As always, my number one music recommendation is to get off streaming sites and enjoy owning music again! However I will also list here some actual recommendations. I absolutely love music and I can't tell you how much it would make my day to hear from you if you check out anything here and enjoy it. Two fingers to the algos always.
This is not really in any order, which I don't think would ever be permanent anyway. It's more of a desert island kinda top 10 of albums I dearly love. I'm sure there are a ton of albums technically better than anything here, but I don't love them!
This album is a time machine that picks me up and plants me firmly back into 2008. I'm 19 years old, at university, and really living for the first time. Highs, lows, firsts, lasts, good, bad, ugly, everything is happening to me. I am being squeezed and squashed into a person like one of those penny souvenir machines, and this is the soundtrack that's playing through all of it. Absolute Balance is my favourite song but it's all great and I will simply never tire of it. It ticks a lot of the boxes of things I like - there are noisy guitars but its not heavy heavy, boy/girl vocals, clever lyrics, yearning - but it's also more than the sum of its parts for me, probably because of the context I just mentioned. I love all their albums and I've seen them live tons of times and know all the side projects etc but this is the one for me.
This album is such a state changer for me. Like if I'm stressed or worried or just feeling bad, I put this on and from the opening chords everything just starts to relent a little. By the time I'm singing along the weight comes off me and 33 minutes and 51 seconds later I am guaranteed to feel better. It's such a cohesive album, in its sound but also the wordplay and repetition. Nothing outstays its welcome. A perennial fave.
This album has been so special to me since it came out. I wasn't so in touch with music at the time it came out but I'd been following Frank since Nostalgia, Ultra and I liked Channel Orange (although I still think it could do with an edit), but Blonde was an instant connect for me and its been a regular in the rotation ever since. Godspeed and Self Control are two of my favourite songs ever. The fact he's never (yet!) followed it up has only added to its legendary status. There are so many influences here and its intimate and emotive and sad and beautiful and sexy and it'll always be one of my faves.
Two awards for this one - the most recently released album on the list, and also by far the worst cover imo, I hate it! But the music is so good! I actually found it quite randomly - when the most recent Geese record came out I was listening to it for the first time and reading some reactions to it on fantano's subreddit (no judgement pls) and someone referenced the Wednesday record that had come out the previous week in a way that intrigued me, so I put that on and basically listened to it non stop for months, to such an extent that I still have only listened to that Geese record all the way through once or twice. I went deep down the Wednesday and MJ Lenderman rabbit hole and I am still listening to at least some of this record every week. I've gone back to the other stuff and there's so much to love and enjoy but something about this album just feels so correct to me. I love the flow of it, I love Karly's voice, I love the balance of it. They were also phenomenal live, Karly is truly an incredible front person with an unbelievable amount of charisma. My favourite is probably Bitter Everyday but The Way That Love Goes has been known to make me tear up (beautifully written context from Karly here ) And Townies! and Wasp! And okay just all of it tbh. All the flowers for Wednesday. Also Karly has a personal website and a Jellystar phone which makes me feel even more like we are kindred spirits.
This is an exceptional album and if all you know of Jimmy Eat World is The Middle and Sweetness (both bangers but very, very different) then I implore you to listen to this all the way through. This is a classic so there's been plenty written about it by people more knowledgeable and eloquent than me, but there are just so many great songs here. I always really love Jim Adkin's voice and lyrics but it's the instrumentation here that really blows me away. there are so many great sounds on the album, amazing details, beautiful arrangements. It's so layered and rich without being too much, everything sounds just right. It flopped commercially at the time and they were dropped from their label which is bananas because this is simply a perfect album. I also really love Chase This Light and Bleed American / self titled, but Clarity is the really special one.
You know what, take that "most recent" award from Wednesday and hand it over to the Prince of Cats, the Lord of the Bins himself, because this album definitely needs to be here. Its a bonkers album, full of amazing story telling. Its theatrical, its cool, its beautiful, and something weird happens to my heart in the too-few verses he raps in French. Its a masterpiece honestly and I wish more people could hear it and buy it so he never has to get a job and can make more music forever and ever. Its so complete as an album in the way it flows and I love that, it's so antithetical to the playlist model of releasing music nowadays - but if for some reason you had to pick one track out its probably I.D.W.G.A.J.
I could sway between this and Circles to be honest but I think this has to pip it for me for two reasons. 1) Mac never heard Circles and I know his family have managed his work and his estate respectfully, and the finished Circles is amazing, but I can't help but wonder if he'd have been happy with it in the end or what he would have changed. He was so creative and brilliant, who's to say? and 2) The dissect podcast that goes deep on this album which I just found so enjoyable and really enhanced my appreciation of it and all the layers and hidden details and symbolism etc etc. It's a great album with so many bangers and its so crafted. I love a lot of his stuff, Circles was a massive lockdown album for me, Good:AM is great, Faces, even the cheesy college rap I find fun, but Swimming is really his most complete and realised work in my opinion. And shout out to the bassline on Whats The Use?, I could never get tired of that. RIP Mac '92 til infinity.
There simply has to be some Los Camp! on this list. A band with such an incredible discography at this point, I could've picked almost anything. I also absolutely love what they're doing now, making and releasing their stuff completely independently through their own label and lifting the lid on the mechanics of that, what they make from streaming and touring etc. They have so much integrity, I'm really proud to have been a fan of theirs for so bloody long. Good people who make great music. This is probably my favourite album of theirs and contains some of my favourite songs, but I could also have gone with All Hell or Hello Sadness on a different day. This album reminds me of quite a tough time in my life in between the two main COVID lockdowns where I played it a lot and kinda wallowed about, feeling sad and also playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto. I also had a wisdom tooth removed to I Broke Up in Amarante
Another sentimental pick but I still think this holds up great. January 31st 2003 - my 14th birthday. Snow day got me out of school and my mum took me to the HMV in Ealing Broadway and bought me this album on CD. I don't know how I knew about it but I was pretty music obsessed at that point and I think I was reading NME and that kinda thing. It definitely wasn't the typical thing teenage girls were into at that point. But I loved his voice, his lyrics, the tunes, the references to a world I knew nothing about really. I have a massive soft spot for UK garage and the influences on this still sound great to me. I also have memorable story of buying the follow up A Grand Don't Come for Free on release day the following year. Woolworths in Greenford didn't open till 09:00 and I had to be in school for 08:50. So I deliberately forgot my tie so I would be sent home to get it, stopping at Woolworths on the way to cop the CD, which I spent the rest of the day listening to on my discman with a headphone snaked up through the arm of my blazer. A different time!
I've never heard a better album about a terminally ill person dying, featuring a song written from the POV of a cat. The lyrics make this album for me, its poetic but accessible, clever, emotive and catchy. Another under-appreciated gem! I also love their previous album, but this wins for A New Name For Everything, one of my favourite songs ever.
"When the bottle cap ashtrays and intimates' ears are all full
With results of your breath, and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull
One more time, try
Stand with your hands in your pockets and stare
At the smudge on a newspaper sky
And ask it to rain a new name for everything"