Guest Blogger Ryan Hall Shares Top 2018 Releases

Ryan Hall of Tome To The Weather Machine shares a few notes about his recap of 2018’s most notable releases. Head over to his site to check out the list!

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What does it mean to create a year-end list? As high-minded music criticism seems to bow out to market-fed algorithms, can we really trust these anymore? Does critical consensus begin to feel even more suspicious? If anything, the act of creating a list for anything beyond the cultural capital that being the kind of person who creates a list, is to describe how the year looked from where you were standing.

For me, it was watching what comes after our supposed “post-genre” moment in time. This is personified in watching an artist like Dedekind Cut, whose sublime album Tahoe topped my list, move through his career from cutting-edge hip-hop producer to avant-garde provocateur with $uccessor, to fully embracing the form and the genre of creating a straightforward ambient record. Who knows what will happen next, but if the trajectory of some of 2018’s breakout stars: Dedekind Cut, serpentwithfeet, Yves Tumor are any indication, form and genre aren’t things to be discarded wholesale or seen as disposable wardrobe pieces, but rather vast, self-contained playgrounds resilient to mutilation and mutation.

The paragraph above is the most thinking I’ve done about how music I like fits in with the broader landscape. The 50 albums on here represent that moment when you are listening to an album and something just clicks and you want to tell everyone why you love it so much. I’ve been doing Best of Lists on Tome to the Weather Machine and elsewhere for almost 10 years. And honestly, that’s the formula for covering what I cover and creating this list. It’s how the musical world looks from where I’m standing. You like what you like. Hopefully, if you haven’t heard of some of these releases you check them out and purchase them from the labels and artists out here putting in work. - Ryan Hall