dusted

Icewear Vezzo

It’s getting harder, year after year, to sift through the hip hop mud to find something even remotely resembling a gem. The problem is not that rappers nowadays have nothing to say. Ninety percent of all artists in any genre have nothing to say. It’s that to even say nothing and sell it for something requires artistry. And artistry is the last thing hip hop artists care about. With easy availability of any platforms and dirt cheap studios and whatnot, anybody who says something on the mic thinks of himself\herself as an artist. After losing enough time sifting through dozens of the new so called geniuses who can’t even rhyme I found myself returning more and more to the artists I discovered in the past and who continue to put out solid music and are always reliable. None of them (Vezzo, Z-Ro, Boldy, Rio, the late Ka, Cash Kidd and half a dozen of others) had a breakthrough album in 2024, yet they carry artistry on their sleeves proudly.

Keep reading

Adeem the Artist

2024 had its downsides, meaning most of it. It’s hard not to feel pessimistic these days. Between the global political chaos and inexorable personal grind (a function of this stage of life, working, parenting, and the like), little feels straightforward or easy. Maybe that’s why my tastes this year have veered toward more accessible sounds, even if not necessarily simpler or easier ones. I’ve veered somewhat from the more experimental or deep-listening end of my tastes toward more classic songwriting. None of it really worked as a balm, but much of it offered immediate entry to someone amid a hectic, harried season. Music can exist just to be music, but — intended by the listener or not — it also has its uses. For me, much of that experience in 2024 revolved around immersion in worlds most accessible to me.

Keep reading

The Minneapolis Uranium Club

I’m sure there are people who glide through November, then December, then New Year’s day without getting snagged by even a single impulse to summarize. Someone somewhere, who, faced with the rapid approach of 2025, has just shrugged without a second or third intrusive thought about what was and what it meant. Must be nice, I guess. But I can only guess, because I’m at least ten retrospectives in, music-related and otherwise. Let’s stick with the music-related. I’m sorry to report that I haven’t arrived at a grand, unifying theory of my 2024 listening experience. Still, more than in recent years, the albums that stuck with me were immersive, escapist or both. Can’t imagine why.

Keep reading

Rick White and the Sadies

2024 was a great year for adventurous music. Organized sound was the poultice over the festering wound that our socio-political continuum continues to inhabit. The world is literally becoming a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song, and those of us who aren’t members of the billionaire class are on the precipice of another four years of misery. We continue to cling to music as a source of hope.  Here are a few records that raised my spirits this year.

Keep reading

DIIV

The more time I spend listening to new music, the more I realize the extent to which my year-end list is largely dependent on the records I’ve chosen to focus on reviewing for Dusted. It takes time to listen to and digest music to the point where I find myself with something approaching insightful to say, which means I’m pretty discerning when it comes to choosing albums to review. There’s only so much time available to listen to new music, so it pays to focus the firehose of continuous new releases into a manageable stream. All of the following have necessitated repeat listens, not only in order to get my head around them, but also to get my head into them, to lose myself in their world. There’s been a hell of a lot of great music released this year; these are the records I kept returning to.

Keep reading

Los Campesinos by Martyna Bannister

At this point, my fondest wish for these year-end essays is that some day I’ll get to write one that starts by noting we just had a year where it didn’t feel like everything got worse. But 2024 is not that year, and 2025 already isn’t looking good either (up here in Canada we’re looking down the barrel of an election likely to give us our worst Prime Minister in some time, and that is a low bar to limbo under). And yet we keep making art in the face (sometimes directly, defiantly in the face) of all that. Even recent confirmation that Spotify is worse for music than you might have thought simply will not stop the human impulses to create and connect.

Keep reading

2024 was an overwhelming year in almost every sense, but the subject here at Dusted is music, and music was a phenomenon that was overwhelming in a good way. I fell in love with brand new albums I will listen to for the rest of my life, discovered decades old albums that were like missing pieces of myself, and I didn’t get to albums I might fall in love with ten years from now. My band released eight of our own albums to varying degrees of notice. I did a brief tour, something I had not done for over a decade, and we played more shows than we ever have in a year.

Keep reading

Ben Chasny came to VT in 2024, go figure.

Things have been feeling very end of the world for a few years now, and 2024 (especially from November on) only intensified my sense of doom. It’ll get worse, too, in 2025. The vilest, stupidest people on earth are in change, and oh boy, do they have a lot of ideas, all of them bad.

But you lived through last year, too, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to experience whatever hell 2025 brings. It’s scary shit, but also deeply tedious, so let’s talk about music instead.

Because music came through in a big way this year. There was so much of it, and so much that was great.

Keep reading

And with that, Dusted is on break for the rest of the year. We will be back on January 2, 2025 with our reflections on the music of 2024 (and other things). Thanks as always for reading, and happy holidays to your and yours! We’ll see you next week.