Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2018

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50.

October 5, 2018
Critic Score
68
8 reviews

48.

March 30, 2018
Critic Score
80
17 reviews

Freedom is not a “challenging” listen, but choruses or hummable melodies are few; rather, the album progresses at a loping, steady pace, as if somehow delivered by natural rhythm.

46.

May 18, 2018
Critic Score
79
12 reviews

This isn’t new; it sounds familiar, a deeper foray into Narkopop’s haunting rhythms. but Rausch removes itself further from the arboreal muses of Narkopop or, at least, subverts them.

45.

May 18, 2018
Critic Score
84
35 reviews

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

44.

Jeff Witscher - Approximately 1​,​000 Beers
June 30, 2018
Critic Score
90
1 review

43.

August 18, 2018
Critic Score
83
4 reviews

The self-mythologizing that Ka composes on Orpheus vs the Sirens constitutes a minoritarian epic that resounds with the properly poetic catharsis that might purge the constraints from a life’s definition.

42.

Matthew Revert / Vanessa Rossetto - Everyone Needs a Plan
August 20, 2018
Critic Score
90
1 review

41.

March 30, 2018
Critic Score
80
1 review

40.

Perfume - Future Pop
August 15, 2018
Critic Score
80
1 review

39.

February 16, 2018
Critic Score
85
27 reviews

On the nose with invisible fingers, In a Poem Unlimited is as lush, disgusted, and dour as the previous album, but with less obscuring vaporous swirl. The tone is more one of defiant, soaring majesty and poison-laced confection, underscored with lyrics of damnation and earnest imparting.

38.

September 17, 2018
Critic Score
83
3 reviews

Seasoned to perfection, the album documents Roc Marciano cementing his legacy as an MC, producer, and influence in control of his ends — that is, not only of his money, but of his destiny. Behold a Dark Horse.

37.

May 11, 2018
Critic Score
80
38 reviews

After Bloom’s widescreen production almost pushed them into stadium territory, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have continued to amp up the melodies while retaining the band’s ASMR qualities, arguably culminating with Depression Cherry. While the latter wasn’t completely adored at a critical level, to me, it felt like they’d at least hit on the blueprint for a masterpiece. On 7, the Baltimore duo presents us with the completed architecture.

35.

Seth Graham - Gasp
March 23, 2018
Critic Score
80
2 reviews

30.

Klein - cc
May 24, 2018
Critic Score
84
2 reviews

28.

August 24, 2018
Critic Score
76
2 reviews

27.

Simple Affections - Simple Affections
November 28, 2017
Critic Score
90
1 review

26.

April 5, 2018
Critic Score
76
3 reviews

In spite of its blurry visage, Stage 4 finds The Caretaker rejecting nothingness, collapsing the fear of death into an all-encompassing object of life hurtling through the chaotic unknown. Even in the face of obliterating dissolve, Leyland Kirby finds music.

24.

June 8, 2018
Critic Score
74
7 reviews

Musically, the album’s apparent incompleteness — the always dissolving lack of coherence, the mosaic of multiple voices, the chance and chaos by which the songs were arranged — abides by the peripheral pull of curiosity.

23.

June 1, 2018
Critic Score
64
37 reviews
Even at 23 minutes, it almost feels like two different albums: an aggressive, dissonant one, and an empathetic, soulful one.

22.

RP Boo - I'll Tell You What!
July 6, 2018
Critic Score
76
10 reviews

21.

September 28, 2018
Critic Score
78
21 reviews

20.

June 8, 2018
Critic Score
83
19 reviews

soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative.

19.

September 7, 2018
Critic Score
83
7 reviews

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

18.

August 17, 2018
Critic Score
85
40 reviews

Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer.

17.

Barrio Sur - बड़ा शोक (heart break)
January 15, 2018
Critic Score
80
1 review

16.

May 11, 2018
Critic Score
71
9 reviews
Like its predecessor, it’s an album of party records; these are songs that will be played ad infinitum at functions until the hooks, the breaks, and, of course, the bass are burned into the brain of every attendee.

15.

Bamba Pana - Poaa
August 24, 2018
Critic Score
76
2 reviews

14.

January 19, 2018
Critic Score
78
5 reviews

[meme review]

13.

March 16, 2018
Critic Score
83
20 reviews

The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter, and when I looked out of my window, into a black night, there were no crows or rainbows or signs, but inside of my room, inside of my body light gleamed.

12.

October 26, 2018
Critic Score
79
28 reviews
Together, its 15 tracks form an intimidating but coherent whole that serves as Holter’s most sophisticated and engaging release to date. For a composer of Holter’s rapidly increasing stature, that is high praise indeed.

11.

October 12, 2018
Critic Score
78
5 reviews

9.

April 27, 2018
Critic Score
78
21 reviews
Like its predecessor, the album is musically stripped to its most utilitarian elements, focusing on Harris’s voice and piano, with almost nothing else permitted to enter the frame. If there is a notable difference in sound, it’s that the artist’s singing no longer marches in strict time and pitch with the piano’s melody, but ventures into the occasional portamento, gifting a few beautiful jazz notes to the piece.

7.

September 14, 2018
Critic Score
85
26 reviews
What Double Negative seems to be doing is provoking the listener to actually feel the songs, not by way of the old associative emotions — the you’s and I’s, the easy reactions — but through the deconstruction of what’s habitual, returning music to what it actually is: this other form of communication.

6.

April 27, 2018
Critic Score
81
6 reviews
Elysia Crampton’s new self-titled album, her fourth since dropping the E+E moniker, is a tightly-controlled, affectively capacious accumulation of sound that communicates beyond speech.

5.

August 10, 2018
Critic Score
79
17 reviews

Tirzah’s Devotion, these 14 numeral moments, sketch a way toward communicating loving better.

4.

Charli XCX - Pop 2
December 15, 2017
Critic Score
81
12 reviews

For better or for worse, Charli XCX is embracing maturity on her fourth mixtape ... And though she may not find what she’s looking for anytime soon, Charli XCX, on Pop 2, is at least looking down a new path.

3.

Lolina - The Smoke
March 14, 2018
Critic Score
90
2 reviews
In spite of this unavailability, upon which she has built her public image, Lolina has steered clear of the forgettable. As if taking a bus and a train and then throwing her Oyster into the Thames before running off on foot, she escapes into circulation, and across dimensions of it. Her perfect crime consists in continuing to plant the evidence, prolonging the search.

2.

September 5, 2018
Critic Score
83
13 reviews

For an artist who’s demonstrated a remarkable ability to evoke moods of melancholy and fear in his music, Safe in the Hands of Love thrives on its intensity and excitement, revealing a side of Yves Tumor that we’ve never seen blossom so fully like this before.

1.

June 15, 2018
Critic Score
82
23 reviews
In its flows and breakings, it echoes and repeats a fractured self, locating this fracture as something aimed toward futurity, toward a new image of pop music, toward a new mode of being and becoming, toward a new way of moving limbs on a dancefloor with others. It’s incredible.
Original Source: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2018-favorite-50-music-releases
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