Meet Good Luck Charm Records, The Midwest's Best-Kept Secret

In my mind, the midwest is synonymous with good music. From Ska and hip-hop to emo and hardcore, there’s a music scene for every possible genre and taste out there. There’s so much, in fact, sometimes it can feel daunting to jump into. However, with no shows happening for the foreseeable, the best way to discover these acts now shifts to social media, blogs, and labels. 

While these three entities can work together to shed light on new acts, we still live in a world dominated by a neverending news cycle and constant shitposts. Sometimes it’s hard to breakthrough, but that’s why repetition is key. I don’t necessarily see myself as a “tastemaker,” but I wanted to use what little platform I have to shine a light on Good Luck Charm Records, a bastion of the Michigan music scene, and a label that symbolizes everything good in DIY.

Created by Jake Rees of No Fun Club, Good Luck Charm Records is a label devoted to elevating the types of bands you never hear about, even within DIY-focused publications. The label has had a hell of a year, helping bring roughly half a dozen Michigan-based bands to wider platforms through small tape releases and light social media promotion. Much like this blog, GLC exists as a side-project, and the fact that Rees has been able to promote such incredible artists on top of his day-to-day obligations is nothing short of inspirational. 

Focused almost entirely on the Michigan scene, these are the types of bands you’d find opening and middling at DIY gigs in basements all over the midwest. These are the bands you’d see in a dingy Detroit bar and be blown away by. These are the types of bands you’d fall in love with after one performance and walk away with an armful of merch thinking to yourself, ‘why isn’t everyone talking about these guys?’ Hence this article. 

While I’d hope you walk away from this having discovered a new up-and-coming Michigan band, I hope if nothing else, you take away the importance of DIY and how vital it is to support your local artists. Even if you don’t have massive amounts of disposable income (who in this scene really does?), you can still help local acts by sharing them with friends, streaming them online, picking up tapes on Bandcamp, or bringing your friends to a gig once shows are back. Bands like these exist all over the world; it’s up to us, the fans, whether or not they find their audience or not. 

---

Boyfrienders - Scenes of Brooklyn or Meditations on Mid-Twenties Mediocrity 

First up, we have Boyfrienders, a synth-pop group from Wyandotte. If you’ve been following the blog closely, you might remember our interview with Benny Morawa earlier this year when we helped premier “The Lower East Side Blues.” Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with Boyfrienders. I could talk about Morawa’s awesome contributions to Mover Shaker’s excellent sophomore album, I could talk about the guest features from Felix Beiderman and Garrett Hunter, I could talk about Morawa’s unique position as a non-binary frontperson and how that impacts their creative process… there are simply too many things to note in this short of a write-up. 

A loose concept album, Scenes of Brooklyn or Meditations on Mid-Twenties Mediocrity is exactly what it sounds like: a post-college grappling with one’s place in the world. Blending electronic elements with flashy indie rock, this release is like a hyper-modern DIY evolution of Future Islands as seen through a series of train stops in the most populous city in our nation. If the name alone doesn’t want to make you click play on the record, then I don’t know what will. 

It Doesn’t Bother Me - It Doesn’t Bother Me

Put simply, It Doesn’t Bother Me released one of the best EPs of the year. Not only that, they released one of the best debuts of the year. It’s one thing to release a good collection of songs; it’s another for that collection of songs to be this polished, catchy, and playlist-ready. 

Featuring jittery guitar tapping, lighthearted self-deprecation, and a hearty helping of group chants, this is a textbook midwest emo release. What separates it from the Mom Jeans of the world is the band’s ability to make these songs sound entirely fresh and approachable to someone outside of the scene. These aren’t just “good emo songs,” these are good songs full-stop. Plus, clocking in at only 12 minutes, this EP offers a low-risk entry point into the world of sad white guys talking about their problems. The band’s self-awareness makes it easy to see the forest through the proverbial trees, allowing anyone to easily see the deeper artistry beneath the familiar emo frameworks.

Bombastic Dream Pussy - BDP

Easily the best band name on this list (and possibly in the world), Bombastic Dream Pussy is a grungy rock act that slithered from the collective depths of DIY venues all across Detroit. Helmed by Hayley McNichol, this EP features instrumental contributions from the likes of Dogleg, Parkway & Columbia, Shortly, and Holy Profane to name a few. 

The best way to first experience Bombastic Dream Pussy is to witness Hayley pour their emotions out by playing these songs out on-stage. Since that’s not currently possible, the second-best way to experience BDP is to watch this video of McNichol performing lead single “Blood on My Bike Seat” to a rapt audience at Fauxchella III. This song details the hyper-traumatic experience of sexual assault, as seen directly through McNicol’s eyes, but wraps this story in a simple chord progression paired with a folksy twang that makes the topic feel slightly more digestible. It’s lyrically-heavy, but I can’t think of a single better encapsulation of what makes this project special than that song. The EP itself features 26 minutes of 90s-inspired indie rock that soundtracks Hayley’s experiences and emotions in a shockingly catchy way. It’s powerful, moving, and completely transportive.  

Happiness Isn’t Possible / Content. - Split

Last but not least, we have a split between two Ypsilanti bands that bring together disparate styles in a surprisingly effective combination. First on the split is Happiness Isn’t Possible, a hardcore act featuring members of Solemn Judgement, who I’ve also written about. The band comes out swinging with the seasonally appropriate “What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?” Sounding like a broken nose received in a sweaty Michigan basement, this track is a crushingly-heavy seven-minute odyssey that fluctuates between doomy riffage, hardcore breakdowns, and glitchy Code Orange mayhem. It’s absolute chaos. 

Meanwhile, Content. finds Kris Lane (formerly of Hibiscus Bones and Swordfish) embarking on a solo project he describes as “post-whatever.” Leaning heavy into the blurry shoegaze/ambient side of the musical spectrum, Lane’s contributions are dripping in reverb. It’s a wall of sound that’s at once fuzzy and heavy, yet resonant and deeply-felt. The lyrics mesh into the wall of guitar, crashing drums, and a whir of electronics, creating songs that feel more like dreams or distant memories. These songs feel like the soundtrack to a horror film that hasn’t yet been made, and that makes them feel all the more haunting and visceral as you listen waiting for something to go wrong.

---

There you have it, four excellent releases from a tiny label from a small corner of our country. While I admittedly have a soft spot for Michigan, what’s incredible about DIY is that there are bands just like this all over the country. There are incredible acts just waiting to be discovered and shared by you. Good bands require good fans to survive, and you don’t have to own a label or run a blog to help good music flourish. Whether you want some tappy emo or some fist-balling hardcore, there’s so much incredible art out there just waiting for you. Your support goes further than you know, and luckily for us, there are people out there like Jake helping it make its way into the world. 

An Introduction To Post-Rock

Sometime in the spring of 2011, I was assigned to read The Metamorphosis for a high school lit class. I was a little bummed that I had to spend some of my spring break doing homework, but it was a class I enjoyed, so I did it anyway. That year my family spent our spring break in a little house on the Oregon coast, and it was (unexpectedly) rainy for most of the week. Given the weather, I decided what better time to sit down and read this trippy-ass short story.

I laid down on my rented bed in my room that smelled distinctly “beachy” and listened to the raindrops patter against the window as the skies turned greyer and darker. I turned on my trusty iPod and decided that now was the time to listen to that new band I heard about called “Explosions in the Sky.” I put on The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, the album with the most striking title, and cracked open my copy of the book.

For the next 40-some-odd minutes, I became so absorbed in the reading that I completely forgot about the outside world until the album came to a close. It was a meditative and (fittingly) transformative listening experience. I’d never heard anything quite like that album, and I immediately started another one of the band’s half-dozen records I had loaded onto my iPod before leaving Portland. 

Over the course of the next year, I had an absolute love affair with post-rock. A love that was kindled by one record soon grew into a new realm of sound that I relished exploring. It wasn’t like the other rock music I was used to, it completely calmed my mind and helped me focus on my work, whatever that was at the time. 

The genre single-handedly helped me get through college, soundtracking thousands of hours of reading, studying, and writing. To this day, post-rock still offers some of the most breathtaking and timeless songs in my entire music library, and I believe it’s a genre that’s worth submerging yourself in entirely. 

What follows are nine albums intended to offer a crash course of the post-rock/instrumental genre. These are personal favorites from bands that I love, all with varying degrees of significance within the actual “scene” itself, but albums that I would recommend to anyone, regardless of background or experience with this type of music. I genuinely believe that these albums serve a dual purpose as a sort of driving but distraction-free background music while also being some of the most moving and compelling pieces of art ever created. 

---

Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)

Arguably one of the few unanimous post-rock records, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place would easily be on the genre’s Mount Rushmore. While Explosion In The Sky’s debut is a wonderful bit of glittering heavy-metal post-rock, I’d argue the band has improved their sound, production, and approach to music with nearly every record. Their sophomore effort is a more mellow and moody atmospheric experience (that also happens to bear one of my favorite songs of all time), but it wasn’t until The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place that the band found themselves at the forefront of the scene with a budding new audience. Thanks in large part to their contributions to the Friday Night Lights score, but also because Cold Dead Place is a tight, economic album that showcases exactly what the genre is capable of in its purest form. 

Opening with the faint siren song of a single guitar on “First Breath After a Coma,” the record eases the listener into the band’s style like a doctor birthing a baby. The group gently layers multiple shimmering guitars over a subtle heart-beat-like floor tom keeping time. They play with adding and removing elements until a steady drumroll sweeps the listener away, and just like that, we’re off. The band crests and crescendos with masterful ease throughout the record, whether it’s the pensive “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean” or the lovestruck “Your Hand In Mine.” It may only be five tracks in total, but that doesn’t make this record any less fulfilling. I literally could not imagine a better entry point into the genre for myself or anyone else. 

Mogwai - Come On Die Young (1999)

On the polar opposite end of The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, we have Mogwai’s sophomore album Come On Die Young. These two records are not connected in any way, other than the fact that I listened to them roughly around the same time and they both felt like stark counter-points to each other. While Cold Dead Place is a light, airy, and positive album Come On Die Young is a dark, confining, and foreboding piece of music. Just look at the two covers next to each other and tell me which one you think is going to be more oppressive. While I believe that the members of Mogwai are all great people, this record is simply one of the most evil things I’ve ever heard. This is darker than black metal, more unnerving than a horror movie soundtrack, and more overwhelming than anything you’ve ever heard. 

Opening with a swirling, distorted soundscape on “Punk Rock:” the band lets a soundbite from a 1977 Iggy Pop interview provide the thesis statement for the record: “Well, I'll tell you about punk rock, "punk rock" is a word used by dilettantes and, uh, and, uh heartless manipulators about music, that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it.”

After that articulate introduction from the godfather of punk, the band pulls the rug out from under the listener with “Cody,” a precious and slow-moving love song about an ever-shifting relationship existing in an ever-shifting world. While it took me entirely too long to realize that “Cody” wasn’t named after a person, but instead an initialism of the album name, it also took me entirely too long to realize that this is the only song on the record with vocals. From there, “Helps Both Ways” utilizes a sample of John Madden commentary to navigate the murky waters of a crushingly moody riff. Meanwhile, “Kappa” and “Christmas Steps” both boast lumbering instrumentals while “Ex-Cowboy” features the more searing and rapid guitar strumming pattern dripping in reverb that the genre is most known for. Come On Die Young is far from a happy album, but it possesses an emotional catharsis the likes of which few other genres can provide. This record, combined with Cold Dead Place offer an excellent overview of the range that this genre can have with Come On Die Young existing in a more rotted and sinister end without being too offputting to newcomers.

This Will Destroy You - Young Mountain (2006)

Yet another record I’d put on the post-rock Mount Rushmore, the debut album from This Will Destroy You exists somewhere on the tonal spectrum in between Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai. Blending the cinematic builds of Explosions and the more brooding pensiveness of Mogwai, Young Mountain lies at a healthy middle ground of post-rock. 

From the first majestic keystrokes and gently-falling guitar notes of “Quiet,” you can immediately tell this record is something different. There are heart-pumping builds on “There Are Some Remedies Worse Than The Disease,” there’s world-conquering uplift on “I Believe in Your Victory,” and there’s hypnotic glitchiness on “Grandfather Clock.” While the band arguably has bigger “hits” on their self-titled record with songs like “The Mighty Rio Grande,” it’s hard to argue with the punctuality of Young Mountain. This is the debut of a band who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly the kind of art they wanted to put out into the world.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)

Quite possibly the defining work of the post-rock genre, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven contains only four tracks, each clocking in at roughly twenty minutes apiece. It’s less of an album and more of an experience that the band shepherds the listener through. These songs, or acts, are each composed of different movements, all of which are depicted in the vinyl in a timestamped illustrated diagram depicting the “intensity” of each segment. While that gatefold makes this a rewarding album to sit down with, focus on, and follow along with closely, these are ultimately just ornate layers of detail on top of an already-beautiful album.

Album opener “Storm” begins with a triumphant build of guitar, bass, and drums, eventually layering on horns, a string section, and an entire orchestra as the track gains momentum. This is not the dark and grim apocalyptic band that recorded F# A# ∞, or even Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada two years prior, this is Godspeed as a blossoming flower opening up to see the world as their stage. However, by the time the first track ends (a movement called “Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way”), it’s clear that there’s something more sinister brewing just beneath the surface. 

“Static” features ominous demonic hums that build to a cataclysmic explosion. “Sleep” is at once a dreamy, floaty, and wistful bad trip. Finally, the title track brings things home with a soaring and anthemic song that mounts into a beautiful conclusion. Quite frankly, Lift Your Skinny Fists is an album that must be experienced to be understood, there’s a reason why it’s become the defacto post-rock album for millions of fans. 

Sigur Rós - ( ) (2002)

At some point near the end of my high school experience I stumbled upon Sigur Rós, and that discovery (combined with copious amounts of metalcore) helped me realize how little lyrics really matter to me. With all of their songs being either instrumental, sung in Icelandic, or “Hopelandic” (a gibberish blend of English and Icelandic that the band invented), I didn’t understand a word these guys were saying. Don’t get me wrong; a well-written song is great, but as far as I’m concerned good lyrics are just a cherry on top, not a necessity. 

While some may sing the praises of their breakthrough Ágætis byrjun or the overwhelmingly pleasant Takk..., I believe ( ) to be their most consistent album. Comprised of 8 “untitled” songs, the record is divided into two even halves separated by 36-seconds of silence and bookended by two clicks of static. The first half of the album is more bright and optimistic, while the second half is more bleak and desolate. It’s a loose concept album in that sense, but ( ) offers a beautiful depth and breathtaking range of emotions over the course of its 76-minute running time. It bears the strange, otherworldly qualities that Sigur Rós is known for while still feeling grounded enough in reality that a newcomer can wade in comfortably.

Russian Circles - Enter (2006)

Admittedly a half-step away from post-rock and toward straight-up metal, the debut album from Russian Circles is a beautiful, heavy, and riff-oriented instrumental post-metal album. Packed with precise guitar riffs, tight drumming, and world-shattering basslines, this record truly has a little bit of everything. 

From the clockwork-like build of “Carpe” to the crushing bounding riffage on “Death Rides a Horse,” the record is a showcase for the absolute breadth of music that can be created with just three instruments. There’s the deeply-feeling “You Already Did” and “Micha,” both of which are palpable with remorse and pain, all without saying a word. While later Russian Circle albums may be tighter, darker, and more cinematic, there’s something to be said for the staggering range of both emotion and tonality on display in the 44 minutes of Enter.

Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008)

Yet another half-step away from post-rock, just in the opposite direction, Earth are the all-important progenitors of drone as we know it. Characterized by spaced-out repetitive riffs that roll on like long arid stretches of desert, drone is a genre all about soundtracking a time and place that exists only in your mind. The albums work like witchcraft, slowly casting a spell on the listener’s mind until it’s transported to another world far away from this one. Through this slowly-unfolding transportive property, these bands are able to unwind gorgeous riffs that establish a sense of time and place unlike any other genre.

The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull is a mythical album. Aside from its biblical title and gorgeous leather-bound vinyl, the songs here capture Earth at the absolute peak of the band’s mid-2000’s era. Unlike their early trailblazing half-hour dissonant recordings or their more recent vocal pivot, The Bees Made Honey offers (relatively) punctual tracks that swirl and cascade around the listener with unparalleled divinity. Songs like “Miami Morning Comedown II” shimmer with opulent mid-morning light while tracks like “Hung From The Moon” feel more like a desert at twilight; blue and expansive but still hot enough for heat haze to be prevalent. The entire album is like a beautiful mirage, it almost seems too good to be true, but then you reach the end and realize you’ve made it out of the desert. 

Mogwai - Mr. Beast (2006)

Mogwai’s discography is immaculate. While Young Team introduced Mogwai to the world and Come On, Die Young has a special place in my heart (literally the first thing ever posted to this site, which I do not recommend you read) I’d argue Mr. Beast is also one of the best entry points into the band’s world. Their work ranges from spacy love songs, glistening immaculate creations, pensive piano-led remixes, and glitchy electronic diversions, but Mr. Beast is a personal favorite merely because it’s wall-to-wall riffs. While Mogwai are no strangers to The Riff (just listen to “My Father My King” or “Xmas Steps”), the band’s fifth album is arguably the most consistently heavy thing that they have ever created. 

“Auto Rock” kicks things off with a piano melody that gradually mounts along with electronic elements, pounding drums, and buzzing guitar that grows into a rhythmic tribal beat that abducts you into the world of the record. “Glasgow Mega-Snake” turns the metal side of Mogwai up to ten as multiple distorted guitars and bass coalesce into one fast-paced riff that pushes the listener forward like a violent current. Other highlights include the soft and electronic “Acid Food,” the anthemic “ Travel is Dangerous,” the riff-bearing “We’re No Here,” or the penultimate credit roll of “I Chose Horses.” 

One of the things that makes Mr. Beast a fantastic entry point to post-rock is that it’s very atypical of the genre. Lots of the songs here have vocals of some sort, and the average song length is about four minutes. It’s also an extremely-varied album with different sounds and approaches that always keeps you wondering what’s next. Truly one of the band’s many masterworks. 

Slint - Spiderland (1991)

Often cited as the record that invented the post-rock genre, Slint’s Spiderland is a masterpiece. If it wasn’t evident by the cover, this is an album that was created by a bunch of teenagers. Spiderland sold fewer than 5,000 copies, and the band broke up before the record could even be considered a cult hit… but cult status it soon achieved, eventually paving the way for the entire post-rock genre in earnest.

While not as purely instrumental as some of the other records on this list, Spiderland solidified the dark, pensive moodiness that became a standard of the genre. It crystalized the dynamic builds and ever-shifting cinematic landscapes that have become a staple of post-rock. Spiderland is flat-out one of the most influential albums in all of rock music. These guys may not be The Beatles, but in the space of 40 minutes they crafted a world so dense and lived-in that we still have groups exploring its corners nearly three decades later. 

---

There you have it folks,  the single best crash course for a genre I could ever create. If you’re listening to these albums and find yourself hungry for more, I wholeheartedly recommend exploring each of these artist’s discographies because they’re all rich and rewarding in their own way. Beyond that, there are numerous other legendary post-rock bands I didn’t even get into here like Caspian, God Is An Astronaut, Mono, and more. If you’d like, all nine of the albums on this list have been placed into a playlist here for easy consumption. Thank you for reading along about this genre that has meant so much to me over the last decade. I can only hope that you’ll find as much solace and beauty in these albums as I have over the years.

Albums of The Decade in An Era of Real Change: A Fan’s Look at Music in The 2010s

The personal experience of listening to music is probably my favorite feeling in the entire world. There is nothing more cathartic, more soul-stirring, or more fundamentally interesting than taking in a great album; it just feels like the most intrinsic and natural form of human artistic heights. Getting into music has been my defining experience over the last decade. The slow movement from the music that your parents leave you towards entirely new directions that allow you to discover the eternally vast catalog of human creativity is something that I feel like defines the adolescence of most music fans. There is so much with music, so much to talk about and to dive deeper in to. Within the past 5 years, I have managed to discover bands and artists who have spoken to me in such distinctly personal ways that it sometimes feels like direct communication. And yet I always feel like I have just scraped the tip of the iceberg. I just know there is so much more out there, so many new experiences, music heading into 2020 looks incredibly bright.

The 2010s were an insanely groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting time in the music industry; the entire experience and market of music has been digitized for better or for worse, and social media and the internet now replace the predominance of the label from the 2000s. Genres were innovated upon in ways that couldn’t even be imagined in 2009; production, sound design, and countless other technical musical aspects are now truly in their golden age of growth and development. Technology has helped musical achievement reach new heights, but these are only the tools. What is even more remarkable is the breakout in the brand new, vastly diverse and unique, and revolutionary voices which were only so rarely accessed in music before. Queer, trans, POC, and all varieties of marginalized voices made their impact and poignancy common knowledge; the 2010s were the decade where the music industry truly lost white heteronormative orthodoxy as its defining trait. So many new genres, new ideas and forms, and even experiments in what music itself is have become prominent. The 2010s were the new apex of musical change and innovation.

After months of subconsciously thinking about how I would order my favorites from this decade, eventually, I couldn’t help but put the time into doing something like this. It felt right to me, and I genuinely appreciate anyone who shares in this experience with me. I really do think these are the best 100 albums of the decade, and I will attempt, with increasing fervor, to offer why I think so. However, the line between “best” and “favorite” is always a strange territory to me; because music is such a subjective experience, all music criticism is personal judgment by its very nature. Thus, I understand how personal this list is, and I hope that, in a way, it maybe helps the project: this is really just one experience of music, categorized just for the sake of it. Thank you for reading.

---

100 | Rihanna - Loud (2010) 

Loud is a collection of some of the most undeniable hits to come out of this decade, as well as a bold harbinger of the veracity with which pop as a genre would make itself known in the 2010s. Rihanna harnesses the charisma of her earlier works and melds it into a grown-up, revolutionary pop arrangement that would come to define the latter half of her career. Songs like “S&M” are classic iPod Touch-core and bring forward a strange sense of nostalgia upon further relisten. This album is one of the pop landmarks of the 2010s.

99 | Noname - Room 25 (2018)

Room 25, from Chicago veteran Noname, is a thoughtfully provocative album that takes on patriarchy and racial injustice through the lens of whimsicality and comedic overthrow. Long is the tradition of the subtle protest album, records railing out against a diseased and broken culture just as much as they are at any specific political figure. This album is a rich continuation in this legacy. Noname’s flow is effortless and soaring as she rises and falls across bars about injustice and oppression as easily as if she were reading a YA novel. Room 25 intends to convey the banality of evil and greed in our modern capitalist culture, and how this is rerouted through the lenses of race and gender. Noname, with her technical skill and superb political awareness, is exactly the right voice to do so.

98 | Sidney Gish - No Dogs Allowed (2018)

Sidney Gish creates music that is somehow nostalgic without referring back to any specific era or event. Listening to No Dogs Allowed makes you wistful for a bygone era you weren't actually sure ever existed. The songs on this record have an innately charming and ethereal nature to them, basking them in a layer of familiarity that most music can only achieve after repeated listens. Gish is infinitely likable and constructs well-made songs that play exactly to their strengths. No Dogs Allowed is an amazing look at the later Gen Z experience in America today and strikes a deserved chord with many other queer young people. This record is easily one of the most criminally underlooked of the past five years.

97 | Megan Thee Stallion - Fever (2019) 

Megan Thee Stallion wants you to know that she is bad as hell in every sense of the word. This album is an affirmation of both her badness and skill for delivering fun slapper tracks. The album is a lengthy testament solely to the act and lifestyle of being a pimp. As an album, it represents a new sort of gender equality within the rap scene. It’s a 40-minute-long acceptance and celebration of the fact that women can also make dope, focused, and invigorating tracks about all traditional rap topics with just as much self-importance and braggadocio. Megan is impatient for her rise, but Fever shows that this desire is less immature and more important; her voice is powerful and belongs on the forefront of the contemporary rap scene.

96 | Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) 

A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead’s most depressing and mournful record yet, which is a pretty big statement for a band that's made some of the most desolate and unsettling songs ever. Thom Yorke’s voice has ripened even further with age, growing even more ghostlike and otherworldly over the electronic and dream pop-influenced instrumentals. A Moon Shaped Pool is a haunting treatise on impermanence, death, aging, and the legacy we leave behind through art after we are gone. For a band so late in their career, Radiohead maintain a youthful ability to adapt and grow their sound to an evolving musical world, and this skill is one of the reasons they deserve their status as one of the best bands to grace the Earth.

95 | Beach House - Bloom (2012)

Bloom is the ultimate stadium pop album, a dreamy pop piece from an era of oversaturatedness and insincerity in the genre around them. What makes Beach House so honest is their refusal to reinvent the wheel; they may lean heavily on their influences, but they still produce top-notch music which is amazing for what it is. This album, however, is their most original; Beach House delve into the darkened corners of their own sound, breaking the way for their comfortable pace the rest of their discography. This is one of the best dream pop records this decade.

94 | King Krule - The OOZ (2017) 

King Krule creates an incredible exploration into the nature of misery with The OOZ. This record is one of the somberest of the decade, wallowing in depressively lengthy songs and featuring decrepitly introspective songwriting and aesthetic choices. Krule’s deep and rumbling cadence is an enabler of his musical direction, allowing him to truly sell the depth of the misery and depression he reflects upon as fully personal and authentic music. This record, while not essential for every type of music fan, is a poignant and valuable look into the manifestation of depression into art, something those of us with the illness must reconcile with as we seek to create. Krule is authentic, resonating, and triumphant.

93 | DaBaby - KIRK (2019) 

DaBaby is one of America’s new favorite media personalities, in no small part due to the fact that he radiates sincerity in everything he says and does. In every interview, be it in the aftermath of his recent unjust arrest and police harassment in his native Charlotte or on Saturday Night Live, DaBaby is stunningly kind, evocative, charismatic, and hilarious. His music is absolutely reflective of this sincerity, and KIRK is one of the most fun and energizing hip hop records of the decade. His flow remains unchallengably appealing, switching from hit to hit in almost equally bangertastic verses that make you feel like you can run through a wall or punch a cop and get away with it. DaBaby is also unlauded for his ability to bring out good things from others, scoring noticeably above par verses from the likes of Moneybagg Yo and Stunna 4 Vegas which play up from the artist’s usual performance. DaBaby had the epicest 2019 there was.

92 | Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (2011) 

The Fleet Foxes are masters of creating ambiance, and Helplessness Blues is the full realization of this knack as well as the full realization of Robin Pecknold’s vocal talent. Brooding and existential lyrics are veiled in a sash of fluttery strings and naturalistic production. The experience of listening to Fleet Foxes is part of what makes their music good itself; one can’t help but feel at ease when Peckinold is sliding angelically over a sound which can be most accurately described as ‘early Bon Iver but woodsier.’ This album is a key piece of early decade folk and one of the most atmospheric pieces of the decade.

91 | JPEGMAFIA - Veteran (2018)

JPEGMAFIA has recreated the protest song for a new generation, combining leftist liberatory thematic spins and industrial-influenced production to create one of the most political and striking records of the past few years. Internet culture and its influence is absolutely marked on the work, but is nowhere near as saturated and essential to its understanding than his other projects. Veteran is accessible, ravenous, and unforgiving: blame is placed squarely on those who deserve it, and god help those who JPEGMAFIA is able to enact his righteous vengeance upon. Leftist ideology is too rarely directly promoted and understood in contemporary records, and is even more rarely done well; Veteran is this done at its best.

90 | Ariana Grande - Sweetener (2018)

Standing in contrast to the brooding and serious thematic spin of 2019’s Thank U, Next, Sweetener is a treatise on positivity, happiness, and the everlasting energy of the human spirit. Sweetener celebrates the divine nature of budding relationships love, passion, and the emotional ensemble that comes with it. This album also was the first to truly establish Grande as a certified hit-maker, with songs like “God Is A Woman” serving as key set pieces which both advance the album and manage to stand on their own as individual pieces. Ariana’s 2010’s career has been the definition of turbulent, and Sweetener represents an already bygone era and radiating love and positivity which emerged from it.

89 | Blueface - Dirt Bag (2019)

I promise this is not a bit, I really think that Blueface is one of 2019’s freshest rap voices. Blueface is a connoisseur of the dense rap bar and, Dirt Bag hones his ability to deliver biting punchlines into even more memorable choruses following his breakthrough Famous Cryp. Blueface’s lifestyle, worldview, and hedonism are fully celebrated and advertised on the EP: Songs such as “Bussdown” and “Bleed It” represent some of his best songwriting to date. Blueface’s untamed and cascading flow may be off-putting to some, but he carries bars and swings through verses on levels of imagery like no other contemporary artist. This tape is a promising performance from one of rap’s coolest new voices.

88 | Death Grips - The Money Store (2012)

The Money Store is one of 4 Death Grips projects featured on this list; it is reasonable to say that no band had a more consistent, full decade run than the titanic Death Grips. And, although Exmilitary is excellent and influential in its own right, The Money Store is when it all really started; the hype, the bits, and everything tangential to the band’s notorious internet fanbase really began with this album. Completely aside from all that dumb trivial crap, Death Grips can be seen coming into their own throughout the album; harvesting their virulent and pulsating sound, showcasing the flawless drumming of Zach Hill, and creating choruses and hooks which are just as impactful with today’s youth as punk was in the 80s. The Money Store was the beginning of a legendary run.

87 | Toby Fox - UNDERTALE Soundtrack (2016)

I am anti-soundtrack, as a person. I generally don’t love soundtracks to movies or games, and they don’t often stick out to me as independent pieces of work. I’m absolutely a soundtrack Grinch. But I can not even begin to imply that the Undertale soundtrack is nothing other than a work of virtuoso from a man who is just as good of a music producer as he is of a game designer. Undertale transcends its status as the ultimate meme music not by shunning it, but by outshining it through the sheer charmingness and sprightliness of the short songs and the resounding poignancy of the longer-form atmospheric tracks. It is far and away the best soundtrack to any piece of media that I have heard in a long time; it stands as a complete work, and I consider it to be an album.

86 | Rico Nasty and Kenny Beats - Anger Management (2019)

The 2nd shortest project on this list, Anger Management makes its veracity known and leaves its mark fully within the 20 minutes the listener has with it. Kenny Beats is a producer coming fully into his own, and the production on Anger Management reinforces the legitimacy of said rise; there is not one dull sounding moment, and the ferociousness of Rico’s flow never allows for one slow moment. Kenny and Rico are a powerful duo heading into the next decade, and this tape offers hope for even lengthier cooperative projects. However, the album has maintained its status as an energetic festival since release, and will likely only grow more revered with time.

85 | Jeff Rosenstock - WORRY (2016)

Jeff Rosenstock is the definitional cool old head, in no small part because he is still making music that whips ass about 10 to 15 years after the high-point of his career. WORRY, besides being an undeniably charming and endearing record, is some of the best garage rock/ska-influenced rock that’s been released this decade. Rosenstock has a knack for constructing surprisingly wholesome and poignant love songs and lyrical arrangements, and guitar work on this album is fabulously technical. This record represents the best of a genre creating music as they do best.

84 | Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of Denial (2016) 

Teens Of Denial is one of the best conventional rock records to be released in a long time. While it lacks the artistic vision and grandiose thematic construction of Twin Fantasy, Will Toledo’s incredible lyricism is even more the centerpiece of this album. Lyrics that are as common as they are poetic, like my personal favorite, “I did not transcend, I just felt like a piece of shit in a stupid looking jacket,” strike a chord because they are funny, relatable in some way or other, and somehow still incredibly poignant. Will Toledo’s voice is amazing (as it always is), and Teens of Denial was an impressive reflection of a band about to truly come into stride and hit their peak.

83 | Deakin - Sleep Cycle (2017)

In the 2010s, synth-pop titans Animal Collective maintained a steady yet comparatively uninspired pace, choosing instead to develop their solo careers. Sleep Cycle is the best of these solo projects and is notable for being a vocal-based album by a member of the band who was not a primary vocalist. Deakin’s voice is soothing and distant, ushering in the otherworldliness and kindness which caused Animal Collective’s work to resonate with so many. Additionally, Deakin establishes his prowess as a solo artist with his own artistic vision.

82 | Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires Of The City (2013)

Vampire Weekend permanently toe the line of bourgeoisie corniness and perfectly made yacht rock, and Modern Vampires Of The City is the band at their most creative and genuine. Ezra Koening and crew will always sound like a song made for Kia commercials, although if Neo Yokio is any indication, the band operates with this fully in mind. However, this doesn’t mean the music is bad in any sense of the world; Vampire Weekend produce music that is so insanely well crafted that it wraps back around to feeling inauthentic in some way. The band manages to make this sincerity known with heart-wrenching songs like “Hannah Hunt,” and as always Koenig’s smooth and reassuring voice is a highlight of the album and a treat to hear. Despite everything, Vampire Weekend slaps and will continue to slap. Ezra’s grand design is beyond our mortal plane of understanding.

81 | Denzel Curry - ZUU (2019) 

I hate to nuance positive reviews with negativity, but it needs to be said; I thought Denzel Curry was pretty crap before ZUU. I still think that “TA300” or however it's spelled is a cornball-bonanza, and I thought there was no way the follow-up would be anywhere close to good. I was dead wrong. Denzel Curry managed to harness all the good, endearing parts scattered in his previous work and congeal them into a 30-minute banger fest based on South Florida pride. ZUU works extremely well because it is a catchy, non-assuming record that seeks only to deliver the highest possible frequency of kickassishness it can within its short running time. And for the most part, it succeeds, forming a lasting contribution to the 2010’s rap canon.

80 | (Sandy) Alex G - Rocket (2017)

(Sandy) Alex G is the most relevant voice in neo-folk to emerge this decade, doing so largely by constructing a sound that is warmly inviting and understanding of the difficulties of the modern rural/suburban experience. Although there are experimental tracks like “Brick” scattered throughout the record, the core of the album’s arc is a story of the warmth of domesticity, the ethereal nature of family, and the wistful beauty of a domestic existence. (Sandy) Alex G’s music is charming to its core, unassuming about the listener, and a completely self-contained experience that is somehow also universal in its messaging.

79 | Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015) 

Courtney Barnett possesses a knack for bitingly real lyrics and sound songwriting, which has rightfully allowed for her to be recognized as one of the best singer-songwriters this generation. Songs on Sometimes I Sit and Think are morose, relevant, familiar, and loving all the same; it is an insanely smart testament to the strangeness of the modern human condition. I would also be remiss to not mention how hard the bass lines and guitar choruses hit on this album. The ability to combine such fierce songwriting with powerful music is all too rare in rock today, which is why Barnett’s breakthrough was such a breath of fresh air when it first released and still remains so to this day.

78 | Slowdive - Slowdive (2017) 

Reunion albums always pose a risk of severe disappointment, especially when said band is as relevant to the development of a genre and music internet tastes as Slowdive are. Instead of wavering under such expectations, Slowdive soared, delivering one of the best shoegaze albums of the decade and a highly worthy addition to the Slowdive canon. While not a revolutionary reimagining of their previous sound, the eponymous album continues the band’s uncanny knack for creating dreamy, refreshing soundscapes, which are the sonic equivalent of the eternally pleasant feeling of the cold side of the pillow. Many shoegaze bands have come and gone since Souvlaki’s release in 1994, but with their 2017 return, Slowdive proved that their ethereal magic is eternal. 

77 | Tame Impala - Currents (2015) 

Kevin Parker’s follow up to the breakout Lonerism establishes him as one of the most influential and prominent producers and sound designers of the century. The sleek, techno-rock filtered production aesthetic so carefully created by Parker more than carries famously maligned weak points such as “Past-Life.” Meanwhile, the high points of the album such as “Let It Happen,” and “Eventually” stand as some of the most sonically pleasing songs of the decade. If Rihanna thinks that Tame Impala songs sound good enough to be on the masterful ANTI, I trust that judgment.

76 | alt-J - Relaxer (2017) 

I went to an alt-J concert shortly after Relaxer was released. Every bandmember stood amongst their synthesizers on stage, harmonizing and doing what they do while thousands of tranced-out/high teenagers danced rabidly to the music. The concert, much like the band and this album, was not a repudiation of their critics or reimagination of their style, but a celebration of their particular approach to indie music. To this day, the show’s pure, simple, and positive essence remains one of my fondest live music experiences. Similarly, the group’s third effort is an unassuming yet remarkable record if only for its sheer dedication to the craft of creating enjoyable, layered psych trance-pop. alt-J focuses not on pretenses, but on making pleasant and thoughtful music, and Relaxer is their best work yet.

75| Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Bandana (2019) 

Although their first collaboration produced the renowned Piñata, Freddie Gibbs and Madlib found their true sound on Bandana. Madlib proves that, as we all know, he is still one of the forefront producers in the world; it feels canned talking about Madlib production at a certain point (what hasn’t been said?), but it really is that good. Gibbs continues his incredible post-wrongful-arrest hot streak into 2019 with this record, delivering fierce and firm bars with little breathing room from top to bottom of the tracklist. He even drops an anti-vaxxer line and it still kinda hits, that’s how hard this record is. “Classic” style rap records made in the 2010s were rarely ever non-derivative, yet Bandana feels wholly original and self-created.

74 |  Lil Peep - Come Over When You’re Sober, Part I (2017) 

The story of 2010’s rap is impossible to tell without the inclusion of Lil Peep. One of the original artists to become popular off of Soundcloud following and an originator of the rise of “emo rap,” Peep's music reflected the bitter realities of his life with the same kind, soft-hearted emotionality which continues to resonate with fans of his work long after his death. The music itself exists on the fringes of misery, a world full of painful break-ups and the all-encompassing horror of drug addiction. Yet somehow, his outlook and talent shine through this misery, delivering songs that are empathetic yet empowering. The music scene and the world is a darker place without him.

73 | Bon Iver - 22, A Million (2016) 

22, A Million came at a critical juncture in Bon Iver’s career. The album represents a move completely in the experimental direction, abandoning the comfort zone of guitars and understated ballads for an intriguing and admirable voyage into the dregs of Justin Vernon’s psyche. This album is primarily about feelings, and thus the music is designed mostly to procure an emotional and wistful response above all else. The detached sort of imagination I am placed in whenever I listen to this album is a testament to its success in this objective. The longer songs on this album are striking in their permanence and their emotional impact. I have listened to very few albums which so effortlessly throw me into introspection, and the cascading beauty of this album has been a comfort many times in my life.

72 | SOPHIE - Oil of Every Pearl’s Uninsides (2018) 

SOPHIE is one of the seminal producers and most visible trans musicians in the industry today. Her debut album, a techno-influenced dream pop extravaganza, is a triumphant reflection on both existing as a trans person, a woman in the music industry, and an isolated being in the cold and expansive universe. Sometimes, this is done through erotically biting distorted bangers such as “Ponyboy” other times through distant, ethereal angelic pleading like on “Is it Cold In The Water?” Diversity and confusion is a key aspect of SOPHIE’s existence, and this album manifests this into an artistic avenue and a bold exploration that is immeasurably valuable for those unversed in her experience.

71 | Chance The Rapper - Acid Rap (2013) 

Before Chance became the ambassador for cornballs nationwide, he was an up-and-coming rapper who rightfully broke into the mainstream consciousness with his excellent tape, Acid Rap. A product of an early 2010’s hip hop scene which was largely devoid of new ideas and fresh talent, Chance was able to establish himself as a master of fun, catchy hip-hop/ R&B fusion tracks that inspire emotions of youthful revelry and a world full of wild possibilities. Chance also uses his album as a platform for other Chicago artists yet to break into the public consciousness through fabulously crafted features from Saba and Noname. While his public image has shifted more towards Chance the Capper, Acid Rap is still an excellent record from a now bygone era of hip hop.

70 | Young Thug - Jeffery (2016) 

Young Thug’s dynamic follow-up to the equally-strong Barter 6 is a reintroduction of his true self to a hip-hop scene that still was not ready to accept his talent. And, unsurprisingly to his fans, he reaffirmed his status as one of trap’s most eccentric and imaginative voices, constructing a genre-bending fusion feast which holds its originality and fire to this day. Jeffery operates as a Young Thug’s “Self Titled” of sorts, describing the vast, bright majesty of his lifestyle and the connections in life that he has made. Young Thug albums, when they are at their best, are joyous celebrations of humanity and the ties we can make, be they sexual, romantic, platonic, or any of the weird sorts of bonds in between. Jeffery is a fantastic collection of songs with this spirit fully imbued into them, coming out from the seams to explode into one of the most empowering albums of the decade.

69 | Beyoncé - Beyoncé (2013) 

Self-titled albums, as a concept, are about the musicians themselves and the lives they lead. Beyoncé’s self-titled work, from the height of her popularity and the beginning of her cultural indomitability, is focused squarely on her. Beyoncé has developed a voice, an important and valuable voice, and she intends to share it. The thematic focus on women’s empowerment and emboldenment, often through means of wealth and fabulousness, are equal parts reflective of a bygone Obama era neoliberal optimism and a powerful statement rooted in generations of struggle. This album is a testament to the conflict which is black existence in America in the 2010s, and it is executed marvelously. Also, “Partition” bears one of the best beat switches of the decade.

68 | Ariana Grande - thank u, next (2019) 

Songs on thank u, next sound organically cool. Ariana crafts it to seem like she isn't really trying when she makes her lyrics; they're just about how boss she is and the boss life that she leads. However, a close listen reveals that this blasé veneer is just as purposeful and well done as anything else the pop star has ever touched. The emotional reckoning with the highly public nature of her turbulent love life combined with the death of a loved one came together to form a profoundly sincere and thoughtful piece. Ariana is a badass still, and wants you to know it; songs like “7 rings” and “Break up With Your Boyfriend, I’m Bored” are so good that you won’t soon forget that fact. But, as humans are eternally complicated and internally conflicted, Ariana also relays and grapples with sentimentality, romance, loss, and their coexistence all at once. Additionally, the structural tracklist choice of putting the singles exclusively at the end of the record is a bold and rewarding selection, which fits amazingly within the organization of the album.

67 | Carly Rae Jepsen - EMOTION (2015)

Carly Rae Jepsen is a the master of the chorus. One of my closest friends and I have spent many hours discussing *exactly* what makes EMOTION such a fabulous pop project, and we couldn’t help but settle on the chorus writing as one of the primary reasons. Carly creates extended, heart-wrenching, cascading choruses as if it were the easiest thing to do in the world, and loads the album (and B-sides) full of them. Smart pop songs are very often outwardly enjoyable and inwardly miserable, and Carly writes lyrics and songs which are the perfect embodiment of this phenomenon. This album has helped to define a generation of pop and is one of the most influential records on this list.

66 | Blueface - Famous Cryp (2018) 

What makes Blueface good? This is a question many of you are probably wondering at this point in the list; I am here to preach the gospel of chasing a bag and worrying not what others are doing. Blueface songwriting exists in a comic-book universe, where gangbanging heroes pull up and bleed it in broad daylight. Crypping and bravery are the currency of this universe, and our protagonist is rich. Blueface lyrics are densely layered with humor and otherworldliness: from the insanely Freudian extended metaphor of people’s piece being directly referred to as their “second dick”  to the bars about owning a minivan and dealing with romantic partners who don't understand object permanence. In this universe, rapping is storytelling and the beat is a suggestion that can be played with and hopped in and out of. Blueface is a master wordsmith and one of the best musicians in the game when it comes to ‘worldbuilding’ through music; his aesthetic vision and artistic representation of the life he leads and the debauchery he participates in is highly developed.

65 | Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) 

So much has already been said about this album, and how could that not be the case? My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy redefined what hip-hop albums were supposed to look like, sound like, and be structured like in the new decade; no album has been a bigger trendsetter and cultural pariah as this one. The production still holds up after almost a full decade, creating the first true Kanye West masterful soundscape and making an album about being an irredeemable asshole sound like it came from a gospel choir. I won’t dwell on how fantastic this album is; this has been done by better music reviewers than I many times over. But to omit it from this list would be a staunch disservice.

64 | Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory (2017)

Vince Staples is very good at rapping. Technical, concise rapping and flows are done better than Vince by few in the music scene today. Such talent and technicality is the thematic basis for Big Fish Theory, an album with a clear focus as a showcase of the insane talent of Staples and to claim his rightful place at the forefront of contemporary rap. This album achieves this not only through sole reliance on Staples’ revelry, but the eclectic hip-hop production of SOPHIE, creating an Avengers-tier collaboration on “Yeah Right” with Kendrick Lamar. Lyrics on this album are also notably poignant for their strong and powerful political messaging, all coming together to form an excellent rap record.

63 | Jai Paul - Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2013) 

The Jai Paul story is a tragic legend, recounted on music message boards and leak websites for years. That is, until he returned from the shadows with a heartfelt and memorable twitter post and then released the formerly leaked work officially, not in its intended final form but as it was, as Bait Ones, which in spite of everything is still fantastic. Jai Paul has one of god’s chosen voices; something about it daunts you and hangs over the soundscape in your head like an eternal musical poltergeist. The songs are mostly either unfinished or demos, but they are fantastic and imaginative and a completely novel approach to pop nonetheless. The album’s incompleteness is part of the mythos, a work permanently hampered by time yet resilient through all of that nonetheless. Also, in a major upside, he kept the really cool cover which is one of my favorites of the decade. Cool ass album.

62 | Taylor Swift - RED (2012) 

This album comes from a beautiful midpoint in Taylor Swift’s career, the juncture between her earlier pop-country act and her future full-on arena pop direction. What is left in the middle is a sprawling and revolutionary pop record, the best she has ever released and her essential contribution to the 2010’s pop canon. Swift employs her skill for catchy songwriting and earnestness found in her earlier albums, and refines it into a mature and developed pop sound; her artistry comes into its own with this album. All the things Taylor Swift has been praised for for years, be it her fabulous songwriting and riveting orchestration and arrangement, is best on RED. The album is a feat of Americana and one of the best traditional pop albums of the era.

61 | Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (2010) 

The Suburbs is the swan song of the first era of Arcade Fire’s sound; a wistful and optimistic reflection on life in the endless American cultural wasteland which is the suburbs. Those of us who grew up where all houses looked the same for hours on end can have something specific resonate upon listening to this album. Win Butler knows how it feels to exist as a young person in this marginal suburban experience, and the band is able to transpose this feeling across an epic of a rock album. The Suburbs is not the peak of the band’s songwriting, and really that's not an insult considering how Arcade Fire has written some of the best songs of all time, but it still delivers its message with enthusiasm and vitriol.

60 | Tierra Whack - Whack World (2018) 

I feel like, because so much (rightful) attention has been given to the conceptual arc of Whack World as a 15 minute/15 song album, many have failed to commend just how structurally good songs and Tierra Whack’s rapping are themselves. Every blurb on this record manages to be catchy and memorable, creating a rich, cultured soundscape that lingers in your memory for days after listening. Tierra Whack sought to identify the base and concise components of what makes music good, and she absolutely succeeded. It is one of the most imaginative projects of the decade.

59 | Tame Impala - Lonerism (2012) 

On this record, quite unscrupulously titled to its thematic focus on loneliness and isolation, Kevin Parker was able to synthesize 60’s era pop patterns with cutting-edge production. The result is something that is most accurately described as “The Beatles Through A Sepia Instagram Filter”: the sound is breathtakingly familiar yet surprisingly new. Tame Impala’s music is as much original as it is a reimagining of previous sounds. On this album, Parker is more lucid and honest about himself and his life than on any other Tame Impala effort. It is the best album from a band that makes good albums, and the one with the tightest thematic focus and actual positive factors that don’t hinge solely on production.

58 | Snail Mail - Lush (2018) 

Lindsay Jordan is one of the best voices in rock today, and Lush serves as a fantastic debut and introduction of her talents. Aside from her angelic, haunting voice, the songwriting and arrangement skills of Jordan are sublime. Songs on this album are never too short, nor do they overstay their welcome; and when they are playing, the lyrical density and metaphorical motifs inserted into the record are phenomenally deep. This album is well-written, well-made, well-realized, and well-executed, and rarely are debut albums all of these things. Lush is an essential part of the 2010’s rock canon, and Snail Mail will be a core part of the 2020s rock canon.

57 | Mitski - Be The Cowboy (2018) 

Mitski’s popularity exploded with Be The Cowboy, partially as a testament to the excellence of her earlier career, but largely because the album is a culmination of her journey and her most polished and researched sound to date. She has found her songwriting niche as the master of vagueness and subtlety; lines like the choruses of “Two Slow Dancers” and the lines about venus and global warming which manage to be heart-wrenching and desolate despite being trivial at a surface level. Mitski challenges you to understand the struggles she faces and her reckoning with past abusive relationships through the same lens that she does. She executes this challenge by creating compelling, haunting, and universally appealing music that is even more rewarding to those who relisten and attempt to dig deeper into what the album has to offer. It is one of the most layered releases to be put out in years and is a testament to the power of songwriting and poetry. Oh, and her singing is still, like, top 5 in the business right now. That helps a lot too.

56 | Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising (2019) 

Titanic Rising is one of the best chamber pop/singer-songwriter records of the decade, an astounding latecomer of this decade that also serves as an introduction to one of the industries’ most promising figures of the next. The lyrics on this album are phenomenal, some of the best on this list: eternally wise and striking mantras such as “true love is making a comeback” are so commonplace on this album that it feels ordinary in its excellency. So many great records came out in 2019, and this record is reflective of a completely unique vain of this fabulousness; Weyes Blood have returned to the sounds of mid-70s under-recognized artists, such as Joni Mitchell, and completely refined it for a beautiful new sound.

55 | KIDS SEE GHOSTS - KIDS SEE GHOSTS (2018)

Out of the most bizarre and disappointing era of the Kanye West arc comes the collaborative project with Kid Cudi KIDS SEE GHOSTS, a bottled-lightning record, and a testament to the maintained dominance of West as the world’s forefront producer and audio technician. Kids See Ghosts is Kanye at his inward and polished, a digital sandbox of songs constructed with his favorite collaborator on his own terms. While the context of Kanye’s horridness at the time of this record’s release can not be removed from the albums aesthetic, the magnificent and empowering songwriting and high-effort contributions from Cudi are able to exhibit profound beauty also within the confines of the 24-minute work. This album is musically infallible, intense, and a key testament to the new heights of production capable in the modern era. Kanye West has never produced better than this album.

54 | Sufjan Stevens - The Age Of Adz (2010) 

The Age of Adz is Sufjan Steven’s wildest sound to date, a cacophony of noise experimentation and electronic riffing that comes together with his genteel singing to form a reflective, brooding, and stunning album. The album opens with what is probably the masterwork of Sufjan’s conventional style and ends with a 27-minute-long sprawling opus of a song that could easily be qualified as an EP in and of itself. The kicker is that everything in the middle of “Futile Devices” and “Impossible Soul” is completely distinct from the ideas and sound of the opener and closer. The sounds and motifs on this album are experimental yet well-considered, a combination so rare in forays into the unknown. Sufjan had a plan for this album, all the twists and turns which it goes through and decisions it makes, and it is executed immaculately.

53 | Death Grips - No Love Deep Web (2012) 

No Love Deep Web is a snapshot of Death Grips at the high point of their visceralness and intensity; few records released this decade contain the raw untapped power created in some of these songs. Zach Hill, who I personally believe to be the most paramount member of the band, is unstoppable with his drumming on this album. Few have managed to drive the entire arc of songs and be at the forefront of the musical ensemble quite like Hill has, especially on this album. Although the band has evolved into something newer and greater, No Love Deep Web is an essential look at the peak of the band’s first wave.

52 | Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear (2015)

Josh Tillman has one of the sweetest voices in all of music today, and he takes this indescribable talent all the way to the bank on his brilliant sophomore album. Misty’s bitter pessimism and misanthropy are disguised and even enhanced by the divine beauty of his voice; the contrast of the bitterness and resignation of his songwriting and his singing cadence is the essential crux on which this album succeeds. Songs on this album are empathetic and tender just as much as they are condemnations of human misery. The press cycle around Father John Misty and his uber-eccentric public profile often fails to account for just how good the music really is.

51 | BROCKHAMPTON - Saturation Trilogy (2017) 

The “Brockhampton Moment” meant a lot to a lot of people, including myself. I was really, really into the Saturation albums when I came in to contact with my queerness and realized I wasn’t straight. If anything, I can say that Brockhampton acted as a really refreshing and cool way to reflect on the common anxieties and motivations of queer people in today’s world and the internal struggle of queer American existence. It feels amiss to consider the 3 separate works; for me, Saturation is an extended, magical musical slide across three wonderful albums. However, the Ameer sexual assault situation and his subsequent removal from the band have permanently marred and estranged the albums for me personally; it is hard to erase the mark of the man who is literally on the cover of all 3 albums, and his evils seem to hang over the work. Brockhampton’s 2017 was an insane and eventually tragic moment, but the albums themselves remain important, yet sullied, statements on queer existence.

50 | Black Dresses - Love And Affection For Stupid Little Bitches (2019) 

Devi Genetrix and Ada Rook’s chemistry is as tangible as the unending fleeting distortion on every track on this album. The duo explore the trans and -wlw experience through brilliantly layered choruses, early 2000’s nostalgic yet existentially miserable songwriting, and a completely unique sound that relies on the balance between beauty and convolutedness and toes the line everywhere from pop to industrial. Black Dresses make music that is completely their own, an encapsulation of their own journey through queer and trans existence in a hostile and ignorant world. The sound of the band is borderline indescribable and is one of the coolest things I’ve been introduced to this year.

49 | Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (2010)

Have One on Me by the incomparable Joanna Newsom is an amazing avant-garde work of folk and ambient music that pushes the borders of album definition and creativity itself. The longest album on this list, Have One On Me is a lyrical stunner; Newsom is a wordsmith like none other who can elicit nostalgia and dread in the blink of an eye. The album has troughs and lulls that bring the listener in to a sort of meditatively catatonic state which is both pleasurable and intense. Her art engages you in a way other music doesn’t, almost as if she is challenging you to think critically about the concept of the song and album themselves.

48 | Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019) 

Billie Eilish is the harbinger of Gen Z, and with her comes a reimagining of poptimism style sounds with highly apparent ASMR, YouTube, internet, and countless other musical influences. Eilish’s artistry is defined by her youth and her otherness and separation from a world that has doomed her generation; the music produced through this attitudinal lens is a whirling, sharp collection of songs. Her natural virtuoso is unmistakable, and her synergy with her brother’s production is a boon to the playout of a lot of her songwriting. I like Billie so much because she makes incredibly honest, youthful, yet wise pop for a generation that is only now finding its voice. Many of the anxieties and absurdities of the album and her public persona strike a sort of familiarity with younger people, who have been faced their entire lives with terrifying existential threats such as climate change and never-ending war. This album is a manifestation of this dejectedness, this anxiety, and the coolness harnessed from it.

47 | Angel Olsen - All Mirrors (2019) 

All Mirrors is a wonderful hybrid of a multitude of styles and genres from chamber pop to shoegaze to noise and everything in between. Yet, instead of being disoriented and unfocused, Angel Olsen’s vision and clarity shine throughout the record, acting as a beam of light that splits a prism into a complex and beautiful rainbow. Songs on this album are so sonically built and well made they can be almost overwhelming; Angel Olsen is a savant of conveying the emotionally subtle through sonic veracity. This album is one of 2019’s finest because the importance and scope of the project are so visibly apparent in the craftsmanship and tonality of the work; Angel Olsen very visibly put in an excess of time to convey her vision and artistic merit through a prismal artistic lens.

46 | Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) 

good kid, m.A.A.d city is Kendrick Lamar’s finest work, a universally poignant yet personally disorganized album that which is just as much about Kendrick himself coming to terms with his own life as it is about us, the listeners, learning about it. This album is entirely narrative-based, containing discussional interludes and sections which serve perfectly to keep driving the story, and tells an important story on the interplay of race, poverty, and violence within America today. Overall, good kid, m.A.A.d city is hopeful despite the depravity and evil faced within it. Despite the death of a close friend and the injustices of gang violence and the conditions which cause them, Kendrick finds hope in religion and in himself. This album prescribes hope to the hopeless and voices to the voiceless and is a key part of the early 2010’s hip-hop Mount Rushmore.

45 | Freddie Gibbs - Freddie (2018) 

Born out of the fires of Kenny Beats’ production refinery and molded in the heat of Freddie Gibbs’ cadence comes one of the hardest and most underlooked projects of the decade. Gibbs is a veteran who constructs appealing flows and bars like its nothing; part of what makes Freddie so appealing is how effortlessly it feels like the words are falling out of his mouth. This album also encompasses some of the best work Kenny Beats has put out thus far, matching Gibbs’ fierce energy with bouncy and intense production, which even comes to outshine the flow of Gibbs at times. It is a shame this album never took off in critical or commercial circles because it absolutely stands shoulder to shoulder hits-wise with some of the most revered music of the day. Also, this album has an excellent 03 Greedo feature, which got me into him as an artist.

44 | MGMT - Congratulations (2010) 

My all-time favorite bit is how ridiculously often people on /r/indieheads will tell you that MGMT’s Congratulations is the “hidden gem” album of the 2010s. It is non-exaggeratedly every daily music discussion thread. While this is an insane circlejerk, the undercurrent to the sentiment is undoubtedly true - Congratulations is one of the coolest psych-pop records of the 2010s and a seminal album from the earliest part of the decade. The synth work on this album is absurdly good, the best the band has achieved up until this point. MGMT harnessed the might of their youthful energy from Oracular Spectacular and blended it in to form amazingly spacey and exquisite-sounding hooks. This album is the closest musical equivalent I can draw to a powerful shrooms trip on a beach in Malibu, and it is nuts.

43 | Rico Nasty - Nasty (2018) 

Simply put, Rico Nasty delivers some of the staunchest heat known to man on this album. I wish there was a better adjective to describe her flow style than ‘annihilating,’ but going in is really what she does best. This album was a breakthrough in her career, a filtering of the raw energy hidden beneath her previous work, erupting into a sound that is refreshingly insane. Flying over production from Kenny Beats, Rico delivers empowering anthem-esque tracks with the same veracity as she does all-out flaming bangers. This album is a core part of conventional modern hip hops’ environment and has received far too little attention overall.

42 | Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 2 (2014) 

Run The Jewels 2 is a testament to the power that those with artistic vision can achieve with immaculate album organization and construction. Although it feels almost impossible to not find Run The Jewels a little corny, they are so good at the act of creating a rap album that they manage to overcome this predilection towards cornballery and even use it as a charming badge of honor, a testament to their cartoonish lyrics and electronic production. Killer Mike and El-P have undeniable charisma formed very apparently through years of friendship, and it is exuded through every inch of the album. The two of them exchange bars and lines seamlessly, rapping as an integrated machine with their stylistic differences complementing each other instead of hindering. They are both very clearly in their element working together, and the album succeeds because of this.

41 | Danny Brown - XXX (2011) 

With this mixtape, Danny Brown delivered the starkest artistic piece on drug addiction to be released this decade. XXX is a thoughtful, angry, and pulsing album, conjuring up imagery of OD’d rockstars as choruses and illustrating how pervasive and encapsulating drugs can be on one’s life. Danny Brown doesn’t celebrate addiction in any way, but he also does not exclude what he sees as the fun parts of the lifestyle; what results is an incredibly honest rap album which is both influential for its lyrical content, its sound design, and its bangers. Danny Brown’s flow is biting and striking, both because of the high pitched and nasally sound of his cadence and the starkness of the lyrical content..

40 | Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer (2018) 

The interplay of gender, race, and identity in America is a complex web of interaction that many strive to capture and grapple with in their art. None this decade have done a better job than Janelle Monáe, whos’ Dirty Computer is one of the most expressively conscious and dialectically important albums to be released this decade. Monáe is authoritative in her defiance of the capitalistic order which defines our everyday lives and celebratory of her own identity and her rightful and insanely poignant passion. “Dirty Computer” is a sprawling work, taking the listener down all the twists and turns felt in Monae’s experience with gender and race in evocative and eternally relevant ways. Nonbinary identity, blackness in America, grappling with the pressures of both the past and present, and countless other experiences are the underpinning of this fantastic and important album.

39 | Future - Monster (2014) 

Before there was DS2, Monster was the breakout success for Future and is the active host to some of his finest material, which manages to sound just as cool and groundbreaking as it did when it dropped as a mixtape over 5 years ago. Future is a virtuoso of versatility, employing so many varied cadences, flows, and singing styles which all manage to be emotionally provocative and equally entertaining. “Wesley Presley” is one of the hardest songs of his career, “Codeine Crazy” is still his most emotionally gut-wrenching, and “Radical” remains to be one of his most rousing anthems, contesting stellar songs such as “Groupies.” Future delivers consistently, and he delivers amazingly. This album also begins his trend of having only one, insanely high profile feature; in this case, a fantastic verse on “After That” from Lil Wayne that is reminiscent of the peak of his artistry. Monster is an incredible hip hop record and one of the finest works of one of the decade’s forefront artists.

38 | DJ Rashad - Double Cup (2014) 

Double Cup is the forefront of the footwork genre and is an amazing noise project from an artist that was taken from this Earth far too soon. DJ Rashad is a master of production, sewing together samples and beats like a master tailor into one of the most sonically interesting musical endeavors of the decade. Part plunderphonic influenced, part conventional beats, and part classic footwork are the bases upon which Double Cup is built, besides of course just being a cool-ass record at its core. This is the closest album I can qualify as the spiritual successor to the magic of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…; the ambiance and ethereal whimsicality that are the central aesthetic choices of both albums. However, Double Cup is also an experience all its own, and the talent of DJ Rashad will be sorely missed.

37 | Young Thug - So Much Fun (2019) 

Young Thug’s insanely creative and powerful decade is topped off by So Much Fun, his best work yet, and a showcase of the voluminous Atlanta talent in trap music today. This album is stacked to the brim with fabulous features from fellow contemporary Atlantian visionaries such as Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, Lil Baby, Future, Gunna, and many more. However, none are quite as in tune as Thug himself, who has completely come into his own with this album. He is completely unapologetic for his idiosyncrasy, both personal and artistic, and it radiates off of him as he slays track after track with the most polished flow and catchy production he’s had in years. Seeing him rap alongside those popular, younger rappers he directly influenced (including an amazing feature from the stolen far too early Juice WRLD) and create a new generation of insane tracks is a warming feeling for any Thug fan, and I am more optimistic than ever for the directions he will head in 2020.

36 | Everything Everything - Get To Heaven (2016) 

The wistful etherealness conjured on this album by British band Everything Everything is a uniquely powerful aesthetic. This is experimental pop at its finest, pushing boundaries yet keeping things massively enjoyable. Choruses linger and cascade in to overtures, motifs reveal themselves and then re-emerge when you least expect them, and the instrumentality of the guitars and drumming is nothing short of immaculate. In a decade where group pop releases were not at the forefront of critical acclaim, Everything Everything stand above the rest as the landmark of group-based experimental pop.

35 | Beach House - 7 (2018) 

Beach House’s 7 stands for something in and of itself; it is an incredibly well-defined celebration of the genre and one of the most technically sound and auditorily appealing albums to be released this decade. 7 is the band’s opus and the culmination of their decade-long exploration into their own sound and the sound of dream pop in and of itself. The songs on 7 are intensely beautiful, almost overwhelming the listener at times; the catharsis put in to the creation of this album from every single member of the band is palpable. These are some of the sweetest sounding, lush, and expansive songs I have had the pleasure to experience from this decade. Beach House are transcendental.

34 | Tay-K - #SantanaWorld (2017) 

At the age of 16, Taymor McIntyre was facing trial as an adult for a gang-violence related murder in the particularly litigious state of Texas. He decided to take matters into his own hands; he cut his ankle monitor and ran for it, jumpstarting in popularity one of the most short-lived and unique hip-hop careers of the decade. While his notoriety helped Tay-K gain popularity independently, many have correctly identified his tape #SantanaWorld, released while on the lam, as one of the most essential pieces of cloud trap ever released. Tay-K slides over majestic, in-your-face beats with an untamed, sincere, and terrifying flow. Although there are only 8 non-remixed songs on the tape, he manages to make every track important: even back-tracks such as “Lemonade” and “Saran Pack” deliver the fun-loving, renegade-ish feeling that smash-hit “The Race” is most famous for delivering.

33 | Death Grips - Year Of The Snitch (2018) 

Year Of The Snitch is a victory lap for one of the decade’s most illustrious careers. Stefan, Zach Hill, and Andy Moranis are fully in control of their artistry and their legacy and chose to deliver a booming and diverse meditation on their existence as a band and one of their best works yet. Deriving a considerable portion of its sound from “Steroids,” a brilliant pre-album gabber I am choosing to lump in with this album for list space’s sake, Year Of The Snitch is a self-titled album and exploration of the Death Grips legacy. This album is a smart look in to the experience and musical psyche which are wrought from years of constant touring, internet pariah status, and other compounding factors. This managed to reignite the anger of the group, and ushered in what can be seen as a return to their origins, forming the most complete encapsulation of their sound to be released in album form.

32 | Charli XCX - Pop 2 (2017) 

Pop 2 is the textbook definition of an unproblematic favorite; bringing together of dozens of incredibly cool and musically-influential people under the guidance of the visionary Charli XCX. Converting her momentum from Vroom Vroom and Number 1 Angel into pure bliss, Charli constructs insane songs which are as remarkable for their memorability as they are for their sincerity. It is obvious that this album was in the hands of many people and is the passion project of a collected effort; Pop 2 feels too diverse and well-thought-out to be sincerely pinned down as one conceptual work. Charli is stunning in her delivery, maintaining a sort of piercing optimism and dedication to happiness that it is hard to not be won over by. “Track 10” is one of the most essential pop songs of the decade, to tie it all together and top this release off.

31 | Cardi B - Invasion Of Privacy (2018) 

Cardi B can really rap. Her flow is biting and raw yet always completely rhythmically in-check and her adlibs and charisma manage to sell her stylistic choices even more. Invasion of Privacy is a kickass album which has mastered the fun song, pulling in fabulous features from some of rap and R&B’s best. Even Cardi’s slower and more R&B-influenced songs are seasoned with anger and aggression. She is a woman who grew up in unjust conditions and continues to live an unjust existence due to factors outside of her. Her anger, ferocity, and resistance of this world and the hand she has been dealt is the chief underpinning of her music and the source of her artistic authenticity. Because of this, her successes feel like actual victories and her celebrations of them are even more striking; a song like “Bodak Yellow” is hard to sell to an audience and even harder to make good, and she does both. 21 Savage and the Migos both deliver their features excellently and deliver bangers, meanwhile SZA and Kehlani exquisitely complement Cardi’s anger with melody and emotionality.

30 | Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition (2016) 

Atrocity Exhibition is Danny Brown’s most polished work, an incredible achievement in sound construction and working to the strengths and talents of individual rappers. Brown is especially notable for his multiple cadences and flows and ability to swap between them with ease, and Atrocity Exhibition makes sure to make the most it can out of these talents. Rapping on this album is rarely consistent in any factor except for its solidness; cadence, flow, and all other sorts of technical matters are constantly played with and manipulated in order to achieve the best possible sound. What is consistent, however, is the strength of his delivery in an artistic sense. On top of all this, the cohesion of his features add a particularly strong finish to this magnificent record.

29 | Earl Sweatshirt - Doris (2013) 

Doris is, far and away, the best of the early Odd Future efforts and is emblematic of an era of a group which would go on to create their own subculture and music genres. Earl’s flow is insanely developed in comparison to his experience on this album; songs with Vince Staples are some of the most technically precise and contrite tracks put out this decade. The album is ripe in the way of good features; Tyler The Creator drops his early obnoxious public persona and delivers his most endearing bars from the era, Domo Genesis has his only good verse maybe ever, and handfull of the less-recognized voices in the Odd Future extended universe make some of their best contributions. Earl Sweatshirt, even at a young age, was fully-cognizant of the depths of evil and destruction felt by those living in capitalist societies, and his music reflects a sort of youthful jadedness and anger which has become the political fuel for generations of leftist young people. He was one of the first to tap into this feeling in our generation, and the one who probably still does it the best.

28 | 21 Savage, Offset, and Metro Boomin - Without Warning (2017) 

Without Warning is a superb conventional trap album that harnesses the internal spookiness and terror of Metro Boomin’s production and ramps it up to 11 in a vaguely Halloween-themed carnage festival. Offset and 21 Savage trade verses with genuine chemistry and excel on songs on their own, delivering radio smashes such as “Ric Flair Drip” and lower-key scary tracks such as “Run Up The Racks.” Offset is an amazing ad-libber, and that skill is deployed in full-force on this album; his verses feel like his best Migos contributions but more focused and featured appropriately within a well-constructed setting. Additionally, features on this album from Travis Scott and Quavo are notably above the artist’s usual mark, coming together to form the extended universe of Atlanta’s main trap justice league.

This album stands above other traditional trap albums due to its mastery of technical aspects, thematic strength, and just proclivity for making the songs good. It is one of the defining mainstream rap albums of the last five years and provides a key definitional album for the trap genre in the age of cloud trap ascendancy. Also, the cover dog is really cool, I want to pet that guy. ;]

27 | Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo (2016) 

The Life of Pablo is Kanye West at his emotional peak. This album is (and is entirely self-described as) the workings of an insane genius at the height of his power and production capability. What results is the most feature-dense, well-imagined, and ideologically expansive Kanye West album that there ever has been. This album, too, can be seen as the closing of an era, the last ramblings of pre-Republican and pre-billionaire Kanye West, as well as the last album before a major stylistic change heading into the Wyoming Sessions. This album is a panacea of talent that is, in a way, paying tribute to Kanye’s influence. Acts like Chance The Rapper, Sia, Young Thug, Sampha, and many other visionaries who are powerful Kanye-influenced voices turn in fantastic features for this record. All in all, The Life of Pablo is a stunning album that speaks for itself as far as scope and power.

26 | Tyler, The Creator - IGOR (2019) 

IGOR is a fascinating sonic project, a reimagination of the synth as an instrument and a testament to the goodwill and artistic genius with which Tyler, The Creator has come to operate. The narrative of this album is stunning and stark, a non-chronological heartbreak story that serves Tyler more as a means of reckoning with his own identity than with a broken heart. The influences on this album range from Playboi Carti’s adlibs to 80’s synth bands to Pharell beat construction; IGOR is a fusion and amalgamation of all of Tyler’s influences and a reconciliation of them within his own sound. This record contains sounds which will no doubt inspire a generation of artists heading into a new decade, and is a special album with an intrinsic coolness which is undoubtable.

25 | 100 Gecs - 1000 Gecs (2019) 

As much as I am tempted to just write the word “gec” 1,000 times for this blurb, it would be a disservice not to talk about how forward-thinking this album is and how genre-defining it will come to be. Laura Les and Dylan Brady have created the best Bubblegum Bass album to exist yet, and it would be a good world if the sounds and bold new choices made by the duo came to define the genre. Equal parts a child of early 2010s internet culture and early 2000s nostalgia, 1000 gecs is a celebration of the complexity of queer existence in a dystopian and confusing modern-day world. There are poppy poignant love songs which embody this queer experience, such as “Ringtone” and “gec 2 Ü,” just as much as there are insane otherworldly nether dimension bangers such as “800db cloud” and “money machine,” which feel as if they were born from the bottom of a pirated 2004 version of GarageBand gone rouge. 1000 Gecs says a lot, and it says it in all 23 minutes. Even more than that, it feels like they got across what they wanted to say, in their own Gectastic way. 1000 gecs is also impressive because it has the best Ska song of the decade on it, and that's nuts.

24 | The Avalanches - Wildflower (2016) 

It’s hard to imagine how Wildflower, made by the most revered plunderphonics act in the world, could be seen as vastly exceeding expectations. Yet The Avalanches managed to turn in a nearly-flawless, eternally summery work of Americana-themed noise and plunderphonics tracks after their 15 years of absence. The group manages to incorporate other legendary hip-hop voices, not the least of which include Biz Markie rapping about cereal and the best MF DOOM verse this decade, into a soundscape in which they sound reinvigorated and fully at home. Wildflower is a sprawling work of an album, bouncing off of summer barbecues, eternal subway systems, and the energy behind lovers’ eyes in a beautifully paced and never boring odyssey. Danny Brown has two incredible features on this album, one of which is on the lead single, and inspires hope for a future filled with The Avalanches-produced hip-hop fusion tracks. I have absolutely heard this album being played in the lobbies of Chipotle, but it's so good that it even bops there.

23 | Lana Del Rey - Born To Die (2012) 

At the onset of her career, before the limelight and public profile helped her form into one of today’s foremost pop stars, Lana Del Rey had a mystifying knack for conveying personal emotions incredibly effectively. Lana Del Rey, whose name was originally Elizabeth Grant, is an encapsulation of walking contradiction: adjacence to wealth with intense disdain for it, a complex relationship with drugs that changes from song to song, underlying meditations on abuse hidden behind childlike, Lolita-referencing lyrics. However, it is the infallible whole that Lana brings together which defines her as an artist, and this album was her first grand and stunning show of that power to create and construct emotion. This album’s songs were pervasive for a generation of teens, and reflect a youthful sort of outlook that undoubtedly helped to inspire and form many creative tastes. This album is synonymous with the story of 2010s music.

22 | Godspeed You, Black Emperor! - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (2012)

No band makes post-rock sound more angelic than Godspeed, a fact readily proven with the band’s comeback album and modern genre masterpiece 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!. They return seemingly uninterrupted as far as creative vision is concerned, delivering a beautiful reimagining of their own classic sound with an album that builds on lyrical and thematic motifs of their previous works. This album feels like a relic of the past, a too good to be true find that gives you modern access to some sort of hidden and ancient musical knowledge. The best description I have of it to this day, no matter how gross it is, is to imagine if Swans made beautiful and cohesively imagined music instead of their own work. This album is one of the genre’s essentials.

21 | Arcade Fire - Reflektor (2013)

Reflektor is Arcade Fire’s most imaginative and off-the-wall work; a complete departure from their previous sound and aesthetic on The Suburbs, and a brave and successful foray into dance and alternative sounds. Although one can see the legacy of the band as innovators of the entire rock genre, it is still stunning that Win Butler and company manage to make music this diverse and encapsulating over a decade after the seminal Funeral. This album goes on eternally within itself, diving into the corners and complexities of the immaculately curated sound and revealing the deepest oddities of the band members’ musical psyches. Reflektor even offers contributions from David Bowie, who was initially highly instrumental to the band’s popularity and is a figure that is still sorely missed by those in music today. This album is a fascinating look into the power of legacy and innovation.

20 | Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me 

Nothing is more impossible to understand than death and the sorrow that it brings. Nothing that I say here would be better said than Everlum himself; I can’t come close to even suggesting I can understand his emotions or where he came from in the production of this album. I feel like quantifying it as a rateable and reviewable in itself can be seen as a disservice, but it felt wrong to not put it on this list. This record stands on its own.

19 | Future - Dirty Sprite 2 (2015) 

DS2 continues to serve as the premium model for the exemplary and successful mainstream trap album. Everything about the album feels fully within the control of the Future and Metro Boomin grand alliance. “I Serve The Base” has a beat that sounds like a helicopter viciously approaching, Future raps with a borderline speaking-in-tongues flow on “Stick Talk,” the intro to “Freak Hoe” sounds like The King Of Limbs-era Radiohead, and “Slave Master” is so good that Future felt the need to sample his own song 4 years later. So many little things are done correctly, and done so correctly, that they circle back around to being big things. Future is a master of working within his production and styling himself to it; it is how he’s able to create such diverse yet musically-sound titles such as Save Me and HNDRXX. In my opinion, there is no better production to fit within and work with than 2015-era Metro Boomin, and DS2 executes this masterfully.

18 | Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015) 

Carrie & Lowell is the culmination of Sufjan Stevens’ brilliant career; the full maturation of his sound, resonation, and honesty with his individuality and identity, and the absolute peak of his vocal performance. This album is starkly personal and completely unreckonable with upon first listen; emotions inspired by this album feel just as poignant and inner reaching as the absolute peaks only reached by Sufjan once before on Illinois. This album deserves the hallowed praise it continually receives and is a deserved member of the pantheon of singer-songwriter work for the rest of time. It, again, feels hollow to reflect on such a personal and grieving work’s lyrical content; Carrie & Lowell conveys emotionality in a way that few ever works of art ever have. 

17 | Death Grips - Bottomless Pit (2017) 

Bottomless Pit is the absolute peak of the Death Grips’ songwriting arc, an album which is quite easily their most consistent work to date and serves as a shining example of everything the band stands for. Death Grips has one of the most consistent discographies to ever exist, and this album is the group at the peak of their newest and most compelling arc. The songs on this album are perfectly-ordered, excellently paced, and quickly delivered. There is absolutely no doubt that this album is the closest representation of Death Grips’ ultimate vision for themselves as a band. This vision all comes together in the title track, a brilliant closer which infuses all of their previous styles and motifs into a blood frenzied celebration. This album is the peak of the Death Grips discography.

16 | Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs (2018) 

Some Rap Songs is a live look into the inception of a completely-new genre being crafted in real-time. There are incredibly few and far between instances for the listener to be able to witness someone cracking into a completely new, completely off-the-wall way of approaching music. Earl Sweatshirt, with Some Rap Songs (and the also-brilliant follow-up EP Feet Of Clay), is doing precisely that; messing with time signatures, avant-garde jazz riffs, freeform production, and monotone depressing lyrics, all of which come together in the cauldron of creativity to brew up an entirely new musical concoction. The sound of this album, whose roots can be seen on the more somber parts of Doris such as on “Chum,” is eternally distressing; something about the way this record resonates through your mind feels off, almost otherworldly. However, long after you finish listening to the album, this unease and lack of understanding turns into motivation to listen even more. From this repeated listening, the absolute genius of the production, flow, lyrical content, and the sound of this album manage to imprint themselves on your brain. Some Rap Songs is the definition of a groundbreaker as well as the definition of a grower; I can’t imagine any album I’d say more benefits the listener with repeated listening. This album is meditative yet jaded, cynical and depressed yet whimsical. Some Rap Songs is a victory for artistry and will come to be one of the most influential records of the century.

15 | Lil Uzi Vert - Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World (2016) 

Lil Uzi Vert is a visionary when it comes to crafting bangers, and with this release, he delivered a classic trap tape full of nine incredible songs that imbue the listener with energy and power upon every listen. Lil Uzi Vert is emblematic of the early Soundcloud rap era for many reasons. Sure, there’s the abundance of brightly-colored hair, the bootlegged-looking album covers, and space-age production choices, but Uzi succeeded in this field because he’s also the most musical and artistic of this early wave of rappers. “Money Longer” sounds like no song I have heard before or since, “You Was Right” features the incredibly rare double Metro Boomin producer tag, “Ps and Qs” manages to make manners fun, and “Scott and Ramona” is a starkly saddening love song that caps everything off. There are so many impressive things to list about this tape and its construction that I could go on indefinitely. Uzi is a naturally cool and visionary dude, and his music sounds groundbreaking innately; he caught-on to a sound and a style long before others did and was able to put a stamp on it before anyone else was even able to comprehend it.

14 | Pusha T - Daytona (2018) 

Every word in Daytona, from the striking first verse of “If You Know You Know,” to the demolishing finish that is “Infrared,” feels as if it's part of a long-form poem. Songs flow in and out of each other astoundingly, focusing on narrative over track listing. Kanye West’s production is as immaculate as it has ever been, inspiring hope that a transition to a production-focused role may cease the eternal Bruh Moment which is post-2017 Republican Kanye West. Pusha T said that he named the album after his favorite wristwatch, the Rolex Daytona, because he had nothing but time while making the album. This is absolutely confirmed through listening, as this record is one of the best-organized and well-crafted short-form media pieces of the 21st century, as well as the best conventional/classic rap album released this decade. Pusha T is a savant who takes his time with his work and does things right, and Daytona is the ultimate realization of his vision as the best dealer turned rapper in the world. Every repeat listen of Daytona is a treat, and “The Story of Adidon” serves as an amazing unofficial 8th bonus track, given that it’s probably the best diss track of the decade.

13 | Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy (2017) 

Flower Boy is the defining rap album for reckoning with queer identity, a brave and stunning exploration made by the queer communities’ most unexpected member and ally. Tyler, The Creator built a career and legacy off of his creation of the Odd Future clique and subculture; an anarchistic and offensive viewpoint to combat an unfair and oppressive world. This album is striking proof that artistic and personal growth are not only possible, but that they can also lead to some of the highest creative peaks. No one has since made an album more honest in its encapsulation of youthful alienation and malaise, nor has anyone come close to relating queer identity so strongly to blackness and self-identity as a black man. Flower Boy is a beautiful panacea to all sorts of lovesickness and pain. Many young people in my generation who felt the same sort of anger and disenfranchisement championed by Tyler in his earlier work with Odd Future have since come to find a sort of peace and self-understanding with the help of Flower Boy.

12 | Lorde - Melodrama (2017) 

Melodrama is a masterwork of heartbreak. This album is fully immersed in the loneliness and dread which curse post-break-up psyches, the pain of loves come and gone, and the mental processes that come out of nowhere and allow one to begin to sniff the inroads of emotional progress. The production on this album fits the enigmatic and brilliant Lorde like a comfortable wool sweater; she sings from within the music, reaching out to the listener through her poignant displays of lyricism and the relation one can feel with her universal pain. Jack Antonoff, to the surprise of just about everybody, has separated himself as one of pop’s most notable producers and sound designers (indeed, this is a far cry from the ‘fun.’ days for him). Melodrama is fascinating, partially because it is the continuation of an already beautiful discography which takes Lorde’s compelling ideas and spins them in a new and rewarding direction. Above all, her music retains its supremely empathetic quality; Lorde is a master of reaching into the emotional fountain within everyone’s soul.

11 | Playboi Carti - Playboi Carti (2017) 

Jordan Terell Carter is one of the most visionary artists of this generation, and the Playboi Carti Self-Titled is not only an insanely powerful introduction to the music world at large, but an unparalleled celebration of his worldview, and one of the tidiest, most diverse collections of songs that have been put out this decade. Every song on Playboi Carti is completely distinct in both sound and content from its album mates. Somehow, Carti was able to select 12 completely disjunctive, yet insanely polished, song ideas and meld them into a completely realized work. Carti’s self-titled is the perfect embodiment of the Playboi Carti lifestyle, brand, sound, and general approach to the world. Humans are multi-faceted and complicated, so on an album whose concept is himself, Carti captures these differences and personal oddities so well that to listen to this album feels like knowing Carti himself.

Not only is the construction of this album immaculate. Carti is a master of remembering to make the songs good above all else. He exhibits this virtuoso by delivering tunes that never tire, keep on plodding, and even manage to grow on you despite being so out of touch with each other. “Location” has some of the spaciest production I’ve ever heard in a rap song, and it's absolutely cathartic and beautiful; from this track, he moves seamlessly to “Magnolia,” a pop radio hit which feels scientifically designed to be his ‘popular’ song. The songs with Lil Uzi on this album are the peak of the two’s collaborative work, and “New Choppa” with A$AP Rocky elicits terrifying late-night horror carnival vibes. Even deep cuts like “Half & Half,” “NO. 9,” “Kelly K,” and “Yah Mean” are all so creative and charming that you can't help but be won over by Carti and his infallible persona. This is one of the most spirited and well-crafted trap tapes to ever be released and is a landmark of personal achievement in the realm of the self-titled album.

10 | Rihanna - ANTI (2016) 

The phrases ‘sprawling’ and ‘expansive’ are often thrown around in music criticism where they don’t apply. Music writers use these words to define albums that are incredibly well-put-together and long, yet not diverse or epic enough to fit said adjectives. ANTI is the closest definitional album that I can find for those terms that are thrown around far too often; a sprawling pop masterpiece that permeates across all borders and genres of music and comes together under the vision and seemingly god-given natural talent of Rihanna. No album this decade achieves as many different things, and does them all as fantastically, as ANTI does. This record is so consistent that even the 3 bonus tracks are not only essential but worthy of consideration as actual album tracks (I don’t want a world where “Goodnight Gotham” isn’t considered part of the main ANTI canon). This album is truly something special and all too rare in the music scene today; an album that is great largely because of how fully it encapsulates the base definition of great albums. ANTI is a primal exercise in album composition and a test of the limits of diversity and style brought together under one roof of musical genius, and it succeeds more than is possible to describe.

9 | 21 Savage & Metro Boomin - Savage Mode (2016)  

Savage Mode is the magnum opus of the most important producer of the decade and a testament to the power that fantastic production can have and the heights to which it can carry an album. Metro Boomin’s beats on this album are the most masterful we’ve ever seen in his career; the culmination of his efforts from 2014 onward and a striking reaffirmation for him as the best producer on the planet. There are very few albums where the artist is more in-tune with the production than the brilliant and haunting 21 Savage is with Metro’s direction. Every word that leaves his mouth is exactly in tune, exactly on time, and strikes even harder than the one that came before it. This is the most technically crafted trap tape that I have ever heard. This tape set the direction for a half-decade of both trap and pop rap and very well may be the peak of the genre.

21 doesn’t need to convince you that he is a hard motherfucker. As soon as you hear the brilliant first two tracks, “No Advance” and “No Heart,” his badassery unquestionably oozes from every pore. As far as innate believability of the lyrics because of the rapping flow, 21 pales only to maybe Pusha T as far as genuineness in delivery. 21 Savage is a fantastic rapper who was able to put behind the amateurishness of his early work on this album, crafting what is far and away a top 10 rap performance for the decade. Savage Mode is the best of every world; lyrics, production, flow, sound, and everything else you could possibly want in a rap album is consummately taken care of by the artists. Metro deserves to have his name on the album, and 21 deserves his place in the pantheon of great rappers of our time.

8 | Mitski - Bury Me At Makeout Creek (2014) 

Bury Me At Makeout Creek was my high school breakup album, my personal anthems of a young love lost, and the acute pain felt at the time that it occurs. However, to pigeonhole this album as being a breakup record (or even a romantic record) would be a disservice; Mitski is an artist who approaches music from countless different pathways and to define her work as only one thing is wrong. Part singer-songwriter, part rock, and part everything else, Bury Me at Makeout Creek is a stunning record that gets more done in 30 minutes than other artists manage to do with 2-hour efforts. If you’re looking to experience catharsis embodied fully in music, you will find it on this album. If you’re looking to uncover the rawest and most base release of emotion communicated through shredding guitars and heartbreaking vocals, you will find it on this album. If you want precise guitar work, immaculately constructed motifs, and directions you never knew a guitar could go in, you can find it on this album. Regardless of why you find yourself drawn to music as a medium, you will find something positive and wondrous contained in the walls of this brief yet stunning work.

Rock as a genre has historically been hostile to voices that are not from the white male perspective, and Mitski’s music is a complete repudiation of this sadly-persistent attitude in the music community. With Bury me At Makeout Creek, Mitski made a better rock and roll album than 99.9% of the rock bands this decade, and it isn’t even really a “full” rock album. Talent is prescribed entirely on bases not related to gender and race, and too long have rock and roll voices and exposure been defined by these archetypes. Mitski’s music is internally defiant of these gender roles and racial definitions of genre, and her music is a full rejection and complete defeat of such patterns of thinking.

7 | Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019) 

Norman Fucking Rockwell is a fabulously introspective and stunningly beautiful exploration of womanhood in America. The record is a love letter to Americana and a testament to the atmosphere that enabled the culturally pervasive Lana Del Rey to grow into the woman and artist she is today. Del Rey’s voice is as good as it's ever been, growing even sweeter and more daunting with age; as a result, NFR is one of the most stunning vocal performances of all time. Lana kills it, and she kills it on every track. It is impossible to not feel some kind of way while listening to “Venice Bitch,” or really any song on this album for that matter. Whether it’s the strength of her voice as both an artist, or the strength of her voice as a singer, something about these songs has the power to place you directly in Lana’s viewpoint. This allows you to experience the emotions, feelings, and experiences Lana has with more clarity than any other piece of media I have ever engaged with. I first listened to this album while stranded on a bus after waiting for six hours following an accident. The record was so transformative that it immediately pulled me from the annoyance and triviality of my own situation into the real, expensive, and complex problems that Lana Del Rey grapples with in her life. Norman Fucking Rockwell is a masterpiece of empathy as much as it is of singer-songwriting. I can only hope my experience with this album continues to evolve in the way it has in the short time since its release.

6 | Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012) 

The fact that Fiona Apple takes the title of this flawless work from her own poetry is abjectly unsurprising given the composition of the album. The Idler Wheel... is prosaic and poetic at its core and all the way through its existence; Apple is a master of the subconscious blend of poetry and music, and it is the most apparent on this album. A product of 13 years of work, this album is the strongest narrative musical work this decade by a solid margin. This album contains better poetic content than most poetry collections and better narrative content than most novels. Fiona Apple is the single most magnanimous singer-songwriter on the face of the Earth, and this album is her reintroduction to a new generation with her most heartbreaking work yet.

Fiona Apple captures the feeling of disconnectedness and loneliness caused by depression and general ennui better than any other artist I can think of. She is blazingly aware of her own faults and beats herself up for them more than she beats up others for theirs. This consistent dejectedness and loneliness that she espouses makes you long to only see good things for her and her life. The lyric “How could I ask anyone to love me, when all I do is ask to be left alone” is easily one of my favorites of the decade, and it isn't even the best lyrical selection from the album. Even past the lyrical and thematic content, this album *sounds* great too. She is able to incorporate percussion and strings with more versatility and vivaciousness than I have ever seen. Fiona Apple is an indispensable voice.

5 | Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (2018) 

Twin Fantasy is the best rock and roll album of the decade. Even if you were to remove the stunning, beautiful, and poignant content of this album’s thematic motifs and lyrical content, you still have a band that has completely set themselves apart from other rock acts thanks to their ingenious evolution of the rock and roll sound for a new generation. Much like Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound revolution, Car Seat Headrest have made rock a 21st-century genre through the sheer widening and complication of sound. Songs on Twin Fantasy are never repetitive or tiring in the slightest even though the record clocks in at an hour and a half long. If anything, the album feels short given the scope of its sonic achievement, masterful guitar work, stellar production, and far-reaching lyricism.

At its core, Twin Fantasy is a love story and statement on queer existence in this new generation. The record weaves the tale of a dying relationship made and developed through the internet with dazzling sound design and lyrical excellence. It highlights the contradictions that things like technology, being queer, distance, family, and emotionality can have on love and the emotional fallout that happens when these things seem to conspire against you. I can’t describe how relevant Twin Fantasy was for me personally in the coming out process. This album’s lyrical content, subdued humor, and the resignation of Will Toledo were some of the first things that truly helped me understand my own queerness, and I know I am far from alone in this. This is a special once in a generation sort of album.

4 | Beyoncé - Lemonade (2016)

Beyoncé’s immaculate Lemonade represents the ultimate triumph of the concept album as a valid media organization. Never before and never again will there be a better effort to capture one’s own pain, sense of loss and abandonment, and anger at unfaithfulness than there has been here. Although many among us can relate to the fierceness of the lyrics, the intensity of her sentiment, and the graceful nature of her forgiveness, it is impossible to say any of us have truly felt Beyoncé’s pain. The overarching motif Lemonade is that relationships, no matter how public, are inherently personal; therefore, the reactions and emotions caused by their twists and turns are entirely personal. Nobody can understand exactly what it is like to be you, and thus nobody can really ever 100% feel how Beyoncé felt during the construction of this album. However, one of the many reasons this record is flawless is because so many people relate to it so personally. Beyoncé managed to construct an album that is both wholly personal and universally relatable. What began as an entirely subjective experience has transformed into an objective battle cry for womanhood and black identity in America, and this is an altogether unique artistic occurrence.

Lemonade brings in talent from all genres and musical heritages. Beyoncé is able to create classic White Stripes era riffs with Jack White with the same ease as she manages to deliver a fantastic Kendrick Lamar set piece. So many people contributed small parts of themselves and their own pain into the creation of this record, and Beyoncé immaculately fused it together under the hood of her own experience. This album is starkly beautiful sounding, and it feels amiss to not mention the production given how insanely consistent it is from the front to the back of the record. This album is truly something special.

3 | Playboi Carti - Die Lit (2018)

Die Lit is trap’s best album and an absolute tour de force of cloud trap. Playboi Carti carried the momentum of his self-titled work more successfully than anyone could have imagined, forming a machiavellian treatise on life, a penning love letter to Atlanta trap, and completely revamping an entire genre in the process. Die Lit is massive, sprawling, and expansive in both its sound and ideas. Pierre Bourne has emerged as a new saint in the pantheon of all-time producers, bringing his completely fresh and insane sound to a genre already filled with dozens of other visionaries waiting to help develop it. Carti’s flow rests somewhere between that of a goblin and a pop singer, a tense sort of duality that slaps hard and remains unchallenged in the rap game today. It is absolutely unprecedented how an album with this many tracks manages to deliver essential songs at such a high ratio; consistency is one of this album’s biggest selling points. Carti continues to be a visionary both musically and culturally, and it has become increasingly evident that he is in the middle of constructing a new vision of punk trap while also on one of the best album runs of all time.

Die Lit is cool, sleek, and long-lasting, but above all, it manages to be pervasively fun. This album is one of the most joyous and pleasant listens of the decade, a work of absolute eternal happiness and aesthetic jubilation. It is impossible to overstate how much this album means to me and how much I have listened to it. The spirit of this album remains undefeated despite injustice and pain, Carti holds an indomitable spirit that he successfully projects out into the world.

2 | Kanye West - Yeezus (2013)

It is absolutely impossible to overstate the impact of Yeezus as a record; from its lasting and entrenched influence on the future of rap and hip-hop production to the emotional wrath and disquiet it immediately released in the souls of the music fans who had years to reckon with it. From the hundreds of artists who have taken pieces of this record into their own to the monumental meaning it has to artistry as a whole, the shadow of Yeezus looms large over the music industry even today. This album will continue to be regarded as one of the decade’s most classic and influential works, and it is without question that this analysis is deserved. Yeezus operates on the same thematic and aesthetic wavelength as The Great Gatsby; it is an album about the depravities of wealth and success, and the failure to understand oneself as a human in the light of drug abuse and moral depravity. This is all a byproduct caused by a predatory culture that feeds upon those human relations that offer the only hope of escape from this bleak and wretched world. These messages are packed into a compact 40-minutes where no two songs sound alike. “Black Skinhead” is one of the best rock songs of the decade, “Bound 2” is a completely unrivaled love song, and “Send It Up” is a drill-infused genre-bending masterwork. Every song on this album accomplishes a different goal but works toward the same end, all coming together to form one of art’s mightiest achievements.

1 | Lorde - Pure Heroine (2013) 

Pure Heroine captures the essence of pure, unadulterated young love, more brilliantly and perfectly than any other album has ever even come close to. Pure Heroine is a victory for the pop genre and an undisputed top 2 or 3 pop album of all-time. Such isolated works of transformative genius, works that contribute to a completely different and compelling direction for a genre as varied and diverse as pop, are once in a lifetime opuses. The fact that Lorde managed to compose such a work on her DEBUT album at the age of 16 is unequivocal proof of her genius. I can’t even remember what I was up to at 16 besides gaming. This album would feel like an anomalous showing if Lorde has not also released another one of the best albums of the decade. And really, how anomalous can this perfect of an album be? The talents of Lorde and her truest, completely ungarnished inner-self are present in every pore of this album.

Pure Heroine is an album about love; love that shockingly persists in spite of the wasteland of suburbaness and apathy which has long been at war with the psyche of the youth. It feels wrong to even discern between analyses of songs on this album given how flawless every minute of this record is and how the miraculous whole speaks for itself better than any particular partition of the music. This album is a work of sublime thematic genius, an absolutely infallible artistic achievement completely lacking a single bad moment, error, or lapse in thematic judgment. “Royals” is one of the best hit songs of the decade, and “Team” is even better; there’s no part of this album that doesn’t completely break the mold. It is impossible, once introduced, to stop thinking about the stark utopia of suburban love that Lorde has generated on this album. Pure Heroine is, quite simply, one of the best albums of all time.

---

If you want more thoughts on this decade of music, follow Jack on twitter @tedcruzcontrol.

And Then We All Bought Yachts: A Minus The Bear Discography Ranking

For a band whose name is based on a joke about a blowjob, Minus the Bear have played a surprisingly vital role in my musical development. An alternative rock band hailing from the rainy city of Seattle, Minus The Bear made a name for themselves with a unique combination of catchy indie rock, mathy guitar tapping, and odd time signatures. This resulted in a sound that was at once accessible, dancy, hyper-technical, and entirely their own. Their lyrics are evocative and poetic, often centered around tales of love and life in the Pacific Northwest, along with iconic sing-along choruses that would become lodged in your prefrontal cortex for days on end. The band officially called it quits at the end of 2018, but to this day, they remain one of the most important and influential acts of my life. 

Minus The Bear’s Discography is somewhat daunting, stretching from the early 2000s to their final release at the tail end of 2018. They underwent very few lineup changes, but each release brought a new tone that saw the band refreshing their sound like the changing of the seasons. During their time together, Minus The Bear produced six studio albums, three EPs, two acoustic releases, one remix album, one B-sides collection, and a whole host of singles. In other words, there’s a lot of music, and somehow all of it’s worth digging into.

I first discovered Minus The Bear when a friend forced his headphones over my ears sometime in high school and played “Pachuca Sunrise” on his lime green iPod Nano. From the second that I heard those first dreamy notes, I knew that this band would become my new obsession. Placed in the same category as Portugal. The Man (who I also did a discography ranking for), these bands became the face of musical discovery for me in high school. They represented something new, something fresh, and something that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I downloaded the band’s discography as of 2008-ish and began to slowly immerse myself in the world of Minus The Bear.

In turn, I paid it forward and got some of my friends into the band. One of my closest childhood friends and I became MTB partners in crime, attending some half-dozen concerts together throughout high school before going our separate ways in college. To me, these songs evoke warm memories of the last carefree days of high school. They remind me of long drives on summer nights with the windows down and rainy Portland springs, begrudgingly juggling school with my teenage job at a grocery store. It’s not an understatement to say that this band soundtracked some of the most important moments, and feelings, of my life.

It’s worth noting that while this is a “ranking” of Minus The Bear’s discography, even the lowest album on this list is still a fantastic record that’s worth listening to. I believe that each of Minus The Bear’s albums shine on their own merits, the big difference is that some of these albums arrived in my life exactly when I needed them, while others haven’t had the fortune to coincide with major life events. In other words, there are no bad Minus The Bear albums: this list merely goes from “good” to “great.”

It’s also worth noting that for the purposes of this ranking, I will be disregarding the band’s remix album, B-sides collection, and some of the smaller promo singles like YAR and Hold Me Down. This list will focus on the group’s core studio albums and EPs: a grand total of eleven entries. So welcome to the world of Minus The Bear. Pour a glass of red wine, and prepare to journey into one of the best discographies of indie rock. 

---

11 - Voids (2017)

Part of me feels bad putting the band’s last proper studio album lowest on this ranking, but Voids has had the least amount of time to make an impact on me, especially in comparison to some of the later albums on this list. That said, Voids is still a fantastic record that represented something of a return to form for the band as they circled back to the more mathy and intimate style of their early releases. Behind the scenes, Voids is the only album to feature drummer Kiefer Matthias who joined the band two years earlier replacing founding member Erin Tate. This record also marked the return of the band to their original label, Suicide Squeeze, for the first time since 2007’s Planet of Ice. So with some old and some new, Voids feels like a career-spanning retrospective that also acts as a truly fantastic bookend.

Voids sees MTB at their most wistful and diverse, synthesizing every different type of song they’ve made across their 17-year career into one LP. Songs like “Invisible” and “Last Kiss” are poppy radio grabs that are primed for bouncy indie dance parties and sunny top-down singalongs. Conversely, tracks like “What About The Boat?” harken back to the band’s debut, eschewing radio-ready choruses for more technical instrumentation, subdued vocals, and self-destructive lovelorn lyricism. Meanwhile, “Silver” sounds like a mid-career OMNI-cut, and “Lighthouse” builds to a glitchy, psychedelic guitar solo that would have fit in perfectly on Planet of Ice. With this record, the group pulled out all the stops and created an album that felt designed to please every type of MTB fan regardless of what their favorite era of the band was.

10 - Fair Enough (2018)

Minus The Bear’s final release, Fair Enough, was an apt farewell. An EP comprised of three Voids leftovers and one remix, the band’s last formal release was a bite-sized send-off that they put out right before embarking on their farewell tour at the end of 2018. Fair Enough simultaneously acted as a reminder of what made the band great and also served as a  bittersweet love letter to fans. Everyone went into this EP knowing it was the band’s final work, and that made it all the more difficult to say goodbye. 

The opening track “Fair Enough” begins somberly with lead singer Jake Snider touching on all of his favorite topics; women, alcohol, and regret. This leads to a masterful build as synthesizers, bass, and guitar swirl together over a drumroll. “Viaduct” is a hard-driving anthemic cut, and “Dinosaur” is a groovy and carefully-constructed piece centered around one of the band’s signature guitar-tapped lines. I will say, while Sombear’s remix of “Invisible” is serviceable, the decision to close the band’s entire career out on a remix is a perplexing one. It ends up feeling more like the reprised music that plays over the end credits of a movie than a thoughtful message to fans after two decades of support. That minor gripe aside, Fair Enough is a well-rounded goodbye that briefly touches upon all the reasons why Minus The Bear were such a creative force of nature. 

9 - Infinity Overhead (2012)

Infinity Overhead was the first Minus The Bear album released after I graduated from high school. While it might seem silly to demarcate a band’s discography by my own “pre” and “post” high-school phases, it feels relevant to mention here because this was the first Minus the Bear record that I consumed outside of the environment in which I first discovered them. This shifted my perspective as a listener and led to me experience the album differently than any of the band’s previous work. In other words, whether well-founded or not, this record represented an irreversible shift in my relationship with the band and how I viewed them. 

The first side of the album is interesting and fun, if not a little uneven. “Steel and Blood” is catchy enough, even if it feels like a label-mandated requirement for a lead single. Meanwhile, “Diamond Lightning” is flat-out one of the best songs the band has ever created, featuring soaring, gorgeous instrumentals and nostalgic, picturesque lyricism. Where the album really shines, however, is in its back half. From track six onward, the group launches into a stretch of fantastic songs that sound unlike anything they’ve ever created before or since. “Heaven is a Ghost Town” is an eerie and pensive meditation, “Empty Party Rooms” is a minimalistic construction that builds to an anthemic chorus, and “Lonely Gun” is a funky, obtuse track with electronic claps and a wah-wah guitar line that sounds like a laser. Perhaps most importantly, “Cold Company” is a cathartic closing track featuring a sticky chorus, a molten guitar solo, and a punchy, tight riff. It may be a little uneven, but my love and appreciation for Infinity Overhead has only grown with time.

8 - This Is What I Know About Being Gigantic (2001)

On This Is What I Know About Being Gigantic we hear Minus The Bear in their earliest, most primitive form. While obviously lacking the same level of production as any of the recordings that followed it, this EP still manages to showcase a band who very much has a fully-formed idea of who they are and a vision of what they’re working towards. 

There’s signature mathy guitar tapping, synthy embellishments, technical drumming, weird time signatures, romantic lyricism, catchy choruses, and bizarre song titles. It’s textbook Minus The Bear right from the very start from the awesomely-named “Hey Wanna Throw Up? Get Me Naked” to the enamored and intoxicated “Pantsuit... Uggghhh.” In a heartwarming turn of events, “Lemurs, Man, Lemurs” was a staple of the group’s farewell tour setlist, and let me tell you, it was nothing short of life-affirming to hear a room full of people yelling “roll one for me / roll one for me / let’s drink all night” at the top of their lungs a full seventeen years after the song was released. 

7 - Acoustics II (2013)

I’ll admit that including Minus The Bear’s acoustic albums in this countdown feels like a bit of a cheat, if only because they’re essentially Greatest Hits records. While the band’s acoustic releases feature cherry-picked hits from every stage of their career, I’d argue that the songs standalone and were recreated with enough love and care that they constitute their own entries. Acoustics II is, as you would expect, a fully-acoustic collection of songs and a sequel to the band’s first acoustic release in 2008. Practically doubling the original Acoustic’s runtime, the sequel is a full-length release that reimagines some of the band’s greatest tracks from each of their previous albums along with two unique tracks created just for this record. 

One of the most striking parts of both of Minus The Bear’s acoustic releases is how above-and-beyond the band went. They could have just sung their old songs over a single acoustic guitar and released them to rabid fans, but instead, they reimagine them from the ground up with lush additions and careful instrumentation. The songs are faithful and true to the originals but also feel renewed and fresh, cast in a new, more minimalistic light. We as listeners see the barebones artistry of each track; the lyrics are laid bare, every guitar note is crystal clear, and the bass carefully guides each track to its intended destination. Everything is carefully constructed, resulting in a loving release that feels like a celebratory victory lap lauding the band’s prior artistic achievements.  

6 - Omni (2010)

I’ll admit that it took me a while to come around on Omni... In fact, this seems like a good as place as any to acknowledge that I flat out didn’t like this record for years. Perhaps because Minus The Bear were coming off (arguably) their strongest and most cohesive project with Planet of Ice, but also because this album represented a shift away from the more moody and atmospheric work of their first few albums towards a more bright and sunny style of indie music. 

Omni’s opening track sets the tone for the record perfectly. Based around a melody played off a Suzuki Omnichord, “My Time” is a dancy warm weather song that was often accompanied by cascades of balloons or explosions of confetti at the band’s live shows. In fact, the entire first half of the record is packed with catchy and pristine cuts that could have easily been chart-topping singles if there were any justice in the world.“Summer Angel” is an amber-coated love song that finds the band happier than they’ve ever been. “Secret Country” is a careening cliffside banger with a powerful riff, buttery smooth drum beat, and muscular synth line. “Hold Me Down” is a groovy and restless track that alternates between pensive introspective stretches and fast-paced eruptions of joy. By the album’s back half, the sun has set, and the group’s love-filled optimism has made way for the distorted and mind-altering allure of drug-fueled nightlife. “Into The Mirror” is a narrative track starring a cast of seedy characters and a mirror piled with excessive amounts of cocaine. “Animal Backwards” is an abstract and psychedelic journey led by reversed bass-pumping synth line that sounds like it could have soundtracked Homer’s Guatemalan Chili Pepper trip. By the time “Dayglow Vista Rd.” rolls around, the sun has risen once again, and the group finds themselves just as enamored and overjoyed as they were at the start of the journey. Finally, “Fooled By The Night” acts as a final coda that assures us everything will be okay in the end before sending us off into a restful sleep.

5 - Acoustics (2008)

Coming hot off the heels of their third album, Minus The Bear’s first acoustic EP may have been released in October of 2008, but that didn’t stop it from feeling like a warm ray of sunshine. Like letting fresh air into a room that has become stale and stagnant, Acoustics saw the group stripping themselves of all studio magic and electronic trickery for a release that felt both bare and lively. Pulling mostly from the previous year’s Planet of Ice, this EP revisited some of the band’s most recent creations and cast them in a considerably different light. Also accompanied by a cut from their debut, their sophomore record, and a unique song recorded just for this release, Acoustics might be Minus The Bear at their most lyrically-precise and instrumentally-pure.

The opening salvo of “Guns & Ammo” and “We’re Not A Football Team” go a long way for setting the warm, sunny tone of the release. Sounding like an early-June day, these tracks evoke hammocks, fresh blades of grass, and light beers enjoyed in that hour right as the sun is setting and you’re enjoying the last waning moments of warmth. Even the Planet of Ice tracks which sounded frosty and atmospheric in their original context now sound wholesome and positively sun-drenched in their new acoustic dressings. This release goes a long way in letting the music speak for itself; showing that these songs can exist in any context and still work toward their intended purpose. 

4 - They Make Beer Commercials Like This (2004)

Admittedly a bit of a dark horse in this ranking, They Make Beer Commercials Like This is Minus The Bear’s second EP. Initially released in 2004, two years after their debut and one year out from Menos El Oso, Beer Commercials essentially acted as an artistic stopgap between the band’s shifting styles. This EP saw MTB drop some of the more fast-paced leanings of their debut and move into a more mature space that they fully fleshed out on their sophomore record.

Part of this EP’s strength comes from how punctual it is. A lightweight six tracks clocking in at a collective 22-minutes. This was later expanded to seven tracks when the band re-released this EP in 2008, but the point still stands: Beer Commercials does not overstay its welcome. Opening track “Fine + 2 PTS” is a sexy dance number that thumps with bass and synth practically leaping off the record drenched in neon light and smelling like high-end cocktails. While other highlights on this EP include the extremely-mathy “Let’s Play Clowns,” the trashy punk “Dog Park,” and the carefree “Hey! Is That A Ninja Up There?,” the strongest song is undeniably the one smack-dab in the middle of the tracklist.

“I’m Totally Not Down With Rob's Alien” opens with a hypnotic electronic drum beat, reverb-laden guitar strum, and glitchy flash-forward to the song’s emotional climax. Through each of the verses, Snider paints a picture of one carefree day from his childhood. He’s lakeside somewhere, it’s a sunny afternoon, and his parents are out at the grocery store. He decides to take advantage of this quiet and go for a swim. In the chorus, he belts out, “And I swim out as far as I can / And float on my back / Just waiting for nothing.” Not only is this a beautiful and poetic image, but I’ve also found that it speaks to something deep within me. Our narrator is young (at least young enough to still live with their parents), and there’s some deep-ingrained satisfaction in taking time for yourself just to exist and speak to no one, or as Snider puts it: “It's a lot more fun alone.” With this one song admittedly weighing the release higher in my opinion, Beer Commercials is still a tantalizing and well-constructed release that foreshadowed the greatness to come and also leaves you wanting more.

3 - Planet of Ice (2007)

Planet of Ice just might be Minus The Bear’s masterpiece. Despite coming in at third on my list, Planet of Ice is often cited as many fan’s favorite MTB album, or at least a high point in the band’s discography. Unequivocally the darkest and most proggy record in the group’s history, this third album found Minus The Bear slowing things down and exploring darker corners of their psyche (and the world) than they ever have before. 

One point in favor of Planet of Ice’s greatness is the staggering range of tracks. You have easily-digestible earworms like “Burying Luck,” and of course, the undeniable “Knights” with its bouncy drumbeat and scream-along chorus. There are pensive jazzy tracks like “Ice Monster” and “Part 2” that sound tailor-made for dark, rainy, neon-lit alleys and rooms illuminated solely through the narrow slats of Venetian blinds. Planet of Ice also boasts some of the longest songs the band has ever created: “Dr. L’Ling” uses its seven-minutes to create a time-bomb like build that erupts into a dance party, meanwhile “Lotus” is an expansive multi-part odyssey stretching nearly nine minutes long. This record also saw Snider experimenting with his lyrics, turning away from loosely-autobiographical tales to fascinating character studies on “White Mystery” and the aforementioned “Ice Monster.”

The album’s most impressive feat comes in its three-song stretch near the end with “Throwin’ Shapes,” “When We Escape,” and “Double Vision Quest.” These are arguably three of the strongest songs the group has ever created, and the fact that they’re all next to each other only makes the record feel all the more impressive. “Throwin’ Shapes,” the shortest cut on the album (and a staple of the band’s live set), is a chorus-heavy dance track that’s packed with irreversible momentum. “When We Escape” begins with a tone-setting synth melody and step-ladder guitar tap that mounts up to a gnashing moshpit-inspiring breakdown before floating off into space. Finally, “Double Vision Quest” is a spellbinding zero-gravity love song centered around hypnotic guitar work that climaxes in an extended instrumental break where each band member gets to flex their respective chops. 

It’s also worth noting that the bonus tracks for Planet of Ice are also spectacular. “Cat Calls and Ill Means,” “Electric Rainbow,” and “Patiently Waiting” are all deep cuts that every fan should hear (most of which finally got their justice on the band’s B-sides collection Lost Loves). Hell, even the P.O.S. remix of “Knights” is fantastic, and I’m usually wary of electronic remixes like this. There’s definitely an argument to be made that Planet of Ice is Minus The Bear’s best album, while I’ll never deny the quality of this record, it sits at one tonal (and technical) end of the band’s discography; it’s darker, more electronic, and more proggy than anything else they’ve ever created. In other words, it has earned its name. It’s just that when it comes down to it, I’m a bigger fan of the band’s warmer, more fast-paced releases. Speaking of which… 

2 - Highly Refined Pirates (2002)

Here is where I abandon any real impression of this being an objective list. While Highly Refined Pirates has its fair share of fans, it also finds the band at their most brash and charmingly-ignorant. Released just one year after the scene-setting Gigantic, this album represented Minus The Bear’s full-fledged unveiling to the world, and what an unveiling it was.

Opening track “Thanks for the Killer Game of Crisco Twister” wastes no time getting into things with Snider belting out, “And then we all buy yachts!” at the two-second mark. Placed over a knotty guitar line, this opening lyric more or less acted as the band’s mission statement for the first half of their career. Equal parts goofy, catchy, and chaotically-obtuse, I can’t think of a better one-line encapsulation of the band than this one. These tongue-in-cheek boasts lead to half-ironic imagery of sunglasses, remote island cabins, and endlessly-topped off beverages. This all builds to a cathartic chorus of “Our girls are looking so good! / Our girls are looking so good!” To me, these lines evoke lakeside bike rides during summer vacations in high school. They smell like sunscreen and feel like high desert sun on my skin. Ironic as these lyrics may be, they also manage to capture something beautiful and wholesome that I’ll never be able to reclaim again. 

The following songs feature similarly feel-good sentiments like “Monkey!!! Knife!!! Fight!!!” which erupts in a chorus of “We'll drive around the lake / Just a little too fast / Yeah, windows down / The wine in our heads / The city lights just blur.” Reading these lines written out, you might think they’re off a chart-topping rap song, but instead, they’re placed over a bouncing rhythm section and precise math-rock guitar. The band’s earliest hit, “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse,” tells the tale of escaping overseas where the red wine flows freely, where there’s a simple pleasure in a solitary park bench, and where a two-star hotel will suffice. 

These drunken elations are punctuated with meditative instrumental tracks that act less like a breathless pause between songs on the dancefloor and more like a stand-in for the two hours of sleep caught between benders. “We Are Not A Football Team” is a slow-paced springtime love song in which natural beauty and late nights lead to spending time with someone you adore, where your only goal is merely to be in their presence. Similarly, “Get Me Naked 2: Electric Boogaloo” saw Minus The Bear beating everyone to the ironic subtitle punch while also featuring some of the most beautiful and poetic descriptions of an early-stage relationship I’ve ever heard. Things get slightly murkier by the end of the record as “Spritz!!! Spritz!!!” seemingly expends all of the band’s energy, leaving them drained of endorphins for the jazzy “I Lost All My Money At The Cockfights” and the heartbroken “Let’s Play Guitar In a Five Guitar Band,” both of which still manage to work their way up to moving choruses and instrumental builds. 

Highly Refined Pirates, rough-around-the-edges as it may be, is an album that captures a mood and distills it down to its purest essence. In the same way that Carrie & Lowell is a dark and morbid album about the loss of a loved one, Highly Refined Pirates is a light and sunny album about carefree summers and innocence lost. Those records are obviously on opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, but they both manage to capture their respective moods to great effect. The songs on Highly Refined Pirates shimmer like the sun bouncing off a lake. They breeze through your ears like a summer wind nudging the leaves on the trees. Sure, this album literally soundtracked some of my last pure and innocent summers, but the music itself reflects those memories beautifully, even if they’re a little over the top. 

1 - Menos El Oso (2005)

Here we are at the top of our list with Menos El Oso. One of the many reasons I don’t consider myself a “music journalist” is because I’m not nearly impartial enough to be paid to do this. I let personal experiences, biases, and perspectives seep into my writing, and that is (generally) considered a big no-no in journalism of any form. As you can see above, I’m prone to elevating albums based on hyper-specific personal experiences, and I also don’t like being negative, so the whole “critical” side of the profession kid of falls flat for me. Even so, I’m about to use a word I try my hardest to avoid at all costs because of what it entails: Menos El Oso is perfect.

I used to fall under the camp that no album can ever be perfect because it’s an inherently unreachable descriptor. Whether it’s the production, one weird guitar lick, or even one word in a verse that doesn’t sit right with you, there will likely always be something that detracts from an album and keeps it from perfection. While I still believe “perfection” is a loaded term that should generally remain unused, I also believe that, when taken on the merits of indie rock, Minus The Bear’s second album is a perfect creation.

Not only was the band able to overcome the dreaded sophomore slump, but they also created their single most varied, long-living, and financially successful album. Sure, Menos El Oso is the best Minus The Bear album, but it’s also one of the best indie albums of all time. This record is a staggering achievement of musicianship, songwriting, and creativity where every song stands on its own, feels unique, and builds to something bigger. There is simply no other way that this ranking could have ended.

From second one of the record, the band comes out swinging on “The Game Needed Me,” bashing the listener over the head with a breakaway table of a riff. The guitar, bass, drums, and electronics all coalesce into one pointed barrage of instrumentation that immediately introduces the listener to the wonderful world of Minus The Bear. Things subside just enough by the time that the first verse rolls around in which Snider provides a stark contrast to the opulent opening lines of Pirates as he sings, “We don't have money / So we can't lose it” before his concerns are quelled by the touch of another person. Soon, his mind shifts from romantic pursuits to capitalism as he questions the exchange of time for money, the desire to escape that dynamic, as well as the fear that he might miss the “caress” of his office desk. “The Game Needed Me” is a killer opening track and represents an immediate improvement of the band on virtually every level.

“Memphis & 53rd” bears a similar array of earthly concerns in between hazy dream sequences and stays in arid desert motels. Similarly, “Drilling” is a tight song featuring picturesque oceanside cliffs, scenic overlooks, and the nagging feeling that this all is too good to be true. The songs on this record range from carefree party tracks, fast cars, and childlike innocence on “The Fix,” “Michio’s Death Drive,” and “Hooray,” just to name a few. These emotional high points are tempered with the darkness of morbid noire tales on “El Torrente,” and dingy smoke-filled bars on “Fulfill The Dream.”

Of course, I’d be remiss to not mention “Pachuca Sunrise,” the band’s magnum opus, and the reason I fell in love with Minus The Bear in the first place. Featuring uplifting glistening guitars, a mellow, laid-back rhythm section, and lyrics of paradise on earth, there’s a good reason why “Pachuca Sunrise” has endured as the band’s most popular song. Alternating between this heavenly depiction of a remote Mediterranian beach and snappy drum-led choruses that feel constructed with the sole purpose of providing fans the perfect beat to dance around to. 

Capping Menos El Oso off is “This Ain’t A Surfin’ Movie,” which has the distinct qualification of being my favorite song of all time, an honor it has held for nearly a decade at this point. I wrote about this song in loving detail for Swim Into The Sound’s celebratory 100th article, but it’s obviously worth going into at least a little bit of detail here. Much like “Pachuca Sunrise,” “Surfin’ Movie” recounts a tale of a beach-side getaway. It’s you and the person you love most spending the day away from civilization, troubles, and worries. This song bears some of Snider’s most precious and loving lyricism as he depicts reveling in a lover’s soft touch, the beauty of song, and ultimately becoming one with nature. It’s about finding your soulmate and planning out your future together as memories of cities and the bustle of modern life become fainter by the minute. It’s gorgeous, loving, and the single most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. “This Ain’t A Surfin’ Movie” speaks to something deep within me, and I want to live in these five minutes forever. It’s a perfect song and the cherry on top of a perfect album. 

If Planet of Ice is a frigid winter album and Omni is a breezy summer record, then Menos El Oso is every season in one. It stretches from sweltering deserts to snow-covered Pacific Northwest towns. It ranges from perilous cliff tops to sandy beaches. It spans entire lifetimes of love, life, mistakes, and memories, all in just 45 minutes. Each song manages to sound different from the others that surround it and simultaneously bear loving, poetic verses alongside bouncy dancefloor-ready choruses. There’s not a bad song in the bunch, and the fact that Menos El Oso contains both the band’s biggest hit and my favorite song of all time means that it was a shoo-in for the top spot on this list. 

It’s worth reiterating that, as much as I love Menos El Oso, every album on this list is fantastic and worth digging into. Even a cursory look at the band’s top songs on Spotify reveals a diverse list of hits that range all the way from their first album to their most recent. You’ve got “Pachuca Sunrise” off Menos El Oso, “Into The Mirror” off Omni, “Absinthe Party” off Highly Refined Pirates, “Knights” off Planet of Ice, “Last Kiss” off Voids, and even “Rob’s Alien” off Beer Commercials. In other words, Minus The Bear have managed to release an undeniable hit song off everything they’ve ever released, and if that’s not a feat, then I don’t know what is.

It’s incredible when you revisit some pivotal form of art from your youth and it still holds up. Minus The Bear have offered something that not only holds up, but ages like a fine wine. These albums impacted me deeply in high school and led me to new forms of music, but have only continued to get better with each passing year. These albums have become inextricably linked to some of the most important memories of my teenage years and beyond. 

Minus The Bear became a point of bonding for my friend group. These songs soundtracked long nights making dumb decisions, and carefree days skateboarding through culdesacs. These tracks played during moments of absolute love, as well as the aching pain of heartbreak. I can still close my eyes and transport myself back to summer days of Watermelon Arizona tea, sunscreen, and scabs from skateboarding down a hill that didn’t seem that steep from the top. It was nights of video games and making each other tear up with laughter as we willingly sacrificed precious hours of sleep just to continue staying awake to create a few more bleary memories.

These albums are obviously very near and dear to my heart, but they’re also near and dear to a lot of people’s hearts. When Minus The Bear decided to call it quits in 2018 I was saddened by the proverbial closing of such an important chapter of my life, but the memories associated with this music will live on forever. That’s a tall order for a band whose name is based on a blowjob joke. Long live Minus The Bear.

Swim Into The Sound's 20 Favorite Albums of 2019

Music moved too fast for me in 2019. Last year I listened to over 450 new releases and wrote reviews for nearly one-quarter of them. This year I listened to less, I wrote about less, and felt more out of the loop than ever before. I still managed to make it out to a ton of concerts, kept a long-running list of new albums, and discovered some cool stuff along the way, but I’ll be the first to admit there’s a lot that passed me by in 2019. 

In addition to my lack of exploratory listening, this was also a year of “good-to-great” for me. Not only did this year lack a unanimous critical darling (I refuse to acknowledge NFR), there wasn’t even one breakaway album that I heavily connected with until about halfway through the year.

For some reason, once summer rolled around, things really started to pop off, and an avalanche of new albums led to what honestly felt like a new phase of my life. This mountain of new music, combined with moving across the country (again) this time to Denver, really made 2019 feel like multiple years packed into one. 

I may have listened to less “new” music than ever before, but last year taught me that’s an exhausting endeavor to undertake. Instead, this year I found myself discovering albums that I loved and burrowing I to them like a security blanket. Most of the albums you’re about to read about connected with me immediately upon first listen, but also went on to become something that I could return to often. Instead of listening to a critical darling, thinking ‘this feels important,’ and returning to it very few times, this year I listened to what I wanted to, and I think this list reflects that. That means this list has a more narrow scope than any previous album of the year list I’ve ever published on this site, but it feels true to me and true to my experience this year.

These are the albums that soundtracked my year. Not only that, these are the albums that made my year. That made me feel welcome. That made me feel grounded. That made me feel at home, even when I was thousands of miles away from my friends and family. These are the records that I listened to and saw a piece of myself in. These are my favorite releases of 2019. 

---

20 | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest

As is the case with most people, my first foray into music was hyper-uncool. Aside from digging through my dad’s CD collection and mindlessly consuming whatever was served up to me on VH1, the first albums I ever spent my own money on were Motörhead’s Ace of Spades and Anthrax’s Attack of the Killer B’s. One of the first new records I ever purchased was Black Tide’s Light from Above, which retroactively, wasn’t particularly “cool,” but makes sense in the grand scheme of things. Given this early childhood brush with various forms of heavy metal, it’s easy to see why Infest the Rats’ Nest feels like an album tailor-made for me. 

I’ve never been a big King Gizzard guy, I respect the high-concept albums, the hustle of releasing five albums in one year, and the overall energy of the band’s live performances, but it wasn’t until this year that that band finally created the album I’ve been waiting for them to make. Featuring red-hot guitar licks, boisterous, driving rhythm sections, and snarling heavy metal vocals, this is Gizz’s heaviest album to date. It’s a mix of speed metal, stoner rock, whacky 80’s hair metal, and borderline-prog all rolled into one. It genuinely feels like the band took that first collection of CDs on my middle school iPod Mini and modernized it in the best way possible. It’s a goofy album, but that’s kind of the point. The band is at their best when they’re not taking themselves too seriously or trying too hard, and Rat’s Nest comes off as an effortless love letter to the albums that my entire musical taste is built off of. 

19 | Bon Iver - i,i

Three months before Justin Vernon began to tease Bon Iver’s newest album, I published a career retrospective that hypothesized the band’s discography had only gotten stranger and more removed from reality as it went on (in a good way). I’ve come to love it all, but this newest record proved that once you travel far out enough, the only direction to go is back. If 22, A Million was Justin Vernon as a glittering meteorite far off in space, then i,i is the sound of his soul returning to earth. Blending elements of all the band’s previous releases, i,i takes pieces from the group’s folk, baroque pop, and electronic phases and combines them all into something that ties a neat bow on the band. It’s holistic and fulfilling, the long-awaited conclusion to over one decade of heartbreak and growth. If this is where Bon Iver decides to call it quits, then it would be a satisfactory finale. 

18 | Charli XCX - Charli

There are few things more cliche than a music journalist invoking the phrase “future of pop” when talking about Charli XCX. The reason that phenomenon has become so widespread is because it’s hard to listen to Charli’s music and place it anywhere on the musical spectrum that currently exists. It sounds like pop; it’s approachable, singable, and incredibly-well produced, but it’s also glitchy, bassy, and laden with so many other genres that it genuinely feels like the near-future amalgamation of all pop culture. It’s the re-introduction to the monoculture, should we be so lucky. 

Charli finds our would-be pop princess of the future actualizing herself (and her music) in a way that she never has before. Charli XCX songs tend to be about one of two things: partying, or the comedown. Aided by a star-studded lineup of musicians, Charli makes some of her most poppy (“1999”), emotional (“Thoughts”), and hard-hitting (“Click”) music to date. There are choruses worthy of a Taylor Swift album alongside bars worthy of a Young Thug mixtape, and in that duality lies the raw power of Charli XCX.

17 | Heart Attack Man - Fake Blood

Earlier this year, Heart Attack Man’s guitarist, lead singer, and social media mastermind Eric Egan made headlines when he posted a (normal, average, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary) orange beanie on eBay and racked up a bid of nearly 100k dollars. This meme-worthy auctioneering move brought the band to the attention of traditional music publications and earned them swaths of new listeners (myself included). When they released their sophomore album Fake Blood several months later, it immediately became clear that the band is good at a lot more than generating headlines. 

Taking a guitar-first approach to pop-punk, the group crafted eleven immaculate tracks that are somehow catchy, moshable, touching, and personable, oftentimes all at once. Songs like “Fake Blood” and “Out For Blood” lean heavier into the catchy pop side of things sounding like they could have come straight off a late-90’s alt radio station. Meanwhile, deeper cuts like “Cut My Losses” and “Sugar Coated” find Egan bearing his teeth and spitting bile at whoever finds themselves unfortunate enough to fall within his crosshairs. Personal favorites “Rats In a Bucket” and “Crisis Actor” are riff-centered singalongs that feature addicting hooks, biting commentary, and even a reading of the Miranda Rights that manages to sound heavy as fuck. Fake Blood feels like the best example of what pop-punk can achieve in 2019; a perfect mix of studio polish, well-paced energy, stellar songwriting, and just the right amount of heaviness sprinkled throughout. It may be 17 on our list, but if there were an award for the most crowd-hyping, guitar-shredding, hard-hitting pop-punk record, then this would be number one.

16 | Field Medic - fade into the dawn

I first discovered Field Medic in a freak playlist accident, and have been deeply in love ever since. Combining Bob Dylan-esque deliveries, jaunty folk ditties, boombox-led bangers, alongside some of the most poetic love songs I’ve ever heard, Kevin Patrick Sullivan offers a hyper-modern take on folk music. fade into the dawn was on my radar from the moment it was announced and somehow did not disappoint my exceedingly-high expectations. Featuring a similar spread of folk to country to borderline-pop, Field Medic’s 2019 record offers an escape from the normal into the extraordinary. While some songs provide far-off musings of the future, most of the tracks simply offer unique perspectives of everyday events and relationships. Whether it’s the life of a touring musician, body art, or the unknowable other, Kevin Patrick Sullivan has once again proven himself adept at reflecting the human condition within the space of several beautiful minutes. On top of all this, album closer “helps me forget...” is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard all year and was only narrowly edged out by The National and Slaughter Beach, Dog as my favorite song of the year. 

15 | Greet Death - New Hell

Listening to New Hell is like casting a spell upon yourself. From the moment you hit play on the record, its energy will pour from your speakers and will grow to permeate every corner of whatever room you find yourself in. The songs creak, rumble, and reverberate, bouncing around the walls of your brain and leaving you emotionally-drained in their wake. It’s not a fun listen by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an emotional outpouring, and that can be rewarding in a different way. From the folksy (Sandy) Alex G-like “Let It Die” to the heavy-as-shit borderline-stoner-rock shoegaze found on “Strain,” the record is varied and masterfully-crafted. There’s an impressive range of moods on display here, each one a different shade of downbeat but also adorned with shimmering gold and silver accents that add some brightness to the otherwise overwhelming darkness. And while New Hell is one cohesive piece overall, each song also has special moments that make it feel unique from the others that surround it. There’s a molten guitar solo on “You’re Gonna Hate What you’ve Done,” there’s crushing fuzzed-out riffage on “Strange Days,” hypnotic lyricism on “Entertainment,” and the band caps it all off with an epic ten-minute closing track. New Hell is a dark, moody, and morose album with transitive properties so strong that it’s impossible to come out of your first listen the same person.

14 | Future Teens - Breakup Season

I’ll start this off by saying that I absolutely despise the fetishization of sadness. Even worse than that, the memeification of sadness (tweeting “listening to the new Mount Eerie and crying, brb” or something along those lines). If that’s how you get your sadness out, then go for it, but more often than not, it feels like people idolizing the wrong thing and emulating “sadness” for the sake of internet points… well, this got off track quickly. The point is that Future Teens’ sophomore album Breakup Season feels like real, genuine sadness in a way that isn’t overwrought, performative, or played-out. There were probably sadder releases to come out this year, but where Breakup Season excels is that it feels like a version of sadness that’s true to me. It’s not overtly sad (in fact, it’s often pretty catchy and upbeat), but the feelings are real, the experiences are shared, and that takes guts. 

“Happy New Year” is a dynamite slow-burn opener that allows for Amy Hoffman’s voice to shine like a diamond. “Born to Stay,” “Emotional Bachelor,” and “Frequent Crier” are all peppy sing-along emo tracks that zero in on specific elements of living with depression with hyper-realistic and confessional slice-of-life observations. By the back half of the album, the group has turned their gaze outward to their relationships with the people around them. “Swiped Out” tackles what an average relationship looks like in the era of smartphone dating, and “Heavy Petting” is a cleverly-written love song about the time when your pet feels like the only constant companion in your life. Breakup Season captures and articulates a specific brand of struggles for the mid-to-late-20-something, and that’s what makes it particularly affecting. The fact that it’s all catchy as hell is just a bonus.

13 | Mannequin Pussy - Patience

I once heard a theory: every band name is bad, it’s just a question of whether or not the band’s music makes up for it or not. Think about it. Mom Jeans is a bad name, but their music is good. DaBaby? Terrible name, but his songs bang. Even The Beatles, one of the most revered musical groups of all time, has a name that’s based on a terrible pun. While that observation was mostly a joke, I can’t think of a better example of this theory than the punk phenom Mannequin Pussy. The band has weighed in on their own name, even offering to write coworkers and moms letters explaining the meaning behind the name, but for those not easily swayed by “bad” words, the music more than speaks for itself. 

Patience is, at its core, a breakup album; 25 minutes of anger, resentment, and recovery that come in the wake of a major emotional turnover. My friend described lead single “Drunk II” as “a war crime,” and he couldn’t be more right. The song strikes a perfect balance of sneering punk anger, real-ass emotions, and a hook that’s catchy enough to climb the Billboard charts (if there were any justice in the world). Much like the band’s sophomore effort, Patience is a short burst of hooky, well-envisioned, and incredibly-polished punk music. There’s a perfect spread of fast-paced thrashy scream-along ragers alongside catchy and approachable love songs that your mom might even be able to tolerate. The record moves fast, hits hard, and leaves you wanting more, the way that all great music should. 

12 | 100 gecs - 1000 gecs

As is I’m sure was the case with most people I hit play on 1000 gecs not knowing what I was getting into. I think out of everything I’ve listened to this entire year, 1000 gecs was the only record to truly surprise me. And I mean shock me. Comprised of musicians Laura Les and Dylan Brady, 100 gecs is making music that needs to be heard to be believed. The two musicians have a ravenous appetite for (and adoration of) music, and 1000 gecs is a solidified effort to display it. 

On this record, you’ll hear PC music, dubstep, bubblegum pop, hip-hop, grindcore, pop-punk, house, ska, and dozens more. The most obvious connections to draw are artists like SOPHIE, Sleigh Bells, BROCKHAMPTON, Crystal Castles, and maybe even some Breathe Carolina… but even that long list of genres, artists, and influences fail to capture what 100 gecs sound like. The duo is deconstructing not only pop music, but pop culture. This is what Lil Aaron was doing when he combined leaned-out autotuned trap and pop-punk. This album is jittery, jumping between genres, sounds, phrases, and ideas within seconds. It’s blindingly-bright fun, and if you’re a fan of any one of those genres, you’ll likely find something to glom onto throughout the album’s 25-minute running time. 1000 gecs is a record in its own class and of its own world. 

11 | The National - I Am Easy To Find

The National have become masters of the pivot. Their discography is fluid; each album flows easily from one to the next with the band only making minor changes and gradual shifts. Over the course of decades, the band has managed to make each record sound just different enough that every new release feels refreshing yet familiar. They ease fans into each new era with strong singles, they know how to close a record, and they put on a hell of a good live show. There’s a reason they’ve become the de facto father figures of the indie rock circuit because they’re one of the most consistent bands in the industry. 

The pivot the band made on I Am Easy To Find sees the group shifting the spotlight away from lead singer Matt Beringer and his iconic voice towards a cast of female singers. Released alongside an accompanying 27-minute film by Mike Mills, I Am Easy To Find is part album part visual art piece. The film depicts one woman’s life from birth to death, all set to songs from the album. We see her first breath, first love, her first fight, her first child. Everything. It’s a gorgeous, goosebump-inducing black-and-white narrative that is nothing short of captivating. The album tells a similar narrative over the course of it’s one-hour running time, but its crowning achievement comes in the final three minutes with “Light Years.” The song is an achingly-gorgeous piano ballad that also happens to be my favorite song of the year. It’s a wonderful and meditative message that ties the record up with a neat little bow and sends the listener off into the night thinking about what they had just consumed. It’s beautiful, painful, and ever-changing, much like life. 

10 | Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride

While I do consider myself a fan of Vampire Weekend, I have what I like to call an “on-again, off-again” relationship with the band’s discography. I arrived at their self-titled record years after everyone else, and the only song I still find evergreen is the fast-paced (but admittedly basic) “A-Punk.” Meanwhile, I believe Contra is a near-perfect indie rock record, while Modern Vampires of the City is mostly over-cooked and only has one truly great song on it. When Rostam left the band in 2016, people (rightfully) thought Vampire Weekend might not be long for this world. His production and instrumentation had become so synonymous with the group’s sound that fans wondered how they would ever continue without one of its most pivotal founding members. Turns out the answer, after a six-year gap between albums, was to smoke a ton of weed, retreat into nature, and get really into the Grateful Dead.

Preceded by a perplexing album cover that broke the band’s longstanding visual aesthetic, lead single “Harmony Hall” set the tone (and expectations) for this album early on in its release cycle. Opening with an acoustic guitar, serene lyricism, and a melody that echoes The Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey,” this song let fans know early on whether they’d be into this new era of the Vampire Weekend or if they should tap out now. There’s something equal parts cringey and endearing about a bunch of ultra-white Ivy League graduates trading in their polo shirts and boat shoes for tye-dye t-shirts and Birkenstocks, but the music speaks for itself. “Bambina” is a bouncy auto-tuned Contra-level cut, “This Life” is a fast-paced ass-shaking track, and the Steve Lacy-assisted “Sunflower / Flower Moon” are as danceable as they are musical, offering a groovy late-album one-two punch. Meanwhile, closing track “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin” is a pensive Modern Vampires-esque send-off that’s lovingly-constructed and precious. And if you need any proof that the band can actually live up to the jammy-inspiration of The Dead, then look no further than any of this year’s Austin City Limit’s performances where the group shows they can skillfully take one of their base songs and blow it up to extraordinary and psychedelic proportions. Father of the Bride is proof that sometimes change is for the best, and sometimes your best is yet to come. 

9 | Charly Bliss - Young Enough

The innate power of Charly Bliss lies in how genuine each member of the band is. While they first made a name for themselves in indie/pop-punk/alt music circles with 2017’s Guppy, this year’s Young Enough is a step up in nearly every imaginable way. Still bearing Eva Hendricks’ piercing and unmistakable vocals, the band’s newest effort takes the power-pop found on Guppy and infuses it with a hearty helping of synth, resulting in a record that feels accessible and honest with just the right amount of bite.

The album walks a fascinating and addicting line between throwback synth-pop tendencies and hyper-modern rock songwriting. Electronic drums keep time in between distorted guitar stabs on “Capacity,” slow-building guitar and basslines build to an explosive finish on “Young Enough,” and “Hard to Believe” sounds downright Pixies-esque in its foundation. This album, combined with October’s follow-up EP Supermoon, paint the picture of a band with a fully fleshed-out vision and an unapologetic approach to their music. Young Enough is an album that radiates strength, even in its weakest moments, and that’s the kind of energy we could all use more of in 2019. 

8 |  Knocked Loose - A Different Shade of Blue

Confession time: I first listened to Knocked Loose in October of 2018. Partially because I had aged out of the hardcore phase of my high school years, but also because I had somehow confused them with Knuckle Puck for literal years. So imagine my surprise when I listened to Laugh Tracks and heard something as decidedly not-pup-punk as Knocked Loose. Needless to say, Laugh Tracks is a spectacular album that quickly became my go-to when I needed some angry hardcore music. While it’s a well-constructed release, Laugh Tracks it also very much feels like a “debut album,” so I was ravenously curious to see how they would follow that up on their sophomore release, especially now that the band had garnered a massive following.

A Different Shade of Blue is pure emotional catharsis. “Mistakes Like Fractures” is bone-crushing. “Forget Your Name” will rip your ribcage open like a shotgun blast. “A Serpent’s Touch” should come with a fucking warning label. The album is 38 minutes of nonstop, punishing riffage, violent breakdowns, and vitriolic lyricism. It’s moshpit-initiating, fight-instigating hardcore, and this record made it clear why Knocked Loose has become the gold standard for the genre.

7 | Prince Daddy & The Hyena - Cosmic Thrill Seekers

It’s easy to make a great first album; it’s the culmination of years of hard work, a lifetime of creativity, and countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears. For these reasons, the Sophomore Slump is a very real thing, yet Prince Daddy & The Hyena managed not only to subvert this phenomenon; they vaulted over it in style. It’s one thing to make a good sophomore album, but the decision to make the follow-up to your breakthrough album a three-act concept piece based on a bad acid trip filtered through the lens of The Wizard of Oz is next-level insanity. 

Cosmic Thrill Seekers is a 40-minute excavation of the soul, accompanied by all the fears, insecurities, and manias that come with it. Beginning with“I Lost My Life,” the album throws the listener headfirst into Kory Gregory’s raspy singing voice as he recounts the beginning of his acid-fueled tale over an acoustic guitar. Things really open up on “Lauren (Track 2),” where the band launches into a hard-charging riff that blends punk and emo into a finely-distilled fusion of the two genres. The songs flow together flawlessly, quickly guiding the listener along fast-paced crowd-churners, grungy pop meditations, and even upbeat dance tracks. Cosmic Thrill Seekers is an album packed with intricacies, scattered thoughts, and self-referential melodies. Songs fold in on themselves, pulling back language and chord progressions used on earlier songs. On top of all this, the closing track loops perfectly back to the beginning of the album, making this an endlessly-relistenable release that circles the listener right back to the start of the adventure. These elements all combine together for a rewarding and slightly-high-concept emo record that has its own dream logic and internal rhythms. It’s wandering and wonderous, charming, thrashy, and endearing. 

6 | Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties - Routine Maintenance

The first Aaron West album, We Don’t Have Each Other, was the story of a man blindsided by divorce. Grief-stricken and confused, Aaron fled south on an impromptu road trip to Georgia in order to find himself, or at least some answers. Bittersweet, the following 7” recounted the story of his return to New York, and found our hero facing the memories of the relationship that he had left behind. 2017’s Orchard Park was a one-off single that offered a brief update on Aaron’s life in the form of himself and his mom spreading his father’s ashes. This year, the newest update to the Aaron West saga arrived in the form of Routine Maintenance, and it’s one of the albums that made me feel most consistently this year.

It’s worth mentioning that this story, the downfall of Aaron West, is all a fabrication, a character study helmed by Dan Campbell, the frontman of The Wonder Years. Much like his main band, Campbell lends his poetic songwriting and emotional voice to Aaron, but the fact that he’s been able to create this character and relationships that feel so realized and lived-in is nothing short of an absolute artistic achievement.

While it would have been easy to make Routine Maintenance about Aaron meeting someone new, falling in love, and getting over his previous relationship, we all know that real life doesn’t work that way. Instead, the latest record finds Aaron at a crossroads. He takes his band on the road, finds some success, and then suddenly, his brother-in-law passes away. By the end of the record, Aaron is living with his mother, sister, and his nephew Colin under one roof in New Jersey. Aaron is helping out around the house, taking Colin to school, and doing the best he can to fill in the role of a makeshift father figure. It’s in the album’s final moments that it’s title Routine Maintenance makes sense. Because sometimes life isn’t about getting better, it’s about helping other people get better. It’s about doing what you can, carrying the weight, and doing minor upkeep in the name of making the world around you a little better.

5 | PUP - Morbid Stuff

Life isn’t miraculous. It’s not a movie, and it’s not a pop song, hell, it’s not even a commercial. There’s no justice, no resolution, and there’s definitely not a storybook ending… but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. More often than not, life is just lots and lots of the same thing, and that’s a different kind of evil. Life’s not out to get you; it merely bides its time until you fall prey to it in one way or another. This unchanging and unflinching indifference of life often makes one fantasize about the end of it, if only because it’s the last significant change we have left in store for ourselves. Struggling with (and raging against) that monotony of everyday life is exactly what Morbid Stuff is about. 

Coming off their genre-elevating sophomore album The Dream is Over, Pup’s third album is filled to the brim with throat-shredding group chants, cutting lyrical honesty, and fist-balling riffage. The album opens with an anemic guitar lick that sounds like it’s being played from the top of a mountain for onlookers below. Lead singer Stefan Babcock quickly undercuts this propulsive energy as he enters the fray and snottily explains how he was “Bored as fuck / Sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff / Like if anyone I’ve slept with is dead.” These morbid curiosities pave the way for full-throated group chants and rocket-like drum beats that eventually fizzle out into a defeated lullaby ending, a perfect crash course for the particular brand of unhappiness that PUP deals in. As a whole, Morbid Stuff feels like an incredibly democratic creation, with each member getting chances to shine from one song to the next. There’s cynical, biting songwriting on “Kids,” moshpit nu-metal breakdowns on “Full Blown Meltdown,” and even enough room for a one-line guest feature from Eva Hendricks of Charly Bliss on “Free At Last.”

Morbid Stuff lies at an odd intersection between pop-punk and full-on punk. The band has a knack for making these incredibly-catchy and energetic songs that are ripe for singing (screaming) along with, but there’s also enough of an edge to them that they’re rowdy, sweaty, and cathartic in a live setting. It’s like Speed; these are songs you can sing along to while in the car, but it feels detrimental to the artistic experience if you’re shouting along while going any slower than 50 miles per hour. Best consumed while flying down the highway or packed into a room with 500 other sweaty fans, Morbid Stuff is not for the faint of heart — it’s for the ones with the pissed-off, fed-up, raging hearts.

4| Oso Oso - Basking in the Glow

In the past few years, the lines between emo, pop-punk, and indie rock have become so blurred that we’ve almost looped back around to using the word “emo” as a slur. As artists continue to experiment with mixing these sounds into one big genre-fluid cocktail, nobody did it better this year than Jade Lilitri of Oso Oso. 2017’s Yunahon Mixtape was a near-perfect emo album, packed with more hooks than Nevermind and some of the best bridges in the game. Last year’s two-track single offered a tantalizing glimpse at where Lilitri was taking the group, and 2019’s Basking in the Glow represents the fully-realized potential of that emo/indie sound.

Songs like “the view” and “basking in the glow” are some of the sweetest and poppiest tracks I’ve heard all year with choruses that shimmer and lyrics that are ready for emo kids’ Instagram captions the world over. And as you would expect with any emo-adjacent record, there’s also an impressive range of emotions on display throughout. The thoughtful “dig” is a spacy and meditative track with a Smashing Pumpkins-like fuzzed-out buildup, meanwhile “wake up next to god” is a fast-paced air-drum-inspiring banger featuring tight palm-muted punctuation. Basking in the Glow is (fittingly) a bright, sunny, and warm record with a constant underlying layer of unhappiness. It’s like a spoonful of honey; sugary sweet, beautifully-golden, and sticky enough to stay with you long after you first consume it.

3| Macseal - Super Enthusiast

Simply put, I don’t think there was a better crafted, better written, or better-performed album this year than Super Enthusiast. While Macseal made a name for themselves with Always Sunny name-dropping and hyper-compelling shout-along emo rock, they gradually did what all of us do and mellowed out. Last year’s four-track Map It Out saw the band leaning away from those guitar-tapped riffs and screamed vocals of their early recordings and into something more poppy and polished. This year’s Super Enthusiast sees the band completing that transition swirling together a mix of mathy emo and hyper-polished indie rock.

Super Enthusiast is picture-perfect emo. It’s not particularly midwesty, it’s not really screamy, but the band was able to take the best elements of all those disparate subgenres and combine them into something remarkably holistic and pure. The songs sparkle with crystal-clear guitars, immaculate bass, and pristine drumming. Other than the band’s slight sonic shift, one of the most significant changes from Macseal’s early work is the noticeably better production. Even the most slow-paced song on Super Enthusiast is lovingly-crafted, adorned with reverb, crisp background vocals, and a slow build of distortion. There are also some remnants of the band’s early sound on songs like “Upside Down Again,” which bears a floaty, dreamlike riff that’s probably my favorite of the entire year.

Super Enthusiast feels like the album equivalent of one of a freshwater lake. It’s wondrous, natural, and almost too pure for this world. As you look down from the snow-capped mountains and gradiented blue sky, you see the reflective surface of the calm water and feel at peace. The band is no longer comprised of emotionally-turbulent teenagers, they’ve grown up, developed, and evolved into people with different coping mechanisms than whining and watching Always Sunny. They still have problems, frustrations, doubts, and fears, but they have developed new ways of dealing with whatever life throws at them. They have an unshakable lust for life.

2 | Origami Angel - Somewhere City

This year I turned 26. This means that Wonder Years lyrics hit different now, but it also means that I’m (arguably) more of an adult than I was before. This year I also moved across the country (again), got a place of my own (again), and started a new job in a new city (again). I packed everything I owned into the trunk of my car and drove my ass from Michigan to Colorado over the course of a few days in late November. I fought through fog, snow, and freezing rain, but I got there in one piece, settled in, and moved into a new apartment all my own with a new job right down the street.

I guess all of that is an achievement worth celebrating, but this year I also did something else I’m proud of: I bought Gushers at the grocery store. They weren’t that expensive (or as good as I remember), but that purchase felt symbolic: a snack from my childhood bought with my own money for the explicit purpose of taking myself on a trip down memory lane. Somewhere City is an album about that.

Half concept album, Somewhere City finds Origami Angel weaving a tale of a mythical land where the fast food is abundant, and the Dr. Pepper flows freely. It’s a place where your childhood cartoons are always on TV, and the only commercials are from those 2000’s youtube nostalgia compilations. It’s an album-length early-twenties realization that things will never be the same, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try your hardest to recapture a small fragment of your past.

Since the beginning of the year, Origami Angel have been on a roll. Between splits, EPs, energetic live shows, and out-of-the-box promotion, the DC-based duo has rightfully made a name for themselves as one of the faces of emo’s fifth wave. Their music is catchy, smart, and hooks into a level of nerdy specificity that connects directly with my brain. This is all to say the band seemingly has everything going for them, but you don’t have to take my word for it, you can watch any one of their music videos, and you’ll see the glowing, joyous, communal spirit of DIY emo.

Which brings us to the album.

Released at the tail end of the year, Somewhere City is Origami Angel’s first full-length record, and the band pulled out all the stops. From a “nice touch” technical level, the album pulls off all the cool conceptual things I love; it loops from beginning to end like Cosmic Thrill Seekers, and it ends with a medley of every previous song much like “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral.” Most importantly, every song stands on its own as a one-of-a-kind creation, and I mean every song. There’s catchy riffage on “24 Hr Drive Thru” and “Doctor Whomst,” speed-metal breakdowns on “666 Flags,” and bouncy power-slide emo on “The Title Track.” Most uncharacteristically for the genre, the biggest throughline of the album is a message of overwhelming positivity and reassurance on songs like “Skeleton Key” and “Find Your Throne.”

Somewhere City is an unapologetically bright and youthful album. Despite the album’s multiple layers of conceptuality and its ARG rollout, Somewhere City is, at its core, 30 minutes of tight riffs and feel-good nostalgia that will send long-lost memories rushing back like a pack of Gushers. This one of the best emo albums of the year, one of the best debuts of recent memory, and will likely go on to be a formative album for thousands of music fans à la to Home, Like Noplace Is There, or Whenever, If Ever.

Somewhere City spans childhoods, generations, and emotions. It’s lovingly-constructed and musically-correct. It’s filled to the brim with fast-tapping riffage and already-iconic group chants. If you haven’t yet memorized every beat of this record, there’s still time to grab a ticket to Somewhere City, all you need is an open mind and a hungry soul.

1 | Jail Socks - It’s Not Forever

The best and worst part about running a blog by yourself is trying to decide your album of the year. Do you pick the albums that made the most significant cultural impact? Do you pick the most financially successful albums that dominated the radio and defined the year? Do you pick the consensus albums that show up on every other blog? Honestly, those are all background factors, because ultimately your “album of the year” should come down to one of two things:

1) The album that you thought was the “best” this year
2) The album that connected with you the most

Sometimes the first one makes sense — albums like Blonde and To Pimp A Butterfly that are undeniably great and well-crafted. Sometimes the second one makes sense, an album that hit you at the right time, spoke to you in the right way, and put words to the emotions you couldn’t articulate. For me this year, that was Jail Socks. 

Within the space of a calendar year, I went from not knowing who Jail Socks were to being a die-hard fan. I go into greater detail in the full review for It’s Not Forever, but for the sake of a quick recap; after discovering the band through a video making the rounds on emo twitter, I downloaded the band’s four publicly-available songs which almost immediately worked their way into my daily rotation. 

It’s safe to say this EP was easily my most anticipated release of the year. For my first listen, I sat down, cranked my speakers as loud as I could stand, and freaked out to every note alone in my house like I was a goddamn youtube reaction channel. But I wasn’t performing for a camera; it was one-hundred-percent genuine.

It’s Not Forever is punctual, a lightweight six tracks clocking in at a collective 20 minutes. It contains two re-recordings of songs from the band’s first demo and four new tracks. Even with its abrupt running time, this group of riff-obsessed teenagers from North Carolina managed to do more with one side of a record than some artists did with 60+ minutes this year. 

The EP starts off like a firecracker with fast-paced emo guitar tapping on “Jake Halpin.” That song bleeds flawlessly into “Parting Words” as the band strings the listener along with a breadcrumb trail of bouncy basslines, crashing cymbals, and anthemic group chants. Lead single “Poplar Avenue” is an energetic feel-good breakup anthem, and “Steering Wheel” is an impactful song of personal growth set to a background of cascading guitarwork and emotional vocals. It’s instrumentally-precise but emotionally messy, and that’s a dynamic I find myself endlessly enamored with. 

Everything on this EP simply works. It may not be all that accessible to anyone outside of the midwest emo scene, but it connected with me in a way that I find absolutely astonishing. Not only is this EP great on a technical level, but it’s also hard to overstate how important a role this band has played in my 2019. Jail Socks have been the soundtrack to my year. They’ve been the soundtrack to my time in Detroit, and the words to everything I’ve felt this year. They’re emblematic of a greater movement in emo music and symbolic of everything that 2019 has meant to me. When I look back on my time in the Midwest ten years from now, these are the songs that will pop into my head. 

Very few times have I found a collection of music that seems so specifically wired to my brain. Every guitar tap, bass thump, drum hit, and shout-along vocal lands. I’ve memorized every molecule of this EP because it makes sense to me on a higher level. It’s like someone took a corner of my brain, threw it into the studio, and then performed it back at me. It’s miraculous, and I hope that everyone reading this is fortunate enough to find their equivalent at some point in their life.