The following piece is excerpted from issue 4 of Pitchfork's quarterly print magazine, The Pitchfork Review, which is available on newsstands now. Discounted subscriptions are available through the holidays.
Some may claim that November 2014 is too early for a 2015 End-of-the-Year List. But accepting that time and the universe are infinite and overlapping—with all realities happening simultaneously and invisibly—it’s the end of the year somewhere.
Choosing albums that could make it through our spam filters was no easy task. After all, how does one choose just ten Sacred Bones releases? There are zero major-label releases on this list because all the majors refused to send us any promos because our readership, according to the suits, doesn’t "buy music" anymore.
Anyway, in no particular numerical order—because the only number we respect is the '90s—our 2015 End-of-the-Year List.
The Flannels: Nexium
With their debut Nexium, a concept album devoted to all three members’ stomach discomfort, New York City’s Flannels have meticulously constructed a memorable album juxtaposing the Pixies dynamics, Boston (the band, not the city) guitar crunches, and Killing Joke’s hynotic bass lines; all made shockingly new by the virtue of punk-infused energy.
Black Sunglass Religion: Fuck Sex
Atlanta’s baddest bad boys are at it again. After the distracting controversy of their last album, States Rights, BSR have returned with twelve tracks in six minutes, every song a note for note cover of the first thirty seconds of “Daydream Believer” but infused with a wild garage punk intensity that makes it entirely new.
Terrible Namaste: Even Within You I Am Without You
When Sean Percy’s stepcousins went off to serve in Iraq, Percy knew that he had to document his own feelings about his own youth, his own internal war. With a working class sensibility derived from his father having at one time worked, Percy, over the course of 22 epic Pogues-by-way-of-Jimmy-Eats-World ballads, clocking in at just over three and a half hours, explores the rites of manhood as only one post-graduate backed by four guitarists and six beards can. Terrible Namaste proves emo revival is here to stay and, infused with a punk soulfulness, it is new and it is gorgeous. Perhaps unbearably so.
WHITE PRIVILEGE: ? ? .
Gaining attention with their inspired EP of Miranda Sex Garden covers, White Privilege could have rested on their laurels, riding the madrigal revival straight to the top, but instead, by infusing 16th-century baroque composition with a punk energy, they forged something completely fresh. A renaissance of the senses writ both large and small, and fragile like a nimbus cloud made of punk.
Rotating Animal Noun: RatoxtigerrabbitdragonsnakehorsesheepmonkeyroosterdogpigMAN
The concept behind Rotating Animal Noun is extremely, perhaps exhilaratingly, high. Having toiled in obscurity for years, the Collective (they reject the term “band” as “faux collectivism”) struck upon the genius, brave notion of changing the animal in their name to suit whatever the animal name zeitgeist of the year. Thus they’ve been Wolves, Elks, Cats, Dragons, Panthers, Chinchillas, Mice, and most recently Pussies; whatever the times required of this collective of thirty six of Montreal’s most trenchant modern life observers/buskers, but never, till now, men. Their newest album, an instrumental punk song-scape in one distinct part, is mind blowing and not unlike a universe being created; a billion universes being created, as there is not one single motif, on the whole fifty six minute record, that is repeated. Difficult? No. Not merely difficult… merely… Human.
Morgan Town: (Not For Nothing) I’m a Literal Baby
Morgan Town (nee Dylan Bryce) is not just the only rapper on this list; he is the first white NYC rapper to have been conceived in the bathroom of Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick. He is an actual baby. Aw. Look at his widdle feet. As all our friends have told us, there’s nothing punker than a newborn baby.
Extraneous Vees: Damaged, With Bangs
Combining the disparate influences of Kate Bush, Siouxsie Sioux, and Patti Smith, but infused with a girl-group punk energy that literally redefines newness, EV assured their place on every end of year list with their single “I’d Potentially Date a Music Writer (I Suppose)”.
VICE INTERN: P(ay).R.E Interns
Is it electro-punk made new by electro-clash revival energy or electro-clash made new with electro-punk fury? Only their coke dealer knows for sure. And he’s not talking because he dead.
Manicured Lawn: Paint Drying
The all-too-common epic journey from young manhood to slightly-less-younger manhood is the deceptively tranquil well that Manicured Lawn draws from. Transforming the everyday with punk lucidity, the songs of Paint Drying ebb and flow with a gentle fury that conjures up grass growing and mist falling on a parent’s back porch in Anytown, USA. Nobody does whatever it is Manicured Lawns are doing better, though a million other bands may try.
Token Noise: ˆΩsssssssssssssllllllu
We haven’t listened to it all the way through. But we have been assured of its joyous energy, its infused punkness, its novelty covers. Noise is the new punk, as EDM is the new disco and disco is the new noise and hip hop is the new rock'n'roll and guitars are the new short story in the New Yorker and newness is a universe being born eternally in the shadow of a dream, as a star, as a universe, as a punk.