Paranoid Void is a japanese rock outfit and their debut(?) album "Literary Math" sees the band toying around in a pretty progressive/experimental place. The guitars flip between enormous ethereal, yet distorted echo tones and a twangy jam-band sound. The bass is incredibly present in the mix and is often found riffing right alongside the guitars. I'm no drummer so I have difficulty describing the drums (maybe bombastic?), but they feel like a lot of fun. I've come back to this album A LOT this year and it's the reason I made an exception to allow for albums from the end of 2017 to make this list. Sadly, I don't speak japanese so a lot of the vocal themes are lost on me. But despite the language barrier, I still love this album.

This album is a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea on a bad day. This album is melting snow at the end of winter break. This album is 20% melancholy and 80% cute incarnate. Tranquil synths meet buzzy melodica(?) meet acoustic strings in a short, 11-minute, instrumental package that just makes me feel good inside. Multiple tracks seem to revisit and transform the same musical motifs over and over again. To some this might sound repetitive but I find it really creative and fun. It may be the only way an 11-minute album can work.

Sloth & Turtle's eponymous 2018 record is probably my favorite album in the "instrumental" space that I stumbled across this year. Lots of tippy-tapping, noodly riffs paired with wild effect-chains and acoustic guitars. The closing track is one of my favorites and takes on more of a post-rock slant with a super beachy reverb and marching-band-esque drums.

Cannonball!`s biggest strength is by far its wild jazz instrumentation. Morimoto's background is as a saxophonist and he makes great use of his horn to set dreamy atmospheres (see: Sections) and toot out cacophonous brass tones (see: Picture of a Painting). You'll also find lots of fun drum bits, bright piano, and strange synth tones such as the bloopy foundation of the title track, "Cannonball!." Vocally, Morimoto has a soft, monotonous vibe that meshes well with his vocal delivery and occasionally touches on something that sounds mildly annoyed (see: This is Not). I had the pleasure of seeing Sen Morimoto perform live this year and it was a blast. The drumming was insane, the saxophone was powerful, and the tone was inviting.

"Our Place" is absolutely the album I most respect from 2018. I wish I had a better word than "experimental" to describe it. It's beautiful. It fuses art rock, folk, and spacey psychedelic (psy-fi?) music into a narrative of existential fear and acceptance framed by the death of of a loved one. The heart and soul of this album is the dynamism that drives all 34 minutes of it. The intensity and composition of the music drastically shifts and changes from moment to moment. Pounding drums give way to whirring strings. Whirring strings give way to squealing synths. Vocal delivery softens and explodes, not at random, but exactly when it should. Some tracks like "Waiting Room" have more straightforward composition. Others like "Bless the Decomposers" could practically rub elbows with `musique concrete` tunes. Best of all, despite all of this shifting and changing and transforming, the album feels cohesive; it makes sense from start to end.

Frankly, I don't know what Iglooghost or this split EP is. It's chaotic and quick with instrumentation that sounds like every sound ever sampled is being thrown at you all at once. Everything about it feels intentionally difficult to parse including its visual presentation which features mysterious gumball-machine-figures with dunce caps and glossy marble exteriors. That being said, I think the confusing presentation may be one of my favorite aspects of the music. I love the character art, the black and white design of the split EPs, and the visual world building around the music. Maybe at some very very very far removed level it reminds me of my first, notably confused-yet-intrigued experience with The Chariot and their album "One Wing." Everyday is certainly not an "Iglooghost day", but there certainly are some and when they happen there is nothing more satisfying than this special combination of crystalline synths, robotronic drums, distorted woodwinds, conlang babel, and lore Googling.

Delta Sleep's "Ghost City" is an album that knows where to draw the line between being "Mathy" and being palatable. Rhythmically, the album adopts a lot of the jerky,rapid-start-stop patterns that I love without sacrificing memorable hooks or catchy motifs in their melodies. There are a lot of familiar math-rock-y timbres and tones on this album: bright guitars, indie-rock vocals, and sharp drums. Narratively the album touches upon themes of "nature vs machine" that I find a bit goofy and cliche, but the themes are sonically well-supported and delivered. I don't think this is an album that will convince anyone to like math rock if they don't already, but it might convince them it's not a hopeless contest to write the least presentable music in the holy name of "odd time signatures."

This may not be a full album, but I cannot get enough of this track. It kicks off like some kind goth "Monster Mash" remix and before you know it the guitars swell to this beautiful ringing chorus. Bolm's vocal delivery is fairly tempered throughout most of the song which juxtaposes really well against the aggressive closing lines of the chorus.

I've kept up with Joji's music since I stumbled upon "rain on me" a year and a half ago. The moody piano and tired mumble-voice appealed to my own sense of self-importance and coincided with a period of my life where I spent hours getting lost in "lofi hip hop" youtube playlists (don't tell anyone but I still do sometimes). Months later, I was disappointed when the debut EP "In Tongues" released and didn't hook me the same way. I haven't figured out why. Maybe I just fell out of love with the somber, romantic style of mumbly RnB. Regardless, I didn't pay much mind when he dropped the single "Yeah Right" and I kept my distance from the summer pop album that he dropped with the rest of his 88rising labelmates. "Ballads 1" has me tuned back in though. The album is not without its problems -- the obnoxious bass on "Attention", the grimey guitar solo on "Wanted U", the test drive/long ride wordplay on "Test Drive" -- but I think the good largely outweighs the bad on the album. The chorus to "Wanted U" and the entirety of "Why Am I Still in LA" could go toe-to-toe with some of my favorite emo tracks. The rising vocal composition on "Slow Dancing in the Dark" pairs beautifully with the synthetic harp and buzzy synth that forms the song's musical foundation. "Can't Get Over You" is short-n-sweet with minimal production that makes every harp pluck, every drum hit, and every clap that much more memorable.

I don't have too much to say about this album. I really like it, but a lot of it feels foreign to me. It's a blend of jazz, progrock, mathrock, and ambient electronic music (ala C418) that either has me bobbing my head or scratching it. It's a very indulgent record with long track-times and wandering arrangements that can make you feel lost if you don't know what to expect. But this indulgence affords them the opportunity to write an album that always has something new to discover. I first found this band through their stellar Audiotree Live performance awhile ago and was pleasantly surprised to find their drummer was Nnamdi Ogbannaya who took a spot in my "favorite albums of 2017" last year with his release "Drool."