2019: A-Z | All Mirrors - Angel Olsen | You Sexy Thing - Zella Day

Looking back at 30 years of music | Angel Olsen, Billie Eilish, Clairo, Dido, Emily King, Faye Webster, Girl Ray, Hannah Cohen etc,

Oct 11, 2024

When he was asked by Variety about the lack of women nominated or winning any Grammy awards in 2018, Recording Academy president Neil Portnoy said that “women need to step up”.

The problem in the music industry is not a lack of women making great music, but a lack of recognition of the great music they’ve made. Rock music, especially, has historically been an incredibly male dominated market. For most people, it doesn’t matter that rock and roll owes so much of its history and DNA to queer black women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, it’s a music made by men.

Starting with the likes of Elvis and Little Richard, through The Rolling Stones and Dylan, on to Springsteen or Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin or Guns n Roses, and then later on in Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Foo Fighters or the indistinguishable Red Hot Chilli Peppers and then with The Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys, it’s been hard for artists like Alis Lesley, Patti Smith, Suzi Quattro or Courtney Love to make themselves heard above all the noise the men were making.

So, for Neil Portnoy, here’s an A-Z of great releases from women who stepped up in the year after his comments. It’s not comprehensive, as there were too many to fit into most of the letters.

Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

One of my favourite releases by anyone, not just in this year but in the whole decade. Olsen had some incredible songs on the album before this, My Woman, but All Mirrors was really up on another level. After beginning with a gentle, hushed vocal and swell of synths and strings, as soon as the snare drum hits a little over a minute into the song and Olsen belts out with the full power of her voice, you know you’re in for something special.

And with songs like All Mirrors, What It Is and Chance, this is a really special album.

Billie Eilish - WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO?

Billie Eilish is one of the most exciting artists to have broken through in recent years, and WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO? really took the world by storm. It’s rare to really feel like you’re hearing a whole new genre being born these days, but this avant-pop record feels just as vital, exciting and fresh now as it did then.

It’s hard to pick a favourite song from the album, but after all the excitement and inventiveness of bad guy, all the good girls to hell or bury a friend, the beautiful vocals and lyrics of when the party’s over really cut through.

Clairo - Immunity

Her debut album, Immunity announced Clairo as a major new talent. Whether it’s on the dreamy, brooding opener Alewife or the more uptempo Impossible, the music here always seems to have something interesting and unexpected going on underneath her vocal. Far from being a straight pop record, this album has got plenty to keep you coming back for repeated listening.

Dido - Still on My Mind

While she’ll probably never get back to the kind of ubiquity she enjoyed with tracks like White Flag or Thank You, songs like Take You Home can remind you of what made Dido so popular at the start of the century.

Emily King - Scenery

My favourite Emily King song will probably always be Distance from her 2015 album The Switch, but Go Back from 2019’s Scenery runs it close. A propulsive, soulful song with a solid beat, her smoky voice is perfectly accentuated and complimented by descending synths, guitars, piano and strings.

Faye Webster - Atlanta Millionaires Club

Another one of my absolute favourite albums of the year, it opens with the utterly perfect Room Temperature. Drenched in lilting pedal steel and full of fantastic lyrics (“Looks like I’ve been crying again over the same thing / I wonder if anyone has ever cried for me?”), this song would feel too short to me at twice the length.

Blending soul, country, indie rock, rhythm and blues, jazz and hip-hop, other highlights on the album include Right Side of My Neck, Hurts Me Too, Pigeon, Jonny, Kingston and Come to Atlanta.

Girl Ray - Girl

Following up their fantastic 2017 debut Earl Grey, Girl picks up where they left off on their first album. While I think I prefer their first album, there’s still a lot of fun to be had with this one. Show Me More and Friend Like That are both highlights, with their infectious bass-lines and funky feel, they each put both the indie and disco into indie-disco.

Hannah Cohen - Welcome Home

A swirling daze of dream-pop, Cohen’s third album Welcome Home opens with the infectious This Is Your Life. A lilting ballad that sweeps you away on a bed of guitar, hazy vocals and synths and leads you into an album that it’s easy to get lost in.

Having established such a lush sonic landscape, Cohen never lets it drift away. There’s not a bad song to be found here but highlights include All I Wanted and Holding On.

Izzy Bizu - GLITA EP

This EP features a far more electronic R&B feel than on the song she had announced herself with, 2015’s White Tiger, this collection sees Izzy Bizu searching for a new sound. The EP notably includes a re-record of one of her best songs, which she originally sang with the electronic duo Honne, and which (quite surprisingly) has an un-credited feature from Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

Jade Bird - Jade Bird

Songs like I Get No Joy make Jade Bird sound like a direct musical descendent of KT Tunstall. The song has more than a little bit of Suddenly I See about it, but that is no bad thing.

Karen O - Lux Prima (with Danger Mouse)

A psychedelic blast of orchestral pop, this album is a sprawling blend of styles and genres, including rock, disco, funk, pop and trip-hop. It’s a massively ambitious work, and a real work of art. There’s not many albums that aim as high as this one does, less yet that reach those heights and even less still that sound anything like it.

Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell

Lana Del Rey’s most ambitious and potentially her most perfectly realised album yet at the time it came out, this feels like the record where she really came into her own as an artist. Better than the the two that came before it, she found the sound she’d been circling around for a while here and the formula that she has stuck with ever since.

Marika Hackman - Any Human Friend

Another artist who did their best work in 2019, this was one of the most exciting albums that came out all year. the one, blow and i’m not where you are were some of the most electrifying tracks to make their way into the world that year.

And they were even better on stage. I saw Marika Hackman two or three times in 2019 and each show was a masterclass in frenetic, joyous abandon.

Native Harrow - Happier Now

When I listen to the great opener to this album, Can’t Go On Like This, it puts me in mind of Francois Hardy. The second song How You Do Things makes me think alternately of Joni Mitchell and First Aid Kit. Perhaps it’s not great to spend the whole time you’re hearing one singer thinking about other musicians, but those are hardly bad artists to be compared to.

Oh Land - Family Tree

A lush album, with ambitious and grand arrangements, this album alternately feels like spring and winter. With its fresh and chilly sound, its sound can evoke the sight of snow falling, or the crunching as you step into a settled patch of it, but conversly the music can also evoke images of growth, flowers blooming and coming back to life.

The fifth song is called Make My Trouble Beautiful. Thanks to a wonderful string arrangement - sounding like it’s lifted straight from a film score and occasionally affecting an far east-Asian lilt - gentle harp, brass, piano, celeste and propulsive percussion, the music is made beautiful, too.

Patty Griffin

Perhaps the oldest and most established artist in this whole piece, there are great and powerful songs all over Patty Griffin’s self-titled 2019 album.

Sounding like it’s drifting in on an echo from an Old West long forgotten, there are great guitar parts all over this record - acoustic rhythm and lead, as well as crying steel guitar - beautiful piano, captivating vocals and, maybe more than all that, great lyrics and storytelling.

Quelle Rox - Cosmic Gloom

I don’t even know what you’d call a song like this. Cosmic is right. A space-age slow-jam about who knows what. All I know is that it’s entrancing and enchanting; like watching the fragments of light dance along the wall after bouncing off a glitter-ball.

Ruby Fields - Permanent Hermit EP

“I used to love dinosaurs when I was a kid” Ruby Fields sings on the opening track Dinosaur from her 2019 EP. I still love dinosaurs as an adult, and I love this reserved indie outpouring too.

Stella Donnelly - Beware of the Dogs

With a very similar, albeit maybe more fleshed out, sound to Ruby Fields and sounding a little like Kate Nash in her vocal delivery, there are a few standout tracks on Stella Donnelly’s Beware of the Dogs, but the highlight is definitely third track Season’s Greetings.

Taylor Swift - Lover

There are some really great songs on Taylor Swift’s seventh album, Lover. Cruel Summer, Cornelia Street and Death By A Thousand Cuts are all excellent, and very varied from each other.

Alongside All Too Well from 2012’s Red, the titular track Lover might be one of her most timeless lyrics ever, and with its slow-dance arrangement, should really be more of a modern standard than it is.

Uffie - Tokyo Love Hotel

More of an EP than an album really, Papercuts has got quite an interesting feel with its stop-time arrangement and disorienting synths and vocal effects, but opener 80’s style opener Drugs is the real standout.

Vanessa Amorosi - Back to Love

Something of an outlier among the dance pop elsewhere on the album, third track Heavy Lies the Head sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place on a Demi Lovato release. Amorosi worked with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics on this record but at times, on songs like Back to Love, it sounds more like something Avicii would have helped her make.

Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising

Another one of the heavyweight releases of the year. I got this record when it first came out because the cover really caught my eye. The music lived up to the arresting visuals, and honestly surpassed them.

This album is going to age incredibly well. With her enchanting and captivating voice, lush string and piano arrangements, these songs sound grand, majestic and powerful. There’s a celestial quality to this album. It feels very of the earth, and yet, so ethereal and other-worldly. Her 2022 follow up And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow was just as good.

Ximena Sariñana - ¿Dónde Bailarán las Niñas?

Like a Mexican Girl Ray, this album also blends a funky, disco-lite energy with an indie attitude and a dose of pop. I don’t know what she’s singing, but on tracks like No Sé, Lo Bailado or Fuego I like the way she sings it.

Yuna - Rouge

Featuring a whole host of guest stars, this album is a silky, grooving R&B record that washes over you with a blissful detachment from the first sound of strings at the top of the brilliant opener Castaway, right up until the closing notes of Tiada Akhir 41 minutes later.

Zella Day - You Sexy Thing (Single)

Whilst the long wait for a full length follow up to Zella Day’s 2015 debut Kicker went on for another long year, we did at least get this slick electro cabaret cover of the Hot Chocolate classic You Sexy Thing.

Worlds away from the acoustic cover of Seven Nation Army which had first brought her to prominence four years earlier, she really leans into the sensual, sultry and sexual energy of the song and brings an edge to the recording which she had developed in her stage shows, but which had maybe been missing from her studio work up to this point.

I think it’s fair to say that the women really stepped up in 2019, but then again, let’s not give any credit to Mr Portnoy for that. If that wasn’t enough, here are some more releases not mentioned above.