TranscendNoise

10. Charly Bliss – Guppy This is the best pop-punk record this year, no doubt about it. I lend this appeal mostly to Eva Hendricks voice, a non-singing voice at times, disappearing when shrieking but ultimately beautifully emotive and relatable. Surely she follows in the lane of previously known female rock singers and the grunge of the 90´s, yet there is a huge amount of comedy, irony, and quirkiness in her delivery and lyrics that are supported by forward-thinking instrumentals that sound as polished as they appear raw and spur of the moment. Her outings range from “I pied the trampoline” to questioning her relation with “Am I the best / Or just the first person to say yes” and these forms of youthful energy and anxiety resonate even when the teenage years are pretty much over and done. Indie rock has to deliver on these fronts, the idiosyncrasies of being young while touching on the first questions and introspections of adulthood and generally being in touch with a world out...

30. Voices from Deep Below – I Want to Stand Where the Sun Himself Shakes with Fear Voices From Deep Below are one of my top finds of 2016 and this year they delivered yet another epic shoegaze album. While they even sing “I´m hazy” in one of their songs, this album is more than just one of the best shoegaze offerings I heard in a long while. The compositions are long, hazy and reverb-soaked until the brim. But without becoming too dreamy or ethereal, Voices From Deep Below keep it on the hard-hitting side of the genre and offer up respite only to drown out the negativity and longing their songs carry. It feels good to experience this kind of aggression in such an outfit and a hunger to deliver something that feels instantly recognizable in a sea of carbon copies. If one track, check out opener “This Is The Way” to be instantly immersed and turn that shit up! <a href="http://voicesfromdeepbelow.bandcamp.com/album/i-want-to-stand-where-the-sun-himself-shakes-with-fe...

40. Remo Drive – Remo Drive  For your dose of indie energy and teenage angst, Remo Drive provide the good stuff. Their debuts album Greatest Hits does feel like a band that has been around for a long time, honing their skills and unleashing an album of their best work to date. Not many bands of this genre sound as fresh as Remo Drive. What captured my attention were their stunning instrumentals and disdain for standard song structures. Some songs will break down in the middle part with a purely instrumental stint only to pick up where they left. "Strawberita" for instance has this huge instrumental bridge that feels like an impromptu jam in disregard of how the track started. And this linear writing style pays off track after track, not letting their songs become simple pop or pop-punk and emanating an overflow of energy and creativity. After this first outing and up until now staying completely indie, Remo Drive might become one of the leading bands of the genre and ...

51. Youth Code – Commitment To Complications  This is the best album I missed in 2016. I read something about Youth Code, but never checked them out and that was a mistake. Industrial works best when it knows how to interlock tension with release, the hard-hitting with silence and glimpses of space between the pressure. Don´t get me wrong, in contrast to their previous work Youth Code haven´t gone soft here, but you immediately get the refinement of their sound. The programming is richer and tends to include elements that could be straight up synth pop. In many instrumentals, I´m reminded of something you´d hear in a Prurient release, only in a stronger song structure and shaped up to fit the gruff vocals by Sara Taylor. The peak of this style and my favorite track on this is the closer “Lost At Sea”. This one shifts from synth ritual to broken musing only to arrive at the tortured screamed ending. After hard-hitting tracks like "Avengement" and more straightforward s...