Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - EARS

Oh God. No. Save us. We’ll do anything - anything so that we don’t have to relive the hell-year of 2016. Please, we’re begging you!

Mind you, our aversion to 2016 is nothing to do with the records released that year. As the world went wild, some of music’s biggest acts were making definitive LPs that dealt with the hardest things life can throw at us. David Bowie said farewell with ‘★ (Blackstar)’ - put out just days before he passed away, this extraordinary parting gift conjured Scott Walker and Xiu Xiu as Bowie took one last look at the planet he landed on all those years previously. Radiohead laced Thom Yorke’s breakup through some of their best songcraft since ‘In Rainbows’ on ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds made the murky and grief-stricken ‘Skeleton Tree’, an album that came out in the wake of the death of Cave’s teenage son. All three made our top twenty for the year.

Other artists were also going through it in 2016: Danny Brown’s incredible ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ exploded the very notion of what a hip-hop record could be, piling on ultra-obscure post-punk samples and demonic bad-trip beats to create a landmark album for both the genre and the artist; Mitski continued to ward off her sorrow with emotional grunge tunes on ‘Puberty 2’; Carla Dal Forno married introspective balladry with brooding electronic techniques throughout her breakthrough LP ‘You Know What It’s Like’; Glaswegian punks Anxiety careered through twenty minutes of gut-wrenching hardcore with their eponymous record. This was heavy music for heavy times.

Mind you, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Classical artists did some great things with old materials, making some of the year’s most vibrant music in the process: Mary Lattimore got her harp to sing on ‘At The Dam’; two cellists, Helen Money and Oliver Coates, used their instrument to very different ends while both achieving superb results; the late Jóhann Jóhannsson (RIP) combined chamber composition with electronics to typically stirring effect on ‘Orphée’.

And there was also plenty of hope to be found in machine-music. Mark Pritchard’s ‘Under The Sun’ was frequently as sunny as its cover artwork, Steve Hauschildt brought the shimmering sound of his Emeralds group to bear on ‘Strands’, and Huerco S. made one of the most cerebral techno albums ever in the form of ‘For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)’. Ultimately, however, the year belonged to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, whose utopian brand of new-age electronica landed her not one but two spots on the list - one of which was the year’s chart-topper ‘EARS’.