work captures a crystalline moment in time, as though it actively freezes your surroundings into a diorama and lets you walk around in that solitary universe. This debut, sure enough, surges onward through post-punk styles big and small, from The Fall to REM, to Prolapse and Idlewild. Throughout five tracks, Davachi sinks us into a transfixing golden hour that envelops us with the warmth of organs, arpeggios without edges, and disembodied pianos.

As with the best spiritual jazz records, Trust In The Lifeforce… was equally blissful and raging, both out-there and in-here – the most intoxicating collision of beats, jazz and apocalyptic visions since DJ Shadow discovered David Axelrod.

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The London-based producer is as well-known for her effortless cool-girl style as she is for her post-club sound—she has more in common with the devil-may-care vibe of Rihanna, who notably featured the producer’s work in her work in the New York Fenty x Puma runway show back in 2017. Hope, exhaustion, romance, secrets?

On this release, Zs are a quartet covering two guitars, a sax, percussion, and electronics. (Richard Allen), Mediafired ~ The Pathway Through Whatever (Exo Tapes Inc., 2011)

In contrast to the ill strife of Bestial Burden or the astral dissociation of Contact, Devour seems to present a solution for Chardiet’s career-long quandary of how not to feel trapped inside your own body: eat yourself.

Like many masters of traditional instruments, she is fluent in the long history of her instrument, including its connections to the middle-eastern oud. Night Of The Worm Moon 20 BRITTANY HOWARD It didn’t need to be: Kay’s blend of “straight hip-hop shit” (his words), the Haitian music his family played in his childhood home, muffled but chest-puffed bass and synths that purred with lust caught the attention of pretty much anyone listening. The album plays with British anxieties and takes maximalism to grander, manic heights, and somehow manages to evoke pop sensibility. CITY SLANG After Dream River’s spacious meditations on the natural world, six years later we find Bill Callahan keeping things within four walls.

—Austin Jones, When Montreal-via-Haiti producer KAYTRANADA came out as gay shortly before he released his debut studio album 99.9% in 2016, it was kind of a big deal. HUMAN SEASON Throughout their storied 25-year career, Wilco have consistently questioned themselves and their creative purpose.

We’ve already shared our picks for the best albums of 2019, as well as many genre-specific lists, including country and pop. There’s a progression throughout the album that mirrors a hero’s journey, a call to adventure punctuated by war of mythopoeic proportions between each track’s moving parts. 43 WH LUNG In 2018, she released Anno, an avant-garde reimagining of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” contributed to the soundtrack of The Favourite, and scored Bo Burnham’s directorial debut Eighth Grade.
Across seventy minutes. The sounds of old find themselves lodged uncannily amidst the noises of the present; the godly stench of the ever-dying sun floods our decade with the irradiance of the 20, century. 28 JENNY HVAL Three albums in and New Zealander Hannah “Aldous” Harding remains impressively tricky to pin down.

An indication, if you need one, of Mering’s breakthrough with this remarkable, transcendent album. Fans of kaleidoscopic crossover can check her out in the Silk Road Ensemble. Grimoire is a force, almost unmatched, in this grand exercise of unravelling, the best we can sacrifice to experience some beyond. That’s to say, anyone fearing the kind of indulgences White brought to last year’s solo album Boarding House Reach will have enjoyed the more conventional rock leanings of Help Us Stranger. This shines throughout the album; s/t is off-center, but glimmers with an uncharacteristic beauty. Later, “Bias” begins with a deep, tentative beat as if faltering at the precipice of defeat, then surges with a breakbeat so grounding as if our hero is gritting teeth teeth in renewed determination. But one area we haven’t yet covered in list format? 48 LIZZO “Moment EP” is as polished as it is kind, offering a hand to a better world, cool waters, and the eternal possibility of an endless summer. The intricately constructed pieces are tightly controlled, with crescendos often limited to a braying guitar chord sustained over the metronomic mutter of the supporting cast. 9 BIG THIEF —Austin Jones, Math has never sounded so good.

5 LANA DEL REY

3 PURPLE MOUNTAINS JAGJAGUWAR The track used on the mix that sticks out the most is also the mix’s most mesmerizing moment.

—Austin Jones, Yeule, a project by London-based Singaporean producer Nat Cmiel, is all about online dreams. Blending tradition, history, hopes and ideals, she paints an elegant painting in sound.

(Richard Allen), Matmos ~ Ultimate Care II (Thrill Jockey, 2016) The EP not merely announces an exciting new voice in electronic music but instantly justifies any expectations across its 20 minutes.

—Austin Jones, Hval recently told The Ringer, “One thing I’m really enjoying about becoming older is just realizing you’re very small and insignificant. She dips her toes into her trademark transgressive smut on “Supersoaker” with lyrics that wouldn’t be out of place on a Cardi B track: “Better grow gills, bring a snorkel / chug a whole gallon to reload.” To compensate, the oceanic inflections make Trinity siren-like and alluring, touting its own indulgence in plain sight. She crashes together the old with the new, the middle with the far East, and the rustic with the elegantly refined. —Austin Jones, What does nightlife sound like? Cuz I Love You Its title inspired by Sun Ra’s The Night Of The Purple Moon, the second solo LP from the La Luz singer and guitarist moulded the interstellar jazz auteur’s cosmic bent to her own fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The making of The Doors’ Morrison Hotel: “Most of it was really fun…”, How Bruce Springsteen made his new album, Letter To You, John Lennon – The Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide.

It contains the entire word “honesty” inside it, which makes it sound religious, protestant, hierarchic, purified.” Layered atop it is a discussion between Hval and Laura Jean about child birth, abortion, and the responsibilities of humans to create life. Despite featuring a number of the scene’s major players – saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Cassie Kinoshi, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, trombonist Rosie Turton and more – it never felt like anyone was queuing up for a solo, instead striving to fashion a supremely harmonious blend of ’70s astral jazz and contemporary global flavours. For the front cover of Titanic Rising, Mering submerged an entire bedroom, complete with teddy bear and laptop. 44 ROBERT FORSTER (David Murrieta Flores), Matana Roberts ~ Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee (Constellation, 2015)

There were customarily heroic jams like “Milky Way” – but also a vein of melancholia, as best heard on “Olden Days”, that helped underscore the losses Young experienced during a difficult 2019, including his former wife Pegi and long-serving manager Elliot Roberts. Serf’s Up!

Dogrel Norman Fucking Rockwell A collaboration with Italian multiinstrumentalist Turrisi, it addressed the ‘other’ of the title through its examination of Islamic influences on Western music: thus the title track mixed banjo with Middle Eastern percussion, Giddens’ impassioned vocals meshed with lute on “Ten Thousand Voices”, and a take on Ola Belle Reed’s “Gonna Write Me A Letter” highlighted the blues’ explicit links to Africa. But Berman’s generous final act was to give hope to others by excavating the darkest recesses of his psyche with such eloquence and humour, all set to his unique brand of endearingly louche country-rock.

All Mirrors

Like many masters of traditional instruments, she is fluent in the long history of her instrument, including its connections to the middle-eastern oud.

Wu Man is a world-class maestro of the Chinese pipa – a short-necked lute, with four strings picked upright. Here’s how the aftermath often goes if you’re lovingly accepted rather than callously rejected: You shed a massive chunk of your internalized homophobia or transphobia; you begin speaking about your love interests or gender identity as though they’re no different from the majority; your angriest, most despondent, distant selves disintegrate as you stop wearing the mask that’s long squashed your happiness.

Humanworld

Over baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk, the album’s narrators found themselves adrift in Del Rey’s deeply seductive vision of California, populated by ne’er-do-wells and fly-by-nights. There Is No Other Opening track “Homeostasis” directly references the error in comfortable stagnancy, punctuated by watery, robotic melismas that challenge the track’s natural, static looping state. PARTISAN 21 RHIANNON GIDDENS feat FRANCESCO TURRISI Last year, our Albums Of The Year poll found seasoned veterans like Low and Yo La Tengo discovering new sonic methods to convey their apprehension and sense of displacement during these complex times.
“LA” contains some percussive gongs that wouldn’t be out of place on a Mortal Kombat song, which later melt into a twisted lovesickness. Descend into the crypt, find the mirror in which no gaze is ever returned, and feel the rush of true experimentalism: a slight, yet immense step into the unknown. After the serious noise of her Body/ Head project, we were probably unprepared for the vibrancy and colour (even jokes) of No Home Record. On The Line was resolutely not a period piece, however, its sumptuous production only serving to better highlight the bleeding edge of Lewis’s lovelorn ballads, from the wayward “Taffy” to the deliciously lugubrious “Hollywood Lawn”. This striking solo debut from the Alabama Shakes singer swapped stirring Southern soul for something more intimate and experimental. Author: Voidman.

4AD Inferno brought his customary wit and elegance to bear on a set of wonderfully pithy songs about ageing, family, climate change and the artist’s place in the world. 99.9%, though, wasn’t an overtly queer musical collection.

INTERSCOPE The year’s pop phenomenon, courtesy of “Bad Guy” – a record of such creepy delivery and intention it threatened to darken the skies at a radiant Glastonbury – Eilish had no problem extending her vision to a full album.

Whether the machine swirls or rinses, and whether Matmos taps or beats, the music works its way to a frenzy of techno excitement ~ without the aid of traditional instruments. Reward Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin project is now on its fourth installment, and shows no signs of weakening. Horizon

And now, without further ado, A Closer Listen presents The Best Experimental Albums of 2010-19! MATADOR