The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far

There are certainly existential questions to ask about The Album in an era where the platforms-that-be are trying to steer the direction of music towards fragments of songs. But if this list is any indication, it remains as vital a form as ever. Here are the best albums of the 2020s so far. You’ll find high-BPM dance music, hypnotic ambient jazz, new-gen indie rock, daring rage rap, and maybe, just maybe, that album that scored a Perfect 10. –Mano Sundaresan

The 100 Best Songs of the 2020s So Far

jaydes: heartpacing (2022)

Broward County, Florida’s timeline of teen rap stars includes mercurial talents like Robb Bank$, XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God, and the still-ubiquitous Kodak Black—but no one has flexed an intrinsic, swoon-worthy charm like jaydes. Baptized in the same purple goop that birthed Luv Is Rage and The Life of Pi’erre 4, he emerged as a black sheep in an online world of Auto-Tune wizards and melodic contortionists. On his breakout 2022 tape, heartpacing, the then-16-year-old unlocks a playful dichotomy between his sludgy, snot-nosed coos and slinky, rollicking plugg textures, folding warm R&B runs into the forms of golden era SoundCloud rap. When he croons conceited mantras over a classic plugg beat on “built off slime,” you can practically hear him snatch the torch from his predecessors. –Olivier Lafontant

DJ Travella: Mr Mixondo (2022)

The young Dar Es Salaam producer has morphed into one of the greats of singeli, a highly-caffeinated regional genre that relies on manically frenetic 200+ BPM tempos where it feels like the space-time continuum is going to collapse the moment you press play. With the constant barrage of drums, frenzied melodies, and various Tanzanian doohickeys raining upon you at that speed, singeli’s got this finger-in-the-electrical-socket jolt that makes you feel alive. Travella slots right into the canon of the breakneck tradition with Mr Mixondo. Tracks like “Beat Kikosi” and “Crazy Beat Music Umeme 2” feel like being strapped to the outside of a rocket ship that’s taking off at warp speed. At the same time, moments of clarity and calm dot the record, like when Travella folds in outside influences like dembow (“London Bandcamp”) and footwork (“FL Beat”). Working in a genre that already feels eons ahead, DJ Travella somehow blasts singeli even further into hyperdrive. –Tyler Linares

Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us (2024)

Vampire Weekend have lost their illusions, buried their remains, and built a memorial to young adulthoods lived in New York, a mausoleum made of towering peaks and charmingly precious lyrics. For this band of once-precocious kids now slipping into middle-age, disgraced ’80s art queen Mary Boone evokes the tarnished dreams of Manhattan transplants and a bag dropped onto the train track must be let go no matter what. The irony is that songwriter Ezra Koenig and his buddies can’t relinquish memories, which inform, on the transportive B-side, the most somber, regretful music of their career. The characters Koenig sketches may be rarified, but Only God Was Above Us makes the sadness universal: his futility in the face of war, his increasing resignation to the realities of aging. Such truths hang on; everything else is fodder for the subway rats. –Daniel Felsenthal

jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) (2023)

Jaimie branch was at war for the world. “Gonna take over the world/And give it back to the land,” she chants with breathless urgency during one of the many exhilarating rave-ups on her third and final album with the Fly or Die quartet. Her sudden death, at 39, just a few weeks after the album’s recording, tempts a retrospective reading of ((world war)). Nevertheless, this is the most forward-looking of the late jazz musician’s works, full of undeniable momentum and contagious exuberance as branch and her ensemble meld folk, calypso, dub, and punk into fervent, free-flowing jazz. It’s her most political record, too, reveling in community and shouted slogans against borders, against war, for resistance, for revolution. While branch was firmly focused on the future, she still left us with something to remember her by, and, importantly, a mantra to lead us on: “Don’t forget to fight.” –Matthew Blackwell

Noname: Sundial (2023)

On Sundial, she deploys her piercing intellect and rapier wit to interrogate everything from the failings of post-BLM America and the nature of fandom to problematic beauty standards. Her honey-smooth voice loops lazily around jazzy grooves as she jumps between radical political critique and merciless self-reflection, with some of her prickliest barbs aimed at those who see themselves on the right side of history. Dense, complex, and full of messy contradictions, Sundial is one of hip-hop’s smartest voices holding the culture—and herself—to account. –Bhanuj Kappal

Blood Incantation: Hidden History of the Human Race (2019)

After a decade where it seemed like every metal band had to have some kind of elevating affixation on the genre in order to cross over—everything was either “-gaze” this or “post-” that—it was starting to feel like metal as a whole was on a long campaign to apologize for itself. But leave it to Blood Incantation, hailing from the head-shop-speckled foothills of Denver, to bring things back to basics while simultaneously blasting off into the future. With its Greatest Hits of eye-dilating pseudoscientific conspiracies, Hidden History of the Human Race is proudly absurd, its labyrinthine death metal riffage contracting and expanding spacetime at once, throttling us into lightspeed one second before opening up an ambient black hole the next. Is DMT a tool for communicating with ancient civilizations? Has our universe happened before? Did aliens invent the guitar? –Sam Goldner

Jim Legxacy: homeless n*gga pop music (2023)

In a post-Blonde world crowded with would-be R&B auteurs, Jim Legxacy stands out. On his third album, homeless n*gga pop music, the London multi-hyphenate asserts both a strong sense of place and a clear sonic identity. Like so many of his peers, Legxacy is a magpie-like producer—his holy trinity is midwest emo guitar riffs, Afrobeat drums, and modern rap beats—but his genre-hopping feels purposeful and evocative, serving his earnest, oddly specific storytelling. (“You don’t want to teach me how to DJ anymore,” he sighs on the opener.) From Aphex Twin to Jai Paul, the UK has a proud tradition of tinkerers creating whole worlds in their bedrooms. Legxacy could be the next in that lineage. –Mehan Jayasuriya

Daphni: Cherry (2022)

“Hi, it’s Dan. Daphni is my alias for dancefloor ready music," reads the Spotify bio of Daphni, and that feels like an understatement from Dan Snaith, the Canadian musician best known for his synthy, but not always dancy, work he’s done as Caribou. Daphni’s third album, Cherry, simply bangs, as Snaith approximates the sparse-yet-massive sound of early Chicago house with a twist of Todd Terry’s sample-happy sensibilities. Conjuring the age-old chemistry between four-on-the-floor beats and asses out of their seats is Snaith’s objective here, but it’s not without tension. Cramming 14 tracks into 48 minutes, Cherry seems designed to leave us wanting more. –Rich Juzwiak

Tyler, the Creator: CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST (2021)

On CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, Tyler, the Creator’s palette bursts with color: his open-faced grill glints in the sunlight, his skin glistens with exotic oils, and the landscape behind him is breathtaking. In some ways the record is a return to his brazen approach to rapping: I picture saliva flying through teeth during the crescendo of “MASSA,” and sweat seeping into his ushanka amid the egotistical Kanye-isms of “CORSO.” But the lurid themes of his Odd Future days feel like fragments of a past life. Punctuated by DJ Drama’s banter, this is Tyler at his brightest and most pompous. You hear it in the flowery woodwinds beneath spoken-word vanity portraits, his high-strung nomadic tales atop electric samples, and the citrusy aroma baked into his synth leads. Tyler, the Creator is thriving and he wants to make sure you know it. –Olivier Lafontant

Mk.gee: Two Star & the Dream Police (2024)

Los Angeles has the industry cornered on producing swaggy white boys these days, but while they all have falsetto and slurry affectations borrowed from hip-hop, there’s a sauce that only Mk.gee has. After being the secret weapon behind Dijon's debut album, Absolutely, I can’t believe Mk.gee still had so much juice in the tank. On the other hand, everything about the rollout for Two Star & the Dream Police screams next-up, from the carefully crafted visual album that accompanied it, to the way Michael Gordon’s hair drapes dreamily over his eyes. Luckily, he also has it all: the second-coming-of-Jai-Paul sonics, the rocket ship roar in the vocals, the aquatic guitar tone and the chops to wield it, and most of all, the will to remake pop according to his dark, cinematic vision. –Adlan Jackson

Huerco S.: Plonk (2022)

Brian Leeds’ Plonk was too strange to start a new wave of anything, which is why it’s so great. It’s a world where ordinary sounds find themselves in extraordinary situations. We perceive zithers and harps, the edges of voices, firecracker-string percussion, beats made of zaps and air. But most of what we hear has no name—these mirages of tone and impact, trick-mirror proportions and elastic tempos; here the terrifying pauses of Biosphere, there the nanobot churn of Autechre, mixed with Laraaji-like bubble baths and steely impressions of trap and drill. Kansas City techno is legendary in that it doesn’t super exist, which is how Leeds treats it: a fantasy fairground, the illusions whirling on exposed gears. –Brian Howe

Dijon: Absolutely (2021)

Dijon isn’t afraid to sound like a mess. Making “Rodeo Clown,” a torch song for a bull rider nestled at the heart of his debut album, Absolutely, he stayed up until 7 a.m. drinking, recording take after take in a feat of obsessive dedication. Unsurprisingly, he sounds battered, hoarse, and unsteady, as if he might just dissolve into an ugly sob. Not every song on Absolutely, a collection that draws on the dizziest strains of heavy-lidded R&B and whiskey-damaged Americana, required such self-destruction to make, but, across the record, Dijon continually reaches for moments of frayed emotional intensity. These cutting, vulnerable songs feel like they might have clawed their way out of his chest if he didn’t open his mouth to sing them, which would’ve made an even bigger mess. –Colin Joyce

Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8 (2021)

Three years before the world could hear it, in the wake of a serious illness, London-based jazz musician Nala Sinephro began to feel her way into the ambient netherworld, teasing out tentative shapes on harp and synthesizer. Released in September 2021, her debut, Space 1.8, confirmed that the shape of jazz to come would be gorgeously ethereal. Accompanied by some of her city’s finest players—saxophonist Nubya Garcia, drummer Eddie Hick—she ranges from 75-second beat-music miniatures to sprawling, 18-minute fantasias, all of it bound by the silveriest threads of meditative grace. –Philip Sherburne

Mannequin Pussy: I Got Heaven (2024)

Mannequin Pussy have always been romantics, their sound capacious enough for both brutal noise and heartfelt examinations of trauma and love. On I Got Heaven, the Philly punks heighten every contradiction they’d previously tackled—longing and rupture, chaos and melody, pop ambition and punk ethos, the sacred and the profane—and then explode them into a triumphant record of desire and resilience. Here, Marisa Dabice is a bloodhound on the scent of human connection; she castigates broken promises and hypocrisy with the same intensity as she hungers for intimacy, on songs that shimmer and swoon without losing an ounce of ferocity. When Dabice howls, “I got a loud bark, deep bite,” she makes you feel the band’s teeth in your neck, and she knows you like it. –Marissa Lorusso

Ken Carson: A Great Chaos (2023)

I was dead on my feet during the end of a long run when “Lose It” came on and Ken croaked, “The only way I express myself is through my music.” For a moment I felt invincible, the obscenely microwaved bass injecting my legs with a jolt of raw speed. I sprinted the entire length of Prospect Park before collapsing into a puddle. A Great Chaos may be the most hysterically kinetic rap tape since Whole Lotta Red. The production is absurd, from the guillotine synths of “Me N My Kup” and the distorto-fog shrouding “Succubus” to “It’s Over,” whose sickly beat is so evil it makes me recoil in awestruck disgust. More than just an internet rap beatpack, it’s fueled by Ken’s doofy energy, the way he chuckles like a Team Rocket grunt and smears his voice across the mix like anti-style graffiti. Sure, he’s not the most lyrical rapper—but he knows how to ride a beat and how to lose himself in it. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive (2024)

Nine albums in, Alynda Segarra made the record of their lifetime—a nonlinear memory box archiving the mythology of their formative years, when the Bronx-born troubadour hopped trains, ended up in raucous New Orleans street bands, and became one of their generation’s most fearless folk-rock storytellers. The songs of The Past Is Still Alive traverse the Florida heat and San Francisco’s Castro District, graffitied boxcars and a toxic Superfund site all in service of the poetry—yes, poetry—of a queer and anarchic survival. The tales could be a movie, or a book—they’re an album that folds you into its visceral, sometimes prayerlike melodies. In songs reminiscent of Lucinda Williams’ literary road ballads or the biting rave-ups of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning-era Bright Eyes, Segarra pulls us up onto the freight train and out to an old-weird America that feels bracingly new. –Jenn Pelly

The Soft Pink Truth: Shall We Go on Sinning So That Grace May Increase? (2020)

Drew Daniel’s least dancefloor-focused record as the Soft Pink Truth is an album of heterogeneous unions: disparate voices overlap and spill into each other; drifting ambient piano finds itself gliding atop a seductive house beat; a gorgeous melody—seemingly pulled straight from ’70s singer-songwriter folk—is the intro of a caterwauling six-minute noise track. It all makes sense together because it’s all rich, warm, spirited, playing like an extended jam session recorded on a sunny day, united by Daniel's desire to make joyful music in the face of an increasingly harsh-edged world. –Shaad D’Souza

KeiyaA: Forever, Ya Girl (2020)

On Forever, Ya Girl KeiyaA is both teacher and pupil. She is the sole songwriter and instrumentalist as well as the main producer on most of the album’s psychedelic, zigzagging neo-soul tracks. She sounds self-possessed and knowledgeable on “Rectifiya” in which she asserts, “I predicate my consciousness/And state of well-being on my own feelings.” And yet, you get the sense that the songs also work as mantras, a means for KeiyaA to access and be transformed by emotions and insights beyond herself. The resulting music is impressively precise and introspective, grappling with earthly concerns with poise, while also channeling the unexpected, iridescent revelations and comforts of the divine. –Vrinda Jagota

KMRU: Peel (2020)

When Peel arrived in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, coyotes roamed the Golden Gate Bridge, wild goats chewed the hedges of Llandudno—and people began to wonder just how long this all might go on. Summer’s glow needed a different soundtrack, and “Why Are You Here,” Peel’s shimmering opener, unfolded over 15 minutes like a slow sunrise. But Peel’s tender grace reaches well beyond the extraordinary circumstances of its release date. Its knit of delicate field recordings and rolling ambience—the organ on “Well,” the coastal wash on “Klang”—present a moving abstraction, like the mottled, shifting gray conjured by a sonographer’s ultrasound. It is both snapshot—the entire album was recorded over just a 48-hour period—and eternity. Even after hundreds of listens, new strata emerge. Almost as if the title was intended as a verb. –Will Pritchard

Destroyer: Have We Met (2020)

Dan Bejar once speculated that any given Destroyer song depicts “a city in upheaval.” If so, Have We Met is the warehouse metropolis of Synecdoche, New York: cavernous and self-referential, teeming yet desolate, with the threat of a fire around any corner. Ever since his soft-rock star turn on 2011’s Kaputt, Bejar has lolled about in exquisitely tailored sonic throwbacks. Here, he pops the seams. Working with longtime collaborators John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, the funk-rock elegies and New Romantic jaunts turn brittle and deliberate. Still, even at his most disembodied, Bejar remains the ever-present eccentric, peeling off witticisms, rebukes, and inverted cliches like bills from a bottomless bankroll. If the titular question suggests a squinting size-up at a party, the album argues that, cosmically, the answer doesn’t matter one fucking bit. –Brad Shoup

Rx Papi / Gud: Foreign Exchange (2021)

Icicles and jammed pistols; broken homes and a speechless therapist—Rx Papi’s 2021 opus, Foreign Exchange, is not for the faint of heart. Amid the sea of loosies the Rochester rapper poured onto YouTube in the early 2020s, it stands as his best and most fully realized project. Stockholm native Gud’s frigid dreamscapes perfectly contrast Papi’s grating verses about rocky family relationships, the psychological tolls of street life, and the possible futures he didn’t have a chance at experiencing. It is a sort of verbal exorcism. The haunting opener “12 Stout Street,” beloved by a new generation of TikTok-brained rap fans, pulls back the curtain on his deranged mind: “For so many years, I held it down/I never in my life wanted to sell drugs/I would’ve been cool with playing games and shit/But instead I’m running with the gang and shit.” –Millan Verma

Haim: Women in Music Pt. III (2020)

The title of Haim’s third album is a bit of a feint: a confident, satirical barb about the Los Angeles sisters being pigeonholed because of their gender. While one song on the lovingly acronym’ed WIMPIII addresses that state of affairs directly—the Joni-worthy admonition and ferocious acoustic strums of “Man From the Magazine”—the rest of the record finds Este, Alana, and their spokeswoman-vocalist Danielle utterly lost: geographically adrift, life’s colors fading; isolated from lovers and even engaged in self-defeating games of infidelity one-upmanship; barely able to recognize their own faces in the mirror before blinking and coming to behind the wheel. The leap in lyrical distinctiveness from the comparably one-size-fits-all emotions of their first two albums is remarkable; so is the expanded musical range in which these songs are set. If Haim were lost, they searched endlessly for new ways of being in idiosyncratic ragers (“The Steps,” “I Been Down”), off-kilter UKG experiments (“I Know Alone”), the spirit of Lou Reed at his sweetest (“Summer Girl”), sultry head-spinners (“3 AM,” “Gasoline”), and more besides. The irony of the title is that if this record had been made by someone named Kevin, or Matty, or Jack, WIMPIII would have been emphatically acclaimed as a generational masterpiece; for those listening closely, their songs of desolation hit home, and offered one. –Laura Snapes

Lil Uzi Vert: Eternal Atake (2020)

Did you hear? Lil Uzi Vert hasn’t been the same since they came back. I heard they were in a multiyear coma following a botched stagedive at Rolling Loud. Or that they’d been initiated into a new religion, trading their Off-White Prestos for Nike Decades. The truth might be even less believable: NASA sent them into orbit on a SpaceX rocket—and then they were abducted by aliens.

As concept albums go, Eternal Atake plays it pretty fast and loose, but that’s the Lil Uzi Vert way. And they’ve never sounded faster or freer than they do here, French-made slacks splitting at the seams, bemoaning fair-weather groupies on “Bust Me” and tumbling through “Silly Watch” in dactylic tetrameter, so desperate to fuck they’d “do it in a Honda Accord.”

The demon is in the details: the bloodlust animating Balenci ballouts and semiautomatic shootouts on “POP,” how Uzi tenderly tries to keep their boys out of jail by taking killshots themself on “I’m Sorry.” By the time they wail, “Every time I have a show, gotta sell it out ’fore I go to sleep,” it’s hard to tell if they’re flexing the fervor of their fandom or anxiously refreshing Ticketmaster as if their moment could slip away. But right then—before COVID lockdowns, before the felony assault case, before the 10-carat bindi—Baby Pluto had the solar system hanging onto every syllable, ready to Futsal Shuffle on command. –Vivian Medithi

yeule: Glitch Princess (2022)

Of all the records to articulate queer coming-of-age this decade, none captured the complex relationship queer people have with the internet quite like Glitch Princess. Through disintegrating, unsettling production, yeule expresses the loose sense of identity that comes with life online—even the opening track, “My Name Is Nat Ćmiel,” glitches as they attempt to capture their experiences with eating disorders, drug addiction, and dysphoria in simple sentences. It’s comforting to escape into a screen, but a life lived entirely inside can lead to loneliness and debilitating self-hatred—a lesson proven true on the album’s acoustic centerpiece, “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty.” Inspired by a real-life friend pulling the songwriter out of an emotional spiral, it proves there’s hope for the corporeal world yet. –Hannah Jocelyn

HiTech: Détwat (2023)

HiTech’s arrival on the club circuit was an ass-clapper’s fever dream. The Detroit trio runs their shows as if they’re waging war against stuffy parties; producer/MCs King Milo and Milf Melly might fly into the audience to pour Henny down everyone’s throats, leaving DJ 47Chops on the decks to keep the BPMs high and the ghettotech raunchy. Détwat distills the trio’s joyous blend of juke, jit, Jersey club, and whatever else they can get their fingers on into a smooth, ecstatic all-nighter. Everyone’s invited: aunties throw it back, dudes bust out the fleshlights—even the opps get laid. Détwat widens the dancefloor while paying tribute to the classics, ending up somewhere both classy and nasty at once. –Sam Goldner

The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention (2022)

When A Light for Attracting Attention arrived in 2022, it confirmed the Smile were more than just a pandemic pastime for Radiohead’s restless executive branch. Swapping out the reliable backbeat of Philip Selway for the slinkier, jazzier touch of Tom Skinner, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood let the rhythm lead the way on labyrinthine grooves like “The Opposite” and “The Smoke” and hit the gas on snarling debut single “You Will Never Work in Television Again.” The thrill of this new blood even motivated Yorke to deliver definitive studio versions of long-gestating song sketches “Open the Floodgates” and “Skrting on the Surface,” both of which date back to the late aughts. If we continue to get three Smile albums for every one Radiohead record, it’s not the worst bargain. –Zach Schonfeld

Helado Negro: Phasor (2024)

In a promotional video for Phasor, Roberto Carlos Lange records a vocal take while supine, basking in window light from the floor. This might not accord with our traditional visions of “hard work,” but make no mistake: Lange is working. He is on the floor, yes, but he is on a mission. For the past half-decade, Lange, as Helado Negro, has quietly dedicated himself to capturing domesticity’s hard-won comforts, and on Phasor he has honed his craft to so fine a point that its nine rumpled, softly alive songs seem to rise directly from his chest cavity, to emanate from the floorboards. Every acoustic guitar strum, every depth-charge synth pulse, every softly crooned word has been sculpted into a whole that faintly recalls vintage J Dilla—handcrafted yet somehow unearthly, rough-edged and irregular by design, and lit from within by a mysterious glow. –Jayson Greene

Florist: Florist (2022)

Florist’s fourth album is not just about the songs Emily Sprague and her band perform. It has a particular preoccupation with documenting the environment in which they were created: a house in New York’s Hudson Valley with a porch full of screens beckoning in the sounds from the adjacent woods. Set and setting are equally important on an album that alternates between folk numbers and gorgeous ambient-leaning instrumental interludes. The effect is a record that drifts in and out of song like someone in a rocking chair with a guitar in their arms. The ritualistic sense of being upstate—that is, being humans in nature—is rendered subtly in this gloriously porous music. –Rich Juzwiak

Yaya Bey: Remember Your North Star (2022)

“Who would I be/If I had not been who I needed to be?” Yaya Bey wonders over a sunny, meandering horn on “reprise.” Throughout the song, she revisits and exalts past versions of herself; she channels self-love into a tenderness towards others, yet also wonders who she herself might have been under different circumstances. The song embodies the central tension in Remember Your North Star: between the limitations imposed on Bey by racism, capitalism, and misogyny, and the expansiveness of the love she feels and desires.

Across 18 songs that span R&B, amapiano, and dancehall, she mocks male machismo, fights to make art while being behind on rent, and laments the way women are conditioned to crave male validation. She acknowledges how difficult it can be to see her worth, yet sings about herself and the people around her with curiosity and empathy. On the hazy spoken-word track “i’m certain she’s there,” she searches for bits of her estranged mother in herself. On “blessings,” she sees the world with awe despite her ongoing sadness, a warbling synth adding glimmers of intrigue to her meditations. “Doesn’t it feel like gold/Whether it stays or goes?” she wonders. She knows that states of mind are fleeting, and that she can’t will her way out of systemic oppression, but nevertheless continues to find comfort in her deepest self: one that reflects the light she sees in her loved ones and that continues to cultivate care whenever she can. –Vrinda Jagota

Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer (2022)

Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul share a beautiful friendship. Throughout the Belgian duo’s first LP, they give the impression of being the kind of pair who finish each other's sentences and riff with each other to the point of hysterics. Whether they’re parodying every single dance-pop refrain from the last 40 years on “Ceci n'est pas un cliché,” excoriating the contortions of politically correct racism on “Esperanto,” or trading lines about the thrills, terrors, and humiliations of early sexual experiences on “It Hit Me,” they keep the beats sharp, crisp, and hefty. At the bottom of the frustrations and belly laughs is a call to fold back into the wisdom of the body: to trust it when it feels like dancing, to follow it to abandon. –Sasha Geffen

The 1975: Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022)

Across Being Funny in a Foreign Language, Matthew Healy is endlessly vulnerable. He’s jubilantly in love, reminiscing about Christmas kisses, and reflecting on his cancellation. He also let an outsider have some input, as Jack Antonoff joined him and fellow 1975 architect George Daniel in the producer’s booth for the 2022 album. It’s an act of selflessness that he let a pop whisperer reign in his tendencies to sprawl, a way of saying he’ll put the art over his indomitable desire to litter another album with interludes. The result is a 1975 album that gets to the core of many of the band’s beliefs: sincerity, love, lewdness, and air-tight pop music. –Matthew Strauss

Soul Glo: Diaspora Problems (2022)

When the Black diaspora assembles on Soul Glo’s fourth album, it’s not quite a cheery family reunion—it’s more a humid, heaving mosh pit where personal and musical histories smash together. Led by vocalist Pierce Jordan’s viscid growl and sprawling lyrics, the omnivorous hardcore band stitch blast beats, power chords, and funk breaks into heavy tapestries. Stories of acute distress run through these feral tracks, which drag you into Soul Glo’s bleak world like riptides. But beneath the sweltering rhythms and constant references to Black mortality runs a deep pride in the hustle—in the work and effort of survival. Some folks sell Yeezys and Telfar to get by. Others torch precincts and pray to Chris Dorner. Soul Glo embraces them all. –Stephen Kearse

Yaeji: With a Hammer (2023)

Yaeji's With a Hammer takes one idea—namely, the volcano of rage that bubbled up inside the Korean-American artist during the quiet of the pandemic—and studies it from every angle. By turns self-deprecating and dreamy, embattled and querying, her debut album confronts this strange new emotion in the methodical manner of a practiced designer. Her cellophane-clear vocals float between airborne flutes, mallow-soft synths, and laser-cut rhythms, a bilingual record of her mission to “break the cycle.”

But in contained bursts, Yaeji also grabs her tools and lets rip. She snarls like a wildcat over headbanger drums (“How you like it now?!”), sets fire to tracks like “For Granted” in a crazed drum ’n’ bass finale, and transmutes long-buried feelings into molten guitar and breakcore. The process is irreversible, like a controlled explosion by a one-woman bomb squad. –Chal Ravens

Taylor Swift: folklore (2020)

A Taylor Swift song is an invitation: fans root around the lyrics for any hints about her life, her relationships, who she really is. Fifteen years into her career, folklore turned the lens outward. This was fiction, Swift insisted, in the title, in the track chronicling the former owner of her Rhode Island home, in the glittering gut-punch trio of songs about an affair. The facade let Swift be more honest and incisive. She stitches herself into the fabric of her characters and embroiders the kinds of details that drive her best songs: the closet where a child hides from her father; the corrosive thrill of waiting for a call; the lie that works until it doesn’t. Swift swivels back to herself for just one track, “Mirrorball,” one of the best she’s written, about the weight of all of her fans’ projections, how eagerly she spins to reflect our desires back onto ourselves. That’s the flip side of dazzling everyone, she says: Do it enough and you may lose sight of the truth. –Dani Blum

Rio da Yung OG: City on My Back (2020)

Like clockwork, a thread will pop up on my timeline every so often of people reminiscing on their favorite “WTF did he just say” Rio da Yung OG bars. They will post clips of a 30-something who has a slightly congested nose, raps about violence how I imagine the writers of Tom and Jerry discuss it in storyboarding sessions, and constantly hangs around gas stations. Rio is from Flint, Michigan, along with a whole scene of unicorns like RMC Mike, who raps like he has nails for breakfast, and YN Jay, a.k.a. “The Coochie Man.” The key to the ridiculousness of City on My Back, Rio’s best tape, is how committed he is to technique and fundamentals in the lineage of his mentor, Detroit rapper Peezy. When he tells you about smuggling Actavis in lotion bottles, he enunciates every word like an MC plucked from a different generation, and the pockets he finds in these sturdy instrumentals are refreshingly conservative. Listen to the Dayton Family, the Flint rap group that caught the attention of No Limit Records in the ’90s, and you could easily imagine all of them on a song together. As Rio shaped the sound of Michigan, the spiritual center of rap in the 2020s, everybody’s bars got tighter and the genre got a whole lot more fun. –Mano Sundaresan

Jeff Parker: Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (2022)

Jeff Parker’s live album with his IVtet—culled from recordings at the small Los Angeles cocktail bar ETA between 2019 and 2021—lit a beacon for the ambient jazz that effloresced during this decade’s early years. Its aesthetics are both disjunctive and alchemical: processed and looped saxophone, deep-pocket grooves you could set your watch to, post-production interventions and the enduring feel of a live session. This concert series rippled through jazz’s collective consciousness the way that sets at the Five Spot or the Village Vanguard did in the middle of the last century. The technology has changed, but word traveled the same, radiating from the energy of a few players, and the culture responded wholeheartedly once it had learned this music’s language. –Daniel Felsenthal

Jenny Hval: Classic Objects (2022)

Can art make us immortal? And which is more valuable, immortality or copyright? In the strange weather and serpentine melodies of Classic Objects, Jenny Hval walks a labyrinth of memory, through a Carl Theodor Dreyer screening, past Prada Marfa, into the woods. She walks offstage and leaves us to the chirping crickets, as if to ask: What, finally, can compare to nature? She’s her own knowing muse, and these long, majestic songs are a subtle drug: the curious approach of the artist to the world. –Anna Gaca

Chief Keef: 4NEM (2022)

For the majority of the 2010s, Chief Keef’s aversion to the limelight cast his biggest hit-making moments in amber while he simmered below pounding out strange and arcane mixtapes. In the wake of Keef’s meteoric ascension, he left a rabid drill landscape that latched onto his influence and produced a slew of copycapts, while he toiled away making his own strain of innovative sound like a mad scientist. 4NEM is like stumbling upon that laboratory in Spy Kids 2, instead it’s as if Steve Buscemi was locked away with a treasure trove of mid-2000s Atlanta trap and Memphis rap cassettes. Keef emerges blazing, rapping with urgency over boisterous brass and ferocious hi-hats. When he’s able to make morbid, off-the-cuff bars about discolored pee and special attacks from Street Fighter land with the impact of a Howitzer, it’s hard to imagine how one could forget about Keef’s prowess, even for a second. –Matthew Ritchie

The Microphones: Microphones in 2020 (2020)

Albert Camus once said, “A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” This is the work of Phil Elverum and his self-mythological masterpiece Microphones in 2020. His patient narration of his past to try to understand his own work through the detours of, for example, Stereolab, the biome of the Pacific Northwest, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is endlessly fascinating. By the end of the album’s lone, riveting 45-minute song, you come to know an artist who seeks to know himself. It’s the rare album with an ending that just shouldn’t be spoiled. –Jeremy D. Larson

Tirzah: trip9love...??? (2023)

Name a harder record with a softer singer. You can’t. trip9love...??? is a fucked-up miracle of an album, made from the strange bedfellows of Tirzah’s blunted, rolling lilt and producer Mica Levi’s absolute pummeling of the drum machine, of their dialing every knob deep into the red. It’s haunting and ecstatic.

And, while trip9love...??? may be an incongruous record, it is a cohesive one. Tirzah sings like she recorded her vocals under a blanket in the corner of the room, keeping her voice down so as to not wake the neighbors. Her voice is husky and soulful, but a little bit tortured, like she had to expel this art from somewhere deep inside her core, and not wholly on her own terms. Like she had to make due. Levi’s warped piano-trap-drum experimentalism may not have been the most obvious compositional choice to back such vulnerable vocals, but they go together spiritually even when they don’t totally jell. Opposites attract. And then they team up to violently attack you. –Matthew Schnipper

Mach-Hommy: Pray for Haiti (2021)

Slimy, subterranean production and an innovative approach to commerce made him a maverick of the rap underground, but as the 2010s ticked into the 2020s, there was one thing Mach-Hommy did not have: a flagship album to reel him in from the far corners of the off-mainstream. Pray for Haiti reunited Mach with the Griselda gang after years of tension and beef, snapping him into line with the group’s signature sound: the impeccable batch of beats features carefully sheared samples, gritty drums, and an enhanced sense of craftsmanship. And while the specter of Mach’s Haitian ancestry is never far from reach, Pray for Haiti also plays like his witty facsimile of a rap star. On “The 26th Letter,” Mach visualizes the python trench coat he’s going to buy, celebrates the luxury of flying first class, and evaluates metamorphosing his voice to match 50 Cent’s for more mass appeal. “Mach-Hommy is a icon,” raps the man who never shows his face, “end quote.” –Dean Van Nguyen

Yasmin Williams: Urban Driftwood (2021)

Folk guitar in the 2010s often meant John Fahey and songs rooted in rural places and experiences. That began to change in the new decade, when players like Yasmin Williams started incorporating new sounds and ideas into their compositions: contemplative New Age instead of homespun folk, Windham Hill instead of Takoma Records. On her second album, Williams brought an inventive approach to a commonplace instrument, as she strummed, picked, hammered, smacked, bowed, finger-tapped, and slapped the strings of her guitar. Watching her play was like watching a musician pull off increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand, but what truly distinguished Williams wasn’t the spectacle of her performance but the clarity of her compositions. She wrote most of the album during the protests of 2020, when she was routinely marching in Washington, D.C., and those experiences inform the tension and optimism of songs like “I Wonder (Song for Michael).” On Urban Driftwood, she emerged as a natural storyteller—quite a feat for any instrumentalist. –Stephen M. Deusner

Bladee / Ecco2k: Crest (2022)

For over a decade, Drain Gang have tormented their fans and foes by embodying all the contradictions an existential Swedish rap boy band should. The pandemic era saw the Stockholm collective branch from its rap renegade roots, just in time for a new crop of teenage Drainers—sucked in by their ecosystem of meme-makers, TikTok stans, and Draincore fashionistas—to witness their terminally online heroes transforming into morbid angels of sonic pleasure.

Crest, the prettiest album Drain Gang’s membership has yet produced, threatened to jettison loyalists of the grayscale “Drained-out” aesthetic for good: Rather than writhing out of some murky emo underworld, Bladee and Ecco2k’s vocals descend androgynously from the heavens, entreating us to abandon our desires, possessions, and perhaps our earthly bodies. Show-stealing producer Whitearmor swaps cloud rap’s dub and trap sonics for an ennui-obliterating maximalism that finds common cause between video-game adventure themes, a goth-rap Postal Service, and the hedonistic whiplash of happy hardcore. His miniature symphonies help buoy a lyrical mishmash of Zen, romanticism, nihilism, and religious imagery that resolves in the epic “Five Star Crest,” a 9-minute tribute to Drain Gang associate Vattenrum, who died at 25 in 2019. As his friends philosophize over mortality, they find beauty in the void he left and entered, varnishing grief with such glossy melodrama it radiates a hard-won lust for life. –Jazz Monroe

Björk: Fossora (2022)

Björk has built a monumental body of work by doing whatever the hell she wants, and Fossora is among her most daring endeavors. Put succinctly, it’s a concept album about mycelium that uses gut-hollowing bass clarinets and head-splitting gabber to allegorize the connection between hope and death. Whether mourning her late mother or pondering new love, every emotion on Fossora blooms slowly like a forest mushroom. It feels, at times, powered by magical forces, always highly emotional and crushingly realistic. –Cameron Cook

Nilüfer Yanya: PAINLESS (2022)

Nilüfer Yanya crafts her sophomore album PAINLESS with an icy precision fit for a German aerospace factory, pulling surgically from a revolving palette of tones and textures: mesmeric loops, brittle arpeggios, pulsing breakbeats, and blast guitars, all framing Yanya’s dusky voice. The effect, in moments, is like Love Deluxe rendered via In Rainbows, music so intricate, immaculate, and inventive that you can’t help but marvel at the sumptuous ingenuity of it all. Yet for all that composure, Yanya isn’t afraid to let her emotions boil over. On “shameless” and “midnight sun,” her voice catches in her throat as if she might not make it through the take without breaking down. Hers is a suave, sophisticated spin on heartbreak music that nonetheless strikes with the intensity of a panic attack. –Evan Rytlewski

MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks (2024)

Dad, why’s the McDonalds flag at half mast today?

Well, son, it’s in honor of the houseboat that sank at the Himbo Dome last year. It’s in memory of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who was mowed down by Lightning McQueen in a terrible accident one Christmas Eve. It’s to remind us that perfect little babies can grow up to be jerks.

Who’s that, Dad?

That’s MJ Lenderman playing his fourth album, Manning Fireworks. It’s about loneliness, and lapsed Catholics, and the paradoxes of contemporary masculinity, and lots of other things we’ll talk about when you’re older.

Hey Dad, what’s that sound?

That’s the fiddle, son, sighing against the heavy wind on “Manning Fireworks.” And there’s the pedal steel, winding its yawn through the windows of a Buffalo beach house on “Wristwatch.” And if you listen closely, on “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” you can hear the clarinet, singing its lonesome duck walk.

Hell yeah, Dad.

Hell yeah, son. –Arielle Gordon

Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars (2022)

A veteran of the DIY noise-rock vanguard, Bill Orcutt actually recorded these intricate and brief pieces for four guitars alone, one twisting capillary at a time. (When he plays this material live, he’s joined onstage by three absolute ringers whose furrowed brows and frequent smiles are testaments to the album’s technical aplomb and ecstatic essence). Each layer demands careful listening so that these pieces can first feel like statements about our divided attention spans and the anxiety of distraction. But listen to the way they cohere, like strands of metal winding into beautiful sculptures. It becomes a wordless call for solidarity, seemingly discordant parts dazzling with how righteous they become when they connect. –Grayson Haver Currin

Dua Lipa: Future Nostalgia (2020)

When Future Nostalgia was released on March 27, 2020, joining a heaving mass of anonymous bodies on a sweaty dance floor seemed as unlikely an event as a holiday on Mars. In light of the album’s timing its title seemed eerily prescient. As we collectively yearned for a glimpse of a future beyond the pandemic, Dua Lipa, flanked by a veritable pantheon of producers from the past 20 years of dance music (including heavyweights like Stuart Price and Ian Kirkpatrick), delivered a one-thousand-horsepower neon disco time machine, both comfortingly retro and markedly of its time. Future Nostalgia’s slick, visceral groove gave Lipa’s music a new cohesiveness, an antidote to the go-girl-give-us-nothing vibe that had begun to define her output of enjoyable yet thematically disjointed radio hits. By transforming the club into a space-age fantasy, she tapped into an aspirational hedonism that would push against the malaise of the early 2020s—and solidify her status as the era’s defining pop star. –Cameron Cook

Bad Bunny: Un Verano Sin Ti (2022)

The Puerto Rican hitmaker was on the top of the world when he released Un Verano Sin Ti, or A Summer Without You: a sonic postcard from his beloved home of Borinquen. An exaltation of the summers of his youth, Bad Bunny’s fourth album also serves as a crash course in Caribbean musical syncretism, in which elements of reggaetón, trap, house, and Dominican mambo are craftily shaken and stirred. Wedged between stellar collabs with Rauw Alejandro, Bomba Estéreo, and the Marías is an act of raver resistance titled “El Apagón,” or “The Blackout”—a condemnation of those who value the island more for its tax breaks than its people, who still endure a shoddy electric grid. As Un Verano rocked the pop charts—even Taylor Swift gave into the merengue frenzy of “Después de la Playa” at the 2023 Grammys—it also mainstreamed Puerto Rican resistance. –Suzy Exposito

The Weeknd: Dawn FM (2022)

The Weeknd is if the online music cognoscenti and the world-conquering pop star were realized in one person. That guy met a bloody, surgically assisted demise at the February 2021 Super Bowl halftime show and then gave us Dawn FM, the only transcendental near-death listening experience hosted by Jim Carrey with a song about autoerotic asphyxiation on the Hot 100. Still too edgy for your mom’s playlist—except suddenly he also sounds like he’d like to meet your folks some time. “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and he means it? Times do change. –Anna Gaca

Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg (2021)

If Siri had an Ennui Update, she would sound like Florence Shaw. The Dry Cleaning singer, who didn’t even want to be in the band at first, shirks every rule of performance: She stands dead-eyed and static during shows and never lets her voice climb above the decibel of a low-wattage microwave. But, of course, that’s what makes it all work, and the south London band’s 4AD debut, New Long Leg, felt like the peak of Dry Cleaning’s dead-panning, post-punk form. Whether it’s atop the walking bass and breakdown beat of “A.L.C.,” or the metallic guitar licks of “John Wick” and “Scratchcard Lanyard,” Shaw’s one-liners are the star. Some favorites: “Your own personal fatberg, homemade.” “The last thing I looked at in this hand-mirror was a human arsеhole.” “More espresso less depresso.” Each line feels like it’s spilling out the lips of a codeine-dosed diner waitress, whose absurdist insults don’t hit until long after you’ve tipped her. –Madison Bloom

100 gecs: 10,000 gecs (2023)

The influential, often-sampled Sleng Teng Riddim was created by accident, when a Jamaican musician named Noel Davey hit the “rock” preset on a Casio MT-40 and liked the digital squelch of its beat. In a cross-cultural coincidence, that sample had been programmed by a Japanese engineer, Okuda Hiroko, who was in turn inspired by the Jamaican rhythms of dub and reggae.

That’s nice, but wait, look: Laura Les and Dylan Brady are on the 10 o’clock news, laughing over your dad’s dead body. And is that Anthony Kiedis over there, performing fellatio? Those details in “Most Wanted Person in the United States,” which cruises along the Sleng Teng Riddim as the pair wreak havoc, epitomize 100 gecs’ anarchic approach to musicology on their chaotic second album, 10,000 gecs.

Les and Brady could be the in-house DJs for Spencer’s Gifts: “Hollywood Baby” thrums with the gang vocals of Warped Tour whiners; “Doritos and Fritos” is the Nickelodeon commercial you hear when you get to hell; “I Got My Tooth Removed” asks, “What if your madcap dentist made third-wave ska?” 10,000 gecs is a thesis statement for 100 gecs’ absurdist blend of pop history and pure id. I’d say they graduated summa cum laude from the University of Mall Rats if I wasn’t certain they’d turn it into a joke about ejaculate. –Arielle Gordon

Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2 (2021)

Want to get to know Dean Blunt? Throw on Black Metal 2. Yes, it’s elusive and strange, but it’s also the clearest statement yet from the shapeshifting British singer-songwriter. After years of hints and rumors of a sequel to 2014’s celebrated Black Metal, fans pored over its sequel like holy writ to glean priceless scraps of insight into Blunt’s evolution. But puzzlement quickly shades into pleasure across the album’s sparse but unsparing 23 minutes: Ominous lyrics about scammers, guns, and LSD are brightened by some of Blunt’s poppiest compositions, full of swelling strings and jangling guitars. He sounds as detached as ever, but his deadpan baritone is lifted by Joanne Robertson’s heavenly background vocals—a guardian angel guiding a troubled anti-hero through his dark night of the soul. Like a noir novel missing its final pages, Black Metal 2 leads us back to the beginning again to follow its fragmented, frustrating, alluring plot, the solution to its mystery always just out of reach. –Matthew Blackwell

Sofia Kourtesis: Madres (2023)

Four tracks in, Peruvian producer Sofia Kourtesis’ Madres offers its mission statement, “How Music Makes You Feel Better,” and demonstrates it with one of the most proven methods there is: uninterrupted house bliss. There’s the lush twilight embrace of “Cecilia”; the multi-erupting geysers of “How Music” that burst into R&B coos and synth light-dancers; the minimalist interludes like “Funkhaus” and “Moving Houses” that almost suggest Steve Reich gone balearic. There’s more to the mission, though. The title Madres suggests two things— first, Kourtesis’ own mother, whose cancer was treated by a neurosurgeon who heard her share the title track on Instagram,but also a community lineage. Kourtesis threads laughter and protest chants and incidental sound through the mix constantly, an undercurrent of collective joy. Music makes you feel best, she’s saying, when it’s communal. –Katherine St. Asaph

Kim Gordon: No Home Record (2019)

Put a contact mic on your index finger, run it across a topographic map of Kim Gordon’s career, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a slight approximation of No Home Record, an unlikely debut album that gathers the debris of three-plus decades and melds it into something alien, ruthless, and brutally cathartic. The California of Gordon’s youth brimmed with sparse, winding roads and the stench of murder; as Manhattan’s alt-rock matriarch, she’d go on to score a rickety downtown, serenading its clamor with a bass guitar and a breathy singsong. No Home Record shoves these histories into a blender, imposing its noisy will upon a sleeping world, middle fingers raised. Dreamed up alongside co-producer Justin Raisen, Gordon’s aggro hotbed pairs the noise-rock squall of her past with the avant-rap rage of her present, like betta fish blazing through a bloody tank. There’s a long list of vets who deserve to sit around collecting royalties. High up as Kim Gordon may be on it, it’s the last thing she’d ever want to do. –Samuel Hyland

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)

Natural Brown Prom Queen’s pairing of virtuosic fiddle-playing with strains of funk, pop, and soul has the flair of an oil painting: butter-rich with color and dabbed in diverging textures, it reveals more and more staggering detail the closer you lean in. Sudan Archives’ Brittney Parks thwarts expectations by the minute: rapped verses drip into expressive violin suites, while meditations on a range of topics—domesticity, colorism, her beloved hometown of Cincinnati—morph into ass-shaking floor fillers. You can sense the follow-your-arrow fun Parks has in forming and deforming genre, drawing on a wide broadband of sounds while retaining her own vivid style. Listen in awe as she finds rooted bliss on “Home Maker,” builds a call to arms during the lush “NBPQ (Topless),” and ratchets up the intensity over a winding six minutes on the odyssey “ChevyS10.” To date, there still hasn’t been anything else quite as pleasurably off-kilter. –Eric Torres

Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher (2020)

Although Phoebe Bridgers has unwittingly become the patron saint of sad girls rotting in their rooms, she’s anything but passive on Punisher. “No longer a danger to herself and others,” she sings of a young woman in recovery on “Graceland Too,” “She made up her mind and laced up her shoes.” On an 11-song voyage toward an exploding sun, Bridgers exorcises homicidal feelings toward her father, admits she often wishes her partner’s mom would just shut the fuck up, and prostrates herself in devotion to a married man. The shame of these confessions denatures under the ultraviolet rays. She makes an apocalypse enticing. Not only is the destruction cleansing, but by blazing a new path forward (“I don’t know what I want/Until I fuck it up”) without the veneer of civility, you can scream at the top of your lungs whenever you want. –Heven Haile

Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime (2021)

On his 2021 album, Afrique Victime, Tuareg musician Mdou Moctar comes across as a Saharan guitar god, dishing out divine blessings and celestial justice in the form of blistering, soul-shredding guitar solos. Moctar and his band fuse North African desert blues and Takamba rhythms with the guitar pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix, crafting exhilarating guitar-jams about love, gender inequality, and revolution. There are psych-rock freakouts and campfire sing-alongs, all centered on his ability to render simple, two-chord progressions as titanic tectonic shifts that reconfigure the landscape in their wake. On the towering title track, Moctar’s guitar squalls like a jet engine, the rest of the band racing to stay in time, as he rails against colonialism and neo-imperialist exploitation. It’s a thrilling, inventive throwback to the idea of rock as true rebel music. –Bhanuj Kappal

Yves Tumor: Heaven to a Tortured Mind (2020)

Heaven to a Tortured Mind clears the haze of Yves Tumor's previous work with a flash of purifying flame. Throughout the album, each sound jostles for space at the front of the mix: machinic drums; taut, elastic bass; roaring, virtuosic guitar lines; Tumor's sprawling, open-throated vocals. Like Prince before them, Tumor shines up each element of their production to such a precise degree that the whole recording thrums with erotic frisson: the gyrating pull of perfect individuals in motion. "Strawberry Privilege" draws Tumor's falsetto into a mutated girl-group interplay, while "Kerosene!" and "Super Stars" buzz with the kind of sex that strains toward the firmament. Each delicious grotesque cries out to the divine and shivers in earthly pleasure. –Sasha Geffen

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince (2021)

On Vulture Prince, genre-blending composer Arooj Aftab savors the poignancy and beauty in every note. Written after the death of her brother, Vulture Prince offers space for solace by bridging Hindustani classical, jazz, pop songwriting, and ghazal, a form of poetry originating in Urdu that explores themes of love and loss. Every moment holds weight—the tinny metal of violin strings in each bow stroke, the subtle differences between each finger as it plucks the guitar, the smallest waver of vibrato in Aftab’s voice. The feelings of grief, yearning, and love that she explores can feel ungraspable, but Aftab, with her simple melodies, captures and releases them to the world with a little more hope. –Vanessa Ague

Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020)

More than any other Perfume Genius record, you can really move to Set My Heart on Fire Immediately: Slow dance to “Whole Life”; sway in time with “Describe”; slink, strut, spin, when “On the Floor” comes on; thrash during the almighty climax of “Some Dream.” Between this album and 2017’s No Shape, Mike Hadreas performed in, and composed the music for, Kate Wallich and the YC's dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here; the impact of that looms greatly on this record, which exalts the body in all its possibilities and inherent limitations. Don't you just wish you could become elastic and acrobatic during “On the Floor,” or float weightlessly during “Moonbend”? Probably, but as Hadreas’ music has made clear over the past decade-plus, there are some states the body just can’t transcend, no matter how hard you try. Maybe just slinking or thrashing is enough, as long as you do it as the title implores—Immediately. –Shaad D’Souza

ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross (2023)

ANOHNI won’t be quiet. The pier prophet returned, in 2023, with a folk/soul masterpiece, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, seizing every tool in her box and her band of Johnsons to make us listen to our hearts. Across My Back, she snarls at the self-destructive, mourns dead icebergs and friends, and takes big risks with subjectivity. (“Scapegoat,” for one, unpacks victimhood like a hand searching through entrails for divination.) The music is more brutal than any in her past. And more beautiful: “Why Am I Alive Now?” drifts through dread on tufts of strings. For the sunset stomper of orchestral funk “It Must Change,” she commands the title as prayer and warning. Can you hear her? –Jesse Dorris

Faye Webster: I Know I’m Funny haha (2021)

Is Faye Webster about to cry tears of sadness or joy when she sings, “You said if we weren’t in love/We’d still be best friends?” The Atlanta native, who came up photographing rappers and working with alt-rap label Awful, fully honed her bedroom pop meets rockabilly sound on her 2021 album I Know I’m Funny haha. Riddled with heart-wrenching and clever verses that are never too self-serious, the album paints Webster as someone aloofly swaying through life, but secretly consumed by regret and overthinking. It’s a mirror to the 2020s, and our hunt for normalcy amid gloom. Saxophones and slick pedal steel make the journey a lot easier to stomach. –Millan Verma

454: FAST TRAX 3 (2022)

FAST TRAX 3 reimagines a treasure trove of tracks that were collecting dust on Florida rapper/producer 454’s hard drive into a DJ mix that’s both punchy and soothing—perfect for replacing your usual 5-Hour Energy on late-night road trips. Drawing from the delirious, sped-up beats of the Sunshine State’s “fast music” scene, 454 plays puppet master by pitch-shifting quirky R&B samples over ethereal production until they’re nearly unrecognizable. While the music industry rushes to blindly cash in on the TikTok-driven craze of sped-up song edits, 454 deftly wields the technique to transform everyday mundanities into an exhilarating ride. In his chipmunk vocal cadence, he weaves together wistful vignettes about playing GTA in fourth grade and missing MF DOOM with playful flexes like his mayo-colored Toyota Camry. The result is a kaleidoscopic experience that takes you through every peak and valley at hyperspeed. –Serge Selenou

Kelela: Raven (2023)

In the 2010s, Kelela was a crucial disciple of the Black queer underground, bridging experimental, electronic, and R&B sounds; this decade, one might say she became its patron saint. Tired of the white gaze standing over her creative outlets, Kelela stepped back and recalibrated her voice. The resulting album moves between impassioned bangers and minimalist ecosystems, detailing the vulnerability, loneliness, and beauty of rebirth. She blends spiritual jazz, R&B, ambient, dancehall, and jungle with help from a powerful list of collaborators who also stand at the forefront of Black music ingenuity. On “Holier,” she declares, “I go where they hold me down/And you’re not gonna take my crown,” a meditation that’ll protect marginalized voices for years to come. When you’re a Black woman, getting personal is a political act. Like The Velvet Rope or A Seat at the Table before it, Raven reminds us that destroying our expectations, which are so often shaped by oppressive systems, is essential for creative restoration. –Gio Santiago

Fever Ray: Radical Romantics (2023)

Where does Karin Dreijer end and the sonic and visual characters they inhabit begin? That’s not a riddle—it’s practically the modus operandi on their third Fever Ray album. In-betweenness is the point on Radical Romantics, an album about “finding out what it is to love” according to Dreijer’s 2023 interview with Pitchfork. Dreijer lays it on thick in woozy, sex-tempo electronic tracks with smudged synths and creepy, crawling beats. Few artists of the last four decades, if any, have embodied Kate Bush’s Dreaming-era production ethos—letting the weirdness in and allowing it to corrode the very boundaries of pop—as Dreijer does here. Dreijer’s journey of self-discovery as a queer, nonbinary person has been chronicled in interviews and their art, and the numerous references to their past work sprinkled throughout Radical Romantics play like self-reflection from an artist in constant flux. Four songs were co-written and produced by their brother Olof Dreijer (who even brought along the steel drum for the oozing highlight “Kandy”). Together, they were the Knife; now they’re kind of something else, Schrödinger’s sibling duo. Radical Romantics is a rundown of the greatest quirks of an artist who views identity as a playground and not just a framework. –Rich Juzwiak

Jockstrap: I Love You Jennifer B (2022)

Like many of their peers, Jockstrap emerged from London’s music scene with a sprinkle of hype, some audacious ideas, and an elite music education to help pull them off. They also had a rarer, more intangible commodity: a singer who wanted to sing. In a scene dominated by inclement poets, post-punk wildcats, and monologuing auctioneers, Georgia Ellery believed in the magic of ballroom melody and the sparkle of the hired gown. Her bandmate, Taylor Skye, mashed up aquatic techno, daydreamy chanson sampledelic pop, galactic prog, and goofy electro-spectacles to deliver simultaneous shocks of the new and the old; his productions can sound like a galaxy-brained robot making fun of humanity’s pesky 20th-century music. The duo turns this would-be conceptual exercise into the most soulfully evocative, heavy-of-heart and light-of-spirit music that their cadre has produced. Not that they seem interested in being its flag bearers. I Love You Jennifer B is the album the A&R tells you not to make, unconcerned with nailing the sound that will consolidate a bankable fanbase. But this is how so many great debuts feel—like a beguiling series of doors, kicked open and slammed shut. –Jazz Monroe

Jane Remover: Frailty (2021)

Everything that entered Frailty left transformed. Emo and shoegaze seemed content to speed-cycle the ’90s in perpetuity, before “Your Clothes” and “Kodak Moment” fused the two into the future sound of oversaturated internal circuitry. Once proudly online ephemera, hyperpop, digicore, and dariacore were now album-oriented formats. Most importantly, Jane Remover considers it a work of a completely different person. Less than a year later, she came out as trans and changed her artist name. Yet, for all of its forward-thinking alchemy, Frailty is anchored to history by the most timeless of adolescent feelings: identity crisis, sexual frustration, revenge fantasies and the earnest belief that none of it is ever going to change. The teenage mind of 1921 wouldn’t be able to comprehend the sound of Frailty, but they’d totally get it all the same. –Ian Cohen

Wednesday: Rat Saw God (2023)

Just because Wednesday lead singer Karly Hartzman is comfortable sharing her work-in-progress state doesn’t mean she’s uninterested in further self-growth; she just wants her compass for good, reckless fun to make it out unscathed in the process. On Rat Saw God, Wednesday smear country and shoegaze like they’re drawing faces in the mud caked on their legs. The Asheville-based indie rock group’s fifth album is stuffed with vivid descriptions as metaphors for life lessons: a puddle of pee in the street that flushed out alcohol, the metal roof of a semi-truck crumpled under a bridge, full-sized candy bars from the decrepit house on Halloween.

Rat Saw God is proudly lived-in and splayed wide, like an unmade bed at your best friend’s with crumbs between the sheets. Hartzman and bandmate MJ Lenderman intertwine their voices with easy trust on slow-burner “Formula One,” the tempo accelerates on “Got Shocked” like the speed settings on a turntable changed, and the growing pains at the center of “Chosen to Deserve” are enviably unbarred. There’s a charged air to Wednesday’s music that suggests change will eventually arrive. “God, make me good,” Hartzman pleads on “Bull Believer,” only to immediately amend her prayer: “But not quite yet.” –Nina Corcoran

Jessica Pratt: Here in the Pitch (2024)

Jessica Pratt’s fourth album is a self-contained universe, her music at its most imperial. Here in the Pitch trades in wide-screened minimalism. In being a Cassavetes girl in all of its grainy sorrows. In sounding big by being small. There are reverberant kick drums. There are squiggles of synthesizer. “World on a String” is steaming tape hiss and a simple acoustic guitar. “By Hook or By Crook,” is a kind of far-out, hypnagogic bossa nova track, where Pratt’s vocals sound like an echo from another room. Pratt tends to be opaquely impressionistic in its lyrics, populating songs with highways and aster dawns; wild centuries and evil innocence. But then there is “The Last Year,” a quietly brutal study in love, rendered with complete lucidity. “I think it’s gonna be fine,” she sings, steady and unsure and hopeful all at once, “I think we’re gonna be together.” Then, like some kind of distant star coming into focus: piano, masterful and heavy, unfurling like a big sigh. –Sophie Kemp

L’Rain: Fatigue (2021)

With her second album, Taja Cheek amplified the resplendent atmospheres that shimmered throughout her self-titled debut. Though expanded in scope and scale, Fatigue maintains the Brooklyn musician’s skepticism toward the song form as an obligatory base unit of musical communication. Across the album, subtle grooves surge and then collapse; ambient loops swell and shiver away. Cheek works in mixed fidelity, gathering widely, populating the record with alternately scratchy and pristine sound; both scheduled studio sessions and off-the-cuff iPhone memos play into the creation of Fatigue's assemblages. Comic moments, like airhorn blasts and a clip of a roommate cackling while she makes up a song on the fly, offset Cheek's elegiac, searching vocals. Fatigue's rich textural contrasts provide fertile ground for Cheek to sift through the hard work of change and the exhaustion it leaves in its wake. –Sasha Geffen

Turnstile: GLOW ON (2021)

GLOW ON has achieved the rare feat of becoming the gateway album that gets an entirely new generation of listeners—old and young—to like hardcore. Naysayers and scene puritans are too late to tear down Turnstile; the Baltimore band heard it all before its third album even dropped anyway. They’re one step ahead when admitting they’re here to entertain (“If it makes you feel alive/Well, then I’m happy to provide”), their production is glossy (“You really gotta see it live to get it”), and their lyrics are positive mental attitude in action (“Beauty is built not from outside”). That’s just the way Turnstile like it—always has been.

Pulsing through GLOW ON are electrical currents that make you feel alive. Daniel Fang hits his drums like he’s trying to split them open, beckoning you to headbang until sweat flings off your hair strands. When singer Brendan Yates interpolates Sly and the Family Stone, it’s with the utmost sincerity—an emotion that was mocked in machismo hardcore circles when he was a kid. Now, when Yates barks, “I want to thank you for letting me be myself!” to an arena, the audience doesn’t just hear him out, but yells it back in his face, spittle flying through the air. The feeling is mutual. –Nina Corcoran

Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2022)

What’s most captivating about Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is the freedom Kendrick Lamar allows himself just to rap. Mirroring the raw, unfettered, unanswerable quality of the subject matter—technology, family, substances, sex, cancel culture—Lamar fully unspools, taking cues from Baby Keem and late rappers Drakeo the Ruler and XXXTentacion to sing, squeal, slither, chant, and, in between some heavier moments, have some actual fun. And then there’s the Drake of it all; already, fans have gone back and traced, line by line, the subliminals that pepper these two discs. The headline-grabbing beef is really about the virtues of hip-hop’s upper class, and it feels like a natural progression from Lamar’s deep interrogation of his values across Mr. Morale. Along the way, Lamar caught fire, padding his already championship-caliber stats. “Stop playin’ with me ’fore I turn you to a song,” he snarls on “Rich Spirit,” sounding as vicious and unbeatable as ever. –Mano Sundaresan

Asake: Mr. Money With the Vibe (2022)

One of the most memorable shows I’ve seen in the last few years was when Asake performed his fully formed debut Mr. Money With the Vibe at the Palladium Times Square. The crowd was full of Black East Coasters, some repping their West African and West Indian flags, singing along to the shimmering melodies of “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)” and the saxophone-laden chants of “Dupe” like a shitfaced white college bar does “Sweet Caroline.” It felt like I could see the trajectory of pop music shapeshifting in real time, as the Lagos-bred showman found a way to lace so many global musical strands into multiple eras of Nigerian pop. Mr. Money With the Vibe is an organic fusion of hip-hop, dancehall, and house music, but notably centers amapiano. Asake doesn’t treat the booming South African genre as a shiny new thing to be bled dry until the next trend comes along, but instead uses it as a way to unleash his big, heartfelt singalongs. –Alphonse Pierre

Jessie Ware: What’s Your Pleasure? (2020)

When Jessie Ware dropped What’s Your Pleasure in June 2020, some locations experimented with “opening up” after the COVID lockdown, and her fourth album served as unofficial soundtrack for finding our dance legs. Bumptious in its kinetic energy, What’s Your Pleasure realizes the hopes of those of us who longed for an album’s worth of the Devotion-era bonus track “Imagine It Was Us” and 2012’s Katy B collaboration “Aaliyah.” Mutant disco, nu-disco, Simian Mobile Disco, disco disco—the album earns its title. Her collaborators, among them James Ford and Morgan Geist, pillaged 40 years of beats, squeals, sequencers, and crunches. “Save a Kiss” and “Ooh La La” were confrontations; “The Kill,” one of the 2020s’ best slow burns, deepened the reach of her post-sophisti-pop ballads. Ware was up to the challenge. She kept us dancing on our own and for the rest of the year made the simulation reality. –Alfred Soto

Low: HEY WHAT (2021)

Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker recorded HEY WHAT while trudging through an era heavy with death: the hibernation months of 2020, when every venture into public, every encounter with friends or strangers, hissed with the threat of infection. During this quiet and frightening time, the couple worked piecemeal with producer BJ Burton, furthering the explorations into distortion, corrosion, and erasure they had begun with 2018’s Double Negative. HEY WHAT pushes harder, gets louder, dragging Low’s most explosive impulses into an apocalyptic arena. Guitars trill, occasionally gentle and unblemished; more often, they blister and steam past recognizability. Artifacts that would end up trimmed from a more traditional recording—blasts of static, spectral overtones, whirring feedback—form the weathered architecture at the center of Low’s compositions.

Throughout HEY WHAT, Parker and Sparhawk intertwine in harmony, as they’ve done all throughout the band's three-decade tenure. Sheathed in electronic filters, their voices together synthesize a new sound all its own: neither one singer nor the other, not two individuals leaping hand in hand across gorgeous intervals, but an alloy—a shared, third presence.

HEY WHAT would be the last album Low released before Parker’s death of cancer in 2022, following a long, private illness. Her absence now haunts these last traces of her voice, which arcs with graceful abundance through HEY WHAT’s chilling wilds. –Sasha Geffen

Alex G: God Save the Animals (2022)

“My teacher is a child with a big smile,” Alex G sings on “No Bitterness.” It’s a very sweet song. Elsewhere, on "S.D.O.S.," from the same album, God Save the Animals, he lists off some other people he apparently employs. “God is my designer,” he sings. “Jesus is my lawyer.” Sure! That song, “S.D.O.S.” is not sweet at all. It’s weird and funky and punk and the Auto-Tune is dialed up to the funhouse mirror setting. It sounds like what the “my teacher is a child” guy would sing if his body got used like a ventriloquist's puppet by an alien at karaoke night.

That’s not a bad thing. A decade and a half since he started pumping out albums of folky, earnest indie as an acoustic guitar guy, Alex G has pushed the shape of the genre into newer, oblongier shapes. God Save the Animals contains guitar solos, gothic keyboard riffs, spare and off-key acoustic guitar, warbles, countrified fiddle, at least one very thoughtful love song, and (don’t worry) enough moments that sound like Built to Spill. It feels delicious to slurp from this messy soup of progress. It feels obvious, too, like why shouldn’t someone so good at making one kind of song try their hand at all the others? We contain multitudes, as should our indie rock. –Matthew Schnipper

Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess (2023)

When she emerged from St. Louis in January 2023 wearing cat ears and Wayfarers, Sexyy Red seemed fully formed, spitting like a pre-prison Gucci Mane and smirking over her shoulder. Her debut commercial mixtape Hood Hottest Princess delivered on that tantalizing potential. Her steady, distinctly unglamorous freestyles withstand Tay Keith’s murderous “Pound Town” beat as valiantly as the Gregorian-chant-meets-ass-claps refrain of “Looking for the Hoes.” A victory lap for a proudly midwestern personality bomb rapping as confidently about wet pussy as being a single working mom, Hood Hottest Princess sparked up and toked on what was then the hottest July in history. The party didn’t last. But damn, did we throw down. –Hattie Lindert

Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales (2021)

In medieval Europe, a woman who was giving birth would ask trusted family members and friends to gather in her room and support her during the process. These people were called gossips. Today, the term is more often used as a negative epithet—but on her wise and poignant R&B album Heaux Tales, Jazmine Sullivan celebrates gossip’s emotional significance, showing the revelations and self-explorations that arise when women nurture community.

The heart of the album comprises six interludes, in which Sullivan passes the mic to Black women she loves, who then share their desires, mistakes, and dreams; after each one, Sullivan sings a song that embodies the speaker’s central message. These songs contain exceptional empathy and nuance, often showing the emotional truths hidden inside sexist tropes meant to flatten women. On “The Other Side,” a woman who might elsewhere be derided as a gold digger shares her desire for financial stability. On “Lost One,” a cheater acknowledges her selfishness while begging her ex, “Don’t have too much fun without me.” The intensity of her plea, sung over a lone, echoing guitar loop and a chorus of backing vocals, burns incandescent.

On closer “Girl Like Me,” Sullivan recounts a breakup that leaves her lonely and confused, her amber vocals dripping with yearning. To cope with the rejection, she decides to become a self-described hoe: an aloof woman incapable of being hurt. Of course, having heard Sullivan unpack her friends’ complex motivations and histories over the course of the album, we know that the real woman beneath this cliché will have her own set of dreams, heartaches, and shortcomings, too. On Heaux Tales, every possible version of Sullivan and her friends, real or imagined, is treated with care. –Vrinda Jagota

Nourished by Time: Erotic Probiotic 2 (2023)

Marcus Brown’s songwriting makes you feel like a voyeur peering into a private world. His debut album, Erotic Probiotic 2, tackles universal concepts—sex and relationships, missed connections, the woes of living in a capitalist world—but with the poetic misdirection of a person writing in code only they’re meant to understand. Where his wordplay leaves you guessing, the passion comes through in his rumbling baritone, peppered with heartrending micro-modulations as breathy sighs and murmurs escape his throat. He reaches through decades of influence, filtering the sounds ’80s freestyle, ’90s Miami bass, and generational cross-sections of R&B through the love and angst he feels for his hometown of Baltimore. There are a multitude of touchstones, but the largest is unmistakable: Marcus Brown’s sensitive heart. –Shy Thompson

Amaarae: Fountain Baby (2023)

Leaping from Highlife to Afropop, then Atlanta rap to ambient electronic, Amaarae undressed her conservative and feral impulses on the 2023 release that arrived three years after her debut. Fountain Baby left old fans feening and brought converted acolytes panting as they raced to the front of the show. The absence of features was a shushing finger for the doubters who believed she could not carry a body of her work on her own, after seeing the co-credits on her first album. Here, she channeled the sensuality she feels when desiring a good time, the anger that comes from being solely perceived through the borders of geography instead of the vastness of her interests, and the freedom inherent in a womanhood that is both demure and demanding. “Angels in Tibet” alongside “Big Steppa” are the coin flip that showcase someone jumping off the mountain and never landing back down. Amaarae took flight and increased the pressure on her peers to perhaps leave the ground for the first time. She could almost be saying, “The view is better from up here.” –Tarisai Ngangura

Cash Cobain / Chow Lee: 2 SLIZZY 2 SEXY (2022)

In the great pantheon of horny rap music, alongside the real degenerates like SahBabii and LL Cool J, are Cash Cobain and Chow Lee, and their deluxe edition of 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy. Across 25 sex-crazed anthems, without any concern for sample etiquette, the New York rappers go on a depraved spree of freaky-ass punchlines. That might sound gimmicky, but Cash and Chow are true romantics and even truer New Yorkers, bringing the city to life while they thirst. After a while, it becomes more than a tape about pussy-eating and getting your dick sucked; it’s about falling in love in New York. –Alphonse Pierre

Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises (2021)

It arrives like a push notification from a distant galaxy. In its message, a seven-note arpeggio, are invitations from various figures: a legendary saxophonist, a genius electronic producer, a greater being perhaps. All they’ve asked of you is to sit back, and experience Promises, a nine-part ambient, celestial, spiritual jazz piece, and the greatest collaboration this decade has seen so far. On Promises, you’ll find Pharoah Sanders, Sam Shepherd, and the London Symphony Orchestra sketching out a future towards higher grounds: a saxophonist’s pledge framed around a producer’s world-building expertise, and orchestral swells so exquisite they move towards transcendence.

Promises isn’t one of those albums you put on for everyday comfort. It’s a deep plunge, like an intense old friend or grief who visits after years of dormancy. When Sanders passed away in 2022, Promises began to sound like a fitting conclusion to his career: Where he once breathed fire, now his playing simply breathes. In its repetition, grandeur, and astounding silence, the composition carves out life, death, and the afterlife. What a gift to witness someone’s final masterpiece, a long exhale in the stars and all that lives beyond. –Gio Santiago

FKA twigs: MAGDALENE (2019)

FKA twigs first entranced the pop world through a series of visually elaborate, self-produced works unmoored from conventional structure. Then, in late 2019, she delivered MAGDALENE, an intimate, almost divine invitation into her psyche, written in the tumult of a very public relationship with her ex, Robert Pattinson. Inspired by Mary Magdalene, a figure both revered and reviled in Catholic scripture, twigs uses her as a muse to explore and reclaim her own sensual reality, carving space for vulnerability, longing, and strength in stillness. MAGDALENE is her ode to women pushed to the margins and a stunningly original statement on freeing desire from its repressive roots.

In a post-girl boss era depleted of loud empowerment anthems, twigs led a quiet rebellion, collaborating with dance heavyweights like Skrillex, Jack Antonoff, and Benny Blanco, who ground the album firmly in the era’s hybrid pop, electronic, and experimental styles. It’s an exercise in spatial fluidity, where hymnal bliss meets soft choral flourishes, and twigs’ precision reinforces her vision of desire as “a sacred geometry” within women. The ambiance here shifts from thrashing and wistful (“Fallen Alien”) to mournful (“Mirrored Heart”). Even the seamless integration of Future, the sole featured guest, into this labyrinth feels like pure alchemy. (twigs, like us, prefers “sad Future.”) MAGDALENE finds its strength in quiet, deliberate sensuality, a theme beautifully encapsulated in the video for album closer “Cellophane,” where twigs performs pole-dancing splits and contortions, ultimately spiraling her way into a peaceful rebirth. –Clover Hope

Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd (2023)

Death has always dotted Lana Del Rey records, but before Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, it never seemed to totalize, to obliterate—and ultimately, to regenerate—the way it does here. There are the uncles’ bodies hanging “real high/In the national park sky,” the high-school boyfriends’ ashes scattered somewhere by a lake, the “blood relatives” whose recall of cultural artifacts unnerves her the way her postwar nostalgia once did contemporary audiences. Ocean Blvd is more relentlessly bleak than Lana’s masterpiece, 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, but also more hopeful: Pleas like the title track’s “Don’t forget me” are leavened by the belief that someone might answer them. The centerpiece is, of course, the sprawling “A&W,” where God “puts the shower on while he calls me.” But the album is just as sharply observed when Lana turns her gaze to her loved ones—the brother who won’t quit smoking, the sister whose baby she adores, and possibly covets. It rejects the idea that “big men behind the scenes” are the ones “sewing Frankenstein-black dreams” into her songs. No one else works a needle like this. –Paul A.Thompson

Alvvays: Blue Rev (2022)

At first blush, Blue Rev is sublime: dreamy textures, lived-in melodies, masterfully constructed pop songs. But go back again, and again, and again, and these songs continually reveal new charms, emerging and receding in the swirling guitars that soar and echo around singer Molly Rankin’s elliptical, panoramic reveries. Sometimes her voice blends into this wall of sound, a lush complement to the band’s fuzz and squall; sometimes she belts for the rafters, breaking through with a gut-punch of emotion. Her lyrics aren’t afraid of big questions—how to parse stasis from change; how loneliness can be a blessing; how time can upend some truths and leave others unchanged—but she’s more likely to offer an impressionistic sketch than a platitude. And while Blue Rev spans power-pop sweetness, dreamy synth beds, and soaring guitar solos, its songs are all united in their meticulous attention to detail. The album’s writing and recording hit a near-comic number of speedbumps—a flooded studio, a theft of early demos, lineup changes, visa issues, not to mention a global pandemic. It’s a wonder it exists at all, never mind that it exists like this: triumphant and dazzling, immediately satisfying and continually enriching. –Marissa Lorusso

billy woods / Kenny Segal: Maps (2023)

“No man of the people, I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of y’all,” billy woods howled on his first collaboration with Kenny Segal, released at a time when people could be more selective about their agoraphobia. Four years later, on Maps, one of rap’s most uncompromisingly cerebral linguists proved the old adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; he gets equally emotional about the mouth-watering smell of conch fritters, sizzling Szechuan, and brined pork belly as he does about FaceTime with his partner. Modest indie rap fame has earned him $300 Ubers, “celebrity pre-rolls” and Japanese denim, but he longs for his tomato patch and the taste of New York tap water. The going line on Maps was that it was a concept album about travel. Really, it’s more rediscovering what you love about home. –Ian Cohen

ML Buch: Suntub (2023)

There’s a moment about halfway through “High Speed Calm Air Tonight” where ML Buch begins to gently hit the side of the guitar with her hand. It’s so quiet you might miss it on your first listen, but it’s the heart of the song, and it sums up in a few seconds what’s so magical about her second album, Suntub: its inventiveness with her chosen instrument, its mischievous fascination with body parts, and the way that every diddle and curlicue and filigree on the 55-minute release really seems to mean something. The Danish composer’s lyrics suggest a singularity between nature and the human body, painted in such orgiastic imagery as to make In Utero seem modest. Yet the music, rendered with real and virtual guitars, suggests a 2D flattening of nature: not the awe you get walking around in the woods, but the way a tree in a video game might look more like a tree than a tree in a real forest. Suntub uses the vocabulary of the virtual to express a truth older and scarier than the internet, one that gives the record an emotional charge that never lets up over 15 songs. After a few listens, you start to suspect her flat and affectless way of singing is a way of holding back tears. –Daniel Bromfield

Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (2023)

Desire is often depicted as a void, an outline, a blank. Its sketchiness exerts a special pull on the imagination, so that what is missing often becomes more vivid and perfect and charged than the actual object itself. Countless musicians have made their name channeling longing, but few of them have considered its shape as thoughtfully as Caroline Polachek does on Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. The title is a statement of intent: to assume the emotion in all of its forms by treating the absence at its heart like a seed. The music that grows from it is as lush as it is eclectic: bel canto and bagpipes, drum ’n’ bass and Dido. This hothouse climate is pure atmosphere for Polachek’s voice as it gathers from breathy surrender to elemental blasts of force; sounding out new possibilities by wailing, caressing, and sighing into the negative space. Words don’t always map onto experience, so she barrels ahead with her own invented love language: phrasing her longing in lyrics that are by turns visceral, abstract, precise, and Wikipediated. But with Desire, Polachek’s master stroke is to recast emptiness as openness, “lack” into pure potential. In her pursuit of desire, the singer built out a dazzlingly ornate record, while honoring the yearning, searching heart at its center. –Harry Tafoya

Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022)

How loud can you make a whisper? How intimate can you make a scream? On “Blurred View,” Adrianne Lenker sings to a lover under her breath with a microphone placed directly on her throat, while James Krivchenia quietly taps a kick drum rigged with contact microphones both inside and out. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You represents the pinnacle of Big Thief’s long-running commitment to radical transparency and to each other. The mics picked up their unspoken thoughts along with every muffled thump and strum, while Lenker pondered flowers, blood, potatoes, sparrows, apples, lovers, loss, skin, memory. Unions this harrowingly intense are not built to last forever, and this one did not—in July of this year, bassist Max Oleartchik departed for “interpersonal reasons.” Whoever Big Thief are going forward, they will never be this band again. But we’ll forever have Dragon New Warm Mountain, the sound of the only big-tent indie rock band of the 2020s at the peak of their evanescent powers. –Jayson Greene

Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud (2020)

Sometimes you feel an album so deep in your bones the artist’s personal transformation becomes the soundtrack to your own. Five years ago, Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee was a restless and frequently brilliant project that never stayed in one place for long. She started recording under the name in 2012 with American Weekend, an album‌ of lo-fi confessional folk, and from there she touched on emo-inflected indie, experimented with electronics, and veered into noisy alt-rock. Her songs were about emotional torment and the pain of growing up, and her embattled characters often seemed like they were searching for a place to hide. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield stepped into the light.

Inspired by long-time faves Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams, Crutchfield wrote an album that channels her heroes’ fusion of toughness and tenderness. There’s still plenty to be afraid of in Saint Cloud’s world, and the specter of death is never far from mind. But these stories evince a hard-won wisdom born of Crutchfield’s new sobriety, and the clarity of the songs, bolstered by an earthy country-rock sound with the no-frills functional beauty of a handcrafted table, is infectious. For many who heard the record around the time of release, Saint Cloud became a lifeline—any history of this decade will remember March 2020 as a month that separated before and after. But several years on, its themes now exist outside of time. It’s an album about the often overlooked quality of endurance, a record that throws off life-preserving heat from a coal-rich fire that’s burning slow. –Mark Richardson

Chuquimamani-Condori: DJ E (2023)

Every time a new sample, a new drum pattern, a new guitar riff enters the fray of Chuquimamani-Condori’s beguiling collage DJ E, it’s like getting zapped by an emotional defibrillator. It’s the sort of album that just knocks you out and makes you go, How did a real person come up with this? Chuquimamani-Condori, the producer formerly known as Elysia Crampton, built their shapeless opus with endless stacks of sound, colliding like particles. Still, each layer lives on its own, whether it’s the sci-fi bloops undergirding “Eat My Cum,” or the gusts of screwed vocals on “Know.” And, even though I’ve never heard anything exactly like it before, it makes me nostalgic for the cacophonous moments in my childhood home where, in one part of the house I’m playing an NBA Street sequel at full blast; in another, my sister is watching cartoons; in another, my mom is on the phone; and, in another, my dad’s got kompa rippling through the walls. I imagine anyone else who gets lost in DJ E’s distorted Andean folk and dissected club music will be slingshotted back to the times where they felt the most alive and didn’t even know it. –Alphonse Pierre

Rosalía: MOTOMAMI (2022)

After the world-building of her breakthrough album, El Mal Querer, anything Rosalía made—short of another song suite about an arcane 13th-century romance— was going to be a jolt. But when MOTOMAMI was released four years later, it hit like an 18-wheeler, a dazzling volte-face fueled by clashing sounds and ideas that marked her as a master technician who is more than a little mad. Here, reggaeton and bachata butt up against chiptune and pop and are kissed through the phone by Julio and Wisin and, naturally, Soulja. Rosalía references industrial canon like Yeezus and The Downward Spiral, but also collages like Grouper’s evil twin. While plenty of early ’20s records hold a mirror to—yawn—our attention spans shot by social media slop, Rosalía makes techno-dystopia her candy store. When her songs hiccup with background noise like a Twitch stream you forgot to close, or swell with the kind of saccharine synths you get by hearing an “ethereal” preset, you feel the wonder of a painter who just found an eighth color in the rainbow. It feels as miraculous as her voice, which can project like Piaf or rasp or coo or cackle or gulp the air. You can afford to take a beat when you have infinite rubber to burn. –Owen Myers

Charli XCX: BRAT (2024)

Some great artists have to crash and burn before they can truly thrive. Charli XCX just had to Crash. Her chart-topping 2022 album could have been the perennial underdog’s springboard out of pop’s middle class. Instead, she side-eyed the path of major-label A&Rs and mass-market compromise. Was Charli XCX really a radio-friendly unit shifter, or was she more of a…

Brat. The word is now more meme than noun, perhaps more color than concept. My brain is assailed by visions of a friend’s bootlegged, lime-green ‘brat’ baseball cap, or poppers huffed over a fresh puddle of festival vomit, before it recalls whatever the word used to mean. It was an album of cathartic, ecstatic excess, and a “Brat Summer” of conspicuous transgression. Brat at large was a drunk genie in a vodka bottle, who could only grant you infinite serotonin by making the world five percent more annoying.

A decade of cult acclaim had granted Charli a captive fanbase, happy to tag along with anything from bloghouse throwbacks to future-pop bacchanals from producers like A. G. Cook and Easyfun, not to mention a chapbook of in-jokes and mononymous namedrops. Her lore encompassed not only the pop princess but also the club maven and the Tumblr poet, the it girl and the over-it girl. She could brag, pine, and bristle while sounding just like her honest self. It was creative élan, not marketing nous, that made the memification inevitable: Without Charli’s reckless self-belief—her chatty insolence or eye-rolling rejection of pop relatability—Brat would not have become a byword, or excuse, for trashy thrills and middle-class decadence, nor a symbol of youth savvy, crowbarred into increasingly ill-fitting political campaigns. It would never have become, as these things often will, a useless buzzword for anything naughty or bright green. Brat Summer would never have died, but its most grateful acolytes would never have lived. –Jazz Monroe

Veeze: Ganger (2023)

There are certain substances that become prisms for rappers, their descriptions refracting through regional and personal styles as if through a thousand shards of glass. Codeine cough syrup was, simply, syrup—then sizzurp, lean, mud, my cup, the dirty, and so on, from Texas to Atlanta and beyond. Nearly halfway through Ganger, the narcotic debut album from the eccentric Detroit rapper Veeze, he describes a cup “so dark it look like slave land.” Where other rappers may let this line land heavily, Veeze lets its float past, as he does with nearly everything. Ganger is full of enjambment and ellipses, ideas competing with one another or allowed to drift into the ether, each of them odder and more specific than the last. –Paul A. Thompson

Beyoncé: RENAISSANCE (2022)

When doors could finally be cracked open, Renaissance was the conductor that compelled us to hit “play’ and perform a collective post-pandemic swag surf. Gathering the genres that make Black nightlife sweaty, sticky, and exuberant—Chicago house, disco by way of Donna Summer and Nile Rodgers, New Orleans bounce, R&B remixed with New Jack Swing and hip-hop—Beyoncé’s seventh album dragged listeners out of stasis and into an ecstatic, glitter-filled revelry that many are still dusting off their shoulders whenever they reminisce about the tour experience that doled out bliss in generous amounts. With collaborators like Raphael Saadiq, Pharrell Williams, and Honey Dijon, the record—more than ushering people to the dance floor—revealed the breadth of community needed to create any song that opens up the blinds and lets the light in.

Each person is owed and on this album, all were named, including the Clark Sisters, a pioneering gospel group whose song “Center Thy Will” was sampled on “Church Girl,” where the sacred and sinful is positioned both in the club and beneath the steeple. In both places people come for release and leave cleansed anew. After crafting Lemonade, an album widely accepted as her magnum opus, it’s astounding that Beyoncé found a way to not only vocally surpass her best work, but simultaneously expand the ways her entire discography is analyzed and understood. By making herself a historian, she forced us all to be students. All while still rocking a groovy two-step. –Tarisai Ngangura

SZA: SOS (2022)

SZA opens SOS rapping from a mountaintop, and across this 23-track emotional tour-de-force, she stays there, even as her mercurial masterpiece becomes an avalanche of titanic beats and virtuosic hooks and genius one-liners. In this uncontainable opus of female interiority, SZA fully commits to her complexity—her desires, vengeance, humor, wrath, discernment, occasional delusions—and refuses to sweep shit under the rug. Diving between chest-puffing confidence and bone-deep insecurity, between flexed muscles and tears, she alchemizes pain into knowledge, into growth, maybe even—as the title suggests—salvation.

Anyone who’s dated this side of DM-slides and tried to “find deeper meaning in nonsense” will hear the savage anatomization within her lyrics and scream. (One line can’t capture its sweep, but “You got a new bitch, what the fuck you cryin’ for?” is the most satisfying rebuke to players who also play the victim that I’ve ever heard.) Her eyes pierce through deceptive men and their contradictions just as she exalts the relief of being fully seen. She knows she’s “too profound” for those who wrong her, and perhaps that’s because she understands the most foundational fact of emotional survival: strength requires vulnerability.“Nobody gets me,” SZA sings from forbidding heights — and here it is nice to imagine her turning her attention away from the heartbreaking man, and towards the millions of fans who catapulted SOS from one peak to the next— “you do.” –Jenn Pelly

Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee (2024)

There was a time when all music sounded like Diamond Jubilee, when rock’n’roll was the future and thousands of bands wanted to become stars. There was a time when groups whose names were all some variation on the Plural Nouns would lug their guitars and amps to the local radio station and cut a few tracks in hopes of stardom pinned on the perfect melody, the catchy guitar line, and a lyric as good as “All I got is the truth/All I want is you.” There was a time before streaming when you could discover bands like Cindy Lee and their odd uncompromising artistic statements issued on private-press labels sold outside sparsely attended shows at the local armory and then buried in an egg crate only to be thumbed across decades later at an antique store or estate sale. There was a time before songs went viral on TikTok. There was a time when you felt an album belonged to you.

Every story about Diamond Jubilee should begin with “There was a time….” The sprawling, eternal, double-album is a period piece that allows us to look back at what it was like to look forward. Enchantment and disenchantment work together to conjure this singular sugar-sweet unease unlike anything else in music released in the last handful of years. “Dreams of you/Visions of doom,” sings Patrick Flegel in their brittle falsetto, capping off their years-long Cindy Lee project with the clearest songwriting and sharpest melodies of their long career as a musician. Inside the spell of Diamond Jubilee’s ’60s psychedelic chanson garage-pop there is unbridled romance and hope, yet to consider its obstinately antiquated and luddite qualities in the stark reality of the 2020s is to feel total hopelessness.

Part of the album’s lore is that it’s only available to stream on YouTube and download on a Geocities page, but still not available on streaming services or physically. It’s not that all good things should be slightly unattainable, but, specifically, Diamond Jubilee should be slightly unattainable. You can spend your entire life trying to put your arms around what makes a pop song good, but you always have to leave room for the unknowable holy spirit that runs through it—that which is slightly unattainable. It’s a perfect little overtone for the magic Diamond Jubilee. Just put this record on any way you want and Cindy Lee will appear as a mirage—wearing a fabulous beehive wig and red sequin dress, singing through spring reverb playing a Telecaster plugged into a little overdriven Fender Champ. She’s here for an unforgettable moment, briefly and simply, and then maybe never again. –Jeremy D. Larson

Playboi Carti: Whole Lotta Red (2021)

By late 2020, Playboi Carti—a well-read student of Atlanta trap, now a wraith with a hoarse throat and a bad temper—had gone from superstar to silhouette, basking in his castle while forum-trawlers mythologized his footsteps. He was a fabled ghost, glaring out from the fringes of hip-hop, waiting to pounce when the clock struck twelve on Christmas morning. And when he did with Whole Lotta Red, it sounded like the death throes of a vampiric cyborg, curtains drawn not to keep sunlight out, but hellfire in. There’s something Faustian about his breathless mantras, scathing boasts about the superpowers he sold his soul for: the ability to speak in hieroglyphics, the ability to influence people with said hieroglyphics, the ability to conquer the world with said influence. A devil-horned despot, Carti wades through the charred entrails of his early SoundCloud days, guiding us through the carnage like Hell’s highest usher. “New Tank” takes the brooding sputter of “New Choppa” and douses it in kerosene. Listen closely enough to “Vamp Anthem,” and you can hear “Magnolia”—and a good chunk of its era's fuck-all optimism—choking to death. There’s no milly rocking down here. No time for it, either. For a project that so dramatically bookended 2020, an insular year that rendered all souls terminally online, it’s fitting that it anticipated our feverish, self-actualizing rap landscape. Have a bedroom? You have a booth. Have an Instagram? You have a streaming service. Have a snippet? You have a song. In the carnage of Carti’s Inferno, all is fast, and all is rage. All that isn’t is burned alive. –Samuel Hyland

Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020)

When Fiona Apple reemerged with her first new album in eight years, we were one month into the bleak and fearful confines of lockdown. Though it was a small comfort, Fetch the Bolt Cutters appeared in the middle of the night like a blazing torch…or was it a flamethrower? Apple’s fifth record flickers and scorches; her cobweb-fine vibrato calls out for companionship on “I Want You to Love Me,” and then stretches into phlegm-flecked howls on “For Her”—a song furiously penned in response to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The record is notched with scars from a post-Trump society, but Apple’s parables of women being assaulted, silenced, and defamed are as timeless as they are timely. Her thorny resilience is a rare thing in popular music, and her stories, tempestuous and explicit, have a mythic weight.

In an act of artistic telepathy, Apple treated her Venice Beach home as one big instrument, long before any of us were isolated with the daily noises of our dwellings. She played the very foundations of her house, stomping on the floor, slapping the walls, even rattling a box of her late dog’s bones to capture the ragged percussion of a body getting tossed around rigid structures. A dense, nest-like accumulation of shouts, barks, and whispers amplifies the vérité nature of these songs, which have the tactile quality of rummaging through a loved one’s attic.

There is a lived-in patina throughout, but even if Fetch the Bolt Cutters bears the stain of shared experience, no one else could have made this record. Apple’s winding braids of verse and melody share more DNA with folk songs and spirituals than they do modern pop. Her inimitable voice, jagged or trembling, is like none other. Her instincts as a producer reject unnecessary polish, and snatch up the clacking, booming, rustling din of existence. By preserving all the “flaws,” the raw material of our untidy lives, Apple crafted a staggering work we could step into—to feel her rage, or her unbridled empathy, firsthand. –Madison Bloom

Listen to selections from the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.