And so our first non-metal metal number one in over a decade of me doing this list. This album is special in that it sounds profoundly unique. Its The Fall collaborating with Tony Bennett doing a set of show tunes covers. It's the Divine Comedy busking with Bob Dylan at an underground jazz club. It's the Polyphonic Spree channelling their inner Pink Floyd on a really really really bad day for every single member. Shit, I don't know what it is apart from it being brilliant.

This is an album that confounds everything. It is but it's not. It's there but it isn't. It's black but it's white. In its short duration, it traverses every pinnacle of musical ability but still stays resonantly undefinable. There is a distinctly Jazz like distortion of time signatures and use of polyrhythmic structures, but it is also too jaunty and "Broadway" to be jazz.

 The tracks bled into each creating a continuous 35 minutes of rolling music. The tone and texture continually shifts, switching from dark and doomy to light and breezy within the same song. There is a fundamental playfulness to the whole approach as if the band had the entire history of music at their disposal to create just over half an hour of product. 

There is a distinct irreverence to everything that has come before. Like “Hellfire” is a hard stop year zero, building a new musical reality from the bones of what came before. There is no respect or adherence to the old ways, instead, there is a frantic creative desire to build new structures on the ruins of what came before.

Absolutely key to the brilliance of the album is the vocal delivery, which is shared by all three core members. We are used to difficult music being topped with difficult and challenging vocal styles. Here Gordie Groop croons like a nihilistic lounge singer in some dystopian post-apocalyptic nightclub. The quality, range, and sumptuous nature of the vocals feel simultaneously disarming and completely necessary.

In all, this album is not just superb, it’s ground-breaking. It draws a line under all that came before and reimagines and reconstructs music for the post-Spotify generation. It is distinctly new but builds on the old. It is familiar but also completely alien. It is extraordinary and by a country mile my album of the year.