As the old saying goes: If you want to sculpt a statue of an elephant, you just get the biggest granite block you can find — and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. I am trying to take the same approach to my year-end lists. I start with the giant slab of music contained in The Long List of everything I heard; then I chip away more than half the releases to form this massive, woolly mammoth of everything I wanted to hear again; and finally, I whittle that down to a still-elephantine Short List of ivory-pure excellence that you’ll never forget. Read on:
Hans Condor
Big Breakfast
Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. But only a loser believes it has to be the healthiest. In the capable, callused, coffee-stained hands of Nashville noisemakers Hans Condor, your morning repast can be gritty, greasy, groovy, gargantuan and gloriously guilt-free — as long as it includes their latest album Big Breakfast.
True to its title, this sucker is a tasty home-cooked feast for musical gourmands of all stripes — assuming those stripes include sludgy ’70s-style boogie-rock a la Black Sabbath, scorching mosh-pit salvos stright from the valley of 1984, Ramones-style punk-pop charges, chugging country-punk firecrackers, crunchy roots-rock anthems and hard-twangin’ heartland-rock raveups. Naturally, everything is served up hot ’n’ nasty, straight off the grill — and covered / smothered with more fuzz and muck than last week’s leftovers at the back of the fridge.”
The Hard Quartet
The Hard Quartet
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Hard Quartet are a band. But what is a band? A band, perhaps, can be thought of as a body, a corpus, in which physically discrete lifeforms comprise a chimera that shrieks with one voice.
In this particular band, which is one of millions in the world today, four players selflessly merge, become musical, and emit rock ’n’ roll that is familiar but new, warm but icy, melodic but Sphinx-like in its seductive and subtle riddles… essentially, The Hard Quartet — a supergroup featuring Emmett Kelly, Stephen Maklmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White — have leveled, cultivated, and made lush an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture. Says Malkmus: “We’re all jazzed.”
JP Harris
JP Harris Is A Trash Fire
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “JP Harris’s historic restoration carpentry has continued to be a baseline for his relationship to music; the yin to his yang, the Bert to his Ernie, the Dolly to his Porter. It was through this concurrent line of work that he met another twice-initialed singer with a penchant for old Americana music, obscure film, and overly elaborate ethnic meal preparations: JD McPherson. The two became fast friends and would eventually, through many twists, turns, false starts, and biblically-proportionate plagues, enter a modest studio in Nashville to record Harris’s latest album.
Over the course of nine months in 2023, they recorded a sometimes lush, sometimes sparse, and sometimes jarring country album of Harris’ originals, loudly and violently squelching any attempt to pigeonhole a song into any subgenre of country music. Only albums by Lee Hazelwood and an obscure folk album that Waylon Jennings made when his hair was still short were allowed to be mentioned in reference. Featuring the guest vocals of Erin Rae, The Watson Twins, Shovels & Rope and producer McPherson, the record is equal parts satire, reflection, and apology to those that would listen.”
Hakushi Hasegawa
Mahōgakkō
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Japanese musician Hakushi Hasegawa / 長谷川白紙 has just released their new album Mahōgakkō / 魔法学校.
The title, which translates to Magic School, seeks to make sense of a chaotic, vibrant world by letting itself get swept up in it. A balance of pop and pandemonium, the album is one of extremes, where chipmunk-pitched voices square off against percussion set to speed metal’s tempo and volume. Noise and melody, cutesy and aggressive, acoustic and electronic — all come to a head in a process Hasegawa calls the Explanatory Ratio. “The balance is probably the only thing in my work that is intentional and very important to me,” shares Hasegawa. “In many of my songs, I use a scale that I personally call the Explanatory Ratio to guide my work. This is not a sophisticated musical theory at all, but simply a subjective scale that looks at the balance of sounds that are explainable to me and sounds that are not explainable to me, and whether or not they are distributed in the ratio that I set for each piece.”
High On Fire
Cometh The Storm
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Grammy-winning hard rock power trio High On Fire — now celebrating their 25th anniversary — recorded Cometh The Storm at GodCity Studio in Salem, Mass., with producer Kurt Ballou. The 11-song effort — the band’s ninth studio album and first new music since 2018’s Electric Messiah — is the first to feature drummer Coady Willis (Big Business, Murder City Devils) alongside bassist Jeff Matz (Zeke), and singer-guitarist Matt Pike.
Adds Pike: “I think this band’s always had a really good drive. It’s a different entity. It’s its own thing. Which, I think, makes all of us very proud to be a part of it. It’s not an average band.” Shares Willis: “Being a fan of each other’s bands for a long time, it feels like all bets are off and anything goes, which is a liberating feeling. That feeling of making something out of all of these imperfect parts and it becomes this magical, weird, new idea that none of us ever anticipated. Against all odds. That’s the joy of it.”
Hot Mud
Rehab Rock
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I guess you could say Hot Mud was an alter ego of a man named Muddy Watters. It was a self-proclaimed nickname for his wild intoxicated personality.
Over time Hot Mud completely took over and eventually found himself in very dark places, in his surroundings, and in his own mind. A rocky road (to say the least) thankfully led him to rehab. Hot Mud spent over a year in treatment facilities, where he became sober and healthy. He did recovery work, attended meetings, found hope, and settled into second-stage sober living. He crammed musical instruments, recording equipment, and cameras into this tiny room the size of your mother’s closet. He covered his wall with green bristol board to make trashy music videos. He taught himself basic recording techniques while performing each composition, layering one track at a time onto a broken computer with broken instruments, some found in the rehab facility’s basement. He huddled in the farthest corner of his room and sang as quietly as possible, trying not to bother the other recovering tenants. Hot Mud created a record of songs he wrote during his struggle with addiction and the early stages of recovery. Rehab Rock is packed full of many musical styles and sounds, changing from song to song. Each composition is accompanied by lyrical content that is gritty and real (maybe a little too real) yet occasionally charming, silly, and fun… and it all sounds damn good!”
Hot Mud
Pink Cloud Pop
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On his second solo album, we find Hot Mud floating in his never-ending pink cloud. Here he has found purpose, happiness, and love. He sings of his newfound zest for life, embracing his oddities in anthems for outcasts. A new musical collection expands his journey as an artist and recovering addict, it’s a record called Pink Cloud Pop.
Pink Cloud Pop’s title and theme refer to the term ‘pink cloud’ known in addiction recovery circles as a temporary phase of euphoria and extreme optimism during the rehabilitation process. The album is a sequel in the Hot Mud story, picking up right where Rehab Rock ended. His songwriting continued throughout his stay in rehab, gradually evolving into a new positive perspective, mirroring his attitude and behavior.”
Brittany Howard
What Now
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There’s a double meaning to the title of What Now, the revelatory new album from singer-songwriter Brittany Howard. “With the world we’re living in now, it feels like we’re all just trying to hang onto our souls,” says the Nashville-based musician and frontwoman for four-time Grammy winners Alabama Shakes. “Everything seems to be getting more extreme and everyone keeps wondering, ‘What now? What’s next?’ By the same coin, the only constant on this record is you never know what’s going to happen next: Every song is its own aquarium, its own little miniature world built around whatever I was feeling and thinking at the time.”
With five Grammy wins and 16 nominations, Howard follows up her massively acclaimed solo debut Jaime — a 2019 LP that landed on multiple year-end lists — with an album that draws its immense and indelible power from endless unpredictability. Over the course of 12 tracks, Howard brings her singular musicality to a shapeshifting soundscape encompassing everything from psychedelia and dance music to dream-pop and avant-jazz — a fitting backdrop for an album whose lyrics shift from unbridled outpouring to incisive yet radically idealistic commentary on the state of the human condition. At turns galvanizing, cathartic, and wildly soul-expanding, the result is a monumental step forward for one of the most essential artists of our time.”
Hurray For The Riff Raff
The Past Is Still Alive
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With the release of their latest and hmost liberating album to date, Hurray For The Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra) open the doorway to a language and world that are finally their own.
The Past Is Still Alive represents a new beginning in Segarra’s lauded evolution as a storyteller. During a period of pain and personal grief, they found inspiration in radical poetry, railroad culture, outsider art, the work of writer Eileen Myles, and the history of activist groups like Act Up and Gran Fury. Discovering a stronger, more singular style of writing, Segarra uses their lyrics as memory boxes to process their trauma, identity and dreams for the future. They immortalize and say goodbye to those they have loved and lost, illustrate the many shapes and patterns of time’s passing, and honor the heartbroken and the hopeful parts of themselves, as they deliver a first-person telling of their life so far. It is both a memoir and a roadmap. And though The Past Is Still Alive was made in North Carolina and produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee), the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based Segarra brings listeners to places far beyond: Vivid experiences of small shops and buffalo stampedes in Santa Fe, childhood road trips to Florida, struggles of addiction in the Lower East Side, days-long journeys to outrun the cops in Nebraska, and more across their most magnetic collection of songs yet.”
Hushmoney
Hushmoney
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Across their debut album, Hushmoney paint the ridiculousness of existence so very right.
Mixed and mastered by Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip (Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy, Title Fight) Hushmoney is a deft concept album about the faulty choices that bitter men nearing middle age can make, backed with the chances they have to redeem themselves if they know where to look. We’re all trying to figure out how to survive and make meaning — and to have a little fun in the process, too. If the band itself has been an escape hatch from mid-30s anxieties and disappointments for its members, its work here shows how much fun you can have and how good you can do when you start to turn that stuff on its head, to turn it all into a shout-out-loud rock song.”
Ibibio Sound Machine
Pull The Rope
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Pull The Rope, the new record by Ibibio Sound Machine, casts the Eno Williams and Max Grunhard–led outfit in a new light. The hope, joy, and sexiness of their music remain, but, further honing the edge of their acclaimed 2022 album Electricity, the connection they aim to foster has shifted venues from the sunny buoyancy of a sunlit festival to a sweat-soaked, all-night dance club. The atmosphere has changed, but you’re still having the time of your life.
Produced by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, M.I.A.) and Grunhard, Pull The Rope finds Ibibio Sound Machine pushing beyond the sonic frontier established by their acclaimed 2022 album Electricity, with elements of post punk and Chicago house giving Williams’ rapturous vocals a timeless edge. New bangers like Got To Be Who U Are would be just as intoxicating in 1984 or 2044 as they are today.”
Idles
Tangk
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tangk is the righteous and vibrant fifth album from madcap truth-seekers Idles. Pronounced “tank” with a whiff of the “g” — an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined their guitars sounding that has since grown into a sigil for living in love — the record is the band’s most ambitious and striking work yet.
Where Idles were once set on taking the world’s piss, squaring off with strong jaws against the perennially entitled, and exercising personal trauma in real time, they have arrived in this new act to offer the fruits of such perseverance: Love, joy, and indeed gratitude for the mere opportunity of existence. A radical sense of defiant empowerment radiates from Tangk, co-produced by Nigel Godrich, Kenny Beats and Idles guitarist Mark Bowen. Despite his reputation as an incendiary post-punk sparkplug, frontman Joe Talbot sings almost all the feelings inside these 10 songs with hard-earned soul, offering each lusty vow or solidarity plea as a bona fide pop song — that is, a thing for everyone to pass around and share, communal anthems intended for overcoming our grievance. Tangk is a love album — open to anyone who requires something to shout out loud in order to fend off any encroaching sense of the void, now or forever.”
Illuminati Hotties
Power
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Illuminati Hotties is the musical project founded by singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and tenderpunk pioneer Sarah Tudzin. Their new album Power — co-produced by Tudzin and John Congleton (St. Vincent, Death Cab For Cutie) features the Hotties’ trademark wit, vibrancy, and undeniable fun.
Of course, you might be forgiven if you don’t get that impression from Tudzin’s description of lead single Let Me In: “I find that something I have in common with most people that I talk to lately is the immense fear of and inability to be alone with ourselves,” she says. “Constant motion, avoidance, restlessness –— anything to keep myself from stagnating have always been my coping mechanisms when my inner monologue starts to get loud.”
Iron & Wine
Light Verse
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When the pandemic began, and the world shut down, so did the process of creating for Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. In its place was a domesticity that the singer hadn’t felt in a long time, and although it was filled with many rewards, making music was not one of them. Reflecting on that time, Beam notes:
“I feel blessed and grateful that I and most of my friends and family made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed compared to so many others, but it completely paralyzed the songwriter in me. While so many artists, fortunately, found inspiration in the chaos, I was the opposite and withered with the constant background noise of uncertainty and fear. The last thing I wanted to write about was Covid, and yet every moment I sat with my pen, it lingered around the edges and wouldn’t leave. I struggled to focus until I gave up, and this lasted for over two years.”
Jagged Baptist Club
Physical Surveillance
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The debut album from L.A.’s Jagged Baptist Club is a bundle of energy and attitude. The band describe themselves as like Blur and Public Image Ltd trying to cover The Rapture and Happy Mondays while Division Of Laura Lee and The Vines throw tomatoes at them.
Physical Surveillance is about letting old habits, old realties and old selves die. It’s about moving forward, growing upwards and trying to focus on the present and look towards the future. It’s about realizing that you can become a better version of yourself and that it’s OK to close the book on your past, in a way that doesn’t erase the past but at least puts it under glass. It’s also just really fun to listen to.”
Japandroids
Fate & Alcohol
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Japandroids’ Fate & Alcohol is their fourth and final full-length. Written in part while the duo — drummer-vocalist David Prowse and guitarist-vocalist Brian King — were touring behind their 2017 album Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, the album is at once a return to form and a thrilling step forward, a monument to the chemistry they’ve honed over nearly two decades side by side.
Recorded in Vancouver with longtime collaborator Jesse Gander, Fate & Alcohol finds them pursuing new ways to bottle that same rush — to write songs with the vitality and dynamic interaction of their early material, without sacrificing any of the nuance or ambition that marked Near To The Wild Heart Of Life. “As a band, you always want to feel like you’re progressing while simultaneously preserving what’s unique about you,” King says. “This record combines the energy and abandon of the first two with the storytelling of Near To The Wild Heart Of Life — youthful exuberance but tempered with a point of view, of life lived.”
The Jesus And Mary Chain
Glasgow Eyes
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Marking 40 years of The Jesus And Mary Chain, Glasgow Eyes was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio in Glasgow — where Jim and William Reid continued the creative process that resulted in their previous album, 2017’s Damage and Joy, their highest charting album in over twenty years.
What emerged is a record that finds one of the U.K.’s most influential groups embracing a productive second chapter, their maelstrom of melody, feedback and controlled chaos now informed more audibly by their love for Suicide and Kraftwerk and a fresh appreciation of the less disciplined attitudes found in jazz. “But don’t expect ‘the Mary Chain goes jazz,’ ” Jim Reid cautions (and/or reassures). “People should expect a Jesus And Mary Chain record, and that’s certainly what Glasgow Eyes is. Our creative approach is remarkably the same as it was in 1984, just hit the studio and see what happens. We went in with a bunch of songs and let it take its course. There are no rules, you just do whatever it takes. And there’s a telepathy there — we are those weird not-quite twins that finish each other’s sentences.”
The Jesus Lizard
Rack
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In the jade-cultivating climes of rock journalism, the angle “band has new album” is about as interesting as watching Instagram reels of your brother-in-law’s bathroom remodel. But when a band decides to follow up their last album from over 26 years ago? That’s high on testicular fortitude and as dumb as fidget spinners. Yet, when that band is The Jesus Lizard, everything in your pathetic cultural dystopia suddenly falls away and the air smells like Heaven…
Their seventh studio album Rack, produced by Paul Allen, features 11 tracks of brisk guitar rock you haven’t heard since… well, the last time The Jesus Lizard took over a stage in your town. The band — vocalist David Yow, guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm. Sims and drummer Mac McNeilly — have returned with a record teeming with the kind of madness needed to beat down today’s AOR mediocrity and piss-perfect pop drivel alike.”
Johnny Blue Skies (aka Sturgill Simpson)
Passage Du Desir
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After promising to release only five studio albums under his own name, Sturgill Simpson marks the beginning of a new era with Johnny Blue Skies and the release of Passage Du Desir.
Out on his own independent label, High Top Mountain Records, the album includes eight songs produced by Johnny Blue Skies and David Ferguson, recorded at Clement House Recording Studio in Nashville and Abbey Road Studios in London.”
Jamey Johnson
Midnight Gasoline
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Award-winning singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson’s Midnight Gasoline is his sixth album and first new solo studio set in 14 years. It is also the first of his Cash Cabin Series, a collection of albums recorded at the famed studio in Hendersonville that was owned by Johnny Cash and June Carter and is now owned by their son, John Carter Cash.
Johnson spent three weeks recording about 30 songs there, sleeping in his bus outside so that he could remain immersed in the creative space. “There is a presence there,” he says. “There is a spirit in the place. Maybe it was born there from Johnny and June, and maybe it was born there from the countless other artists who have come to that studio to record. But there is a spirit there and I love it. It feels like home to me… I’ve always wanted to make an album there. I went in with an album in mind, where we go in and cut and cut and cut. That is when I knew we were off to the races. This is more than an album; this is a series.”
