Best of Pop 2021


Let’s hear it for the best pop albums of 2021!


Number Five: Honne – Let’s Just Say the World Ended a Week from Now, What Would You Do?



I know next to nothing on Honne, but I was really hooked by 2018’s Love Me / Love Me Not, and here I am, in 2021, starting my top 5 of the year with this album! It’s the most straightforwardly pop album of the bunch, but it’s great, dynamic, and has a lot of interesting ideas! So, you should definitely check it out!


Number Four: Half Waif – Mythopoetics


I’ve always … Read more

Dan’s Top 31 Albums of 2020

A bit late to the party, but here we are, nonetheless.

Let’s get the obvious out the way first. 2020 was a bad year, and this did have a knock-on effect with the amount of music that was released as well. While I personally would not say we had any absolute gamechangers this year, that doesn’t mean the year was an absolute waste. (At least, not in this one regard…) It was enough to bring me back from the dead, after all.

I may not have the same mettle for metal as Matt, nor the same dedication to deathlessly digging … Read more

NOT-002: Rïga – Chaos et félicité

The Hype

Here comes the second release under Not Music‘s wings! French percussionist and composer Bastien Jouvin’s creative journey for Chaos et félicité has been kick-started by our Marathon software. The prospect of new, impossible rhythms seems to have had a catalytic effect on him, and new compositions just seemed to pour out of his mind. The results of these experiments are amassed on this forty-minute album, which is coming out in one month, on August 7.

Rïga’s style fuses electronic walls of texture, classical percussion, post-rock swells, noise passages, and hardcore beats, and it’s truer than ever on … Read more

Devin Townsend – Empath

Devin Townsend is an artist that has always been hard to classify. Releasing such a wide range of music, from death metal, to ambient, to new age, to progressive rock, to country. But to be confined to just one genre wouldn’t be Devin Townsend. Which is why he lets it all out on Empath, jumping from style to style at whim, and creating something truly unique as a result.

I reviewed the last Devin Townsend Project (DTP) album Transcendence back in 2016 saying it took Devin’s sound to a new level. Now that I reflect on it, that … Read more

Malthusian – Across Deaths

The Music

The Words

Five years after tantalizing the death metal world with their MMXIII demo and three years removed from another promising EP, Below the Hengiform, Ireland’s quasi-supergroup Malthusian has finally delivered a full-length that lives up to their monstrous potential. Members of the quartet have roots in Altar of Plagues, Mourning Beloveth, and Wreck of the Hesperus, among other acts. Malthusian’s musical mission, as their moniker suggests, is to spread a prophetic warning of overpopulation: the idea that human growth is unsustainable and will lead to a global catastrophe as our resource usage exceeds … Read more