It’s been a pretty tranquil year for Matt Bellamy and Muse; they didn’t release a new album, they didn’t headline multiple dates at Wembley Stadium, and they still haven’t played that much talked about gig in space. In fact, in the last twelve months, Matt Bellamy only did one tangible thing of real note, and he didn’t allow it to be televised. 

At Reading and Leeds Festivals in the UK, Muse played a two hour headline set, the second half was a blistering greatest hits set full of jaw dropping jams, mammoth bounce along riffs, and ear scraping arpeggios. It was the grand finale that culminated in a triumphant reading of “Knights Of Cydonia”, but that’s not why Matt Bellamy made this list, that is business as usual for Muse. It was the first hour, where Muse played Origin Of Symmetry, the band’s breakthrough LP in full. 

Rather than simply resuscitating some old staples like the relentless “Hyper Music” and the wiry Western rock of “Dark Shines”, the old Muse of 2001 was resurrected. Dark, brutish, and oppressively pessimistic, this Muse was monolithic, and daunting in the sheer scope of their attack. Replacing pomp with paranoia, they reminded the world that before they were pop stars, Muse were the sonic harbingers of societal apocalypse, and boy did it sound good.

Gillian Welch and her husband and song writing partner Dave Rawlings, are absolute perfectionists. Every microphone, amp, and hair has to be in the exact right spot for this duo to record, and perhaps unsurprisingly for such an exacting pair, when they ran into a bout of writer’s block, they didn’t even consider risking their legacy for seven long years. 

Dave Rawlings struck out on his own in the intervening years with a charming album of his own, but it was clear that the world wanted a Welch record. The Harrow & The Harvest arrived this November, and it surpassed all expectations, with its bleak timeless tales of depression and subversion. This was Bluegrass Country folk at its darkest and most beautifully composed. 

As an album it struck a chord with times of social and economic depression, but it was on the road that Rawlings came into his own. Without undermining the emotional severity of Welch’s words, and while operating in the tiniest windows, he unleashed hell on acoustic guitar, cramming in more notes, and more dramatic crescendos, than the laws of physic would seemingly allow. Rawlings truly must be seen to be believed, he may be quiet and unassuming, but he is, without doubt, the best live guitarist in the world, right now.

For whatever reason Dave Mustaine and his Megadeth band mates saw fit to turn the band’s thirteenth studio album into a real event. 2011 was always going to be a landmark year for Thrash’s founding fathers, as the world was treated to a well deserved reissue of 1986’s imperious Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? Having endured the scoffs of the indie press and the broadsheets for two decades, Megadeth, with this one re-release, found themselves critical darlings, and Dave Mustaine wasn’t about to squander this second chance. 

Th1rt3en built on the moment of Endgame and United Abominations by capturing a sense of urgency and ageless abandon. Having struggled in the past to feel at home in the 21st century Mustaine finally found his voice as a weary, downtrodden curmudgeon, bent to the point of breaking by toxic relationships and poisonous politics, and ready to let rip. With skidding solos, stampeding riffs and addictive choruses Mustaine’s voice simultaneously represented the rage of age and the frustration of youth, without feeling remotely contrived. 

As if Megadeth’s year needed another highlight, audiences in the UK, South America and the US were finally treated to those long awaited big four gigs, bringing tears to old metal head’s eyes at the sight of Mustaine, Hetfield and Hammett standing axe to axe on stage.

“I Want To Drink Your Fucking Blood!”, having spent years carefully cultivating structured odysseys delving into time, space and the depths of human emotion, who would have thought that it would be those seven words, screamed over an irrepressibly jagged beat, that took Mastodon into the top 20 for the first time? Brent Hinds and Bill Keiliher took the biggest risk of their collective career in 2011 when they decided to throw out the eight-to-twelve minute intergalactic odysseys, and condense everything down into a series of sub-four minute pop songs. 

Surprisingly, despite a few dissenting voices, Mastodon managed to retain the wealth of good will they’d earned on Crack The Skye, as they produced the boldest and most immediate album of their careers to date. There were illusions to The Beatles, there were huge hooks, and there were a series of beautiful layered rhythm sections interspersed with mind warping effects. The entire album captured the sensation of hurtling, as Hinds and Keiliher locked in with drummer Brent Dailor to create an album that sped down hill at a suicidal pace. 

The Hunter had the sound of a band on the edge, diffusing down every aspect of their careers so far into a polished circle pit inducing formula, for most it would have been too much, an impossibly cluttered end product would have ground to a bloated holt, but not for Hinds and Keiliher, who proved themselves to be true craftsmen in 2011, the equals of any task, mammoth or minute.

Nearly nineteen years after the release of her exhilaratingly bare debuts Dry and Rid Of Me, PJ Harvey has finally released a record as unnervingly harrowing as those stark statements. Despite this, Let England Shake couldn’t be more different from PJ’s early work; luscious strings, lugubrious auto-harp, and warm charming riffs replace the harsh deprivation of the bleak 90s’ aesthetic. The lyrical content is equally detached, the deeply personal darkness of Dry has made way for a study of an entire nation at war, an exploration of a society not only gutted by bloodshed, but raised, and built upon it. Much has changed, but that prickly stirring in your stomach that only PJ Harvey can create, is very much in tact. 

Limbs are left lying in trees, flesh rots, and men go to their deaths, but PJ sings beautifully and the arrangements are sumptuously naïve. Having spent years researching the English folk tradition while immersing herself in writings of actual soldiers, PJ was ready to create a remarkable fusion sound that melds her down tuned alternative guitar seamlessly into the technicolour flourishes of Let England Shake. 

The album bites hard, speaking directly to a quintessential Britishness: to a country built on mourning and united by one-minute silences. There’s a wonderful complicity to the album, the rosy charm with which PJ details “flesh quivering in the heat” perfectly recalls the distinctly British tendency for furrowing onwards, with head down, unflinching acceptance. By speaking to a nation’s fundamental character, Let England Shake possesses a powerfully timeless quality, and in a year where London burned, the lines “How Is Our Glorious Country Sewn? Not With Wheat And Corn” couldn’t have been anymore chilling, timely or prescient.