Fopp's Best Albums of 2017

Josh Tillman’s third album as Father John Misty is a wry and passionate complaint against nearly everything under the sun: Politics, religion, entertainment, war—even Father John Misty can’t escape Father John Misty’s gimlet eye. But even the wordiest, most cynically self-aware songs here (“Leaving L.A.,” “When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay”) are executed with angelic beauty, a contrast that puts Tillman in a league with spiritual predecessors like Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson. A performer as savvy as Tillman knows you can’t sell the apocalypse without making it sound pretty.

'Pure Comedy', Father John Misty’s third album, is a complex, often-sardonic, and, equally often, touching meditation on the confounding folly of modern humanity. Father John Misty is the brainchild of singer-songwriter Josh Tillman. Tillman has released two widely acclaimed albums – 'Fear Fun' (2012) and 'I Love You, Honeybear' (2015) – and the recent “Real Love Baby” single as Father John Misty, and recently contributed to songs by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cudi. While we could say a lot about 'Pure Comedy' – including that it is a bold, important album in the tradition of American songwriting greats like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Leonard Cohen – we think it’s best to let its creator describe it himself. Take it away, Mr. Tillman: 'Pure Comedy' is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence. Something like that. 'Pure Comedy' was recorded in 2016 at the legendary United Studios (Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Beck) in Hollywood, CA. It was produced by Father John Misty and Jonathan Wilson, with engineering by Misty’s longtime sound-person Trevor Spencer and orchestral arrangements by renowned composer/double-bassist Gavin Bryars (known for extensive solo work, and work with Brian Eno, Tom Waits, Derek Bailey).

No listener to Dawson’s earlier music has ever discerned a lack of artistic ambition. Whether they got on at the last stop - the 4 track Tyneside-Trout-Mask-through a-Vic and Bob-filter of Nothing Important - or earlier in the journey, with The Glass Trunk’s visceral song cycle or The Magic Bridge’s sombre revels, devotees of his earlier recordings will be at once intrigued by and slightly fearful of the prospect of a record that could make those three landmark releases look like formative work. Peasant is that album. From its first beguilingly muted fanfare to its spectacular climax exploring a Dark Ages masseuse’s dangerous fascination with a mysterious artefact called the Pin of Quib, Peasant will grab newcomers to Richard Dawson’s work by the scruff of the neck and refuse to let them go until they have signed a pledge of life-long allegiance.

After a six-year break during which frontman Robin Pecknold vanished to the Washington woods then reappeared as a college student in New York, Fleet Foxes return with a fresh sense of purpose. Expanding on the harmony-driven sound of their first two albums, *Crack-Up* boasts both pretty, straightforward folk tunes (“Naiads, Cassadies,” “Fool’s Errand”) and sprawling, suite-like explorations (“Third of May / Odaigahara,” “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar”) that are at once comforting and quietly avant-garde. It’s a balance that allows the band’s natural sweetness—and wild ambition—to shine.

Crack-Up, Fleet Foxes' long-awaited and highly anticipated third album, comes six years after the release of Helplessness Blues and nearly a decade since the band's self-titled debut. "Rewarding, involving, and meticulous," says the AP, "Crack-Up has been well worth the wait." "Likely to be the most remarkable album you will hear this year," exclaims the Times (UK). "The return of one of the most original bands of this century." Pitchfork calls it "their most complex and compelling album to date."

Nearly 20 years into the band\'s career, The National have reached a status attained only by the likes of Radiohead: a progressive, uncompromising band with genuinely broad appeal. Produced by multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner in his upstate New York studio (with co-production from guitarist Bryce Dessner and singer Matt Berninger), *Sleep Well Beast* captures the band at their moody, majestic best, from the propulsive “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” to “Guilty Party,” where Berninger’s portraits of failing marriage come to a sad, gorgeous, and surprisingly subtle head.

Sleep Well Beast was produced by member Aaron Dessner with co-production by Bryce Dessner and Matt Berninger. The album was mixed by Peter Katis and recorded at Aaron Dessner’s Hudson Valley, New York studio, Long Pond, with additional sessions having taken place in Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles.

On *Painted Ruins*, Grizzly Bear continue to revel in the dynamic between relaxed and urgent. Breathy vocals, arrangements that move from stripped-down and subdued to grand and cathartic—it\'s all there. But they’ve also found a new groove. “Wasted Acres” is bathed in lush, buzzing atmospheres, but its almost loungey swing fits like a worn-in pair of jeans. The intricate drumming that propels “Three Rings” also falls right in the pocket. But those newfound comforts are most apparent in the thrumming bass of the New Wave-kissed “Mourning Sound” and on \"Glass Hillside,” where the band channels Steely Dan’s jazzier moments.

Though Arcade Fire have always been comfortable making grand statements, they’ve also been generous with nuance. After joining forces with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy on 2013’s *Reflektor*, the Canadian outfit bring in a similarly impressive crew of co-producers—Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Pulp’s Steve Mackey—for *Everything Now*, an album whose jaunty, disco-indebted art-rock is weighted with haunting takes on information overload (the ABBA-esque title track) and nostalgia (“Signs of Life”). “If you can’t see the forest for the trees, just burn it all down,” frontman Win Butler sings on “We Don’t Deserve Love,” a gorgeous yet disorienting ballad at the album’s conclusion. “And bring the ashes to me.”

After his breakthrough *Lost in The Dream*, Adam Granduciel takes things a step further. Marrying the weathered hope of Dylan, Springsteen, and Petty with a studio rat’s sense of detail, *A Deeper Understanding* feels like an album designed to get lost in, where lush textures meet plainspoken questions about life, loss, and hope, and where songs stretch out as though they\'re chasing answers. For as much as Granduciel says in words, it’s his music that speaks loudest, from the synth-strobing heartland rock of “Holding On” and “Nothing to Find” to ballads like “Clean Living” and “Knocked Down,” whose spaces are as expansive as any sound.

While evolving from the feral roar of 2007 debut *Strange House* toward the saucer-eyed dance rock of 2014’s *Luminous*, The Horrors have often sculpted sharp pop tunes. Their fifth album fully embraces those melodic instincts while exploring the possibilities offered by mixing psychedelia, rock, and synth-pop with their gothic otherness. The results are disparate and gripping, from “Machine”’s grinding urgency to the woozy swagger of “Press Enter to Exit.” Finale “Something to Remember Me By” is the towering peak of their most assured album to date, evoking Balearic-period New Order with its yearning fusion of house and synth-pop.

In the two years since *To Pimp a Butterfly*, we’ve hung on Kendrick Lamar\'s every word—whether he’s destroying rivals on a cameo, performing the #blacklivesmatter anthem *on top of a police car* at the BET Awards, or hanging out with Obama. So when *DAMN.* opens with a seemingly innocuous line—\"So I was taking a walk the other day…”—we\'re all ears. The gunshot that abruptly ends the track is a signal: *DAMN.* is a grab-you-by-the-throat declaration that’s as blunt, complex, and unflinching as the name suggests. If *Butterfly* was jazz-inflected, soul-funk vibrance, *DAMN.* is visceral, spare, and straight to the point, whether he’s boasting about \"royalty inside my DNA” on the trunk-rattling \"DNA.\" or lamenting an anonymous, violent death on the soul-infused “FEAR.” No topic is too big to tackle, and the songs are as bold as their all-caps names: “PRIDE.” “LOYALTY.” “LOVE.” \"LUST.” “GOD.” When he repeats the opening line to close the album, that simple walk has become a profound journey—further proof that no one commands the conversation like Kendrick Lamar.

On their second album, Wolf Alice continue to draw their cues from ’90s alt-rock. They do it with such adventure and panache that it never becomes simple mimicry, though. The melody and dissonance of shoegaze are fashioned into aching, beautiful tributes to passed friends and relatives (“Heavenward,” “St. Purple & Green”), “Yuk Foo” mauls misogyny with punk fury and wit, while the title track is an epic journey in stoner rock. Out front, singer/guitarist Ellie Rowsell is an increasingly assured presence, skillfully inhabiting the many moods of her rivetingly personal lyrics.

Some bands take a few years to regroup for their next move; dream-pop pioneers Slowdive took 22, a return all the more bittersweet given how many bands their sound has influenced since. Combining the atmospherics of ambient music with rock ’n’ roll’s low center of gravity, *Slowdive* sounds as vital as anything the band recorded in the early ‘90s, whether it’s the foggy, countryish inflections of “No Longer Making Time” or the propulsive “Star Roving.”

“It felt like we were in a movie that had a totally implausible ending...” Slowdive’s second act as a live blockbuster has already been rapturously received around the world. Highlights thus far include a festival-conquering, sea-of-devotees Primavera Sound performance, of which Pitchfork noted: “The beauty of their crystalline sound is almost hard to believe, every note in its perfect place.” “It was just nice to realise that there was a decent amount of interest in it,” says principal songwriter Neil Halstead. The UK shoegaze pioneers have now channelled such seemingly impossible belief into a fourth studio opus which belies his characteristic modesty. Self-titled with quiet confidence, Slowdive’s stargazing alchemy is set to further entrance the faithful while beguiling a legion of fresh ears. Deftly swerving what co-vocalist/guitarist Rachel Goswell terms “a trip down memory lane”, these eight new tracks are simultaneously expansive and the sonic pathfinders’ most direct material to date. Birthed at the band’s talismanic Oxfordshire haunt The Courtyard – “It felt like home,” enthuses guitarist Christian Savill – their diamantine melodies were mixed to a suitably hypnotic sheen at Los Angeles’ famed Sunset Sound facility by Chris Coady (perhaps best known for his work with Beach House, one of countless contemporary acts to have followed in Slowdive’s wake). “It’s poppier than I thought it was going to be,” notes Halstead, who was the primary architect of 1995‘s previous full-length transmission Pygmalion. This time out the group dynamic was all-important. “When you’re in a band and you do three records, there’s a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record.” Drummer and loop conductor Simon Scott enhanced the likes of ‘Slomo’ and ‘Falling Ashes’ with abstract textures conjured via his laptop’s signal processing software. A fecund period of experimentation with “40-minute iPhone jams” allowed the unit to then amplify the core of their chemistry. “Neil is such a gifted songwriter, so the songs won. He has these sparks of melodies, like ‘Sugar For The Pill’ and ‘Star Roving’, which are really special. But the new record still has a toe in that Pygmalion sound. In the future, things could get very interesting indeed.” This open-channel approach to creativity is reflected by Slowdive’s impressively wide field of influence, from indie-rock avatars to ambient voyagers – see the tribute album of cover versions released by Berlin electronic label Morr Music. As befits such evocative visionaries, you can also hear Slowdive through the silver screen: New Queer Cinema trailblazer Gregg Araki has featured them on the soundtracks to no less than four of his films. “When I moved to America in 2008 I was working in an organic grocery store,” recalls Christian. “Kids started coming in and asking if it was true I had played in Slowdive. That’s when I started thinking, ‘OK, this is weird!’” Neil Halstead: “We were always ambitious. Not in terms of trying to sell records, but in terms of making interesting records. Maybe, if you try and make interesting records, they’re still interesting in a few years time. I don’t know where we’d have gone if we had carried straight on. Now we’ve picked up a different momentum. It’s intriguing to see where it goes next.” The world has finally caught up with Slowdive. This movie could run and run...

Pushing past the GRAMMY®-winning art rock of 2014’s *St. Vincent*, *Masseduction* finds Annie Clark teaming up with Jack Antonoff (as well as Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sounwave) for a pop masterpiece that radiates and revels in paradox—vibrant yet melancholy, cunning yet honest, friendly yet confrontational, deeply personal yet strangely inscrutable. She moves from synthetic highs to towering power-ballad comedowns (“Pills”), from the East Coast (the unforgettable “New York”) to “Los Ageless,” where, amid a bramble of strings and woozy electronics, she admits, “I try to write you a love song/But it comes out a lament.”

Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. Produced by psych-rock luminary Dave Fridmann, it's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There's percussive, dream-state electronics (“Coolverine”), church organs as chariots of existential fire (“Brain Sweeties”), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android (“aka 47”). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realized art-pop sing-along of their storied history, “Party In The Dark,” a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips, featuring Braithwaite's seldom-heard melodic vocals declaring he's “directionless and innocent, searching for another piece of mind”. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armor through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal “Every Country's Sun,” its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.

Intended as an examination of 21st-century femininity and masculinity, Laura Marling’s sixth album drills into her friendships and relationships with absorbing intimacy. Musically, it’s one of her finest records too. She consistently finds a captivating balance between immediacy, nuance, and adventure—whether she’s plucking cascading acoustic melodies on “Nouel” or creating a suspenseful union of hushed electronic beats, filmic strings and snaking electric guitar on “Don’t Pass Me By.”

Goldfrapp have tended to zig-zag between dynamic electronica and sparser, folkier sounds with every release, but their seventh album successfully absorbs both styles. “Systemagic,” a pounding throwback to 2005’s *Supernature*, and the metronomic disco of “Everything Is Never Enough” plug the duo back into the mains. However, *Silver Eye*’s central passage of sedate, spare electro is warmed by soul and intimacy typical of their more pastoral moments, not least on the pleading “Beast That Never Was.”

Frontman Joe Newman describes his band’s third album as “a great landscape eliciting different emotional reactions.” It’s fabulously treacherous terrain, dotted with unpredictable twists, turns, and rabbit holes. Even the most immediate track—“Deadcrush,” simmering space-funk inspired by deceased objects of desire—is dazzlingly rich in ideas. The band’s ambition reaches towering peaks on “Pleader,” which samples Ely Cathedral’s choir *and* its heating system while snaking through gentle folk, dystopian discord, and symphonic majesty. A remarkable balance of invention and accessibility, *Relaxer* places alt-J in a lineage of great British rock innovators that stretches from Pink Floyd to Radiohead.

“I feel weird,” repeats Stephen Bruner on “Captain Stupido”. That’s encouraging because the leftfield moments have always lent his jazz/funk/soft-rock fusions singular charm—even here when he meows through “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)”. By those standards, the melancholy “Walk On By”, with its pensive verse from Kendrick Lamar, and “Show You the Way”—co-starring soft-rock icons Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins—feel irresistibly straightforward, but their velvet melodies are as beguiling as Bruner’s falsetto harmonies.

Singer Hannah Reid is still beset by the troubling complexities of love and relationships on London Grammar’s second album. That’s good news for the rest of us because anguish and sorrow are premium fuels for a pure, versatile voice that soars and plummets with rare melancholic grace. The trio’s music remains haunted and hymnal, minimal yet efficient, softly accenting Reid’s emotion and allowing itself to rise to gorgeous, euphoric swells on the slow-burning “Hell to the Liars” and the gently blissful electro-pop of “Oh Woman Oh Man”.

Depeche Mode’s lyrics have been so consumed by personal anxieties during the latter half of their career that it’s startling to hear some explicitly political songs here. Stripping back their blues influences in favor of muscular electronics, they rage against apathy and the ruling classes on “Going Backwards”, “Where’s the Revolution,” and “Scum”. However, it’s in the more optimistic and confessional moments—Krautrock peace anthem “So Much Love” and distorted Motown ballad “Poison Heart”—that *Spirit* truly excels.

Long before London-by-way-of-Belfast’s Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar released their first 12-inch as Bicep, they’d proven themselves curators of the highest order, plucking out crucial techno, house, and disco tracks for their *Feel My Bicep* blog. This self-titled debut LP is where their impeccable tastes and killer DJ instincts all come together. “Glue” wears the duo\'s classic dance influences on its sleeve: It starts like a breaks-driven UK garage tune, but slyly morphs into something resembling atmospheric, ‘90s downtempo. And their love of ethereal vibes and Balearic house lives in the moody, blissed-out “Drift” and “Ayaya.\"

Contemplative, colorful electronica from the UK producer. On his sixth album, Simon Green explores the theme of migration through global sounds. His references are subtle, but not overly serious; he drifts from old-school Brandy samples (“Kerala”) to Moroccan Gnawa musicians (“Bambro Koyo Ganda”) with signature restraint (“Outlier”). There are a few high-profile guests along the way, including Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters) and Nick Murphy (Chet Faker), but they’re not the main attraction—this LP is about the ride.

New music from Simon Green aka Bonobo is always an event, but when it heralds the arrival of a whole new album (his first since 2013’s “The North Borders”), it’s really something to get excited about. The masterful, magisterial “Migration” is Green’s sixth album and it’s a record which cements his place in the very highest echelons of electronic music and beyond. Lead track ‘Kerala’ was the first track Green recorded for the new record, putting together a rough version of it on the tour bus while DJing across the States in 2014. It’s both a classic piece of Bonobo music and a development, all arpeggiated, twisted, layered strings and shuffling dancefloor rhythm. The music gradually builds until his introduction of a sample from RnB singer Brandy, itself cut up and dealt with as a further texture, with the whole sitting in a sweet spot of uplifting euphoria that he’s so adept at finding. The hypnotic video (also released today), has been directed by Bison (Jon Hopkins/London Grammar/ Rosie Lowe). It compliments the shuffling arpeggios and beats perfectly by creating staggered loop effects where the lead Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace/Inside No. 9) battles through a mysterious, distorted reality with a meteor flying overhead. In particular, there is a theme on the upcoming album of migration, eruditely put by Green as “The study of people and spaces,” he expands, “It’s interesting how one person will take an influence from one part of the world and move with that influence and affect another part of the world. Over time, the identities of places evolve.” Indeed there is a “transitory nature” to the album, not only through its themes, but also through its guests and found sounds. Michael Milosh, from the LA group Rhye, for instance, is originally from Canada and recorded his affecting vocal on ‘Break Apart' in a hotel room in Berlin. Green, meanwhile built the structure of the track during a transatlantic flight. Nick Murphy (formerly known as Chet Faker), on the other hand, is from Australia, but a shared love of disco brought the pair together for the hugely emotive ‘No Reason’. Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, originally from Florida, delivers a superbly understated vocal for the glistening textures of ‘Surface’, while Moroccan band Innov Gnawa, based in New York, provide the vocals, on ‘Bambro Koyo Ganda’. Additionally, Green has used a sampler (“but not in a big boomer, wearing a cagoule kind of way.”) and woven found sounds such as an elevator in Hong Kong airport, rain in Seattle, a tumble dryer in Atlanta and a fan boat engine in New Orleans into his intricate sonics. Bonobo’s DJ shows cannot be underestimated in importance to the overall feel of “Migration”, his much loved Output DJ residencies in New York and his global ‘Outlier’ club curated series were where he road-tested tracks. The landscape of his new home in California has provided the artwork of the record, designed by Neil Krug (Boards of Canada/Lana Del Ray). All the desert locations pictured “are close to where I now live,” Green explains. “Part of the writing process was to drive up to these places and live with the tracks as I was making them. This was a new part of the world to me, where the landscape is quite alien and Martian.” The album cover art has been gradually appearing in London and Los Angeles as giant murals, and have been fully unveiled today. A contemporary of artists such as Four Tet, Jon Hopkins and Caribou, Bonobo also counts among his famous fans the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Skrillex, Disclosure, Diplo and Warpaint. His 2013 album “The North Borders” went Top 30 in the UK and was number 1 in the electronic charts in both the US and UK. In support of that record, the 12-piece band Green runs played 175 shows worldwide, including a sold out show at Alexandra Palace. Bonobo has built a large, loyal and engaged global fanbase: over half a million album sales and over one hundred and fifty million streams on Spotify point to the levels of success achieved by this quiet, self-effacing man. It might be difficult to imagine it, but “Migration” will take his beautiful, emotive, intricate music to an even bigger audience. “My own personal idea of identity has played into this record and the theme of migration,” Green explains. “Is home where you are or where you are from, when you move around?” The personal, it seems, can also be universal.

Benjamin Power’s third album as Blanck Mass is club music for an uninhabitable planet. Like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin (or Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, for that matter), Power’s best moments twist pop shapes into dark new forms, alloying industrial music with R&B (“Please”), and Caribbean rhythms with Arctic atmospheres (“Silent Treatment”), creating a hybrid that hits like 100 pounds of fog.

As humans, we are aware of our inner beast and should therefore be able to control it. We understand our hard-wired primal urges and why they exist in an evolutional sense. We understand the relationship between mind and body. Highly evolved and intelligent, we should be able to recognize these genetic hangovers and control them as a means to act positively and move forward as a compassionate species. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Recent global events have proven this. The human race is consuming itself. World Eater, the new album by Benjamin John Power’s Blanck Mass project, is a reaction to this. There is an underlying violence and anger throughout the record, even though some of these tracks are the closest Power has ever come to writing, in his words, “actual love songs.” “Maybe subconsciously this was some kind of countermeasure to restore some personal balance,” Power explains. On World Eater, Power further perfects the propulsive, engrossing electronic music he has created throughout his impressive decade-plus career, both under the Blanck Mass moniker and as one-half of Fuck Buttons, as he elaborates upon the sound of 2015’s brilliant double album Dumb Flesh. As massive as the sonic world of the new record often feels, its greatest achievement is in its maximization of a limited set of tools, a restriction intentionally set by Power himself. “As an exercise in better understanding myself musically, I found myself using an increasingly restricted palette during the World Eater creative process. Evoking these intense emotions using minimal components really put me outside of my comfort zone and was unlike the process I am used to. Feeling exposed shone a new light on this particular snapshot. I feel enriched for doing so.”

The album that finally reveals a superstar. Sampha Sisay spent his nascent career becoming music’s collaborator à la mode—his CV includes impeccable work with the likes of Solange, Drake, and Jessie Ware—and *Process* fully justifies his considered approach to unveiling a debut full-length. It’s a stunning album that sees the Londoner inject raw, gorgeous emotion into each of his mini-epics. His electronic R&B sounds dialed in from another dimension on transformative opener “Plastic 100°C,” and “Incomplete Kisses” is an anthem for the broken-hearted that retains a smoothness almost exclusive to this very special talent. “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” meanwhile, makes a solid case for being 2017’s most beautiful song.

Uncertain times and an unruly squad of new collaborators set the table for the most dazzling Gorillaz album yet. It’s a white-knuckle joyride that sees Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s virtual band dart down fresh electronic avenues—tracks are darker, lyrics explicitly politicized and the collaborators more inspired. Arming “Let Me Out” with Mavis Staples and Pusha T provides an electrifying highlight, Savages’ Jehnny Beth lends a fluorescent rallying cry to “We Got the Power”, while Benjamin Clementine is a legitimately haunting presence on the hymnal “Hallelujah Money”.

‘Dark Days + Canapés’ is Ghostpoet's most defining album to date. A stunning and stimulating return, 'Dark Days + Canapés’ is a record that captures the sense of unease felt by so many in recent times. After receiving recognition for the beat-driven arrangements of his first two albums, third album 'Shedding Skin' initiated a more alt-rock sound that saw Ghostpoet Mercury nominated for a second time. New album ‘Dark Days + Canapés’, produced by Leo Abrahams, best known for his work with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins, delves even further into a fuller, guitar driven sound. When commenting on the first track from the album, ‘Immigrant Boogie’, Ghostpoet aka Obaro Ejimiwe explains; “I’m usually more comfortable writing in ambiguous terms, but this time around I felt there were specific stories that needed telling.” Serendipity and experimentalism were embraced in the studio and several original ideas evolved or were supplanted by something unexpected. On 'Freakshow’ the addition of manic laughter from a gospel choir, who had turned up to sing on a different track, compounds the crazed nature of the song, whilst ‘Blind As A Bat...’, influenced by Talk Talk’s ‘Laughing Stock’, saw string players invited to improvise with fragments of their performance sampled and overlaid to build something less structured, more wayward and reflective of the state of mind of the protagonist. Typically self-effacing, Obaro says; “there’s a sort of life-force that Leo and the other musicians brought to this record, and that was crucial. I want people to listen to the songs and be able to say, ‘So Isn’t just me then? Phew.”

Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens' follow-up to her highly praised solo debut album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, includes nine original songs she wrote or co-wrote, a traditional tune, and two civil rights–era songs. She co-produced the album with multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell in his Louisiana studio, with the bulk of recording done in wooden rooms built prior to the Civil War, over an intense eight-day period. "Giddens emerges as a peerless and powerful voice in roots music," Pitchfork exclaims. It's a "rich collection," says NPR; "hope comes back to life in Giddens' music."

From the record title to the snarled lyrics, Roger Waters is clearly not content. His sumptuous, languorous post-rock mixes through gruff interjections about the state of the world. Waters channels Pink Floyd’s greasy funk in “Smell the Roses” and even their sense of epic grandeur in “The Last Refugee,” given an immaculate buff by producer Nigel Godrich. He’s at his malevolent best playing the exasperated old coot, either taking on God’s mistakes in the stately “Déjà Vu” or cursing up a storm in “Broken Bones.”

Released almost 40 years to the day that The Jam’s debut arrived, Weller’s latest solo excursion extends an absorbingly experimental stretch of records that began with 2008’s *22 Dreams*. *A Kind Revolution* is the warmest album of that run—unflaggingly catchy and optimistic, yet exploratory enough to stretch from punchy cosmic rock (“Nova”) to brooding, Boy George-assisted funk (“One Tear”) and the ruminative psych-gospel of “The Cranes Are Back.” At the tail end of his 50s, the Modfather sounds as invigorated and inventive as ever.

Recorded under a full moon in late 1976, *Hitchhiker* captures an unaccompanied Young at his most penetrating and stripped down. Though several of these songs later became staples (“Pocahontas,” “Ride My Llama,” the haunting “Powderfinger”), they never sounded quite as pure as they do here—never quite captured that elusive balance of ethereal and elemental that makes Young such a legend. First written off by record labels at the time as little more than a set of demos (in Young’s telling, at least), *Hitchhiker* stands now as a beautiful, singular document—and it\'s lightning in a bottle.

"Epic kraut-pop opera teeming with motorik rhythms and analogue synths.” NPR “A mind-expanding delight, devoid of retro posturing.” Guardian “Sparkling strangeness from one-woman genre-buster..superb.” Uncut “Intoxicating space-rock.” MOJO Modern Kosmology sees Jane Weaver's melodic-protagonist channeling new depths of creative cosmic energy within. After the huge critical acclaim of 2012's “Fallen By Watchbird”, followed by 2015's exploratory "Silver Globe" LP winning her unanimous "record of the year accolades" and hefty measures of radio play-listing Jane Weaver's conceptual trajectory has sent her neo-kosmische penchants to the point of no-return. Jane Weaver's unwaning yearning for psychoactive pop energy has just reached a new level of magnetism. As snowclones go, Modern Kosmology is the new Silver. Another Spectrum to add to the tension. Jane Weaver also announces a short run of album launch shows in the UK this May, ahead of more extensive UK and European touring to be announced later in the year.

On his fifth solo record, the prolific Steven Wilson builds a monumentally lush collection inspired by his ‘70s and ‘80s art-pop heroes, like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Wilson’s cinematic ambition pays off in spades: The title track’s mystical grooves ease you into the album’s layered sound, and Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb provides a showstopping performance amid cosmic pop atmospheres on “Pariah.” Steady yourself for the guitar solo of “Refuge”—it’s an epic shred over the song’s spacey crescendo.

Four years after Lorde illuminated suburban teendom with *Pure Heroine*, she captures the dizzying agony of adolescence on *Melodrama*. “Everyone has that first proper year of adulthood,” she told Beats 1. “I think I had that year.” She chronicles her experiences in these insightful odes to self-discovery that find her battling loneliness (“Sober”), conquering heartbreak (“Writer in the Dark”), embracing complexity (“Hard Feelings/Loveless”), and letting herself lose control. “Every night I live and die,” she sings on “Perfect Places,” an emotionally charged song about escaping reality. “I’m 19 and I\'m on fire.\"

The Weather Station has been acclaimed for her “measured, perceptive storytelling… an unmistakable and communicative voice, able to convey hope and hurt with equal clarity” (Pitchfork). With The Weather Station, Lindeman reinvents her songcraft with a vital new energy, framing her prose-poem narratives in bolder musical settings. It’s an emotionally candid statement – a work of urgency, generosity and joy – that feels like a collection of obliquely gut-punching short stories. “I wanted to make a rock and roll record,” Lindeman explains, “but one that sounded how I wanted it to sound, which of course is nothing like rock and roll.” The result declares its understated feminist politics and new sonic directions from its first moments. There are big, buzzing guitars, thrusting drums, horror-movie strings and her keening, Appalachian-tinged vocal melodies. Reaching towards a sort of accelerated talking blues, she sings with a new rapid-fire vocal style. After two records made in close collaboration with other musicians, including Loyalty, which FADER called “the best folk album of the year,” and Exclaim!echoed with a stellar 9/10, Lindeman self- produced for the first time since her debut. The band comprised touring bassist Ben Whiteley, drummer Don Kerr, and guests, including Ryan Driver (Jennifer Castle), Ben Boye (Ty Segall, Ryley Walker), and Will Kidman (The Constantines). But the heaviest thumbprint on the record belongs to Lindeman; she wrote the dense, often dissonant string arrangements and played most of the wending, tumbling guitar lines.