NME's Best Albums of 2018 (So Far)

Music for the weak. Comprised of vocalist Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty, and drummer Charlie Forbes, the London-based five-piece began as school boys. From the outset, Shame built the band up from a foundation of DIY ethos while citing Eddy Current Suppression Ring and The Fall among their biggest musical influences. Utilising both the grit and sincerity of that musical background, shame carved out a niche in the South London music scene and then barrelled fearlessly into the angular, thrashing post-punk that would go on to make up Songs of Praise, their Dead Oceans debut. From “Gold Hole,” a tongue-in-cheek take-down of rock narcissism, to lead single “Concrete” detailing the overwhelming moment of realising a relationship is doomed, to the frustrated “Tasteless” taking aim at the monotony of people droning through their day-to-day, Songs of Praise never pauses to catch its breath.

Forget everything you know about Hookworms. Ok, maybe not everything; the urgency and viscera both live and on record that led the five-piece to prominence across two blistering full-length LPs—2013’s Pearl Mystic and 2014 follow-up The Hum—remains. However, as they return with their much-anticipated third record Microshift, the title of the record connotates more than just the intended nod to the audio plug-in their vocalist MJ regularly uses; it could also be an understatement of a three-year narrative that’s brought about changing circumstances, influences and subsequent evolution.

MGMT’s music has always pinballed between accessibility and experiment, pop, and psychedelia—a tension that has produced some of the catchiest, most synapse-stretching music of the young century. Reining in the freak-outs of 2013’s *MGMT*, the band’s fourth album plumbs their (relatively) accessible side, refracting ’80s-style synth-pop (“Little Dark Age,” “One Thing Left to Try”) and ’60s jangle folk (“When You Die”) through a warped, surrealistic sense of humor—a sound at once cheerful and violent, eerie and inviting, light and thrillingly dark.

Transangelic Exodus, Ezra Furman’s second album for Bella Union, is a new landmark for the American singer-songwriter: “not a concept record, but almost a novel, or a cluster of stories on a theme, a combination of fiction and a half-true memoir,” according to its author. “A personal companion for a paranoid road trip. A queer outlaw saga.” The music is as much of an intense, dramatic event, full of brilliant hooks, with an equally evolved approach to recorded sound to match Furman’s narrative vision. In honour of this shift, his backing band has been newly christened: The Boy-Friends are dead, long live The Visions. In other words, the man who embodies the title of his last album Perpetual Motion People is still on the move... Or in the vernacular of the new album, on the run. “The narrative thread,” Furman declares, “is I’m in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal, as is harbouring angels. The term ‘transangelic’ refers to the fact people become angels because they grow wings. The have an operation, and they’re transformed. And it causes panic because some people think it’s contagious, or it should just be outlawed. “The album still works without the back story, though,” he vouches. “What’s essential is the mood - paranoid, authoritarian, the way certain people are stigmatised. It’s a theme in American life right now, and other so-called democracies.” After “Perpetual Motion People” was released in July 2015, Furman had moved back from California (Oakland) to his home town of Chicago. But after a year, he returned to the west coast (Berkeley this time). “I just seem to keep moving,” he sighs. Still, Transangelic Exodus was mostly recorded – as all Furman's records have been since 2011 - at his bandmate (saxophonist/producer) Tim Sandusky’s Ballistico Studios in Chicago, and with the other Visions - Jorgen Jorgensen (bass, and on this album, cello), Ben Joseph (keyboards, guitar) and Sam Durkes (drums/percussion). Just as Furman’s band hasn’t really changed, so his musical DNA remains intact – a thrilling, literate form of garage-punk rooted in The Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman and ‘50s rock’n’roll. But Transangelic Exodus is noticeably different to its predecessors. “2016 was a hard year,” Furman recalls. “While the political and cultural conversation devolved in a very threatening way, we travelled and toured a lot. We saw ourselves coming to the end of what we were, and we wanted to become something new.” Furman cites Vampire Weekend’s “Modern Vampires Of The City”, Beck’s “Odelay”, Sparklehorse’s “It’s A Wonderful Life”, Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, Kayne West’s Yeezus, Angel Olsen’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness and Tune-Yards’ Who Kill – “artists making the most interesting music with the available resources” – as influences on Transangelic Exodus, plus Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen and James Baldwin’s ground-breaking, gay-themed 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. “My previous records were original in their own way, but got classified as an off-kilter version of a retro band, and I wanted something that sounded more original,” he explains. “So we took time off touring, and made sure we took time with every song. I demoed with different band members, and then combined different demos – some parts even made the final album. So, the sound is more chopped up, edited, affected, rearranged.” One prime example is the album’s lead single ‘Driving Down To LA’, a sparse, but explosive, mix of doo-wop and digital crunch. Another is the haunting ‘Compulsive Liar’. “I wrote it as a ballad on a classical acoustic guitar, but we made it stranger, which brought out the emotion of the lyric more than it would have in its original form,” Furman says. “It’s less predictable; you don’t know where the song might go, and that makes me happy.” Furman once said, “The opening lines of my records tend to be summary statements.” So, what does, “I woke up bleeding in the crotch of a tree / TV blaring on the wall above the coffee machine” (from ‘Suck The Blood From My Wounds’) say about Transangelic Exodus? “I like the opening lines so much, I had to keep them even though they don’t make a lot of sense! You’re dropped into this story or situation, unsure where you are or what’s going on, and suddenly you’re moving. That’s what being alive feels like to me. Unknown and intense. It’s a big part of the record’s mood.” Checking Furman’s successive album covers will show his personal journey, coming out as queer and gender-fluid, which the jagged, agitated ‘Maraschino-Red Dress $8.99 at Goodwill’ meets head on, namely “the painful experience of being a closeted gender-non-conforming person. Having ‘trans’ in the album title has a lot to do with being queer, like [album finale] ‘I Lost My Innocence’ [“…to a boy named Vincent”). That early experience marks the narrator for life. From a young age, because of issues surrounding gender and sexuality, I felt fated to have an outsider perspective. It radicalises you.” Transangelic Exodus addresses another kind of coming out, as Furman addresses his Jewish faith on record much more openly than before, from the shivery ballad ‘God Lifts Up the Lowly’ (which includes a verse in Hebrew) to the exquisite ‘Psalm 151’ and the line “I believe in God but I don't believe we're getting out of this one” in ‘Come Here Get Away From Me’, a heady blend of rock’n’roll rumble and ghostly clarinet. “There is a lot of longing and anger in those songs,” Furman reckons. “A longing for God, and God’s help, wondering how long this can go on. It feels like we’re in exile – the innocent, persecuted, oppressed and threatened. But it’s hard in pop culture to make explicitly religious statements, as many people – including myself - have been hurt by religion.” Part of Furman’s motivation is the, “fear of fascist takeover,” expressed in the video to ‘Driving Down To L.A’ (filmed in Virginia, and uncannily storyboarded before the state’s infamous Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally), as Ezra and his angel are pursued by modern-day Nazis. “At school, we learned all about the Holocaust, and were invited to imagine what would happen if the Nazis invaded again. As white supremacy has become more explicitly institutionalised in the US, my childhood nightmares have started to show up in songs.” Crossing between love, gender, sexuality and religion, and singing in solidarity with the innocent, persecuted, oppressed and threatened, Ezra Furman has soundtracked the current fear and loathing across America like no other, while pushing ahead with his own agenda, always on the move.

On their second album, young hardcore heroes Turnstile slice, dice, and defy genres at every turn. Leadoff ripper \"Real Thing\" cranks a turbocharged riff against melodic backing vocals and a loungey piano outro, while \"Generator\" spins a Helmet-esque groove into a psych-grunge bridge and hyper-metallic guitar solo. Bassist Franz Lyons takes over for frontman Brendan Yates on the soaring staccato groove of \"Moon\" (which also features subtle backups from Sheer Mag\'s Tina Halladay) and \"Right to Be,\" which boasts spacey production from Diplo.

Clean presents Sophie Allison as a singular artist, wise beyond her years, with an emotional authenticity all her own. “It feels like my first real record,” says Allison. “It’s my first real statement.” It’s an emotional album, heavy on themes of growth, isolation, and change, but balanced by a lightness of touch, and with hooks to spare. Clean is a true step forward, a mature, powerful album from an artist just coming into her power.

On robo-funk adventure “Get In the Mind Shaft,” Jack White recalls the wonder of first playing a piano chord by hitting three notes together. It’s a neat allegory for a record that feverishly forges disparate elements—hip-hop, country, gospel, electronic music, jazz—together to see what magic happens. Here, at his most playful, White obliterates any lingering notion of him as a garage-rock diehard. “Over and Over and Over” delivers a familiar but no less invigorating dose of high-voltage blues, but only after he’s successfully cross-pollinated rock and psychedelic funk (“Corporation”) and *rapped* through “Ice Station Zebra.” The cascade of ideas is dizzying, but two decades after White first committed himself to vinyl, his possibilities seem endless.

Quite possibly the photo negative of the New York Trio\'s difficult second album, *Twentytwo in Blue* features Sunflower Bean opening up and luxuriating in their prodigious talent. Key to its success is the positioning of Julia Cumming. She’s front and center here, taking the vast majority of lead vocals and dusting the band’s imaginative dream-rock with an unmissable star quality. She’s light and mesmeric on the album’s poppier moments (“I Was a Fool,” “Twentytwo”) and an impassioned presence when the trio dart confidently towards punky, political edges (“Crisis Fest,” “Puppet Strings”).

It was worth the wait for Colombian-American songstress Kali Uchis’s first full-length. A romantic collage of artists and sounds she’s encountered along the way—Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins on “After the Storm”, and Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn on the surfy “In My Dreams”—the album draws on Latin pop (“Nuestro Planeta”), hypnotic R&B (“Just a Stranger”), and high-flying psych-rock (“Tomorrow,” with production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). It’s a sign of Uchis’ artistic vision that she pulled so many creative minds into a single body of work that sounds so distinctly her own.

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” the most chantable song of 2017, introduced the Bronx MC’s lively around-the-way-girl persona to the world. Her debut album, *Invasion of Privacy*, reveals more of Cardi\'s layers, the MC leaning forcefully into her many influences. “I Like It,” featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin, is a nod to her Afro-Caribbean roots, while “Bickenhead” reimagines Project Pat’s battle-of-the-sexes classic “Chickenhead” as a hustler’s anthem. There are lyrical winks at NYC culture (“Flexing on b\*tches as hard as I can/Eating halal, driving a Lam”), but Cardi also hits on universal moments, like going back and forth with a lover (“Ring”) and reckoning with infidelity (“Thru Your Phone”).

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Tom Misch studied jazz guitar at a Conservatoire of Music. A single year, however, proved enough before his attention switched to his own bedroom productions. This debut album perfects a blueprint explored on early acclaimed EPs and singles: unhurried vocals complementing a cross-pollination of deeply attractive pop, jazz, and hip-hop. And the highlights come thick and fast. “Man Like You” and “You’re On My Mind” will illuminate candlelit bedrooms, while Loyle Carner pays tribute to the pair’s South London roots over a hypnotic sax loop on the funk-flecked “Water Baby”. The album’s warm and celebratory mood peaks, however, with De La Soul’s weightless “It Runs Through Me” verses.

The Aussie dance-pop group know exactly how to start the party. In darkened bar just near heart of London, there’s a cartoon that’s come to life. While the rest of the city toils away watching the clock and waiting for home time, the bar staff here are working overtime to provide enough shots for their only customers – the living illustration that’s sprawled across table number 5. It’s a scene that needs to be seen to be believed. On one side, there’s a statuesque chap clad only in a pair of nothing-to-the-imagination hot pants sat next to a woman in a custom designed babydoll dress and shorts combo, it’s 6° outside. Facing them are two figures sat in silence; each veiled secretively in what look like a satanic beekeeper’s hat made of a material so black, the light seems to fall into it. The bar staff can’t work fast enough for them, shot after shot is delivered then downed but the demeanour never changes. Although the carnage going on is controlled for the time being (it’s 3pm after all – these people aren’t animals), there’s an air of nonchalance that seems to suggest that for them, it’s business time, all the time. It’s pure confidence, man. If Janet Planet, Sugar Bones, Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild weren’t a band already you’d be snapping at their heels demanding they form one before they left the bar. Fact is, they are. From Melbourne by way of Brisbane, Confidence Man are unarguably one of the hottest acts on the planet right now. A portable party that’s levelled dance floors and flattened festival crowds as it’s rolled out across the world, they are a machine custom designed to make you dance and lose your cool. How they formed is a matter of debate. Janet: “These guys (points to Clarence and Reggie, the veiled men) were real saddoes playing by themselves and I needed someone to play music with me. They were obsessed with trying to find someone cool and they saw me dancing in a club and were like, “We want that girl!” I knew if we were going to get anywhere, we needed a hot dude with a six-pack at the front of the stage to even things out because they were so damn ugly themselves. We were hanging out at the public pool one day and there was this hot pool guy cleaning the pool and dancing to the music in his head. He looked pretty good in hot pants and while his moves weren’t conventional, they had a certain flare. And now, we’re like mum and dad and these two are just our petulant kids.” *muffled disagreement from the veils* Sugar Bones: “Man, we’re all just trying to make it in this crazy world. *another shot goes down* It’s hard to work out what’s truth and what’s fiction when talking to Confidence Man – reality seems to bend around them with every glug of alcohol. They formed in Brisbane, four veteran musicians with no prior knowledge of the music scene they were entering. They moved into a big house together 1600 km away in Melbourne where the band took off at astonishing speed, thanks mainly to their full-force, unrelenting live show and their studio is in the study of their shared house. Even the factual information they share sounds outlandish – take, for instance, the tale of when they first realised the band had legs… Janet: “Golden Plains at the Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre in Victoria. They’re incredibly picky about who they book. They initially didn’t want to book us because they didn’t think we were cool enough. Our manager convinced them to come see us and they booked us on the spot. We were playing at 2 in the afternoon and there was no one there, it was blazing sunshine. Then the arena started to fill and before we knew it there were 10,000 people in front of us, screaming, getting down, jumping back up.” Perhaps then the best way to drill right into the band’s psyche is through their debut album. Confident Music for Confident People sets eleven tales of 21st century ennui to irresistible, irrepressible dance music. The opening lines of Try Your Luck (“I must confess/I’ve been sleeping with your ex/’Cos I heard he was the best/I must confess/I never would have guessed he would get so obsessed… I’m not surprised”) set the tone perfectly for what follows. Here is a set of songs that take the kind of all-consuming interior monologues that bored, disaffected youth are wrestling with the world over and places them square in the middle of the dance floor before adding call-and-response choruses for good measure. You’d almost think it was made in some kind of sonic laboratory by crazed muso-scientists if you weren’t sat in front of the record’s unflappable, gloriously flamboyant creators on a wet Tuesday afternoon. Elsewhere, Sugar Bones effortlessly nails the snorting and cavorting lifestyle of fantasist rock stars “who think they’re hot shit” (Don’t You Know I’m In a Band) while on C.O.O.L. Party, Janet coolly brushes off her obsessive partner (a guy called Dave – “a dick surfer boy drug dealer who works on Wall Street”) to what sounds like a rocket powered futurist Tom Tom Club backing track. On Out the Window, the band reluctantly emerge blinking into the bleachy sunlight from a darkened house party while a driving Balaeric backing track that’s worthy of imperial phase Happy Mondays rolls out behind them; Better Sit Down Boy presents three and a half minutes of the most perfect pop music you’ll hear all year, a track so urgent you can almost feel the wind whipping past your head as it speeds by. Confident Music for Confident People is big and brash and bright as hell, like Dee-Lite tooled up and ready for our berserk modern times. The perfect embodiment of the characters that made it, the album manages to be both wildly ambitious and deceptively simple. Listening to it, one gets the impression that Confidence Man could go anywhere from here. Janet: “Eventually we want to record an EP for each person. You know… Clarence McGuffie takes you down memory lane, Sugar Bones sings the blues, that kind of thing. Five tracks from each person’s perspective. The series would keep going and getting darker when you get to the veil guys. Reggie’s tales from the world’s least glamorous toilet cubicles…” Sugar Bones: “We’re obviously pretty confident, and real confidence knows no bounds. I don’t think there’s any end to the ambition really. Janet Planet for President. She could run on the slogan ‘I’m The Best’.” Janet: “Basically, we’re all wankers. Nice wankers.” Sugar Bones: “Loveable wankers.” Clarence and Reggie: Nod agreeably It takes real confidence to speak up and say that. They’ll go far. Now, more shots please, barman.

Released in 2018, J. Cole’s fifth studio album came together in just two weeks, after Cole shared the stage with fellow voice-of-a-generation rapper Kendrick Lamar during his *DAMN.* tour, and decided he was ready for another anthemic body of work. The result, *KOD*, is riddled with social messages and symbolism, starting with the title itself, which is an acronym for many things: Kids on Drugs, Kill our Demons, and King Overdosed. The colorful album art, meanwhile, displays children taking pills, snorting cocaine, smoking weed, and sipping lean (when you look closer, the children can be seen morphing into morbid figures, under the cloak of a jewel-encrusted king). The lyrics on *KOD* are even more provocative, and find Cole leaning inward, unpacking his own traumas, demons, and vices, warning about unhealthy dependencies to materialism and drugs. On “Once an Addict,” the platinum-selling rapper uses his mother’s story to ruminate on the intergenerational effects of alcoholism, while “Kevin’s Heart” finds him using comedian Kevin Hart’s publicized infidelities as a vehicle to discuss Cole’s own internal struggles with monogamy. These are weighty topics. But listeners didn’t mind: *KOD* not only topped the album charts, it broke numerous streaming records on its first day of release.

After two concept albums and a string of roles in Hollywood blockbusters, one of music’s fiercest visionaries sheds her alter egos and steps out as herself. Buckle up: Human Monáe wields twice the power of any sci-fi character. In this confessional, far-reaching triumph, she dreams of a world in which love wins (“Pynk\") and women of color have agency (“Django Jane”). Featuring guest appearances from Brian Wilson, Grimes, and Pharrell—and bearing the clear influence of Prince, Monae’s late mentor—*Dirty Computer* is as uncompromising and mighty as it is graceful and fun. “I’m the venom and the antidote,” she wails in “I Like That,” a song about embracing these very contradictions. “Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”

Building on his background as a classical pianist and composer, British producer Jon Hopkins uses vast electronic soundscapes to explore other worlds. Here, on his fifth album, he contemplates our own. Inspired by adventures with meditation and psychedelics, *Singularity* aims to evoke the magical awe of heightened consciousness. It’s a theme that could easily feel affected or clichéd, but Hopkins does it phenomenal justice with imaginative, mind-bending songs that feel both spontaneous and rigorously structured. Floating from industrial, polyrhythmic techno (“Emerald Rush\") to celestial, ambient atmospheres (“Feel First Life”), it’s a transcendent headphone vision quest you’ll want to go on again.

Please note: Digital files are 16bit. Singularity marks the fifth album from the UK electronic producer and composer and the follow up to 2013’s Mercury Prize nominated Immunity. Where Immunity charted the dark alternative reality of an epic night out, Singularity explores the dissonance between dystopian urbanity and the green forest. It is a journey that returns to where it began – from the opening note of foreboding to the final sound of acceptance. Shaped by his experiences with meditation and trance states, the album flows seamlessly from rugged techno to transcendent choral music, from solo acoustic piano to psychedelic ambient.

In 2016, Alex Turner received a piano for his 30th birthday and started playing seriously for the first time in over 20 years. Songs for Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album eventually emerged—a collection of brooding, cosmic lounge-pop that’s typical of the band only in its disdain for playing it safe. Here, light-years from their previous riff-driven adventures, melodies unspool slowly but stick faster with every listen. A watering hole on the moon provides the conceptual framework for Turner to muse on life, pop culture, and technology with heavy-lidded introspection. “I need to spend less time stood around in bars/Waffling on to strangers about martial arts,” he sighs on “She Looks Like Fun.” He shouldn’t be hasty: Wherever he finds inspiration, it takes his band to daring new places.

Seven albums in, Parquet Courts deliver their most nuanced, diverse LP so far. While their raw, post-punk side is amply present on tracks like \"Extinction,\" with its Fall-evoking riffs, that\'s just one among many arrows in the Brooklyn band\'s quiver. Between the children\'s choir on \"Death Will Bring Change,\" the trippy, dub-inflected touches on \"Back to Earth,\" the G-funk synth lines on \"Violence,\" and the polyrhythmic, disco-besotted grooves of the title track, Parquet Courts deliver on more fronts than ever before.

"Wide Awake!" is a groundbreaking work, an album about independence and individuality but also about collectivity and communitarianism. Love is at its center. There’s also a freshness here, a breaking of new territory that’s a testament to the group’s restless spirit. Part of this could be attributed to the fact that Wide Awake! was produced by Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, but it’s also simply a triumph of songwriting. “The ethos behind every Parquet Courts record is that there needs to be change for the better, and the best way to tackle that is to step out of one’s comfort zone,” guitarist/singer A Savage says of the unlikely pairing. “I personally liked the fact that I was writing a record that indebted to punk and funk, and Brian’s a pop producer who’s made some very polished records. I liked that it didn’t make sense." It was Danger Mouse, an admirer of the Parquet Courts, who originally reached out to them, presenting them with just the opportunity to stretch themselves that they were hoping for. The songs, written by Savage and Austin Brown but elevated to even greater heights by the dynamic rhythmic propulsion of Max Savage (drums) and Sean Yeaton (bass), are filled with their traditional punk rock passion, as well as a lyrical tenderness. The record reflects a burgeoning confidence in the band's exploration of new ideas in a hi-fi context. For his part, Savage was determined not to make another ballad heavy record like the band's 2016 "Human Performance." "I needed an outlet for the side of me that feels emotions like joy, rage, silliness and anger," he says. They looked to play on the duality between rage and glee like the bands Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Black Flag. "All those bands make me want to dance and that's what I want people to do when they hear our record," adds Savage. For Brown, death and love were the biggest influences. Brown has never been so vulnerable on a Parquet Courts record, and the band, for all their ferocity, has never played so movingly; it’s a prime example of Brown “writing songs I’ve been wanting to write but never had the courage.” For the two primary songwriters, "Wide Awake!" represents the duality of coping and confrontation. “In such a hateful era of culture, we stand in opposition to that — and to the nihilism used to cope with that — with ideas of passion and love," says Brown. For Savage, it comes back to the deceptively complex goal of making people want to dance, powering the body for resistance through a combination of groove, joy, and indignation, “expressing anger constructively but without trying to accommodate anyone.”