Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

​For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

More >>

​Brooklyn post-punk trio Household has all the taut, jittery rhythmic propulsion of vintage art-pulsers like LiLiPUT and Delta 5, but the band adds a gorgeous, infectious layer of minor-key harmonies taken from the first wave of '90s twee. Guitarist Talya Cooper says the twin vocal dynamic between her and drummer Jenna Weiss-Berman sprung from an office friendship where the two fielded technical service phone calls for a nonprofit and chatted about bands like Huggy Bear and Black Tambourine: "I asked her if she wanted to play drums in a band with me while we were, no joke, standing by the water cooler." Bassist Isabel Freeman joined up, and the three recorded the sardonic Items, an album of two-minute ragers where pop melodies float determinedly over jagged rhythms and clipped, strangled guitars. It's available now as a $3 BandCamp download, but is due later this fall as a cassette tape (via Wild Isle) and on 12" vinyl (via Dull Knife). Opening track "Go Away" is blocky and brittle, playing like spiraling twee-pop bubblegum after spending a semester at the Gang Of Four school of rock.

More >>