Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

Hailing from Glasgow in Scotland, the lads of Ashenspire make progressive metal for the working class that is grandiose and theatrical. The lyrics are largely delivered as spoken word over instruments that amplify the dark storytelling and agitation of the narrator.

The story told, as the band puts it, is about “hostile architecture” under late capitalism, which refers to the “design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes.” Each song draws inspiration from the post-industrial landscape of cities, “hauntological in nature,” that are so often unfit for housing due to cost-cutting.

For example, the “Law of Asbestos” refers to the cancer-causing mineral that was incorporated into electrical insulation for many buildings, especially before the 1980s. Asbestos continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. A metal-sounding saxophone accentuates Ashenspire’s rage: “A corner cut, a penny saved, Grenfell burns again and again and again!”—a reference to the Grenfell Tower fire that resulted in 72 deaths.

“Tragic Heroin” has a kind of anthemic quality to it. At the end, Ashenspire proclaims: “Fueled with your labour. Built with your bones. There are no great men. Only the great many.”

Then there’s the sprawling “Cable Street Again.” A tapestry of darkness percolates, sounding almost jazz-like in sections. Ashenspire warns the dispossessed and disposable human beings faced with hostile architecture that is part of the threat of fascism. “You cannot fix that which is working as intended.”

In a final call to action, Ashenspire belts out, “Get down off the fence before the barbed wire goes up.”

(Kevin Gosztola)

Jake Blount – The New Faith

Sometimes it is necessary to look to the past to learn about the future. That is the case with Jake Blount, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar whose stunning concept album weaves a compelling Afrofuturist narrative.

The album’s premise is similar to Octavia Butler’s influential 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, an apocalyptic tale of Black American refugees struggling to survive ecological collapse.

Blount reworks ten traditional Black spirituals, along with two original spoken word compositions, and imagines what Black religious music would sound like in a future ravaged by climate disruption. Three of the tracks feature rousing verses from rapper Demeanor.

“Take Me To the Water,” a traditional hymn and first track on the album, morphs into an ominous prayer for those seeking to “be washed for the sins of humanity.” It is a call “to reject the greed of our forefathers,” who “melted the ice at the ends of the earth, drowned the coast, emptied the seas and forests of life, filled the very ocean with fire.”

Not only does Blount prove he is a skillful musician, but in developing these themes throughout his album, he proves that he is also an archivist, historian, and prophet capable of sounding an alarm for humanity.

(CJ Baker)

Bob Vylan – Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life 

UK grime-punk and hip hop duo Bob Vylan storm their way through a crash course on underclass survival in a capitalist world, where one’s life could be snuffed out at any moment without any remorse.

“The BBC are talking about the GDP. That means fuck all to me,” Bob Vylan raps. “I gotta eat.”

How the underclass lacks access and cannot afford healthy food is the subject of “Health is Wealth.” Bob Vylan states, “The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips is a tactic of war waged on the poor.” But the damage done by junk food can also be self-inflicted, as the duo acknowledges, and the track develops into sound advice for eating right to survive.

Take note of the album cover. It’s a dark and brilliant nod to the way society dupes people into believing they may escape poverty if they could just win the lottery. 

Several of the songs incorporate thick guitar riffs to make the rhymes more potent. That’s especially true on “Phone Tap (Alexa),” a fierce assessment of the role that lower class people play in enabling a police state.

Bob Vylan raps, “If somebody’s getting bodied, watch the ratings hit the roof. I was there, I was there, gather ’round and gather proof.” Then the cops come to the door, and the doorbell rings. “Our babies” are taken.

“Alexa, take me to prison,” the duo roars at the end of their gutting indictment.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Fantastic Negrito – White Jesus Black Problems 

Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, who performs under the pseudonym Fantastic Negrito, recently discovered that his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were a white Scottish servant named Elizabeth Gallimore and a black slave whose name has been erased in the annals of history. This lineage inspires Fantastic Negrito’s compelling concept album, which he released as a multimedia project with a companion film.

The album reclaims the story of the courageous forgotten, as emphasized on the “Man with No Name.” It contains a galvanizing message of hope and perseverance, particularly as he sings, “I keep moving on.”


“There’s a feeling out there right now that we can’t get anything done because we’re so polarized, so entrenched in our ideologies and unmoved by facts or logic, but I wanted to share this story because I think it smashes that narrative to pieces,” Fantastic Negrito shared. “I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, both Black and white, who showed me that anything is possible.”



From the ugliness of injustice to the beauty of what can be gained in the struggle, Fantastic Negrito grapples with it all in his music. 



(C.J. Baker)

Ezra Furman – All Of Us Flames

Ezra Furman breathes new life into a stale and largely heteronormative art form by incorporating themes of queerness into her timeless-sounding rock music. 
The album is the third in a trilogy of albums that includes 2018’s “Transangelic Exodus” and 2019’s “Twelve Nudes.”

On “Book Of Our Love,” Furman expresses a desire to forever remember those who historically tend to have their identities erased. On “Lilac and Black,” Furman dreams of “my queer girl gang,” whose enemies will eventually “bow down before our wrath.”


“It’s a queer album for the stage of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole,” Furman declared. “I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.”

Furman succeeds in crafting a vision of a world, where everyone may feel that they belong. 



(C.J. Baker)

Hurray For The Riff Raff – Life On Earth

Puerto Rican singer-songwriter and self-described “nature punk” Alynda Segarra’s album is a worthy follow-up to their exceptional 2017 album, “The Navigator.” It explores themes of immigration, the environment, and other social ills.

One of the album’s many highlights is “Precious Cargo,” where Segarra sings, “We made it to the border. I jumped and I was detained. Split me from my family. Now the light begins to fade. They took me to the cold room, where I sat down on the floor. Just a foil for a blanket. For 17 days or more.”

“I don’t know why he would lie on me. The man from the I-C-E. And I don’t know why he hate on me. The man from the I-C-E,” Segarra adds, as she grapples with cruelty of immigration agents.

The album’s title track gorgeously acknowledges the peril from man-made climate change and other societal ills. Yet despite the despair, throughout each song Segarra approaches the subject matter with an embrace of beauty and hopeful yearning.

Segarra shows that she has the gift of being able to express the humanity of the downtrodden. Thankfully, they shared this precious gift with the world.

(C.J. Baker) 

Leyla McCalla – Breaking The Thermometer

“In 1980, Radio Haiti was shut down and all of its journalists were either executed, jailed or exiled alongside many of Haiti’s most prominent artists, intellectuals and academics,” recalled Haitian American multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla.

McCalla’s “Breaking The Thermometer” project combines audio from the Radio Haiti archives to create Afro-Caribbean music that honors those who rebelled against the United States-backed dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, as well as Jean-Claude’s father, François Duvalier. The songs are in English and Kreyòl, a native language in Haiti.

Over banjo and soft percussion, “Fort Dimanche” features a Kreyol radio clip that leads into McCalla singing about the prison, where François Duvalier had entire families executed. A Haitian man describes when their family was killed at the prison and how it inspired him to become a journalist. (Note: At one point, the fort was a military facility for US Marines in the 1920s.)

The song, “Ekzile,” is a somber melody mixing several string instruments over soft percussion. It features a Haitian woman who recounts fleeing brutal repression and ending up in New York. McCalla movingly grapples with what it is like for someone to have to leave their home because they are no longer safe.

“Le Bal est Fini” (“The Party is Over”) stands out among all the tracks. It is an invigorating tribute to the journalists who defied dictatorship. All the percussive elements of the project shine, culminating in a solo that ends with dogs barking.

Jean Dominique, Radio Haiti’s owner, was murdered, and McCalla developed a close relationship with Michèle Montas, Dominique’s widow. The project honors their resistance. “A big part of their connection and their love for each other was their love for journalism and their vision for what this could do to transform their country,” McCalla told the Guardian. “It’s a really hard thing to have faith in, but that faith held them together.”

(Kevin Gosztola)

Samora Pinderhughes – GRIEF

Our annual list, given Shadowproof’s journalism on prison abolition, would not be complete without this collaborative album from singer, songwriter, pianist, and scholar Samora Pinderhughes.

For “GRIEF,” a part of the Healing Project, Pinderhughes interviewed around 100 people of color who shared their experiences with incarceration or “structural violence.” The online archive of interviews features includes insights on abolishing prison, but the album is more introspective than essayistic and draws from the well of emotions that come from prison life and life in a world of prisons.

Through the harmony of “Holding Cell,” Pinderhughes sings, “Holding cell, I can’t get well while you hold me.” The slave labor, or slaving for the tiniest of wages, comes through on, “Hope,” as Pinderhughes, Nio Norwood, and Jehbreal Jackson sing, “While we try to build a room for our freedom (for our freedom). We build what they destroy.”

“Masculinity” is a profound inward examination from the perspective of a man grappling with their incarceration or carceral past. “If I feel these things, is it gonna hurt me?” Pinderhughes wonders. The lyrics eventually give way to an ethereal alto sax outro from Immanuel Wilkins.

Pinderhughes told the New York Times that he intended to explore how the machinery of incarceration operates and ask, what is the system doing to people? What can be done to fight back? And then, from a more personal perspective, “How am I a part of that? How am I implicated, and how am I doing something against it? What does that make me feel like?”

You feel every word of the experiences that flow through the music, as well as the spirituality of interrogating a harmful system that has impacted so many lives.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Since their formation in 2014, Soul Glo has built a reputation for their ferocious musical attack and radical political lyrics. The hardcore punk band is made up of Black musicians who share their experiences as artists in a genre dominated by white groups.

On the album, the band dispels the myth that lasting change can come from continuing to prop up the two-party system. For example, lead singer Pierce Jordan derisively snarls on “John J,” “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip. But still liberals are more dangerous.”

Elsewhere, with the incisive “Fucked Up If True,” Soul Glo address the fallacy that voting is enough to enact meaningful change.

“So we just gon always vote in false elections and accept each result and it’s effects as though people were powerless. Do you feel supportive care? How do you wake up everyday? What enforced your belief that you can vote their power away?”

The album is filled with killer anthems of righteous indignation that continue punk’s tradition of confronting racial and social injustice, and it is the band’s first release on renowned punk label Epitaph.

(C.J. Baker)

Tanya Tagaq – Tongues

Canadian Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq aims “to repair the damage” from trauma inflicted by centuries of colonial repression.

Over 10 tracks produced by Afrofuturist and poet Saul Williams, the album spits in the face of her oppressors then shifts away from their savagery to what gives Tagaq empowerment, joy, and strength.

“Teeth Agape” bares a maternal instinct to protect her child from further trauma from colonizers while “Earth Monster” celebrates the creation of life. “Today is for her, and today is for me. For choosing to make her, to keep her, and to love her.”

“They took our tongues,” declares Tagaq on the album’s title track. She vows, “You can’t have my tongue,” and later adds, “I don’t want your shame.” Her vocals grow more guttural as she confronts the loss of language that came as a result of white colonial settlers, who committed cultural genocide.

“The Canadian government took Indigenous children away from our families for many generations in the residential school system,” Tagaq told NPR. “All of us know who didn’t come home.”

Tagaq’s vocal artistry is a dagger aimed at the hearts of those complicit and responsible for all the pain and terror. But the power in her voice also carries a sense of pride. She does not want anyone’s sympathy or guilt in order to live life on her own terms—free of the legacy and influence of colonizers. 

(Kevin Gosztola)

Black Monument Ensemble – NOW

The story behind the making of this album is part of what makes it exceptional. According to Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble, it was recorded in the summer of 2020, “following months of pandemic-induced fear and isolation, the explosion of social unrest, struggle, and violence in the streets, and as the certain presence of a new reality had fully settled in.”

BME, which is a “multi-generational collective” with members who range from 9 to 52 years old, entered a garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio and recorded each track in a few takes. 

The percussion and wind instruments combine for  transcendent beats and rhythms, and for “The People Vs. The Rest of Us” and “Keep Your Mind Free,” Locks seamlessly weaves in samples to create a sound collage. BME even embraces the presence of cicadas, which enhances the performance in a remarkable way.

It is easy, as “The Body Is Electric” recognizes, to be caught up in the grind of life, the struggles around us, the despair and devastation that surrounds us. Yet BME dares to dream of what can be achieved in this new reality, especially if we can all enter that forever momentary space that is now.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – G_d’s Pee AT STATE’s END

If late-stage capitalism sounds like anything, it is the brooding dissonance of this album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Their soundscapes survey civilizations ravaged by pestilence and climate disaster. Yet there is a majesty and grandness to their music of desolation.

GYBE is a Canadian post-rock band that combines noise with a range of instruments, including violins and an organ. They wrote the album on the road before the pandemic, and then they came home in the pandemic normal to finish completing the project in masks.

Radio frequencies on the album are “pulses of rising white static” because “automated militaries” take up so much bandwidth. There are periodic announcements from the watching and killing machines of our world, but then there are also the “ham radio dads,” who stay up all night talking about their dying wives and “what they will do with their guns when antifa comes.”

As the band states, the apocalyptic pastors now cry, “End Times Soon!” Their album is about waiting for the end because all “current forms of governance” have failed. It’s also about waiting for a beginning, and for that, they have a list of demands for humanity—empty the prisons, take power from police, give the power to neighborhoods, end forever wars and imperialism, and tax the rich until they are poor.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Irreversible Entanglements – Open The Gates

The free jazz collective’s third offering is a sonic exploration of post-colonialism. With Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet blaring out into the universe and Keir Neuringer’s saxophone piercing the sky, the ensemble summons whatever spirits they can connect with from the past and present to propel the music forward.

Fragments of poetry from Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) agitate but also reach for deeper understandings of creation and what brought Irreversible Entanglements to this place, to where they are crying out, “Open the gates!”

While some of their previous ompositions have explicitly named the sources of struggle and despair, particularly for Black lives, its lyrics are more understated. They are above all beckoning. This is an evaluation of what has been and what could possibly be.

As they put it, “The universe was awash in the sickly static veneer of anti-cosmos, of anti-nation; the halls were emptied, our shadows echoing and staining the walls of our abandoned oases – so we poured out into 2020’s wild streets. The ghosts of our labor danced around the sickness as we set fire to our old ways of thinking and moving, as we set fire to cop cars and bashed in the windows of our own rising disenfranchisement.”

“Open the gates!”

(Kevin Gosztola)

Femi Kuti & Made Kuti – Legacy+

The legacy of legendary activist and Afrobeat originator Fela Kuti is carried on by his son Femi and grandson Made on “Legacy +.” It is a double album that includes “Stop The Hate” (the 11th album by Femi) and “For(e)ward” (Made’s debut album).

Like Fela’s music, the two albums mix poignant political commentary with infectious beats. Femi takes aim at Nigerian political corruption while touching upon issues of universal concern. On “Na Bigmanism Spoil Government,” he says, “Come on, tell them, let them change their ways.” He also encourages the masses to take their stand against authority on tracks like “Set Your Minds Free.”

Made covers similar themes but experiments more with the music. He also pays tribute to his grandfather on “Different Streets,” (“A prophet is what many of us call Fela. Someone with very special skills to see very far. But grandpa was not predicting the future with songs. He was speaking about everything he saw. Everything that was wrong”).

Femi and Made are torch-bearers of Afrobeat, and no doubt Fela would be proud of the music they are creating.

(C.J. Baker)

The Muslims – Fuck These Fucking Fascists

The Muslims are what they say they are and fucking mean every fucking word on this fucking album. They describe themselves as a “crunchy, kickass punk band of Black and brown queer muzzies.” They say “your racist dad is a piece of shit and THIS IS NOT A SAFE SPACE.” That is fucking all caps because no one perpetuating vile systems of oppression will be spared.

With that said, the band’s messages range from deadly serious to the stuff of anarchic pranksters. “Crotch Pop A Cop” and their song imagining the ghost of John McCain visiting the White House are mischievous fun. The sharp wit of “Illegals” is more biting than the majority of protest songs recorded recently.

The average song length is a little less than two minutes because the Muslims don’t need any fucking longer to fucking call out who needs to be called out. They just fucking show solidarity with those feeling spit on and beaten down then get on to pounding out the next riff.

Fuck Nazis. All cops are class traitors (and bastards). Take your pleas for unity and fuck yourself. And most importantly, be proud of who you are.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory Of Ice

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is an acclaimed novelist, poet, scholar, and singer, as well as a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, an indigenous group in southern Ontario, Canada.

A prominent theme on “Theory Of Ice” is climate change. On “Break Up,” the opening track, Simpson poignantly sings, “There is euphotic rising and falling. Orbits of dispossession and reattachment. Achieving maximum density: 39 degrees Fahrenheit.” The song “Failure of Melting” bleakly depicts the impact on our natural world (“The caribou sit measuring emptiness. The fish study giving up.”) 

But the album’s standout is her potent reworking of indigenous musician Willie Dunn’s “I Pity The Country.” The tune not only builds on the theme of climate change but explores other aspects of Canada’s troubled history of colonial oppression. 

Dunn’s classic protest song may be from 1971, but the lines, The police they arrest me. Materialists detest me. Pollution it chokes me. Movies they joke me. Politicians exploit me. City life it jades me,” still resonate in fifty years later.

(C.J. Baker) 

Snotty Nose Rez Kids – Life After

On the indigenous Canadian rap duo’s fourth album, they once again blend banging beats with pointed political commentary.

Darren “Young D” Metz of the duo described the origin of the title: “There are times when I don’t want to talk to people about [my struggles], so I just write about it, for my own sanity.”

“There were things that we needed to say and get off our chest. We came up with [the concept of] ‘Life After’ because it’s about life after the pandemic, but it could be life after anything, really. Life after depression, or life after success, after grinding for so long.”

Beyond the pandemic, they confront police brutality on ‘Red Sky at Night,’ rapping, “We ain’t safe in the streets from the people or police or the system put in place for the wealthy. No Justice, no peace, we’re dying in the belly of the beast.” They rap about religious corruption and the numerous children’s graves found at former residential schools on “Grave Digger,’ saying “I been tryna save my people. I’m the one that should be saved. I just wanna catch a body. I’m so tired of digging graves.”

In Canada, there is much discussion about truth and reconciliation. SNRK play a vital role in amplifying uncomfortable truths that must be part of that process for indigenous communities.

(C.J. Baker)

Sons of Kemet – Black to the Future

“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet bandleader Shabaka Hutchings told Apple Music. “Then try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.”

“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (featuring Moor
Mother & Angel Bat Dawid) addresses issues of oppression, and “In Remembrance of Those Fallen” pays tribute to those who have fought for liberation and freedom within anti-colonialism movements.

The album reflects upon the past while providing a galvanizing message for moving onward to the future. It is music that successfully engages the mind, the heart, and the body.

(C.J. Baker)

David Rovics – May Day

Guitarist and folk singer David Rovics remains one of the most prolific and hardest working musicians writing songs of struggle. In 2021, Rovics reunited with the band he performed with from 1997-2008. Sean Staples played mandolin and guitar, Eric Royer played banjo, and Hazel Royer played bass live in a studio.

The banjo and mandolin combine to add a bittersweetness to “If A Song Could Make Your Troubles Go Away,” as Rovics sings about all he wishes he could do for the downtrodden.

“I know I’m not the first to feel like I’m knocking on the door of either a new dystopia or some movement of great renown,” Rovics muses on “116 Degrees,” a song that surveys the human sacrifice zones, which are and will continue to bear the brunt of climate-fueled disasters.

He pays tribute to Anne Feeney, the late great protest singer who departed this world in 2021, and memorializes more atrocities against Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid. And in the tradition of music’s best topical protest songs, the ballad, “When Chevron Came To Ecuador,” summarizes the sordid events around the oil company’s “Chernobyl of the Amazon” and their imprisonment of human rights attorney Steven Donziger.

(Kevin Gosztola)

Witch Camp (Ghana) – I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be

This is an important archival project that collects field recordings from Ghana’s infamous witch camps.

Witch camps are settlements, where women accused of witchcraft can seek refuge. Those persecuted as witches often suffer from mental health issues and physical ailments. Others are shunned as a ploy to steal their land after their husband’s passing.

“Belief in witchcraft is sometimes also used as simple scapegoating for the arrival of bad luck, such as foul weather or illness,” said photographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli, who worked on the archive project.

“More commonly, it is a justification for pre-existing hate and prejudice. A member of my own family was driven out of her village in Malawi as a child after she was accused of being a witch due to having a white father— a fate that could have been my own if our places of birth were simply swapped.”

The musicians employ unique instruments from the natural environment, such as corn husks, a teapot, tin cans, and tree limbs. Altogether, those involved create a remarkable project that preserves overlooked cultures and elevates the voices of those who often overlooked and rendered voiceless.

(C.J. Baker)