The 31 Best Albums of 2018 So Far

Gas – Rausch

(Kompakt)

Wolfgang Voigt’s return in 2017 with Narkopop, his first album as Gas in 17 years, proved to be the beginning of a period of creative fertility that yielded another even more compelling release just one year later. That album, Rausch, is a work of haunted ambience, a hypnotic melange of industrial grime and Black Lodge mysticism that sounds as dystopian as the world feels right now. This isn’t necessarily pretty music, not by any conventional measure, but there’s something stunning about the way it presents darkness in an almost orchestral fashion, making a gritty dub techno sound through lush, elaborate means. This is less of a comeback than the awakening of some long dormant beast. – Jeff Terich

Jean Grae and Quelle Chris – Everything’s Fine

(Mello)

Jean Grae is that rare underground female voice that every mainstream rapper really should be putting on a pedestal. She and her now-fiancé Quelle Chris just assembled a sly statement album that addresses what it means to be young, black, and American in today’s sociopolitical climate. It’s reminiscent of the laid-back observational bars spit/produced by De La Soul/Prince Paul back in the day, with a darker bent drawn from K.C. Green’s famous Gunshow meme. Jean and Chris say more with a gun-cock sound effect in a skit than most say in entire albums, and they have a lot more to say beyond that. The Carters may run things, but this power couple is ascendant. – Adam Blyweiss

Hot Snakes – Jericho Sirens

(Sub Pop)

If all we had to show for 2018 was a new Hot Snakes album, it’d still stop short of being a total disaster. The San Diego band’s fourth album and first in 14 years sounds like no time has passed at all and rips with seemingly even more ferocity than any of us remembered. Jericho Sirens isn’t so much a return to form as a reshaping of it, one with more barbs and bristles, serrated edges and poison tips. The minute-long pummeling of “Why Don’t It Sink In?” is manic and menacing, less a punk song than a frontal assault, while “Six Wave Hold-Down” and “Death Camp Fantasy” layer on the hooks while offering a brutal kick to the gut. Hot Snakes didn’t owe us anything, but we’re richer for having run through their gauntlet anew. – Jeff Terich

Iceage – Beyondless

(Matador)

For a good four years, Iceage were firing on all cylinders, releasing three dark, visceral and rapidly evolving punk records in quick succession. So it seems remarkable that after 2014’s Plowing Into the Field of Love, it took yet another four years to deliver its follow-up. Now more sophisticated, versatile residents in the field of love, Iceage reintroduce themselves as gothic romantics with swagger to spare on Beyondless. Their best album to date, Beyondless thrives on elaborately woven arrangements over chaos and intensity, their brooding dirges and glam-rock crunch revealing more layers and entire aspects of the band’s sound that were only hinted at the last time they entered a studio. An album of sex, anxiety, uncertainty and vice, Beyondless recaptures a mythical rock ‘n’ roll danger that we often hear so much about but rarely hear firsthand. – Jeff Terich

JPEGMAFIA – Veteran

(Deathbomb Arc)

The blissful cloud-rap backing of “1539 N. Calvert,” the first track on JPEGMAFIA’s fourth album Veteran, doesn’t quite prepare the listener for the chaos that ensues throughout the album. A post-Death Grips industrial-rap exercise in absurdity, confrontation and speaking truth to white supremacist power, Veteran takes exactly one track before the floor drops out: “Real Nega” uses an intentionally obnoxious Ol’ Dirty Bastard sample to open an explosion of machine-gun beats and actual machine guns (in a lyrical comparison to Lena Dunham no less). The self-produced album by Barrington Hendricks (who is in fact an Air Force veteran) sounds something like Fear of a Black Planet produced by Oneohtrix Point Never, less “Black CNN” more “anarchist Reddit.” It’s aural mayhem, but JPEG’s harsh truths are capable of cutting through even its nastiest noises. – Jeff Terich

Janelle Monáe – Dirty Computer

(BadBoy)

Janelle Monáe built such a rich world with her Metropolis suite that it likely never occurred to anyone she’d leave the android behind on her third album. Dirty Computer is still a work of dystopian narrative, albeit one whose backdrop looks a bit similar to the present. And amid its repudiations of hate, prejudice and oppression, there are joyous celebrations of Blackness, of queerness, and of a damn good groove. The first album Monáe’s released since the death of friend and mentor Prince carries a great deal of his influence, and in turn she does his legacy proud by unleashing a truly funky masterpiece. On Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe delivers a pynk reign. – Jeff Terich

Mount Eerie – Now Only

(P.W. Elverum and Sun)

The great Canadian poet Anne Carson said in an interview a few years ago that she didn’t believe in art as therapy. It’s possible, then, that she might have a bone to pick with Phil Elverum. Since losing his wife, the writer and musician Geneviève Elverum (formerly Castrée) to cancer in 2016, Elverum’s work has grown more and more intimate, unflinching, and stark. Above all, though, Now Only, like its remarkable antecedent, A Crow Looks at Me, is deeply personal. “I sing to you,” he tells Geneviève on “Tintin in Tibet,” and it’s clear that Now Only is meant for her, as a place for him to put the stories he would be telling her. So he isn’t singing to us here. But he does know that we’re listening, and so, as his steady, muted intonations roll on and on, he lets us see our pasts and futures in the aftermath of his loss, lets us be transformed by it as he was. Art may not be inherently therapeutic, but I know, from this record and so many others, that it can be a comfort, and maybe that’s enough. – Ben Dickerson

Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour

(MCA Nashville)

Golden Hour was met with its share of love, critical praise and adoration, but to be honest, it feels like Musgraves wrote the album specifically for me—and every other person trying to navigate their twenties. “Lonely Weekend” finally nails what it’s like to come to terms with doing absolutely nothing on Saturday night. Each song is charming, honest and witty, and the influence of Musgraves’ marriage to Ruston Kelly invigorates her writing with a new outlook. Falling somewhere between Bonnie Raitt and Carly Rae Jepsen, Musgraves’ junior album is a true triumph, the perfect soundtrack for summer. – Virginia Croft

Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of

(Warp)

We’ve heard twisted takes on pop before, from Beck to Olivia Tremor Control. Daniel Lopatin throws his inventive electronica concern into that fray for discomfiting versions of R&B balladry and groove. Unlike OPN’s past connections to vaporwave, Age Of is built with bigger pieces and decorated with bolder strokes. Lopatin and his friends sing and chant, their vocals lurching, exploding, and disappearing without warning. Classical harpsichord and guitar weave around squeaking acid synths and glitching effects. It’s a strange, strangely beautiful blend of music, taking sounds that on their own might be accessible—even potentially bland—and pushing them through electroacoustic cheesecloth to leave behind pure and substantial artistry. – Adam Blyweiss

Palm – Rock Island

(Carpark)

Philadelphia’s Palm was formed in non-traditional fashion; four amateurs, novice musicians fairly new to their respective instruments, in pursuit of something singular, crafting and retracting excellent, hidden experiments along the way. The members share an innate sense of rhythm, patterns that swim in the shallow end of the subconscious: off-kilter, yet eerily familiar. Rock Island, Palm’s excellent Carpark debut, is the band’s most focused release yet, an album exceptionally distinct and unafraid to bend the definition of “indie rock” in 2018. With label backing, Palm has been rightfully revealed to a much larger audience, with publications pinning the music as art or math rock, but the music seems to occupy a realm of its own—one that the band acknowledges as having more of an abstract visual appeal. The refreshingly novel steel drums of “Dog Milk,” the tolling guitars on sleeper hit “(Didn’t What You Want) Happen” or the sublime breakdown of “Forced Hand”—they’re all moments that set Palm’s music apart, making Rock Island one of the most unique records we’ll hear this year. – Patrick Pilch