2024 in music

If last year for me was defined by The Dear Hunter, this year has been defined by what’s to come after. Is there anything else that’s worth listening to now that I’ve found TDH? Turns out the answer is yes!, even if my taste has been pretty thouroughly been influenced by TDH.

This post is pretty much a collection of music I’ve found since I started listening to TDH, but first, some more The Dear Hunter!

In The Dear Hunter Recommendation I said I hadn’t listened too much on The Color Spectrum. Well, that has changed now. It’s a good album! Essentially it’s a mega album consisting of nine EPs, one for each of the colors Black, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, and White. I don’t like Red that much, so usually I start listening from Orange. My favourites are Violet and White, where Home and Mr. Malum are two songs that stand out.

Their latest project called The Indigo Child is some form of super ambitious multi-media project consisting of concept albums and an actual movie production. Antimai, which I covered in the last blog post, is the first full album in this series, but before that they had released an EP also called The Indigo Child that I listened to more this year. The first two songs “The Indigo Child” and “The Indigo Child (Reprise)” make me really excited for the coming music from this band.

They have also released the prologue to the movie (or will it be a TV-series???).

Honorary mention: Honorary Astronaut. I haven’t listend in this album yet, but it seems pretty nice. It’s still by Casey Crescenzo, but not released under the TDH name.

Now the question was how do I actually find music that scratches the same itch as TDH?

One thing I did was that I looked at the TDH subreddit, but much of what I tried didn’t stick.

Late this year I found the Swedish blog Copyriot’s tips for finding new music when you’re not on Spotify. Basically:

• Look into who is booked for the same concerts/music festivals/clubs as artists you like
• Follow links on an artist you like’s Discgogs page. Artists they have collaborated with, the record lables that released their music etc. Repeat the process for however long you like.

On Discogs I found the non-TDH album that most closely scratched that TDH itch: “Razia’s Shadow: A Musical” by Forgive Durden. TDH’s frontman features in the first song. Something I’ve noticed this year is that I probably like music that has story to them. In addition to Razia’s Shadow I’ve found the band Protomen. They make concept albums that are stories based on the Megaman games.

Presumably this taste is something I’ve picked up from TDH, but it’s also kind of funny because I’m really bad at picking out the lyrics so I usually don’t really know what the story is about. I suspect that the reason I still have this taste is that I like what it does to the structure of an album, so that it has prologues, buildups, climaxes, and wind-downs. That makes for a cohesive structure.

I’ve experimented with small-web search engines like Marginalia to find actual people’s blogs on topics I like. One album I’ve found this way is “Adventure” by Lydian Collective. I found them on someone’s website where they’ve graded the music they’ve listened to, which I in turn found by search for The Dear Hunter on the search engine Clew. My untrained ears tell me they are an instrumental math rock band, but they describe themselves as a jazz/fusion band.

Otherwise I’ve found a lot of my music at a certain chat forum’s music channel, where people of the community share and recommend music they like. If I haven’t written how I found the music, it was probably from that chat forum.

• A Black Mile to the Surface
• A Million Masks of God

Manchester Orchestra is shaping up to become one of my favourite bands. Despite that I’ve found that it takes me quite some time to get into their music. For the two albums I’ve listened to so far it has taken me multiple attempts until I feel like I’ve gotten into it. By some unexplainable coincidence, I’ve accidentally started listening to an album of theirs at ~70% speed twice without noticing my mistake until halfway through the album.

A Black Mile to the Surface has lots of recurring motifs and songs that lead into each other, with perhaps one of the strongest last songs of an album that I’ve listened to, all of which create a very cohesive listening experience.

I have been trying to get into rap, but it has been hard. It is in many ways fundamentally different from the music I’m used to, and the ways I’m used to picking up new music don’t seem to work here. Normally I would listen to a couple of songs from an artist or band in the background while doing something else to see if there is something there that catches my attention, and then listen to their music more frequently through their albums. With rap that doesn’t seem to work. One reason is probably because much of the value of rap lies in the lyrics, and that is hard to pick up when you aren’t actively paying attention to it. It doesn’t help that I’m already bad at picking up the lyrics with music I’m used to, let alone rap. The importance of lyrics makes it harder to appreciate in many other ways as well, because the texts are often written in a cultural context that I’m not a part of, so a lot of the bars become incomprehensible to me. Rap by white (American) artists seem to generally be more easily approachable, but I don’t really like the vibes of that.

With that said, I’ve so far found two songs that I do like. The first one is Euphoria by Kendrick Lamar. This one is extremely lyrics based and my enjoyment comes primarily from that. It is written in a sophisticated style that manage to say a lot with few words, and it’s not a song that pulls it punches. The only reason I understand anything in this song is because FD Signifier made a 3h+ long video explaining the 20 past years’ history of rap and the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Listening to this song is quite different from any other song I’ve listened to. Normally I feel comfortable listening to songs while doing chores, and I do get a lot of enjoyment out of that. With Euphoria I feel like the only way I can enjoy it is through sitting down and listening to it intently, and once it gets going there’s barely any room for pause.

The other song is also by Kendrick: King Kunta. The enjoyment I get from this one is closer to how I ordinarily listen to music, the focus here for me is the rythms of the beat and the rapping interact with each other. This is also closer to what I’ve imagined rap to be: very rythmic where the song is closely tied to the rythm of the beat. I don’t know where this conception of rap comes from, but I suspect it is from the rap my dad used to listen to from the 80s and 90s. A lot of contemporary rap that I’ve listened to seem to have a looser relation to the underlying beat, which has made it harder for me to get into.

I don’t get Not Like Us at all.

Going forward, I’m curious about his albums “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City” and “To Pimp a Butterfly”. I think I’ve listened to them once each, and I found some stuff in there to pique my interest. My preference for concept albums prevails in the hip hop genre as well it seems like.

Oh, Doechii’s Tiny Desk has also piqued my interest. That was some good stuff.

Two other rap songs I’ve found this year are Hind’s Hall I and II by Macklemore. On a technical level I’m not sure if the lyrics are that advanced or nuanced, but that’s perhaps not necessary. The subject matter isn’t exactly morally complicated. I also appreciate that he featured some Palestinian artists in Hind’s Hall 2.

Kofia, of “Leve Palestina” fame is a band I’ve been listening to as well, primarily their debut album “Palestina, mitt land” from 1976. It really struck home how long the Palestinian people have been suffering, and how brutal their oppression has been. The song “Dom dödar våra kamrater” (They are Killing Our Comrades) is especially haunting. (sidenote: Found a translation here: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/dom-dodar-vara-kamrater-they-are-killing-our-comra.html )

Fleet Foxes, in particular their eponymous debut album. I think I listened to these more early in the year, but haven’t listened to them lately.

Hazards of Love I listened to a bit, but never really got into.

Same with Dirt Poor Robins. From them I liked the The Raven Locks set of albums.