Indieheads Podcast’s Q1 Favorites

A collection of our favorite albums we listened to this quarter.

With many of us now having more time on our hands to listen to music, we at the Indieheads Podcast wanted to revive this blog a little bit and put together a little list of our favorite albums and other music we listened to this quarter. The following blurbs you’re about to read come from myself (Matty), Zach, Rose, Nat, AJ, Dyl, and Jackson.

Anti — 2020

Andy Shauf — The Neon Skyline

Lately, I've been thinking about ghosts. Memories from my past, our collective pasts, drifting up from the earth and lingering in our consciousness. That which haunts us returning at our most vulnerable, precisely when it can do the most damage. If we’re lucky, we might be able to learn something about ourselves, about our weaknesses or how we can grow, from the experience. But we’re not often lucky.

Naturally, I’ve been returning to Toronto-by-Saskatchewan singer-songwriter Andy Shauf’s The Neon Skyline more and more these days. The album-length narrative charts the reappearance of an old flame named Judy against a backdrop of purgatorial drinking and reminiscence that spans the entire domestic partnership as well as its messy falling-out. What makes Shauf’s writing and musicianship quietly sublime isn’t his mundane subject matter, but rather how he weaves a vividly unglossy tableau of common human mistakes against an exceptionally crisp sound design. Shauf’s ‘70s-Nilsson-esque acoustic guitar and punchy snare hits create an indelible atmosphere for his stories of regret and self-loathing, his themes of recursion and cyclical emotional duress made all the more palatable and memorable by hypnotic clarinet and handclap parts. It’s one of the catchiest albums in recent memory whose scenarios play like a root canal of the brain.

Yet, perhaps the biggest sticking point of the album is how Shauf complicates this notion of embetterment in the face of one’s errors. If you’re not paying close attention, you might miss the fact that Shauf lays this theme out on “Where Are You, Judy?,” the second song of the album, by having his narrator wonder, “Do I pretend that I know all that shit I did? And I know how I could fix it?” Like anyone haunted by ghosts, we’re not given an easy answer with how to deal with them and move on. As Shauf’s narrator ends the album thinking back on the night and the relationship writ large, all he can muster is, “Oh, I’m already bored.” Shauf wanted this to be an intentionally ambiguous end to the album, and that lack of specificity is a potent loose end. Bored of what? Of dwelling on Judy? Or his direct confrontation of his past actions? Like the rest of us, that depends on whether he’s lucky enough to learn from his ghosts.— Nat

37D03D — 2020

Bonny Light Horseman — Bonny Light Horseman

In uncertain times, sometimes all you need is for an album to be comforting, and if Bonny Light Horseman were just that, I’d still think incredibly highly of it. Anaïs Mitchell and Eric D. Johnson are two great tastes that taste great together, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman holds the whole enterprise together swimmingly. It’s the sort of thing that’s directly in my wheelhouse: an album of centuries-old folk traditionals, played and sung beautifully. And if that’s all it were, it’d be great. But it’s more than that. Mitchell and Johnson quietly bring these songs into the 2020s in ways both simple (the narrator’s travelogue in “Magpie’s Nest” now goes “from Boston down to Jersey, from there to God knows where”) and profound (as in the warning of the title track, the pro-labor narrative of “Mountain Rain,” and the jawdropping “Blackwaterside”). To use an extremely me-core analogy: the difference between a good Broadway revival and a great one is if the people in charge bother to interrogate and reexamine the material instead of just trotting it out again because it worked before. Bonny Light Horseman is a great revival.

But let me not bury the lede. Bonny Light Horseman is a gorgeous album, and more importantly than that, it’s an album that has provided me no small amount of comfort in the last three months. Since the news of the pandemic, I’ve held tight to this album like a security blanket, and each time I’ve found something new to take refuge in. One day it’s the harmonies, the next it’s the production, then another time in the craftsmanship. In times when the outside world feels 10,000 miles away, I put on this album and remember that these songs have helped people survive hard times before, much like they’re helping me survive hard times now, even in a small way. — Zach

Western Vinyl — 2020

WILDCARD: Activity — “Earth Angel”

The balance of the delicate and the rough. The sacred and the profane. Just from its opening moments, it seems as if this song would continue to carry its fragile, sweetly dreamlike grace the whole way through. It’s the first time the words, “I wanna fuck around,” softly slip out that the track’s underbelly is truly revealed. One of the most exemplary tracks from this project from members of Grooms, Russian Baths, and Field Mouse, the blend of their collective serenity and freneticism shifts to the forefront once the song hits a bridge where fuzz distortion on both guitar and vocals overwhelm the listener. By the time frontman Travis Johnson is hoarsely screaming the refrain in the last chorus, the mood has shifted. What was once soft is now feral, primordial. A desire overflowing beyond what a body, a throat, can muster. The desperation inhuman, unable to be replicated through voice alone. This is the nature of desire. The bounds beyond what the body is capable of. — Nat

Freedom Sounds — 2020

Navy Blue — Àdá Irin

On our most recent podcast, I mentioned that what made Kendrick Lamar stand out compared to a lot of other artists was his deep sense of empathy and his articulation of it. One thing I wish I mentioned is that a lot of Lamar’s music deals with generational trauma, having to inherit and come to terms with what your forebears dealt with along with the own trauma of growing up in a racist state system. On his debut album, Sage Elseller, aka Navy Blue, also looks to these issues with the tribulations and occasional triumphs that come with. While Elseller may not possess the technical ability of Lamar or his friends/collaborators like Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, he does possess a killer ear for production (the album was largely produced by him) and a deep well of empathy that Elseller pulls from.

Songs like “Simultaneously Bleeding” and “With Sage” show a person desperate to fulfill his purpose, even with the demons of his and his ancestor’s past looking to bring him down. It’s this ability to rise above that is very much shown in his music, as rarely does Elseller feel lost in the sonic world he’s created. Even with his occasionally “off” flows, it all adds to the appeal of someone who is on their own path, thanking the friends and family who helped him start the trek. Àdá Irin isn’t for everyone, but if you’re able to set a path through the soulful abstract of Navy Blue, it’s one that you won’t mind getting lost in. — Matty

Topshelf — 2020

Ratboys — Printer’s Devil

For Ratboys, Printer’s Devil takes a “two steps forward, one step back” kind of approach. This isn’t an insult to the record, more of a notice in the particular way it handles its sound and sequencing, which is quite unique. The opening two tracks, “Alien With a Sleep Mask On” and “Look To” take off into the stratosphere of hard rocking punk sounds, producing immensely catchy tunes in the process. However, the album fully steps up when the band allows themselves to draw back and fully retreat into the mild folk and country lane that they’d previously only teased on their earlier record GN, before smoothly blending the two sounds together for the remainder. This lets the band hit an incredibly comfortable aesthetic place not dissimilar to their Chicago forebears and (now unfortunately cancelled) tourmates Wilco, stepping a fine line that allows for smooth melodies to bloom from their songs while still allowing a nice punk edge occasionally seep in. Similarly, Julia Steiner’s lyrics manage to conjure vivid images that feel foreign without the experiences they’re tied to, having a specific home in the inbetween of familiarity. The album as a whole feels strange and foreign but also right in its place, especially as it chooses to end on the uncertain note of its title track, moving into a “Kidsmoke”-esque electronic jam that spells out an interesting path forward without explicitly saying what that will be. Printer’s Devil as a whole perfectly blurs these aesthetic lines and brings the band’s ideas into a new cohesive form that manages to be completely refreshing. — Rose

Asian Man — 2012

WILDCARD: Joyce Manor — Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired

I’m planning on making a larger piece about this LP soon so I won’t say much here but, this record has quickly become deeply, deeply important to me in such a short amount of time. Joyce Manor’s Barry Johnson has gone back and forth on this album in recent years, but in his breakdown of their discography for Kerrang, he said something really interesting about Of All Things: “I don’t hate it, but I just think it sounds like a confused guy, because it was made by a confused guy.” Hey, Barry! That’s why I like it!

Even before COVID-19 laid its path of destruction on the US, creating a vacuum of uncertainty for many of its citizens, I was in my own world of uncertainty. Like Barry Johnson was in the period he wrote this album, I am also a confused guy right now. Confused about what I was doing in school, what I was doing for work, what my dreams were, what my goals were, and just… of all things I will soon grow tired. I desperately, desperately wanted to see myself somewhere different than where I was, I just didn’t know where that somewhere is, especially now. With its freeform but somehow cohesive structure, going from no-fi demos to raging punk songs to a fucking incredible cover of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Johnson and Joyce Manor mapped out my own inner turmoil. I just kept repeating those 13 minutes because it was in that short time that I could find some peace in the mess of it all. — Matty

Merge — 2020

Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud

Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, a Grammy-winning crossover hit that successfully reappropriated the stylings of traditional country songwriting into bubbly bona fide pop hits, is one of the most significant albums in recent history. For a genre that’s often unfairly dismissed as conservative and reductive, the work to reclaim folk and americana storytelling has been put in by many admirable artists since the start of the 2010s, though many were hesitant to listen. If Golden Hour was a demonstration that mainstream country doesn’t have to be dominated by acts like Florida Georgia Line and some other bands named after either a state, a truck, or both — Saint Cloud is a testament to the very best that the genre can offer.

Masquerading credibly as your favorite kind of indie rock, Waxahatchee’s latest (and greatest) effort is tied to the tradition and structure of singer-songwriter legends, but liberated by an infectious modernity. Her sensibilities as a lyricist have never been sharper, as most songs exist in some ethereal plane of feeling and sensation — not tied down by narrative or setting, these songs are driven by universal experience that any listener could become lost in. Many of the lyrics on Saint Cloud fixate on the sky, floating, flying, or simply levitating off the ground. The cover finds Crutchfield placed on the roof of a truck, splitting the horizon, caught at the perfect center of two separate worlds. The music, then, sounds this way too. It is an album that honors those that inspired it, but boldly charts a new course, one that will undoubtedly be referenced as an influential stroke of deeply-felt genius for years to come. — AJ

Other People — 2020

Nicolas Jaar — Cenizas

Despite having multiple critically acclaimed albums under his belt and a great track record as one of the most consistently inventive thinkers in the world of experimental electronic music, every Nicolas Jaar album still manages to completely catch me by surprise and knock me on my ass. You always know going into one of his records that you’ll hear sound design and production techniques you’ve literally never heard on planet Earth before, but even with that expectation in my mind going in it’s another thing entirely to put on a Nicolas Jaar album and experience for yourself just how alien and strange this sonic landscape is.

The immersive world the Chilean producer conjures on Cenzias, the 3rd full-length album released under his own name, is no exception to that streak of creativity and forward thinking, as he continues to expand his sonic palette with new instruments (that saxophone on “Agosto”!!!) and abstract sounds that cannot for the life of me be traced to any recognizable instrument (namely whatever the hell is happening on “Menysid”). Cenzias sets a new bar for Nicolas Jaar’s mind-bending production skills; but what makes this record truly special is not the bells and whistles but rather the deeply felt emotion at the core of these sonic experiments. Nicolas Jaar’s music is often incredibly heady but never divorced from reality entirely, as he is constantly asking himself the question “can electronic music talk about the world around us? Can we get outside this abstract bubble?”. His 2016 album Sirens did just that by directly exploring themes of political struggle and identity in the shadow of a rising global tide of fascism, and while Cenzias isn’t as openly and obviously political on its surface, this is an album similarly steeped in a sense of dread about the current state of humanity that can be felt reverberating in every uneasy melody on this album.

This album is definitely a grower, even by Nicolas Jaar standards, but if you stick with it through the strange and often atonal sounds and textures designed to get under your skin, the emotional payoffs towards the back end of this record are genuinely some of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Moments like the ghostly choir vocals on “Hello, Chain” or the cascading ambient pianos on “Garden” are absolutely haunting when listened to on their own, but the way the album builds to those moments when you listen in sequence and allows them to slowly reveal themselves to the listener in a way that makes their stunning beauty so much more affecting. — Jackson

Deathwish — 2013

WILDCARD: Deafheaven — Sunbather

There’s nothing new I can say about Deafheaven’s Sunbather. One of the most iconic and controversial black metal albums of the past several years, Sunbather bridged the gap for a lot of listeners who had fallen off hardcore music or never advanced past anything nosier than a Titus Andronicus solo. My earliest taste in music was defined by characteristically childish anger; records that was abrasive and immature. It was, upon reflection, a way to channel an abstract, adolescent frustration into some form of catharsis. Sunbather, though, is a similar exercise in alleviation. In these troubled times, I have found comfort in every passage of the album’s melodic heaviness, George Clarke’s throaty decelerations of uncertainty a panacea for the immense anxiety that now surrounds the very act of waking up. I’ve listened to Sunbather nearly every day since this global pandemic kicked off, and it has rewarded me with some sense of stability and bliss. — AJ

Anti — 2020

Half Waif — The Caretaker

Over the span of a month I’ve gone from seeing my partner every day to not seeing them in over four weeks. Quarantine has stranded me some four hours and 200 miles away. We speak daily, over text, occasionally over phone, revealing the incremental liminal space of our relationship in a slow, draining fashion. Ever since The Caretaker dropped, I’ve listened to it at nearly the same daily pace; two, three, four listens over and over, sometimes letting the album loop over on itself, allowing Nandi Rose Plunkett’s beautiful vocals wash over me in a haze, constantly drifting in and out of focus. Half Waif’s fourth record stresses the careful space many of us find ourselves in now, taking for granted the space and time we share with the ones we love the most, reflecting on how much of our lives we’re willing to share with who we hold closest. Yet record strikes a disarming balance between intimacy and isolation, exploring the binary relationship between both and how far we as individuals are willing to push the boundaries of both. — Dyl

Mord — 2020

SHXCXCHCXSH — VOOO EP

VOOO is an exhausting listen. It pummels and pounds your eardrums with harsh grainy percussion loops and synths for close to 25 minutes, always relentless in how it uses its repetitive patterns to shake you down. When it’s rigid and locked in with its loops, it’s hypnotic in its pull. When the EP compounds on that effect by overlapping loops, however, VOOO reveals SHXCXCHCXSH as subtle masters at their peak. That much is clear on “OPPP,” where the absolutely punishing opening Shepard tone beat gives way to a creepingly coarse melody just barely peeking out from the haze, bringing extra weight in place of any relief. More than any other release from this enigmatic, prolific Swedish dark techno duo, VOOO sounds like the unreleased soundtrack to a pulsating neon-soaked action film known for its notoriously graphic violence, the kind that plunges you into an unceasing altercation of the senses. I don’t feel immersed when I listen to VOOO; I feel trapped, enclosed on all sides. And it’s an entrapment that leaves me dazed and staggered long after each listen. — Nat

Drag City — 2011

WILDCARD: Bill Callahan — Apocalypse

Bill Callahan is a genius — this is not an astute observation. Over the span of his now 30-year career, he’s crafted a consistent tone and setting as close to perfect as any artist can get. The return to this well is constant, it is with a delicate balance of respect and curiosity, with such a display of craft and improvement it’s astonishing how quickly I want to return for more. Timely as its title may seem, Apocalypse is such a perfect distillation of all things Callahan — a reimagining of Americana for the 21st century, a re-examination of a transcendental life found in the bellowing winds and acoustic echo of his signature songwriting style. — Dyl

Republic — 2020

The Weeknd — After Hours

If you’re reading this, you’re obviously using a device connected to the internet, so I’d like you to do me a favor: Go to your search engine of choice and plug in the phrase “his best since Blood on the Tracks” and tell me how many results pop up. It’s a lot, right? It seems like every decent-enough album Dylan put out from the 90s on got that tag at one point or another, and only rarely (hello Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and so on) did it earn the billing. Got all that? Now go read any number of reviews for After Hours, the Weeknd’s fourth official studio album, and see how many of them say something along the lines of “his best since Trilogy.” Again, probably a lot, right? Except here’s the thing: the comparison is 100% justified. Abel Tesfaye hadn’t made a full-length project this theatrically captivating in nearly a decade, but somehow he came through this time. It’s the best surprise of the year so far.

The strengths are immediately apparent: it’s his first proper album since 2013’s misbegotten Kiss Land that gets in and out in under an hour; Max Martin is mostly kept in a corner (and even his contributions work, particularly the brilliant “Blinding Lights,” the best Weeknd single since “Can’t Feel My Face”); the concept is tight; and the big-name “surprise” producers — Uncut Gems cohort Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker — play directly into his best qualities as an artist. Make no mistake, the Weeknd is still the Weeknd, for better and worse (“Futuristic sex, give her Philip K. Dick” is the best-worst/worst-best punchline of his since “David Carradine, I’mma die when I cum”), but the aesthetic choices work to serve who he’s been all along, a debaucherous, heartsick lothario who we all know is heading towards an ugly ending. It’s just that the journey there this time around, filtered through a painstakingly-crafted collage of new wave, R&B, dream pop, and even ambient, is more enjoyable than it’s been in a long time. We may not have many event albums like this in the coming months, and even fewer that are this good. Cherish them while you can. — Zach

Domino — 2020

Sorry — 925

I had a tough time choosing between this and Disq’s Collector for my second choice on this list, as they both possess a strong favor towards the Gremlin Mindset, but while I love Collector’s funhouse mirror structure, 925 is just a bold debut record. I literally know almost nothing about this group, and I could look them up for you right now and tell you all about them, but that would take away from my journey of getting into this LP and it’d take away from yours too, so I’m gonna spare the details: listen to this album.

It’s deconstruction and rebuilding of pop and rock music in its own image, with some Lynch-ian sound design thrown in the mix makes 925 for one of the most addictive listens this year. The push and pull aspect between its two vocalists on some of these songs, one female, the other male, presents an extremely interesting gender dynamic on some of these album’s songs, with the female vocalist taking the lead on most of these (again, I’m literally refusing to tell you anything about this band, as the mystery of it is what grabbed me in the first place). She’s got such a sense of control throughout these songs despite her unassuming presence that makes for a bewildering listen. When we first laid bare the tenets of the Gremlin Mindset, we knew that many artists would follow with their own interpretations, and Sorry’s rewriting of this scripture is one of my favorites yet. — Matty

(Okay, I did read a little blurb about the band after writing this and of course they cite Dean Blunt as an influence and of course I’m gonna eat that shit up!)

Saddle Creek — 2020

WILDCARD: Frances Quinlan — “Carry the Zero”

Likewise is, to date, the best album of the year I am patently unqualified to write about. As someone who hasn’t ever felt particularly compelled to take the plunge on Hop Along, I don’t know where this album necessarily fits in alongside Frances Quinlan’s “day job,” but here’s what I do know: it is an excellent album that contains some absolutely fantastic songwriting. So why am I saying that and then highlighting the one song she didn’t write? Easy answer: it bangs, whips, slaps, fucks, etc. Better answer: it’s because she makes it something entirely unique from the original. Whereas Doug Martsch created it as a jangly rocker, Quinlan takes it into brittle, shimmering synthpop territory, crafting a fittingly iconoclastic ending to a fittingly iconoclastic debut album. — Zach

Triple Crown — 2020

Dogleg — Melee

I think the best way to distill the magic of Melee is to consult an early play-by-play of the opening track, “Kawasaki Backflip”.

0:00: The first good guitar riff on the album appears! 0:08: Drums punching in like thunder from the heavens… 0:09: ….and everything else joins them. 0:35: The real riffs hit. 0:40: TEAR DOWN MY WALLS, WE DON’T NEED THEM NOW

The point here is that Dogleg don’t waste time on Melee. Clocking in at around 36 minutes, every song here finds the perfect re-usage of the formula, showing you an incredibly cool thing they’re able to do with guitars, drum, and bass, and then just hammering it into the dirt with maximum propulsion. Between the hoarse shouting and rapid struts of “Hotlines”, or the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Cap’n-Jazz! frenzy displayed on lead single/shout-along “Fox”, Dogleg prove themselves to be some of the worthiest torchbearers of the art known as rock and roll music with guitars, throwing in every little genre hallmark you can come across as they proceed to stick to their “go fast and break shit” playbook. Its brief runtime lends it to insane replay value, letting one throw themselves in wherever they feel like on the album to ride out to the end, getting the same value out of all the ridiculous riffs and drum fills that pop in different forms throughout. It’s an anxious spiral of guitar wizardry, and a brilliant testament to dudes rocking everywhere. — Rose

Hush Hush — 2020

Still Life — for a long time I went to bed early

Still Life, the alias of composer Daniel Fine, makes scores for films that don’t exist. Rather, they don’t exist yet. His work is inherently cinematic, evocative of time and place in a way that it can pair with nearly any moment in one’s life if applied properly. for a long time i went to bed early sticks to several memories for me, though it was just released a few months ago. The twinkling of piano keys and buzzing ambient tones bring vivid imagery of a rain soaked Midtown Manhattan, it’s spoken-word interludes are echoed conversations from strangers passing on the street. There is a tangible sadness in Still Life’s music, but a comforting sadness, for it is one that has passed. Not to say that these feelings are easy to overcome, or memories to be forgotten — for a long time i went to bed early is the sonic representation of a process: hurting, healing, and learning to move on. — AJ

Secretly Canadian — 2020

Porridge Radio — Every Bad

Every Bad, the sophomore effort from the 4-piece Brighton indie rock outfit Porridge Radio, takes the DIY charm of their first record Rice, Pasta, And Other Fillers and ratchets up the musical and emotional intensity up to 11; as the band who have “always known they were the best band in the world” try to stake out their territory as a voice to be reckoned with in the larger world of rock music. You may not personally agree with their braggadocious claim right away, but the passion and conviction the band performs with on this album makes it near impossible to deny that they really mean it.

This intense self-belief can be felt tangibly in every element of this album, but nowhere is it more present than in the performance of the band’s dynamic frontwoman Dana Margolin, whose electric vocal performances steal the show on practically every track here. Combining the acerbic wit of an artist like Marika Hackman with the raw vulnerability of someone like Adrienne Lenker and the explosiveness and rawness of punk singers like Jehnny Beth of Savages, Dana is the complete package as a band leader, and what she lacks in experience she more than makes up for with pure determination and effort. Using a lyrical style that leans heavily on repetition, Dana writes songs that are essentially a series of mantras she delivers over and over again with more intensity and raw emotion each time she says them, like a spell she is trying to cast with all her might. And as her vocal performances build and build to cathartic climaxes her band is in lock step with her, clearly having developed a tight knit chemistry as a unit from their years honing their chops at DIY shows.

This album is a little messy at times and not every song is as strong as the clear highlights such as “Sweet”, “Long”, and “Lilac”, but there is undeniably a winning formula on display here that if properly tinkered with really could produce a true blue classic of modern indie rock. Half of the battle of creating a classic album is being crazy enough to think you have the capacity to make one in the first place, and this band clearly has the pure ambition needed to shoot their shot and truly become the great band they already see themselves as in their head. — Jackson

Experiences — 2020

Ulla — Tumbling Towards a Wall

A remarkable record of sonic poetry, rooting itself in the murky fog of the sound of decade’s past. Diving into this record feels like revisiting your favorite museum, displayed all around are beautiful works, conjuring and inhabiting spaces so often familiar yet with just enough to leave a stirring, ceaseless impression deep in one’s mind. Ulla carries thick layers of atmospheric pressures as if they were nothing, pulling all at once from the likes of Alva Noto, Fennesz, The Orb, Seefeel — all at once crafting intimate spaces of boundless nostalgia, finding contemporary discomfort settled just behind the curtain of their smoky auras. Step inside this museum and you will find an abundance of classic and modern works, comfort and isolation, loss and reconnections — such is the circular nature of everyday life. — Dyl

Strut — 2019

WILDCARD: Patrice Rushen — Remind Me (The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978–1984)

In these trying times of self-isolation, many of us are turning to art that comforts us or helps us temporarily escape the harsh realities of life, and for me that musical safe space has and will continue to be classic disco and RnB. And if you are looking for a musical pick me up, you really can’t do much better than the Patrice Rushen hits compilation Remind Me that was released last summer and has remained in heavy rotation for me ever since. Her name probably doesn’t instantly ring a bell for most people, as perhaps her most recognized pop culture moment came in the form of a sample on Will Smith’s “Men In Black” rap single that accompanied the movie of the same name, but her discography is a hidden treasure trove that features many of the best Disco and RnB singles of the early 80s and should be MUCH more appreciated than it currently is. Already an accomplished Jazz pianist and singer by the time she signed to Elektra records in 1978, Patrice set out to expand her sound further, combining her skills with a team of talented session musicians who could help bring her auteurist vision of “sophisticated dance music” to life. The resulting 5 albums she released in her 7 years signed to Elektra have been whittled down to this near-flawless 90 minute compilation that now serves as a perfect entry point for modern audiences to familiarize themselves with her sound and her unique talents as a songwriter and arranger. From the infections disco guitar riffs and piano flourishes on “Haven’t You Heard” to the triumphant horns on “Never Gonna Give You Up — Won’t Let You Be”, this album is every bit as technically impressive as it is a fucking blast to listen to, with something for the music nerds and the casual listeners to enjoy on nearly every track here. I could go on about all the things I love about this album but there’s truly no need to when the music so effectively speaks for itself. Just go put it on and try not to crack a smile or move your body to the music: it’s pretty much impossible. — Jackson