Nim's albums of the year 2022 list
[originally posted December 19th 2022 on cohost]
I picked out 17 albums that stood out to me this year. I am aware that's a very odd number of albums to pick but it just happened to be 17 albums that I particularly wanted to highlight and talk about. Albums are in no particular order, this is not a ranking
Young Costello - Stories Told, Some New, Some Old
I know I just said "in no particular order", but I placed this on top for a reason, and that is cause I want this to be the first thing people say after they click on this post, cause this is the one that makes me feel the strongest. Yes, my favourite album of the year is a 4 track EP. What about it?
This is probably the most masterfully crafted ska punk I've heard since the last Streetlight Manifesto album. Absolutely explosive sound and energy right from the first note. There's so many layers to these compositions, playing with song structures and harmonies, and so much emotion in the songwriting and storytelling, and hearing this underlined by this powerful 3-piece horn section seriously brings tears to my eyes. The lead vocals are beautifully raspy and sound fantastic both in quiet acoustic sections all the way to full on screams. The music has depth and complexity to it without sacrificing catchiness and accessibility, hits hard immediately on the first listen and then just get better and better and stick with you the more you listen to them. This is only a 4 track EP but it's all they need to make me completely fall in love with them.
SOUL GLO - Diaspora Problems
This album got a lot of (well deserved) attention already so I'm sure if you're in the market for this kind of music you've heard of it. But god damn this rips so hard so I also have to talk about it here. Them most straight forward description for this would be hardcore punk with ocassional rap section insterspersed, but you need to really hear this yourself to understand how absolutely fantastically unhinged this sounds. The singer hammers through the lyrics at absolutely dizzying speed and breaks into visceral shrill screams. The voice sounds incredibly untamed which is something I extremely appreciate cause very often harsh vocals to me sound too much like a vocal technique and less like a natural expression of extreme emotions that make your voice break (whether this is healthy for your vocal chords is a different question that I can't comment on but I absolutely love how it sounds here). Instrumentally it's also extremely frantic switching between wildly different tempos on a dime, ranging all the way from blast beats to half time metalcore breakdowns. It ocassionally has moments where it lets go off the gas and gives you some room to breathe and variety in sonic texture (such as in the more electronic / industrial rap track Driponomics or the ambienty guitar driven intro to (Five Years and) My Family) but the vast majority of this album is really full throttle, if not in speed then in intensity. The most exciting parts in this album are the tempo changes particuarly when they find a way to naturally intensify the song from mid to higher tempo where before you notice it they transitioned back into breakneck speed. One very noteworthy addition over previous material that the band added on this album were horns (no, this does NOT make it ska!), which is completely not the kind of band I would have expected horns in, but they're placed low in the mix and add such a good texture to tracks like Thumbsucker, Jump!! ... and Spiritual Levels of Gang Shit without hogging too much of the attention. This album really beats you over the head with its intensity but it's so damn exciting and unhinged.
Perennial - In the Midnight Hour
Hyperactive and noisy. Shouty avantgarde noise punk with a healthy bit of dance beats thrown in for good measure. The songs are extremely fast and loud and only rarely stop to give you a moment to breathe, and if they do, they immediately kick back in full throttle before you even had time to realize that there was a breather there. The band hammers through the 12 tracks with great efficiency, not wasting a single second, with an average of under 2 minutes per song, but somehow still finds space for experimental song structures and transitionary pieces. The energy is so enthralling, due to its short length i would often play it twice in a row cause I just needed more of this.
Kochkraft Durch KMA - Alle Kinder Sind Tot
Loud, fuzzy guitars, synthesizers, heavy 4-on-the-floor techno beats and even some cowbells. The mood is dark, doomy and oppressive but delivered in such hard-hitting bangers, dancable beats and so much sarcastic wit so there's never a sense of overbearing negativity. Their style varies somewhere between fuzzy garage rock, techno and dance punk, it's always very loud, very energetic and very fun. They're also one of the best live bands I've ever seen. Up until this album I thought their studio recordings never were quite able to match their live energy, but this album gets very close.
Roshambo - Survive, Revive, Revolt
This is a supergroup featuring members from various bands from the UK ska punk scene. While there are certainly heavier skacore bands, this feels appropriately gritty and angry as you would expect from hardcore punk, and it manages to keep the bouncy, lighthearted dynamics of ska that often get lost when you put it into heavy music. The choruses are infectious, the horn work is amazing and the breakdowns hit hard. Everything is enhanced with ocassional little bits of dub and reggea and it also features guest vocals by both vocalists of Sonic Boom Six (who are one of my favourite bands that have sadly not released new music in a while so I was very happy to hear them here).
JER - BOTHERED / UNBOTHERED
If you hang around on YouTube or any ska related social media communities a lot you might know Jer from their strong online presence with the channel Skatune Network, where they do ska versions of popular songs, many of which are already bursting with creativity. This is their first full length album of entirely original material. The songs show tons of stylistic variety from fast paced pop punk inspired songs to indie rock to slower more experimental pieces built around reggea and rap vocals and are backed up by an impressive number of guest musicians like Jeff Rosenstock and We Are the Union's Reade Wolcott. The lyrics cover topics in the dichotomy of the negative and the positive that is set up in the title of the project, ranging from for example systemic injustice to self-actualization, so while it addresses several serious and dark topics, it ends on a great note of optimism and thriving for improvement.
pinkshift - Love Me Forever
The hottest new band in emo and indie punk. After their Saccharine EP last year made a huge impact on the scene and put them on that map, they now followed this up with their full length debut. The songs have so much punch, are amazingly catchy, and just sound incredibly good. Energetic, powerful and passionate. This is exactly how emo punk rock should be, fun and accessible but heaviness, grit, and a strong sense of urgency and passion.
Melted Bodies - The Inevitable Fork vol. 1
"Metal should sound like youre driving a burning clown car off a cliff otherwise i'm not interested" - me, last year on twitter, about this band's 2020 debut album. This is their follow-up (and also the only metal album on this list?), though only the first part of a multi-piece series of EPs. This one does get a little longer to get going but once it does it is beautifully unhinged, chaotic and wild. Musically this lays somewhere between System of a Down, Melt-Banana and Mr. Bungle, with vocals performances that can easily keep with with Serj Tankian in his wildest moments. That being said I actually do enjoy the full length album more than this EP, but that is more of a testament to how incredible good that album is rather than the shortcomings of this EP. In any case if you like bizzare sounding alternative metal I can not recommend this band enough, and this EP is a great, bite-sized introduction. I am very much looking forward to hear the sequels to this project.
Bob Vylan - Bob Vylan presents The Price of Life
Grime/punk/rap duo. An absolute incredibly powerful display of anger and frustration with racism, poverty, violence and austerity. Beautifully uncompromisingly forward with its messaging with no room for ambiguity or subtleness and a sound with the much needed power to bring the message across. Their typical mode is loud crunchy guitars, heavy mid tempo drums and aggressive ranting, but beyond that there is a enough variation in instrumentation and intensity to keep it musically exciting all the way through.
Hans Gruber and the Die Hards - With a Vengeance
The most chaotic skacore has been in a while. This album is hyperactive and messy, in the most creative and fun way possible. The songs take so many hard left turns, from ska upstrokes to lightning fast skate punk to a soulful sax solo to a metal breakdown. There is so much variety in sound, tempo and delivery, changing back and forth at a moment's notice, and all delivered with so much wit and snarkiness. It also mixes in tastes of various other south american music genres (please excuse my lack of knowledge on these. Samba maybe??) in a way that really don't hear very often in this scene, which makes this one of the most unique sounding ska bands currently around.
White Lung - Premonition
The 5th, and apparently, their final album. I love how they sound both dreamy and atmospheric but also forceful and brutal. The sound is very clean but it creates such an overwhelming wall of noise. The drums are just hammering on and on, clashing against the delicate, playful guitar work, pushing it forward, faster and faster, with barely any moment to breathe.
nightlife - fallback
Nightlife play "soulpunk", which is made up of soulful pop/RnB infused with crunchy rock guitars. The pop is extremely catchy and the guitars and drums sound thick and punchy. Rather than keeping their different influences in separate parts that they jump back and forth between, they manage to merge these different genres into one coherent, seamless sound. The production is absolutely pristine, the pop absolutely shines and the guitars and drums still sound satisfyingly powerful without overwhelming the softer aspets of the sound. Overall just a blissful experience.
Nova Twins - Supernova
This duo has made quite a name for themselves in the alternative music scene, being endorsed and working with many established artists like Tom Morello, Skunk Anansie, Bring me the Horizon and Enter Shikari. Nova Twins play what I would call a very contemporary interpretation of nu metal, heavy rock and metal music mixed in with RnB, grime and electronics, taking this by this point established concept of rap rock and making it sound fresh and exciting. On prior releases they always felt more of a singles band to me where I would enjoy individual tracks but rarely listen to the whole album. I'm not sure what exactly they changed on this release, but something about it makes it work so much better as a whole for me and give me a great full album experience beyond just individual bangers.
Eichlers - My Checkered Future
Eichlers is arguably the pioneer of "hyperska", which puts ska into the instrumentation and production style of hyperpop and it turns out these styles fit together like they were made for each other. The sunny album art might contribute to this but the sound is just beautifully warm and lighthearted and just straight up fun and there's so much creativity packed into this. Who would've thought how well trap beats and glitchy, autotuned vocals go together with horns and upstrokes. Not something I'm in the mood to listen to at all times but this needs to be on this list for how seminal this album is for modern ska. With how strongly the ska scene has been tied to punk music since the 90s, it's great to this album take the complete opposite stylistic direction.
Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen - "musik"
This trio combines an acoustic driven indie folk sound with an fuzzy garage rock electric bass. This combination sounds so incredibly cool and I've been in love with it ever since I first stumbled upon a live performance of Zement off of their previous album. The songs are incredibly catchy and are energetic, not so much that you'd go wild the pit but so that you'd bop along and enjoy every moment, with a nice feeling of urgency and melancholia.
The Bruce Lee Band - One Step Forward. Two Steps Back.
I always found Bruce Lee Band sounded like the missing link between second wave 2tone ska and modern 3rd wave ska punk. It doesn't quite have the intensity of ska punk but it's rather light and bouncy sound is still more forceful than what you'd hear from the 2tone era. However you may associate this sound, this is a perfectly executed piece of modern ska, all songs fun and catchy (but not without bringing some great messages across), brief and straight to the point. This is a pretty unsuspecting album compared to my other ska picks on this list but damn it's so good.
Brutus - Unison Life
After their second album Nest didn't really manage to get through to me very much (despite being unarguably a very good album), I thought the band would just kind of drift away from me, but this new release got me fully back on board. Brutus have a very unique style, combining post-hardcore, post-rock, and sludge metal. It all sounds very atmospheric but also energetic, heavy and impactful. They are able to get a lot of variation out of this pool of styles they have positioned themselves in, drawing from a variety of different sonic textures, beats and vocal performances. The vocals on this album I thought were especially great, showing lots of intensity and emotion, largely with clean performances but ocassionally pushing past the point of clean singing and letting her voice break a little, which adds a lot to the emotional impact. The trio of the tracks Liar, Chainlife and Storm I though were the strongest point of the album that showcase the variety of everything the band can do.
Live shows this year
It's been so good to be able to see live shows again this year. Most of these were in the second half of the year so it's gotten quite busy. All of them were great and I wouldn't have wanted to miss them, but the best show this year and possibly one of the best I've ever witnessed, were Kochkraft. Sorry everyone else, but Kochkraft takes the live band crown. They're just too powerful.
Thank you for reading. This year ruled (for music at least)