2021 was a spectacularly immense year for music. It felt like all of the bands who weren’t able to tour last year spent 2020 writing and recording new albums. Then this year, they released them.
With such a flood of new music, it’s worth noting that almost every year end list I’ve seen looks entirely different. Many publications that I could usually predict with decent accuracy (NPR, Pitchfork, etc) listed dozens of albums that I never even heard of. I listened to more music this year than ever before, but I’ve never been so aware of what I was missing. Many albums that I would have/should have liked were released to widespread acclaim (i.e., Quicksand, Every Time I Die, Low, Maybeshewill, Failure, the list goes on) and yet I watched them go by, my attention already stretched to its limits.
In any case, here are the records that really grabbed me this year.
than Deafheaven.
Since my second or third year of college, the surest way to keep me from listening to something has been to drop the word “metal” in its description. Metal (and by extension, hardcore) was something I had enjoyed while I was following the scene, but I had grown out of it and moved on to the greener, more mature pastures of folk, electronica, and art rock.