In recent years I have added this additional, more personal category to my year-end lists. The idea is to include albums I fell in love with over the past year, but which were released sometime beforehand. This is meant to act as a list of recommendations for those people who generally share my taste in music. It do not wish to include any reviews of the music below. It is also not ranked, obviously, and I have tried to order it chronologically by when in the year I immersed myself in each album/EP.
I do not have to have actually purchased the music in question during 2019; the only exclusive rule for this list’s content is that the music was not released in 2019. So for example, I got Mogwai’s Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will when it came out, but I returned to it a lot in April for some reason.
Albums That Defined My Year
吉村弘 – Music for Nine Post Cards
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
The Hotelier – It Never Goes Out
World’s End Girlfriend – Farewell Kingdom
Zwan – Mary Star of the Sea
Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will
Mogwai – Every Country’s Sun
RADWIMPS – RADWIMPS 3 ~無人島に持っていき忘れた一枚~
Baths – Pop Music / False B-Sides
Agraph – A Day, Phases
Autechre – L-Event
Agraph – Equal
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Original Soundtrack
RADWIMPS – RADWIMPS 4 ~おかずのごはん~
Agraph – The Shader
Toe – The Book About My Idle Plot on a Vague Anxiety
ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION – マジックディスク
The Microphones – The Glow Pt. 2
The Appleseed Cast – Middle States
Toe – For Long Tomorrow
AFX – Chosen Lords
Placebo – Black Market Music
Final Fantasy X Original Soundtrack
Tycho – Past is Prologue
Nonlocal Forecast – Bubble Universe!
Thanks for reading! I will return with our regularly scheduled Ambient / Drone album reviews soon.
By Isak McCune