I love this thread every year, to precede listageddon
It’s very simple, you pick a record that you think people may have missed or forgotten and share a brief description. Given there are 120,000 songs released every day and 20-30 must hear albums every Friday, so it’s very easy to not have heard something other people are obsessed with
I’ll start…
Ripe by Postcards
This record has the magic of so many things that I can half hear and half feel in its bones. In some ways it sounds like turn of the century Cure inspired indie (Interpol, The Stills, Remy Zero, Pretty Girls Make Graves) but in another way the record feels like a rejection of what came after the Cocteau Twins and Jeff Buckley, and has its defiant own insular sound with a fire in its belly.
It was released on the Beirut label Ruptured who consistently release great records (lots of them featuring Julia Sabra and producer Fadi Tabbal who seems like Lebanon’s Johnny Jewel or Dan Carey) and thank you to whoever it was on these forums who recommended it back in March
Every now and again I fall completely out of step with the current music scene, which becomes an opportunity to go back and listen to records that came out before I was old enough to become aware of them. This year I’ve found myself trawling through old NMEs and Peel playlists to look for records that were massive in the 80s but time has forgotten. One of my favourite genres remains “female-fronted indie pop” - and this has been backed up by a lot of listening to The Darling Buds, Heart Throbs, The Popguns, even Th’Faith Healers - so it’s been a real treat to discover The Cords, and only very recently. They proudly wear their influences - talking up early Primitives records and being photographed in front of a wall of Vaselines posters. Their songs seem deceptively simple, but then so did those which influence them and, like other bands like Blushing, they bring just enough of the here and now into a gloriously retro sound.
Oh yeah! I watched this live set on an ice rink and the collab with FKA twigs, and YouTube keeps treating me to tunes but haven’t heard the album yet. Will do
or the new Ninajirachi record, doesn’t seem to be mentioned much on here but it’s got some of the best glitchy, witty ‘‘girl edm’’. A real shot in the arm.
Not sure if it counts, and maybe everyone who’s interested already knows it, but The Year of Radical Romantics by Fever Ray is the one for me. It’s probably my favourite thing they’ve released. Truly wonderful stuff.
There you go. No one ever talks about them here but I think they are amazing, all albums are good. This ones no exception. Experimental leaning hip hop, jumps around genres (veers into doom metal at one point) good raps, contemporary issues, great production,
