The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far: 100-51
A compendium of Paste's favorite albums from the last 25 years.
The first issue of Paste came out in July 2002. Since then, this site has catalogued the best and worst contemporary music the industry and the underground have had to offer. This week, we’re focusing on the former, highlighting our favorite albums released since 2000. We’re 25-percent finished with this century, and it’s given us some of the most important musical artifacts ever, from Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize to Metallica declaring war on Napster. In-between, every genre and sub-genre imaginable, from egg-punk to math-rock to neo-soul to K-pop, has boasted a record or two worth checking out. We’ve compiled a list of the 250 greatest albums of the 21st century so far, spanning January 2000 to December 2024. If you’re looking for 2025 releases, or expecting either of our recent Perfect 10s to be present in this ranking, you’ll just have to come back in 2050 to see if their relevancy holds up.
In compiling this list, we’ve 1) reached back into the Paste archives and pulled out a few albums we’d consider to be “cornerstones” of this magazine’s 20-year identity and 2) re-evaluated albums we scored high, low, and all decimal points in-between. These 250 entries feature editorial and freelance voices from all iterations of the magazine, from our inaugural issue to our most-recent online features. We’ve been unveiling the ranking in five parts since Monday. Today, it’s numbers 100-51, featuring heavy-hitters, underrated gems, and maybe some records you forgot about. Thanks in advance for taking this journey with us, and thanks for the twenty-three years of support along the way. Now, let’s see what the millennium has had to offer thus far. —Matt Mitchell, Music Editor
100. Lupe Fiasco: Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor (2006)
In my lifetime, Lupe Fiasco is rap’s greatest export who’s in the margins of stardom. For twenty years, the Chicagoan’s been making excellent records. Seriously, just look at the catalogue: The Cool, Lasers, Samurai. Lest we forget the man’s debut, Food & Liquor, which I discovered after watching Lupe perform “Kick, Push” on One Tree Hill (I didn’t think that show would get referenced in this list twice, by the way). But it’s not just that track. It’s “I Gotcha.” It’s “Daydreamin’.” It’s “Hurt Me Soul.” It’s contributions from Jill Scott, Gemini, Jonah Matranga, and Matthew Santos. It’s production by the Neptunes, Kanye West, Mike Shinoda, Prolyfic, and Soundtrakk. It’s the lyrics, which tell stories of skateboarding, single motherhood, creative pride, American misconceptions of Islam, and addiction. Lupe was a twenty-something hot shot with a quick pen in 2006; Food & Liquor made him a rap hero. I think his best is still yet to come. —Matt Mitchell
99. Jessica Pratt: Here in the Pitch (2024)
Much of Here in the Pitch attempts to reckon with time and all of its charms, disasters, and unknowns. Whether that’s done through nods to a post-psychedelic haze on “World on a String,” through horn placements that echo the sounds, sights, and ashy hues of the speakeasies that Los Angeles miscreants might have stumbled into four, maybe five decades ago, or lines like “I soon should know what remains / I never was what they called me in the dark / I never was / Here I sit so long”—it’s obvious that Jessica Pratt has never felt more comfortable in her own ambitions, a truth most prominently on display throughout a track like “Get Your Head Out,” which shimmies between the vibes of dimly lit hotel soirées and “in the stars waiting ‘til love’s aligned.” On Here in the Pitch, it’s as if Pratt is walking with us down the Yellow Brick Road, but the cobblestone quakes with bitumen smacked by traces of romance and horror that, on their own can be quite maddening but, here, make for some adventurous, Great American Songbook-worthy shapes. Here in the Pitch is a serenade of our own unique endtimes, packed with rollicking, sugar-sweet verses and vocalizations you can twirl your body to and curl up and anguish over all the same. And, at a mere twenty-seven minutes in length, Pratt wastes no time with us. The whole project is tight as a wire. “It seems it’s all so wonderful inside,” Pratt beckons, slashing through gloom with a wounded olive branch. —Matt Mitchell
98. My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge (2004)
While expectations were high for the scrappy New Jersey band, My Chemical Romance’s major label debut under Warner Records subsidiary Reprise Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge proved they could learn from their first album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love‘s weaker moments and create an era-defining record in the process. The band got tighter, Gerard Way’s songwriting chops were stronger, and the group nailed what became their signature sound —one that combined their extensive influences, ranging from The Misfits to Queen, to create a theatrical, new brand of emo, unlike anything else under the genre’s umbrella. Growing up in the midst of the MCR phenomenon when “Helena” made waves on MTV, it was the first time in my lifetime that I witnessed in real time a shift in the music industry, with a new brand of glam rock that tapped into teenage angst while not feeling corny or manufactured. My Chemical Romance went on to put out another groundbreaking masterpiece two years later with The Black Parade, but it’s Three Cheers that made that ambitious concept album possible. —Tatiana Tenreyro
97. Amy Winehouse: Back to Black (2006)
Above all else, Amy Winehouse was funny. We saw that on “Fuck Me Pumps,” the standout track from 2003’s Frank, Winehouse’s contemporary R&B-indebted debut. She also knew that humor wasn’t necessarily just a ha-ha experience; she had a command of dark humor that few have ever matched. That talent showed itself on Back to Black, a daring collection where Winehouse embraced a vintage soul and Motown girl group-inspired aesthetics with the help of frequent collaborator Salaam Remi and some new talent: Mark Ronson, who’d jumped into production for Nikka Costa’s 2001 album Everybody Got Their Something, and Sharon Jones’ band The Dap-Kings. Hits like the title track, “Tears Dry On Their Own,” “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good” mixed breakup devastation with brassiness and a touch of dramatic humor that only she could wear elegantly, defying expectations and mainstreaming the underground retro-soul movement. —Devon Chodzin
96. Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (2019)
The first song on Purple Mountains is “That’s Just The Way That I Feel” and it is tempting to just copy/paste all of its lyrics into this space. That’s it. That’d be the blurb. Here’s why: It is, from the first line to the last, a densely packed and endlessly generous example of the extraordinary brilliance of David Berman, the poet and songwriter behind Purple Mountains (and his previous project, Silver Jews). In just under three-and-a-half minutes, he ambles through an abundance of twisted metaphors, skeptical aphorisms, relentless assonance and amusing imagery, using it all to paint a wry smile and some weary hopefulness over the narrator’s desperation: “A setback can be a setup for a comeback if you don’t let up,” he sings against strummy midtempo country-rock, “but this kind of hurtin’ won’t heal.” The narrator, of course, is Berman, who died by suicide twenty-six days after the album’s release, taking with him arguably the most skilled lyricist of his generation and leaving behind Purple Mountains, a masterwork that laid bare his struggles with such complexity and nuance, it was easy to overlook the bigger picture. “That’s Just The Way That I Feel” isn’t even the best or most foreboding song on the album, by the way. There are nine more just like it, including a couple called “All My Happiness Is Gone,” and “Nights That Won’t Happen.” Listening to them is really hard, but it’s also a vivid reminder of Berman’s towering talent—and to love your people while you can, to appreciate artists and their art, and to go back and listen to all those great Silver Jews records, too. —Ben Salmon
95. Frou Frou: Details (2002)
Frou Frou only made one record together, but it effectively set the tone for the twenty-three years of electropop that followed. Details put the work of Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth on the map. “Breathe In” is among the best breakout singles this century. Frou Frou’s brand of dance music cut out the drones and made extensive use of live instruments. None of these songs sound cluttered; Heap’s voice is an angelic compliment to the bubbly wonder of “It’s Good to Be in Love” and “Must Be Dreaming.” Frou Frou’s ideas are full of drama, and they outshine so much of the European pop music that was happening in 2002. I wish this album was the biggest thing of all time. Thankfully you can hear Details in the details of its strongest progeny, in the effervescence of Grimes, Clairo, and Cafune. Imogen Heap’s solo catalogue ain’t half bad, either. —Matt Mitchell
TV On The Radio has released many great albums over the past two decades, but they tapped into a certain magic in their sophomore record, Return to Cookie Mountain. It’s easy to become enamored the second you hear the foghorn-like looped samples, trip-hop beat, and an a cappella duet from Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone in the opening track “I Was A Lover.” While the ferocious, adrenaline-rushed single “Wolf Like Me” catapulted TVOTR to stardom, the band thrives just as much in quieter moments, like “Province.” With their genre-pushing methods, taking inspiration from psychedelia, post-punk, shoegaze, and doo-wop, Cookie Mountain allowed the band to level up and become tastemakers in the New York City indie scene. —Tatiana Tenreyro
In 2004, 69-year-old Loretta Lynn released her thirty-seventh solo studio album. It could have been a sad affair, the desperate yawp of a legendary Nashville madam teetering into an aged cliché of herself, but with the help of rock and roll upstart Jack White, Lynn made the greatest record of her career. Like a bunch of rowdy grandkids, White and a crew of friends (most of whom would converge a year later as The Raconteurs) lent a sly, gritty feel to Lynn’s thirteen mostly-autobiographical tracks—Van Lear Rose was her 70th release overall, but it was only the second time she’d written or co-written all of her songs. Her seasoned, tremulous voice paired perfectly with White’s electric guitar warble, pulling off mournful country crooners and all-out rock numbers with equal grit and spunk. —Rachael Maddux
In 2010, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the most expensive rap record ever made and, clocking in at more than seventy minutes in length with a collaborator list that’s a day-long, you can tell exactly why. Kanye West’s fifth album was such a strong pivot from 808s & Heartbreak that it could have failed if the right era of culture didn’t rise up to accept it. And, of course, we all adored Kanye’s vision then, which came after he exiled himself to Hawaii after interrupting Taylor Swift at the VMAs in 2009. Much of MBDTF was made in Honolulu, and it features some of Kanye’s most important tracks—including “Monster,” “All of the Lights,” “Gorgeous,” and, lest we forget, “Runaway.” And that one single piano note that gets carried across the first vignette of “Runaway,” it is recognizable by even the most casual rap and pop fans alike. Featuring guest performances from Kid Cudi, Elton John, Pusha T, Rick Ross, John Legend, Bon Iver, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna, among others, MBDTF was ambitious and stuck every landing. Kanye would outdo himself later in the 2010s, but this was the record that cemented his stardom in not just the rap game, but in the modern zeitgeist of music altogether. It’s Beatles-level territory, a type of celebrity that transcends eras. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy very well might be Kanye’s Sgt. Pepper, if only because rap music was never the same after it hit the shelves. —Matt Mitchell
Chromatics’ 2012 album Kill for Love is a perfect rendering of what a modern synth-pop album can—and should—be. A boastful, meticulous project that delivers adoring, striking electronic songs, Kill for Love is a magical entry from one of this century’s greatest bands. In ways that perfectly blend synth-pop and rock and roll, Chromatics deliver a full-bodied, dynamic, and ambitious concerto of distortion, echoes and haunted synth-pop. Songs like “These Streets Will Never Look the Same,” “Candy,” and “Broken Mirrors” shape an ambient, brooding and relentless soundscape of electronic grandeur. Kill for Love took the momentum of 2007’s Night Drive and turned it into a vehicle with the gas pedal taped to the floor. The band would make one more album together—Closer to Grey—in 2019 before calling it quits, but Chromatics live on infinitely through Kill for Love—a contemporary masterpiece as high-scaled and epic as any record of the last twenty years. —Matt Mitchell
I don’t know what score we gave it, but Paste was rather unenthusiastic about Be when it came out twenty years ago. Thankfully, that was twenty years ago. Enough time has passed now, and Paste has gone through enough personnel changes, for us to finally say this is one of the greatest rap records ever. I’m a Common fan; he and J Dilla’s “So Far to Go” is worth the fandom alone. Be was the record that got me into him, and it’s the record I used to find the magic of Like Water For Chocolate. I don’t know how anyone could hear “The Corner” or “They Say” or “It’s Your World, Pt. 1 & 2” and not want every succeeding rap record to sound just like that. Common called upon the Kids, Kanye West, John Legend, and the Last Poets to fill out the sound alongside him, and the product is certifiably masterful. Much leaner than Like Water For Chocolate, Common’s vibrancies lit a flailing rap world ablaze. We knew he was a whipsmart lyricist; Be turned him into a poet with more catchiness than he could carry. I think Be is underappreciated still, if only because not enough people are calling it one of best rap albums ever constructed. Forget the 21st century, this is a hip-hop fundamental. —Matt Mitchell
Josh Tillman’s creative persona feels like a natural extension of his sprawling and strange backstory: He’s part cultural provocateur, part hippie-rock satirist, part soulful balladeer. What’s most surprising about I Love You, Honeybear is how it balances that cartoonish character with the real-life Tillman—who married his then-wife, Emma, in 2013. Honeybear thrives on the knife’s edge of that enigmatic split personality, as he attempts to reconcile the love-swept optimist with the world-weary wise-ass. Fittingly, the LP’s most striking moments meditate on the sublime and deeply complicated art of sharing life with a single partner. The title track is an apocalyptic love song submerged in waltzing, Spector-styled orchestrations—with Tillman embracing his wife, at peace as they drown. Sonically, Honeybear finds Tillman in a ruminative mood, favoring lavish strings, sweeping layers of voices and acoustic guitars. But he still has a knack for unexpected flourishes, like the psychedelic guitar solo on “Strange Encounter.” With I Love You, Honeybear, Tillman wrestles with a lot of heady subject matter: modern narcissism (“Bored in the USA”), his own tendency to doom personal relationships (“The Ideal Husband”), the general downfall of mankind (“Holy Shit”). But the less he strains, the more his songs resonate. On threadbare closer “I Went to the Store One Day,” his voice skirts into falsetto over hushed fingerpicking and strings, as he croons about buying a plantation with his wife and letting the yard grow wild—and how that dream originated from a chance parking lot hello. Tillman will probably always write with a wink—but he’s learning to infuse that approach with genuine heart.—Ryan Reed
Consider all the doors electronic music opened for artists, who can now use a computer to combine whole orchestras; all the people it brought together in houses, clubs, discotheques, and warehouses; all the pioneer work it did to influence the pop, rock, and hip-hop music of today. This idea that electronic music has wedded all these once-disparate genres and listeners together is the thesis of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Look to “Giorgio by Moroder,” a nine-minute monologue by the father of disco and dance music himself complete with a gradual transition from the quiet murmuring, to the disco band, to a futuristic, EDM explosion—“the sound of the future,” in his own words. The live band, novel in the French duo’s discography, flows throughout the rest of the record like hot blood, taking many shapes as it dramatizes the fact that electronica has become the heart of modern music. “Within” becomes a somber ballad, pairing the timbre of the piano with a chilling, struggling-to-speak robotic voice. “Get Lucky” is a timeless and infectious dance pop classic, and “Instant Crush” is arguably the best alt rock song ever made. At a time where we’ve grown wary (and sometimes rightfully scornful) of the computer’s capabilities, Random Access Memories reminds us that electronic music is an evolution of human brilliance—a new way to bring us together and create something truly spectacular. —Victoria Borlando
Frances Quinlan is one of the greatest lyricists and vocalists of 21st century indie, and that is a hill I have been willing to die on since I first heard “Sister Cities” playing as background music during a writing exercise in my seventh grade English teacher’s classroom. While 2012’s Get Disowned might have more raw emotional heft (although frankly it deserves a spot on this list too) and 2018’s Bark Your Head Off, Dog might showcase more polish and varied instrumentation, Painted Shut finds that sweet spot right between the two, and milks it for all it’s worth. Each song reads like a short story and hits like a sucker-punch: accounts of abuse, death, guilt, cowardice, childhood, love, loss—told not with abstraction or metaphor, but in images so hyper-specific they burn. A waitress who looks like you, a child you failed to protect, a desperate father who posts motivational videos to Youtube that no one will watch. What makes Quinlan singular isn’t just the detail, but how the detail detonates: the songs build entire lives in a few lines, then collapse them with a single, devastating phrase: “We all will remember things the same,” or “None of this is gonna happen to me within my lifetime.” Their voice, raw and ragged and miraculous—truly one of the greatest indie rock voices of this generation—tears through these scenes like a second narrative thread, equal parts witness and wound. Painted Shut doesn’t generalize to be relatable; it burrows inward, past skin and bone, and somehow arrives at a deeper truth—one that’s terrifyingly familiar. There are bigger, louder, flashier albums from this era, but none that make being alive, in all its shame and mystery, feel so startlingly clear or so painfully human. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Charli XCX’s destiny as the future of pop was clear from early on, even if it took the mainstream until Brat to catch up. Early hits like “Boom Clap” and high-profile collaborations with Icona Pop and Iggy Azalea earned her acclaim, but it was 
Converge was three albums in by the time Jane Doe happened. It’s not a rebirth but a confirmation, as the band’s cocktail of punk and heavy metal is a potent one. I hear some of these tracks—“Distance and Meaning,” “Fault and Fracture”—and wonder why no other release from Y2K sounds quite like it. The formula was there, and Converge took it to task, leaving the room with one of the best metal albums ever, let alone in the confines of this list’s requirements. For me, it all comes back to the opening track: “Concubine” is a brutal and brief blitz of shredded vocals, power riffs, and collapsing, thunderous percussion. There’s so much happening here; I still can’t pick out all the pieces. What I do know is Jane Doe wounds, destroys, and resurrects. I feel lighter beneath the weight of all of this noise. —Matt Mitchell
1997’s Time Out of Mind demonstrated that living legend Bob Dylan could still make a record that struck a chord, or maybe even a nerve, with audiences. If that agitated, alienated, and aching affair found Dylan staring down the barrel of his own mortality and questioning his place in the world, then “Love and Theft” follows as the life-affirming conclusion that Dylan’s only getting started. That’s not to say these songs rose-tint matters or turn a blind eye to the greed, corruption, and pain that Dylan regularly roots out. Far from it. However, listeners can’t help but notice a renewed brio and alacrity as a game Dylan takes turns as drifter, homespun philosopher, and romantic while deftly sampling Americana traditions from folk and blues to jazz and rockabilly. No song captures this spirit more succinctly than country rocker “Mississippi,” a Time Out of Mind leftover. “But my heart is not weary/ It’s light and it’s free,” declares Dylan’s perpetually down-on-his-luck protagonist. It’s a song of pain, regret, and hard knocks, but it’s also one of gratitude for the whole mess. And that’s the point. Dylan’s here for all of it on “Love and Theft.” Love, beauty, pain, regret, the whole shebang. —Matt Melis
Many of the best albums in history defy genre, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde is no exception. A shuffle of pop, soul, R&B, rap and experimental, Blonde is thematically bound to a headspace—articulating a swirl of emotions from euphoria and hunger to angst and sorrow—but listening to it is a bodily experience. Blonde features what were boundary-pushing recording choices at the time, like voicemail overlays and loopy vocal stacks, and it’s now clear those flourishes represent the apex of an entire era in popular music. Fellow generational greats like Kendrick Lamar, Solange and Radiohead also took artistic leaps on their sublime albums in 2016, but none jumped as high as the elusive Frank Ocean. Halfway through a decade defined by a transition to life online, Blonde was tangible. And that visceral nature is why it still rings clear today. —Ellen Johnson
The first few years of Jason Isbell’s solo career were beset with personal problems, including a well-publicized struggle with alcohol abuse, and his first three solo outings often played like too much of the same thing. But with Southeastern, Isbell has broken this hard luck streak, crafting an album worthy of his considerable talents. Each of the songs is a stunner. “Cover Me Up” is on the one hand a gentle, insistent love song, and on the other a moving testament to personal redemption that never once turns a blind eye to past indiscretions. It sets the tone for the remainder of the album, which is given equally to the promise of romance and the ever-looming possibility of suffering, both self-induced and arbitrary. As good as the songs are, Isbell’s singing may be even better. It’s certainly some of the best vocal work he’s ever committed to tape. His baritone, always rich, is deepened here by a grittiness that lends Southeastern a real soulful quality. By any reasonable aesthetic criteria, Southeastern is a triumph. It’s the most potent expression to date of Isbell’s talent (including his Drive-By Truckers output) and, ultimately, was a harbinger of great things to come. —Jerrick Adams
Many in the acting and modeling fields also find their way into music, but Sky Ferreira’s foray was no ill-advised stunt. Ferreira had been putting out music on MySpace since she was a teen, which resulted in a major label bidding war and album deal with EMI that turned sour. She scrapped plans for her debut album and put out two EPs with Capitol instead—2011’s As If! and 2012’s Ghost. While electronic met acoustic on the disjointed Ghost, Night Time, My Time arrived with much more gusto than many would’ve thought. Equipped with soaring pop hooks and smudged textures, Ferreria sounds melancholy yet mature. “I Blame Myself” is a vulnerable display of self-loathing (“I know it’s not your fault / That you don’t understand / I blame myself”), “Kristine” is a biting roast of abhorrent rich kid behavior (“Stabbing pens in my hands / And I’m never working, I’m just spending”) and the title track is a glimmer of morbid transcendence (“I wouldn’t feel anything / When we burst into dust forever / And no angels will help us out”). Her dense, rough-edged pop proves both danceable and insightful. Despite its yearning melancholia, it’s a constant rush of instrumental and emotional uplift. —Lizzie Manno
Low’s fifth album is the kind of record that makes everything else sound impatient. Released in 2001, Things We Lost in the Fire marked the moment when Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s decades-long experiment in quiet stopped being aesthetic and started being existential. Every song feels carved out of restraint: the drums barely touch air, the harmonies hover like they’re waiting for permission to exist. But what emerges isn’t calm—it’s pressure, the weight of emotion held perfectly still. The beauty is ruthless. “Sunflower” begins with a corpse releasing flowers into the night; “Dinosaur Act” pushes forward, exhausted but proud and alive; “Closer” seeks the warmth of connection in the face of loss. And then there’s “In Metal,” written for their newborn daughter Hollis, where Parker sings about wanting to freeze her child in time—“Wish I could keep your little body / In metal”—while Hollis’s voice, barely a year old, giggles faintly in the background. It’s terrifying and human in equal measure. When Parker died in 2022, Sparhawk ended Low, knowing the band couldn’t exist without that equilibrium. Yet his most recent solo record, Hollis sings beside him (“Not Broken”), her voice startlingly like her mother’s. From the baby sounds caught on tape in 2001 to the adult duet decades later, Things We Lost in the Fire has become something larger than grief—a record that documented a lineage. It endures because it understood, long before the rest of us did, that nothing lasts, but everything echoes. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Terre Thaemlitz’s New York deep house milestone is also one of dance music’s supreme protest statements. Here is an album whose message is literally inseparable from the music, beginning with a manifesto exalting house’s queer origins and condemning its decontextualization and commodification. Later, voiceovers sketch quick audio portraits of voguers and queens who sought the “occasional feel-good” in the pre-Giuliani NYC club scene: a kid with wings, a victim of a gay-bashing being “kicked around,” a drag queen who sat in front of Thaemlitz in the club strung-out and broke while Madonna made millions off the moves she learned from her. Surrounding these stories are snowcapped piano chords and the distant shouts of eight million souls drowning in NYC. This is one of the most vivid evocations of being lost ever conjured in music, and it peaks with one of the 10 or so greatest ambient recordings ever made, “Grand Central Pt. II (72 Hours By Rail from Missouri),” a track so lonesome it simply tears through you. —Daniel Bromfield
Joyce Manor had an unbelievable streak of excellent albums, but it was with their third LP, Never Hungover Again that they tapped into something truly special. It’s one of those records that makes you feel nostalgic for memories that aren’t even your own, with Barry Johnson confronting the transitional period of fleeting-youth-into-adulthood by writing vivid stories of ill-fated romances, bittersweet hangouts with friends, and summers that can change the trajectory of your life. There are very few pop punk songs to emerge from the 2010s that are as anthemic as “Heart Tattoo” or “Falling in Love Again,” which manage to capture the playful, hooky energy of other California greats like blink-182 while not feeling like an imitation of said past. —Tatiana Tenreyro
I fall more in love with Tender Buttons each time I hear it. I’m glad we got Trish Keenan for as long as we did. Her singing, perfect as it was, takes me everywhere I hope to go. Tender Buttons, her band Broadcast’s third and last studio album, is their best (though The Noise Made by People and Haha Sound are actually that good, too) and brightest effort. Call it dream pop, call it hypnagogic pop, call it electropop, call it indie. I don’t care what you call it, as long as you call it perfect. It’s stripped back but supplied with beats, gentle guitar work, murky synths, and, of course, Keenan’s commanding lullaby. It’s psychedelic and emotional, never too cluttered by its own ideas. “Tears in the Typing Pool” and “America’s Boy” moved the needle for me first, until I spent time with “Arc of a Journey” and “Black Cat” and decided that, yes, this is one of the most important albums put out in my lifetime. I’m thankful for Tender Buttons’s light, even when I’m certain I don’t deserve it. —Matt Mitchell
I love Ethiopian jazz so much. Out of all of the styles of music that have gone viral since the boom of TikTok, that’s the one that deserves to be in front of as many people as possible. Keyboardist Hailu Mergia, along with Mulatu Astatke, is the genre’s guy. Ever since Awesome Tapes From Africa started reissuing all of these great Ethiopian jazz records, his stock has only risen. Mergia’s 2018 record Lala Belu, which arrived thirty-three years after his previous one, sounds nothing like whatever your favorite record from that time was. The songs mark a second act for Mergia’s catalogue, after so many years of dormancy, and they’re a damn perfect curation to begin with. The title track’s “la-la-la” and “ba-ba-ba” melody compliments the scribbly fifth bar; the 10-minute “Tizita” features a 4/4 suite and big bursts of synth; the funky “Gum Gum” is an organ jam that feasts not on crescendos, but tiny spells of groove. Lala Belu is a perfect jazz album, thirty-nine minutes of deeply emotive, joyous music. —Matt Mitchell
Taylor Swift has tried her hand at all kinds of genre variations throughout her career, but only once has she achieved an entire album of pop perfection. Cut to 2014. Swift is flying high after releasing her masterpiece Red, and the world is unfolding before her. Rather than linger in the pop-country middleground where she found great success, Swift went full pop mastermind on 1989, named for her birth year. Pulling from the sweeping pop of the era in which she was born and working with hit master Max Martin, Swift was able to weave 1980s new wave with gargantuan hooks and ultimately surpass the tired EDM-infused pop of the early 2010s—and outlast most of the blah radio pop of that time. From start to finish, 1989 might be the most cohesive listening experience of Swift’s entire discography. From the high stakes of “Out of The Woods” and lust of “Wildest Dreams” to the verve of “Style” and self-discovery of “Clean,” 1989 is maybe the most important album of Swift’s career. All these years later, it still sounds good as new. It deserves to be remembered as one of the best American pop albums of all time. —Ellen Johnson
White Blood Cells is a practically perfect album that’s a certified classic for a reason. There are no filler tracks, with each song being written with an immaculately crafted melody that will stick with you forever, from the vibrant, country-tinged “Hotel Yorba” to the explosive, undeniable 00’s rock classic “Fell In Love With a Girl.” Meg’s drumming is so dynamic on this record that although many have tried to imitate her work, none have come close, while Jack studied the rock legends that came before him, like Jimmy Page and Charley Patton, with such reverence that he manages to take everything he absorbed and come through as a loyal disciple, one who proves himself to have a place within their pantheon of history, too. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Halfway through his mid-career masterpiece Clear Moon, Phil Elverum hears a bell echoing somewhere in the hills—“so I opened the door and went there,” he sings, and the awesomeness of that decision sums up something fundamental about his entire discography, the constant awareness of the churning of nature just outside the walls of his home and the nagging desire to cast off the trappings of civilization and slink away like a wolf. On his breakthrough The Glow Pt. 2, released as the Microphones, that theme was caught up in the details of his recent breakup. On his later albums following the death of his wife Geneviève in 2016, it’s been tempered with an awareness that the metaphorical treatment of death in his art pales next to the meaninglessness of real thing. Yet on Clear Moon, nature remains a memento mori, and the message that you will die is written in the branches, in the clouds that are always passing overhead. Among his pure shows of devotion to the “natural world, and whatever else it’s called” that define the first decade-plus of his Mount Eerie project, this is the best and the most moving. —Daniel Bromfield
Though Vince Staples’ proof was already in Stolen Youth, the 2013 mixtape he spit out with Mac Miller (Larry Fisherman), his major label debut—and first official full length—Summertime ’06 acts as an all-consuming testament to a talent far beyond its years. Not to sell Youth short, but Miller’s loosely saccharine production fit a Staples who’s cooled quite a bit since then. On Summertime, the rapper is all ice-cold edge, inside and out: refined, honed, sharp enough to cut subcutaneously. And so, on Summertime ’06, an older, wiser Staples digs in with Clams Casino, No I.D. and DJ Dahi, producers who represent the best of most generations of hip-hop, to help him carve out a sonic space better fit for his aging worldview. In turn, the album is more than an ambitious kind of coming-of-age chronicle—it’s a blithely sad thing, one in which institutional racism (“Lift Me Up”), addiction (“Jump Off the Roof”), and even loneliness (“Summertime”) feel impossible to overcome. Staples hasn’t gotten harder, just smarter—and his producers, balancing industrial clank with cloudy dope-scapes, have allowed him a sturdy vulnerability off which he can bounce his feelings. Though Staples hails from Long Beach—and shared a year of assured hip-hop releases with Boogie, another brilliant rapper from the area who’s finally getting his due—his tracks rarely feel exclusive. Here, he was ready to mine deeper bedrock. And rarely has the sound of an artist scraping bottom been this assured. —Dom Sinacola
The discography of Kill Rock Stars’s enfant terrible post-hardcore trio Unwound was already the stuff of legends going into the 21st century. You’ve got Fake Train’‘s dour DIY punk voltage, Repetition’s tight, oppressive employment of its namesake technique—but 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You was an effort that sounded nothing like the Unwound of the nineties. The seventy-five-minute record starts with two uninterrupted minutes of a screeching synth, not wavering, not building, but flatlining across the track, before giving way to a melodic guitar riff and Justin Trosper’s swirling vocals. “Save your grace,” he sings, layered in canon with himself, “I’m going soon.” From there, the record moves between ghostly keyboard passages, choppy post-rock riffs, and lyrics as oblique as the structure of the songs they track. Listening to Leaves Turn Inside You is something like grasping at shadows; it’s a protean album, a difficult thing to grip one’s hands around. But of course it is: here’s a punk outfit with DIY roots, who had been touring near-constantly for almost a decade, who were on the road during the attacks on 9/11, who had spent two years recording Leaves on nothing but an 8-track, reckoning with a new sort of fin de siècle malaisie. You can hear it in the way Trosper stutters out “T-t-t-t-t-t-t-treachery” on “Treachery,” in the tremolo beating under the whisper-screamed As I Lay Dying quotes on “Scarlette,” and perhaps most clearly in “Off This Century’s” refrain, “The last century hasn’t ended yet / bring us the head of the king.” Unwound would break up almost a year to the day of the release of Leaves Turn Inside You, citing fatigue from their relentless tour schedule and bassist Vern Rumsey’s struggles with alcoholism, but Leaves Turn Inside You’s near-fanatical cult following has only grown, with fans equally as moved by its dark, immersive atmosphere and its cryptic, yet prescient vitality. —Madelyn Dawson
Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally’s third album as Beach House, 2010’s Teen Dream, transformed them into indie darlings, and their music appeared in everything from Zooey Deschanel’s twee-V show New Girl, a Guinness ad, and generational anthems from The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar. Although Teen Dream was a level-up in terms of songwriting (catchy choruses!) and production (live drums!), its bigger, bolder follow-up, 2012’s Bloom, matched those upgrades with its mountainous scope and luxuriant sonics. Early cuts like “Myth” and “Lazuli” set the stage for what soon follows with gauzy guitars and booming drums, and both songs have become expected characters in the Baltimore duo’s live sets. Daniel Franz’s rollicking toms on “Wild,” augmented by co-producer and indie mixing legend Chris Coady, were designed to be heard in wide-open festival fields. “Irene” ends the album with a comparable level of majesty; a fuzzed-out, one-note riff, chromatic guitar leads; Legrand’s lilting legato; and, after several minutes of silence (or a groove that infinitely repeats until you manually move the needle on the vinyl edition), the extravagant hidden track “Wherever You Go.” On Bloom, Beach House firmly cemented themselves as dream-pop mainstays, undoubtedly among the most influential indie bands to emerge this century. —Grant Sharples
Solange sounds reborn on her third album, 2016’s A Seat at the Table. It opens with “Rise,” a fitting introduction to a record that Solange spent approximately eight years making. Her filigreed vocals, backed by rich harmonies, remain front and center. “Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise,” she sings, hanging on to that last word and stretching it out. A Seat at the Table is a record about easing the toil through self-realization, and, here, Solange achieves that goal on her own terms. —Grant Sharples 
The Midnight Organ Fight is dark and angsty, as Scott Hutchison details the intensity of his depression, which has caused the dissolution of his relationship. With its heavy lyrics, it would be a tough listen, but The Midnight Organ Fight is so stunning and spirited that you can’t help but fall in love with it. Frightened Rabbit created some of the most powerful sing-alongs about the burden of struggling with mental illness, from “Floating in the Forth” to standout “Modern Leper.” But even in those moments of darkness, Hutchinson tries to push through, reminding himself that it’s what he could accomplish while being alive and persevering that would leave a mark. After Hutchison passed in 2018, The Midnight Organ Fight serves as a legacy to his raw, masterful songwriting, which helped his fans feel less alone in their struggles. —Tatiana Tenreyro
As The National entered their second decade as a band, living and working in New York City during its Meet Me In The Bathroom era, the five-piece had found its thematic orientation. High Violet collected millennial disappointments and set them to some of the most intricate music you can dream up. Those discontents are best exemplified by “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” a song with slippery lyrics that speak of uprootedness and unceremonious returns to the heartland, unending financial woes, and a collective freefall toward a bottom that never seems to come. Gratuitous but infectious closer “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” turns that gaze inward at a protagonist whose newfound aloneness reveals that the fairy tale denouement of love is rare to the point of being a lie. And yet, as The National traffic in a heft and darkness they couldn’t quite reach on prior albums, the music grew bolder and more ornate. Indie legends like Sufjan Stevens, Mads Christian Bauer, and Justin Vernon make appearances. There’s no stone left unturned, elevating the post-punk revival sound of the Great Recession-era into something brash, timeless, and detailed. With High Violet, The National became the premier band for the world-weary, those who were told to expect the world and got much less in return. —Devon Chodzin
It still defies belief that Clipse had so much trouble persuading Jive Records to release Hell Hath No Fury in the first place. The Virginia Beach hip-hop duo’s second album is the magnum opus of coke-rap, thanks to Pusha T and Malice’s vivid, menacing and frequently funny descriptions of the illicit lifestyle that slinging cocaine has afforded them, laced here and there with moments of soul-searching. Pharrell Williams (credited here as the Neptunes) paired their terse rhymes with inventive production that’s heavy on edgy beats and glitchy synth that reflected Clipse’s dissatisfaction with the label: there’s disorienting arpeggios from what sounds like a harp on “Ride Around Shining,” clattering polyrhythmic percussion and woozy Caribbean steel drums on “Wamp Wamp (What It Do),” and back-masked whatever that is on “Momma I’m So Sorry.” Hell Hath No Fury revels in the material rewards of the drug life, but there’s an undercurrent of darkness and desperation here that erodes any surface-level glorification, turning Clipse’s second album into a come-on, and also a cautionary tale. —Eric R. Danton
Even when certain critics panned Lana Del Rey’s record Born to Die—and the infamous Saturday Night Live performance that preceded it—most of them acknowledged that the singer’s debut album contained a kernel of American songwriting greatness. On Norman Fucking Rockwell!, that seed (which was already blossoming in 2012, frankly) shoots into a flourishing magnolia tree, with every lyric a fragrant petal that reveals a flicker of her personality: a poised clapback at a reporter (“You took my sadness out of context / At the Mariners Apartment Complex”), sighing eyerolls at a tortured poet beau (“Cause you’re just a man / It’s just what you do”) and muted optimism whispered to herself (“Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have / But I have it”). As the petals drop, the scenery flits between a waning summer over Venice Beach, teary backseat arguments, and vaguely witchy Laurel Canyon parties, all distinctly American scenes rooted in Del Rey’s knack for braiding minute details into achingly ornate renditions of the U.S. flag. Normal Fucking Rockwell! isn’t Del Rey’s first masterstroke, but it is the album that converted some of her steeliest critics, who finally resigned to join the singer’s new refrain of “Fuck it, I love you!” —Victoria Wasylak
Few bands from the Meet Me in the Bathroom era of New York City rock and roll have ever hit the scene in a way that was quite as powerful as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ debut. Fever to Tell arrived in 2003 and changed the game forever, with Karen O quickly establishing herself as one of the greatest bandleaders of all time. She, Brian Chase, and Nick Zinner called upon TV On The Radio’s producer David Andrew Sitek and, together, the four musicians made, in my opinion, one of the best garage rock albums ever. Very much shouldered by the popularity of “Maps” (and for good reason), Fever to Tell widened the scope of rock and roll’s Y2K revival by introducing elements of dance, art-punk and post-rock into their sketches—all of which would become this vast, incredible landscape of musical explosions, including songs like “Pin” and “Y Control” and “Date with the Night.” For a band with a sound as big as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’, you’d think they made a gazillion records and not just five. But, they certainly don’t live in the shadow of their first outing—rather, they took the hype, reverence, and excitement around Fever to Tell and fashioned it into an unparalleled introduction that would, twenty years later, continue to worm its way to the forefront of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ creative and cultural existence. Fever to Tell went gold, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs became the rock stars of our greatest dreams. —Matt Mitchell
The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders are great Tribe albums. But We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service is a great Tribe album that has André 3000 and Kendrick Lamar. That’s just math making a strong case that this LP is the best thing this group’s ever done. With absolute certainty, “The Space Program” and “We the People…” are the greatest one-two opening punch in their catalog, and fairly strong arguments that a band would make a better President than our current one. On the latter, these everymen know what unites America (“The ramen noodle”), and they know the bigotry that rips it apart (“Muslims and gays / Boy we hate your ways”). And in one career-best verse on the former, Q-Tip rightfully salutes Confederate flag-capturer Brittany Newsome, the murdered Eric Garner and a doomsday premonition from his own “Excursions.” Inverting a storied history of legendary African-American musicians from Sun Ra to George Clinton to Lil Wayne, Tribe cement their rep as the most earthbound crew of all time: “There ain’t a space program for n****s / You stuck here n***a.” Call it “Incursions.” Yet, We got it from Here… proceeds from one crucial innovation since Tribe last made a record in 1998: the jazz-rap album you cannot relax to. Kendrick himself pioneered this with the unanimously received masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly a year earlier, and Tribe’s most political album by miles is almost as fraught. All sorts of arresting, arrhythmic junk clutters their chewiest grooves while Q-Tip, Jarobi, and the one-of-a-kind Busta Rhymes one-up their own high-anxiety flows in these secretly recorded tracks like the Navy playing war games. Just listen to Q-Tip’s hiccuping breathlessness on “The Donald” or Busta’s exorcisms on “Dis Generation.” These guys never rapped like this before, and they never will again. —Dan Weiss
“How could that happen again? / Where the fuck was I looking / When all those horses come in?” The line opens “Kamikaze,” but it could easily be repurposed to express how it feels every time Harvey transforms into yet another version of herself, as she does on this Mercury Prize winner. Inspired by a trip to New York in 1998 to film with Hal Hartley, which she ended up extending for nine months after falling in love with the city, she began writing for the project she would refer to as “pop according to PJ Harvey.” Perhaps the most singularly triumphant work in Harvey’s catalogue, Stories does defiance in a way she hadn’t yet explored, and feels confident in a way that floats above the rest of the world, rather than fighting back. What else in her discography captures the head-on swagger of something like “Big Exit” or “This is Love”? What else sounds like the gentle glide of Thom Yorke’s voice underpinning Polly’s in “Beautiful Feeling,” or the heavy, warm piano march that carries “Horses In My Dreams”? Even the gentle collapse and defeat of “We Float” feels like light flooding your senses in the best possible way. Though it’s unlikely that Polly will ever make anything this purposefully polished again, it’s a little blip of calm in the eye of the larger storm, a moment of shimmering assurance among a back catalog that largely aims to make the listener uncomfortable. Few albums by anyone have captured that precise feeling, making Stories something truly special. —Elise Soutar
Alvvays are masters of quality over quantity—they know what they have to say, and they waste no time getting to the point. The most recent release on this list, Blue Rev is a joyride of masterfully written jangle-pop tunes that were recorded in one sitting, with producer Shawn Everett filling in the gaps and fleshing out the texture of the record’s all-killer-no-filler fourteen tracks. The group became Grammy underdogs with the standout single “Belinda Says,” which contains one of the best key changes of the last decade. The musical chemistry between every member of Alvvays soars through each track’s story, many of which are inspired by frontwoman Molly Rankin’s favorite books, lyrics, and Go-Go’s member. Blue Rev is an album about identity and sense of self. Alvvays, who’ve never dropped an EP or a standalone single, act without flaw. —Leah Weinstein
To experience Janelle Monae in all their glory, Dirty Computer is best experienced in its Black Mirror-esque, “Emotion Picture” sci-fi film form—a 48-minute romp through Monae’s Afrofuturist, dystopian world. (After all, multimedia tends to be Monae’s forte; beyond the video and album, the project also inspired them to write the short story collection The Memory Librarian.) These 14 perfectly funky pop songs are powerful, sometimes-celebratory and sometimes-biting odes to bodies and sex and race, these bits of codes and numbers that make up the computer algorithm of human identity. Dirty computers should be celebrated, Monae asserts in this masterpiece. They would know—“I am not America’s nightmare,” they sing on “Crazy, Classic, Life,” “I am America’s dream.” —Annie Nickoloff
In order to get the most out of Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, you have to accept your own limitations. After four albums of uncompromising ambient music, Liz Harris’ fifth full-length as Grouper offered some of her song-est songs, but her words are hushed, buried, or otherwise occluded in a fog of acoustic guitar, tape hiss, and plenty of reverb. Where words are intelligible, you can’t help but lock in and see what they reveal. However, where you can’t understand her, you might connect with how her vocalizations and instrumental arrangements make you feel. “Traveling Through a Sea” feels like puttering through an unknowable barrage of obstacles; “Tidal Wave” sounds like a triumphant folk song facing off against an onslaught of negativity. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill weaves a web connecting different forms of gloom—feelings of mournfulness, defeat, drudgery, and confusion all come to mind. It’s also not strictly sad—it’s something knottier, something harder to summarize, and hearing a representation of those difficult-to-verbalize sensations provides a balm so nourishing that it’s impossible to put back down. —Devon Chodzin
On Emotion, Carly Rae Jepsen transformed from a future one-hit-wonder to a pop phenom. Opener “Run Away With Me” is the rare breed of pop perfection that inspires people to make a 12 minute musical analysis about it. Skeptics would diminish Emotion as yet another white girl pop album about crushes and fantasies, but the way in which Jepsen delivers these songs is what makes it so timeless. Carly’s vocal performances and the stacked cast of producers (Shellback, Ariel Rechtshaid, Rostam and Blood Orange, just to name a few) are full of personality and refuse to shy away from their masterclass of ‘80s pop pastiche. Jepsen’s desire on this record is constant and unrelenting in the way young love and infatuation are supposed to be. —Leah Weinstein
Honestly, You Forgot It in People could make this list on the strength of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” alone. Few songs have ever captured the hazy ache of adolescence metastasizing into adulthood so precisely—Emily Haines’s voice pitch-shifted and looped until it sounds like memory itself deteriorating, like nostalgia eating through tape. But what makes the album essential isn’t just that one perfect moment of collapse; it’s how the rest of it feels like the world being rebuilt around it. Broken Social Scene was a tangle of Toronto misfits who turned excess into ethos, a rotating door of musicians crashing into one another until the friction sparked something radiant. “Cause = Time” jitters forward like a body learning to dance again, “Stars and Sons” explodes into riotous euphoria without warning, “Looks Just Like the Sun” wades through finger-picked guitar, fog, and feedback before finding something almost pastoral at its core, and “Lover’s Spit” turns desire into something communal, nostalgic, exhausted, and desperate all at once: “You know it’s time that we grow old and do some shit.” Each song feels like a different version of the same emotional weather—tenderness, panic, elation—shifting directions every few minutes. What set You Forgot It in People apart wasn’t just its sense of scale, but how it made scale feel intimate. This wasn’t indie rock’s typical lo-fi minimalism, but an odd kind of humble, unaffected maximalism. Every instrument leaks into the next; textures blur until they feel tactile, physical. The production turns mess into atmosphere, layering until the songs feel less like compositions than living ecosystems; symphonic, shapeless, and emotional all at once without abandoning its heart. There’s no pretense of detachment here, no need for irony to prove sincerity. You Forgot It in People believes in feeling—unpolished, overblown, magnificent feeling—and that belief reshaped the decade that followed. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Art Angels was the record that solidified Grimes as more than a DIY artist who made songs out of her bedroom. She was finally acknowledged as a full-fledged producer. A collection of explosive experimental pop songs marked by enlivening percussion and irresistible melodies, each song on Art Angels features a unique smattering of electronic embellishments. Still, Grimes’s signature playful approach to production links them all. This is Grimes stepping into her full, unabashed form for the first time. “World Princess part II” is a heavy diss track to jealous male producers and features piercing vocal effects and hefty breakbeats, while “Flesh without Blood” sees her call out a fake friend amongst a maximalist collage of effects and driving guitar. Then there’s the surprising track “Pin.” In it Grimes uses references from a Shakespeare play to convey her complicated feelings of being in a toxic friend relationship. Meshing the modern with the classic, this is another signifier of Grimes’s genius. —Camryn Teder
“Here you will find food for your body / As well as comfort for your troubled mind.” Coming off the high of Madvillainy, his landmark collaboration with Madlib, MF DOOM (Daniel Dumile) turned inward on MM.. FOOD, the de facto sequel to 1999’s Operation: Doomsday. Across the record, DOOM obsessively constructs a world built on wordplay, kitchen-table philosophy, and TV dinner surrealism. It’s a disorienting, skit-heavy album that expertly blends samples from cartoons like Spider-Man and Scooby Doo with deep cuts by Anita Baker, Frank Zappa, and Whodini, all while delivering some of the most intricate verses in rap history. DOOM was a generational wordsmith, pulling equally from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions and soundbites from Watermelon Man. He also referenced The Dictionary of Clichés and Depraved and Insulting English—it’s never just “bitch” when “snitch knishes” hits harder. On MM.. FOOD, he holds a warped mirror to early 2000s rap, turning rap beef into metaphor (“I don’t get angry at this point, so [rap beef] is like whatever,” he told XXL in 2013). He dismisses rappers who built their careers on diss tracks and appearances, all while cloaked in anonymity behind his iconic metal mask. On opener “Beef Rapp,” DOOM throws shots at the likes of 50 Cent, who famously posed shirtless on his debut album cover: “And keep a shirt on, at least a button-up / Yuck, is they rhymers or strippin’ males? / Out-of-work jerks since they shut down Chippendales.” MM.. FOOD is a masterclass in metaphor and reference, with verses that could take weeks (months!) to fully unpack. His vocabulary was expansive, his flows knotty but hypnotic, and his skits—chaotic, cartoonish, cutting—would go on to inspire a generation of rap weirdos and experimentalists alike, from Earl Sweatshirt to Doechii (whose Alligator Bites Never Heal nods directly to DOOM’s love of sketch-like transitions). DOOM took a wild swing mid-album with a 6-minute comic collage (from “Poo-Putt Platter” to “Fig Leaf Bi-Carbonate”), cut up cartoon audio set to thumping 808s. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it’s essential. Like the rest of MM.. FOOD, it’s indulgent and totally singular—a kitchen-sink classic that proved rap could be brilliant, bizarre, and built entirely on its own rules. —Cassidy Sollazzo
I LOVE THIS ALBUM! WEEN FOREVER! Have you listened to “Transdermal Celebration”?? A lot of the lead-up to Quebec was odd or disastrous. Drummer Claude Coleman Jr. was recovering from a near-fatal car crash, so Josh Freese stepped in. Gene Ween was going through a divorce. Dean Ween’s drug addiction had gotten worse. The band was no longer on Elektra Records. So what we get is this album of sad, sad, sad songs. It’s Ween at their darkest, yet who can argue with the results. The songs rock like it’s no one’s business. “Tried and True,” “Chocolate Town,” and “The Fucked Jam” all sound so different, wading through psych-rock, twee pop, and whatever the hell “Hey There Fancypants” is. It sounds like a mariachi band on a pontoon boat. Quebec exists because of turmoil but excels because every melody is immediate and every brush stroke of what-the-fuck-was-that is anything but ill-timed. The ballads sit next to weird shit knocking doors off their hinges. The rock tracks are sometimes dreamy, sometimes yachty, sometimes proggy and always kick-ass. Quebec just rules. Don’t know what else to tell ya. —Matt Mitchell
There are universes inside of every note Julia Holter arranges, writes, or plays—a lushness loaded with neatly looping melodies, ambitious arrangements, lyrical ideas vivid enough to see and touch and taste. Yet, where those universes can hold darker matter for intervals of later albums like Aviary or Something in the Room She Moves, 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness is the sound of light hitting every corner of an open room, airy and luminous even as Holter stacks sounds to fill the space. Though tracks like “Feel You,” “Sea Calls Me Home,” and “Betsey on the Roof” contain all the complexity without forgoing an immediate stickiness that places it alongside the most listenable indie pop the last decade had to offer. In her impressionate vignettes of longing and loss, Holter bottles the sound of spring blooming again, of waving a boat in on a distant shoreline—all while smuggling the avant garde into one of the most accessible art pop triumphs of the century so far. —Elise Soutar
Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois vibrates with a shimmering, fantastical energy that bottles the magic of the Midwest into an impressive 22-track, 74-minute runtime. The album marks a departure from the more reserved sounds of his past albums, Seven Swans and Michigan. Stevens extensively researched the state of Illinois by taking trips to different parts of the state and poring over its historical texts and literature. It is widely considered to be Stevens’ magnum opus with its immersive, larger-than-life instrumentation and comprehensive lyrical content being the most dynamic work we had seen from Stevens at the time of release. The grandiose orchestrations are saturated with an eclectic blend of sounds including oboe, vibraphone, accordion and banjo. Stevens deployed a string quartet and a five-piece choir to expand the album sonically, creating triumphant blends of soaring sound through layered vocals and rousing strings. He adeptly navigates the space of the album, transitioning from lush theatrical tracks to acoustic elegies with cohesion and poise. Illinois captures a dreamlike vision of life in the Midwest with wondrous and spellbinding artistry. —Grace Ann Nantanawan
What Boris has managed to do in its thirty-two years is simple: The band has made metal music sound beautiful. The Japanese trio formed in 1992 and have consistently kept their sound in an evolving focus ever since. While albums like Akuma No Uta and At Last – Feedbacker are tremendous, nothing quite captures the band’s lasting legacy quite like their 2005’s Pink. It sounds like Black Sabbath doing shoegaze, or Slowdive doing heavy metal, and it’s so sludgy, drony, and dense. Few Japanese experimental groups have ever made such a fuzzed-out, blackened heart of doom sound so cosmic and accessible. The heaviness is resounding, and songs like “Pseudo Bread,” “Woman on the Screen,” and “Farewell” are among the greatest metal songs of noise tracks of all time—and it’s why Pink is, without a doubt, one of the greatest records of the 21st century. —Matt Mitchell-
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