In the 2010s, as playlists swelled with unrelated tracks and algorithms shot listeners off in all directions, the full-length release started to feel on the verge of becoming an antique. But great artists will always want to create works that expand their visions, and this decade, they found new ways to push the LP forward. They pioneered the visual album, perfected the surprise drop, and stretched running times as long as they pleased, no longer beholden to physical media. So the form endures, and at the end of a turbulent decade, it is thriving. Here are our top 200 albums of the decade.
For more about how we put together this list, read this letter from our editor-in-chief Puja Patel. And check out all of Pitchfork’s 2010s wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Note: FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE and Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors, two albums released after the voting for this list took place, appear near the top of our Best of 2019 list. Had they been released earlier, they would have been included here.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Ratking: So It Goes (2014)
As suggested by the painstakingly detailed map of New York City that covers So It Goes, Ratking’s 2014 debut is a deep dive into their hometown. Storming from the stoops of Harlem to the bustling storefronts of Canal Street are the gaptooth spitfire Wiki and the languid daydreamer Hak, whose relentless banter never loses steam. Producer Sporting Life’s abstract, sample-heavy soundscapes conjure the chaos of the modern concrete jungle—a sound that evokes the dissonance of ’70s no wave and the experimentation of ’90s hip-hop. Together, Ratking paint a compelling city portrait: “Remove Ya” addresses its rampant stop-and-frisk abuses, while the jazzy “Snow Beach” chastises gentrification for poisoning the Big Apple. So It Goes shows NYC as it really is: pretty, gritty, and gross, forever restless and forever alive. –Quinn Moreland
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Wu Lyf: Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (2011)
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, plenty of indie bands sprang up with crystalline guitars, cryptic lyrics, and an aversion to sharing basic biographical details. But those other acts didn’t have a singer like Wu Lyf’s Ellery Roberts. Go Tell Fire to the Mountain supported Roberts’ shredded growl with patient post-rock builds, and the result was pure catharsis. These songs were so cuttingly earnest—“I love you forever,” Roberts rasped on the opener, “L Y F”—that it almost came as no surprise when the group broke up afterward. Who could sustain such intensity; who would want to? It wasn’t always easy to tell what Roberts was hollering about, but Wu Lyf’s best songs, like the sweeping “We Bros,” could have you chanting along, caught up in a frenzy of oddball solidarity. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Jean Grae / Quelle Chris: Everything’s Fine (2018)
On Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris tackle a range of modern topics—from the mistreatment of black people by the police to the ever-growing influence of Instagram models—through dense skits, outrageous parodies, and sharp rapping. The conversations they begin don’t always reach a conclusion, but they’re thoughtful, and the duo never sacrifices style for substance. Grae is the steady force and more of a traditionalist: She’s technically precise, while Chris is the wild card. But despite their differences, they complement each other perfectly, whether rapping or producing. That balance carries over to their wide array of guests who all rise to meet their energy. Yet, in the end, the album is about Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, who make it clear that they’re not content to be “fine.” –Alphonse Pierre
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Fatima Al Qadiri: Genre-Specific Xperience (2011)
Few documents of global music this decade were as interesting as the producer Fatima Al Qadiri’s Genre-Specific Xperience, an icy, minimal exercise in translating and flattening microgenres—juke, dubstep, digital tropicália—into a cohesive statement that tied to her international upbringing and youth as a gamer. Just five songs long, the record was high-minded—its videos, helmed by highly regarded artists like Ryan Trecartin and Sophia al-Maria, debuted in New York’s New Museum—but it also provided a template for what a cerebral dancefloor could look like. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Portal: Vexovoid (2013)
Some 21st-century death metal acts embraced digital technology and the clarity it brought; imagine listening to a jackhammer busting through concrete in hi-def. That modern crispness is nowhere to be found in the eruptive music of Portal, who instead update old-school death metal by making their music sound not like just one tsunami but dozens of them. The Australian group successfully shaded the lines of all instruments into one cumulative blast, with everything melting together: the slow, guttural growling of lead vocalist The Curator, drummer Ignis Fatuus’ rumbling percussive churn. (All the band members are anonymous and perform masked.) There are glints of familiar metal tropes—epic guitar solos, sci-fi-homage lyrics—but by boiling these elements into a tarry, punishing brew, Portal bring metal back where it started, as the sound of something terrifying, exciting, and new. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Downtown Boys: Full Communism (2015)
“Why is it that we never have enough with just what's inside of us?” screams Victoria Ruiz at the start of “Monstro,” the highlight of Downtown Boys’ cyclonic debut album, Full Communism. It’s a fair question to throw at a capitalist country that's hell-bent on extracting every modicum of value from its people, especially its young and marginalized. With true punk fury—and the occasional stellar use of saxophones— Downtown Boys clear themselves a space to rage: Joey L DeFrancesco cracks bedrock with his guitar chords, while drummer Norlan Olivo agitates the whole band into breakneck urgency. With Full Communism, Downtown Boys established themselves as the harbingers of righteous frustration at a system that keeps people pinned down in a cycle of exploitation. –Sasha Geffen
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Titus Andronicus: The Monitor (2010)
Throw together the Civil War, Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey, and Titus Andronicus singer Patrick Stickles’ self-imposed exile from mainstream American culture—plus some bagpipes—and you get The Monitor, the blueprint for a decade of emo rock bands. In Stickles’ fevered imagination, everything is a metaphor for everything else: high school is a battlefield, his anxiety and malaise is Abraham Lincoln’s, and tramps aren’t born to run as Bruce said, but instead were born to die. As the rhythm section storms along, Stickles screams himself hoarse about accepting your given lot in life and the folly of using spite for fuel. On one song’s chorus, he screams “You will always be a loser” over and over, which at least gives the losers an anthem, too. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Lil Peep: Hellboy (2016)
Hellboy was released while Lil Peep was a teen, just a few years before he died. The mixtape is focused on pain and how he hoped his might dissipate, and how he figured it probably wouldn’t. That he wasn’t wrong makes listening to the album feel like hearing a very loud alarm with a signal you cannot heed. The isolation at the core of his music wasn’t particular to him; he was just particularly good at distilling it. About the insistence of his depression, despite newfound success, he raps, “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself.” It’s particularly bittersweet that he made it sound so tantalizing, the sound of his voice rich over the borrowed riffs of emo bands and electronic music producers. If you’ve ever felt that way, his music assures you that you’re not alone—and if you haven’t, he gives you a glimpse of what that suffering feels like. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: SoundCloud
Kelela: Cut 4 Me (2013)
When Kelela debuted with Cut 4 Me, she solidified an experimental bass movement into something that felt human, as if a team of extraterrestrial scientists finally made contact. The mixtape was welded by a group of producers from UK imprint Night Slugs and their L.A. sister label Fade to Mind who bent elements of drum’n’bass, dubstep, techno, grime, and footwork into sparse soundtracks for the club underground. Kelela was the skeleton key to the crew’s disparate styles, a siren who could unlock a matrix of synths, shattering glass, and sputtering bass to reveal the soul hiding in the pauses between. It’s rare when something is both so clearly reflective of its time and predictive of the future, and Cut 4 Me was just that. –Puja Patel
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow (2011)
On Kate Bush’s only studio album of the decade, she sings about catching a snowflake out of the sky, warning a hunted yeti, and sleeping with a dissolving snowman. And she does so wide-eyed and full-heartedly, even painstakingly. 50 Words for Snow, named for the myth that the Inuit have such a vocabulary, boasts all of her trademark magical realism, fantastical lovers, and far-flung settings, but the songs are more quietly ambitious than past works—almost like chamber pieces. The material is more wistful: Where Bush’s best singles have often been about having something beautiful that you’re about to lose, much of 50 Words for Snow addresses things that are already lost. The wistfulness is often self-referential, as on “Snowed In at Wheeler Street,” a tale of star-crossed lovers with lyrics threaded with references to her old songs. It's music that rewards close attention in an age where that is increasingly rare. –Katherine St. Asaph
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Huerco S.: For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also Those Who Have) (2016)
Huerco S. got his start crafting techno that erased most of the things that typically make dance music tick: beats, basslines, forward drive. Within a few short years, those subtractive processes yielded For Those of You Who Have Never (and Also Those Who Have), an album of barely-there ambient music. Twirling grainy wisps of synthesizer around a hollow core, it’s hardly more substantial than wind chimes caught on corroded magnetic tape—and all the more captivating for it. Churning loops bubble up into a fizz of tape hiss, sounding like a lo-fi cassette dub of Berlin ambient-techno pioneers Basic Channel; bell tones and tinny synth riffs stumble down a delay-pedal hall of mirrors. It’s almost impossible to fix any of these ethereal pieces in your memory, but as long as the disc is spinning, it is an uncommonly enveloping listen. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Miranda Lambert: The Weight of These Wings (2016)
For the first half of the decade, Miranda Lambert was a country superstar with a string of radio hits, a recurring spot on The Voice, and a picture-perfect marriage to fellow singer Blake Shelton. But when they divorced in 2015, the breakup encouraged her to go down a darker, more existential path. Her ambitious double album The Weight of These Wings carries on in a grand tradition of messy relationship statements: It has the grit of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers and the uncertainty of Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, wrapped up in Lambert’s fiery, down-home charm. Its songs are torch ballads and highway anthems with a live band that feels borne of late night jam sessions, raw and unglamorous. For Lambert, redemption comes from buying a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses, by spending late nights alone at the bar, in knowing that she alone controls her destiny. Legend has it, she hung up on the first interviewer she spoke to about the record—the question was about Shelton’s new partner, Gwen Stefani—and decided that she would do no press surrounding the album, letting the music speak for itself. “All you had to do was listen,” she said. And the music says it all. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Pusha-T: Daytona (2018)
After the breakup of the Clipse, his duo with his brother, Pusha-T spent this decade trying to find his footing as a solo rapper. He’s had plenty of highs—his verse on “Mercy,” all of “Numbers on the Board”—but he’s also had releases that didn’t live up to the high standard he once set. Daytona is the full realization of Pusha as a star. The drug dealing raps that fans first fell in love with on Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury are just as rich here as he settles into a new corporate villain persona. Executive produced by Kanye West, Daytona closes with “Infrared,” an end-to-end thriller, famous for the petty shots at Drake that lit a new flame to one of this century’s defining rap beefs. And yet, for all the storylines and drama that surrounded Daytona, the music rises above. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Iceage: Beyondless (2018)
With limbs flailing and sweat matting his hair, Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt grew up before our eyes. He was only 18 at the top of the decade, when he and his childhood friends were dubbed the Next Great Punk Band, and across four albums and countless shows, they put in the work needed to uphold the claim. Beyondless, the quartet’s most recent LP, saw them once again expanding their sound in service of their ever-growing ambition, this time incorporating manic violins, honky-tonk pianos, and, for the first time, a guest vocalist in Sky Ferreira. The permanently anguished Rønnenfelt offers up a clear example of his dark philosophy in the cabaret stunner “Showtime,” narrating the onstage suicide of a handsome young singer. Over drunken drums that lead the rest of the band along by a rope, he snarls into the mic, grappling with the very public line of work that’s made him a minor heartthrob among the indie set. This is the latest, greatest Iceage: a bit more romantic but as fiercely droll as ever. –Noah Yoo
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Various Artists: Mono No Aware (2017)
Assembled by PAN label head Bill Kouligas, the compilation Mono No Aware offered a referendum on what “ambient music” means in the streaming era and a who’s-who primer on the genre’s emerging voices. An immediate standout was Yves Tumor with the gossamer synths and vérité chatter of “Limerance.” But at 16 tracks and nearly 80 minutes, the comp feels like a fun house with trapdoors at every turn: Open one and tumble into the breathy murmurs and glacial drifts of Malibu’s “Held.” Open another and hear Kouligas’ “VXOMEG” morph from harsh squall to blurry drones. Enigmatic and patiently unfolding, Mono No Aware stands as an argument for appreciating everyday subtleties in an era prone to bombast. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Hailu Mergia: Lala Belu (2018)
Reissues of obscure albums ran rampant this decade, thanks in part to labels following the YouTube algorithms that guided listeners to styles they may have otherwise never found. But the MP3 blog-turned-label Awesome Tapes From Africa bucked that trend, diligently digging through physical artifacts to discover true gems. Take keyboardist/composer Hailu Mergia, a star in his native Ethiopia in the ’70s who moved to Washington, D.C. and became a taxi driver. Discovery of an old tape in Bahir Dar, a tourist hotspot in northern Ethiopia, in 2013 ignited Mergia’s dormant career in the West, capped by Lala Belu, his first new album in decades. On it, Mergia still sounds spry and roving on piano, accordion, and synthesizer, his melodic sense as acute and mesmerizing as ever. With Mergia at the helm of a jazz trio moving as a crackling, telepathic entity, Lalu Belu astonishes not by being a nostalgia trip but by sounding triumphantly in the present. –Andy Beta
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Soccer Mommy: Clean (2018)
Clean is a breath of fresh air that will also knock the wind out of you. Nashville singer-songwriter Sophie Allison was far from the only former home-recorder making bittersweet indie pop in 2018, but she did it her own way, and with impressive craft. Released when Allison was 20, these endlessly replayable songs have the prickly slouch of ’90s indie rock, but with wide-eyed vulnerability and bright melodies in place of ironic distance; the sharp eyes and conversational delivery of vintage Taylor Swift, but with more of real life’s mess. It’s tempting to dwell on just the first three tracks: the relationship dysfunction of dreamy ballad “Still Clean,” the vicarious imperturbability of swirling anthem “Cool,” and, especially, the damn-she-just-did-that Stooges reversal “Your Dog.” But the rest is also revelatory; the subdued finale “Wildflowers,” where Allison intones that she “found God on Sunday morning, layin’ next to you,” is a sigh of relief that leaves you gasping for more. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Elysia Crampton: American Drift (2015)
Elysia Crampton’s experimental electronic music unearths deep personal truths in surprising places. Her earlier work as E+E turned heads by finding something sublime and alien in edits of pop hits by the likes of Justin Bieber. Crampton’s first album under her own name, American Drift, is a four-song, 30-minute set bringing together crunk, trap, cumbia, spoken word, crickets, and blaring radio station identifications. American Drift runs deeper when you learn about the ideas that inform it: The Bolivian-American producer described the album as an investigation of her adopted home state Virginia’s history, of brownness, of colonialism. As the bubble for mass-market electronic dance music was about to burst, this individualistic approach distinguished Crampton as a renegade on the rise. –Marc Hogan
Listen: SoundCloud
G.L.O.S.S.: Trans Day of Revenge (2016)
“T.D.O.R.” usually stands for Trans Day of Remembrance, a time to pay tribute to victims of violence in the community. G.L.O.S.S., the Olympia, Washington-based hardcore punk band, flipped the R to “revenge” on the only EP they released before breaking up in 2016. (Their acronymic name was equally bold: "Girls Living Outside Society's Shit.") With Trans Day of Revenge, G.L.O.S.S. railed against the cultural tropes that so often diminish a trans woman's life into a narrative of muted tragedy. Inflamed and incandescent, lead singer Sadie Switchblade's yowl scorches anyone who would tell her to shut up, stay docile, wait her turn. “When peace is just another word for death/It’s our turn to give violence a chance,” she screams in the opening bars against the roar of distorted electric guitar, just before a typhoon of drums crashes in. Continuing in the riot grrrl tradition of flashing sharpened teeth at embedded patriarchal violence, G.L.O.S.S. burned bright in their brief time together, leaving behind a relic of pure and righteous anger. –Sasha Geffen
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jamila Woods: LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019)
On her second album, R&B singer Jamila Woods grapples with the present by looking to the past. Each track is an ode to one of her inspirations, most of them women of color. Sometimes she writes directly from their perspective, but more often she draws from her subjects’ lives and adapts their words to her own life. She channels Eartha Kitt’s self-assuredness, then Frida Kahlo’s sense of balance in romantic relationships; Zora Neale Hurston reminds her that she is allowed to contain multitudes. Pulling from so many texts and thinkers, LEGACY! LEGACY! is theoretically dense, but it flows like honey. Woods’ voice is rich and velvety, and the album’s grounding in emotional truths makes it accessible and immediate. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe (2013)
On paper, it shouldn’t work: Two grizzled veterans of dour, navel-gazing Glasgow post-rock bands team up with a young singer raised on third-wave emo. They make bright, shiny synth-pop that is entirely self-written and self-produced, but is so immaculately constructed, it feels like it was built by a team of scientists. And yet, in 2013, The Bones of What You Believe served as the ideal wake-up call for those stumbling blearily out of the chillwave daze. On soaring songs like “The Mother We Share,” “We Sink,” and “Recover,” Lauren Mayberry’s crystalline voice deconstructs fractured relationships with beguiling poetics and brutal honesty, while the music swells with a mastery of dancefloor dynamics that nods to New Order and Depeche Mode. On their debut album, Chvrches ushered in a new era of dance pop with an indie soul. A thousand Spotify-core bands bloomed in their wake, but none could ever capture the same magic. –Amy Phillips
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Shabazz Palaces: Black Up (2011)
There isn’t as much room for mystery in music now as there was in 2009, when Shabazz Palaces crept onto the scene. Two EPs, sparse cover art, conceptual experimental music—at first, this is all we knew. By the time Black Up dropped, we knew the group was led by Ishmael Butler (formerly of Digable Planets) and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, but their biographies didn’t matter; they had effectively let their music do the talking. Black Up is drowned in murky instrumentals and bombastic, introspective rhymes. The sounds flirt with jazz, but also root themselves in a firm understanding of silence, or the sparse magic of simplicity. The songs teem with unexpected climaxes, like when “Free Press and Curl” veers straight into gospel, or the way "Recollections of the Wraith" seems to wrestle with itself before settling on a rush of soaring vocals in the chorus. From great mystery exploded an album of impossible vision. –Hanif Abdurraqib
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Savages: Silence Yourself (2013)
The post-punk hero of the decade wore pink stilettos onstage and made monogamy sound as appealing as anthrax. Jehnny Beth, frontwoman of Savages, sang with a sinister and a heavy-lidded hauteur, adding omnidirectional disdain for all things patriarchal and vanilla. Below her, terse, voluble bass and severe toms also nodded back to another era, one more restrictive to women as bold as the ones in this London band.
Savages’ debut came almost secondary to their quick mythology—their live show was explosive from the jump, a salve for those who missed the dark, sweaty scenes that predated them. But Silence Yourself carries every bit of that adrenaline; in its coiled, sparking guitars and rabid screams, it warns of the dangers of technology while weaponizing its potential. Too loudly to be ignored, it disputes complacent norms: Maybe marriage isn’t idyllic, but asphyxiating. Maybe an endless stream of information isn’t edifying, but toxic. And maybe a clarinet solo does belong in the year’s most casually brutal rock album. Suddenly, the alternatives sounded ancient. –Stacey Anderson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Margo Price: All American Made (2017)
Margo Price toiled for years to become an overnight sensation: Her acclaimed debut Midwest Farmer's Daughter, released in 2016 on Jack White's Third Man Records, came out after she had spent more than a decade in the Nashville trenches. But that album was a Trojan horse for the thornier sentiments she would smuggle onto the airwaves and stages with her follow-up, All American Made. Price mingles the political and the personal until they're indistinguishable on songs like “Heart of America” and the barnstormer “Cocaine Cowboys,” leading a band that draws on old-school honky tonk rhythms without coming across the least bit revivalist. “Pay Gap” couches its income disparity blues in flourishes of accordion and Lone Star guitar, while the Dylanesque title track wanders a desolate America as Price wonders if her pain—all our pain, actually—might be specific to this place. –Stephen Deusner
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here (2010)
When Gil Scott-Heron sampled Kanye West, five years after having his own “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” hook used by West on Late Registration, it felt like a kindly nod from a mentor. Scott-Heron, whose spoken-word vocals so wisely distilled America’s racial and social turmoil in the ’70s and early ’80s, had already served as an invaluable forefather to hip-hop. He had nothing to prove. But even at 62, Scott-Heron still had his ear to the ground. On I’m New Here, his 13th and final studio album before he died in 2011, he doesn’t just swerve into icy, minimalist electronics for the first time—he, along with producer Richard Russell, uses them to bring new friction to his aching, burnished voice. Over 15 tracks of wry philosophizing and solemn reflection, Scott-Heron honors everything in his rearview, from the strong women who shaped his character to the many mistakes that cost him dearly. He seems deeply lonely at times—a secluded insomniac who’s seen it all and knows change is stubborn to come—but at times, he also sounds reinvigorated. It’s a beautiful note he bows out on. –Stacey Anderson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Jessie Ware: Devotion (2012)
Arriving at the same time as industrial-strength belters like Adele and Florence Welch, fellow UK singer-songwriter Jessie Ware was an anomaly. After collaborating with post-dubstep acts SBTRKT and Joker, Ware synthesized her love of American hip-hop and R&B with dance music. The result was a preternaturally poised debut filled with a headrush of affection, all delivered in Ware’s elegantly airy voice. Devotion flits between sumptuous pop-R&B and sweeping power ballads, but it’s never missing Ware’s gentle, discerning touch: a surprisingly earworm-y Big Pun sample speeds behind “110%” (later replaced by a soundalike following a clearance dispute with Pun’s estate), while the anthemic “Wildest Moments” gave both Adele and Welch a run for their Top 40 money. Much of Devotion went on to soundtrack TV dramas and romance movies, which feels like a badge of honor: Ware provided a masterclass in mining the ups and downs of romance with an artful, featherlight touch. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Sharon Van Etten: Are We There (2014)
Are We There was a great deepening—of Sharon Van Etten’s emotional range, of the power of her songwriting, and of the potency of her voice, which became an alarmingly physical instrument. The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s vocals shake her body like a mighty engine, and on primal moments like “Your Love Is Killing Me,” it feels like we were hearing Van Etten literally come apart as she sings. She claws the walls off every word.
Her fourth album, Are We There, was the first to rise from classic soul more than indie rock; the faint organ licks and slow, patient drums are designed to center a torrential voice, the kind that stands pleading at the footlights. That is Van Etten, and her performance is transfixing, exhausting, cleansing. –Jayson Greene
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Hurray for the Riff Raff: Small Town Heroes (2014)
Alynda Lee Segarra had been releasing albums under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff for years before her ATO Records debut, Small Town Heroes, introduced the Bronx-born, Louisiana-based singer-songwriter to the world at large. A former freight train jumper and street busker, Segarra collects sounds and melodies like postcards from across America, mixing rhythmically lurching New Orleans R&B, rural blues, and Appalachian stomps into a new form of roots music. Small Town Heroes consists mostly of traveling songs—reflections on life as a touring musician—but also the thoughts of a woman who has spent most of her adult existence in transit. She's seen jubilation, tribulation, and cold-blooded murder, but Segarra keeps wandering, as though she can't wait to see what's over the next hill or around the next corner. “We might not be here when next year comes,” she sings on “Small Town Heroes.” “You better live it like you’re on the run.” –Stephen Deusner
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Popcaan: Where We Come From (2014)
On Where We Come From, Jamaican singer Popcaan’s soothing melodies shine over slick production from Dre Skull, Dubbel Dutch, and other in-demand beatmakers. Together, they jump from silky love ballads to grind-ready bangers. “Love Yuh Bad” is the album’s centerpiece, as Popcaan’s lovestruck lyrics anchor a hip-shaking dancefloor groove. Just as great are the moments when Popcaan fuses the rich sounds of his home with traditional pop bounce, like the scintillating title track. But through all the genre bending and lane-switching, Popcaan is clearly, deeply proud of his dancehall roots. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
JPEGMAFIA: Veteran (2018)
Baltimore rapper JPEGMAFIA’s darkly humorous—and occasionally troll-ish—personality is on full display throughout his gleefully unfiltered breakthrough album, Veteran. The Air Force vet’s chaotic stream-of-consciousness flow includes odd references—like to Macaulay Culkin, and to the wrestling theme song that doubles as his producer tag—as well as things he detests, like Morrissey (on a song called “I Cannot Fucking Wait Til Morrissey Dies”). Sometimes he spits with aggression over an airy instrumental ready to be embraced by the SoundCloud community, other times he scream-raps about Tinder and political figureheads over noise music. No matter the specific sound or subject matter, this scatter-brained album can’t help but leave you energized and ready to fight. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Skee Mask: Compro (2018)
On the surface, Brian Müller’s breakthrough album as Skee Mask is an attempt to meld furious drum patterns with gorgeous ambient passages, à la Aphex Twin. But keep listening, and Compro becomes more complicated. The German producer uses the last 20 years of electronic music as a massive sandbox from which to create textured tracks that are familiar enough to be enjoyable, yet mutate enough to constantly surprise. Album opener “Cerroverb” is built on empty space: Cosmic blips burble and then fade away abruptly, like the track is decomposing as you listen. Later, “50 Euro to Break Boost” offers up a gritty breakbeat smeared with foggy synths that hover like a beautiful, toxic rain cloud. With Compro, Müller doesn’t build a world as much as he soundtracks its weirdly beautiful end. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Paramore: After Laughter (2017)
It turns out, the incredibly personal connection that a teenage Hayley Williams of Paramore created with her fans back in the Warped Tour days—which many adult critics didn’t acknowledge at the time, as though her band’s pop-punk contained frequencies only teenagers could hear—was strong enough to last the decade and dynamic enough to grow and deepen with age and maturity. Call After Laughter “emo for adults”: Williams wrote an album that feels like a perfect window into the inner turmoil that defines millennials’ state of extended adolescence. Maybe modern Paramore feels as urgent as old Paramore did once because the confusions of young life have lingered longer than expected; maybe no one really ever grows up at all. Or maybe the feeling of release—of clenching your fists and singing along with “Forgiveness” in your bedroom—is just an essential and eternal pleasure, one conjured better by no one than Williams. –Alex Frank
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place (2011)
Singer and ambient composer Julianna Barwick has mentioned the importance of seeing Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg’s epic war film, at a formative age. Most crucially, she remembers its score by John Williams, which featured a boys choir singing the Welsh lullaby “Suo Gan.” Her breakthrough album, The Magic Place, summons similar moments of peace amid chaos. Her primary mode of expression is her voice and a loop pedal, layered to feel completely enveloping: the reverb-coated sound of singing and breathing, echoed until you forget where it’s coming from. Arriving early in a decade that would find other young artists drawing inspiration from the once-maligned New Age genre, the album represented a shift in how the underground could embrace the celestial. As the world was getting louder, Barwick was building her own sanctuary, full of light and space and strange enough to feel like home. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
(Sandy) Alex G: DSU (2014)
Alex Giannascoli could never be called a frugal songwriter. Undeniably prolific by 2014, he’d amassed a cult fanbase but most of the world didn’t yet know him. DSU, his fifth proper album as Alex G, changed this. Self-recorded in his Philadelphia home, the characters in its 13 songs are often bleak—lovesick fatalists, regretful junkies, and self-proclaimed emotional voids—but in his hands, they transform into slightly haunted, subtly profound stories. His songs are built around catchy, intimate melodies evocative of Elliott Smith at his poppiest, with disorienting flourishes of freakiness, like a pitch-shifted baby voice or sharp blasts of dissonance. Insular without being inaccessible, addictive while still being idiosyncratic, DSU affirmed that the decade’s most singular voices were probably holed up in their bedrooms, waiting to be heard. –Quinn Moreland
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Nicki Minaj: The Pinkprint (2014)
On her third studio album, The Pinkprint, Nicki Minaj came closest to putting it all together: rapping and singing, EDM and hip-hop, seriousness and ridiculousness. She pared back her straight pop overtures like “Starships” and put her audacious versatility on full display. The Pinkprint’s all-you-can-eat buffet includes the raw autobiography of “All Things Go,” the campy raunch of “Anaconda,” and the Ariana Grande-featuring “Get On Your Knees,” as well as riotous flow showcases like “Want Some More.” Eccentric production is her co-star: There’s the Enya-inspired minimalist synth pop of “I Lied,” the fiery pan-Caribbean groove of “Trini Dem Girls,” and the feel-good dubstep-pop of “The Night Is Still Young.” No one will mistake The Pinkprint for a tightly-constructed masterpiece like its namesake, Jay-Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint, but the album helped add depth and dimension to Minaj’s image and blaze a stylistic trail for future rappers like Cardi B. It would also prove to be the creative high point in Minaj’s decade. –Jason King
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Jay Som: Everybody Works (2017)
Everybody Works, the Bay Area singer-songwriter Melina Duterte’s first proper album as Jay Som, vaulted her to the main stages and into a new indie-rock vanguard. The songs represent a dizzying crash course in everything that makes the genre great. First single “The Bus Song” veers from coffeehouse strums to gleaming trumpets, from the unspoken dynamics of two friends’ particular relationship, to universally understood concerns like the odor of public transportation. Duterte’s vocals, hushed and conversational, hold everything together: Even when the arrangements plant a sly toe in near-funk territory, it sounds small enough to fit in your pocket and large enough to change your world. –Marc Hogan
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Hop Along: Painted Shut (2015)
Listening to Frances Quinlan fray her vocals is like watching someone rip a gnarly run in their black tights: Instantly, the whole outfit is rendered punk. On Painted Shut, the breakthrough album from her band Hop Along, Quinlan is on glorious display; her voice scrapes viscerally against the word “picture” in “I Saw My Twin,” the phrase “to post a motivational video” is briefly lent the velocity of an asteroid barreling toward earth in “Happy to See Me.”
Being able to wring emotion out of any word is a gift, but then Quinlan has to rub it in by being one of the most compelling storytellers of her generation, too. In “Powerful Man,” she feels guilty for catching a father beating his child and not pressing the issue with an overwhelmed teacher. Elsewhere, she sings from the perspective of the ’60s folk musician Jackson C. Frank, alluding to tragic moments from his biography and invoking the general unfairness of life with a metaphor about horseshoe crabs. All the while, the rest of the band meets Quinlan’s sharp turns with their own clear-eyed intensity: Her brother Mark Quinlan takes cues from the simple but forceful percussion of grunge drummers like Dave Grohl, while the enthusiastic yet angsty guitars channel classic indie and pop-punk alike. In a decade where the lo-fi solo project often dominated indie music, Hop Along made a strong case for honest-to-goodness rock bands, one pummeling performance at a time. –Jillian Mapes
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Meek Mill: Dreamchasers 2 (2012)
In May 2012, Meek Mill effectively broke the rap internet: Dreamchasers 2 caused the mixtape site DatPiff to crash en route to becoming the most downloaded release in its history. The project marked a turning point in the Maybach Music Group signee’s career, when he moved out of Rick Ross’ shadow and deepened his sound. Most notably, on “Amen,” with Drake and Jeremih, the Philly rapper slowed down his flurry of a flow; he had the wealth of time on his side.
But even on a project this victorious, legal woes haunted Mill. His contemplative rework of Drake’s “The Ride” devotes many lines to Philadelphia assistant district attorney Noel DeSantis, who would face off against him in the courtroom seven months after DC2’s release, when Judge Genece Brinkley prohibited Meek from traveling outside of his hometown to perform. (Brinkely’s decisions on Mill’s legal problems would only grow more troublesome.) To the hip-hop world, DC2 made Meek untouchable, as powerful a star as he’d ever been. But inside the criminal justice system, he was at the mercy of others, forced to fight like he’d been doing since he was a teenager. –Ross Scarano
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Sturgill Simpson: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014)
Sturgill Simpson’s music is rooted in modern country, but he’s also part of the proud heritage of “cosmic country,” a spacey descendant of Rhodes scholar Kris Kristofferson and Kahlil Gibran-quoting Willie Nelson. On his breakout album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson braided together no less than Jesus, Buddha, and “reptile aliens made of light” in the very first song. From there, the Kentucky native managed to dig deeper into his earthy roots of while also wandering even further into galaxy-brain thought. Simpson still refuses to be penned in and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music is when he started to elevate. –Andy Beta
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The 1975: I like it when you sleep… (2016)
The 1975 have come a long way over the last decade. Matty Healy and co. have morphed from a spunky buzz band with a few bratty, glossy singles into the act that best captures the anxious modern condition—or, at least, has the ambition to try. The band’s second album, I like it when you sleep…, is the moment when their skills caught up with that ambition. Instead of sticking with sleek Phoenix-esque pop-rock, the band opens themselves to a wide range of influences: the sleek pop of the ’80s, neo-soul, shoegaze, and heartfelt acoustic balladry. Not every single lyric landed, but they met each clunker with a line that captured exactly what it’s like to live in this moment. Take this one at the center of “A Change of Heart”: “You said I’m full of diseases, your eyes were full of regret/And then you took a picture of your salad and put it on the internet.” That perfect balance between anguish and absurdity is what makes the 1975 feel so relevant, and so resonant. –Jamieson Cox
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Noname: Room 25 (2018)
Noname once quipped that her style is “lullaby rap,” in reference to her soft timbre and relaxed cadence. It was a great tweet, but lullabies didn’t deserve the co-sign: Room 25 isn’t putting anyone to sleep. She breathlessly details her inner life and the world with singular introspection and grace. Choice words for the prison system, wasteman boyfriends, pandering politicians, and Noname herself give the record a patina of seriousness, but she is as amused as she is agitated. From the frank sex raps to the constant boasts to the in-your-face cleverness, a giddy energy animates Room 25 and sells its free spirit. The album is the sound of a rapper realizing her powers and testing them for herself and no one else. When she says, “You really thought a bitch couldn’t rap?” it feels like both a wisecrack and a statement of purpose. –Stephen Kearse
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Pallbearer: Foundations of Burden (2014)
Arkansas doom metal band Pallbearer rose above the pack through sheer ambition. The emotional intensity and velocity of their songs suggest open spaces instead of dimly lit basements, singing along over solitary headbanging. For all the misery and pain conjured by their music, played at slow speeds with infinite layers of guitars, their records can feel oddly uplifting. Some of that is due to the soaring vocals of Brett Campbell, but the real magic lies in the band’s songwriting. Their epic song lengths become templates for dazzling melodies, classic rock choruses, and solos as memorable as the hooks. On their sophomore album, Foundations of Burden, Pallbearer cleaned up their sound, stripping away the murk of earlier releases. Near the end of the record is “Ashes,” the atmospheric interlude that’s a prerequisite for any serious doom metal album. Far from filler, it’s a masterfully composed, pop-leaning ballad. –Sam Sodomsky
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Sleigh Bells: Treats (2010)
The intro to Treats is exhilarating: two quick cherry-bomb pummels, guitars and brass blown up huge enough to make engineers quiver and listeners thrill. The sound is physical, designed to rattle rooms. It wasn’t much like the previous music made by Derek Miller, who was in a metalcore band, or Alexis Krauss, who in her teens was part of a Cheetah Girls-ish girl group. In fact, it wasn’t like much else at all.
The newness of Treats lends itself to metaphors: It’s like you took an old issue of YM magazine, shot it, sampled the gunshots, then wrote lyrics out of the tattered snippets about braces, illicit drugs, “dumb whores, best friends,” and beach bashes. It was pure pop as concentrate. Come 2019, Treats still sounds like nothing else around, but for a different reason—unlike most pop music today, it has negative chill. (It also doesn't sound like Sleigh Bells these days, who have inevitably done a sonic pivot.) But echoes of it can be found: PC Music took the art-pop roots and a few of the sounds—the sonar-like pings of “Run the Heart,” the Jock Jams synths—and made them more candy-colored. Artists like Lorde and Billie Eilish revel in Sleigh Bells’ distortion, and in their upending and mocking the bubblegum tropes that, in another era, they may have become. –Katherine St. Asaph
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The 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018)
The 1975’s Matt Healy described his internal monologue—actually out loud—to the New York Times thusly: “I’m Jim Morrison. Am I Jim Morrison? I’m sorry that I’m Jim Morrison. I’m [expletive] Jim Morrison!” On A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, Healy’s relentless self-belief paid off, his flailing coalesced into dramatic gestures, and he finally nailed the part he auditioned himself for. He is magnetic and empathetic and tender and unbearably silly, all at once and all of the time, and so is the music, which smears together Auto-Tune, orchestras, glam-rock guitars, and entire showrooms full of 1980s synths.
Across the album’s 15 songs, Healy wants to verbalize every racing thought in your fevered brain: your boredom, your callow judgments, your sudden bouts of existential terror and your equally sudden bursts of inexplicable lust, your opinions on how whiskey tastes and the sound of your Twitter feed imprinting itself on your neural cortex. On an album stuffed with wry quotables, the funniest might be “I’ve just got one more thing to say.” –Jayson Greene
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Jenny Lewis: The Voyager (2014)
Jenny Lewis’ third solo album is a nostalgic swan dive into past lives, as sprawling as Lewis’s own impressive turn from child actor to rock poet. Scattered memories appear like flipped tarot cards—plane tickets to Paris as a teenager, the Twin Towers falling, a punch in the drywall during an argument—melting into a colorful but weary montage over sunny ’80s new wave and ’70s rock. Some song hit close to home, like the dryly funny “Just One of the Guys,” a meditation on sexism and ageism in music. Others are far more distant, like Lewis gushing about a future wedding and the faded romance that follows it on the deceptively bubbly “Love U Forever.” Armed with a perfect rainbow Nudie suit, Lewis asserted herself as a mature, somewhat wistful rock veteran, and took her rightful place as a bona fide solo star. –Hazel Cills
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21 Savage / Metro Boomin: Savage Mode (2016)
In the middle of the decade, Metro Boomin was the most bankable producer in hip-hop. He helped auteurs like Future flesh out their sounds and kept Drake on top of the world with beats that were pulsing, punishing, and ahead of the curve. So it’s strange that the greatest thing he’s done sounds nothing like his catalog of louder hits, and sounds like virtually none of the other mainstream rap produced this century.
Savage Mode plays like a dream sequence, where 21 Savage’s half-whisper sinks into what sounds like fraying, muddy silk. It’s not dissimilar to ambient music, but things that exist as atmosphere are seldom this unsettling. Together, Metro and 21 make having sex in lavish hotels with jewelry swinging against your chest sound like a completely foreign experience—not just the price of the room or the chains, but the sensation of having things touch your neck, the unnatural feel of the bedsheets. It’s a terrible, tranquil body high that ends too soon. –Paul A. Thompson
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Mica Levi: Under the Skin OST (2014)
With her soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 body horror film Under the Skin, the electronic musician and composer Mica Levi drew on the dissonance of avant-garde icons like John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti, adding her own, distinct chill. Throughout the score, violas, cellos, and drum machines are slowed down to grim effect, perfectly mirroring Scarlett Johansson’s performance as a seductive, murderous alien. Beyond amplifying the visuals, Levi explored the pure physicality of noise: the thrum of blood rushing to the head, the prickling of small hairs, a soft touch, or the sensation of an otherworldly lifeform drinking you down to your last drop. –Andy Beta
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Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (2019)
David Berman’s final album followed a long period of silence, and his isolation echoed through the music. His comeback after abandoning Silver Jews in 2009 found him contemplating the struggles of maintaining relationships, faith, confidence, and hope as you get older. “Things have not been going well,” he announces wearily in its opening track, and the songs that follow prove this to be something of an understatement. Although bleak, the music never wallows, thanks to the cozily upbeat arrangements from his new backing band (featuring members of Woods) and his peerless lyrics. His writing remained as complex, funny, and smart as any of his classic work, from the songwriting-as-therapy spiral of “Storyline Fever” to the color-coded purgatory in “Margaritas at the Mall.” In the wake of Berman’s death—just a month after the album’s release and days before a scheduled tour—fans lit up the internet telling stories, sharing photos, and citing his best lyrics, many of which came from these songs. His voice never felt louder or more vital. –Sam Sodomsky
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Arctic Monkeys: AM (2013)
The influence of hip-hop acts—especially Mike Skinner’s the Streets—could be heard in the lyrics of Arctic Monkeys right from the start. But it wasn’t until their fifth studio album, AM, that the Sheffield band fully reflected that influence in their music. On AM, they bent these sounds to their will so casually it was breathtaking. Who could have foreseen that the Monkeys’ spartan guitar riffs would sit so well over a muscular, Dr. Dre-style beat on “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” Or that Alex Turner’s wily vocal hooks on songs like “Do I Wanna Know?” could have so much in common with the lyrical strut of the best MCs? AM was a giant, cocksure beast that seemed entirely happy with its place in the world, making it one of the few indie rock hits of the 2010s that sounded like it genuinely belonged in the decade’s pop mainstream. –Ben Cardew
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Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster (2009)
At first, Lady Gaga seemed like a slightly smarter-than-usual dance-pop hopeful and nothing more. But then came “Bad Romance.” A gothic psychodrama draped around a titanic club banger, accompanied by an instantly iconic music video in which she stoically burns a man to death, the song announced Gaga as a true force to be reckoned with.
“Bad Romance” kicked off The Fame Monster, a collection of eight songs released as a deluxe edition of Gaga’s 2008 debut album, The Fame. (Yes, we know: The Fame Monster was technically released in late November 2009. But for something that cast such a long shadow over this decade, we’re making an exception.) Other than the supremely fun, Beyoncé-featuring “Telephone” (originally written for Britney Spears!), none of these songs sounded like anything else released at the time. They’re bizarre and jarring, full of references to death, dangerous sex, Hitchcock movies, and eating brains. (There’s also “Speechless,” an unabashedly retro power ballad that Meat Loaf would have killed for.) The Fame Monster’s release kicked off an arms race of pop kookiness: Suddenly, it seemed like everyone from Katy Perry to Nicki Minaj to Kesha was falling all over themselves to out-weird each other. But nobody’s freak flag ever flew higher than Gaga’s. –Amy Phillips
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Playboi Carti: Playboi Carti (2017)
Before he emerged from the shadows with his eponymous debut mixtape, Playboi Carti was an enigma: The Atlanta native's SoundCloud page was a secret hiding in plain sight, spoken about with gatekeeping whispers, and his leaked tracks were passed around the internet like contraband. Playboi Carti brought substance to the growing mythology surrounding him, as he established himself as a rapper willing to bend genres and switch styles on a whim. On the tape, Carti emphasized his narcotized delivery and ad-libs while adding polish to his dreamy sound with help from producer Pi’erre Bourne. Songs like the hypnotizing “Magnolia” brought Carti’s ability to create an entire aura around snippets of songs to the mainstream, making rap that was just as enjoyable in a 30-second Instagram clip as it was blaring in full from a car speaker. –Alphonse Pierre
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Mac DeMarco: 2 (2012)
Love him or hate him, Mac DeMarco’s influence on an entire generation of bedroom-pop acts and would-be scum-rock wunderkinds is tough to overstate. His breakout album, 2, established his penchant for cigarettes, zany antics, and quietly compelling songwriting. Throughout, the then-22-year-old Canadian waxes drolly on addiction and suburban sedation, intertwining his laid-back voice with flanged guitar work. His devil-may-care attitude can be seen in live videos from the period, where he would walk out with a beat-to-hell guitar that was falling out of tune, its un-clipped strings dangling from the headstock, and proceed to make not giving a shit look like the most alluring—and even admirable—way of life. This was when he was at his most free, before he was saddled with the expectations of being indie rock’s class clown, before his music took him to high places no one could have ever foreseen. –Noah Yoo
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Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise (2011)
At the beginning of the 2010s, the echoes of peak chillwave lingered in the air, and a sample of rushing water typically indicated the onset of a feel-good, uncomplicated song. Nicolas Jaar's debut album begins with splashing sounds, but it quickly sidesteps the path toward easy bliss. There's menace lurking beneath the producer's work, a ghostly energy that opens up in his understated beats and sinewy basslines. Percussive guitars and close-miked vocals bleed into waves of reverb. During the early-’10s glut of bro EDM and bubbling chillwave, Jaar found magic in restraint, leaving enough space in his music to give the impression of a nefarious presence always lurking around the corner, of a young artist eager to play the notes that aren't there. –Sasha Geffen
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The National: High Violet (2010)
High Violet has the swimmy quality that comes with making sense of a new reality. It was the first National album to really incorporate guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s experimental tendencies, making what was solid and plainly beautiful on Boxer fractious and unreliable—not a fake empire, but a treacherous one. Frontman Matt Berninger feels separated from lovers, from home, from the person he was and the one he is becoming. To survive, he makes depression, debt, and self-destruction into sublime cosmic jokes at his own mopey, myopic expense. It was the last time Berninger’s lyrics were perfectly congruent with the times, an existentialist eclipse before he became more character than chronicler. Once adulthood fits, it’s hard to remember how it once didn’t. –Laura Snapes
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Sheer Mag: Compilation (2017)
There are two kinds of punk bands: nihilists and life lovers. Philly group Sheer Mag have spent their five-year existence attesting to the power of the latter. With shimmying, riffy protest rock and the coolest of neo-heavy-metal-style band logos, Sheer Mag became underground heroes this decade for their sticky songwriting and their principled independence. Like hardcore icons Black Flag and Minor Threat before them, Sheer Mag laid the foundation with a string of EPs, then rounded them up with the no-filler Compilation, still their high-water mark. It’s full of songs about gentrification, crooked cops, slumlords, yuppies, old-fashioned heartbreak, and other trials and tribulations that eat away at Generation Y’s more critically minded members. The music can be aching, swaggering, and celebratory—but it all feels designed to help us live. –Jenn Pelly
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Chief Keef: Finally Rich (2012)
When Chief Keef’s major-label debut came out in 2012, it was scrutinized to a degree rap hadn't seen since the moral panic days of the ’90s. Here was a hardened teen from the most neglected corners of Chicago making music that reflected—and, yes, romanticized—the violence he came up around. Keef was more clever and more in control of his vision than his detractors gave him credit for, though, and his minimalist wordplay served to emphasize his monumental hooks. Finally Rich was drill’s great crossover event, polishing the rapper's nihilistic imagining of trap just enough for the radio without compromising its fundamental menace. Even after Interscope and the A-listers who'd been so eager to jump on his remixes cast him aside following this album, Keef continued to make inventive, influential music throughout the decade. But Finally Rich remains his pinnacle, and a best-case scenario for what can happen when a street-tested sound meets a big-time budget. –Evan Rytlewski
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PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (2011)
On her eighth studio album, released two decades into her remarkable career, Polly Jean Harvey explores England’s military history, from World War I to the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, with sharp, journalistic observance and poetic grace. Moving from English folk to Jamaican reggae, and from dark comedy to just darkness, she examines the nature of conflict itself and the raw human tragedy that lies at its center. A thread of weary nostalgia weaves its way through these 12 brief but devastating songs, shot through with despair at human inability to learn from our mistakes. It’s an album that hits right in the gut, timeless yet horribly timely, locally specific yet globally relevant. –Ben Cardew
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Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (2019)
On Titanic Rising, Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood, she combats dread through empathetic songs that are propelled by a masterful understanding of lush, ’70s pop harmonics. Mering’s willowy voice gives her warnings about the most hellish aspects of life a graceful air, as best exemplified on Titanic Rising’s penultimate track, “Picture Me Better,” a letter to a friend who died by suicide during the recording of the album. “Waiting for the call from beyond,” Mering lilts, as old-world Hollywood strings swell underneath her. “Waiting for something with meaning to come through soon.” –Noah Yoo
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Fennesz: Agora (2019)
Using computers to turn sounds into alien shapes now feels like a given, but at the turn of the century, guitarist and producer Christian Fennesz’s audacious noise- and pop-smearing work suggested strange, glitchy new worlds. Two decades on, the Austrian ambient artist suddenly found himself without a studio space, so he resorted to doing what so many teens do, jamming away in his bedroom on headphones. But even in such homely environs, he operates like an old master, patiently layering guitars and electronics one downstroke at a time until it all accrues into a vast canvas of distorted bliss. Agora boasts both the most expansive and most finely detailed soundscapes of his career. Contemplative and visceral, blurred and acute, the album upholds Fennesz as the 21st century’s finest romantic futurist. –Andy Beta
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Rick Ross: Rich Forever (2012)
Rick Ross’ best work happens when he’s completely, utterly divorced from reality. Case in point: His 2012 mixtape Rich Forever, in which the former prison guard fully embraces his villainous kingpin persona, casting himself as the hardboiled antihero of his own blockbuster action franchise. Forgoing the decadent, red-velvet soul of his studio albums, Rich Forever emphasizes tight, IMAX-sized instrumentals. From the searing synthesizers of “High Definition” to the brutalist, grinding trap of “Yella Diamonds,” nearly every beat is as mammoth and monumental as Ross’ brontosaurus grunt. And at a time when rappers like Drake and Kendrick were prioritizing grounded, personal statements, Ross doubled down on fantasy. There isn't a single claim on Rich Forever that a fact checker could verify, and the mixtape is better for it. –Evan Rytlewski
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Parquet Courts: Sunbathing Animal (2014)
In an era when indie rock got cozier than ever with the pop mainstream, Parquet Courts preferred to be left alone. After breaking through with 2012’s delightful and funny Light Up Gold, their follow-up album, Sunbathing Animal, made the band an unlikely pillar of modern American rock. The record cultivates an air of hyper-rational individuals thwarted by modern mania; its surrealist screeds transform, upon inspection, into pleas for sanity. Andrew Savage and Austin Brown emit a flurry of barely formed questions: How do you navigate the enduring challenges of love and passion amid labor exploitation, political cruelty, and the specter and spectacle of American violence? The music runs then crawls, plays dumb then flaunts frills. To hide genius hooks in songs so slack is audacious, the mark of a band either certain you’re paying attention or the complete opposite. –Jazz Monroe
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Emeralds: Does It Look Like I’m Here? (2010)
With Does It Look Like I’m Here?, the experimental Ohio trio Emeralds ascended toward more melodic, starry atmospheres without losing any of the density and power of their previous sound. In shorter songs full of rising arpeggios and drifting guitar lines, they layered loops and doused the stereo spectrum in glittering accents. Channeling the synth explorations of the ’70s and the dreamy ambience of the ’80s, they presaged the New Age pop revival that would flourish throughout the decade. Though they would only make one more album together, the subsequent solo work of Mark McGuire, Steve Hauschildt, and John Elliot continued to uphold the idea that soothing, space-bound music can be just as edgy and complex as harsh noise. –Marc Masters
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Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (2015)
Alabama Shakes’ second album begins with a song about an astronaut who has been shot into space on a mission to find a new planet where the human race can settle and start over. And thus, Sound & Color subverted almost everything we’d come to expect about a band that had been positioned as saviors of back-to-basics rock’n’roll: what frontwoman Brittany Howard was singing about, how the music sounded, even which planets they visit. There’s something alien about songs like “Future People” (about meeting the you of 10 or 20 years on), but Howard’s concerns can be earthly as well: losing a lover with a Mickey Mouse tattoo on “Miss You,” paying the water and power bills on “Don’t Wanna Fight.” The Shakes groove and vamp like the Swampers from Mars, with Howard shouting and crooning and squealing like Bowie by way of Etta James. Sound & Color is grounded in Southern soul, but the band’s gaze is fixed on the heavens. –Stephen Deusner
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A$AP Rocky: LIVE.LOVE.A$AP (2011)
LIVE.LOVE.A$AP feels like one of the first hip-hop projects that could not have existed without the internet. Marked by A$AP Rocky’s straightforward delivery and “I’m the shit” attitude, the 2011 mixtape is rooted in the rapper’s Harlem upbringing, but the sound of the project is pulled from scenes across the country that Rocky and his crew fell in love with online: The chopped vocals are true to Houston’s lean-infused drip, the dark themes are directly influenced by SpaceGhostPurrp’s Miami-based Raider Klan, and the cloudy production is built on a style that was thriving in California through artists like Main Attrakionz and Lil B. Along with producer Clams Casino, Rocky brought a new flavor to these styles—not rehashing existing ideas, but entwining them with his own to create something unbound by regional lines. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: DatPiff
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)
When Tim Hecker released Ravedeath, 1972 in 2011, critics interpreted the Canadian producer’s clash of organic pipe organ and synthetic corrosion as a comment on music’s chances of survival in a digital world. In 2019, that matter seems superficial compared to Ravedeath’s unavoidable contemporary resonance. Its grimy, eddying tundras are nothing less than an omen of our promised apocalypse, where decay has defeated living matter and noise has drowned out signal. The music, however, remains gorgeous and rooted in the metaphysical. While the forlorn cirrus wisps that writhe and glimmer through the static don’t offer anything so trite as optimism, they cast the ruins in the sobering relief that elevates Ravedeath, 1972 from ambient reverie to enduringly urgent confrontation. –Laura Snapes
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Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (2011)
The making of Fleet Foxes’ second album was fraught, due in no small part to the success of their first. Robin Pecknold and co. wondered how to trust their instincts without leaning on formula, and fretted about the reception that awaited their new music. These worries form a backdrop for Helplessness Blues, the unmistakable work of uneasy hearts. Starting with the scene-setting intonation that opens the record (“So now I am older”), Pecknold’s melancholy tenor heralded a decade of discourse about millennial anxiety. He paints an indelible portrait of fading young-adulthood—diverging from the path set by parents, searching for place and purpose, falling out of relationships that have dried up. Above all, Pecknold questions his ability—and will—to be anything other than, as he describes it on the title track, “a functioning cog in some great machinery.” These complicated fears offer a foil to the swollen sound that envelopes them. Fleet Foxes’ maximalist folk, with harmonies stacked high as mountains and reverb that could fill caverns, makes feeling small seem epic. –Olivia Horn
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M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2011)
Around the time Anthony Gonzalez wound down the tour for 2008’s Saturdays = Youth, the M83 frontman left France and moved to Los Angeles. The city inspired his biggest, best, and most cinematic album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. These songs are steeped in a kind of magical realism stemming from the intensity of adolescent emotions, full of heart-on-sleeve choruses, slap-bass funk, vintage synth swells, and a desire for home or love or something just out of reach. The album contains a loose narrative that has something to do with brothers and sisters, but you don’t need to know any of the story to get swept up in the neon-lit groove of “Midnight City” or swept away by the tidal wave that is “Steve McQueen.” Gonzalez’s nostalgia is very specific, very personal, and very idiosyncratic, which makes Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming sound so universal and inviting, not to mention sturdy enough to withstand the wave of imitators that sprang up in its wake. –Stephen Deusner
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Frankie Cosmos: Zentropy (2014)
Greta Kline once quipped that the title of Zentropy, her full-band studio debut as Frankie Cosmos, meant a descent into “zen-ness”: an embrace of one’s surroundings. It’s a clever way of approaching the album, which collapses notions of big and small, sophisticated and rudimentary, serious and funny, until there’s little choice but to accept them all as the same. Zentropy doesn’t feel longer than its 10-song, 17-minute run time, but it feels like more. Tempos careen and stutter unpredictably, lyrical motifs bleed between tracks. Gigantic feelings go supernova out of notebook-worthy musings on being “the kind of girl buses splash with rain,” yearning to go dancing, and mourning the death of a dog. Beneath this, Klein filters a ’60s girl-group pop sensibility through the New York deadpan of ’00s anti-folk and the pajama-party whimsy of ’90s K Records. Later Frankie Cosmos albums would go longer, and run no less deep, but with Zentropy, Kline made us one with everything. –Marc Hogan
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Amen Dunes: Freedom (2018)
The fifth album from Damon McMahon’s hallucinatory rock project Amen Dunes pumps the vapors of bygone rock jams into half-seen visions of the past. McMahon has an eye for the antihero and his vulnerabilities, the fading conscience of modernity. “Pride destroyed me, man/Til it took ahold of me,” he sings over cresting bass on the luscious “Miki Dora,” a sympathetic homage to the surfer icon of hedonism and chaos. A master of the lyrical arched eyebrow, McMahon is capable of conveying total honesty in one line and ironic remove in the next. His band builds a warmly reverbed atmosphere, steadying psychedelic swells and loops against murky rhythm until the air feels rotten with insinuation. Freedom doesn’t feel like an album from this decade; it feels like an album suspended in time. –Anna Gaca
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Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels 2 (2014)
Run the Jewels were rap’s most thrillingly unlikely success story this decade: El-P, an indie-rap lifer and Killer Mike, an Atlanta rap vet finding new inspiration in each other. When they joined forces, they rapped as if their lives (and ours) depended on it. Run the Jewels 2 was where their uncanny chemistry reached Anarchist Cookbook proportions. It’s an album of virtuosic vulgarity, a pair of underdogs seizing their moment and reaching new heights, both in their cadence-shifting bars and El’s arena-quaking productions. But beneath the bluster, what sets RTJ2 apart is its humanity and prescience: on police brutality, on #MeToo, and on the burgeoning friendship between two world-hardened idealists. No wonder Marvel gave them their own comic books. –Marc Hogan
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Tame Impala: Lonerism (2012)
At its core, Lonerism is a tightly wound, deeply internal album about what it means to always feel like an outsider. That it gained such a huge following and catapulted Tame Impala into the mainstream is ironic, but not surprising. Throughout the record, classic rock tropes are updated with reverence, memorable riffs are tossed off like they’re in endless supply, and moments of bliss allow for at least an illusion of catharsis: The tongue-in-cheek single “Elephant” is so sure of itself that it practically swaggers, while “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” is built around blown-out cymbals and a communal hook that happens to be all about frontman Kevin Parker’s own indecision and dashed hopes. If there’s one idea to take away from Tame Impala’s second album, though, it’s that everything repeats itself and nothing is ever really in our control. Frustration never sounded so good. –Sam Hockley-Smith
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Various Artists: Bangs and Works Vol. 1: A Chicago Footwork Compilation (2010)
In dance music circles, it’s hard to think of a more important recent document than Bangs and Works. While Chicago footwork had been percolating for over 20 years at the time of the compilation’s release, for many people outside the local scene, it proved to be their first experience of the genre’s marriage of breakneck beats with haunting soul samples. Alongside searing examples of the form by pioneers like RP Boo and DJ Rashad, who would go on to take footwork around the world, there’s a DJ Nate track that verges on the spiritual, and a succinct meditation on loving support by Tha Pope. A decade on, Bangs and Works still sounds as fresh and invigorating as the first listen. –Ruth Saxelby
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Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)
When A Moon Shaped Pool entered the world in May 2016, many of the horrors Radiohead had spent more than two decades warning us about were coming to fruition. Campaigns for Brexit and Trump were spreading odious strains of nationalism. The Earth’s temperature was reaching precipitous new highs. Nefarious companies were harvesting data from tens of millions of Facebook users in order to undermine American democracy. The record also arrived amid acute personal tragedy for Thom Yorke, who had announced a separation from his partner, Rachel Owen, the year prior. (Seven months after its release, Owen died following a long battle with cancer.) It’s no wonder that, according to one scientific analysis, A Moon Shaped Pool was found to be the infamously bleak band’s most depressing album.
And yet the record does not wallow. The stubbornly forward-facing quintet allows itself to look back—most notably with “True Love Waits,” a live fan favorite since the mid ’90s, finally put to tape in the studio—while avoiding self-parody or indulgence. On the luminous ballad “Daydreaming,” Yorke sounds like he’s levitating when he sings, “We are just happy to serve... you.” It’s a nod to the symbiotic bond Radiohead keeps with their listeners through the worst of times, a bond that this album elegantly upholds. –Ryan Dombal
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Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial (2016)
Like his indie rock forefathers in the Replacements, Car Seat Headrest mastermind Will Toledo sounds sincerely undecided about embarking on any kind of grand search for purpose. He feels like a walking piece of shit, which is basically the default state for modern young people. On Teens of Denial, following a prolific run of Bandcamp releases, Toledo comes off like a passive avatar for the feelings he’s channeling. Even when he shakes off the doldrums long enough to rouse his audience into a singalong, it’s with a self-conscious—but nonetheless empowering—line like “I’ve got a right to be depressed!” The beautiful thing about this record is how it doesn’t demand our loyalty, only that we admit we feel the same way. –Jeremy Gordon
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Panda Bear: Tomboy (2011)
As a follow-up to 2007’s acclaimed Person Pitch (with Animal Collective’s even-more-acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion in between), Noah Lennox’s fourth solo album as Panda Bear often seems a vehicle to adjust classic sounds into a new, weird future. Covered in the singer’s rich self-harmonies, the Beach Boys references are almost too easy to make, with the wave-touched “Surfer’s Hymn” perhaps even acting as overt bait. But churning behind those echoing cries are any number of marginally identifiable sounds—fast-cycling bells? backwards pianos?—that flicker like reflections in dark water. Brimming with dubby modern psychedelia, Tomboy may be more like a VR beach than a surf-and-sand one, but it offers just as many pretty sunsets. –Jesse Jarnow
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Yves Tumor: Safe in the Hands of Love (2018)
With their third album, Safe in the Hands of Love, Sean Bowie took a hacksaw to the very idea of experimental music. They ripped into entrenched notions about its sound and audience, then stood back to admire the glorious mess. Still, the producer-singer’s opposing musical textures cohere astonishingly well: R&B grooves meld into sinister spoken-word interludes, sensuous cellos and militaristic chopper sounds share space. Bowie tugs at the ear with teases of pop before abruptly morphing into something far more severe. They often invert foreground and background, retreating to near-tuneless vocal melodies that act more as scaffolding than centerpiece within their heady brew of electronics. Amid the tumult, Safe in the Hands of Love examines the tension between being held, being confined, and the rare instances where the two conditions meet. The album itself occupies a similarly strange intersection: It is both remarkably beautiful and remarkably unnerving. –Olivia Horn
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Real Estate: Days (2011)
There are albums on this list excavated from the darkest pits of despair, ones that irrevocably reshaped the sound of pop, and ones that will be commemorated by future generations as crucial documents of the decade’s political turmoil. And then there’s Real Estate’s second album, Days, which people turned to when they wanted something that just sounded good. If that seems like damning praise, consider how hard it can be to face the challenge of substantiating serenity, of finding validation for the ambient sadness and fleeting joys that make up most of life, of appreciating the past without being trapped in it. With this album, Real Estate casually perfected a novel form of crisp, interlocking jangle that could’ve been sourced from any point in the last 35 years. Days’ most enduring image is a pair of names carved into a tree—fitting for an album that will always be right where you left it, exactly how you remember it. –Ian Cohen
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Deafheaven: Sunbather (2013)
Singer George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy recorded their first demos as Deafheaven while living with 12 other people in an old nunnery in San Francisco’s Mission District, their call-center jobs barely lucrative enough to cover a combined $500 in rent. Listening to the opening notes of their sophomore album, you can’t help but get the sense that they are trying to escape: Clarke screams like a man in fear for his own life as the song’s frenzied guitar tremolos and ragged blast-beats sound like they are trying to outrun each other. To the chagrin of black metal and hardcore purists, Deafheaven also seemed determined to evade any distinctions between one brand of wall-of-sound catharsis and another, teetering endlessly between ecstatic chaos and the melodic romance of ’90s shoegaze and post-rock. But focusing on Sunbather’s surface prettiness ignores the sheer scale of its compositional ambition, its brocaded sonic sub-plots and gut-punching crescendos channeling the go-for-broke ambition of people with nothing to lose. –Emilie Friedlander
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Snail Mail: Lush (2018)
How does Lush manage to sound so radiant? After a series of defining teenage experiences—lust burning so bright you can’t sleep at night, crushing heartbreak, getting so drunk you can’t see straight—Lindsey Jordan immediately put those feelings to tape, capturing them at their greatest intensity. There’s more to Snail Mail’s debut album than her gripping guitar playing, whether she’s unfurling gentle melodies or slicing out unforgettable riffs. There’s more still beyond her clean, expressive voice, which conveys a sense of wonder and boundless curiosity. The root of Jordan’s precocious, multifaceted talent is her writing, and the way she can cut to the core of a complicated feeling with just a few words. Look at the chant that closes “Heat Wave”: “I’m feeling low/I’m not into ‘sometimes.’” What more needs to be said about someone who makes you happy occasionally but will never make you whole? –Jamieson Cox
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The Hotelier: Home, Like Noplace Is There (2014)
Even for an emo record, Home, Like Noplace Is There is unflinching in its depiction of constant crisis. From beginning to end, it details one calamity after another—some merely deflating, others catastrophic, including incidents of addiction, abuse, and suicide. It’s a lot, and sometimes Home is almost too effective at conjuring the panic of barely holding it together when the people we care for need us the most. But the album balances its strife with jumpy pop-punk hooks, and never grows numb to suffering or loses its drive to uplift. Instead, what emerges is a portrait of contagious empathy. –Evan Rytlewski
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Tyler, the Creator: Flower Boy (2017)
Throughout Flower Boy, Tyler, the Creator appears to recount the tale of a bygone romance with a male lover, describing their magical connection on “Glitter” and mourning their end on the wistful “See You Again.” He also uses their story as a device to reveal more about himself than he ever has before. Over sweeping, orchestral funk arrangements, he earnestly addresses his anxieties about fame, his paranoia about being canceled were he to come out, and the terrifying reality of police brutality. He takes stock of his emotional development, too, as he raps on “Where This Flower Blooms” with pride: “I rock, I roll, I bloom, I grow.” It marks Tyler’s departure from the artist he was—a trouble-making scoundrel who used homophobic slurs and graphic imagery throughout his incendiary songs—to a more compassionate rapper, ready to embrace the softer parts of his personality. The album blossoms with hope, making it Tyler’s most expansive project yet. –Michelle Kim
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Girlpool: Before the World Was Big (2015)
Girlpool’s first full-length record is a study in tiny worlds and overflowing hearts. Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad were still teenagers when they wrote these humble songs with bass and guitar, and there is something so profoundly young adult about Before the World Was Big. The album encapsulates what it’s like to walk through your hometown and realize you don’t live there anymore, or to suffer a serious heartbreak for the first time; on "Chinatown," Tucker and Tividad pose question after question about their own existences and whether they are capable of being loved. The duo went on to make more ambitious records, but Before the World Was Big will always be their spare, indelible reminder to notice what it feels like to be alive while you still think you’re invincible. –Sophie Kemp
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Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker (2016)
Leonard Cohen was too grand a figure to let death sneak up on him. Instead, he graciously accepted its approach and courted the void with one final masterpiece. You Want It Darker arrived just weeks before Cohen died at 82, still a goliath of his form. It is a profound work that addresses a man’s end, and what he must let go of once he gets there. Cohen’s legendary baritone is leagues deeper than before, perhaps sunk by the weight of his subject matter. On the title track, he sounds as though he’s been living off a steady diet of cigars and scotch; his grumbles are foreboding, even sinister, against the synagogue choir that echoes him.
Cohen’s repetition of the word “hineni,” Hebrew for “here I am,” is one of the record’s most chilling moments—his humble surrender to a greater power. You Want It Darker is full of these concessions: he sings of relinquishing life, love, and libido throughout its sparse yet rich compositions. His ability to examine mortality with such restraint is a testament to his elevated craft—when he sings of letting go and traveling light, it’s with relief. –Madison Bloom
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Death Grips: The Money Store (2012)
That ringing sensation in your head from the crossed streams of cable news and political discourse? That’s The Money Store. Every time you’re digitally assaulted by millions of loud voices creating nothing but noise? Pure, unadulterated The Money Store. Recorded (improbably) at the Chateau Marmont, and released (even more improbably) by the same label that puts out Mariah Carey and Meghan Trainor, Death Grips’ proper debut album captured the barking, unstoppable information overload of the 2010s in a burst of experimental rap and rock. It's a pure thrill to hear: throat-searing vocalist MC Ride, keyboardist Andy Morin, and drummer/producer Zach Hill assault the senses with blasted beats, brutally nonsensical sloganeering, and sour melodies that sound like squeezing a lemon onto a skinned knee. –Larry Fitzmaurice
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Janelle Monáe: The ArchAndroid (2010)
The ArchAndroid, the debut studio album by Atlanta Renaissance woman Janelle Monáe, foretold her cultural impact on the decade. Its storyline about a messianic android is tied together by apocalyptic rock, jiggling funk, and psychedelic soul, all delivered with cinematic flair. Monáe’s star would continue to rise from here, from her guest vocal on fun.’s ubiquitous “We Are Young,” to her acting roles in Moonlight and Hidden Figures, to an Album of the Year Grammy nomination for 2018’s Dirty Computer. The ArchAndroid is the genesis of it all. –Ben Cardew
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U.S. Girls: In a Poem Unlimited (2018)
As U.S. Girls mastermind Meghan Remy has evolved from one-person noisemaker to charismatic leader of a cracking rock band, her aesthetic priorities—simple melodies, rich textures, subversive lyrics—have remained steadfast. They’re all perfectly present on In a Poem Unlimited, an unabashed pop album that swings on the surface but gets thorny underneath. Complex verses about sexual dynamics and interpersonal conflict cut through music that reveres nostalgic styles like disco and glam without aping them. Along the way, Remy captures the tension of the times with a rapturous swagger, building a catchy, cathartic response to the world. –Marc Masters
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Sampha: Process (2017)
When we need to give definition to tough feelings that have no clear shape and no end in sight, no word satisfies like “process.” Grief, sobriety, adulthood, etc. don’t feel so daunting and boundless when they’re “processes”; they take on a structure that they lack as experiences. As Sampha adopts the term to capture the tumult of his mother dying from cancer in 2015, he embraces both its clarity and its dizziness. His delicate, tender voice never disguises the despair at the heart of these songs, yet there’s a striking sense of wonder to his writing, a wide-eyed willingness to find a way to carry on despite the pain.
As hooded figures give chase on “Blood on Me,” a car takes flight on “Under,” and a lone gunman cries for his mother on “Kora Sings,” death takes on a dreamlike quality. The production froths with energy and verve despite the glum backdrop, constantly swirling around Sampha’s fragile falsetto or geysering into open air. Sampha grieves by expressing his sorrow as well as molding it into new forms. “It’s never gonna feel real,’” he once said of his mother’s death, skeptical of the allure of closure. Process takes that dread as a challenge. –Stephen Kearse
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Japandroids: Celebration Rock (2012)
Of course, an album called Celebration Rock begins with the sound of fireworks—a spectacle that is at once exhilarating and ephemeral, the ecstatic climax to an event that also signals it’s time for everyone to go home. Japandroids spend the next 35 minutes doing whatever they can to delay the moment when the highest of highs must give way to the cruelest of comedowns. The Vancouver duo’s second album condenses all the promise, excess, and regret of an epic all-nighter into an eight-song dusk-to-dawn cycle, like a Dazed and Confused that swaps out bored teens in the ’70s for directionless twenty-somethings in the 21st century. Nostalgia hits like a panic attack, the line between motivational anthem and break-up song gets blurry, and even the most starry-eyed declarations of devotion come embedded with escape clauses for when the thrill is gone. Back in 2009, Japandroids introduced themselves to the world by declaring “Young Hearts Spark Fire.” On Celebration Rock, their relentless effort to keep the flame alive only made them more conscious of the shortening wick. So, of course, an album so fervent yet fleeting also ends with the sound of fireworks. –Stuart Berman
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Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013)
Thomas Bangalter and Guy de-Homem Christo spent more than a million dollars to make their triumphant comeback record, Random Access Memories. It showed. In rejection of the frictionless EDM sounds then at their commercial peak, Daft Punk went straight to the source in their quest to revive some of their favorite analog styles. They booked time in a handful of the world’s most renowned studios to record the disco pioneer Nile Rodgers, several hall-of-fame session musicians, and vocalists including Pharrell and Panda Bear, then painstakingly pieced together their work into songs that span poppy funk, prog, new wave, soft-rock balladry, and even spoken word (courtesy of electro godhead Giorgio Moroder). As a whole, the album plays like an eclectic radio transmission beamed in from an imagined past.
The highlight remains “Touch,” a psychedelic showstopper sung by ’70s songwriter Paul Williams, best known for his work with Barbara Streisand and the Carpenters. At one point in the intricately arranged song, a space-age choir gives way to Williams’ voice—delicate yet firm—backed by nothing but a grand piano. “Sweet touch, you’ve almost convinced me I’m real,” he muses, a mouthpiece for the mysterious duo who remind us just how tangible music can be. –Noah Yoo
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EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
Confessional songwriting in the 2010s had a tendency toward extremes—you had your empowerment narratives, where struggles were introduced and then brushed aside to allow time to wallow in the fabulous now, and you had your nihilistic tales of pill-popping self-hatred. Past Life Martyred Saints, the debut album by Erika Anderson’s project EMA, lives in the complicated middle, a place where the pain is very real but so is the occasional flicker of hope.
Over blues-scuffed alt-rock, Anderson’s characters pull up their sleeves to reveal open wounds and fading scars and speak of an emptiness that makes them want to vomit, but deep down they also believe that someone out there might love them. Later in the decade, Anderson would turn her eye to the political and cultural forces that drive people toward darkness, but Past Life is far too claustrophobic for that kind of perspective. When something heavy is on top of you and pressing down, the only thing you can think about is how to get out from under it. –Mark Richardson
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Waka Flocka Flame: Flockaveli (2010)
In its gunshot ad-libs and aggressively escalating synths, Waka Flocka Flame’s debut still feels explosive. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easier to embrace how an album that once led to think-piecing and hand-wringing about authenticity and struggle is just pure fun, too. As much as you can draw a line from Waka and producer Lex Luger's steamrolling sound to Chief Keef and Young Chop’s gruesome Back From the Dead mixtape, you can also connect Flockaveli to the live-show antics of Travis Scott, rallying the teens to mosh. Though Waka eventually took the EDM route, playing shows at frats and shotgunning beers with undergrads, his debut struck the right balance between harsh realism and recklessness. –Ross Scarano
Listen: Waka Flocka Flame, “Hard in Da Paint”
Julia Holter: Aviary (2018)
Ninety minutes long, with its billowing proportions blown out in strings, horns, choirs, harp, percussion, synthesizers, reeds, bagpipes, and more, Julia Holter’s Aviary revels in ecstatic excess. Meandering, shape-shifting, and often dissonant, its melodies diffuse into clouds of pure atmosphere, offering the opposite of the glib simplicity that so much pop aspires to in the streaming era. Playlist fodder, this is not.
Aviary’s references are among the most erudite and obscure of any of Holter’s albums, encompassing Dante, Pushkin, Occitan folk songs, and an academic tome about mnemonics and the Middle Ages; Vangelis’ Blade Runner score is in there somewhere, too. Nevertheless, Holter’s search for meaning in “destitute times” translates to an unmistakably contemporary record, her stream-of-consciousness lyrics gesturing bleakly at the nightly news (“Frequent missile talk/Slurping on the words I heard from the wretched zone/Fortune throwing candy slow in a death crawl”). And while its surfeit of feeling can mimic the shell-shocked sense of information overload that accompanies a long day scrolling social media, its moments of catharsis cut deliciously deep. –Philip Sherburne
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Kaytranada: 99.9% (2016)
The debut album from Montreal producer Kaytranada is a shining example of dance music as more than the sum of its parts. Blending soul, hip-hop, house, jazz, and disco, and featuring vocal turns from the likes of Vic Mensa, Syd, Craig David, Anderson .Paak, and more, the album is also a reaction against the relative whiteness of EDM circa 2016. For all the acrobatic weaving of glitchy beats with slinky, complex instrumentation, it never feels anything but warm; the athleticism isn’t necessarily beside the point, but it’s not meant to make a spectacle of itself, either. Moreover, the album is a benchmark for how pop music has commonly come to be thought of in this decade: If you blend enough genres together, they cancel each other out, and what’s left is just its own thing that doesn’t have any particular use for a tidy classification. –Steve Kandell
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Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan (2012)
Dirty Projectors used to be an inscrutable band. You’d read about how frontman David Longstreth conducted 18-hour practices in an airless Brooklyn studio, or reworked the chords of a Black Flag song to synchronize with the Fibonacci sequence or something, and think: This is music for people who make you feel like a moron for humming along to the radio. But on Swing Lo Magellan, their formal experimentation slowly gave way to an emotional generosity no amount of musical theory could obfuscate.
The album shines with the warmth and familiarity of a group of loved ones trading stories around a campfire. It’s unguarded, with “Impregnable Question” offering itself as a premier wedding song for former hipsters experimenting with sincerity. It’s funny, like when singers Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle clown Longstreth’s knotty lyrics on “Unto Caesar” (“Uh, that doesn't make any sense…”). Swing Lo Magellan ended up being the last album with this lineup of Dirty Projectors, making it a bittersweet listen. But we know it was real while it lasted. –Jeremy Gordon
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Moses Sumney: Aromanticism (2017)
Only once a decade, maybe, do you get a voice like Moses Sumney’s. It is cotton-soft and canyon-wide, as crisp and ornate as frost forming on the window. A similar coldness—the absence of love—informs his spare, beautiful debut album, Aromanticism. It is not a lament for lost love but a guess that love may never arrive. His brand of blues is heavy with emotion, even as he wonders if he might not want to feel any of it. Maybe he’ll call you back; instead of sex, how about just a little making out in the car? On most songs, his falsetto hangs over spare electric guitar—except for the knockout “Lonely World,” around which the entire album spins. And though solitude haunts these songs, it also seems like a kind of relief: “To behold and not be held,” he sings, those words a blessing and a curse. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Disclosure: Settle (2013)
Howard and Guy Lawrence’s debut album as Disclosure overhauled house, two-step garage, and other strains of dance music for the day-glo EDM brigade. The brothers, who started DJing as teenagers in southeast England, may have relied on familiar formulas with Settle, but they still managed to fashion them into one of the most irresistibly inviting dance records of the decade. The duo supported their carefully curated patchwork of genres with a wide net of guest artists, many of whom turned into quick success stories themselves: the duo single-handedly launched Sam Smith’s career with the bombastic “Latch,” and the Nottingham pop group London Grammar began climbing after their slow-burning turn on “Help Me Lose My Mind.” Disclosure wouldn’t scale the same heights again, but Settle remains a vivid, ecstatic time capsule of early-2010s club music at its pinnacle. –Eric Torres
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Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt (2013)
Allison and Katie Crutchfield’s scrappy teenage band P.S. Eliot was beloved far beyond the Alabama DIY scene they rose in. After the twin sisters broke up the group in 2011, Allison stepped out from behind the drums to lead the noisy guitar-pop band Swearin’; Katie holed up at their parents’ home with an acoustic guitar and recorded her debut as Waxahatchee, the stark, searing American Weekend. Its follow-up, Cerulean Salt, focused all that accelerated musical experience and added new color. Katie still recorded at home, but now “home” was a Philadelphia house she shared with Allison and her Swearin’ bandmates, who pitched in across the album. Backed by thudding drums and blown-out guitars, Katie’s heartrendingly vivid sketches of alienation and self-doubt sound almost triumphant, especially on the surf-flecked “Coast to Coast,” where she insists, in her faint drawl, “I’ll try to embrace the lows.” After this, Waxahatchee jumped labels to indie titans Merge, releasing two more remarkable albums and continuing to inspire a generation of acolytes to sing their own messy truths. –Marc Hogan
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Helado Negro: This Is How You Smile (2019)
Roberto Carlos Lange had been building toward This Is How You Smile for over a decade. Whether tinkering with vocoders or recruiting new collaborators, Lange has experimented under the banner of Helado Negro in a manner that is patient and community-oriented; people have always mattered most to him. He reached a creative apex on This Is How You Smile by washing his sound in tape hiss and soft-lit synths, casting a twilight glow over bilingual meditations on community, displacement, and loving the skin in which you were born. Lange’s fount of hope within This Is How You Smile is a balm for everyone, but for the black and brown people whom he singles out in heartfelt lyrics (“History shows/That brown won’t go/Brown just glows”), it feels like benediction. –Eric Torres
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Jeremih: Late Nights: The Album (2015)
Despite an attitude that ranged from nonchalance to outright self-sabotage, Jeremih quietly sustained mainstream success throughout the decade. Take Late Nights, an album that represents a triumph within the major-label system for its mere existence. Singles “Planez” and “Oui” became rap and R&B radio mainstays purely off the strength of the songwriting; Jeremih otherwise declined to engage in any sort of promotional tactics, from shooting music videos to performing on television. In touring the album, he immediately clashed with headliner PARTYNEXTDOOR—top-billed despite having far fewer hits—before being accused of sending out a body double at a show in Houston.
While a dominant musical theme of the 2010s was the seamless fusion of rap and R&B, as employed by artists like Drake and Post Malone, Jeremih got to the same place from the other side; his R&B flows and flexes like rap music, but with a distinct melodic bounce that could only come from a singer. The music on Late Nights rates as some of the finest R&B of the decade, even if that genre tag fits loosely: Highlights “Pass Dat” and “Drank” are experimental celebrations of substances that travel along pathways carved by Lil Wayne and Young Thug, and ballads like “Actin’ Up” and “Remember Me” have a stoned spaciness that recalls the decade’s best hip-hop. The album’s most instructive song is “Paradise,” a gentle acoustic outro that begins with Jeremih still high from the night before, a girl next to him in bed, and ends with him alone in a jacuzzi toasting his great life. You get the sense he enjoys the solitude. –Jordan Sargent
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Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012)
When shadowy studio rat Johnny Jewel cofounded the Italians Do It Better label in 2006, his music as part of reformed noise-rockers Chromatics cast him as an artist wonderfully out of time with his surroundings. But when Chromatics’ fourth album Kill for Love was released in 2012, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect: Jewel's nocturnal aesthetic had just served as the primary sonic influence for Nicolas Winding Refn's stylish hit film Drive. Kill for Love is a pitch-perfect and impeccably post-genre blend of Italo disco’s slow-motion thump, the self-mythologizing of classic rock, and smeared-lens ambient synth workouts. Music that sounds this eerily timeless also takes time to get right. –Larry Fitzmaurice
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Ariana Grande: Sweetener (2018)
For a moment, it seemed like Ariana Grande’s career could be consumed by darkness. In 2017, 22 people were killed in a suicide bombing at her concert in Manchester. For most people after that, just getting out of bed would be an accomplishment. But Grande, with immeasurable strength, managed not only to throw off the covers but to return to center stage with Sweetener. The path from trauma to sunny pop affirmations isn’t a straight one, but she walked it with grace and poise. Pharrell, who co-wrote and produced much of the album, evokes his early-’00s heyday with bouncing, hectic beats, while Grande uses her big voice to both mourn and celebrate. The devastating “no tears left to cry” could have been too sentimental in someone else’s hands; in Grande’s, it’s an anthem. Everything on this album is. –Matthew Schnipper
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Bad Bunny: X 100PRE (2018)
It’s rare for a musician to sell out arenas based on the strength of singles, but Bad Bunny was doing exactly that, around the world, even before his outsized, wacky persona was noticed by most English speakers in America. The Puerto Rican singer and rapper was exactly the right person—young, outré, extraordinarily talented, experimental—at the exact right time, spreading Soundcloud singles through word-of-mouth until he was eventually the purveyor of his own nuevo religión. X 100PRE—internet wordplay for “por siempre,” a self-estimation of his musical longevity—was a thrilling exploration of his range, hitting on the Latin trap wave he helped captain, but also diving into dembow, yearning ballads, clubby reggaetón, and delightfully feisty emo.
Bad Bunny’s unwillingness to conform to the rigid masculine scripts that often inform música urbana—his nail polish and acrylic extensions just the tip of it—informs the freedom of his music, and X 100PRE was a brilliant musical rebuttal to that rigidity. Throughout, his deep, demonstrative care for his community is tempered by an equal capacity for personal bluster and self-regard. (Or, as he raps on the banger “Caro,” “Yo sé cuánto valgo”: “I know how much I'm worth.”) Though lite reggaetón and its offshoots continue to break through to English-speaking audiences and climb charts in the States, Bad Bunny’s debut is most important as a rejoinder to his masses of young Spanish-speaking fans: This is their world now, and his, and they’ve earned it. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Todd Terje: It’s Album Time (2014)
The title of Norwegian nü-disco master Todd Terje’s only full-length record to date is a joking acknowledgement that all hyped DJ/producers inevitably make the leap from 12-inches and edits to “serious” album statements. Terje approaches this common rite of passage as a truly special once-in-a-lifetime event—one that demands dressing up in your finest evening attire and cracking open that bottle of bubbly in the back of your fridge. You don’t so much listen to It’s Album Time as step into its cosmic cocktail-lounge fantasia. Like a proper host, Terje sets the perfect pace for the evening’s indulgences, laying out the tantalizing hors d’oeuvres (the frothy space-funk trifles that comprise the record’s opening suite) before serving the main course (the hedonistic electro-house pleasures of “Strandbar” and “Delorean Dynamite”). In his effort to reshape the DJ/artist album template in his own eccentric image, Terje can’t help but indulge in one cliche of the form: the rock-star cameo. But in this case, it’s hardly a calculated crossover attempt: by enlisting Bryan Ferry for a moody, minimalist reading of Robert Palmer’s 1980 new wave nugget “Johnny and Mary,” Terje provides both a well-timed respite from the album’s relentless revelry and a sympathetic portrait of the lost souls most in need of it. –Stuart Berman
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The War on Drugs: Lost in the Dream (2014)
On Lost in the Dream, the War on Drugs’ third album and first masterpiece, highlights like “An Ocean Between the Waves” and “Red Eyes” pivot on simple pleasures: a slow build, a well-timed “woo!” But bandleader Adam Granduciel’s production is meticulously layered, occasionally fading into pure ambience and letting his dark textures tell the bigger story. Legend has it, Granduciel was tortured by its creation, endlessly scrapping and rebuilding each track by himself to the point of madness and near-physical collapse. “I didn’t feel like I was contributing to the canon in the way that I wanted to,” he said at the time. It’s a high standard, but it suits him: This is music that lingers forever in the hazy intersection between real life and our wildest dreams. –Sam Sodomsky
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Low: Double Negative (2018)
During this time of unrelenting political insanity, Low could’ve easily played it safe and stayed out of the fray. But 25 years into a career full of risk-taking, the Minnesota trio felt compelled to confront the confusion—or, at least, turn confusion into music. On Double Negative, the patient slowcore sound that Low coined long ago disintegrates into broken melodies, distorted ambience, and distant echoes. On “Always Up” and “Always Trying to Work It Out,” the group reflects the sleep-deprived fatigue that anyone with a smartphone experiences on a day-to-day basis. But Double Negative isn’t just a standard Low album broken into bits. It’s a self-contained work with baked-in influences—dub, techno, drone, noise—that guide its core while producing something paradoxical: a coherent expression of disarray. –Marc Masters
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Jai Paul: Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2019)
In 2013, when a collection of demos and rough takes credited to Jai Paul went up for sale on Bandcamp without his involvement or approval, it pushed the already reclusive pop-soul artist even more into the fringes. For almost seven years, he was mostly silent, aside from contributing one guest feature and working behind-the-scenes with his artistic think tank the Paul Institute. But then he re-materialized in 2019 with new music, a formal release of the leaked material, and a note to fans describing the “complete shock” and subsequent emotional fallout of the experience.
Spanning a nine-year creative period, Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) remains an appealingly unpolished, timeless capsule of shaggy beat experiments, space-age funk workouts, and the limber, Bollywood-sampling “Str8 Outta Mumbai,” a gleaming pop highlight that tamped out the one-hit-wonder debate that had hovered around Paul after his breakthrough hit “BTSTU.” What already felt beamed in from a thrilling, genre-agnostic future at the onset of the 2010s was given a deserved revisit and reality check by the end of the decade. –Eric Torres
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Vampire Weekend: Contra (2010)
Vampire Weekend’s 2008 debut offended the punk-minded with its Wes Anderson-like vignettes of upper class life. Upping the ante, Contra took its title from Nicaragua’s CIA-backed right-wing paramilitaries—a witty inversion of The Clash’s Sandinista!, named in tribute to that country’s socialist government. Contra amplifies and exacerbates all the aspects of Vampire Weekend that trad indie rock fans associated with la contrarrevolución: the dainty details, the blithe bounciness, the preppy smartness, the clever-clever references. Polishing the debut’s demo-like sound, Contra set its sights on the charts. Drum machines merge with hand-played rhythms, digital reverb lends a slightly canned quality to proceedings, and, on the mad sprint of “California English,” Ezra Koenig’s already buttery voice is buffed to a slick Auto-Tune sheen.
What Contra does share with Sandinista! is the later Clash’s outward-facing perspective and yen for border-crossing hybridity. The instrumental arsenal includes rebolo, zabumba, and shereke, and no, I don’t know what those are either. But these exotic borrowings read less like rhythms-of-resistance solidarity and more like liberal-elite tourism. What does it all add up to? Whose side are Vampire Weekend on anyway? It’s hard to care when the sound is this captivating and the words dance with the melodies so attractively. –Simon Reynolds
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Tirzah: Devotion (2018)
It’s not just her tone (a warm and gentle rasp) or her lyrics (a scrapbook collection of reflections on the nature of relationships) that make Tirzah’s debut album such a standout. It’s also the casual intimacy of her delivery: the way the London artist extends each word of the chorus of “Fine Again” into a line long enough to wrap around a shoulder. The non-verbal vocal wriggles on “Affection.” The chin jut and soft warning of “Go Now.” Many of the songs use improvised first-take vocals, which is a testament to Tirzah’s friendship with the composer and musician Mica Levi, who crafted the album’s spacious beats and introspective piano refrains. In taking care to value in-the-moment feeling over post-production polish, Devotion achieves the feat of being a truly idiosyncratic pop record that it’s easy to feel at home with, too. –Ruth Saxelby
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JAY-Z / Kanye West: Watch the Throne (2011)
Upon its release in 2011, JAY-Z and Kanye West's self-celebrating team-up Watch the Throne drew blowback for its Maybach-destroying extravagance in the wake of the global financial crisis. Neither rapper has ever been one to apologize for pushing the boundaries of good taste, though, and the gilded album had the substance to back up its vanity. Both stars saved some of their deepest, most sorrowful ruminations on race for these songs about making it to the unimaginable upper echelons of society and still feeling like an outcast. In between infamous lines about planking on stacks of cash and marrying the Olsen twins are thoughts on gang violence in West’s native Chicago and hymns that invoke Martin and Malcolm. Is this album wholly relatable? Not really. But it’s enlightening nonetheless, and often unexpectedly moving. –Evan Rytlewski
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Bon Iver: 22, A Million (2016)
In retrospect, maybe the stylistic shifts on 22, A Million shouldn’t have been so unexpected. After all, Justin Vernon’s time in the studio with Kanye West gave him plenty of exposure to Auto-Tune and other digital technologies, and that hypermodern signature positions 22, A Million about a billion miles from the modest, earthy tones of the band’s first two albums. But what ultimately makes the Wisconsin group’s 2016 album so striking has less to do with production choices than sheer chutzpah. There’s an unabashedly gonzo energy to the album, from its yin and yang symbols and yodeling-adjacent vocal leaps to its typographically deranged track titles that look cribbed from a witch house mixtape. It’s not always easy to tell how much is an elaborate gag: Is Vernon, once the face of anti-branding, really singing the praises of the upscale hipster hangout the Ace Hotel? But by the time you hit the tangled saxophones and processed choirs of “___45___,” there’s no doubting the album’s fundamental sincerity. –Philip Sherburne
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Joyce Manor: Never Hungover Again (2014)
With their third album, the California pop-punk band Joyce Manor distilled their frayed fuzz into an elemental blast of power and melody. This is a collection of chiseled, two-minute songs that makes you want to howl to the rafters, and the polished production serves their poignant insights on the indignities of aging. As frontman Barry Johnson sings, “Your body’s saying, Isn’t that enough?/Your brain is going, I don’t give a fuck.” There are moments here that could scan as vitriolic, but they feel empathetic coming from Johnson, a narrator who recognizes self-destructive behavior because he’s no stranger to it. It’s a last gasp at freedom and feeling good without consequence, knowing full well that the crash is waiting for you. –Matthew Strauss
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Caribou: Our Love (2014)
Dan Snaith didn’t appear to overthink the success of his 2010 album Swim. He didn’t fret, at least not publicly, about trying to imitate its success, nor did he dive back into the comfort of the esoteric. Instead, he figured the reception of that album meant that people liked what he was doing. For its follow-up, the former mathematician moved even further away from the cerebral, opening his heart and giving us a batch of body-moving love songs.
The lyrics don’t look like much, but they operate as mantras. “Can’t Do Without You” is a tenderizing phrase; by the time the song’s done, Snaith’s pledge that “you’re the only one thing I think about” comes across as heartbreakingly sincere. The effect is similar on “Our Love” as bass fills in the silence, suggesting the beating of multiple hearts. It isn’t always so easy, as the minor-key melody and lyrics of “Back Home” suggest. But if it were easy, it’d remain unspoken, and Our Love is an album about how worthwhile it is to say what you feel. –Jonah Bromwich
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Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, girl (2015)
Right around the time “self-care” entered the American lexicon, Jenny Hval wondered aloud on her fifth record, “What is it to take care of yourself?” As calm electronic beats turned ominous, the Norwegian musician grappled with a wide range of options, ranging from beauty rituals set by the capitalist patriarchy to her own desire to touch herself with dirty hands. It is this juxtaposition between the edifying and the primal that makes Hval’s albums so thrilling, and Apocalypse, girl is her crowning achievement to date—a generous record that explores big feminist questions and childhood fever dreams alike while flitting among eerie ambient sounds, lounge-lizard folk, and one-woman Gregorian chants. With its bongo-laden smirking about women’s strides meaning Hval can “consume what I want now,” “That Battle Is Over” is an immediate standout, but the looser tracks detailing Christian dedication and early psychosexual thoughts show off Hval’s entrancing voice and reveal their brilliance more gradually. Pegging Apocalypse, girl is as difficult as answering Hval’s initial question, and just as ever-changing. –Jillian Mapes
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Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife (2015)
Rae Sremmurd’s debut arrived when rap was still mired in the moody angst of Drake and Future, making their irrepressible giddiness all the more striking. Brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi regarded rap stardom not as a dreary obligation but as a comically awesome fantasy come true, head-banging and high-fiving their way through turn-up music equally suited for house parties, strip clubs, and skate parks. Producer Mike WiLL Made-It created an intergalactic funhouse for his protégés (the name “Rae Sremmurd” is his “Ear Drummers” tag backward), but it was the duo’s free-spending, safe-sex-having zeal that sold it. –Evan Rytlewski
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Haim: Days Are Gone (2013)
You can pretty reliably guess someone's generation by which artist Haim reminds them of. Fleetwood Mac? Wilson Phillips? Paula Cole? That's what happens when you study decades of AAA radio like it’s the sacred canon, then recapitulate it all in one album. Days Are Gone excels in this soft-rock mode: It’s full of singalong commitment phobia, gently lit love affairs, and heartbreak that's well-behaved but still moving. Crucially, there’s also levity—like “My Song 5,” which draws its power from muffled rage and the default title of a Garage Band demo. The lyrics are to-the-point and the arrangements are given a nostalgic haze, both of which highlight the Haim sisters’ unshowy chops. They’d soon also moonlight extensively as session musicians for artists like Vampire Weekend, remaking a large swath of the decade’s rock in their image. –Katherine St. Asaph
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Jessica Pratt: On Your Own Love Again (2015)
On Your Own Love Again feels beamed in from some implacable, dreamy elsewhere. With little more than guitars and her voice, Jessica Pratt offers floating melodies that sometimes sound spare and wintry, sometimes warm and sleepless, and always with an ache entirely their own. Her songs provide a universal shelter for sadness, as much in the intimate late-night tradition of Leonard Cohen as in the pastoral spaces of her Drag City labelmate Joanna Newsom. Whether it’s the sudden tape-warp of “Jacquelyn in the Background,” the self-harmonies of “Back, Baby,” or Pratt’s sometimes-affected voice, On Your Own Love Again creates a space for itself that seems to change with the quality of the light. –Jesse Jarnow
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Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap (2013)
The already-vanishing difference between a mixtape and an album—from a rap listener’s perspective, at least—evaporated completely in the 2010s, and no one took advantage more enthusiastically than Chance the Rapper. The Chicago MC was barely 20 years old when he started giving away what was technically his second mixtape, Acid Rap, for free online, but it instantly felt like a classic album. He had already shown promise on his first tape, 2012’s intricate 10 Day, but Acid Rap raised the stakes to giddy new heights. Chance’s cartoonish squawk veers unpredictably between cigarette-burnt sing-song and “tobacco-packin’ acrobat” rapping. He manages to project off-kilter exuberance even as he’s haunted by the same gun violence as his Chicago drill-rap contemporaries. And he’s assisted by an improbable yet satisfying guest list that includes hometown speed-rapper Twista, like-minded genre-bender Childish Gambino, and a rising Noname. With Acid Rap, he earned his stardom. –Marc Hogan
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Burial: Rival Dealer EP (2013)
William Bevan (a.k.a. Burial) once described Rival Dealer as a collection of “anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves.” Considering his music’s dank, glowering atmosphere, the idea might seem counterintuitive, but whatever you decide the music is about, its three tracks represent a real departure for the London producer. Rival Dealer serves as the climax to a three-EP streak of genius, beginning with Kindred and Truant/Rough Sleeper. The title track opens with a melody resembling a scream, cooling into gentler vocals and softer beats before opening up into a gorgeous major-key pool of light. “Hiders” steers into near-schmaltzy euphoria, while the closing track, “Come Down to Us,” samples an inspirational speech by Lana Wachowski about “other worlds previously unimaginable.” Burial’s music has been caricatured for his moodiness, but Rival Dealer proved that his music serves a higher purpose. –Jo Livingstone
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Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost (2011)
After releasing their promising indie-pop debut two years earlier, Girls thoroughly redefined themselves on their second and final album, Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Now, Christopher Owens and JR White’s homespun project was a vehicle for opulent, laser show-worthy ’70s classic rock. But their record also further illuminated the wounded emotional core embedded within frontman Owens’ lovable fuck-up persona. The album’s devastating centerpiece, “Forgiveness,” takes the form of an eight-minute confession-booth visitation in which he begs for mutual absolution from all he’s wronged and all who’ve wronged him—and when this hushed acoustic hymn erupts into a squealing guitar solo, it’s less a gratuitous display of fretboard fireworks than a physical manifestation of the immense effort and pain it takes to overcome past traumas. Just a year after releasing this record, Girls were no more, and the news of their sudden demise came as a shock to many fans. But in hindsight, we shouldn’t have been so surprised: Father, Son, Holy Ghost is a pristine portrait of a band that did everything they wanted to do and said everything that needed to be said. –Stuart Berman
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Solange: When I Get Home (2019)
On the When I Get Home interlude “Can I Hold the Mic,” Solange makes a case for honoring all the different parts of yourself. “I can’t be a singular expression of myself, there’s too many parts, too many spaces…” she says, trailing off in thought, like this list could go on for eons. The idea of the infinite existing within the singular is a running theme throughout the album—especially when she sings about her hometown of Houston, a city that contains multitudes. Solange represents its expanse with her loosely arranged soul music that’s steeped in the drowsy feeling of the city’s chopped ’n’ screwed hip-hop, expanded with glittering new age synths. On “Almeda,” she uses the word “brown” like a mantra, her repetition ultimately rendering signifiers of black culture—molasses, waves, dark liquor, and more—as sacred. –Michelle Kim
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Aphex Twin: Syro (2014)
Syro is the kind of album you return to in order to remind yourself why you fell in love with electronic music in the first place. To enjoy it is to luxuriate in perfectly executed fundamentals of composition: the resolution of a chord progression, the precise arrangement of percussion that transforms a straight beat into a syncopated one, the discernible shape of a melody that drifts and changes without losing its essential character. And while the music comes from many sources—techno, house, ambient, and various branches of electropop are always present, in ever-shifting proportions—you get the sense that this particular arrangement of sounds, with its rhythmic quirks and signature tuneful flourishes, could only come from one person. After the shock of hearing new music from Richard D. James subsided—released with little warning, Syro was the first new Aphex Twin album in 13 years—we had time to appreciate that this was one of his very best records, which is to say that it’s one of the best instrumental electronic records ever made. –Mark Richardson
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Tame Impala: Currents (2015)
With Currents, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker abandoned the more resolutely lo-fi aesthetics of his first two albums, like a film director transitioning from Super 8 to IMAX. Opting to record and mix everything himself with fresh gear, he added a technicolor precision to the group’s sound while staying true to the catchy bassline melodies, echoing coos, and flanged guitars of Tame Impala’s past. Parker clearly believes that there are certain sounds that feel undeniably good, regardless of context, and he puts them to work on the slinky future-disco of “The Less I Know the Better” and the squelching synthesizer balladry of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” (a noted Rihanna favorite). His perfectionism pays off as his drums jump through the speakers and his synths burn with clarity, offering a new gold standard for rock production. –Noah Yoo
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Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo (2011)
On Smoke Ring for My Halo, Kurt Vile’s breakthrough album, the Philadelphia songwriter plays an acoustic guitar and sings about how he’ll probably never leave his couch again—“cause when I’m out, I’m only out of my mind”—and literally shrinking to hide from the world by hiding inside his baby’s hands. Where his past albums had been scuzzy, lo-fi efforts, Smoke Ring formed the groundwork of his next decade of output, spotlighting a poet who untangles circuitous trains of thought over hypnotic guitar patterns. Vile doesn’t wrestle with social anxiety or depression so much as he acknowledges the symptoms, second-guesses his own logic, loses his focus, and circles back around. Sure, he plugs in and brings some heft on songs like “Puppet to the Man,” but more often, he keeps things quiet. How’s he supposed to figure himself out with all that noise? –Evan Minsker
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Four Tet: There Is Love in You (2010)
For the first time in his career, Kieran Hebden decided to test out new songs—the material that would become There Is Love in You—by blasting them in clubs. When “Love Cry” reached the partying masses, they screamed with approval, and each time he played it, he tightened it more and more based on the crowd’s reaction. Fresh from collaborations with the iconic percussionist Steve Reid and in an arguable creative peak in his career, Hebden harnessed the thrill of these surroundings to create a tribute to music’s transportive power, its ability to make you feel so chemically blissed-out that the stresses of life fall away. He even plants the seeds of his own autobiographical joy, amplifying the literal heartbeat of his godson and recording a friend’s kid playing a toy piano. It’s an album that focuses on the love within all of us, and to get us there, Hebden meditates on his own happy place. –Evan Minsker
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Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (2010)
The Suburbs is like an audio analogue to Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood: both messy but privileged coming-of-age stories set in Texas, ambitiously executed and critically adored. Yet after grappling with death and religion on their first two records, when Arcade Fire turned their collective eye toward leaving home on The Suburbs, the concept seemed almost small-scale by comparison. The music, of course, was anything but, with multiple two-part songs, recurring musical motifs, and new beginnings peppered throughout the album’s 16 tracks. Loosely inspired by the Houston-area childhood of band leader Win Butler and his brother Will, the album innately understood how urban sprawl could engender claustrophobia in the hearts of the young and strange, and that this experience may look different in the rearview mirror. It portrays the dread of suburbia as manifesting in power-tripping cops and “dead shopping malls rising like mountains beyond mountains,” but it also fondly remembers the way the world could feel patient and unpretentious. Best of all, the sound was vast and electric and opulent in ways that the backdrop could never be, capturing the narrators’ dreams and frustrations and pointing Arcade Fire toward their dance-rock future with the stunning “Sprawl II.” –Jillian Mapes
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The Weeknd: House of Balloons (2011)
With his debut mixtape, Abel Tesfaye introduced the world to his hedonistic universe. Back then, we knew nothing about him, save for a Drake cosign, and with so much mystery we had to focus on the tangible: the now-iconic sans-serif type and artsy, Tumblr-core nude on the cover artwork, and the music itself. PBR&B jokes aside, the Weeknd’s first mixtape was a harbinger of trends to come, full of seductive songwriting enmeshed with genre-agnostic production. Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Beach House samples? Check. Cocaine-fueled carnality? Plenty of that.
Songs like “The Morning” and “Wicked Games” predate the Weeknd’s outright pop aspirations and highlight his raw talent for hooks, while the creeping bells and loping drums of “What You Need” designed the blueprint for an entire generation of twilight crooners. House of Balloons and his subsequent mixtapes may have landed Tesfaye his major label deal, but to this day, eerie album opener “High for This” might remain the Weeknd’s most effective mission statement. Gritty synths bloom as his beguiling voice glides through the air, inviting you to relax, breathe deep, and shed some clothes. –Noah Yoo
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SOPHIE: OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES (2018)
Much of the science fiction we read in middle school fears a future in which people lose touch with what makes us human: our emotions, our favorite books, our memories. But what if the future, full of computerized voices and digitized avatars, allows us freedom from restrictive contemporary notions of gender and sexuality? On her debut album, the Scottish producer SOPHIE’s plastic, glinting experimental pop dares to imagine a time when we’ll have agency over our bodies and identities. On “Faceshopping,” she finds realness in the seductions of Photoshop, and on “Immaterial,” vocalist Cecile Believe gleefully chants, “I can be anything I want.” While the album is lyrically abstract, it is also SOPHIE’s most vulnerable project; before she released the music video for “It’s Okay to Cry,” few listeners had ever seen the elusive producer’s face. SOPHIE build a whole new world, one where our most authentic selves are the ones we construct, reinvent, and debut to the world every day. –Vrinda Jagota
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Cardi B: Invasion of Privacy (2018)
From the moment Cardi B started rapping for money, she wanted to be the shrewdest in the game, even if she wasn’t the technical best. It was after the summer of “Bodak Yellow,” her playfully taunting mainstream introduction—and the first of four unprecedented No. 1 hits—that she became unstoppable, moving at roadrunner speeds. The audacity, humor, and business savvy that made her famous on both Instagram and reality TV carried over to her debut album, Invasion of Privacy. Her music was sensitive and hardcore, carefully crafted, and, most of all, likable. The bass on “I Like It" seemed made to blow out speakers on any continent, and “Be Careful” was Cardi's rap version of a quiet storm anthem. Her once unrefined flow—a subject of ridicule—was more sculpted, even next to agile guests like Migos, Chance the Rapper, and SZA. It was a seamless debut, made better by the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be this good. –Clover Hope
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Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (2015)
Before he became notorious for trolling journalists and engaging in performance art about What It All Means, Josh Tillman captured the feeling of love as a defiant, selfish, and contradictory state of emotions on I Love You, Honeybear. Across the album, he cooes sickly sweet comes-ons to his wife, Emma, knowing the private rituals of companionship seem delusional from the outside; he spits vitriol at a dull woman he meets at a party before deciding to go home with her anyway; he languishes in his personal crises like a pig rolling around in the mud. The music is sensual, the vibe languid. Through everything—the muck and desolation of existing on this stupid planet—Tillman tilts towards love, because real life gave him no other choice. –Jeremy Gordon
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Robyn: Honey (2018)
Following up 2010’s beloved Body Talk was always going to be a daunting task. So for her first album in eight years, Robyn skipped floor-filling pop anthems in favor of the tender electro-pop therapy we didn’t know we needed, meeting real-life heartbreak and loss first with mourning, then with acceptance and celebration. Taking her time meant Robyn came to the table with deep reflection, scripting effortless-seeming phrases—“turned all my sorrow into glass,” “we’re making diamonds”—that froze transient emotion in amber. She’s both the subject and the sympathetic ear, playfully poking holes between her personal and artistic identities on “Send to Robin Immediately,” and issuing a collective invitation to party, party, par-ty on “Beach 2K20.” More than any one standout song, Honey is a mood and a balm, an equilibrium as light and steady as its beachy house beats. But perhaps the best moment is the transcendent closer “Ever Again,” a plea for peace—“How ’bout we stop arguing and do something else?”—sealed with the promise that no matter how long you wait, real honey never spoils. –Anna Gaca
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Perfume Genius: No Shape (2017)
No Shape, the fourth album from Mike Hadreas’ avant-pop outfit Perfume Genius, is a rapturous ode to true love that spares no bell, whistle, or baroque string section. Following 2014’s grittier, more hemmed-in Too Bright, No Shape is split wide open and sparkling. Hadreas exalts love in its many forms: sensual, mundane, and defiant, allowing his skyward voice and lavish compositions to elevate the familiar into the realm of myth. During the chorus of “Just Like Love,” the titular three words sound sung by a field of wildflowers swaying in the wind. Hadreas knows that comparing things to love is a timeworn exercise in melodrama, and yet when you’re in its grasp, there is nothing too grand to describe it. Still, he is just as quick to be vulnerable: On “Die 4 You,” his voice retreats to the trembling timbre of Sade. On the closing ballad “Alan,” written for his boyfriend and longtime collaborator Alan Wyffels, Hadreas is equally delicate, though his proclamations are less lofty. “Did you notice,” he sings, in recognition of a small and simple kind of love, “we sleep through the night?” –Madison Bloom
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Drake: If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (2015)
If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late captures rap’s biggest star in self-congratulation, celebrating his ascent to sovereignty and already on the defensive as a result. It’s Drake at his loosest musically and tensest spiritually. Rarely has he been pettier. IYRTITL was a “retail mixtape,” as Drake’s camp stressed, and that was a calculated distinction to relieve the pressure he felt to deliver a classic album after announcing Views From the 6; he release IYRTITL as a sort of preface to that record, and it freed him up considerably. Drake is showing off, enjoying a victory lap, burning bridges and taking risks, his flows unbound but the pressure of delivering a classic album. With ominous, mesmerizing beats from his in-house team at OVO (40, Boi-1da, PartyNextDoor) and a few talented Canadian mainstays (WondaGurl, Frank Dukes), these songs establish Drake as a relentless conqueror: “The game is all mine and I’m mighty possessive/Lil Wayne could not have found him a better successor,” he boasts in the tape’s closing moments. IYRTITL finds a master schemer taking stock of his positioning—as rap’s ambassador to Toronto, as influencer and tabloid fodder, as wary and dangerous mogul—and realizing the full extent of his power. He marvels at his own superiority throughout and presents himself as untouchable, because he pretty much was. –Sheldon Pearce
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Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma (2010)
Steven Ellison got his start scoring for Adult Swim in the late ’00s, and with his breakout LP Cosmogramma, he channeled that anarchic energy into a new medium. Fusing jazz, video-game sounds, post-Dilla hip-hop, IDM drum breaks, laser shrieks, and much more, he forged a fluid and propulsive music that doesn’t have a name. He made Cosmogramma while his mother was dying, so he sampled the sound of her hospital-room machinery on “Galaxy in Janaki,” the album’s hypnotic final track. Elsewhere, he processes the weight of his musical heritage: the recurring joyful soul melodies recall “Love Hangover,” written by Ellison’s grandmother Marilyn McLeod, and mournful jazz-harp interludes reference Ellison’s great-aunt, Alice Coltrane. Live instrumentation and guest vocals from Ravi Coltrane and Thom Yorke send ambient melodies drifting over steady grooves and skittish beats. Ten years later, new artists are still treading in FlyLo’s cosmic footprints. –Jo Livingstone
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Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015)
Aussie singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett established herself as a wordy, clever storyteller with her debut full-length, and she earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in the process. Her songs unfurl at a stream-of-consciousness pace, narrating the mundanities of daily life over garage-rock guitar. She sings about about the benefits of owning a percolator, the burnout of office workers, and even, at one point, restlessly declares mid-song that she might be hungry. But the poetic attention Barnett pays to everyday experiences belie her greater anxieties beneath the free-wheeling music: a tour of a sad house on “Depreston” tells a story of death and regrowth; a walk on the beach in “Kim’s Caravan” leads to a meditation on destroyed coral reefs. With Sometimes I Sit and Think, Barnett became a poster woman for a young generation seized by self-doubt and introversion, and her music never failed to process those feelings with a dark sense of humor. –Hazel Cills
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Fever Ray: Plunge (2017)
Karin Dreijer's 2009 self-titled debut as Fever Ray was about motherhood, but motherhood portrayed via a near-unbroken stretch of anhedonic sludge: postpartum depression as an album. So it was a surprise to many when, upon revisiting their solo project nearly a decade later, Dreijer inverted it entirely to release a playful, gleeful album primarily about queer desire and kink. In this, it shares a lot with the Knife's opus Shaking the Habitual, but where that album was bundled with a manifesto, Plunge came with a personal ad seeking “hours and hours of sharing.” Every emotion is huge and earnest; the songs about lust have a near-apocalyptic urgency. The love songs have a frantic glee and the kink is as much about sentiment as sex. The political songs are personal (and delivered the iconic lyric “this country makes it hard to fuck!”). The most Fever Ray-esque track, “Mustn't Hurry,” is about wanting to leave that album’s gloom behind to get to the good part: “Saw the blood,” Dreijer sings, “but it's not scary.” –Katherine St. Asaph
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Future: Dirty Sprite 2 (2015)
Future’s consistency works to his disadvantage; his relentless stream of albums and mixtapes this decade can feel like a level plane. Dirty Sprite 2 is manifestly some kind of peak, though, in quality and mainstream impact. The album works as a microcosm of Future’s career: fixated in themes and mood, a steady accumulation of dirge upon dirge sustaining his bleak vision of joyless hedonism. It could be ambient music, almost, if the beats—mostly by Metro Boomin—didn’t hit with such pummeling physicality.
Memorable images flash up now and then: the codeine urine of “Thought It Was a Drought,” the literal money-laundering of “Blood on the Money.” But Future is not a lyrical MC in the tradition upheld today by Kendrick Lamar. He’s a voice more than a writer, who shines as texture rather than text, and his most crucial accomplice was the late engineer Seth Firkins, the Auto-Tune wizard who coated Future’s bleary croon in a hundred subtle shades of digital grit. A plateau of pleasure-pain, DS2 finally breaks loose with the closer “F*ck Up Some Commas”: an anthem of ecstatic indifference, Future squandering money and life-force over Southside & DJ Spinz’s slow-mo stampede. The third verse, where Future chops his vocal against the beat like a deejay slashing the cross-fader, is one of the decade’s most thrilling and purely musical moments. –Simon Reynolds
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Mitski: Be the Cowboy (2018)
Few songwriters articulate wanting quite like Mitski. Across her catalog of impassioned rock anthems, sometimes she aches for a love that falls like “a body from the balcony.” Other times, she wishes simply to see the world and still pay rent. A classically trained composer who began her career recording piano ballads, Mitski insists that her music is technical rather than emotional, the characters in her stories fictional rather than autobiographical. Be the Cowboy, her fifth album, is a stunning piece of theater on the subject of wanting. Whether she’s spinning pain into something danceable on “Nobody” or pushing away a devoted lover’s touch on the searing “A Pearl,” the stories Mitski tells may be imaginary but the emotions are real. As she expands her sound, swapping her signature guitar shredding for synthesizers and disco, assuming the voices of weary wives and swaggering conquerors, Mitski’s songs are the most complex they’ve ever been. –Hazel Cills
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Danny Brown: XXX (2011)
When he broke through in 2011, Danny Brown seemed to be running backwards at us, howling from about five years into the future. He was a Ghostface-level narrator with an asymmetrical haircut, tight jeans, gap teeth, and an imagination so vivid it seemed to frighten even him. Brown rapped in an astonished yelp and treated verses like advanced Pac-Man levels, gobbling up as much of his surroundings as he could before the timer buzzed. The title track from XXX (a triple entendre for his third album, his 30th year, and his preferred adult entertainment rating) compacts his vision, his determination, his torture. “I never leave the house, ain’t slept in three days/Poppin’ pills, writing, drinking, and smoking haze,” he rapped, his voice fraying at the edges. "Weaving kicks and snares, trying to dodge these hooks/Keeping it original, something that’s overlooked.” He would say all of this, in a million inventive ways, after XXX, but the thing about a first impression is that it only happens once. –Jayson Greene
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Grouper: Ruins (2014)
Liz Harris’ music as Grouper has always been intensely private, sometimes intimidatingly so: the sound of solitude so profound, so all-encompassing, that it blots out everything beyond it. Harris spent the first few years of the decade pushing deeper and deeper into emptiness, covering her tracks with impenetrable echoes, but Ruins felt like tearing away a veil. Recorded during a stint on the coast of Portugal, it’s just Harris alone at the piano, her voice unadorned, singing with unnerving candor about heartbreak and confusion. The only reverb is that of the piano’s sustain pedal; her only accompaniment is the occasional sound of crickets, frogs, a passing thunderstorm. Toward the end of “Labyrinth,” a microwave beeps when the power flashes back on after a blackout—a strange and startling reminder that there is a world outside this terrifying, irresistibly beautiful loneliness. –Philip Sherburne
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Arca: Arca (2017)
Arca, the Venezuelan producer also known as Alejandra Ghersi, laced her singing voice into her early Soundcloud mixtapes and her debut album, 2014’s Xen. But it always came through corroded, as if chewed up by the intricate electronic shapes she’d twist with her synthesizers. Known for working behind the scenes with Kanye West and Björk, Arca established her impressive technical skills on her first few records, but it wasn’t until 2017’s self-titled breakthrough that her artistic spirit came to the forefront. She built Arca around her singing voice, its ragged edges tracing stories of death, and yearning, and change. If Xen and its 2015 follow-up, Mutant, flourished in cerebral space, then Arca aims straight for the beautiful tumult of the body. It's a delicate and stormy album about shedding skin and growing it anew, about the pain of nursing a wound and the celebration of watching the body stitch itself back together whole. –Sasha Geffen
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King Krule: The OOZ (2017)
When he released his debut album, 2013’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, Archy Marshall was 19 years old and self-certain, a swaggering rogue prowling London backstreets amid urban decay. His second album as King Krule, The OOZ, sees little of note on those streets, but constructs an elaborate microcosm in Marshall’s bedroom, where decay is a kind of comfort. After releasing a series of experimental songs under various monikers, he conceived The OOZ as a return to “guitar music.” But Marshall sets a new benchmark for the form, conjuring an odyssey of overdosed psych, anxious hip-hop, zombified punk, spoken word, loping jazz, and sound art. Vignettes flit by, conjuring heartbreak and depression; the expensive, isolating city backdrops his existential funk. Yet the immersive production and poetry reach out to you, like panicked arms from a murky deep end. Even as The OOZ churns through Krule’s torment, it glows with a melancholy too exquisite to fear. –Jazz Monroe
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Taylor Swift: Red (2012)
Red is a portrait of a young woman eager to feel everything on her way to the top. Its songs are self-aware enough to be funny and guileless enough to be honest, capturing the temptation of risk-taking, the rush of memory and disappointment, and the transformative power of grown-up romantic love felt for the first time. The album gave Taylor Swift her first No. 1 hit (the irresistible “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”) and inaugurated many of her famously over-the-top marketing tactics: commemorative Keds sneakers, Papa John’s pizza boxes, weaponized tabloid gossip. Aside from her pop leanings, the chipper breakup-to-makeup story “Stay Stay Stay” and melancholic renewal ballad “Begin Again” would be some of her final acoustic-forward recordings of the decade. Soon after Red, nobody in America could ever again plausibly ask, “Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway?” –Anna Gaca
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Kamasi Washington: The Epic (2015)
For at least 60 years, Los Angeles jazz culture has been shaped by several of its circumstances: a slower pace of life, rehearsal spaces in great supply, proximity to the TV and film business, and a vague condescension emanating towards it from New York. When the saxophonist Kamasi Washington released his first album for a label in 2015 after a few self-released starts, he was 34 and unusually ready for the spotlight. He’d had the time, space, and resources to develop an uncanny fluidity among his band members, who’d known one another since high school; they benefited from years of church and R&B gigs, and the encouragement of a network of local elders and heroes. They weren’t academic formalists or bebop sticklers; they knew the canon, but grew up geographically close both to the grooves of Compton hip-hop and the commercial, proggy, and spiritual branches of jazz embodied by Patrice Rushen, George Duke, and Alice Coltrane.
This mixture of things—and its beneficial distance from New York—gives The Epic its casual hugeness. Washington's playing, informed by Kenny Garrett and Pharoah Sanders, comes out in agile, darting climbs toward free-jazz wail, then slow elegies, and then clipped, mellow funk. The band includes two drummers, two bassists, a choir, and strings; it is thundering and chill, monolithic and uncontrived. It began one of the strongest groundswells in the last quarter-century of the jazz tradition, if you want to call it that. And if you do, consider that jazz has accommodated popular and sacred and advanced musicianship—the academic and the vernacular—since it began. –Ben Ratliff
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Kendrick Lamar: DAMN. (2017)
Kendrick Lamar uses inner conflict as the main fuel source for DAMN., an autobiographical work of epic proportions that won him a Pulitzer Prize. He plays tug-of-war between good and evil, illustrating how futile morality is when you grow up in a place like Compton, where racialized oppression and violence is commonplace. Lamar touched on these themes in his earlier works, but as he breezes through his rapid-fire verses, flashing his lyrical dexterity and the vocal flexibility that he honed with To Pimp a Butterfly’s funk experimentation, he brings an unprecedented technicolor detail.
DAMN. concludes with Kendrick revealing his astonishing origin story in “DUCKWORTH.,” involving a coincidental meeting years ago between his father and his label head, Anthony Tiffith. It could have left one dead and the other in prison. But since both ended up safe, Kendrick frames the story as proof of his “chosen one” status, a fateful sign that he’d go on to become the greatest rapper in the world. Whether or not you believe in divine intervention, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t fulfill that prophecy. –Michelle Kim
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Björk: Vulnicura (2015)
On her eighth studio LP, Björk returns divorce to the arena of biblical sin. A monstrous take on the breakup album, Vulnicura bypasses heartbreak records’ usual sensitivities, demanding “emotional respect” like an angry god berating a malign species. Zero-gravity beats (co-produced by Arca) splice with close-miked vocals and string section heraldry, situating Björk’s despair in an ancient tradition—one that knows agony is a form of majesty. On “Black Lake,” she sings to her ex, “You fear my limitless emotions.” Emotional maximalism is not a chance fact of this superstar’s existence, the album reminds us, but her core philosophy. By lamenting one man’s failure, she demands reckoning from all her listeners, illuminating the sacred bond between art and principle. –Jazz Monroe
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St. Vincent: Strange Mercy (2011)
The shadowy narratives that make up Strange Mercy, Annie Clark’s third album as St. Vincent, flash by in sharply lurid images: horsehair whips, dirty policemen, suitcases of cash. Clark’s father went to prison for stock fraud in 2010, which gave rise to Strange Mercy’s elliptical lyrics that often allude to depression, crime, and anger. But she used the incident as lighter fluid for apoplectic guitar shredding and dark tales of complicated power dynamics, whether between a dominant and submissive, a police officer and a civilian, or a parent and a child. Strange Mercy fuses the cinematic thrust of Clark’s 2009 album Actor with stirring experimental accents, from the corrosive solo that caps “Northern Lights” to the wiry motif that runs through the exquisite pop workout “Cruel.” She would go on to throw bolder shapes, but with its quicksilver moods and mercurial instrumentation, Strange Mercy is the most urgent and resonant St. Vincent album to date. –Eric Torres
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Young Thug: Barter 6 (2015)
Young Thug went from the face of rap’s inter-generational wars to one of its elder statesmen with unsettling speed. Just a few years ago, when he first emerged as a leader of Atlanta’s melodic new school, his contortionist flows and frenzied yelps were a novelty; today, his stylistic progeny dominate the charts. Still, Barter 6, Thug’s de facto debut album, remains his most cohesive project to date. Alternately paranoid, introspective, and tongue-in-cheek, he glides over production by Wheezy and London on Da Track. Although the release was attended by some high-profile drama (the name was an obvious, if inscrutable, subliminal aimed at his former idol Lil Wayne), Thug sounds inordinately focused, easily out-rapping guests like T.I., Boosie BadAzz, and Young Dolph, all of whom deliver memorable turns on songs like the creeping “Can’t Tell” and the stormy “Never Had It.” He’s remained prolific since then but, following plenty of leaks, label drama, and personal setbacks, Thug has yet to recapture the purity of that moment. –Rawiya Kameir
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Jlin: Black Origami (2017)
Indiana footwork innovator Jerrilynn Patton, aka Jlin, once said that “the literature for experimental music is blank pages.” Her steely second album is a testament to this out-of-box thinking. Charged with a constant feeling of discovery, it offers no real hierarchy of sound, as the well-oiled polyrhythmic parts clatter, woosh, and glitch together with balletic ease. Black Origami sounds like real life, like industrialization collapsing and recalibrating, generative and alive.
“I call it Black Origami,” Jlin has said, because “all those folds and bends that you go through in your life, that is what folds you into that piece of origami. You start off as this blank sheet of paper, this innocent thing. And then life starts bending and folding, bending and folding.” In her own folding, she establishes herself as one of the most forward-thinking contemporary composers in any genre, and one of the most human. –Jenn Pelly
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LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening (2010)
Before he entered the hibernation that was supposed to be his grand exit, LCD Soundsystem lifted up every last commandment James Murphy believed in: Get newly baptized under the disco ball, change who you are if it helps someone fall in love with you, never make a hit, take one last shot at your critics, then leave the stage forever.
This final album from the band—the story went—was full of stakes and climaxes and last-goodbyes. “It was a music of desperation,” Murphy once said of “All I Want,” the beating heart of the record, a song so stuffed with feeling it ends with Murphy crying, “Take me home." He sings again of home at the very end of the record, as if heaven or a wine-bar proprietorship calls him hither. Of course, in the real world, where LCD Soundsystem reunited and made another good album seven years later, the “take me home” motif now scans a little more like a drunk guy in the back of an Uber after a long night. The saga of This Is Happening and the band’s final concert at Madison Square Garden fizzes in the mind like a dream, too cathartic and momentous to ever be real. –Jeremy D. Larson
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DJ Koze: Knock Knock (2018)
DJ Koze doesn’t sing on his records, but his personality nevertheless shines through with every wonky beat—and electronic music’s premier troublemaker with a heart of gold was never more lovable than on Knock Knock. His productions have always been somewhat at odds with the sorts of Ibiza mega-clubs he’s often booked to play—intimate instead of bombastic, squirrelly instead of grandstanding—and Knock Knock makes the most of his idiosyncrasies: A Bon Iver sample puts a campfire-folk spin on glitchy deep house; Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner gurgles sweetly through Auto-Tune. Much of the album’s jewel-toned sampledelia is decidedly laid-back, with chopped-up soul over easygoing drum breaks, but there’s no missing the mainstage triumph of the Gladys Knight-sampling disco-house anthem “Pick Up,” a bittersweet breakup anthem that, heard amid a throng of 10,000 souls dancing in unison, is simply life-affirming. –Philip Sherburne
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Grimes: Visions (2012)
Claire Boucher’s first two albums as Grimes submerged her pop instincts deep within experimental manipulations. Visions, her third record, glints with the excitement of a newly unlocked talent and the thrill of wielding it. Its songs are twisted flashes of pop melodies laid over frothy techno pulses, where something vaguely sinister underlines the sweetness of the vocals. The album operates by its own unconventional timekeeping—many tracks are over four minutes, many others under two—and in its own unfamiliar yet accessible space. Its beats sound close but cavernous, feeling out a dance groove in the dark of “Circumambient” and erasing and rewriting itself half a dozen times on “Oblivion.” There are ballads, too, if that’s what you call a song like “Skin,” festooned with gothic filigrees. Almost eight years later, Boucher’s human-generated cyborg pop still feels enigmatic. –Anna Gaca
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Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica (2011)
Listeners encountering Replica upon its release didn’t have to know its backstory to tell that something had changed in Oneohtrix Point Never’s work: In place of the retro-futurist synth fantasia of the New York musician’s previous albums were curious, half-melodic abstractions with origins difficult to tease out. Many of the sounds, it turned out, were sampled from TV commercials from the ’80s, but Daniel Lopatin’s curious way of chopping and looping freed them from kitschy overtones—really, from any context whatsoever. Instead, these disembodied voices and half-recognizable sounds suggested only a kind of vague, inchoate melancholy—the sadness of dead media, a gesture of mourning for a past whose outline was already fading from memory. –Philip Sherburne
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ANOHNI: Hopelessness (2016)
Hopelessness is a tremendous, terrifying reflection on the perils of drone warfare, our digital panopticon, the continued degradation of the planet Earth, and patriarchal violence. In these horrifying, beautiful songs, ANOHNI presses crisis to flesh—and as this decade wore on, they became more and more relevant.
Beyond ANOHNI’s supernal voice, which easily communicates both intimacy and dread—her tone elegant and refined with empathy while being robust enough to condemn evil—there is a material perspective that makes all of these crimes feel more visceral. She sings about “exploded crystal guts,” feeling the temperature of a near-boiling planet on the skin, idle lenses observing unknowing figures, the marrow being sucked out of bones. Throughout Hopelessness, these become powerful symbols of American carnage. Produced alongside Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, ANOHNI embraces electronic dance music as a compelling vehicle for truth-telling without losing its serrated edge. Hopelessness crystalised the environmentalist pop ANOHNI had made for years with Antony and the Johnsons into piercingly sharp, graceful protest songs for our present and future dystopias. –Sheldon Pearce
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Carly Rae Jepsen: E•MO•TION (2015)
E•MO•TION marked the end of Carly Rae Jepsen, wholesome chart-topper, and the beginning of CRJ, patron saint of just going for it. After the mind-numbing ubiquity of “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen went in search of her own sound and, after cowriting hundreds of songs, landed on bright, bold synth-pop with a distinct ’80s sleekness. Though E•MO•TION was initially considered something of a commercial flop, it became, along with a few other LPs, emblematic of a certain 2010s trend: the rise of the mainstream pop star swerving to collect her indie cred. Working with collaborators like Dev Hynes and Rostam, Jepsen honed her reference points and packed the album with tactile sonic details: the synth sheen cascading off “All That,” a ballad seemingly made for the prom scene in a John Hughes movie, or the way the house-tinged sleeper “Warm Blood” pulses on at least four different levels at once. And who could forget the most epic saxophone part to open a pop song since “Careless Whisper”? But it was Jepsen’s unabashed yearning and acute sense of rejection that turned E•MO•TION into a certified cult hit—relatable in the way that a really good rom-com is, and just as rare. –Jillian Mapes
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The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (2013)
The Knife’s fifth and final album demanded nothing less than the obliteration of Western society’s sturdiest pillars: capitalism, patriarchy, gender conformity. And like true performance artists, siblings Karin and Olaf Dreijer knew that the legitimacy of their message hinged on their willingness to obliterate themselves. Even coming from a group that had, over the previous decade, forsaken neon-bright indie-pop for black-light techno-goth and impenetrable operatic dronescapes, Shaking the Habitual marked yet another radical act of self-negation. The shadowy electro provocateurs were reborn as an animalistic, post-apocalyptic industrial act making an ungodly clang from (presumably) short-circuiting synths and burnt-out oil drums bashed by human bones. Whether it’s subjecting you to pulverizing electro-punk, nauseating 19-minute ambient movements, or diseased tropical funk, Shaking the Habitual relentlessly agitates as a means to inspire resistance. In retrospect, the album functioned as a punishing boot-camp drill to prepare us for the difficult conversations, legislative battles, and bad-faith disinformation wars that rage today. –Stuart Berman
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Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me (2017)
Pause for a moment to remember December 2009, and think of the people you knew who were alive then, now gone. The older you are, the more names will come to mind. And the next 10 years will bring more names still—possibly many more. There’s no escaping it.
Death is real. With that line, Phil Elverum begins A Crow Looked at Me, his hushed and plainspoken album about the loss of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, to cancer the year before. Crow is one of the most specific albums ever made—the details, and there are many, are drawn directly from the songwriter’s life, from what’s arriving in the mail to how long he holds on to his wife’s old toothbrush. But inside the minutiae are truths that exist independently of Elverum. It’s impossible to listen and not think about the people around you. His story starts to feel like yours.
Crow is like a letter from an old friend that you savor alone and then put back in the drawer when you’re finished, a work designed to cycle in and out of people’s lives. “We are all always so close to not existing at all,” Elverum sings in “Swims.” When that thought is close at hand, so is this record. –Mark Richardson
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A Tribe Called Quest: We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service (2016)
Within the span of one month in 2016, A Tribe Called Quest fans went from never expecting music from the group again to mourning Phife Dawg to preparing themselves for a new album. This whirlwind of emotions can be felt in the frantic and urgent music itself, which explores exit strategies and considerations for a newer and better world in the first two songs alone, “The Space Program” and “We the People….” The record was released at the tail end of the week that Donald Trump was elected president, but its pitch-perfect intersection of fury and sadness had been brewing for years, which meant it arrived as a perfect response to people who assumed America had only recently become violent and frightening. Beyond all of this, the album momentarily returned Phife Dawg to us, his voice showing no rust despite the years. This is the album’s truest gift; his instantly classic verse on “Black Spasmodic” feels like the MC kicking in the door to a dark room where everyone is sleeping and turning all of the lights on. –Hanif Abdurraqib
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Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time (2013)
Despite the desires of her label, Sky Ferreira refused to be molded into the next coy pop princess. As a result, her debut album was locked in purgatory for years, until she put her own modeling money toward financing it. When it finally emerged in 2013, Night Time, My Time testified to Ferreira’s authentic edginess, from the cover—a humid shot of a topless, glaring Ferreira in a green-tiled shower—to her vulnerable, often self-loathing lyrics. Throughout it, she owns her emotional complexities, moving coolly from optimism to frustration to a Lynchian brooding that the director himself later put to good use. She’s a starry-eyed romantic on “Boys” and a scorned lover on “You’re Not the One;” she takes accountability for her reputation on “I Blame Myself” and questions her relevance on the title track. Working alongside producers including Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen, she fashions these raw sentiments into sparkly synth-pop and grungy, kohl-lined gems. “Nobody asked me if I was okay…Nobody asked me what I wanted,” she murmurs throatily at one point. Night Time, My Time is testament to the power of singing for oneself. –Quinn Moreland
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Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (2010)
Then, now, and forever, love makes people go a little crazy. Even Erykah Badu, goddess of unbothered R&B, is not immune. Throughout Return of the Ankh, her only proper album of this decade, she offers up conflicting desires with the unfiltered realness of a drunk dial. She pines for a long-distance love with lusty teenage angst. She laughs about fucking around on a besotten boyfriend. She cautions would-be suitors on a song called “Fall in Love (Your Funeral),” which works in lines from Biggie Smalls’ cold-blooded classic “Warning.” At one point, her frustrations make her contemplate gunplay.
But for every moment of blind passion here, there is an equal and opposite moment of contemplation: On the psychedelic 10-minute suite “Out My Mind, Just in Time,” she evolves from a doting, codependent lover to a solo superhero in tune with her own worth. The arrangements, largely based on the comforting grooves of ’70s soul, add an element of analog time travel to her cosmic funk. Though a record all about the vagaries of the heart may not be a new idea, in Erykah Badu’s hands, it never gets old. –Ryan Dombal
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Beyoncé: Lemonade (2016)
The first thing Lemonade delivers is wrath: Infidelity has ruptured not just marriage but a whole life. Beyoncé, the world’s most powerful woman, is gleeful to set streets on fire, throw off her wedding ring, shit-talk with her girls to abandon. If Lemonade’s first 10 minutes has a headline, it would be that Jay-Z, dummy that he is, really did cheat. But then everything builds to something more profound, more complete: a prayer about how love can fracture the self. Suddenly we’re in Texas, in stadiums, on plantations; a Led Zeppelin beat is next to a reggae sample. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” appears next to a James Blake feature.
Lemonade feels like an exercise in dissonance, the act of holding two warring ideas in your head and in your heart: You can love someone but also hate them, adore your father and also resent him, want to cry and twerk at the same time. One woman can feel all of this—and more—at once, Lemonade suggests, because that’s how confusing life and grief and history is. It exalts the mundane as profoundly spiritual: being black, being a woman, feeling confused, feeling grief, trying to forgive, feeling sexual. In all those, together, is the healing. –Hunter Harris
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Charli XCX: Pop 2 (2017)
After cowriting and appearing on Iggy Azalea’s hit “Fancy,” Charli XCX could have easily shipped out to Los Angeles to record Max Martin cast-offs forever. But instead, Charli began to construct her own little weird pop utopia from the ground up, turning to the squelchy, hyper-synthetic sounds of producers like A.G. Cook and SOPHIE. The Pop 2 mixtape, Charli’s best full-length to date, is the brilliant culmination of all that effort: a nonstop avant-garde party built for fembots and fog machines. Over the sound of her hissed “XCX” and “It’s Charli, baby” signatures, she pulls in multiple collaborators on each track, like the filth-loving rapper CupcakKe and the rising dance princess Kim Petras. Throughout, she solidifies her mastery of the strange, wonderful new pop world she continues to build. –Hazel Cills
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Bill Callahan: Apocalypse (2011)
About halfway through Apocalypse, Bill Callahan describes a scene in which a man, sitting alone in a boat, fires a flare gun into the sky. As the flare rises, the man can see everything. When it comes back down, it sets his boat on fire. The boat goes down—the man, too, in all his contradictions. If he seems worried, Callahan doesn’t tell us. If anything, the mood is one of lightness, of calm, of finally being released from the illusory responsibilities of being all the things the man thought he was.
Callahan’s writing is like this: Matter-of-fact but philosophical, deeply felt, a little uncanny—parables on our condition. Coming after more than a dozen albums, Apocalypse feels like an ascendance: His voice is lower, his music more rustic but more psychedelic, too. The stone-faced man who seems to know all, and in denim, no less. And if he seems a little serious, that’s because he is. Then again, so is life. –Mike Powell
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Tierra Whack: Whack World (2018)
Welcome to Whack World, the surreal universe of the Philly dynamo Tierra Whack. Here, as established in her 15-minute audiovisual album that plays like an absurdist children’s sketch show, BET stands for “bitches eat tacos” and self-care advice is administered with childlike glee. Whack’s playfulness also extends to her vocal prowess: on one song she spits with the fervor of André 3000, on another she jokes around with a goofy Southern twang. Her creativeness is both fun and impressive, like when she uses whimsical imagery to work through tough subjects: Fried chicken condiments serve as a segue to address the violence in her hometown, and when she mourns her dead “dog,” it’s coded language for a late friend. Though packed tight, each song on Whack World lands just at or under one minute long, and Whack’s imagination runs unbound throughout. –Michelle Kim
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David Bowie: Blackstar (2016)
David Bowie was sometimes accused of being calculating, and that trait served him triumphantly when it came to stage-managing his exit as an artist. From its daring music to its perfect title, from its stunning artwork to its startling videos, Blackstar was a magnificent farewell to his audience. Even the timing was immaculate, the album coming out two days before Bowie’s death. As pop’s greatest self-dramatist, he doubtless felt he owed his audience a consummate denouement, but you also get the sense from Blackstar that Bowie felt free of obligations, able to explore and experiment to his art’s content. Unlike his preceding album The Next Day, Blackstar betrays zero concern for radio play or other worldly metrics of success. The cutting edges dominate, with a palette steeped in lifelong loves like jazz and brief passions like drum ‘n’ bass. But although the urgent desire to break new ground rather than revisit familiar pathways is palpable, flickers from Bowie’s vast past appear: the harmonica texture from Low’s “A New Career in a New Town,” for instance, rematerializes on the closing “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” That title is Bowie affirming the value of mystique. It’s notable that he never wrote a memoir—a rare act of superstar tact.
Yet while Blackstar’s words are oblique, vocally and emotionally, Bowie has rarely seemed more achingly exposed. The title track is one of the strangest and strongest things Bowie ever made. The glassy-grey waver of his voice sounds like he’s already a ghost. The refrain “I’m a blackstar” serves as a chilling image for the extinction of personality, but also hints at the way icons fascinate long after they’ve faded from the scene, just like black holes emit radiation. –Simon Reynolds
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Rosalía: El Mal Querer (2018)
Melding classic flamenco techniques with trap and the stylistic instincts of the Instagram generation was postmodern, to say the least. And El Mal Querer, the Spanish virtuoso Rosalía’s debut album, also highlighted a very 2010s tension between cultural appreciation and appropriation, given the Catalan singer’s pop take on the storied gitano genre and, more complexly, her adoption of an Andalusian accent—two hallmarks of the Roma people in Spain. A lesser musician might not have weathered the criticisms—she still seems to be figuring it out—but El Mal Querer was one of the most exquisite albums of the decade. Rosalía’s conservatory-trained voice is elevated by her epic album concept based on a 13th-century novel. Her interpolation of the text’s eternally human themes into today’s hyper-tech landscape, with glitchy and romantic production courtesy of El Guincho, meant that it translated widely. Her emotion was emphatic and fluent, even if many of her listeners’ Spanish-speaking ability wasn’t—a giant step for a burgeoning global pop star. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe (2013)
By late 2013, Dev Hynes had established himself as the go-to vibey songwriter of the moment. His tracks with Solange and Sky Ferreira established a new sound in pop, merging slinky guitar with full-on lamentation and heartbreak. These bummer jams, spiked with extra catchy catharsis, succeeded because they felt real, but Hynes had yet to fully capitalize on his talents as a solo artist. That changed with Cupid Deluxe. Leadoff track “Chamakay” serves as a mission statement of sorts, with Hynes using all his tricks at once: women harmonizing, echoed percussion, romantic pleading, gurgling bass. The album follows a similar kitchen-sink-funk feel, as Hynes pilfers the best bits from disco, soul, and R&B, creating a hybrid sound that's inimitable and vastly appealing. At times, a breathy saxophone wafts in from nowhere, as if things weren’t sexy enough. After Cupid Deluxe, Hynes further opened his sound: His subsequent albums are deeper, more complex, and more adventurous. But they never sounded as undeniably funky. –Matthew Schnipper
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Vince Staples: Summertime ’06 (2015)
Vince Staples’ debut for Def Jam doesn’t fit neatly into any Los Angeles rap tradition—it’s not radical, just cold and alien, as if the north side of Long Beach were a quasi-industrial hell. The album occasionally grapples with the white gaze—see “Lift Me Up,” where he looks out at a sea of pale fans cheering after asking them “Where my niggas at?”—but it is most effective when the rapper disappears into his own gut, his own memory. For all the obsession with what’s happening metatextually in his music, Summertime ’06 is striking because of moments like on “Like It Is,” when Staples, who has two brothers, confesses to feeling like his mother’s only son.
Across two short discs, the rapper works like a pitcher changing speeds: there are the laconic taunts of “Street Punks,” the staccato come kill me bluff at the beginning of “Señorita,” the wistful pleading of “Summertime.” And of course there’s that dizzying third verse of “Norf Norf.” That’s the song that was immortalized in the video of a frantic white mother, crying as she reads the cop-bashing lyrics into her webcam, horrified that something so offensive to her sensibilities had become inescapable. But the song, like Staples himself, is not interesting primarily as an exercise in social chaos. “Norf Norf” is essential because it’s breathless and virtuosic, full of tics and unfabricatable details that are impossible to wash away. –Paul A. Thompson
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Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (2019)
There are few modern descriptors more benign than “folk-rock.” But with U.F.O.F., Big Thief capped four extraordinarily productive years and a five-album run (including Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek’s solo debuts) by giving folk-rock teeth again. They didn’t need to be loud or aggressive, though the screaming through tears on the opening song could unnerve even a hardened listener. Instead, U.F.O.F. strips away the bucolic qualities usually associated with acoustic guitars and hushed vocals to reassert a fundamental strangeness, a powerful awe at the world’s mysteries. Moving away from the often harrowing autobiographical material of 2017’s Capacity, Lenker sings of metaphysical states and UFO friends, motley menageries of dogs, fruit bats, silkworms, and moths. There are fewer certainties in her lyrics than ever before—is “Open Desert” about swimming or dying?—except for the truest certainties of all: the knowledge that all things are connected, death is life’s lone constant, and a glimpse of the infinite can be found in a trick of light on water or a whispered vocal harmonized just so. –Philip Sherburne
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Bon Iver: Bon Iver (2011)
With Bon Iver’s second, self-titled album, Justin Vernon leapt from his cabin in the woods into a world entirely of his own imagination. The sweeping compositions were a huge shift from his debut For Emma, Forever Ago’s spare folk, with arrangements that sounded like they bloomed directly from Vernon’s subconscious. Precise in imagery but hazy in structure, the songs evoke places and moments the way Vernon remembers them: unreliably and romantically. People get mixed up with the landscapes: He whisper-sings about bones and nature in the same breath, painting images of a human frame breaking the curvatures of the sea. And on “Wash.,” he refers to his hometown of Eau Claire just as “Claire,” emphasizing how loving a place is not so different from loving a person, and the memory of one is often entangled in the memory of another. –Michelle Kim
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Beyoncé: 4 (2011)
Before her albums were world-stopping cultural events, before a surprise release meant “pulling a Beyoncé,” there was 4. The superstar’s aptly named fourth album marked a return to hardcore R&B after 2008’s dispiritingly middle-of-the-road I Am...Sasha Fierce; it’s telling that nothing here cracked the Top 10 pop chart but several songs ran up the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. Beyoncé was done catering to visions of how her music should sound. The star power she enlisted was massive—Kanye and André 3000 cameoed, The-Dream and Tricky Stewart lent their songwriting chops (most notably on the perfect torch song “1+1”). And then there was a young Frank Ocean, who co-wrote the silken “I Miss You,” a song so powerful the demo allegedly made Beyoncé cry.
But ultimately the marquee star of 4 was Beyoncé’s indefatigable work ethic. She turned in 72 songs for this project; 12 made the cut of the standard release. (On that note: Stick with 4’s original sequencing—the reconfigured tracklist on Spotify snuffs its slow burn and displaces “Countdown” from the climax position.) She gave us more key changes than we ever thought we needed. (“Love on Top” has four!) And she blew with a late-anthropocene gusto, quivering and shaking around words, interpreting by the syllable. –Rich Juzwiak
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Mitski: Puberty 2 (2016)
After the majestic ballads and clear-eyed heartache of her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski returned with a louder and gnarlier indie-rock record rife with distortion and thrashing guitar riffs. Hurt still radiates from its pores, but so does the sound of struggle. Here, Mitski is experiencing a second coming-of-age, a metamorphosis from young woman into adult. She is grappling with how the world sees her and who she wants to be in it. On “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars,” she articulates the many mundane and not-so-mundane thoughts tumbling around her brain at any moment, pivoting from her fear of death to anxiety over an upcoming interview. On “Thursday Girl,” she sounds lost in existential angst as she searches for someone to “please tell me no.” And on the album centerpiece “Your Best American Girl,” she struggles with a lingering sense of shame about her upbringing and what it means to feel fully American and fully worthy of love. As always, Mitski is tremendously talented at working through her feelings, but on Puberty 2, the exhilaration comes not from catharsis, but from marinating in emotional conflict. –Vrinda Jagota
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Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest (2010)
On their fifth album, Deerhunter linger in the dark recesses of the mind. Understated and insular, especially compared to the band’s previous avant-garde leanings, these songs shine a light on private pains: melancholy, rejection, repression. And yet many of Halcyon Digest’s bleakest moments are also its brightest, which is in itself a statement on how difficult memories can shift into something more manageable. Full of lush textures and impressionistic details like “a dirty couch in the gray fog” and “the smell of loose-leaf joints on jeans,” Halcyon Digest watches memories get blown away by the sands of time yet never quite makes peace with mortality. Pushing forward this sense of impermanence, the closing track “He Would Have Laughed,” a seven-and-half minute tribute to the late rocker Jay Reatard, cuts out suddenly in the middle of a dreamy melody, a candle extinguished as quickly as life itself. –Quinn Moreland
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FKA twigs: LP1 (2014)
FKA twigs is already so fully developed as an artist that her voice—wispy, breathy, disarmingly operatic—can sometimes be overshadowed by her astonishing performances. They function as demonstrations of her dancer’s command of her body, living art installations, and full-spectrum auditory experience—together, something like live 4DX. LP1, her first full-length, alluded to the expansive visionary she'd soon become, twisting her nimble voice over a textured palette of glitchy beats and sweeping synths.
LP1 often sounds mournful, upended by her propensity for minor keys, and a notion of sexuality that was widely ascribed to its songs that may not have been explicitly about sex. This interpretation may have been partly because of how twigs carries herself—a generously candid musician and sinewy dancer—but is also attributable to the complex ways she delves into such topics as autonomy, aloneness, and sensuality in a holistic sense. Lead single "Two Weeks" may have been a break-up song lyrically, but the way she dives into it—vocal cadences interplaying with triple-time bass—elevates it into something like a triumphant prose poem to herself. Released in a crowded year for British experimental electronics, twigs' sense of drama pushed the landscape of heady dancefloor tracks into a blissfully corporeal space. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Earl Sweatshirt: Some Rap Songs (2018)
At the start of the decade, when he emerged as Odd Future’s most gifted rapper, Earl Sweatshirt laced his intricate verses with outrageous lines about masturbation and hating Steve Harvey. But after branching off from the collective, he grew into the role of jazz poet, with an expanded circle of friends influencing him. On Some Rap Songs, a lyrical and beat-making breakthrough, Earl details his coming-of-age in a deadpan delivery over murky, mesmerizing loops that sound like they’ve been left out in the sun for weeks. On “Azucar,” Earl wields his grimiest flow and delivers one of the album’s definitive one-liners: “There’s not a black woman I can’t thank.” Only two tracks surpass the two-minute mark, and the brevity makes them even more impactful and replayable. Earl still shocks, but now it’s by way of his stunning candor about the most personal aspects of his life, including dealing with depression and the aftermath of his father’s death. Here, Earl digs deep, heals, and completely comes into his own. –Alphonse Pierre
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Angel Olsen: Burn Your Fire for No Witness (2014)
It’s hard to imagine the decade without Angel Olsen’s magnetic howl. Her sophomore album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, was the kind of breakthrough that shifted the scene around it. Now the folkier corners of indie rock are filled with auteur singer-songwriters who are trying to be both timeless and out of time, intimate-seeming yet often fleshed out by a smoky full band, angsty like punk and sad like old country. That’s largely her influence.
Olsen’s turning point came as a result of her imagining a new way forward, both in terms of the album’s richer instrumentation and within its narrative arc. Spurred by a breakup but ultimately about much more, Burn Your Fire for No Witness is self-help by way of total emotional whiplash. At her most optimistic, Olsen’s words serve as tiny mantras for fledgling twenty-somethings, the sort of poetic phrases a millennial might tattoo on their body. Employing the album’s signature light-dark imagery, she writes her way straight out of a creative rut on “Lights Out”: “Just when you thought you would turn all your lights out, it shines,” she croons, a cool edge to her voice. A lesser singer would have delivered the line with more earnest hope, but Olsen knows that lurking behind every step forward is a dark night of the soul waiting to strike. –Jillian Mapes
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Jamie xx: In Colour (2015)
Hearing In Colour feels like listening to the dissection of a heartbeat—skittering anxieties mirrored in the snares, the warm glow of love reflected in steel drums, camaraderie sampled via musical voices of the past.
By the time the record came out in 2015, Jamie Smith had already made two LPs with the xx, remixed an album by the legendary musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron (later loaning a sample from the project to Drake for a Top 10 hit), and released a solo track called “All Under One Roof Raving” about the communal ethos of the UK underground. He was a dance music enthusiast who didn’t really enjoy drugs, a loner who frequented London’s famous Plastic People nightclub by himself, a kid who watched UK garage documentaries on tour when he was homesick. In Colour was the result of his self-directed club education, a collection of influences—’90s jungle, swaggy doo-wop, the exaltation of trance, and the tension of two-step—that were reverent of the past but wary of nostalgia. It’s the sound of longing and loneliness mixed with the joyful relief of discovering that you’ve been among friends all along. –Puja Patel
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SZA: CTRL (2017)
On CTRL, SZA offers a rare thing: a millennial black woman’s coming-of-age story. It could’ve been a movie but instead, it’s a collection of songs that have the hyper-specificity of a group chat. Her experiences—and her listeners’—are all here: bad jobs, stoned Netflix binges, time-sharing men, late-night tacos, and being horny, sad, elated, messy, self-destructive, self-sufficient. She sings with pathos in every creak of her voice, catharsis in every sigh. She’s emotionally generous and wise, an Erykah Badu for people who spend entirely too much time on dating apps.
SZA packages up all of these feelings into an album that’s deceptively musically and technically masterful. She takes R&B to unexpected places, with composition so eccentric it becomes inimitable (as anyone who has tried to belt along her vocal runs knows). It took her a long time to release CTRL—derailed by label politics, three totally different versions existed before this one emerged. Because of that, maybe, the album is such an accurate soundscape of the false starts, rough drafts, and dashed expectations of growing out of your twenties. –Allison P. Davis
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Kacey Musgraves: Golden Hour (2018)
With Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves burst the country music bubble, welcoming a rainbow of humanity to join her rousing chorus of “when I say yee, you saw haw.” Her third record draws on pop and country sensibilities to document falling in love—and staying there—with remarkable clarity and a lingering sense of wonder. A noted fan of story songs, Musgraves knows that sometimes, the story is as simple as how flowers look on the walk to the bar. On an album accessorized with disco beats and vocoder trills, even vibe-harshing characters like the know-it-all boor of “High Horse” get the glitterbomb treatment. There are pangs of anxiety, too—fear that the glow will fade, or that faraway family will slip out of reach—but they only make Musgraves’ bliss more believable, and the satisfaction sweeter. –Olivia Horn
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Destroyer: Kaputt (2011)
Dan Bejar made a masterpiece out of a comedown, a glassy-eyed look at a world starting to collapse. The dyspeptic indie rock of Destroyer’s past is smoothed with soft-rock saxophones and New Age synths, topped by Bejar’s louche vocals (recorded as he laid supine on a couch). The atmosphere was so lazy that Bejar could hardly be bothered to bring his tongue to his teeth to voice a “th” sound; as a result, he exquisitely “summed sroo the books on your shelf.”
Underneath the listless arrangements, Bejar settles into his bon vivant character. He’s music’s Oscar Wilde, staring up at the stars from the gutter while rattling off his favorite UK music mags and “chasing cocaine through the back rooms of the world all night.” The mood all drains into the final track, “Bay of Pigs (Detail),” a 11-minute monologue delivered from a dock to the ocean. Tossed-off epiphanies (“the world’s just bones”) swirl into big thoughts and little memories. Underneath Bejar’s prose lurks the tides of death, love, and some great or terrible occasion just on the horizon. “As apocalypses go that’s pretty good, sh-la-la, wouldn’t you say?” he sings, careless and preoccupied. Nero fiddled; Bejar chilled. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Beach House: Teen Dream (2010)
Beach House are nothing if not devoted to a mood. On their first two records, that atmosphere was one of lo-fi wistfulness, but on Teen Dream, the Baltimore duo amplified their dream pop to the logical next step: grandiose, sweeping songs that are more My Bloody Valentine than Mazzy Star. It’s the sound of a band pulling back the veil of composure and unleashing the emotional intensity that has long been bubbling beneath the surface. Teen Dream is less an ode to adolescent nostalgia as it is a tribute to a lost feeling of passion: With Alex Scally’s guitar swelling to imperial heights and Victoria Legrand’s voice reaching new depths, euphoria bursts from every note. As Legrand chants “it is happening again” on “Silver Soul,” the urgency of her voice commands you to hold on tight to this rapture for as long as you can, because losing it would be devastating. –Quinn Moreland
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DJ Rashad: Double Cup (2013)
DJ Rashad was a singular genius and one of footwork’s architects, who shared credit for this unselfishly with other members of his inimitable Teklife crew. He was someone who was there at the beginning but unafraid of the future, and Double Cup is a genre-defining masterpiece because he wasn’t afraid to tweak the genre’s DNA. It’s warm but alien, brutal but weightless; it has all the requisite, trance-like repetition fit for dancing without the stench of pretense or academia. It melts the long history of Chicago house into the glossiest bits of pop-rap, the athletic feats of juke into the warmth and soul of the city’s R&B. It has all the jaggedness of something stitched together by hand but none of the attendant imperfections. It moans and whimpers and bludgeons and exhales, all in perfect time. You can practically hear Double Cup sweat. –Paul A. Thompson
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Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana Del Rey’s fifth and finest album, begins with a breakup and ends with self-affirmation and hope. In between, she takes on wide-lens topics—climate change, gun violence, depression, death—with effortless cool. (She even manages to seamlessly fit in a Sublime cover.) Her indelible pop melodies are strung together with the grace of a tragic ballet. Lana worked on the record with Jack Antonoff, a producer known for encouraging pop artists to indulge their most theatrical, bombastic sides. Del Rey, however, encourages a more somber atmosphere, defined by muted piano, acoustic guitars, and layered harmonies that pair with her angsty, existential stories—’70s in spirit and ’90s in frame of mind, to paraphrase a lyric. If Lana’s music once sounded like a collage of her heroes’ greatest hits, then here is where she lapsed into her own language entirely. –Sam Sodomsky
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Kendrick Lamar: good kid, m.A.A.d. city (2012)
On his major-label debut, Kendrick Lamar rapped like he’d been holding a breath his whole life, and when he exhaled, everything came out: his troubled and reverent relationship to West Coast gangsta rap; the horrors and comforts of his adolescence; his mother and father, and Uncle Tony, whom he watched get shot at a burger stand; walking back from Bible study and gang-banging; the nameless souls who died asking only that Kendrick sing about them. Somehow, despite all of these harrowing details, you can play good kid, m.A.A.d. city at parties, drinking to its songs about the perils of drinking. It is a morality play that resists easy lessons, a sermon that embraces pleasure. Every autobiographical rap album that came after it walks in part in its footsteps. –Jayson Greene
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Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Named after Sufjan Stevens’ late mother and stepfather, Carrie & Lowell exists beyond the realm of typical singer-songwriter fare, with intimate silences and details that feel like a true tour through one man’s memories. Compared to the decade’s other creative-nonfiction-folk landmarks—Sun Kil Moon’s Benji and Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me—the songs on Carrie & Lowell rarely take place in the present tense. Instead, Stevens blends his childhood and future, his fantasies and traumas, his loved ones and tormentors, into a record where unromantic confessions (“You checked your texts while I masturbated”) blend into the universal (“We’re all gonna die”). It makes his personal history feel almost allegorical, and even more powerful for it. –Sam Sodomsky
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Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me (2010)
Joanna Newsom has called Have One on Me her “early ’70s California singer-songwriter album”—and indeed, there are implicit references to Joni Mitchell and the smooth, layered arrangements of Laurel Canyon in centerpieces like “In California” and “Good Intentions Paving Co.” Her songwriting, newly direct here, often concerns falling in and out of love, drinking and dancing, leaving home and coming back. Among the most beautiful ballads in her catalog, “Baby Birch” pairs her harp with electric guitar to stark, almost confessional effect; it’s the rare Newsom composition that could be drawn from the traditional American songbook.
As the follow-up to 2006’s wildly ambitious Ys, even just the barroom title of Have One on Me seems to signal a more earthbound turn from a harpist who often composes with a full orchestra in mind. But through these songs, Newsom’s greatest asset remains the cosmic grandeur she brings to even the most familiar scenes. “You give love a little shove and it becomes terror,” she sings on “Soft as Chalk,” a quiet warning from a songwriter known to dissect the simplest truths until they turn mystical and strange. –Sam Sodomsky
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Kanye West: Yeezus (2013)
It’s hard to listen to Yeezus and not think of its caustic opening squelch as the definitive moment when New Kanye was born. As that gurgly, disorienting sound pulses and convulses for 15 seconds, it feels like a laser is cutting a hole through spacetime. Kanye emerges from this portal as confident as ever, but he sounds angrier, uglier. His rapping is crude and labored; the rhymes are vulgar and the images are incendiary. Soul—the fulcrum of his past music, in design and affect—is supplanted by bitter, horny electricity. It feels as if Skynet sent a Terminator back in time exclusively to hip-thrust and shout obscenities in the town square.
In 2013, the theater of Kanye scorching his public image was already a familiar show, but Yeezus felt like a plot twist because of its intensity. From the writing to the producing to the mixing, Kanye and his corps of writers and producers insist on provocation. The lyrics repurpose loaded terms like “god,” “slave,” and “apartheid” for relationship drama and petty screeds. Stripped down by executive producer Rick Rubin, the sound bed is just as bristling: the low-end hits like a tsunami, verses spazz into glitchy screams, wormholes to the chipmunk soul of Old Kanye materialize then blip out, digital effects swirl and explode like fireworks. The combination of these constant spasms and Kanye’s aggrandizement make the record feel like a toxic rager, but look closely and there’s a grace to its motion, an elegance to its seizures. The house, industrial, and drill influences he draws from are brandished as weapons but put to use as tools, sanding all this rage into music that is as slick as it is prickly. New Kanye, same old grandiose vision. –Stephen Kearse
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Lorde: Melodrama (2017)
What do you do when your debut album, a goth-pop account of life as a teenage outsider in suburban New Zealand, turns you into a global superstar and generational icon at the age of 16, paving the way for a new wave of awkward, self-conscious pop disruptors to follow in your footsteps? You move to New York, hunker down in the studio with Jack Antonoff, and record, to date, this century’s greatest album-length exploration of the messy transition from teendom to adulthood. You capture heartbreak, hedonism, and the perils of fame with pointillistic detail. You eviscerate your ex and celebrate new love with enough gut-punching lines to launch a thousand Tumblr posts. You perform in a wedding dress on Saturday Night Live. You review onion rings on a secret Instagram account. You wait for the rest of the world to catch up. –Amy Phillips
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Drake: Take Care (2011)
Take Care’s album cover shows Drake, alone in the VIP, with little more than the cup that makes the Nazi’s head implode at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for company. It is a perfect vacuum, where no subtlety can find breathable air; he may as well have named the album RICH GUY ENNUI, but damn if he didn’t earn his ludicrousness. So Far Gone was the breakthrough mixtape; Thank Me Later was the hype-fulfilling proper debut. Take Care went weirder, longer, deeper. The lushness and the sincerity flow forth from the first seconds of “Over My Dead Body”—the piano frills! the self-regarding unburdening!—and never stop. Even the hits are plaintive; a song as big as “HYFR” should have no right to be that earnest. On “Marvins Room,” quite possibly still the definitive Drake song, we get pitch-perfect generational oversharing: “Having a hard time adjusting to fame,” he actually says out loud.
It’s strange to put on old Drake at a public function. One of the many Rules of Drake is “There Is Always New Drake.” That’s not to say his machine-like industriousness makes his old stuff obsolete. The new bangers are for everyone, so the classics become more intimate. Close the doors, pop on your headphones. This is him talking to you now. –Amos Barshad
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Rihanna: ANTI (2016)
With ANTI, Rihanna hopped off of the factory line, destroyed the mind-control machine, added some salt to the cafeteria’s chicken. She took risks and freed herself from mainstream pop expectations, cementing herself as a risk-taking, boundary-breaking godhead. Her eighth album moves from jarring, atonal rock to lackadaisical dancehall before switching up into sultry, sex-positive R&B. She bounces into a stoned torch song in which she’s all but crooning on top of a piano before, whiplash: a weird but brilliantly faithful cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” just because she can. Every left turn is delivered with her inimitable attitude and empowerment; every shrugged decision leads to a fascinating new journey.
Upon ANTI’s release, the New York Times called it the “record you make when you don’t need to sell records” but, really, it’s the album Rihanna made when she no longer had to sell Rihanna. When it was released, she was enjoying the most freedom yet in her career: She’d been through her Saturn return, she’d swerved Drake, she’d jumped from Def Jam to Roc Nation and started her own imprint there. She’d acquired the masters of all the songs she’d recorded at Def Jam and was fully independent. She was ennobled to take a big, ambitious swing that could have broken at the seams, yet ANTI proved her modern rewriting of that old adage: Freedom’s just another word for no fucks left to give. –Allison P. Davis
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Grimes: Art Angels (2015)
Grimes is a producer, a provocateur, a punk—and, yes, a pop star. By her own estimation, pop is “music that seeks to hit the pleasure center,” and Art Angels, replete with surging dance beats and saccharine girl-gang vocals, undeniably fits the bill. But on Claire Boucher’s fourth album, her pleasure comes cut with danger. Shrieks and snarls burn holes through the aptly named “SCREAM;” in one distinctive visual, she knifes herself and smears blood across her face; on “California,” a lyric about “commodifying all the pain” points to the sinister capitalist underpinnings of the entire pop enterprise. Along with mussing up pop’s slick surface with a generous coating of gore, on Art Angels, Boucher conspicuously styles herself as an auteur, challenging the notion that pop’s frontwomen are seen but not really heard without a cadre of industry men behind them. If such women are the product of a “pop star mold,” Grimes has left that mold noticeably warped. –Olivia Horn
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Frank Ocean: Channel Orange (2012)
Christopher Breaux began the decade as a recent transplant to Los Angeles who’d written a few minor songs for Justin Bieber and Brandy. He will end it as Frank Ocean, not just one of the most acclaimed musicians of his time but a trailblazer for artists’ autonomy and their freedom to express their sexuality. His legacy on the former was secured when he delivered one album to Def Jam and sold another immediately to Apple. The latter came years earlier when he published an open letter on Tumblr in which he came out as queer, one of the first men in R&B and rap to do so. But the album that accompanied that letter, Channel Orange, was not crafted to echo what ended up becoming a major cultural moment.
Instead, Ocean’s studio debut is an unassuming, languid record; its drums shuffle along softly, cushioning Ocean's weightless vocals. It’s queer, too, in its own pure, nascent way: Across the span of an hour, Ocean slips into different narrative roles, including father, trust-funder, drug addict, Egyptian king, rock star. The act of inhabiting someone you are not is inherent to the queer experience; after all, pretending to be straight is nothing if not the assumption of a persona. Perhaps this informs Ocean’s richly observed characters, especially the subversive closer: On “Forrest Gump,” Ocean imagines himself within that movie’s universe, cheering on the well-meaning galoot playing running back. He sings of his fingertips and lips burning as he chain-smokes through his nerves, ending with a lilting outro—“Forrest green, Forrest blues/I’m remembering you/If this is love, I know it’s true/I won’t forget you”—that captures the peculiar, melancholic longing of the closet. His tenderness is unforgettable; even the second half of “Pyramids,” told from a pimp’s perspective, foregrounds the humanity of the woman who works for him. Channel Orange, above all, suggests the work of a profound empath, and in the seven years since its release, Ocean has shown himself to be nothing if not that. –Jordan Sargent
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D’Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah (2014)
After he released 2000’s steamy soul classic Voodoo, D’Angelo went into freefall, reeling from addiction, a near-fatal car crash, and the deleterious psychological consequences of starring in the thirst-trap video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Black Messiah served as evidence that his decade-and-a-half sabbatical also brought about creative maturation. Played by the Vanguard band, the album’s painstakingly crafted R&B fusion veers from the twitchy groove of “Ain’t That Easy” to the Pointer Sisters-ish jazz-bop of “Sugah Daddy” to the delicate guitar balladry of “Really Love.” D’Angelo’s muffled falsetto obscures the lyrics of songs like “1000 Deaths” and “The Charade,” but on those tracks, he wades deep into issues like police brutality, putting the album in conversation with Kendrick Lamar’s activist classic To Pimp a Butterfly and the era’s #BlackLivesMatter concerns. Like one of those rare, exotic plants that only blooms every decade, D’Angelo only seems to gift us with a new album once a generation or two. But he always feels right on time. –Jason King
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Robyn: Body Talk (2010)
In 2010, Robyn rebooted. Five years after founding her own label and securing the artistic freedom she never had as a bubblegum-pop teen icon, the Swedish singer announced an ambitious plan to release three mini-albums in one year, recording and touring simultaneously to fund her efforts. The gamble paid off: Body Talk, the compilation of those releases, distills love, loneliness, and dancefloor euphoria into electro-pop perfection. Its legacy transcends just being a stellar record: Body Talk is the mark of a singular artist claiming her future.
Body Talk reintroduces Robyn as an innovator and a powerhouse, as well as a woman with complexities to celebrate. She’s a hyper-optimized fembot rebelling against societal expectations; she’s a globetrotting badass you should know not to fuck with; she’s indestructible. These 15 songs surge forward with pulsating four-to-the-floor breakdowns, disco sparkles, and glitchy techno earworms (most produced by Klas Åhlund). But beneath Body Talk’s metallic armor is vulnerability: Robyn is an outsider seeking salvation on the dancefloor, who uses this space to spark the fire inside her. “Don’t you know when nothing ever seem to make sense/You put your dancing shoes on and do it again,” she proclaims on “In My Eyes.”
A current of self-assuredness runs beneath Body Talk, even in its loneliest moments. The record’s two life-affirming hits, “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” are vivid portrayals of heartache told from two sides of the same coin. In the former, she is brokenhearted but resilient, dancing her pain away at a nightclub among “stilettos and broken bottles.” In the latter, she is the one crushing hearts as she instructs her lover on how to ditch his girlfriend, imploring him to treat her with the respect and kindness she deserves. Robyn’s strength and empathy inspired a new generation of pop artists, from Carly Rae Jepsen to Perfume Genius, and the escapism her music offers is just as generous: Every song on Body Talk is an invitation to transform your own pain into triumph. –Quinn Moreland
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Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City (2013)
Modern Vampires of the City was the moment when Vampire Weekend stopped knowing everything. Ezra Koenig turned his gaze from mansard roofs and diplomats’ children to wonder aloud about God and the nature of existence. Rostam Batmanglij, now working with producer Ariel Rechtshaid, crafted his most sentimental, stirring music yet. “If I can’t trust you then dammit, Hannah/There’s no future, there’s no answer,” Koenig sings softly on “Hannah Hunt,” interrogating a relationship in novelistic detail, winking toward hopelessness while suggesting that all the universe’s truths can be contained in a single love affair. Later, on “Ya Hey,” Koenig confronts God, asking how He could remain silent in a rotten world. Again, he seems to know the answer: There’s never an answer. –Matthew Strauss
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Solange: A Seat at the Table (2016)
Every artist hopes to capture the zeitgeist, to make the right record at the right time. Yet only a handful can claim to have given voice to a movement, as Solange did with A Seat at the Table. At once deeply personal and unapologetically political, the album offers an honest reflection on race and identity in America in the twilight of the Obama era. The album’s rousing message of black empowerment is set forth in no uncertain terms on “F.U.B.U.”—For us, this shit is for us—and feels more urgent than ever as we approach the end of this tumultuous decade.
More than just rage against the system, though, there’s a life-affirming joy in A Seat at the Table. On tracks like “Weary” and “Don’t Touch My Hair,” Solange rises above the insidious slights that come with moving through the world as a black woman, soaring toward a higher creative and emotional plane. That spiritual levity is buoyed by a series of conversational interludes, soul-bearing monologues from the singer’s friends and family. As Solange’s mother, Tina Knowles, opines, “It’s such beauty in black people.” –Chioma Nnadi
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Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012)
With seven years between 2005’s Extraordinary Machine and The Idler Wheel, patience became a core tenet of Fiona Apple fandom. Even still, it’s hard to say anyone was prepared for the tempest that is this album. Apple’s fourth record and only release of this decade contains her most incisive, clear-eyed, and ambitiously sparse songs to date. Her smoky, operatic alto is a beacon for roving inner monologues on self-acceptance in the face of sadness and pain, whether offering wholehearted generosity in the face of a breakup on “Werewolf” or attempting to decelerate the rapid-fire pace of an overactive mind on “Every Single Night.” Here, she relies on her piano as a powerful duet partner, with winding melodies rambling amid many clattering instruments. Much of Idler Wheel is consumed by a sense of isolation, but as always, in Apple’s hands, it transforms into a salve for those of us who just want to feel everything we possibly can. –Eric Torres
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Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
When Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly, he spoke about the title’s contrast between a butterfly—delicate, bright, free—and “pimp”: a word that hearkens aggression, deviance, and exploitation. The album itself is a dance between this dichotomy, one black Americans know all too well: between pain and beauty and what happens when one is informed by the other. Lamar invites us to Compton to watch him sermonize from his front porch while jazz, funk, and soul bands rove through, providing the melodies to his experimental beats. With assists from Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, the Isley Brothers, and George Clinton, he shows the range and harmony of black creativity; with his sharp and empathetic lyrics, he gives us the playfulness and joy of “King Kunta,” the frustration and didacticism of “The Blacker the Berry,” and the plain hope of “Alright.”
There’s music made by black people and then there’s black music: songs that hit you in the chest and make their way into your bloodstream, that become part of you. TPAB was released in the spring of 2015, three years after Trayvon Martin was gunned down, and over a year after Michael Brown and Eric Garner were murdered; Lamar knew that pain and knew, too, that more was to come. But with this album, he steeled us against the future and gave us not just anthems but prayers. He gave us the album he knew we’d need to keep going, as we always have. –Kara Brown
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Beyoncé: Beyoncé (2013)
“We be all night,” Beyoncé proclaimed on “Drunk in Love,” the most meme-ready track on her self-titled album. She was singing about riding her husband’s big body like a surfboardt, but she may as well have been referring to the way listeners gulped down Beyoncé, which dropped at midnight on a Thursday and seemed to envelop all of social media into the dawn hours while also revolutionizing how albums are conceived and released.
The first major pop album to adapt to the way we listen to, and watch, music in the YouTube age, her first “visual album” couldn’t have worked if it weren’t Beyoncé at her absolute best. Over 14 tracks, she peels through her exhaustive musical vocabulary: married-woman trap bangers, ’80s-influenced roller-rink jams, grown-ass R&B, burlesque backseat scores, contemporary blues ballads. And then there was “Flawless,” which sampled Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 TEDX talk and helped establish Beyoncé as a fierce interpreter and purveyor of black feminist thought for the pop masses.
It’s difficult to understate how enduringly Beyoncé shifted culture (“I woke up like this!”), reasserting the artist as a full-spectrum visionary who was also dreaming up the future, invigorating the industry, maturing in her marriage, and blossoming into first-time motherhood. There is no doubt we’ll still be discussing it for decades to come. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
The sheer audacity of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is matched only by its overwhelming appetite. Born in a period of strife amid self-imposed exile, during a near-mythic island summit of rap superfriends in Hawaii, MBDTF is an exercise in God-level debauchery. It is at turns baroque and symphonic, with song-length Auto-Tuned codas, posse-cut performances that redefined the form, and an immense phantasmagoria of light and sound that threatens to overshadow its A-list cameos. It was a creation that accurately reflected West’s massive ego, in a period of rare bruising: By 2010, he’d drunkenly antagonized Taylor Swift, symbol of All-American sweetness, and been called a jackass by a sitting president. But instead of apologizing, Kanye conjured a warped, all-encompassing vision of excess, a toast to the assholes, a battle cry for fellow monsters. It was a huge risk that proved not just redemptive but deifying.
MBDTF’s songs are meticulously designed set-pieces that ably house all their drama. West goes bar-for-bar with Raekwon on “Gorgeous,” leveling some of his sharpest critiques of race, class, and rap iconography, only moments after pairing beatmaking legends RZA and No I.D. together on an epic deserving of an opera house. The endearing douchebag anthem “Runaway” stripped Kanye of any remaining pretense, his singing bald and honest, and reintroduced Pusha T as his attack dog. With the industry in flux and rap sales lagging, the new landscape began to take shape in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s wake. It spearheaded the first wave of great albums produced this decade; the two biggest rappers of the next generation, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, followed Kanye’s lead overtly on their breakthrough records. Bon Iver’s profile was exponentially boosted by this album. Pusha and Nicki Minaj aren’t really Pusha and Nicki Minaj without it. And for Kanye, MBDTF remains the most pristine jewel in a collection of rare artifacts—a perfectionist’s brush with perfection. –Sheldon Pearce
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Frank Ocean: Blonde (2016)
In 2016, the hinge year of a grotesque age, Frank Ocean’s cars were his confessional booths. They included a white Ferrari and a BMW X6; the Bugatti “left some stretch marks on the freeway,” as he remembers listlessly. To Ocean, the car is an Americana icon of certain ideals: freedom that turns solipsistic and reckless; materialism we worship as artistry; barrel-chested masculinity, queered on backroads. Above all, transience.
Frank Ocean is the hinge artist of our time, the true voice of a generation because he takes long silences. With Blonde and its attendant works, his Boys Don’t Cry zine and Endless, he took his time building his staircase to somewhere. Elusive and independent, he weaves from genre to genre, sometimes shifting gears to obliterate category altogether, as he cruises past the conventions the culture still fears to let go. On Blonde, the languid guitar of surf rock coexists with soft doo-wop melodies; Frank the rapper—who is heady and occasionally, knowingly vulgar—coincides with Frank the singer, who is plaintive and longing. Sometimes, he just talks rhythmically, like in “Nights.” “Futura Free,” the triptych anchor of Blonde, moves from midtempo to atmospheric synth to a clanging guitar solo. The impressionistic lyrics mirror the feeling of wanting to disappear, for a spell: “Breathe till I evaporated/My whole body see through.”
Songs evaporate on Blonde, too: they’re hazed, minimalist, capricious. The sweet, airy strum of “Pink + White” is hardened by its last few seconds, as we hear birds swarm. So, too, in “Ivy,” which starts off a masterpiece of cinematic lovesickness and then warps at its tail-end, ceding to a clang of instruments. The slight touches of distortion on Blonde call attention to impermanence, the trap of artifice, and, distantly, death. But Ocean is never sanctimonious; the whole point of existence is that a dark musing on morality can—and should—be interrupted by soft flesh, a sticky plant, a designer shirt. Live a little. Live too much. Because he is a writer first, he kinks his voice to suit his characters and his stories: On his cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Close to You,” a song about the fear of solitude, he multiplies and increases. On “Seigfried,” as he considers settling down for “two kids and a swimming pool,” his warble is warm, fragile, and resigned; then he almost shrieks, “I’m not brave!” It is an ache, a primal tearing of a social contract each generation learns is a lie.
The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. “Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,” Ocean sings on “Solo,” capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Blonde is one synonym for American. –Doreen St. Félix
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