Denzel Curry - TA13OO

Score: 8.6 

The latest release from rapper Denzel Curry is divided into three sections, dealing with different topics and throughout different personas and star guests. It's an impressively versatile record that retails personal loss, issues, romance and politics in the darkest and most cinematic ways possible. Eerie, caricaturesque and terribly somber, TA13OO invites you to leave all the conscious behind and submerge into a candid void full of terrors and anger... and you don't regret taking the risk.

Tracks I like the most: SUMO | ZUMO, SWITCH IT UP | ZWITCH 1T UP, SIRENS | Z1RENZ, CLOUT COBAIN | CLOUT CO13A1N, PERCS | PERCZ, VENGEANCE | VENGEANCE

Tracks I like the least: TABOO | TA13OO

Artist: Denzel Curry

Country: United States

Album: TA13OO

/eleased: 27/07/2018

Genres: Hip Hop, Rap, Experimental

Length: 43:20

Let's Eat Grandma - I'm All Ears

Score: 7.9 

The sophomore full-length album from the English duo Let's Eat Grandma finds them even growing on their idiosyncratic, maximalist way of creating and performing avant-pop, with catchy lines that go to unexpected places to return in swirly airs and thick compressions. Composed by short passages and extensive pseudo-danceable bangers, the album unfurls and displays a crucial ability for the batshit; a pleasure to the ears and the mind.

Tracks I like the most: Hot Pink, Donnie Darko, Cool & Collected

Tracks I like the least: Falling Into Me

Artist: Let's Eat Grandma

Country: United Kingdom

Album: I'm All Ears

Released: 29/06/2018

Genres: Avant-Pop, Indie Pop, Synth-Pop

Length: 51:27

Chvrches - Love Is Dead

Score: 5.2 

In Love Is Dead, the third album from the Scottish trio, the music they stand for unashamedly aims for the popular rising of mainstream, and loses pretty much everything that made them special and adorable in the first place in the process. It's a pity the band willingly falls into repetitive, unnecessarily quasi-catchy hooks and washed-out instrumentation to achieve musicality, because most of the songs could have glimpses of potential, whether it not being for the tasteless production and poor execution. Shall we still keep faith on them after this?

Tracks I like the most: Get Out, God's Plan

Tracks I like the least: Never Say Die, Graves, Heaven/Hell

Artist: Chvrches

Country: United Kingdom

Album: Love Is Dead

Released: 25/05/2018

Genres: Synth-Pop, Indie Pop

Length: 49:03

Preoccupations - New Material

Score: 8.3 

The second album from the Canadian band with their name Preoccupations might disappoint the ones expecting the classic frensy and maximalism of their debut record, since A New Material is much more focused on building colossal ambients and vibrations around doomed, blacky, smoky distortion and heavily grained vocals. Though more subdued and safer, the record stays strong and builds into apocalyptic (if not, celestial) heights and depths. The group, rather than minimising their sound, have expanded their mood and capacity; it's a victory for their ever-going internal construction.

Tracks I like the most: Espionage, Decompose, Solace, Compliance

Tracks I like the least: Disarray

Artist: Preoccupations

Country: Canada

Album: New Material

Released: 23/03/2018

Genres: Post-Punk, Art Punk, Indie Rock, Experimental Rock, Industrial

Length: 36:07

Mitski - Be The Cowboy

Score: 8.4 

The fifth album from the Japanese-American artist Mitski is her most accomplished yet. Fulled with songs that mostly stop before three minutes, they are all meticulously thought out and executed, with each instrumental piece in perfect order and position and each utterance with thousand meanings. All that said, the singer still finds ways to sound raw and real, convinced about what she's saying and as enamoured of life as doomed by it. Be The Cowboy is intense and rewarding, lush and almost-acoustic in feeling, and severely self-deprecating but cockily triumphant.

Tracks I like the most: Nobody, Washing Machine Heart, Why Didn't You Stop Me?, A Pearl, Me And My Husband, Pink In The Night

Tracks I like the least: Remember My Name

Artist: Mitski

Country: United States

Album: Be The Cowboy

Released: 17/08/2018

Genres: Indie Rock, Indie Pop

Length: 32:28

Lucrecia Dalt - Anticlines

Score: 8.0 

The Colombia-born, Germany-settled electronic artist returns with her sixth electroacoustic manifesto and, in it, she displays a regurgitating and utterly cerebral ambient record. In both sadistic, gross spoken word and swirly manipulation of synths, Lucrecia Dalt evolves and deconstructs her sound palette to meander the sky and dig deep into the ground. It's, indeed, a terrestrial-yet-galactic work that's airy and polluted.

Tracks I like the most: Edge, Tar, Analogue Mountains, Concentric Nothings, Eclipsed Subject

Tracks I like the least: Glass Brain

Artist: Lucrecia Dalt

Country: Colombia/Germany

Album: Anticlines

Released: 04/05/2018

Genres: Electronic, Experimental, Ambient, Spoken Word, Electroacoustic

Length: 36:31

Lolina - The Smoke

Score: 8.6 

The third record from the experimental composer Inga Copeland is a distorted completion of songs that are as difficult-to-catalogue as intriguingly erratic. Part horror-film oriented, part carnavalesque-fueled, the tracks generally start with simple piano-driven compositions and evolve into eerily galactic places, bringing lots of elements that (nonetheless) never come to harmonise. The Smoke is fuzzy, entertaining, knacky but, above all, superbly off-kilter.

Tracks I like the most: A Path Of Weeds And Flowers, Fake City, Real City, Style And Punishment

Tracks I like the least: Roulette

Artist: Lolina

Country: Russia/United Kingdom

Album: The Smoke

Released: 14/03/2018

Genres: Experimental, Electronic, Zolo, Synth-Pop, Progressive Pop

Length: 28:03 

Mount Eerie - Now Only

Score: 8.6 

The latest album from the American artist is a continuation of his soul-crushing, devastating record from last year, A Crow Looked At Me. In both of them, he explores the dense territories surrounding the mindset and physical spaces between life and death, nature and music, and anger and serenity. Composed by six songs, the composer gives us another track to discover his inner thoughts while showcasing his enormous talent for simple-yet-extraordinary story-telling. Once again, reality surpasses fiction, and it's the more jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring for its own unpredictability.

Tracks I like the most: Distortion, Tintin In Tibet, Now Only

Tracks I like the least: Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup

Artist: Mount Eerie

Country: United States

Album: Now Only

Released: 16/03/2018

Genres: Indie Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Minal, Drone

Length: 43:36

Skee Mask - Compro

Score: 8.1 

The second full-length album from German electronic producer Skee Mask is a hypnotic and transgressive mixbag of ambient, break beat and maximal techno for both introverts with their headphones, extroverts with their dance-floor, or viceversa. The tracks breath into one another blending styles, moods, speed and energy, where the organic melts into the artificial to create a piece of machinary music like no other. 

Tracks I like the most: Rev8617, 50 Euro To Break Boost, Dial 274, Flyby Vfr, Muk FM

Tracks I like the least: Vli

Artist: Skee Mask

Country: Germany

Album: Compro

Released: 15/05/2018

Genres: Electronic, Ambient, Techno, Breakbeat, Experimental

Length: 64:58

Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage

Score: 8.8 

After six years and a severe accident, the singer-songwriter and producer Melody Prochet returns with her much-anticipated sophomore album; and it's a blast. One could have thought that all the crazy, magical and stratospheric ideas that made her debut album so appealing and entertaining came from her producer and ex-boyfriend Kevin Parker from Tame Impala, but Bon Voyage serves as a wonderful example of the capacity, diversity and extreme talent the artist contains all over herself and by herself. With only seven tracks and 33 minutes, the record takes outstanding risks and twists and succeeds in all of them, creating a picture that's as iridescent as phantasmagoric. Hands up for THE experimental album of the year.

Tracks I like the most: Desert Horse, Quand Les Larmes D'Un Ange Font Danser La Neige, Cross My Heart, Shirim

Tracks I like the least: Var Har Du Vart

Artist: Melody's Echo Chamber

Country: France

Album: Bon Voyage

Released: 15/06/2018

Genres: Psychedelic Pop, Psychedelic Rock, Experimental Pop, Progressive Pop, Dream Pop

Length: 33:17