The single best LP of 2024

At about this time of year, you’ll be seeing lots of ‘album the year lists’

Or, more likely, you’ll have seen em. It’s December 31st, for goodness sakes. The Bristol Beats Club is rather late to the party. Still, despite being uninvited, we’d very much like to join. Not with a ‘top 100 LPs of the year list’. Cause, really, who has the time? We’re music journalists. And such lists bore us.

So instead, we’re just serving up the one album we’re crowning LP of the year this year. And that album is Nia Archives’ Silence is Loud.

Admittedly, Silence Is Loud is a left-field choice for the Beats Club.

Is it indie? No. Rock? Nope. Electro? Not really.

If you need to box this album in (and you do), it’s jungle. Which is a sub-genre, apparently, of Drum n Bass. But don’t stop reading just yet! We know as well as anyone, DnB, the traditional preserve of pill-heads and neanderthals, is awfully repetitive. Which, believe it or not, tends to make much of the genre sound same-y.

Silence is Loud, though? It’s distinct.

On Silence is Loud, Nia’s outstanding vocals add an soulful element to the traditional high-tempo loops, creating an at-once chaotic and cathartic listening experience – from start to finish.

Chaotic, cathartic, and genre-progressing. Defining, almost. That’s what we’d say Nia has achieved by laying soulful melodies atop her DnB undercurrents. And we’d say as much cause, once we’d listened to this banger a few times over, we were thirsty for more.

We explored the genre more deeply. Spotify’s ‘similar artists’ algo let us down. As did Apple Music’s. And independent research seemed to suggest there isn’t anything quite like this out there at the moment, which puts Nia Archives in a clas of her own.

There’s something else that sets this record apart – and that’s there’s an actual point to this stuff.

Yes, these tracks are party tracks. And, yes, they’ll fire you up. But listen more closely and what you’ll see here is an artist baring her soul. Silence Is Loud, the eponymous album’s title track, reveals the loneliness familiar to anyone who has ever loved.

The upbeat Cards On The Table discusses taking risks, while immediate follow-up Unfinished Business explores the complexities of new relationships.

Crowded Roomz further reveals Nia’s deep-seated vulnerabilities, and so the record continues – to the extent that this doesn’t feel like an electronic record at all. If you were to read Nia’s lyrics divorced from her productions, you might pin this on a poetic early-noughties indie outlet destined for self-destruction.

Towards the tail-end of the record, Nightmares and F.A.M.I.L.Y wander towards the tedious, but we can forgive as much given how much we looped this record upon its release earlier this year.

And as you’d expect with our record of the year, Out Of Options, a stripped back Silence Is Loud (reprise) and So Tell Me all ratchet-up the record’s quality, with each track in turn cradling listeners, gently brining them back down to earth as the record comes to a close.

A success so stand-out seems impossible to repeat. And you know what? So be it.

Records of the year should be different. They should move music forward. For us, Nia Archives’ Silence Is Loud does exactly that.

If, in future, we receive a similar follow-up, we of course won’t be equally wonderstruck. But that’s OK.

Silence Is Loud isn’t indie, or rock, or indietronica. We don’t care. It’s a masterpiece.

Silence is Loud by Nia Archives is our album of the year.