The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2023

It's been a long long time coming, but we are delighted to finally announce the release of our new album False Lankum, along with the premiere of the first single, Go Dig My Grave.  The album was recorded across 2021 & 2022 by our longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy in Hellfire Studio and Guerilla Studios in Ireland. The cover was shot by Steve Gullick, famed for photographing Nirvana amongst many greats, with a Gustav Doré illustration featured in the lower third, designed and laid out by Alison Fielding. It is our most ambitious record to date and we are very proud to finally unleash it upon the world. As well as the standard black vinyl, we will be releasing a Limited Edition Burnt Orange Transparent Double LP & CD. There will be an opportunity to obtain four limited edition prints, by legendary photographer Steve Gullick. The individual prints will be available across the world, with a signed edition available from Bandcamp.

Like it did for listeners, Polly Jean Harvey’s 10th album came to her by surprise. “I\'d come off tour after \[2016’s\] *Hope Six Demolition Project*, and I was taking some time where I was just reassessing everything,” she tells Apple Music of what would become a seven-year break between records, during which it was rumored the iconic singer-songwriter might retire altogether. “Maybe something that we all do in our early fifties, but I\'d really wanted to see if I still felt I was doing the best that I could be with my life. Not wanting to sound doom-laden, but at 50, you do start thinking about a finite amount of time and maximizing what you do with that. I wanted to see what arose in me, see where I felt I needed to go with this last chapter of my life.” Harvey turned her attention to soundtrack work and poetry. In 2022, she published *Orlam*, a magical realist novel-in-verse set in the western English countryside where she grew up, written in a rare regional dialect. To stay sharp, she’d make time to practice scales on piano and guitar, to dig into theory. “Then I just started,” she says. “Melodies would arise, and instead of making up vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I\'d just pull at some of the poems. I wasn\'t trying to write a song, but then I had all these poems everywhere, overflowing out of my brain and on tables everywhere, bits of paper and drawings. Everything got mixed up together.” Written over the course of three weeks—one song a day—*I Inside the Old Year Dying* combines Harvey’s latest disciplines, lacing 12 of *Orlam*’s poems through similarly dreamy and atmospheric backdrops. The language is obscure but evocative, the arrangements (longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish produced) often vaporous and spare. But the feeling in her voice (especially on the title track and opener “Prayer at the Gate”) is inescapable. “I stopped thinking about songs in terms of traditional song structure or having to meet certain expectations, and I viewed them like I do the freedom of soundtrack work—it was just to create the right emotional underscore to the scene,” she says. “It was almost like the songs were just there, really wanting to come out. It fell out of me very easily. I felt a lot freer as a writer—from this album and hopefully onwards from now.”

Les Disques Bongo Joe are pleased to announce the fourth album of La Tène ! Collaborating for the third time with the band, we're proud to release Ecorcha/Taillee, a two track project in between drone, folk, experimental and occitan music. La Tène’s long, hypnotic, wordless pieces are built from traditional folk instrumentation, wild percussion and blurred, subtle electronic embellishments, and feel as ancient and earthy as those millennia-old artefacts – with all the metal, wood, dedication and craftsmanship they entailed. As on their previous release Abandonnée / Maleja, a double set running to over 80 minutes, Cyril Bondi, Alexis Degrenier and Laurent Peter expand to seven members in total. Cohorts Jacques Puech (cabrette – a small bagpipe associated with the Auvergne region of France), Louis Jacques (cabrette and a larger, 23” bagpipe), Guilhem Lacroux (12-string guitar) and Jérémie Sauvage (bass) each return to add colour, layers and intrigue. Ecorcha/Taillée was recorded in a barn converted into a ballroom and cultural centre which exists to promote the folk music of region Auvergne. Both L’Ecorcha (eighteen and a half minutes long) and La Taillée (just under a quarter of an hour, brevity by this group’s standards) were recorded live and what you hear is a single take, with no editing after the fact. L’Ecorcha goes into space with simple, minimal tools. Beginning with a single, doomy chord circling in perpetuity and a metallic shaker by way of rhythm, a drone of unspecified provenance is joined a little under halfway through by Alexis’ hurdy-gurdy, adding bucolic buoyancy while Laurent uses the wooden surface of his harmonium as an extra percussive source. La Taillée is spikier, danceable even thanks thanks to Cyril’s insistent drumming and the harmonium and hurdy-gurdy moving in a glorious lockstep. If you were to think of the relationship between Lou Reed’s guitar and John Cale’s violin while taking in La Taillée, you wouldn’t be OTT by any means. Inspirations, soundalikes and kindred spirits are elusive and fleeting in the case of La Tène. There are a couple specific to Ecorcha/Taillée, both brought to the table by Alexis : a Christian song titled La Passion, collected in 1883 by French folklorist Félix Arnaudin, and a reggaeton hit single from 2022, Saoko by Spanish star Rosalía. La Taillée adapts its crunchy central riff in La Tène’s own image. It’s that link between the past and the future that also rings out in the music of La Tène.

In March 2023, Tresor Records will release "Crash Recoil", a new album by Surgeon. It marks Anthony Child's first techno LP in five years, following a period in which he felt uncertainty in his role as a techno producer and found it tough to locate inspiration. This new album encounters him drawing on spontaneous techniques to arrive at unchartered topographies. "Crash Recoil" originates from Surgeon's recent live sets, where he experimented with constraints in performing and embracing the twists, turns and paradoxes that arrive from this. Each fresh iteration on consistent MIDI sequences and hardware reconfigured tracks into different constellations, creating an inspiring vortex of unpredicted events where ideas could flourish. This new approach allowed him to capture the spontaneous energy of his live shows in a way he had never done before. "This is not a live album, since it has not been recorded in one go during a live performance. In the same way that bands tour songs before going into the studio to record an album, I was able to explore these songs and hone their effectiveness during my live performances before creating a studio version." The result is eight tracks that emphasise a new techno sound for Surgeon, drawing in references from across the musical spectrum. "I can hear Coil, King Tubby, Detroit Techno and The Cure all wrapped up with 30 years of DJing," Surgeon says of the album. Melancholic hum-like ambiences smudge around unadorned, near-droning basslines, crunching rhythm and percolating arpeggiations. The tracks carry unique and potent locomotion, with a low-slung grind through toughened terrains, breathing with a free spirit, untethered by a studio-based perspective. We hear manifestations of the same raw material across the album, like a textural motif, carving new variants and creating a cohesive work full of recollection.

Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow are the two most Googled phrases. It is also the title of the second album written by babybaby_explores, fka Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk…initially a pseudo research concept project. This is their first album to be officially released (No Gold, 2023). The band is composed of Lids B-day: effected vox & sampler, sam m-h: electric guitar, and Gabe C-D: drum machines. These three fweaky decade long high school best friends come from a clam chowder airport suburbia located just outside of Providence, RI. The album was recorded by Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets over the span of two days. It features 10 tracks created in the same way every babybaby_explores song is made: via writing sessions that are spontaneous and improvisational. If something makes them laugh or feels right, it is recorded and then perfected through repetition. The three act intuitively and playfully towards one another. They meet in the middle, each declaring their own tune, responding to one other, sparring playfully. Songs erupt with little control. They are happenings that the band gets stuck on. The project exists to recreate and recapture a moment that held something enjoyable for each member, and to accurately re-render and share the joyous joke with others. 

Selvutsletter marks the first new Lost Girls album since their acclaimed debut 2021 album, Menneskekollektivet, which was named one of the year’s best releases by Pitchfork, The FADER, Brooklyn Vegan, Paste, FLOOD, and more. Where Menneskekollektivet was about exploring club beats and expanding and trying out structures, Selvutsletter is about disappearing in experiences. It combines the intuitive, late night feel of Lost Girls’ previous work with experimental rock music as its object. Like its predecessor, the album title is a made up Norwegian word, a word that almost exists. The band’s own translation of Selvutsletter is “self-effacer: Someone who tries to erase themselves. Someone who is cleaning out themselves. Performing exorcism. Or perhaps just getting older, less interested in their own present self.” Following the hypnotic lead single “Ruins” — “a clanging and lovely piece of kinetic post-punk” (Exclaim!) — “With the Other Hand” surges with propulsive beats and shimmering guitars guided by Hval’s soaring vocals. Inspired by Leonard Cohen, “With the Other Hand” began with a guitar line written by Volden that was passed along to Hval who began rearranging the chords beyond recognition. “The result was a structure of verse and chorus, a pop song whispering about someone’s mysterious journey through a street, a building, and a stage,” the band says. “The chorus goes like this: ‘With the other hand I open rooms / With the first one I write,’ describing two parts of something - a creative process, or two parts of the unconscious. Or perhaps the two hands describe Lost Girls themselves. One opens rooms, the other writes.” Lost Girls’ collaboration dates back more than a decade, with Volden playing regularly in Hval’s live band, as well as the duo’s acoustic collaborative album from 2012 (under the moniker Nude on Sand). In 2022, the duo were booked to perform a concert at Les Subsistances in Lyon, and they decided to use the opportunity to create all new material. Working in tandem, with Volden creating beats and wild sets of guitar chords and Hval restructuring the parts, creating melodies and word, and adding more sounds, they started spiraling into unchartered territory of shorter, more concise and melodic songs. As the material for Selvutsletter developed, words already embedded in the chords, guitar sounds and rhythms began to dance around. Lyrics soon began to take shape, their subjects spanning cities after dark, music rituals, band practices of the ‘90s, and the early days of the internet. These were Hval's own memories of her hometown and her obsession with creating music as a way of leaving it behind or even setting it on fire. Selvutsletter is, in that sense, about retracing Hval and Volden's steps back to how it felt to discover music, the intensely physical and communal experience of creating something.

-> Listen/order via horn-of-plenty.bandcamp.com/album/mares <-- Horn of Plenty casts its gaze into the thriving contemporary Belgian underground with Annelies Monseré’s Mares, a remarkable body of experimental compositions that taps the deep well of raw, emotive expression rumbling below numerous traditions of European folk music. As a member of Ghent’s experimental music scene, over the past two decades Annelies Monseré has slowly refined a singular approach to musicality, moving from the sparse, instrumental piano works from that defined her early career, toward increasingly complex arrangements of instrumentation that offer a central place to her own voice, issued by noteworthy imprints such as Morc Tapes, Stroom, and three:four. Like her work within the widely celebrated ensemble, Luster, as well as Distels, her duo with Steve Marreyt, Monseré’s solo efforts establish a strikingly beautiful and remarkably unique territory that elegantly balances between rigorous experimentalism, minimalism, drone, and folk. Recorded between 2016 and 2022, Mares is arguably best approached through the song that marked its inception and conclusion, a rendition of Cyril Tawney’s Sally Free & Easy. Written in 1958 and popularised by Pentangle during the early 1970s, it has been approached by so many artists - Davy Graham, Trees, Tony Caro & John, Marianne Faithfull, Flying Saucer Attack, etc. - that it’s become a “standard” within the folk scenes of the last half century or so. Initially drawn to the melodic qualities of the tune, Monseré became fascinated with the lyrical content, which she points out are “ethically problematic: a sailor ‘slutshaming’ a woman because she left him.. blaming her for his (planned) suicide”. Refined from paired down beginnings over a six year period, a droning, feminist dirge slowly emerged from her hands, incorporating male backing vocals and harmonium as brooding counterpoint to her voice, that entirely recasts the song into a new and radically prescient form. It is this sense of contrast - the elemental humanity and tension that runs below countless traditions of folk, reconceptualized within the forward thinking temperaments of contemporary experimental music - that defines Mares as such a distinct piece of work. A departure from her previous solo efforts, being the first to leave behind her main instruments, the guitar and piano, the album was conceived by Monseré as something akin to timbral painting; “adding similar layers upon each other with (slightly) different hues”. Taking the image of the sea and the ethical tensions within Sally Free & Easy as a conceptual departure point - weaving these themes like a thread through the record - amongst complex sets of harmonic relationships and varied durational structures that unfold within the remaining seven compositions, she intertwined her own childhood memories of the sea with interrogations of how “these memories are often arbitrarily fixed and tainted by the present, and more metaphorical (even biblical) connotations of the sea, hinting at toxic human relationships and intoxication in its multiple senses.” Appearing with the immediacy and emotiveness of folk music, imbued with sense of adventure of experimentalism and bred with the restraint and elegance of minimalism, Mares’ is a deep body of sonority that draws upon the fundamental human need to express and commune through sound, projecting this ancient need into forward-thinking forms without sacrificing its roots. Profoundly beautiful, elegant, and poetic, these eight tracks offer immersion into the singular creative voice of one of the most unique artists currently working in the Belgian scene.

Following 5 BBC Folk Awards nominations and a designation by the Guardian as Folk Album of the Year in 2019, it is fair to say that Lisa O’Neill is one of the most evocative songwriters in contemporary Irish music today. Fresh off 2018’s collection Heard a Long Song Gone for the River Lea imprint, The Wren EP in 2019 and an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s "All the Tired Horses" for the final scene of epic TV drama Peaky Blinders, O’Neill now returns with her latest album, and first for the Rough Trade label, the beautiful, resonant All Of This Is Chance.      A raconteur in the truest sense of the word, every story starts somewhere and O’Neill starts this extraordinary collection here on earth, on Irish soil, hands in the land. The album is full of both orchestral masterpieces like the ambitious and cinematic "Old Note" and the title track of “All of This Is Chance”, inspired by the great Monaghan writer Patrick Kavanagh's prescient meditation on The Great Hunger, as well as stirring meditations on nature, birds, berries, bees, and blood that ring out over a clacking banjo, dusting and devastating all those in its wake.      All Of This Is Chance takes Lisa’s inimitable voice to greater heights, or depths, depending on which way you look at it.

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

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The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

Like any great takedown or scathing tabloid opinion, the beauty of Sleaford Mods’ self-described “electronic munt minimalist punk-hop rants for the working class and under” is how they turn their anger into fun. So if the band’s rise from fortysomething never-wases to bellicose fiftysomethings who reliably make the English Top 10 seems unlikely, consider that they’re less a product of post-punk or early rap than than of an online discourse that privileges quick draws and sure shots. Their crude melodies are catchy (“Right Wing Beast”) but not quite as catchy as their persistent omnidirectional yelling (“UK GRIM”). And because they’re adults, they have enough humility to ask their therapist why they feel like slapping all these posers (“DIwhy”)—even if the therapist tells them, “Because they’re fucking c\*\*ts.”

Sleaford Mods will return in 2023 with new album UK GRIM. Throughout their music the duo's poetic protest and electronic resistance has seen them consistency chart and call out their times with an eloquence and attitude that has made them one of the most urgent and unique voices in modern music. Hailed by the likes of Liam Gallagher, Seth Myers, Iggy Pop, Amyl & The Sniffers and a legion of loyal fans whose devotion for the band would rival most sports supporters. Continuing this sonic vocation on their new album, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn's creative evolution now finds them capturing the atmosphere of their era too. Though no strangers to the dancefloor, the minimal yet immersive beats and grooves of UK GRIM's tracks – which include collaborations with Dry Cleaning's Florence Shaw and Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro among them – add a new, physical dimension to Sleaford Mod's sound that makes their words more vital than ever. Music for body AND mind.

In the tropical Caribbean forest a river runs, the streaming water drowning out the rustling of leaves, the pulse of insects and the birds’ cry. The song of a man, more powerful than that of the waters, rises to the tops of the ancient trees. Polobi, balanced on a rock, launches a melody towards the infinity of the sky. Drawing inspiration from the heart of the tropical forest, the mystical character of Polobi and his musicians collaborate with idiosyncratic producer Doctor L (Les Amazones d’Afrique, Mbongwana Star), forging a radical new take on the Gwo Ka musical tradition from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. An electro-acoustic palette and offbeat rhythms adorn these deeply rooted Creole songs with a unique sound universe.

“The world got shook” So Algiers formed a crew. The band—who have built one of the most exciting catalogs and cult followings of recent years, with 2020’s There Is No Year described as "electrifying and unpredictable" (The Observer) and "precise, thoughtful and powerful" (NME) —gathered a posse of like-minded artists to create their fourth album,  SHOOK, out February 24th on Matador. Stacked with guests spanning icons through to future stars,  SHOOK  is a lightning rod for an elusive yet universal energy and feeling. A plurality of voices; a spiritual and geographical homecoming; a strategy of communion in a burning world; the story of an end of a relationship; an Atlanta front porch summer party. Ultimately, it's a 17-track set of the most mind-expanding and thrilling music that you are likely to hear anytime soon. Algiers have always been unflinching, but SHOOK is at the same time notably joyous and celebratory. It was born when Fisher and Mahan found themselves back in their native Atlanta for several months, reeling from growing pressures and burnout as touring musicians. This triggered an intense period of beatmaking, reconnecting as friends over hours immersed in episodes of Rhythm Roulette and Against the Clock and descending deep into alt-rap YouTube rabbit holes. A revisit of DJ Grand Wizard Theodore’s 1970s punk-infused New York City rap masterpiece ‘Subway Theme’ served as a spiritual moodboard for the album’s cross-pollination of urban and counter-culture styles. Across the seamlessly flowing set, including spoken vignettes and ambient instrumental segues, the band pay respect to a sprawling lineage of rap and punk iconoclasts from DJ Premier, DJ Screw and Dead Boys to Lukah, Griselda and Dïat – chopping and screwing beats on a dusty SP-404 and a Sequential Circuits Tempest, building imagined sample libraries from scratch. While community and collaboration has always been integral to Algiers’ ethos, SHOOK brings this to its fullest manifestation. The liner notes read like a who’s who of ground-breaking and contemporary underground music, featuring Zack de la Rocha, Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), billy woods, Samuel T. Herring (Future Islands), Jae Matthews (Boy Harsher), LaToya Kent (Mourning [A] BLKstar), Backxwash, Nadah El Shazly, DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music), Patrick Shiroishi, Lee Bains III, and Mark Cisneros (Hammered Hulls, The Make-Up, Kid Congo Powers). Their contributions throughout deftly reshape and recontextualize the notion of being Shook from a variety of perspectives, occupying shifting roles as oracles and narrators. “It very much deepens and broadens the world of Algiers”, says drummer Matt Tong. Atlanta, where the genesis of this record took place, is ultimately at its heart. It opens with a robotic train announcement from Hartsfield Airport—iconic to many Atlanta natives—that used to frighten Fisher when he was a child. Field recordings and original samples created by the band emphasize throughout a sense of place, collectivity, imagined community and home, all building a world that evokes the elusive sensory experience of growing up in the urban South. “We were working in an environment that we were used to”, says guitarist Lee Tesche. “It feels like the most Algiers record that we've ever made.” The accomplishment of this record is made all the more impressive by the fact it was made by a band who were falling apart and on the verge of breaking up. But instead they have produced an extraordinary, transformative record born from a shared sense of place and experience. “I think this record is us finding home,” says Mahan, with Fisher adding: “It was a whole new positive experience— having a renewed relationship with the city we're from and having a pride in that. I like the idea that this record has taken you on a voyage but it begins and ends in Atlanta.”