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ALBUM REVIEW: A Good Year - Play
Danish duo A Good Year have only been releasing music since 2024 but have rapidly cemented themselves in the Alternative Indie scene. Their musical catalogue transports the listener into a dusky, smoky parallel world. Punctuated by the duo’s ability to effortlessly add their own flare. This universe-transforming superpower is explicitly demonstrated in ‘Play’, the duo’s follow up to ‘Sofina (Soundtrack)’.
The album begins its enchantment with ‘Dealerz’ a collaboration with Quiet Light and Late Verlane, two artists who are also brandished with the label Alternative Indie. The song is laidback, moody and indulgent in its homage to Slacker Rock. Although, this wouldn’t be an A Good Year tune if they didn’t emulsify their own style into the song, letting their own thumbprint lurk in the back of the track, manifested in the form of an eerily melancholic synth pattern.
A Good Year doesn’t shy away from collaboration, with only three of the albums twelve tracks not having any featured artists. All of the collaborative work makes the project feel unpredictable and like patchwork, each artist hypodermically injects the album with something completely different. Impressively, the colliding styles are able to harmonise and interweave seamlessly. The seventh offering from ‘Play’, ‘Blue Flame’, portrays this with ease, fusing the stuttering Indie sound of Tiffi M and the pop energy of MØ, creating a vibrant, psychedelic experience that swims and floats around limitation.
When A Good Year do work alone, the tracks come out equally dreamlike. ‘This is not home’ and ‘In between’ nestle back-to-back, before the album finishes with ‘YSL’, boasting the duo’s talent for making music with an attached adhesiveness that sticks to the zeitgeist and becomes rewired. A Good Year stand out in current culture, but not in an unfamiliar way. They are, simply, cool.
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