Year in review: The best indie albums of 2021

Sincere Engineer’s second album, and first since 2017, sounds like a band antsy to get back into the world. Then again, with a song like “Recluse in the Making” on the album, maybe not. The music flows with energy and raw nerves, and no album this year felt as tapped into the anxiety of uncertainty in love.

Wolf Alice calls to mind the days of Britpop when a band like Blur could be massive in the UK but be known as “That band with the ‘Woohoo!’ song” in the United States. If you’ve been sleeping on them, now is the time to amend that. “Blue Weekend” feels more like blue skies and endless possibilities than sadly waiting for Monday to roll around.

IDLES’ “Ultra Mono” fell somewhat flat in 2020. It was pretty good, but nothing special. Instead of continuing to feel at sea, the aggressive, snide punk band (who tends to not like to be called a punk band) sounded revitalized in “CRAWLER.” It’s much more in step with their standout album from a few years ago “Joy as an Act of Resistance.”

Pom Pom Squad stuck to her motifs and double her output (14 songs compared to seven on 2019’s “Ow.) with “Death of a Cheerleader.” The album can be a little scattershot sonically, but it might just speak to a talented young musician trying to find what serves her best. Sometimes it's harkening back to ‘60s girl group music, sometimes it’s just writing a simple, heartbreaking song that would fit in any era.

Some albums feel like being punched in the gut emotionally. "Home Video" from Dacus feels more like remembering being punched in the gut, and weirdly still being nostalgic for that time in your life. It evokes feelings indicative of a title like "Home Video." Dacus has something to share with us, and we're on the couch, a bowl of popcorn in our laps, waiting.

Turnstile got a ton of love in 2021, and for making the most-danceable post-hardcore album of the year we guess that makes sense. “GLOW ON” manages to be intense and toe-tapping simultaneously. It’s rave music for people who grew up in mosh pits instead.

Home is Where sometimes feels like a project that is barely holding it together. The frontman scream sings lyrics to songs with names like “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays.” And yet, Neutral Milk Hotel had a cult following for a reason. When you are at home screaming “Hey Samantha!” to yourself, it’ll all make sense.

War on Drugs continues to do the War on Drugs thing. This is not a complaint, but a sense of comfort. You know what you are getting, and the odds are you will be happy with it. They don’t sound tired or played out. They just sound like a band that knows exactly what it’s doing.

You could be forgiven for being turned off by the title of Faye Webster’s album. However, if you hear the titular line in the context of the album’s lyrics it’s much more palatable. The whole album is quite pleasing, in fact. Webster gets into a straight-up groove but manages to litter the pathway of the album with cutting, occasionally heartrending, lyrics. And yes, sometimes she is funny (haha).

With each album, Lillie West gets a little less frantic and lo-fi. Do we miss some of that energy from “Sleepyhead?” We’re be lying if we didn’t say yes, but we aren’t complaining about “I Want the Door to Open.” Any album that can hit you back to back with “Color of the Pool” and “DIVER” has more going for it than most.

Michelle Zauner has said that “Jubilee” is the first album she’s made when her life wasn’t overflowing with sadness. It’s a chance for her to paint with some of the other colors of her sonic palette. We’re sure that’s a relief for her, but it’s also to the gain of fans of Japanese Breakfast. “Jubilee” is able to explode out into the world in a variety of ways, but it still holds fast to what made Japanese Breakfast’s music worthwhile in the first place.

Illuminati hotties put out one of the more chaotic albums of the year. Once a musician who could do a sincere cover of “I Want to Dance with Somebody,” now she’s making songs like “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA” which answers the question, “What if Primus, but good?” Sometimes she’s snarky and too cool for school. Sometimes the sincerity comes back. Maybe Illuminati hotties is just an artist not afraid to mix and match as she sees fit. It won’t be for everybody, but you don’t make a song like “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA” if you care about that.

Remember Sports (once known as Sports) called it quits once upon a time, but fortunately, they returned to gift us with more music. While the ragged, lo-fi days of the early albums are gone, “Like a Stone” is still a band brimming with energy and verve. They may try out a few more musical tricks and be a little less straightforward with the lyrics, but it’s still the band we’ve loved since “All of Something.”

2020 was the year of Phoebe Bridgers. “Punisher” grabbed a lot of headlines. In 2021, Bridgers’ friend Julien Baker dropped an album in “Little Oblivions” that almost makes “Punisher” seem cheerful. Baker used to make stripped-down acoustic music, and with “Little Oblivions” she gets a little richer in terms of sound. At the core, though, is still her beautiful voice and open, evocative lyrics. She manages to share so much without feeling like oversharing. No album will shake your soul like this one in 2021.

If you have listened to prior Slothrust endeavors, you could have fairly assumed that “Parallel Timeline” would be reasonably snide and snarky. However, the band that gave us “Crockpot” does not feel like the band behind this album. Oh, it’s still a weird collection of songs with some idiosyncratic lyrics. It’s also, dare we say, emotionally honest. There’s a pleasantness to “Parallel Timeline” we never expected, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

We could say the same things about Cloud Nothings that we did about War on Drugs, but then we’d be accused of self-plagiarism. The fanfare seems to have slipped, but the quality of the music hasn’t. Cloud Nothings gets into a groove of beautiful noise and restless energy and we never get tired of that.

We admittedly never said to ourselves, “I wonder what Courtney Barnett has to say about the pandemic and these uncertain times,” but after listening to “Things Take Time, Take Time” we wondered why we didn’t. Her incisive lyrics and way with words were perfect for a time like this. The album feels like Barnett strumming her guitar while she talks to us about her life, how she feels about the world, and a whole lot more. It’s like a one-sided conversation we’ve been dying to have.

If you want an album bursting with sonic energy, the Middle Kids’ “Today We’re the Greatest” should be right up your alley. It jumps out of your speaker (or headphones or earbuds or whatever) and engulfs you. There’s an anthemic quality that still stays within the certain musical expectations associated with indie music. It’s like they have their feet in two worlds, but those feet are firmly planted.

Wednesday is awash in a shoegaze-y fuzziness that fills the room like smoke, making it a perfect listen for when you want to just lay there and chill out. Or, rather, lay there and have an existential crisis. You try listening to “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do?” and remain stoic.

“Valentine” feels like a morosely fitting title for Snail Mail’s album, because she doesn’t merely wear her heart on her sleeve. She rips it out of her chest, still bloody and beating, and holds it out to you. In addition to not sounding like her previous work musically speaking, it’s also absolutely confessional, sometimes uncomfortably so. If you are down for the music equivalent of reading somebody’s diary during the worst year of their life, “Valentine” is the album for you.