We’re halfway through the year and sharing our favorite albums of 2021 thus far! Here’s Chad’s list of current favs and some words about the releases.
Visit the store and check ’em out on our 2021 staff picks (thus far) display!
Live music is making its way back into our lives, and I’m grateful for that on several levels, first and foremost because working musicians are getting back to making a living on the stage. But as someone who has attempted to turn the pandemic lemon into lemonade at every turn, I’m also grateful that the pause in live performances yielded some incredible new music that only got made because the artists making it had nothing else to do but stay home and work on their craft. Seriously, I can’t remember a recent year bursting with this much good music, or being this excited about all of it.
And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can’t keep up. My listening to-do list currently numbers two dozen 2021 albums I haven’t even dented yet, and there’s even more music on the way this summer and fall that I can’t wait to hear.
The five albums on my mid-year list feature sounds that are exciting and fresh, steeped in nostalgia or somewhere in between, and it’s the in between where I’ve found my ears happily residing in recent years.
Black Country, New Road – For the first time
For the first time comes on like the back-alley turducken baby of Tindersticks, Slint and Fontaines D.C. – freakish and delectable. It sounds like it could all fall apart at any moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this overly-talented band self-destructs within two years, but for now we get a ringside seat to a musical tug-of-war between restraint and abandon and an unreliable narrator spitting absolute lyrical gems like “I am invincible in these sunglasses / I am the Fonz, I am the Jack of Hearts … I’m a modern Scott Walker / I’m a surprisingly smooth talker / And I’m invincible in these sunglasses.”
Bicep – Isles
My favorite electronic album of the year (thus far, of course). Sometimes Isles comes on like Boards of Canada if they had actually tried to make music for the club, other times is reminds me of the tribal-inflected 1995 house classic Leftism by Leftfield. But mostly, the album takes me into the modern realm of ethereal and emotional electronic music populated by the likes of Bonobo and Jamie xx, and if you dig those artists, don’t take a pass on this one.
Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg
John O. gushed about Dry Cleaning until just about everyone on staff listened, and now we’re all fans. Imagine Siri – and yes, I’m talking about the smartphone assistant – reprogrammed to share poetic non sequiturs and observational stories from modern bohemian Europe over arty mid-tempo post-punk and you have New Long Leg, a captivating album that pulls you further into its strange world with each listen.
Twit One – Objets Trouvés
Twit One played a part in one of my favorite albums of 2020, Testiculo y Uno’s Two, of which I remarked at last year’s midpoint that I never tire of sample-laden, jazz-inflected instrumental hip-hop. Here we are a year later, with the noir head-nod opus that is Objets Trouvés, and I still can’t get enough.
Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
From Belle & Sebastian to the Goon Sax, some of my favorite albums are by young people making music about being young. Twenty-one-year-old Arlo Parks chronicles her particular place in the world at her particular age with poetic grace and insightful perspective, delivered with a casual tone that invites the listener in like a conversation with a trusted friend. The best writing colors a story with details that are so specific they achieve something universal, and if that doesn’t make sense to you, listening to this fantastic record will.