55 Albums Released in 2019 That Splash Oat Milk In My Earl Grey
This year felt like slo-mo, a holding pattern and a fast-forward button stumbling towards unknown ends. I spent the early months in paternal bliss and sleep deprivation, caring for my newborn daughter, then spent the rest of the year running to slow down… to make the most of small moments with my family, to juggle that thing every lifestyle magazine calls the work-life balance, to know when I need help and being willing to ask for it, to making priorities with loved ones.
Also, after years of oolongs and a staunch no-milk-in-tea-except-milk-teas policy, I started putting honey and oat milk in my Earl Grey, an old tea standby that's felt warmly familiar in colder months. Similarly, I dug my heels into familiar-to-me gnarly metal, deep drone and abrasive punk this year, uninterested in poptimist takes on indie-rock. In an effort to maximize more time with new family and less with bulls***, I leaned hard into my Viking's Choice column at NPR Music (which went weekly!) to shout out underground debauchery and beauty to anyone who would listen.
Below are 55 albums (and a few reissues and archival releases) that hit me in different ways over 2019. No ranking, just links out to Bandcamp where available. They come paired with emoji because that's a thing I do on Twitter.
See also:
Viking's Choice: The Year In The Loud And The Weird (my annual year-end episode of All Songs Considered)
20 Punk Albums Released In 2019 That Flip Eggs, Pick Up Chains
20 Metal Albums Released In 2019 That Bluurgh Over Sick Riffs
A nine-hour playlist of 2019 jamz
But first, some stray thoughts:
Ta-Nehisi Coates' still-ongoing Captain America run has been extremely rewarding. A beloved superhero comes to terms with the line between patriotism and nationalism as Coates underlines that American progress often comes from reluctance.
Daniel Warren Johnson's Murder Falcon spoke to me not only as a metalhead who loves cartoonishly kick-ass violence, but also as a dude with a tender heart… that final issue still gets me in the feels.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours is secretly a trilogy of movies about the loving, painstaking process of creation, specifically music. I'd never seen any of them until paternity leave (and a sleeping baby) gave me hours to binge long-neglected to-watch lists. In 1993's Blue, in particular, a composition mirrors the grief of Juliette Binoche in an exquisite performance.
Tiny Desk concerts I produced for NPR Music in 2019: American Football (with a children’s choir!), Thou, Erin Rae, Carly Rae Jepsen (sort of), Jimmy Eat World and Mount Eerie (videos coming in 2020).
There’s a gallery at Glenstone, a truly stunning museum experience, that’s literally just a room full of books, a sculpted wooden bench and a large window that looks out on the rolling hills of Maryland. I could spend hours there.
The second season of KCRW's Lost Notes, hosted by Jessica Hopper, built episodes like albums, sequenced with eureka moments throughout. See: the story of a teenage Farsi New Wave sibling duo and a difficult and necessary reassessment of John Fahey through the women in his life.
High Spirits (May 7, Atlas Brew Works) is such a force for good. Heavy metal singalongs about love, friendship and positivity. I feel like this band needs to tour with Sheer Mag to be fully appreciated by an unknowing audience.
Has your baseball team ever won the pennant with the sleeping baby on your chest? So many silent screams of joy in our household as the Nats not only won the National League, but the whole dang World Series. I haven't lived in a city/state with a baseball team that's gone to the World Series since 1995.
Circuit Des Yeux's Haley Fohr (Dec. 5, Hirshhorn) tuned her voice to feedback hum and the rest that followed felt like a wordless eulogy for 2019. I felt renewed by it.
I can't think of a prettier song released in 2019 than "This Time Around" by Jessica Pratt. It is saudade whispered into the wind.
This was my Linda Ronstadt year. Heart Like a Wheel, Canciones de mi Padre, her records with the Stone Poneys — the Queen of LA, with a voice that both bursts out of and melts into dusk, softened the edges of long days with an equally adventurous and easygoing spirit.
🚙 Petrol Girls, Cut & Stitch: In 2019, it was crucial — life-affirming and -saving, even — to make your own noise. "This is the sound / It moves in our bodies / It passes through time / Brings what came before us," Petrol Girls' Ren Aldridge screamed at the top of a turbulent punk record filled with compassion. That boundless philosophy resonated with me this year — to listen and absorb more deeply, to excavate the traces of memory in music.
👽 Blood Incantation, Hidden History of the Human Race: Simultaneously exists in the gaping maw of death-metal tradition and the galaxy brain of its future.
💾 Kali Malone, The Sacrificial Code: Seeks the solemnity of the drone in the pipe organ, but leans into the vulnerability pushed through the air.
🕹️ billy woods & Kenny Segal, Hiding Places: An album-length self-excavation that crawls through moldy memories in a brutal poetry that is at times darkly funny but mostly wrestles with personal and societal truths that'll leave you touched, shook.
📟 Holly Herndon, PROTO: One of our deepest thinkers went to the past to make music from the future.
🚨 Rakta, Falha Comum: Creepazoid emanations from a subterranean plane.
🐣 Sunwatchers, Illegal Moves: Ecstatic protest music summoning the beauty and rage of Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Rhys Chatham and Hawkwind.
🏞 Bill Orcutt, Odds Against Tomorrow: The most engaging, radical, but surprisingly accessible solo guitar album of the year. Bill Orcutt's ragged-yet-tender guitar skronk gives shaggy texture to rapturous melodies.
🍕 Control Top, Covert Contracts: This hits some dance-punky Erase Errata sweet spots for me, but with the technical finesse of a power trio.
🚟 Real Life Rock & Roll Band, Hollerin' the Spirit: Applies minimalist techniques to rumbling, dueling guitar histrionics with a reckless, but locked-in energy. Never woulda thunk American Football and Henry Flynt could hoedown together.
🐠 Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet, Orange: Balances austere beauty with rumbling earth. Riveting music for string quartet.
💥 Mdou Moctor, Ilana (The Creator): Where ZZ Top bombast, Black Sabbath riffs and Tuareg trance rhythms swirl into an acid-rock stomp.
👑 Vagabon, Vagabon: Goes so many places, yet always returns home.
🎭 JPEGMAFIA, All My Heroes Are Cornballs: A neon-freaked feast blasted in slow mo and fast forward all at once.
🌆 Denzel Curry, ZUU: Dude's a metal rapper without a metal band, but if he ever started one, I'm down 100 percent.
💨 Whistling Arrow, Whistling Arrow: An avant UK supergroup of prepared guitar, violin, electronics and hypnotic percussion drinks deep of dark lagers and mossy earth.
🐸 101 Notes on Jazz: Things are getting hard around the boloney hole...
🐳 M. Sage, Catch a Blessing: Warm, fuzzy world-building from blocks of sound stretched and warped into a new nostalgia.
🚇 Mizmor, Cairn: Deliberate and patient in its annihilating pace; lumbering, yet regally melodic riffs echo into a chasm of feedback.
🌅 Takafumi Matsubara, Strange, Beautiful And Fast: Next-level grind from the Gridlink mastermind and friends. While No One Knows What the Dead Think picked up where Discordance Axis left off, Takafumi Matsubara shreds into the future.
🐎 American Football, LP3: A reunion that keeps on giving and growing. Impressionistic in its quietly bursting arrangements and attuned to the individual talents of its vocal guests, especially that stunning duet with Hayley Williams.
🔋 v/a, Seitō: In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: This compilation does for modern Japanese women in experimental music what P.S.F.’s Tokyo Flashback comps did for the Japanese psychedelic scenes of yore.
👗 Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated: Didn't hold together as much as I wanted, or play like E•MO•TION's late-night mixtape, but every time one of its singles popped up on a friend's playlist -- "Julien," "Want You in My Room," "The Sound" and especially the slow-burn synth-pop exhaustion of "Too Much" -- I'd think, "Carly Rae Jepsen is the Queen of the Song I Needed Right Now."
🌕 Rong, wormhat: Just bonkers. Boston's Rong channels the joyous chaos of Japanese punks Melt-Banana and the aggro skronk of Brainiac with a tad of Deerhoof's weirdo-pop hooks.
✊🏿 Sounds of Liberation, Sounds of Liberation / Unreleased Columbia University 1973: Free jazz and funk band deep in spiritual grooves. Killer performances all around, but such a trip to hear more from young vibraphonist Khan Jamal during his Drum Dance to the Motherland era.
🐬 Great Grandpa, Four of Arrows: If Sixpence None the Richer made an emo record, but only had Return of the Frog Queen on the mood board.
📳 Sarah Louise, Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars: One of my favorite guitarists right now. Digitally processes melodies and single notes in an electronic elation landing somewhere between Robert Fripp, Alice Coltrane and Terry Riley.
📮 Sarah Hennies, Reservoir 1: An immersive sound cycle in constant motion, a quiet rumble that slowly transforms in and out of a glorious clatter.
👣 Psychedelic Speed Freaks, Psychedelic Speed Freaks: Munehiro Narita essentially picks up where High Rise left off, still plays the guitar like it's about to blow up.
🍩 Town Portal, Of Violence: Most instrumental post/prog-rock puts me to sleep, but this Danish trio illustrates just how dynamic and sound-rich this music can be.
🛀 Jim O'Rourke, steamroom 45: An electronic excavation from the deep abyss. The 37-minute "Sigaretstraat" is a master class in patience, dynamics and sublime dissonance.
🎀 Cristina Quesada, I Think I Heard a Rumor: Multi-lingual, ultra-chic dance-pop with super-smart synth arrangements. Think: Tiki drinks and mod dresses.
⏹ John Luther Adams, Become Desert: Truly time-less music; as in, music without time.
⏏ Julia Reidy, brace, brace: Late night, longform excursions that offer an alternate Blade Runner soundtrack with frenzied 12-string, fuzzy synth glossolalia and an Auto-Tuned bummer haze.
🚞 A Million Dollars, I Love Your Voice and I Love You: Weird and warped twee-pop that woulda headlined Silent Barn.
📠 Priests, The Seduction of Kansas: Truth-telling and truth-seeking through a mangled disco haze and bleak New Wave romanticism.
🏭 Werner Durand with Amelia Cuni and Victor Meertens, processions: Majestic drones capture an undulating wonder with enveloping somnolence.
🎳 Sheer Mag, A Distant Call: The denim-and-leather-jacket-wearing standard bearers of truly independent rock and roll double-downed on their sound, but opened their hearts a bit more.
📒 Susan Alcorn / Joe McPhee / Ken Vandermark, Invitation to a Dream: Illuminates the flickering motions of exploration.
😱 Serpent Column, Mirror in Darkness: Pitch-black metal chaos with forceful melodies twisted into the tableau. Honestly? Deathspell Omega but skramz.
🏅 Pernice Brothers, Spread the Feeling: Joe Pernice digs into his '80s record collection to return with some of his most delicately written, winsome guitar-pop in years and tons of one-liners: "Love is a shoeless charlatan, a silver-tongued huckster with a sadist’s lipless grin."
🍓 Kalie Schorr, Open Book: Whip-smart, hook-twanged country-pop raised on MTV2 pop-punk and Sheryl Crow.
📀 Angel Olsen, All Mirrors: In a year where we lost Scott Walker, this felt like a torch passed from 1969.
😪 Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom pt. 2: Phil Elverum draws us in evermore, revisiting a beloved album, mode and collaborator (the remarkable Julie Doiron), and molding them into his ever-changing songwriting and circumstance. Contains the most tender couplet of the year, which I'll carry with me always: "If ever the bonfire that I carry around could warm you again / I will be out here in the weather for you glowing."
🙉 75 Dollar Bill, I Was Real: Serious hypno-grooves from these drone excavators.
👢 Karen Marks, Cold Cafe: The early '80s artist behind the Sky Girl comp's broodiest track gets a few more songs of existential synth-pop and jangly post-punk. Just wanna put them on mixtapes for friends.
🍻 Haunt, If Icarus Could Fly: Synthesizes an earnest, studied love for '80s heavy metal with tons of guitar harmonies and can-crushing anthems, yes, but also a ton of heart.
🍖 Bob Dylan, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The strangest, most mystical and wild Dylan persona in all of its face-painted glory.
🌹 A Pregnant Light, Broken Play: Damian Master's endless creativity and shameless bravado coalesce into a rugged beauty. As always, riffs for days.
🦄 Fire-Toolz, Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace): Clashes New Age synthscapes, clubby raves, jazz fusion and metal shrieks into an idiosyncratic master's pure creation.
🌇 Maria W Horn, Epistasis: Quiet, yet forceful acoustic elements are wrapped in the sinews of technology to blur composition. A stirring mix of icy string drones and minimalist piano.
🐲 Soul Glo, The N**** in Me Is Me: Distills the rage and terror of living in America while being black with blunt force.
🍢 Mára, Here Behold Your Own: Snapshots of a time before parenthood rendered in garbled organ, ambient guitar loops and echoing lullabies. Felt this one deeply.
🚙 The Go-Betweens, G Stands for Go-Betweens: The Go-Betweens Anthology - Volume 2: There's a live KCRW version of "Quiet Heart" that just absolutely destroys me. Deeply thankful for the presentation and preservation that's gone into these box sets.
😈 Bat for Lashes, Lost Girls: A coming-of-age concept album about a teenage vampire gang that was somehow severely overlooked. Some of Natasha's most tender songwriting and a rich synth-pop world that'd make M83 jealous.
