Best 40 Albums of 2017

[minkylowlife]

Please note that any album out of the top 10 could have been album of the year. 2017 was an embarrassment of riches for quality albums, and choosing which would take the top slots was an exercise in masochism. Please enjoy!

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40. Lushloss - Asking/Bearing
Download: “Shame”, “Hold Uu”, “Wanting”

Lushloss left herself quite a challenge when she began Asking/Bearing. To cover the topics of mortality and the impact the death of a grandparent has on one’s parent, as well as navigating the issues of identity surrounding being a transgender Korean-American, would be a daunting task even with lyrics - and yet Lushloss succeeds in exploring these areas with an intimate instrumental epic. Clips of conversation between her and her mother add to the tenderness of Lushloss’ soft, gentle electronics, and the scope of the project casts particular poignancy onto the samples and atmospheres Lushloss creates. It was a bold choice - and in this case, it truly paid off.




39. Mura Masa - Mura Masa
Download: “Love$ick (feat. A$AP Rocky)”, “1 Night (feat. Charli XCX)”, “Firefly (feat. Nao)”

It’s difficult to make a cohesive record when you’re constantly drawing in guest stars. Somehow, Mura Masa accomplished this on his debut LP, a summery, enjoyable foray into an area of pop music that succeeds on streams far more than it does on car radio. Mura Masa has carved out a sound of his own, one that, God willing, will infect other producers to the point of pushing the conventions of tropical pop music forward.

Mura Masa’s songs are tight and warm, not obtrusive but not lightweight either. Listening to the individual pop songs is like peeping through a keyhole into a fully-decorated room where a party’s going on. Guest stars abound on the tracks, using Mura Masa’s summery electronics and bouncy beats like jungle gyms to show off on. Despite the various genres of electronic pop Mura Masa dabbles in, there’s a clear bloodline that each track comes from, and the resulting album is a cohesive and crafted whole that can not only be put on as background music, but can be enjoyed note-by-note.




38. Ibeyi - Ash
Download: “No Man is Big Enough for My Arms”, “Deathless”, “Waves”

The French-Cuban sisters who perform under the name Ibeyi are, I believe, the only artists making music of their genre at this moment: an intimate potpourri of chant, R&B, electronic, West African rhythms and traditional piano balladry that recalls but doesn’t mimic FKA Twigs, Lafawnduh and PJ Harvey. And it’s not just novelty that elevates Ibeyi’s work, but a keen sense of conveying powerful emotions and the weight of history with elegantly simple instrumentation. The sisters together have an incredible sense of harmony, and harness vocal arrangements that can express strength and tenderness with effortlessness. The album feels very bare, with only flickers of electronic flourishes and plenty of moment where the vocals are steady in the forefront. The record is enough to convince someone that though not the only form of storytelling, a voice is perhaps the greatest bloodline to culture of all.




37. Weezer - Pacific Daydream
Download: “Weekend Woman”, “Mexican Fender”, “Beach Boys”

Hooks, hooks, hooks. It’s what makes Rivers Cuomo worth giving a shot again and again, even as he aggressively squanders most of his goodwill with each subsequent tottering release. Weezer’s always had a wealth of catchy choruses and hummable verses, and that can take a band a long way. And occasionally, knitted together just right, make a delightful record.

Pacific Daydream lacks the grandeur, self-absorption and ambition of Weezer’s early records, and that plays to its advantage - this is a straightforward pop record. The crunchy guitars are pared away, as are any edges to Rivers Cuomo’s obnoxiously boyish voice, leaving behind a slick core of massive earworms and charmingly goofy lyrics. Songs bounce along and explode into singalong choruses, skating through breezy vignettes. It’s a perfect album for barbecues or driving down the PCH. After decades of alternately supplicating to and trolling his fanbase, Rivers Cuomo seems to have finally found what Weezer’s good at in the 2010’s: crafting glittering, polished, sun-soaked postcards to Southern California.




36. Lydia Loveless - Boy Crazy and Single(s)
Download: “Lover’s Spat”, “The Water”, “Fall Out of Love with You”

Even on a b-sides collection, Lydia Loveless has more energy than the average country act. Boy Crazy and Single(s) is an assortment of odds and ends, but because Loveless’ style lends itself to a delightful unpolished messiness, it seems relatively seamless. Loveless hurtles through songs like a runaway train, daring the band to keep up with her - even her ballads have a sort of untamed hustle to them. And yet, despite the punk rock attitude and the jazzy way she scribbles out a melody, Loveless is still undeniably country, invoking worn whiskey-stained leather and mud-spattered boots. This collection is packed with personality and energy in a way few people on the scene can manage.




35. Samantha Urbani - Policies of Power
Download: “Time Time Time”, “Hints & Implications”

Sometime in the early 2010’s, a new vein of auteur pop was brewing in metropolitan hubs. These pop singers had a mythos of meticulously controlling their own image, of eschewing trends or the pop machine, and of almost intentionally dodging any sort of mainstream success in favor of cult internet fanbases. Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira were two of this scene; Samantha Urbani is a third, and one who has not seemed to find her footing over the last few years. She still hasn’t released a debut album, but her first EP promises it will be excellent. Urbani utilizes the tropes of pop music with honed precision (check that key change in “Hints & Implications”, that saxophone in “Time Time Time”) with lyrics that strike a bit too insightful to fit into mainstream pop music. The music is slick and polished, the melodies indelible, the delivery confident. It gives the sense that Urbani is not struggling but is, in fact entirely in control as she takes her time.




34. Leikeli47 - Wash & Set
Download: “$”, “Ho”, “Attitude”

If there’s one thing Leikeli47 is overflowing with, it’s swagger. Wash & Set is an album of distinct hip hop tracks, which the young, masked emcee stomps all over as if the beats are her complete territory. At times heartfelt, boastful and coy, Leikeli47 infuses every line of her considerable flow with personality and confidence, using the stylistic variation of her beats and arrangements as if they’re a jungle gym she’s just happy to play on.




33. Margo Price - All American Made
Download: “All American Made”, “Weakness”, “Learning to Lose (feat. Willie Nelson)”

Ever a reliable storyteller in country music, Margo Price appears to be from a dying breed as her genre increasingly merges with pop and even hip hop. By contrast, Price is a traditionalist - but that doesn’t make her stagnant so much as practiced. Her ability to set a scene is sharper than ever, and as she turns her focus to politics she is able to (pardon the pun) mine a hard-lived life’s worth of wisdom from her empathy for the world. Price’s voice is as pure as crystal, adding an almost unsettlingly angelic quality to her treatises on rural living and social injustice (“Pay Gap” is outright woke country). The songs rarely rock (“Weakness” goes the hardest of the bunch), but the variation among the ballads make this a collection that is both indebted to its roots and a creative step forward.




32. Destroyer - ken
Download: “Sky’s Grey”, “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood”, “Saw You at the Hospital”

Let’s get this out of the way first: Dan Bejar of Destroyer sounds like he’s a wizard archivist in a Don Bluth movie. His voice is weird. The rest of his music is not much more mainstream. It exists in a bizarre universe parallel to indie rock, as indebted to post-rock music as it is to jazz, filled with guitars but also keyboards tracing the patterns video game makers use for their Egyptian levels. The lyrics have just enough cogent, familiar honesty in them to make up for the absolute gibberish of the others, as if he’s a friend who just had a few too many drinks and said a little too much. The production weaves different sounds through the arrangements like threads of a tapestry, allowing each element to shine. It’s a smart, well-made, weird little album, one that’s deeply enjoyable to listen to but relatively inscrutable to absorb. Definitely worth a listen.




31. Miguel - War & Leisure
Download: “Told You So”, “Caramelo Duro”, “Banana Clip”

Miguel’s fourth full-length record hits like a bullet of completely irresistible charisma and funk. It’s polished like a diamond, each squelching synth and ad-lib immaculate and honed for maximum appeal. Miguel, however, doesn’t lose his personality under the slick production and songwriting. Instead, this R&B/funk record comes across as a series of small but successful experiments, ones that see Miguel dabbling in different genres and with new subject matters without sacrificing his professionalism or personal stamp.

Plus it has a song about cheating on your boo while aliens invade Los Angeles, which is worth the price of admission.




30. Taylor Swift - reputation
Download: “Getaway Car”, “Delicate”, “New Year’s Day”

Taylor Swift’s album was surrounded by a confused media campaign that sought to rehabilitate her from the feud with Kanye West (in which she was portrayed as the antagonist despite Kanye releasing a music video with a naked wax doll of her) with a combination of self-awareness and complete obliviousness. It’s a shame that the rollout overshadowed the record, which is one of the most adventurous and interesting of Swift’s career without losing the hooks that made her famous. Blending hip hop, EDM and electronic influences with her knack for packing lyrical details with entire kingdoms and comfort around a memorable melody, Swift has put together several glittering pop songs, ranging from intimate and breathy tracks like “Delicate” and “Dress” to throbbing jams like “…Ready for It?”. The best track on the record is “Getaway Car”, a song that finally made me “get” the Taylor Swift magic - just shy of four minutes of condensed, clever, emotive storytelling with an exhilarating chorus and sparkling crescendo.




29. Peter Silberman - Impermanence
Download: “New York”, “Gone Beyond”

Recorded after Silberman had to temporarily quit music and leave his home of New York City, Impermanence is an EP about that moment when you retreat from the world to recuperate. The sounds are quiet and intimate, melodies slight and gentle. Silberman reintroduced music into his world by slowly crafting each song, and there is a warmth and tenderness to how he cares for every note his voice shivers over. This is an album of dust motes and morning chill, meditative and private and slow-moving, elegant in its peacefulness.




28. MUNA - About U
Download: “If U Love Me Now”, “Crying on the Bathroom Floor”, “I Know a Place”

Pop music tends to exist in emotional extremes. Love is eternal and overpowering, heartache devastating. “I Will Always Love You”. “How Do I Live”. “Together Forever Always”. And yet human experience is much more deeply nuanced than what pop music tends to represent, so MUNA’s attention to those tricky details is welcome. Instead of earth-shattering love, MUNA instead focuses on the little moments preceding and after a breakup: realizing you haven’t even thought of an ex for a while; watching their new bride and imagining yourself in that dress; sabotaging a new relationship because of the baggage you have from your old one. It’s an expert tactic that makes their pop songs, propelled by synths and heavy beats and a voiced accented but not corrected with vocoder, something special and unique in a world of binaries.




27. Jimmy Urine - The Secret Cinematic Sounds of Jimmy Urine
Download: “Fighting with the Melody”, “Patty Hearst”, “I Want to Be Human”

As a lifelong fan of Mindless Self Indulgence, I feel almost obligated to rank Jimmy Urine’s solo project on this list. The good news is that it would have merited a ranking on its own strength, even if it were devoid of the context of Urine’s original band. Influenced mostly by the video games and John Carpenter soundtracks that first turned Urine on to music, The Secret Cinematic Sounds is aptly titled; despite lacking any sorts of acoustic guitars of breathy vocals that usually characterize diaristic records, the album is one of the most unusually intimate of the year. The love letter to 8-bit and the 80’s feels labored over out of love, at once a faithful homage to those original sounds and a distinct and personalized spin. It’s a peek into the brain of one of modern punk’s most creative musicians and a fascinating one at that.




26. Amber Mark - 3:33am
Download: “Monsoon”, “Can You Hear Me?”

You’d think an album about losing a parent to terminal illness would be a dour, painful listen, but Amber Mark’s debut EP is deeply enjoyable. Propelled by handclaps, jaunty piano and pulsing electronics, 3:33am feels alive and filled with movement and spark. With a soulful voice and gut-wrenchingly specific lyrics, Mark balances between verve and catharsis, plumbing deep emotions without exploiting personal tragedy. The album is structured around the stages of grief, shining brightest with standout ballad “Monsoon”, and emphasizes that grieving isn’t about merely existing, but about feeling. There is no other record this year that turns a meditation on loss into such a vibrant and joyous celebration of life.




25. John Moreland - Big Bad Luv
Download: “Sallisaw Blue”, “Slow Down Easy”, “No Glory in Regret”

John Moreland’s a gem tucked away into the seams where country and folk are stitched together. His music is decidedly earth-bound, with a hint of a Tom Waits-like creak in a voice, Neko Case’s penchant for surprising off-harmonies, and the mud-spattered ephemera of the road and of small towns and of gas stations and worry lines around the corners of a mother’s mouth. Big Bad Luv occasionally bursts into hurtling folk-rock (such as in opener “Sallisaw Blue”), but it’s in the ballads that Moreland truly shines; “Slow Down Easy” sounds like a spiritual standard that could have weathered the 20th century, and when he sings “God bless our busted hearts” on the highlight of the album “No Glory in Regret”, it sounds like the truest prayer ever put to record.




24. Jidenna - The Chief
Download: “Bambi”, “Long Live the Chief”, “A Bull’s Tale”

Through his debut album The Chief, Jidenna spends a good deal of time resting on charm. This isn’t a bad thing; such a winning, contagious energy gives him broad latitude to explore different genres with abandon. Jidenna skips through various permutations of rap and pop, finding homes for both political commentary, boasting and straightforward sexy club songs. Somehow, the heartfelt personal tale of his father’s funeral sits side by side with a dance floor banger and one of the year’s goofiest lines, “the lady ain’t a tramp just because she bounce it up and down like a trampoline”. The freedom to explore allows Jidenna to craft a multifaceted approach to his music and a debut album full of endless possibilities for the future.




23. Alvvays - Antisocialites
Download: “Dreams Tonite”, “Lollipop (Ode to Jim)”, “Not My Baby”

There’s a certain magic that comes from a band so successfully playing to their skillsets to marry two genres and create a distinct, fantastic new hybrid. Shoegaze and indie-pop have always existed side-by-side, with various artists weaving between the two, but few bands have managed to build upon the strengths of the two to keep all the highlights and leave all the downsides behind. Alvvays find the atmosphere of shoegaze but the energy and joyousness of pop, with sparkling reverb-heavy guitars and a lead vocal as sweet as cold root beer. Though marketed as a “rock” band, songs like “Lollipop”, “Not My Baby” and “Plimsoll Punks” are catchier than nearly anything on top 40 radio right now, and the record stands as a cohesive whole and a powerful artistic statement from a young band that’s hit its stride.




22. Father John Misty - Pure Comedy
Download: “Total Entertainment Forever”, “Pure Comedy”, “When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay”

At this point, you either like Father John Misty (née Josh Tillman) or you can’t stand him. A winking ironic hipster stereotype, Tillman is everything people hate about millennials. If you’re not on board - and I don’t blame you - his navel gazing self-absorption is nothing but male entitlement with critical acclaim. If you are on board, it’s because there’s some magical spark of recognition in what you hear.

Tillman has an opinion on everything from the narcissism of loving someone with the same interests (“A Bigger Paper Bag”) to the pie-in-the sky fantasies of anarchist libertarians (“Birdie”), and he’s set out to make sure you hear it. The thing is, he dresses it up in some excellent melodies that excuse the extensive track run-times, with a charismatic folk-rock vocal and just enough ornamentation to be tasteful. And even better, sometimes his observations are not only cogent, but exactly what’s on your mind. I spent a lot of time listening to this record while alone with my thoughts, mulling over everything from religion to my addiction to my smartphone. Sometimes it’s good to just let Misty’s melody pick up my voice and to feel, speeding down the highway, just a little understood.




21. Nadine Shah - Holiday Destination
Download: “Evil”, “Yes Men”, “Out the Way”

On her third LP, Nadine Shah is out for blood. She doesn’t worry about playing nice as she uses her powerful, liquid voice to argue for the rights of refugees and immigrants, to castigate politicians for their hypocrisy and bigots for their ignorance. Propelled forward by a gothic band, churning with basslines and guitars, Shah despairs for 2016 with deft craftsmanship and looks towards an uncertain future. She is a voice for the underrepresented, and at the moment that’s what we need.




20. Kelela - Take Me Apart
Download: “LMK”, “Better”, “Blue Light”

After four years of teasing, Kelela’s debut album meets and exceeds expectations. Carving a whole new corner of modern R&B, Kelela find new surfaces and textures to spread her buttery voice over, and sumptuous emotional material to work with. Take Me Apart, for the most part, avoids easy relationships; Kelela is more interested, instead, in the frustrations of relationships disintegrating. There are no explosive ends here, but builds that seem to tower into the ether, escaping the sci-fi soundscapes of her arrangements as if they were spaceships exiting the atmosphere. Kelela cleverly straddles the line between inventive and practiced, delivering an R&B album that is slick, futuristic and filled with warm, pumping blood.




19. Tomberlin - At Weddings
Download: “You Are Here”, “February”, “Untitled 2”

When Tomberlin put out her debut album, there seemed to be no effort at making a splash. The album, barely longer than an EP, was instead slipped onto Bandcamp with little fanfare, like a gift that a guest leaves under the guise of forgetting and never asking about later. And that sort of shy gentleness is reflected in the music, which details quiet, soft emotions with quiet, soft sounds. Reverb-laden guitars tiptoe across the arrangements, and Tomberlin’s voice rarely rises above a sigh. Recalling atmospheric greats like Grouper alongside the bloodletting singer-songwriting of types like Ryan Adams, she creates not a world but a warm little room all her own, filled with pillows and books and fingerprints and ghosts. The songs are delicate and hushed, intimate and nuanced. The final track, “February”, is allowed to linger past the expected end of the song, leaving an impression like watching a slow sunrise. It’s a remarkably restrained work, and Tomberlin’s early mastery of mood-setting will surely serve her well in her future endeavors.




18. Alex Lahey - I Love You Like a Brother
Download: “I Love You Like a Brother”, “Let’s Call It a Day”, “There’s No Money”

There are some artists who imbue everything they do with joy; new Australian artist Alex Lahey is one of them. Whether she’s singing about being broke or an ill-advised hookup, Lahey has an infectious, undeniable energy over rock-solid songwriting. Lahey’s got an ear for choruses that lets her transcend your typical garage rock fare. Her melodies are slick and hooky enough for massive pop anthems, but just enough tooth-gritting and crunch to hit like a shot of whiskey. This doesn’t feel like a debut album; it’s far too self-assured. But it has something fresh and ebullient about it, and I hope that Lahey doesn’t lose an ounce of that sparkle as her career unfolds.




17. Moses Sumney - Aromanticism
Download: “Quarrel”, “Make Out in My Car”, “Lonely World”

The first time I heard Moses Sumney’s debut album, courtesy of VinylMePlease’s Record of the Month program, I could tell from the first track that I was listening to something singular. There are influences on Sumney’s work, but they seem to be streaks upon a canvas, contributing to the whole but working only as an element. There’s a hint of Ella Fitzgerald, of Sufjan Stevens, of serpentwithfeet, of Sigur Rós, but the delicate arrangements and vocal maelstroms are all Sumney’s.

Despite the full arrangements, the fussiness of Sumney’s compositions give his work a sense of space and airiness, allowing his voice to take center stage. His voice, even at its most powerful, sounds like a confidence between conspirators; there’s something endlessly whispering and intimate about his delivery. He uses that as a key to open a door to boundless discovery. Sumney’s songs swirl into vortexes of emotions and power, picking up speed and elements from sparse beginnings into towering typhoons. Through it, he interrogates power and separation on a cerebral and emotional level. He is unable and unwilling to leave behind the fact of his blackness, which colors all his relationships, both with people within his community and outside it. Aromanticism is a vital and breathtaking exploration through these fraught dynamics, set to spellbinding soul-pop-alt music.




16. Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me
Download: “Real Death”, “Toothbrush / Trash”, “Swims”

This was a particularly difficult record to place; it’s a singular and gutting piece of work by Phil Elverum, who lost his 35 year-old wife to cancer only a year after the birth of their daughter. It’s hardly music in the traditional sense; part bloodletting, part eulogy, A Crow Looked at Me is a meticulous detailing of the aftermath of death. Recorded on his deceased wife’s instruments, Elverum adds only hints of melodies over guitar strums, and whispers or mutters most of his lyrics. The focus is entirely on the scenes he paints with gutting bluntness. Poetry flecks the songs haphazardly and almost accidentally; it’s not unlike flecks of mica in a slab of granite still warm from the body heat of someone who’s recently departed.

“It’s not for making art,” Elverum mumbles of “Real Death” on the opening track, before admitting “words fail me”. He then recalls a memory for the listener from just after his wife’s death, receiving a package in the mail that she ordered behind his back before her departure: a backpack for when their daughter goes to school in a few years. Death doesn’t live in just the moment someone takes their last breath; it’s there in the toothbrushes that need to be thrown out, in the news story you’ll never be able to share, the old photographs on the fridge, sand in blankets from trips to the beach that will never be repeated

Death may not be for making art out of, but Elverum has probably put out the most singularly powerful work on the matter in music.




15. Juliana Hatfield - Pussycat
Download: “When You’re a Star”, “Sex Machine”, “You’re Breaking My Heart”

I hope someday Pussycat is a time capsule. I hope someday we look back at this furious, conflicted, slapdash record as the product of a bygone time and not as something so vital, prescient and relatable as it is today. Recorded over a month in the direct wake of Donald Trump’s election, Hatfield sought to capture fury and exorcise demons on the fourteen tracks on this blistering record.

There’s a frenetic energy to the punk-styled rock songs Hatfield uses to slash and stab at every time of predator. This is a record of someone lashing out, and both production and implementation push Hatfield into the battle zone. Hatfield’s schoolgirl-like vocals add an especially ironic bitterness to her crunching arrangements, and her rage culminates in the bile-flecked, vicious track “When You’re a Star”, a caustic profile of Bill Cosby that takes its chorus from Donald Trump’s deplorable “grab her by the pussy” comments. Hatfield takes no prisoners; “Kellyanne” sees Hatfield graphically fantasizing about setting the song’s namesake on fire, and “Rhinoceros” is a brutal supposition of what life must be like for Melania. Elsewhere, “Sunny Somewhere” and “You’re Breaking My Heart” capture the quiet moments after the election, the places where we reconciled our sense of crushing betrayal with the fact that trains still ran on time and the sun still rose on schedule.

This could be the album of the #MeToo movement. There is a wealth of pain and injustice weaponized here into not just a battle cry but a sword for victims of abuse who need something musical to cut through the chaos with.




14. The National - Sleep Well Beast
Download: “Guilty Party”, “Turtleneck”, “Carin in the Liquor Store”

The National’s seventh album comes from the depths of, oddly enough, domesticity. With most of the songs locked inside the setting of a decaying, but not dead, marriage, the album asks more questions than it answers. Alongside intimate, patient electronic and piano-based murmuring and occasional stabs of guitar, the band creates a portrait of aging love that is at once claustrophobic and comfortable, worn-in - and altogether unsettled. The “beast” of the title track is only temporarily sleeping, not slain. The refrains the band relies upon (“why can’t you find a way?”, “I’m going to keep you in love with me for a while”, “I say your name, I say I’m sorry”) are not conclusions but restless, open-ended grasping, the products of a relationship forever in progress, a testament to marriage as a lifelong work. It’s in the National’s ability to fully merge such intimate and understated tumult in both their lyrics and sound that their genius becomes clear.




13. Japanese Breakfast - Soft Sounds from Another Planet
Download: “Boyish”, “Till Death”, “Road Head”
Having exorcised some demons on Psychopomp, last year’s Japanese Breakfast album plumbing the wells of grief, Michelle Zauner began 2017 by exploring less visceral topics. Soft Sounds for Another Planet was originally intended to be a sci-fi concept record, although “Machinist” the lead single, seems to be the only vestige of that idea. Zauner seems, for the better, incapable of avoiding injecting humanity and reality into her songs.

Zauner’s songwriting, always a strong suit of hers, has a loose, dreamy quality to it. With influences of shoegaze and confessional 90’s songwriters, she infuses her garage band sound with artistic flairs. And there’s something so endearing about Michelle Zauner’s gawky squeal of a voice, a kind of sincerity that couldn’t be conveyed with a more traditionally skilled singer. Zauner sounds like someone who would have reason to be too shy to sing overcoming her anxieties in the sincere name of being heard. Melodies that would be a little too clean with a more polished vocal take on a girl-next-door earnestness - check the truly beautiful chorus of “Boyish” and imagine it with a pop vocal and see how much impact it would lose.

The melodies are just too sweet and warm and intimate for sci-fi epics. They’re meant for domestic adventures. Perhaps someday Zauner will take us to another planet, but right now I’m fine with just out of this world.



12. Katie Ellen - Cowgirl Blues

Download: “TV Dreams”, “Proposal”, “Houses Into Homes”

Katie Ellen (real name Anika Pyle, formerly of departed-too-soon punk band Chumped) has a debut that sets out to walk a tightrope: how does one create an album that tackles a fear of commitment and convinces the listener both of the love that someone feels for another as deeply as they convince the listener of why they shouldn’t marry them? The answer, Katie Ellen seems to say, is to honor brutal honesty. She pulls no punches in describing the comfort she finds in imagining herself crawling into a picture frame, where no one will demand decisions from her; doesn’t shy away from the fact that sex has become predictable; shades in the right nuances to make it clear that it’s not that she doesn’t love her boyfriend, but fears foreclosing possibilities of whatever else may be out there for her. The lyrics seem carved from bone with their earnestness, the emotions they convey conflicted and delicate.

And it sounds lovely, too. With her girlish keen, Katie Ellen sounds exactly the part of an uncertain young woman afraid of subsuming her identity, or worse, of having every part of herself she’s running away from affirmed. The melodies weave over guitars that give the whole record a sort of homemade feeling to underscore Katie Ellen’s sincerity. It’s indie singer-songwriter fare, but Katie Ellen hasn’t lost her punk leanings; a kind of fervent energy underscores even the most delicate ballads on the record. Both music and lyrics capture anxiety and passion in equal turn, which shows that Katie Ellen has truly met the challenge she set for herself with her concept.




11. Aimee Mann - Mental Illness
Download: “Good for Me”, “Rollercoasters”, “Patient Zero”

When the title of Aimee Mann’s new album was unveiled, most fans greeted it with the sort of knowing nod that characterizes Mann’s body of work since Bachelor No. 2 in 2000. It’s fitting for an artist who’s spent the last several albums illustrating deadpan portraits of alcoholics and lost causes and fuckups and dead-ends and depressives to finally just put it up front that she’s singing about mental illness. What fans didn’t yet know is that, with only minimal changes to her musical aesthetic, she was about to reach one of the most consistent and lovely works in her oeuvre.

Mental Illness is an album about difficult topics made easy to listen to. Mann’s arrangements, inspired more by Bacharach and Barry Manilow than rock and roll, are poised and refined. String arrangements sigh, piano chords daintily guide the listener along the top-line, bass notes strike in perfect quarter notes. The gently-strummed “Rollercoasters” Aimee described as “when John Denver’s too hard rock for you” to the show I saw in San Francisco. Her voice, that wry mellow coo, is never harsh and never raised into a wail or shout. There’s a kind of warmth to her music, the kind that makes sarcasm feel like an inside joke instead of a cutting remark.

As always, her lyrics are impeccable (opener “Goose Snow Cone” aside). Her couplets have an economical bent that convey whole scenarios in tidy rhymes (“It happened so fast and then it happens forever” she sings of regret; elsewhere “hip hip hooray, hocus pocus, with some magic you can fly through the air / but when you’re the guy pulling focus, there are people who will wish you weren’t there”). They’re pointed and at times painful, a little too accurate at describing bad situations, but Mann has never been concerned with brooding. There’s a plainspokenness to them that makes them feel knowing and even gentle with the subjects of her art. These aren’t songs for catharsis but immaculate character studies that become moving by their incredible precision.

It’s not that Mental Illness is much different than her other highly-consistent records; it’s more guitar-based than the synthpop-influenced Charmer, a little more pristine than the twang-flecked $#@%ing Smilers. It’s just that everything’s clicked into focus to highlight her strengths. As such, Mental Illness is an achievement, an example of what happens when an A-grade artist once again hits A+.



10. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.
Download: “HUMBLE.”, “XXX (feat. U2)”, “LOVE (feat Zacari)”

This album made most of the top ten lists of the year - and with good reason. While sufficiently more pop-oriented than Lamar’s earlier releases, DAMN. loses none of the artistic edge or ferocity that defined To Pimp a Butterfly and Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City’s success. Some of the ephemera around the album’s mystique was a bit excessive (if an album is meant to be played backwards, just press the tracks in reverse order), but the developed creation is a lush, passionate, intellectually-challenging and heartfelt depiction of Kendrick’s personal life, and the political, emotional and social forces that affect it.

Though it has pop trappings, the music makes no bones about being a rap record, with Kendrick flexing and casually dispatching haters, critics and rivals throughout most of the songs with nimble lyrical violence. The beats are innovative and hard, the tracks kept together mostly through rhythm rather than melody. And as a record, the songs reveal both poignancy and ugliness through masterful craftsmanship and expert album arrangement. “LOVE.” is aqueous and gentle, adding a sense of deep tenderness and context that makes the following song “XXX” all the more potent as Kendrick vows to take revenge on anyone who would dare hurt his loved ones in a blistering rattle. “LUST” creeps and gasps, while “HUMBLE.”, the big single, stomps along with an aggressive piano line and Kendrick’s trademark high-pitched flow.

Over the record, Kendrick exposes a variety of things on his mind with the sort of intensity that shows they’re life or death: financial insecurity, child abuse, violence, media critique, hypocrisy, ego, intimacy, religion. It’s a credit to his songwriting that his takes on each of these subjects is fresh and important.

There’s not much I can say about this record that hasn’t been said better by other bloggers and critics who can put the importance of this record into better context than I can. It’s worth checking out. It’s worth owning. It’s worth listening to, front to back or back to front, time and time again.




9. Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps
Download: “Smoke Signals”, “You Missed My Heart”, “Motion Sickness”

It would be a mistake to assume that because Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter who trades mostly in acoustic guitar observations that she is simple and treacly. Stranger in the Alps, her debut album, is anything but. Bridgers has a keen eye for humanizing, specific details for the people and places she’s painting (“one of your eyes is always half-shut, something happened when you were a kid”, she sings about an old friend, then “I want to live at the Holiday Inn where somebody else makes the bed”). Bridgers’ voice wisps along the melodies, which are memorable and gentle and carry the lyrics, rather than compete with them. Each song, mostly only lightly-decorated with tasteful strings or washes of guitar, feels completely lived-in, as if they are ever-evolving drafts trying to pin down figures in motion. These are songs about people in liminal states: friendships that have dissolved into memories, romances lingering between infatuation and commitment, old flames that are burning down into ambivalence, sibling rivalries dulled with adulthood. It’s fitting that the sketches Bridgers draws are nuanced and considered, and she has a rare talent pulling out the conflicting feelings that contribute to her “emotional motion sickness”. There are no tracks that contain easy answers or cartoon people; “Funeral”, the saddest track of the bunch and a gutting ode to self-flagellation, still makes a pit stop to value the comfort of friends, and “Smoke Signals” manages to briefly revive the embers of an intense bond that has since been locked away in the corridor of the past, both in its loving memory for detail and its warm, foggy instrumentation.

The album closes with a cover of Mark Kozelek’s “You Missed My Heart”, a murder ballad that Bridgers injects shocking new life into with woozy harmonies and a river-like muted piano riff. It’s my pick for the best song of the year, as Bridgers animates a heartbreaking, gripping story over seven hushed, intimate minutes, before drifting away on a final meditation of the cyclical nature of violence and love. It caps off a masterful debut album.




8. Lorde - Melodrama
Download: “Supercut”, “Writer in the Dark”, “Sober”

In 2017, artists are increasingly making songs as opposed to albums, hoping too capitalize on the rise of playlists as a form of music discovery. Always one to approach pop from her own perspective rather than the dominating trends, Lorde has chosen, instead, to craft a work that is most enjoyable as an entire record than as a smattering of individual highlights. As she set the trends for the husky mumbles currently dominating female-oriented pop with “Royals”, we can only hope that Lorde’s vision bears fruit for all of pop music.

And what an album it is. Lorde imbues every song with her incredible emotional intelligence. She is at once self-aware and trapped inside herself at the self-critical, passionate and intense moment in a young person’s life where they first experience heartbreak. As on the best breakup albums (as in life), Lorde ping-pongs between feelings; she replays a greatest hits of her ended relationship in “Supercut”, drowns her fear of the oncoming collapse in alcohol and drugs on “Sober” and “Homemade Dynamite”, taunts her lover via text message in “Hard Feelings / Loveless” and indulges in vengeful fantasies of stalking in “Writer in the Dark”. Each picture is delicately and idiosyncratically painted by Lorde’s association-based lyrics. Lorde approaches her lyrics as Beyoncé or SZA do, delicately applying flair to individual words as if she were applying rosettes to a cake’s icing. The production and arranging are genius, balancing lush strings, claustrophobic intimacy, genuinely surprising musical turns and muted garnishes in a decidedly accessible context.

The hardest part of grieving a relationship, perhaps, is the understanding that healing is both inevitable and on a distant horizon. We cannot help being trapped in time, and the same set of facts that will mean very little to us ten years from now are all-consuming in the present. This trapped feeling is only intensified by youth, when one’s aware that their coping mechanisms are only half-formed and their reactions are “melodramatic” and outsized. Lorde captures herself with gentle criticism and endless empathy. I feel almost cheated that this record didn’t exist during my first heartbreak; I can hope that young women in the future will find solace in this reflection of their experiences now.




7. Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory
Download: “BagBak”, “745”, “Rain Come Down”

Before Big Fish Theory was out, Vince Staples released the single “BagBak”, the most anthemic anti-Trump (and anti-government) song of 2017. At a blistering pace, Staples catalogued a litany of oppressions before demanding “Tamikas and Shaniquas in that oval office” and then leaping off that into a battle cry. Much attention was paid to the line “tell the president to suck a dick”, but not to the following line: “because we on now”. Big Fish Theory, as depressive, dark and nihilistic as it is, is also a call to transmute injustice into action.

But as opposed to protest albums born of celebration and defiance, Staples’ work is the product of a seething sort of bitterness and righteous, stone-cold fury. His words are like blades, piercing and violent. Beats feel as if they’re shrapnel, the sharp and deadly products of destruction. Staples’ flow is tight, maximizing every opportunity for hard-hitting lyrics. A line like “they don’t never want to see the black man eat / nails in a black man's hands and feet / put 'em on a cross or you put 'em on a chain” is rife with meaning and entendre, invoking multiple elements of the long thread of subjugation of black people in the United States with masterful economy. The fact that Vincent serves lyrics that tight and honed with every verse is a gift from the most talented and focused rapper of our generation. Staples pushes the limits of what political rap should sound like under Trump.




6. Julien Baker - Turn Out the Lights
Download: “Turn Out the Lights”, “Sour Breath”, “Claws in Your Back”

When Julien Baker released Sprained Ankle in 2015, it was the first album I’d heard in a long time where I wondered if she would live to make a second. Baker’s songwriting and delivery was so sparse, so raw, so vulnerable and sincere that it could have only come from the bottom of a pit. That same evocative talent and honesty is present on Turn Out the Lights, but this time I have no doubts that Baker will be gracing us with her artistry for many years to come.

Musically, she flexes her muscles; while she plays most of the instruments herself, she’s brought in a handful of collaborators to add violins and background vocals to a handful of tracks, and she trusts her piano figures more than she did on her first record, instead of retreating to the familiarity of guitars. It’s a successful evolution. These songs have wound their way into my bones, the perfect overlay of vocals and music, as if each word were just the natural conclusion of the melodic line.

While part of Sprained Ankle’s appeal was Baker’s youth and vulnerability, Turn Out the Lights abandons the naivety for wisdom. The result of Baker’s successful struggles to maintain sobriety, Turn Out the Lights is an excavation of the emotions that brought her to rock bottom and the music of, hand-over-hand, starting to climb the ladder back out.

One could criticize Baker for mulling over the same ground for an entire album, but that’s besides the point - overcoming addiction, wrestling with faith, and treating mental illness are all uneven, inconsistent struggles. Sometimes people backslide. Sometimes they plateau. Sometimes they make marked improvements only for the floor to fall out under them. Baker imbues each song with both despair and hope, and retreading the same material is not from unoriginality but from a methodical, diligent effort to leave no stone unturned, no detail unshaded, no glimmer of light uncaptured.

Many of the songs on this record are addressed directly to God, in a fumbling, heartfelt, complex attempt to make out one’s place in the world. It’s a big question to shrink down into the details of laminated name tags at in-patient clinics or folding metal chairs, and yet Baker does so masterfully. She paints conflict and peace both. “All my prayers are just apologies”, she breaks out during “Televangelist”, before questioning if her adherence to religion is just another way to self-flagellate. Grace is “humiliating” when one is squandering the life they’ve been given. But later, on “Everything That Helps Me Sleep” she steps back, noting that the “perforated dark” of a starry night is a reminder of absolute love, or at least of natural beauty.

The final ten seconds, in which Baker addresses God with the hopeful “I think I could love the sickness You made” and then retroactively determines, of an overdose or a suicide attempt, “I take it all back, I change my mind, I wanted to stay!”, is the most earned moment in music in 2016. Her struggles are not over; the well is deep, and the water is cold. But the only way out is to start climbing, and as Baker does so, hopefully she will inspire hundreds more to make that same ascent.




5. SZA - Ctrl
Download: “Prom”, “Drew Barrymore”, “Normal Girl”
One of the reasons people love music where performers are being unabashedly themselves is that in authenticity, there’s the potential to see yourself reflected - and upon seeing yourself reflected, your emotions become clarified, articulated. That’s what SZA does on this record; she casts a sharp eye on the experience of being in your mid-twenties and not yet settled down, not yet paired up, not yet fixed into the life you plan on leading. It’s an arresting, touching and at times uncomfortably intimate affair.

SZA doesn’t go for dramatics to prod at the tender parts of our hearts; instead she is just herself, using slinky R&B melodies and chill vibes as canvases upon which she draws insecurities, self-criticism, poignant emotion and attachment. Her voice is deeply expressive, and yet bears great potential for ambiguity; there’s longing in tracks like “The Weekend” and “Love Galore”, but also a certain sultry satisfaction. Her lyrics similarly toe the line between canny self-awareness and blatant soul-baring.

By being vulnerable and brutally self-critical, she connects to and gives voice to those awkward ages where you’re trying to push forward to the next stage of life without all the coping mechanisms you need to excel there. How many twenty-somethings have had reckless, birth control-less sex in the heat of the moment? Have settled for a dead-end relationship for just a little while because it guaranteed being touched? Have felt that the trail of broken romances behind them was just proof that they were somehow fundamentally unlovable?

SZA’s album brings comfort because it’s like looking into a mirror, even if we aren’t banging our boyfriend’s buddies or being the side-chick to a philanderer. This is the perfect record to sit with as you drink a glass of wine and wonder how your life got to the point it’s at and where it’ll go from here. SZA’s probably out there wondering the same thing.




4. Perfume Genius - No Shape
Download: “Just Like Love”, “Otherside”, “Slip Away”

In a year where political strife and natural disasters seemed to infect our very air, Perfume Genius found happiness. In a committed relationship and becoming accustomed to sobriety, Mike Hadreas took to the studio for the follow-up to his rightfully acclaimed 2014 album Too Bright. And he created No Shape, a reckoning not with trauma but with healing for the first time in his career. Like his stated influence Tori Amos, Hadreas travels from the hushed piano balladry of his origins into a place entirely more experimental and challenging.

At times, No Shape is uncomfortable. This is visceral body music. Without using any of these sounds in particular, this album evokes the sense of bones breaking, guts twisting, spines cracking, sweat dripping, mouths salivating, hearts pumping blood. The production finds the hollow spaces in the instruments and allows them to cavernously echo; each sound is fine-tuned to rattle the cells. The arrangements sound like half-recollected dreams of how genres should be; “Run Me Through” has a Stevie Wonder-like shuffle by way of Portishead, and “Just Like Love”, with its riff of violins and hiccuping synthesizer, sounds like it should be soundtracking a scene in a French cafe in a David Lynch film. The album tends to be categorized as “rock”, but it only has the barest similarity with even other alternative works.

Still, there are moments of transcendent beauty. Heaven itself breaks open during the chorus of “Otherside” in a handful of glorious seconds that feel stolen from another plane of existence. A tack piano slams through the last few seconds of “Slip Away” like a shout of defiance. The dizzying viola figure in “Choir” is wild and gorgeous. And like the concept behind the record - or the Junji Ito-esque lump of distorted flesh in the “Die 4 U” video being wooed by Hadreas’ love - the grotesquery and beauty exist side-by-side in undeniable codependence.

The queer experience can be simplified into an expression of pride and abandon for some, or it can be pulled, maimed and disfigured, from the maw of trauma. Perfume Genius has always celebrated the latter, leaning into community and defiance, but never before has he seemed to have come to complete terms with it. Now it’s as if he’s come to not only forgive but love the experiences that brought him to the present. The final song, “Alan”, sung by his boyfriend of over a decade, is a testament to the fact that without the homosexuality that punished them in their youth, their tender love would never have existed. It’s the deepest sort of celebration.

Perhaps, in 2017, the greatest act of resistance comes from being at peace.




3. Zola Jesus - Okovi
Download: “Exhumed”, “Remains”, “Witness”

Zola Jesus has always traded in simplicity. Her melodies drape themselves over spartan syllables, lines of vocals drawn out like landscapes. She’s straddled the line between emptiness and carving out space for herself, which at times she’s had difficulty filling. It’s as she turns to her emotions around death and loss - her real emotions, not the posturing of a counterculture witch-house sorceress - that she finally finds the heart to flood those empty spaces with color.

This is by far her best album, and one of the best of the year. The production is immaculate and synergistic. Zola’s voice commands like the horns of war; the beats and swells of strings buoy her to towering heights. Her trademark howl is the anchor that keeps her wild emotions from drifting off to sea. She stands at the center of her record with unparalleled conviction.

The songs are more crafted and powerful than ever. After stumbling and losing her way trying to ape top 40 conventions on Taiga, she returns with hard-earned wisdom to finally accomplish the task of marrying personality and appeal with the heart-racing, glittering “Remains”, a song that sounds programmed by a neural network in terms of how it takes the elements of pop and flips them upside down. At first glance of the simple lyrics “Remains” could be a breakup anthem, but when paired to music it’s clear that Zola may have created one of the best songs out there about mortality and legacy. “Exhumed” is a Orphean rescue effort into the bowels of hell; “Half Life” is so lush it seems to almost wallow in its beauty. “Witness”, with its sighing strings and stripped arrangement, is the prettiest moment on the record, but also the most earnest, and reveals a tenderness Zola didn’t seem capable of years ago.

Having shed her disguise as the oracle of death, Zola Jesus now stands as a goddess of life, dripping with humanity, and in this form she truly comes into her own.




2. Charli XCX - Pop2
Download: “Backseat (feat. Carly Rae Jepsen)”, “Lucky”, “I Got It (feat. Brooke Candy, CupcaKke and Pabllo Vittar)”

In a brighter timeline, 2017 was the year Charli XCX ruled the charts. The inescapable melody of “Boys” rang out from every car over the summer, and “ILY2” soundtracked the year’s most acclaimed indie romcom. The sound of the year wasn’t trap drums and milquetoast white men strumming acoustic guitars or aping The White Stripes, but the candy-coated, shimmering wonderland of ADHD-riddled PC music posse cuts. It would be a better world than the one we have now.

This year, despite her third record getting stuck in label purgatory, Charli XCX was extremely prolific, dropping two boundary-bending mixtapes that would be the envy of other pop singers and a separate song and music video that became an instant cult classic. Number 1 Angel, the first mixtape, contains some of the highest watermarks of her career, but it’s in Pop2 that Charli XCX is at her most realized: a creative, aggressive, brainy party brat with a glittering diamond emotional core. A dizzying playground of synthesizers, guest features and hooks, Pop2 is the best case pop music can make as a genre that straddles avant garde and mass appeal. Charli deploys her guest stars with razor precision, stepping out of the way long enough to give them places to shine (special credit to CupcaKke, who giddily demolishes her verse), while her own punky, bad-girl vocals draw her humanity out even over all the electrical clanking and whirring.

On Pop2, Charli smears Vocoder and pitch-shifting across her melodies like paint on a post-modern art piece; “Lucky” is a despondent robot powering down while reckoning with the end of a relationship, while “Tears” and “Delicious” are zig-zagging journeys through choruses and sounds. They’re decidedly “pop” music, but also nothing anyone would expect to hear on pop radio. Elsewhere, “I’m On It” sounds like a dystopian girl-group anthem on cocaine, and “Unlock It” pairs the mixtape’s sweetest melody with almost hyperactive imagery of a romantic date. “Backseat”, the collaboration with “queen of everything” Carly Rae Jepsen, is worth all the hype - a mammoth sparkling ballad that builds to a dramatic drop as Charli and Carly chirp “all alone, all alone” at each other racing away from a decaying relationship.

The entire affair sounds like someone beating up a Dance Dance Revolution machine with a baseball bat, in the best possible way. It’s messy and crashing and filled with pink pastel cotton candy, and absolutely pushes the edge of what pop music should sound like.




1. Björk - Utopia
Download: “Tabula Rasa”, “Saint”, “Sue Me”

Björk does not create albums; Björk creates whole ecosystems, alien planets populated by flora and fauna carried inside her counterintuitive melodies, detail-oriented production, and creative manner of incorporating natural sounds and movements. The world Björk created in Utopia is tangible and lush and interdependent and organic, the many competing elements anchored in the heart that Björk puts into every song.

There is no doubt that an exercise like Utopia could be academic and sterile; it is, after all, a lengthy, meandering record influenced by modern classical composers and with more attention to recurring musical motifs and countermelodies than to creating vessels for bloodletting. But Björk is her own secret weapon. Her singular magnetism - a combination of hard-won wisdom, a knack for simple truths, an expressive and idiosyncratic voice, and a penchant for endless, restless exploration - is the core around which disparate elements align into harmony.

While the idea of an album about being in love sounds one-dimensional, Björk peels away layers of the most compelling emotion in the human experience as if cutting away at a diamond to reveal new facets. This is not just love for a lover; Björk takes the time to recontextualize love into a force that motivates her journey through the world and our understanding of our past, a spiritual and inescapable thread that determines her relationships with her daughter, her lover, her ex-husband, her country, her body, her planet. “Tabula Rasa”, a battered benediction for her daughter, is one of the record’s finest moments, capturing how love and fear and regret braid around each other; “Sue Me” is a raucous and defiant vindication on behalf of womanhood; “Losss” honors the heart’s ability to not just recover from trauma but incorporate it as wisdom.

The centerpiece is the marvelous, sprawling ode to her origins “Body Memory”, but the true gems are the triad at the end: the playful, spry instrumental terrarium “Paradisia”, the pure and delicate “Future Forever”, and the paean to a goddess of music who attends the funerals of strangers and comes to deathbeds and divorces, “Saint”, which elevates at the end to a blossom of the most lovely, simple melody on the record. “Music loves too,” Björk sighs, acknowledging for one song the incredible miracle of the medium that allows her to share her soul with us.

No one else could make this record. This is the sound of the future, and proves that no other artist puts as much of themselves into music as Björk does, nor has such a natural and seemingly effortless ability to execute their vision.