Every year it’s the same thing. As the office at Beats Per Minute’s headquarters is just about to start our annual secret Christmas Party – including a dozen memorable live performances and enough booze to send half our staff into winter sleep – a loud chant rises from the street below. Peering from the high up windows down, the dystopian image of an unwieldy mob carrying torches and signs saying “PITCHFORK” materialises, as they clamber for heads… or answers as to why their favourite album hasn’t been included, hard to tell. In utter hysteria, the staff is running around with arms flailing, trying to figure out who to address the mad crowd. Chase is abroad and Rob has quickly locked himself in our mixing studio, while Andy just shrugs, pointing out he’s only listened to screamo and BRAT. “These are surely Swifties – you speak their language!” Alright, it’s left to me to address the people, so let me try with an admission:
DEMOCRACY DOESN’T WORK!! There I said it. We have Trump 2.0, we have multiple genocides that our elected parties won’t address and/or even support and no Geordie Greep in our Top 50 Albums. I know, these are dire times, and we are in this issue because we trust the will of group dynamics over the sheer truth of, uh… let me check my notes… individual will? How did I come up with that?? Well, good grief and alas, our Top 50 is very solid but it indeed doesn’t include many great albums. But that’s simply due to the fact that each person is different, dare I say unique even, so that any list can only be an indicator of who we are. There’s many albums that deserved a placement, many beloved by some of our staff but unheard by others, forgotten due to time. We see you all, we see your fans, we know your power!
Thus, I present to you, the reading public: Beats Per Minute’s Honorable Mentions of fantastic 2024 albums we truly, truly loved, which likely deserve to be on our Top 50 but… weren’t.
Pleased, the crowd goes back home, and I take the elevator back up. Everyone is clapping, at least they will be until they realize it wasn’t my speech that sent the angry mob home, but my generous donation of our alcoholic reserves for the evening to them… let’s hope nobody notices these are only virgin mojitos…
Listen to a Spotify playlist of highlights from our Honorable Mentions 2024
Alan Sparhawk – White Roses, My God
[Sub Pop]
Creativity can often be born of terrible tragedy. After the 2022 passing of his wife and Low bandmate Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk stepped away from music for a time, instead focusing on how to weather this personal devastation and seeing what the future might bring in her absence. This year he gave us White Roses, My God, a stylistic detour into processed vocal pop and alternative electronics.
On initial listen, it didn’t sound like him – the vocal effects felt as though they distanced Sparhawk from his audience. But then something strange happened. After further listening, it became apparent that this was a world that he was building in real-time, a place where he could go to deal with the pain and with the loneliness, while also letting us share in his hurt. These new environments were different but, upon further reflection, not as alien as they first seemed. His voice became another instrument in his palette of sounds, a conduit of synthesized movement and undefined emotional turmoil. White Roses, My God was his gift to those who shared in his heartache, and for those seeking meaning in the grief in their own lives. – Joshua Pickard
Angelo Harmsworth – Without Blinking
[Warm Winters]
Angelo Harmsworth has a knack for atmospheric manipulation, for thorough soundscape renovation. Regardless of amplitude or tonality, his work engulfs you, shaping the world around you, all realities adjusting to fit his sonic perspective. Without Blinking is one of his most unnerving, beautiful, and disorienting releases, a triptych of songs that speaks to how dissonance and stillness can share intrinsic rhythmic properties and reflect one another in ways that could never have been imagined. Chaos runs parallel to order, oceans of drones and electronic chatter operate within vast areas of negative space, marked by moments of random structure. He’s briefly aided by sound operative Felisha Ledesma, spinning glitchy webs of circuitous filaments before diving headfirst into some kind of industrial ambient narrative. Cascading ribbons of electronic movement break over your subconscious, a wall of sound threatening to overwhelm the senses, and you can find Harmsworth comfortably surveying the ensuing turmoil from its highest elevation. – Joshua Pickard
Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere
[Century Media]
Blood Incantation are no strangers to cosmic prog metal eccentricities. They embrace and revel in the opportunities the sound affords them. Their affection for this theatricality is coded into the band’s DNA, and Absolute Elsewhere highlights the evolution of their control over its primordial impulses. It’s noodly but hits like a ton of bricks, melodic but blackened around the edges. The album, split between two chaptered longform tracks, is chock full of the mazelike rhythms and tectonic riffs fans have come to expect, but it also jumps track on occasion, rifling between metal, prog, dark ambient, and something that resembles burnt shoegaze without ever losing cohesion. It’s corrugated music for midnight convulsions and 2am comedowns, offering a spectrum of geologic revelations and experiences. There’s plenty of room to get disoriented inside its caverns and cathedrals, but you’ll be too preoccupied with what you’re hearing to notice that you’d gotten lost hours ago. – Joshua Pickard
The Bug – Machine
[Relapse]
Whether you call it gothic dub or industrial ambient, The Bug’s latest album, Machine, is a sanctuary for blackened instrumentals that torch the foundations of their influences. This is the sound of nitrogen narcosis, of atmospheric pressures and ruined worlds. You’ve got only a moment to pull oxygen into your lungs before the music pulls you back down into its inky darkness. The bass shudders and shakes itself apart while drones buzz and multiply in abandoned cities. It’s bleak and compelling stuff, direct and honest in its end times machinations, though it might suggest that something could rise from the ashes after we’re all long gone. Kevin Richard Martin has always made bass music for the apocalypse, but here he conveys a grand vision of doom without a single word, metallic hearts pulsing and rusting and falling apart as he carries us all toward the mushroom cloud on the horizon. – Joshua Pickard
Burrrn – Without You
[Self-released]
The comeback of Japanese shoegaze outsiders Burrrn dropped without much fanfare or announcement. That sadly makes sense, as their only album – 2011’s Blaze Down His Way Like The Space Show – had garnered a small cult following through word of mouth. Nobody seemed to have the group on their radar anymore, yet they somehow managed to record this jaw-dropping homage to 90s shoegaze. Departing the edgy feedback laden tone of their debut, Without You is closer to the work of Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine, a gorgeous psychedelic work. Rich in texture and indulging in the late-60s aura that gave the first generation shoegaze bands their magical aura, it’s a record that deserves more attention – it easily overshadows many of the current day efforts that go viral on TikTok. – John Wohlmacher
Colin Stetson – The Love It Took to Leave You
[Envision/Invada]
At various points across Colin Stetson’s latest album, The Love It Took to Leave You, it becomes hard to determine where he ends, and his instruments begin. His music has such a tenacious physicality to it, resulting in an almost herculean bodily achievement as he mines saxophone and clarinet of their sounds, expressing himself through the rods and posts and keys resting within reach of his fingers. After 2023’s When We Were That What Wept for the Sea, a study in spontaneous combustion inspired by the death of his father, it was difficult to imagine such a fully realized collection coming just one year later.
Arguably his most accomplished work, The Love It Took to Leave You reveals a refinement in the way in which he interacts with his instruments, using circular breathing to pour his whole being into every moment of his performance. Keys clack and snap while a dog collar-like device he wears around his neck picks up the sounds of his breathing. Half-buried rhythmic moans feel as if they were ripped from the inner core of the earth, drawn from some nameless depth and cast upon the ground to call forth some ancient eldritch entity. And who’s to say that they haven’t. – Joshua Pickard
Camera Obscura – Look To The East, Look To The West
[Merge]
It was starting to feel like we would never see them again. Eleven years on from their fifth album, Desire Lines, beloved Scottish indie pop band Camera Obscura returned with a grand reentrance. Their newest record, Look to the East, Look to the West, picks up, essentially, where they left off. There are some subtle adjustments to their sound (how could there not be?) like some more electronic flourishes here, a programmed beat there, some more spacious instrumentation. It’s also their first album without keyboardist Carey Lander, who died of cancer in 2015, and who is given a beautiful, heart-tugging tribute here on “Sugar Almond”. Overall, though, the album serves as a reminder of what made them so vital to begin with, and is both a fitting reintroduction and a map of potential routes forward for the band, if they so choose to keep carrying on. – Jeremy J. Fisette
Cuntroaches – Cuntroaches
[SKiN GRAFT]
There’s something special about this Berlin-based band, existing somewhere between noise-rock, hardcore and post-punk, playing shows that are deafeningly loud and marked by violent feedback collages. Cuntroaches have been around the scene for a while, but this year they finally unloaded this shockingly dynamic, incredibly infectious debut album, that can best be described as a cross of Wolf Eyes and Liars. But hey, comparisons don’t really work, no matter whether which way you assemble them. This is a genuinely fresh, unique and clever record. Yes, it’s at times quite hard to bathe in its sudden onslaught of violent screams and tribal rhythms, but it’s also incredibly danceable and melodic. Hardcore punk has suffered from an almost submissive reverence of its past for the last couple of years, lacking innovation and passion. Here, both collide in a fiery ball of disrespect and fun! – John Wohlmacher
DIIV – Frog In Boiling Water
[Fantasy]
Shoegaze, while not decidedly apolitical, often evades politics in favour of an introspective focus. With Frog in Boiling Water, DIIV have found an elegant contradiction of this trend. The songs focus on the harm of American Imperialism (“Raining On Your Pillow”), destructive accelerationism (“Everyone Out”), late stage capitalism (“Soul-net”) and multiple songs that make references to revolutionary fight against oppression or needlessly cruel industrialised death (“Somber the Drums”, “Little Birds”).
Additional to the album, the band presented a chaotic, Web 2.0 looking platform on https://www.soul-net.co to further the intricacies of the record. It’s a nigthmarish and pseudo-occult labyrinthine collage, simultaneously showcasing how little we have achieved and how consumer friendly the borderline apocalyptic chaos of the current age has become. Reflecting the beauty of shoegaze with post-capitalist, genocide accepting horror works disturbingly well, and Frog in Boiling Water might yet reveal its power with time. – John Wohlmacher
ELUCID – REVELATOR
[Fat Possum]
It’s a bit criminal how ignored Armand Hammer’s other member has become. ELUCID has grow to be a brilliant rapper on par with billy woods, and with REVELATOR, he delivered a sprawling, borderline cyberpunk record. Confronting the horrors of Palestine, the ignorance of a broken political system and (obviously) tensions inherent to the black experience in America, the record is an abstract, pounding and colourful counterpart to the more ambient-oriented We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. A work that needs to be experienced in whole, as it leads the listener down an imaginary cityscape, through bars and clubs, alleyways and markets, into basements and parks, introducing a host of broken figures who rant and rave about their pain and the injustice of an uncaring world. Multi-cultural and defying any temporal placement, it produces in-betweens of digital life and ancient memory. It’s an experience that won’t be easy to let go off, marked by an intense magnetism that keeps beckoning to come back, journey in again. – John Wohlmacher
Geordie Greep – The New Sound
[Rough Trade]
Yeah, this should likely have been in our Top 50, shouldn’t it? Hey, don’t ask me, I voted for this. Precisely because it’s, kind of, an even more insane record than the Black Midi trilogy: Geordie Greep unchained! He’s going full prog rock here, or all King Crimson. Comedy rock? Maybe. All these infectious island grooves and jazzy compositions definitely are humorous, as Greep imagines himself a leg-humping lothario. Yeah, this is peak, from its iconic cover to its loungey instrumental title track, all killer no filler, no fucks given! It’s almost literary when it comes to the lyrics, a vast canvas of characters and situations, places and faces – The New Sound could be studied and disseminated, analysed and theorised about. Don’t ask me why I have to write about it in Honourable Mentions, I’m just a dog! – John Wohlmacher
Goat Girl – Below The Waste
[Rough Trade]
Previous Goat Girl albums didn’t shy away from the harshness of life, but skirted over them with a youthful zim and irony. On their third full-length, Below The Waste, the London band have done away with the grooves and are instead wading their way through the emotional filth and detritus of life at eye-level – even their cartoony stage names names are gone; this is Goat Girl facing up to the real world.
By far their darkest album to date, Below The Waste finds the trio of old friends reflecting the reality of living in one of the world’s biggest cities, being dragged down daily by injustices, depression and addiction. The result is the band’s loudest and most unruly to date, Lottie Pendlebury’s breathy and beleaguered delivery relaying her exhaustion at the constant battle to keep her head above the rising tide of injustice and cruelty all around. In amongst the drudgery there is still a strong vein of friendship and togetherness that binds them and their community, an aural representation of the fuel that allows them to keep biting back against the bastards. The struggle seems to have only brought the band closer together and what results is the tightest, most diverse, thrilling, unique and rewarding Goat Girl album to date. – Rob Hakimian
Halsey – The Great Impersonator
[Columbia]
How The Great Impersonator ended up one of this year’s most controversial records will remain an utter mystery to me. Being branded as borderline unlistenable by multiple notable publications, but praised by many others, it stood out in a year where the choice in pop allowed only for apple green hedonism and sepia-toned self narcissism.
After confronting a terrible cancer diagnosis in the wake of becoming a mother, Halsey had to confront the reality of mortality. With The Great Impersonator, she explores a world without her. For one, it’s an album made to provide her son with a kaleidoscopic impression of who she was in case he would lose her. Additionally, it’s also allowing the musician to imagine versions of herself she never was, alternate histories, previous iterations that have already ceased to exist. For this purpose, Halsey adapts the aesthetics, images, styles of other musicians – perfectly in line with the aura of pop music’s cannibalistic nature.
There’s nods and reconfigurations of PJ Harvey, David Bowie and Joni Mitchell, Bruce and Dolly. Some of these pastiches are clear as day, others more cryptic, expanding within the specific track’s lyrics. It poses a lot of questions – of genre configuration, of iconography and archetypal tendencies. But at the album’s centre, there’s Halsey, confronting past demons and current fear. Pop, in this way, becomes the real costume here, allowing for a tender, shocking and painful singer-songwriter album to slowly unfold within. It’s a very postmodern approach, and one that demands of the listener to almost academically discern why certain artistic choices were made. These are the songs of a person who, as they wrote and recorded them, thought she would not live to see them released – everything about them is purposeful. But then within all these contradictions, all the intentionally awkward imperfections, the varying mixing aesthetics and masks lies a revelatory nakedness that is completely absent from current day pop. – John Wohlmacher
Henrik Appel – Shadows
[PNKSLM]
Do you need a Velvet Underground fix? Have you worn out your copy of Transformer? Then let me introduce you to Stockholm musician Henrik Appel, someone who shares your VU and Lou Reed dependence and who just so happened to have released an album this year that pays homage to those artists while also making room for his own distinctive personality to shine through. Shadows is the result of Appel opening his writing process to his band and discovering that collaboration doesn’t necessarily mean dilution of thought. Taking his DIY rock impulses and merging them with his unique take on folk storytelling and jazz apoplectics, he and his band (and writing partner Emma Lind) have created something that is both referential and free to walk its own course. Streaks of wild saxophone echo across the landscape, building and maintaining a considerable momentum, as he lets the music evolve and grow until its ready to conquer the world – Joshua Pickard
ian vhs – pink slut
[Self-released]
The music of ian vhs is wrapped in mysterious Portuguese adornments, equal parts K-Pop iridescence and 90s R&B empowerment. Across pink slut, beats click and wander while a voice guides us through a labyrinth of electro-kitsch and explicit body positivity. It’s both nostalgic and futurist in its approach to these sounds, drawing from past lineages before letting the music take you on a trip into the years ahead. There’s little to no information available as to the identity of ian vhs, but this anonymity adds to the ethereal quality of the music. We keep searching for some inroad to classify or label it, but it continues to evade our attempts to corner it. The album is filled with Day-Glo flourishes, vivid illuminations that highlight the innate musical theatricality on display, patterns that repeat and warp as the music wraps us tighter in its grip. – Joshua Pickard
Laryssa Kim – Contezza
[City Tracks]
Laryssa Kim excels at hypnogogic exploration on her debut album, Contezza, turning field recordings, a rainbow of squiggly synths, and her own processed voice into an offering of experimental hymns and nocturnal exhalations. The way she loops elongated drones together with pulsing tones makes it feel as though she’s actively mapping out the interior causeways of a heart, before she heads back out to larger exteriors, drenching her electronics in perspiration and red blood cells. But it’s love, above all else, that occupies her time – the lack of, the release from, its disappointments and pleasure – and she uses music as a sort of primitivistic ritual to purge and examine the scars present in her own life. Between ambient visions of heartache and midnight revelations, she creates a sound that’s feels ancient and modern, a contradiction intensely expressed through oblique melodic execution and overt humanistic observation. – Joshua Pickard
Mach-Hommy – #RICHAXXHAITIAN
[Mach-Hommy Inc]
2024 was a rough year for hip-hop. Beefs and scandals brought out the worst in old favorites, fueling vitriolic disses, awkward scrambles, and just general bad vibes. Meanwhile, much of the newer and more interesting rap music trends are as much hyperpop as they are hip-hop. But none of that really matters if you’re a Mach-Hommy fan.
#RICHAXXHAITIAN doesn’t do much to switch up the script Mach’s been following for the past 5+ years, and that’s a good thing. The raps are dense, the beats all psychedelic boom-bap. Old buddies are here: Fahim, Droog, Roc Marciano, all doing their thing. It’s the fact that Mach has sharpened his craft to a point of near-perfection that makes this album so good. Around every corner there’s an unexpectedly slick sample or tongue-twisting bar, and it kept me coming back as much as any 2024 album. That, plus the KAYTRANADA-produced title track (with a chorus from the recently-freed 03 Greedo) is an absolute banger, and one of the biggest flexes of the year. – Ethan Reis
Mitochondrion – Vitriseptome
[Profound Lore]
If you’ve ever taken a sledgehammer to the chest, you’re likely to understand the pure undiluted force that Vitriseptome, the latest album from Vancouver metallurgists Mitochondrion, possesses. It’s been almost 14 years since we last had a proper studio album from the band, and in that time, it seems they’ve been working out how to further disrupt the earth’s normal geologic cycle. The guitars riffs are punishing, and the drums rise out of the earth like some newly freed demon looking for retribution. It’s hard to fully comprehend the density of the record without experiencing its crushing sonics firsthand. But it’s not bound to simple amplitude – Vitriseptome expresses a complexity that begs to be explored and pulled apart. It’s a record that encourages the listener to look past the corrugated assault of its surface and revel in the shifting gravitational forces moving beneath that stratum of noise. – Joshua Pickard
Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja
[Nuclear Blast]
Metal has always been sidelined in pop cultural discourse. At most, you will find some hollow appraisal of Metallica – because, well, metal needs some kind of great fountainhead for the normies after all – and if you’re lucky then Reign in Blood is mentioned. The rest is often kitsch or boomer-core, with Neurosis, Godflesh; Imperial Triumphant and Slipknot being foreign names that are redelegated to the “special interest” sections of historical appraisal. Because people would still rather believe that metal is unlistenable noise than intricate and enjoyable popular music? Well, what if I told you this year saw the release of an album that mixed scary cosmic grooves with neon-lit electronica, an album that sounded as if it was produced by SOPHIE and existed in the world of The Expanse? Because it exists in Muuntautuja.
The Finnish Oranssi Pazuzu have always been one of current metal’s best bands, offering an especially clever psychedelic twist on the genre. Here, they leap forward into a futuristic world that mixes Italian horror film soundtracks with Radiohead-like instrumentation, electronic noise and the beauty of Pink Floyd – all set in a futuristic spaceship. It’s a magnificent album that sounds decades ahead of its time, a collage of music’s entire history. It’s proof that metal can live within the context of pop music! – John Wohlmacher
Phosphorescent – Revelator
[Verve]
Matthew Houck has been breaking my heart for years now – I’ve almost become accustomed to it. From those early broken folk rambles to his more produced, though equally as affecting, later albums, his candid and heartbreaking narratives of love and its terrible and joyous consequences have played in an endless carousel in my head and heart. Revelator, his latest as Phosphorescent, finds him mulling over and examining the nuances of what family and home can mean, of the complicated twinning of partners. His knack for penning earworms and insightful story-songs that keep you up at night, enveloped in their own significance, is on full display – each song is a world unto itself, a place where endings and beginnings and the turbulence that leads from one to the other is thoroughly investigated. It’s a gem and a wonder and a collection of songs that provides illumination to the ache and thrill of everyday moments. – Joshua Pickard
samlrc – A Lonely Sinner
[samlrc’s Flowerfields]
One of the unsung leading trends of 2024 was post-prog-rock. No, not prog rock, that easily definable messy collage of 70s cliches – nobody seemed to notice how many cool and legitimately innovative works from Vylet Pony or Geordie Greep were… oh wait, strike Greep, he’s still busy cleaning the stains “Holy Holy” left on his pants. Anyways, my favourite of the bunch came from Brazil, with A Lonely Sinner. Mixing shoegaze, folk, ambient, minimalism and anthemic post rock, samlrc found this incredibly unique expression of melancholy that’s like nothing else I’ve heard all year. There’s shades here of Animal Collective and Mogwai, Della Zyr and My Morning Jacket, Kate Bush and Mount Eerie. An album of rare imaginative power and stark beauty. Just utterly wonderful! – John Wohlmacher
Spirit Of The Beehive – You’ll Have To Lose Something
[Saddle Creek]
Pennsylvania psychedelic pop collagists Spirit Of The Beehive returned with what seems ostensibly their most bright and poppy record to date this year. However, despite the City Pop samples and pastel coloured synth washes, You’ll Have To Lose Something is in fact a exploration of depression and nihilism.
Coming in the wake of the break up between band members Zack Schwartz and Rivke Ravede, You’ll Have To Lose Something isn’t explicitly about heartbreak but is all about the difficulty of human connection in the modern era. Their unpredictable layering, sampling and tight instrumentation gives a kaleidoscopic setting into which they weave tales of people vicious self-loathing and unhealthy behaviour. However, between their intersecting voices, they make these feelings seem universal and personal. For all the barriers that may seem apparent in their sonic approach, all they really want is for you to spend time with them – and it’s a more than rewarding experience. – Rob Hakimian
Sumac – The Healer
[Thrill Jockey]
The Healer is the sound of tectonic plates grinding against one another, the sound of continents forming and then being consumed by the ocean. It’s the sound of topographical movement. And it’s a goddamn good time. Sumac have always enjoyed the theatricality of metal’s extended narratives and musical witchcraft, but on their latest album, they discover something human in their cosmic forge. Guttural incantations are recited, the full mass of their collective experiences is expressed, and the earth pauses briefly in its rotation to acknowledge this artificial gravity. These four songs are chapters to a grand architectural design, examinations of creation and destruction, corruption and innocence. The band is fascinated by how we can overcome terrible things and rebuild our lives in the wake of that destruction. Despite its predilection for volume, The Healer doesn’t wallow in misery or self-pity – it seeks out any glimpse of light and rises to meet it, carrying us if necessary until we can make it on our own. – Joshua Pickard
SummerIsForever – “LAB SEQUENCE”
[Self-released]
“LAB SEQUENCE” is a warning shot across hip-hop’s bow. It offers a weird and compelling look at how the genre can embrace the odder corners of its history and break free of the mainstream banalities that seem to have clogged its landscape over the last year. The album renders the genre down into abstract realities, combining elements of vaporwave, electronic music, and rap experimentalism into a collage-like framework of mysterious beats and ambient backgrounds. Generally brief in their tenure, the tracks explore insular complexities, disparate emotional connections, and downright strange sonics in service to a deconstructionist assessment of hip-hop’s future. Aided by a coterie of likeminded producers and emcees, SummerIsForever taps into a mercurial vein of music designed to eliminate restrictions and call attention to the opportunities that these sounds afford those with the determination to dig deeply into their melodic minutiae. – Joshua Pickard
Tindersticks – Soft Tissue
[Lucky Dog/City Slang]
Tindersticks have always moved among the lesser illuminated avenues of music, opting to follow their own crooked muses rather than trailing behind trends that flare out and collapse before they can even be quantified. They further cement their reputation for being wonderfully out of sync with modern radio fashions on Soft Tissue, an album enamored of 70s soul and the ascending countrypolitan arrangements of artists like Glen Campbell and Charley Pride. Stuart Staples’ soulful drawl has always sounded best when wrapping elliptical syllables around spiraling melodies, and tracks like “The Secret of Breathing” and “New World” allow him room to maneuver around in wistful atmospheres buoyed by front loaded bass lines and twirling orchestral conspiracies. The album highlights the band’s long-standing ability to draw out and share the beauty in everyday things — and even after all these years, they still know how to describe and evoke the ordinary in breathtaking detail. – Joshua Pickard
Vylet Pony – Monarch of Monsters
[Horse Friends Music]
Self-excoriation through music: that is what Vylet Pony accomplishes on her new album, Monarch of Monsters, a collection of blackhole reflections and refractions that deal with shifting identities, past transgressions, and the ways in which we attempt to earn redemption. Littered with broken pieces of alt-rock, grunge, nu-metal, alt-pop, and more experimental musical deviations, the record functions as an interior excavation, an emotional deconstruction, a travelogue of realizations concerning bad choices, questionable behavior, and inflicted pain. It’s a concept album based on a novella based on critical self-examination. There are no easy answers here – songs often stretch out and elongate, therapeutic sessions in which Vylet reckons with the person she is now and who she was years ago. This primal treatment allows her to utilize sound as a restorative device and gives her license to unravel and rebuild her self-image while addressing the hurt she has caused. It’s a brutal and occasionally violent method of actualization, but for her, it’s the only way to move forward. – Joshua Pickard
Listen to a Spotify playlist of highlights from our Honorable Mentions 2024
