The 20 Best EPs of 2015
20. Diet Cig – Over Easy
Alex Luciano and Noah Bowman of upstate indie duo Diet Cig exude cuteness, a factor that might prejudice listeners to the shallow assumption of terminal twee. Instead, their debut EP is clean, brisk, and excitably adjacent to pop-punk, filled with vivid specifics of heart-bruised, post-collegiate dickin’ around. As repeat listens crucially reveal, they’re not shy, precious, or even particularly sweet.
19. iLoveMakonnen – I Love Makonnen 2
Makonnen’s first act, his elevation from home recording weirdo to Drake-signed, hit-single-having sorta-mainstream act, had the classic arc of an underdog made good. Comparatively, this year has been a letdown, leading to best-guess speculation that his big-deal label might be a poor fit after all. Maybe it’s as simple as acknowledging that capturing a random bolt of pop-culture lightning is hard as shit to do twice in a row? Still, his second, less-hyped OVO release might be a better crystallization of his home-recording strengths, leaning more heavily on the off-beat loverman crooning that made him standout in a sea of Soundcloud.
18. G.L.O.S.S. – demo
Hardcore punk has traditionally needed something concrete to rage against, lest it become an empty, macho snooze. Thrilling then that these trans, queer, femme kids from Olympia, Washington, should tackle the toxicity of masculinity itself. They need a whole eight minutes to burn it all down.
17. Malory – Malory
That Malory Butler should crash out from a career track in professional ballet, only to end up a late-night techno producer is an irresistible biographical detail that isn’t quite as key to her current music as it might seem. Her minimal, acid-flecked debut for the always tasteful Brooklyn label GODMODE is more concerned with repetition than precision, more into spare thump than graceful flourish.
16. Weyes Blood – Cardamom Times
Natalie Mering’s slow, soulful folk has never been as clear as these four songs, put to tape in a dingy bedroom near the Rockaway shores. That setting feels instructive‚ a small, quiet place to reflect on a vast, unknowable expanse down the road. There’s a direct through line from her work to old British pastorals, or lightly psychedelic Laurel Canyon strums, but the terminally tentative quality of the soured relationships that fuel her songs’ sad beauty feels very of the moment.
[sc:natalie ]
15. Petite Noir – The King of Anxiety
The work of South African songwriter Yannick Ilunga recalls stuff made elsewhere on the continent in the 70s and 80s, by idiosyncratic visionaries like William Onyeabor or Francis Bebey, who had one foot in deep, traditional rhythms and another in the far out sounds of the Western rock fringe. If King of Anxiety never again reaches the heights of its opening track, the post-punk campfire singalong “Come Inside”, it’s just because he set his own bar too high to vault over.
14. Sheer Mag – II
Those who worry that rock music has lost all its swagger should be calmed by this young Philly crew, who reframe strutting, Thin-Lizzy-at-the-Enormodome moves as a lo-fi secret for basement-dwelling kids feeling left out from the culture at large.
13. Girl Band – The Early Years
Like previous bands called Girls and Women, Girl Band are dudes, a note that’s never so much “funny” as it is “pointlessly confusing” in all cases. This bunch are excitable Dublin lads as interested in spastically twitch-dancing the punk music as Liars were back before they lost their bassist, developed witch panic, and fucked off to Berlin. Oh, what deeper identity crises they’ll have to look forward to! Here, they’re content to shout sick nonsense until red in the face.
12. Galcher Lustwerk – Parlay
11. Open Mike Eagle – A Special Episode Of
For the last few years, the Hellfyre Club collective has been the low-key pulse of left-coast rap. A Special Episode Of is a slim expansion of key member Open Mike Eagle’s 2014 full-length, Dark Comedy, and like that record, it’s peppered with esoteric pop-culture references and alt-comedy touch points. That focus makes total sense for Mike, who is a true wit himself. His Club cohort Milo (who cameos on the EP) made one of the best rap albums of the year from sleepy philosophizing. Mike’s flow is relaxed too, but he does in just a little bit harder. In production, his ears are wide open, his taste not self-conscious. Who else would think to swipe a 2002 Broken Social Scene hook to anchor a hip-hop track? Who else would to feature MC Paul Barman on a rap song in 2015?!
10. Thundercat – The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam
Thundercat’s biggest 2015 moments were appearances on other people’s records, his killer basslines on lend to Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington albums had folks reevaluating the place of warm jazz instrumentation in the landscape of current music. But this breezy 16-minute gem of instrumental workouts and sly pop songs is impressive on its own. “Them Changes”, a vintage-vinyl funk collaboration with Washington and Flying Lotus, is particularly rad, the impossibly cool hero’s entrance scene in a Tarantino flick just waiting to happen.
9. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Planning Weed Like it’s Acid / Life Is Lost
Ben Daniels never makes it too easy.His long-running, ever-shifting but now-stabilized, group A Sunny Day in Glasgow have simultaneously been the most interesting shoegaze AND indie-pop band of the past decade, growing a cult following for blown-out aural confusion that’s consistently compelling. Their latest release is a 9-track “double EP”, with no distinct split point between its two sides, that’s only kept from album status by concision relative to their usual sprawl. ASDIG’s bite-size is still a mouthful. But their jittery song structures have calmed some. Their old ghost echoes are now more likely to crest in poltergeist wails. They’ve streamlined without nearing normalization.
8. Kelela – Hallucinogen
Kelela Mizanekristos’ place on the Warp Records’ roster does makes sense. Her music so far has been marked as much by its atypical computer beats as its assured R&B vocals. But the balance is weighted more towards warm humanity. For an EP called Hallucinogen, the overall effect is somewhat smooth and sober. Here and there, though, traces of tracers creep in to subvert the sound. The way the title track spirals her voice down a rabbit hole of digital glitch is an update on drug-freakout music of the 60s and 70s, a reflection of the ways our language of surreality has changed since then.
7. Guerilla Toss – Flood Dosed
Like an abrupt time-jump on a trippy cable drama, the latest EP from Boston-gone-Brookyn band Guerilla Toss finds our gang in a much different place than we left them. This is only logical. The record they made for their new label DFA was held up by a pressing plant snafu, so they made some new stuff to tide us over. But whatever happened to them on that now highly anticipated record, the G. Toss of Flood Dosed sounds enormous, still dense but more coherent and in full command of the chaos they’ve always channeled. There’s a super specific vibe to this stuff that recalls some of the straight-up coolest rock/pop ever made: atonal deep cuts from Tom Tom Club LPs, early Stereolab’s slips into Marxist kraut-punk, or Pylon brooding around, too anxious to dance. It’s a game-changing tune up that puts an extremely hard-working band over the top.
6. Nao – February 15
Nao’s clicking, nu-90s soul music is very British, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect. It’s conversant with electronic club culture in a way that seems ingrained and lived-in instead of experimental. In fact, it’s not far from the sound found on AlunaGeorge’s underrated 2013 record Body Music. (That duo’s producer George Reid is a collaborator on her boldest track “Golden”, so there you go.) Supposedly, the young artist behind February 15th is personally quite shy, sticking to a performing pseudonym in interviews, posting abstractions rather than glamour portraits as artwork. But there’s an openness to her lyrics and, more importantly, something in her trembling, soaring voice suggests she won’t, or can’t, hide herself away for long.
5. Yvette – Time Management
For a few years now, Yvette have been the most electric, must-see noise acts in New York City. Their finely calibrated mix of blasting noise and surprising melody blows most anyone else consistently gigging here out of the water, yet their volume is so punishing that it almost feels risky to suggest their live show to friends without first requesting a signed waiver, absolving you from future legal action. It may be safer to find the right headphone pain-point for these latest bits of sinister deadpan in private, and build up a steady tolerance to the fight-or flight responses they provoke.
4. Tropic of Cancer – Stop Suffering
Over the course of a full album, Tropic of Cancer’s lush, grief-ravaged music could be suffocating. But with just three songs on Stop Suffering, you can submerge in Camella Lobo’s depression and never want to rush up for air. I never knew how much I needed a slower, gother variation of a Yo La Tengo ballad circa …And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, until I was parked right there in the middle of “I Woke Up and the Storm Was Over”’s emotionally obscure cul-de-sac, quietly misting up.
3. Lotic – Heterocetera
J’Kerian Morgan’s first release for the compulsively boundary pushing Brooklyn label Tri Angle is skeletal and shrieking. It’s minimalism is upsetting, scary even. Lotic uses well-worn samples from vogue-scene staples, but the tracks he builds from them turn into warning sirens or futuristic horror film scores. A drawback to dance music’s steady cultural rise is that spaces that used to be surrogate homes for alienated groups are now subject to the same tension experienced everywhere else. Lotic’s anxiety gels into anger. In a VICE interview earlier this year, Morgan called Heterocetera “the biggest middle finger I can do right now in response.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n9pSx9cyCk
2. Malportado Kids – Total Cultura
There is, for sure, a fat creme fraiche dollop of white cultural myopia involved when saying “I’ve never heard anything like this before!” in relation to the debut EP by Downtown Boys’ members Victoria Ruiz and Joey La Neve DeFrancesco. Their shuffling rhythms are rooted in “cumbia,” a massively popular dance music variant that’s nearly ubiquitous across the breadth of Latin culture, both domestic and abroad. Still, mixing the joyful sort of music in-the-dark city dwellers usually hear only by accident, stumbling through street fairs, with Ruiz’s righteous punk shouts—anti-colonial agitprop delivered mostly in Spanish—is super-fresh and currently singular. It’s power isn’t coming from mere novelty.
1. FKA twigs – M3LL155X
Of all the highest-watt pop figures of the moment, FKA twigs is the one who’s placed the EP format most central to her quick-rising career. M3LL155X, titled as a kinda dopey hacker way to spell “Melissa,” is her third sumptuous EP in three years and the first since last year’s LP1 made her a star. Her multi-hyphenate persona is so thoroughly modern that she’d never let her self be “just” a songwriter, or a dancer, co-producer, or visual artist. All of those things are essential to the monolith she’s building of herself. When you’re operating at that level of actualization all the time, maybe brief declarative statements are all the more necessary? She’d probably prefer we didn’t take these songs as pure music, divorced from the intense video art they came packaged with. Just listen close, though, and you’ll hear clear evolutions to her sound. It’s the most up-tempo, aggressive thing she’s done in a discography defined so-far by its deliberate pace. In places, her delivery is clipped and bilious, as opposed to the slow, poisonously seductive R&B singing of “Two Weeks”. She sounds kind of angry, pissed off at the indignities brought on by true celebrity. That might be a phase, a blip on the way to accepting that she can’t control her image 100% of the time. All the better then that she got this on tape.