The 100 Best Albums of the 2010s
A comprehensive document of the decade that made us.
The Indieheads Podcast is probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. Whether it’d be the amazing group of friends I’ve made within the podcast or the fans/listeners I’ve gotten to know over the years, nothing has made more of a positive impact on me. Who would have known that some random comment I made in an r/indieheads General Discussion thread five years ago would have such a profound impact on my life?
Whatever the case here we are: our best albums of the decade. While the Indieheads Podcast was created at the almost exact midpoint of the decade, the years prior were still ones most of us were online and active for, and our time in this podcast has re-warped and changed our opinions on these times. Hell, the two months we’ve spent trying to get this list together has already profoundly impacted our opinions on this decade.
This is not a list about the musical landscape as a whole in the 2010s. This is a list about the albums that were important to us within the Indieheads Podcast canon. Do these two overlap occasionally? Of course. There’s going to be a number of albums here you’ve already seen in plenty of other best of the decade lists. However, this is our perspective on the landscape of the 2010s. There’s no corporate interests you can blame for your opinions on this list it’s all us baby!
To put it simply, our most formative experiences with this art form happened with releases from this decade. Without a ton of albums on this list, none of us would be the people we are today. So with that, here are our 100 best albums of the 2010s.
100. Weezer — Weezer (The White Album)
A band whose career can be described as nothing if not patchy, Weezer emerged from a run of seven albums that range from passable to unlistenable with their fourth self-titled album, the White Album, which showcases the best of Rivers Cuomo’s songwriting skill and excellent crunchy rock production to boot. Cuomo, ever eccentric (or, less charitably, weird) came up with new songwriting strategies, such as joining Tinder and talking to random women and the infamous “spreadsheet method” to try to generate new and more interesting subjects for the songs on White. Albums that followed White would only suffer as these experiments outgrew themselves (resulting in barely comprehensible songs like “Zombie Bastards”), but here, Cuomo captures that SoCal magic with “California Kids,” “Jacked Up,” and “(Girl We Got A) Good Thing.” It is interesting, though, that the best songs on the album, “King of the World,” an ode to Cuomo’s wife, and “Do You Wanna Get High?”, do not follow these new songwriting structures whatsoever, instead opting for the type of narrative songwriting found on the Blue Album (1994) and Pinkerton (1996). “Do You Wanna Get High?”, my favorite Weezer song ever, actually originated in the Green Album (2001) era, but goes above and beyond anything found there with its soaring guitars and addictive, edgy lyrics. How does White compare to Blue and Pinkerton? It’s hard to say. Weezer is basically an entirely different band at this point — Cuomo is at a completely different point in his life, the topics the songs are addressing are entirely divergent — but it is hard to deny that White is a return to form. If only the albums that Weezer has released since 2016 could compare. — Delaney
99. Vampire Weekend — Contra
On their 2010 sophomore album Contra, Vampire Weekend ditches some (but not all) of the Ivy League aesthetics of their debut, and adopts new musical styles that only improve upon their iconic sound. Vampire Weekend arguably defined indie-pop in the late 00s, and with Contra, they set the tone for the genre in the 2010s as well. Ezra Koenig’s near constant literary and cultural references shine on tracks like “White Sky” and “California English,” while his more absurdist tendencies come through on “Horchata” and ska classic “Holiday.” “Diplomat’s Son,” possibly the band’s best song, is a six minute Rostam Batmanglij-penned introspective consideration of a fictional gay relationship that combines all of Batmanglij’s early production hallmarks — carefully selected samples (M.I.A., in this case), gorgeous string parts, and persistent synths. The album is just perfect song after perfect song, and I haven’t gotten even the least bit tired of it after ten years of listening. — Delaney
98. Twin Shadow — Forget
What does reminiscence become when nostalgia is absent? Or when all that’s left is nostalgia’s inverse? If any album were to evoke that feeling, it would be Twin Shadow’s tremendous debut Forget. George Lewis Jr. burst into the very beginning of the 2010s with one of the bitterest synthpop albums of the decade, one where themes of memory and regret and heartache and disdain still caress his every thought of the past and every memory he wishes he can detach himself of. From the warped synth loops on the opening one-two punch of caustic anti-love songs “Tyrant Destroyed” and “When We’re Dancing” to the scornfully stubborn prom-dance kiss-off of the title track, Forget paints an intricately rendered portrait of diatribes against wistfulness through its myriad snapshot stories and abstract metaphors. Lewis’ pop song craft is in perfect form too, with “At My Heels” and “Castles in the Snow” should-have-been-anthems that stand alone just as well as they do within the album. Listening to Forget often feels like opening up a diary written a literal decade ago, capturing the messiness and unpleasantness of real-life adolescence from a prescient distance, often too uncomfortable to revisit. But Lewis’ greatest strength enveloping those emotions in a damn great synthpop album: wonderfully lovely for those who listen passively, and deeply cathartic for those who pore over each lyric because they see their own want to forget in it. — Nat
97. The Mountain Goats — Beat the Champ
John Darnielle understands that professional wrestling is a broken industry. Wrestlers aren’t given healthcare and have to pay for their own travel. The general public’s apathy towards the wrestling industry is used by those in charge to keep fucking over the athletes they employ. John Darnielle also understands that wrestling fucking rocks because everything is wrestling and wrestling is everything. Beat The Champ is a beautiful record about death, loss, birth and rebirth through the lens of shredded people in spandex pretending to fight each other. — Gavin
96. The Hotelier — Home, Like Noplace Is There
There’s that joke about how every emo band has an unhealthy relationship with their hometown, and Home, Like NoPlace Is There might be the one example in which that rings true to its core. And who knows, perhaps that’s why it has been one of the most enduring emo albums of a decade in which emo was finally given a proper renaissance, or maybe it’s just because the Hotelier seem to represent the ethos of the 2010’s emo revival better than anyone else. Sonically, it’s the perfect fusion of pop-punk and hardcore music, taking heavy rock instrumentation and some of the most dramatically powerful vocal performances you’ll hear, and blending it all together with an absurd amount of melody and just all-around memorable hooks. But despite this album’s pop-sensibilities, there’s absolutely nothing sugary about it, and the thematic content within these songs is far from “pleasant”. Home, Like NoPlace Is There is through-and-through a tragedy, a walking tour of Christian Holden’s hometown as he’s met with rehashed trauma and regret at every turn. The loss of friends, the ceaseless struggle with mental health, and the pain of thinking that you’re working through these things on your own are all heavy, suffocating presences on these tracks; constant reminders that, for better or for worse, there really is no place like home. — Jake
95. The Front Bottoms — The Front Bottoms
The Front Bottoms are not your Mom’s emo-punk band — no, in fact your Mom has probably begged you to turn them off at some point or another. Crawling out of a borough of Bergen County, New Jersey and teetering on the edge of a new era of sound, The Front Bottoms’ self-titled created a space for the rejected and dejected. Brian Sella’s crooning can be polarizing to some as he sings effortlessly simple lyrics over the sound of his fingers sliding against strings and an echoing drum beat. Introducing an intensity with little to no indication through his voice, Sella says things like “I have this dream that I am hitting my dad with a baseball bat / And he is screaming and crying for help / And maybe halfway through, it has more to do with me killing him / Than it ever did protecting myself” and “Mouth the words to me so we can keep things quiet / And I’ll still know exactly what you mean.”
Equidistant between horny and depressed, The Front Bottoms explores the minutiae of interpersonal relationships and the fear of not living up to what is expected of you. The antithesis of refinement and overproduction, The Front Bottoms self-titled is an ode to kids driving down New Jersey back roads hoping they figure things out, and it doesn’t hurt if some weed is involved too. — Kasia
94. Courtney Barnett — Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
There are too many things too close to comfort that Courtney Barnett’s debut LP reminds me of: hopelessly, inactively pining for another woman you’ll never talk to; being stuck in scenarios where you’re constantly reminded of people who hurt you; putting your trust in someone who will abandon you in an instant when you submerge yourself into your deepest vulnerabilities; gradual environment decay; systemic economic disparity and the marginalization of gentrification; the nights where I’d wander out to precarious places — cliffs, rooftops, highways, downward-slanted exterior ledges of third-floor-windows — just to take in the vantage point, to the point where others became concerned I’d do something to myself there.
It’s Barnett’s voice, rarely rising beyond a languid sigh, only ever raising her voice to let her most passionate pleas shake you down to your core. It’s her guitar: raw and messy and distorted in more fast-paced moments to match her emotions, subdued and almost mournful when she’s letting her greatest agitations tremble her mind. More than anything else, it reminds me of what it’s like to carry the weight of propelling your awkward lurching body forward so you can exist in the world as a mellow depressive lesbian in spaces with elements often pitted against you, or in moments where your body and mind are pitted against themselves. Moments where all you can do is just sit, and let the world rattle around you.
(P.S. Historians have long vouched for the transition between “Elevator Operator” and “Pedestrian at Best” as one of the best in indie rock, but a new school of thought argues that “Aqua Profunda!” into “Dead Fox” is just as valid.) — Nat
93. Baths — Romaplasm
Speculative fiction has been a staple of queer storytelling for as long as there have been queer stories to tell, but this tradition has seldom been applied to music. Let Romaplasm endure, then, as the modern era’s great queer song cycle, a short story collection whose milieus are perfectly suited to its hypercolour production. Affairs with zeppelin pilots, escapes from JRPG-esque townships, arrivals on off-world metropolises: there is little fantastical territory Will Weisenfeld doesn’t cover. And yet, lines like “our good will is going to kill us,” or “queer in a way that’s failed me” are undeniably of our time, and the album’s narrative approach only amplifies their potency. In glorious fashion, Romaplasm proves that sometimes the most important worlds are the ones we imagine for ourselves. — Lily
92. Waxahatchee — American Weekend
American Weekend is Katie Crutchfield’s farewell message to the fractured relationships she experienced in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Crutchfield’s first solo record is a haunting lo-fi retelling of excessive drinking, ghosting friends and locking yourself away from people who used to make you happy. While Waxahatchee’s recent work offers a more refined sound and lyrical content, the unfiltered sound of small-town heartache keeps me coming back. — Gavin
91. Taylor Swift — RED
It’s hard being a Taylor Swift fan. One time a man on Reddit told me, after I recommended he actually try listening to RED before criticizing it, “You’ve obviously got some sort of memories connected to this album but seriously, this is emotionally inspiring for you? How do you even feel emotions from this song? I’m sat here genuinely wondering what could have piqued your soul after listening to a song like that because I got the absolute complete opposite. This stuff is downright soulless and I’m gonna have to listen to ‘Not’ by Big Thief now just to feel something again.” However, despite the odds, Taylor Swift does inspire some real emotions in me, and I think it’s worth the constant persecution on the internet (lol).
RED is an album constantly stuck between worlds. It’s stuck between heartbreak and love, between country and pop, between Joni Mitchell and dubstep. The track listing is baffling — who would have thought one could go from “All To Well,” to “22,” to “I Almost Do,” to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” to “Stay Stay Stay,” and have it actually make sense; the emotional whiplash is staggering. For a third of the album, Swift is in love, “burning red,” for another third, she’s experiencing the worst heartbreak of her life (“And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest / I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here / ’Cause I remember it all, all, all too well”), and for the last third, the third we heard on the radio for two years nonstop, she’s mocking her ex (and herself) — “And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” Swift is a rare breed of popstar — her 10+ year career has constantly shapeshifted and evolved to adapt to what works best for her in the moment, and her songwriting (she has a songwriting credit on every single song she has ever released) has rarely faltered. On RED it is at its strongest. — Delaney
90. Mitski — Be the Cowboy
On Be The Cowboy, Mitski turned her talent for large-scale expression inward to create one of the decade’s exceptional works of miniaturism. The album revels in fine detail: the smell of a gymnasium, the distant sound of people, the right shade of lipstick, the hue of city light on naked skin. The slightest of sensations becomes the stage for the grandest of emotions, rendered all the more potent by some of the most concise pop songwriting you’re likely to find this century. All this serves to bring Mitski’s many characters to life with visceral precision. The speakers on these songs are far from the autobiographical indulgence there were initially pigeonholed as. These are fully formed women, expressing agency, powerlessness, self-determination, longing, love, rage, despair, and hope, often within single verses or lines. Her craft here is so nuanced that it is difficult not to see yourself within it. If the most affecting works of art are those rendered with a loving hand, then Be The Cowboy proves Mitski’s reputation as one of the most generous artists of her era. — Lily
89. Purple Mountains — Purple Mountains
The extratextual narrative surrounding this album has, in many ways, overshadowed the actual music itself. David Berman’s return to music and subsequent, tragic suicide has shifted the way this album is consumed. No longer is it only the triumphant return of one of indie rock’s most celebrated poets; it’s also the last transmission from a genius who hated the limelight. Everything that made Berman such an incredible songwriter is present on this album, from the wry witticism to the monotonous, yet deeply impactful vocals. It’s even got some of the best writing he’s ever done (it’s hard to beat “If no one’s fond of fucking me/Maybe no one’s fucking fond of me”). The instrumentals also manage to be gorgeous without taking focus away from the vocals. Despite these immense qualities, knowing the context of the album makes it a difficult listen. It often feels like David Berman’s brief reemergence into the public eye was only heartbreaking, but at least we got to hear from one of the most gifted songwriters ever one last time. If nothing else, I hope that the outpouring of love towards David from friends and fans can be a lesson to us all; there is always someone out there who cares about you. — Ethan
88. Hurray for the Riff Raff — The Navigator
Sometimes, it takes a while for an album to reveal its true significance — take something like the discography of Nick Drake as an example. Other times, it’s immediately apparent — these are your good kid, m.A.A.d. citys, your Yeezuses. And in rare cases, such as with Alynda Segarra’s astonishing sixth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff, it’s both at once. The Navigator, a Broadway-indebted concept album about gentrification and its accompanying loss of identity among those who get shunted to the ghettos and “Rican Beaches” to make way for tomorrow, was of course instantly relevant in the first months following Donald Trump’s inauguration. But the record, and especially the penultimate track, “Pa’lante,” would gain even greater importance in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and the administration’s shameful response to the crisis facing Puerto Rico in the aftermath. Segarra herself acknowledged this when speaking with Billboard after her first concert in Puerto Rico following Maria: “It felt like I didn’t write the song — we wrote the song.” The Navigator has thus taken on a new life as a talisman of resilience: after all, “Pa’lante” translates to mean, roughly, “forward,” and for people like the ones Segarra documents on the album, forward is the only way to survival. — Zach
87. black midi — Schlagenheim
A band whose influences can be attributed to going down a YouTube recommendation rabbit hole after watching The Needle Drop’s Swans — To Be Kind review, black midi can only exist in our current year. When we talk about how easily accessible the consumption of music has become and how that’s going to influence the future, black midi are about as early of an example as we’re going to get. Four graduates of the esteemed BRIT School, it’s clear that these are folks who have gotten way more time with their instruments than probably humanly healthy, but what’s the problem with that when the tunes on this album are so good? Whether they’re playing against my levels of anxiety on songs like “Speedway” or pulling the rug out from under me on “Of Schlagenheim” whenever singer/guitarist Geordie Greep does his little gremlin screeches (the Gremlin Mindset, learn it!), Schlagenheim is one of the best debuts this decade from a band that looks to define the next one. — Matty
86. Warm Bodies — Warm Bodies
Is Olivia Gibb okay? I ask because there’s so much of Kansas gonzo punk weirdos Warm Bodies’ debut LP where she sounds like she’s insurmountable pain, on the brink of a total breakdown, ready to claw her own skin off, or maybe your face. All the while, dementedly fast surf rock guitars and drum fills fuel the frenzy behind the vocals. On tracks like “My Face Fell Off” and “I Need A Doctor,” the speed and yelping almost feels uncomfortably raw, like listening to a DIY Bandcamp project while watching real footage of someone being set on fire. This is the kind of unspeakably bizarre punk for people to laugh in the face of the grotesque, who find release in the splatterhouse body horror of Ichi the Killer and Cronenberg films. It’s beyond repulsive to all, but to those who find pleasure in repulsion, it scratches an itch that only the most feral music can. Those who have the album scratch and scratch and scratch until they bleed will find just as much enjoyment in it as Warm Bodies do.— Nat
85. Swans — To Be Kind
— Will
84. Oneohtrix Point Never — Garden of Delete
Videodrome re-imagined in the creatively bankrupt, recyclable nature of chan board culture. Jacob’s Ladder where trauma is replaced with ironic self-afflicted torment. Silent Hill reset in a thrashing techno-babble hellscape designed by millenials who built new religions in Runescape and G-Mod RP servers.
If all this sounds too much like pop culture pandering, an over-reliance on references and vague misremembered pasts of online experiences, that’s precisely the point. Arriving right at the zenith of vaporwave’s cultural power, Daniel Lopatin crafted an album celebrating a new, universal culture birthed out of the decade’s convergence of human society with its vast virtual landscapes; yet damning its tendency to heighten and exacerbate our worst shortcomings, playing the arbiter of manufactured isolation and anger for a generation pushed out into the crumbling, infested arms of the digital void. The result is a project looped outside of its time; distorted, mutative, finding serene moments of quietude and beauty among the synthesized, auditory rubble. — Dyl
83. Low — Double Negative
It’s the moment where the noise drops out completely, leaving nothing but spare piano in its wake, that’s most representative of Double Negative for me. After the album begins by slamming the listener headfirst into a perpetual barrage of noise on the opening track “Quorum,” this quiet breaks through almost 2 minutes into the song, interrupting the discord for a vacuum-like calm. It’s a brief reminder of the sound Low, formed 25 years before this twelfth studio album’s release, was well known for, but its ephemerality as an instrument of contrast illustrates what makes this album particularly special in their extensive back-catalogue, arguably the best record of their long-storied career. Much of Double Negative works in an enmeshment of the band’s characteristic wounded slowcore with uncharted abrasive elements, such as on “Always Trying to Work It Out” and the pleadingly anthemic standout “Disarray.” At other times, it lingers close to the sparely devastating, as on the pained Mimi Parker-led “Fly” and mournful Alan Sparhawk-sung “Dancing and Fire,” though never for more than a song at a time, with more aural din and debris always around the bend. It’s the quiet’s proximity to the noise on “Quorum,” then, that I think says the most, how close calm can be to total cacophony at any moment. But there’s hope in that too. Near every moment of chaos, there can be a clearer sublimity close by. Maybe imperceptible over the horizon, but ready to emerge nonetheless.— Nat
82. Joanna Newsom — Have One on Me
Joanna Newsom’s music has always been deceptively personal. Beneath the stories she tells, as removed from the present as some of them may seem, there’s always the sense that a living, breathing person is shining through. In this vein, Have One on Me, despite being the largest in scope, is one of her most intimate projects. All of her songs here feel so lived in. Each one is a world unto its own, and listening to the album often feels like meeting people at a dinner party, or going out to do nothing with friends. However, as much as her writing was as impeccable as we’d come to expect it, her songwriting reached new, astronomical highs on this album. The title track, “Good Intentions Paving Co.”, “In California”, and “Kingfisher” remain some of her finest achievements, and “Good Intentions” very well may be her best song so far. While I may prefer Divers, this album is an incredible achievement, and if it ends up being her legacy, so be it — it’s hard to complain about work this good. — Alex
81. Glocca Morra — Just Married
Look. It’s a shouty emo record that’s full of sick ass riffs. There’s a Menzinger on the album art. There’s orgcore punk posters on the wall. They’re all drinking pabst. This shit was manufactured in a lab for the sole purpose of activating the happiness chemicals in my brain. I am a parody of myself.
Anyways, here’s the part where I say all those terms that you nasty little emo freaks crave: angular. Midwest. Skramz. Twinkle. Ian Cohen. Screaming in a basement. Boredom. Kinsella. Fender. Math. 7.3 no BNM. Tapping. 704 W High St, Urbana, IL 61801. — Gavin
80. Armand Hammer — Paraffin
Eric B & Rakim, Q-Tip & Phife Dawg, Havoc & Prodigy, Vast Aire & Vordul Mega. Woods & Elucid. Perhaps it’s audacious to throw Armand Hammer in such a varied and prestigious lineage of New York rap duos, but Paraffin is the kind of masterpiece reminiscent to any of the works these other names brought at their peak. Its DNA is closer to The Cold Vein than The Low End, though, with the duo throwing their end-times gospel over claustrophobic, terrifying, but occasionally beautiful beats from a swath of producers like Kenny Segal, Messiah Musik, and Elucid himself. Woods and Elucid manage to illuminate all manner of dark stories with their own strongly present styles, with Woods “kicking in [the] door to drive the point home” and Elucid gracefully treading over in his more tempered back method. The record is loaded front to back with enough quotables to sustain a less-capable rapper’s whole career, mapping out a world in steady decline and making the average listener feel as if the walls are closing in around them every second. New York has never before been rendered so apocalyptic, and no duo could have presented it as well as Woods and Elucid have here.— Rose
79. Haley Heynderickx — I Need to Start a Garden
For all intents and purposes, this album should have never come out. While she was rising within the Pacific Northwest music scene, completing her debut album became an increasingly Herculean task. A failed recording session in a barn and a later session in a professional studio left her broke, dealing with infighting bandmates, and most importantly: lacking confidence. You wouldn’t be able to hear that in the final version of I Need to Start a Garden, as songs like the finger-plucking “The Bug Collector” or intense “Worth It” speak of an artist wise beyond her years. It’s a melancholic record that breathes with such a deep, vast empathy that almost scares me at times. And also it’s just really fun to scream along to the hook of “Oom Sha La La” as really, I probably do need to start a garden. — Matty
78. Weyes Blood — Titanic Rising
I’ve been getting progressively more depressed about climate change this decade. While it’s one thing that our president is a denier of it, it’s another to realize that the system of capitalism is not at all equipped to deal with the massive crisis ahead of us. But if we burrow our heads in the sand, we not only give up our chances of stopping this dilemma, we also give up on the things that make us human. Titanic Rising is about that, attempting to gain some sense of normality in the face of an impending apocalypse. It’s wanting to not give up on a relationship, because otherwise who knows if you’ll have time to find another someone in your life. True love is making a comeback, but only because you need someone to hold your hand as you face the end of the world. — Matty
77. Sampha — Process
Trauma is in no way exclusive to any single decade. And yet, the 2010s felt like the decade where our relationship to the cumulative compounding of trauma weighed us down so much that addressing it openly became unavoidable. Arriving in early 2017, just when our cultural understanding of trauma reached a level of nuance and ubiquity befitting the full examination it deserved, Sampha’s debut Process positioned itself as a nakedly vulnerable means of making sense of grief, loss, and the trauma that lingers in its wake. The roots of the trauma in question are multifaceted (incomplete familial relationships, death, fatalistic medical concerns), varying from song to song, as does his ways of coping with and — for lack of a better word — processing his pain. Blaming himself, coming to terms with the fact that he doesn’t have to go it alone, and letting go of the pain he carries with him is all part of “the character of [Sampha’s]” evolution across the album, the man behind the character’s delicate voice fluttering in each blow to his composure. From the opening distress calls of “Plastic 100°C” and the deathly fear of “Blood On Me,” to the final peaceful acceptance stage of “What Shouldn’t I Be?,” each moment of Process stings with its verisimilitude to the process of living with trauma, every trying thought and ugly moment that comes with the path to grieving, whether for yourself or another. For someone whose decade became a rapid downslope into harm and trauma, Process came along at just the right time, and no other album this decade spoke to me and helped me move forward quite like it.— Nat
76. PJ Harvey — Let England Shake
Is there a more prescient opening lyric this decade than “the West’s asleep”? In 2011, “asleep” was a good way to describe much of the modern, complacent, neo-liberal political landscape, and Polly Jean Harvey decided it was time for a wake up call. Hence, Let England Shake, the finest protest record of the 2010s, was inspired equally by the horrors experienced by Harvey’s native England in World War I and the more modern terrors faced by soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global nightmare that much of the western world was content to try and sleep through. In turns despairingly bleak and darkly humorous (“The Words That Maketh Murder” reappropriates the “what if I take my problem to the United Nations?” line from Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” and it might be the grimmest punchline heard on record all decade), Let England Shake is one of the most urgent, clear-eyed anti-war albums ever recorded. Naturally, the press loved it, awarding Harvey her second Mercury Prize. Everyone made a fuss over its importance. And then everyone moved on.
But, like all the best protest records, Let England Shake transcends its time. The album has proven distressingly evergreen as the decade draws to its bitter end. Right-wing extremism has risen from the fringes of polite society to the palaces of government at home and abroad: the cry of “Goddamn Europeans!” that begins “The Last Living Rose” is utterly chilling in the age of Brexit. With eight years behind it, Let England Shake might just be the record that best explains our current political wasteland. It’s a monolith, one that even Harvey herself couldn’t live up to when she tried to go back to the well on 2016’s fascinatingly flawed (and, tellingly, more focused on the United States) The Hope Six Demolition Project. But even though we find ourselves in a waking nightmare, at least we have PJ Harvey and Let England Shake to rouse us alert and awake, never letting us forget that the glorious land — of England, of America, everywhere — is watered with blood. — Zach
75. Jason Isbell — Southeastern
Several summers ago I learned an old high school flame died of an overdose. We drifted apart some and at the time of her death I can’t admit we were particularly close, but she had a good heart, and hearing the news so casually from a mutual who treated her passing like old news stopped me in my tracks. Later that night I put on Southeastern, which over the years had grown into a multi-feeling album; for mental illness, personal anxieties, boredom, or creative inspiration. There’s the obvious standouts, “Cover Me Up,” “Elephant”, “Live Oak.” There’s the energetic ballad of “Flying Over Water,” the relative comfort & reassurance of “New South Wales.” Southeastern is a condensed form of what folk music in the 2010s should be; unsure, anxious, working class, yet above all else hopeful and vulnerable, allowing itself the comfort and courage to speak clear as water and soft as air about its fears, and shortcomings, and trusts, Isbell placing his faiths in these common truths as if that’s all we have left to hold onto in a world we’ve made increasingly dark. It’s an album which doesn’t try to do too much, doesn’t overload listeners with heavy-handed emotions or subject matters disconnected from regular life. Considering where Isbell was at the time he wrote the record (a recovering alcoholic kicked out of his previous band, the legendary Drive-By Truckers, looking stone-faced at the rock bottom void which too often claims those less fortunate,) it stands as the crowning achievement of his career. That’s a tall declaration for an artist who is arguably the greatest songwriter of his time. — Dyl
74. Emperor X — Western Teleport
After more than 10 years of lo-fi experimentation, Chad Matheny, AKA Emperor X, made his bedroom pop masterpiece before the term was even coined. So many different musicians have been influenced by Emperor X, ranging from Katie Dey to Tyler Bussey of TWIABP & Strange Ranger, but no one has managed to do it better than him. Within the first 30 seconds of the album, its signature blend of cacophony and pure pop bliss is clearly demonstrated. This mixture of chaos and order doesn’t just apply to the sound of the album; the lyrics are also just as dynamic. No other musician could transition so well from a song about the complexities of religious fundamentalism into one about expressing love through the repairing an AC unit. Emperor X manages to both push boundaries and create incredibly enjoyable music on this album in a way that is astonishing to behold. — Ethan
73. Death Grips — Exmilitary
Standing at a unique intersection of hip-hop, punk rock, and electronic music, Death Grips’ debut mixtape Exmilitary didn’t fit into any easily identifiable genre silo, and stuck out like a sore thumb compared to much of the other music being released in an era dominated by bands like MGMT and Passion Pit. Poptimism was in, synth pop was in, and whatever the hell Death Grips was doing felt like a declaration of war against all of those trends. When we were introduced to Death Grips through their insane music videos for “Beware,” “Guillotine,” and “Takyon (Death Yon),” no one in their right mind would have said “these guys are gonna be the next big thing in music.” And even as they gained popularity no one could have possibly imagined that they would be forebears of any sort of large trend. As shocking as it was to listen to Exmiltary for the first time and be introduced to the explosive musical style of Death Grips, what’s truly shocking is that these three lunatics did start a trend, and in 2019 you can see the musical DNA of Death Grips influencing artists across genres. Even as the scourge of mellow “Spotify-core” music continues and popular music sounds increasingly sedated and chill to a fault, artists like black midi, 100 gecs, JPEGMAFIA, SOPHIE, Black Dresses, Injury Reserve, Shygirl, and countless others have clearly taken the baton Death Grips has passed them and ran with it, determined to make music that is too visceral for chill vibes playlists.
Exmilitary was a complete shock to the system in 2011, and looking back on the decade there are few debut albums that established a band as forcefully as this mixtape did. First impressions are everything, and few debut projects have a first track that crystallizes a band’s ethos as well as the track “Beware” does for Death Grips. Sampling a Charlie Manson interview, a Jane’s Addiction song, and a reggae track from Dickie Burton, “Beware” is the kind of musical Frankenstein’s monster that Death Grips were the masters of. With Zach Hill’s frenetic drumming and MC Ride’s vocals as the binding ingredients, Exmilitary is filled to the brim with anything and everything they felt like throwing into the pot, from Bad Brains to Pink Floyd to multiple samples of a marching band drumline for additional percussion. But what’s great about these samples is not just the variety of them but how they are completely transformed and repurposed in these insane hip hop experimentations, taking sampling sources iconic and obscure and melding them into something wholly original and distinctly of the internet age. Death Grips didn’t invent a genre as much as they pioneered an attitude: combining musically omnivorous production with a no-holds-barred, in-your-face presentation that demands your attention. From the moment I heard MC Ride scream “I fuck the music / I make it cum / I fuck the music with my serpent tongue,” it was abundantly clear that Death Grips were not like anything I had heard before and probably unlike anything ever made, and I was absolutely hooked.— Jackson
72. Caroline Rose — LONER
There are plenty of better records on this list, but by my estimation, very few of them are as no-shit funny as Caroline Rose’s LONER. Caroline understands the key to any real humor is digging at the trauma and then just throwing all your frustration against it in an absurd manner. Digging at the malaise (“More of the Same”), loneliness (“Getting to Me”), and leering eyes (“Bikini”) of the culture she’s become immersed in, Rose approaches all of it in lurid style, a synth driven lurch of rock music that makes you just want to get down and d-d-d-d-dance. The eleven songs here lean equally between the riot grrl anthems of the 90s and the kind of glittery barn-burners Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake would put out in the decade prior. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the record, however, is the way Caroline managed to quietly reinvent her sound from the ground up following her two previous records running as an alt-country artist. The change here is staggering but invisible to anyone casting a cursory glance, but either way the results can be noticed, and they shine quite brilliantly. This isn’t her first rodeo, but it’s by far the most impressive she’s undertaken.— Rose
71. Aphex Twin — Syro
Strange, isn’t it? You expected the future to be chrome and drab, more weird and less existentially terrifying, or perhaps you just didn’t realize how powerful nostalgia was and the ways it manifests and forces itself into our collective overwhelming nightmares. Too late do we often realize the present is only reverberations of the past, too little do we try reconnecting ourselves with memories we once had, emotions we once felt, too soon does time fade from us and we are left with moments just a little more fleeting, in spaces left a little too empty. This melancholy is the crux of Syro, the not-so-triumphant return of Richard D. James to electronic music’s greatest titan. After 11 years and countless hours from diehard fans spent digging through archival tracks embedded deep into derelict message boards and chat rooms, the name Aphex Twin now synonymous with a promise of a strange, exotic future, what many of these bleepheads got from Syro was a passive shrug of the shoulders, a slight disappointment. Yet it’s exactly in this void where Syro pulls its brilliance, rather than filling the entirety of its runtime with the many bells & whistles, mind-bending twists & turns of synthetic goodness, it’s the restraint and the willingness to leave a certain breath to the album which informs the brilliance of those sensual 64 minutes. Let it be said throughout the dark web that when the Aphex Twin returned, he did so with the gift of brevity. — Dyl
70. Angel Olsen — MY WOMAN
From its joking-not-joking title to its effortless blending of sincerity and camp, My Woman established Angel Olsen as one of the decade’s great shape-shifters. Over a set of instrumentals that could have been lifted from any point in the last 50 years, Olsen’s acrobatic voice lent the album’s varied lyrical vignettes a razor-sharp impact. Whether on its loosely queer-coded ballads (“Never Be Mine,” “Heart-Shaped Face”) or its sprawling meditations on identity and growth (“Sister,” “Woman”), her impeccable songcraft created a broad canvas for listeners to project, and ultimately navigate, their own experiences in relation to the world at large. True to its title, My Woman was among the decade’s essential documents of modern femininity, an album that allowed countless people to find themselves in real time. — Lily
69 (nice!). Rozwell Kid — Precious Art
In 1967, The Beatles released their critically acclaimed masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While Sgt Pepper’s is heralded as an innovative record for countless reasons, one of the most prominent innovations that the Beatles introduced to the pop music scene was the use of sound effects as an instrument on the song “A Day In The Life”, having an alarm clock blare during the bridge.
40 years later, Rozwell Kid released a goof song which features several grown men barking like dogs for 7 uninterrupted seconds.
I have done the math. According to my last.fm, I have spent 223.987778 hours listening to their fourth album, Precious Art. That’s 9.3 days of my life. On the surface, Precious Art is very very silly. There’s songs about boogers, Weird Al, and dancing in the outfield of childhood baseball games. But underneath all of the fun that Precious Art offers lies heartache, longing, and public nervous breakdowns. It’s not a record for everybody, but it’s my favorite album of all time. Nice. — Gavin
68. Gang of Youths — Go Farther in Lightness
In the spring of 2018, I was working a crappy job at the airport while falling in love with this album. It was during this time that I settled on my favorite quality in art: life affirming. In my personal dichotomy, life affirming is one step past catharsis, which is an extreme emotional release. Life affirming art provides a catharsis, but rather than just providing a release, it heals the soul by exorcising everything bad and repatching everything that is good.
Gang of Youths influences include (but aren’t limited to) Bruce Springsteen, U2, Arcade Fire, The National, Japandroids, Titus Andronicus, and Christian rock. Which is to say they make you feel like your heart is actually about to explode. Little effort is made to hide these influences, as evidenced by the opening piano riff that pays direct homage to “Thunder Road”. But what is popular music if not a culmination of what’s come before? “Keep Me In The Open” might be derivative of a certain band mentioned above, but who’s to complain when it’s an improvement in every regard? What Gang of Youths bring to the table is a life affirming gusto that reminds you why you fell in love with arena rock from days of yore.
Lead singer and songwriter David Le’aupepe only knows how to create in one gear, and that’s complete sincerity. Only a handful of bands would have the gall to make a song named “The Heart is a Muscle”, and even fewer could actually pull it off. But Gang of Youths are triumphant thanks to David Le’aupepe sultry baritone and a chorus that teeters on pure ecstasy. “What Can I Do If the Fire Goes Out?” matches its dramatic spiritual lyrics with a tremolo guitar riff played with such vigor that you can practically see sparks flying from the guitar. If you close your eyes it feels like you’re levitating. Go Farther In Lightness unfortunately isn’t reminiscent of what rock music in 2010’s actually sounded like. If it were, there would be a lot less “rock is dead” think pieces and maybe world peace. — Will
67. FLANCH — FLANCH
Being pushed into a religious childhood at a susceptible young age leaves phantom images of theology in the brain, even if you leave the faith. I can’t wrest images of Sunday school talks of hell and salvation, or poorly animated Christian cartoons, or confirmation lessons and youth group bonding over Christian metal from my memory, no matter how hard I try. The iconography, terminology, and belief system of Christianity follows me no matter how secular a life I lead.
FLANCH — the Indiana avant-electronic production duo of Peter Timberlake and Ben Peterson, accompanied by a revolving cast of local singers and rappers — understand this better than anyone else. The lyrics on their debut name-check all the usual Biblical suspects like Cain and Abel and Jerusalem, but they’re folded into a larger reverential style that reads as hymnal songwriting exalting some higher power through pious deference to Ableton. Like me, I suspect Timberlake and Peterson can’t shake the ubiquity of the Internet for those growing up in the new millennium, as the record is teeming with references to robotics and online dating (and a chaos-worshipping Star Wars novel villain that only people who pore over Wookieepedia obsessively would reference), delivered in inhuman pitch modification while noisy synth beats clang on. What keeps me returning to FLANCH (and what makes it the quintessential album of the 2010s, in my view) is how it views these disparate elements as symbiotic: for people of a certain age and upbringing, these unrelated things feel inseparable, all part of the same formation of identity, one of “chaotic emotion, near-aquatic in motion.” It’s only fitting that FLANCH as an album, sounds exactly like the lives it aims to evoke. — Nat
66. Dean Blunt — The Redeemer
I discovered this album in 2015 in midst of my first real, tangible breakup. That entire year for me was really a haze, as when there’s no set timeline for how to get over a breakup, the perception of time slips away. You continue to go back and forth between memories and specific thought patterns, thinking about the times you thought were better with broken pair of rose-tinted glasses. There’s a lot of ways you can view The Redeemer. Maybe it’s a tribute to the great pop breakup albums of the 70s and 80s considering its samples of Kate Bush and Fleetwood Mac. It could possibly be a piss take to the emerging influence of 808s & Heartbreaks amongst hip-hop and R&B. Possibly, it’s a look at an abusive relationship through the perspective of the intoxicator. Hell, it might be all of the above or more. Simply, there’s an alluring mystery to The Redeemer that makes it so malleable. No matter where I’ve been in my life in the four years since I’ve heard this album, there’s always something that speaks deeply to me where no other album can. — Matty
65. D’Angelo and the Vanguard — Black Messiah
The release of Voodoo in early 2000 catapulted D’Angelo to the status of neo-soul sex icon in a big way, causing a multitude of personal issues for the man himself. In the 14 years between Voodoo and Black Messiah, he went through the suicide of his close friend Fred Jordan in 2001, resulting in ensuing drinking problems, a breakup with his girlfriend in 2005, and a stint in rehab the same year. The raw emotion from these experiences are all over Black Messiah, an album that was originally planned to be released in 2015 (which would have likely seen it overshadowed by To Pimp A Butterfly), but was pushed up because of the Ferguson and Eric Garner cases.
Questlove once described the album as “the black version of Smile”, describing how D’Angelo went as far as to create his own unique software patches for the album. Indeed, D’Angelo pulls from everyone from Sly and the Family Stone to Herbie Hancock, recontextualizing the last 50 years of R&B in a way few can do. As D’Angelo put it in the liner notes, “It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. Not every song on this album is politically charged (though many are), but calling this album Black Messiah creates a landscape where these songs can live to the fullest. Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.” — Josiah
64. Anaïs Mitchell — Hadestown
What’s the purpose of a myth? To comfort, to entertain, yes, but also to instruct, perhaps to inspire. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has provided inspiration for artists of all stripes, from the director Marcel Camus and the playwright Sarah Ruhl to the men and women in Arcade Fire, whose 2013 album Reflektor took partial inspiration from the doomed lovers. But no one has turned this ancient story into such profoundly, vividly current art more than folksinger Anaïs Mitchell, whose Hadestown has gone from a small stage in Barre, Vermont to an underground sensation when released as an album at the top of the decade to the Walter Kerr on Broadway, where it lives now as a critical and commercial smash that took home nine Tony Awards this June. It may seem remarkable that it’s this story, one that is so loudly anti-capitalist and anti-industrialist, that has captured the imagination of the Great White Way. But when you put on the original album, you may find yourself as in thrall to her creation as the denizens of the underworld were to Orpheus’s song.
Featuring a murderer’s row of folk and Americana artists — including a never-better Justin Vernon as Orpheus — and Mitchell herself as Eurydice, Hadestown transposed the legend from ancient Greece to a world that seems quite like Dust Bowl America. In this reality, Hades is a ruthless industrialist, and Eurydice goes to Hadestown not because of a snakebite, but for a more human reason: for all his pretty music, Orpheus isn’t keeping the fire lit or the shelves full. How the story unfolds from there is no news to anyone with even passing familiarity with Greek mythology, but Mitchell’s songs bring the old story to glorious life. From Orpheus and Eurydice’s wrenching ballads and Ani DiFranco’s cabaret showstopper “Our Lady of the Underground” to the prophetic call-and-response of “Why We Build the Wall” and the slow-burning dread of “Doubt Comes In,” Hadestown is consistently a delight to listen to, as beguiling as it is chilling. And as the decade wore on, the album’s explicitly leftist ideals proved more and more urgent in a world that grows more dystopian seemingly by the day. Mitchell said of the project’s genesis that she saw herself in Orpheus: “When I face that faceless world, that circular logic that reduces the human heart and the human spirit to a series of numbers, all I can think is, ‘If I could only write a song beautiful enough, maybe I could move someone, maybe I could change things.’” On Hadestown, she wrote twenty.— Zach
63. The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die — Harmlessness
Remember Funeral by Arcade Fire? Everyone loves that album. It’s great! Harmlessness is the closest parallel that I listened to in the 2010’s. This is the part where I would usually write a paragraph or two explaining this statement but this is my last “blurb” as we’re calling them and editorial is asking us to keep it short because Medium already has our unfinished draft at an 89 minute read. Is anyone even going to read this or are you just scrolling to the bottom? Whatever the case, if you are reading this, it’s probably because you’re a fan of the record and know that it’s an indie rock masterpiece that’s high on catharsis, with enough detail to notice something new every time you listen. If you haven’t listened to the album, you’ll just have to take my word that it’s the (checks notes) 63rd best album of the 2010’s.— Will
62. PUP — The Dream is Over
On The Dream Is Over, PUP frontman Stefan Babcock is desperate. After years of playing in bands, his vocal chords were so damaged to the point where his doctor told him it was unlikely that he would be able to continue his music career, allegedly telling him “the dream is over.” Every song on the album is soaked in frustration, anger, and sadness, and yet PUP prevails — they’re making it through. On “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will,” the grueling experience of touring has started to get to the band. PUP is, at its heart, a live band; they’ve played upwards of 550 shows in the last 5 years. Somehow, I’ve been at none of them (I have a ticket for a show in March), but the energy is palpable. Just listen to the transition between “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP” — even on the shittiest earbuds it hits you like a truck (on the Don Valley Parkway, ha ha). “Sleep In The Heat,” probably PUP’s best song, is about the death of Babcock’s pet chameleon. It feels like a punch in the gut after all the other trauma on the album — first he’s injured his vocal chords, then he has a relentless touring schedule that turns him against his bandmates, and now his fucking chameleon, who’s his sole companion in this horrible world, is dying? “And nothing I say will make it okay / You just sleep in the heat and repeat / You’re wasting away / And nothing I do is gonna save you / I’m trying my best, but you can’t even / Look at me or talk to me or tell me what’s happening to you,” he sings. The Dream Is Over is really just a series of tragedies and frustrations. It’s the perfect soundtrack if you’re feeling depressed, hopeless, frustrated, or defeated. There’s no happy note to end on here, and sometimes that just is how it is — but maybe PUP can help you get through it. — Delaney
61. Lomelda — Thx
Texas ranks as #47 for states with the worst transportation infrastructure. Missouri is only ahead 11 states at #36. I’d like to think the roads of eastern/central Texas where Hannah Read is from aren’t too different from the roads connected to St. Louis, Missouri that I drive on almost every day. It’s on these roads sometimes that we don’t have much else to do but ponder upon things. It’s these insights inspired by the loneliness of the road that largely shape this album. Sometimes, the distance of your destination can largely match the emotional distance of who you’re driving to. Thx, since when I first heard it, has been a deeply meditative album for me. Whenever I listen to this album now, usually in my car, it feels like Read is right there next to me, sitting in the passenger seat. Despite the melancholy she sings about on this record, there’s a warmness throughout hat feels like I’m talking to a friend, us both just trying to make sense of it all. — Matty
60. Deerhunter — Halcyon Digest
Editor’s Note: This is one of the best abolum, sof all time,.
Halcyon Digest is an eternal work of art, one that promises the joy of hearing your new favorite album ever-ever today, yesterday, and for the rest of one’s life.
I have seen visions of New Jerusalem in the guitar tones of this album. And the basslines. And the drum kicks. It is immaculately produced, the pristinest diamond of the lo-fi basement pop that Deerhunter (and especially Bradford Cox) embodies — songs spring forth with fragmented memories that tear apart at the seams; others taper off, quietly, and with mind-boggling trauma. Lots of people die. Lots of feelings die! But they don’t really stay dead — the record affirms life, relishes it, holds it close, and laughs, knowing it, too, would’ve laughed in its absence.— Jeremiah
59. Danny Brown — XXX
No genre better captures the energy of the 2010s than Hip-Hop. The meteoric rise of Soundcloud, surprise drops, and artists’ exceptionally excessive outputs all chart the course of online music discussion in the past ten years. A genre that had been historically too dangerous for radio became the cornerstone of cultural cache and influenced culture at large. But as the face of Hip-Hop changed over the decade, Danny Brown loomed large as a medium between the traditional old guard and an energetic onslaught of new faces. 2011’s XXX hit at the very beginning of this window, and introduced audiences at large to the Detroit rapper’s signature and wordplay and polarizing vocal style. Riding over an hour of chaotic beats and carnival-esque production Danny Brown walks the listener through a fiendish parade of drugs, sex, and danger.
At once a concise and sprawling concept album, XXX brings to life the downward spiral Danny Brown knows all too well — coming off an illuminating high into a dark and depressive state in the back half of the record. This project put Brown on the map and paved the way for similarly groundbreaking projects, Old and Atrocity Exhibition. Though he’s gone on to reinvent himself multiple times over, nothing stands better as a bold declaration of Danny Brown’s artistic vision than this album, including both the following lines: “The last ten years I been so fucking stressed/Tears in my eyes let me get this off my chest/The thought of no success got a nigga chasing death/Doing all these drugs in hopes of OD’ing next” and “Stank pussy smelling like Cool Ranch Doritos.” — AJ
58. Big Thief — U.F.O.F.
Few stories in 2019 caught the world of independent music by surprise more than the rapid ascension of Big Thief to headliner status. Following two well-liked, if under the radar, releases on Saddle Creek, the Brooklyn quartet jumped to 4AD and made one of the most startling leaps of the decade, releasing two exceptional records in under five months. And if Two Hands captures the band leaning into the earthier, more classic “rock band” side of their sound, U.F.O.F. finds them tapping fully into the ethereal, mysterious qualities of their songwriting in ways that were hinted at on Capacity and which truly started to come into focus on Adrianne Lenker’s solo album, abysskiss. All the clues you need are in the cover art: Two Hands has them up close and personal, U.F.O.F. at a distance. Because of this, U.F.O.F. is perhaps a bit more difficult to immediately connect to than Two Hands, but from the second “Contact” kicks in, you can tell that this band has seriously leveled up. Over the course of 12 songs (two of which are full-band rearrangements of songs from abysskiss), the band continually displays a baseline of sheer craft and musicianship that’s impossible to ignore, and even harder to forget. And Lenker, for her part, uses the record to stake her claim as one of the greatest songwriters working today. It all coalesces into what the band promised on their first album: a masterpiece. There can be little doubt that 2019 belonged to Big Thief, and if U.F.O.F. is any indication of how they’ll mature into the next decade, there may be just as little doubt that the 2020s will belong to them, too. — Zach
57. Perfume Genius — Too Bright
Mike Hadreas has had an incredible run this decade, and while the maximalism of No Shape is awe inspiring, this one is most important to me. It came to me during an intense period of depression I had in the fall following my high school graduation, which was the result of a prolonged trauma that I just didn’t know how to deal with. It was a HARD year in general, but for about 3 months I was recessed into a futon playing Dark Souls and smothering my ears with a cocktail of Death Grips, Run The Jewels 2, Mick Jenkins The Water[s], James Blake, Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ Rhythm and, of course Too Bright, which pairs much better with Dark Souls than one might imagine. Things have improved since then, a process that began when I started interacting with other people again by joining The Indieheads Podcast.
I can’t stress enough that in fall 2014 this album was an essential tether for me. I connected to it in ways I couldn’t with other music at the time. I was absolutely drawn in by Mike Hadreas’s wryly funny but crushing lyrics, his emotive singing, and the band’s ability to work with familiar sounds and styles to create something that sounds like absolutely nothing else while still being easily digestible. I love how well Mike and his band flowed from piano ballad to synthpop banger to noise pop and back again, something which is still thrilling to this day. In the years since this album has remained endlessly listenable in spite of its heartrending lyrics, which at any given time threaten to unravel my DNA helix. — Alex
56. Kendrick Lamar — DAMN.
Even on what’s considered to be his “low-stakes” album of the decade (ignoring Black Panther: The Album), DAMN. still is one of this decade’s most poignant artistic statements. While it may tone back the ambitious arrangement and sequencing of his last album, Kendrick Lamar dives further into the personal as someone still coming to terms with the wild differences between his past and present. Between radio smashes like “LOYALTY.” and “HUMBLE.,” Lamar presents some of his deepest meditations on the isolation of fame and so-called fortune, an isolation only deepened by the institutional racism of the United States. Even when you seemingly have it all, it could all go away in a second, or at least that’s how it feels when you think everyone is out to get you. Whether it’s a feeling driven by truth or paranoia, it drives this album’s most personal moments along with its most braggadocious. It’s a challenging tightrope Lamar walks on this record, but it’s that ever present danger that makes this such an exciting listen front to back like no other Kendrick album. — Matty
55. Daft Punk — Random Access Memories
One couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Daft Punk as the most hands-off band ever. They rarely show their faces, do interviews, perform live, or even put out music. Their intention here, however, has been to remove the usual cult of personality that surrounds musicians to “make things about the music,” and the work they put out absolutely reflects this; their few shows and best work (for the most part) have all been remarkably maximal. Random Access Memories is not maximal in a “Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” kind of way, but more in the immaculate production and studio engineering in the album’s sounds and textures. Also, as per usual in Daft Punk’s discography, there is a surprising amount of emotional depth to be found in their robot love songs — “Instant Crush” is one of the most affecting and mournful songs I’ve heard this decade. It’s hard to tell what the legacy of this album is going to be — nowadays I only hear about it because someone has referenced the “you should check out get lucky if you have the chance. sound of the summer” tweet — but it remains a landmark entry in an essential band’s catalogue. — Alex
54. Car Seat Headrest — Teens of Denial
Depression, huh? It’s great stuff! Right? Of course not, but Teens of Denial does try to find the ridiculousness of it all when your brain is always on the attack against you. If 2015 was me trying to fill myself back up from emptiness, 2016 was me not realizing the fuel I was using was some defective, black market shit. Shit that’s unpredictable much like this album, with all the various twists and turns Car Seat Headrest mastermind Will Toledo takes on this LP. However, unlike the twists and turns depression takes on my own life, this time those twists and turns lead to satisfactory moments and conclusions like the breakdowns and switches of “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” or “The Ballad of Costa Concordia.” While some may argue this is Toledo at his most filtered (Teens of Denial is the only CSH release where Toledo is not credited as a producer), his brash creativity breaks through everything, with the indie rock canon adding another important character to its midst for us to praise and roast at free will. Anyways, here’s Adam Driver hopping along to “Drunk Drivers /Killer Whales.”— Matty
53. Beach House — Teen Dream
People accuse Beach House of not being the best band of the decade. HAH! I laugh!
Beach House is the best band of the decade, and this, one of their crowning achievements from it, is one of the best albums of all time. Wading through waist-deep snow, Victoria and Alex unfurl luscious, somber, skyscraping moods of walking-into-beasts-gaping-mouths-waiting heartache and the untold tribulations of going away somewhere and not knowing when or where you’ll come out on the other side. There’s terror in the margins — and comfort, too. Muted colors swirl, dying loves cry out, striped horses stand tall — yet the album persists, and envelops, and cools the burning skin of youth (and therapods — they were likely warm blooded — check out those porous bones, feathers, low predator-pray ratio, and agile movement!)
I enjoy this record very much, and treasure it very much. One day, someone might try to strip it from me, but I will not let them! I cherish it, and swaddle it like my dearest stuffed animal. It will take care of me, and I will take care of it — just as the story goes. — Jeremiah
52. LCD Soundsystem — This Is Happening
James Murphy is a guy who probably deserves all the shit he gets, but in some sense you have to respect his craft. He’s a perfectionist, and he loves showing off that fact every time he steps out into the public eye again with LCD Soundsystem. So perhaps with even the faintest sense of finality ahead, he saw an out when he made This is Happening. Why else would he throw half of these ideas in there, the Michael Musto beef, the odes to rock and roll excess contained in a song that is the very definition of rock and roll excess, the nine minute song with the big “drop” that everyone still goes bananas over online. Every statement here has a weight to it that can only come with that sense of finality, and Murphy not only understands it but embraces it, making arrangements that cascade out of the dancefloor and into forever, a long sigh at the end of a raucous celebration. You can choose to get caught up in all these raw feelings the music throws at you, or you can channel them into the party. Who cares about finality, even if it’s under false pretenses? Either way, you’ve gotta respect the motherfucking craft. — Rose
51. Phoebe Bridgers — Stranger in the Alps
I follow the Phoebe Bridgers lyrics bot on Twitter and it always brings down my mood. Bridgers only has one solo album, and that album only has 10 songs, so there are not all that many lyrics for the bot to tweet, but every one of them is emotionally devastating. “Come to find out / I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end / We found our way out / Of a suicide pact of our family and friends” it tweeted today, from “Would You Rather,” Bridgers’ first collaboration with Conor Oberst. Beautiful poetry, instant melancholy. Earlier, it tweeted “I’m singing at a funeral tomorrow / For a kid a year older than me / And I’ve been talking to his dad; it makes me so sad / When I think too much about it I can’t breathe,” from “Funeral.” I mean, what do you even say about that? This morning — “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time / And that’s just how I feel / Always have and I always will,” again from “Funeral,” — I just eat this shit up. And then, of course, from “Motion Sickness,” probably her best song: “I have emotional motion sickness / I try to stay clean and live without / And I want to know what would happen / If I surrender to the sound.” This song in particular really hits you; Bridgers’ pain is on full display. “Emotional motion sickness” is the perfect descriptor, she’s confused and hurt and lonely but at the same time knows that her subject is horrible and so she’s angry too, and she’s not afraid to let us know. Stranger In The Alps is an incredible debut, and it perfectly encapsulates the vast power that Bridgers’ lyrics have to affect you on such a visceral level. — Delaney
50. Arcade Fire — The Suburbs
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. In the wise words of friend-of-the-podcast Jeff Rosenstock, “Nostalgia is great, how else can you be sad about being alive currently while remembering your past inaccurately?” And straight off the heels of two of the most beloved indie albums of all time, Arcade Fire aimed to tackle this exact idea. There are a lot of arguments to be had about which Arcade Fire album is the best, but I think The Suburbs might capture the essence of the band better than any of them. It’s full of the group’s signature theatrics: dramatic vocal delivery, ambitious and generally big-sounding production, and a combination of concentrated rock music with tinges of chamber-pop orchestral arrangements. What pushes this album into greatness, however, is its emotionally sharp songwriting at every turn as frontman Win Butler paints a dreary picture of suburbia. Houses falling down, the past fading, and the disillusionment that comes with modern adult life; a sentiment that would become more prescient every day that the 2010’s trudged forward. And that’s where the danger of nostalgia rears its head. Thoughts of the unfulfilling wasted hours of adulthood cut that much more sharply when compounded by dwelling on a romanticized version of the past, when at the end of the day, you were probably just wasting hours back then, too. — Jake
49. Adrianne Lenker — abysskiss
abysskiss is an album that tackles universal themes head on, and with absolute humanism, compassion, tenderness. From “Terminal Paradise,” which explores death, fear, human connection, and letting go, to “10 Miles,” which is permeated with loneliness but comforted by the known presence of a partner who feels far away but not out of reach, the album is marked by complex poetry at every turn. However, it is never pedantic, and it never uses language that would bar people from entry; in this way, as much as the album is an exploration of the self, its defining and most important quality may be its openness. abysskiss has a lot to say about being a good partner, friend, and person, without letting go of being an individual. It’s comforting and feels safe, and has become a sort of sacred ground for me to retread, growing as I do. Make no mistake: as Big Thief hype grows and grows, this remains her most vital work. — Alex
48. Sufjan Stevens — Carrie & Lowell
As the popularity of indie music as a whole skyrocketed during the 2010’s, it’s only natural that the indie poster-child himself would see a comparable spike in relevancy during this decade. And of course, that’s not to say that Sufjan hadn’t already established himself as an extremely well-respected figure in the community, but between things like releasing the vibrant electronic cavalcade that is The Age of Adz, recording an outer-space-themed collaboration project, creating the soundtrack for Call Me by Your Name, and subsequently performing at the Academy Awards, this decade saw Sufjan Stevens climb to the highest echelons of indie fame; a trajectory that might not have been as prominent if not for his 2015 release, Carrie & Lowell.
In many respects, this album could be seen as Sufjan “returning to his roots” for lack of a better term. Distancing himself from the heavy electronic art pop influences of his few projects before this, Carrie & Lowell sees Sufjan at perhaps his most stripped-down, most melancholic, and most vulnerable. Now, Sufjan was of course no stranger to transparent and emotionally affecting songwriting, but even his most personal albums before this were injected with a healthy dose of color, light-heartedness, and tongue-in-cheek performances. Carrie & Lowell has none of that, and it makes sense why as these songs are all thematically centered around the death of Sufjan’s mother, Carrie, who had a history of struggling with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance abuse, and who abandoned him at one year of age. These songs feel like Sufjan frantically searching for closure as he wades through complicated memories of his time in Oregon as a child, wrestling with regrets about not trying hard enough to get close to his mother before it was too late, and the unhealthy habits, faith-questioning, and self-loathing that accompanies it all. Sufjan himself summed it up best with his line “What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?”. Trying to work one’s way through the unflinching permanence of death can often feel futile and scary and ultimately useless, but doing it for an audience requires bravery and bold intent; things which Sufjan has repeatedly proven to have in spades. — Jake
47. Richard Dawson — Peasant
Richard Dawson is, without hyperbole, one of the most creative songwriters I’ve ever heard, and given his fairly modest listener-base, I feel comfortable calling him one of the most underrated as well. In 2017, his experimental freak-folk roots met perfectly with some razor-sharp pop sensibility, and the offspring of those two seemingly contradictory attributes gave us Peasant. In my opinion, the first noticeable thing when you listen to this album is the guitar. It sounds like Richard Dawson is beating the shit out of a rickety old garage-sale acoustic, playing riffs that are so winding and complicated that they almost sound random. And when you mix that together with his also extremely eccentric vocal delivery (i.e., a combination of some very British croons and wails, with Dawson embodying his characters in crisis as much as he can force his larynx to muster) it seems logical that it should just be a kind of incoherent mess, right? No. Very wrong. Despite overflowing with idiosyncrasies in the songwriting, the arrangements, and the performances, Peasant manages to be overwhelmingly immediate. Beneath all of the layers of complexity are genuinely some of the most infectious melodies I’ve ever heard, and they’re accompanied by some equally colorful and compelling storytelling. All of this forms an album just as lived-in and messily near-collapse as the “houses caked in clay and sheep-dung” its residents live in.
And the songwriting itself is worth delving into its own right. Even in an especially strong decade for short fiction, it seems only fitting to call Richard Dawson a master of this craft in the 2010s. By setting his astutely rendered miniature narratives of ordinary lives in the Old English kingdom of Bryneich on this particular collection, Dawson transposes his common preoccupations into a conceit that lets the primeval core of these subjects stand starker than ever. The Family Drama becomes a father tending to his son’s injury from a beast in the woods. The paralysis of existentialism emerges as a soldier fears going to war and leaving his beloved. Dysmorphia finds new skin through an epic poem of a mythical pin granting its wearer eternal beauty. Like any great short story collection, each piece within Peasant (especially the unexpected tone-shift at the heart of “Ogre”) is so fully realized that they stand just as complete on their own as they do comprehensively. The fact that each is just one piece in a sweeping tableau of the crudely human attempts to make desire reality only makes it that much better. — Nat & Jake
46. My Bloody Valentine — m b v
My Bloody Valentine’s greatest skill has never been their lyrics, or vocals, or songwriting, it’s been their ability to create a mood and thrust the listener into it. Whether or not you think Loveless is the better album, m b v sees guitar wizard and primary songwriter Kevin Shields at the absolute peak of his powers, doing what only My Bloody Valentine can do. The songscapes (yes, songscapes) on this record are truly masterful, and the way the album progresses through them mirrors how the “songs” themselves progress. We start where Loveless left off and end the album in uncharted territory, with sounds and structures I have simply never heard before. By the end of the record, their instruments are in a rhythmic death spiral that, for the second time in a small discography, redefines what shoegaze is and what it could be. Here’s hoping the next one doesn’t take 20 years. — Alex
45. Milo — So the Flies Don’t Come
Rory Ferreira knows how to rap. From his amateurish, nerdy debut project at the start of the decade, to his final project under the Milo alias running in outright stately form, he’s proven his ability repeatedly. Even so, there was a time when it seemed like he didn’t have it in him, and then he launched all those weighted expectations out into the stratosphere. After the muted response to his debut album Toothpaste Suburb and the hassle surrounding its release and the royalties from it, he had a lot to be frustrated with. Not just in the context of his own life, but the rising tensions of simply being black in a country becoming increasingly hostile with the existence of people like him. Instead of giving up, he turned around and made an album that translates the urgency of his emotions into a work weighted with everything surrounding him. He freewheels on ten tracks about whatever feels most important to him, be it shittalking ignorant fans, paying homage to his LA forebears, or taking on a philosophical perspective of color and personhood in America. Kenny Segal takes the boards on every song, building a muted but easily flowing palette for Rory to throw down some of the strongest writing in his career.
Similarly, the guest spots here all build a nice atmosphere to work around, from Open Mike Eagle’s bemused musings on “true nen” to Hemlock Ernst’s shining star turn on “souvenir”. Most of the songs here clock in just under four minutes, but manage to use their lean timescale to make every second feel necessary. Looking towards the albums that followed, where he chose to go even further into the philosophical ether, it feels almost like a miracle that this album came about as succinctly as it did, feeling just right in the space it occupies. The album ends off with “song about a raygunn”, a tribute to a person who even Rory would now say doesn’t deserve it. But, in some sense, you can see its words reflecting on his own place in the artform. He doesn’t even really have to rap: in the end, he can just talk good.— Rose
44. Fleet Foxes — Helplessness Blues
In the early years of the 2010’s, we were still deep in the throes of the modern indie-folk renaissance, and in no small part due to the success of Fleet Foxes themselves. And although this trend would slowly begin to die out as the decade grew older, there are still a few albums that stand as a beacon to how successful the genre could be if executed correctly. While Fleet Foxes found most of their commercial success with the release of their self-titled debut album, Helplessness Blues worked to perfect the band’s knack for texture, multi-part harmonies, intricate instrumental arrangements, and the mixing together of all those elements into a picturesque rendering of the natural world we all live in.
Nearly every song on the tracklist here is able to achieve a delicate balance between crafting traditionally lush, reverb-heavy chamber-folk soundscapes, as well as injecting a healthy dose of interesting dynamics and creativity in comparison with many of this album’s contemporaries. There’s a wealth of breathtaking orchestral arrangements, an impressive depth of instrumental variety, creative shifts in song structure, and it’s even complete with a free-jazz saxophone solo! And as the sonic detail of the group’s music matured on this album into even more ornate territory, the album also matured thematically; filled with Robin Pecknold’s contemplations of the inevitability of death, reflecting on the inescapability of change, musing over his own place in the grand scheme of things, and a general longing for peace, or the hypothetical ‘Innisfree’ as it’s referred to throughout the album. I don’t think there’s any part of Helplessness Blues that isn’t engrossing and captivating in its beauty, and even if that’s not the prevailing opinion, there’s no questioning this album’s importance within one of the most ubiquitous musical trends of the decade. — Jake
43. Björk — Vulnicura
I raise a monument of love
There is a swarm of sound
Around our heads
And we can hear it
And we can get healed by it
It will relieve us from the pain
The breakup album is one of the most common archetypes in music for a reason: we’ve all had a breakup, and there are few relatable human experiences that translate more effectively to songwriting than a breakup. But the downside of that relatability is that its very easy to write a by-the-numbers, boring breakup song that turns an incredibly complex human experience into something trite and one-dimensional. Thankfully, Bjork’s stunning ninth album Vulnicura is absolutely not that at all, as her “complete heartbreak album” beautifully portrays the messy whirlwind of emotions that unfold in the leadup to, and the aftermath of, a difficult break up.
The first two-thirds of the album’s nine tracks acts as an organized timeline of Bjork’s many emotional states, with each track given a subtitle that indicates when it was written relative to the breakup, from “9 months before” all the way to “11 months after.” Most breakup albums focus solely on the post-breakup and the easily recognizable heartache that it comes along with, but Vulnicura is focused on every stage of the breakup, including the dread and anxiety that comes as a relationship is nearing the end of its course and the couple hasn’t even realized it. This phase is represented by the first three tracks “Stonemilker,” “Lionsong,” and “History of Touches,” in which Bjork still believes that “maybe he will come out of this loving me” but is beginning to reckon with the disconnect growing between her and her partner. As the album arrives at the breakup itself, the fears and negative emotions bubbling under the surface of the first three tracks erupt into total devastation. In the album’s emotional climax, “Black Lake,” Bjork’s descent into heartbreak is mirrored by the production from co-producer Arca, which turns increasingly apocalyptic as Bjork mourns the death of her relationship and her family. Delivering some of her most powerful vocal performances ever on this album, you can practically feel the pain leaving her body, the accumulating bile of an unloving marriage finally being purged out of her as she unleashes lyrics like “You have nothing to give / Your heart is hollow.” This album delivers plenty of the pain that comes inherent to the breakup album’s formula, but what makes it truly special is the moments of beauty that come out of this emotional release. Vulnicura isn’t a funeral for a dead relationship, it is a full metamorphic cycle in which Bjork comes out the other side of the relationship reborn, scarred by her pain but not defeated by it. — Jackson
42. Charly Bliss — Young Enough
The first time I attempted writing this, I was drunk and typing incoherently on a mechanical keyboard. The next three or four times I attempted this, I marvelled at my own drunken genius. However, I have heard enough rational voices to throw that to the sewers, and, although I am not happy about it, will attempt to explain how this album makes me feel without pictures, using the phrase “the elders,” saying “what the fuck,” or “ripping off my lips,” whatever the fuck that means.
This album is very good. Extremely good. It has the best hooks of any album I have ever heard. It also plumbs frightening depths with such clarity and such delirious joy that I am genuinely startled every time I innocently put it on hoping for a raucous good time (which, I should add, it does provide). Toxic beasts tangle with profound hopes for authenticity in a skirmish that certainly won’t end after 24, or perhaps ever. Youthful emotions crash heavily over tender baby heads, splitting hairs and tearing out piercings. Those thought dead die, and rise again, yet Young Enough endures still, providing enough hooks to clear out all cornerstone species in the ocean and fill the creepy upside-down sinners room from Big Trouble in Little China.— Jeremiah
41. Solange — A Seat at the Table
Out of all the landmark albums created as a reflection of black life in America this decade, what sets A Seat at the Table is the calmness with which it encapsulates such a broad scope of experience, probably because it focuses largely on the experiences of black women. It acts as a sort of salve, with soundscapes that bring to mind a soft warmth as opposed to the more fiery moments that punctuate albums like To Pimp a Butterfly and Black Messiah. It is an album more of celebration than of anger; rather than focus in on all the things to be mad about, she simply states that they are there and many. She reaffirms with “F.U.B.U” that her music is by and for black people, and “some shit you can’t touch.” What really makes the album shine though, other than her cool assuredness, is Raphael Saadiq’s production, fusing modern funk and classical instrumentation with graceful care. — Josiah
40. Mitski — Puberty 2
My favorite album title of the decade is Beach Slang’s The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us. It’s a bit wordy for an album title but it’s a succinct description of the human condition. The next best thing is Puberty 2 by Mitski. Adolescence comes to an end, but we never stop growing or feeling awkward as we try to find our place in the world. Mitski Miyawaki knows just as little as you do and she’ll be the first one to admit it. She does, however, have a talent for conveying her lack of knowledge in a way that’s poetic and resonant. Puberty 2 is a song cycle that focuses on the universal themes of heartbreak and depression, but in such an intimate manner that it feels as if she’s singing directly to your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes she accomplishes this intimacy with poetics like on “Fireworks” when she sings “One morning this sadness will fossilize and I will forget how to cry”. On “Your Best American Girl” Mitski utilizes dynamics to keep the song engaging before exploding to deliver one of the most massive choruses of the decade. And then on “Thursday Girl” she just repeats the phrase “Tell me no” but does so with such yearning and conviction that it elicits a physical reaction. Mitski has all the tools to have a long and successful career, but coming up with another record as focused and consistent as Puberty 2 will be a tall order. — Will
39. DARKSIDE — Psychic
In a decade where “rock and roll music with guitars” has fallen in and out of favor seemingly by the day, isn’t it funny that the record from the 2010s that most follows in the lineage of Dark Side of the Moon — a record that makes you wanna pack a bowl and wonder about What It All Means with your dorm buddies — was made by a Chilean electronic music producer and a classically trained guitarist from London? The only official album released under the DARKSIDE banner, Psychic is a perfect marriage of Nicolas Jaar’s impeccable production skills and Dave Harrington’s incredible musicianship; his playing is the secret ingredient that makes the album work, ranging from his strutting licks on “Paper Trails” to his more complementary work on songs like “Heart.” Jaar, meanwhile, finds a way to out-James-Blake James Blake, putting his pliable voice to use not just on the bluesy workout of “Paper Trails,” but bad-trip wigouts like “Greek Light” and torch songs like “The Only Shrine I’ve Ever Seen.” The two great tastes turned out to taste great together, and Psychic stands as one of the great electronic albums of the ’10s, one that even people who aren’t bleepheads (present company included) adore. The first song released from Psychic was its monumental opening track, “Golden Arrow,” accompanied by a video capturing a thick plume of black smoke billowing in slow motion. That’s the album in microcosm: a little inscrutable at first, but once you look through the smoke, it’ll give you a high the likes of which very few albums released this decade can match.— Zach
38. Queens of the Stone Age — …Like Clockwork
Josh Homme came close to death in 2011 from complications during a knee surgery. But he didn’t go to heaven or see angels; he saw nothing. He stared at the abyss and the abyss stared back. Afterwards, Josh was hospitalized for weeks and bedridden for months. This entire experience sent him into a deep depression and from that darkness came …Like Clockwork.
With …Like Clockwork, Queens of the Stone Age step away from the all-gas-no-brakes hard rock of Songs for the Deaf and turn in the most diverse collection of songs in their career. Just across the first three tracks the band goes from brooding and woozy on “Keep Your Eyes Peeled”, to uptempo pop rock perfection on “I Sat By The Ocean”, to piano balladry on “The Vampyre of Time And Memory.” Homme switches roles from track-to-track with ease and wears every costume with an unforgettable swagger. Josh’s lead performance is aided by a wide supporting cast, with bandmates Troy Van Leeuwen and Dean Fertita, along with guest performers including Dave Grohl, Alex Turner, Trent Reznor, and Sir Elton John.
The common threads that tie the album together are an overwhelming sense of dread and lyrical themes of nihilism and fatalism. With more confidence than ever that there’s nothing else beyond this, Josh comes to believe that nothing matters and begins to lose touch with reality. Material objects have no meaning. People come and go. The only thing separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom are tails. Our God is the sun. The first lyric of the album hints “don’t look, just keep your eyes peeled” and by the last lyric he sees “one thing that is clear, it’s all downhill from here.” — Will
37. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — Skeleton Tree
You can tell a lot about an album from its first few seconds. Going off of that, the military drumroll and gut-scraping drone on “Jesus Alone” that opens Skeleton Tree, Nick Cave’s 16th album with the Bad Seeds, is one of the most foreboding calling cards of any album this decade. Recorded in the wake of the tragic death of Cave’s son Arthur, the songs that compose Skeleton Tree carry an unnerving sense of foresight. The lyric sheet is filled with visions of the end of the human age, worshippers outliving their gods, an unknown “you” falling from the sky and crash-landing in a field; it’s important to remember that the album was largely written prior to Arthur’s passing, but I don’t know if there’s a more harrowing collection of songs released in this or any decade.
Nick Cave has always been fascinated with death, but Skeleton Tree may be more accurately termed as a grief album, one that grapples with mourning as a public figure and finding temporary respite in sex, and one that sometimes breaks down into the simplest way to express these feelings when everything else fails: “don’t touch me,” “I need you,” “nothing else matters.” The album’s most miraculous aspect is how it closes in a place of peace and acceptance, an everyone-in-the-studio chorus of “it’s alright, now” that may be the most powerful moment in Cave’s entire discography. While Cave would reappear at the end of the decade to fully examine the aftermath of Arthur’s death with the devastating Ghosteen, Skeleton Tree is his defining statement of the 2010s, an album that provides deep despair and hard-earned hope for whenever the need arises. — Zach
36. Death Grips — Niggas on the Moon
Niggas on the Moon is the death of Death Grips 1.0. Whether that death can be perceived as how they’ve conducted themselves in the media since this release or the fact that they haven’t been able to reach the creative peaks this album climbs, Death Grips have become a different band after this album, for better or worse. With a v-drum kit full of Björk samples and vocalist Stefan Burnett/MC Ride at his most vulnerable, Niggas on the Moon is unlike anything else this decade, as it’s hard to connect this album to anything before or after its release, even within the band’s discography. Like, what other band is gonna do some of the shit Zach Hill does on this album like the outro to “Big Dipper” or the entirety of “Up My Sleeves?” Mystifying and esoteric, Niggas on the Moon remains the most haunting album of their career thus far. — Matty
35. Jeff Rosenstock — We Cool?
In 2017 I was depressed and my mom and dad saw my tiny little dick while I was sobbing in the shower listening to “Polar Bear or Africa.”
This album fucking shreds. Good job, Jeff. — Gavin
34. Titus Andronicus — The Monitor
Perhaps Patrick Stickles’ greatest curse was being way too correct about everything at the beginning of this decade. The Monitor is an incredibly prescient work, whether it be in the heavily copied “high ambition ramshackle band meets major label cash” production that’s inspired so many artists this decade, be it Car Seat Headrest or the dozen high-profile emo artists who will tell you it almost certainly saved their life, or the lyrics that landed right on the nose with the inhospitable political landscape we built for ourselves off the waning optimism of the Obama years. This is an album that treats the American Civil War as a lens for modern day depression and angst, and it walks the tightrope of engaging the concept sincerely without ever falling too hard into the inevitable cheesiness of such an audacious concept, through subtle narration and battle hymns presented over some of the tightest melodies a punk band has crafted this decade.
The sheer miracle of this band getting this kind of support at this time in their career produced a set of circumstances that made this a truly miraculous album. This is the best set of Bruce Springsteen songs since Tunnel of Love, with Stickles and the band channeling all their energy into something that sits higher than themselves, from the riotous choruses of “A More Perfect Union” and “No Future Part III” to the slower dread of cuts like bar-crawler “Theme from ‘Cheers” (which is obviously not the actual theme song to the sitcom “Cheers”). All in all, it’s a pummeling work, and although Stickles hates to admit it, a perfect and necessary one in not only the band’s career, but in the trajectory of the decade at large. Through The Monitor, cultural detritus from all eras has been cobbled together into a work that looks great next to the big hitters, even for a bunch of losers from New Jersey.— Rose
33. The War on Drugs — A Deeper Understanding
“Father, let me crunch that guitar. Give me more, so i may cackle, and feed my youths, those hungry birds demand solos.”
It’s been said that The War on Drugs only have one song, but they play it so well no one notices. A Deeper Understanding capped off a tremendous decade for the last bastion of Dad Rockers with some of the most soaring, atmospheric instrumentation from this impressively innovative band. Though Lost in the Dream may seem like it’s destined to be the group’s legendary album, tracks like “Holding On” and “Thinking Of A Place” prove they still have so much more to work with. — AJ
32. Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool
Here we are, at the end of the third consecutive decade in which at least one Radiohead album will likely be on the majority of the world’s end-of-the-decade lists. And if you are reading this blurb at all, I likely do not need to sit here and explain to you why this band has seemed to maintain such a high level of quality output, or why they remain such significant figures in the music world over 30 years into their careers’. It’s simply because they’re that good. And A Moon Shaped Pool solidifies that fact perhaps better than any other album the band had released prior to this. In the few years preceding this album, there was a sort of concern that Radiohead and their tangential projects were growing stale, or were becoming less emotionally affecting, as albums like The King of Limbs and Amok were met with relatively lukewarm reception. Fortunately, with the band’s 9th studio album, they were able to demonstrate that they are still very much capable of writing and recording incredibly compelling, dynamic, and moving music even in these later stages of their career. A Moon Shaped Pool sees Thom Yorke wading through his own personal strife, examining the deterioration of his relationship with his partner up close, and doing so under a blanket of some of the most immaculately ethereal production that Nigel Godrich has put to tape. The lush, organic side of Radiohead is met perfectly with the cold and alienated one. It’s just as somber as most Radiohead fans could ever want, but there’s a poignancy to it; some level of emotional precision that the band has never reached before. Would I say it’s their all-time best? Maybe not (I would — Alex). But it certainly eliminates any shred of doubt that Radiohead are one of the most enduring and significant musical groups of my lifetime. GOAT 10/10 thank you dads — Jake
31. David Bowie — Blackstar
Listening back years later with the knowledge of this album’s ultimate arrival hanging in the back of the mind, an act of karma, an ironic twist of cosmic predestination, expecting every ache and feeling the creak of each bone, the untethering of each individual strand, memory snapping in and out of focus while the larger picture looms close by. The journey is well-worn by this point, at times the euphoria washes over and the royalty precedes itself, every triumphant moment fossilized and relived again and again and again and again. Ebbs and flows, yet futile all the same, similar to this review, the expectation of the final word, the closing of the great man’s book even when it’s just not that easy, yet the definitive must always reign supreme, the linear notions of time ever gasping for air just long enough until they return back to the certain predisposed psyches of collective memory. Why bother with any of it, why even muster the courage to write these words nor revisit those modes of the past if not for purely selfish reasons? Bowie, mighty as he was (and he was, truly,) did not even have the answer. Try as he might, he could not even leave behind the clues, the keys, or any sort of direction out; just documents, little tools used to create archways and narratives across the ever-twisting time and space he now resides in. Make of the final hour what you will, push it, contort it into strange shapes; manipulate memories, redefine older ones, bastardize others. Bowie knew the spectacle lay within the misdirection and trickery. — Dyl
30. Open Mike Eagle — Dark Comedy
Like many other depressive people, I used to self-deprecate and use humor to deflect at a point in my life earlier this decade, when what I really wanted to have was just any kind of meaningful relationship. It would only make sense, then, that at the height of my tendency to put myself down, I’d immediately — obsessively — connect to an album whose opening lyrics mention making jokes so gallows that you need to “add a lol ’cause nobody seems to know that [you’re] joking.”
Dark Comedy is a desperate plea for connection cloaked in the performative shields of stand-up punchlines. Beneath even the brightest, funniest, and most light-hearted tracks on the first half of the album, there’s a persistent sense that Open Mike Eagle is using these raps to cope with a grimmer sense of self-regard. There always seems to be a turn into the more morose, the more reflective, just waiting to sucker punch you when you least expect it. How else to describe the bittersweet ode to living as part of an impoverished friend group on “Ice King Dream (Very Much Money)” following “Golden Age Raps,” which uses the same concept for a braggadocious joke? I could spend full paragraphs extolling the more humorous tracks on this album (the wordplay on “Qualifiers”! the stacked iconic lines of “Doug Stamper”! the goofy cybernetic fantasy of “Informations”!), but it’s always the more somber tracks that put this album over the edge for me. The centrifuge of distress that soundtracks “A Modern History of Dance” and the cyclical chaos of the ego on “Deathmate Black” resonate with me more because they cut deeper to the root of my self-loathing. As a depressive person, I find it’s easy to get caught in the sparseness, defeatism, and strategic cacophony of “Idaho,” which wagers that it might be better to stay in isolation than make the effort of venturing out into a world that’s just as lonely. But that’s why “Big Pretty Bridges (3 Days in Albuquerque)” makes for such an incredible closer, both as Open Mike Eagle’s direct thesis for establishing meaningful connections with others and as a mission statement for depressives like me. To an outsider, the jokes that Mike (and, in my worse days, myself) toss off can seem unthinking, perfunctory. But it takes a tremendous amount of effort and pain to be open enough just to do that. In other words, to crib from one of the most crushing lines on Dark Comedy, “look at me when I talk to you, ’cause this is not some shit I’m sleepwalking through.”— Nat
29. Death Grips — The Money Store
While plenty of albums in the preceding two decades dealt with our world’s mounting technological anxiety, these records largely held this phenomenon at a distance. The internet age was framed as a kind of impending dystopia, or an imaginary otherworld, not an inarguable fact of our daily lives. Previous attempts to grapple with this positioned artists as being in dialogue with these changes, but never as active participants in them. Enter The Money Store, arguably the first pop album to be wholly and completely of the internet.
Even though it had vague predecessors, The Money Store clearly marked a turning point, the moment the internet arrived en masse within our music culture. And I’m not talking about the /mu/ fanatics, the ARGs, or the industry hijinks, all of which could (and have, and will) fill multiple thinkpieces on their own. More than any album before it, TMS sounds like how the post-internet world operates, from its glitch-soaked production to its obscure samples, warped into unrecognizable facsimiles of themselves. Not to mention its memetic lyrical tendencies: the referential onslaught of “Hacker” singlehandedly spawned at least a half-dozen lines that linger in the cultural detritus to this day. Really, is there anything more online than an album that fashions one of its most memorable hooks from a garbled soundbite of Serena Williams yelling?
All these traits reflected the kind of copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy feedback loops that came to define the decade’s cultural cycles, and its unsettling tone now reads as anticipating how the internet’s early promise was squandered to authoritarian ends. Much of the album’s reception still fixates on these elements, but to indulge in them entirely is to neglect that The Money Store remains a songwriting triumph. Without the populist inclinations that underscore virtually every moment, its confrontational aesthetic would have certainly been dismissed as a flavour of the week. Instead, its expert deployment of pop song structures to abrasive ends rendered “like Death Grips” a crutch for describing nearly any artist with melodic chops and a distortion pedal. Although its torch has since been carried on by albums that reach for even further extremes, The Money Store remains a singular watershed, the point where the technological dam burst from the near future into our horrifying new present. — Lily
28. Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
In an era of oversaturation, with more media at our disposal than ever before, Kanye West has always had a gift for cutting through the noise and demanding attention. After infamously interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs, Kanye was one of the most famous people in the world and also one of the most hated. He responded by retreating to Hawaii for the better part of the next year in a self-imposed exile, but he wasn’t there to wallow. Instead, he worked on repairing his image the only way he knew how: by making the greatest rap album ever.
With the help of an A-list team of producers and collaborators, Kanye West reaches new mythical heights. Every song sounds decadent and regal, with soaring choral vocals, lush orchestral instrumentation, and towering collages of samples that, according to West, took over 5,000 hours to assemble. Every feature is career highlight, whether it’s established legends like Jay-Z and Raekwon, rising stars like Pusha T and Rick Ross, or up-and-comers such as Bon Iver and Nicki Minaj. Rather than pleading innocent, Kanye lays it all out on the table and straight up tells you he’s an asshole, but he’s also the greatest living artist so you have to forgive him. Because his greatest strength has never been his talent, creativity, or even his work-ethic. Rather, it’s a deeply ingrained egotistical belief beyond belief that he’s the best that drives him to visualize greatness and make it a reality. In career full of influential and beloved classics, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Kanye West’s definitive monument to his own ego, excess, and douchebaggery.— Will
27. Julia Holter — Have You in My Wilderness
In a decade marked by ever-increasing artistic anxiety over financial conglomeration over the means of creation, Julia Holter’s output was one of the brightest and genuinely moving, a passionate and talented musician coming into her own to dominate the art pop avant in such a way not seen since the heydays of Björk and Kate Bush. An argument can be made for any of her other albums; the ethereal and pastoral quietude of Ekstasis, the nocturnal cacophony of Loud City Song, the totalism and overwhelming beauty of Aviary. However, Have You In My Wilderness avoids the typical cynical trappings of pop aesthetics and reception with its brazen honesty, soulful compositions framed by a strange, dreamlike journey through the poetic, bringing to fruition an introspective peace giving way to gorgeous and poignant pleas for interpersonal compassion and tonal revolution. — Dyl
26. Father John Misty — I Love You, Honeybear
I Love You, Honeybear is a great album i have not listened to in about 3 years. I don’t really know how to approach it anymore, and my emotional distance from it has lowered it farther on my so called “list” then it probably deserves to be. I am genuinely frightened to put it on right now in fear of what may surface.
Here’s what I remember: ILYHB is an extremely heartfelt and heinous album about true love. Mr. John Misty hurts bad, but also horns bad, and really loves his freaking wife dude. He doesn’t really understand why, and tries really hard to understand why, but he is unable to understand why. All he knows is that his love and his life (which are, as we learn, one and the same) are extraordinarily bound up in contingency. It is in this contingency that he realizes that his love and his life lie, and it is beautiful and moving. Plus, to quote the man himself he’s “truly singing my ass off all over this motherfucker.” This is true. He has a voice of the angel, and uses it to great effect, and ouchies my motherfucking butt. Genuinely terrified thinking about this album, but I have one of 250 limited edition posters mounted about my computer as I speak. I never removed it from its plastic wrapping that the frame store put on it. Many people have gotten mad at me over this fact, but I do not know if it will ever come off. It is really the best artwork of the decade. Hoes extremely mad.
This really is one of the best albums of all time. My continued, genuine fear of it is a testament to that. It’s amazing how much great art I truly, profoundly fear. — Jeremiah
25. Deafheaven — Sunbather
Sunbather ranks among the decade’s greatest self-fulfilling prophecies: an album about wanting to make great art so badly that it propelled its creators to make great art about that very impulse. At its opening notes, the album feels on the verge of breaking apart under the weight of its own ambition, and every aspect of its composition serves to amplify this effect. From the imposing length of its four main tracks, to the way Kerry McCoy’s chord progressions strain agonizingly skyward with each iteration, to George Clarke’s impassioned vocals, the music here feels drenched in the type of grand yearning that one would expect to come from the famously dire circumstances it was written under. Sunbather wears the all-consuming nature of its production on its surface — it is the sound of young, desperate people engaged in a last-ditch attempt to leave something of lasting value in this world.
Thankfully, they succeeded wildly at it. So wildly that Sunbather has long-outlived the furor about the band’s metal bona fides that met its release. It now stands as the exact kind of totemic artifact it so self-consciously longed to become, the moment that canonized Deafheaven as one of the 2010’s definitive rock acts. Few other artists can boast the deft aesthetic synthesis or endurance-pushing performances the band became famous for. Nor, in George Clarke, one of the era’s most exceptional new lyricists. Throughout Sunbather, Clarke’s wail conceals an intricate poetic tapestry, broadening the album’s themes of desire to incorporate matters of class, poverty, trauma, family, addiction, isolation, and the way these cycles serve to trap people within themselves. It is a remarkable feat of construction, matched by the band’s uncanny dynamic abilities, and its cumulative impact is overwhelming to behold.
Sunbather is, at its core, an act of pure romanticism, so awash in the ferocity of its own feeling that it succeeds in transforming that force into something far greater than itself even as its sonics threaten to overwhelm it. Deafheaven improbably created the type of generational lightning-in-a-bottle record that one dreams either to make or to discover, and it is as rewarding to parse and revisit as it was to fall in love with for the first time. There is little else this decade that rivals its intensity, a work whose longing burns so bright that to listen to it feels like staring into the sun. — Lily
24. Daughters — You Won’t Get What You Want
I saw Daughters play their 2018 seminal release You Won’t Get What You Want on a miserable southern night with the rain pouring down and the fog leaking into the venue from all sides. I stood next to three men wearing black wizard cloaks. Alex Marshall pulled out what was left of the hair on the back of his head, accidentally(?) kicked someone in the face as they were trying to climb the stage, and bashed his microphone against his forehead several times in a row. Nick Sadler almost got into a fistfight with the sound engineer. My friend got his wallet stolen out of his pocket only for it to be stuffed down his shirt by the same perpetuator. I spent the last 20 minutes of the show trying to calm down a drunk woman by the bathrooms who was wearing heels not at all suitable for a punk show. Sweaty white men are the most terrifying when they are wearing all black and have handlebar moustaches. — Dyl
23. Kanye West — Yeezus
In the immortal words of Earl Sweatshirt, “what i drew from yeezus is that kanye is very horny and impatient”, and as I revisit the album at the end of the decade, I can’t help but come to the same conclusions. Yeezus is the crassest, the angriest, and most importantly the horniest album in Kanye’s entire discography. By all accounts, this should have been a complete and total disaster. On paper, dropping in a sample of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” between lyrics about “speaking swaghili” and a drop from an EDM trap song should have been a trainwreck, but on this album Kanye and the incredible team of producers who worked on this album manage to hone his manic impulses and crazy ideas into something that has stood the test of time remarkably well. Especially after ye, now that we’ve seen what a Kanye album looks like when the effort is even more last-minute and it doesn’t all magically come together, the fact that Yeezus still holds up as well as it does is equal parts impressive and baffling.
Working with former collaborators Daft Punk as well as a number of other artists like Gesaffelstein and TNGHT, the sonic palette of Yeezus takes Kanye’s previous experiments with electronic music to abrasive new extremes. From the moment the howling synthesizers of “On Sight” blare into your headphones like an air raid siren, this album makes its intentions very clear: the immaculate maximalism of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has been thrown out the window in the name of pure, uncut aggression. He makes that even more explicit moments later in the song as it suddenly cuts to an angelic choir singing “He gives us what we need / it may not be what we want.”The fact that this album was remotely commercially successful and songs like “Black Skinhead” have become staples in sports arenas is a testament to Kanye’s star power: only he could make something something so thoroughly strange, confrontational, and hostile and still have it become so ubiquitous.
The 2010’s have been a strange and complicated time for Kanye fans, and at this point I’ve grown really tired of Kanye’s instinct to constantly troll his audience for attention, but on Yeezus it was still really fun to watch Kanye be the wrestling heel. While his attempts at provocation on Ye feel much more like temper tantrums, Yeezus remains this wonderful moment in the timeline of his discography where Kanye’s antics still felt mostly harmless and Kanye was still committing to the same level of artistic perfection that defined his run up to that point. Yeezus simultaneously was the signaling of Kanye’s personal and artistic unraveling to come and also possibly the last truly great album he’ll make, a document of both the artistic genius and the egotism that have always equally defined Kanye. It’s loud, it’s incredibly silly, it’s immaculately crafted, it’s debaucherous, it’s everything Kanye is, for better and for worse, and for that reason it’s my favorite Kanye album of this decade.— Jackson
22. Tim Hecker — Virgins
Hail to the new sonic messiah, Tim Hecker. Compounding decades of auditory experience and experimentation into the grandest magnum opus of audial composition, the strands of time and memory bubbling to the surface of this record like a bad dream inevitably recalled in the waning moments of the metaphorical waking paralysis plaguing the everyday with the strangest of haunting nodes. Flashes of hung pianos and corrupted glitchy goodness terrify yet oddly comfort the weary mind, conveyed only through the most instinctual of human interactions. It is here Hecker reveals the falsehood of expectation, that all language is expressed within a vacuum, empty rooms left to collapsing dust, becoming mute when the understanding of the interactions with language is intrinsic to the nature of memory and being. With Virgins, the manipulation of communication through traditional mediums is no less a subversion of the norm than it is entirely personal, led and framed in such a way as to greatly influence one’s own perception of time. Everything is misdirection, everything is painful, and Hecker, through his many albums and countless hours of reflection on the meanings of the human condition, envelops in 50 minutes of elaborated time the devastating impact the haunting past and haunted future have on our present moment. — Dyl
21. Kevin Morby — City Music
City Music, the esteemed Apostle (alongside its esteemed ‘First Pope’ brother, Singing Saw, who is joining us here today in spirit [because I’ve already broken a lot of rules in this process and I figure having two albums wedged into one slot would be excessively confusing]), stands tall amongst disciples as perhaps the most lovingly conceived, carefully nurtured, and goodness-gracious-gob-rockin’ of its ilk. City Music, as relayed to us by High Priest Morby, is a peculiar form of music that occupies the physical space that surrounds us. For some, this music ensnares; some find liberation. For Kevin Morby, it is discovery — the delight of discovering that you despair, and the despair of discovering that you delight. Discovery, as seen in tin cans and dead friends, is miraculous, and stunning, and ground trembling. Every note, every line, we find Kevin and friends emerging, “arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.” Morby discloses himself unto himself, just as the City Music stands-out-in-itself-from-itself, just as we emerge, and abide, and sway. City Music exists in a constant state of ‘standing forth;’ listening to it unfurls, and unfurls, and unfurls — and for this, I am eternally grateful.
City Music, and Kevin Morby’s deeply tragic jilting at the hands of the Moon in “Come to Me Now” laid the foundation for the Moon King of Greth monomyth in Alex and my Minecraft world. It is deeply absurd, but also very tragic, and very sad (and canonical!). When my mouth fails to open, I remember it as a testament to the staying power that this simple album has - it strives and lives and delights and weeps (so much, in fact, that Kevin’s tour suit was decked out in tears) that it has become part of my immediate emotional family. It is an extraordinarily vital album about ordinarily extraordinary things, and beautiful and pleasant beyond compare.
Early on when discovering the record, I had the realization that it would be one of my favorite albums ever, a feeling I hadn’t had in a very, very long time — since I was a kid, at least. I savored it, and thought the feeling gone, but listening to it now, reflecting on it now, I know that it has not. It’s a deeply special record, and holds a very dear place in my heart. Just as I am excited to continue putting it on with profound curiosity (or without), I am excited to share it with anyone curious enough to ask for years to come.— Jeremiah
20. Foxing — Nearer My God
In 2015, Foxing were set. ‘Medic’ the standout cut from The Albatross was a staple in Spotify’s pre-programmed ‘Indie Rock’ playlist ecosystem — packaged coldly and callously in front of the least attentive audience imaginable. The band could have rested on their semi-virality, coasting off endless tours and festival sets to a crowd waiting to hear “that one song I like.” But Foxing’s ambition, and desire to fucking make it never wavered. What I love about 2018’s Nearer My God is the unashamed manner in which the band describes it. They see it as their OK Computer, and they’ll tell you they genuinely believe it’s the best album ever made.
Nearer My God never stops reinventing itself: unfolding over a sprawling tracklist full of nasty solos, horn sections, and an ambient arrangement cleanly cutting down the middle. ‘Grand Paradise’ is the thunderbolt that opens a storm of cacophonous, anxious energy — racing the album forward with the sense that these songs could fall apart at any moment. This music plays with a cinematic language, building up to tremendous peaks over and over again only to come crashing into the next onslaught of intensity. ‘Slapstick’ concludes with an anthemic explosion of cathartic release. ‘Gameshark’ whips up a sinister tornado of impending danger with high-pitched howls and spiraling distortion. There isn’t a song on the record that isn’t constantly trying to dazzle the listener with ambition and exciting ideas. I mean, ‘Bastardizer’ ends with a fucking bagpipe solo. Foxing shot for the fences with Nearer My God, and ascended high into the heavens. — AJ
19. Sufjan Stevens — The Age of Adz
Going in blind, it would be very difficult to determine that Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois (2005) and Age of Adz (2010) were made by the same artist. Despite these wild sonic differences, the core of Adz is still unique to Sufjan and Sufjan only. While Stevens pivoted away from his folk roots in favor of a more electronic sound, the orchestral scale of many of Illinois’ greatest cuts are still present on this follow-up LP. “Futile Devices,” of Call Me By Your Name fame, opens the album, and with its acoustic guitar it leads the listener to believe that maybe this album might be an Illinois redux after all, but as soon as you hear the liquidy synth work of “Too Much,” that all changes (One of the best if not the best TV performances of the decade is of this song on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon where he shows middle America he isn’t afraid to let his weirdness out). It’s a fear throughout that Stevens’ voice is may be at risk of being drowned out by these other-worldly synths, but it’s his lyricism that shines throughout. The album is loosely a concept album based on the art of Royal Robertson, which is where lyrics like “Gods of hosts created death / Fortune save me from his wrath / Spaceship at the house at night / Prophet speak what’s on your mind” (from “Get Real Get Right”) originate, but it’s also a recovery album — Stevens was hospitalized for a viral infection for much of 2009, resulting in songs like “I Want To Be Well,” where he almost yells: “I’m not fucking around / I want to be well, I want to be well, I want to be well.” The album’s back half is taken up with the behemoth 25 minute “Impossible Soul” about which probably too much has been said already on the internet — however it is very good. Age of Adz is a major shift in style for Stevens, but it doesn’t seem out of his comfort zone; indeed, his career is made up of experiment after experiment, and he seems right at home in all of them. — Delaney
18. 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
Fiona Apple is a mysterious entity who knows more than me, and has ascended. For this, I am grateful. I periodically go through extreme phases where she is the only artist I can listen to and interviews of hers are the only things I can read. I scour the far corners of brain looking for new ones, and learn new things every time. Did you know she had a brief marriage in France? Her music is her own, no matter how hard my grubby fingers try to wrest control of it from her. I just can’t! It belongs to her, and her only, and the fact that I desire nothing more than to absorb it fully into myself speaks to the unyielding grace and benevolence with which she composes and lives and shares.
This is the best album of all time. It takes many people much time to finally listen to it, but they all eventually agree. I agree with them. It is a master at her most masterful, paring down and juicing the fuck up at the same time. The love songs delight, and the anti-love songs devastate (not necessarily like, me, but whoever “Regret” is aimed at is definitely laying 6 feet under ground somewhere). The hooks songs zip, and the verses bop. The percussion scoots, drags, scuffs, chugs, screams, and rattles — the piano playing may be the best I’ve ever heard. Listener, beware!
Editor’s Note: This is the greatest album of all time.— Jeremiah
17. Carly Rae Jepsen — EMOTION
EMOTION, Carly Rae Jepsen’s masterpiece, feels like a party from beginning to end. We start out with “Run Away With Me,” which inspires only feelings of pure joy as when I saw her live this summer, it caused actual tears of joy to stream down my face. By the fourth track, “Gimme Love,” you’re dancing. The bass kicks in for the back half of the album, building up until you reach “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance,” which is a straight (lol) up club banger. A spiritual successor (or maybe younger sister) to Robyn’s Body Talk, EMOTION is full of tracks like “Run Away With Me” and “I Really Like You” that hit the same cultural touchstones as “Dancing On My Own” or “Call Your Girlfriend,” and bring out equally exuberant reactions in a crowd. Emotional from start to finish, EMOTION more than earns it name, but however, it’s never quite sad. Even when Jepsen is moody, she’s gleeful, she’s dancing, she’s hopeful, she’s triumphant. Jepsen knows the perfect pop formula, and she’s not afraid to use it. “Everything you ever wanted / Now it’s happening, now it’s happening!” — Delaney
16. The Hotelier — Goodness
To listen to Goodness is to soak in a sunbeam.
It’s upfront and in-your-face, one of the most vulnerable and earnest albums of all time. Following their isolated and incisive classic Home, Like No Place is There, Christian Holden walked his band out of the (proverbial) woods and into the (literal) field of grass that Goodness’ soundscapes occupy. When I close my eyes listening to this album, the visualization of a summer day — reeds waving on still water — comes to me with no effort at all. Featuring strikingly honest songwriting and crisp performances (the fucking drums on this thing), Goodness emerges as an anthemic bullet of self-validation, reassuring rock music in spite of an all-encompassing sense of imposing dread. It weaves together the specific and literary imagery of quiet and dusty cabins with heart-rending verses that arc into ethereally unbearable universality. Contained in the microcosm of these songs are periodic interludes of spoken word, choral arrangements, and hushed fireside ambiance.
While nothing sounds like the hardcore cuts off Home, and it lacks the iconic moments that still get posted on /r/emo once a week, this is a natural next step for The Hotelier, earning their acclaim as one of the most unique bands of the decade. Goodness is nothing you expect an emo album to sound like but everything you want it to make you feel. — AJ
15. Japandroids — Celebration Rock
Ye Gods, ye Mighty. Tremble upon the works of mortals, and weep, for the age of the divine has ended. The third chapter has closed, for now mortal man claims the earth. Despair, and cry out.
“But sir, the elders!”
“Fuck the elders”
You can’t hear it over the fireworks at the beginning but I swear to god on my life that that haunting, harrowing exchange is buried deep in the mix during the beginning of “The Nights of Wine and Roses.” I promise you. This I swear. The fucking elders, what the fuck.
Celebration Rock is the best album of all time. It should also be noted that rocks very hard. It is uniquely life-affirming, a rowdy-raucous-God-fearin-friend-lovin-lover-kissin-beer-drinkin-tear-weepin peal of drums, thunder, and selfhood.
There was a period of time during the great schoolwork wars of 2016 when I decided that putting on Celebration Rock while I tried and failed to do assignments in the wee hours of the morning in the library was the correct way to appease my disease-addled mind and I’m not sure why I expected that to go well but it ended up being really formative anyways. Instead of straining my eyes staring at a blank word document I was instead absolutely rocking out while straining my eyes staring at a blank word document. At a certain point during adventures like that, you will know God.— Jeremiah
14. Mount Eerie — A Crow Looked At Me
The fact that something this viscerally intense is also music seems to me a phenomenon unique to this album. As a matter of fact, an observation that I’ve heard ad nauseam about A Crow Looked at Me is that it just doesn’t “feel” like an album. I don’t necessarily agree with that sentiment, but from a production standpoint these songs are very minimalistic, and there are only a handful of instances on the album in which Phil adds something aside from just guitar and vocals. Some tracks have very light percussion or tinges of piano, but for the most part, the instrumentation is pretty meager. This in itself obviously isn’t enough to warrant denying its status an album (this isn’t even Phil’s most stripped down album), but it eschews a lot of other singer-songwriter conventions as well, particularly in his words which read more like the diary entries of a man deep in the throes of grief and trauma and death then they do lyrics to a song out of which people are supposed to derive some sort of enjoyment. If it feels too brutal, or oppressive, or uncomfortably personal, it’s because that’s the exact characterization of death that Phil Elverum is attempting to paint here.
Art has always utilized death as a poetic device, or adorned it with metaphor and symbolism, but that notion is categorically rejected time and time again throughout these tracks. Real death is absurd, unfair, and ruthlessly hard to find meaning in, and the songs go well out of their way to make sure that fact comes through with as little embellishment as possible. But in nearly direct contrast, Phil will occasionally veer off and obsessively scour his surroundings looking for something meaningful or symbolic anyway, almost unintentionally. In “Ravens”, for example, Phil talks about two ravens flying by and believing them to be an omen. In “When I Take Out the Garbage at Night” he talks about leaving the windows open in case “something needs to leave”, despite the room growing cold due to an incoming thunderstorm. And “Toothbrush / Trash” is literally about Phil feeling guilt from throwing away Geneviève’s toothbrush and trash, and feeling bad about letting a fly out of the window, thinking that “maybe that was her too”. Even the name of the album itself, A Crow Looked at Me, is in reference to an experience in which Phil and his daughter encounter a crow on their walk through the woods, and feeling it to be too important to ignore. All before going back to rejecting the idea that something this senseless can even have meaning at all.
At its core, though, A Crow Looked at Me is not about death; it’s about the consummate annihilation of someone’s personal life, and it remains hard to talk about because of how complete this expression is. How are we supposed to critique or even wax poetic about this man’s feelings on the death of his wife? It feels rude to acknowledge how good the album is — the overwhelming skill, vulnerability, and power in the music and words — because any judgment we pass on the work feels inherently tied to the tragedy itself. It’s hard to say that “Soria Moria” and “Ravens” are two of Phil’s best songs because it feels like tacit support of what has happened. This being said, A Crow Looked at Me is a really important album that I think will mean a lot to a lot of people going forward. The work Mr. Elverum did in processing his grief is incredibly vital, and many of us will come to know loss this heavy someday, if we don’t already. — Jake & Alex
13. Frank Ocean — channel ORANGE
Because my only form of music listening in the early 2010s were MP3s from rap forums, my experiences with channel ORANGE at the time of its release were briefer than I would have liked. For at least a solid week though, when the album was streaming on a site specifically for it (remember when that was a thing?), I was obsessed, until I wasn’t. For a few years, the album would occasionally slip into the memory hole for me, until I’d find it again and realize just how important this album was to me.
So when everyone was freaking out and trying to figure out when we’d get Boys Don’t Cry (the album that would eventually become Blonde and maybe Endless too?), I was perfectly content to wait. The deep, rich songwriting on this album and the characters Frank Ocean presented left me with plenty to explore. Sometime the queer-tinged “Forrest Gump” or “Thinkin Bout You” is what gets to me, other times it’s the cracked lens of nostalgia on “Sweet Life” or “Crack Rock,” or hell, maybe the debauchery of “Pyramids” or “Monks” is worth falling for some days. While nostalgia, ULTRA. might have put Frank on the map as someone to watch, it was this album that confirmed his fierce originality, and his spot as one of the most important voices of our generation. — Matty
12. Vampire Weekend — Modern Vampires of the City
Modern Vampires of the City came out in May 2013 when I was a junior in high school. It was the first time I had ever heard of Vampire Weekend, and I assumed they were an emo band, which at the time was something that made me very skeptical. However, I was intrigued by the cover and surprised at the multitude of very positive iTunes reviews that called this album a significant maturation, and as a Radiohead obsessive and Kid A acolyte, I had to bite. I listened to some of the iTunes previews and didn’t like them, but was still too curious, and walked to my local record store after school to buy the album on CD.
What a fortuitous decision that was! Vampire Weekend has since become one of my favorite bands, and the layered writing, existential themes, and unpredictable genre mashups on this album have continued to captivate me throughout the past 6 years. The self-portrait Koenig paints of his struggle with faith is compelling and relatable no matter your background (I was raised agnostic and remain that way), and I’ve found that my relationship to it has only grown in stature over time. At the core of the obvious religious, political, and mortality themes, the thing this album really grapples with is the growing pains of becoming an adult and the weight of the responsibility of taking care of yourself.
The music on this record has a life of its own. There are analog sounds here that I have simply never heard before and have not heard since. At times the album feels almost downright ramshackle, and at each emotional peak where it feels like Ezra might just fall apart, the music threatens to do the same. Make no mistake: they put WORK into these songs. Every performance is heartfelt, every production choice deliberate. They worked hard tinkering with the percussion and keys to make them sound “underwater,” and this absolutely comes across to the listener. Modern Vampires of the City has so much to offer and consistently rewards repeated listens. Also, it bangs. I can’t think of anything more I could ask of it. — Alex
11. Joyce Manor — Never Hungover Again
LOOKING AT YOUR FACE IN THE DARK
YOU DON’T EVEN LOOK THAT SMART
COULD NEVER MAKE IT PAST THAT PART
AND I NOW I GUESS WE NEVER WILL
I cannot tell you how many times I have screamed this, and many other lyrics from Never Hungover Again in my car this past year. Is it weird that I’m talking about a record from 2014 that I didn’t fully connect to until almost five years later? Yes. Do I care? No, because this album whips ass and hits you right in your quarter-life crisis like no other album. Have I ever meticulously taken down a screen door to my home after I got locked out coming home from a horrible date? Not necessarily. Does every cell in my body relate to “Victoria” anyways? You bet your ass they do.
And that’s really the strength of this album and of Joyce Manor’s catalogue as a whole, creating these personal, hyper-specific scenarios for the listener that you can’t always make sense of. Yet, there’s just something about them that speaks to you anyways. It’s a strength that’s carried some of the biggest alt rock bands of other decades, from the Smiths to Weezer. While I pray to the Gods every day that Barry Johnson doesn’t end up becoming a Tory or a weird #YangGang guy, it’s his work on this album that will cause people to forever defend this band no matter what. — Matty
10. Japanese Breakfast — Soft Sounds from Another Planet
I have an unfortunate habit of writing from a detached, analytical perspective. Call it pretentiousness, or muscle memory from my past life as a failed musicology student, or just a general fear of vulnerability, but I’ve always struggled to write about music in the first person. Everything must be held at a distance, an object for study and dissection rather than something to be experienced. There are some albums, however, that carry such uniquely personal significance to me that I have no way to meaningfully discuss them without delving into that informal place my critical superego prevents me from exploring on paper. Soft Sounds From Another Planet is one of those albums.
I first heard Soft Sounds during one of the most fraught periods of my life. I had been living as an out trans woman for about six months by then, and had experienced great personal upheaval on every level. My familial and personal relationships had been strained to their limits, and the way I navigated the world had been changed enormously by the consequences of living as a visibly femme person. My sense of safety, selfhood, and of the world around me had all been altered in profound and isolating ways that I still struggled to express. I was in a phase of heavy reflection about these changes during a layover, on the way back from a music festival where, for the very first time, I spent time around people who had only ever known me as my out self, when I decided to give the album a listen.
Soft Sounds felt like all those lonely sensations of out womanhood projected on a giant screen, my new reality evoked in art. It was not until it began playing that it dawned on me: I had never heard those feelings expressed before. Certainly not like this. It felt like coming home to something for the first time, just as my rapidly-changing body had in those fragile early months. Michelle Zauner had created a work that reflected the often-painful complexity of moving through the world as a woman, in the way I moved through the world as a woman. In a way that resisted the flowery tropes of canonical “women on womanhood” art, that acknowledged the knotty, uncertain, painful, resilient, beautiful motions of coming into oneself. And, crucially, in a way that acknowledged the fear and tumult of doing so in the midst of our Trumpian nightmare world, mere weeks before the full ugliness of the “cruel men” alluded to throughout the album was exposed at an unprecedented scale. After six months of being lost in the frightening and disorienting motions of nascent womanhood, Soft Sounds was the moment that allowed me to feel found.
My experience does not appear to be a unique one. I learned this one year later, at the same festival I was returning from when I had that first listen. Seeing the reverence in the faces of people around me, almost all women — many of them non-white, non-cishet women — as Japanese Breakfast took the stage to the opening drones of Diving Woman, confirmed that Soft Sounds had been a quietly life-changing album for countless people. We sang the words to “Road Head,” “Boyish,” and “The Body is a Blade” as if they were pulled from our own heads, as if they were sacred texts that had allowed us to feel more seen than ever before. The album had reached into the inner lives of those of us who remain invisible, pushed aside, and silenced, and externalized them in a way we could connect to, that made us feel part of something greater which allowed us to get through the next day, no matter how difficult it was. Companionship and timing were now more than abstract ideas: they had become concrete, life-giving, life-saving forces, who, like us, were oh so beautiful to revel in. There are very few albums in a generation with that sort of power. I will be forever grateful to Soft Sounds for sharing itself with me at the time I needed it most. — Lily
9. Kendrick Lamar — good kid, m.A.A.d. city
While good kid, m.A.A.d. city was only just the beginning of Kendrick Lamar’s incredible run of music this decade, there’s some special alchemy in this particular album that I keep coming back to even more so than his incredible follow ups DAMN. and To Pimp A Butterfly. Perhaps this sentimentality is mainly a product of the fact that good kid, m.A.A.d. city came out during my high school years as I was getting more and more into rap music for the first time, but I still contend that this remains Kendrick’s best work as it is the most perfect marriage of his intellectual and crowd-pleasing instincts. The magic of this album is that it’s somehow Kendrick’s singles album and and also an incredibly conceptual LP where each track works as a standalone statement but when put together in sequence they tell a complete narrative. It’s easy enough to attempt to make an album conceptual or cinematic by simply tacking on a couple of sketches, but on this album Kendrick goes above and beyond to take listeners into his world and create a compelling character arc without ham-fisted storytelling techniques. We see Kendrick’s home city of Compton through his past and present perspectives as he combines stories of youthful indiscretion like “Backseat Freestyle” and “Art Of Peer Pressure” with tracks like “Real” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” where he reflects on his past with maturity and insight he lacks earlier in the album, using different inflections of his voice to show what age Kendrick is at without having to say it. Everything from the lyrics to the vocal inflection to the interstitial voicemails are all working in sync, all in the service of the same story beats. It all feels so effortless yet so precise. Like a perfect movie, there isn’t a wasted second or moment out of place. And then on top of all that you have the Jay Rock “Money Trees” verse, which makes me want to do a backflip out of a second story window.— Jackson
8. Destroyer — Kaputt
This is a multimedia review. I’ve had this planned for ages, even before I got drunk and lost all track of time.
VISUAL MEDIA:
Ram in a Thicket. Sculptor unknown. Age roughly 2000 BCE
WRITTEN MEDIA:
Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion.
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink,
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.The very deep did rot -
O Christ! — that ever this shall be
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Jeremiah writes about the album:
This album is magical. My head hurts, but this album is magical, and Dan Bejar is the only person I can trust. I’m not sure there is an album as well produced or mixed as this one, for one thing. For another, Dan Bejar is the only person I can trust. It is about 8 spaces too low on this list as it occupies a coveted spot in a holy trinity that is apparently known only to me but I think known in most hearts.
Editor’s Note: Despairing is the natural condition that Kaputt finds the listener in. Despairing is the natural condition that encompasses all other natural conditions — this is known to many, but open to few. Kaputt opens it and places it on a shelf, and revels in it. Despair and all its wonder parades itself for us and we laugh and revel and rejoice and weep and find heart — for this is the natural condition that we find ourselves in. In absences we find the inverse, and Kaputt is ripe with the inverse: wrested from dusty harbors, we find ethereal sax and the imperiled stasis of chasing some girls and/or cocaine through the back rooms of the world all night. Despair drives plate tectonics, and plate tectonics drives extinction events — this is known to us through critical analysis of the Permian Extinction (the Great Dying). Despair is the only thing that is known to us, and is the natural condition of things. Kaputt recognizes this, and despairs, and revels.
“Don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves, don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves, don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves.”
Editor’s Note: Every song on Kaputt may be the greatest song of all time — a true testament to the frightening power of ye who despair. and “Bay of Pigs (Detail)” simply exists. It is Amos’ basket of fruit. Beware!
Kaputt is beautiful musically and lyrically as well. Dan Bejar is the greatest songwriter to ever live, and this album rocks my socks off. No sock rock, I like to call it (as opposed to a “guitar sock rock” record such as Celebration Rock, which I like to listen to while wearing my blue guitar socks). Mr. Bejar has scoured every inch of every velvet chaise and soot-stained lover’s booth to find words to slur through enveloping, ethereal fields of vision — this is the tunnel/albatross he bore for us, and yielded to us. And, evidently, to his daughter, as many of these songs were first conceived and sung as lullabies. For this, I tremble, and am grateful.— Jeremiah
7. Jeff Rosenstock — WORRY.
There’s an image from a recent interview with director Bong Joon-ho that says something to this effect: “I tried to express a sentiment specific to the Korean culture, but all the responses from different audiences were pretty much the same. Essentially we all live in the same country called capitalism.” Over the last several decades, Jeff Rosenstock has been cataloguing his strange anarcho-punk anxieties, packing gigantic choruses into records that maybe a few kids in a basement would get excited about, but never quite finding the audience he was looking for. With WORRY., that audience found him instead. Jeff had never changed what he was writing about, cataloguing his personal inadequacies and the absurd politics of purity in an increasingly co-opted music scene, but in an incredibly frictional time around the 2016 election, these themes suddenly resonated that much harder with music listeners who found him then.
Musically, the record is a culmination of all the styles and ideas that he’d carried with him through the last dozen or so bands he’s been involved in, but at heart it’s a pop-punk album, and a damn high watermark for the often-dismissed genre. Just listen to little parts like the bassline on “Wave Goodnight to Me”, a piece which could hold its own as a lead melody, or the full-throated guitar leads accenting the chiptune-ish synth work on “Festival Song”. These dozens of touches, along with the deft hand of producer Jack Shirley, build the record into a sound that makes the songs not just catchy, but a thrill to listen to and discover new details every time. Similarly, the lyrics are a hearty shout into the void at the tribulations of finding love and personal comfort in the death knell of late capitalism, becoming a “willing participant” in the very systems that seek to destroy the cultures you care about deeply.
Obviously though, I would be remiss not to mention that part of WORRY. The album’s greatest strength is its structure that’s damn near identical to the immortal Abbey Road, with its A-side being comprised of the lengthier tracks that can be seen as the big singles and emotional anchors, and the second half being a freewheeling medley of songs that run around the two minute mark. From this point, Rosenstock manages to throw every kitchen sink idea that’s ever propelled his creative urge (Hardcore!!! Synth pop!!!!!! SKA!!!!!!!!!!!) into one fifteen minute genre playground of revelatory rock music. When it finally comes to a close, it feels absolutely exhausting, but one gets the sense that even in the fact of all this absurd existential terror, there’s something worth saving, and even Jeff is smart enough to notice that.— Rose
6. Car Seat Headrest — Twin Fantasy
Trying to insert any sense of objectivity in the way we talk about Twin Fantasy is probably a futile plan because it is an album that inherently attaches itself to you in deeply personal ways. It’s a simple rock record about a bad relationship and the following breakup, but it sits outside the normal confines of rock, with the original recording feeling like it could fall apart at any second and the 2018 remake projecting itself as a pristine pop document to sit alongside not just any modern indie record, but with the Spector-style studio records that inspired the melodic ideas at its core. The original record feels like a piece made in a moment of incredibly raw emotions, and the remake is a laser-precise machine made to tear your heart out. “Nervous Young Inhumans” in its original form is a ratchety jam that mellows out into a nervous confessional, in its new state it’s evolved into a full on groove in the vein of the Killers. “Cute Thing” is now a full-throated arena rock song compared to its earlier endearment. Regardless of the changes in arrangement, however, is the simple fact that the songs at the core of Twin Fantasy are just excellent rock songs regardless. Both a cult classic and a universally powerful record, Twin Fantasy is the kind of album that will be striking to anyone from the first drum hits.
Even the very act of recording and subsequently re-recording an entire album track-for-track is something that makes this a unique musical experience. And unlike the basis of some criticism I’ve seen towards this concept, I really don’t see this as re-doing songs in order to endow them with a level of commercial success they didn’t have before. As a matter of fact, Will Toledo has done this very thing many times throughout his discography, long before he was ever signed to a major label. Sometimes full songs will appear on more than one project with some sonic variation, sometimes it’s repeated melodies, and every once in a while you’ll encounter one of the many lyrical motifs that show up on random songs, tying Car Seat Headrest’s discography together like a spider web. Sometimes certain moments or places or events in life stick with you permanently, and it only makes sense that things would reoccur in a discography that’s so well-known for being almost voyeuristically personal. And when you have an entire album dedicated to revisiting the past, it’s easy to notice the rifts in meaning and changes in perspective that come with maturity, and just having more life experience.
For instance, the entire monologue at the end of the aforementioned “Nervous Young Inhumans” has been changed to reflect anxieties that resemble something much closer to a touring musician contemplating the past than they do to a 19-year-old college student in the midst of actual, current emotional turbulence. There are also new lyrics in the song “Famous Prophets” that seem to be Will directly expressing regret at how he handled the writing of the previous version of the album, giving the new version a whole extra level of meta self-reference. Not making the new version good in spite of the old version, but making the new version contingent on the fact that the old version exists at all. The fact that the songs have been rerecorded, and the reasons why they were rerecorded are both part of what the album is about.
The ending monologue/voicemail from “High to Death” maybe explores this relationship the best. The high school student talking about how she lost a sense of connection to the art that she created seems to be a direct reflection (heyyo) of how Will probably feels about the original version, and is perhaps why he made a new version to begin with. The events of Twin Fantasy were clearly very formative and important to its creator, and losing touch with those events and that time period (especially considering how the original album has kind of taken on a life of its own in the public) is probably hard to deal with. In the end it’s become a work untethered from its creator and something worth hearing from either end of its creation. It’s a unique work, built in pairs. Will Toledo please unblock willforthrill.— Jake & Rose
5. Sun Kil Moon — Benji
I could talk at hours (and have, on the Indieheads Podcast) about what makes this album so special musically and lyrically, but what makes this album my album of the decade is something deeper and more profound than any straightforward critical analysis would yield. In my view, the primary goal of all art is to bridge human connection, to communicate some ineffable feeling that feels unique to yourself but actually is essentially human. The experience of being alive is predicated on the isolation of consciousness, of being stuck in your own perspective, but a great piece of art can tear down those walls of isolation and reveal how we’re all a part of one story, one that has been going on long before any of us got here. James Baldwin famously said “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
Benji, more than any other piece of music or art from this decade, has taught me about the experience of being alive in the way only great art can, and the more life I live, the more I find myself returning to this album as an essential text for how I view the world around me. There are a lot of people different Mark sings about on this album: mothers, uncles, brothers, aunts, old friends, neighbors, kids from elementary school, ex girlfriends, and every single person he sings about is treated with an unwavering commitment to empathy and understanding no matter how long that relationship may have lasted. And as life (and often death) happens to all of these people, Mark’s heart breaks for each of them equally, mourning the loss of a cousin he barely knew not because of anything she said or did for Mark but because she was a human as deserving of love and respect as anyone else. What’s crushing about Carissa burning to death or Micheline getting robbed by her boyfriend or any of the other tragic figures in this album are not the awful fates that they were dealt, but rather the hopes and dreams and love they left behind. The tragedy of Jim Wise is not the fact of him mercy killing his wife in the hospital, it’s that no one is around to appreciate the bright red cardinal perched on the birdbath anymore.
There are countless albums this decade I loved, but none that feel as essential to who I am as a person in the way that Benji immediately was for me. It’s an album I know I will revisit time and time again, not simply because I could listen to Mark Kozelek tell stories for hours, but also because I know there will be countless more days where I need to be reminded of the universality of the human experiences depicted here. Challenges lurk around every corner in life, and while the world can often feel needlessly cruel in its randomness and chaos, when I listen to Benji I feel less alone in that expedition into uncertainty. We all “want love like anyone else”, we all make mistakes, we all deserve respect and dignity, we all go through suffering, and when we go, we will all be missed dearly by those who love us. — Jackson
4. Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp a Butterfly
Sometimes it all comes down to craft.
As a young fan and critic reading the retrospectives, oral histories, and best-of lists of past eras, one starts to fantasize about what it was like to be there when the canonical Great Albums dropped. “How would it have felt to be following music when Ready to Die came out? Hounds of Love? Songs in the Key of Life? Velvet Underground & Nico?” The fantasy of being there for a comparable moment becomes a mythical high to chase, one we hope might be on the way with every high-profile announcement, with every obscure Bandcamp project we check out on a whim. There are albums across this spectrum that we grow to adore, disregard, or despise over time. Such is the nature of fanaticism. Lingering behind all this though, is the dream of being confronted with such undeniable capital-G Greatness that you just know, “this is one of those moments.” To Pimp A Butterfly was one of those moments.
To Pimp A Butterfly has become so integrated into the cultural wallpaper that it’s easy to forget how easily it could have failed. Following the instant-classic reception of good kid, mAAd city, and Kendrick’s infamous throne-claiming “Control” verse, anticipation for another full-length was at a fever pitch. “How could he possibly follow this?” The stylistic whiplash of lead singles “I” and “The Blacker the Berry” confounded matters further. Then, the announcement, the title, the artwork. “How in the HELL is he going to follow this?” The idea that To Pimp a Butterfly could equal GKMC seemed preposterous enough on its own. That it could surpass it was beyond consideration. I remember hesitating to press play on the morning of its release, finally thinking “alright, if he jumps the shark then fine, we still got some great albums along the way.” I’ll never forget my sense of “oh my god is he doing this” gleefully morphing to “oh my god he’s DOING this” as the album unfolded. “Holy shit, this is it. This is IT.”
Criticism in the 2010s took on an unprecedented interactive quality. The proliferation of social media, streaming, and mass communication turned the once-solitary ritual of discovering music into an inescapably communal one. Often, this shift has been to the detriment of the form. Albums have been met with increasingly polarized reception, based either on superficial indulgence-in or reaction-to excess hype. But there is a unique joy to the rare times nearly everyone within your filter bubble seems to be in agreement about something — when every group chat, timeline, and comment section is bristling with that ecstatic feeling of “Holy shit, this is IT.” In a decade defined by cycles of heightening despair, there were few salves like you and your circle getting to just feel excited by something.
Music can be important, radical, ambitious, and transformative, yes, and these are necessary hallmarks of an album’s impact on the culture. Beneath all that, though, is the fact that sometimes you hear an album so perfectly constructed that it makes you really freaking happy, and it gives you an excuse to be really freaking happy about it with all your friends. Together, you get to not only witness a moment, but share it. This was a decade very short on comfort, but one of the great comforts I’ll get to carry into the coming decades is the memory of being there for To Pimp a Butterfly. Even better: I will get to carry the knowledge that through it all, I wasn’t alone. — Lily
3. Japanese Breakfast — Psychopomp
Editor’s Note: [1:51:32 AM] Jeremiah: so AJ
My favorite album of all time is Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Not a surprising or controversial choice, but it is. Celebrating its 15th anniversary at the tail-end of the decade, the album cast a long shadow over the indie rock of the 2010s. Though it’s been examined to death, there’s no denying the almost mythical quality in which Funeral seemed to materialize out of nowhere in 2004 and elevate Arcade Fire to superstar status overnight. That volatile sensation has seemingly been lost in modern rock. Now, bands fight tooth and nail to climb up long ladders of means testing, media coverage, and privileged positioning to maybe earn their way to a KEXP session three years after scoring a 7.9 on Pitchfork. There was a running joke on the Indieheads reddit a few years back about finding ‘the next Funeral’ — if ever there could be one.
My favorite album of the decade is Japanese Breakfast’s Psychopomp. And though I didn’t realize at the time, it is the perfect successor to Funeral’s throne. Michelle Zauner’s debut LP sliced through the noise of a wildly crowded year (seriously, count how many albums from 2016 are on this list). Packed full of hypnotic melodies, consistently stellar guitar work, immersive interludes, and incisive lyricism, Psychopomp stands as an infinitely replayable and rewarding record with stunning confidence and audacious self-assurance. Written after the subsequent and shocking loss of Zauner’s aunt and mother; it grapples with death in a coherent, tangible pathos a la A Crow Looked At Me but brings moments of pop songwriting as infectious as Emotion.
My favorite song on Psychopomp is the first track, “In Heaven.” It welcomes the listener at once with a cascading piano riff and layered strumming, hiding a dark wave of grief beneath waves of shimmering rhythm. I won’t include Zauner’s lyrics out of context here, as they are so paramount to the cohesive experience of the album. In only 25 minutes, Japanese Breakfast plot an arc of love, loss, and identity. There isn’t a single second on Psychopomp that isn’t firing on all cylinders: working tirelessly to captivate and command every ounce of the listener’s attention.
My favorite feeling when listening to an album is realizing when one deeply resonates — connecting in such a way I am raptured with a significant sense that this piece of art is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It’s an incredibly rare sensation, if not unrealistic. When it does come along, as it did with Psychopomp, it is a once-in-a-lifetime moment of euphoria.— AJ
2. Frank Ocean — Blonde
There’s a moment on one of the recent Blonded Radio episodes (Blonded 008 to be exact) where, as the opening to Vegyn’s track “It’s Nice to Be Alice” plays, Frank jokingly chimes in saying “This is epic. Stereo. Oh it’s STEREO. It’s wide. Far out on both sides,” and asking “Who else sounds like this? Shit don’t sound like this.” This jokey rant he goes on actually epitomizes a sonic quality that is all over both Vegyn’s solo music and his production on Blonde; this grandiose, cinematic and wistful quality that, as Frank points out, practically no other artists can pull off in the same way.
2016 had, arguably, the largest density of great albums in any year this decade, and yet Blonde has this ineffable quality where it ages perfectly and cuts deeper than even the Radiohead album that came out that year (helped in large part by the exquisite Jonny Greenwood string arrangements on “Seigfried”). In a time when the preceding hype seems to constantly eclipse the quality of the actual album, the four year silence before Blonde couldn’t have been more deserved considering the result we got. The fan’s cries for a new album that permeated that four year period are still present now in the hype around Ocean’s upcoming project, but they are quieter now, as if everyone knows that if we simply don’t rush Frank and give him the time he needs, he’ll deliver the goods.
Blonde came out five days after my 18th birthday, less than two months before the 2016 election, and is inflexibly linked in my mind with feelings of growing older and trying to gain insight into how the world works. I’m constantly amazed by Frank’s ability to draw from personal experience without feeling indulgent, lacing real life experiences with his ability to transport the listener with even the most minimal instrumentation. I think a lot about the juxtaposition of the “Be Yourself” interlude with “Solo”, going from motherly advice about staying off drugs to the smoked out sadness of single life. There are so many small moments like this on the album I obsess over that feel innately relatable. The subdued, psychedelic yet deeply honest nature of Frank’s songwriting lends this album to being combed over constantly for new meanings, which is what I’ve done since the album came out and is probably what I will do for the rest of my life, as well as with every new song or album he puts out.— Josiah
1. Joanna Newsom — Divers
Divers is the greatest album of the decade. If you need convincing, I’ve penned a much longer essay about this that you can read here. Divers is an album that sneaks up on you very slowly over the course of a year or two and then ensnares you, which can mean any number of things: some listens the album is a gentle hug from behind; a companion you need to feel safe and okay, and other listens it wraps a cable around your neck and drags you throughout town, loudly ringing a bell and heralding the times to come. This album is remarkable in its gentle exploration of some of life’s most bitter truths. It spirals through human existence and time itself, slamming its head on every single edge, and lands on a soft bed and thinks: it’s alright.
That’s the essence of Divers. Some of its songs are truly punishing (looking at you, “The Things I Say,” “Pin-Light Bent,” and “Divers”), but at its core the record is a celebration of life. As personal and dark (but never dramatic) as it is, Ms. Newsom maintains that it was the most fun she’s had recording an album. It shows: Divers is genuinely playful, and listening to her have fun while meticulously detailing things that she is obviously hurting about — like the slow decay of a friendship on “Goose Eggs” — can be plain-and-simple transformative. You want to match her energy. You want to remember that “the moment of your greatest joy sustains.” You want to stand brave. It is a timeless exploration of the ups and downs of life, and in this way Divers is endless: it will always be relevant, it will always be relatable, and it will always be this fundamentally human. It’s an astonishing document of authenticity and artistic vision, and a passionate love letter to being alive. Most of all, it’s just goes. Every song is so well put together. Every word is vital and necessary. It’s so fucking good dude. — Alex
The list you just read was put together by the following folks: Matty, Alex, Zach, Dyl, Jeremiah, Rose, Jake, Lily, AJ, Delaney, Jackson, Nat, Gavin, Ethan, Josiah, and Kasia.
