Honorable Mentions

Nine Inch Nails- Ghosts V: Together; Mare Cognitum and Spectral Lore- Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine; Slomosa- s/t; Lady Gaga- Chromatica; Dope Smoker- Zeroin; Kamasi Washington- Becoming soundtrack; Defeated Sanity- The Sanguinary Impetus; Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats- Unlocked

Legit Haven’t Spent Enough Time With Them to Have an Opinion So Far

Napalm Death- Throes of Joy in the Arms of Defeatism (I know, I know…); Open Mic Eagle- Anime, Trauma, and Divorce; Today is the Day- No Good for Anyone; Nug– Alter Ego; AC/DC- Power Up

For entries 20 through 6, unsurprisingly, I’ll be summing up my feelings for the record in question in haiku. 5 through 1 get a proper, overwritten Shaun Hand blurb.

HENCEFORTH…

20. Imperial Triumphant, Alphaville

Just when you thought that

Avant-Jazz and metal were

done as a couple…

19. Gaerea, Limbo

I am going to

check out so much Portuguese

black metal next year.

18. Xazraug, Unsympathetic Empryian

Symphonic but not

cheesy like Dimmu Borgir

or some goofy shit

17. Tame Impala, The Slow Rush

A breezy & fun

little record: the summer

record COVID killed.

16. Quakers, Quakers II: The Next Wave

Like 89 songs

And all of them are perfect.

Guilty Simpson’s there.

15. Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still

A good Ulcerate

record is equal parts fear

and horrified awe.

14. Black Curse, Endless Wound

What the fuck is in

the water out in Denver??

Sick bands everywhere.

13. Esoctrilihum, Eternity of Shaog

Black metal with vi-

olins, weird, squirrely riffs abound.

Fucked up, grim, necro.

12. Feminazgul, No Dawn for Men

This record is so

much better than a good troll,

but that doesn’t hurt.

11. clipping., Vision of Bodies Being Burned

Daveed Diggs dropping

this gem around Halloween

beats Hamilton, guy.

10. Of Feather and Bone, Sulfuric Disintegration

A better year for

fucked up blackened death metal

has yet to arrive.

9. Elder, Omens

Unabashedly

bringing back late aughts-style

post-metal. On board.

8. Deftones, Ohms

A Deftones record

is always welcome. This one

is top shelf business.

7. Westside Gunn, Who Made the Sunshine?

Only Buffalo

could produce someone as cold

yet fire as Westside.

6. Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist, Alfredo

Back to back classics.

Maybe the middle of a

threepeat, maybe not.

Alright, so…

5. Mr. Bungle, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny

It’s fascinating to see the genesis of a bona-fide “Well yeah, EVERYONE loves THAT record, but…” album. I don’t think anything in Mr. Bungle’s decades-long (!) career is this accessible – nary a bout of diarrhea nor circus noises to be found here – or this good. I’d be the fifteen hundredth person to point out how this is the best thrash record I’ve heard in a long time, regardless of whose name is attached, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Of course, straightforward thrash via Mr. Bungle is weird as hell for anyone else. But the band attached is legendary: Scott Ian (one of metal’s best rhythm guitarists) and Dave Lombardo frame the chaos perfectly, pulling the record back into unorthodox thrash when it starts to wander. Disco Volante might be the nerds’ gateway, but Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny is the rare metal record that balances ferocity with a kitchen sink of influences. Worth the wait and the hype.

4. Jay Electronica, A Written Testimony

Maybe you’re like me and had no idea who Jay Electronica was besides a few guest appearances (and even then, couldn’t pick his voice out of the lineup). Maybe you’d been waiting a decade for this record to come out, poring over different mixes of “Shiny Suit Theory.” But either way, A Written Testimony is a goddamn triumph. I thought the same thing many others did at first: Jay-Z is on every track with vocals, a la Biggie/Puffy. But Jay isn’t propping up J. Electricity one bit. Instead, he provides a counterpart to the non-HOVA Jay’s tight, intellectual rhymes like Ghostface on Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. While one Jay might be the most rich and successful rapper going, he cedes enough space and attention to Jay Electronica, in both beats and bars, to keep it his record. Some rapper/producers can do it alone, but they can’t all be MF DOOM. Jay-Z doesn’t weigh A Written Testimony down in the slightest, nor does he let the record belong to anyone but the guy with his name attached to it. A unique, brilliant, and concise record.

3. Run the Jewels, RTJ4

Run the Jewels have a bizarre issue with their records: Run the Jewels 2 was recorded a few months before Michael Brown and Eric Garner jumpstarted a long-overdue discussion about police brutality but provided a perfect soundtrack for it. RTJ3 dropped (unofficially/officially) in late 2016, recorded while Trump was still an oddity and not the fucking President; I can’t separate dealing with a new (though, really, the Actual) reality under a neofascist from “Down” to “Kill Your Masters.” And, like (strange) clockwork, El-P had put the finishing touches on RTJ4 in the early days of the pandemic; no particular references to anything happening in 2020 (save the unfortunate overlap of Eric Garner and George Floyd saying, “I can’t breathe.”) and yet it fit our new nightmarish normal perfectly. Not that it’s without singles (“JU$T” is just as butter as anything else with Pharrell’s stamp on it) but the smirking and bullshitting is done in front of a backdrop of tension. “Yankee & The Brave” sets the record up perfectly: you feel like you’ve been dropped into the middle of something that’s been going on for a while, and it’s already at DEFCON 1. A spry verse by 2 Chainz here, a hook by Gangsta Boo there, and a mood provided by Josh Homme and Mavis Staples are all well and good, but this is still Jaime and Mike’s world. They sound like they could go another 40 rounds after this, and I pray (to whatever I pray to…?) that they do.

2. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fiona Apple shouldn’t have to be compared to a man in order to matter. However, “the female Tom Waits” comparison is impossible to miss. Not that she made a record as phenomenal as Fetch the Bolt Cutters only by discovering someone else’s brilliance. This is the most Fiona Apple thing Fiona Apple’s ever done, and all the more gripping for that reason. Not that she’d been shy or reserved (on, say, one of her albums with a prose poem for a title) up to now, but nothing’s holding her back here. Her dogs show up a few times, there’s wailing and moaning, there’s joy in guitar necks and bellowing about rape. But the genius is Fiona’s shepherding her abashedly weird parts into great songs. Loathe as I am to say it, she really is the female Tom Waits: she makes the music she wants to, completely independent of whether or not it resembles anything released alongside it. There’s raw blues and Tin Pan Alley-like numbers and stomp/clap percussion. There’s a melancholy post-cabaret ballad called “Cosmonauts.” NPR is fascinated with the titular “Shemeika.” Never heard another record quite like it, and it’s goddamn perfect because of that. She’s irreplaceable.

1. Hum, Inlet

Like a number of highly-anticipated records in the last decade, Hum’s phenomenal Inlet dropped on a random Wednesday afternoon, without warning, before it was officially released that Friday. They join a growing roster of bands/artists who’ve made legit comebacks after a decades-long absence, but (again, without warning) Hum became the band to beat in that regard. Inlet is perfect: it both picks up around where 1998’s (!) Downward is Heavenward left off and expands on it immensely. Microgenres based around Hum’s Great Wall of guitars and shoegazy shyness have risen and fallen in the time the band have been absent, but they don’t sound like they’re playing catchup. They sound in the moment – in THIS moment – and commanding. It’s better than m b v. It’s better than Black Messiah. Traced in Air. The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny (see #5). It might even inch out Thank You for Your Service… We Got It From Here or Time Out of Mind. Songs from Inlet will rattle around in your head for years to come. They could wait another 22 years to follow it up and these songs won’t manage to get old. The sad, catchy masterpiece that we both need and deserve.