#aotyedit

In all, CMAT emerges as a rare and disarmingly compelling voice in today’s music landscape, equally at ease slipping punchy political observations and cultural critique into buoyant melodies, as she is with heartbreak and wry humour in her songwriting. EURO-COUNTRY cements this duality: it’s an ambitious but flawlessly executed leap uniting sharp commentary on capitalism, national identity, grief, fame, and beauty standards with emotional resonance, captivating hooks, and her signature comedic flair.

New Zealand indie-rockers, THE BETHS, are back with their fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie. For the quartet, the record can be summarised as a representation of life where nothing is straightforward, and everything happens in its own mysterious way. It’s as equally terrifying as it is beautiful but, in the words of frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes, “Linear progression is an illusion. What life really is is maintenance and finding meaning in that maintenance.” And, frankly, the album serves as a sweet reminder that we are all human beings going through our own stories at different paces, so there’s no point in comparing yourself to others.

Over its 12 songs, Hasan steadily unspools her narrative through radically precise pop. She sifts through suppressed emotions, setting vibrant lyrics against pattering drums, ringing electric guitars and rhythmic bass lines. Hasan channels life lessons from her dad in ‘Coloured Concrete’ and flips poetry into song on ‘Miss Construed’ and ‘Spinning Plates’. Even in its title and sound alone, ‘Verbathim’ is a self-determined statement of being. // I wanted people to mark my words with the things that I was saying long before October 2023. Then, I was stripped of all connection and ostracized. It felt biblical and like someone [was] holding my tongue. I wanted [the title] to be as if someone grabbed my tongue in the middle of saying ‘verbatim’. It’s going to be historical, especially when Palestine is free.

Like the name suggests, Ace by Madison Cunningham is the ultimate comeuppance. It’s about time, too, being her third album via Verve Forecast. Finally, her folk-ish sonnets have the chance to sing. To be fair, even calling the songs on this album ‘sonnets’ somehow feels like a disservice to them, not least because it isn’t actually factually correct. The 14 tracks, in themselves, are their own epic poems; masteries of little worlds which Cunningham seems to have deftly conjured up under the slight touch of her hand. Of course, that seems like quite a loose image, but there’s no way of describing Ace other than utter beguiling magic. The basic principle of a break-up is hardly the most original source material, but amid the slew of monotonous heartbreak records out there, Cunningham has managed to create something that seems truly visionary and original. Between lush orchestrations, wailing vocals, and a truly pulsating heart, every song tells its own unique and distinctive story; this allows you to open up to the world of Ace while appreciating every intricate instrumentation for what it’s worth.

Well, [the album title] came from the closing track. I’m talking about childhood and summertime and innocence, and I remembered this snow cone flavor that I ate as a kid called Tiger’s Blood. It’s strawberry and coconut mixed together. I’m talking about somebody’s mouth being stained with tiger’s blood because it’s red from eating a snow cone and I loved it so much. I was like, “That sounds so muscular and intense but also innocent and sweet.” I just really liked the juxtaposition of that, of these polarizing meanings. It’s actually pretty innocent and innocuous, but it was hitting me in a certain way that felt like it represented the record.

That streak continues here, but the real delight of this ostensible side project is Allison Crutchfield’s return to the mic after an extended absence, and the rebirth of a sibling rock band, apparently sans fistfights or cricket bats. That means two great songwriters who, one senses here, write a little differently working together than they do separately.

SAYA is confirmation that her music is its own kind of cinema. These songs are spiritual, even in their cell-splicing beats, reverb sonar and drive-you-mad transitions; the guitars are intricate and the rhythms lope and twang through wounded frames. Gray’s classical background (her mom founded the Discovery Through the Arts school in Toronto and her dad is an acclaimed trumpeter) makes for good context, as SAYA is its own body and brain, a breakup exercise full of epic, idiosyncratic stories of farewell and mourning cut up into an all-encompassing and all-evading menagerie of trip-hop, psych-folk, prog-rock, glitch-tronica and dubby fusion. Written on a retreat to Japan during the comedown of 2023, Saya Gray has colored reinvention in 10 stages of grief, setting nebulas aglow in the dust, in the bizarre and in the bold.

I think that what's really important to me in my songwriting — and it's becoming more important with time — is documenting people that I find to be really important, or places or times in history, or what I'm witnessing around me. // You're almost like a musical journalist. // Yeah, I would say that's a lot of what this record is. And also learning what I have to say goodbye to, learning about what I can carry with me. We can't take everything with us: Some people are going to leave and some experiences are going to end. But at the same time, people stay with us. Their memory stays with us. I think that's where grief also becomes such a huge part of this record, grief being just another way that we love.