Christopher Owens - I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair 

To get here, Christopher Owens had to go through hell. There was a time, over a decade ago now, when his old band Girls looked set to be one of the defining bands of their generation, pairing as they did classic pop touchstones with invention and ambition. Ultimately, the group fizzled as both members struggled with addiction, and in the years since, Christopher has dealt with homelessness, a serious motorcycle accident, and the death of his former bandmate, Chet ‘JR’ White. He has made solo albums before - the strange, baroque ‘Lysandre’, the gospel-tinged ‘A New Testament’ and the loose, light-footed ‘Chrissybaby Forever’ - but none quite captured the magic that Girls’ two records proved him capable of. ‘I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’, however, is another matter entirely; suddenly, magnificently, he has rediscovered the songwriting tools that had been eluding him all at once. Stylistically, the album wanders, so we get blissed-out guitar pop as the record’s backbone, which he demonstrates early with ‘Beautiful Horses’ and ‘I Think About Heaven’. Later, he’ll inflect that blueprint with psychedelic looseness on the gorgeous ‘I Know’ and lean into country on ‘This Is My Guitar’ and ‘Distant Drummer’. He finally plugs in and goes electric on the handsome, reverb drenched ‘Two Words’, before the album closes with seven minutes of pure catharsis on ‘Do You Need A Friend’. The refrain on the latter, “If you really wanna know / I’m barely making it through the days,” hits mightily hard given his recent history, but the track rings out with optimism, the sound of the storm finally passing. Christopher Owens has emerged from it with potentially one of the year’s best records.