10 underrated albums for the colder months
Despite the fact we experience the transition from autumn into winter each year, it never fails to come as a surprise when the days feel like they’re ending at 4pm, a thick layer of darkness blanketing any hopes of productivity and motivation. For some people, the dropping temperatures and foggy landscapes are a welcome change from sticky, unpredictable summers, cherishing every icy breath and glistening footpath, with music guiding the way.
Perhaps you despise the colder weather and need some musical accompaniment to help romanticise the season, or maybe you’re in search of albums to help you fall in love with winter even more. Whatever the reason, we’ve curated a list of ten great albums that seem to evoke the sound of frosty morning walks and cosy evenings inside the house.
The fuzzy warmth emitted from bands working within the reverb-heavy shoegaze genre makes for perfect cold-weather listening – the haziness of the instrumentals reflecting weather such as fog or frost. While albums such as Slowdive’s Souvlaki or My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless are great for this time of year, this list contains some less celebrated shoegaze and dream-pop cuts that deserve to be more greatly appreciated.
Folk is also a great winter genre, with minimal nostalgia-steeped guitars and perhaps even flutes, creating an innately cosy atmosphere. Many forgotten folk records are perfect for this time of year, from Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day to Dave Bixby’s Ode to Quetzalcoatl. Discover a collection of wintry records, ranging from folk to slowcore and dream pop below.
And we wrapped them all up in one long, perfect, wintery listening experience for you in a playlist at the foot of the piece. Enjoy.
10 albums for winter:
Broadcast – Haha Sound (2003)
While Broadcast’s Tender Buttons and The Noise Made By People are perhaps their best-known works, garnering a dedicated cult following, the band remain relatively underappreciated. Broadcast possessed such a unique sound, blending electronica and ambient sounds with Trish Keenan’s otherworldly voice. Their music has often been categorised as falling into the elusive hauntology genre, creating a somewhat liminal feel.
The band’s second studio album, Haha Sound, only feels appropriate to be played in the colder months, especially the aptly titled ‘Winter Now’, which has a distinctively wistful quality. Elsewhere, disorientating electronic sounds evoke dark nights, such as on ‘O How I Miss You’. To put it simply, Haha Sound feels like the antithesis of summer.
Dave Bixby – Ode to Quetzalcoatl (1969)
Michigan-born Dave Bixby spent much of the 1960s doing copious amounts of acid, leading to the formation of his album Ode to Quetzalcoatl, a criminally underrated folk record that remained relatively obscure for decades. He released the album himself after spending three nights recording it in a friend’s home, using music as a path to self-discovery.
For Bixby, Christianity appeared to be his answer, and while much of the record deals with religious themes, the beautiful combination of his voice and guitar playing will attract even the least pious listeners. An album highlight is ‘Morning Sun’, a warmly euphoric slice of lo-fi folk that will certainly linger with you after just one listen.
Duster – Duster (2019)
Look no further than Duster’s 2019 self-titled album for those more contemplative, moody moments. While any Duster album could find a home on this list, their third record, coming 19 years after their sophomore release, Contemporary Movement, contains some perfect winter cuts, such as ‘Chocolate and Mint’, ‘Damaged’, ‘Go Back’ and ‘Ghoulish’.
Duster formed in 1996, becoming prominent members of the slowcore movement with their debut album, Stratosphere. Yet on Duster, the band show an even greater expanse of influences, using richer, noisy guitars to create an emotionally poignant sonic palette, allowing their instruments to do most of the talking.
Lovesliescrushing – bloweyelashwish (1992)
Diehard shoegaze fans might be familiar with Lovesliescrushing, but in comparison to their ’90s contemporaries, the ethereal band fails to receive adequate praise for their mind-blowingly beautiful creations. Having formed in 1991, the band, comprising Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, focus heavily on texture, evoking emotion through thick layers of noise and ambient sounds. Arpin-Duimstra’s angelic vocal delivery elevates the duo’s music to a heavenly plane, as best demonstrated in songs such as ‘babysbreath’.
On bloweyelashwish, their debut album, reverb-drenched guitars create a singular, haunting atmosphere that is melancholic yet incredibly resonant. While ‘dizzy’ feels as disorientatingly nostalgic as its title, ‘halo’ is incredibly ominous, bringing to mind images of forest openings and mountains stretched with mist.
Mojave 3 – Ask Me Tomorrow (1995)
After the dissolution of Slowdive in 1995 due to being dropped by Creation Records, Rachel Goswell, Neil Halstead and Ian McCutcheon continued under a new name: Mojave 3. Ditching their classic shoegaze sound, the band opted for a more instrumentally minimal approach, using less reverb and more slide guitar, piano and gentle percussion. On their debut album, Ask Me Tomorrow, the band shared one of the most gorgeous songs of the ‘90s, ‘Love Songs on the Radio’.
The track alone is worth picking up a copy of the album for, but then you’d be dismissing a wealth of other great cuts, such as ‘Tomorrow’s Taken’, ‘You’re Beautiful’ and ‘Pictures’. Taking influence from country-inspired folk, the record is nearly faultless.
The Cat’s Miaow – Songs ‘94-’98 (2022)
The Cat’s Miaow followed in the footsteps of indie pop bands such as Marine Girls and Talulah Gosh, although they emerged in the early 1990s on the other side of the globe. The Australian band never made much of an impact, rarely playing live or releasing studio albums apart from rare cassette recordings. Yet, a 2022 compilation of some of the band’s most vital tracks from between 1994 and 1998 reveals a blend of shoegaze, indie pop, slowcore and dream pop, with standouts including ‘Shoot the Moon’ and ‘Let Me Brush The Hair From Your Face’.
There’s a slight vulnerability to Kerrie Bolton’s voice, which is sweet and youthful, the perfect accompaniment to the jangling guitars. The Cat’s Miaow knew how to make the perfect indie pop song. With songs such as ‘Smitten’, the beautiful simplicity of the lyrics, “Just wanna dance in your shadow/ I just wanna wake and see you smile/ For now, for always,” is the perfect winter warmer.
Vashti Bunyan – Just Another Diamond Day (1970)
After being kicked out of university for spending too much time writing songs, Vashti Bunyan travelled to New York City to try and figure out what to do with her life. There, she became enamoured by Bob Dylan and suddenly realised that she was, in essence, already a musician; she now just had to become a professional one.
So, back in London, she set about acquiring some contacts and soon met Andrew Loog Oldham and he accurately equated her to the English Françoise Hardy, which typifies her sound. Just Another Diamond Day truly has a Mediterranean aura to it, lilting around loose melodies as though swayed by a sea breeze or passing fancy as Jacques Dutronc walks by. Filled with a sense of fun and frivolity among the solemn beauty that she gently croons, her tracks remind you of those moments when you happily drift off somewhere pleasant while waiting for the kettle to boil.
Cocteau Twins – Blue Bell Knoll (1988)
Blue Bell Knoll isn’t a record of escapism; it doesn’t whisk you off anywhere but irrevocably changes what’s around you. Cocteau Twins are the masters of that; their embalming soundscapes immediately transform your overly cold, flat, traffic-stationed car or stuffy bus ride with an aura of drama and dreaminess. In the bleakest midwinter, this addition of mercurial colour is a godsend.
The record purposefully avoids hits in favour of a swirl of sound that can transform your being into a cup of warm tea, like the most favourable incarnation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. And beyond the quilted feeling that the effortless nonsense casts, the production layering is truly astounding, with pinging delays, syncopated echoes and an array of effects well ahead of their time.
Sibylle Baier – Colour Green (N/A)
The German artist Sibylle Baier recorded the tracks on the album Colour Green using a reel-to-reel tape machine in her first apartment. The recordings themselves seem intimately wrapped in the duvet-trapped dreaminess from which they were conceived and chronicled. She handed out a few of these deeply personal tapes to friends and retired the masters to a box like old greeting cards. Thereafter, she got on with the business of living. Some 30 years later, her son discovered the tapes, and there’s simply no imagining the billowing of emotions and wonderment he experienced when he first hit that fateful play.
The album is a masterpiece wrapped up in the organic miasma of sincerity and pleasure that surrounds it. Almost impossible to replicate owing to the gentle embalming of the backstory, it resides as a piece of music that genuinely seems to have been fished from the floating firmament—entirely singular in its dainty humility. Love in the Shakespearean mainstream is all sunshine and rainbows, but for the most part, it is bills, snuggles, squabbles and cheap glasses of wine; Baier’s song proves these everyday trifles are just as romantic as we embrace the simple, glowing salvation of bonds that spare us from the dull drudgery of life.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Idiot Prayer (2020)
The cacophony of Nick Cave’s back catalogue is distilled down to a sketch of sheer beauty that has you marvelling at its majesty in a fixed gaze for a solid 90 minutes of wonder. It’s just one man, a piano and a massive empty room, but you could drop a bomb into the bottomless bounty of unfurling poetry and euphony on display and never hear it explode.
If winter is a time for reflection on the year that has come before and a harvest to stock up for what lies ahead, then Cave cares to listen to all of your floating thoughts as he regales you with transfigured introspection riding on melodies he seems to have lassoed from the ether and sent back rattling towards the rafters of the firmament. The performance is awe-inspiring, but it never daunts or gets ahead of itself either.
