Just a quarter into 2016 and it already feels like we’ve experienced the full emotional and sensorial spectrum of a year’s worth of music. And given how much we listen to these days, we sorta have, comparatively speaking: We got the big album (The Life of Pablo), the critically acclaimed album (untitled unmastered.), and the pop album (Vroom Vroom); the misfit (LEXACHAST), the mixtape (Purple Reign), and the miscellaneous (Arigato). But try as we might to sanctify and fetishize just 20 out of an increasingly ridiculous amount of great music being released, our favorites this quarter are already looking to the future. From Dean Blunt’s Babyfather and Young Thug to Charli XCX and 18+, more than half of the artists on this list have either already dropped a new release or are planning one (or more) for later this year. Crazy times.
Before we get to the list, here are releases that we loved but didn’t make this cut: Lucrecia Dalt’s Ou, Blithe Field’s Face Always Toward the Sun, Lil Yachty’s Lil Boat, Eric Copeland’s Jesus Freak, Why Be’s famished 003, LIL UGLY MANE’s Oblivion Access, Katie Got Bandz’s Drillary Clinton 3, The Body’s No One Deserves Happiness, Sicko Mobb’s Super Saiyan Vol 3, Future’s EVOL, Josephine Foster’s No More Lamps In The Morning, Lil B’s Thugged Out Pissed Off, Aluk Todolo’s Voix, Matmos’ Ultimate Care II, Mikael Seifu’s Zelalem, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Grandfeathered, Space Camp 1991’s Space Camp 1991, and David Bowie’s Blackstar.
Brood Ma
DAZE
[Tri Angle]
Yah, dystopia reeks. Anthro-alphabetic paradigms keep getting written into rocks. We are overtaken and infatuated with intensely overstimulating our small, shitty human brains that regularly ruin everything. We consume byte-sized grains of regime. We file them in arrays of ridiculous, jumbo images. Images drip as Hard Wear, as Thorium and NRG. Images drip as sonic precodes shifting and producing essential strands of malignant code. Images rot like organic structures throbbing with diseased life. Brood Ma’s trance-inducing gamification of image-sound spawns music as flighty, small, and vexing as it is leviathan. Metallurgic textures descend into plate-shifting blasts of geo-sound. Silvery video game dust is blown all over the mix. Molten cores of human-hatred pool — attempting to melt shoddily-built structures back into primordial shapes — a cloud of poisonous gas, a mesa of weird ore. DAZE is a bitter, harsh cloning of geologic sound functioning as an unforgiving critique on net-concrete “club” musicology. Early in 2016, we see the crusts of net-movements cast as an elemental friction between planet and image — with tension building evermore, no release in sight.