2019 is a bittersweet close to a complicated decade. At its most rewarding, this year’s music offered solace from a troubling time, even when it faced crisis head on. As we head into a new era, here are fifty of the releases that captured the ‘10s’ waning moments the best.
50. ZUU Denzel Curry
Difficult to categorize and impossible to stop, Denzel Curry has been creeping on ah come up for years now. The Florida MC’s fourth album might be the one that gets him the exposure he deserves - lead single “RICKY” is the hip hop record of the year, a crash course in the school of hard knocks that reverently melds Miami bass music to trap with flabbergasting prescience.
49. basking in the glow Oso Oso
Pop punk outfit Oso Oso makes music gloriously reminiscent of turn-of-the-century emo, simultaneously anthemic and intimate, like whispers meant to be screamed. Their third studio album feels like their breakthrough record, packed to the gills with some of the year’s best indie rock songs.
48. Brandon Banks Maxo Kream
Maxo Kream is one of the most exciting talents to emerge from the Houston hip hop scene since its heyday. Brandon Banks feels like a refinement of his excellent debut, a masterful exercise in storytelling and an emotive contextualization of the rapper’s familial lineage.
47. WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish is truly pop music’s bad guy. The seventeen-year-old rises to the top of the heap with one the most unique and fully-realized debuts in recent history, unprecedentedly cohesive in its hushed terror and winking humor.
46. Immunity Clairo
One of the year’s most affecting indie pop records comes courtesy of shooting star Clairo, a bedroom music whiz who quickly rose to fame with a series of self-produced viral hits. The production here, assisted by ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, is glossy and professional, a striking shift from her early material. But the talent remains - Clairo is a marvelously gifted songwriter with a penchant for lonely pop treasures.
45. Cheap Queen King Princess
The major label debut from King Princess is assured and brilliantly gay. The singer-songwriter is a gender-queer force of nature, brutally honest and unwilling to bite her tongue. She rose to prominence with the gender role-smashing “1950” and delivers on its promise here with a collection of confident, sex-positive radio jams that posits her as one of pop’s most exciting rising talents.
44. The Center Won’t Hold Sleater-Kinney
The punk rock mainstays team recruit St. Vincent for their humongous, metallic ninth studio album. It’s a willful shift in direction, one that alienated drummer Janet Weiss and led to her departure from the band later this year. In context, it’s a very bittersweet victory - the music here is often spectacular, and the songwriting remains as viciously charged as ever. But it might be the end of Sleater-Kinney as we know them, the end of an era for one of modern rock’s most consistent forebearers.
43. Athena Sudan Archives
Stones Throw songstress and violinist Sudan Archives writes songs that ache with insight. Her debut Athena finds her straddling and making peace with the rough edges of life as a black woman, gifted with an adventurous musicality that swells her stature ten times its natural size.
42. No Home Record Kim Gordon
It’s hard to believe that Sonic Youth founder Kim Gordon hasn’t released a solo album until this year; her echoing legacy as a leading woman of indie rock has been an inspirational feedback loop for generations. That said, No Home Record is a revelation, unexpected in all the right ways. It’s born from the same ethic as Sonic Youth’s most experimental works, hissing with fresh, dark energy. Highlights such as “Sketch Artist” and “Don’t Play It” are bracingly stream-of-consciousness, layering Gordon’s evocative growl over shredding electronics in a way that feels familiarly inventive.
41. PUNK CHAI
From the opening chords of glitter-bomb introduction “Choose Go!”, the sophomore album from Japanese electro-punks CHAI is a hyper-speed blast. The group’s “neo kawaii” manifesto is all-inclusive and outrageously fun, a reconceptualization of Japanese beauty standards that deserves to be heard worldwide.
40. Miss Universe Nilüfer Yanya
In 2014, London singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya turned down a spot in a girl group curated by One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson, a decision that eschewed possible fame in preservation of personal and artistic integrity. Yanya’s first album, Miss Universe, suggests that she made the right move; her sound is not the kind you can fit in a box. Highlights “Paralyzed” and “Baby Blu” blend R&B, indie rock, and pop with unflappable ease, and her songwriting is clever and open. She’s still developing her sound, sure, but Miss Universe stands as a captivating and utterly unique debut.
39. American Football (LP3) American Football
The second-wave emo legends sound inspired as ever on the second album released since their 2014 reunion. On LP3, the band leans into the music like they did in their early days, allowing their songs to envelop and consume. An added dimension here is the noted presence of female voices, including those of Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. It feels like a purposeful revisiting of a genre once notorious for its toxic lack of feminine perspective, and as a result, the band’s third album moves past solitary monologue into conversation.
38. Reward Cate le Bon
Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio effort feels deserved, its title fitting and descriptive. The mountainous synth-pop she grafts here is her most accesible material to date, but it sacrifices none of her song craft or straightforward emotionality. High points “Daylight Matters” and “Home to You” stand out as some her most fruitful and gratifying work yet.
37. Bandana Freddie Gibbs & Madlib
The Gary, Indiana MC’s second collaborative album with Madlib matches its predecessor in quality and outdoes it in experimentalism. The storied producer stitches his traditionally murky sample work to trap-infused drum programming, and Gibbs is sharp and versatile as ever. The project is also peppered with stunning guest spots from Pusha T and Anderson .Paak, among others.
36. Life Metal Sunn O)))
Drone metal wizards Sunn O))) have spent a career finding the intricacies in greyscale. On the first of two albums released by the duo this year, their trademark sludge becomes something truly blissful. Life Metal was recorded and mixed by Steve Albini, who brilliantly utilizes analog recording to bring out the warmest elements of the band’s sound. It’s a fully immersive listen, the real-time expansion of drone metal’s sonic and conceptual boundaries.
35. The Practice of Love Jenny Hval
On her seventh album, the Norwegian iconoclast finds transcendent middle ground between the densely conceptual and the unexpectedly approachable. The Practice of Love draws on themes of sexuality, body image, and female reproduction in radical and imaginative ways, draped across a surging electronic soundscape. Jenny Hval’s releases are consistently challenging and always captivating; this just happens to be her best yet.
34. Sinner Moodymann
Sinner is the first album in five years from Detroit techno legend Moodymann, a wild ride through Prince-indebted funk, minimalist house, and twisting jazz. Twenty-plus years into the game, Moodymann remains one of the most vital and creative forces in electronic music.
33. Fever Megan Thee Stallion
Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion has quickly emerged as hip hop’s it-girl. Razor-sharp and brazen, her first-full length is one of the most thoroughly engaging hip hip projects of the year. Its cataclysmic one-liners are sexed up and confrontational, sizzling with radiance of a star in the making.
32. Agora Fennesz
Christian Fennesz makes some of the most enthralling ambient music in existence. His first project in five years makes wide, reverberating landscapes out of claustrophobic spaces, ever expanding and endlessly fascinating.
31. Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest Bill Callahan
The seventeenth album from indie folk auteur Bill Callahan is his longest to date, a graceful and flowing patchwork of allegory and intensely personal narrative. It’s a searching, optimistic piece of work that beams with newfound acceptance.
30. Beware of the Dogs Stella Donnelly
One of last year’s greatest and most devastating achievements was Stella Donnelley’s “Boys Will Be Boys,” a timeless and powerfully empathetic reflection on rape culture. Her debut album is cut from the same cloth, keenly written and beautifully performed, airing out misogynistic douchebags and rallying women who have held their tongues for far too long. Beware of the Dogs puts Donnelley in the big league, courageous in its unflinching honesty and stunning craft.
29. FEET OF CLAY Earl Sweatshirt
With his second EP, Odd Future graduate Earl Sweatshirt continues to shape a singular and revelatory sound that dodges expectation at every turn. Even in the direct shadow of masterstroke Some Rap Songs, FEET OF CLAY feels like a massive development - the music here is bewildering and dense, rewarding replay with endless wisdom and astonishing detail.
28. uknowhatimsayin¿ Danny Brown
Long held as one of hip hop’s most innovative and charismatic MCs, Danny Brown tops off a spectacular decade with an uncharacteristically polychromatic head trip. It’s vibrant and clear-headed, a tremendous shift in gear from the spiraling dread of 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, and a tremendous display of Brown’s surreal lyricism.
27. X 100PRE Bad Bunny
On his major label debut, Latin trap superstar Bad Bunny offers a wide-range dream of reggaetón without boundaries. His music is a seemingly bottomless well of energy and possibility, and he’s not afraid to ruffle some feathers - “Caro,” with its gender-bending masterpiece of a music video, is a massive statement within the context of a genre that is still moving towards acceptance. In his sheer disregard for convention, Bad Bunny is restructuring Latin pop in his own vision.
26. This is How You Smile Helado Negro
On his most explorative and soul-stirring effort yet, Helado Negro digs deep into the sepia tone innocence of childhood with a journeyed heart. Among its moments of devastating grief lie swatches of untouched happiness, artfully preserved in capsules of cloud. This is How You Smile is an album about getting older, a meditation on identity, and a celebration of the years before life gets so impossibly complicated.
25. House of Sugar (Sandy) Alex G
(Sandy) Alex G is a genius songwriter and a goofball, and his eighth (!) studio album is his most refined yet, a stunning synthesis of all of his charms. House of Sugar is ostensibly a record about addiction, opener “Walk Away” its hypnotizing statement of intent: as guitars whirl and foam, glitched-out versions of the same mantra circle themselves dizzy: “someday I’m gonna walk away from you/not today.” This set-up frames two of the most indelible tracks in his catalogue, “Hope” and “Southern Sky,” a pair or Elliott Smith-summoning reflections on substance abuse and depression. Sugar is a remarkably heavy record, and Alex G’s trademark quirks are a comforting relief - “Bad Man” is delivered in a smirking southern accent, and “Cow” is a recklessly beautiful love song that may well be about a cow. It all culminates in live closer “SugarHouse,” a breathtaking denouement that sounds like great Bruce Springsteen, mostly because Alex thought it would be funny. Ultimately, House of Sugar ends up as one of the year’s best records because it’s utterly human. It’s vulnerable and imperfect and worth knowing for those exact reasons.
24. Patience Mannequin Pussy
On the Philadelphia hardcore quartet’s third studio effort, patience is multifaceted and complex. It dulls the pain of trauma only if you let it; patience is a crawling journey, one through which you cultivate respect for yourself and your own boundaries. On the title track here, frontwoman Marisa Dabice reflects on the gendering of patience - in a culture where men are praised for lack of such a virtue, women are often forced to flex theirs with twice the effort. Dabice recounts a partner’s teeth-gnashing at the denial of her body, a foreboding and gruesome opener that culminates in “Drunk II,” the best and most immediate song here. Harrowing and bloodshot, the song ends up exactly where you fear it will: “at the end of the night, I am walking home/I pretend that I was wet, wanting them/No means please stop, I need to be alone.” In the song cycle that follows, the band works through the aftermath of rape with empathy and honesty, coming out at the end with the patience to start over. The brief, 25-minute duration of Patience was most likely intended - it’s a journey in miniature, and the rest is up to you.
23. Emily Alone Florist
The title of Emily Sprague’s third album with Florist (and her first as a solo act) is a perfect summation of its sound and introspective songwriting. It draws to mind the distinction between the words “lonely” and “alone,” the former inferring sadness and the latter only isolation. Opener “As Alone” sounds blissfully alone, but not lonely - here Emily finds peace in nature, pondering the flowers and her own body with an all-encompassing wonder. There’s plenty of loneliness here too, a void-shaped force that informs songs like “Moon Begins.” But even on that track, like most here, she balances her morbid reflections with a graceful serenity: “death will come/then a cloud of love.” The carefully picked guitar work and plaintive songwriting here call to mind the works of fellow queer indie folk artist Dear Nora and the unmatched poise of Nick Drake’s seminal Pink Moon. She shares with those artists a marvelously open approach to songwriting, but Emily Alone finds in all of its searching an essence that is, indeed, Sprague’s alone.
22. Titanic Rising Weyes Blood
On her fourth studio album as Weyes Blood, Natalie Mering invokes her signature blend of stately, Carol King-style folk and sweeping chamber pop majesty in unforeseen ways. She also throws some sunset-stained pedal steel into the mix, preening country music for its loneliest bits on “Andromeda” and “Something to Believe.” The music on Titanic Rising is striking in its intimacy, but it sounds enormous, like she’s playing from the bottom of the ocean (fittingly, the album cover features a bedroom submerged in water). The centerpiece here is “Movies,” a breathtakingly spacious ballad that fills every empty space in its architecture with light, spotlighting Mering’s immaculate voice and heart-stopping harmonies. Her last album, 2016’s excellent Front Row Seat to Earth felt rooted in scorched desert, but on Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood has crafted a subaquatic masterpiece that effortlessly evokes the spectacle and tragedy of its titular shipwreck.
21. Father of the Bride Vampire Weekend
Father of the Bride is the New York band’s first studio album since their opus, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, and the first to follow the departure of multi-instrumentalist and producer Rostam Batmanglij. Bearing the weight of Vampire Weekend’s ever-growing critical legacy, their forth studio album has been breathlessly anticipated for years, and it mostly avoids reckoning with expectation by dodging it altogether. Bride is a restless double-album that is at times self-deprecating (the winking “Unbearably White”), apocalyptic (“How Long?”) and monstrously inspired (the towering, Paul Simon-esque “This Life”). Many of the tracks here feel like products of an outrageous jam session, unusually relaxed and freeform in composition. Although Rostam is present as a songwriter, the production here is handled by frontman Ezra Koenig and super-producer Ariel Rechtshaid, a folksier departure from the stadium-sized sonics of Modern Vampires. Danielle Haim and Steve Lacy are notable collaborators here, and Father of the Bride ends up being the funnest and wildest release of Vampire Weekend’s career, even its moments of existential dread and soul-wrecking sadness.
20. So Much Fun Young Thug
His first official studio album, So Much Fun is Young Thug’s victory lap. Not that he shows any signs of slowing down - this is some of the most engaging and mind-warping music he’s ever made - Fun just happens to be the last release in a decade’s worth of incredible music. The confidence and weirdo grandeur of modern classics like Barter 6 and JEFFERY call into question what exactly makes this Thugger’s only album, especially since the best of his mixtape releases are unquestionably album-quality. However, I suppose that if any particular entry in the artist’s catalogue is fit for that distinction, it’s this one; Fun is Young Thug’s most cohesive effort yet, all thriller and no filler. The highest points here include the unreasonably gorgeous Lil Uzi Vert duet, “What’s the Move,” and the album’s biggest hit, the superb and regal Gunna collab “Hot,” but there’s honestly no track here that you should go without hearing. Ten years in, Thug’s singular and inventive sound has already spawned a sea of disciples and knock-offs, and So Much Fun is the perfect cap-off for a truly game-changing run.
19. Jimmy Lee Raphael Saadiq
Raphael Saadiq has long been one of music’s most valuable and under-regarded songwriters. He’s consistently pushed the boundaries of modern soul, from his early achievements with Tony! Toni! Toné! to his essential contributions on Solange’s A Seat at the Table, even if he’s never quite secured his deserved rank as a household name. Jimmy Lee is his most courageous work yet, a haunting and thematically dense eulogy for a brother of the same name that contracted HIV and died of a heroin overdose. It deftly traces the lines between mass incarceration and drug abuse in the black community, talking alternately to the devil and god in-between breaths. It’s a heavy but immeasurably rewarding listen, and Saadiq has never sounded more in charge of his craft - peaks such as “This World is Drunk” and “My Walk” are gorgeously composed, produced, and performed, a testament to this man’s sweeping legacy and never-ending ambition.
18. Nothing Great About Britain Slowthai
Slowthai’s debut landed at the perfect time - Britain is in the middle of a spectacularly muddled Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson is the prime minister, and the social climate is understandably tense. The brilliantly titled Nothing Great About Britain follows in the storied tradition of anti-Royal punk kiss-offs, and Slowthai is a witty and capable messenger. The Northampton MC is the spitfire of grime’s most recent wave, and his debut album is a furious, churning account of modern life in the UK. It’s an eclectic affair, as indebted to grime forefathers like Dizzee Rascal as it is to the trunk-rattle of American trap. It’s also tremendously introspective (the simmering “Peace of Mind”) and lots of fun (the anthemic Skepta collaboration “Inglorious”), a heaping victory for UK hip hop and a definitive document of the Brexit-era resistance.
17. Remind Me Tomorrow Sharon Van Etten
On Remind Me Tomorrow’s cold open, the flattening “I Told You Everything,” singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten is in the midst of total, unguarded intimacy - “sitting at the bar, I told you everything/you said, “holy shit, you almost died.” It’s almost intrusive in its purity, a seat at the bar where she and her partner break down as one in empathy and release. The rest of Van Etten’s fifth studio effort follows suit, courageous and bare in its raw flesh. The album marks a dramatic shift in the artist’s sound, its pounding percussion and winding synths the product of a new partnership with producer John Congleton, and the eclectic pallet here adds an extra wallop. Van Etten’s writing is similarly expansive in its range, reaching new heights in the bittersweet nostalgia of “Seventeen.” During the writing of Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten was pregnant with her first child, and at 38, she surveys her growth with a well-deserved cynicism: “Now you’re a hotspot, think you’re so carefree/but you’re just seventeen, so much like me.” The album aches with experience, and Van Etten frames her journey with an awe-inspiring openness.
16. Originals Prince
The posthumous additions to Prince’s catalogue have offered peaks into his artistry that might have seemed impossible while he was alive. Famously guarded and critical of online access to his music, Prince would likely have kept the contents of Originals vaulted. It’s unfortunate, because this compilation is a seismic revelation, a testament to his strengths as a songwriter and a visionary. All of the tracks here are demo versions of songs Prince eventually sold to other artists, many of whom (Apollonia 6, The Time) branched from the “Minneapolis sound” lineage. That said, almost every one of these scrappy takes outshines its eventual, more polished incarnation, and the ones that might not - The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” - are thrilling glimpses at the songs they could’ve been. The sky-scraping peak of Originals is “Baby, You’re a Trip,” a boundless funk ballad that sunk into obscurity in the hands of artist Jill Jones. It’s almost unfair in its beauty and power, and the fact that he let it out of his own hands is astonishing, a hint at the sheer depth of the artist’s creative well.
14. LEGACY! LEGACY! Jamila Woods
Chicago singer-songwriter Jamila Woods has been rising like candle smoke since her scene-stealing appearance on Donnie Trumpet’s “Sunday Candy,” a Chance the Rapper collaboration that introduced the world at large to her honey-lathered croon. It’s at times sultry and often cutting, and with LEGACY! LEGACY!, Woods pushes it into the definitive. She doubles down on the revolutionary overtones of her superb debut, HEAVN, by moving the spotlight inward, finding the personal in political. “BETTY” is a moving and empowering tale of self-discovery, an arc of internal redemption in the face of systemic oppression, and the scorching “MILES” finds her perched upon on bedazzled throne of her own creation. Appropriately titled, the album grapples most explicitly with the specter of black legacy, contemplating mortality and the lasting impact of social upheaval with a steadfast curiosity. The track listing reads like a study in great black and brown visionaries (“ZORA,” “FRIDA,” “BASQUIAT”) and in the album’s soaring apex, she finds greatness in herself: “Don’t call me legend ‘til I kick the bucket.”
13. ANIMA Thom Yorke
Following last year’s Suspiria, Thom Yorke’s soundtrack for the Luca Guadagnino film of the same name, the Radiohead frontman reemerges from the void for his finest solo album to date. ANIMA is an expectedly harrowing listen - in 2016, his ex-wife Rachel Owen succumbed to cancer - and the most outwardly apocalyptic fever dream he’s offered since his band’s 2000 epoch, Kid A. It grinds and shuffles and twitches, demons seeping through the cracks of its clattering drum programming. Synths burble and pop like fluorescent magma, and Yorke stares, dead-eyed, into the darkness. His lyrics are seething and hopeless here, a suffocating sheet of paranoia and panic, making highlights such as “Dawn Chorus” and “Not the News” some of the best work Yorke has ever done. His previous solo albums (2006’s The Eraser and 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes) have hinted at ANIMA’s horrifying grandeur, but they seem like sketches in the retrospect - this is Thom Yorke in prime form, the sound of one of music’s strangest geniuses finding his own jagged groove.
12. Ghosteen Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave’s previous album, 2016’s tragic Skeleton Tree, dealt with the immediate emotional aftermath of his son’s accidental death. It was a ten-ton listen, the sound of Cave working through an impossible grief in real time. This year’s Ghosteen is a sprawling account of what happens next, the sound of the day after. It can be a similarly taxing listen, but Cave balances the heavy biblical allusions used to similar effect on Skeleton Tree with a near-magical catharsis. Opener “Spinning Song” soundtracks the exact moment when acceptance replaces disbelief, as Cave distills his demons into a revelatory mantra: “peace will come, peace will come, and peace will come in time.” Ghosteen brims with sorrow, for sure, but also gestures with bravery towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
11. Jaime Brittany Howard
The first solo statement from Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard is one of the year’s most assured and deepest-reaching efforts. Named after a sister that died in her teenage years, Jaime draws on themes of race, religion, family, and queer love, all with a clarity of mind and heart that are hard to achieve. “He Loves Me” radiates confidence in God’s love, even in the consideration of the sinful ways in which we get by, and “Georgia” finds its sweet spot somewhere between civil rights anthem and unrequited love song. The album is also a thrilling listen sonically, alternately rafter-shaking and sweetly meditative, recalling in its fullness the meticulous funk sculpturing of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. The players here include jazz keyboardist-to-the-stars Robert Glasper and Nate Smith of the Dave Holland Quintet, but the listener’s attention is never pulled too far from Brittany Howard’s greatest asset: her earth-shaking, spirit-summoning, heartrending howl of a voice. It’s what rockets Jaime into the stratosphere, wrapping tales equally painful and sincere in a muscled confidence.
10. i,i Bon Iver
Here’s a leadoff: i,i might be Bon Iver’s least consequential album. It’s doesn’t hold the genre-molding power of For Emma, Forever Ago, and it’s not as stunningly cohesive as Bon Iver or as gorgeously corrosive as 22, A Million. It lags in spots and, rather unusually, it probably won’t reconstruct your concept of what a Bon Iver album should sound like. i,i is the first of the band’s albums that sounds like they’ve settled into a style, and as a result, it’s the kind you have to live with to fully appreciate. But once you do, dear god, is it incredible. The mountainous “iMi” sets the scene as a collage of Bon Iver’s most grandiose and ambitious tendencies, layering acid-warped vocal samples over thundering drum programming and surging synth work, all awash in Justin Vernon’s gorgeous walls of harmony. The glossy and anthemic “Hey Ma” is an honest-to-god pop song, and “U (Man Like),” brilliantly pairs Moses Sumney and Bruce Hornsby (the latter of whom released an excellent Vernon-assisted project this year) - somehow, all of it comes out sounding exactly like Bon Iver. Once you move past the initial shock of its lived-in and familiar soundscape, i,i is the kind of album you get lost in; though it’s probably not the band’s most important record, it’s certainly their truest-to-form, and that’s a distinction worth celebrating.
9. Tunes 2011-2019 Burial
Right before the year-end list deadline, Hyperdub dropped this gargantuan compilation of Burial’s output from the last nine years. It’s an essential listen, even if you’ve heard all of the material before now. At an intimidating two-and-a-half hours, it’s a comprehensive reframing of the British recluse’s post-Untrue catalogue that puts his frustratingly sporadic releases into perspective. In the gaping twelve-year absence of a third studio album, it might be tempting to write off Burial’s decade-plus career as top heavy, but that would be a vital error. Tunes 2011-2019 is arranged in a loose reverse chronology, and the inspired sequencing sheds light on the immense artistic growth he’s endured since Untrue. The front end of Tunes is largely beatless, a sharp turn for a producer whose early works reimagined the rackety shuffle of 2-step and UK garage. The rest, however, showcases just how eclectic his percussion driven work has become - “Rival Dealer,” from the definitive EP release of the same name, sits weightlessly on the breakbeat from the Soul Searchers’ “Ashley’s Roachclip,” and career highlight “Ashtray wasp” remains stunning in its stretching of UK electronic music’s rhythmic boundaries. But the real kicker has always been Burial’s mastery of atmosphere - the omnipresent crackle, the enormous, new-age-gone-bad synth pads, and the unreasonably affective vocal chops. This is the producer’s legacy, and Tunes couldn’t display it any better.
8. IGOR Tyler, the Creator
One of the most fascinating and thorough metamorphoses of the decade has been that of Tyler, the Creator. Emerging first as the virtuosic ringleader of L.A. collective Odd Future, the musician has spent the past few years peeling back the layers of shock value that was initially his calling card. The artist left underneath has made some of the most sensitive, soulful music of the century, and IGOR, a funk odyssey that draws heavily on themes of queer longing, registers as his most honest and exciting work yet. Whereas 2017’s Flower Boy felt like an HD rendering of an existing vision, IGOR feels like a complete reinvention. Tyler sings much more than he raps here, a stylistic transition he’s been hinting at for several years, and his production work has never been so colorful and nuanced. Early highlight “EARFQUAKE” sounds like what might happen if George Clinton was artificially preserved and continued to make Parliament records into the year 3000, and closer “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” draws upon Tyler’s noted Stevie Wonder influence in epic and innovative ways. By the end of the record, Tyler has spread his wings, a remarkable achievement for an artist that, ten years ago, might have insisted he didn’t have them at all.
7. HOMECOMING: THE LIVE ALBUM Beyoncé
Beyoncé’s last live album was released in support of 2008’s I AM… SASHA FIERCE, the megastar’s least cohesive, most stylistically confused body of work. The live album itself is a generally outdated concept, and it made much less sense toward the end of the previous decade, before streaming services took over the music industry and album sales became an afterthought. As a result, 2010’s live take on I AM… has sunk into the recesses of a legacy that has expanded to unfathomable dimensions over the past ten years. As the crown jewel of this truly legendary stretch, HOMECOMING is an indisputable victory - the album is a fabulously mastered recording of Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance, and it feels like a live recording in the purest and most rewarding sense, pulsing with adrenaline. It also feels tailored to a music culture that has, over the past several years, reinvigorated the significance of on-stage performance. Beyoncé makes the most of this platform, retracing the expanses of her career with grace and verve and transforming the Coachella stage into an HBCU football field. HOMECOMING is a tremendous salute to black excellence from an artist who consistently celebrates its possibilities.
6. Purple Mountains Purple Mountains
After the 2009 dissolution of David Berman’s seminal band Silver Jews, the artist retired from the public eye, ostensibly leaving behind a legacy of brilliant and searingly observational indie rock. A decade into the future, Berman reemerged with this year’s Purple Mountains, an endearingly crafted behemoth of an album that is both sidesplittingly funny and overwhelmingly sad, often at the same time. Less than a month later, he was gone again - having dealt with severe depression his entire life, David Berman hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. His death marks an intense blow for indie rock and humanity at large, with Purple Mountains as primary evidence. This is some of the singer-songwriter’s finest work, inscribed carefully with the kind of thoughts that are usually scribbled without the intention of recitation. In the wake of Berman’s death, it’s temping to reframe the project as a last will and testament of sorts, akin to David Bowie’s Blackstar, but it’s not easy to tell and it might not matter - the artist had been writing music this beautiful and despairing his entire life, and Purple Mountains is a fitting bookend, whether it was intended as so or not.
5. U.F.O.F. / Two Hands Big Thief
Adrianne Lenker and her band Big Thief have quickly emerged as indie folk’s great new hope, musically dexterous and tremendously emotive. The two albums they released this year, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, are like different sides of the same coin; U.F.O.F. is twisting and uneasily serene, like the product of some brilliant dark magic, and Two Hands heaves with life, sturdy and organic. Each album, however, makes its case as one of the year’s most compelling pieces of work, showcasing Lenker’s otherworldly voice and blistered songwriting, as well as the band’s magnetic chemistry. Two of the songs on U.F.O.F. (“terminal paradise” and “from”) appeared in solo form on one of last year’s most bewitching releases, Lenker’s acoustic abysskiss, but they’re ten times as powerful here, fleshed out in intricate and marvelous detail. Big Thief have been on a tear since 2017’s Capacity, but their dual success here puts them in a league all their own.
4. All Mirrors Angel Olsen
Each successive release in Angel Olsen’s remarkably sturdy catalogue has expanded the singer-songwriter’s sound in unprecedented and spell-binding ways. 2016’s MY WOMAN, for example, flipped the torch-lit indie rock of her breakthrough Burn Your Fire For No Witness into a set of wide-lens blues epics. It’s predictable, then, that Olsen’s fourth studio effort does its predecessor one better - if MY WOMAN constructed a world all its own, All Mirrors threatens to swallow it whole. Opener “Lark” is positively terrifying in its immensity, a scream into the void of hurt and heartache. The title track is a monstrous synth-pop ballad that gives recklessly into a steamrolling dread. “New Love Cassette” is the closest Olsen has ever hewed to pop, and it suggests that if she wanted to, she could obliterate mainstream radio too. As a whole, All Mirrors is sweeping and universe-sized, a dare from Olsen to guess where she’s going next.
3. When I Get Home Solange
2016’s A Seat at the Table stands as a benchmark of 21st century music, a cinematic and all-encompassing masterpiece that pushed an ever-rising Solange to the forefront of black music and culture. In the three years since that album’s explosive arrival, Donald Trump has become the most powerful man in America, tensions constantly threaten a fever pitch, and the world has breathlessly awaited new Solange. While ASATT’s follow-up, the magnificent When I Get Home, revolves around similar themes of self-empowerment and black pride, the album’s overarching focus is liberation through radical sensuality. With a vast team of producers that includes New York jazz outfit Standing on the Corner, Metro Boomin and Pharrell, Solange crafts a pillowy songscape that celebrates blackness from a strikingly settled-in perspective. Highlights such as “My Skin My Logo,” a lighthearted but empowering duet with Gucci Mane, and “Almeda,” which features an incredible turn from Playboi Carti, are absolutely flooring in their flowing confidence and scope. Home is not quite the era-defining statement that ASATT has proven itself to be, but that might be the point - here we see Solange basking in her mastery, defiant to expectation and more comfortable in her skin than ever before.
2.MAGDALENE FKA twigs
Considering that FKA twigs has always worn her technicolor heart on her sleeve, it seems almost redundant calling MAGDALENE her most personal work yet. Even so, it’s undeniable; twigs’ second studio album practically heaves with emotion, tangled and gnarly and almost unbearably gorgeous. She works with an almost entirely new cast of collaborators here (the likes of which include Nicolas Jaar, Oneohtrix Point Never, Skrillex, Jack Antonoff, and Kenny Beats) and there’s certainly a big budget feel to the album. But what makes it so stunning is its moments of quiet - “home to you,” in particular, might be her finest moment yet, an endlessly building and completely heartbreaking opus of a song that turns silence into an open wound. MAGDALENE is largely an album about the unique pains of being vulnerable in the public eye, and it works through the wreckage in real time, marvelously brave and crushing in its honesty.
1. Norman Fucking Rockwell! Lana Del Rey
The most remarkable thing about Lana Del Rey’s expectation-shattering Norman Fucking Rockwell! is its harrowing synthesis of everything that has made the songstress an alluring force from the start. Even her introduction to the world-at-large, a puzzling performance of “Video Games” on Saturday Night Live, felt like a train-wreck you couldn’t peel your eyes from. As she quite literally spiraled her way through a tale of perfect love in a broken age, contradictions flew fast and furious - it was willfully nostalgic but unquestionably rooted in the present, reckless but marvelously poised. Over the following seven years, Del Rey has matured immeasurably as a singer, a songwriter, and a performer, but the draw is exactly the same: absolutely no one else is writing odes to a failing society as stark, damning, or timeless. Rockwell is unquestionably Lana’s most personal work to date, shedding almost entirely the “gangster Nancy Sinatra” role that dominated her earlier albums. Though her lyrics have always suggested a profound appreciation for the complexities of America and its icons, she emerges here as a genuine treasure of the heartland, surveying our culture with the deftness of the writers she admires. Though Rockwell is full of twisting and affecting epics, album’s absolute peak is “The Greatest,” which eulogizes a crippled country and a dying earth with gripping immediacy: “the culture is lit and I had a ball/I guess that I’m burned out after all.”