THEEDADROCK.BLOG 2024 Retrospective
2024 was a banner year for alternative music, with a wide spectrum of killer sounds from the underground. Familiar bands pushed themselves in creative new directions with thrilling results, and new artists captivated with impressive efforts that spanned from the turntable to the stage. Check out a sampling of albums that were in heavy rotation this past year at THEEDADROCK.HQ, and pack your headphones with even more exciting tracks on the complete THEEDADROCK.BLOG 2024 Retrospective playlist!
Uncle Acid and the deadbeats - Nell’ ora blu
Uncle Acid and the deadbeats go full giallo on the sweepingly epic Nell’ ora blu and the resulting album is undoubtedly their most stunning achievement to date. A tightly arranged narrative arc that imbues cinematic compositions with intense psychological horror to create a masterwork of progressive artistry that transcends the genre conventions. Nell’ ora blu demands complete attention, and rewards the investment with an experience few bands are talented enough to convincingly deliver.
Get the album here. Follow Uncle Acid and the deadbeats on Instagram.
Fontaines D.C. - Romance
Fontaines D.C. made a daring leap with their fantastic 2024 LP. Romance is a progression, an expansion on the sonic ambition of Skinty Fia that leans hard into the heavier end of Britpop and jagged alt rock with an uncompromising approach to channeling emotions and aggressions into a breathtakingly widescreen commentary on life, love, and loss amidst the unrelenting turbulence of the modern era. The album is bigger in all quantifiable measures than anything Fontaines D.C. has done to date, a massive declaration of intent that ripples and flexes with vivacious muscularity.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Fontaines D.C. on Instagram.
Some Days Are Darker - TV-MA
Some Days Are Darker built upon the gothic foundations of their texturally umbral debut with a sweeping air of expanded theatricality on TV-MA, a tightly focused conceptual narrative that intimately chronicles the rise and fall of romance with the unmitigated grandeur and tragic splendor of cosmic creation itself.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Some Days Are Darker on Instagram.
Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere
Blood Incantation swung for the fences with Absolute Elsewhere, a titanic expression of extradimensional terror and progressive writ large on a cosmic scale. Transmuting the muscular brutality of Mastodon and Sleep with the psychedelic cinematics of Pink Floyd and (the appropriately featured) Tangerine Dream, Blood Incantation have engineered a generational breakthrough for brainy, brawny heavy music that places the band at the forefront of a new sonic movement.
Get the album here. Follow Blood Incantation on Instagram.
JD McPherson - Nite Owls
Nite Owls embraces JD McPherson’s latest evolution from roots rocker to midcentury mod. The production on Nite Owls is sumptuous, intricately layered and brilliantly nuanced in a way that expertly highlights the rich compositions and impeccable talents of McPherson and his players. Like the songwriting, the instrumentation on Nite Owls is complex but approachable, traditional without being held back by convention, and refreshingly playful.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow JD McPherson on Instagram.
Been Stellar - Scream From New York, NY
Been Stellar have developed an unrelentingly massive sound on their exhilarating debut LP, Scream From New York, NY. Firmly entrenched in the slick burliness and open vulnerability of alt rock traditions at their world-dominating 1990s peak, the album is accented with a distinctly angular New York perspective and a swaggering sense of Britpop's cinematic confidence. Pulling all these elements together, Scream From New York, NY has a timeless feeling that captivates immediately, cumulating into a thunderhead of stadium sized intimacy that crackles with an electric vibrance.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Been Stellar on Instagram.
Kate Clover - The Apocalypse Dream
Following up 2022’s underground ripper Bleed Your Heart Out, Los Angeles firebrand Kate Clover returns with The Apocalypse Dream, an unmitigated powerhouse of an album that whips and crackles with electric attitude born from the sunbaked streets and neon-lit back alleys of a city forever on the cusp of total obliteration and embroiled in the upheaval of perpetual rebirth.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Kate Clover on Instagram.
Miranda and The Beat - Can’t Take It
Miranda and the Beat further cements their status as rising stars of the alternative underground with the band’s sophomore LP, Can’t Take It, a blistering collection of scalding rippers and introspective arrangements that explodes like a supernova and folds in upon itself into an bottomless well of inescapable gravity. Tackling headlong the pressures of modern living, Can’t Take It presents a thrilling window into a multifaceted psyche imbued with the strength to overcome the unrelenting onslaught of external forces and anxious internal conflict.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Miranda and The Beat on Instagram.
Castle Rat - Into The Realm
Like a battered cassette tucked into a forgotten box of teenage ephemera along with a velvet pouch of twelve-sided di, a sticky Castlevania NES cartridge, a dogeared dirty magazine, and some dried up leftover weed Castle Rat emerges from the darkness with their debut LP Into The Realm; an atmospheric bruiser that fully embraces the down-tuned stylings of doom metal with a forward-thinking reverence and a knowing theatricality that injects fresh vigor into the medieval miasma.
Read the full review here.
Get the album here. Follow Castle Rat on Instagram.
Faux Real - Faux Ever
Like an electroclash bizzaro-Sparks with a dash Weird Al dadaism, fearless genre benders Faux Real broke out with their extraterrestrial debut LP, Faux Ever, combining the boundless chemical exuberance of rave culture with a dedication to pushing boundaries, topped off with symbiotic choreography unlike anything ever seen. Faux Real’s public access Space Channel 5 is steeped in Y2K aesthetic but so immeasurably ahead of their time that Faux Ever feels like a distorted signal from a wayward satellite beamed across space and time to offer a glimpse of what pop music could look like in a distant future. Absolutely unmissable!
Get the album here. Follow Faux Real on Instagram.