While 2021 has been another traumatic and troubled year for the music industry, especially on the live front, rock ‘n’ rollers the Überverse over have once again been proven themselves to be a resilient and imaginative bunch with a continuing avalanche of high-quality new music on a scale that would bury a small eastern European republic. Our team of ninja reviewers have been consistently amazed at how artists, both individually and collectively, have consistently risen to the challenges we have all faced over the past 12 months to produce, in many cases, the best work of their careers to date.
Our reviewers listen to literally hundreds of albums every year, which is reflected in the fact that some 107 of them were submitted for this end-of-year summation. Last time around, we presented our individual selections for our favourites – an extremely difficult task in its own right, with some of us facing the almost impossible task of even whittling it down to our favourite 20 titles, with some lists written and rewritten on several occasions.
We then set the ÜRHQ goblins to work on our state-of-the-art abacus, tallying the scores generated by each list to reach our final Top Five favourite albums of 2021. We would like to stress that this is not a “best of…” compilation, as each album has its own merits and is not necessarily any better (or worse) than any of the others. These are just the ones that have worked their way to the top of our playlists and remained embedded in our aural cortexes over the course of the last 12 months…
And, in the best tradition of the old TV chart countdowns, we present them in reverse order:
- CHVRCHES – ‘Screen Violence’
- Iron Maiden – ‘Senjutsu’
- The Wildhearts – ‘21st Century Love Songs’
- The Night Flight Orchestra – ‘Aeromantic II’
- Green Lung – ‘Black Harvest’
So, there you have it. Our top five favourite albums produced and released during what undoubtedly has been another difficult year for both music lovers and music makers alike. We hope you’ve enjoyed the coverage we’ve brought you over the past year. We’ve certainly enjoyed bringing it to you and look forward to continuing to do as we move into a hopefully brighter 2022.
All that remains is for us to wish you, from everyone at ÜRHQ and Team Über, a Happy New Year. Keep ‘er lit, keep ‘er between the hedges and keep on rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’ with your favourite website \m/