ICYMI: 10 best albums of the year so far, from Olivia Rodrigo to David Balfe
David Balfe of For Those I Love (left) and Olivia Rodrigo (right), who released Sour this year
Is it pop? R’n b? Experimental soul music? All of the boxes are ticked on the sublime second album from Baltimore’s Josiah White. The subject matter is gay love in Trump’s America. And the vehicle via which White ponders his place as a queer black man in an ever more divided world is blissed-out balladry, brimming with warmth, wit and a woozy sense of optimism.
The teen actress blossoms as a pop star on a record that plays out like a gothic reimagining of Skins or Dawson’s Creek (or HBO’s already baroque Euphoria). Rodrigo has an irresistibly laconic voice and pivots between hazy electronica and rock music that verges on indie pop. There’s been a backlash, of course, with Rodrigo accused of appropriating the fallen cheerleader artwork from Hole’s Live Through This and an Elvis Costello riff on the track Brutal – which Costello rightly dismissed on the basis that all artists are ultimately rummaging in their forbears’ work.
The Fall and Fontaines DC are among the reference points for this essential London post-punk band. Jangling guitars will make you yearn for the indie discos of yore, though the project’s true secret weapon is Florence Shaw, who delivers dense spoken word over Tom Dowse’s incessant guitar. The effect is both surreal and sublime.
A secret gift wrapped just for you, the eighth studio album from Filipino-American producer and singer Ringgo Anceta brims with low-key surprises and pithy humour. Technically it’s an r’n b LP. But Rare Pleasure soars above genre to float on clouds of pure joy. And in view of the year we’ve all just lived through, it’s a record crying out to be played over and over.
Grief is something with which the world at large has had to reckon 18 months into the pandemic. And it is a subject that producer David Balfe unpacks with tenderness, wit, and wisdom on his For Those I Love project. An homage to his late friend and bandmate Paul Curran, this suite of Jamie XX style bangers is also coloured by the grit and angst of Balfe’s hard knock upbringing in Coolock and Donaghmede. Irish music is awash with fake working class heroes. But Balfe’s snapshots from life on the margins are authentic and emotive.
The haters claimed there were too many ballads on Del Rey’s seventh studio LP. And it’s true the going is cautious and graceful throughout. However, the often oblique Del Rey has never been more direct than when yearning for her pre-superstar days of quiet struggle, as she does on White Dress. The title track, meanwhile, perfectly captures the unnerving in-between quality of life at the moment, where everything at close hand feels drab and repetitive and yet the horizon is streaked with fear and loathing.
There is full-on and then there is the debut from Ghanan-Australian singer and rapper Owusu. Smiling with No Teeth is by turns creepy, fantastical and irresistibly catchy. Comparisons are pointless - but if you wanted to imagine Kendrick Lamar making a lo-fi record brimming with haunting vintage synths, you wouldn’t be entirely in the wrong time zone.
Goat Girl’s 2018 debut album was a glorious mess. Second time around, the all-female London four piece demonstrate how far they’ve come as songwriters. Brimming with zinging hooks and off-kilter lyrics (P.T.S. Tea recounts being splashed with scalding hot brew on a ferry), it’s quirky, tuneful, and full of post-punk brio.
The glory years of high-concept electronica are evoked on the second long-player from the Belfast producer duo of Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar. There are hints of Orbital, Brian Eno, Underworld, Leftfield and early Chemical Brothers on a record saturated in epic beats and a boundless sense of adventure.
One of the great post-Brexit albums, Elizabeth Bernholz’s rumination on English identity and the degree to which it is bound up in nativism, xenophobia and an obsession with the past makes for a wonderfully un-mooring listen. A cover of Fire Leap from The Wicker Man sounds like Prodigy trapped in a folk-horror movie from the Seventies. Who could – or would want to – resist?
