RIOT’s Albums of the Year 2022: 20-11 (Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Gilla Band, Wunderhorse)

The RIOT team count down their long-awaited 2022 Albums of the Year.

20. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever // Endless Rooms

During the world’s longest lockdown (245 days to be precise), Rolling Blackouts CF’s singer and guitarist Tom Russo took to tirelessly walking the streets of Melbourne. This sprawling sensation percolates the band’s third album, Endless Rooms, filling the gaps and articulating the edges of their hallowed jangle-pop sound. Rather than being jammed into existence like previous projects, enforced isolation meant these tracks were built up slowly piece by piece. Layers of maze-like analogue synth, church organ, and glockenspiel slotted together before being infused with lashings of squelchy, overdriven ’90s grunge, and topped with soapbox ponderings on our disconnected existence. Endless Rooms is proof the Aussie lot can do pondering on the prom just as well as beers on the beach. OS

18. Gilla Band // Most Normal

On their unrelenting third album, made with an arcade of pedals and processors, Dublin refuseniks Gilla Band (nee: Girl Band) voyage deeper still into unhinged sonic absolutism. This time around, budget airlines, department stores, and Big Brother boxsets all take a mauling, amid a sonic barrage which occasionally coalesces into pleasing punk-funk but mostly glories in making organs sound like a warehouse full of malfunctioning white goods. It’s a claustrophobic listen, but then again, when are Gilla Band not? Energised by its manic outbursts and gleeful abandoning of familiar structures, the Dubliners continue to garner fresh terrain in a musical landscape pocked with pallid precision and wrung-out algorithms. This is the mob at their raucous best. OS

8. Wunderhorse // Cub

After raging in his teens as the frontman of Dead Pretties, Jacob Slater found himself approaching punk’s well-trodden precipice. Coveting an outlet for the softer sensibilities he’d been suppressing, he founded solo project Wunderhorse and set to work on what would become one of the year’s defining debuts. With scuzzy rock charm and ageless resonance, Cub is the album Slater was always supposed to make. An inquisition on growth, healing and forgiveness, it wrestles with one-sided relationships and precocious mistakes via Slater’s armoury of wistful lyrics and baggy, bricks-and-mortar melodies. A real rock thoroughbred. OS

Link to full feature: https://riotmag.co/riots-albums-of-the-year-2022