2024 kicked off in style with some fantastic albums. We’ve seen some astonishing debuts rub shoulders with legendary-status acts, bands take about-turns to surprise us, and some Louder Than War favourites continue to charm. Here are just some of our favourite albums we have covered so far in 2024.
Amelia Coburn: Between The Moon And The Milkman
From sinister encounters amid the bustle of Mexico City to reading Soviet-era satire under the Atlas Mountains via an essential stop at Dublin’s premier Leprechaun Museum, Amelia Coburn’s debut album Between The Moon and The Milkman is an astonishing collection of songs and stories, all told with the unmistakable profile of Coburn’s North East homeland on the horizon. The album sees Amelia inviting the listener to step into the world as she sees it, fitting somewhere in the twilight hours, a world full of darkness and light and soundtracked by magic and melancholy.
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Big Special: Post Industrial Hometown Blues
Taking the blueprint of Sleaford Mods, flirting with Franz Ferdinand adding a dirty old blues mix and creating their own sound which is astonishing for two working-class blokes from Birmingham. You don’t need a full band to be powerful, just a great lyricist, a top as fuck drummer and a head full of ideas. The brilliant duo of Joe Hicklin and Callum Maloney slam into our lives like a hammer battering on the music scene that no one else has recently.
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Bill Ryder-Jones: Iechyd Da
This is the sound of an artist bearing their soul and what truly results in an album that is personal and yet speaks to each one of us, forces us to listen to the voice inside, the one that is often buried by the chaos. Like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith before him, he is finding his way through the world through his music, gazing at the storm and knowing that behind the turmoil there is a sun, behind the pain there is hope. What enables us to endure the trials and tribulations of life is the strength of our spirit. Iechyd Da encapsulates that to perfection.
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Bob Vylan: Humble As The Sun
In these fractious times, there are no clear-cut lines, and the complexities are incendiary. It’s rare to find voices that cut through the noise and make sense of the narrative. With a genuine anger, Bob Vylan has connected with the frayed edges of the sonic landscape with a clutch of releases and genuinely incendiary live gigs and the third album finds new ways of getting the message across. Taking the message to the masses without losing the edge is the conundrum that the Bobs are dealing with, and Humble As The Sun sounds like the beginning of their next adventure.
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Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow is a quite majestic body of work, created by a quartet at the very top of their game. Unquestionably, in his ninth decade of this mortal coil, Charles Lloyd remains at the absolute zenith of his powers. He reminds us that in 2024, we shouldn’t beware the Ides of March. We should celebrate them. Presented to us thoughtfully and artfully, it is a vessel that contains all of Lloyd’s years of know-how, sagacity and virtuosity. It is a record to utterly lose yourself in and, being a double album, offers us plenty of space to do just that.
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Commoner: A Commoner’s Quest
While only 7 songs, A Commoner’s Quest clocks in at 41 minutes. It takes you on a journey from crushing heaviness through mellow acoustic snatches to head nodding, anthemic guitar riffs. I’ve found far too many many sludge or stoner bands plain boring because they are just slow and that’s about all they have to offer. Commoner keep things interesting with lots to add to the mix. They make every second matter. The heaviness derived from their combination of modern stoner influences with classic heavy bands like Sabbath and a gnarly punk sneer gives them an edge as sharp as an axe.
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Crooked Little Sons: Regenerate
Ten years in the making, Exeter’s rampant punk rock garage blues sleaze upstarts anticipated debut album lights up your speakers with a rollercoaster thrill of no-nonsense noise. They are a band that revitalise rock n roll better than most and give a bit of sparkle to a scene that needs a different slice of good-time punk n roll. Jay Davies from Rare Vitamin spotted their potential straight away and added them to his roster of punk as fuck bands, knowing they’d come up with this party of a debut. It’s a whole lot of fun and the punk just rolls out from the off.
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Douglas Dare: Omni
Douglas Dare’s fourth album for Erased Tapes sees the artist take a different route. Still steeped in personal storytelling and deft contrasts, Omni embraces the electronic. Welcome to the darkwave disco. In creating Omni, Douglas Dare has demonstrated admirable boldness. It takes courage to change a winning formula, just as it takes courage to tell such personal stories. We should celebrate that. And whilst doing so, we should celebrate the quality of this collection. Vive la différence.
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Erotic Secrets Of Pompeii: Mondo Maleficum
Erotic Secrets of Pompeii have absorbed everything from the history of cerebral, dark & strange rock music, but seem outlandishly original somehow. Very few debut albums come as fully formed and as ornately finished, as lyrically bizarre and musically fresh as this. There is not much from the past twenty years that holds a candle to it in terms of breadth of imagination, iconography and bewilderment. It’s an odyssey that takes in Greek myth, Gothicism, Magick, the apocalypse, pre-history and of course love, sex & death and Rock’n’Roll.
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Fat White Family: Forgiveness Is Yours
All great art jaywalks the tightrope between genius and madness, all great performance takes this one step further forward and all great poets go to the beyond on our behalf and Fat White Family snapshot this pearls from chaos principle better than anyone. The band’s fourth album, Forgiveness If Yours is full of beauty and madness as it veers from leering disco to music hall ballad to shimmering freak scenes. There is 3D film soundtrack and specral soundscapes, there are gonzoid workouts and bump n grind dirty disco grooves.
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Girls In Synthesis: Sublimation
There’s a primitive impact shooting through the veins of the record – less crash and smouldering crater but more the revealing of the weapon that made the fucking crater – a sharp beam of sheer, stripped-back power that can snap ships in half in a blink. Although this isn’t minimalism – the melodic aspects of what they do, something sometimes buried beneath the barrage of the whole riotous racket – have a chance of captivating the mind rather than gasping for air.
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House Of All: Continuum
Not even a year since their debut album and offshoot album Bay City Pistols, HOUSE Of ALL are back in all their glory with another nugget of magic sound from the minds of Bramah, The Hanley Brothers, Wolstencroft and Greenway. Their musical paths have gone in different directions to keep their own flame alive yet this is just a fucking fire of five individuals who still want to play and keep us aware of talent that never dies whilst staying true to their original purpose in life. THE MUSIC.
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IDLES: Tangk
“Love is the thing”, singer Joe Talbot reminds us throughout the album. It is a new focus, a desire to stand tall and proud in the face of adversity and meet it head-on with positivity, with love. With it also comes a handbrake turn in musical direction for the band.Tangk is IDLES’ Kid A, their Vitalogy, their Tranquility Base, the band flexing their collective creative muscle to break the box left behind them. There will always be gems from their past for them to return to, but Tangk is a different beast altogether, one that opens future avenues rather than closes doors.
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Jane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle
While Weaver is frequently described as a “psychedelic,” artist, this is not psychedelia as we know it – expansive and oft-experimental, but less spectrum of mind-melting colour, more velvet blacks and shimmering silvers. The result is a hypnotic musical floatation tank revealing an artist truly creating her most fulfilled, ambitious and well-realised work yet. A cosmic odyssey of a record unafraid to be bold and expansive.
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James: Yummy
James’ delicious eighteenth studio album and their appetite for making new music appears not to have dimmed as they enter their fifth decade as a band as they invite their fans to feast upon twelve songs that rank as one of their strongest collections of their career. Yummy is the sound of a band refusing to rest on their laurels, in love with their creative process and looking forward rather than backwards. They still possess the ability to produce the anthems with which they made their name, but here they’re searching for deeper connections.
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Johnny Mafia: Année Du Dragon
Back when bands like Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, and Throwing Muses ruled the underground airwaves, there was crossroads between melody and punk rock of those many bands that could’ve been your life. It kickstarted a global scene that, for a few golden years before the craving for dollar signs packaged everything like tasteless white bread, was awash with creativity. That is where Johnny Mafia want to take us back to, to an era that was at the same time teeming with optimism and cynicism, with surrealism and the starkness of reality as the freaks and geeks finally inherited the Earth.
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King Of Pigs: After Victory Comes Defeat
Nottingham thrashers King Of Pigs return with another dose of Boston-style hardcore. It rips your face off. The band’s own take on things is that they wanted to focus on “quality not quantity”. I think they’ve made the right move. I remember records loaded with lots of fast tracks that were pretty much unlistenable because the quality was lower than the sound of a wasp trying to escape a biscuit tin.
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Lemon Twigs: A Dream Is All We Know
Somewhere in this sweet golden music, there lies a corruption, a dissonance, though not in the music itself. The plurality and singularity are referenced more than once in the titles and lyrics, and the words are often at odds with the bright, bold melodies, speaking of lost ground and broken promises, expectant hearts and the inevitable passing of time. Are they attempting to make a monument, an idol to a specific time or genre? Do the words subvert the songs enough to drag them from any sort of pastiche? Almost every song is between two and three minutes and harmonically perfect.
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Liam Gallagher and John Squire: S/T
For those of us who kept faith in seeing John Squire’s inevitable musical genius rise again, or who take delight in rock music’s last great star and singer bringing his best game to the party, over ten relentlessly invigorating, upbeat and life-affirming tracks, Liam Gallagher And John Squire proves that some gods still have the voices to make your soul shake, and the music to make your heart sing. This release was always going to mean more, was always going to matter
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Little Man Tate: Welcome To The Rest Of Your Life
Welcome To The Rest Of Your Life is an album which even the most dedicated of fans could probably never have imagined happening, I doubt the four lads making it would have either. It’s often a risk to reform and release new material after such a lengthy gap, but Little Man Tate have smashed it. It’s recognisably Little Man Tate, you still feel as if you’re overhearing a conversation or being spoken to directly. Welcome back!
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Mumbles: In The Pocket Of Big Sad
What the band have delivered here, as well as capturing the energy and abstract nature of their live sets, is an occasionally challenging, sometimes confusing record, but one which will draw you back for multiple listens. It incorporates elements of emo, noise rock, folk, ambient and free jazz, defying easy categorisation. According to the band, In The Pocket of Big Sad is “ultimately just double-time indie rock with ideas above its station”. Mumbles are ultimately entirely their own thing.
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Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud
Drum & Bass has perhaps been something of a niche concern for too long, which is a huge shame, as to my mind it is a genre that has produced some of the best, catchiest and most incredible music of recent years. It is a genre that is a complete world within itself, with many different sub-styles and threads to follow, from the more commercial end of the spectrum to full on noise assaults. Step forward then Nia Archives. Silence Is Loud is a tremendous debut that surely marks Nia Archives’ move into the spotlight of being a major act.
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Night Motor: Vessels
Night Motor take a walk on the darker side for their second album. There is clear maturity and nuance on this album compared to the blistering debut. Vessels is delivered with passion and subtlety, power and vulnerability. Let’s hope it brings them some good times.
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Nubiyan Twist: Find Your Flame
Nubiyan Twist’s vibrant fourth album, Find Your Flame, is the one that they have always promised to make. It perfectly showcases the nine-piece band’s versatility as they skip effortlessly from jazz and soul through R&B to Afrobeat. Featuring smart collaborations, outstanding musicianship and first-rate compositions, it absolutely thrills and excites. Indeed, it is wholly accurate to state that there is not a single mediocre tune on this album. Zero filler; every single second counts. Through adversity, Nubiyan Twist have categorically found their flame.
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Pete Astor: Tall Stories & New Religions
On his new album, Pete Astor revisits and re-records songs that first appeared on releases by The Loft, The Weather Prophets (on Creation) The Wisdom of Harry (Matador) as well as from solo albums. No ‘greatest hits’ like ‘Up The Hill…’ or ‘Almost Prayed’ but others ‘selected for more interesting, often esoteric, reasons’. The songs are the thing, but the arrangements, production and musicianship are thoroughly spot-on and make this album a sublime, chilled-out, work of absolute perfection. Every crooned melody and shimmering twang will send shivers down your spine.
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Poppycock: Magic Mothers
Poppycock are a predominantly female collective built around Una Baines, a founder member of both The Fall and Blue Orchids and a symbolic godmother to many Mancunian artists and musicians who cite her as an aspiration and mentor. Following low-key releases over the years, finally a full-length album on Tiny Global, and it is utterly spellbinding. In essence, Magic Mothers, a labour of love stretching back 15 years and more, is a collection of songs Una Baines has written, performed with a cast of friends, singers and players.
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Richard Hawley: In This City They Call You Love
In This City They Call You Love showcases the lighter side of his considerable songwriting talents, allowing more space for the songs to breathe in the most natural way possible, whilst still nurturing the flowing melodies and beautiful arrangements that are so typical of his work. It’s an album that weaves a spell which grows stronger through repeated listens to the point where it settles easily into the very fabric of your soul. It is also an album that provides a most effective antidote to the harsh realities of life that surround us all so I really do recommend a dose.
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Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
It takes a lot of courage for an artist to deviate from a path that is tried, tested and successful. However, with admirable boldness, Shabaka Hutchings has effectively started again. Indeed, he describes this collection as a second debut album. Fortune favours the brave; his ambition has paid off. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is an excellent album, one that unpacks so much as it unfolds. It’s lasting impression will be a collection of reflective compositions, warm and personal, and created by an artist at the top of his game.
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Small Black Arrows: The British Museum
Without a doubt one of the best releases this year Small Black Arrows pierce a hole in your heart with some of the best music around. A Mercury-hitting slab of a concept album that will keep you captivated for a long time with the texture of soul and hard-hitting beauty from a duo who mean business. This duo have totally raised the game of modern music as we know it. They don’t comply with your normal indie by numbers in all the tunes on this epic and just go with the flow on their own agenda.
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St Vincent: All Born Screaming
Like a Ziggy for the fast moving now, or a Kate Bush for the 21st century or a Jimi Hendrix player of sonic electricity, St Vincent has been the shapeshifting queen of many guises. Her musical and stylistic moves were breathtaking yet somehow always managed to add in the most intriguing and vital ingredient – Annie Clark herself who lurked behind the St Vincent alter ego to the mix. On her new release, she fills the songs on her self-styled post-plague pop album with the confusion of reality.
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The Church: Eros Zeta And The Perfumed Guitar
A thrilling end to a fine concept album from someone I can actually call a genius. Steve Kilbey. If you like your Chameleons, Echo And The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, Spiritualized, Pink Floyd or anything modern psychedelia then look no further. These are a band that need listening to. This is the best psych journey I’ve heard for years, taking the essence of Floyd and early psych to the next level. I’ve been listening to early Church stuff and the signs have always been there but never in a massive concept way like this. It’s huge stuff.
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The Jesus And Mary Chain: Glasgow Eyes
The Jesus And Mary Chain return four decades after they first set the music world alight. And they’ve lost none of their fire or fury. When it works, it works as well as you would hope. It’s no Psychocandy, but how could it be that? Men of 60 don’t make transgressive records like that. But brothers of 60 do have a sibling kinship that results in a symbiosis when they finally get together. Is Glasgow Eyes is a fresh start for the Mary Chain or just the latest chapter in alt pop’s second-most high-profile sibling soap opera?
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The Lovely Eggs: Eggsistentialism
Eggsistentialism may be their most accomplished and emotionally resonant release. The production, the songwriting and the way it’s meticulously stitched together make it an undeniably impressive 40-minute trip. People really love this band (I certainly do) and it isn’t hard to see why. Rest assured; this album will only make you love them more. They have described the album as a ‘wilderness years’ record, an album about facing challenges and surviving. This is the sound of a band who’ve put their whole lives into their art and that unwavering commitment really does show.
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The Shop Window: Daysdream
Following a run of singles, It’s A High, A World Where We Remain, I Run and Blues, which would put any self-respecting 7” releasing band of yesteryear to shame, we finally have the long-awaited album. Daysdream is a 16 track, hour-long double, at effectivily the price of a single disc (and probably cheaper than most of those too). It’s perfectly balanced throughout, the ‘Days’ disc filled with choppy, upbeat indiepop whilst the ‘Dream’ disc is more melancholic with a Shoegaze influence.
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The Smile: Wall Of Eyes
The Smile return with their second album. The expectations are higher, but then so is their freedom to explore and defy them all. What may have, upon the release of their debut album, felt like a stop-gap side project, keeping our appetites whet for the return of the main attraction, has become a full-on force of nature. The Smile harness the best of the three players: the cracked beauty, the lush arrangements, the scattergun electronics, all pulled together once again into something truly special.
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Thou: Umbilical
Thou have let loose a new LP that blows the doors off genre boundaries and slams speakers to pieces with ten tracks of the gnarliest, heaviest, filthiest and most articulate Sludge on the planet. Umbilical is something else, entirely; there is an urgency, articulation and necessity to it. Difficult to define, but inherent in its voice from the moment the needle comes down. There is a surety and conviction in the tone from the very beginningr that makes you sit up and notice. You’re suddenly aware you’re witnessing something out of the ordinary. Something special.
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TV Smith: Handwriting
Whatever punk was, or whatever it is now matters little – TV Smith is still one of the first songwriters of his generation – punk gave him his break but also threatened to trap him, but he’s smarter than that, and this brilliant album is full of evidence that he has never lost his melodic inspiration and visionary creativity that somehow finds something new in songs that sound both as old as the hills with their urgent folkiness and yet very much of the moment with their infernal energy and poetic relevance and emotional rescue.
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Ultimate Thunder: A Spider Will Come To Eat Your Flesh
Ultimate Thunder are the Leeds learning-disabled / neuro-divergent band who made the news recently when their funding was cut. This is their second album collaborating with producer/ musician James Mabbett (Napoleon IIIrd). ‘The Fall meets Hawkwind’ description still fits but there is so much more to this band and it’s a great punk/experimental album in its own right. Ultimate Thunder are true creatives. Unhindered by rules, expectations, fashion, trends, commerce and bull. They are great artists.
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USA Nails: Feel Worse
On their new album for One Little Independent, prolific no-wave noiseniks USA Nails take us (or push us) through ten punishing rounds of tunes that, although come close to cardiac arrest, feels utterly wholesome. It’s not an album erupting with a pastiche of multiple ideas and a potpourri of scattershot agendas colliding at different times but keeps its observations in-tact, the experiences coherent, the ideas intimately bound in personal travels but creates a bigger, more resonant, psychosocial picture because of that.
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YOBS: YOBS
On their debut album, YOBS waste no time dousing you in a kerosene-soaked garage-punk cocktail, standing over your trembling body, match lit and ready to fall. It’s a burn-it-to-the-ground nihilistic blast of pure energy that at no point lets up; a take-no-prisoners drive-by through the derelict streets of a decaying society, scattergun shots ringing out in their aim to take down those responsible for this slide into seemingly permanent putrification. YOBS are the gang that stalks the shit-stained alleyways with a menace that unifies all to fight back.
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Zanias: Ecdysis
Vocal powerhouse Zanias returns with an album of creative healing and inventive soundscapes. Ecdysis sees Zanias moving on from Chrysalis, continuing to stretch her wings creatively. It is in part a calmer and less structured affair, rich in atmosphere and hugely evocative, soundtracks for futuristic filmscapes that have yet to be made. Listening to Ecdysis makes me feel that I have travelled with its creator, on an emotional and affecting journey. What more can we ask of a piece of art, other than it gives us a glimpse into the artist’s soul?
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