And we’re back! This is the second of a two-part post detailing my favourite full-length albums of 2024. Check out picks #11-#25 here!
Warning: Extremely frank and graphic depictions of eating disorders below. If you feel this may be upsetting to you, please proceed with caution.
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10. Sinema - Fear of the Fall
The 90’s have been “coming back” for longer than the 90’s themselves. This is particularly true of emo, a genre which for the last ten years has been foundationally entwined with archives, reference, and revival. Indeed, I think one of the hallmarks of DIY emo in a post-Fueled by Ramen world is the rejection of capitalist-aesthetic temporalities—or rather, an ongoing care and maintenance of our creative works across decades in spite of an overarching culture industry that, in pursuit of capital gains, co-opts even the most sincere, substantive works of art into a trend cycle of “hot” to “not” to “nostalgia”. We talk about the greatness of legendary 90’s/00’s emo/screamo bands like Saetia, Jeromes Dream, and Portraits of Past in the present tense. Right now, those very same bands are headlining DIY festivals across the world, being invited not as “has-been” novelties but as luminaries in contemporaneous community with the kids they inspire.
Given that context, it is no surprise that Denton, TX emocore band Sinema sound like the year 2001, even though 2001 has to have been 3-5 years before its members were born. Despite this, Sinema pull off Y2K-style post-hardcore with panache on debut LP Fear of the Fall, mixing the anthemic choruses and delicate arpeggios of Thursday with the pummeling metalcore rhythms of From Autumn To Ashes. Yes, there are both clean and screamed vocals, and it’s the same kid making the impressive split-second switches between the two (at least in live performances). The total package is impassioned, compelling, and devastatingly gorgeous.
I’d like to tell you that Sinema are offering some grand theoretical reinterpretation of their references—but I don’t think that’s accurate, nor do I think heavyweights like Alexisonfire require reinterpretation. So, how about this: on Fear of the Fall, Sinema are refining a sonic legacy that began two decades ago, and will continue on for as long as there are dorks like me to cherish it. And along the way, they made an album that soars into the stratosphere and glistens with star power.
9. The Body - The Crying Out of Things
Depending on how you slice it, The Crying Out of Things is anywhere from the eighth to the twenty-fourth full-length album from Portland, OR/Providence, RI/Little Rock, AR-based industrial/doom/sludge/experimental band The Body.
Yes, nothing is straightforward with The Body, who are probably the most prolific collaborators, collagists, and genre-hoppers of their generation. Still, if one can argue that there is a core essence of The Body beneath the side quests into ethereal drone and Appalachian-tinged folk dirges, that essence is on display on The Crying Out of Things.
This album is heavy, with thundering percussion and guitars that sound as if they’ve been thrown down a hundred-foot well filled to the brim with molasses. Chip King’s high-pitched, fuzzed-out squeals are as tortured as they’ve ever been, accompanied by harrowing spoken-word samples and an ethereal late-album cameo from previous collaborator Dis Fig. Additionally, guest trombonist Dan Blacksberg steals the show on songs like “Last Things” and “End of Line” with haunting, otherworldly brass tones.
The Body have been screaming Bloody Mary into the void for a long time now, and The Crying Out of Things might be their best, bleakest venture to date, like what might play in a lonesome astronaut’s mind as they, untethered, hurtle into unending blackness.
8. Terry Green - PROVISIONAL LIVING
Look: The Greater Toronto Area is weird. We’re kind of isolated, at least compared to America’s massive Northeast Corridor that pits four multi-million strong population centres within striking distance of each other. The major cities we do have in our orbit—Ottawa, Montreal, Buffalo, and Detroit—are more arduous trips than one would imagine due to long drives through sparsely populated wilderness, language barriers, international borders, and the Great Lakes. Consequently, we rarely cross-pollinate, and often only those who can already afford costly P-2 touring visas are able to catch the eye of star-makers south of the border. Furthermore, Ontario musicians, artists, and DIY spaces are mired in precarity at home due to astronomically high costs-of-living and massive provincial cuts to arts funding.
Essentially: every album that comes out of this godforsaken town is a miracle. So let us not begrudge GTA screamo legends Terry Green for taking 7 years to cook up their second LP PROVISIONAL LIVING. You can’t rush greatness.
Terry Green specialize in prog-y, semi-melodic post-hardcore that is as pretty as it is achingly sincere. Bright guitar licks float atop the din like Millais’ Ophelia on the water, and sudden drops between heavy thunder and serene stillness on songs like “SAFETY” and “EASY” hit like punches to the solar plexus. The drums are a highlight of Provisional Living, filling out the sound with a precise, rollicking warmth.
With its direct, heart-renderingly revelatory lyrics, PROVISIONAL LIVING sets to music the beauty of chaos, crisis, and the complexity of human experience, like the parallax of reeds whipping by in front of the mighty, unmoving sea as viewed from the window of a bullet train.
7. HYPER GAL - After Image
From the off-kilter psychedelia of Les Rallizes Dénudés to the memetic Artaudian chaos of The Gerogerigegege to the demented pop-tinged noise punk of Melt-Banana and Otoboke Beaver, everybody knows by now that Japan has the coolest shit around.
Continuing in this tradition are Osaka two-piece HYPER GAL with their new LP After Image, an album that feels…almost impossible to classify. Fluorescent synths that stop and start in recursive fits are deployed layer upon layer, in slightly askew counterpoint to punk-inflected drums and shimmering waves of feedback, all punctuated by the uncanny brightness of (what I assume to be) a MIDI horn sample pack. This is all topped off by delightfully deadpan vocals that seem to follow a parallel yet separate rhythmic logic to everything else. Chaotic as all the no-wave-y experimentation may seem, there’s an unexpected gentle warmth that permeates throughout the album, as if the maximalist noise rock of Lightning Bolt was tempered with the lingeringly earnest sensibilities of Kore-eda.
In the grand scheme of things, though, HYPER GAL’s singularity confounds all comparisons. After Image is doing one-handed cartwheels at the edge of musical convention, as if it were made by alien archaeologists and ethnomusicologists ten thousand years in the future attempting to reconstruct the music of humanity from a small surviving handful of random artifacts.
6. drive your plow over the bones of the dead - tragedy as catharsis
Oh look, a Canadian screamo band with a preposterously long name. I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Vancouver’s drive your plow over the bones of the dead ostensibly take their name from a 2009 mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk, who herself lifted the title from a paraphrased line in a William Blake poem. Tokarczuk’s novel, originally published in her native Polish, is an existential interrogation of the line separating humans and animals. It’s short, violent and searing, much like tragedy as catharsis.
DYPOTBOTD make gnarly emoviolence. Not one track on tragedy as catharsis is over three minutes; the vast majority are under 90 seconds. Like sonic precursors Jeromes Dream and Combatwoundedveteran, DYPOTBOTD play at a fever pitch, as if the tightly-wound guitars and impassioned screams are in an all-out death match against the other occasionally punctuated by hauntingly pretty melodic fragments. This continues for 18 blistering minutes until closer “baleful solitude”, whose ending descends into impassioned, near-arrhythmic cacophony. Wickedly fast and animalistically ferocious, DYPOTOBOTD howl and thrash throughout tragedy as catharsis like apex predators flaying open unfortunate prey with their bare teeth.
5. Xiu Xiu - 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips
My favourite part of being a longtime Xiu-inator is the near-annual tradition of hearing how bandmembers Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo bounce between bizarro-world pop-rock, glitchy psych-ward ballads, and harsh industrial noise on each new release. Last year’s Ignore Grief leaned heavily into that last category, foregrounding shuddering percussion and squealing analog synths as if soundtracking a particularly surreal haunted castle. I enjoyed that record thoroughly, but I am beyond pleased to announce that this year, the pendulum has swung back to the experimental chiptune-inflected psychedelia of 2004’s Fabulous Muscles or 2017’s Forget.
In other words: Xiu Xiu is fun again! Praise be! Take “Veneficium”, which…could almost be on the radio? Keyword here is “almost”: the light, prog-y guitar licks are tempered with an evil droning bass line and Stewart’s signature uncanny vocal stylings. Or look to album opener “Arp Omni”, a stirring ballad set to adagio strings that defies the Xiu Xiu penchant for rhythmic babble in favour of the best lyrics of Stewart’s career: “I have done almost nothing right my entire adult life/But having dared to touch the fire with you/Breaks the chain of my being nothing too”.
That being said, Xiu Xiu still mesh their new groove with the freaky abstract noise that Seo brings to the table (see here: the intricately arranged “Pale Flower” or the early SOPHIE-esque textures throughout “Bobby Bland”). The best moment on the album up, however, has to be the cathartic, heart-wrenching freakout on album closer “Piña, Coconut & Cherry”.
13FBISWBHG brings out the poppier, groovier side of Xiu Xiu while never sacrificing the madcap experimentation and singular creativity we’ve been expecting for over two decades now. Music for mad scientists to jitterbug, slow dance, and just go apeshit to with their most grotesque humanoid experiments.
4. Mamaleek - Vida Blue
Look: you’re just going to have to listen to Vida Blue to wrap your head around it.
Vida Blue is a slinky, enigmatic tour de force that swoons, hisses, and sometimes erupts with pathos. It is nominally a black metal album by virtue of Mamaleek’s previous work, yet it structurally owes far more to the free-associative glee of avant-garde composers like Ligeti or Schoenberg. The album slithers between blues rock, freeform jazz, and noise rock freakouts, all punctuated by occasional lapses into Lebanese folk stylings and vocals reminiscent of an even-more-tortured Michael Gira. Again: you’re just going to have to listen to it.
Vida Blue is also a portrait of its makers’ immeasurable grief following the March 2023 death of Mamaleek member Eric Alan Livingston. Mamaleek, whose remaining members are anonymous, analogize this grief into eulogies for the Bay Area they call home. The title track is an elegy to both Vida Blue, a legendary 70s MLB pitcher who passed in June 2023, as well as the A’s he played on who this year relocated from Oakland to Las Vegas. Meanwhile, “Vileness Slim” mourns the decline of the Bay Area from a lively creative mecca to a hollowed-out monument to neoliberal capital’s most dispossessive excesses.
Vida Blue is a completely singular, emotionally evocative, and visionary record that words can only make mockery of. You’re just going to have to listen to it.
3. Chat Pile - Cool World
On 2022’s God’s Country, Chat Pile painted an absurdist, horror-tinged landscape of flyover country blight, like if the Muppets remade The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as directed by Ken Loach. The riffs hit like head-on collisions between speeding cement mixers and brick walls, and Raygun Busch’s vocal performance was as unhinged as it was charismatic, closing out with the harrowingly bizarre nine-minute odyssey “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg”.
If God’s Country sounded like the hottest, most oppressive day of a Dust Bowl summer, then this year’s follow-up Cool World is like an energy grid-decimating blizzard. Here, the Thou-ian sludge of God’s Country has evolved into barbed-wire Jesus Lizard noise rock. Opener “I Am Dog Now” is stadium-sized, with a thundering groove to rival fellow heavy music breakout stars Knocked Loose. This leads into glassy, hazy guitars that bite like freezing wind on downtempo tracks like “Frownland” and “Camcorder”.
Busch’s songwriting has grown more poetic on Cool World. Take “Tape”, in which haunted, muttered verses about the horror of bearing witness to U.S.-backed atrocities in Gaza give way to a one-two punch of refrain and chorus: “They made tapes/It was the worst I ever saw”. Each repetition of these one-liners is more devastating than the last, like the last roars of a mortally wounded tiger.
Chat Pile may well be the biggest name in noise rock right now, and they prove exactly why on Cool World, bringing their Leatherface-with-a-distortion-pedal sound into the malaise and abject horror of 2024 America.
2. White Suns - Dredging Heaven
Walking past the boutique izakayas, all-night vape shops, and gaggles of rich kid Dimes Square-wannabes that today populate Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it’s hard to imagine that in the late 1970s these streets were the grimy, hellish epicenter of America’s avant-garde. It was in those bleak circumstances that the likes of Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, and James Chance fused the experimental challenge of postmodernism with the abrasive amateurism of punk, thus pioneering no-wave.
Nearly fifty years later, the New Yorkers in White Suns are proving that no-wave still has bite, especially when tempered with noise rock and death industrial. I’m not confident I can assess all the different time signatures throughout Dredging Heaven, and I’m even less confident that that even matters. These songs are moreso exercises in texture—grinding, droning, punishing noise and guitar textures that hammer like complex polyrhythms over pummeling drums. Just when you think you’ve figured out one of their sonic puzzles, White Suns zips along to the next rumbling bit of cacophony.
I am devastated that I can’t find the lyrics to this record online. Over the stuttering din of feedback and percussion, I can just make out some gorgeous, evocative gothic poetry: “We drink in the shade of grieving trees/Their damned shapes arcing over us/Roots grew true like emerald veins under the skin of a grand [?]”. I would kill to know what word I’m missing there—but never mind, because on Dredging Heaven, White Suns alchemize noise into its own kind of poetry.
1. Uniform - American Standard
I would not wish the hell of an eating disorder upon my worst enemies. When it’s bad, it’s bad, like a parasite gnawing away at you from the inside, making you unable to see the world in full colour, making every waking thought a landmine. You watch as your obsessions hijack your mind, watch as your body falls apart, and you feel as though you are powerless to stop it. You have tricked yourself—in trying to exert dictatorial control over your body, you have surrendered all autonomy. Your head pounds under fluorescent lights as you try not to pass out on the subway, your mouth reeks of stomach acid and you stare blankly with bloodshot eyes at yet another purge cycle in the toilet.
American Standard, named after a popular brand of toilets, is about Uniform vocalist Michael Berdan’s lifelong struggle with bulimia. It is the most visceral, accurate depiction of life with an eating disorder to memory, as summed up by the bone-chilling lyrics to the album’s intro chant:
“A part of me/But it can’t be me/This meat on my waist/…Fills up my home and swallows my bones/It’s something else/It can’t be me”.
From that, we launch into the title track, a 21-minute odyssey that deploys pummeling industrial beats within the structure of a multi-suite prog epic. Swells of feedback squelch while instruments pound like the walls of one’s mind on a sleepless night. Berdan’s vocals are disgustingly gnarled throughout, sounding as if he were being burned alive. On the next track, “This Is Not A Prayer”, he cries out:
“And will you get up the nerve to tell me that I look sick?/And will you get up the nerve to tell me that you’re afraid?”.
The first time I heard it, I stopped dead in my tracks and wept, and then wept again as an ominous choir echoes over the cathartic, blast beat-driven catharsis of closer “Permanent Embrace”.
Fuck The Substance. Uniform’s American Standard is the new gold standard of body horror, and the gold standard of music in 2024.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! If you’d like a sampler of all my picks, I’ve made this Spotify playlist for your perusal. Next up is an exclusiveeeee interview with your new fave Toronto skramz band! But Listmas isn’t over—I’ll be back toward the end of December to break down my favourite EPs and a few fantastic full-lengths that caught my attention a bit too late to be included here. Stay tuned by subscribing now for freeeeeeeee :)
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