Weapons-grade 808s, luscious horns and a megastar’s early steps: the best music our writers discovered this year

From a slept-on Chief Keef banger to an overlooked Taylor Swift classic and a neglected jazz Kenny, we reveal the older releases that have got us going this year

As someone generally averse to the fact that album releases never seem to slow down any more, even at the end of December, I managed to miss Chief Keef’s 4NEM when it dropped in late December last year. Known for pioneering drill before it splintered into a thousand different global subgenres, the Chicago rapper is beloved for the kind of abrasive, potty-mouthed raps that older listeners shake their fists at but which send younger listeners into a craze.

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by Christine Ochefu, Tim Jonze, Shaad D'Souza, Ammar Kalia, Safi Bugel, Elle Hunt, Laura Snapes, Dhruva Balram, Dave Simpson and Joe Stone via Electronic music | The Guardian

Ukrainian hardcore, Nigerian alté and Red Bull-soaked bloghouse: 2023’s most promising musical newcomers

From Memphis rap to Manchester post-punk and Laurel Canyon-worthy beauty, a new generation is coming this way

From Los Angeles, US
Marina Allen wears songwriterly classicism with incredible lightness: there are tinges of Brill Building doyennes such as Laura Nyro to her conversational piano playing and lilting voice; of west coast wonder to her open-hearted and unflinching lyricism. Her second album, 2022’s gorgeous Centrifics, was produced by Cass McCombs and Weyes Blood collaborator Chris Cohen, and represented Allen daring herself to say “yes” to being honest with herself, to write her way out of rumination. LS
Recommended if you like Joanna Newsom, Cassandra Jenkins, Carole King
Up next Touring the UK from 8-15 February

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by Shaad D'Souza and Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Flume, Body Type, Midnight Oil and more: the 21 best Australian albums of 2022

From globe-trotting glitch-pop to Aria-winning Yolŋu surf-rock, here are Guardian Australia’s favourite releases of the year

Key track: Tread Light

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by Andrew Stafford, Nathan Jolly, Shaad D'Souza, Sian Cain, Michael Sun, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Nick Buckley, Janine Israel , Walter Marsh and Jared Richards via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 50 best albums of 2022: No 3 – The Weeknd: Dawn FM

Abel Tesfaye’s luridly spectacular album continued his trangressive and dazzlingly deranged themes with gorgeous, grand music voiced by his depressive alter ego

• The 50 best albums of 2022
• The best songs of 2022
• More of the best culture of 2022

Dawn FM is the Dom Pérignon of male manipulator music – a slick of negging and neediness, sleaze and sanctimony that carries the unnatural, alluring glow of toxic waste. Released without fanfare in the first week of the year and still as luridly spectacular 11 months later, the Weeknd’s fifth album – eighth if you count his superlative and still-astounding 2011 mixtape trilogy – is also his most dazzlingly deranged, and a high watermark for any star seeking to inflict their own vision on mainstream, stadium-primed pop music.

Dawn FM serves as the midway point in a trilogy of concept albums that began with 2020’s After Hours, and which will supposedly end with an album about the afterlife. But it also feels like a direct reaction to After Hours’ success. That record allowed Abel Tesfaye to showcase some of his most nakedly transgressive art for increasingly huge audiences. In its music videos, he depicted himself battered and bruised, his teeth caked with blood; he attended awards ceremonies in full facial bandages and occasionally appeared in caricaturish prosthetics. The aesthetic leaned obscurist, drawing liberally from the relatively obscure 80s Scorsese comedy After Hours and the suffocating atmospherics of cult synth-pop band Chromatics.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It was a gateway for people to get into electronic music’: 30 years of Warp Records’ Artificial Intelligence

Taking cues from Detroit techno and showcasing Autechre and Aphex Twin, the famed compilation found hedonism in the wind-down. As it is reissued, famous fans from then and now explain why they love it

In the white hot rave heat of 1992, Warp Records, then based in Sheffield, released a compilation for the wind-down: Artificial Intelligence. The name would, sadly, prompt talk of “intelligent techno” and then “intelligent dance music” (IDM), implying an air of nerdy elitism. However Warp insisted the title was only ever a tongue-in-cheek alignment with sci-fi, and the balmy music was unmistakably hedonistic. Taking cues from Detroit techno, and featuring future superstars in Autechre and Aphex Twin (as the Dice Man), it perfectly captured the still-ecstatic backroom and after-party vibe of the era.

As a new reissue celebrates the compilation’s 30th anniversary – and three decades of its pleasure principle reverberating across subsequent scenes and generations – we asked famous fans from 1992 to the present about why Artificial Intelligence endures.

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

Manuel Göttsching laid the groundwork for generations of electronic musicians

The restlessly innovative German guitarist went on to make records including the legendary E2-E4, a foundational source for techno and ambient house

Although it might help, there’s a fair chance you don’t need to be standing behind the counter of a record shop to know what “the album with the chess cover” refers to. Since its release in 1984, Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 – iconic chessboard sleeve and all – has been heralded as a Year Zero for electronic minimalism by crate-diggers and newcomers alike. Some have gone further, declaring it the first electronic dance album. In any case, for Göttsching, who died last week aged 70, it was just one of several giant leaps guided by a career-long reverence for the unrepeatable moment.

Born in 1952 in West Berlin, Göttsching spent his youth listening to opera at home and playing in blues bands with friends. It was with one of them, Hartmut Enke, that he later studied improvisation under Swiss avant-garde composer Thomas Kessler. Alongside fellow student Klaus Schulze, the outgoing drummer of Tangerine Dream, they swiftly broke free from the world of blues-rock to form Ash Ra Tempel in 1970. Described by one early critic “as the James Brown band on acid,” their searing freakouts, captured on early 70s albums Ash Ra Tempel and Schwingungen, redrew the map for free-form psychedelia. Albums such as Seven Up – an avant-garde collaboration with countercultural guru Timothy Leary – proved a legitimate alternative to the norm, even for many fans of innovators such as Neu! and Can.

From the first foreboding textures of Amboss, the sprawling opener from the band’s 1971 self-titled debut, Göttsching was a guitarist who seemed to intuitively grasp that spontaneity is often best harnessed within basic parameters. All it took was a cue or two – a couple of chords or some skeletal rhythmic motif – for mind-melting exploration to roam free. Released in 1975, his solo debut, Inventions for Electric Guitar (subtitled Ash Ra Tempel VI following the departure of Enke and Schulze) was a textbook example of his improvisational talent. Inspired by the cyclical electric organ of Terry Riley, its trance-inducing guitar mantras may have been the closest mid-70s rock came to mimicking the advent of digital audio sequencing. If Inventions for Electric Guitar proved anything it was that much like the vast careers of his peers, including Schulze and Neu! co-founder Michael Rother, Göttsching’s output was often most potent when it played with both chance and control.

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by Brian Coney via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mount Westmore: Snoop, Cube, 40, $hort review – harmless nostalgia and charmless bluster

(Mount Westmore/MNRK Music Group)
The west coast rap supergroup’s album works reasonably well at times, but there are more misses than hits

Last October, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort released not-bad bop Big Subwoofer, its camper-than-panto video showing the west coast rap supergroup Mount Westmore flying into space to… stage an am-dram Avatar sequel in a strip club? It was never quite clear. Distressingly, they tried to parlay the limited artistic gains of that debut single into a summer album, Bad MFs, which appeared “on the blockchain” (honestly, no idea) and is proffered here with a worse name and tracklisting. Its lush, soul-stroked title track is gone, while the drab, misanthropic Have a Nice Day (Fuck You) remains.

Their four quite different flows still work reasonably well together, from $hort’s lubricious bars to Cube’s truculent pugilism, over comfort-zone beats of electro, P-funk and other familiar 1980s grooves. Yet harmless nostalgia predictably succumbs to charmless bluster. Up & Down is the nadir, wherein our four elderly chums become obsessed with watching a “thicc” woman (wife, mother, daughter or stripper, it’s again unclear) struggling to put on jeans because of the size of her thighs. It’s supposed to be amusing, but has all the wild comedy of listening to your dad trying to finish a porno.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lea Bertucci: Xtended Vox review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(SA Recordings)
It might sound a bit Vic Reeves, but go past the giggles and the experimental vocalists and this compilation touches profundity in fascinating ways

The first time you witness a truly experimental vocalist, you could be forgiven for believing that you’re watching Vic Reeves’ absurdist comedy. These performers create art from all the stray noises – sibilants, clicks, breaths and plosives – that sound engineers usually try to disguise. Once you get beyond the initial shock and stifled giggles, these performances initiate a profound examination about the nature of sound, the inarticulacy of speech, the limitations of musical instruments and the blurring of melody, harmony and rhythm as categories.

These are all clearly things that interest the American sound artist, composer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci. She is best known for making drone-based, site-specific works that explore acoustics, but Xtended Vox is a compilation of contemporary artists who are doing extraordinary things with their vocal cords. Bertucci herself contributes to one track – a duet with composer Ben Vida, previously of New York outfit Town & Country – featuring garbled whispers and stray burbles that have been put through assorted FX pedals and cut and spliced into a shimmering soundscape.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

2ManyDJs on 20 accidental years of mashups and mayhem: ‘It’s more fun when it’s a little bit naughty’

Their album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2 kicked-started the mashup phenomenon. As they prepare for an anniversary concert, the Dewaele brothers discuss bootlegs, brotherhood and looking back

In 2002, Belgian duo Stephen and David Dewaele released a mix album called As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2 under the name 2ManyDJs. It sold half a million copies, and its playful, hectic variety spoke to people who were equally excited by Daft Punk and the Velvet Underground, garage rock and electroclash. In many clubs, though, there was some initial resistance. “Half the people were like: ‘We’re here for house music, what are you playing?’” Stephen remembers. “A quarter were like: ‘OK, I’ll go with it.’ And 10% were like: ‘Oh my God, you played the Stooges!’ Those were the people we were doing it for. Gradually that room shifted to everyone going: ‘Give us the Stooges!’ The world had turned upside down.”

This month, as the album comes to streaming platforms for the first time, the brothers are throwing a 20th anniversary party at Brixton Academy, London, where they will play a souped-up audiovisual version of the mix. “We took a lot of convincing,” says David. “It’s not in our nature to look back. But that particular record still sounds fresh because we didn’t really know what we were doing. If listening to old records is like looking at old pictures of yourself, this is different. It’s like looking at a picture of yourself but you had no idea there was a camera. It was just us messing around.”

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by Dorian Lynskey via Electronic music | The Guardian

BBC Sound of 2023: Fred Again, Gabriels and Rachel Chinouriri among nominees tipped for success

Dance music acts dominate the award, whose previous winners include Adele, Stormzy, Sam Smith and Haim, with many having already had breakout success via TikTok

This year’s BBC Sound of 2023 shortlist – which tips the brightest new musical talents – suggests that dance music will dominate the next 12 months.

Among the 10 nominees are Piri and Tommy, a young Manchester couple who make drum’n’bass in their bedrooms, and who went viral on TikTok with the single Soft Spot; Bradford-born jungle producer Nia Archives, who is also nominated for the Rising Star award at next year’s Brits; and the ubiquitous London producer Fred Again, AKA Fred Gibson, who has worked with acts such as Stormzy and Charli XCX and struck out as a solo act in 2021.

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

25 Years of UK Garage review – roll-call of electronic music genre’s glory days

Most of the scene’s stars are here for documentary which follows its emergence from ‘wild west’ parties to chart success and moral panic

This exhaustive insider survey of UK garage music – whose demise has been greatly exaggerated – leaves you feeling like some wrung-out Ayia Napa afterparty casualty. It isn’t too great at clearly delineating the scene’s origins (in short: up-tempo versions of Paradise Garage-style house, hence the name, dovetailing with British jungle), and gives too much airtime to seminal club night Garage Nation, possibly because its former promoter Terry Stone co-directed this film. But, calling on an A-Z of exponents – from Pied Piper and MC Neat to approximately 13% of So Solid Crew – it supplies a wry rewind to late 90s extravagance and hand-wringing consternation about the genre’s future.

The film meanders through UK garage’s early days, a “wild west” with promoters such as Stone running free in the era’s more laissez-faire clubland to road test MCs and dubplates of potential new bangers. The garage sound was more lacquered and luxuriating than jungle, bringing in more female clubbers, and the style 100% aspirational. The documentary works best in the more structured segments cringing at the fashion of the era (think palm tree-print Moschino T-shirts and pinstripe trousers) and the excess. By the early 00s, when UK garage was decamping en masse for summer rec in shellshocked Cyprus, it was getting out of hand. Perennial afterparty venue Insomnia apparently had a secret room with a four-poster bed and, for some reason, a monkey; So Solid’s Lisa Maffia confides that the smell of sambuca hits her sick trigger to this day.

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by Phil Hoad via Electronic music | The Guardian