No Frills Reviews

2024 saw the release of False Comforts, a lo-fi alt-pop beauty from Amsterdam-via-Oxford singer-songwriter, Max Blansjaar. It made no.42 in our top albums of the year. Here he recommends three of his favourites from 2024.

If I’m going to risk my down-to-earth credentials praising an album so hipsterish it makes Vampire Weekend look (even more) like The Wombles then it has to be really excellent. Diamond Jubilee was initially released on Geocities before expanding by popular demand to the normiesphere of Bandcamp in October. Totally magical guitar-playing with some of the screeching fury of the Velvets (nostalgia for aliens), but there’s futurism in its disjointedness too; stuttering and slowing of tape machines and a voice that never quite seems fully present. R.I.P. Mark Fisher, etc., is what I would say if I were a hipster.

• Bandcamp

The fourth full-length from Nate Mendelsohn, A.K.A. Market, reaffirms why I feel so honoured that he co-produced my most recent record. Symphonic and crazy imaginative, with a palette incorporating everyone from The Beatles to Frank Ocean and (at least once) J.S. Bach; the composition is immaculately precise, rhythms and harmonies as complex and angular as the winding, almost neurotic trains of thought they carry – sprawling arrangements push on all the right points and heighten minutiae to cosmic proportions. When things occasionally pull back, the noise of a million thoughts distilled into a sudden, startling clarity; it’s just stunning.

• Bandcamp

I’ve known Julia-Sophie for a while, so I also know how long this album has been in the works (I’ve had ‘telephone’ stuck in my head for maybe five years). Just an epic record with an unmatched clarity of vision. Electronic timbres make a vessel for vividly expressive songwriting, Julia-Sophie’s voice (one of the best in the game, by the way) sounding hushed melodies while analogue synths and drum machines glitch and swirl around them, textures best captured really by biological metaphors: heartbeats, pulses, breaths…it all feels deeply personal, but at the same time it transcends itself—the best confessionals are the ones that explicate the actual process of feeling, that tap into some fundamental sense of what it means to be alive—me and her talk a lot about intent and about principles, and she’s possibly the most principled artist I know. It shows.

• Bandcamp