Though our culture of fast distraction seems hell-bent on crushing the album beneath its endless scroll, the form remains a pillar of art, something to aspire to. In music, when you want to make a statement, you make an album. Still. And right now, those statements are perhaps more varied and fluid than ever before. In the following list, you will find full-length declarations of self-worth sung through the languages of R&B and goth, political rebellion both rapped and screamed, musical memoirs backed by beats and guitars, and multidimensional dreams of escapism by way of pulsing synthesizers. Here are the 50 best albums of 2017.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Yaeji: EP/EP2
Yaeji contains multitudes. On her first two EPs, the New York City-based producer flirts with hip-hop cadences and pounding club house beats. She recites hypnotizing lyrics about the most mundane observations, switching effortlessly between English and Korean to take advantage of the melodic structures of each language. And she raps in a combination of whisper and spoken word, positioning her voice as both intimate and distant. With each new song, Yaeji sounds more comfortable embracing the binaries that exist within her identity and her music. On EP2, she reveals the full spectrum of her interiority, seamlessly moving between uneasiness and confidence. At 24, she seems to understand how opposites aren’t necessarily contrary, and that they’re often interconnected. –Michelle Kim
Listen: Yaeji, “raingurl”
Open Mike Eagle: Brick Body Kids Still Daydream
Open Mike Eagle has spent this decade distinguishing himself as one of the greatest underground rappers in Los Angeles. On his fifth solo record, the tightly wound Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, Eagle reverts back to a childhood in Chicago spent partly in the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, at one time the largest block of public housing projects in the country. Over 12 songs, Eagle explores our relationship to physical spaces and traces the slow, accretive drip of American racism as it flows through city councils and federal housing policy. He’s an inimitable writer: On “Brick Body Complex,” one building is personified as a battered man. There are tantalizing moments of fresh air, but the album largely captures the claustrophobic sound of a society as it crumbles. –Paul A. Thompson
Listen: Open Mike Eagle, “Brick Body Complex”
(Sandy) Alex G: Rocket
On Rocket, the singer-songwriter formerly known as Alex G employs lovingly recorded violin and piano on tender, country-leaning jaunts. He also cranks up the distortion and bass for the Death Grips-adjacent screamathon “Brick” and cloaks his voice in a misty Auto-Tune effect on the wistful “Sportstar.” Those two tracks, which rank among the strangest and best he has recorded, arrive side-by-side smack in the middle of the album, breaking up its gentler moments with a blast of surrealism. Alex G’s songs have always had more swimming beneath the surface than they show on first play, but Rocket sees him broadening his formal range to new, bizarre, beautiful peaks. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: (Sandy) Alex G, “Sportstar”
Kehlani: SweetSexySavage
Brimming with bangers, ballads, and boss-bitch aphorisms, Kehlani’s sublime studio debut uses pop-kissed R&B to sing the story of a relationship. But the Oakland native isn’t given to desperate, tear-soggy pleas. Instead, the 22-year-old offers odes filled with wisdom, self-confidence, hard-won vulnerability, and lyrics that dissect the psychology of her romantic affairs. The all-class effort simply sounds amazing, too: From jazzy two-stepper “Keep On” to the glossy “Distraction” and delightfully giddy “Get Like,” the album’s sleek brightness is heightened by the contrast of Kehlani’s husky vocals. With all due respect to the album’s title, the singer sums herself up best on the catchy “CRZY”: “If I gotta be a bitch, I’ma be a bad one.” Clearly. –Rebecca Haithcoat
Listen: Kehlani, “CRZY”
Laurel Halo: Dust
Dust is Laurel Halo’s loosest offering yet, orbiting out from its oddball-pop epicenters to the point of near-chaos. The producer’s music has always been exploratory, knitting together synth-pop, Detroit techno, and jazz with a singular, continuous voice, and that process feels particularly gleeful here. Her vocals and lyrics are, just like the instrumentals into which they’re woven, another site of play: The voicings of Halo and her collaborators—notably Klein and Lafawndah on the standout single “Jelly”—recall as much the experiments of Meredith Monk as they do a more tightly laced pop single. Meanwhile, her stylized lyrics lean into nouveau-Beatnik territory as she asks questions like, “Did this ever happen/Do you ever happen?” over stretched-out dub. But even if Halo dips unapologetically into weirder and more challenging zones than she has before, Dust is also, on some level, a genuinely fun album—one that bears the stamp of its creator’s limitless curiosity. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Laurel Halo, “Do U Ever Happen”
Girlpool: Powerplant
With a few simple changes—cranking the volume, singing a little louder, adding drums—Girlpool made the leap from a promising indie rock band to an essential one with their second album, Powerplant. Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad retain all the appeal of their signature saw-toothed vocal harmonies and surrealist nursery rhymes here, but they deploy these strengths for more ambitious endeavors. The writing is haunting, funny, and intimate—see: “I faked global warming just to get close to you”—and each song on Powerplant builds up its own fully fleshed out world of subtle gestures, heartbreaks, and emotional thrills. When tasked with confronting how big and scary the world gets the second you grow up, Girlpool did more than just meet the dangers head-on. They conquered them. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Girlpool, “It Gets More Blue”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid
Whereas many of her contemporaries use analog synth technology to pursue bleep-bloop abstraction, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith takes her weapon of choice—a relatively rare, ergonomically beautiful 1970s system named the Buchla Music Easel—and weaves it into a rich, colorful tapestry of sound.
The Kid, her fourth full-length album, is a concept piece of sorts, its four sides tracing the passage of a human from childhood to old age. “In the World” and “I Am Curious, I Care” are whorling fractals of sound that find Smith pondering themes of innocence, experience, and life’s interconnectedness, her voice multi-tracked into an otherworldly chorus. At its best, The Kid feels like a profound embrace of life, even when, by the end, it’s staring death square in the face. –Louis Pattison
Listen: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, “I Am Curious, I Care”
Lil B: Black Ken
Lil B has built a career on quantity, and his albums are usually defined by cherry-picked highlights. Black Ken breaks this cycle. It is still abundant, stuffed with an hour and 39 minutes of the Based God rapping and singing over self-produced electro-funk beats, but the album is also a defining statement throughout. It feels difficult to nail down a specific hit, partially because he expertly cycles through so many modes. Lil B is sometimes the undeniable party starter, distilling club bangers into easily shouted catchphrases about going dumb and turning up. He’s also quietly introspective, reflecting on his unique position in the culture as an internet icon who is famous but not rich. Elsewhere he’s aggressive, offering the ultimate kiss-off anthem with “Bad Mf” and airing out his beef with Soulja Boy on “The Real Is Back.” This thing is the total package—even the skits are funny as hell. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Lil B, “The Real Is Back”
Vagabon: Infinite Worlds
On Infinite Worlds, Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko creates her own brand of indie rock out of journeys both literal and figurative. Many of the New York-based artist’s tracks mix French—which she spoke in her home country of Cameroon—with English. This amalgamation of language is familiar to those who are torn between two worlds, struggling to remember old practices in a new culture. From “Fear & Force,” which finds her hiding in small spaces, to the interlude “Mal à L’aise,” which gets its title from the French word for “discomfort,” Vagabon faces dark emotions head-on. The central questions of the album are about home, how we attempt—and sometimes fail—to find it in new places and in the people we love. Vagabon doesn’t find a definitive answer to these questions, but her process of searching is a joy to observe. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Vagabon, “Fear & Force”
Zola Jesus: Okovi
Zola Jesus’ Nika Danilova personifies a certain kind of anxious dread in her music, one steeped in a goth-pop lineage that resonates through catharsis. Okovi, her fifth full-length, is a return to the singer’s more avant roots after the pop feint of 2014’s Taiga. Its operatic balance of dark ambient iciness, wavy post-industrial bass, and blood-drawing string sections is immediately gripping, barreling over any attempts at casual half-listening. But when those production touches underpin boldly straightforward reckonings with mortality, depression, and powerlessness, there’s no concealing the intent. Through her defiant voice, Danilova is searching for a place in the world before the afterlife claims her. –Nate Patrin
Listen: Zola Jesus, “Exhumed”
The xx: I See You
The xx named their third album after a line from the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror”: “Please put down your hands/’Cause I see you.” Throughout the record, the London trio take that edict seriously, recasting their precocious bedroom indie pop into something newly ascendant, rhythmic, and exhilarating. I See You addresses the band’s personal demons: alcoholism, the deaths of loved ones, disconnection from one another. It sounds like a lot to tackle for a group known for their great command of subtlety, but these topics led to a creative revitalization—not only in their forthright lyrics, but also in a more upbeat sonic palette that includes bold uses of familiar samples and dynamic brass. By filtering their typical introspection through real-life tragedies, the xx lean into a more refined version of themselves, maturing in real time. –Eric Torres
Listen: The xx, “I Dare You”
Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up
Fleet Foxes’ first album in six years is about existing within limitations and weathering deep self-doubt. It contains leader Robin Pecknold’s best lyrical work yet, rife with imagery of roaring oceans and rising fires as well as existential conundrums. Over folk instrumentals that expand and crash in multi-part suites, Pecknold’s ego fights with insecurity; on “I Should See Memphis,” he concocts visions of grandeur while lamenting better things just out of sight. At the song’s end, Pecknold offers a beatific and disjointed howl that seems to contain the many ideas he has still to share while offering a peek up over the walls he’s built around himself. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Fleet Foxes, “I Should See Memphis”
Drake: More Life
Following the paranoid, sonically muddy VIEWS, Drake’s latest album—correction, “playlist”—More Life feels like a cool breeze. There’s less gloomy lyrical introspection, more musical range, and the added emphasis on dancehall, grime, and Afrobeats marks a dramatic, Black Atlantic sea change. Though much has been made of More Life’s reliance on a heavyweight features list over the development of Drake’s lyrical persona, the balance between the rapper’s ambivalent tone and the blissful, eclectic music selection works uncannily well. So when Drake shrugs, “Passionate from miles away/Passive with the things you say,” over the haunting whale song synths of “Passionfruit,” the result is a note-perfect crescendo of danceable distance. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton
Listen: Drake, “Teenage Fever”
Julie Byrne: Not Even Happiness
Julie Byrne speaks with an unusual kind of precision, the kind that comes with a high degree of self-knowledge. Both qualities are hallmarks of the singer-songwriter’s music—heard in her intricately fingerpicked guitar and her quietly observant lyrics, which zoom in on the tension between aloneness and love, between ego and selflessness, with a compassionate heart and a poet’s eye for detail. It’s in that friction that she finds the spark that sets her songs alive, on cold nights under lonely prairie skies, thinking of a presence many miles away. As she sings in “Morning Dove,” “I went out walking in the wood/And the light cast long from the moon/And life is short as a breath half-taken/I could not wait to tell you truth.” In song after song, her hushed, almost heartbreakingly beautiful third album, Not Even Happiness, captures precisely that sense of emotional questing and wide-eyed revelation. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Julie Byrne, “Morning Dove”
Syd: Fin
The title of Syd’s solo debut evokes silent, slippery creatures moving just beneath dark water, and the Odd Future vet glides through her icy body music in the same way. Her confident singing and rapping connects languid jams like “Smile More” and twinkling, post-Aaliyah come-ons like “Body”—it’s amazing how she can make you sweat with a single, softly spoken invitation. Songs like “Know” and “All About Me” suggest Syd as a C-suite executive or a high-powered attorney—someone in total command, who takes the edge off with good weed and better sex. (When she’s fascinated by a woman who’s just as independent on “Got Her Own,” the results are magnetic.) She’d seem totally detached if not for “Insecurities,” a track about finding the confidence to leave a relationship that’s dragged her down for too long. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable closer for an album defined by seductive, effortless cool. Even sharks can suffer broken hearts. –Jamieson Cox
Listen: Syd, “Got Her Own”
Playboi Carti: Playboi Carti
No rapper ad-libs quite like Playboi Carti. The fidgety Atlanta upstart rarely sustains a thought for more than a few bars, but whenever rhymes elude him, he just kicks around random words and consonants. Sometimes he fills entire verses with the word “what.” On a more traditional album, such tics might scan as filler or transparent stall tactics, but Carti commits to them so fully on his debut project that they become an attraction unto themselves. There’s no precedent for a rapper hitting such heights while rapping so little.
Carti’s haphazard rhyming may be an acquired taste, but his ear for production is undeniable. His beatmakers, including breakout star Pi’erre Bourne, drape him with instrumentals that are daffy yet chic, airy puffs of neon and pastel that contort in hypnotizing ways, like marshmallows in a microwave. They’d flatter just about anybody, and when A$AP Rocky shows up to spit one of the album’s few writerly verses on “New Choppa,” he sounds like a bona fide heavyweight. But really, Carti proves again and again that such effort isn’t necessary. Music this posh speaks for itself. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: Playboi Carti, “New Choppa” [ft. A$AP Rocky]
Mount Kimbie: Love What Survives
Mount Kimbie has always been a difficult act to pin down. Though they once inspired the awkward “post-dubstep” tag, on Love What Survives, they’ve abandoned electronic music almost entirely. And yet, in doing so, they’ve arrived at some of the most vital music of their career. The King Krule collaboration “Blue Train Lines” is as propulsive a post-punk song as anyone’s written this decade, crafted from buzzing synth drones, sculpted feedback, and twitchy drums. “Marilyn,” which features Micachu, builds a pop melody from the overlap between kalimba notes that ricochet through the mix. Longtime collaborator James Blake returns for two showstopping tracks, both of which manage to push the trio’s shared aesthetic into new territory: “We Go Home Together” aims for blemishes-and-all blue-eyed soul, more willfully rough-hewn than anything either artist has previously released. In its deep grooves, loose energy, and rich textures, Love What Survives suggests that if nothing else, Mount Kimbie might be defined by the messy friction of collaboration itself. –Mehan Jayasuriya
Listen: Mount Kimbie, “Blue Train Lines” [ft. King Krule]
33.
Kelly Lee Owens: Kelly Lee Owens
It would not be fair, exactly, to say that “Arthur” is an instrumental song. The highlight from Kelly Lee Owens’ debut album may not contain words, but it’s filled with expressive coos: There’s mourning in them, celebration, pensiveness. The track is a tribute to Arthur Russell, that New York guru of diverse and idiosyncratic electronic music, and Owens proves herself a worthy follower, having come out of the rock world as a bassist before adopting a digital approach. When the Welsh musician occasionally adopts lyrics, they are clipped, and through repetition, they take on a mantric quality (“the colors, the beauty, the motion,” she says flatly through “CBM”). Trading on its sad/beautiful dynamic, Kelly Lee Owens reveals itself as a record that can appeal to both listeners already obsessive about their electronic music and ones newer to the digital world who seek a meaningful toehold. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Kelly Lee Owens, “Arthur”
Lana Del Rey: Lust for Life
Lana Del Rey’s music has always been an exploration of her own fandom: intimate thoughts on life and love commingling with instantly identifiable language from her record collection. This aspect of her persona explodes on her sweeping fourth album, Lust for Life, which is peppered with classic rock quotes and musings from the crowd at Coachella. Musically, she dabbles in everything from trip-hop chill to future psych-rock lushness to robotic doo-wop balladry. For the first time on any of her albums, she even lends verses to other artists, from A$AP Rocky to Stevie Nicks; you can practically see her swaying to the beat, listening in reverence as her friends and heroes step to the mic.
Still, Lust for Life revolves around one person. In “Heroin,” the most traditional-sounding Lana Del Rey song here, she delights in subverting the sad-girl mythos that she has, by now, completely outgrown. “Writing in blood on my walls and shit,” she sings with a sigh over a characteristically dramatic crescendo, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sick of it.” Over the course of Lust for Life, she adjusts to a swiftly changing world, where one can sense, at any given moment, hope or despair or ennui. Whatever comes next, you can bet she’s got the perfect song cued up. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Lana Del Rey, “Heroin”
Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference EP
On Harmony of Difference, Kamasi Washington further solidifies his place as his generation’s foremost purveyor of spiritual jazz. The subdued 30-minute EP is a far cry from the massive three-hour journey that was 2015’s The Epic, filled with subtle nuances, like the way the sax echoes and fades on “Desire,” or the ’70s-inspired Brazilian soul of “Integrity.” And it all comes together on the 13-minute “Truth,” the EP’s volcanic concluding track, which fuses melodic and harmonic elements from the record’s previous songs into one massive composition. The release may not be as ambitious as his previous work, but it still resounds with Washington’s commitment to spreading peace, love, and unity through his music. –Marcus J. Moore
Listen: Kamasi Washington, “Truth”
Slowdive: Slowdive
How to make a successful comeback album: 1) have a relatively small original catalog so fans still hunger for new material; 2) make sure key members are involved; 3) pay close attention to what you used to do best; 4) write great songs. Slowdive’s first album in more than two decades checks all these boxes, capturing the precise sound of the band at its shoegazing peak, but it also adds an extra half-turn of beauty. These are among the most captivating melodies frontman Neil Halstead has written, and the album’s lush guitar tone is gorgeous as ever, while infused with a new delicacy. Where their 1993 classic Souvlaki could be dense and heavy, still speaking the language of rock, Slowdive is pure weightless dream-pop bliss—every track shimmers and sparkles and floats like a soap bubble in the sunlight. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Slowdive, “Sugar for the Pill”
Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels 3
Less than 10 minutes into Run the Jewels 3, a massive, synthesized crowd is heard chanting the group’s initials: “R-T-J! R-T-J!” It feels worlds apart from their 2013 debut, on which Killer Mike and El-P reveled in the low stakes they’d allowed themselves. Where the first Run the Jewels album was a controlled exercise, and the second applied their new style to heavier and more overtly political themes, Run the Jewels 3 is clean and competent, a professional turn that’s still irreverent where it matters. El says a prayer for Vietnam vets then promises to style on you endlessly; Mike rattles the cages of complacent American capitalists. The beats are stuffed with tangents and competing textures, as Mike continues to assert himself as one of rap’s most powerful vocalists. RTJ3 is informed by (and, at points, seems tailored to) the festival circuit that’s treated the duo so well, down to a show-stopping set piece of a verse from Danny Brown. It’s frantic music for frantic times, but El and Mike have it down to a science. –Paul A. Thompson
Listen: Run the Jewels, “Don’t Get Captured”
Ibeyi: Ash
When the Yoruba people—who originated in present-day Nigeria and Benin—arrived in Cuba via the middle passage, they were enslaved, cut off from their ancestors, and denied the freedom of religion. But their culture survived, with songs and spiritual practices passed down through generations. Those traditions eventually made it to Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz, the French-Cuban twin sisters who perform as Ibeyi.
To hear Ibeyi’s second LP, Ash—minimalistic arrangements of modern jazz, soul, and hip-hop elegantly woven with West African rhythms—is to receive energy carrying the weight of history. Naomi’s gorgeous rasp complements Lisa-Kaindé’s tender sweetness, and the pair’s sonic palette strikes a balance between their Yoruba heritage and the new music they discover every day. With Auto-Tuned spirituals, Spanish raps, and jazzy sax solos, Ash defies most attempts at categorization. Its very existence is proof of a culture that refused to be suppressed, and its beauty a testament to the pain that made it possible. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Listen: Ibeyi, “Me Voy” [ft. Mala Rodríguez]
Future: HNDRXX
For all his eccentricities, Future has spent the last few years releasing the same mixtape over and over. Following a spectacular run of slurry, despondent rap in 2015, his productivity began to feel tiring instead of exciting. This year, he released two full-length, bona fide albums a week apart: The first one, FUTURE, was indeed more of the same. But then came HNDRXX, which was not.
The album recasts Future as a romantic pop icon—instead of icy and detached, it is warm and romantic. He sings about watching his lover make breakfast with the ocean behind her and sharing a hot yoga class, about texting back-and-forth and picking her son up from his father. Through all of this, of course, he’s still overmedicated, a self-proclaimed “bad guy” sounding surprised to feel so tender. But as he luxuriates in the album’s buoyant beats, Future finally sounds like he’s escaping depression by losing himself in love again. –Jay Balfour
Listen: Future, “Fresh Air”
Jay Som: Everybody Works
Everybody Works, from 23-year-old Melina Duterte, can restore your faith in the future of indie rock. Part of that comes from its restless sound, an interplay between the chilly whispers of shoegaze and warm R&B-funk, packaged with lyrics that consider the benefits of patience in moments of pessimism. The album also feels like a thoroughly modern invention in its design: budget bedroom pop, with every part played and produced by Duterte, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it based on the record’s robust sound. Like a homemade outfit mistaken for a designer look, the LP is a testament to the vast ingenuity that can be tapped into when resources are tight. Everybody does work, but some people just work harder. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Jay Som, “Baybee”
Priests: Nothing Feels Natural
The long-awaited debut from the D.C. punk quartet Priests recognizes that the outrages in our headlines and Twitter feeds are perennial rather than isolated occurrences—that injustice and violence are literally tenets of our national anthem. Written well before the 2016 election, Nothing Feels Natural concerns itself with the individual’s perseverance in the face of endless turmoil. The album is resoundingly urgent because it survives and thrives. Whether referencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, condemning music industry leeches, or marveling at an asshole ex, Priests burst with infectious and topical energy. It is so easy to be swallowed by the sheer horror of existence, but Nothing Feels Natural provides a beacon of hope. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Priests, “No Big Bang”
Thundercat: Drunk
Thundercat’s third solo album is an inward-looking suite of songs informed largely by the virtuosic bassist’s own eccentric sensibilities. The result includes goofy-ass lyrics, depressing balladry, and guest spots by artists as disparate as Kendrick Lamar and Kenny Loggins. Undulating basslines and ultra-crisp drum loops serve as fitting foundations for his anxious ponderings on ideas both big and small. In “Friend Zone,” Thundercat muses over a funk groove about whether a woman spurned him because of his adoration of video games; “Walk on By” grapples with death; and the penultimate track, the Pharrell collaboration “The Turn Down,” takes on the impending doom of man-made climate change. Spread out across 23 tracks, Drunk kicks off in high gear, frenetic and playful, before eventually coming to resemble the bleariness of its creator’s late-night state. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Thundercat, “Walk on By” [ft. Kendrick Lamar]
Big Thief: Capacity
There is a song on Big Thief’s Capacity that sounds like it was recorded on frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s phone, late at night and under a blanket, whispered over her acoustic guitar. Like most everything on the album, “Coma” is an oblique mixture of rapture and dread, a locked box to which only Lenker has the key. But halfway through, it’s as though the covers are thrown off: The full band’s vivid, pulsing folk-rock spills across the stereo field, bright as the full moon.
This kind of metamorphosis goes to the heart of Big Thief’s gorgeous, moving, at times painful second album, in which images of trauma and redemption dance in the darkness under the watchful eye of owls and magpies. Lenker’s gift for empathy is astonishing: In her stories, she slips seamlessly across the lines dividing man and woman, mother and daughter, even victim and attacker. But despite a pervasive sorrow and an occasionally suffocating sense of menace, her band’s capacity for catharsis proves nearly limitless. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Big Thief, “Coma”
St. Vincent: Masseduction
Early discussions around Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent were driven by questions regarding its potential mass-culture appeal. The singer-songwriter was now a subject of tabloid interest. She was working with Jack Antonoff, a producer famous for his hits with Lorde and Taylor Swift. Was Clark due for a zeitgeist moment? In reality, the project wasn’t so dramatic a pivot. It was—shocker—another sequence of richly compelling songs, given greater heft thanks to Clark’s feverish performances.
There’s the guitar squall at the end of the title track, which reasserts her noise-rock bona fides even as the song’s beat tugs her toward the dancefloor; countrified shades of regret color “Happy Birthday, Johnny;” and on “Los Ageless,” a layer of distortion on the vocal track can’t mask the exposed nerve underneath—including an “Oh my Lord” that sounds as though it had traveled from the blues shouts of Howlin’ Wolf and PJ Harvey before landing in Clark’s throat. On Masseduction, Clark doesn’t capitulate to pop as much as she makes pop adapt to her own core idiosyncrasies. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: St. Vincent, “Los Ageless”
Arca: Arca
Alejandro Ghersi’s voice had trickled into his work as Arca before, though he’d never really positioned himself as a singer. But on the producer’s third, self-titled LP, the howl beneath the veil comes into full bloom, rubbing its raw, bloodied edges against his labyrinthian MIDI arrangements and piercing beat work. The singing feeds the frenzy of his compositions: On “Desafío,” for a moment, the lacerations across his soundscape contort into falsetto-streaked, sugar-dusted pop. That he sounds lost among his own architecture only reiterates the album’s lyrical themes of alienation, displacement, love-as-violence and violence-as-love, sex drives and death drives, and the weird, helpless longing that lurks in the shadows of our minds. Arca is Ghersi’s first full-length work since he began collaborating with master producer and vocalist Björk, and her influence floods its veins. Here, he applies the technical dexterity he’s honed to sternum-rattling siren songs, threading his voice in and out of the haunted machines he calls home. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Arca, “Reverie”
Björk: Utopia
You stare at the screen and wonder if anything you felt that day was real: He told you he cared for you, but how can you invest in something tossed off an iPhone keyboard? Björk, ever a seer of what is new and modern, is here to tell you that the emotions you experience through the glass of your hardware are as true as anything. She has characterized Utopia as her “Tinder album” because it’s an exploration of something we all do more and more of: get to know one another online.
Here, the medium is the message. With co-producer Arca, she creates an electronic pastoral of flutes and bird noises that feels as lush as an actual meadow. On the bucolic climax “Future Forever,” she imagines a digitized paradise of love—a productive exercise even if it’s just a hopeful fantasy. The album’s wisdom is clear: If you’re lucky enough to get a text message that makes you blush, be sure to count that blessing and, like Björk has, sing its praises. –Alex Frank
Listen: Björk, “Future Forever”
Migos: Culture
When Donald Glover proclaimed Migos’ No. 1 smash “Bad and Boujee” to be “the best song ever” at this year’s Golden Globes, the statement seemed sensible—which in itself is kind of crazy. It was a testament to what the North Atlanta trio have perfected across the last six years: a woozy trap style that they stretch in strange and unique ways on their second album, Culture.
Even though 18 different producers contributed to the record, it still manages to achieve a level of cohesion. This is largely thanks to Migos’ confidence in their own sound—triplet flows, symphonic hi-hat work—which has become infinitely influential. And the album’s light-handed use of features proves that Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff aren’t merely relying on their peers to get the job done. While many may try to duplicate their style, no one knows the formula quite like these three. –Kristin Corry
Listen: Migos, “T-Shirt”
Julien Baker: Turn Out the Lights
At one point in the video for “Appointments,” a highlight off Julien Baker’s sophomore album, the Memphis singer-songwriter finally leaves her empty house—and is suddenly followed by a barrage of undulating dancers. It’s an apt metaphor for Turn Out the Lights, which operates under the belief that there is beauty—even transcendence—in showing people the darkest, most conflicted parts of yourself in the stark light of the day.
Alongside elegant strings and woodwinds, Baker’s clean guitar loops and plodding piano lines form a nest for lyrics about depression and substance abuse struggles. She often maintains the optimism of someone successful in her recovery efforts, though never without the memory of how it got so bad. But there is something else at play here, something that defines Baker’s choice to live, and that is her faith. Turn Out the Lights is not a Christian record, but it does have Baker asking a higher power why she feels broken as she wrestles to find the answers internally. She doesn’t come up empty-handed. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Julien Baker, “Appointments”
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Rest
Grief is the only truly universal experience, yet entire albums about death are still rare enough to shock. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s fifth and most personal record, Rest, reckons with the lost family members that have defined her life. In 2013, the singer’s sister died. The tragedy prompted Gainsbourg to start writing her own songs, something she had previously avoided due to her late father Serge’s giant legacy. Her lyrics are deft and minimalist, whether she’s singing about lying with her father’s dead body and the sound of nails entering his coffin, or about her sister’s struggles with alcohol. She finds an elegant match in production by SebastiAn and Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, whose hypnotic atmospheres and horror movie synths scintillate like snowfall at dusk. As Gainsbourg longs to commune with her lost spirits, Rest suggests that grief’s best possible outcome can be a kind of beautiful purgatory. –Laura Snapes
Listen: Charlotte Gainsbourg, “Deadly Valentine”
Perfume Genius: No Shape
Mike Hadreas once wore bondage gear and lipstick on “Letterman” to sing about scandalizing families, and it’s always seemed as though the courage to execute that transgression came from having outlived so many harrowing ordeals: addiction, homophobic bullying, depression, Crohn’s disease. That past haunted his first three albums as Perfume Genius. On the fourth, No Shape, he celebrates the love and sobriety he now enjoys without denying any residual melancholy.
Opener “Otherside” begins with the kind of delicate balladry that defined Hadreas’ early work. Then, suddenly, the song explodes into a cloud of chimes and sighs—a glitter cannon at a piano recital. Emotionally, it’s Dorothy stepping into a Technicolor world that’s more cheerful than her black-and-white home, but also scarier. This tangle of pretty contradictions defines the new Perfume Genius: quiet and loud, introspective and flamboyant, sad and happy. More spangly bursts of sound punctuate “Slip Away,” which could soundtrack lovers fleeing an angry mob; “Wreath” is similarly propulsive, although this time it’s death pursuing Hadreas. Love, worry, hard-won wisdom, and plaintive strings spill over from the big production numbers into the lullabies. Hadreas leaves us in neither Oz nor sepia-toned Kansas, but his own bright heart. –Judy Berman
Listen: Perfume Genius, “Slip Away”
Sampha: Process
It now seems curious that London electro-soul singer Sampha made his name as a collaborator with other mononyms—Kanye, Drake, Solange—when he had such a singular, achingly personal drive at his core: the long cancer battle and eventual death of his mother, and his struggle to come to terms with it. Grief runs through his long-awaited debut, Process, like a solitary, sustained note, his luscious voice like a cry padded with cotton and shredding at the corners. The album is as effortful in discovery as the title suggests, but it edges away from neat resolutions and Hallmark platitudes. It is a record about staring into the space where someone you love once was. And it is more beautiful than the situation deserves. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Sampha, “Blood on Me”
Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me
As a subject for song lyrics and poetry, death is a perennial that stretches back to the dawn of human language. We use words to try to understand the nature of a soul, the meaning of the universe, what might happen next. Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie lost his wife to cancer when she was just 35 and their daughter was not yet two, and A Crow Looked at Me, an album written in the immediate aftermath, is heavy with death in every strummed note of its spare arrangements. But Elverum doesn’t focus so much on the Big Questions, singing instead about the mundane details, like when it’s finally time to throw away the departed’s used toothbrush. Someone’s there and then they’re gone; the world seems like it should stop, but it doesn’t. Hearing Elverum catalog his grief and confusion with tenderness and bracing honesty does a couple of things at once: It makes us feel less alone, and it reminds us to go easy on ourselves. No one actually knows how to get through the worst of it, and sometimes survival is all you can hope for. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Mount Eerie, “Real Death”
JAY-Z: 4:44
When recording, JAY-Z seemingly always wants to hear the beat as loud as possible. Some variation of “Turn the music up, turn me down” has become a common refrain across his career, to the point of parody. With these requests for volume, it feels like he’s using the booming frequencies between his ears as jet fuel to power his extravagant id. But on most of 4:44, you get the impression he wants the music low, so he can finally hear the quiet anxieties whispering inside of his head. He’s not projecting grandness; he’s allowing himself to be small. Instead of his typical dialed-up intros, one track even begins with a quaint confession of weakness: “Got a lil’ cold, so bear with me.”
Urged on by producer No I.D.’s thematically harmonious sampling of classics by the likes of Nina and Stevie, 4:44 finds the rapper introspective and apologetic—for his infidelities, for his reckless youth, and for providing a faulty blueprint for a generation brought up on his signature flash. It’s not a full-on pity party, though. The man born Shawn Carter also offers a new set of life rules marked by black ownership, legacies across generations, and personal responsibility, all while deftly avoiding the pitfalls of respectability politics—given his rampant regret, holier-than-thou isn’t really an option. Startlingly self-lacerating and honest, 4:44 is a winning admission of defeat from the only rapper who could ever knock JAY-Z off his gilded perch. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: JAY-Z, “The Story of O.J.”
LCD Soundsystem: American Dream
“You warned me about the cocaine, then dove straight in” is the LCD Soundsystem experience in a nutshell. Coming halfway through the nine-minute “How Do You Sleep?”—somehow only the second-longest song on American Dream—the lyric has it all: neuroses, memories, white lines. James Murphy is supposedly singing about his former friend and business partner Tim Goldsworthy, and their split is audible on this heavy epic. But while the song may be thematically on target, it sounds darker than before. “How Do You Sleep?” is one of a few uncharacteristically foreboding tracks from the band’s comeback record, their first since Murphy retired to write music for high-profile marketing projects and open a wine bar. American Dream also includes plenty of classic LCD: No one does rock’n’roll disco better, and on songs like “Tonite,” “Call the Police,” and “Other Voices,” we get the barnburners LCD are best known for and still capable of. But it’s the album’s more ominous moments that make it so worth the wait, and such a relief to hear. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: LCD Soundsystem, “How Do You Sleep?”
The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding
Until now, the War on Drugs leader Adam Granduciel’s greatest act of studio wizardry has been to give his music the appearance of real rock instead of what it really is: ruthlessly engineered pop fantasy. A Deeper Understanding blows his cover—with legendary industry guru Jimmy Iovine’s blessing, and new label Atlantic’s budget, Granduciel ditched his makeshift home studio to record his first blockbuster in Los Angeles and New York alongside an army of vintage synths. The record is his most expansive and escapist yet, as its pristine perpetual motion machines quarantine the listener from 2017’s politics, narratives, and trends, allowing us all to sort through our shit in peace. It’s a monolithic sound, egoless as it distills the pure artistic essence of pop music at its most inclusive. –Ian Cohen
Listen: The War on Drugs, “Pain”
Jlin: Black Origami
If Jlin’s debut album, Dark Energy, saw the Gary, Indiana, producer edge away from the basic tenets of footwork, Black Origami has her striding into her own musical world. With a clear spirit of adventure, she unleashes a globe-trotting journey through percussion, where American marching bands meet techno hi hats, tabla drums caress stuttering percussive hooks, and djembe drum rolls float over electronic bass drum thumps. They all form rhythmical tangles that unfurl like the paper-folding art of the album title. Balanced against this percussive uproar are two hugely elegant choral numbers in “Holy Child” and “Calcination,” where Jlin lets astral melody seep into her steely sonic mix. With Black Origami, Jlin not only takes a huge leap forward—she drags electronic music along in her wake too. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Jlin, “Holy Child”
Fever Ray: Plunge
Plunge, Karin Dreijer’s second album as Fever Ray, returns to a similar landscape of eerie synths and alien vocals that defined her self-titled 2009 debut. But now, the avowedly queer singer turns up the political forthrightness as she aims her focus toward fucking, loving, and finding freedom. Instead of foggy mystery, her videos are made up of S&M tea parties; instead of ominous abstraction, her lyrics are declarative and up-front. “Destroy boring,” she proclaims, traversing across blitzkrieg electronics, singalong melodies, and a tender violin dirge on her journey of discovery. Frenetic and freewheeling, Plunge revolts against dystopia by reveling despite it. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Fever Ray, “This Country”
Tyler, the Creator: Flower Boy
In years past, Tyler, the Creator didn’t give a fuck—about you or anyone else—as he snarled, stomped around, and bit into roaches. There were a few hints of emotional vulnerability, but anarchic rapper mostly masked his true self behind layers of aggression and all-caps tweets. On Flower Boy, though, he drops the bravado. Over a musical backdrop that Stevie Wonder might admire, he finally gives us a sense of the man behind the facade. He’s riddled with loneliness, wallowing in angst and self-doubt. And on “I Ain’t Got Time!,” he seemingly all but comes out when he raps, “I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” It’s a surprising revelation for the 26-year-old, whose homophobic slurs have peppered his music since Odd Future’s earliest songs, and the candor is refreshing. Perhaps Tyler really gives a fuck after all. –Marcus J. Moore
Listen: Tyler, the Creator, “I Ain’t Got Time!”
Vince Staples: Big Fish Theory
While Vince Staples’ affable, everyman charm and witty online presence has endeared him to hip-hop circles, the rapper has bigger goals in mind. On Big Fish Theory, his concise and clear-eyed second album, he continues to shift away from expectations, this time condensing sharp social commentary and personal insights into tightly knit club tracks. Staples is a committed civic observer here, unabashedly thumbing his nose at the government on “BagBak,” one of hip-hop’s first responses to the Trump presidency.
Most often, though, his favorite subject is the one in the mirror. “Big Fish” is a striking character profile, rich with detail about his pre-fame life in Long Beach, California, as well as poignant admissions about his anxieties as a marquee name. The album’s rhythms draw from from big-beat and house, but rather than signaling a departure from hip-hop, Big Fish Theory reinforces Staples’ niche within black music overall; it establishes his connection to the young black men and women who fostered the rise of electronic music decades before him, on dancefloors in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and beyond. The result well worth savoring, before he evolves to his next exciting form. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo
Listen: Vince Staples, “BagBak”
Moses Sumney: Aromanticism
Throughout the glassy, gossamer soul of Moses Sumney’s debut album, the 26-year-old finds new ways to talk about loneliness, romance at a distance, the ability to “behold and not be held.” Sumney is not fixated on an inability to love so much as an inability to belong to a love made in this broken, repressive world—the “Lonely World” that heaves and swells at the center of Aromanticism. Sumney has the voice of a saxophone with an old reed, his tone unfailingly pure in the falsetto where he spends most of the album. Not since D’Angelo, Frank Ocean, or Jeff Buckley has a songwriter debuted with such a singular gift for tip-toeing through heartbreak, though Sumney might be more vulnerable than them all. It’s R&B for castaways, a euphorically miserable ode to solitude. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Moses Sumney, “Plastic”
Lorde: Melodrama
Of all the cinematic wonders on Melodrama—Lorde dancing alone through an exposed window; pink gums smarting around a tequila-drenched lime—none is as obsessively rendered as the car crash in “Homemade Dynamite,” her breathless surrender to hedonism. “We’ll end up painted on the road/Red and chrome/All the broken glass sparkling,” she marvels. This isn’t a PSA about driving under the influence. It’s a fantasy: Wouldn’t it be simpler if this car flipped right here and we all died, and everything was absolute, all our doubts crushed between fender and asphalt?
That finality is almost preferable to what Lorde reckons with amid Melodrama’s bruised euphoria. How do you live with your regrets? How many times do you let yourself get hurt when you know every relationship eventually goes tits up? And how do you stop bitterness from tarnishing the golden parts? Most twentysomethings have to shake off a measure of youthful idealism to thrive in the real world, but Lorde is different: On Melodrama, the former teenage nihilist wrestles with how much to care. She doesn’t find the answers (because there aren’t any), but the album’s many majestic pop moments let her dabble with the sensation of sweet surrender. –Laura Snapes
Listen: Lorde, “Homemade Dynamite”
Kelela: Take Me Apart
So much forward-thinking pop and R&B succumbs to innovation fatigue, offering intricate futurescapes that nonetheless start to sound interchangeable. But Kelela remains ambitious and distinctive on her first proper album, offering unshowy yet modern production alongside emotionally complex lyrics that spare neither her partner nor herself from her high standards.
Take Me Apart is dense with carefully chosen details. “LMK” sounds like a hit from a parallel, less dysfunctional radio universe, as hooky as it is subtly wistful. She’s rarely obvious: On the Arca-produced “Turn to Dust,” the singer’s multitracked vocals are unexpected against pizzicato strings and the most overtly felt cello swoon of the past few years. The last minute of “Blue Light” begins almost a cappella, with Kelela admitting to a potential partner that “darling, my guard is down.” On a lesser song, that would be the end of it: a quiet outro for quiet feelings. But Kelela’s voice splits into a dozen parts, hooks pinging between registers. The symbolism is potent: Vulnerability is often expressed through smallness, but for Kelela, it’s a magnifying force. –Katherine St. Asaph
Listen: Kelela, “Blue Light”
King Krule: The OOZ
So much music seems happy to be merely complementary now: in the background, on a playlist, soundtracking that new TV show. But those in search of something more immersive can find a gangly, ginger, hollering hero in King Krule’s Archy Marshall. The 23-year-old Londoner doesn’t need Netflix to fill out his engrossing blue-and-black tracks, and the only playlist that could suitably house the songs from his second album is his second album, The OOZ. The record, more than any other this year, creates an entire universe unto itself.
Fittingly for 2017, that universe is a dark place, practically post-apocalyptic. Throughout, Marshall sounds like the loneliest astronaut, looking out at the ultimate emptiness, wondering what on earth went wrong. There are fits of scuffed-up punk anger, bouts of contemplation hung upon exploratory jazz chords, ambient soliloquies of the mind. “Nothing’s working with me!” he yowls at one point. But within Marshall’s world of decay, everything works to color in the crumble. Only a master of his own musical universe could make such a collapse feel so whole. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: King Krule, “Slush Puppy”
SZA: Ctrl
In the fall of 2016, it seemed like SZA’s debut studio album would never see the light of day. The rising R&B talent born Solána Rowe proclaimed that she was quitting music, a decision attributed to her battles with anxiety, a frustratingly perfectionist attitude, and, perhaps, some cloak-and-dagger label politics, too. But soon enough, SZA was writing through her personal reckoning, laying bare the kind of vulnerability most often whispered in private. She penned sincere songs about love, heartbreak, self-esteem, and the idea of control—what it means to have it and let it go.
Throughout Ctrl, SZA is startlingly open about her loneliness and need for attention, but she is no one-note, downtrodden protagonist: She jumps from exploring the sting of being passed over to empowering women to be themselves and enjoy their lives. Elsewhere, she’s fancy-free, further showing the beautiful contradictions of women, even at their most unsure. Her soulful vocals, dotted occasionally with twee inflections, are compelling and instantly recognizable as hers, paired with lush production that uses both subtle R&B samples and original, stirring instrumentation. Her work here let thousands of listeners feel seen, understood, and less alone. That’s a special type of kindness to put out into the world; it’s only fitting that some of it should come back around. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo
Listen: SZA, “Go Gina”
Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.
Kendrick Lamar is taking his pulpit to arenas now. In 2017, his deeply cerebral rap dominated pop culture as he scored his biggest hits without compromising his epic vision, while headlining festivals and out-streaming the biggest pop stars. And he did it all while posing a radical question: How does one enjoy the spoils of rap majesty and still earn entry into the kingdom of heaven?
DAMN. is as zealous and purposeful as it is broadly appealing. The record is rangy and radio-friendly, sacred and secular, full of evocative scene-setting and risk-taking. Kendrick’s more complex ideas get pared down without losing impact, flexed in his most digestible storytelling yet. Scripture becomes song on DAMN., where Deuteronomy and the curses of disobedience inform paranoid musings and philosophical debates. The fame monster has been eating away at his spirituality again, but this time he returns to the source: God.
These are the tension-filled tales of a self-professed sinner, reborn but not yet redeemed, chasing divine favor and freedom. On “HUMBLE.,” he tries to induce meekness; “LUST.” considers the monotony of materialism; and “LOVE.” longs to find beauty in a depraved world, and in others. The pressures of being a missionary and emancipator crash onto the rapper’s very human shoulders on “FEEL.”: “I feel like the whole world want me to pray for ’em/But who the fuck prayin’ for me?” When he takes the wider view to his community, his rhymes burst with urgency. “See, in a perfect world, I’ll choose faith over riches/I’ll choose work over bitches, I’ll make schools out of prison,” he raps on “PRIDE.,” where paradise can be found in self-actualization. “I’ll take all the religions and put ’em all in one service/Just to tell ’em we ain’t shit, but He’s been perfect.”
Throughout, Kendrick’s inner war rages on, as he dares to expose grim realities while questioning his place in them, and in the next world. He wonders aloud how to be a good Samaritan, a rap king, and a savior; how to savor both the pleasures of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. But Kendrick’s kingdom is here on Earth, as he takes his rightful place before the altar and on the rap throne, humbling many of his peers in the process. The hymns and prayers are for Him, but the preternatural raps are for us. –Sheldon Pearce
Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “ELEMENT.”
