Metal Hammer's Guilty Pleasures Of 2014

Even though 99.9% of our time is spent listening to metal, sometimes we need a break. And this is a celebration of everything we’ve been listening to but wouldn’t admit it to our mums (this is a lie, we’re not sorry about any of these).

PVRIS – White Noise

Merlin Alderslade: “Whatever you want to label them – electro-rock? dance-pop? alt-indie?! – PVRIS have managed to produce a debut absolutely brimming with heartstring-tugging melodies, sumptuously infectious hooks and smartly crafted lyrics. Genres be damned: this is one of the best debut full-lengths to land in a long, long time.”

Peter Hammill – All That Might Have Been

Dom Lawson: “Peter Hammill is 66 years old and has been making music since the mid-‘60s, and yet his work still crackles with a heartfelt devotion to creating something vital, challenging and new. His 32nd – yup, 32nd! – solo album is simply one of his greatest creations; a fearlessly bewildering and amorphous collage of sound, melody and elegant invention that demands total immersion and surrender. My fucking hero.”

Billy Idol – Can’t Break Me Down

Vanessa Thorpe: “Pure freaking cheese. YES!”

Tegan & Sara feat. The Lonely Island – Everything Is Awesome

Lewis Somerscales: “Cause everything is awesome right?”

**Alexander Milas: **“I’m not sure you can call this a pleasure so much as it’s a disease. You really need to see the Lego Movie to comprehend just where this bizarre, incessant and ridiculously infectious piece of pop-heroin is coming from, but months on and it still hasn’t failed to bring a smile to my face.”

H.E.A.T – Tearing Down The Walls

Jonathan Selzer: “AOR heaven and H.E.A.T’s utterly uncynical approach wasn’t trying to leg-hump the short-circuiting corpse of a once-glitzy genre like the vast majority of their peers, this was a bunch of young Swedes touching down on a lurid new planet, running rampant, swinging through the trees, and gorging themselves on nectar.”

Taylor Swift – Shake It Off

Luke Morton: “Tay Tay has come a long way since her country music origins and is now a pop music behemoth who loves nothing more than kicking the charts up the jacksie. It’s infectious, it’s happy, it’s fun – it’s all you need from the multi-award winning Pop Princess. All hail Swift!”

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