1) Japanese Breakfast, “Jubilee” … and more / 2021 is Michelle Zauner’s year. The Japanese Breakfast mastermind has made one of the year’s great rock records and, with “Crying in H Mart,” released one of its most exquisite, wrenching memoirs. Whether crafting considered prose about cuisine, culture clashes and the ties that bind a family or swirling, textured sonics, everything she does is humane and heartening.
2) Black Midi, “Cavalcade” / This buzzed-about album is worth all the noise. Think Nick Cave fronting TV on the Radio and upping his non-sequitur quotient. One of the greatest things about “Cavalcade” is its closing seconds, how an album’s worth of chaos ends with calm.
3) 81355, “This Time I’ll Be of Use” / Pronounced “bless” (read it again), this Indianapolis collective crafted one of the most vibrant, lived-in hip-hop albums of the year. So fluid and united.
4) Jenny Offill, “Weather” / This little novel did a number on me. Structured as a series of short scenes and monologues, Offill grounds us in This American Moment as we follow the voice of Lizzie, a university librarian who’s facing the end of the world as she knows it (and feels far from fine). The stream-of-consciousness form might put off some readers, but it rang true and resonated in a moment when we’re thinking about everything all the time.
5) I.S. Jones, “Sister, Stretch My Hands” for Ex/Post / A remarkable opening statement (“After you died, / the sky reached down / in endless bouquets of rain / or laughter. / I don’t know the difference anymore.”) sets off this poem in two parts, a masterful union of particular phrases and overall mood. Life, love and grief weave their way through these lines in ways that will both stagger and console readers.