At 24, Bradfordian Nia Archives has already clearly marked out her musical territory.

While many of her Gen Z contemporaries have embraced the rave, jungle and drum’n’bass sounds of the early-mid 1990s, she’s done it more wholeheartedly than most: particularly rebuilding the rolling breakbeats and deep bass of jungle as a kind of British urban folk music, collaborating with older generations (original junglists DJ Die and Randall of Watch The Ride), and demonstrating how her natural Caribbean-influenced Yorkshire vocal articulation fits perfectly into that. 

Jim and William Reid’s musical trajectory has been extraordinary. They started out by out-punking punk with terrifying noise barrages and wilfully clumsy three-chord thrashing, but quickly revealed a deep love of classic pop song structures which became ever clearer as they sonically mellowed in the early stages of their career.

Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the imagination of the listener is left to run free.

Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it, her output since Sonic Youth (and her marriage) dissolved in 2011 has been prodigious.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Mito y Comadre Guajirando (ZZK)

Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson has covered a lot of ground over three decades, from dank cellar ambience to refined baroque composition, and from chirpy funk to monstrous noise. But his default mode is instantly recognisable: 170+ beats per minute jungle / drum’n’bass-adjacent breakbeats, squelching acid techno synths, high drama rave chords, all with him playing jazz fusion bass guitar over the top like a maniac.

Floridian-born, longtime Brooklyn resident, now Asheville, North Carolina based Roberto Carlos Lange doesn’t rush things, but he gets them done. This is his ninth album in 15 years, during which time he’s built a substantial body of audiovisual / computer art / installation work too. And as with all this creative endeavour, it’s not showy, it doesn’t demand your attention, but it spreads out its ideas and emotions very much at its own pace.

It seems like time flows differently for J Mascis. He’s now not far off 60, it’s 40 years since he founded Dinosaur Jr, and he’s been involved in untold musical project from the most rarefied of abstract psychedelia to guesting with Lemonheads and Nirvana, but within his own core output he is tapped into exactly the same wellspring as he was all those years ago.

Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.

Some years there’s no obvious Album of the Year. 2023 is not such a year. Any one of five albums could have been my choice. I chose Kesha from that esteemed selection because her fifth album bombed commercially, and I want to BIG IT RIGHT UP.