It’s that time of year again, where everyone is posting their Spotify Wrapped and Album of the Year lists, shining a light not only on their personal listening habits but the overall landscape of stories, styles, tones, and sounds explored throughout 2021. 

This year we saw artists explore subjects that uplifted us, that weren’t afraid to bare their souls, and reminded us just how weird living during a pandemic can be. Within the New England music scene we were graced with an array of music that was dark, angry, vulnerable, melancholic, joyful, and curious. Here is a look back at some of my favorite releases from New England and Boston based artists from this past year;

Future Teens, Deliberately Alive

Future Teens continue to mix the emo music tropes of angst with introspection. Deliberately Alive is a look at personal struggles of anxiety and depression and how they find their way into parts of daily life – from fear of being honest, clinging to memories through rose-colored glasses. Overall the question being explored and Future Teens seek to answer to, ‘which is worse dying young for facing the future?’

I was unaware I needed an emo cover of Cher’s “Believe” until Future Teens gifted it to us as the closing track to this EP. The dual vocals of Amy Hoffman and Daniel Radin change the tone of this track to one of longing, fitting the running themes found throughout these five tracks.

 

Bicycle Inn, THIS TIME AND PLACE IS ALL I’LL EVER KNOW

Bringing their own alternative spin to the melancholic stylings of this new wave of emo by combining it with indie and power pop. With lyric content in line with classic emo songs – mental health, existentialism, love and loss, and the struggle to find their place. Tracks like “Leatherbound” shift between sharp confessions and upbeat power up, while tracks like “In Memory” slow down in tempo and mood allowing a change for the lyrics to take a front-seat.

Fiddlehead, Between the Richness

Between the Richness essentially picks up right where the band’s debut Springtime & Blind left off in terms of subject matter. Except now Pat Flynn is tackling and exploring the paradoxical place where happiness meets sadness, where love meets loss. These songs express the weird emotion that is grief and how it is ever changing and ever present.

Good Sleepy, everysinglelittlebit

This record takes what works in both the styles of midwestern emo and math rock into a sound that feels familiar as they navigate dark and light subject matter, from hopefulness to hopelessness. From searing vocals that build to emotive highs before falling towards instrumental closings.

Shallow Pools, headspace

Shallow Pools embraced their reluctance to grow up and started to accept change. This 5-track EP the quartet use their synth-forward dream pop stylings to lay their fears and worries bare with the hope that in the end they can find change a little less scary.