Here’s a brief list of what could plausibly be considered “rock” in 2016: digitally manipulated sound fragments, free-jazz freakouts, emo spoken-word, octogenarian baritone, a song that sounds like a vintage Disney soundtrack, and warped variants on all manner of light ’70s sounds—plus, of course, plenty of punk, post-punk, and Thin Lizzy-style guitar licks. Practitioners of the genre might not even have defined themselves as rock. But the best knew how to mine music history’s overlooked veins, wherever those could be found, and hammer them into fresh and singular shapes all their own. Here are Pitchfork's favorite rock albums of 2016—whatever that means.
22, A Million
Yes, Justin Vernon’s third album as Bon Iver came with its own line of flannel shirts. And a newspaper. And cryptic artwork. But there was also the music__—__which, as Pitchfork wrote, had precedents across rock’n’roll, R&B, and electronic genres, as well as on more recent records by avowed Bon Iver fan Kanye West. Still, 22, A Million sounded “only like itself.”
Bon Iver: “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
Blackstar
On January 8, David Bowie’s 69th birthday, the art-rock legend released his 25th studio album, Blackstar. On January 10, Bowie died after an 18-month battle with cancer. Blackstar has never sounded the same, but both before and after Bowie’s graceful exit, the record was stunning, masterfully embracing astral jazz in a way that redefined the limits of a Bowie album while tapping into the same zeitgeist as Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-inflected 2015 LP To Pimp a Butterfly. Upon learning of Bowie’s death, Blackstar songs like the harrowing finale “I Can’t Give Everything Away” took on a deeper resonance. In his mortality lay a new form of immortality, for Bowie and his legions of grieving fans.
David Bowie: “Blackstar” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
Teens of Denial
Every generation deserves a band capable of inspiring shout-along catharsis. For many, Car Seat Headrest are that band. Teens of Denial, the act’s first proper album, ran into some unfortunate copyright problems courtesy of the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, but this vividly imaginative expression of present-day angst via vintage indie rock still drove along unstoppably.
Car Seat Headrest: "Vincent" (Buy on Bandcamp)
Skeleton Tree
With his bands the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, and the Birthday Party, Nick Cave has assembled a powerful repertoire of songs riddled by death. As Cave and the Bad Seeds prepped for their 16th album together, Skeleton Tree, they had to grapple with a more personal loss: The frontman’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died in July 2015 after accidentally falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, England. As Pitchfork noted, “This is a record that exists in the headspace and guts of someone who’s endured an unspeakable, inconsolable trauma.”
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “I Need You” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
You Want It Darker
This fall, Leonard Cohen preceded the release of You Want It Darker by proclaiming, in an expansive New Yorker profile, “I am ready to die.” A month later, the legendary Montreal-born singer-songwriter was dead at 82, having passed away in his sleep. If “Hallelujah” and so many other soul-illuminating songs hadn’t already cemented Cohen’s legacy, this elegantly enigmatic album’s wry, gravelly-voiced farewell might’ve guaranteed what Cohen said in another recent interview: “I intend to live forever.”
Leonard Cohen: “You Want It Darker” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
Trans Day of Revenge
“We’re fucking future girls, living outside society’s shit,” Sadie Switchblade declared on behalf of her fellow trans women at the outset of G.L.O.S.S.’s de-facto mission statement, 2015’s “G.L.O.S.S. (We’re From the Future).” This September, G.L.O.S.S. broke up, citing the band’s toll on its members’ “mental and physical health.” In between, the Olympia hardcore band released Trans Day of Revenge, a searingly visceral EP that looked at the horror and brutality of the contemporary world and responded, “When peace is just another word for death, it’s our turn to give violence a chance!”
G.L.O.S.S.: "We Live" (Buy on Bandcamp)
Goodness
The Hotelier’s expansive third full-length, Goodness, made noise over its NSFW cover art. But louder still were the Massachusetts trio’s post-emo-revival ambitions, from singer Christian Holden’s spoken-word album intro to the lonesome drum cracks at the close of finale “End of Reel.” Pitchfork wrote, “For as riotous as it can sound, Goodness is remarkably precise in how it plays with dynamics and layers.”
The Hotelier: "Soft Animal" (via SoundCloud)
I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
After the Walkmen went on hiatus in 2013, frontman Hamilton Leithauser’s 2014 solo debut, Black Hours, featured Vampire Weekend producer/multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij on its standout tracks. (Batmanglij, now an in-demand pop producer in his own right, parted ways with his own band early this year.) Each of these two East Coast indie-rock veterans brought his particular strengths on their first full-length together. Leithauser’s old-timey urban ennui found fresh expression within Batmanglij’s richly inventive sonic frameworks, which hint smartly at doo-wop, folk, country, and, maybe best of all, Disney soundtracks.
Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam: “A 1000 Times” (via SoundCloud)
Mangy Love
Since debuting early last decade, Cass McCombs has quietly cultivated a reputation for both mysteriousness and top-notch songcraft. Mangy Love, his eighth studio album, came as something of a reintroduction, concentrating McCombs’ customary fog until it glistened. He waxed poetically and politically on songs like “Bum Bum Bum.” He drew his languidly eclectic, ’70s-ish style into its smoothest yet courtesy of producer Rob Schnapf, and played well with a range of well-chosen others, from Angel Olsen to Blake Mills. And he was funnier than ever, too.
Cass McCombs: "Opposite House" (via SoundCloud)
Puberty 2
Singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki is based in Brooklyn, but she was born in Japan and grew up in various countries around the world, eventually studying music at SUNY Purchase. She went on to turn heads with her carefully crafted, gleefully self-pitying (and cleverly “Simpsons”-referencing) third album, 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek. On Puberty 2, the multi-instrumentalist commanded her biggest audience yet, and she didn’t disappoint, making the ’90s alt canon defiantly her own on songs like the surging “Your Best American Girl.”
Mitski: "Your Best American Girl" (via SoundCloud)
Singing Saw
Kevin Morby used to be the bass player for Woods and the singer of the Babies (with Vivian Girls’ Cassie Ramone). After a move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, the Kansas City native began releasing solo albums of his own. This year’s Singing Saw is his finest yet, evoking Nashville Skyline-era Bob Dylan and early Leonard Cohen, among others. As Pitchfork observed, “His music comes from another place, one where you try and piece together meaning by tapping into a kind of collective unconscious, using whatever tools you have at your disposal.”
Kevin Morby: "Destroyer" (via SoundCloud)
My Woman
Asheville-based singer-songwriter Angel Olsen’s transition from austere folk to fearsomely confident folk-rock—from her earliest songs through 2012 debut album Half Way Home and 2014 breakout Burn Your Fire for No Witness—was striking in itself. On My Woman, her third album, she established herself as a force of nature in rock’n’roll full stop: all-encompassing, cinematic, and very much in control of her own staggering talent.
Angel Olsen: “Shut Up Kiss Me” (Buy on Bandcamp)
Human Performance
Andrew Savage played in a few notable bands around Denton, Texas, including Teenage Cool Kids, before teaming up with co-songwriter Austin Brown in Parquet Courts, a noise-streaked group utterly redolent of their adopted New York City hometown. Human Performance is the quartet’s third proper album in a fascinatingly messy discography, and it offers the best distillation of their sardonic powers to date, particularly when breaking out of their mold on songs like the Orange Juice-shambling “Berlin Got Blurry.” But you can’t take the Texas out of the band: Human Performance’s “Captive of the Sun” spawned a late-night TV performance (and eventual remix) with Houston rap legend Bun B.
Cardinal
This New Jersey band has been self-releasing music since 2010, and Cardinal marks their first proper album. The Saddle Creek-tinged Americana rock on display here is skilled as it conveys a sense of effortlessness. “Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward,” Pitchfork wrote, “an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process.”
Pinegrove: "Old Friends" (via SoundCloud)
A Moon Shaped Pool
Radiohead have long been known to transform old musical ideas into new ones, but their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool**, took such reinventions to another level. Yes, previously teased tunes such as the ominously stabbing “Burn the Witch” appeared, but most bewitching was how Radiohead inhabited elements of their past styles—orchestral grandeur, Brit-folk eeriness, electronic gloom—in unfamiliar ways. The biggest reinvention of all, of course, was a keys-and-vocals transformation of the fan favorite “True Love Waits,” a triumphant affirmation that beneath Radiohead’s techno-dystopian brooding beats an all-too-human heart.
Radiohead: “Burn the Witch” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
Adore Life
Savages’ debut album, 2013’s Silence Yourself, made good on a trail of feverish live shows with an imposing treatise in how post-punk aesthetics could still be used to confront darkness, sexuality, and political complacency. Like many great sophomore albums, Adore Life explored similar pummeling sonic terrain while plumbing richer depths, with dynamic leader Jehnny Beth turning her lyrical attention to love in all of its manifold varieties—including, as the heart-stopping title track suggests, love of life itself.
Savages: “T.I.W.Y.G.” [Preview] (via SoundCloud)
III EP
III is, appropriately enough, the third EP in as many years from Sheer Mag, a Thin Lizzy-riffing, capitalism-averse band out of Philadelphia. It’s only four songs, but as Pitchfork wrote: “Their music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They’re the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer.”
Sheer Mag: "Can't Stop Fighting" (via SoundCloud)
Front Row Seat to Earth
Natalie Mering has been creating music under some variation of her Weyes Blood alias since 2006, and on her fourth album, Front Row Seat to Earth, her development from spectral experiments to lushly fantastical balladry was its most stunning yet. Despite nods to ’60s psych-folk and ’70s AM-radio, Mering fully inhabited the calamitous present.
Weyes Blood: “Do You Need My Love” (Buy on Bandcamp)
Paradise
White Lung’s 2014 album, Deep Fantasy, brought the Vancouver band’s post-hardcore frenzy to a wider audience with breakneck guitars, powerfully delivered vocals, and unstinting, often topical lyrics. Now based in Los Angeles, leader Mish Barber-Way settled in for the long haul on follow-up Paradise, which tested out bigger-sounding production, a wider range of lyrical perspectives, and brighter melodies. Rounded out by drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou and guitarist Kenneth William, White Lung’s sonic attack was subtler here but still thrilling, a statement of purpose from a bold songwriter intent on growing bolder.
White Lung: "Kiss Me When I Bleed" (Buy on Bandcamp)
Light Upon the Lake
One of guitar music’s low-key delights of 2016 came in the form of Whitney, a band featuring Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, both formerly of Smith Westerns (Ehrlich also played with Unknown Mortal Orchestra). Their debut album, Light Upon the Lake, filled a particular niche this year: warm, earnest, and easygoing folk-rock, with winsome vocals and subtle instrumental prowess. Comparisons to another duo of retro stylists, Girls, were earned, but the haunting falsetto on a song like “No Woman” could reach even someone who wasn’t a fan of that now-defunct group.
Whitney: "No Woman" (via SoundCloud)
