Folklike percussion and overall song structure give the project a distinct voice and a sense of trajectory, while choral-inspired harmonies layer over attention grabbing guitars and synth drones.

The noise falls away when Geraldi escapes the city limits, the countrysides’ twangy pedal steel playing smooth and clear through the airwaves. But the road trip is inherently transient. The signal is lost.

Abstractly tracing the arc of abuse, this record begins with these hauntingly warm tones, sounds that hold you in a loving embrace even as you know that that embrace will imprison and stifle your soul later on.

Incorporating tendencies like swirling repetition and biting jazz chords within country music creates an unusual and unforgettable sound, inviting bands of the future to elaborate upon the ideas demonstrated here.

Seeing outer Chicagoland through the city’s eyes and vice versa, this album pulls us away from rural folk themes into an environment that we are significantly more likely to have firsthand experience living in.

We really thought that we’d be safe putting out our top 50 albums list a week ago, but 2023 had one last ace up its sleeve in the form of this masterpiece for the slacker generation.

When Solska rails against people in their community who have caused harm to themselves or their loved ones, their unapologetically bloodthirsty tone forces us to analyze our own most strained relationships, uncovering the most grotesquely spiteful portions of ourselves and forcing us to decide whether these enemies deserve such vitriol.

Like a fever dream somewhere between a late night true crime documentary and a televangelist sermon, the record Edifice by December Magic presents a mythologized version of the murder of JonBenét Ramsay.

As the record progresses, each track continuously strips back further layers of warm synthetic drone, further exposing a bumpy, bristling underbelly of clicks, wavers, and pops that destabilize the record’s central sound.

This album imprisons charming country and folk riffs into sparse loops with intense delay and reverb, recontextualizing the remoteness of the countryside into something threatening.

However, while the cracks in the American facade appear implicitly in other vaporwave releases, the stifling level of distortion and noise in this record makes its source material nearly unrecognizable, showing us just how far we’ve come from this so-called “golden age.”

The top 50 albums of 2023, according to us

Yes, we waited until the last possible minute to release our album of the year list. That being said, the artists we like to cover typically aren’t bound to the schedule of the broader music industry, and for our AOTY list a few last-minute additions were worth waiting until the actual end of the year.

Reflecting on things like change, transformation, and death can bring up all sorts of conflicting emotions, namely those of fear and doubt. In 1989 by Fiona’s Spiral speaks to the neverending repeating nature of things, however this EP is refreshing in its loving, hopeful approach to change.

A wild assembly of instruments including brass and piano pulls off these grand arrangements, augmenting the powerful personality of the singer to create a homespun yet intricate sound.

In crafting such a wildly inconsistent voice, Gamboa reveals the impacts of a scattered and unreadable identity, a social-media-fueled condition that I’m actively contributing to right now.

Despair claws its way to the surface with Clark’s incredible emo-tinged vocals, all while disorienting and dissonant orchestral arrangements push us further down this dark path.

The new album ATROPHY by Midwestern Roadkill is a raw look into what a depressive episode can actually be like. Characterized by fuzzy, hazy production, this skramz-pop release carries with it a sense of isolation and impermeability. It’s the sound of not leaving your bed for 3 days straight, the blinds drawn shut and air stale with halitosis.

Each musical idea establishes itself prominently and confidently before being thrown to the side, this energetic approach leading to an extremely satisfying listen as Pudgel explores a huge array of sounds in its 20-ish minutes.

Each track brings remarkable levels of variety, at times even reaching into free jazz territory as an assembly of auxiliary instruments establish melodies on top of familiar droning guitars.