I was going to make a top 50 albums of the year list, but then decided that you don’t need yet another blog telling you how great Poison Season and To Pimp a Butterfly are. So, I decided to do something a bit different and more in the vein of this blog. Here are the best, most overlooked albums of the year. Enjoy!
15. Charlie Brand – Monsoons
Monsoons is nothing like the over the top saccharine melodies Charlie Brand helped create with Miniature Tigers. It’s sweet, gentle songwriting with the occasional spaceship noise thrown in for good measure.
[pop]
14. Macross 82-99 – CHAM!
Die-hard future funk and vaporwave fans might not like where Macross, future funk’s most talented and prolific producer, has gone with his newest effort. There will be those that are sad that he’s drifting away from funking up old Japanese disco deep cuts. But they’re wrong. With CHAM! he manages to strike the perfect balance between delivering atypical, future funk bangers for his old fans, and branching into exciting, fresher hip hop-influenced sounds.
[future funk]
13. PWR BTTM – Ugly Cherries
A wonderful debut from PWR BTTM. Ugly Cherries is full of genuinely catchy pop punk anthems that will have you singing along.
[pop punk]
12. Gengahr – A Dream Outside
A top five debut that was fairly lauded when it came out. Maybe everyone forgot about it because they took the album off of Spotify. Take a hint, guys.
[psychedelic rock]
11. Dråpe – Relax/Relapse
One of the best, most accessible pop albums of the year. Only one listen required to see the hype.
[pop]
10. The Districts – A Flourish and a Spoil
If rock & roll is dead than The Districts reanimated the corpse and walked it around in 2015 like a zombie marionette.
[indie rock]
9. Chastity Belt – Time To Go Home
Sleater-Kinney released an album this year and this still the best record by an all girl band. I said it. Fight me.
[noise pop]
8. Marco Vella – Shadow Mountain
Seven of the most perfect electronic and ambient music tracks out right now, and from a complete specter. This debut will blow your hair back and lead to frantic googling of ‘who the hell is this guy?’.
[electronic / ambient]
7. Sui Zhen – Secretly Susan
Even if this album didn’t have great jams like ‘Take It All Back’ and ‘Walk Without Me’, it would still be on this list for the album cover alone.
[electronic / singer songwriter]
6. Title Fight – Hyperview
Ian Cohen agrees with me, this was a top 10 album of 2015.
[melodic hardcore]
5. Empress Of – Me
I suppose it’s not overlooked so much as not placed high enough on the end-of-they-year lists. I mean c’mon, this is just a better version of what Grimes tried to do, and there are twice as many bangers.
[dream pop / str8 bangers]
4. Astronauts Etc. – Mind Out Wandering
The only notable source that reviewed this album was Paste, who gave it an 85. Really? Paste? That’s it. What’s the state of music journalism when fucking Paste are the ones with their finger on the pulse. Their office is in Georgia for Pete’s sake.
[dream pop]
3. Roman à clef – Abandonware
Abandonware is 29 minutes of 80’s pop hits that you and your mom can enjoy together. Best debut album of the year award goes to… Roman à clef! Ryan and Jen from Sunny Day in Glasgow, please come to my living room to accept your award.
[pop]
2. Evans the Death – Expect Delays
There is a song on Expect Delays called ‘Bad Year’ where Katherine Whitaker cries out, “I’ve had a bad yeaaaarrrr.’ Well, if having a bad time caused these guys to make such a great album, I hope the rest of their lives are terrible. 🙂
[indie rock / noise pop]
1. Vundabar – Gawk
Vundabar are the Drake of indie rock. I’ve never heard an album with so many effortless hooks. Gawk is so incredibly lean that it gives the impression of having been forged over and over in the studio like hot steel, hammering away anything that wasn’t an absolute banger until they were finally satisfied – there’s no fluff here, folks. Every song could have been the single.
[Drake rock]
The Overdub 