Best Music of 2018: #5-1

5) The 1975
“Love It If We Made It” – A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The 1975’s sound slaps your skin like ice-cold tap water — refreshing and reliably engineered to hold the shape of whatever sonic vessel it’s poured into. On the band’s third album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, sun-flecked synths, lustrous guitars, and singer Matt Healy’s elastic tenor play chameleon to a bevy of styles — slinky auto-tuned R&B, Technicolor Xylo Myloto-indebted pop, and George Michael-esque balladeering. Healy renders ennui and ecstasy as unlikely bedfellows in 21st century match-making —frenetic, stupefying, and adroit as a stiff cocktail with Red Bull floater.

“Love It If We Made It” is the album’s titanic centerpiece, a would-be Tears For Fears anthem sung slouched from the big chair, exhausted yet triumphant. “We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin/ Saying controversial things, just for the hell of it,” Healy commences and never slows down, romanticizing his own drug addiction as breezily as he does a dozen spirit-crushing memes of 2018 — racial violence, climate change, sycophancy, and xenophobia to name a few. Modernity has failed us, he succinctly reminds, but seldom does a society’s collapse sound this majestic.

Is the horn-splattered chorus one of attention-whore cynicism or genuine human redemption? You’re never quite sure. It’s one of the song’s many delicious contradictions, along with inspiring progressives to gleefully chant “I moved on her like a bitch,” a lyric that recasts Trump’s moral repugnance as glorious pop hook. “Love It If We Made It”’s ripped-from-the-headlines, cultural catchphrases bring to mind a classic from another other 80’s alt-rock giant, but the outcome is less certain these days. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Healy doesn’t know what to feel. So he feels it all.

4) Kasey Musgraves
“Slow Burn” – Golden Hour

photo by Jamie Nelson

The aurora borealis, psychotropics, and mankind’s creation; “These are real things” Kacey Musgraves professes wondrously on “Oh, What a World.” Golden Hour is a world of Musgraves making, one where a country singer can turn red and blue states purple, where a top ten album plays just as well in New York City dive bars as Nashville honkytonks, where banjos rub elbows with auto-tune and disco beats without ever sounding forced. These confluences feel natural in no small part because of the ease with which Musgraves imparts genuine emotion.

She juxtaposes the contentment of marriage against lonely weekends and self-reflection against long nights of drinking with a verisimilitude that suggests to have achieved the former, Musgraves has endured her fair share of the latter. “You can have your space/ Cowboy/ I ain’t going to fence you in” she chides, a clever little turn of country rock phrasing that sketches a fractured relationship so clearly that you can’t believe another songwriter hadn’t thought of it first.

“Slow Burn” is the brooding hit Ryan Adams has been trying to pull off for over a decade (he got so desperate he even covered 1989 in its entirety). Golden Hour is a fully-realized fusion of pop’s sugary rush and country’s bittersweet poignancy that makes Swift’s statement of maturation seem puerile by comparison. The result feels so effortless it isn’t even a “crossover” — Golden Hour simply exists in all worlds at once.

3) Snail Mail
“Heat Wave” – Lush

Getty Images/Ringer Illustration

It’s both logical and lamentable that every conversation about Snail Mail starts with the same remarkable fact; front woman Lindsey Jordan wrote and recorded her debut LP Lush while still in high school. To suggest she merely crafts songs with an emotional intelligence beyond her years is to underestimate the intrinsic wisdom of lead single “Pristine’s” climactic query: “Is there any better feeling than coming clean?” No question in 2018 prompted a more resounding yes. Snail Mail doesn’t just channel their 90’s indie influences (Pavement’s wry apathy, the crystalline guitar tone of Galaxie 500-meets-Sonic Youth, and Liz Phair’s flat vocal affect), they instantiate them for a new generation.

“When I’m feeling low/ I’m not into sometimes” Jordan professed on “Heat Wave,” and for anyone who’s ever grown tired of the bullshit inherent to being someone else’s second option, those words felt like an epiphany. Songs like “Speaking Terms” and “Let’s Find an Out” run the gamut of tried-and-true teenage dispositions (infatuation, boredom, indignation, regret, and resolve) without ever feeling overwrought. You don’t have to be an adolescent to feel things this deeply, this profoundly. Jordan possesses the uncanny ability to cast a lucid gaze on the most overlooked part of failing relationships — not their puppy-love beginnings or devastated ends, but the nuanced joy and heartache of all that lies in between.

2) Beach House
“Dive” – 7

photo by Shawn Brakebill

Throughout their 13 year career, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have established a sound so identifiable yet undefinable that the words “Beach House” have become more than just a band moniker. It’s a feeling, a vibe, and a mood as easy to place as it is confounding to explain. It’s built on transient mystery, dream-like nostalgia, and a sense of gauzy lucidity typically associated with the consumption of very, very good drugs. To me, Beach House songs have always felt like the last moments before twilight fades — that divine time when the air turns pinkish and a ripe summer day’s contented swell of life finally exhausts itself.

On the thick, obsidian sounds of 7, Beach House’s gloaming becomes a witching hour, an enigmatic evolution of psychedelic space pop that is the heaviest, darkest, and most self-actualized album they’ve recorded to date. Freed up by the vault-emptying exercise of 2017’s B-sides and Rarities, the duo wrote and recorded tracks at a more deliberate pace and challenged themselves to create sounds that might not be possible to replicate live. Legrand’s husky tenor still exudes a distinct, feminine energy, but there’s a denser, more muscular aura to songs like “Dark Spring” and “Pay No Mind” that recalls Slowdive’s most mesmerizing heights.

The oscillating bleeps, drills, and weird throb of “Lemon Glow” can’t hide one of the greatest melodies of the band’s career. “Dive” is a shoegaze magnum opus, a slow winding build whose lacerating guitar and drum bomb finale make cataclysm sound blissful. Beach House’s familiarity-by-way-of-intangibility hasn’t always worked in their favor, but the creative leap they’ve taken on 7 redefines what it means to be canonical. Beach House don’t just sound like themselves — they’re the best version of themselves, reinvigorated and reinvented.