30. G.L.O.S.S. — Trans Day of Revenge
Courtesy of Total Revenge Records
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To call this album a call to arms almost seems like a platitude. Trans Day of Revenge was a fucking explosion. Even at this point less than six months after its release, the album’s history is almost mythic: a little-known trans-feminist hardcore band from Olympia whose name stands for Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit releases a relentless album the same day (as if by some fucked up twist of fate) that the country is learning about the Orlando massacre. Their message (which they inject mercilessly into an album that stretches a scanty seven minutes) is summed up by the first words Sadie Switchblade screams on the opening track: “When peace is just another word for death / it’s our turn to give violence a chance!” But a band burning so hot and saying so much couldn’t possibly have lasted much longer than the total 15 minutes (including their 2015 demo) which they had a chance to put to wax: after notoriously refusing a $50,000 major label contract, G.L.O.S.S. announced their breakup hardly two months after this monumental release. Before that happened, though, a friend of mine said to me casually, “Isn’t it crazy that we live in a world where bands like Downtown Boys, PWR BTTM and G.L.O.S.S. are all even able to exist at the same time?” I agreed with him then, and I agree with him even more now. We need a whole lot more bands like G.L.O.S.S. Fast.
— Troy Sherman
29. Andy Stott — Too Many Voices
Courtesy of Modern Love Records
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Andy Stott knows how to use silence. The most breathtaking sections on the Manchester-based producer’s Too Many Voices are those where Stott brings everything to a brief halt. A microsecond here, a fraction of a measure there — soundless. And then, like some chromatized tgardener, he shovels crisp clumps of sound back into the voids where they weren’t. The effect is truly ethereal: silence becomes an instrument, a sound itself, blending in seamlessly with a soundscape that in the hands of lesser producers would have overcome it. All this isn’t to say, though, that there’s not a lot going on in Too Many Voices — that little liberation of silence makes all of Stott’s bent-up techno compositions float that much more freely, making Too Many Voices one of the most buoyant and spacious albums of the year.
— Troy Sherman
28. Frankie Cosmos — Next Thing
Courtesy of Bayonet Records
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Next Thing sounds the way blushing feels. It sounds like a boy choosing someone else. It sounds like standing in the corner at a party. It sounds like your skirt ripping in class. It sounds like being interrupted. It also sounds like the text conversation with your best girl friend. It sounds like figuring out how not to care about that boy anymore. It sounds like smiling and laughing and driving around and being ok.
In a feminist music moment of girl pride and power, songwriter Greta Kline, unblushingly makes female shame her subject: claiming and probing it, inviting it out of the bedroom into the broad daylight, instead of subordinating it; trying to figure out what it means.
The warm, velvety album is a balance between Kline’s blunt, piercing meditations on shame and sadness: “You make me feel like a fool / Waiting for you” (“Fool”), “When I know I’m not the best girl in the room / I tell myself I’m the best thing you can do / do I belong, do I belong?” (“Too Dark”), “Am I still so sad? I guess that’s pretty lame” (“If I Had A Dog”) — and declarations of resilience, embodiment, joy and delight: “Some day in bravery / I’ll embody all the grace and lightness” (“Embody”), “It all make sense now thanks so much / good by forever, what the fuck” (“Is It Possible/Sleep Song”), “You change, I change / hooray” (“Tour Good”). In the vast emotional range she imbues the album with, Kline insists upon the keeping the messy inextricability of shame and pride, sadness and joy, control, power and disempowerment unrelentingly, irreducibly in view.
— Jael Goldfine
27. The Avalanches — Wildflower
Courtesy of Astralwerks
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Sixteen years in the making, The Avalanches’ Wildflower stitches thousands of samples together into a lovely, kaleidoscopic dream sequence. Though the album self-consciously calls back to the mood of the sixties, Wildflower is actually as contemporary as they come: a piece of art that reappropriates pieces of culture as diverse as hip hop, flower-child psychedelia and obscure television to create a journey that feels both universal and personal.
Though almost entirely created from other sounds, Wildflower incorporates new verses from rappers like MF Doom and Danny Brown. Their contributions fit nicely into the album’s wide-open expanse — take a song like “The Wozard of Iz,” where Brown’s hard-nosed verse about going to prison segues into a gorgeous string section. Despite its utopian vibe, the song — like Wildflower as a whole — is tinged with poignancy and nostalgia.
Wildflower is a self-contained world, with songs that bleed seamlessly into each other. The entire thing can be enjoyed as an uninterrupted piece of music. As such, it functions both as personal escapism and a communal party, a blissed-out journey you’ll wish you could stay on indefinitely.
— Max Van Zile
26. Teen Suicide — It’s the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot
Courtesy of Run For Cover Records
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Teen Suicide, a band that once released a compilation titled rarities, unreleased stuff and cool things, seems to thrive on curiosity and ambition more than discipline. “did u know I have always approached writing records as “drawing specific worlds” ?” frontman Sam Ray asked me in a Twitter convo back in April. (Yes, I’m poorly trying to name-drop.) Thankfully, all of the group’s irreverence and creativity came to a head in It’s the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot. In just over an hour, the Maryland quartet explores garage rock, emo, experimental lo-fi and folk punk sonic worlds, putting their melancholic spin on each of them. It’s the Big Joyous Celebration is an irreducible album, one that grows weirder and more emotionally powerful with every listen.
— Shay Collins
25. NAO — For All We Know
Courtesy of RCA Records
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Albums are expected to be events more than ever today. They have narratives both internal and external, they arrive through surprise releases or with accompanying video projects, their songs are expected to express a range of styles that make a statement about the artist’s hybridity (think Lemonade, Pablo, ANTI, Blonde or many of the other major releases of this year). For All We Know is a refreshingly unpretentious collection of songs. There’s not a ton of stylistic variety across the album’s 18 tracks: for the most part, they stick to a formula of slinky funk grooves and sweet, sly vocals. This isn’t an album that demands much of you, or feels like a homework assignment; it’s one that you can put on and jam out to for 50 extremely enjoyable minutes.
— Jack Jones
24. Car Seat Headrest — Teens of Denial
Courtesy of Matador Records
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After years spent honing his sound through free Internet releases, Car Seat Headrest frontman Will Toledo went major-label with a debut album that builds proggy, epic jams from the base components of Nineties-style emo rock. Long suites like “Joe Gets Kicked Out of School” and “Cosmic Hero” tend to develop into epic crescendos — but the lyrics are always deeply felt and personal, often dealing with Toledo’s experiences with depression.
Few recent bands have brought as much ambition to indie rock, but Toledo never lets his songwriting obscure the emotional punch of his lyrics. On the opening anthem “Fill In The Blank,” for instance, he sets the tone for the entire album: “I have a right to be depressed / I’ve given every inch I had to fight it.” The confidential, honest tone makes Teens of Denial relatable, and Toledo’s songwriting chops make it violently catchy; the result is one of the most thoroughly engrossing debuts in recent memory.
— Max Van Zile
23. Slime Girls — Tapioca
Courtesy of Slime Girls
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What started out as the score for a short anime film turned into one of the sweetest, weirdest and most unabashedly energetic and fun releases of 2016. LA’s Slime Girls (aka Pedro Silva) has specialized since 2012 in making video-game music from the heart, but it’s Tapioca whose charming fretfulness (in turns bouncing off the walls and bottled right up) doesn’t dip or falter one bit. Equipped with the best-titled songs of the year, no contest — “3000 unread messages & a cherry slushie,” “just be yourself my dude” — Tapioca is meant to be listened to when you’re looking down at your phone and walking around in the sunlight. I swear, it’ll give it some meaning.
— Troy Sherman
22. Solange — A Seat at the Table
Courtesy of Saint Records
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A Seat at the Table, Solange Knowles third album, is a unique masterpiece, opposing musical conformity while serving as a monumental and unconventional contribution to the black movement, and its history and culture. Knowles truly conveys a radical but honest message underlying her soft and wise lyrics; audiences will feel a vast array of emotions as Knowles confers her deeply resonating narrative of the struggles and melancholies of black womanhood in America. A Seat at the Table’s lyrical ingenuity along with its varying sound of funk, soul and melodies reminiscent of the seventies offers a transformative experience into an untravelled, alternative dimension. Knowles’ metaphorical lyricism-”Now I don’t want to bite the hand that’ll show me the other side, no-but I didn’t want to build the land that has fed you your whole life, no,” from “Don’t You Wait,” and “Well it’s like cranes in the sky-sometimes I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds,” from “Cranes in the Sky” induces depth in thought that transcends music. A Seat at the Table is easily the best album of the year that everyone must listen to.
— Janelle Odionu
21. Danny Brown — Atrocity Exhibition
Courtesy of Warp
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As low-brow as he might try to convince us he is, Danny Brown is a smart fucking dude. At risk of sounding like an asshole, I’d say that what he does on Atrocity Exhibition is straight up postmodern. Take the opening song, “Downward Spiral” (and yes, that is a Joy Division reference, just like the album title): over a Krautrock sample so deep even Faust would say it’s too obscure, a disinterested beat bounces off the walls with its shoulders slumped while Brown raps about the usual fare — lotsa drugs and a threesome the night before where he had to “stuff it in soft.” But all the usual braggadocio is just masking a degree of ultrapersonal fear, claustrophobia, paranoia — and guilt that you’d be hard-pressed to find on any other rap album from 2016. If you can manage to squeeze past the thin fragments of conventionality and nestle deep enough into Atrocity Exhibition, you’ll come face to face with an album whose confrontation with genuine terror doesn’t just justify the Joy Division parallel; it might really scare the shit out of you.
— Troy Sherman