Unexpectedly, the VI part of “Top-20 Albums of the Month” became the strongest, even though June is not the best month for releasing music. 11 out of 20 are releases from lesser-known artists. There are a minimal number of pop music albums; instead, this part of digest is primarily saturated with prog, metal, indie, and alternative rock. In the selection process, I listened to 1391 albums. You can find the complete list of albums in a txt file on boosty and patreon.
Emojis showcase popularity, from total unknowns to superstars: [🌌🌑🌙☄️✨🌟]
20. SHAED - Spinning Out
🇺🇸 US, District of Columbia / June 7 / 0,830 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
indie pop / electronic
SHAED featured in our digest back in 2021 with their rather intriguing album “High Dive”. Now, three years later, they’re back with their third studio album “Spinning Out”. Sticking to their down-to-earth and uncomplicated indie-pop sound, they continue to charm listeners. SHAED's journey began with their debut in 2016. The trio released EP and singles for two more years until their breakout single “Trampoline” hit it big, amassing 900 million streams on Spotify. Riding that wave, they recorded their first album, “Melt”, which turned out to be one of the most noteworthy albums of 2018. Their unique blend of indie-pop and electronic music created an almost cinematic volume and depth, setting them apart with a sound reminiscent of musical friends Ruelle and Fleurie. However, SHAED chose not to stick to this signature sound, opting instead to move towards a simplified indie-pop style. This new direction is still good music, but the band's original sound might have earned them higher rankings.
19. VENUES - Transience
🇩🇪 Germany / March 29 / 0,834 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
post-hardcore / alternative metal
A belated March album - sometimes due to a promotion error, an album can go so unnoticed that it doesn’t even get mentioned on the aggregators where I track releases. Venues, a band from Stuttgart, were in our digest back in 2021, but I don’t recall if their album made it to the lists or perhaps only as a bonus. It sounded quite typical of alternative metal with the standard “female for clean vocals, male for screams” formula. In their new album “Transience”, this aspect hasn’t changed, but the sound has become much more harmonious. The songs no longer feel predictable; you can sense the thought and artistic vision behind them. The choruses are catchier and more memorable, and the riffs are heavier and more groovy. The band is evolving from an unremarkable group among thousands to one with its own identity, that's great.
18. The Warning - Keep Me Fed
🇲🇽 Mexico / June 28 / 0,835 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative rock / hard rock
“Keep Me Fed” is the fourth album in the career of the Villarreal Vélez sisters trio, each of whom fell in love with their instrument as a child, giving their parents the unique bragging right of “raising an entire band”. The sisters gained early fame through their covers on YouTube, but their original music remained unnoticed for a long time. From the pop-rock sound of their first album, they gradually moved towards a heavier style, finally finding their sound akin to Royal Blood on “Keep Me Fed”. This album marked their debut on the charts, even securing the number one spot on the UK rock albums chart for a week, proving that their hard work has paid off.
17. Frances Forever - Lockjaw
🇺🇸 US, Massachusetts / June 28 / 0,844 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music
bedroom pop / alternative pop
The debut album from TikTok star Frances Forever, who gained fame with the unpretentious song “space girl”, which went viral in 2020. After several singles and EPs, they developed a more refined taste for styling their compositions, allowing them to create a cohesive bedroom pop album, at times even approaching indie rock and shoegaze sounds. “Lockjaw” is a rare case where the second half blooms and holds more interest than the first - artists usually put the most captivating tracks at the beginning. Frances Forever also practices an interesting idea where each concert on their tour has a themed dress code for the audience. I’m not sure if they came up with this idea or adapted it, but it's brilliant nonetheless.
16. Evergrey - Theories Of Emptiness
🇸🇪 Sweden / June 7 / 0,848 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
power metal / progressive metal
Evergrey is a band with a 26-year history, often flying under the radar as a go-to band for metal fans who’ve already explored the big names but still crave more from the genre. It doesn't matter if it's power metal or progressive; Evergrey represents the tier-2 scene in both. Despite their veteran status, the band tries to incorporate elements of modern sound to avoid being associated with overly old-school music. Songs like “To Become Someone Else” or “We Are The North” undoubtedly sound like contemporary metal. However, the influence of classic 2000s power metal is still present, as seen in the opening tracks “Falling From The Sun” and “Misfortune”. The second is much more interesting, while the lead single “Falling From The Sun” feels too worn-out and clichéd.
15. Alkera - Zamanın Ötesine
🇹🇷 Turkey / May 24 / 0,851 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metal
The debut album of the highly underrated band Alkera, that I discovered among the overlooked June releases, pleasantly surprised me as a prog fan. It's even more delightful when our digest features music from unconventional places, adding diversity to the selection. On Spotify, Alkera has fewer than a thousand monthly listeners, which is both unfair and understandable. Releasing progressive music in national languages is at least ambitious, given that fans of the genre are a small, scattered group worldwide. A couple of years ago, the quintet tried releasing music in English, but it had less prog and more ordinary rock, lacking the beautiful moments of arrhythmia and syncopation that saturate their new album “Zamanın Ötesine”.
14. Detroit Hills - Us
🇧🇾 Belarus / June 9 / 0,852 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive rock / alternative rock / post-rock
Moving from one unexpected location to another - only when I started filling out the form for the Top-40, I realized the band is actually from Belarus. Based on their sound, I thought they were from Scandinavia, likely Norway, throughout the blind selection stages. The sound of Detroit Hills feels like A-ha had decided to dive into progressive rock after their 1993 album “Memorial Beach” and added some cool modern riffs with hybrid picking in the style of Tim Henson, whose influence is particularly noticeable in the song “A Star to Guide”. The band debuted with an instrumental EP in 2013, released an album in 2015, and then found their voice on the 2019 EP. Since then, they’ve spent four years working on their album “Us”, which consists of nine excellent tracks, captivating with their meticulousness and attention to detail.
13. Grace Pettis - Down To The Letter
🇺🇸 US, Texas / Alabama / June 14 / 0,856 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
folk / country / americana / soul
Recording an album as a form of emotional recovery after a divorce has become somewhat of a trope for female artists. Every month, there’s a new, decent album born from the energy of a finished marriage. And this source seems endless, as most relationships eventually end that way. We were looking for Perpetuum Mobile in the wrong place all this time. Although Grace Pettis is releasing her third album, she is still an artist finding her style. Three years ago, her song “Landon”, co-written with the legendary '90s folk-rock duo Indigo Girls, achieved moderate success. While figuring out her artistic direction, Grace produces a broad spectrum of songs. Her album “Down To The Letter” is clearly divided into two halves. The first half consists of songs that any Midwest radio station would happily play, though they are rather superficial (except for “Horses”, which stands out for its tenderness and daintiness). The second half is filled with more artistically free material, making it a pleasure to listen to, especially the trio “The Better And The Worst”, “Vivian”, and “Year of Losing Things”.
12. Chelsea King - I'll Meet You in Dreams
🇺🇸 US, Tennessee / May 24 / 0,858 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
indie rock / alternative rock / pop rock
The musical world Chelsea King paints on her album “I'll Meet You in Dreams” is reminiscent of mainstream pop and rock from the late '70s, right before analog synthesizers and samplers flooded popular music, creating the aura associated with the '80s. Chelsea loves vintage, but reimagined with live instruments. Her retro nostalgia extends beyond music; she also collects old furniture, which can be seen in her music videos. An even more intriguing aspect of her biography is her work on Songfinch, a website where users can purchase custom songs for special occasions or heartfelt messages. Clients provide the text and general framework of the song they want, and the musician completes the freelance order, composing and recording a professional, personalized song for a select audience. This job is a fascinating way for Chelsea King to gain experience.
11. Hippotraktor - Stasis
🇧🇪 Belgium / June 7 / 0,860 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metal / post-metal
It's rare to come across such raw, rough, untamed, and aggressive metal albums that exude primal energy and unstoppable sonic power. Even genre-wise, describing the album “Stasis” is challenging because it kaleidoscopically fragments various metal subgenres throughout the songs, making you catch flashes of Gojira, Tesseract, Mastodon, Lorna Shore, or Meshuggah. The recipe for their particularly fierce sound lies in regularly releasing tension by inserting melodic, reflective, and elegiac episodes, creating contrasts that allow them to return to aggressive fragments swiftly, like a cyclone. Originally conceived as an instrumental trio, the project accidentally expanded to a quintet, successfully adding the magnificent vocalist Stefan de Graef from Psychonaut. Today, they deliver one of the best metal albums of 2024.
10. AURORA - What Happened To The Heart?
🇳🇴 Norway / June 7 / 0,861 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
indie pop / folktronica
Modern people have so long identified themselves with their brains, making it hard to remember a time when perception was any different. Only the linguistic environment still preserves fragments of old idioms and expressions, where people were defined by their hearts. In the framework of transhumanism, a person is their brain, and everything else can be replaced. How did we subtly abandon a huge part of the philosophy and culture of irrationalism and sensualism, crudely narrowing the boundaries of sensual and creative understanding of this world, even though the realm of art was never meant to follow the methodology of scientific life? How did we end up in a world where Karl Popper overshadowed Søren Kierkegaard? These are the questions Aurora Aksnes tackles on her fourth studio album, where she explores this theme from sixteen different angles over the course of an hour.
09. Julie Christmas - Ridiculous and Full of Blood
🇺🇸 US, New York / June 14 / 0,862 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
sludge metal / noise / post-metal
Julie Christmas, an extreme vocalist from the 2000s, was actively involved in numerous projects, most of which have ceased to exist. Her initial band, Made Out of Babies, was followed by supergroups Battle of Mice and Spylacopa. These projects are now rarely listened to, especially Spylacopa, which has only 400-ish monthly listeners on Spotify. Even the involvement of Greg Puciato from The Dillinger Escape Plan hasn't helped, despite their album “Parallels” being quite enjoyable and undeserving of oblivion. In 2010, Julie released her debut solo album, after which she largely went inactive, with only a few interruptions, including “Parallels” and the collaborative album “Mariner” with Cult of Luna in 2015-2016. It's unclear whether anyone anticipated her second solo album 14 years later, but it makes a striking impression with its madness, chaos, cacophony, and the wild energy Julie infuses into her vocals. “Mariner” was the pinnacle of her career, giving her the most recognition. In “Ridiculous and Full of Blood”, you can feel her desire not only to replicate past success but also to carry forward the stylistic legacy of that album.
08. Jess Cornelius - CARE/TAKING
🇺🇸 US, California / 🇳🇿 New Zealand / 🇦🇺 Australia / June 14 / 0,864 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
indie rock
I have a particular fondness for composers who began their careers as adults with fully formed personalities. I often learn about this much later, when I delve into their biographies and start to sense a distant commonality among them, though I can't quite pinpoint what exactly connects them. Jess Cornelius moved from New Zealand to Australia in her twenties and, at 27, formed the indie rock band Teeth & Tongue, based in Melbourne. It's now hard to gauge how successful the band was; on one hand, there is a fairly extensive article about them on Wikipedia, but on the other hand, their Spotify statistics are not very high. Nonetheless, Teeth & Tongue opened for many major bands visiting Australia, which was the peak of their growth. In 2017, Jess ended the project, moved to California, and began releasing solo albums under her own name in her forties. The sound of her new record, “CARETAKING”, is very appealing with its raw, unpolished quality, deviation from production, mixing and mastering standards - this is what indie music should be, operating outside the control of major labels.
07. Rendezvous Point - Dream Chaser
🇳🇴 Norway / June 21 / 0,871 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metal / progressive rock
From their debut album, Rendezvous Point has established themselves as a band that mirrors everything done by Leprous. They diligently follow the stylistic twists and turns of their leader, implementing similar elements into their music. At one point, they even lured in Baard Kolstad as their drummer, one of the most talented young drummers in the world. His only condition for joining was that he be allowed to perform naked, quite the elegant and concise rider. Despite their cloning tendencies, Rendezvous Point creates quality music and could regularly satisfy the hunger for new Leprous tracks in the gaps between their albums. However, Rendezvous Point hasn't quite matched Leprous' work pace; in 10 years, Rendezvous Point has released 3 albums, whereas Leprous has released 5.
06. greek - ACCELERATOR
🇺🇸 US, Virginia / June 28 / 0,878 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative pop / neo-soul / bedroom pop / contemporary r&b
The second studio album from the mysterious 23-year-old artist known as “greek”, originating from the small town of Martinsville in southern Virginia. greek maintains his image as a reclusive studio artist, sharing minimal information about himself and rarely giving interviews. It's quite challenging to find information about him because searches for “greek Virginia” bring up Greek cuisine restaurants, and “greek singer” results in singers from Greece. The album “ACCELERATOR” is an intriguing mix of various styles, with soulful unpredictable harmonies, hip-hop grooves, and retro beats. Another interesting feature of his music is when a theme that's present almost throughout the entire song suddenly disappears, leaving you disoriented as if the composition's coherence is falling apart, then mixes with another idea until the original theme returns just before the end.
05. Azilis - Fleur bleue
🇫🇷 France / May 29 / 0,884 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
jazz / neo-soul / chanson française / mpb
When I come across such flabbergasting songs like “Pensées sinueuses” during the selection process, it's always an emotional rollercoaster. Initially, I'm captivated by its brilliance, but soon, paranoia sets in. I start to worry that my musical knowledge might fall short and that this gem could simply be a cover of an obscure or forgotten jazz standard from a century ago - or perhaps from the golden era of the 1950s-60s when Brazilian music captured the hearts of European and American audiences. So, I dive into an extensive search for any trace of this song, as I strive to feature only fresh material in this digest, ideally free from covers. To my relief, “Pensées sinueuses” is an original creation by Azilis Esnault, written just a few years ago. You can find this mesmerizing track on her debut EP from 2022, and there's also a 2021 concert recording with the LOUCANTA quartet, where she performs it a tone lower than the studio version.
04. Rowan Drake - For all my eyes have seen
🇺🇸 US, New York / June 14 / 0,884 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative pop / indie rock
Rowan Drake, another promising talent from America's heartland, emerges from the quaint town of Ithaca, home to Cornell University. Unlike greek (#06), who is on his second album, Rowan hasn't yet released a full-length record. Instead, he offers us his second mini-album, “For all my eyes have seen”, which runs for 27 minutes. Rowan's musical journey began after a severe injury at 15 dashed his dreams of becoming a professional snowboarder. Music became his solace. In 2022, his debut single gained some attention, followed by a noticeable EP in 2023, filled with youthful love songs encased in typical indie-pop vibes. But fast forward to 2024, and his music has evolved, brimming with complexity and icy tones. His heavily aspirated falsetto carries the spark of genre greats. The second “Why” carries the essence of Jeff Buckley's style, with compositions unfurling over steady acoustic guitar strumming. Meanwhile, “Unsee” is charged with the energy of Thom Yorke.
03. King Hannah - Big Swimmer
🇬🇧 UK, England / May 31 / 0,885 /☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
indie rock / alternative rock / shoegaze / dream pop
King Hannah is a Liverpool-based duo made up of Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle, blend into their music the sonic worlds of Bill Callahan, PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star, and Portishead. After the success of their 2022 album, the band gained enough traction to embark on a successful tour across Europe and the United States, collecting their experiences into musical vignettes that they released on their second album, “Big Swimmer”. The first two tracks create the misleading impression of a spoken-word album. The unhurried “Big Swimmer” features Hannah evading any concrete statements with vague and elusive lyrics for a full five minutes. Following that is the playful and self-ironic “New York, Let’s Do Nothing”, featuring an interview scene where the singer gleefully confesses her love for wasting time and messing around when she finds herself in New York. Just when it seems the entire album might follow this semi-serious meta-ironic tone, the third track, “The Mattress”, kicks in with its grunge-infused sound, and Hannah starts to sing more, albeit in her usual lazy style.
02. Hiatus Kaiyote - Love Heart Cheat Code
🇦🇺 Australia / June 28 / 0,892 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
jazz-funk / neo-soul / future soul / blue-eyed soul
It was hard to imagine that Hiatus Kaiyote's return to the stage after a long hiatus would be so triumphant, amassing over a million monthly listeners and solidifying their status as one of the genre's standout acts. The break wasn't due to burnout but more to address Nai Palm's health issues. But in 2021, the band made a splendid comeback with “Mood Valiant”, featuring catchy melodies interspersed with unexpected harmonic twists and top-notch technical performing at every level. Recently, I stumbled upon a bass cover of “Chivalry is not Dead” on YouTube, making me ponder if I could ever reach that level of bass guitar proficiency. I'm thrilled that Hiatus Kaiyote didn't make us wait too long and have entered a cycle of regular releases, dropping their fourth album, “Love Heart Cheat Code”. The album's title has a distinctly gamer vibe, instantly recalling their second album, “Choose Your Weapon”. The album is magnificent, though it feels a bit shorter than its predecessor, especially as it wraps up not with an original song but with a revisionist cover of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit”, one of the most famous Phrygian-mode songs. Hiatus Kaiyote's reinterpretation is so radical that they even replaced the iconic bass riff.
01. Storefront Church - Ink & Oil
🇺🇸 US, California / June 28 / 0,911 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
art rock / chamber pop / alternative rock / indie rock / baroque pop / shoegaze
The album “Ink & Oil” presents an impossible task when it comes to selecting a song for a preview. Ideally, one would choose the most encapsulating track, or at least the very best one. However, this is simply not feasible. The album is so diverse that there isn't a single song that can represent it entirely, and the number of fantastic tracks makes it pointless to try and pick the best one. The artist released two music videos: the noisy avant-garde “Coal”, which intermittently derails into the melody of a Christmas waltz, complete with a frenzied declamation at the end; and the Radiohead-esque, inert, and apathetic “Divine Distraction”, which is the polar opposite of “Coal”. In this state of uncertainty, the only option is to leave it to the gateway song that greets the listener, guiding them through an hour-long journey of spellbinding soundscapes.
Thank you for reading my digest. If you enjoy my work, you can support me with any level of paid subscription on patreon. This greatly helps in releasing future parts. Also, the bonus 21-40 places for the VI part turned out to be really cool, featuring even more great music.
