Emerging in mid-November, the sophomore album by Deaf Radio is the latest release on the list this year, impressively making it to the edges of the top 5 in just a few weeks. Deaf Radio are from Athens (Greece, not Georgia USA), but their work is firmly rooted in the Californian desert. Like its predecessor, 2017’s Alarm, there’s no getting round the fact that Modern Panic owes a huge debt to Queens of the Stone Age. Even the band’s name is surely a nod to the ‘radio skits’ on QOTSA’s 2002 masterpiece Songs for the Deaf. The deep love that Deaf Radio obviously have for Homme and Co is tattooed all over both of their albums so far (to the extent that one can’t help wonder whether Panos Gklinos is trying to make his voice sound like Josh Homme’s, to match his band’s musical reverence, or whether the stark vocal similarity is a happy accident). To be fair, album two sees Deaf Radio starting to adapt their QOTSA-patented template. Tracks like ‘Animals’ and ‘Fossils’ show there’s an evolution underway here, and more of Deaf Radio’s own ideas come through. Where Alarm was unquestionably ‘derivative of’, Modern Panic is merely ‘influenced by’ (or a ‘Homme-age’ to!), QOTSA – and it’s the significantly better record for that fact. However, even if you take the (no longer entirely fair) view still expressed by some critics that this is just a QOTSA rip off, Modern Panic is a better ‘QOTSA album’ than two out of the last three records that QOTSA have made themselves. For a long-time QOTSA fan like me, that’s a neat trick.