The 20 Best Experimental Albums of 2017

From Arca’s operatic insanity to Klein’s thrashed R&B, these are the year’s most urgent experimental records.
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The album, as a form, is a suggestion at best, and 2017’s most adventurous artists stepped well beyond its boundaries—if they acknowledged its boundaries at all. Most of the time, what’s considered experimental music derives from serious, sustained play: with genre, with form, with tempo and attention, and even with reality. The albums that pushed the hardest in all directions this year managed to carve out pockets of time where the rules and limitations of the broader world didn’t bear down quite so harshly. They came from experimental veterans who have been straining against convention for decades, and they came from young artists starting to cultivate their voice. But all of them, whether they adopt the vernacular of harsh, guttural noise or delicate, synthesized ecosystems, offer reprieve from the repetition of mundane life. In them, you might just find a way out.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.


Sacred Bones

20. 

Pharmakon: Contact

Where many noise musicians explore the cacophonous potentials of technology, Margaret Chardiet seeks to exploit the most gruesome overtones of her own voice. On Contact, she screams like she’s trying to escape her own body and reach someone—anyone—who can empathize with her interiority.

Listen: Pharmakon, “Transmission”


Hyperdub

19. 

Klein: Tommy EP

The referential title of Klein’s Hyperdub debut EP (and the title of some of its songs, like “Everlong”) allows a slight, winking opening into the chaos contained within. The way she assembles ragged clips of guitar, piano, and voice often sounds like a machine intelligence trying to recreate late-’90s radio hits, but the specificity of her compositions belies her human intention.

Listen: Klein, “Prologue”


Self-released

18. 

Amnesia Scanner: AS TRUTH

On the follow-up to last year’s AS EP, Berlin production duo Amnesia Scanner double down on the more abrasive elements of their techno experimentalism. The gasping, stuttering tracks woven together within AS TRUTH make it sound like they’re torturing the machines they employ, like something deep within the circuitry is trying to break free.

Listen: Amnesia Scanner, “AS Brieth” [ft. Colin Self]


Astro Nautico

17. 

L’Rain: L’Rain

Taja Cheek’s debut album slips nimbly from one genre to another as she peels back layers of mourning following her mother Lorraine’s death. L’Rain exposes the absurdity of expecting pain to dampen with time when time itself can hardly be relied upon—the album seems to happen all at once, all the time, its vividness and simultaneity as cutting as its intertwining melodies.

Listen: L’Rain, “Stay, Go (Go, Stay)”


Temporary Residence

16. 

Eluvium: Shuffle Drones

Eluvium’s Shuffle Drones contains only 13 minutes of music, but as a work designed to be looped on shuffle indefinitely, it’s the only album of 2017 that is, potentially, infinite. Whether played for 13 minutes or the next 13 years, its resonances and repetitions surprise in their endurance, their slowly unfurling complexities. Eluvium plumbs the mechanics of listening and attention with some of the prettiest string chords in his oeuvre.

Listen: Eluvium, “and to randomize”


Self-released

15. 

Yves Tumor: Experiencing the Deposit of Faith

Yves Tumor’s follow-up to Serpent Music bores even more holes in the enigmatic musician’s bricolage. As soon as the album finds a groove, it ditches it, resisting easy patterning or casual listening. Among the chaos, Tumor indulges gorgeous, delicate textures and melodies, keeping you on your toes not with abrasion but with diaphanous textures and uncanny turns.

Listen: Yves Tumor, “E. Eternal”


Mute

14. 

Ben Frost: The Centre Cannot Hold

Few albums captured the kind of precarity that haunted 2017 so well as Ben Frost’s latest, which, with titles like “Healthcare” and “A Single Hellfire Missile Costs $100,000 USD,” dares to gesture literally at the sicknesses currently plaguing earth. The album’s drones and scrapes supply a grounding counterweight to omnipresent anxiety while still allowing space for moments of spare beauty.

Listen: Ben Frost, “Eurydice’s Heel”


Mexican Summer

13. 

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: On the Echoing Green

Between shoegaze and abstract ambient experimentalism lies Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, whose On the Echoing Green draws out the lushest and most organic quality of both genres. The tasteful use of vocals and reverb makes this album among his most accessible offerings, while still offering glimpses at the darkness coiled within.

Listen: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “A Song of Summer”


Constellation

12. 

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Luciferian Towers

Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s politics have always tended toward the insurrectionary, but there’s hardly been a better year in recent memory to rally behind their sweeping anticapitalist orchestrations. Their latest boasts a three-track guitar-based sequence called “Bosses Hang,” which ranks among the most spirited and hopeful music they’ve ever performed.

Listen: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Bosses Hang (Pt. I, II & III)”


Ninja Tune

10. 

Forest Swords: Compassion

Matthew Barnes’ latest full-length expands the warm, spacious electronic zones he’s cultivated during his years as Forest Swords. The bellows and groans of the vocal samples woven through his percussive patterns keep Compassion more human than machine, even as Barnes’ abstractions defy literal narrative.

Listen: Forest Swords, “The Highest Flood”


Halcyon Veil

10. 

Mhysa: fantasii

Mhysa’s debut album often plays like one of those “as heard from another room” remixes on Tumblr—if the other room were an abandoned aircraft hangar. The Philadelphia vocalist and producer punctuates the LP with covers of Donna Summer and Prince songs sung against striking silence or industrial beats, but Mhysa’s own tracks feel similarly (and compellingly) disjointed, as delicate vocals tiptoe over increasingly complex percussion and detuned synthesizers.

Listen: Mhysa, “Spectrum”


Hush Hush

9. 

Lushloss: Asking/Bearing

Olive Jun winds a disarmingly intimate conversation with her mother throughout the first half of Asking/Bearing, and the questions she asks—about family, memory, legacy, and loss—inform the hissing vocal and synth tracks that comprise the rest of her debut LP. With a lower-fi sound that exposes the seams in her work, Lushloss dissects the effects of trauma, both individual and intergenerational, across a collection of songs that sound as though they’re always on the verge of breaking open and being reborn.

Listen: Lushloss, “St Marco”


Constellation

8. 

Joni Void: Selfless

Formerly known as Johnny Ripper, Jean Cousin debuted as Joni Void this year with a sweltering descent into existential chaos. Spoken word pieces about the impossibility of being known by another, as well as rap breakdowns and choppy piano samples, careen throughout Selfless, which, as an electronic piece, is often as gripping as it is terrifying.

Listen: Joni Void, “Cinema Without People”


Temporary Residence / 2062

7. 

William Basinski: A Shadow in Time

The mind behind The Disintegration Loops put his powers of decay toward eulogizing David Bowie a year after the glam god’s departure from earth. A Shadow in Time induces a mournful trance befitting such a loss, with streaks of saxophone that nod to Bowie’s playful spirit even as he stared down his own death on his final album, Blackstar.

Listen: William Basinski, “For David Robert Jones”


Sacred Bones

6. 

Blanck Mass: World Eater

Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power deepens his posthumanist grooves on his latest Blanck Mass offering. World Eater carries a considerable amount of menace in its cracks, but more than anything, its feral beats and synthesized squalls stay focused on forward propulsion. This is an album that moves more than it stews, despite its darker, more cynical corners.

Listen: Blanck Mass, “Silent Treatment”


Kompakt

5. 

GAS: Narkopop

Wolfgang Voigt’s first album in 17 years drags him back into the miasma that floated throughout 2000’s Pop. While still operating in the world of drone-tinged, minimalist techno, Narkopop hews darker, like the swamp Voigt draws from has become polluted in the decade and a half since he left it. For two and a half hours, Narkopop festers at a steady tempo, deepening its excavation of the seam between human noise and environmental sound.

Listen: GAS, “Narkopop 1”


Milan

4. 

Ryuichi Sakamoto: async 

Inspired in part by the spare, beautiful films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async similarly finds value in nature’s discordance, and humanity’s awkward place inside it. With synthesizers, pianos, static, and strings, async simulates a structure struggling to keep its form against entropy’s ravages, like a dying human trying to stay separate from the earth.

Listen: Ryuichi Sakamoto, “fullmoon”


Pan

3. 

Various Artists: Mono No Aware

The first compilation collected under the watchful eye of Berlin label PAN, Mono No Aware emphasizes the interplay among its discrete tracks, a comprehensible whole made by a wide variety of artists. Featuring contributions from Yves Tumor and M.E.S.H., the compilation offers a surprisingly cohesive cross-section of contemporary ambient experimentalism. This isn’t airport music—it’s quiet but not easy to ignore, rife with unsettling turns and internal contradictions that encourage active listening through its many subtle variations on a theme.

Listen: Yves Tumor, “Limerence”


Western Vinyl

2. 

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid

Like a grade-schooler constructing a terrarium, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith pours as much life as she possibly can into her latest LP. The Kid ripples with joy and excitement as Smith traces the boundaries of a human lifespan, the limits of memory, and the creative verve coursing through every living thing.

Listen: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, “An Intention”


XL

1. 

Arca: Arca

Having grown comfortable with his command of software instruments, Arca turned to something even more temperamental and difficult to control: the human voice. His self-titled album exploits the ragged edges and natural flaws of his singing, plunging into deep meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and death while also offering some of the most complex and stunning instrumentals the producer has ever crafted. Few get to claim Björk as their mentor, but Alejandro Ghersi proves he’s worthy of the honor.

Listen: Arca, “Desafío”