Fopp's Best Albums of 2017

Songwriter Margo Price spent nearly a decade struggling around Nashville only to have her debut, *Midwest Farmer’s Daughter*, hit the country Top 10. Spirited, sharp-witted (“Do Right By Me”), class-conscious (“Learning to Lose”), and deeply bittersweet, *All American Made* cements Price’s place alongside artists like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell—keepers of the flame but never slaves to tradition. “At the end of the day, if the rain it don’t rain,” she sings on the fingerpicked folk of “Heart of America,” “We just do what we can.” It’s a tale of blue-collar hardship drawn from her own life.

*Prisoner* continues to refine the sound that Ryan Adams first explored with his 2014 self-titled album: a sure-handed mix of *Tunnel of Love*-era Springsteen, ‘80s college rock, and soft-focus synths. A track like “Anything I Say to You Now” illustrates how perfectly this formula suits him; a Smiths-esque jangle of guitars gives sentimental depth to his plain-spoken refrain, “Anything I say to you now is just a lie.” As he works through the rest of the emotional wreckage, highlights like \"Shiver and Shake” prove that Adams’ poignancy as a songwriter can still bring us to our knees.

Politically turbulent eras traditionally breed angry, young bands. However, six middle-aged veterans of rap and rock have made one of 2017’s most bracingly polemic albums. Addressing racism, poverty, and social injustice, MCs B-Real and Chuck D retain all their intensity and verve, the latter lacing every syllable with a penetrating, imperious punch. Behind them, founding members of Rage Against the Machine crystallize anger and resistance into razor-edged, metallic funk as if it were 1992 all over again. “Hail to the Chief” and “Unfuck the World” are as zealous as you’d expect, while “Legalize Me” adds an intriguing psych-glam stomp to their sound.

For the most part, Lana Del Rey’s fifth album is quintessentially her: gloomy, glamorous, and smitten with California. But a newfound lightness might surprise longtime fans. Each song on *Lust* feels like a postcard from a dream: She fantasizes about 1969 (“Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind”), outruns paparazzi on the Pacific Coast Highway (“13 Beaches”), and dances on the H of the Hollywood sign (“Lust for Life” feat. The Weeknd). She even duets with Stevie Nicks, the queen of bittersweet rock. On “Get Free,” she makes a vow to shift her mindset: \"Now I do, I want to move/Out of the black, into the blue.”

Bolstered by a notoriously great *Letterman* performance, Future Islands’ 2014 effort *Singles* was a breakthrough for the synth-pop romantics. *The Far Field* dives further into their sound, combining the expressiveness of soul with the leanness of post-punk and New Wave, underlined by immediate songwriting and the strong, vulnerable voice of Samuel T. Herring. “I don’t believe anymore/I won’t grieve anymore,” he croons on the standout “Cave.” “’Cause what was gold/Is gone and cold.”

2014’s 'Too Bright' showcased Mike Hadreas stepping out saucily onto a bigger stage, expressing, with the production help of Portishead’s Adrian Utley, emotions arranged all along the slippery continuum from rage to irony to love. Here in 13 new ferocious and sophisticated tracks, Mike Hadreas and his collaborators blow through church music, makeout music, an array of the gothier radio popular formats, rhythm and blues, art pop, krautrock, queer soul, the RCA Studio B sound, and then also collect some of the sounds that only exist inside Freddy Krueger. Tremolo on the electric keys. Nightclubbing. Daywalking. Kate Bushing, Peter Greenawaying, Springsteening, Syreetaing. No Shape was produced by Blake Mills, the man behind Alabama Shakes’ Grammy Award winning album. He added precision and expansion. Some things are pretty and some are blasted beyond recognition. Records like this, records that make you feel like you’re 15 and just seeing the truth for the first time, are excessively rare. They’re here to remind you that you’re divine.

With guitar strums and spare piano chords, the New Zealand singer/songwriter constructs intimate, haunting transmissions that invoke Joni, Kate, and Nico. Harding freezes birds in flight with the subtle power of her voice on “Swell Does the Skull” and “Horizon.” Additional credit goes to PJ Harvey producer John Parish, who brings out deep color and firmly frames Harding in the present.

Songhoy Blues has always been about resistance. We started this group during a civil war, in the face of a music ban, to create something positive out of adversity. As long as we have music left in us and something to say, we'll keep fighting each day with music as our weapon, our songs as our resistance.

On Antisocialites, Alvvays dive back into the deep-end of reckless romance and altered dates. Ice cream truck jangle collides with prismatic noise pop while Molly Rankin's wit is refracted through crystalline surf counterpoint. Through thoughtful consideration in basement and abroad, the Toronto-based group has renewed its Scot-pop vows with a powerful new collection of manic emotional collage.

Mark Lanegan’s poet-of-the-underworld persona has proved remarkably flexible over the past 20 years. His fourth album with Mark Lanegan Band falls in line with 2014’s *Phantom Radio*, mixing the grit of blues and murder ballads with gothy electronic atmospheres. As always, the center of these songs is Lanegan’s voice, a husky instrument as threatening as it is seductive, be it on the brooding ‘60s shuffle of “Emperor” or the soaring “Nocturne,” which plays devil to U2’s angels.

The Shins’ music has always had a Swiss watch-like quality to it: Seamless from the outside, hypnotically intricate when you open it up. *Heartworms*, their first LP in five years, bridges the electronic textures of 2012’s *Port of Morrow* with the jangly, cerebral pop of *Chutes Too Narrow*, touching on psychedelia (“Painting a Hole”), country (“Mildenhall”), and synth-pop (“Cherry Hearts”). It\'s the band’s most adventurous album yet.

*Room 29*, a collaboration between Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) and Chilly Gonzales, is a modern study of space and memory. Based on the rich history of Room 29 of Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont, this song cycle combines pensive, dreamy piano, whispered narratives (“Room 29”), and quietly stark exchanges (“Tearjerker”).

“Divination/Cleromancy/Comes the card that I refused to see” – The Afghan Whigs, “Oriole” “Cleromancy” isn’t a word one normally finds in rock lyrics. Then again, In Spades – the forthcoming album by The Afghan Whigs, from which the new song “Oriole” hails – is defined only by its own mystical inner logic. The term means to divine, in a supernatural manner, a prediction of destiny from the random casting of lots: the throwing of dice, picking a card from a deck. From its evocative cover art to the troubled spirits haunting its halls, In Spades casts a spell that challenges the listener to unpack its dark metaphors and spectral imagery. On the one hand, In Spades is as quintessentially Afghan Whigs as anything the group has ever done – fulfilling its original mandate to explore the missing link between howling Midwestern punk like Die Kreuzen and Hüsker Dü, The Temptations’ psychedelic soul symphonies, and the expansive hard-rock tapestries of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. At the same time, this new record continues to push beyond anything in the Whigs’ previous repertoire – another trademark, along with the explosive group dynamic captured on the recording. Indeed, the chemistry of the lineup – Dulli, guitarists Dave Rosser and Jon Skibic, drummer Patrick Keeler, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson, and Whigs co-founder/bassist John Curley – set the tone for In Spades’ creation. When it came to follow up the band’s triumphant return to recording – Do To the Beast (2014), which was the band’s first ever Top 40 album, – the die was cast. “This is the first time since Black Love [the Whigs’ 1996 noir masterpiece] that we’ve done a full-blown band album,” Dulli says. The joys, sorrows, and upheavals of innocence and experience echo throughout In Spades: it powerfully documents where The Afghan Whigs have been, and where they might go next. For Dulli and Curley, it’s a journey that, since their origins as one of the first Sub Pop acts to be signed from outside the label’s Pacific Northwest base, has spanned decades. Dulli notes they were barely in their twenties when they first started the band, and yet here they are, fulfilling dreams long held and frequently realized. “Having a break from the Whigs helped me remember what made it so rewarding,” Curley says. “Over the course of a lifetime, there are constants, and there’s also change. You see who’s dropped off the vine – who’s going in reverse, and who’s still by your side. It’s interesting to see where life takes you, and where it doesn’t. That’s the journey and it hasn’t stopped.” In Spades was recorded at Rick Nelson’s studio Marigny Sound in New Orleans, LA.

Deep-thinking South London rapper Loyle Carner bares his soul on his confessional, jazz-infused hip-hop debut, *Yesterday’s Gone*. On dramatic opener “The Isle of Arran,” he samples a rapturous choir and some funky guitar licks, using his soft-spoken flow to ponder the meaning of death. Elsewhere, “Ain’t Nothing Changed” finds the MC languidly reciting rhymes as if perched on a bar stool in a basement jazz club, chewing over the realities of financial debt while accompanied by bluesy saxophone and a boom-bap beat.

As its title suggests (albeit a little backhandedly), *Flower Boy* explores a softer side of Tyler, the Creator. Not that he wasn’t thoughtful before, or that he’s lost his edge now—if anything, the dark wit and internal conflict that made *Goblin* a lightning bolt in 2011 has only gotten richer and more resonant, offset by a sound that cherry-picks from early-\'90s hip-hop and plush, Stevie-style soul (“Garden Shed,” the Frank Ocean-featuring “911 / Mr. Lonely”). “Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” he raps on “Where This Flower Blooms.” “Dye your hair blue, s\*\*t, I’ll do it too.”

Fifty years into his career and Randy Newman’s songwriting is as sharp as ever. On his first album since 2008’s *Harps and Angels*, he balances sarcasm and sentiment, gorgeous orchestrations and his own deadpan vocal delivery. Newman takes us through debates between science and religion (the gospel-tinged “The Great Debate”), portraits of John F. Kennedy (“Brothers”) and wayward surfers (“On the Beach”), and the kind of bittersweet vignettes of American life that he does in ways few other writers can (the heartbreaking lullaby “Wandering Boy”).

Temples’ second album brings increased purpose to the heady psychedelia of their debut, *Sun Structures*. Synths add playful menace to the dynamic grooves of “Certainty” and “Mystery of Pop,” and whether the quartet dabble in freak-folk (“Oh the Saviour”) or motorik glam (“Roman God-Like Man”), insistent melodies are always sewn in. With its euphoric chorus, the widescreen “Strange or Be Forgotten” could have been written to fill arenas. On this evidence, that wouldn’t be presumptuous.

Temples’ 2014 debut ‘Sun Structures’ arrived with sky in its hair and the endorsements of Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr ringing in its ears, putting the Kettering quartet at the forefront of an exciting new wave of British psych. Yet whereas the artists they were most obviously indebted to – think early Bowie and Pink Floyd, Nazz and T. Rex – employed subversive humour and acid-fried absurdity, Temples themselves were masters of surface-level psychedelia: less a state of mind, more a feat of engineering. - Barry Nicolson NME.com

R&B singer Kelela’s deeply personal debut LP does just what it says on the label. Over beats from Jam City, Bok Bok, Kingdom, and Arca—which swerve from warped and aqueous to warm and lush to icy and danceable—Kelela turns her emotions inside out with a sultriness and self-assuredness that few underground artists can muster. She’s tough and forthright, tender and subdued on songs about breakups (“Frontline”), makeups (“Waitin”), and pickups (“LMK”)—and the way she spins from one mode to the next is dizzying in the best way possible.

After a couple of collaborative albums—one with singer/songwriter Jessica Hoop, another, all covers, with Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell—Sam Beam returns to Iron & Wine. Pivoting from the experiments of 2013’s *Ghost on Ghost*, *Beast Epic* finds Beam in a simpler, more familiar mode: Warm, quietly celebratory folk-rock charged with uplift and hope. “Where we see enough to follow/We can hear when we are hollow/Where we keep the light we’re given/We can lose and call it living,” Beam sings on “Call It Dreaming,” blending the intimacy of Elliott Smith with the bittersweet radiance of Cat Stevens.

The Deluxe 2xLP version will be on red & blue vinyl with alternate artwork, two bonus tracks from the 'Beast Epic' recording sessions along with three home recorded demos, and will have an etching on side D. The digital download that comes with the deluxe 2xLP will also include the 5 bonus tracks found on the 2nd LP. The bonus tracks are 1. Hearts Walk Anywhere, 2. Kicking the Old Rain, 3. About a Bruise (demo), 4. Claim a Ghost (demo), 5. Summer Clouds (demo). The black vinyl single LP, CD, cassette, and digital versions will all come with a digital download of the full album, but will *not* include the bonus tracks that come with the deluxe 2xLP package.

A master of showmanship, shock value, and theatrical controversy, Marilyn Manson has unquestionably cemented his place in American pop culture. The Antichrist Superstar’s industrial-strength 10th album is as diverse as it is brash. Bluesy riffs violently fling from beat to beat on the swaggering “Tattooed in Reverse,” the deliberately obnoxious “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” shrieks and shakes with the disemboweling aggression of *Mechanical Animals*’ finest moments, and, in a rare moment of (relative) fragility, Manson pleads for understanding on “Blood Honey,” insisting, “I’m not being mean/I’m just being me.”

Kieran Hebden’s restlessly inventive, genre-splicing music is often as unpredictable as it is hypnotic. That holds firmly on his ninth album as Four Tet, where harp-mottled openers “Alap” and “Two Thousand and Seventeen” suggest the supple, folk-inflected electronic of 2003’s *Rounds* but soon give way to singular experiments in ambient techno (“LA Trance”), head-nodding deep house (“SW9 9SL”), and abstract neoclassical (“10 Midi”). As ever, Hebden builds his music with precision, warmth, and a rare gift for consuming melodies.

Lean in close, HAIM has something important to say. On their second album, the sister trio—Alana, Danielle, and Este—explore sounds and eras while deepening their emotional connection. “Want You Back,” “Little of Your Love,” “Found It in Silence,” and “Ready for You” will resonate with fans of the first LP—all sweet melodies, catchy rock and pop hooks, and gonna-work-it-out feels. HAIM also unfurl swashes of vintage ‘80s/‘90s pop (“Nothing\'s Wrong” and “You Never Knew”) and confessional showstoppers (“Night So Long”) that, when combined with their crush-note lyrics, consistently hit the sweet spot.

Even in the increasingly crowded field of electronic music, Kelly Lee Owens’ debut album arrives as a wonderful surprise. An album that bridges the gaps between cavernous techno, spectral pop, and krautrock’s mechanical pulse, 'Kelly Lee Owens' brims with exploratory wonder, establishing a personal aesthetic that is as beguiling as it is thrillingly familiar.

Described by frontman Wayne Coyne as “Syd Barrett meets A$AP Rocky and they get trapped in a fairy tale from the future,” *Oczy Mlody*—Polish for “eyes of the young”—is a set of viscous, synth-driven nocturnes that extends the band’s recent run of moody experimentation. While “Galaxy I Sink” recalls the despair of 2013’s *The Terror*, the prismatic pop of “We a Family” sounds relatively unburdened, thanks in part to an appearance by friend and collaborator Miley Cyrus.

It took getting to the end of their second album to remind Royal Blood what they loved about being in a band. The huge success of their self-titled debut in 2014 had thrust bassist and singer Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher into a world of rock stardom they hadn’t planned for, and now they had to follow it up. “We were terrified,” Kerr tells Apple Music. “Suddenly, what we thought was a bit of fun, something our mates would hear, had become this traumatically amazing experience. It was awesome, but after every high, there’s a low.” “Daunting” is how Thatcher remembers it, and as people around them began to bandy about the phrase “difficult second album,” the duo struggled to generate momentum. “It became like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” recalls Kerr. Propelled by a breakthrough in the form of the gnarly rock groove of “Lights Out,” they found forward motion. Their second record’s title might give some insight into Kerr and Thatcher’s warped mindset at the time—“I was in a pretty mad place,” says Kerr—but the songs here chart a thrilling evolution, expanding their drum-and-bass setup with subtle flourishes of keyboards and Rhodes while retaining the epic minimalism of their debut. *How Did We Get So Dark?* cemented Royal Blood’s status as a new rock superpower. “It’s almost like we had to remind ourselves who we were,” says Kerr. “As soon as we put the chemistry of the band as the priority, that’s when the songs began to come to us.” Kerr and Thatcher put themselves through the wringer, but they got there in the end. Here, they guide us through their triumphant 2017 album, track by track. **How Did We Get So Dark?** Mike Kerr: “I think we probably mixed it and finished it days before the deadline. It wasn’t until it was on the record that we had time to sit back and go, ‘Oh. This song is actually really good.’” **Lights Out** MK: “I was doing some writing with a friend of ours, John Barrett, who’s in a band called Bass Drum of Death. I showed him a few ideas I was working on. One of them was the groove of what would become the verse of ‘Lights Out.’ He was like, ‘This is amazing. This has got something to it.’ And I was a bit like, ‘Has it?’ It was nice to have someone who wasn’t in the band, to give us that sense of relief, basically giving you a bit of a hand. This song, for us, was a big slap in the face, like, ‘Wake up. You’re really, really good. Now fucking finish.’” Ben Thatcher: “We were trying to find the blueprint, and when ‘Lights Out’ came, we knew it was a good song and that we just needed to follow up with nine others.” **I Only Lie When I Love You** MK: “I wrote this in an Airbnb in Brighton. I think I was trying to write songs that sounded like The Hives, a mixture of The Hives and a Jack White song. Someone told me this quote: ‘Women fake orgasms, but men fake relationships.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s brutal.’ I thought of the phrase ‘I Only Lie When I Love You’ and it was so horrible. I paired it with the riff and I was like, ‘Actually, this is really, really sick.’ It was different for us because the song is made up of, essentially, the same riff throughout. We were listening to a lot of songs that did that—hip-hop does it all the time—and we were like, ‘How do you write a song that’s essentially the same the whole way through?’ We realized how much more complicated it actually is. There’s lots of tricks to keep it interesting.” BT: ”It’s quite bold, too. Straight away, it’s in your face. We hadn’t got a song like that, that starts with the words.” **She’s Creeping** MK: “I became really interested in the vocal melody and the bass melody doing two different things and creating two countermelodies. Before, I played riffs and sung over them, whereas this is when I was really getting really into the idea of creating harmonies with the basslines. It was the first time I was singing more falsetto, and I guess that really comes with confidence, and allowing more of my voice to be heard, and more of your influences to be heard. Just getting a bit more comfortable in your own skin.” **Look Like You Know** MK: “This is one of those songs that was trying to reveal itself in loads of other ideas. And it was really the rhythm and the groove of the song that helped it come alive. We started adding keyboards to it and suddenly it felt almost like a James Bond ballad, which was cool. We’d made a whole record with just a vocal and a bass and drums, so adding keys felt fun. But we were very cautious and tried to remain as tasteful as possible, as to what purpose it’s serving.” **Where Are You Now?** MK: “This was written on the road. It was for a TV show called *Vinyl*, which Martin Scorsese was producing. They sent us the trailer for the first series and it was just mayhem in the ’70s music industry, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, trashing shit. I realized that I’m quite stimulated when I see something. It was the first time I’ve written a song with a real brief to it.” **Don’t Tell** MK: “This was another leftover idea from writing ‘Lights Out’ with John Barrett. We were listening to a Beck song called ‘Debra.’ It has a ridiculously high vocal, and John was like, ‘Can you sing that high?’ I said, ‘At karaoke, I can, yeah.’ I think we were writing a song for John, because he was like, ‘Oh man, I want to sing that high on stage.’ But I called him and said, ‘Hey, remember that idea we started? We’ve actually made it a Royal Blood song, believe it or not.’ The solo section was just desperately trying to sound like Jimi Hendrix on a bass and tremendously failing, but I gave it a shot.” **Hook, Line & Sinker** BT: “This was one of the first songs to be written. At that stage, we didn’t know what the second album was gonna be like. When you go back to writing an album, you just want to do the craziest thing you can do. And it was just really heavy. I think the end of this song is the heaviest thing we’ve done.” **Hole in Your Heart** MK: “‘The Keyboard Song,’ as it’s known on tour. ‘Hole in Your Heart’ and ‘Sleep’ were two songs that kept borrowing from each other. We tend to write in puzzle pieces and we wait until we have enough pieces that come together to make a song. And we couldn’t work out which chorus was for what song. At the time it seemed crazy, but we were just like, ‘What if we had most of the track on Rhodes and used a Fender Bass Rhodes?’ Playing different instruments, suddenly you prove to yourself you can actually change quite a lot and it doesn’t change quite a lot. You can actually be more varied and you can’t escape the band’s sound.” **Sleep** MK: “The lyrics are so comically dark. I like the idea of it ending and someone being like, ‘Oh. There’s no hope at the end.’ We already thought the album title was funny, because why would you want to listen to an album called that? What possesses someone to put that on? Finishing it on this is like, ‘Remember: You wanted this.’ This was one of the last songs we recorded. You can probably hear that I’m like, ‘Thank fuck it’s over.’”

On his first album in seven years, James Lavelle assembles a characteristically wide cast of collaborators, but *The Road, Pt. 1* is as moody and introspective as his rock-electronic hybrids have ever sounded. Mark Lanegan’s gravelly baritone lends sorrowful weight to the theatrical strings of “Looking for the Rain,” while “Cowboys or Indians” demonstrates Lavelle’s fondness for fusion, toggling between acoustic folk and nervous trip-hop. The dark clouds grow a silver lining on “Stole Enough,” a bittersweet song for piano and gospel chorus.

Though Mac DeMarco has become known, in part, for playing a lovable buffoon online and on stage, he\'s also quietly assembled one of the most rewarding bodies of work in indie rock. *This Old Dog* picks up where 2014’s *Salad Days* left off, with a set of sunlit, heartfelt singer/songwriter fare that finds DeMarco reflecting on family with often stunning candor. From the acoustic warmth of “My Old Man” to the hushed crooning of “Sister” and the devastating observations of “Watching Him Fade Away,” it’s his finest album to date.

“All This I Do For Glory” is a reasoning and exploration of the machinations of ambition and legacy, an examination of the concepts of afterlife, and the first half of a doomed love story in the model of the greek tragedies. As a narrative, it exists temporally somewhere between 2015’s “Never were the way she was” (with Sarah Neufeld) and the first volume of the NHW Trilogy. With this, his first solo outing since 2013’s “To See More Light”, Colin Stetson ventures into territory both familiar and strange. Here still, is the dogmatically stripped down approach to performance and capture (all songs recorded live with no overdubs or loops) but there is an immediacy to the album that belies a more invasive and thorough miking of the various instruments being utilized and a seeming influence drawn from the early nineties electronica of artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, evident in the more pointed role played by the instruments' many percussive elements. There are ancestries, motivic and timbral, woven through these six songs that plainly anchor them within the shared universe of his Trilogy, though the overall experience is one of extreme intimacy, the sounds and imagery more tangible and immersive than previous offerings. The brief and brutal “In the clinches” recalls (or presages) echoes of songs like “Judges”, though now feeling like one has fallen down the bell of Stetson’s ancient bass saxophone itself. “Spindrift”, crystalline and serene, calls to mind the ambient works of Aphex Twin, while “Between Water and Wind” with it’s “Immigrant Song” swagger, relentlessly carves it’s way into the bedrock here, paving the way with an increasing focus on the minute and the minimal, with a deepened sense of patience shared by most of the album’s six tracks. Engineered and mixed by Stetson himself, this album represents a decidedly independent approach across the entire creative process and finds him at the top of his game, both as a composer and instrumentalist as well as a producer.