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An annual Top 31 countdown of the best albums of the year

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#20 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Juana Molina

January 12, 2026 by Royal Stuart in 2025, Top 31

DOGA by Juana Molina

I’m gonna fuck this up. I don’t know how to write about this wonderful musician. I don’t have the depth of knowledge necessary to wax on about a Spanish-singing Argentinian auteur. Or maybe I just don’t have the usual tropes I fall back on? Maybe this is more of a challenge than I’m used to, and that voice in the back of my head is balking at needing to go outside of my comfort zone? Growth at age almost-52 is harder than you might think. Here goes nothing.

Juana Molina is not the kind of artist you’d typically find in the Top 31. Living in Buenos Aires, 64 years old, creating dreamy “folktronica” that she typically sings in her native Spanish – she’s not the typical indie musician I am drawn to by any measure. And yet, with her eighth album DOGA, she’s made what I feel is the 20th best album of 2025.

Molina’s path to college radio play across the world started in 1961, when she was born to a tango-singing father and an actress mother. Unable to make money in a career in music, she focused on the stage, quickly reaching some fame in Argentina as a sketch comedy actress. Apparently in the early 90s she was quite popular across the country, and at the height of her acting career she quit, finally able to turn her focus back to the music that was overwhelming her psyche.

Since releasing her debut album, Rara, in 1996, her climb to recognition outside of Argentina grew slowly. That album did not find an audience in her home country, but she was undeterred. A quick jaunt to Los Angeles allowed her the space to put together her second album, 2000’s Segundo, which caught the attention of David Byrne (see #27, who as you remember founded world-music focused record label Luaka Bop). He asked Molina to open for him on his tour that year. Her audience grew slowly over her next three albums, expanding her global presence into Europe and Japan. Her fifth album, 2008’s Un dia, got an unexpected boost when her music was featured in the background of a Radiolab episode in 2008 titled “Sperm.” Due to an outpouring of inquiries about that music, the popular podcast ran a whole segment featuring Molina in 2009, adding an even greater amount of US-based attention to the singer / songwriter.

Her sixth and seventh albums, 2013’s Wed 21 and 2017’s Halo were well-received, and while I know I had heard of the artist by this time, I still hadn’t given her or her music any attention. Then DOGA came out in November. And this time, thanks to a friend who earlier in the year had forced me to listen to a Juana Molina song1, I paid closer attention. It may have taken me nearly 30 years to come around, but I’m so glad I finally did.

DOGA is one hell of an album. Molina’s soft-spoken voice sounds to my non-Spanish speaking ears like an additional instrument, delicately laced across the top of intricate, off-kilter, mostly-electronic beats. Hit play on the video for “Desinhumano,” above. I hear what sound like influences of Björk (Icelandic, 60) and The Knife / Fever Ray (Karen Dreijer, Swedish, 50), but as Molina is older than both of those huge, international female artists, I wonder if I should actually be saying they’re influenced by her. I can confidently say if you’ve been a fan of either of those artists in the past, then Juana Molina is right up your alley.

It’s a rare thing to come to an artist for the first time on their 8th album and 30 years into their musical career. Normally at this point, if an artist makes it to their eighth album, they’ve settled into their “only the super fans will dig this” era of their career, no longer able to bring in new fans the way their earlier albums may have. Molina and her album DOGA is clearly different. Hopefully you hear it, too. And I hope this review did justice to her and this fantastic album.

1. In January 2025, I created a new way for new music to enter my life. I gathered a small group of friends for the purposes of sharing music between us. We dubbed it “Record Cabinet,” and decided to gather every ~6 weeks or so and bring two songs to share based on a theme as established by that session’s host. For the October “Foreign Exchange” theme, a friend (hi Brent!) brought the Juana Molina song “El Perro” from Segundo as his song representative of “a song from the Southern Hemisphere. I love all the different ways new music can make it to my ears.↩

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  1. The Rubber Teeth Talk by Daisy the Great
  2. Billboard Heart by Deep Sea Diver
  3. Thee Black Boltz by Tunde Adebimpe
  4. Sinister Grift by Panda Bear
  5. DON'T TAP THE GLASS by Tyler, The Creator
  6. I’m Only F**king Myself by Lola Young
  7. Who Is The Sky? by David Byrne
  8. THE BPM by Sudan Archives
  9. The Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift
  10. moisturizer by Wet Leg
  11. TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Nine Inch Nails

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January 12, 2026 /Royal Stuart
juana molina, bjork, fever ray, the knife, radiolab, david byrne
2025, Top 31
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#31 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Nine Inch Nails

January 01, 2026 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2025

Welcome to the 17th annual Bacon Top 31. A quick primer to anyone new here: the Top 31 is my personal blogging platform. I post primarily in January. Every day throughout the month, I’ll count down my favorite albums of the previous year, starting at #31 and ending in my favorite album of that year. There is no committee, no group consensus — this is the culmination of a year’s worth of listening by one aging caucasian Gen-X man.

When I started the Top 31 in 2009, my first child had been born the year before. The expansion of my family didn’t affect my love of music, but the additional mouth to feed hit my family’s bank account in a way that forced me to be more innovative in how I consumed music. I began acquiring most of my music for free (via mp3s) and maintained my live-show diet by getting in for free thanks to my local music blogging credentials. Along with all the free music, a sense of guilt began to fester inside me – I was enjoying all this great artistry but giving basically nothing back to the artists.

Fate intervened, and presented an opportunity for me to alleviate a lot of that guilt: a close friend of mine (hi Ryan!) had been running his own version of a Musical Advent Calendar in the 00’s, and when the effort exceeded his available time, he decided to call it quits with his 2008 list. There was nobody in my circle picking up the slack, so after clearing it with him first, I started up where he left off. I put my own spin on the idea (for one, I expanded from his more traditional 24 advent days to a larger 31 days of the month), bought the URL baconreview.com, and in December of 2009 the Bacon Top 31 was born.1

17 years later, I’m still here, avidly collecting new music throughout the year, taking in everything I can like a sponge with ears, and then ranking and writing about the artists and albums I’ve loved. The guilt that drove my output in 2009 is no longer there – I spend plenty in support of the artists I listen to, through streaming and vinyl and concerts (just ask my lovely, supportive wife). Today, I share the Top 31 purely out of love — I want you to read, listen to and ultimately fall in love with the albums and artists like I have. And if the artists get some form of additional kickback, all the better. Music sustains us, we sustain music.

Let this year’s spreading of the love of music begin…

TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Nine Inch Nails

We start the 2025 Bacon Top 31 with an artist whose debut album came out 36 years ago. I’m fairly certain Nine Inch Nails need no formal introduction. But if you’ve not really paid much attention (like me) to Trent Reznor’s movements over the last 20-30 years, let me give you a quick refresher.

Since releasing Pretty Hate Machine in 1989 (!), Reznor has become quite the auteur. He’s released 14 Nine Inch Nails albums and, together with his writing partner Atticus Ross, he’s created the soundtracks for 21 films. The latest Reznor / Ross soundtrack, for 2025’s TRON: Ares, marks the first time they’ve applied the band name Nine Inch Nails to a soundtrack, implying that until now, all previous soundtracks were not worthy of the NIN name.

I concur: their soundtrack to TRON: Ares feels very much like a Nine Inch Nails from my youth. Prior to this album, I think the last NIN album I listened to and actually enjoyed was 1999’s Fragile. Consequently, despite having released multiple NIN albums since 2009, none of those were worthy of the Top 31. In fact, the only time Reznor has appeared on the Top 31 at all was as a collaborator on a couple songs on Fever Ray’s last album, Radical Romantics (#10 back in 2023). I even saw Nine Ince Nails perform on stage in 2014 (with Soundgarden opening!), and yet nothing recorded was hitting me quite like PHM or The Downward Spiral.

Ares is a return to form for Reznor and Ross. This feels like the Nine Inch Nails I loved in the 90’s. Click play on the video above, for the song “As Alive As You Need Me To Be.” So good! I can’t say if the movie is any good, but I am glad to know that should I see it, I’ll at least be entertained by the soundtrack.

1. I’m stretching the truth slightly. The url I bought in 2009 was for royalbacon.com, which I’ve not done anything with. I didn’t buy baconreview.com until January 2011, after two years of hosting my blog on tumblr. This is why the earliest posts on baconreview.com (that I migrated over from blogspot) have different formatting and poorly-managed cross-posting links.↩

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January 01, 2026 /Royal Stuart
nine inch nails, trent reznor, fever ray, atticus ross
Top 31, 2025
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#10 on the 2023 Bacon Top 31 — Fever Ray

January 22, 2024 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Radical Romantics by Fever Ray

Welcome to the Top 10 albums of 2023. This is where things really get fun for me, thinking about the albums from the year that I had the most trouble putting down, and what they mean to me and place they occupy in my life.

Fever Ray is the moniker under which Karin Dreijer – half of the groundbreaking electronic duo The Knife – performs, and seeing them appear here in 2023 should not be any surprise. The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual was #29 back in 2013, and both of Dreijer’s earlier Fever Ray releases have appeared on the Top 31 (#18 in 2009 and #21 in 2017). I am always picking up what they’re laying down.

Dreijer, and their nom de plume, Fever Ray, are unlike anything else I currently listen to. In my younger, gothier days I’d cycle through The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie, and the like, and while all of those bands had a particular look to them – liked to wear dark makeup and do funny things with their hair – I would never have said any of them were “in costume.” My days-away from 50-year-old wants to call Fever Ray “goth,” but there’s something more to it. Dreijer and their Fever Ray bandmates are 100% “in costume,” all the time. On the cover to their phenomenal third album, Radical Romantics, Dreijer has a bald cap on, a ringed mane of long thin white hair, and elaborate makeup that would make them a shoe-in for the Ghost of Christmas Past in a revival of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Radical Romantics is Dreijer’s best album since The Knife’s Silent Shout, which came out back in 2006 (better than the two previous Fever Ray albums, and way better than The Knife’s final album, Shaking the Habitual, from 2013). The additional help Dreijer brought onto Romantics likely has something to do with it. In addition to roping in their brother Olof (aka the other half of The Knife) for four songs, Fever Ray also collaborated with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Oscar-winning and Grammy-winning duo behind the soundtracks to 2010’s The Social Network and 2013’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (that’s not to mention Reznor’s other gig) on two songs. You can watch videos for both of those Reznor / Ross songs. The first is featured above, called “Even it Out,” and even shows Reznor and Ross performing within. There are some definite Reznor-like sounds flowing through the song. The other is “North,” a more subdued affair, with similar production to the duo’s soundtrack work. Obviously, Dreijer’s work without the help is great, too (the albums wouldn’t appear here on the Top 31 if I didn’t think so). But when 60% of the songs on the album are essentially The Knife songs or tangential Nine Inch Nails songs, there really is no comparison.

You can watch a couple other videos the band has released from the album: “Kandy” and my favorite track from the album, the opener, “What They Call Us.”

I had the immense pleasure of seeing Fever Ray perform live in November, and it was everything I want out of a live show. Theatrics, costumes, dance routines and throbbing bass make for one hell of an experience. Just last week Fever Ray released a live performance video created for ARTE.tv (“the European Culture Channel”) concert series “Passengers,” called Les Hauts Fourneaux d'Uckange (in English, The Blast Furnaces of Uckange) — an hour-long, extremely well-produced film showing the band perform in an abandoned factory in northern France. I encourage you to watch the performance, as it is nearly 1:1 of what I saw back in November, right down to Dreijer’s deathly makeup, their David-Byrne inspired big suit, and the light-up cloud headpiece worn by the keyboardist. Watching them perform, you’ll start to understand what is so magical about Dreijer and the band.

Radical Romantics is eerie, intense, brooding, and it seeps into every one of your orifices like a thick fog. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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  1. Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers
  2. Blondshell by Blondshell
  3. All of This Will End by Indigo De Souza
  4. My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross by Anohni and the Johnsons
  5. Sundial by Noname
  6. 10,000 gecs by 100 gecs
  7. For That Beautiful Feeling by The Chemical Brothers
  8. ÁTTA by Sigur Rós
  9. Chronicles of a Diamond by Black Pumas
  10. The Art of Forgetting by Caroline Rose
  11. Bewilderment by Pale Jay
  12. The Window by Ratboys
  13. Action Adventure by DJ Shadow
  14. Let’s Start Here. by Lil Yachty
  15. Pollen by Tennis
  16. Greg Mendez by Greg Mendez
  17. Teenage Sequence by Teenage Sequence
  18. everything is alive by Slowdive
  19. My Soft Machine by Arlo Parks
  20. I/O by Peter Gabriel
  21. Los Angeles by Jacknife Lee, Budgie & Lol Tolhurst

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Full Albums
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Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

  • Apple Music Radio Playlist
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View all previous years’ Top 31s

January 22, 2024 /Royal Stuart
2023, advented, fever ray, the knife, the cure, siouxsie and the banshees, bauhaus, trent reznor, atticus ross, nine inch nails
Top 31
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#21 on the 2023 Bacon Top 31 — Pale Jay

January 11, 2024 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Bewilderment by Pale Jay

Soul music has had its ups and downs here on the Top 31. From Seattle’s own Pickwick hitting #1 back in 2011, to Leon Bridges and St. Paul & the Broken Bones, to the goddess herself, Sharon Jones in 2017 (RIP), the genre remains alive and well. Enter Pale Jay, a newcomer to the field, with his debut album, Bewilderment. With a voice like Lee Fields or Curtis Mayfield, and easy-living music evocative of Khruangbin, Pale Jay will have you leaning back in your chair and blissfully dreaming about easy breezy summer days.

There’s not much information out there about Pale Jay. He has no wikipedia page, he plays anonymously, and his web presence is boiled down to a single Bandcamp page. He does maintain an active Instagram account, a la SAULT or Banksy. The music on his page only goes back to his first EP, back in October 2021. And aside from a couple singles, this short-but-sweet debut album (with eight songs and coming in at just 24 minutes) is all we get of him. I did find a site reviewing this album who claims Pale Jay was trained as a jazz vocalist and pianist and calls southern California home.

There have been a few artists over the years here on the Top 31 who have chosen to keep their identity a mystery. Some choose to wear obfuscating makeup, such as The Knife or Fever Ray (2009 and 2017). Others choose to stay out of videos and remain unnamed, like Sault (2019, 2020, 2021, and who could forget their SEVEN albums that were #1 collectively just last year). Or there’s artists like Orville Peck, who have worn a mask in public for their entire musical career, and have never dropped character when the public is watching or listening.

Pale Jay fits into the Peck line of anonymity. But whereas Orville Peck has been around long enough that people have been able to put together who his true identity is (thanks to matching up the tattoos he wears all over his body), Pale Jay remains entirely anonymous for the time being. He wears a red balaclava in public (reminiscent of Pussy Riot, who choose to remain relatively anonymous for fear of retribution from the Russian Government), along with a white bucket hat with a red plastic brim. Those combined generally with an all-white turtleneck and white pants, he is effectively covered from head to toe aside from his (yes, pale-skinned) hands, ankles, lips, eyes, and sometimes forearms. (It’s only a matter of time before someone identifies him by the bird tattoo on his left inner elbow.)

You can watch videos Pale Jay has created for each song on the album, each featuring the artist in his signature costume, mostly walking / biking / boating in one long take to each of these songs.

  • “Preface”
  • “In Your Corner”
  • “Dreaming in Slow Motion”
  • “Bewilderment”
  • “Vladimir”
  • “Don't Forget That I Love You”

There’s also this video for a beautiful acoustic rendition of “By The Lake” that will set aside any worries that Pale Jay is unable to master that gorgeous falsetto in a live setting. I chose the featured video above only because it has him driving while lip syncing, with others blissfully trusting their lives to the masked man behind the wheel.

Put Bewilderment on, right now. It’s a short, 24 minute commitment, and you won’t be disappointed. I guarantee it.

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  1. The Window by Ratboys
  2. Action Adventure by DJ Shadow
  3. Let’s Start Here. by Lil Yachty
  4. Pollen by Tennis
  5. Greg Mendez by Greg Mendez
  6. Teenage Sequence by Teenage Sequence
  7. everything is alive by Slowdive
  8. My Soft Machine by Arlo Parks
  9. I/O by Peter Gabriel
  10. Los Angeles by Jacknife Lee, Budgie & Lol Tolhurst

Subscribe to the Top 31 playlists!

Full Albums
All albums in their entirety

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Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

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View all previous years’ Top 31s

January 11, 2024 /Royal Stuart
2023, advented, pale jay, curtis mayfield, khruangbin, leon bridges, pickwick, st. paul and the broken bones, sharon jones, lee fields, the knife, fever ray, sault, orville peck, pussy riot
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#31 on the 2022 Bacon Top 31 — FKA twigs

January 01, 2023 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Welcome to the fourteenth annual Bacon Top 31. 14! At the completion of this list, I’ll have written a blog post for 436 albums since I began back in 2009. And I still look forward to writing and sharing my top albums, every year. It’s likely because I don’t write throughout the rest of the year. Rather, I listen. My music consumption remains as active as ever: I constantly seek out new albums, and I’m almost always listening to the album I most recently found. The act of collating, ordering, writing about and weighing each against the others as well as the events of the year that led them to be loved by me hits many different pleasure points in my brain.

14 years as an amount of time feels relatively short, until you really start to examine what has transpired in the interim. In 2009, for instance, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th US president and Michael Jackson died; Captain Philips’ cargo ship was boarded by pirates and Captain Sully Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson River (both stories were recreated as movies with Tom Hanks in the lead, in 2013 and 2016, respectively). In 2009, the iPhone 3GS was released, Facebook had not quite reached 500 million users (they’re now at nearly 3 billion users monthly), and Instagram had not even been invented yet!

That’s enough about the past, let’s get back to the present. For the next 31 days I’ll be counting down my favorite albums from 2022. I hope you read and listen alongside me, confirm or deny your own preferences against mine, and find some new music you hadn’t yet heard. Let’s get to it.

CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs

By the time Tahliah Debrett Barnett, otherwise known as FKA twigs, released her first official recording, 2012’s EP1, at 24, she’d been making a name for herself as a backup dancer in music videos, for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jessie J, and Ed Sheeran. EP1 had four songs, and a year later, EP2 came out with an additional four songs. Twigs learned early on how to channel the raw energy that comes from dancing in sex-and-image-first videos into her own music: she produced a video for each of those eight songs on the first two EPs, understanding the influence those visuals could have on her listening world.

In 2014 she released her first full length, LP1, which was the #10 album that year. That album had twigs singing in her signature falsetto, softly and intimately as if she’s lying next to you on the same pillow, with her lips next to your ear. CAPRISONGS is much more forward, more bold.

The album is technically a mixtape, but don’t look to me to define the difference between that and an album — I tried to figure it out, but failed. Twigs brings the term to the fore by peppering the album with the sounds of a cassette tape being loaded and a tangible, tactile PLAY button being pushed. Perhaps calling this a mixtape rather than an album is the easiest way twigs could break her own mold. Her falsetto is still there, but so, too, is her naturally-unaffected voice, sometimes pushed through machine modification, sometimes angrily barked. Many guest singers and rappers appear alongside twigs throughout the record: Pa Salieu, Dystopia, Rema, Daniel Caesar, Jorja Smith, and Unknown T all make an appearance. The Shygirl fueled “papi bones” is a personal favorite, with its driving, dance-heavy beat that demands the listener move their body. The Weeknd makes the biggest splash on the album, with the duet “tears in the club” featured in the video above.

fka Twigs is an enigma, a blend of beat-heavy indie pop, avant garde artistry, and primal urge. She flourishes at the intersection of Björk (artistic musical expression), Grimes (indie dance yumminess), and The Knife/Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer (thrill and horror imagery), and if you like any one of those artists then you’ll feel right at home with CAPRISONGS. Seek it out at the links below, and then check back in tomorrow for something entirely different.

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There are many ways to listen to the 2022 Bacon Top 31. Subscribe now and enjoy the new albums / songs as they are revealed on the countdown!

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January 01, 2023 /Royal Stuart
2022, advented, fka twigs, the weeknd, bjork, grimes, the knife, fever ray, karin dreijer andersson
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#10 on the 2018 Bacon Top 31 — First Aid Kit

January 22, 2019 by Royal Stuart

Ruins by First Aid Kit

Breaking into the top 10 of 2018, here’s Swedish duo First Aid Kit appearing again with their fourth album, Ruins. (They first appeared on the Bacon Top 31 with their sophomore album Lion’s Roar at #4 in 2012 and then Stay Gold at #17 in 2014.) Sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg, like The Decemberists back at #14, have found a formula that works well for their unique talents. But the difference here is that their music is timeless. Rooted in country, theirs is not a new sound, but it’s not an old sound, either.

Voices like butter, harmonies like satin sheets, these two have been making hit after hit since they first started recording music back in 2007 when they were both still in their mid-teens. By sheer coincidence, the sisters’ younger brother was in kindergarten with the daughter of Fever Ray / The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson, and mother Söderberg encouraged Dreijer to listen to her daughter’s songs on Myspace. Achieving popularity in Sweden came shortly after they signed and recorded with Dreijer’s music label, Rabid Records. But it wasn’t until Robin Pecknold, lead singer of Fleet Foxes, came across the sisters’ cover of his song “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and subsequently discussed it on his own band’s webpage did the duo start to get international fame.

Listen to the song in the video above, for “It’s a Shame,” and you can see why these big name artists wanted to be attached to First Aid Kit. Put on the album and the difficulties of the day just slough off. There’s a couple more fun videos from this new album, for Rebel Heart and Fireworks. This band, and this record, will be one I listen to often probably for the rest of my life.

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11. Cocoa Sugar by Young Fathers
12. Loner by Caroline Rose
13. Big Red Machine by Big Red Machine
14. I’ll Be Your Girl by The Decemberists
15. The More I Sleep the Less I Dream by We Were Promised Jetpacks
16. Joy as an Act of Resistance by IDLES
17. Hell-On by Neko Case
18. Superorganism by Superorganism
19. Living in Extraordinary Times by James
20. Thank You for Today by Death Cab for Cutie
21. Black Panther: The Album by Kendrick Lamar
22. Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film) by Thom Yorke
23. Merrie Land by The Good, the Bad & the Queen
24. Room 25 by Noname
25. WARM by Jeff Tweedy
26. God's Favorite Customer by Father John Misty
27. Vessel by Frankie Cosmos
28. For Ever by Jungle
29. Twerp Verse by Speedy Ortiz
30. Remain in Light by Angélique Kidjo
31. This One’s for the Dancer & This One’s for the Dancer’s Bouquet by Moonface

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January 22, 2019 /Royal Stuart
2018, advented, first aid kit, fever ray, the knife, karin dreijer andersson, robin pecknold, fleet foxes
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#21 on the 2017 Bacon Top 31

January 11, 2018 by Royal Stuart

Plunge by Fever Ray

And now for the strangest (and probably more divisive than Kendrick Lamar, musically) entry on the 2017 Top 31: Fever Ray. If you like Fever Ray, the band, then you’ve probably already latched onto this album and are loving it. If you don’t know who Fever Ray is, then prepare to be equally angered, frightened, and dumbfounded by what you’re about to hear. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t.

Fever Ray is the stage name of Karin Dreijer Andersson, who is half of the famed Swedish electronic brother-sister duo The Knife. The Knife had some amazing albums when they were together, and now Fever Ray carries the Swedish dark electronic torch. And boy does it get dark.

Her eponymous debut album made #18 on the 2009 Top 31, and here we are eight years later with Plunge. Andersson has a unique sound and voice that is unmistakably hers, and Plunge is no different. But within the album, she seems to be pushing things further, into more difficult territory, similarly to what Björk has been doing on her last few albums. But while Björk has managed to find a zone that is completely unlistenable to me, Fever Ray manages to pull it off a little bit better.

I only cringe a little when I’m listening to Plunge. But I do make a point to make sure no children are within earshot, as the music can get quite vulgar in addition to the darkness, with lines like that from the song “This Country,” which has the lovely line “This house makes it hard to fuck” and “This country makes it hard to fuck” repeated over and over and over again.

Fever Ray’s visual output is every bit as dark and interesting as the audio. The video above, for the song “To the Moon and Back,” you’ll notice, is labeled “Part III.” That’s because there were two disturbing, minute-long shorts that were released prior to the video (Part I: Switch Seeks Same and Part II: A New Friend).

I believe I’ll continue to listen and be intrigued by Fever Ray for the entirety of her musical career. And I doubt I’ll ever feel at ease about it. And somehow that’s a good thing.

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22. DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar
23. Capacity by Big Thief
24. The Tourist by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
25. CCFX EP by CCFX
26. Woodstock by Portugal. The Man
27. MASSEDUCTION by St. Vincent
28. On the Spot by Hot 8 Brass Band
29. A Deeper Understanding by The War on Drugs
30. Planetarium by Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, & James McAlister
31. A Moment Apart by Odesza

Subscribe to the 2017 Top 31 Apple Music playlist
2009-2016 Top 31s

January 11, 2018 /Royal Stuart
2017, advented, fever ray, bjork, karin dreijer andersson, the knife
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#29 on the 2013 Musical Bacon Calendar

December 03, 2013 by Royal Stuart

[Video above is NSFW! That’s two NSFW videos in a row! Trend?]

Shaking the Habitual by The Knife

The band coming in at number 29 is odd at best. From Sweden, The Knife are a brother and sister electronic music duo, and depending on what song you’re listening to, their music could be described using any of the following words: dark, unlistenable, complicated, dancey, difficult, abrasive, awesome. The relationship a listener develops with The Knife is one of miscommunication, heartbreak, and the kind of love you have trouble describing the why of to a friend.

And here we are, playing them again, and torn as ever. Shaking the Habitual is the duo’s fourth album in their 14-year history, and their first since 2006’s amazing Silent Shout. (Half of the duo, Karin Dreijer Andersson, appeared at #18 on the 2009 Musical Bacon Calendar with her solo project Fever Ray.) I first discovered The Knife thanks to a cover of their 2003 song “Heartbeats” by José González that was featured as the soundtrack to one of the most beautiful commercials for a television set you’ll ever see, back in 2005. While the song González plays sounds nothing like The Knife’s original, I was hooked on both artists.

True to form, this new album is not an easy listener. You really have to dedicate yourself to hearing it if you’re going to put it on. And if you’ve got company, be prepared for some strange looks. But it’s this uniqueness, this otherworldliness, that keeps me coming back to them. There are definitely some “songs” worth skipping on the album. But those songs that you choose to listen to? Those are going to crawl under your skin for a long while.

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30. False Idols by Tricky
31. Let’s Be Still by The Head and the Heart

2012 Musical Bacon Calendar
2011 Musical Bacon Calendar
2010 Musical Bacon Calendar
2009 Musical Bacon Calendar

December 03, 2013 /Royal Stuart
2013, advented, the knife, fever ray
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