Grimes - Art Angels - November 6 - 4AD
Claire Boucher’s ascent to pop stardom is a story that defies the genre’s industry norms. Rather than fitting a label-generated image and singing other writers’ songs, she has always maintained a D.I.Y. approach to crafting who she is and what she performs as Grimes, internet be damned. Her latest effort is no exception, as she exhibited complete artistic control, writing, producing, and recording this new batch of fourteen songs. Art Angels, which pulls from K-pop, bubblegum, Eurodance and more, is essentially a maximalist pop smorgasbord from the perspective of multiple characters. Strip back the personas and tags, though, and at its core Art Angels is simply pop music that everyone can enjoy.
Majical Cloudz - Are You Alone? - October 16 - Matador
Canadian duo Majical Cloudz picked up steam in 2013 after Matador released their second album, Impersonator, a minimalist take on emotive electro-pop coating singer Devon Welsh’s personal yet universal lyrics in a wash of synths and programming. The two have toured heavily in North America since, even opening for Lorde in the fall of 2014. That association alone might’ve indicated that their follow-up would attempt at some sort of crossover appeal, but this year’s Are You Alone? wasn’t vastly different from what made Impersonator so great. Matthew Otto’s instrumental texturing is fuller but doesn’t infringe upon Welsh’s messages, instead providing a comfort blanket to the singer’s fragility and sadness.
Saintseneca - Such Things - October 9 - ANTI-
Though much of Saintseneca’s third full-length, Such Things, was written by the Ohio natives during or shortly after the recording of their second album, there’s an even more potent energy to these recordings than their previous work. Such Things still showcases core member Zac Little’s fascination with traditional folk instrumentation and carefully worded storytelling, but the album leans more towards the rock end of the folk-rock spectrum—a stark departure from their bluegrass-y start. Aside from a few slower, acoustic-driven numbers like “How Many Blankets Are In The World?”, the majority of ST’s songs possess propulsive rhythms and incredibly catchy choruses, proving the band can expound on the intersection of physics and neuroscience while still keeping things accessible.
Title Fight - Hyperview - February 3 - ANTI-
Pennsylvania emo stalwarts Title Fight imbued their bleeding-heart punk with a surprising dose of shoegaze on this year’s Hyperview. Whether jagged and biting or pensive and serene, heavily-effected guitars lent more depth to the band’s sound, complementing the album’s lovelorn subject matter. Take the sequential “Rose of Sharon” and “Trace Me Onto You”, for example, which sound like they could fit on the band’s previous effort, Floral Green, if it weren’t for a glassy guitar sheen and extensive use of the whammy bar. Many were taken aback by the band’s stylistic shift, but the band pulled it off well, opening themselves up to new audiences while retaining much of their core followers.
Viet Cong - Viet Cong - January 20 - Jagjaguwar
Viet Cong made it incredibly easy to let their narrative speak over their music. Founded by Matt Flegel and Michael Wallace after the public dissolution of Women, their previous band, in 2010—and the tragic overnight death of one of that group’s guitarists, Christopher Reimer, just a year later—Viet Cong were steeped in expectation and public fixation from the get-go. Their problematic choice of band name didn’t help much either. But behind the onslaught of news lay a record so dense and obfuscating that the band’s commensurate layers of persona made sense. Over the record’s seven songs, the band manages to completely re-haul and update the post-punk canon, facing Reimer’s death with dry and acerbic statements coated in a patchwork of industrial sounding guitars. As idiosyncratic as their statement was—isolated, suffocated, regretful—it seemed very much of 2015.