A strong year for indie music then, even as Kingsland Road became an X-Factor ‘band’, but a year when it became so cross-pollinated, so inclusive, it became almost unidentifiable.
It’s always tempting to omit established names in favour of new and overlooked records, but the bigger releases have proved impossible to ignore in 2013. Arctic Monkeys, Foals and the National created their finest albums yet, demanding inclusion on this list.
But they were also the only bands to lead with guitars. Ten years ago, indie meant garage band - now that’s Mac software. James Blake, Mercury Prize-winner, is the most obvious indicator of how indie has moved from garage by way of hairdressers, to bedroom by way of Apple store.
This year, John Grant, Pure Bathing Culture, Phosphorescent, Fuck Buttons, Parquet Courts and Blood Orange deserve honourable mentions. But, with that said, here’s to the cream of the crop.
1. The National - Trouble Will Find Me
The National’s sixth studio album will be remembered as their breakthrough. Two epic gigs at London’s Alexandra Palace, in which ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ became a fragile, reverberating soundscape, proved the National are the best songwriters in the world right now. Existential melancholia worthy of a generation.
2. Foals - Holy Fire
Foals get a hard time. With their oh-so-serious attitude, they can seem deserving of it. But ‘Holy Fire’ is an exhilarating, confident guitar album. It’s technical, soulful and self-aware in its pop lure.
The title says it all. The London trio’s debut is a severed artery of emotion. Elena Tonra’s sorrowful, delicate lyrics are held high by a soundscape that seems part Jeff Buckley, part the XX, part SigurRos. An album that can rise like a wave and drop into an abyss.
James Blake works in irregular, unsteady pulses, fragments of loops and strained harmonies that rise until they crack and fall away. That such strange, almost affected, music has garnered such a broad appeal was demonstrated by his Glastonbury set: stripped down, highly-calibrated but naked in its coursing, modern talent.
When Jon Hopkins dropped Open Eye Signal at KOKO, Camden, the crowd responded as if they’d never heard an electronic beat before. Hopkins collaborated with ambient Godfather Brian Eno and folk singer King Creosote (who appears on this album) before gifting us this debut, allegedly a concept album tracing the textured moods of a night out on the town. This is techno as deeply infiltrating as anything since Aphex Twin.
How I wanted to dislike the 19-year-old Brit school graduate from Peckham, with the charity shop style and the downcast, strung out photo-look and the hip-hop sideshow. But then I actually played his album, beginning with a detailed and confessional paean to spending the night walking through London, sung in that weathered nicotine husk. It’s rough and mundane, self-consciously so, but it has the undeniable freedom of a jazz artist.
Where do Arctic Monkeys go now? This fusion of Jay Z production values and Josh Homme-inspired rock ‘n’ roll is their most natural album to date. Yet there are hints of a further evolution away from suburban English life. With their use of I Wanna Be Yours, a John Cooper Clarke poem famous for its inclusion on the GCSE English syllabus, they threatened to become transcendent.
Maybe a year too late to make a major impact and destined to fight in the polo-neck shadows of Alt-J, Fleet Foxes, Local Natives and DjangoDjango. Yet this debut album, released in their native Canada last year, is an energetic, passionate, gorgeously atmospheric example of folkstep in all its alternative glee.
9. British Sea Power - From The Sea To The Land Beyond
The Brighton veterans performed this album as a live soundtrack for Penny Woolcock’s film about the British coast at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival in 2012. Unfolding in movements, this is orchestral, even classical, indie in which fragments of older songs meld in and out. As protean as the sea itself.
Berlin, it’s said, is the best club experience in Europe. Moderat’s follow-up to their 2009 debut gives credence to that claim. This is breathless electronica, varied and stylised yet clean and minimalist, part Trentemøller, part Burial, part Booka Shade, and challenging them all.
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