recommendations
here's a bunch of albums i recommend. you can also check out my music playlist on yt for a ton of individual songs that i've listened to a million times (newest songs are at the top, oldest are at the bottom... some of those older songs are embarassing lmao).i'd say my music taste is... diverse? i like edm, ambient, long, short, slow, fast, new, old (like.. i think 1940s is the oldest i listen to, with billie holiday, neil sedaka, sofia vembo), acoustic, electronic, experimental, rock, screamo, skramz, orchestral, breakcore, jungle, dnb, rap, chiptune, brazillian funk, jersey club, harsh noise, hardstyle, english, german, portuguese, french, japanese, spanish, etc. etc. etc. so i'd say you can safely expect anything in this list. this is all to say, if you give an album here a shot and you don't like it, i hope it doesn't stray you away from the rest of the list.
this list is sorted alphabetically, but if i knew how, i'd probably want this order randomized.
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dj shadow
endtroducing.....
album release date: 96.09.16 date of writing: 26.02.15
i can't remember when or where i first heard this album, it must've been like 10+ years ago at least. but something about the melodies and sounds in this album make me think i've known it for my entire life, which.. it did come out in 1996 (7 years before i was born), so i guess i could have heard it at least once when growing up, then later rediscovered it in late middle school / early high school, which would explain that feeling. but i like to think the melodies and rythms in this album are so solid and fundamental that they just give off the vibe that i have heard them my whole life.
i often find myself coming back to this album and getting sucked into it's foundational chopped drum samples, everything is so smooth and every decision makes sense, and... i don't want to say this album is predictable, but i feel like you almost know what's coming next when listening to a given song. there aren't major surprises in this album which i think is a positive (maybe that's just cause i've listened to this album a billion times tho and i just can't remember how it was when i first listened to it). the bottom line to me is that everything in this album is just solid, i don't know how else to describe it. i think because of this album sounding so fundamentally solid and smooth to me, i find it very easy to focus on something when listening to it, so i have often put this album on when working and stuff.
i love this album. it's hard to pick a favorite track, but if i had to pick one it'd maybe be mutual slump? if you're looking for smooth chopped drums with solid bass and sonically "dark" sounding hand-crate-dug samples and melodies, you should give this album a listen!
glass beach
the first glass beach album
album release date: 19.05.18 date of writing: 26.02.15
this is required listening for anyone and everyone. this punk / emo / pop album is gayyyyyyy. i've been listening to this album for years before realizing myself (in november 2025) that i'm trans! which i've always felt i've related heavily to this album's themes and feelings, and i thought it was just cause i'm bi? but then relatively recently i realized that wasn't entirely the case, and i felt like i grew just a *little* closer to this album after realizing i'm trans, which is... unsurprising. this album is blatantly *all* about being gay and trans, with lyrics directly mentioning hrt: "with spiro and estro from vanuatu" and lyrics like "wanna say i think it's so gay that we really both feel the same way". it *literally* is all about being gay and trans and couldn't be more blunt in it's writing.
this album is catchy, it's production is very tight. this album is of course made by gay people for gay people, but i think anyone and everyone can find something they love in this album, if it is just it's cute melodies or it's expressions of intense love for friends and loved ones.
my favorite track is probably cold weather?? but it could depend on the day. classic j dies is amazing.. bedroom community, glass beach, yoshi's island, orchids, are all super super super super super good. tracks like soft!!!! and dallas are incredibly underrated. this album is just so good...
greenhouse
arc,regn
album release date: 23.09.30 date of writing: 26.02.15
this electronic / glitchy / experimental / edm? / idm? album is absolutely my favorite album of all time. i genuinely think i have listened to this album hundreds of times. after 2.5 years of listening to this album over and over, every single track continues to be endlessly surprising and dense and perfectly arranged and mixed and mastered. i know it's kind of cliche or whatever to say you get "chills" from comsuming a body of work, but i do genuinely continue to get chills when listening to and immersing myself in some songs from this album, like theriocide, overview, mirabilis, 露華, μυρίος, flaw, etc.
arc,regn is an ocean of insanely clean and unique production. it feels like the clumination of everything i've known and loved about em's work throughout the years i've been listening to thier music. i have cried to this album.
we get a little glimpse into the creation process of some of these tracks with this video posted by em that shows a few early sketches and unfinished tracks, as well as some techniques em used to make some of the sounds used on the album (i'd of course recommend listening to the album before watching this video). some of these techniques include: manual insect stridulation by playing short samples at very high frequency. replacing all sound effects in doom with pre-made samples, then recording some of a playthrough, and then sampling that recording. em also used plogue's chipspeech to get source voice recordings to then use retrieval based voice conversion to completely change the sound of that source voice.
greenhouse sounds completely brand new, like nothing i've heard before, and that paragraph above is why. i don't really know many artists that think or know of comparably weird and novel ways to generate interesting audio by any means necessary. greenhouse, and em in general, is a bottomless well of inspiration. every track (not only in this album but just out of greenhouse's entire discography) is perfect, i cannot pick a favorite.
i hope my descriptions of the album make it sound intriguing cause this album genuinely sounds unreal to me, still. after listening to it so many times over the past few years. hopefully you feel the same way when listening to it.
gregory and the hawk
moenie and kitchi
album release date: 08.10.13 date of writing: 26.03.29
similar to my experience with endtroducing by dj shadow, i can't remember when i first heard this album, but it came out in 2008 and i've listened to it occasionally pretty much as long as i can remember. so this album's melodies and lyrics and everything about it is so incredibly embedded in the cracks and crevices of my brain, and i don't think i've really ever found anything that matches this album's sound. Meredith Godreau's cute voice and guitar clashes a lot with the abrasive drums, which makes a really interesting sound, and i like it a lot.
"in order not to worry, you write the words down."
that's kinda all i have to say about this album lol. one of my favorites of all time. simple yet unlike a lot of stuff i've heard. my fav track is maybe harmless? or oats we sow? i dunno, it's all really good.
jordaan mason and the horse museum
divorce lawyers i shaved my head
album release date: 09.06.06 date of writing: 26.02.16
similar to your arms are my cocoon's self-titled, divorce lawyers i shaved my head gives me such an honest display of true emotion of love for friends and loved ones, although it for sure isn't *about* that in the same way i think yaamc's self-titled is (it also isn't skramz / screamo like yaamc's self-titled. divorce lawyers is folk and experimental). divorce lawyers is about being trans and feeling gender dysphoric, and navigating these feelings and finding identity with the help of others. it's kind of brutally honest and outright, and it especially gets in depth with it's expressions of feeling dysphoric about genitalia (mentions it in the bandcamp description even!), so i guess warning for that if you need it.
i can't believe i'm only finding this album recently? i only found it a few days ago and for years i've been listening to and looking for more trans / gay / queer artists, and this album is relatively popular as far as i know? so i'm surprised i'm only finding it now. but yea, this one fits perfectly into my tastes and what i'm looking for. also only about 3 months ago i realized i was trans! so i am very fresh to navigating these new feelings (with the help of friends). all to say, i found this album at the perfect time.
"take the blankets off, show me under your clothes, the tattoos you don't have, but believe me: your body knows."
after listening to this album, if you liked it i recommend listening to the live version at st. george the martyr church, it's really something special. favorite tracks are racehorse: get married, bird's nest, and organs for oceans.
k2
unrealistic project roadmap
album release date: 24.05.11 date of writing: 26.02.22
if you like chiptune / retro osts, stop reading this and LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM RIGHT NOW!! i link to the bandcamp above, but i do recommend listening to the official album stream and visual on youtube here because it shows each track's cover art (and the osc visuals are neat too, especially on spacewalk).
the last time we saw k2 was 9 years before unrealistic project roadmap with tracker's draft, which was "a selection of drafts created for an unrealized concept", so it's a little funny that 9 years later we maybe possibly see that realized concept in the form of unrealistic project roadmap. tracker's draft is amazing, and i do recommend that album as well, but unrealistic project roadmap really does feel like a more realized idea of tracker's draft, and with 9 more years of experience and change, it feels much more polished.
kmoe
k1
album release date: 25.06.06 date of writing: 26.02.22
this is the debut album by canadian hyperpop (and edm? electronic? rock??) artist, kmoe. i've been waiting for this album- or i guess just any new music by kmoe, ever since first hearing his song gloves 4 years ago. and in these months that k1 has finally been out, i've listened to it many many times, and i've been listening to tracks from this album almost every day since it's release. kmoe has an incredible voice which very much shines on this album, and with the album being entirely produced and mixed by kmoe, we get to see kmoe's full breadth of production. and it's incredibly clean, the production on the end of idiot is insane. this album is so incredibly surprising, it's sound is distinct. imo this album is sooo underrated, kmoe deserved wayy more, ppl are sleeping on kmoe.
my favorite track is, bloodbath? carpet? idiot? thousand yard stare? i feel like i've said this on too many of these recommendations but i really can't pick a favorite track...
leroy
grave robbing
album release date: 23.07.21 date of writing: 26.02.16
i've been hooked on leroy (an alias of jane remover) ever since first hearing ricky bobby off dariacore 1, and when first hearing this album on release and i was dyyyying. i wish i could listen to it for the first time again. this album is stupid but it was my favorite of all time for a long long time, and it is very very important to me. i still looooove this album and continue to listen to it front to back over and over when i'm in the mood for loud edm hardstyle glorpshid stupid sound design drops and nostalgia. this is (was?) the final evolution of a genre leroy called "dariacore" that essentially is hard edm with 2010s pop samples, and for some reason this stupid genre continues to grip me and many others. i have cried to this album, just because i love it so much and think it's so well produced.
i joined discord servers to find more ppl who enjoyed this genre and actually went out of my way to interact with new ppl on the internet for basically the first time ever, and these discord servers hosted for-fun music events for not only dariacore, but all genres, which got me to make music for the first time. i participated in all of the events that i could between servers like snare society (rip), pmc, blisscord, etc. this also got me to make music with other ppl for the first time which i think was incredibly valuable.
at some point after the release of grave robbing, snare society, the first dariacore-centered server i had joined and the main server i interacted with ppl in, got deleted. it's two founders said they didn't like taking care of the community any more and i think like 12 hours after that announcement,,, it got deleted. after this i kind of dissolved out of the community as a whole and i slowly lost the burning interest i once had in making music. i'm still confused with the deletion of snare society, it seperated almost 1000 people, it was incredibly abrupt from my point of view, and i have no idea what truly sparked that server getting deleted. before my interest in making music fully dissapated, i later made my own server to host my own music events and it went very very well. the community was small and tight-knit and 4 comps were made before i fully lost interest in making music and decided to archive the server.
this is straying quite a bit from the album i'm recommending, but i just wanted to illustrate why this seemingly silly, strictly for-fun, club shit album is so important to me. it marked the end of something that was really important to me. this album flows really well (every track literally transitions into the next, but each individual track does flow nicely) and it's very punchy and surprising (it's kind of a *thing* in dariacore for it to try really really hard to break expectation and have insane production and sound design). fav tracks are front door entry only, back door exit, pack your bags. but it's all so so good.
old gray
slow burn
album release date: 16.12.09 date of writing: 26.02.22
this year, as of writing this review, old gray's loud, screamo, hardcore album "slow burn" turns 10 years old. slow burn is all about depression. it talks about having friends with depression, talks (mainly) about losing those friends to depression, and it talks about dealing with that grief. slow burn is quick, it has three songs that are shorter than 60 seconds and it has a total runtime of about 20min. but it's incredibly dense, and it's songs either instantly start with screaming and full distorted guitar blaring... or they start very slow and quiet, and build slowly.
"so i left my regrets at the foot of my bed, and i promised when i'm older i wouldn't forget how to cut myself open just to rinse myself clean again."
i like a lot of the songs on this album, the first 4 tracks are absolutely phenomenal. but the 7th track, "like blood from a stone" is definitely my favorite (i recommend listening to that song specifically before reading the rest of this recommendation). i don't know if old gray meant for this to happen in this song, but to me it feels like the writing gets more mature over the track's run. and it fits the theme of the song too, as the character in the story gets more mature after a suicide attempt, and the song is about how the character's writing and art gets more mature after the attempt. i find this very clever, i don't think i've ever listened to or read something where the maturity of the writing changes to support a narrative. also the way the instrumental comes in and builds and builds until it is so loud that you can't even hear the spoken word is very neat.
syzy
weight of the world
album release date: 24.06.27date of writing: 26.03.29
d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d u b s t e p d
your arms are my cocoon
your arms are my cocoon
album release date: 20.09.02 date of writing: 26.02.16
this is the first album released by tyler odom and it's probably the most raw expression of love that i have ever heard. in 2020/2021 it built a foundation for bedroom skramz and screamo for me, but also for the emo scene in general as far as i know. when a yaamc song comes on shuffle i always listen to it twice. it's screamo / skramz, but it's soft, it's gentle, it's warm. all the tracks are witten and recorded in tyler odom's bedroom and car, it is very homemade, and clearly made with love.
"I WANNA FEEL YOUR HEART. PRESSED AGAINST MINE. SO FUCKING HARD. I'M GONNA BREAK MY CHEST. ENTWINE YOUR RIBS IN MINE."
favorite track is metamorphosis, second favorite track is illinois//alberta, but the album is like 15min long how can u pick a favorite. this album is a 2x front-to-back listen every time.