Northern Transmission's Top 10 Albums of 2018 So Far

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.

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.”

Childqueen is something of a Hero's Quest. In the opening "Procession," above a muted drummer's march, an unseen oracle announces to you, the listener: "every morning is a chance to renew, a chance to renew." This is your first clue, setting you on a path to what Kadhja has christened the "childqueen," that innermost self that you were truthfully and instinctively before the weight of the world came crashing in. As with her 2016 debut The Visitor, the songs on Childqueen are never casual, never ditties. Instead, they invite us into a world not wholly our own, a half-mythical atmosphere where past and future meet in a parallel, yet faraway, present. Acting as a sort of diffuse chanteuse, Kadhja's achingly lovely voice achieves what can only be described as "ambient song." Particularly in songs like "Delphine" and "Nostalgia," we hear the jazzier intricacies of the vocal melodies brushed soft at the edges, at times so soft they vaporize into pure mood, or merge with other instruments or with backing vocals that seem to emanate from celestials bodies. And the instruments— played mostly by the polymathic Bonet herself— mix the cinematically and classically orchestral with the noticeably more synthetic. On tracks like "Thoughts Around Tea" or "Another Time Lover," flutes, violins, guitars, drums, and bells share or trade the stage with acousmatic warbles, whooshes, and lines, each gently couching the contours of the others. By combining softer enchantments with an ever-listenable experimentalism, Kadhja has created a soundscape the listener sinks into, unplaceable in genre and decade from beginning to end. Despite its soft tones, despite its listenability, Childqueen challenges us as much as Kadhja's self-description: "I don't like calling myself an artist. I don't like calling myself a singer— or even a musician." This isn’t just paradox. Kadhja came to music early through a maniacally rigorous classical training in her childhood, mastering the violin and viola, in addition to picking up the flute, guitar, and formal composition. But she abandoned classical music for wilder groves, and credits what she now creates as springing from a place of intuition and candid self-reflection rather than theory or her academic past. The Kadhja that leads us through Childqueen is unyielding, truth-seeking, and even mildly misanthropic, dismayed by humanity's talent for self-deception. She urges us to do better. These urges may come in rebuffs to our daily thoughtlessness, from the possible love sacrificed to business sense in "Thoughts Around Tea" to the caustic calls from the title track: "what's the matter, don't you got a man, to tell you what you're worth to him? Where you been at Childqueen?" At other points, her tone turns imploring, as in "Delphine," or encouraging as in "Second Wind" which serves to remind "sometimes I forget, moss grows from my lips. I am fertile. I am rich. I am moist and mineral." The lyrics and melodic lines nudge us along a path of self-discovery— or act as breadcrumbs along her own path. Everything that you hear on Childqueen was created by Kadhja, who has always produced all her own music, insisting on a total vision that is nearly as difficult to co-create as a dream. She does confess: "this record crushed my ego, and I'm surprised I'm still alive." Nevertheless, music remains for Kadhja Bonet a primarily solitary activity, one in which she can tender a connection with that innermost self, the childqueen. The rest of the world, if it pleases, is welcome to listen in, and join her quest.

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.

Made up of seven expansive tracks, Bon Voyage marries Melody’s breathless soprano to the wildest sonic excursions, always pinned to an emphatic, clattering groove as she delivers her fables of spiritual search and emotional healing in multiple tongues (French, English and Swedish). Bon Voyage is a collaborative record between Prochet and Dungen’s Reine Fiske and The Amazing’s Fredrik Swahn with Melody sculpting and producing the sessions as well as encouraging the players around her to experiment, often with instruments that might be less familiar to them. It also features special guests Gustav Esjtes and Johan Holmegaard (both from Dungen) and Nicholas Allbrook (Pond).

Recorded in just under two weeks at Soulwax’s DEEWEE studio in Gent, ‘ESSENTIAL' was created using the gear they didn’t use for their celebrated 2017 LP From DEEWEE, which was recorded live with the band in one take. The band elaborate: "When we were approached to make an Essential Mix for the BBC in May 2017, we chose to do what every sane human being would do, we decided to lock ourselves into our studio for two weeks and make an hour of new music based around the word 'Essential', instead of preparing a mix of already existing music. The product of this otherwise unwise decision is something we ended up being very proud of and is now being released on the piece of plastic you’re currently holding in your hands."

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”).

Composed of eight international artists recruited from all over the globe, London-based cooperative Superorganism made waves with 2017’s woozily addictive hit “Something for Your M.I.N.D”. For their debut the octet lift city sounds and place them center stage—expect revving engines, arcade clatters, and fizzing soda cans. It’s a hybrid of laidback dream-pop (“Reflections on the Screen”) and sunshine-soaked psychedelic jams (“Everybody Wants to Be Famous”) that radiates pure joy. These weird and wonderful anthems are ready to transport you to summer, whatever the weather.