Le Poisson

Musical reckoning

[reckonslepoisson]

Living is Easy, Agriculture (2024)

How do you concoct the grandeur required of blackgaze within the brevity of an EP? Nigh-on impossible, as shown by Agriculture’s insubstantial and immemorable Living is Easy.

Pick: ‘Living Is Easy’

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The Boy Who Cried Terrified, Fakemink (2026)

Fakemink must move on from the sound he has pioneered, for some reason, or so he seems to think. If The Boy Who Cried Terrified is a teaser of a second album – perhaps titled Terrified – then that record will be one of the year’s great disappointments; the profound dilution of one of this decade’s most distinctive hip-hop talents.

Pick: ‘Blow the Speaker’

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Zoo, んoon (2026)

Genre-flitting is all well and good, but the real challenge is to do so while retaining a sense of identity. On Zoo んoon do not just dabble but, in each track, they wholly commit to a new genre; drum ‘n’ bass and bossa, jazzy piano pop, fizzling trap and spacey psych. A consistent identity isn’t particularly clear.

Pick: ‘Hitsuji’

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Take Offs and Landings (2001), The Execution of All Things (2002), More Adventurous (2004), Rilo Kiley

Rilo Kiley made ever-so-slightly-better-than-most indie rock, momentous and pretty and with quirky details, but it has enjoyed greater longevity than most due to one thing: Jenny Lewis. She has hooks with yell-along-ability and not just range but an ability to flick through said range constantly and with ease. Most importantly she has a really excellent pine, the kind of which can add tints of hope or doubt to anything. 

Pick: ‘Pictures of Success’, ‘The Good That Won’t Come Out’, ‘Does He Love You?’

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Daisy, Rusowsky (2025)

I, also, liked Tyler’s Igor. Not enough to make a full-album ode, though.

Pick: ‘MalibU’

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Silent Way, Shinichi Atobe (2026)

Shinichi Atobe is a master of patient, detail-oriented techno. His previous releases have set an extraordinarily high bar; it is a marvel that Silent Way manages to keep pace with expectations, a work with so much evident and meticulous craft, microtonal details and alternative sound tangents, never losing sight of the fact that you’re supposed to dance. 

Pick: ‘Phase 2’

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Heart Ego, Sassy 009 (2021)

Atmo-pop done particularly well, hooks and melodies and the club emerging from richly moody and engulfing washes of gloop. 

Pick: ‘Blue Racecar’

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A Tear in the Fabric of Life, Knocked Loose (2021)

I am so fascinated by the fidelity of Knocked Loose’s sound, how this band has ramped up intensity through production and, as a result, become one of this era’s great rock acts. Many heavy music bands reach a point where innovating the quality of sound results in sanitisation – not Knocked Loose. A Tear in the Fabric of Life notched up the fidelity even further than A Different Shade of Blue, a release of beguiling girth.

Pick: ‘Where Light Divides the Holler’

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Pompeii / Utility, Earl Sweatshirt / MIKE / Surf Gang (2026)

Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE haven’t just spearheaded one of the defining rap movements of the 2020s, now they’re platforming some of the genre’s biggest current talents. On split mixtape Pompeii / Utility MIKE and Earl do their thing, leaving producer collective Surf Gang to fill out the rest. The production intrigues most when it has a liminality that vividly resembles the tangents and distractions followed by the human mind; but it isn’t always so engaging, and at its worst is too sparse and immobile. 

Pick(s): ‘NOT 4TW’, ‘:(again:)’

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My New Band Believe, My New Band Believe (2026)

The luxury of a record to really wrap your ears around. Cameron Picton is most clearly inspired by the billowing, loping, tumbling folk prog of the Canterbury Scene – My New Band Believe is the most pastoral record I’ve heard this decade (and maybe the one before, too) – to which he applies his compositional meticulousness and taste for the momentous.  

Pick: ‘Target Practice’

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Sumday, Grandaddy (2003)

True indie bands save their sophomore slump for the third record. Sumday was a seemingly deliberate attempt to shake off all the grand indie experimentalism of Grandaddy’s first two; twelve versions of the same plodding indie rock song. Well, let’s say nine – there are a few goodies. 

Pick: ‘Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake’

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Music for Nitrous Oxide, Stars of the Lid (1995)

Music for Nitrous Oxide is far darker and far less blissful than Stars of the Lid’s classics (and much less intense, less overwhelming), yet it is still of deliberate craft and distinctly evocative. Each Stars of the Lid album evokes a different thing to different listeners; I hear cavernous religious grandeur at the heart of Music for Nitrous Oxide. Great hunks of cold stone. Distant and reverberant domed ceilings. Lumbering groans of behemothic worshipful instruments. The persistent presence of sin and death. 

Pick: ‘Adamord’

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An Anatomy of the Beast, Intestine Baalism (1997)

Babby’s first melodic death band, and indeed on this occasion I am babby. I can understand Intestine Baalism’s accessibility: all death’s growls and arghs and chugs, the galloping, hammering drums, plus guitar solos with the slow, grandiose drama of classic rock.

Pick: ‘A Place Their Gods Left Behind’

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Rave ’Till You Cry, Bogdan Raczynski (2019)

In 2019 Bogdan Raczynski returned after more than a decade away but not with new music. Rave ‘Till You Cry was a collection of previously unreleased tunes, all entirely within the drill-bass-lullaby-pop boundaries he’d established previously (some tracks were even versions of those released before). The main difference was small but mighty: sound quality. So crisp is the hi-fi here that it has the substantial pleasure of an entirely new work. 

Pick: ‘329 15H’

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I Am Not There Anymore, The Clientele (2023)

What has age – actually, let’s call it greater maturity – done to the Clientele? This was already a mature-beyond-its-years sort of band, wistfully nostalgic for the 1960s and sensibly untempted by contemporary trends. Audially I Am Not There Anymore sounds both more wisened and not. It is youthful in its experiments: perhaps the Clientele have never sounded as diverse as they do here, swoons of orientalism and throbs of downtempo. And yet the band is undeniably aged by one thing: an increased fondness for classical music. Clearly they have gotten into Classic FM, as I’m sure we all do eventually. 

Pick: ‘Fables of the Silverlink’

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Last Exit, Last Exit (1986)

Often supergroups are a bunch of names on paper that one expects earth-shifting greatness from but the results of which are haphazard, inexpressive, impotent. Not Last Exit. One gets a real sense of presence on this record, of the medium itself struggling to contain the might of its inhabitants. Brötzmann, Laswell, Sharrock and Jackson crackle, twinkle, wobble, chug, squeak, spit, tinker, blast – but impressively remain within the blues form, this is certainly rock – not just unrestrained by their peers but enabled by them.

Pick: ‘Red Light’

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Alhambra Love Songs, John Zorn (2009)

In which John Zorn pays tribute to his favourite Bay Area artists – and not just any artists, some of the hardest-to-adequately-pay-tribute-to musicians and filmmakers ever (Lynch, Patton, Eastwood, Guaraldi etc). He tackles them remarkably well. Alhambra Love Songs is a striding, energetic delight that has all the joy of one talent celebrating another’s art. It is among my favourite post-millennium Zorn works.

Pick: ‘Benicia’