This is the first December we have encountered as a fresh-faced publication from Portland, Oregon. Sharing a best of 2018 list feels like an unavoidable obligation to wrap up the year and honor the best works we experienced, but we’re going to try something a little different than the standard staff selection listicle of a top-however-many albums. Sure it’s fun to see what our staff picked as the cream of the crop for the year, but we want to try to highlight the albums that really meant something to us as individuals this year in something longer than a blurb that not a single person will bother to read.

I’m introducing our year-end series called the Music That Mattered in 2018. We want to share the music we loved this year and why, and in at least one case, it wasn’t always a full album. These are not necessarily the albums that we would select as the pinnacle of 2018, but these are our favorites, the ones that were there when we needed them most, the ones that introduced us to a new favorite artist or forced us to rethink the power of music entirely.

We scraped by in our first eight months as a publication. We tried to provide album reviews as often as possible, but life in 2018 encroached on our ability to do so. We’re hoping to change that. I asked everyone on staff to write two or three in-depth retrospective reviews of the records that deserve to have their names shouted before we flip the calendars. We hope you discover some new music that may have slipped through the cracks this year and start 2019 off with a great lineup of records.

We will also feature a few video games that we felt mattered and highlight the one film, Mike Gibbiser’s World of Facts, that we feel challenged the form of a tired medium in an exceptional manner.

I’d also like to announce that the Split Tooth Podcast Network will launch in early January. Split Picks, in which we take two albums by an artist and analyze, compare and break them down until we decide which one reigns supreme, will be the first show, with more to follow in the coming months. We are excited to plunge into multimedia and hope these podcasts will lead to a deeper understanding of the works that have defined our music tastes, and again, lead you to some favorite new music.

Happy holidays from everyone at Split Tooth Media and thank you for encouraging us to keep going this year. Every story view, every like, every share matters more than I can effectively verbalize. If you’d like to stay up to date with all things Split Tooth and help support us, we welcome you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. 

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring. 

Craig Wright, founder/editor-in-chief of Split Tooth Media

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