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.

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Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Brooklyn bubblegum-sludge bashers Hunters are the bastard children of Lollapalooza 1996, a perfect blend of Boss Hog cheer and Melvins churn. Led by co-frontscrungers Isabel Ibsen and Derek Watson, the band is a decidedly Brooklynite version of bands like Jucifer or Lullabye Arkestra, with melodies that lean towards the kiwi and twee, chilly attitudes over broiling guitars, and noise breakdowns that sound like trash being hauled. Their four-track digital EP, simply called Hunters, is available now at a handy name-your-price on their BandCamp site; opening track "Deadbeat" is also available as a stand-alone single on a just-released split 7-inch with Montreal's Dead Wife via Brooklyn label Swill Children. The track (produced by James Iha!) is a two-and-half-minute workout of caveman drumming, a gloriously plodding two-note riff, and the joyous muck-riot of vintage Babes in Toyland.

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