Has Marvel really ditched Iron Man from the MCU? Don’t count on it
It’s a Hollywood ploy as old as time – and one that probably explains why the Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger still have acting careers. If your venerable old action saga is struggling to recoup the greenbacks it did in the early days, just bring back the guy (and let’s face it, it always seems to be a guy) who made it such a success in the first place.
This is the whole reason movies such as Terminator Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate exist (for better or worse). But if Marvel fans had hoped that the suddenly struggling superhero mega-saga might be restored to its former glories by bringing back Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, they will now have to look elsewhere for their returning comic book messiah. Marvel supremo Kevin Feige has put the kibosh on the idea in an interview with Vanity Fair to discuss the latest phase in Downey Jr’s much-garlanded career, pointing out that to reintegrate this version of Tony Stark would ruin the finale of Avengers: Endgame, in which the character sacrifices himself for the greater good.
“We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” said Feige. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
There has been speculation ever since Marvel began introducing elements of the multiverse in recent films that Downey Jr could return via some kind of alternate reality switcheroo. After all, the current on-screen version of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is a variant of the one killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, while Zoe Saldana’s Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy is actually an earlier version of the alien superhero murdered, also by Thanos, in the same film. So why not bring back the MCU’s most famous face, especially as this would effectively allow the studio to have its cake and eat it?
Feige’s argument is a fair one. If moments of high movie drama need to be earned, it is never a good idea to undermine them by signalling that death is not the end. The advent of the multiverse makes anything theoretically possible, yet there is a superior set of rules that’s based on not pissing off your audience, rather than quantum mechanics.
There is also a certain irony to the idea that restoring Downey Jr’s Iron Man would be a much-needed panacea for the MCU’s current ills, because the saga’s success was always based on the concept that characters are the stars of comic book movies, not the actors playing them. Few had heard of Aussie hunk Chris Hemsworth before he started playing Thor, or twinkle-toed Tom Holland before he signed up to
portray Spider-Man.
In many ways the Marvel method seemed to mark a welcome break with the old-style, marketing-led casting approach. Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze in Batman & Robin will always be recognisable as the Austrian oak rather than Batman’s ice gun-wielding nemesis, despite all that fake-frozen makeup. Let’s say nothing about Stallone as a version of Judge Dredd who kept taking his helmet off (sacrilege!) in 1995. But Holland’s masked wall-crawler is SpiderMan first and foremost, likewise with Hulk and Captain Marvel. There were no complaints when Marvel changed the actor playing (admittedly a different version of) Captain America.
On the other hand, the MCU is definitely missing Iron Man, and it almost seems a little unfair that after unprecedented success across a score or more of movies, the character is now effectively unusable. While DC is able to rejig its cavalcade of superheroes with new actors and storylines because nobody really cared much about the DCEU versions of Batman, Superman et al,
Marvel is unable to do the same because fans spent so long buying into Downey Jr’s Iron Man that the idea of anyone else in the suit would seem like a betrayal.
Perhaps the studio had better get over itself quick and cast someone else as a multiversal variant before the character’s absence becomes so entrenched that nobody ever dares bring him back, like the sports team that retires a shirt. Downey Jr made a great Tony Stark, but this shouldn’t mean we have to wait for the MCU to finally fail before we get to see the character soar again. I hear Tom Cruise has a thing for speeding through the clouds at 30,000 feet.
all together with the haste of someone who needs to get to their next job. The end product is fascinatingly tactile and in the case of the ballad 14, utterly beautiful. BBT
34Jpegmafia and Danny Brown – Scaring the Hoes
The precursor to Danny Brown’s introspective Quaranta was made at the crunch point of his addictions – he was in rehab by the time it was released – and his full-length collab with Jpegmafia is hyperstimulated, like a domino effect of short circuits being blasted by too-strong currents. “Blacked out, can’t think no more / So ain’t no way we ’bout to take this slow,” he warns on opener Lean Beef Patty, sounding, as ever, like he’s rapping through molars clamped around a chew toy. There are glitches and breakbeats, the blare of cursed jazz ensembles and broken arcades, skeleton-rattling percussion and slippery samples of Kelis swimming through the whacked signal-to-noise mix. Jpeg’s production chews these sounds up as if between the teeth of a bin lorry crusher, organic source traces glinting amid the detritus and creating the record’s apocalyptic lure. LS
33Grian Chatten – Chaos for the Fly
Fontaines DC remain a going concern, but their frontman made this solo release feel anything but a between-albums diversion. There are forays into new sounds for him, such as the breezy Rat Pack backing of Bob’s Casino and cosmic trip-hop on East Coast Bed, but what remains the same is his strength as a lyricist: he tramps moodily towards misanthropy, but a deep love for humanity prevents him from ever quite getting there. Chatten writes the way a sketch artist draws, in deft, sure lines – whether describing New York’s freezing sidewalks getting salted (“the whole of the city was seasoned to taste”) or pinpointing toxic acquaintances (“they will celebrate the things that make you who you’re not”). BBT
32The National – The First Two Pages of Frankenstein
If Laugh Track sprawled, confidently sharing the fruits of the National’s unexpectedly prolific return, then their beautiful first album of 2023 held a more precarious pose as Matt Berninger tried to maintain his footing on faltering ground. First Two Pages of Frankenstein spanned the terror and rage of how it feels when home doesn’t feel like home any more, when, as Berninger duetted with Phoebe Bridgers, “your mind is not your friend”. But for all that he battled with writers’ block, these are some of his most beautiful, prismatic evocations of loss, from the nihilistic anthem of Tropic Morning News to the vulnerable shudder of undersung standout Ice Machines. LS
31Kara Jackson – Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
A one-time US national youth poet laureate, Jackson’s writerly pedigree leaps out of this droll, glum debut album. Backed by thrumming arrangements of acoustic guitar, pedal steel, ambient tones and more, and with shades of Joni Mitchell as well as a whole lineage of jazz vocalists, she sings of self worth in a world of wouldbe partners, lost loves and people who give her the “dickhead blues”. She captures the bafflement of heartbreak (be it romantic or grief-stricken) just right, where you’re well aware of your feelings but can’t find the route to clamber around them: “When you are stuck sinking in someone’s lagoon / Like a spoon drowns in a stew” is just one of her many spot-on, pleasingly assonant lines. BBT
30Janelle Monáe – The Age of Pleasure
Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” LS
29PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying
In a career not short on left turns, PJ Harvey’s 10th solo album adapted texts from her book-length poem Orlam, a mythic account of a farm girl’s coming of age guided by the spirit of Elvis in the body of a dead soldier and watched over by the disembodied eye of her pet lamb. With experimentation and avoidance of any past repetition paramount, Harvey and her collaborators conjured a folky netherworld that crept up on you like mist over a cliff – synths that buzzed like telephone wires, rhythms like the footsteps of horses hacking out, harmonies that seemed borne on the breeze – a sound that seemed at once totally novel and as if it had emanated from the ground itself. LS
28Everything But the Girl – Fuse
The year’s most surprising return, 24 years after their last record, and a total return to form. Everything But the Girl’s 11th album essayed the precariousness of post-pandemic life through strikingly contemporary, clubinflected melancholy: desolate postdubstep, staticky electronics, AutoTuned alienation. Tracey Thorn’s wise, weary voice cut through it all, clear as a long-exposure photo of car lights in the dark, illuminating the decaying world, growing suspicion and fragmentation of community, and suggesting, in the unassailable tenderness of her melodies and outlook, that intimacy and grace are the best bulwarks we’ve got. That and – as she puts it on No One Knows We’re Dancing and Karaoke – getting lost on a dark dancefloor. LS
27Pangaea – Changing Channels
Hessle Audio, the British label founded by Pangaea, Pearson Sound and Ben UFO, have now spent 15 years chewing through the boundary between techno and bass music, championing sounds that are knottily cerebral and airhorn-worthy all at once. The sweet, glistening glacé cherry on the birthday cake was this album from Pangaea (AKA Kevin McAuley), who pushed the populist side of their sound harder than ever as he swerved through speed garage, deep house, ambient techno, hard trance and beyond. The cut-up chatter and fidget-house bass of Installation made it the dance track of the summer, but it’s just one of four infernally catchy vocal cuts here, while the pure instrumentals are just as spry.
BBT
26Sampha – Lahai
With huge hits for David Kushner, Lewis Capaldi and many more this year, the piano ballad remains a pop mainstay, and often boringly so – but Sampha showed off the form’s timbral and emotional possibilities. His piano playing evokes a hard-won certainty, and sturdily roots these songs, allowing for experimentation to flutter around but never get lost: sunlit hip-hop on Only, urgent secular gospel on Suspended, muted and cosmic Jersey club on Can’t Go Back, and so many imaginative genre flips. His songs, full of sun, sky and flight as he muses on his direction in life, move like murmurations in crisp evening light: clear, decisive yet poetic. BBT
25Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings
Byrne’s third album seems cast in halo light: production shimmering and celestial, melodies swooping like warm winds or moon tides, synths glittering and dancing. These are heart-in-mouth songs of real benediction as Byrne hymns the true love she experienced with collaborator Eric Littmann, who died during the album’s making, and how he taught her to stand for nothing less. Her deep, gorgeous voice is as study as Nico’s yet gentle as a caress, sustaining a vision of intimacy that is as grounded as it is limitless. LS
24Kylie Minogue – Tension
“Spinnin’ around in circles / I could do it forever,” Kylie sings on Green Light, a wink to her pop pedigree and to her intention to spend an eternity reinventing. Unlike her previous two albums, Tension has no theme – other than perhaps that between the past and the present. Lovers are cast in a perpetual now, weighing up what was against what might be; the music shimmies between Kylie’s 80s heyday (via the Weeknd), French touch frisson, her own Body Language-era sultriness, EDM confetti cannons and even a little springy funk à la Doja Cat. She’s taking the pulse of the dancefloor – and the beat goes padam, padam … LS
23Kali Uchis – Red Moon in Venus
The air fairly throbs with light, colour and scent in this intoxicating album by the Colombian-American R&B singer-songwriter: a study of the divine feminine in a truly heavenly setting. There are rapturous statements of love and feelings of impotent hurt, but Uchis is no simpering fool. “Every time I see you smile, that’s all me,” she reminds her lover on All Mine, before turning to a rival: “You couldn’t keep him even if I gave him to you.” Meanwhile on Moral Conscience she tells an ex with brutal simplicity, “when you’re all alone you’ll know you were wrong”, using one of the many thrillingly bright melodies that sharpen the glow of this superb album. BBT
22Sufjan Stevens – Javelin
With masterful arrangements that concertina between delicate fingerpicking and voluptuous orchestral heft, Sufjan Stevens socks you again and again with bolts of pure feeling. He allows his voice to become frail to better amplify its opposite: angelic backing vocalists who offer consoling choruses and sunbeams of wordless love as Stevens frets about his failings and yearns for human connection. By finessing the stark folk of 2015’s muchloved Carrie & Lowell into the grand visions elsewhere in his catalogue, and with electronic percussion more subtly woven than ever before, Stevens is at the top of his songwriting game. BBT
21Paramore – This Is Why
Hypocrisy haunts Paramore’s sixth album, both in the world outside – the demand to be heard but the refusal to hear one another; compassion fatigue; a “smooth operator in a shit-stained suit” – but also internally, as Hayley Williams grapples with the gulf between her best intentions and faltering actions. These frustrations make This Is Why the Nashville band’s most studsup record, fired by a bolshie, splintered attack inspired by 2000s British iconoclasts Bloc Party and Foals. Magnetically restless and unresolved, it only finds resolution on the bittersweet Liar, read by many fans as Williams’ admission of love towards her bandmate and now-boyfriend Taylor York after years of self-denial: an admissible strand of hypocrisy with a happy ending. LS
20Nabihah Iqbal – Dreamer
Like the sunflower of one of Dreamer’s track titles, Iqbal seems to bend towards light – a musician chasing warmth, beauty and transcendence in whatever form she can find it. Her grounding in club culture means that deep house tracks such as Gentle Heart and Sky River properly bump, but this is mostly a dream-pop album, with Durutti Column-ish electric guitar plucking, Cocteau Twins loveliness and, in This World Couldn’t See Us, an unabashed A-ha-meets-New-Order 80s pastiche. BBT
19Kelela – Raven
Flanked by a sweat-beaded crack team of underground producers – LSDXOXO, Bambii, Asmara, Florian TM Zeisig and more – Kelela travelled the breadth of club culture from the strobe light in a black-box dancefloor to the pallid sun through the taxi window on the way home. She champions breakbeat, dub techno, dancehall, ambient, R&B and more but never in straightforward genre studies – Let It Go, say, is a deep house track without the drums – and Kelela’s voice, heartfelt yet with a touch of guardedness, says so much in its tone alone. BBT
18Sofia Kourtesis – Madres
The itinerant Peruvian producer minted an instant Balearic classic, destined to be played in full in beach bars at sunset for a decade or more. Avoiding the heavy-handed emotional manipulation by some producers of this type of deep, songwriterly dance music, Kourtesis doesn’t overegg the drama and moves you – in every sense – with the certainty of her melodies and grooves. The synths shift in soft eddies, but there are sharp glints of light on the surface: the Villalobos-esque trumpet stabs on Habla Con Ella, say, or the stuttering vocal sample on How Music Makes You Feel Better. That latter track name might as well be this enriching, soul-filling album’s subtitle. BBT
17Noname – Sundial
“Build and destroy, build and rebuild”: the Chicago rapper mulls over the challenges and opportunities, the hypocrisies and epiphanies, of postBLM America in the year’s most piercingly intelligent hip-hop album (and it was a crowded field). She imagines new modes of living outside a society that has never cared for her people, and the euphonious boom-bap and neosoul backings keep the mood positive. But she isn’t suckered into Pollyannaish utopian thinking, always provoking her own community, and bracingly frank when assessing toxic relationships or beauty standards. BBT
16Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Now that’s an album title, and moreover, that’s a rock star. Tumor made the competition look creatively timid, spiritually blinkered and sartorially basic as they delved deeper into the scuzzy sound of excellent 2021
EP The Asymptotical World. In this raunchy street-punk setting, basslines prowl around flaming dustbins, guitar riffs etch lightning into leather, and Tumor’s focused, exacting vocals wrap you tight around their finger. Operator has a cheerleader chant of “Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!”, the most obvious wakeup call on an album that reminds you to resist a safe and cosy life. BBT
15 Boygenius – The Record
Seditious barn burners, snowy ballads, new folk standards: the debut album by Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus was an instant indie rock classic, made by an emotionally literate hydra whose bond was tight enough for them to turn over what it means to know someone, and what it takes to let yourself be known, in intimate, brutal, hilarious detail. In the Boys’ world, devotion and destruction go hand in hand, each rendered precisely as terrifying and alluring as the other. “It’s a bad idea and I’m all about it,” as Baker sings on $20, as romantic an invitation to conspiracy as you’ll ever hear. LS
14Billy Woods and Kenny Segal – Maps
As a solo artist, label head and collaborator, including with the duo Armand Hammer, Billy Woods has long been revered in underground rap circles, but this album gave him some of his most accessible backings and brought him to a more mainstream audience. Newcomers and longtime fans alike thralled to his metre, which is focused yet chatty, rhythmic yet unbounded. He also has a gourmand’s lipsmacking appreciation for the tang and bite of language, and appropriately enough, food and drink appears throughout: “Slurp noodles out of clear soup / Delivery fee is oof”; “Julienned scallions and other alliums”; “I sip Mexico’s best slow mezcal Negroni / sitting atop the corral smokin’, watching unbroken wild ponies.” BBT
13Troye Sivan – Something to Give Each Other
Rush, the deliciously bawdy opening song on Troye Sivan’s third album, is a bit of a feint: after all the bodyto-body bumping, the Australian pop star turns wistful, even lovestruck, as he muses on the boys he wants, the boys he can’t have and the boy he lost. He’s twisted up by desire: the robotic vocal processing on lament One of Your Girls embodies how dehumanising it is to want someone so unattainable; Still Got It is an organ dirge that makes crushing into an act of holy devotion; infatuation leaves him lightheaded on In My Room. All the while, he tries to maintain a cosmopolitan cool, his sleek synth-pop slipping from French touch to Spanish guitar to UK garage 2-step. But globetrotting can only get him so far. “I’m just tryna get outside of this body,” he admits on Silly. LS
12Anohni and the Johnsons – My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
Nearly 20 years on from her breakthrough, Anohni’s singular voice still feels like a sun lamp lighting up the grey everyday, and the backings here (co-produced by Amy Winehouse and Duffy collaborator Jimmy Hogarth) allow her to dwell on the warm, soulful end of her remarkably expressive register. But as lovely as the music and vocal delivery is here, the songs grip and sting, confronting as they do the baffling unfairness of grief, guilt at ecological collapse and the cruel vi
olence of transphobia. BBT
11Wednesday – Rat Saw God
The settings of Wednesday songs tend to be pretty shabby: truck crashes, car park overdoses, accidental firework arson, a “sex shop off the highway with a biblical name”. But songwriter Karly Hartzman practically consecrates the defining locales of her North Carolina youth into sites of religious pilgrimage, honouring this vanishing, violent detritus and the overlooked rural lives of those who witness it. Blurring
allegory and anecdote into ripping anthems caught halfway between the disaffection of the 90s Touch and Go catalogue and the Drive-By Truckers’ take on southern rock, Rat Saw God is the year’s best rock album, and a place you’ll want to keep visiting again and again. LS