Whether recorded remotely, live, or in-studio, the jazz and experimental music that left the biggest impression this year did so primarily because it challenged us to find momentum in life. In jazz, Anthony Joseph summoned Shabaka Hutchings and Jason Yarde for a quest to take political poetry as far as he could, and the Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet crafted a set split between meditative rumination and active discontent. In experimental music, Bill Orcutt overdubbed himself on an expansive collaboration with Chris Corsano, the Vietnamese trio Rắn Cạp Đuôi spliced together inscrutable psychedelic collages, and Fire-Toolz delivered a double LP packed with everything from screamo to ambient.
While it would be difficult to land on one element that is shared by the records and songs here, not one of these musicians took the beaten path. Model Home lengthened their cut-up jams, Carmen Q. Rothwell allowed the city to add another dimension to her upright bass-filled songs of regret, and ---__--___ (the musicians Seth Graham and More Eaze) produced a crushing soundscape out of manipulated vocals.
Below, we round out entries culled from our overall albums list and overall songs list with more releases just as worthy of your time, listed alphabetically.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
---__--___: The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid
Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham and Austin electronic artist More Eaze are the animating forces behind The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, their first record together. The pair’s warped electro-acoustic arrangements bridge the void between feral noise and gauzy glimmer. Vocals from guests like Karen Ng, recovery girl, and Koeosaeme are processed to such a degree that they sound like travelers teleporting through the uncanny valley. Strings snarl and howl alongside twisting electronic gnarls on “Sadness, Infinite America … shit,” yielding to the delicate sparkle that leads the early stretch of “In Memory of Simon Kingston” (a song commemorating a New York musician who died at 21 last year). As a harsh vocal scrape interrupts its glistening surface, the record’s collision of elegant idealism and astringent reality is crystallized. –Allison Hussey
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Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives
Little distinction exists between speech and music on The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives, which the British-Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph assembled with a crew of jazz players including saxophonist-composer-arranger Jason Yarde and multi-reed wizard Shabaka Hutchings. Joseph brings the cadence of solos to his declamations of personal and diasporic history, placing musicality at the center of his poetry. When he recounts being “flung so far from any notion of nation” as a young immigrant on “Calling England Home,” his voice gathers depth and grit like a horn breaking into its woody lower register. The saxes, in turn, offer speechlike interjections, conveying urgent and expressive solidarity with every phrase. –Andy Cush
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Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince
When the Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab started recording Vulture Prince, she had no plans for an elegy. But then her brother died, as did a close friend. In tracing the shape of these new absences in her life, her mind went to the Urdu ghazals of her childhood, music and poetry filled with boundless, near-erotic longing for God. Aftab reimagined these ghazals, scored for only soft, stringed instruments—harp, stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, some violin. These sounds call clearly to each other across moonlit space, and Aftab’s voice cuts a path through the darkness in front of it, one line, one footfall, at a time. Jarred out of time, her grief (and ours) softens and grows overwhelmingly beautiful. –Jayson Greene
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Arushi Jain: “Richer Than Blood”
“Richer Than Blood,” the opening track on Brooklyn-based composer Arushi Jain’s debut album Under the Lilac Sky, is deceptively simple. It only consists of two elements: her gentle vocals and the burbling drones of a modular synth. And yet, Jain makes each tool at her disposal feel so much grander: She layers her vocals to sound like a room full of singers harmonizing with each other, and she uses her synth to mimic the effect of an entire string orchestra tuning their instruments before a performance. It’s an introduction that leaves you breathlessly anticipating whatever comes next. —Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Arushi Jain, “Richer Than Blood”
Carmen Q. Rothwell: Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere
Carmen Q. Rothwell sings of grief and heartbreak with remarkable restraint across Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere, her debut album. Often, she’s accompanied by little more than her own harmonies, as on the opening “Don’t Get Comfy.” And, on the lead single “Blissful Ignore,” the New York singer-songwriter and upright bassist allows her voice to follow the melodic counters of her instrument, letting car honks and more city noises leak into the song—it feels like watching her perform through an open window. The album thrives on the meeting of reservation and vulnerability, and its songs feel as emotional and virtuosic as a power ballad yet are sparse and withholding as a Rembrandt. –Matthew Strauss
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Chris Corsano / Bill Orcutt: Made Out of Sound
With its first notes, Made Out of Sound departs from previous recordings by the long-running free-improv team of guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano: There are two guitars here, not just one. Where albums like 2018’s Brace Up! had the searing in-the-moment intensity of live documents, this one was assembled remotely from opposite coasts. Rather than try to mask the artifice, Orcutt leans into it by doubling himself, turning their duo into a virtual trio. Perhaps as a result, Made Out of Sound is oceanic where past records were pointillistic, enveloping you in waves of harmony rather than pushing you through hairpin turns. The overdubs—and the chiaroscuro cover photo—suggest an affinity with Odds Against Tomorrow, Orcutt’s solo masterpiece from 2019. Like that record, Made Out of Sound is often breathtakingly beautiful, albeit in unconventional ways, finding moments of serenity and contemplation amid the turbulence. –Andy Cush
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Circuit des Yeux: “Dogma”
A dear friend’s death, a lonely artist residency, an intractable bout of writer’s block: Circuit des Yeux mastermind Haley Fohr was having a hell of a hard go of things. “Dogma,” the militantly lithe rock track on -io, an album of otherwise pillowy orchestral dimensions, serves as Fohr’s stubborn note-to-self: Keep moving and keep busy, and you might just keep it together. “Tell me how to feel right/Tell me how to see the light,” she commands over drums so mighty they stanch the synthesizer din creeping beneath her. Through this forward motion, she cultivates the strength to survive, at least until answers about what’s next come easier. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen: Circuit des Yeux, “Dogma”
Claire Rousay: a softer focus
Scattered throughout Claire Rousay’s a softer focus are snippets of her daily life: the sounds of a typewriter, a blaring swirl of cicadas, barely audible conversations. Swathed in swells of drone, half-remembered melodies, and strings saturated with melancholy, these prosaic sounds become monumental, activating a powerful sense of nostalgia for moments of quiet reflection and human connection. The abstract pieces on a softer focus are made potent by their suggestive familiarity, each sound a potential trigger for our own memories—happy, sad, or, more likely, somewhere in between. –Jonathan Williger
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Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2
The latest cryptic transmission from British singer-songwriter Dean Blunt is unsparing yet beautiful in its quest for hope in an increasingly despondent world. Blunt refuses allegiance to any single ideology, preferring instead to sprinkle provocative questions about Black rage before vanishing into the shadows. He perfects this approach in the taunting yet empathetic final lines of “MUGU”: “Let it out, nigga, let it out,” he sighs, “show them crackers what you’re all about.” Black Metal 2 doesn’t concede any of Dean Blunt’s mystique, but it’s the closest to a straight answer he’s given yet. –Brandon Callender
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Eli Keszler: Icons
When the COVID-19 shutdown kept people inside, percussionist and composer Eli Keszler turned his attention to the emptied streets. Icons uses on-location recordings of an uncharacteristically calm pandemic-era New York City to frame foreboding ambient mood pieces defined by vibraphone, glockenspiel, piano, and drums. An uneasy percussive skitter underlies the gleaming sound of gamelan bars on “Evenfall,” and Keszler finds a similar impressionistic beauty in the still of decline throughout the album. –Evan Minsker
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Fire-Toolz: Eternal Home
In the ’80s and ’90s, thrifty punk bands sometimes dubbed albums onto cassettes that they’d gotten (or stolen) for free from Christians or motivational speakers. If you focused your ears, you might catch a hint of the original audio grayed out between blasts of hardcore. Angel Marcloid’s Eternal Home operates on a similar principle: It’s a bizarre palimpsest piling up layers of progressive rock, Weather Channel synths, classical minimalism, IDM beat trickery, and screamo. Unlike those lo-fi tapes of yore, though, the Chicago musician’s work is almost shockingly hi-def, every grunge-inspired guitar solo, DX7 chime, and larynx-shredding howl leaping from the speakers in a blast of finely chiseled violence. Yet for all the sensory overload of Marcloid’s 78-minute opus, Eternal Home makes for a surprisingly immersive and even welcoming listen once you acclimate to its everything-goes-to-11 aesthetics. And if you’re looking for hidden messages, Marcloid’s mantra-like lyrics—“I’m owed strength now”; “We may as well be mushrooms”—offer plenty to puzzle over, buried beneath the barrage of stimuli. –Philip Sherburne
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Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises
It begins atomically, with a building block made of seven notes twisting around like a helix. Around this motif Promises blinks to life, a self-regenerating ecosystem in nine movements. This hybrid electronic/jazz/orchestral piece doesn’t feel composed so much as monitored by Sam Shepherd, the boundless electronic composer who performs as Floating Points. Whether arranging the London Symphony Orchestra’s oceanic swells or tapping out notes on a harpsichord that seems to be falling slightly out of tune, Shepherd lays down a framework for the eminent free jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders to follow and then thrillingly disregard.
Sanders is the central voice and shining star of Promises, his first major recording in a couple of decades, and one of 2021’s greatest musical gifts. He trots to one idea, floats to another, then sprints to a third, exploring the universe Shepherd has cast for him and spinning out new meanings for its restless, incessant seven-note central motif. This is the endless joy of Promises: listening to Sanders feel his way through this alien world as if newly born into it. It leaves such a unique impression that although you are listening to music, you are also witnessing its evolution. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Grouper: Shade
Grouper’s Liz Harris pulls you in close on Shade. Her new songs are characteristically intimate, offering quiet truths and rapturous noise that require close focus. The individual components feel familiar—the hushed vocals, tape hiss, and sound of fingertips sliding up guitar strings—but Harris’ fingerpicked melodies and gutting poetry manage to explore new depths of her bottomless sound. Lean in enough and you’ll hear her ponder the light and the clouds, contending with the gravitational pull of darkness: “Bury those thoughts real deep/Bury those bodies deep/Put us back to sleep.” It’s a crushing flash of insight delivered like a whispered secret. –Evan Minsker
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L’Rain: Fatigue
In the hands of Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek, music can be nonlinear and unpredictable without sacrificing grooves and hooks. As L’Rain, her blend of hi- and lo-fi techniques spawns songs that call for a half-dozen genre descriptors—avant-garde, psych-soul, with a side of musique concrète?—and refuse to resolve in an expected way. Her second album, Fatigue, is a symphony of fleeting, hyper-specific sound, from the opulent keyboard arpeggios that open “Two Face” and the swampy bass driving “Suck Teeth” to the heartfelt guitar interplay on “Blame Me” and the ingenuous rhythmic repetition of the phrase “make a way out of no way”—a line borrowed from Cheek’s late mother, Lorraine—on “Find It.” L’Rain songs can be one small idea or 10 overlapping ones, 17 seconds or six minutes, built around a single loop or encompassing upwards of 20 players. The works on Fatigue mimic the nature of grief and change, the haze and backsliding and dark thoughts. Through these vivid fragments, Cheek’s worldview comes across clearly: The best way to achieve growth is through unhindered exploration. –Jillian Mapes
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Lingua Ignota: Sinner Get Ready
Kristin Hayter’s voice, stacked tall atop itself, holds you from a terrifying height. On her latest album as Lingua Ignota, she reckons with devotion and loneliness in rural Pennsylvania, using its spare landscape and its musical and religious history as the fertile backdrop for her work. Between Appalachian instruments and prepared piano, she sings like she’s on the cusp of physical collapse, running her voice ragged only for it to surge into a roar. The point where exhaustion snaps into adrenaline is her starting ground. From there, she traces the contours of human faith, gumming the jagged edges where it breaks. –Sasha Geffen
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Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet: Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet
Luke Stewart and Jarvis Earnshaw create a fiery set of titanic jazz, exploring the possibilities of the genre by moving from transcendental meditation to off-center bebop. Stewart’s bass is swift, and it’s easy to be left stunned by how quickly his hands seem to be running across the instrument. Earnshaw’s sitar is used equally for creation and destruction, bringing the former with gentle picking and the latter with improvisation. Devan Waldman’s sprightly alto sax solos and Ryan Sawyer’s tempered drumming elevate the proceedings further, enhancing the sense that you are hearing the players push themselves towards something new. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
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MATTIE: “Human Thing”
A cybernetic cry into the wilderness, this single from MATTIE appeared out of the ether towards the beginning of March and has yet to wear out its welcome. Produced by MATTIE and Black Taffy, “Human Thing” is a stuttering behemoth of burnt-out snares, guttural bass, and MATTIE's inimitable yelp. Lying somewhere between a club banger and an industrial rock number, this track imprisons you in its reverb in order to ask, “Have you ever loved a human?” -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen: MATTIE, “Human Thing”
Model Home: both feet en th infinite
Listening to Model Home’s both feet en th infinite feels like stumbling upon some mysterious radio frequency—if you bump your dial up a millimeter, you might lose it forever. The new album from the Washington D.C. duo sounds subterranean, emanating from a basement cluttered with cables and mixing boards. Vocalist NappyNappa and electronic tinkerer Patrick Cain take a painterly approach to their songs, shading them with strokes of space-age funk, grimy disco, and underground hip-hop. Tracks like “Ambition” and “Body Power,” with their peripheral chatter and rambling lyrics, harness the spirit of an impromptu performance at a house show—a snapshot of one night that can never be fully replicated. —Madison Bloom
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Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air
On her first release for eclectic indie mainstay ANTI-, experimental noise poet Moor Mother transmits radical messages softly. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is far more hushed than her harsh dispatches of the past. The album nods to ’90s R&B, ambient, and cosmic jazz, and is packed with features from her expanding artistic community including Alabama’s Pink Siifu, and members of her own Philadelphia-based collective, Black Quantum Futurism. Moor Mother mines the same wreckage that she has always confronted—particularly the prolonged effects of intergenerational trauma—but here, she conquers it in a state of relative tranquility. –Madison Bloom
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Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8
Space 1.8 earns its astronomical title through frontier-breaking ambition. Its influences are distinctly throwback—Eric Dolphy’s investigations of the clarinet, both Coltranes’ search for an infinite cry—but the album isn’t content to replicate what worked in the past. London’s Nala Sinephro, utilizing both the harp and synthesizer, guides her band through a muted rumble that pricks the ears with both small deviations and seismic overtures alike. It’s heavy music delivered with a light touch. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
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Rắn Cạp Đuôi: Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế
Rắn Cạp Đuôi, a trio based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, works largely via improvisation, a practice you can hear through the boundless, structureless recordings on their debut album, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế. The group then stitches together those pieces digitally, a process that becomes evident through the abrupt cuts and shifts that make the album feel like a glitching, psychedelic collage, inverting the atmosphere right when you think they’ve settled into a groove. Often, they highlight the ghostly, in-between states of their performances, as in the highlight “Aztec Glue,” which incorporates their closest thing to a conventional melody between a staticky procession of pulsing synths. By the time you think you’ve figured out what this sound is, they’ve already moved on to a new one. This volatility may be the point. —Sam Sodomsky
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Rosie Lowe / Duval Timothy: Son
The emotions that Duval Timothy can unleash with a simple series of chords is unparalleled, and on this collaborative album with the English singer Rosie Lowe, he manages to make 20 minutes feel like an eternity. On the titular track, Lowe’s vocals are transformed from a whispered lullaby to a firmament-shaking choir. With minimal instrumentation, the two create a towering hymn that yawns into the distance. It’s the type of album where each track has enough gravitas to be an album closer, yet the actual conclusion “Gonna Be” manages to reach a level of intensity that catches you in your throat. High pitched voices sing “gonna be,” and they are paired with piano and double bass (played by Tom Herbert). As the song ends, only the double bass is left playing, delivering you into its mighty resonance. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
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Shubh Saran: Inglish
Inglish—the second full-length from guitarist, composer, and producer Shubh Saran—sprouted from several entwined roots. The Bangladesh-born son of Indian diplomats, Saran lived in Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, and Boston before planting himself in New York City around 2014. Saran’s new album is a product of his multinational upbringing, incorporating Middle Eastern folk, progressive rock, Indian classical, and more in its unique jazz fusion. Inglish places bright electric guitar and modular synthesizers alongside instruments from India and the Middle East, often within the same song. Sprawling opener “Enculture” begins as a high-speed race through the desert, before careening into stretches of free jazz piano and skronking synth riffs that nod to Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” With these discrete elements, Saran forms a language all his own. —Madison Bloom
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SPELLLING: “Little Deer”
Bay Area art-pop sorcerer Tia Cabral of SPELLLING reintroduced herself with “Little Deer,” the surging baroque opener of her fantastical third album The Turning Wheel. Evoking the audacious spirits of forebears like Minnie Riperton and Kate Bush, it is a fable-like tale of death and rebirth, of the never-quite-finished process of being a person. Joined by over a dozen musicians—brass, strings, woodwinds, conga, a choir—Cabral brings pop formalism and the questing spirit of ’70s soul orchestration into SPELLLING’s world, making a majestic entry into her sharpest album yet. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: SPELLLING, “Little Deer”
Tirzah: Colourgrade
The voltaic second album from London electronic artist Tirzah revolves around a close-knit, labyrinthine, and slightly crooked emotionality. Working alongside collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, she reduces her formula to elemental parts in order to bring out a more tactile intimacy guided by improvisatory songwriting, looped samples, and ad-libbed vocals. The sparse impressions on tracks like the out-of-step “Beating” and the unsettled “Crepuscular Rays” are the result of years of friendship and community melted down into what sounds like a close, honest embrace. –Eric Torres
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Tomu DJ: FEMINISTA
Tomu DJ finds safety in warm, loosely familiar spaces on FEMINISTA, her first full-length record. The California producer turned to music as she recovered from a traumatic 2019 car accident, and FEMINISTA extends her reach for reassurance. Indebted to club music at its core, the record opens with gentle pop-leaning numbers before leaping into more frenetic, skittering textures, each one stretching out into a self-contained universe. In addition to drawing on reggaetón, Top 40 Pop, and footwork, Tomu DJ has cited Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope as a heavy influence for her work. While FEMINISTA never quite makes a direct nod at its foremother, a kindred hazy sensuality shines through. –Allison Hussey
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Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt: “Untitled One”
“Untitled One,” the opening entry on drummer Tyshawn Sorey and producer King Britt’s self-titled album, is a hypnotic highwire act that careens towards improvisatory chaos yet ultimately keeps its balance. Britt grounds the track with calm synthetic notes before Sorey ventures toward the unknown, playing his drums rapidly and inviting Britt to experiment more, too. Britt responds in turn by playing his synthesizers more freely, and they grow louder and wilder before finally settling back into a metronomic groove. Britt and Sorey know just how much to give and how much to hold back on “Untitled One,” lest they lose their footing. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt, “Untitled One”
Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy
Jazz maestro Vijay Iyer articulates the urgency of protest without shirking the sentimental on this album recorded with longtime collaborators Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey. Iyer’s pin-heeled piano work hot-steps around in search of a sacred chord to alight upon, leaving shallow punctures across your heart as Oh and Sorey’s storm-flung rhythm section executes stomach-lurching shifts. Volatility abounds: The raucous paean “Combat Breathing” honors Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter with music that’s by turns fluid and transfixed, the sound of righteous fury opening channels for electricity to course between the many. –Jazz Monroe
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