#23 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Tunde Adebimpe

January 09, 2026 by Royal Stuart in 2025, Top 31

Thee Black Boltz by Tunde Adebimpe

Tunde Adebimpe, the co-lead singer of stellar 2000’s band TV on the Radio (who are still touring despite having not put out any new music since 2014), has a higher-register voice that is pristine, and it rings through much more than it ever did on the grittier TVOTR stuff. His debut solo album, Thee Black Boltz, more than fills the ten-year void since his full band released their last album.

Born in St. Louis, MO, to immigrant Nigerian parents, Adebimpe has always had a commanding presence on stage, and his star has only gotten more shining now that he’s aged into a man whose dark skin is starkly contrasted by the half inch of bright-white hair atop his head and full beard. Over the past twenty years he’s been able to do so much more thanks to his talents and his looks, appearing in numerous films and television series (such as Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, Noah Baumbach’s Wedding Story, and Disney’s Star Wars: Skeleton Crew).

But it’s his voice that keeps me coming back. On Boltz, he seems to alternate between a few personas within his solo work. There’s some skit-like jokey singing, paired with a couple songs that could have easily been found on a Living Colour album 30 years ago. For the lead single from the album, “Magnetic,” Adebimpe channels his best Ozzy, to great effect. This song also sounds the most like a TV on the Radio song, thanks to the appearance of his TVOTR bandmates Jaleel Bunton and Jahphet Landis.

“At The Moon,” the third track on the album, feels like a lost Nine Inch Nails song with the strong synth rhythm driving the song forward. And then there’s my favorite from the album, “Somebody New” (featured in the video above — it’s fun, you should watch it). Clearly influenced by the New Orders of old, this amazingly-fun hand-clappy dance song could easily have been a b-side to a recent song by The Weeknd.

With the success of this new solo album and with TV on the Radio touring again, Adibempe is just starting the ascent of a new arc in his career as he enters the second half of his century on earth. Check out his full KEXP performance, with his touring band that also includes Bunton and Landis, but distinctly lacks founding TVOTR member David Sitek. Sitek has been on hiatus while the band tours on the 20th anniversary of their smash debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. I have seen no indication of anything new coming out, but if experience tells me anything, there’s got to be something on the horizon. This is all too good not to.

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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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#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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#29 on the 2021 Bacon Top 31 — Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine

January 03, 2022 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

A Beginner’s Mind by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine

Another year, another Sufjan Stevens album on the Bacon Top 31. The man is prolific. He‘s had four albums on the Top 31 (#9 last year, #30 in 2017, #4 in 2015, and famously #3 in 2010), and would have more if I’d been charting when his earlier 00’s albums were released.

As such, it’s hard to listen to any of his new music with unbiased ears. He’s settled into two basic musical modes: soft and delicate (similar to Elliott Smith) or electronic and noisy (think Reznor-era David Bowie), and I enjoy both greatly for different reasons. A Beginner’s Mind falls squarely in the quiet, dreamlike mode, almost like a downy blanket laid gently over your torso. It didn’t hit me as deeply as Carrie & Lowell, his tribute to his parents that hit #4 in 2015, but it’s loveliness clearly couldn’t keep it off the Top 31 entirely.

Each of Stevens’ albums have an overarching conceptual narrative hook, be it a US state (Michigan, Illinois) or mental health (The Age of Adz, Carrie & Lowell). A Beginner’s Mind is no different: each track from the album is inspired by a different movie of the 20th and 21st century. There are songs dedicated to films as varied as All About Eve, Hellraiser III, Bring It On Again, and Point Break. The beautiful “Cimmerian Shade” is sung from the perspective of Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs.

Stevens partnered with longtime friend and collaborator Angelo De Augustine, an LA-based singer/songwriter whose last two solo albums were released on Stevens’ record label Asthmatic Kitty. De Augustine’s solo work pairs nicely with Sufjan’s softer side – A Beginner’s Mind makes sense in either artist’s catalog.

If you like quieter, lightly strung instruments and near-whispered vocals, this album is definitely for you. By now you should know whether you like Sufjan or not. But if you‘re new to his music, don’t start here. Check out Illinois, from 2005. So much has come from that seminal work – I’m excited simply by the thought of someone opening the door and letter Sufjan in for the first time. You’re in for a musical visit unlike any other.

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30. Where the End Begins by Knathan Ryan
31. Private Space by Durand Jones & The Indications

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