Rosali at Gonerfest 21 / Image via Martin Douglas
Douglas Martin won’t hesitate to stretch you like Zack Sabre Jr.
The field of rock music is oversaturated enough to choke to death on, but Douglas Martin Music is back, baby!
Does one of these points have much to do with the other? I doubt it. There are always years where the harvest is fat and others where the harvest is lean. WIth more concentration than ever, there are so many bands trying so hard to “make it” that they forget to put as much focus into their art as they do their social media marketing campaigns and networking blitzes. If this installment of DMDS isn’t your first rodeo, you already know I complain about this incessantly.
On the bright side, 2024 was the first time in many years that I’ve encountered almost as many bands that put out music that fucking kicks ass. I mentioned last year that there were about two dozen albums that made the longlist for the DMDS Best of ‘23. This year, that list topped out at about sixty. And it was even more difficult to rank than it was to cut down—to twelve new albums and one culled from recordings made decades ago—so we’re bringing back an old tradition: listing the entries in reverse alphabetical order.
As the global underground of rock music continues to flourish and bustle in spite of the flattening of its mainstream counterpart, 2024 was a real gold mine for obscure guitar music.
Here is the best of the best.
Winston Hightower – Winston Hytwr (K/Perennial)
Much has been said about this Columbus, Ohio savant—and touring bassist for Soul Glo, every white music nerd’s favorite Black hardcore band—being “the Black R. Stevie Moore,” and while that speaks to the 31-year-old’s breadth and productivity, it also sells him a little short (as direct comparisons often do). Culled from the six dozen or so songs he’s recorded since 2015 (with three new songs for good measure), his first-ever honest-to-g-d full-length set spans an array of styles: Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, the non-novelty work of Afroman, Pacific Northwest cult favorites Lync, Toro y Moi, early Shabazz Palaces, the list goes on. Hightower exhibits a wide range of creativity on Winston Hytwr, and if this full-length is any indication, it is only the beginning (for most of us, not him).
The Submissives – Live at Value Sound Studios (Celluloid Lunch)
A subversive, off-kilter, wildly entertaining art/garage-pop record, this Montreal sextet upends the very idea of a “girl group” by leaning so far into the trope, they topple over and stumble into a frighteningly perfect, almost Stepford Wives-esque facade; singing deadpan from behind blank stares and playing stellar pop songs augmented by psychedelic flourishes. If the songs didn’t jam, none of the high-concept subterfuge would be worth a damn. But it turns out that Live at Value Sound Studios is a true stroke of genius, both conceptually and musically.
Split System – Vol. 2 (Goner)
I’m not the biggest fan of composite entries on lists such as these, but given the veritable cottage industry of Southern Australia’s garage-punk scene—including bands like R.M.F.C., Gee Tee, 1-800-MIKEY, and Tee Vee Repairmann—and their membership in more than one of each other’s bands, including one is pretty much the same as including all. (And all of these bands except for Tee Vee, my personal favorite of the bunch, released albums in 2024.) For my money (and I’ll admit part of the decision to include some bands on this list is a credit to some incredible live performances), Vol. 2 is the cream of the scene’s 2024 bumper crop, a 33-minute sprint coiled tightly in the songcraft department. Sometimes an LP just rips and it doesn’t need to be any deeper than that. Vol. 2 is one such album.
Soup Activists – Mummy What are Flowers For? (Inscrutable)
How’s this for an elevator pitch that will fly right over the heads of the uninitiated: What if the dude from Lumpy and the Dumpers discovered Television Personalities, showed up in Lawrence, Kansas/on the doorstep of the home studio belonging to Caufield and Lira of Sweeping Promises, and recorded an early indie anti-masterpiece that sounds like it could have been released on Rough Trade in ‘82 or imported by Matador in ‘92? Well, you would get one of the weirdest, most satisfying indie rock records that hearkens back to a time when the kind of indie rock records people talked about didn’t sound like shit from an adult alternative commercial radio playlist. Deliriously strange fun from the midwest punk lifer turned vintage indie ace.
The Spatulas – Beehive Mind (PPM)
Before Meredith Soileau-Pratt moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts from the Pacific Northwest—for all intents and purposes, the cradle of the American indie-pop scene—she recorded Beehive Mind with her Portland-based bandmates. The result finds Soileau-Pratt jettisoning her more outré musical tendencies in favor of an impressionistic take on the kind of stuff Postcard or K would’ve put out 30 years ago. (Or, if you’d rather, a slightly blown-out version of self-titled era Velvet Underground.) The blend of balmy jangle and Soileau-Pratt’s elliptical lyrics gives Beehive Mind a delightfully ambling aura; rolling through the afternoon like a long summer drive.
Rosali – Bite Down (Merge)
Rosali Middleman is an artist of many talents. Edsel Axle features neo-classical, solo guitar excursions that give Bill Orcutt a run for his money. She’s also one-third of the awesome rock ‘n roll trio Long Hots—whose nasty, sprawling five-song tape Monday Night Raw is my most obsessively played not-new release of the past number of years. (And not just for its WWE-referencing title.) To the surprise of no one, her singer/songwriter project—first name only like Madonna—has the widest reach, spotlighting the emotional power of Middleman’s voice.
Just like on 2021’s No Medium, she teams with Nebraska rippers David Nance and Mowed Sound (who themselves released a very good record in ‘24), resulting in soulful slow jams like Bite Down’s title track, Linda Ronstadt-esque bangers such as “Hopeless,” and “My Kind,” which captures the ragged glory of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. (If I were doing a ranking of songs, the latter might just be my #1; perhaps the only song released in the calendar year that has made me cry more than once.) I’m tempted to call Bite Down the height of Rosali’s powers, but then she’ll release something in three or four months that will top it. So I’ll just say if there’s any album on this list that you can (and should) play for both your deep cut music head neighbor and your auntie, this is the one.
Thine Retail Simps – Strike Gold, Strike Back, Strike Out (Total Punk)
Another year, another definite article (for all you grammar nerds), another Simps banger to add to the collection. In the opinion of some very reputable sources—most notably, DMDS’s spiritual and aesthetic sibling see/saw—Retail Simps’ third album is their best. Whether or not you agree (for the record: the Dirty Shoes pick is 2023 Album of the Year Live on Cool Street), Strike Gold, Strike Back, Strike Out is a seamless marriage of their first album’s unhinged hollering, smart dumb songcraft, and “juke joint for white punks” vibe with the unbelievable ambition of the aforementioned second record. It makes for a comfortable home for the dissonant, threadbare “Soda Jerk,” the Teenage Fanclub-esque perfect pop of “I Was Watering a Plant,” and the band’s blistering cover of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Barstool Blues”—which I will go out on a limb and say might be the best-ever Neil Young cover (with all due respect to Built to Spill’s version of “Cortez the Killer”).
Les Rallizes Dénudés – YaneUra Oct. ‘80 (Temporal Drift)
Released about three months after my extensively written LRD feature, the latest release from the Japanese noise/psych/fucked up rock ‘n roll legends spotlights the brief-tenured guitarist Fujio Yamaguchi; widely praised for adding bluesy leads and solos with his distortion pedal set to “scalding.” Nowhere in this set is Fujio’s influence more apparent than on the scuzzed-out lurch of “I’m the Darkness,” which blends seamlessly into a version of “Flame of Ice” far less homicidal than the LIVE ‘77 version. Opener “Deeper Than the Night (1980)” is arguably the definitive iteration of that particular jam; augmented by Doronco’s bass near the front of the mix—again handled expertly by Makoto Kubota—along with Mizutani and Fujio’s dueling guitar lines… and a second of unintentional, ear-splitting feedback. Just when you think the treasure trove of the Rallizes couldn’t possibly bear more gems, a new set of recordings comes out that shows a new dimension of Mizutani’s genius as a bandleader.
the gobs – pop off / the gobs / worst one yet (Self-Released)
Many of the names on this list can count 2024 as a breakout year for them, but if there is one band that had the breakout year, it’s this bizarre, apeshit, thrilling Olympia, Washington band. These three EPs—or, if you go by official designation, two EPs and one eight-song, eleven-minute “full-length”—find the South Salish Sea weirdo-punks running through a blitzkrieg of ideas, seemingly jettisoning the notion of quality control in service of their art. Intentionally blown-out or shoddily “produced,” the recordings of the gobs take on a challenging air in the form of stuff that ranges in style from imagined (and aborted) video game soundtracks, house-of-mirrors synth punk sprints, and stirring emotional masterpieces such as “gimmie steel reserve,” “the gobs commit an armed robbery,” and “adopt a baby (to get some chicks).”
Feeling Figures – Everything Around You (K/Perennial)
It’s a question I find myself asking a lot, both privately and very publicly: What the fuck happened to indie rock? I have a lot of opinions about the erosion of the American middle class, none of which have any place in what I have spent the past 16 years cultivating as a forum for rock music criticism. The disappearance of the stylistic qualities of indie rock is very similar, though. What passes for indie nowadays is—with few notable exceptions—simply a development league for the mainstream (which I mentioned last year but most certainly bears repeating); easy listening, the further appropriation of R&B by white kids who don’t have sex, boring rock music, a pale (pun intended) imitation or amalgam of much better artists from the past, a retread of a retread of a retread.
Montreal’s Feeling Figures reflects a time when “indie rock” meant “the groups featured in Our Band Could Be Your Life”; a rock band most certainly, just dialed quite a few degrees to the left. There’s a handful of Sonic Youth-styled tunings, a couple top-notch indie-pop tunes sung by singer/guitarist Kay Moon (the title track and the exceptional “Doors Wide Open”), and a sprawling, tempo-shifting jam to close things out (“Social Anatomy”). Everything Around You was famously recorded prior to Feeling Figures’ 2023 debut Migration Magic; holding back on its release feels like a smart strategic move, as Feeling Figures’ second album is the sort of ambitious step forward we should want and expect from our indie rock bands. If the wheat is ever to be separated from the chaff in the maddeningly overpopulated field of “indie” music, Feeling Figures should be considered the standard and not the exception.
Dummy – Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)
It’s a shame that the infamy of Dummy’s famously pissy, two-part Bandcamp Daily feature written by Mariana Timony—let’s put aside the fact that it was an evocative and accurate portrait of being in a DIY band in the 2020s—has outlived and arguably overshadowed the Los Angeles band’s music from those short years ago. Because, frankly, for the past few years, Dummy has been one of the finest experimental pop bands in America. For all the (warranted but slightly off-the-mark) Stereolab comparisons their debut Mandatory Enjoyment garnered, Free Energy seems to invite and incite critic-fans of the Screamadelica/Madchester axis. Whether the music bears traces of vintage Creation or kranky, whether the rhythms evoke acid house or motorik, Free Energy is a sterling example of Dummy’s lofty-concept mastery along with meticulous arrangement and production. The fact that they’re routinely typecast as crabby indie purists belies the fact that a good percentage of other indie bands out there aren’t operating at this high a level.
CLASS – A Healthy Alternative (Feel It)
A friend of mine (who may or may not have played an instrument on one of this list’s featured albums) and I were chatting about this album and my friend summarily dismissed it as “meat and potatoes,” but I’m of the opinion that sometimes, after so many nights of Coq a Vin or pumpkin risotto, sometimes a good beef stew is exactly what hits the spot, and nothing else will do. Nobody is going to confuse these Tucson punks for reinventing the wheel on their third LP. But if you’re looking for tightly structured, infectiously melodic punk that is equally proto-, garage-, and power pop from arguably the best American band to whip those styles into shape since the Exploding Hearts, CLASS might just be the band of your dreams. No need to save room for dessert.
Alien Nosejob – Turns the Colour of Bad Shit (Total Punk)
Let’s not even consider the dozens of bands Jake Robertson has played in prior to conceiving his Alien Nosejob project; Robertson has recorded over a dozen full-lengths and singles since donning the (awesome) name of his “band.” (Scare quotes needed because sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.) His Bandcamp specifically says “no specific genre,” and he’s held true to that credo, diving into new wave, proto-punk, disco, and glam. Barely 10 months after his “jangly garage rock” album (released in the States on Goner, naturally), Turns the Colour of Bad Shit is an early UK punk record which so faithfully (and sensationally) blares along, you can practically hear the Union Jack getting stomped out in the background. It’s a truly infectious commentary on punk culture, so trenchant in its critiques that “Annoying Riffs” might as well be titled “Douglas Martin: The Song.” And if this album is not your thing, rest assured there will be something completely different on offer next year.
