These are my absolute favorite records from the first half of the year. It’s still in no particular order, but for what it’s worth the first two, Benji and The Future’s Void are my absolute absolute favorites.

Sun Kil Moon – Benji

Benji isn’t the kind of album that is going to reach out and grab new listeners. It is an album that has to be approached, by someone who knows what they’re in for and is more or less down with it. “It” being a kind of middle-aged emotional exorcism, that’s too thematic to be stream of consciousness but too expansive and meandering to be seen as particularly conceptual. This wasn’t an easy record for me to like, either. It’s harsh, it’s affecting, and it definitely took an investment. But once Benji grabs you, it won’t let go. Or maybe you just won’t want it to. Brief aside: I’m not entirely sure why, but I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same always strikes me as what Joanna Newsom music would sound like if she was a dude.

Sun Kil Moon – Carissa
Sun Kil Moon – I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same

EMA – The Future’s Void

I had a conversation with a friend recently about the music of Erika Anderson. Both of us had a similar approach to unpacking her records, and we decided that the easiest way to designate our common ground here was to regard Anderson as a sort of emotional historian, a musician who can capture what it “feels like” to live in a particular time and place, and who can adapt her music to whatever shifts there may be in our collective perceptual landscape. The Future’s Void is an album that could have—in other hands—gone very, very wrong. It contains elements of critique of our increasingly digital lives. But unlike countless editorials and thinkpieces, Void isn’t the work of an outsider. Anderson writes as someone observing something that she is very much a part of, but ultimately can only ride along with. The things she’s critical of are the same things that we’re critical of, the things she finds comfort in are the same things that we find comfort in. I once described her previous album as something like the best encapsulation of the “spirit of my generation” that I had ever heard, but at this point in my life, Void feels so much more imminently relevant. And at this rate, I’ll probably be saying the same thing about her next record in a few years.

EMA – Solace
EMA – Neuromancer

Big Ups – Eighteen Hours of Static

Eighteen Hours of Static opens with the most strained vocal performance on the entire record, a yelling of the lines “With eyes and ears, we can see in here / But with lips and mouths, we could kiss and shout / Let’s take our hands and use them to feel / Then we can rest, and then we can heal.” The music that follows is an oddly distant catalog of modern discontent. Make no mistake, Big Ups are post-hardcore through and through and these are some impassioned songs. But the substance of their lyrics are almost hilariously non-specific, whether it’s angst over “I can’t seem to conjure up anything, because I haven’t done anything,” the way that “everybody says it’s getting better all the time but it’s bad, still bad” or a laundry list of “disposables” that could have come out of any and every household in the first world. It often feels like the album is addressing an audience, more so than a listener. I don’t know if there’s supposed to be a deeper point to all of that (sometimes they drone on like reinforced mantras, “Gotta stay positive. . . No other way to live. . .”) or if it’s just the only kind of song that Big Ups is capable of writing, but the whole thing works as a kind of general, loose catharsis. Also the hooks are top notch, so the tunes here will stick with you if nothing else.

Big Ups – Body Parts
Big Ups – Justice

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything

This is an album that defies convenient genre restraints, so perhaps the best way to classify it is “Music with vocals from some of the dudes what are in that band Godspeed You! Black Emperor.” If that name is enough to excite you (and you haven’t already heard of this project) then go forth, my son. For everyone else, what you have here is a sort of blend of indie-rock (aka “eccentric”) vocals paired with experimental music and compositions vaguely associated with post-rock, though things do get quite a bit punk here. It’s dark, it’s heavy, it’s noisy, and it all climaxes fantastically in the best song that Arcade Fire never wrote, What We Loved Was Not Enough (“all our children gonna die!”).

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Fuck Off Get Free
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – What We Loved Was Not Enough

How to Dress Well – “What Is This Heart?”

The frustrating thing about “What is This Heart?” and perhaps How to Dress Well in general is how much it superficially resembles everything that people who hate modern ambient R&B hate about modern ambient R&B. Lead singles like Repeat Pleasure (in my opinion the weakest song on the entire album) aren’t exactly helping this perception. But while “What Is This Heart” bears more than a little concern for the love life of its narrator, it’s smart enough to know that this is just one facet of a person, one that isn’t inherently good, and one that is extremely vulnerable to whatever else said narrator is going through. While other records might be content to let us know that our singer is lonely and longing for human comfort, “What Is This Heart?” takes the time to establish how and why these events came to pass. Combine that with a change in production that sees Tom Krell finally “stepping out of the shadows” as it were, and this feels like the most impressively “human” entry that this genre has seen in years.

How to Dress Well – Words I Don’t Remember
How to Dress Well – Face Again

Wild Beasts – Present Tense

“We’re decadent beyond our means, we’ve a zeal” is probably tied in to the political nature of the track Wanderlust, but it also reads like what could be the most autobiographical thing Wild Beasts have ever put into a song. This is a band that trades in excess. Their records swagger and sway, brimming with youthful lust and “dancing cocks.” This is the sort of thing that the band has built a fanbase on, and Present Tense opens (possibly) with a recognition of it, before pulling back gradually over the course of the album. It’s tempting to say that Present Tense is the most “emotive” the band has ever been, but then lust and bravado still express emotions. Sincere ones, even. Vulnerable would probably be the best word. Present Tense is more concerned with simple truths and honest reflection, culminating in what may be the first real “love song” they’ve ever done, with the ethereal, almost (but not quite!) saccharine Palace. “You remind me of the person I wanted to be—before I forgot” are the words of someone who has come a long way from “I take you in my mouth like a lion takes his game.”

Wild Beasts – Wanderlust
Wild Beasts – Palace

Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

The music of Timber Timbre is almost maddeningly evocative—as if it’s the score to a film you can’t remember seeing, or you heard it once on the radio, at midnight, during a drive you don’t remember having. The band has a gift for atmosphere, creating such and inclusive sense of time and place that their music can then cycle back and revel in. Hot Dreams is probably their most accomplished work to date, focusing less on a Lynchian horror vibe and more on detailed and ambitious instrumentation (featuring sax work by Colin Stetson!!!). Sometimes this instrumentation is even able to take center stage, bringing to mind the similarly cinematographic sprawls of one of my favorite records (two of them, technically) of last year, Drifters/Love is the Devil by Dirty Beaches.

Timber Timbre – Beat the Drum Slowly
Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

Indian – From All Purity

Indian is a band that wants you to feel pain. There’s a lot going on in From All Purity, but pain is the core mantra. The bio on their bandcamp page concludes with the sentence, “this is the opposite of easy listening.” Their sound blends noise music with metal seamlessly, creating the most punishing, primal, abrasive wall of sound this side of Wreck and Reference. Yet it’s held up by a group of truly talented musicians (including ex-guitarist of Wolves in the Throne Room, Will Lindsay). But there’s an undeniable sense of melody stringing the whole project together, and making it work on a level above your average, interchangeable noise record. And I like it a heck of a lot more than that new Swans thing.

Indian – Rhetoric of No.
Indian – Disambiguation

Wreck and Reference – Want

Want trades in the musical eclecticism of No Youth for something much more raw and focused, but no less original (and unclassifiable). The album opens with a sonic bombast, but it’s just as likely to give way to electric guitar shreds as it is a Tim Hecker-esque ambient soundscape. While the above From All Purity works like a constant violence on the ears, Want takes the listener places, providing some of the most beautiful musical textures that I’ve heard all year right alongside the most abrasive ones.

Wreck and Reference – Corpse Museum
Wreck and Reference – Apologies

Open Mike Eagle – Dark Comedy

Dark Comedy reads a bit like an indie-rap manifesto, from the modest anti-posturing ("we the best, mostly/ Sometimes the freshest rhymers/ We the tightest, kinda”) to everything that comes along with a line like “I’m the president of the rappers that don’t condone date rape” and more or less every line of the “advice rap” Doug Stampers. Eagle has always sort of positioned himself here, as someone overlooking a scene, and then writing his music primarily as a critique of it (two of his earlier efforts are titled Unapologetic Art Rap and, my personal favorite, Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes) but Comedy is perhaps the first time he’s been able to really, really follow through on the whole idea. It’s consistent, it’s on point, it’s completely relational, but also subversive. Eagle has written brilliant songs in the past. Lots of them. But Dark Comedy is the first time that it feels easy to say he’s put out a truly brilliant album.

Open Mike Eagle – Dark Comedy Morning Show
Open Mike Eagle – Qualifiers

The Soft Pink Truth – Why Do the Heathen Rage?

ISIS THE RAINBOW OF SAPPHIRE MYSTERIES YOU ARE THE CALLING I HEAR FROM THE WIND IN MY BONES A MOTHER OF LIFE BEGOTTEN FROM YOUR WOMB OF LIGHT WE RISE NOW OUT OF THE MASCULINE DEATH THAT IS JEHOVAH’S ENSLAVEMENT IN THE FULLNESS OF SWEET WOMANS BLOOD AND FAIRY RAGE OUR TOUCH BLOSSOMS LIKE THE TIDES OF EARTH WE ARE STRONG TO COME AGAIN I BELIEVE IN THE GODDESS THE MOVEMENT FOR LIFE FORMED BY OUR GENDERLESS BRIGTENING FOR OUR POWERLESS AND SUCKLING OUR STRUGGLE BY THE ROSE IN OUR CHAKRAS I TAP THE ANDROGYNE WITH YOU OUR LOVE IS REVOLT WITH YOU WE ARE EACH ATOMS OF SIGNIFICANCE DIANA MY LOVER OF AMAZONS MY TRIUMPH OF FAGGOT WITCHES FEED US THE LUNAR NECTAR BETWEEN POEMS AND TEARS BETWEEN SILENCE AND CELEBRATIONS AND GUIDE US TO DESTROY THE MACHINERY THAT ALIENATES US THEN SHALL OUR CAPTORS PARASITE UPON THEMSELVES O KALI THE SOURCE THE DESTROYER THE RETURN IN PAIN’S DIGNITY YOUR FACE IS BEHIND OUR FACES WE ARE STRONG TO COME AGAIN.

The Soft Pink Truth – Black Metal
The Soft Pink Truth – Satanic Black Devotion