Jen Cloher – I Am the River, the River Is Me
Key track: Mana Takatāpui
Jen Cloher set a high bar after their two previous albums – 2013’s In Blood Memory and 2017’s self-titled masterpiece – were both shortlisted for the Australian Music prize. With a new band and a richly textured new sound, I Am the River, the River Is Me also made this year’s shortlist, and it might just be the best album of the three. Coming out as non-binary and embracing their matrilineal Māori heritage, Cloher is as warm and generous as ever but behind this proud exploration of personal identity and post-colonialism is a universal expression of common humanity. – Andrew Stafford
Kylie Minogue – Tension
Key track: Padam Padam
It’s hard to think of a comeback in music as sterling as Kylie’s, though the timeless quality of so many of her hits means she’s rarely ever felt far away.
Her 2020 album, Disco, was a joyous party starter and a prelude to Tension, which seemed even more determined to keep everyone on the dancefloor. The titular track has a cracking piano riff and lyrics made for shouting with your friends (“cool like sorbet-bet-bet”) and Hold on to Now is the album’s euphoric sleeper hit, but it was Padam Padam that reminded the world why Kylie is Australia’s queen of pop. – Sian Cain
Genesis Owusu – Struggler
Key track: Stay Blessed
You could say Struggler was a sonic departure for Genesis Owusu but then again, Kofi Owusu-Ansah has never really coloured between the lines when it comes to genre. Where his debut moved between bright hip-hop, neo-soul and pop, his follow-up is harder-edged but no more classifiable. This grand, ambitious album – loosely about the struggle to survive in an inhospitable world – is electric, volleying hit after utterly unique hit. Who else could go from spiky post-punk to a Die Antwoord sample to a UK garage bassline in the space of a few songs and make it this much fun? – Katie Cunningham
Troye Sivan – Something to Give Each Other
Key track: Got Me Started
Sivan’s ascendance to the rarefied elite of pop culture should be studied: first, that house tour; then a lauded role in a widely derided TV series; followed by a string of singles which inoculated the faintest streak of gaudiness – a locker room chant, a Bag Raiders sample – into otherwise tasteful paeans to sweat and seduction.
The bulk of Something to Give Each Other is pleasantly subdued, melting from the dancefloor mania of its singles into intercontinental yearning (What’s the Time Where You Are?), self-effacing obsession (Still Got It) and a lament to love lost (Can’t Go Back, Baby) featuring one of this year’s buzziest interpolations – of folk singer Jessica Pratt. It may be aggressively chic but when the furniture is this nice, who’s complaining? – Michael Sun
Angie McMahon – Light, Dark, Light Again
Key track: Saturn Returning
The Melbourne singer-songwriter’s astonishing second album charts her attempt to extinguish the self-doubt and perfectionist tendencies that have long paralysed her. Ironically, while trying to let go of perfectionism, McMahon has created an album that is unequivocally flawless. With echoes of Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Florence Welch and Bruce Springsteen, every song is an assured, life-affirming, stadium-ready masterpiece that cracks you wide open with its expansiveness and vulnerability. Mantra-style lyrics such as “I am already enough” and “It’s OK, make mistakes!” could have sounded trite, but from McMahon they become statements of liberation and exaltation. – Janine Israel
RVG – Brain Worms
Key track: Squid
RVG has long been one of Australia’s finest underground bands and they’re finally getting their flowers, having won the Australian Music prize for their excellent third album. On Brain Worms, the post-punk band blends their signature jangle with synth and electronic elements for the first time. Singer and songwriter Romy Vager’s frank, raw lyricism and shattering vocals are on form here, and her visions of life are sometimes bleak, sometimes sad, sometimes funny but always compelling. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Corin – Lux Aeterna
Key track: Trānsīre
Moody and ominous, Corin Ileto’s sophomore album Lux Aeterna is concept electronica, exploring sound as sentient. Its 10 tracks resemble an alien making its first steps in an unpredictable rhythm.
Bursts of energy – the industrial trance of Vīsiōnem, the hard walls of Extasis – break forth from a strange, engrossing sci-fi soundscape of distorted cyberpunk takes on Gregorian chants (Sunta) and unnerving, skittering beats (Trānsīre). A casual listen isn’t possible: Lux Aeterna is eclipsing, intense world-building from one of Australia’s most fascinating producers. – Jared Richards
Sarah Mary Chadwick – Messages to God
Key track: Shitty Town
Sarah Mary Chadwick’s Messages to God is acutely summed up by the wonderful watercolour work (painted by the musician) that serves as the album art: a floating piano, giant hands plonking on the keys and ghoulish, open-mouthed figures jostling for space. The scorched Melbourne singer outdoes herself on this latest record, where her trembling contralto narrates various hauntings (the suicidal impulses of friends, her wretched upbringing) and an endless search for grace. Mordant humour and the mundane beauty swirl together, accompanied by touches of flute and slide guitar. – Isabella Trimboli
Tkay Maidza – Sweet Justice
Key track: Silent Assassin
Eclectic is the word to describe Tkay Maidza’s second album, which crosses genres with ease. The Zimbabwe-born, Australia-raised and Los Angeles-based rapper flirts with styles and sounds, both paying homage to the past (sampling Skee-Lo’s I Wish on one track and embodying the spirit of Missy Elliott throughout the album) while looking forward into the future. Sweet Justice calls itself a breakup record, but not in the typical sense – rather than farewelling romance, it’s about saying goodbye to an old way of life. There’s a world of possibility here. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Robert Forster – The Candle and the Flame
Key track: Tender Years
When Robert Forster’s wife of more than 30 years, Karin Bäumler, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the former Go-Between turned his songwriting inward – and produced an album that resonated far more widely. With musical contributions from Bäumler and the couple’s two children Louis (ex-Goon Sax) and Loretta, The Candle and the Flame is both a family affair and a celebration of commitment, sobriety and fidelity. It won Forster some of the best reviews of his career, with the highest praise coming from his former partner, Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison, who declared Tender Years the best love song he’s ever written. – Andrew Stafford
Cub Sport – Jesus at the Gay Bar
Key track: Always Got the Love
Jesus at the Gay Bar marks a sonic reining-in for Brisbane’s Cub Sport, trading in the psychedelic-tinged guitars of their fourth album, Like Nirvana, for tight, late-night club-pop while still chasing ecclesiastical highs. The result is an album that doesn’t need to spell out its ideas about self-acceptance as a religious experience: you can feel it out on the dancefloor. Lead singer Tim Nelson’s angelic register soars above breakbeats (High for the Summer), hazy synths (Yaya) and nu-disco (Songs About It). – Jared Richards
Bodies – All the Songs I Know About Fire
Key track: Song for Blessing
All The Songs I Know About Fire, the debut album by Melbourne experimental collective Bodies, feels almost discomfortingly futuristic. Led by songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Daniel Ward, the band make herky-jerky post-punk that’s post-apocalyptic in tone, all quivering vocals and arid, weathered production. Song for Blessing is a mournful highlight that sounds like classic 80s Australian indie as recreated by aliens; Song for Dancing, sung by Aldo Thomas, captures the menacingly sexy synth-funk atmosphere of classic no-wave music. Ward’s lyrics can be esoteric or excruciatingly raw but their vocals are always forceful and searching, making for an album that rarely sounds like anything less than an exorcism. – Shaad D’Souza
Teether and Kuya Neil – Stressor
Key track: Reno
Naarm’s underground rap duo Teether and Kuya Neil’s album sounds like running the wrong way up a shopping mall escalator – an anarchic joyride through late-stage capitalism’s gamified gauntlet.
“If we had cash we could get it all built,” Teether drolly intones on the hook of Reno. On Stressor he invokes Zorro’s folk heroics and conjures feverish scenes – including an arson attack at a Porsche dealership. Kuya Neil’s production is an otherworldly, paranoid collection of bass, koto strings and breakbeats. It’s a powder keg of bangers primed to shake the rat race to its core. – Nick Buckley
Daine – Shapeless
Key track: Doom
It makes sense that Filipino Australian musician Daine has counted Charli XCX as a mentor since their teens; both are pop provocateurs probing the limits of the genre, stretching its outsized declarations and synthetic production to their natural demise. The breakdown is paramount to Shapeless, a rhizomic pop record brimming with rage and despair – a record whose tracks are often punctuated with guttural emo screeches and whirring industrial riffs. It’s like looking into a shattered mirror: mesmeric and shape-shifting. – Michael Sun
Body Type – Expired Candy
Key track: Weekend
Sydney post-punk quartet Body Type is a force to reckon with – their songs are sharp, acidic and incredibly well-crafted. Their second album in as many years adds a dollop of sparkling pop to the mix; there’s a greater focus on melody while retaining their signature snark and astute observational spirit. With three songwriters among them, there’s always a sense of mischief, adventure and variety in Body Type’s music. They could go anywhere from here and it would be worth listening to. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Gena Rose Bruce – Deep Is the Way
Key track: Misery and Misfortune
Getting the US lo-fi legend Bill Callahan to duet on the title track was a coup for the Melbourne indie singer. But the pair’s magnificent intertwining of deadpan baritone and dreamy soprano is by no means the only standout on Bruce’s second album – a lockdown-incubated exploration of grief and inner turmoil. Foolishly in Love – the album’s other Callahan collab – taps a Goldfrapp vein; Destroy Myself, meanwhile, strays into grunge territory; while the influence of Julia Jacklin and Mazzy Star pervade such fragile and introspective songs as I’m Not Made to Love Only You. Despite its Morrissey-esque title, the track Misery and Misfortune is pure rapture, as Bruce has “some kind of rebirth in my darkest hour”. – Janine Israel
Lower Plenty – No Poets
Key track: Back to the Foldout
The Melbourne band’s first record in seven years is a collection of insular, beautifully slanted outsider folk. This is an album about the drags of everyday – the banalities, bitterness and grief that trail us, that seem to take forever to dissipate. But it’s all told with an undercurrent of hope and a slight wink. The arrangements here are fascinating and strange, comprised of scrappy guitars, crooked harmonies and the rare flourish of a children’s xylophone or cello. – Isabella Trimboli
