Stereogum just released its list of the 40 best new bands of the year and Iceage and SBTRKT made the cut:
For being teenage warlords on punk-inspired destruction, the kids in Iceage seem pretty nice. But their music, if you’re just going by that, is brash, forceful, loud and obsessively aggressive. It didn’t take long to catch on; after tracks like ‘Broken Bone’ and ‘White Rune’ surfaced, basically everybody and their mother was rushing home to Wikipedia ‘D-beat.’ Former Stereogum writer Brandon Stosuy wrote that “the young Gravity-nodding no-wave-infused post-anarcho-punk crew’s self-titled debut was one of my favorite albums of 2011, a record that bursts through a dozen songs in under 25 minutes, nailing a particular aesthetic I didn’t realize had so much life left in it.” Preach bro! Nothing is wrong in the state of Denmark, dudes.
This South London producer gets press for goofy reasons: He wears a gigantic African-style mask and Drake loves him. That’s cool and all, but he’s on this list for the way his self-titled debut album pushes the international future-shock sounds of dubstep and bass-music toward a slick, breezy form of soul-pop. London is always good at stuff like this, and SBTRKT’s Little Dragon collab ‘Wildfire’ does to dubstep what Neneh Cherry once did to rap or Yazz did to acid-house: It takes a dangerous underground sound and turns it into bright, shiny double-dutch music. Summer afternoon soundtracks depend on stuff like this.
