My Year in Maximalism
Lately I've been thinking about an essay entitled "Maximal Nation" that Pitchfork ran in December 2011. In it, veteran music journalist Simon Reynolds identified an overarching trend in the year's most acclaimed electronic music, linking otherwise unrelated artists through their common pursuit of things big, busy, and bold. The essay's jumping-off point was Rustie's critically acclaimed Glass Swords, released two months prior. Its brazen day-glo sheen—which paired Eurodance and trance synths with modern trap drums and Seinfeld bass—was diametrically opposed to the stylish minimalism that had always been en vogue in electronic's trendiest sectors. 13 years later, Glass Swords' baroque, synthetic sugar-rush sounds unmistakably, quintessentially 2011, which confirms Reynolds' canny observation about the era's defining aesthetics.
Reynolds also cited everything from Rustie's even more hip hop-fluent bedfellow Hudson Mohawke, to Flying Lotus and Thundercat's frantic electro-jazz psychedelia, to Oneohtrix Point Never's busy "I dare you to call this ambient" compositions, to Gang Gang Dance's more indie rock-adjacent freak-outs. On paper, none of these artists were particularly similar, but they all fit Reynolds' stated criteria:
"Maximalism" is vague and capacious enough to contain a whole bunch of ideas and associations, but the general slant of these verdicts is that there are a hell of a lot of inputs here, in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs, in terms of density, scale, structural convolution, and sheer majesty.
"Maximal Nation" lodged itself in my brain as soon as I read it. I was already a fan of most of the music mentioned within, but Reynolds pulled off one of the most difficult feats in music criticism: unpretentiously explaining to the reader why they like what they like.
For my entire life, I've been terrible at describing my musical taste. I strive to have an open-minded, omnivorous palette—and I think my professional track record reflects that—but I obviously have preferences, so I recognize that this identity is more aspirational than accurate. Re-reading "Maximal Nation," I now recognize how weird it was that I liked every artist referenced therein despite how casual of an electronic fan I was at age 20. I found all that 2011 stuff more instantly gratifying than the deeper, more "tasteful" strains I'd sampled, but also more complex and stimulating than the paint-by-numbers EDM that was blowing up at the time.
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When I started submitting my votes for Pitchfork and Stereogum's Best of 2024 staff lists in October and November, I noticed that most of my top picks were, for lack of a better phrase, doing a lot. Some were popular enough with my fellow critics to land on the consensus lists, but many others were not. As my selections span wide varieties of styles and levels of popularity, I can't pretend that my 2024 taste is indicative of the type of pervasive—but genre-confined—trend that Reynolds identified in 2011.
For once, I found a common thread in what I like. It's not that everything I favor from this year, or from any other year for that matter, is even tangentially maximal, but I illuminated an overarching personal preference. If I'm already predisposed to liking an artist, I tend to gravitate towards their most ambitious, unwieldy, epic, and/or gratuitous work.
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It all started with Infant Island's Obsidian Wreath, the first album I reviewed this year. In their seven-year lifespan, this Virginia screamo band have received an impressive amount of positive press for any upstart heavy band in this day and age, but none of their previous material ever quite connected with me. They were brittle and icy, whereas the screamo I usually gravitate towards is more dramatic and melodic. I got an advance stream of Obsidian Wreath last December, a time of year when I'm so starved for new music that I'd throw on an album by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir if it showed up in my inbox, and it blew my mind.
Obsidian Wreath is—if you'll forgive my use of circa-2011 bacon bro Youtuber language—fucking epic. Infant Island lean into the lush sound of modern American black metal bands like Deafheaven and Panopticon, piling on layers of gorgeous noise while retaining screamo's foundational histrionics. It's a sweeping, intricately composed album that has a real arc to it, a bold moon-shot from a band that couldn't have pulled this off without the years they've spent playing together.
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If asked to single out my favorite 2024 album at gunpoint, it shouldn't surprise you that I'd opt for the most byzantine, convoluted one of the lot. Blood Incantation have always been an aggressively nerdy, cosmic-themed death metal band, and unlike Infant Island, they've connected with me since day one. Much to my delight, they outdid themselves by aspiring to proggy dimensions rarely attempted since the '70s and '80s.
Absolute Elsewhere is a full-length consisting of just two songs—a Side A and a Side B. There are synthy, proggy, melodic passages that completely diverge from death metal, but Blood Incantation's brutal DNA still dominates. Normally, when a band this heavy starts leaning into more melodic territory, it spells a pivot away from metal (see: Between The Buried and Me, Opeth, or Dream Theater), but Blood Incantation subtracted nothing while piling on more twists and turns. As with Infant Island, I heard a daring, skillful feat that other bands would be foolhardy to attempt.
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There comes a time in every big-ticket, mainstream rapper's career when they forsake the insular surroundings they've created for themselves and engage with the outside world. It's technically more maximal, but against type, I usually think it sucks. The singular charm that attracted everyone in the first place is rarely scaleable. Chief Keef already did this over a decade ago with his major label debut, Finally Rich, which mercifully preserved his sound, but less mercifully paired him with A-list guests who had no business muddying up his and Young Chop's chemistry.
Since then, Keef has forsaken the maximal, turning inward, honing his own production chops, and getting weirder. I don't think it was entirely up to him—he was essentially exiled from his native Chicago in the mid-2010s—but his ensuing output is what made me a diehard fan. Almighty So 2 is his first release in years that feels like a major play, and it's the rare hulking, ostentatious album by a veteran rapper that lives up to its stature.
Crucially, it's almost entirely self-produced. There's a clear return to the grandiose drill sound that Keef shied away from in his wilderness period, but in handling it himself, he ensures that it's anything but watered down. The production value and songwriting are noticeably more workshopped, but the intricacies never eliminate the slapdash appeal he made his name on. Like Absolute Elsewhere, this was an album that I anticipated so feverishly that I expected disappointment, and against all odds, both pulled off the brash feats they attempted.
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It's not a major stretch to also describe Mount Eerie's last few years as a "wilderness period." After Phil Elverum's wife died in 2016, he left behind his ambitious studio experiments for starker, more diaristic albums. I enjoyed them all on some level, but I began to wonder if he'd ever return to the noisy, atmospheric, tuneful chaos that initially made me a fan. Elverum is consistently self-referential, to the degree that his vast discography feels like an ever-evolving entity, but he's also always seemed hell-bent on not repeating himself.
I never dreamed he'd make something like Night Palace, a sprawling double album that dips into every furrow he's ever explored. There are spoken-word tracks more unadorned than anything on A Crow Looked at Me, the most traditionally "punk rock" songs he's ever made, outré noise pieces, sweet folk songs, intricate multi-part epics, returns to his natural-world musings, and the most bitingly political lyrics of his career. It all hangs together tenuously, but for any diehard, it's a treasure trove. (And if you want to read this diehard's more in-depth thoughts on the album, there's a whole-ass Stereogum review and subsequent newsletter at your disposal).
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The elephant in the room, the most predictable inclusion among my otherwise semi-inaccessible favorites of the year, is Charli XCX's Brat. Even if you love it, the album has been annoying throughout 2024—obviously the "Kamala is BRAT" stuff, but also the cloying rollout. I still would've liked it if I hadn't paid any attention to the past 12 years of Charli's career, but like Phil Elverum and Chief Keef, she's a long-tenured favorite of mine that captured my heart the moment I first heard her.
I view Brat as maximal. It's unabashedly loud and messy—hedonistic at times, but more expansive because of its lack of emotional filter. I'm not sure it's Charli's most musically maximal album, as 2017's Pop 2 stands as a key text in the rise of hyperpop, but in the way it jam-packs hooks while also challenging the listener with its barrage of sounds, tempos, and feelings, it is extraordinarily extra.
Brat's success takes nothing away from its fundamentally batshit DNA. It's wild that this is the Charli album that blew up after so many years of alternating avant-garde moves and almost-pop concessions, even more so because its predecessor, 2022's much tamer Crash, was positioned as the unabashed ploy for mainstream acceptance. However obnoxious the conversation around it has become—mostly thanks to the general public, but spurred in no small part by Charli herself—I still delight in the fact that something this wild blew up in the way it did
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I had already submitted my year-end votes, and even had the first inkling for this essay, when an artist called abriction came across my desk. For about a decade, Stereogum's monthly metal column has been a cherished, constant source of discovery, and in what would sadly come to be the penultimate edition, the crack team of contributors gifted me one last gem.
Columnist Wyatt Marshall compared abriction to Sadness (a solo blackgaze act whose work has dazzled me ever since I discovered it via the same column), and this piqued my interest. abriction definitely sounds indebted to Sadness' post-Deafheaven emo-metal, but otherwise it's unlike anything else I've ever heard.
This isn't hyperpop, but there's no way it would exist without hyperpop. abriction is the solo project of 21-year-old Meredith Salvatori, and on her generally lengthy songs, she skillfully glides between genres in an intricate, almost impossible catchy way. Her February album, Banshee, is goth-y greatness, but the October EP So Far Away In Time... is so stunning that I haven't been able to stop listening to it. The addition of live drumming is huge, but it's the unfathomable, effortless way these songs manage to cram in features of so many genres that continues to amaze me.
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I'll probably share a more concrete, unadorned list of my favorite 2024 albums before the year ends, and you should know that there are plenty of things on there that I couldn't conform to my definition of maximalism, no matter how hard I tried. There have always been, and will always be, forms of musical minimalism that I love. And of course, the majority of music I listen to falls somewhere in the middle of those extreme poles.
But I think I've learned that personal taste is defined by the things you love that might not appeal to your peers, no matter how close or synced-up you may be. There are various people in my life with whom I can bond over one album or another on this list, but I don't know one other person that would accept all of them straight-up. This isn't me being pretentious—my taste isn't really that weird or abrasive. I've just realized that maximalism, while tolerated or even enjoyed by various others, is something I inherently crave. It's been a great year for that.