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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

Holy Fawn – The Black Moon | EP Review

It’s funny how far first impressions go when it comes to music. Just take a look at Roddy Ricch’s chart-topping hit “The Box.” While the song itself is an undeniable meme-worthy earworm, most people’s first exposure to the track was this infectious 30-second Triller video of Ricch singing along to his own song around the house. Not only did that video expose millions of people to the song across various forms of social media, but it also gave a humanizing and endearing look at the person behind the music to both fans and potential listeners alike. At the time of writing, “The Box” has claimed a #1 position on the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, holding off both Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez as the two pop stars beg their fans for streams in order to attain that coveted Number #1 spot. So why am I talking about a trap song in a review for a three-track shoegaze EP? Because my first brush with The Black Moon was an equally-impactful experience, just on the opposite end of the tonal spectrum.

There’s nothing better than going into music blind. I went into Holy Fawn’s most recent EP having only a vague idea of who the band was. I knew they were signed to Triple Crown, and I knew people liked 2018’s Death Spells, but that was about it. For all I knew, they could have been hardcore, pop-punk, or country… So when I say I went into The Black Moon blind, I mean ignorant.

I’ll admit I’ve been starved for new music in 2020, and January 17th felt like the first big day for new releases this year. We got A posthumous Mac Miller album, a gorgeous new Pinegrove record, a groovy debut from 070 Shake, and a surprise-released Eminem album. It was already a pretty stacked day, but when I saw that Holy Fawn had released a new EP I figured “why not?” and decided to give it a shot.

When you hit play on a song with zero expectations, you tend to make a snap judgment within the first few seconds, and I knew within the first moments of “Candy” that this EP was going to be something special. Immediately met with a swirl of ambient noise followed by a wall of shoegazey riffage, the opening track sets the mood with a masterful hand. Within seconds the song grows in size until it’s towering over you, casting a dark shadow and eclipsing any source of light. The riff eventually dies down for a post-rock guitar line and some of the EP’s most clear-cut vocals, which are soon subsumed by an instrumental build led by a steady drumroll. That build crescendos and drops out for a brief moment of silence before the listener is plunged back into another monstrous riff accompanied by distant black metal screams.

The second track, “Tethered,” acts as a bit of a breather, a three-minute instrumental respite from the emotionally-draining songs that surround it. Reverb-laden guitar and bass notes intertwine as decorative ornamental ambiance circles around them. Then a whir of low-humming static carries the listener to the final track, whether they’re ready for it or not.

Seven-minute closing track “Blood Pact” begins slowly, carrying over that static from the preceding song, but now pairing it with an electronic drumbeat and orchestral soundscapes reminiscent of the early-career This Will Destroy You. Soon harmonized vocals emerge over the hybrid beat which now feels equal parts natural and synthetic. This Slowdive-like harmonization makes way to a measured verse that feels almost Wicca Phase-inspired. After smoothly transitioning between these vastly-different genres, you realize that you have no idea where the track is going next. Around the three-minute mark, the electronic drums fade out and a solitary post-rock guitar note makes way for a soaring passage where rattling bass, driving guitar, crashing cymbals, and searing vocals all coalesce into one cathartic outpouring of emotion. After every drop of this destructive essence is poured out, the electronic beat returns once more and carries the listener off into the silence.

Every once in awhile, you’ll sit down to listen to an album that just hits you in the right spot. Holy Fawn’s The Black Moon is a beautiful EP that just happened to crystalize some feeling I didn’t even know I had inside me. It reminds me of some of my favorite post-rock bands, some of my favorite shoegaze bands, and even some of my favorite new bands like Greet Death. Much like Greet Death’s New Hell (which landed a spot on our 2019 Album of the Year list), The Black Moon is a slow-moving and deeply-moody release that unfurls and slowly permeates every corner of your mind. It’s transcendent, foreboding, and unshakable. This EP is an absolutely fantastic start to the year and proof that sometimes all it takes is one open-minded click in Spotify for art to find its intended audience. 

Accepting Change: The Never-Ending Evolution of Bring Me The Horizon

When I was in high school, one of my most revelatory music phases came when I discovered the wonderful world of modern metal. This was initially seeded by groups like Underoath, Chiodos, and The Devil Wears Prada that I stumbled upon in middle school, but came into full bloom throughout high school when groups like Dance Gavin Dance, Of Mice & Men, and We Came As Romans began to gain traction. 

These bands are often categorized under different labels depending on who you ask; post-hardcore, screamo, Risecore, you name it. For a genre that’s supposedly about upending societal norms, metalheads weirdly tend to be some of the worst, most pedantic genre-nazis out of any music scene. For their sake, I’ll just refer to this overarching scene as metalcore from here on out, but I recognize that I’m painting with a broad brush. Regardless of what you call this style of music, this crop of mid-to-late-aughts metal bands became the foundation for my entire being in high school. This genre influenced my musical taste, my style of clothing, and even my personality for the better part of my teenage years. Do I regret it? A little. Would I go back and change it? Never. 

Essentially an extension of the 2000’s Warped Tour scene, these groups took cues from pop-punk, metal, hardcore, and electronica and blended them into a highly-marketable fusion of all those genres. Some groups like Attack Attack! became memes. Some groups like Of Machines burned bright and fizzled out after one record. Some groups like August Burns Red made it big and have stuck to their artistic guns ever since. And some groups like Bring Me The Horizon struck gold early on then kept growing and pivoting into a band that’s somehow still successful and filling stadiums in 2020.

I’ll be the first to admit that, even over the course of the last decade, most of this music aged has poorly. However, for people like myself who had these bands soundtrack their formative years, the nostalgia factor is undeniable and irreplaceable. Some people have tried their damndest to argue the artistic merit of bands like Attack Attack!, but unless you were listening as it was happening, I don’t see many bands from this scene being accessible to an outsider at all. Like, at all. In 2020, most of these songs sound dated, sexist, or just plain cringy, but when they soundtracked your first romance, your first “real concert” with friends, and hundreds of hours of Call of Duty lobbies, then you’re willing to overlook a lot. 

This is all to say that this era of 2005 to 2012 metalcore is near and dear to my heart. I’ve written about it in bite-sized pieces before, but never focused on any one band in particular. If you’d allow, I’d like to take you on a journey back in time to my specific discovery of one act called Bring Me The Horizon.

The year was 2006. It was my first year of high school, and I was still trying to figure out what the hell that meant. My friends and I were all working on 5-starring every song in Guitar Hero II, and (aside from homework), we didn’t have a care in the world. Drugs and alcohol were never a desire for me growing up, so the only two things filling my brain were video games and music. At the time I was deep into classic rock and Grunge. Kurt Cobain was my left-handed hero, and there was nothing more that I wanted than to be a teen in the ’90s. 

I had a few old-school “metal” bands on my iPod Nano, mostly things like AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, and Metallica, as much as you can call those metal. These groups stood in direct contrast to more contemporary metal acts on my iPod like the aforementioned Underoath and The Devil Wears Prada, both of whom were Christian bands with harsher vocals and more modern sensibilities. While that early wave of Christian metalcore was a game-changer at the time (I still remember the first time I heard “Baby, You Wouldn't Last A Minute On The Creek”), they weren’t necessarily records I was listening to every day. 

Sometime in 2007 a sea change happened, and there became a clear divide in my class of peers. There were jocks, popular kids, burnouts, theater geeks, and all the usual groups you see in every 2010’s-era coming-of-age dramedy, but an emerging addition to the schoolyard class system was the metalhead. This wasn’t the stereotypical 80s metal fan headbanging to Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot, nor was it the 90s relic metalhead listening to Pantera and Slayer, this was a new breed of fan that felt distinctly late-2000’s. 

Colloquially referred to as “scene kids,” this newest subgenre of metal fan bore little resemblance to their predecessors. They squeezed into black skinny jeans, straightened their hair, and wore shirts adorned with brightly-colored neon skulls. It was basically every “rawr XD” meme that we can now appreciate ironically with enough hindsight but done in earnest. They had snakebite piercings, carabiner keyholders, black MySpace pages, and most importantly; they listened to music with breakdowns. As uncool as it sounds now, I desperately wanted to be one of them.

Not only was this group accepting enough to let me into the fold, but it also turns out that I genuinely enjoyed their music. Metalcore aside, this included questionable shit like NeverShoutNever, Owl City, and Metro Station. I only really dipped my toe into most of those bands because the lion’s share what attracted me to the scene were the heavy bands. While the list of late-00’s metalcore acts is practically endless, the one band I still have a visceral memory of listening to for the first time was Bring Me The Horizon. 

We were in the cafeteria, and one of my friends handed me his iPod. He told me “listen to this,” and that was all the preface I got before he played “(I Used To Make Out With) Medusa.” Simply put, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was heavy as shit. Almost too heavy for me at the time, but I wanted to like it. I downloaded the record and soon found myself listening to it frequently enough to build up a “tolerance” to it. 

Technically classified as deathcore, Bring Me The Horizon’s debut album Count Your Blessings was a ten-track, 36-minute-long dip into the most hardcore of waters I’d ever swam in. It was so heavy in fact, I could only handle it in short bursts. Songs like “Slow Dance” and “Fifteen Fathoms and Counting” gave me an instrumental breather between the punishing brutality of “Braile (For Stevie Wonder's Eyes Only),” the piercing screams of “Pray for Plagues,” and the frantic guitarwork of “Off the Heezay.” Count Yout Blessings was shocking, heavy, and changed my taste forever from that point onward.

This album led me to dozens of other groups in the scene, many of which I mentioned above. As I began to immerse myself into this world, its bands, and its unique language of breakdowns and guttural vocals, I gradually grew to love Count Your Blessings. Once I knew the words, where the riffs hit, and what I could “sing along” to, the whole thing became child’s play. What was once the heaviest thing I’d ever heard soon became one deathcore album of many packed onto my 32 gig iPod Nano. 

Then 2008 happened. 

One year after I discovered Bring Me The Horizon, the group released their much-anticipated sophomore record Suicide Season. I excitedly downloaded the album, loaded it up onto my iPod, sat down to listen to it, and the damndest thing happened… I thought it was too soft. Granted, the band shifted from deathcore to a slightly-more-accessible metalcore formula, but still, it shocked me that this band I’d spend so long “adjusting to” was now putting out something that I deemed too far below my current tastes. 

Then two years passed, I got deeper into metalcore, and in 2010 the group put out the mouthful of an album There Is a Hell Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let's Keep It a Secret. Once again, I gave the album a listen and deemed it “too soft” for my taste. It’s not like I was only listening to metal, at this time I was getting into Sigur Ros, Portugal. The Man, Bon Iver, and tons of other groups, the problem was Bring Me The Horizon had set the bar so high with their first album that my expectations were skewed from that point onward.

By the time I hit college, my tastes had begun to expand further into more diverse and eccentric subgenres of music. Everything from Stoner Rock to Electronica was starting to creep its way onto my then-massive 120-gig iPod Classic. Metalcore was still represented, but it began to fade into the background of my day-to-day listening, and by extension, my personality. Perhaps leaving the environment in which I “fit in” to the scene changed my taste in music. Once I no longer had piers from a specific group to connect with, learn from, or impress, then I began to drift into something that felt more honest and true to myself.  

I’d still revisit metalcore every once in a while throughout college. Sometimes it was a concert for nostalgia’s sake, sometimes I just needed something angry to vent through by-proxy on a stressful train ride home. Sometime in 2015 I revisited Suicide Season specifically, and I couldn’t believe it… the record actually sounded pretty good. I went back to Count Your Blessings to recalibrate my possibly-then-out-of-date tastes, and it sounded exactly as I remembered. What happened? Had I softened in my age? Was I not as metal as I once tried to be in high school? Had I lost touch with the scene? 

I gave Suicide Season a few more listens and moved on. I revisited the album again the next year in 2016, and then again the year after that. By 2017 I had graduated from college and found myself in a completely new phase of my life. High school felt like a distant memory, now two periods of my life behind me. Sometime that year, I found myself listening to Suicide Season and came to the shocking realization that it might be my favorite metalcore album of all time. What? 

Turns out that Suicide Season wasn’t bad, it’s just that 2008 Taylor was wrong. My perspective was skewed. My expectations at the time were misplaced, and nine years later those expectations were completely gone. It was as if I was listening to the album for the first time ever. That rediscovery of shifting tastes prompted me to give another shot to There Is a Hell, and wouldn’t you know it, but that album started to grow on me too. 

So there I sat, with egg on my face enjoying Bring Me The Horizon’s first three albums and retroactively chastising younger me for being such a dopey elitist about these two great albums merely because they didn’t have the same low growls and chuggy riffs as the band’s first release. 

By 2018, I still hadn’t given either Sempiternal or That's the Spirit a proper shake, but that summer Bring Me The Horizon started promo for their upcoming sixth studio album Amo. The first single "Mantra" wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I could connect the dots and see that the band had become much more radio-friendly in the two albums that I’d skipped over. Nevertheless, I made a conscious decision that I was going to go into this new album with a completely open mind, non-existent expectations, and zero preconceived notions. 

When Amo released in early 2019 the metalheads did the same thing they always do and complained that it was too poppy. I understood their criticism and saw a younger version of myself in those comments, but I gave the album a shot and, guess what, it’s great. I actually did see some positive early reception on reddit of all places, implying that maybe some of these fans were in the exact same boat as I was, aging gracefully (or not-so-gracefully) into a more refined and open-minded metal palate. 

Sure, the band that created Amo bears little resemblance to the one I first fell in love with back in high school, but that’s what happens over the course of a decade. People change. Bands change. Sounds change. Styles change. Tastes change. The group that wrote the love song "Mother Tongue" is surprisingly not the same group of 20-somethings that wrote “Tell Slater Not To Wash His Dick.”

As I mentioned above, there are plenty of groups from this era of my childhood that have “stuck to their guns” artistically. August Burns Red is still making the same album over and over again for better or worse. Dance Gavin Dance have continued to kill it despite spending a better part of their early years dealing with near-constant lineup changes. Hell, even Underoath are still putting out quality records and sound tighter live than they’ve ever been. It’s okay that Bring Me The Horizon have aged and changed their sound. The band isn’t bound to deathcore, nor should they be. In fact, at this point, Bring Me The Horizon have probably spent more time getting radio play with kind-of-heavy alternative rock than they have making the deathcore albums I associate them with. 

Sure their new sound is more accessible than their early work, but Amo is arguably a better album than the ones I grew up listening. In looking at Bring Me The Horizon, I’m reminded of a younger version of myself that I want to slap for being such a stuck-up prude about something as goofy as subgenres and sonic changes. Likewise, I’m reminded of a younger version of myself that would be shocked at the poppy music I not only tolerate but willingly listen to on a daily basis now. 

I also recognize the fact that I’m not a creature of change. I like to eat the same things, play the same games, and hang out with the same people. I’m not afraid of change, but it sure makes me uncomfortable. I can recognize that this tendency bleeds over into music, even if I like to think I’m more conscious of it now than I was in high school. I’m still as susceptible to snap judgments and bad takes as anyone, but my own revisionist history on Bring Me The Horizon highlights not only how a band can change to stay relevant and successful, but how we as listeners should try our hardest to come into things open-minded. 

I’ve grown to accept these albums for what they are, and high school Taylor would probably hate me for that. Not only that, I’ve gone on to love these albums that I once wrote off for ill-founded and superficial reasons. 

Bring Me The Horizon is a great band. Count Your Blessings is heavy, Suicide Season is near-perfect, and Amo is catchy and eclectic. They’re all great for different reasons, and it only took me a decade to realize it. 

The Stark Maximalism of Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is an enigma. He is reclusive (aside from the occasional Tumblr post, interview, or Oscar performance), and didn’t even perform publicly once last year. His song titles contain more punctuation than a Steven King novel, and the man has released over one-hundred Christmas songs (a feat that we’re dedicated to covering in-full over on our sister site). His discography his one of the best in folk music ranging from soft, stark acoustic on Seven Swans, lush multi-instrumental fanfare on Illinois, and electronic bombast on The Age of Adz. While he initially made a name for himself with a far-fetched promise to record an album about all 50 states, it quickly became clear that his artistry and vision exceeded the need for any gimmicks. That’s about as broad of a career-overview as I can fit into an introductory paragraph, but the important thing to note for this piece is that the record he released in 2015, Carrie & Lowell, might be the collection of songs that end up defining his career. 

Worryingly for fans, Sufjan’s albums seem to be getting fewer and farther between. Carrie & Lowell is now five years old, and it’s still the last studio album from the folk hero; however, that doesn’t mean he’s been any less productive. In the past few years, he’s mostly relegated himself to singles and side-projects alongside conducting, producing, and soundtracking. Even before this five-year gap between records, Sufjan had seemed increasingly uninterested in (and discouraged by) the album format. Before Carrie & Lowell his last album was 2010’s Adz, and his last proper record before that was 2005’s Illinois. There were plenty of B-sides, art installations, EPs, ballets, and avant-garde diversions in between all that, so it’s fair to say that Sufjan is a weird mix of precious and prolific. 

Sufjan is also an artist who’s talented enough to have released several career-defining albums. If you were to ask a fan what their favorite Sufjan album was, you’re likely to get a different answer based on who you talk to. I’m a Michigan man myself, but Carrie & Lowell is a close second. And while Carrie & Lowell may be only one of two records that Sufjan released in the past ten years, there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s one of the best albums of the decade, and I’m about to tell you why.

2010’s Age of Adz represented something of an end for Sufjan Stevens. Apart from his inclinations away from the album format, that record saw Sufjan blowing up his entire persona, sound, and musical foundation into something entirely unexpected and extraordinary. It was the album-equivalent of ego death. He eased listeners in with a familiar acoustic guitar on “Futile Devices,” but then turned everything on its head with electronic drums, angry frustrations, and cinematic builds the likes of which fans had never before seen. The album concludes with the 25-minute “Impossible Soul,” a breathtaking multi-part musical odyssey that retroactively feels like a career-ending period mark.

So where did he have left to go after such an upending work of art? It turns out that the answer was nowhere. Sufjan essentially went into hiding for a few years aside from a second collection of Christmas songs which he bound together in 2012 thanks to his label Asthmatic Kitty. He toured on that album for one festive holiday season (fittingly long-windedly-titled "Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice"), then fell off the face of the earth. 

Sometime after that tour, Sufjan Steven’s mother passed away. 

Sufjan had a strained relationship with his mother. She was the topic of songs like “Romulus,” and (by contrast) “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!” The rough story as presented in “Romulus” is this; Sufjan’s parents got a divorce when he was still a child. His mother moved from Michigan to Oregon and the kids visited her every summer. Sufjan depicts his mother as selfish, uncaring, and something that he felt ‘ashamed’ of. She battled addiction, depression, and schizophrenia, and was generally shown in his music to be an unfit parent. Despite all this, when your mother dies, she’s still your mother, and it still hurts. 

Her death is the event that sparked Carrie & Lowell’s creation. As a result, it’s an expectedly dark, slow, and sad record… and that’s putting it lightly. Carrie & Lowell is a morbid piece of art, a fantastic character study, and an absolutely beautiful reflection on love and mortality. If you haven’t listened to it yet, now is the time to close this tab, turn off the lights, and listen to the record on your nicest pair of headphones. 

When Carrie & Lowell released on March 31st of 2015, it was met with widespread critical acclaim. Aside from the notable context in which it was created, a new Sufjan Stevens record felt like an event worth celebrating. The album represented a sonic return to form for Sufjan, most reminiscent of his early-career acoustic work like Seven Swans and some of the more restrained tracks on Michigan. While critical praise is no consolation prize for a dead parent, it felt like with Carrie & Lowell Sufjan finally became a household name. 

As the full gravity of the record’s lyrics and context began to set in over the first few weeks of its release, Carrie & Lowell almost had a delayed reaction as fans started to recognize the scope and weight of the feelings contained within it. I may just be speaking for myself, but distinctly I recall listening to the album a few times before the words really began to land. It wasn’t until I sat down for a handful of close listens that I grew to understand the severity of the emotions contained within the record. Carrie & Lowell wasn’t just another Sufjan record. It wasn’t Illinois, it wasn’t Adz, and it definitely wasn’t Songs for Christmas, this was something different entirely. Carrie & Lowell is one of the rare albums that sounds sad and also has the weight to back it up. It’s not sad for sadness’ sake. There’s plenty of sad music, and there’s plenty of folk music, but there are very few records like this. 

Album opener “Death With Dignity” sets the tone immediately with a soft, finger-plucked banjo and morbid song title referencing Oregon’s assisted suicide law. Sufjan enters soon after with a soft whispered voice sounding more lost than ever as he sings, “Spirit of my silence, I can hear you / But I’m afraid to be near you / And I don’t know where to begin.” The track ends with a minute of haunting, ghost-like hums that reverberate around the speakers, solidifying the album’s mood for the remaining 39-minutes. 

“Should Have Known Better” is the closest thing the record has to a “catchy” song, placed second in the tracklist presumably to soften the blow of the opening track while also prepping the listener for what’s to come. This song introduces us to the record’s cast of characters, and it’s setting; Sufjan’s mom, brother, and extended family are all represented as well as the state of Oregon. Sufjan’s mom, Carrie, is introduced as a troubled character, establishing her with an anecdote about a time that she forgot Sufjan and his brother at the video store as a child. “When I was three, three, maybe four / She left us at that video store / Oh, be my rest, be my fantasy.” Here he depicts just one instance of her bad parenting, but also follows is up with conflicted feelings of missing her now that she’s gone. 

“Should Have Known Better” ends with a message of hope as Sufjan contrasts this recent loss with a new ray of hope as he sings, “My brother had a daughter (brother had a daughter) / The beauty that she brings, illumination (illumination).” Clinging on to this one shred of optimism, Sufjan sends the listener off to wade through the darkness on the rest of the album. Now we know the stakes, we know the players, and we know how it ends. All that’s left is to fill in the blanks. 

From there, the album spans from love songs on “All of Me Wants All of You” to childhood flashbacks on “Eugene.” Sufjan walks the listener through the stages of grief on “Drawn to the Blood,” and with each track, he takes the listener further down the rabbit hole of loss and confusion that comes in the wake of a loved one’s death. Each song adds another layer onto the relationship between himself and his mother, which sets us up for the heartbreaking depiction of her death beginning on the second side of the record.

Sufjan captures death rawly on “Fourth of July” as he finds himself by his mother’s bedside during her final moments. First, Sufjan sets the scene by establishing his mother’s declining health with beautiful yet pained language. “The evil, it spread like a fever ahead / It was night when you died, my firefly.” From there, he replays a conversation with each stanza trading off between the two of them. The language used is loving and forthright as his dying mother asks, “Did you get enough love, my little dove? / Why do you cry?” elaborating, “And I’m sorry I left, but it was for the best / Though it never felt right / My little Versailles.”

The use of loving pet names is punctuated immediately by post-death logistics as the hospital begins asking Sufjan about how the family would like to bury the body. This gut-punch leads to one final chorus that builds to a climactic chant of “We’re all gonna die,” which is repeated until the song fades out into darkness. It’s sublime.

From that point onward the record shows Sufjan dealing with his mother’s death on “The Only Thing,” flashes back to his childhood once more on “Carrie & Lowell,” and gives a glimpse of hope in the form of love and religion on my personal favorite “John My Beloved.” These songs bear soft acoustic guitar, careful banjo plucks, subtle electronic elements, and creaking piano, creating one continuity of emotion that flows smoothly from one song to the next.

Penultimate “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” finds Sufjan at his most self-destructive, turning to substances and self-harm in the wake of his mother’s passing. Finally, album closer “Blue Bucket of Gold” is a piano-led lamentation that finds Sufjan reaching out to friends, family, and God for support. The song ends with a meditative swirl of electronics that overwhelms the senses and commandeers the track. Of this song, Sufjan explained in an interview:

“I didn’t know (my mom) well in a lot of ways, and I didn’t know how to say goodbye on the last track with articulation. So I quit playing piano and vocals and just stopped. I wanted to surrender her to the beyond with noises that sound bigger than just me.”

So that was Carrie & Lowell; 43 minutes of heartache, confusion, loss, and sadness. It’s not a fun listen, but very few albums capture such sadness in such an open way. From then on, Sufjan let us sit with the record, and that was the last we heard from him until 2017, which is when he began adding more pieces to his creation. It was at this point that he turned Carrie & Lowell from a masterpiece into a complete body of work and one of the most definitive statements that any artist has ever made.  

Carrie & Lowell may not seem like an album most artists would tour off of; the songs are slow, sad, and minimalistic, not exactly befitting of a large-scale theater. But Sufjan Stevens is not most artists. Sufjan took Carrie & Lowell on the road in 2015 and performed the songs as reimagined for the big stage. The tracks turned from somber reflections of death into meditative statements on life. He performed with a full band, adorned the stage with colorful lights, and donned his iconic baseball hat for months of legendary performances throughout 2015 and 2016. The songs were built out with added drums, background vocalists, and keyboards. Tracks were punctuated by ethereal electronic swirls that allowed the audience to marinate on the performance as it unfolded. Each night was capped off with either  “Chicago” or a cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” perhaps to lighten the mood and ease the audiences out of the death-obsessed world of Carrie & Lowell and back into reality. 

A 2015 performance in South Carolina was filmed and released to the public as a standalone album in 2017, two years after Carrie & Lowell first landed. With the performance immortalized on Carrie & Lowell Live, Sufjan took the quiet meditative nature of the original record and turned in into a maximalist reflection on death and life. The songs were the same as they were before, but now re-ordered and re-created from the ground-up so that they shine in a completely different light.

Performing career-spanning tracks like “Redford” and “Vesuvius,” these songs fit in perfectly alongside the core album’s tracklist, further fleshing out the story of Carrie & Lowell and making the five-year gap between the seemingly distant Age of Adz feel seamless. “All of Me Wants All of You” trades Sufjan’s acoustic guitar out for an entirely-electronic soundscape that erupts in a fantastic explosion of psychedelic dance music. If you were to play the live songs side by side with their original you’d hardly be able able to tell they were the same if it weren’t for the lyrics. Similarly, “Fourth of July” is blown out into a seven-minute epic that retains the original’s guitar and piano but culminates in an extended repetition of “We’re all gonna die” over pulsating synths and a rolling drum solo. Even the pensive “John My Beloved” begins with the same familiar piano but eventually adds drums and guitar that gradually build up to a near-post-rock climax. Perhaps most notably, album closer “Blue Bucket of Gold” is followed by a 13-minute wall of ambient electronic music, lending further credence to the Sufjan quote above, leaving audiences no choice but to ruminate and surrender to the beyond, if only for a scant few minutes.

With this live performance, Sufjan gave the tracks on Carrie & Lowell a new life outside of their original context. It’s one thing to perform such a personal and dark album before hundreds of people, but it’s an artistic achievement to change them so significantly and still have them work to the same end. Carrie & Lowell Live stands as an additional support piece to the original record’s greatness, proving that it can work in different contexts and on different scales. It’s great not just because the songs are great, but because it reimagines them entirely. With this performance, Sufjan took the emotion and story of Carrie & Lowell and pushed the maximalist slider all the way up.

The other achievement of this record is that it takes all of Sufjan’s seemingly-disparate musical phases and makes them all work under one unified sound. The live performance takes the songwriting of Carrie & Lowell and touches it up with the electronic embellishments of Adz and the instrumentation of Michigan. It elevates not just the original record, but his entire discography. 

On April 28th, the same day as the release of Carrie & Lowell Live, Asthmatic Kitty announced The Greatest Gift, an album that collected the outtakes, remixes, and demos from Carrie & Lowell all on one LP. Much like the preceding live album, The Greatest Gift further elevated the original record by adding an additional layer of context and emotional complexity, this time in the opposite tonal direction.

As mentioned above, there are three core categories under which the songs on The Greatest Gift fall. First are outtakes. These are songs like “City of Roses,” “Wallowa Lake Monster,” and “The Hidden River of My Life.” These songs fit tonally into Carrie & Lowell, but focus more on building the backdrop of the album as opposed to detailing its central players. Each song name-drops iconic Oregon locations and attractions, these three outtakes (along with “The Greatest Gift”) flesh out the world of Carrie & Lowell primarily through embellishments to the surrounding environment more than anything vital to the story.

The remixes contained on the album aren’t your standard EDM-fueled fare, but instead opt for adding subtle electronic elements that add to the atmosphere of the original songs. The first remix of “Drawn to the Blood” is helmed by Sufjan himself, editing his own song to sound like an Adz bonus track. Hidalgo Negro remixes both “Death With Dignity” and “All of Me Wants All of You” with swirling electronic additions that make it sound as if you’re underwater or floating in space. The incomparable Doveman remixes “Exploding Whale,” initially a loosie, which now finds a home here as yet another Oregon reference. Finally, 900X remixes “Fourth of July,” pulling the song apart piece by piece and reconstructing it into a cathartic seven-minute electronic build that makes expert use of the song’s white space, giving the lyrics ample time to breathe.

Where The Greatest Gift shines, most surprisingly, are its demo tracks. In these songs, we catch a glimpse of the most raw version of Carrie & Lowell in existence. “Drawn to the Blood” receives a “fingerpicking remix” that swaps the rapidly-strummed guitar of the original for a carefully-finger plucked version that sounds a touch more produced, à la “Mystery of Love.” Most notably, “John My Beloved” and “Carrie & Lovell” are denoted with “iPhone Demo,” painting a picture of Sufjan recording his thoughts, feelings, and grief directly into his phone somewhere that studio equipment was all too far away.

These demos are haunting and breathtaking. Recorded in complete isolation, they feature rough-around-the-edges guitar playing and soft, whispered vocals (even more so than usual). These songs feel remarkably “of the moment,” as if inspiration struck, and Sufjan recorded them on the spot in a bout of stream-of-consciousness. These demos capture the emotion and environment so wholly; you can hear the room tone, the creaking of a chair, and the rattling of the guitar strings. It’s Sufjan in an unpolished and lo-fi setting that most fans have never heard before. The demos take the sadness and starkness of the original album versions and amplifies them as far as humanly bearable. It’s an even more accurate portrayal of grief and loss if only because they sound that much more raw and sorrowful.

This collection of songs, particularly the demos, add yet another layer onto Carrie & Lowell, showing an alternative reality version of this album that was just Sufjan alone in his room recording his feelings into an iPhone and releasing it out into the world. You know the songs are great because they still work, even in this context. While Carrie & Lowell Live portrayed the album at its most expansive and maximalist, The Greatest Gift shows the album at its most inward and minimalist. These two releases work in tandem with the original record to elevate the songs and portray Sufjan’s strength as a songwriter and musician. 

On top of these three full-length releases, 2017 also saw the release of Tonya Harding, a single loosely inspired by I, Tonya in which Sufjan recounts the now-infamous tale of the figure skater (and Oregonian) Tonya Harding. That single felt like a leftover song from a reality where Sufjan actually carried out his Oregon album the same way that Illinois had a song about John Wayne Gacy and featured Lincoln and Superman on the gatefold. Additionally, 2015’s “Blue Bucket of Gold (Remix)” offers an alternate ending to Carrie & Lowell that, much like the live rendition, sends the listener off with a disorienting whir of electronics, amplifying what was already on the album by tenfold. 

Through these loose singles and the more Oregon-focused outtakes on The Greatest Gift, Sufjan also presented fans with an alternate reality where Carrie & Lowell was merely another album in the 50 States Project covering the fanciful characters and locations of the Pacific Northwest. Simply put, this makes Carrie & Lowell one of the most flexible, fascinating, and diverse releases that Sufjan has ever created. 

There you have it. One record, one live album, a collection of outtakes, remixes, and demos that add up to a collective 3+ hour listen that I like to call the Definitive Carrie & Lowell. 

With this series of releases, Sufjan Stevens was able to not only craft a masterful and career-defining record, but he was also able to build upon it, flesh it out, and create around it in a way that I’ve seen no other artist do. Together these albums paint a wondrous portrayal of life, love, and loss. Carrie & Lowell is the type of record that only comes around once in a generation, and we’re lucky that Sufjan lent his voice and artistry to depicting such a painful and challenging topic. In immortalizing the passing of his mother and everything that came in its wake, Sufjan created a definitive statement on loss that will live on through the ages. He memorialized his mother in an honest way that made death real, impactful, beautiful, and comforting. I can’t think of a better legacy than that.