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johnbazley · 6 years ago

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My Favorite Albums of 2018

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Honorable mention: Bruce Springsteen - Springsteen on Broadway

This one is tricky to place on a list; it’s not technically an album, though it’s not technically a film, and since I watched it on Netflix/listened to it on Apple Music, I can’t really call it a show I attended, either. Still, as a long-time Springsteen fan from the suburbs of New Jersey where the Boss cut his teeth, this performance floored me. Essentially a performed, abridged version of his 2017 memoir Born To Run, cut with songs from his fifty-year career, Springsteen on Broadway finds Bruce Springsteen examining the threads of his life, trying to make sense of them, and deconstructing the legendary persona he has spent his career constructing. The result is the reframing of many of his biggest and greatest songs. If you are at all interested in the craft of creative non-fiction or Bruce Springsteen music, Springsteen On Broadway is a must-see.

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30. Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

This album reminds me a lot of The 1975’s first record, which I adore. It’s catchy as hell, and it’s my favorite pure pop record of the year. It’s too long and samey—I skip around a lot when I listen now, and there’s probably a fantastic ten-track album within these fourteen songs—but there are some real hits on here. I spent enough much time on the subway this year trying not to bop my head to “Eighteen” that I’d feel wrong not including it here.

29. J. Cole - KOD

I haven’t loved the past few J Cole albums, but I have fond memories of listening to Sideline Story as I rode around Monmouth County, New Jersey in the passenger seat of my friend Kevin’s car the summer after got his driver’s license. I think of those summer nights whenever J. Cole announces a new album, so I always listen to them, no matter how much I disliked the previous one. KOD surprised me because for the first time since Sideline Story, I felt like I had something to chew on and unpack when I read the record’s lyrics. There’s a statement made here about the consumption of black art by while people, and while it is certainly up for debate how effectively that statement is made—I can’t help but feel like substance users are thrown under the bus at times—I do think Cole has finally released a record with a thesis statement. Hopefully his next one has features!

28. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs

Admittedly, this album might be much higher if it had released earlier in the year. There is a strong case to be made that Earl Sweatshirt is the greatest rapper alive, and that Some Rap Songs is his best album—I just didn’t spend a whole lot of time with it this year.

Despite that: I love the mixing on this record, how everything sounds obscured, like a recording of a recording. Earl, much like his old Odd Future cohorts Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean, has gotten much better at what he does since the collective dissolved a few years ago, and his lyricism is better than ever. There’s a trend toward immediacy in hip-hop at the moment as streaming numbers increasingly play a larger role in the business end of things. Some Rap Songs feels like the only album in the genre released this year that was designed with long-term consumption in mind. I can’t imagine this album will leave my rotation any time soon.

27. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

I’ve always been kind of a fair-weather Deafheaven fan. I listen to the new albums when they drop and appreciate them for what they are, but I’m not enough of a metal fan to spend much time with them after that honeymoon period ends. I come back to Sunbather fairly regularly, but mostly because it reminds me of the summer when it gets cold out.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is the first Deafheaven album I’ve fallen for. It’s the first Deafheaven album I recommended to my friends in the group chat who don’t care for metal music at all. Sunbather, and to a lesser extent, New Bermuda showed that there’s plenty of room for experimentation within the black metal genre, but Ordinary Corrupt Human Love blows the whole thing up. I love a subversive record, and while I didn’t spend as much time with this album as I did with other records on this list, I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

26. mewithoutYou - [untitled] LP

All I can say for this record is that it scratched an itch. It’s been a while since I’ve been truly invested in the Will Yip-produced Run For Cover emo scene, but this record reminded me of those heydays with the Citizens and the Balance & Composures and the whathaveyous. I don’t think it’s Yip’s best produced album, and I don’t think it’s mewithoutYou’s best album, but “Julia” worked its way into my head quite often this fall, like an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a few years, coming home to visit.

25. Noname - Room 25

Noname is just so good at this shit. After Acid Rap, I hoped she’d release a mixtape. She did, and Telefone was one of the best albums of that summer--a pivotal summer of my life, the summer we got Blonde, Coloring Book, Puberty 2, and Atrocity Exhibition, no less. Room 25 is even better, and proves that Noname is here to stay.

I put “Ace” on a playlist called “better by fall” in October. That playlist was full of mellow songs that calmed me down, that also had BPMs high enough to put a spring in my step and get me my out of my apartment when I didn’t feel like leaving my bed. It was my happy place when all of the shit started hitting every fan a few weeks into the fall semester. I think I’ll remember this fall much in the way that I remember the summer Telefone dropped--a lot of darkness, a lot of growth, but mostly a lot of good songs.

24. Basement - Beside Myself

I feel like so few rock bands today are concerned with structure and songwriting like Basement are on Beside Myself. This record reminds me a lot of early 2000s Jimmy Eat World output, which is mostly because of how the guitars sound, but I think that comparison really comes together in the strength of the choruses and the way the songs build and release. Each song is built like a brick house. I’ve always kind of doubted that this band would ever be able to top 2012’s Colourmeinkindness, and while I still prefer that record to this one, this one is a nice addition to a discography that gets better with each new release.

23. Vince Staples - FM!

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is home. I moved from New York City back to New Jersey in large part because I felt like I needed it--2018 was the year that I accepted that this place made me the person I am, and that I should embrace it. I wrote a lot about this state and my community here.

FM! resonated with me because it felt like Vince Staples doing the same. I liked Big Fish Theory, but I didn’t return to it much after release, largely because it found Vince abandoning much of the Long Beach, California-centric lyrical content that made me love Summertime ‘06 so much. I think there’s a potency to an artist writing about the good and bad of their hometown, and I love FM! because Vince does it well, in a stylish wrapping that feels more like a meaningful concept record than Big Fish ever did, despite what critics said about that album.

22. Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer

I remember walking around Grand Central trying to catch a train the day after Dirty Computer dropped this spring, listening through the album in full for the first time as I raced through corridors and took my seat, and thinking as “Americans” came to a close, “oh, yes, this is the best album of the year.” It just seemed like a fact at that point that no one could possibly top the beauty of Dirty Computer, which consists entirely of very catchy songs that construct a larger statement piece about queerness, blackness, and womanhood. And while it may be true that Dirty Computer is the best album of the year, I have not listened to it in full since, mostly because I got very distracted with schoolwork and other music in the weeks following its release. However, that listening experience was my most memorable of the year, and this is the only record on this list that I’ve only listened to once. I think that counts for a lot.

21. Alkaline Trio - Is This Thing Cursed?

Earlier this year, I drove 20 hours round-trip to Maine and back to visit a friend in Bangor. I spent most of those twenty hours listening to old Alkaline Trio records, as I’ll do from time to time when I feel nostalgic for my middle school years. I think spending so many hours with Good Mourning and From Here To Infirmary this summer prepped me to love Is This Thing Cursed?, which feels like it could have been released right before Crimson.

If you haven't already been in on Alkaline Trio, Is This Thing Cursed? probably won’t change your mind (though you might like the last record, My Shame Is True, which is more “““mature””” and less spooky, but I digress), but it’s a solid addition to a great discography from a band I’ve loved since Tony Hawk’s Underground came out.

20. Saba - Care For Me

Care For Me is the best rap album that no one talked about this year. The first time I heard “PROM / KING,” I figured Saba would blow up in 2018 the way that Kendrick Lamar did after good kid, mAAd city. That didn’t happen, but I still think Saba is bound for stardom.

19. Hop Along - Bark Your Head Off, Dog

I didn’t stick with this album as much as I thought I would when I first heard “How Simple”--I think a lot of my adoration for this album actually zeroes in on that song, actually--but we had a nice summer fling.

18. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

This album is probably my biggest disappointment of 2018. So much of it doesn’t work for me. I wish I could cut out every terrible, self-indulgent lyric like “Kids don’t want rifles, / kids want Supreme” and “I found a gray hair in one of my zoots, / like context in a modern debate, I just took it out.” “The Man Who Married A Robot” had to have been written by a man who thinks he has something profound to say about how humans are affected by technology, but has also never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Matty Healy apologized for his ridiculous and offensive comments in The Fader about misogyny in rock music and hip-hop, but I can’t return to “Love It If We Made It” after Matty essentially said “hey actually I don’t know what I’m talking about, sorry y’all” with regard to its lyrical content. I think Healy is essentially rewriting Drake’s career, coming so close to genuine profundity at every turn and constantly falling victim to his own inflated ego.

Still, I adore the minute-to-minute songwriting on this record so much that I can ignore its many failed attempts at crafting a larger statement. “I Like America and America Likes Me” is so good that I don’t mind skipping “The Man Who Married Robot” when it’s over. “It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You” is exactly the type of song that seems effortless to The 1975, but no one else has quite cracked yet.

17. Mitski - Be The Cowboy

Be The Cowboy is probably my least favorite of Mitski’s records. This one didn’t blow my mind the way that Puberty 2 did, and I don’t think it’s as timeless as Bury Me At Makeout Creek, but it’s still a god damn good Mitski album. “Old Friend” makes my heart skips beats.

16. Foxing - Nearer My God

I don’t really remember this album coming out. The only thing I remember about the first time I listened to it was that I was falling asleep on the subway, constantly restarting it from track one and dozing off again before that song ended.

15. Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel

I’ve always felt like I should like Courtney Barnett more, and it all clicked into place for me on this record. I love the vocal melodies and how they play with Courtney’s guitar work. It’s also a very enjoyable listen from start to finish, and when it first released, it was my go-to walk-around-my-neighborhood-and-think-about-life album.

14. boygenius - boygenius

This release is such a dream come true that it almost feels wrong—how could two of the best active songwriters today start a band together? And how does that band live up to every expectation? How did Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers come through with their best songs ever for their supergroup? This is the EP that shouldn’t exist because we don’t deserve nice things.

13. The HIRS Collective - Friends. Lovers. Favorites.

This is the album you’re all sleeping on. The best hardcore album of 2018 and among the best of the past five years. For fans of scary, heavy music with lyrics about trans and queer liberation. Read this and listen.

12. Brian Fallon - Sleepwalkers

Sleepwalkers is exactly where I wanted Brian Fallon to go after Painkillers. I know so many Gaslight Anthem fans who want Fallon to write the same song over and over--and I love that song, to be fair--but Fallon’s songwriting is most interesting to me when he’s branching out and experimenting with new songs. I think that’s why I’ve always loved Get Hurt, and it’s certainly why I love Sleepwalkers. The British invasion sound that Fallon plays with here fits like a glove, and the slowed-down Manilow-esque “Etta James” is the best song he’s written in at least four years. I feel like Fallon’s next album will be a bit more typical, as the cycle of Fallon records tends to go, but Sleepwalkers stands out and I hope Brian Fallon never stops writing songs.

11. Jeff Rosenstock - POST-

I think there’s a fantastic seven-track album within POST-. I don’t care much for the long songs here, because I don’t think longer song structures are well-suited to Jeff Rosenstock’s frenetic style, so when I listened to POST- this year, I most often started with “Yr Throat” and turned it off once “9/10″ was over. I’ve included it so high on my list because I think that seven-track album is perfect. It’s frustrating how good those songs are. The thing about Jeff Rosenstock is that he writes so many songs (this is the first of two appearances he’ll make in my top eleven of 2018) that I can forgive the clunkers, especially when they’re so nicely bookended at the beginning and end of an album.

The fact that the larger “rock” audience hasn’t caught on to the fact that Rosenstock is one of the best songwriters alive and releases multiple records each year is confounding. WORRY. remains one of the best rock albums of the decade, and POST- is a perfectly good follow-up.

10. Now, Now - Saved

Now, Now’s turn with Saved reminds me so much of the recent Paramore trajectory. It seemed for a while that the previous album would be the last. When the island-pop follow-up with a new lineup was announced, I feared that everything I’d previously loved about the band was gone. Then the album came out, and I fell head over heels for it.

I listened to Saved a lot on my roof this summer as I stole time and watched the sun set between my two jobs. I often had a few free hours here or there, and I spent so many of those hours listening to “Window” or “AZ” as I sipped a beer and watched the planes land in Queens.

I don’t remember much of this year--so much of it blends together in a way that, honestly, concerns me. But the nights I spent with “Saved” blend together as well, and if I look back at my summer in 2018 and only remember getting drunk as the sky turned pink in Brooklyn with “SGL” in my headphones, I’m cool with it.

9. Ruston Kelly - Dying Star

I’m not usually in the business of recommending country albums, so you know this one must be good.

Dying Star does so much by the books. “Mockingbird” could be a radio hit. “Cover My Tracks” features a main melody that I swear I’ve heard in a Ryan Adams song before. It all works, mind--it works so well that the subversive moments all land even harder.

Maybe I’m just out of touch with the genre, but I have never heard a song like “Son Of A Highway Daughter” before. I didn’t know country artists were allowed to pull a “Hide and Seek” and hide the instruments behind several minutes of vocoder vocals. If this has been going on longer than Ruston Kelly’s tenure in writing songs, please send those albums to me.

I love interesting music, and Dying Star is the most interesting country album I’ve heard since Taylor Swift’s Red (will not be answering messages debating Red’s existence as a country album, thank you).

8. Pusha T - DAYTONA

I spent most of the early parts of 2018 angry at Kanye West. As the “Santeria” beat unfolded from the speakers of my 2003 Ford Escape, stuck in stand-still traffic in Staten Island, mere weeks before its transition would fail and leave me stranded in an AMC Theaters parking lot, I had a single, fleeting moment of shit, what am I going to do if this Kanye album is good?

Luckily, that feeling faded before I crossed the bridge into Jersey. But there are elements to Pusha T’s greatest record, DAYTONA, that prove that Kanye hadn’t lost quite all of his marbles when he conducted these beats and dreamed up the concept of the all-killer-no-filler, seven-track hip-hop album. Every second of this album is good. Because it has so few keystone moments, every moment is memorable. In that sense, listening to DAYTONA reminds me a lot of listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run. Springsteen conducted that album so each side of the LP would start and end with one of the record’s best songs. Therefore, each moment of picking up the record and flipping it results in some thought of “damn, that was good and I am truly enjoying this LP.” I feel like DAYTONA is structured similarly, albeit with the lens for the streaming generation. Pusha gets in and out of verses effortlessly here, and each track opens and closes in a memorable way. Before you have time to get bored, the record is over and repeating and you're ready to hear it again.

It will likely be another several years before another Pusha T record, so it will be interesting to see how this one’s short length holds up as the thirst grows. But for the time being, part of me wishes every album was so dedicated to trimming the fat and delivering the goods only.

7. Travis Scott - Astroworld

I’ve never been wrong about a rapper like I was wrong about Travis Scott in 2014. I wrote Travis off when “Mamacita” dropped because he came across to me as a Yeezus impressionist who wanted desperately to be Young Thug. In 2018, Young Thug hasn’t had the hit I’ve always assumed was around the corner, and Kanye is a hack.

I can only imagine hearing a song like “Sicko Mode” in high school. The way that song, and so much of Astroworld, effortlessly hops between movements, weaving in and out of movements and codas as if that’s ever been allowed in pop music--Travis Scott really did something here. It’s like he traded all of the corniness for genuine insight into the mechanics of hip-hop music, and in the process released of the genre’s standout albums in a post-DS2 world. Sometimes, it’s good to be wrong.

6. Staten - I don’t want to be alone anymore

I always laugh when Justin puts out a new song because he’s so god damn good at this. Unsigned artists shouldn’t be able to make pop music that sounds this solid, this well-produced. Find me another local musician who’s making pop music on the level of “Saturn” or “Loy’s Son.”

There are a ridiculous amount of good Staten albums, and I don’t want to be alone anymore is one of my favorites. Do yourself a favor and spend some time on Justin’s bandcamp page.

5. Antarctigo Vespucci - Love In The Time Of E-Mail

Love In The Time Of E-Mail is my favorite Chris Farren full-length. I love the grit that Jeff Rosenstock brings to Farren’s otherwise glossy songwriting style, and I love how Chris’ lyrics straddle the line because funny and heartfelt, often in the same song. I think my single favorite moment from a song this year is the bridge of “Breathless on DVD,” where Farren sings: “Am I unhappy because I’m not free, / or not free because I’m unhappy? / I wanted to see you / to see if I still wanted to see you.” “Breathless On DVD” is the kind of song that makes you wonder how some emo band didn’t already write this whole album a decade ago. It instantly meshes with the canon of albums I’ve spent my life with, and fits like a glove. I hope I never wear this one out.

4. The Wonder Years - Sister Cities

I wrote a bit about this album in a personal essay for Substream earlier this year, but to elaborate a bit: The Wonder Years have a habit of releasing life-affecting albums right when I feel like I need one. The Upsides and Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing came into my life a few months after I ended my first real relationship and started to wonder why I had spent so much of my life up to that point consumed by my own inexplicable sadness. The Greatest Generation came out a month shy of my high school graduation and I spent a lot of time that summer delivering pizza, dreading the day I’d have to leave my friends to move into a dorm room and meet new ones, listening to The Wonder Years and wondering if this is what it feels like with my wings clipped, I’m awkward and nervous, I’m awkward and nervous.

Sister Cities is an album about boundaries and the bodies of water that separate us and how traveling the planet makes us feel more distant and more connected to the people who pass through our lives for however long. I split my time between New York and New Jersey this summer, working a handful of jobs across both states, trying to pay my rent without the help of student loans and putting a little bit of scratch aside in case I needed to get out in the next few months for whatever reason. Around this time, I also began to process how upset I was about the death of my Aunt Mary, who passed away during my first week of graduate school, whose funeral was the first of a handful I had to miss due to geographical limitations and work obligations. I slept on New Jersey Transit a lot those weekends, and I listened to this album on repeat as I dozed off, as my train passed over bridges and into tunnels, until I woke up and walked off into a different home from where I started.

I think there’s a shift here—Dan Campbell is no longer belting out war cries like “I’m not sad anymore, I’m just tired of this place” or “I’m gonna shoulder the weight till my back breaks, / I want to run till my lungs give up.” It’s a quieter, more personal record that wrangles with quieter, more personal subject matter than previous Wonder Years releases. That resonated with me this year, and while I’m not sure how much I’ll return to Sister Cities compared to The Greatest Generation or even The Upsides in the future, I will not forget the time we spent together in 2018.

3. Spanish Love Songs - Schmaltz

Schmatlz was my most played album of 2018—I think that counts for something. Like if The Menzingers incorporated Bomb The Music Industry’s synthesizer lines, Spanish Love Songs make the most fun denim-clad Americana punk I’ve ever heard. I love every song on this album. I wore it out this year, and then I played it some more. I hear so often from my friends in the punk scene that there aren’t enough new bands making good punk music—this band is doing exactly that, friends.

I think Schmaltz, more than any other album on this list, will be the one that will forever remind me of my time living in Brooklyn. I spent countless nights last year walking home from my local neighborhood bar, Aunt Ginny’s, drunk, anxious, spinning as I avoided traffic and worried about homework I hadn’t done yet and mouthing the words to “Beer & NyQuil” and “Buffalo Buffalo” with Schmaltz in my headphones. It’s a cathartic record that made me feel considerably less alone in a year where my loneliness was more pervasive than ever. It’s a time and a place, but that time and that place weren’t so bad.

2. Jake Newcomb - Yosemite

When I was in my last year of high school, Jake Newcomb was in a pop-punk/emo band called Cross Town Train. Cross Town Train had a song called “Red Floral Dress,” and I can still remember the first time I heard it, in a friend’s house where we all hung out after school. “Red Floral Dress” was Cross Town Train’s best song, I think, the one that the crowd always went crazy for. I heard it hundreds of times that year, most of which I spent at local shows with friends and drunk in basements. I still consider it my favorite song of all time.

I loved and continue to love “Red Floral Dress” because it was the first time I can remember one of my friends creating a piece of art that felt not only impressive from a craft perspective, but truly important. It was cathartic. I was very confused about feelings of love toward everyone that year—my friends, my romantic interests, my hometown, my family—and that moment at the end of the bridge: “I’d been anticipating this for weeks,/because I don’t know how I feel about you—/and then I saw you, and then I saw you, and then I saw you,” sounded so obvious to me. Of course there is an answer here. There is an answer, an answer that Jake Newcomb has figured out, and it will come for you in time.

I have been thinking about “Red Floral Dress” a lot lately because Jake Newcomb released a new album this year. Yosemite is a nine-track album, the first full-length album that Jake wrote and released on his own. I love the vocal melodies and I love how beautiful the acoustic arrangement sounds, but the reason I resonated so quickly with the record is because of how obvious it all seems. Lyrically, the record follows the story of a relationship from beginning to end. Each of its tracks address peripheral factors that put stress on a new relationship. “Sparky” was inspired by the death of Jake’s childhood dog, which coincided with the relationship. “Warped Tour” and “Cross Town Train” consider shared experience and lack thereof between the singer and his partner. Several tracks, like the standout “Little Things,” explore lowercase-p-political themes, like how poverty, the perceived inability to provide for a significant other, and the ever-present fear of climate change damage the ability to see a potential relationship as something that could possibly last in the long-term. In the closing title track, Newcomb croons without judgment about the passage of time: “It’s been a long time / since I loved you / like I used to.”

Yosemite sounds so clear to me—much in the way that “Red Floral Dress” sounded like an obvious answer to my teenage anxiety, Yosemite sounds wise and experienced, vulnerable, and relatable. The album artwork reflects my feelings best—a landscape full of trees, cliffs, fog, dirt, a layered image of a valley that goes on for miles that simultaneously seems so clear, beautiful, and obvious.

1. The Story So Far - Proper Dose

There is so much that I love about this record. I love the production, how it paints frontman Parker Cannon’s voice in a manner that show off his technical chops while retaining so much of the timbre of scorn that gave The Story So Far rise in the punk scene in the first place. I love the committed dive into acoustic tones and slowed down BPMs, both songwriting elements that TSSF have been flirting with since “Placeholder,” but entirely nail with “Upside Down.” I love how surprising these songs are—how the the “save my soul” refrain emerges from the ashes of a 90-second punk banger at the end of “Need To Know;” how the slurred, auto-tuned vocal line in “Growing On You” worms its way out of the bassy “Line” interlude, giving both tracks a sense of linked significance.

All that aside, Proper Dose is my favorite album of 2018 because of its urgency and importance. Its structure and content remind me of Tyler, The Creator’s Flower Boy, which was my favorite album of 2017. On that record, Tyler tells a story while wrangling with questions he doesn’t yet have answers to. Once he has confronted the central knot on “Garden Shed,” rapping as quickly as he can to put his admission of confusion out into the world before he has the ability to stop himself—“that was real love I was in / ain’t no reason to pretend”—the narrative begins to accelerate, rushing in as many disparate directions as possible in rapid succession. The rambling “Boredom” jams up against the erratic “I Ain’t Got Time!” before the split “911/Mr. Lonely” directly confronts that the narrator is lonely and depressed, but will keep on dancing to throw ‘em off. The b-side’s lack of cohesion is its cohesion, as a meta-narrative emerges—Tyler is racing to the end of a record, hoping to find the answers to his questions there, as if all endings inherently offer serendipitous and logical conclusions.

I think Proper Dose is structured similarly, albeit with significant differences. The lyrics to Proper Dose are primarily concerned with Cannon’s struggle with addiction to xanax and prescription cough syrup, and the arc finds the narrator reaching for answers. It’s here where the whole record comes together for me. Yes, “Need To Know” culminates in a surprising refrain, but that refrain is as inevitable is it could possibly be—when Cannon’s frustration and desperate admissions of internal struggle reach their ends, the only logical move is a shift and a direct address: Save my soul. That slurred vocal effect in “Growing On You” works so well because he sounds depleted, and by track ten, Cannon has already effectively shown the extent to which his addiction has left him exhausted. “Not as simple as I wanted it to be,” he sings slowly, as if the words are being pulled out of him, as if doing so is the only way to reach some type of conclusion. “Now I gotta say all of the things that are bothering me.”

All of this is to say that I have written a lot this year, and I still have more trouble than I’d like to admit writing about the knots that tie me up inside. An advisor of mine once told me that writing toward hardship and trauma is like holding a beach ball underwater: it gets harder the deeper one goes. If you let go, the ball returns to the surface, and you must start the work over of returning to previous depths.

I think Proper Dose would be The Story So Far’s best album even with its lyrics—urgency and importance—removed entirely. The vocal melodies here have improved dramatically over 2015’s self-titled effort, and for the first time, the songwriting sounds as though the band prioritized the listening experience over the crowd-going experience for their live shows. But it’s that leap of faith, that urgency and importance, that excavation of one’s own hardship, that makes it resonate so deeply with me.

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