It was 16 years ago that my first Best Albums of the Year list was published, and for most of the years since there have been 40 entries on the list. However, there were many times when recommending 40 as genuinely ‘best’ felt like a struggle, and a few years ago i reduced the total to 30. It’s been a worthwhile experiment, but it hasn’t helped quell the feeling that a list of this kind should be very deliberately exclusive, should only allow admittance not to the merely good (there’s plenty of that), not even to the great (ditto), but to the relative few that genuinely qualify as being … well, best. So, going forward, i’m going to limit the 5:4 Best Albums of the Year list to just 20 releases. It goes without saying that there’s plenty more out there worthy of your time, but these exceptional 20 are more than that: you’re worthy of their time – and the remarkable rewards you’ll enjoy.
20 | Milica Djordjević – Musica Viva #44

This new album of Milica Djordjević’s music serves as both an excellent portrait of her particular aesthetic, and also ferocious proof that she’s undoubtedly one of the most visceral contemporary composers working today. The fact the album opens with the 5-minute miniature Mali svitac, žestoko ozaren i prestravljen nesnošljivom lepotom [Little firefly, brightly illuminated and terrified by unbearable beauty] is in hindsight a mischievous tease, though this short work contains clear archtypes of what’s to follow, above all its intense final tutti texture, laden with tremulous overload. Quicksilver greatly expands on this, demonstrating throughout the most fascinating impression of fast and slow material simultaneously. This is articulated via a fundamentally tense narrative – seemingly quintessential in Djordjević’s work – where hectic episodes have their momentum smashed, and where attempts at focus or shape are rendered confused and blurred. This brings out another crucial dual aspect: at once energised and enervated, the orchestra caught between these poles, collapsing into vague murmurations or forming hyperactive overdetailed melees.
i explored Čvor for wind, brass and percussion in my 2021 Advent Calendar, and while this performance (by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Duncan Ward) is more measured, less wild and desperate than that première performance, it’s still very powerful indeed. The same pervading sense of writhing frustration is etched into everything, the instruments by turns gruff and aggressive, their attempts to extrude outwards invariably sagging back into omnipresent darkness. The album closes with Mit o ptici [Myth of the bird] for choir and orchestra, an overwhelming work based on a text by Miroslav Antić that reflects on the consequences of an act of creation. What separates this piece from the others is the extent of its passion, reaching a point of pure horror in the tumultuous third movement, where the sopranos practically freak out in distress. Highly intricate yet extremely direct, this is among the most compelling orchestral music you’re likely to hear. [CD / DL]
19 | Bass Communion – The Itself of Itself

Steven Wilson only adopts his Bass Communion nom de guerre from time to time, every few years, which makes his latest release, The Itself of Itself, an all the more exciting prospect. Always a vehicle for Wilson’s more radical, less stylistically-bound musical ideas, it’s an album that goes deep into abstract territory, the title openly suggesting it’s not music ‘about’ anything other its own sonic identity. As such, it’s far more elusive than the more immediate forms of gentle, dronal and / or hard-edged ambient heard in previous Bass Communion releases, yet it’s also one of the most – if not the most – compelling of them all.
The musical narratives are often similarly straightforward, though. ‘Unperson’ sets up a place where skittering, scratchy sounds and a distant network of glistening pitches become periodically wiped out by intimidating walls of erosion and abrasion. The title track explores the interplay of assorted deep wind tones, their foghorn-like resonances becoming the primary element among several that play out in parallel to form a composite but sympathetic texture. ‘Apparition 5’ lives up to its name, literally emerging from and quickly receding back to nothing, elusive but with a strength to it; its sibling, ‘Apparition 3’, fixates on a vocal-tinged looping fragment with faint support tones around, mesmerising with an implied sense of determination. The highlights are ‘Bruise’ and ‘Blackmail’, both of which return to noise, the latter in a complex soundworld again comprising multiple individuated elements forming a muscular, homogeneous environment, the former an extended essay in more elusive textural formation, slow but energised, heavily redolent of Kreng in its monochromatic, unsettlingly theatrical atmosphere. [CD / LP / DL]
18 | Sole Massif – Embrace

In his work of recent years, Lithuanian musician Dovydas Vasiliauskas, aka Sole Massif, has consistently set himself apart from the plethora of wannabes (and should-know-betters) exploring the meeting point of dark ambient and glitched electronics. Embrace is some his finest work to date, and perhaps his most archetypal, throwing together seemingly opposite musical elements: one mechanical, percussive and imposing, the other drifting, gentler and almost lyrical. The resulting tension is mirrored in the way the title Embrace suggests intimacy and human warmth, while the soundworld often evokes cool synthetic automation.
In many ways it’s a cycle that places us deep within the imaginary heart of complex, towering machinery. Opener ‘Enigmatic Beauty of Patterns’ suggests the starting up of something industrial, to the accompaniment of blank hiss and an indistinct voice. This continues through ‘Numerical Embodiment’, where muscular power and purring motors are initialised and subsequently pound against our bodies – as much felt as heard – and ‘Immortal Observer’, where abrasion is matched by a beautifully maintained intensity, flurries of accelerating beats answered by drones with shifting details, as if we were hearing the results of machines themselves playing electronics. This pervading sense of being deep within the core of everything is vividly immersive, given space through several more restrained tracks that follow, acting as windows into atmospheres, at times passive though never any less powerful. The closing three tracks are a tour de force, pitting bass and beats against vague disruptions, balancing them against hovering ambient chords, and giving them free rein in closer ‘Cold Luminescence’, where an apparent synthetic brain weighs things up, causing them to tilt and loom. Absolutely extraordinary from start to finish. [FREE DL]
17 | Metteson – Look To A Star

This album feels like a big deal. Not only because Metteson has for the most part been putting out singles for the past four years, but more because the level of Look To A Star’s musical and emotional maturity far exceeds the norm for contemporary pop. There are evocations at play: the verses in opening track ‘Only the Wind’ suggests The Ballet’s brand of wistful intimacy, while its chorus taps into the ’80s anthemic falsetto overdrive of Starship. ‘Anthemic’ is an important word for Metteson’s music; his choruses have a scale and strength of force that make them hugely uplifting, and which don’t simply invite but insist on everyone singing along.
However, the power in these songs comes most from their raw personal honesty, often disarmingly upbeat and thereby, perhaps surprisingly, suggesting optimism. ‘Waves’ is an ode to someone able to handle life better – “You seem to ride the waves that pull me under” – yet it adopts a dancefloor vibe, redolent of Pet Shop Boys in its melancholic hue. ‘Further Away’ takes a similar approach, a driving pulse underpinning accusations – “Courage and will / You took it took it took it” – with one sublime second verse moment (“where have they gone”) when the song momentarily hints at underlying anguish. Hope and resilience are the unmistakable takeaways from Look To A Star, though. Mutual vulnerability and support pervade the again anthemic ‘Heaver Than A Heart’, imbued with radiance in its second verse, while final track ‘Ever Working Tide’ pays slow, simple homage to a companion able to soften hard edges and “share the weight of the world”. Working through past pain has rarely been expressed with such heartfelt positivity. [DL]
16 | Mads Emil Dreyer – Disappearer

“[Forsvindere 2] inhabits a curious kind of almost stasis … yet early on Dreyer … undermines this with temporary tilts … By the time the music box … runs out of energy, we realise we’re some way from where we started … Forsvindere 1, uses the same instruments … utilised to form another mechanism of sorts …. Dreyer starts challenging the texture, worrying it with chromaticisms, compounded by the increasing sense that these regular pauses are themselves something unsettling, as the music never quite seems the same when it restarts. … It’s not surprising that music with such an icy demeanour should cause one to shiver.
Vidder 1 … is lost in waves of shimmer, judder and pulsation as tones caress or jar against each other. There’s a lovely sense of the music enriching, thickening and condensing as it continues … as if it were immersed and suspended within a vibrating viscous fluid. The work’s ambient credentials are reinforced by its lack of an ending, drifting and vanishing before our ears. Vidder 4 … is by far the most tranquil music heard throughout Disappearer …. However, at its mid-point, everything turns oblique … A harmonic cloud starts to form … and Dreyer nicely makes it ambiguous, possibly protective, possibly threatening. Maybe it’s neither, simply an agent of change, for the conclusion is a superimposition of these elements into a rich texture … glimmering and vibrating with energy.
… There’s something surprisingly dramatic about the way each piece rather nonchalantly plays out, never going where or being what we expected. That’s not to say it’s elusive; rather, this is music doing that most basic and quintessential of all musical actions: taking time to reveal its true self.” [reviewed in November]
15 | Poppy – Negative Spaces

Always an artist prepared to move freely between extremes, Negative Spaces isn’t just Poppy’s most accomplished work to date, it’s also her most stunningly unrestrained, an album with absolutely no limits. In the extent of its anger, it harks back to a time (sadly long distant) when the words “Nine Inch Nails” actually meant something, invoking NIN’s ‘Happiness in Slavery’ in opening track ‘Have you had enough?’ It feels intense as an opening gambit, but it’s as nothing beside the razor sharpness and overdriven rage that comes to the fore in ‘The Cost of Giving Up’, extended through ‘They’re all around us’ to screamed accusations of “coward” and “traitor” only made more potent as incandescence shines through the music.
But this is also a pop album, and in tracks like ‘Crystallized’ , ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Halo’ a lighter, more intimate and vulnerable aspect is allowed to express itself. More often than not, though, these softer touches are alloyed with hard-edged confidence, a take-no-shit-anymore attitude that articulates impatient frustration, such as those in ‘Nothing’ for whom “nothing’s enough … testing me with insanity’s grip”, triggering an immense screamo chorus. The high point of all this is ‘The center’s falling out’, so fast and intense it becomes like a pulseless cloud of pure expression, leading to a second half that in the same way veers wildly between temperamental limits. NIN are suggested again in the title track – “If there’s a hell, I’ll meet you there” – but twin aspects of vulnerability and self-reflection give the music depth and prevent it from ever becoming reactionary, a sign of the maturity shown throughout Negative Spaces. This is encapsulated in final song ‘Halo’, where the outpouring about past and present is replaced with a brighter focus on future positives: “I’ll follow”, “I trust”, “I’m full of ambition”, “The future’s never gonna wait.” This is Poppy at her most dauntlessly and unflinchingly real. [CD / LP / DL]
14 | Murcof – Twin Color, Vol. 1

Everything you need to know about Twin Color, Vol. 1 is revealed in the album’s amazing opening track, ‘Going Home (IRCAM version)’. The gentlest of chord progressions, caressed by the lightest of lyrical voices, gives the air of a lullaby. That’s one of the colours, and the other comes soon enough, a ramping up of intensity until everything fizzes and ripples with energy, suggesting everything could tilt over into dysphoric darkness. As the title states, though, these contrasting behavioural colours are twins, and are strongly simpatico. In ‘Cosmic Drifter’ they reinforce one another in the way its laidback, circular liveliness is abruptly transformed around the midpoint, becoming a landscape of the most delicious snarling surges, in turn receding into vague, quasi niente fragments in a dark space. ‘All These Worlds Part I’ (a 2010 reference?) follows a similar trajectory, soft, floating synth pads unsettlingly answered by huge modulating swells with acid at their edges, yet which work to the same end, projecting and elaborating the pad chords with full force before evolving into the most lovely plinking, purring float. It’s all highly organic, and deeply compelling.
Other tracks, such as ‘All These Worlds Part II’, ‘Night Break’ and ‘Tomorrow Part II’ (no sign of Part I) serve as interludes, more modest dreamscapes with gentler ideas, focusing on just one colour; ‘Enemy’ goes the other way, emphasising beats and punchy propulsion. But the album is at its best when Murcof brings the two together. ‘They Glow’ features retro-synth meandering, challenged by distorted stings that ultimately transfigure the track into a massive roaring wall of sustained glory. ‘Fight’ sets up a simple, stately bassline as the seed for an ecstatic melodic climax, every note of which seems to be made of liquid fire. On the strength of this extraordinary release, Vol. 2 can’t come quickly enough. [CD / LP / DL]
13 | Elif Yalvaç – Vection

“Perhaps the most obvious trait, heard in every track and one of the key elements that drives the obfuscatory / allusive aspect of the music, is resonance, the perception that what we’re hearing is reverberation emanating from some unclear source. In many ways it’s how Yalvaç harnesses this that makes the music as tantalising as it is, since while specific details are often scant, they are there. Or, at least, there’s the impression that they’re there, traces of tangibility that either the ear catches or the imagination conjures. But it’s not all smoke and mirrors, a procession of atmospheres and fug; Yalvaç makes sure that some sonic elements are clear in terms of presence, even if they’re unclear in terms of identity.
Take the title track, for example, in which a series of powerful deep waves pass across. My ears tell me there are traces or remnants of bells in there, but they could be a fantasy resulting from the complex vertical agglomerations of hanging notes. … Even more nebulous is Theia … the reverb is modulated by various distorted protrusions at the periphery. Nothing makes it to the surface, though in the track’s latter stages the intensity becomes gentle, allowing some soft, rather ghostly, melodic definition to appear, struck from right and left by fuzzy impacts.
A crucial aspect of the shared qualities of these tracks – one of the defining features of Vection overall – is crowded spaces, Yalvaç filling her soundscapes with a welter of diverse elements. However, the resultant density never feels overcrowded; the soundstage isn’t saturated, and as such, the music remains accessible, overwhelming without becoming overpowering.” [reviewed in June]
12 | Christopher McFall – I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake

“McFall’s work always sounds focused, but that’s especially true of the five untitled parts of I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake. The unity comes in part from the fact that his sound palette is deliberately limited … extended further by a clearly stratified approach to sound, whereby McFall essentially deconstructs the sonic elements and then reconstructs them such that their complexities remain, though now in a new multi-layered form. This creates a beautiful tension in part 1, where it feels active yet at the same time gentle, even relaxed … Part 3 is the only part of the album to assert a more ambient sensibility. A hovering pitch cloud acts as a backdrop for vague noises and scratchy sounds, all held in a rotating kind of stasis. …
It’s in part 2 that the scratchy, granular texture first makes an appearance, heard in the context of clear, regular sounds of wheel rotation, which instantly convey a palpable sense of power. It’s hypnotic as it cycles round, periodically embellished with gentle electronic bleeps, and while the layering is again abundantly clear, the layers sound interconnected rather than separate, heard as discrete aspects of a single totality. … Part 4 is, for me, the highlight. … From the outset things are different from what we’ve become accustomed to: birdsong and vague clatter before we fly into a filtered noise tunnel, soft swishes passing across our ears. But on several occasions it’s as if an invisible creative force is actively changing its mind, switching attention from one thing to another.
The extensive 13-minute final part serves as an extension, a development and a synthesis of sorts. … McFall refocuses one last time, and over low rumble we glimpse again that rudimentary melody, fading away into the night.” [reviewed in September]
11 | Lisel – The Vanishing Point

Is it a contradiction in terms to speak of an edgy ethereality? Yet that’s precisely what comes across most stridently in this latest album from Eliza Bagg’s autotuned alter-ego Lisel. Expanding on last year’s proof-of-concept Patterns for Auto-Tuned Voices and Delay, in the 10 songs on The Vanishing Point Bagg’s über-pure vocals are often placed within dense, busy environments. Her voice thereby sits at a liminal point between being the focal point or just one element among many. This is reinforced by the fact that her lyrics are hard to discern, often turning her melodic lines and gestures into something instrumental or timbral. In turn, this enhances the distancing effect from the autotune, making it the apparent product of some robotic non-sentience attempting lyrical expression. Yet this is matched by the obviously sentient lyricism in each and every song, burgeoning in huge emotional overflows.
Arpeggiated synths are the usual accompaniment in these songs, sometimes providing a kind of idle chugging over which Bagg can flow or soar, elsewhere acting with more agency, propelling the music and carrying the vocals along with them. In ‘Time&Money (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying)’ there’s an overt disconnect between voice and accompaniment, Bagg’s steady melody – here bringing to mind Sarah Blackwood – at odds with the electronics’ intense pounding ferocity. The title track is balanced, gentle rising prettiness forming a backdrop to a line rendered uncanny due to its rippling artificiality, while in ‘Celestial Edges’ the music flits between crowded verses and beautifully radiant bridge passages. Bagg’s vocals come most to the fore in the first and last tracks, ostensibly independent of intermittent beats in ‘Straight to the Heart’, and exploding in a stunning vocoder chorus in ‘The Past is a Tiger’, her voice transformed into an eerie but all-too-human blaze of pure passion. [CD / DL]
Gracias, como todos los años, por estas grandes recomendaciones. Un fiel seguidor desde los comienzos. Desde España.
Por cierto, sólo has utilizado a Francisco López, en alguna tracklist,… No estaría de más abrir un poco el campo a artistas españoles como Eduardo Polonio (recientemente fallecido), Luís Paniagua, Macromassa, Victor Nubla, Fernando Gallego, El sueño de Hyparco,… Un saludo y feliz año!