50 Best Albums of 2017

What’s consistently made Open Mike Eagle a compelling voice over the past decade is the smoothness with which the wry rapper balances sarcasm and empathy. This year’s opus  Brick Body Kids Still Daydream—an LP inspired by the destruction of Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, where young Michael Eagle II regularly visited his aunt as a child—finds him honing in on that gift even further. The anthropomorphic album art plainly summarizes Open Mike’s thesis: “Urban renewal” is easier when you refuse to humanize it. Lyrics rich with detail and color, he fondly recalls absurd living conditions on “(How Could Anybody) Feel at Home” (“It smells like if you imagined you boiled a rose / And the oven is on and the coil’s exposed”) and adds a surreal verve to his malaise on “95 Radios” (“Circled on all sides by used car commercials / It’s worth it though, whole block listening / ‘Cept the kids, they so not interested”). Brick Body Kids also rides off wistful production that sounds like it’s barely fending off sepsis before finally eroding in the distorted finale “My Auntie’s Building,” where the album reaches a devastating climax. “They blew up my auntie’s building, put out her great grandchildren / Who else in America deserves to have that feeling?” Open Mike fumes, echoing millions. — BRIAN JOSEPHS

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Drake’s 2016 album Views was an overlong, dreary, monochromatic record that nonetheless gave Drake the biggest hit of his career (“One Dance”) and dominated sales and streaming charts. But it wasn’t hard to step back and wonder if Drake had become a lonely tyrant, perched upon both the rap and pop worlds from atop Toronto’s CN Tower. However, March’s More Life provided an immediate, sharp contrast. Dubbed a “playlist” (as opposed to an album or mixtape), More Life offered Drake the perfect opportunity to rely on his strengths as curator, tour guide, and director concerned with melody, atmosphere, and respect deference to his guests. He crooned on the lightly psychedelic, bossanova-inspired “Passionfruit,” repurposed a Black Coffee production on “Get it Together” that spotlighted British singer Jorja Smith, and contextualized a global view of rap and pop that found space for grime artists Giggs and Skepta, former collaborator Sampha, and rap superstars like Quavo, 2 Chainz, even Kanye. More Life interpolated Drake’s vision through the lens of Afrobeat (“Madiba Riddim”), dancehall (“Blem”) and frequent lapses into patois and regional slang, genuine affectations that reflect the global diversity of Drake’s Toronto. Rewarding as a pleasant background playlist or as an engaging work of animated pop, More Life is impeccably crafted lifestyle music from the King of Queen City. — MATTHEW RAMIREZ

Read SPIN’s review | Listen on Spotify

Scour the internet and you will find impassioned screeds calling Taylor Swift everything from “the baddest bitch alive” to “the second coming of Eva Braun.” It’s easier to say she used to be good, but now she’s bad: Reputation was Taylor’s coming out as a settler of grievances, as she dropped guitars for synths, love stories for revenge fantasies, and sparkling dresses for laser-cut bodysuits. Once, she denounced the ability of a man to be so casually cruel in the name of being honest; now, the new Taylor relished the fun of being vicious. In between the vampy boasts and denunciations of fake news were torch songs like “Call It What You Want” and “Getaway Car,” which teased that her best days as a dynamic, adult songwriter may be ahead; there was even “New Year’s Day,” for everyone who misses the old Taylor. Like many of us, she became her most interesting self when she stopped worrying about her reputation. — JEREMY GORDON

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Plenty of touring musicians write about the loneliness and isolation of life on the road. Not Japandroids, who still seem to be having fun out there, even as they hit their mid-thirties. On their third full-length, Vancouver’s good adult sons bash it out with loud, sweaty effortlessness, singing about closing down the dive bar with the same gusto as they do traveling the continent. Like the duo’s past albums, Near to the Wild Heart of Life has eight tracks, a double black-and-white portrait on the cover, and a camaraderie that overflows into its searing, anthemic choruses. You have to be a little bit grandiose to get here, which is not to say that Japandroids haven’t acknowledged the painful creep of entropy. “Age is a traitor, and bit by bit / Less lust for life, more taking shit,” Brian King and David Prowse warn on “In a Body Like a Grave,” the manifesto closer that begins as a catalog of spiritual futility. But their pessimism burns off as the song builds, and in its place is a realization: All these late nights weren’t for hedonism but for love, the kind that’s scarred and messy and still undefeated. — ANNA GACA

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

On their third studio album, Crack-Up, Seattle folk-rock favorites Fleet Foxes have wandered far from the woodland sounds of their eponymous 2008 breakthrough. Drawing thematic inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s similarly named essay—a 1936 piece in which frontman Robin Pecknold found solace during his band’s six-year hiatus—Crack-Up echoes Fitzgerald’s notions of existential rupture and duality through polyrhythmic compositions and disjointed arrangements. From its dirge-like first notes to its startling, striding guitar to the gratifying entrance of Pecknold’s familiar, ascendant cry, you can hear the tectonic shifts in asymmetrical opener “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco/ Thumbprint Scar.” Pecknold’s lyrics have become increasingly esoteric, with references to the ancient worlds of Egypt and Rome, paintings by Goya, Muhammad Ali, and the French sailor Bernard Moitessier. But no matter: The harmonic textures carry the listener through. Sweeping and turbulent, Crack-Up sometimes bends toward the grandiose, but its simultaneous embrace of cynicism and celebration, hope and hopelessness, fissure and healing, is a welcome attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. — LIZ CANTRELL

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

You’d be hard pressed to find many albums released in 2017 that were more millennial than the solo debut from Syd, who as the lead singer of the Odd Future offshoot The Internet, was among a group of artists who helped cement neo-soul as part of the millennial canon. Fin expands out Syd’s own universe with sounds beloved by urban young people everywhere: burping Timbaland bangers (“Know”); sauce-spilling minimalist sing-rap (“Nothin to Somethin”); Ciara’s zero-gravity bedroom ballads (“Body”); and that same kind of ballad screwed-down and zonked-out (“Smile More”). But my favorite is the 70 second-long faucet-drip of “Drown In It,” a paean to cunnilingus so sensual and sexy that no man could have written it. – JORDAN SARGENT

Listen on Spotify

Dominated by a mixture of lonesome, spidery arpeggiations and brutalist guitar riffs courtesy of bandleader and lead singer-songwriter Rick Maguire, A Hairshirt of Purpose encompasses all the celebrated, serrated virtuosity you’d come to expect from the Boston-reared four-piece, including lyrics about setting things on fire and the futility of all ambition. “Fingers,” for example, invokes the classic myth of Sisyphus eternally pushing the boulder up the hill. But the band’s fifth LP is surprising for an act that’s often been categorized as post-hardcore. There’s the honky-tonk Figure 8 piano that dominates “I Don’t Want to Do This” and the sickly Abbey Road-ish chords and tender melodicism of songs like “Worms” and “Dogs.” The dreary alien float of “Making Eyes” sounds like an outtake from the second side of OK Computer, and indeed, the band recorded a very persuasive cover of “The Tourist” this year. A Hairshirt of Purpose, as with previous Pile records, may not capture the more feral impressions of the live shows that have helped grow the band’s cult fanbase over the past ten years. But it offers an impressive cross-section of the truly singular things Maguire is capable of as a songwriter. — WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Read our feature | Listen on Spotify

During the press cycle for his 11th album Dark Matter, which came the same year as his scores for Cars 3 and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Chronicles, Randy Newman discussed the pitfalls of his film-scoring career, and his sometimes contentious relationship with movie directors. “People want to be able to tell you what to do, and they do,” the songwriting legend told Spin, explaining that many 21st-century filmmakers objected to film music that felt manipulative, instead preferring propulsive post-minimalism or indeterminate ambience. On Dark Matter, the music feels as entangled with the lyric drama as a film score with its scenes.

Newman is his own director, and he’s as maximal as he wants to be in conveying the humor and the stakes. The result is perhaps the most narratively complex album of his fifty-year career as a solo artist. His ambitious mini-dramas include opener “The Great Debate”—complete with a whole crew of delusional pundits, it’s basically an operetta—“Brothers,” a farcical imagined conversation between Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and “Putin,” a satirical ode to the Russian honcho that’s flanked by an insistent chorus line of “Putin Girls.” The other crucial half of a great Randy Newman album is also here: several potent tender piano ballads to balance out the high-concept, pit-orchestral bombast. “Wandering Boy” and “Lost Out Here” are full-blown tear-jerkers, sung from the perspective of deeply flawed individuals—that is, people—and they rank among the best songs he’s written in the past 30 years. — WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Read our 2017 interview | Listen on Spotify

Yes, it’s been a decade since Leslie Feist warmed our hearts with the indie-pop delight “1234,” only to make an abrupt left turn into the stark, temperamental sounds of 2011’s Metals. Her fifth solo LP, Pleasure, is a more accessible work, with blues-guitar jolts and pummeling drums and PJ Harvey phrasings—flourishes that undergird the Canadian artist’s baroque meditations on life and eros with an electric charge. “I Wish I Didn’t Miss You” is simply Feist’s voice, a few overdubbing effects, and a soul-plumbing guitar, but the song reflects the moment when you’ve run out of tears to cry, and all that’s left is your brittle, broken insides. It may be the saddest song of 2017. But then there’s the thrumming “Century,” which rattles and hums with riotous energy, proving that there is still pleasure to be found in this cruel world. — MOSI REEVES

Read our interview | Read our review |Listen on Spotify

Shoegaze never really valued eclecticism. In a scene where subtle differences could go unnoticed by an untrained ear, the most important thing was to craft a signature sound that separated your band’s style of fuzz from, well, My Bloody Valentine’s monster fuzz. But toward the end of Slowdive’s original six-year run, singer and guitarist Neil Halstead ditched guitar-driven maximalism and wrote 1995’s stripped-down, almost ambient Pygmalion—a frustrating farewell record because it revealed that, unlike so many of their contemporaries, Slowdive had become versatile enough to outlast the mid-’90s shoegaze backlash.

More than two decades later, Slowdive have long ago transcended a long-forgotten backlash. After reuniting on the festival circuit in 2014, the British band took its time constructing the self-titled album that came out in May, and their investment shows: Shoegaze squalls give way to delicate pop bits; “Sugar for the Pill” dares to approach soft-rock territory, and that vulnerability pays off in a stunning remembrance of lost love. Final track “Falling Ashes” is a long, slow, ruminative piano composition that is unprecedented for the band. Along with Twin Peaks, Moonlight’s best picture Oscar, and the electoral reckoning of Danica Roem, Slowdive’s nearly flawless second act was one of 2017’s few auspicious surprises. — JUDY BERMAN

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

The cathartic use of “fucking” in The Weather Station’s rootsy, ambling lilt “Thirty” ranks among the greatest profanities in music this year: “Gas stations I laughed in / I noticed fuck-KING everything / The light, the reflections / Different languages, your expressions,” recalls Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, breaking up the song’s silky stream of free-associative memories with a stinging vulgarity. That “fucking” comes off simultaneously bitter and awestruck, an acknowledgement that conveys the sting of remembrance. “Thirty” unfurls like a vast scroll bouncing down a long staircase, as does equally strummy companion piece “Kept It All To Myself,” both of which distill the unique appeal of Lindeman’s lyricism and arrangements that sometimes seem to be racing through time. Those songs are among the many intriguing and cryptically specific dramas, cast with just two characters (the ultimate archetypal “I” and “you”), that populate the terrifically evocative The Weather Station. — WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Listen: Spotify

On leisure, Miguel Pimentel is an Old Master: Songs like 2015’s “Coffee” evoke a well-sexed cat sunning itself on an unmade bed. War is another steez, though, and except for muddled closer “Now,” nothing on his fourth studio album suggests outright discord. Anchored to the electric guitars he strums here more often than ever, War & Leisure is more than anything a valentine to untrammeled pleasures—never sublime and often silly—to pineapple skies and hard candy, to harems and wolves, to “love in the time of North Korean missile launches.” But Miguel is surest when his objects of desire become stand-ins for music itself: He’s a singing fool who can’t stop interjecting grunts and ha-ha-has. May he never forget, for even when the songwriting gets dodgy— “Banana clip on my love ya-oooh,” he actually croons in a ridiculous number called “Banana Clip”—he can keep the house in Bel Air on a guest vocalist’s salary. — ALFRED SOTO

Read Rich Juzwiak’s profile of Miguel | Listen on Spotify

You would be forgiven for assuming that on This Old Dog, Mac Demarco, the merry prankster of indie rock, would be singing about a literal old dog. But on the title track of his fourth album, he reveals the dog to be himself: “This old dog will not forget, all we’ve had and all that’s left,” he croons, unspooling a gentle ballad about eternal devotion. It sets in motion a tender record that, if you need it to, undercuts Demarco’s image as an unserious dick joker through sweetness and sincerity. There are beautifully sad songs here that display Demarco’s growth was a songwriter and performer. One is “One More Love Song,” a golden-hued piano ballad that plays out like heartbreak rendered in slow motion, with Demarco sounding like a sage lounge singer some movie character, stumbling around in a haze, would encounter. But the best songs on This Old Dog are the ones that lean into the tension of Demarco’s public persona versus his recorded self, cloaking clear-eyed lyrics about breakups and aging in upbeat and plucky arrangements. This is most evident on two tracks about Demarco’s estranged father that bookend the LP. “My Old Man” is a bright and warm song about Demarco looking in the mirror and seeing his dad—a man whom, the song implies, gave into his vices and alienated his partner. The closer is just Demarco singing, over keyboard chords that bounce around softly like bubbles, about his dad dying. It’s called “Watching Him Fade Away,” which is exactly what this wispy, wonderful album does. — JORDAN SARGENT

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

While psychological digging is well-trod ground for the National, Sleep Well Beast finds the Ohio-born band in its most acute, and dark, moment of self-reflection. The band’s seventh studio album seems to exist in a spectral, late-night hour, in a space between dreaming and waking: there are liquid gurgles, metallic crackles, and xylophonic swoops; raindrop drumbeats punctuate “Empire Line”; synths flutter like beating wings on “I’ll Still Destroy You.”

Still, the band hasn’t completely abandoned their signature balladic set pieces. The wintry “Born to Beg” is an operatic exhale and Matt Berninger’s baritone is as murmured as ever, except for the paranoid wail released on the feverish psych-rock jam “Turtleneck.” A chilly melancholia hovers over any National album—the quintet wears gloom like a tattered shroud—but Sleep Well Beast follows that darkness more directly than ever before, leading the listener into nightmare while comforting with one small, but not insignificant, truth: We are not alone. — LIZ CANTRELL

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Playboi Carti’s debut full-length mixtape arrived in April, as refreshing as a light spring shower and as joyously received as the last day of school. The 22-year-old was initially saddled with the “mumble rap” tag, but his presence on the mic isn’t shrugging or disinterested in the form. Rather, it’s acrobatic, as the native Atlantan slides, skates, and breezes over 15 tracks, complete with incessant ad-libs that turn entire songs into sprints. The repetitiveness of his rapping doesn’t nag; instead, it elevates the hooks (“Woke up to n***** sounding like me” from “w​okeuplikethis*”; “This is not pop / This some rock, aye” from “Half & Half”; “You on some other shit / I be on other shit” from “Other Shit”) to mesmerizing effect, operating on the same pleasure centers of the brain that made snap music buoyantly transcendent. This would all just be mindless fun were it not for the ambitious, diverse production: Brooklyn’s Harry Fraud brings trippy cloud rap to Carti; Bricksquad co-founder Southside drags Carti through murky but banging Atlanta muck; and Carti’s go-to producer Pi’erre Bourne lends his gift for sticky melodies and his an ear for trunk-rattling bass to “Magnolia,” which finds Pi’erre cribbing from bounce music to produce a sensational rap anthem. Playboi Carti is effortless fun, an instant party steered by a shape-shifting, charismatic host. — MATTHEW RAMIREZ

Listen on Spotify

Colin Stetson and Greg Fox are both voraciously experimental musicians, and both had a big year. Stetson released All This I Do for Glory, the latest in a string of inventive albums for solo saxophone, and Fox released The Gradual Progression, a collection of instrumentals led by his inimitable polyrhythmic drumming. Both men thrive on collaboration, however, and their greatest work of 2017 happened when they came together for the virtuosic self-titled debut of Ex Eye, an ad hoc ensemble also featuring guitarist Toby Summerfield and synth player Shahzad Ismaily. Stetson and Fox have long been individually interested in the power of repetition and subtly shifting rhythms to bring listeners toward something like nirvana—proclivities that put them in the company of both mid-century American minimalist composers, bong-ripping prog rockers, and metalheads. Ex Eye splits the difference, with monolithic riffs and grooves that draw equally from Dopesmoker and Einstein on the Beach while Stetson’s percolating sax work stands in for a howling lead singer. “Xenolith; the Anvil” sets the tone with a flurry of snare drum hits. “Anaitis Hymnal; the Arkose Disk” follows soon after, patiently crescendoing toward oblivion for nearly 12 minutes. The closest antecedent is Fox’s work in Liturgy, but with none of the dogma or ego that made that band so polarizing. — ANDY CUSH

Read The 25 Best Metal Songs of 2017 | Listen on Spotify

Ty Dolla $ign was one of the year’s most craven hook singers for hire. He interpolated “Thong Song” for Ludcaris and Tamia’s “So Into You” for Kid Ink, and showed up to try and shepherd an Ashanti comeback. But his own Beach House 3 is the latest in a string of solo records that feels highly curated and idiosyncratic, its songs forming a constellation around trends instead of giving in totally to their gravitational pull. The single “Ex” features another obvious interpolation; this time it’s 112’s “Only You,” but here its welded to a springy funk production that presents the song as an imagined DJ Quik remix of a Bad Boy classic. “Don’t Judge Me,” another single, features Future and Swae Lee, two of contemporary rap’s most ubiquitous collaborators. But instead of leaning on those big names, Ty one-ups their aesthetic, writing a somber drug addiction anthem with more relatable pathos than anything Future released this year, in the process drawing out a spaced-out but sage verse from Swae that best captures his brand of stoned soothsaying. Held together with lush Skrillex co-produced interludes, Beach House 3 is an immersive album where experiments like the reggae-pop of “So Am I” and the shuddering Bieber bite “Side Effects” bleed seamlessly into a sort of liquid, permeable R&B, best exemplified by “Message in a Bottle,” which sounds like something that might swim in D’Angelo’s head during a lucid dream. It concludes with an outro called “Nate Howard Intro,” fitting for an album that begs you to get lost inside it. – JORDAN SARGENT

Listen on Spotify

This is the album Jay-Z should have made back in 2006, when the world anticipated his return from “retirement” like he was goddamn King Arthur. Instead, the hip-hop mogul issued a bunch of records, some better than others (2007’s American Gangster deserves a reappraisal), but all which added more to his bottom line than his artistic legacy. More than a decade after his fake retirement ended, 4:44 may be Shawn Carter’s attempt to redefine the meaning of grown-man rap: He doesn’t chase hits like an pepper-bearded sad sack in a throwback jersey, but tries to reckon with fatherhood, extramarital affairs, his family and neighborhood’s honor, and the state of blackness. You know, adult stuff. It’s not as messy and angry as Beyonce’s Lemonade, his wife’s arguably superior meditation on similar themes. Then again, even amidst No I.D.’s stripped-down soul loops and a tone of self-conscious unburdening, Jay-Z remains an artist firmly in control of his inner emotions, even as he surprises us by slowly unveiling them.  — MOSI REEVES

Read our review | Listen on Tidal

On his fifth album as Actress, Darren Jordan Cunningham threw out the template for anything that could be considered “dubstep” for something textural, emotive, and free-flowing. His production once came with associations of the murky bass of Zomby or skittering 2-step of Burial, but ADZ (pronounced “Azid”) emerged fully-formed with the lurching kick and reeling modular elements of Europe’s favorite big-room techno acts. Tracks like “X22RME” have extended moments made for the Berlin club circuit, while others—like “FALLING RIZLAS” and “FAURE IN CHROME”—cut out the drums completely to focus on color and tone. Beguiling listeners and evading assumptions at every turn, the LP questions dance music’s very essence in formalist “genre” to build something so heavy and emotive it’s unclear just what the proper response should be. ADZ proves once again that the experimental side of Actress makes the most impact. — ROB ARCAND

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

On her third album Glasshouse, English pop-singer extraordinaire Jessie Ware tested the strength of her imprimatur as a singer and stylist, and made her first true-blue pop album. The LP is full of genre pivots, from seething future pop-R&B to gospel waltz to bossa nova to campfire folk co-written by Ed Sheeran. Unlike on her 2012 breakthrough Devotion, Ware doesn’t just sustain a potent mood over 12 songs, she bends a bunch of very different but related ideas, turned in by a variety of producers and co-writers, to her own will. Her voice, a mood in itself, is even more alluring than ever; she’s navigating even trickier rhythmic passages without any apparent discomfort, and selling all the proper emotional emphases. Most of the songs sound like the musical equivalent of staring wistfully off a foggy pier somewhere. (Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile lends Ware some Scottish fog with his guest turn on “Last of the True Believers.”) On Glasshouse, Ware fully settles into being something more than the Dusty Springfield of quiet-storm pop-R&B, though that’s a pretty great thing to be on its own: She’s fully become a major artistic voice, a true signpost in the history of British pop. — WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Read Emma Carmichael’s October 2017 cover profile of Jessie Ware | Read our review | Listen on Spotify

We put so much pressure on artists to release major statements every time they enter the studio—especially Vince Staples, whose 2015 Summertime ’06 and last year’s blistering Prima Donna EP earned plaudits as instant classics—that an album as discursive as Big Fish Theory has the air of an afterthought. Fusing the diffuseness of house music with the intensity of his lyrical and vocal commitment, Staples created an unexpected mishmash in his second official full length, often with the help of Justin Vernon, SOPHIE, and producer Zack Sekoff. Sometimes, as on “Crabs in the Bucket,” he dispenses with commitment and hides the beats; other times, like “Homage,” he commands us to lose ourselves in electro-bass and jungle percussion. But disgust becomes Staples’ high, almost effete, timber and like many contemporaries, he saw much in the past two years to be disgusted about. Here’s hoping “BagBak” makes it to his 2026 setlist: “Tell the president to suck a dick cuz we on NOW” is the hook, but the chilling lines are, “So ’til they love my dark skin / Bitch I’m goin’ all in.” Given the times, may Staples (and the rest of us) keep that “til” a threat, not a hope. — ALFRED SOTO

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Not since Aqualung has the flute felt so crucial to the musical zeitgeist. In 2017, the sounds of tubular winds made their way onto the charts, with the “rap flute” phenomenon epitomized on Future’s Billboard Hot 100 No. 5 “Mask Off.” Arcade Fire’s eponymous single off Everything Now hit No. 1 on the adult alternative chart and sampled the bouncy pan from Francis Bebey’s classic “The Coffee Cola Song.” Saint Etienne, they of the 1991 flute-featuring “Nothing Can Stop Us,” broke a five-year silence with a flute-flecked new record. It was, for some inexplicable reason, the year of the flute.

Call it prescience or another marker of Björk’s otherworldly alignment with the universe, but the instrumentation on the iconic artist’s flute-laden tenth LP Utopia (which hit No. 75 on the Billboard 200) marks a logical conclusion to this whole Flute Thing. On the late-year release, it’s hard to tell which flutes are real and which are artificial, but one thing’s certain: She and producer Arca interrogate every key, every trill, and every possible flutter. The winds twist and curl like corkscrew willow branches among actual birdsong and Björk’s benevolent voice. It is a dizzying, headlong spin into the elation of love, while simultaneously critiquing the poison of inherited masculinity. Only Björk could sing “Kafka-esque” next to “patriarchy” and make it sound banging, as she does on the incredible “Body Memory.” She’d initially called this her “Tinder album,” a designation that corresponds to the multitude of possibilities in new romance and the surreality of technological impediment on our very hearts and souls. Moreover, the ever-presence of the wind instruments cuts to the heart (and lungs) of the matter: sometimes we need a reminder just to hear ourselves breath. — DALE W. EISINGER

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

What is The Ooz made of? Some distant scraps of jazz guitar, as if Django Reinhardt were tuning up in a boiler room. An eldritch trace of Fender Rhodes, like a bioluminescent glimmer in the dark. Water running somewhere, clanging pipes. Intruding sirens, footfalls, and feral animals; the eerie shriek of industrial steel shearing wind. A cloaca of bass that hints at dub without remotely being dub, and an ancient drum machine dribbling polluted trip-hop. Everything seems to come through several concrete walls, forming a space that is somehow claustrophobic and vast, empty and teeming. In other words, The Ooz is a sonic synecdoche for 23-year-old English existentialist Archy Marshall, whose slender frame contains impossible caverns of dejected passion and dogged soul. A young-old man with the tender, ghoulish charisma of a mad lounge singer—so, basically, Tom Waits—Marshall lurks in his own music, a wounded minotaur cowering in a lightless urban maze. His opus of low self-esteem fulfills the promise of 2013’s sublimely reticent 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, still dripping with primordial reverb, but no longer hiding in it, its inky depths subsume genres without becoming them. How many hyphens would you spend tagging “Cadet Limbo” before giving up? It’s just a King Krule song, too coherently weird to be fake, and in this way, The Ooz almost revives an old music-crit saw: authenticity. This is who someone is, unrefined—an old soul we want to know, darkly emblazoned in sound. — BRIAN HOWE

Read our interview | Listen on Spotify

Of the two proper albums Future released this year, HNDRXX may be the most romantic and emotionally resonant. It may be just as uneven as FUTURE—there’s a number of atmospherically wavy tracks that don’t quite land—but HNDRXX offers a side of the enigmatic Atlanta vocalist that has been largely absent since 2012’s “Turn On the Lights.” The downtempo “Solo” plunges deep into the rapper’s feelings of loneliness and heartbreak without sacrificing the ghostly tones of his DS2 peak. The collaborative “Comin’ Out Strong” offers a rarity in 2017: a featured role from The Weeknd that doesn’t sound like a cheap throwaway. On opener “My Collection,” Future walks a line between seduction and objectification with such delicacy that he makes such a difficult feat sounds effortless.  — MOSI REEVES

Listen on Spotify

After years of morose frustration and anger directed at both his inner demons and an ignorant, bullying world, Mike Hadreas, the man behind the transgressive pop persona Perfume Genius, finally seems ready to celebrate himself. Where 2014’s Too Bright took a confident step towards molding its creator into a premiere avant-pop star, No Shape is a giant leap into pure sentimentality. With opener “Otherside,” the album begins with a delicate piano progression and Hadreas’ quiet, quivering voice, which is overdubbed with soft, down-pitched vocals that sound like haunting spectres of lovers past. But as the song settles into a hushed, tranquil ballad, a swell of synthesizers crashes down like a tidal wave. This jarring contrast sets the pace for an album that expects more out of pop music, more out out of romance, and more out of the lived human experience. “Don’t hold back / I want to break free,” Hadreas coos on “Slip Away,” a booming self-love anthem that is arguably the strongest argument for unbridled self-acceptance since Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” No Shape expects more from you too.  — ARIELLE GORDON

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

The biggest gripe here was that LCD Soundsystem had the audacity to come back after their dramatic 2011 retirement, especially since their marathon Madison Square Garden send-off had given a nearly perfect band the perfect finale. Conceptually, American Dream adheres to that narrative: The entire hour takes place after the lights go on and you realize you’re too old for an afterparty. Lead single “Call the Police” succeeds Sound of Silver’s “All My Friends” as the gleaming mid-album highlight, but it’s less an act of ascendance than it is a reprieve. Rather, the clearer expression of American Dream’s thesis lies in the glistening disco throwback “Tonite”: “Life is finite / But shit, it feels like forever.” Elsewhere, a manic guitar slyly reminiscent of the one that stumbled through David Bowie’s “Breaking Glass” cracks open “Change Yr Mind.” The LP’s actual centerpiece is “How Do U Sleep?,” an invective against estranged DFA Records co-founder Tim Goldsworthy that transforms into a visceral dance kiss-off at the midway mark. So yes, American Dream is a tonal shift, but it isn’t necessarily a leap. A core motif of James Murphy’s writing has always been how the party’s really a salve for the insecurities that time eventually expose. American Dream is his most potent expression of that inevitability. — BRIAN JOSEPHS

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

It sounds like something only the most shameless screenwriter would contrive: While recording his debut LP, Process, British alt-soul singer Sampha Sisay actually had a lump in his throat. “Sleeping with my worries,” he exhales on “Plastic 100°C,” over a track that seems to take the coursing harps from “The Boy Is Mine” and hook them to a medical ventilator. Then, “I didn’t really know what that lump was.” Neither did doctors, but the lump’s benign effect was highly communicable. Process turned hardened music scribes to jelly, quivering at a reverent pitch hardly heard since the advent of Antony and the Johnsons. Not that it wasn’t earned by Sisay’s vulnerable excavation of personal and parental mortality: A line like “No one knows me like the piano in my mother’s home” should slay any sentient being.

Sampha is prayerful and profound—his star-making supporting turns with Drake, Kanye, and Solange almost invariably nestled his hushed voice in their tracks like votive candles, casting a tremulous spiritual glow. But Process’s efficacy as group therapy overshadowed its efficacy as music. It’s sexy, it quietly bumps, it epitomizes flow. The caressing restraint of Sisay’s delivery masks his crisp virtuosity, the strategy of his falsetto and the shapely swiftness of his lines—though you can’t miss them on the coldly pyrotechnic “Blood on Me,” with its gripping gasps and stutters. More than raw catharsis, Process is a room-stilling performance of anxiousness and uncertainty, rendered with covert sureness. — BRIAN HOWE

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

The cultural realm felt nearly as dark as the political realm in 2017, but that was nothing new. In 2016, our heroes died within months of each other and we were left to savor their final statements: David Bowie cloaked his fear of death in arcane symbolism while Leonard Cohen made his peace with mortality through Zen calm and Jewish humor. While both Blackstar and You Want It Darker were masterpieces, neither album captures the quotidian devastation of what Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum calls “real death.” In July of 2016, the Washington state musician, husband, and father held his 35-year-old wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Elverum, as she died of cancer. He spent that fall using her instruments to record A Crow Looked at Me in the room where it happened, and perhaps that’s why it so fully inhabits the experience of mourning. “Death is real” is the album’s opening line and refrain, a periodic reminder that there is no poetry in bone-deep grief. In stark, almost spoken lyrics and whispery ghosts of melodies, Elverum creeps from paralysis to some form of functionality, finding no solace in the ebbing of a grief that kept him connected to Geneviève. It’s not a conventionally pretty record, but it may be the most exquisite love letter in years. — JUDY BERMAN

Listen on Spotify

Young Thug finally hit No. 2 on the Hot 100 in November, thanks to his featured slot on Camila Cabello’s “Havana,” but lowkey, one of hip-hop’s major disappointments is his underwhelming commercial performance as a lead artist. None of his “commercial mixtapes” have achieved RIAA certification or reached Top 5 on the Billboard 200, and Slime Season’s “Best Friend” is his highest charting single at No. 45. (“Pick Up the Phone,” which went to No. 43, is credited as a Quavo-featuring duet with Travis Scott).

Beautiful Thugger Girls, the follow-up to 2016’s brilliant Jeffery, argues that the crossover onus isn’t on Young Thug—the world’s at fault for not coming around to his kaleidoscopic gifts because this is an aggressive amount of zooted pop songcraft to put into one project. Historians will dedicate textbooks trying to figure out how the joyful melodies of “Do U Love Me” didn’t throw the nation into a perpetual bacchanal. “You Said” sounds like turn-of-the-millennium Craig David repackaged for extraterrestrials. The variegation of the production—which includes the country twang of “Family Don’t Matter” and the aquatic whirl of “On Fire”—further spotlights Young Thug’s talent. There just aren’t a lot artists who can bend the range of sounds (while effervescing, no less) the way Thugger can. — BRIAN JOSEPHS

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

The Buchla analog synthesizer that’s central to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s music was a defining device in the history of avant-garde electronic music, first championed in the early 1960s by Berkeley-based electronic music experimentalists. Originally from Orcas Island, a peaceful respite just off the northwestern coast of Washington state, Smith now calls Los Angeles home—and in pitting elaborate, stratified Buchla constructions against sunny, often fiercely catchy vocal melodies, she manages to keep things very West Coast on her dense double-LP The Kid.

The elements which differentiate The Kid from Smith’s 2016 breakthrough album, EARS, are not limited to its more addictive refrains and richer orchestrations (“I Will Make Room For You,” in particular). Rather, The Kid’s unusual grooves give the listener a strange kind of aural vertigo, an effect which distinguishes the release from other pop-influenced electronic music. Smith has described the record’s textures like “frosted​ ​shredded​ ​wheat”: dizzying arpeggiators, squelching percussion, woodwind flutterings collide and scuttle away from one another in the cluttered stereo image. Luckily, though, The Kid is also so much more than a heady listening exercise. It’s overstuffed with music rich and replayable enough to justify the loftiness of its rough concept: a comprehensive meditation on the stages of human life. — WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Enough about Britt Daniels’ soul. The frisky, stereophonic title track aside, Hot Thoughts is slightly more concerned with the state and shape of your soul. While 2014’s They Want My Soul sold glossy, sanded-down-past-the-quick uplift, Spoon’s ninth LP peddles something loopier, more holistic and prescriptive. Pick your pep talk: murmuring, Circulatory System-esque “Pink Up” for a guru audience; skeletal, sticky “Tear It Down” for a precious reaffirmation of human interconnectedness; “Shotgun” for conflict de-escalation; “WhisperI’lllistentohearit” for existential dolor. Then there’s the distended keyboard funk of “Do I Have To Talk You Into It?” to help close the sale on an album that’s shifts in intensity can initially scan as disincentives, that’s psychotropic saxophone-soaked coda (“Us”) ups stakes on the gorgeously haunted drift that “Pink Up” could only suggest. In a year when there were so many difficult questions that had no easy answers, Hot Thoughts made for perfect, distracting comfort food from indie rock’s most reliably buttoned-up bachelors. — RAYMOND CUMMINGS

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

One of the most punishing things about this year has been the whiplash. Before one 24-hour news cycle ends, another begins, and by the following week, last week’s news seems like it came from some distant, different past. Such uniquely-2017 chaos results in a yearning for truths, histories, and little-told counter-narratives—the kind of nuanced stories that have been stomped out by those trying to maintain a semblance of a grip on supremacy. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sixth and most stunning album is, by that accord, an instant historical artifact: If the whiplash becomes too much, get comfortable in The Navigator. Alynda Segarra, the band’s New Orleans-based singer-songwriter, wants to tell you a story—a true story.

With The Navigator, Segarra weaves a vibrant narrative from her Puerto Rican heritage, covering ground from her Nuyorican upbringing (and her subsequent departure from it) to ‘70s-era Puerto Rican activists whose battle cry was “pa’lante (or “forward”). “Everywhere I go / Someone tells me a lie,” Segarra laments on “Halfway There.” On “Rican Beach,” she sings, “First they stole our language / Then they stole our names / Then they stole the things that brought us fame.” The “they” she speaks of is too obvious to name.

Segarra has grown exponentially on this record, most clearly in the new broadness of her sound. Her band has expanded, as has the spectrum of her stylistic references, which now include doo-wop, salsa, bomba, Broadway, as well as the roots and folk of HFRR’s earliest albums. But The Navigator is a project of creating a physical, breathing artifact for people who have been boxed out of their own history, and that is where the album harnesses its power. “I’ve been called allegedly free,” she sings on “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl,” and it would be hard to find a lyric that more cuttingly captures the con of historical falsehoods—a con that is rapidly getting worse, not better. — DAYNA EVANS

Read Alynda Segarra on music activism | Listen on Spotify 

The consistently thrilling punk elements of Nothing Feels Natural, the proper debut from D.C. queer quartet Priests, may read as escapism at first glance, but they’re not expressions of escapism as much as acknowledgments of the nature of escapism—how there’s a trapdoor underneath every respite. The band’s capricious surf-tinged post-punk has a way of feeling physical and atmospheric at once, with GL Jaguar’s single-note precision spinning into vertigo-inducing riffs atop of Daniele Daniele’s brusque drum patterns. The chemistry almost miraculously manages to sync up with Katie Alice Greer, a dynamo who switches from exasperated howls (“Nicki”) and breathless multi-syllabic runs (“JJ”) with equal emotional fidelity. While Nothing’s more abrasive moments carry a convincing power, it’s the quieter moments that are often the most gripping. Under Jaguar’s soaring riff, the title track ends with Greer resolutely pledging “I can’t wait,” her voice descending into a whisper amidst the noise. — BRIAN JOSEPHS 

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Karin Dreijer, one half of the disbanded duo The Knife, makes music that sounds like ice feels. What her self-titled solo debut as Fever Ray did for motherhood—turn it into an album of slow, frozen nights and postpartum depersonalization—Plunge does for desire: It’s an album full of adrenaline slaps and full-body shudders that suggest lust and terror. “Wanna Sip” begins with horror-film rattling, jump-scare percussion, and high-pitched strings to accompany shrieking scents. In “An Itch,” claustrophobic jostling evokes a scenario all too familiar for anyone who’s lived the post-news of the past few months: “Whoever I meet, they always reach out to touch me.” Here, Dreijer buries her voice in her familiar-but-largely-abandoned Knife processing to evoke Silent Shout, another album about trauma. “This Country” is like The Shining turned personal-is-political: The buzzkill is coming from inside the house. (It’s not just the house—Dreijer lives in Sweden, but it’s no coincidence that the line “This country makes it hard to fuck” was latched onto by US listeners, who can think of more than a few reasons why their country makes it hard to fuck.)

But people see horror films because they want to—they get off on fear, as does Plunge. While Dreijer’s objects of desire are specifically monstrous—women who swing axes, have teeth like razors and draw blood—they’re given a visceral specificity that’s missing in most music about sex. “IDK About You” is nearly four uninterrupted minutes of frantic, footwork-and-batida-propelled horniness. The loneliest tracks—the freezer-burned “Mustn’t Hurry” and the string adagio “Red Trails”—are the most celibate and the most explicitly grotesque cut is the most exuberant: In the “To the Moon and Back” video, she’s cryogenically reconstituted and made the object of a kinky tea-and-pee party. But it’s set to the most joyous track Dreijer’s recorded in years, and the most relieved. — KATHERINE ST. ASAPH

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Dan Bejar’s strange, masterful poetry defies easy explanation, even by the man himself. ken, the latest full-length entry in a 20-year catalog rich with enigma, exchanges some of the orchestral flourish of 2015’s Poison Season in favor of ominous, synthesized sinew that clears space for Bejar’s signature lyrical koans. ken blooms with the vivid scenes and semi-definite plot points of a dream, a riddle wrapped in a mystique inside a sublime melody. “I can’t pay for this, all I’ve got is money,” he offers on “Sometimes in the World”; “Stay lost, never found,” he counsels on “Stay Lost.” Bejar’s writing was inspired, he has said, by a trip across an increasingly incomprehensible United States. Listen sideways and you’ll begin to hear the sordid politics and value calculations seeping from our shared reality to his: “Bombs in the city / Plays in the sticks,” he observes on “Sky’s Grey.” His voice sounds silverly and weathered, the synthesizers wheezy. One could spend hours interrogating the meanings of these things in relation to one another, the unnatural forces pulling them irresistibly into orbit. Now let me tell you about the dream. — ANNA GACA

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

For her debut album, D.C.’s Kelela recorded thickly textured, electronic R&B that reframes the Tinashe aesthetic so that space and narrative rule. Thematically, Take Me Apart explores the thin line between staying around because the sex is awesome and staying around because one guy’s as good as another. Atmospherically, it’s a futurist album of light shafts that unexpectedly darken into chiaroscuros. (Credit producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Arca, among others for the gradations.) Vocally, the record shows off Kelela’s knack for flute-like melodies that evoke Velvet Rope-era Janet Jackson. The subtle tension between all of this gives lines like, “It’s not a breakup / It’s just a breakdown” their poignancy. — ALFRED SOTO

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

If we learned anything from the resistance going mainstream in 2017, it was that a lot of (cough) “woke” people still have a lot to learn. They’d do worse than looking to Sheer Mag’s debut full-length album, Need to Feel Your Love, for a primer on truly progressive politics. The Philadelphia punks—whose influences include Thin Lizzy, KISS, and a healthy dose of disco—use their pathologically catchy debut to spotlight everything from gerrymandering to police brutality to the empowering collective effect of taking to the street. It’s a little bit education. A little bit rock ‘n’ roll. And it’s a lot of fucking fun.

In an era when the term “selling out” becomes more slippery by the second, Sheer Mag has remained consistently true to their punk sensibility and DIY ethos: a self-recorded, self-released album; word-of-mouth success with a strictly leftist lyrical throughline; harmonized guitar solos that noodle in the foreground throughout entire songs; a genre revival no one asked for, but everyone needed. Album opener “Meet Me in the Streets” was inspired by Inauguration Day scuffles between cops and radicals—lead vocalist Tina Halladay screeches, “Seven blocks north of the avenue / We’re throwing rocks at the boys in blue.” Album closer “(Say Goodbye To) Sophie Scholl” is a tribute to its namesake, a White Rose Movement activist who was murdered by Nazis in 1943, at the age of 21.

Need to Feel Your Love is packed with a rawness and a defiance that sounds like little else right now. Which is not to say that punk or the underground is dead. Downtown Boys, Priests, and Protomartyr are all worthy contemporaries—and there’s no shortage of guitar-based radicalism on Bandcamp. But it’s Sheer Mag’s zest for life and even self-lampooning sense of humor that makes them extraordinary. The deliberately over-the-top (and technically adroit) guitar solos and licks give Need to Feel Your Love a lightness—something to shout and dance about—that felt absent in music during a long, dreary year. Because, as it turns out, playing air guitar with the door closed and the speakers up to eleven never stops being fun, even as the world burns around you. — DAYNA EVANS

Read our August 2017 cover story on Sheer Mag here | Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Kehlani put out the best TLC album of 2017. This isn’t meant to dismiss this year’s actual TLC album, and its perfectly immersive, crowdfunded nostalgia, but to explain the particular appeal of SweetSexySavage, which builds directly on Kehlani’s dreamy and deeply personal 2015 mixtape You Should Be Here. SweetSexySavage doesn’t faithfully reconstruct ’90s R&B, but isolates its particular qualities—a cushiony, synthetic lushness, fluttering thickets of percussion—and covers them with different veils of distortion until they successfully land in the present. There are points at which the album embodies its composite nature literally: “Too Much” laterally deconstructs Aaliyah’s “More Than a Woman” and ends up sounding nearly as good as the original vehicle, just with all the seats reclined. But SweetSexySavage is ultimately held together by its vivid sound—like color swimming through the lens of a kaleidoscope—and the force and integrity of Kehlani’s personality: The way she communicates desire and disgust, infatuation and indifference without ever seeming to excuse herself for dehumanizing the people whom her songs address. — BRAD NELSON

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Thundercat’s third solo album is about heavy shit: isolation, alcoholism, death, being friendzoned. It’s an album for loners and hermits, but one that communicates in short bursts, as if you’re sitting on a couch in some basement late at night, randomly flipping through television channels, nothing quite holding your attention but still feeling good as the sound washes over you. Still most well-known as the star session musician of a generation, Thundercat sings in a light, airy voice, which when paired with his playful and elastic bass noodling, a constant mist of synths, and conversational lyrics makes for a humorous album of warm compositions. That its subject matter nudges up against themes that often feed into depression makes that sound feel even more purposeful. Drunk is enveloping and therapeutic; you’re not on that couch alone. – JORDAN SARGENT

Read our interview | Listen on Spotify

The biggest secret of the Culture is that the culture is whatever you make of it—and the North Atlanta rappers have made everything of it in 2017. There’s no precedent in expressing one’s regality with a Leonardo DiCaprio nod and succeeding, but Migos’ genius homage to The Revenant was the public’s introduction to the marmalade-flavored “T-Shirt,” which went on to be one of the year’s signature tracks. Culture was released at the top of 2017, but its shockwaves reverberated through the rest of the year: Quavo became a go-to for pop features; hood romantic Offset became a scene-stealer with his guest verses; Takeoff broke his relative quietude to hit on a song collaborator while a slew of imitators took a pass at copying the trio’s dexterous flows. But as Quavo has noted, the Culture can never be duplicated—there’s no permutation of Migos’ trademarks without Culture close in sight. One clear reason is that the album is stacked with bangers: The raucous reactions to “Bad and Boujee,” “Slippery,” and “Deadz” are Pavlovian at this point. Then there are peculiarities like “Kelly Price,” the six-minute penultimate track that stretches their mélange of ad-libs into trap-nature music. It’s the track that proves again that Migos are not only defining the Culture, they are the Culture.  — BRIAN JOSEPHS

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Most of us spend sleepless hours googling vague afflictions, but for artist Moses Sumney, such late-night searching yielded an unexpected diagnosis: “aromanticism,” the inability to reciprocate romantic feelings. As the Los Angeles singer-songwriter and producer recalled in an interview with the Fader, “I was like, ‘Do I need to go to a doctor, or write an album?’”

Be thankful he chose the latter, because Aromanticism isn’t just an outstanding debut, it’s a fascinating paradox that could come to define Sumney’s career: sensual music about lovelessness. If R&B is the musical language of physical love and gospel is the musical language of spiritual love, then Sumney’s tender vocals conjure both traditions. But often beneath the soaring falsetto lurks something unexpected—folky guitar, or cinematic strings, or strangled horns.  

Aromanticism sounds like no other album released this year, though its melancholy atmosphere certainly fits the emotional zeitgeist of 2017. Sumney’s sonic juxtapositions yield music that feels ancient and futuristic at once, heightening his lonely persona by casting him as an artist outside of time. There’s even something abject about the frantic, straining flute in “Make Out in My Car.” On the album’s most powerful song, “Doomed,” Sumney illustrates how we conflate the ability to love with basic human decency, connecting lovelessness with godlessness, and wonders, “Will I die for living numb?” That someone who feels nothing could possibly write music that feels so much is just another of Moses Sumney’s gorgeous paradoxes. — JUDY BERMAN

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Would you rather be free or be loved? Can you truly give yourself to someone else without losing a piece of your identity? Are you better off roaming the world or enjoying the safety and comfort of home? Julie Byrne explores these and other elemental questions of intimate relationships on Not Even Happiness, her second album of ethereal songs for voice and acoustic guitar.

As a songwriter and performer, Byrne projects serenity while remaining honest about her conflicted relationship with the alternating domesticity and rootlessness that mark her life as a touring musician. “Follow My Voice,” which opens the album, is an entreaty to an anxious companion, made from a place “beyond all fear,” which acknowledges the sacrifices we must sometimes make for the people we care about: “To me this city’s hell, but I know you call it home,” Byrne sings, “I was made for the green, made to be alone.” Her voice has a subdued warmth, like a French horn or muted trumpet, and floats above arrangements that consist chiefly of her own nimble fingerpicking. Occasionally, a flute or some strings enter this hermetic world like outside light suddenly bursting through a cozy apartment window. The music’s solemn grace suggests an alternative to the either-or dichotomies posited above: With hard work and humility, perhaps it’s possible to have love in freedom, freedom in love. At a time when cynicism reigns, Not Even Happiness is an album of near-boundless generosity. — ANDY CUSH

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Paramore’s After Laughter is in one sense a failure. Following up its first No. 1 album and Top 10 single, the band leaned into hyper-pop songwriting, delivering a record of songs influenced by Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, No Doubt, and Taylor Swift. It didn’t stick: The album debuted at No. 6, and lead single “Hard Times” only had a brief appearance on the pop charts. But this should encourage us to love it even more. Like a lot of music this year, After Laughter is a collection of depressed, manic songs presented as a Trojan horse in bright, upbeat arrangements. But there was nothing that really sounded like this, an album of jagged but intricately assembled guitar-pop blurred at its edges by mellow synths, feathery soft-rock choruses, and gently cascading ballads. The album was so out of step with both contemporary pop and rock that instead of upending either it mostly landed undisturbed in a no man’s land. But if there’s any song that could redeem After Laughter commercially it’s the recently released single “Fake Happy,” a peppy but nervy anthem about an emotion that dominated this very bad year: dreading the sort of small talk at parties that is traditionally predicated on telling everyone that things are going are pretty well. “Hey, if I smile with my teeth, bet you believe me,” sings Hayley Williams. “If I smile with my teeth, think I believe me.” She doesn’t actually. – JORDAN SARGENT

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Alice Coltrane was raised in a musical household in Detroit, and learned the basics of her craft in the choir of her local church. She collaborated with her husband John Coltrane for about a year before his premature death due to liver cancer in 1967, and after that, made a series of bewitching and often staggeringly beautiful jazz albums between 1968 and 1975, leading a variety of ensembles on piano and harp. Her solo discography takes John’s freely spiritual approach to improvisation even further toward the cosmos, borrowing fluently from the instrumentation and harmonic precepts of Indian classical music and placing a special emphasis on shimmering textures and sonorites entirely of her own devising.

Alice’s mourning of John led her to begin practicing with Swami Satchidananda, the guru who is best known in America for introducing a generation of hippies to Indian religious thought. And in the mid-1970s, she began a simultaneous process of radically expanding her spiritual practice and simplifying her musical approach. She withdrew completely from the commercial recording industry, and in 1975 established a center for the hermetic study and practice of Vedic philosophy. While living at the ashram in the early ‘80s, Coltrane composed and performed new music for its community of followers, mixing traditional Vedic chant with the gospel of her Detroit upbringing and the ostensibly secular jazz she’d been making in the previous decades. These songs mostly eschewed the swirling atonality of albums like Universal Consciousness and World Galaxy, focusing instead on dense consonances, slow repetition, and ecstatic vocal runs—including, most notably, from Coltrane herself, who had never previously sang on record.

The ashram music was originally released in the ‘80s on a trilogy of extremely limited-run cassette tapes, intended for use in the religious practice of devotees. World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda collects highlights from these tapes and releases them to the wider listening public for the first time. The music has an elemental quality that makes it feel almost ancient, but also makes important concessions to modernity: both in its generous mix of American and Indian modalities, and in Coltrane’s use of the newly released Oberheim OB-8 analog synthesizer. She mostly used the synth to deliver sounds that shift continuously between one pitch and the next, eliding the arbitrary barriers between the 12 tones of the piano keyboard and reaching a high-tech apotheosis of her late husband’s famous “sheets of sound” saxophone technique, which involved blowing through scales so quickly and smoothly that they came to seem like singular glowing objects in the air.

The greatest gift of Ecstatic Music is Alice’s sweetly weathered voice, an instrument of remarkable self-possession and understated power. You won’t find a more moving expression of beatitude than the passage of singing that opens “Om Shanti,” the second track—that is, until Coltrane restates the same drifting theme on the album-closer “Keshava Murahara,” this time backed by a weeping string section instead of a solitary droning organ. The Coltranes spent their adult lives in search of a sound that would bring people to a plane beyond ordinary human experience. Whether or not you reach it while listening to the ashram songs is ultimately up to you, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else’s music bringing you closer. — ANDY CUSH

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

Jerrilynn Patton, the composer and producer from Gary, Indiana who writes and records as Jlin, took a giant step forward on her sophomore release, Black Origami, with some truly fancy footwork—if we really want to call it that. Though the former steel worker was inspired by the frenetic Chicago style of dance music (and now associates with some of its legends), ascribing a genre to her genius sells it short—Black Origami manages to sound like nothing despite its debt to everything. A globe’s worth of sounds are sliced and pieced together in Jlin’s complex designs, which are as unrelenting as they are soothing. The way these tracks roll on their shrapnel percussion and make ribbons of measures has resulted in the most satisfying brain massage since Aphex Twin’s 1996 Richard D. James album. – RICH JUZWIAK

Read our May 2017 cover story on Jlin | Read our review | Listen on Spotify

In the future, it may be difficult to explain the hold the War on Drugs took on music’s collective consciousness in 2017. Call it “dad rock” if you will: This year, Adam Granduciel’s graceful, mood-ring vistas earned praise from indie fans, old-school critics, IRL dads, and normies alike. No discussion of the current state of rock music could fail to mention the meditations of this crew of introverted, denim-jacketed Philadelphia transplants. And indeed, at times, the discussion felt as though it were all about them.

But it’s hardly fair to pin one good band as sole standard-bearers of a legacy, or of a single set of influences (Bruce, Tom, etc.). Even as Granduciel refined the War on Drugs sound to the luxury semi-gloss of A Deeper Understanding, he has retained the dusty Americana accents, the serenity of New Age music, the shimmering fog of shoegaze. Understanding is veined with details like a pining pedal steel on “Thinking of Place” and barely perceptible backing vocals on “Strangest Thing.” Granduciel’s own words are a sigh removed from sadness, less concerned with narrative than the broad contours of a feeling: “Is this love? Are you sure?” asks “In Chains.” To admit to liking the War on Drugs is to admit to cultivating a depth of emotion that’s sometimes difficult to access—and therein, perhaps, lies the key to their unlikely triumph. — ANNA GACA

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

The brilliance of Lorde’s sophomore album is in its efficiencies. It’s a near-perfect set of micro-dramas (do not dare mention the beach!) that play out over 11 songs, which is exactly how long any album should be. The songs are clearly sparked from a specific a moment in time, but feel universal–there is not one but two attempts at “Sober” and “Liability,” the second versions of each more forgiving of how difficult it is to wrestle with your own variations of bullshit. Over the course of Melodrama we watch a woman shed the calculated cool of teenage apathy to face the certain messiness of adulthood. Sagas of heartbreak, crippling self-doubt, and excitable crushes play out in bite-sized epics. That the singer managed to give Jack Antonoff–the chosen producer of the moment–his only great songs of the year is a magical feat in itself.

The dynamic between these two is something special, for sure. Lorde plays into Antonoff’s pop impulses and humanizes them with the kind of enigmatic quirk that reveals a great songwriter. She “chk-chks” the sound of a gun-cocking on “Perfect Places” and over-enunciates the ticks on her “Homemade Dynamite.” She collapses into the end of a verse of “Liability,” drawing self-effacing idea that she’s easily entertaining and just as easily forgotten. She wears her moments of mania on her sleeve–“I am my mother’s child / I’ll love you ’til my breathing stops”–on the throaty “Writer in the Dark.” She owns arguably the best pop-song (and Taylor Swift song) of the year with “The Louvre,” an earnestly bright and conversational anthem. With Melodrama Lorde has conveyed the title-concept as sincere and aspirational, and delivered gut-punch that take some a “greatest hits” album to land. - PUJA PATEL

Read our review | Listen on Spotify

There’re so many reasons why dozens of big-name artists—including her namesake, the RZA—have cosigned SZA. For one, the New Jersey singer Solána Rowe has made an album that’s wide-ranging even by R&B’s modern mutability: There’s the lo-fi rock of “Drew Barrymore”; the opulent R&B on “Love Galore”; the dusty drums and intricate jazzy arrangements of “Doves in the Wind” and “Pretty Little Birds.” For two, SZA portrays life with a hyper-specificity that’s as rawly probing as an autopsy, using the kind of details that real life serve up better than imagination. Album opener “Supermodel,” for example, is so clear and blunt, it’d be called “confessional” if she blinked once: “Let me tell you a secret—I been secretly banging your homeboy while you in Vegas all up on Valentine’s Day.” (This incident really happen.) But more than anything, SZA’s just stark, honest, and damn talented. It’s undeniable in the quarter-life anxiety of “20-Something,” in the transparently feigned emotionlessness of “The Weekend,” and in the airiness of “Love Galore,” a song about a summer fling kept past its expiration date with a hook light and floaty as a breeze. SZA’s the future—and who needs a better reason than that. — KATHERINE ST. ASAPH

Listen on Spotify

Capacity, the second album of bracing folk rock from Brooklyn’s Big Thief, opens with a waltz-time ballad called “Pretty Things.” The song proceeds with the fractured clarity of a traumatic memory, laying out the themes of the music to follow: love, sex, violence, childhood, family, and the ways in which they intertwine to make a life. “Holding my wrist to the bed, he was thrusting and moaning / And pressing his head to my temple,” songwriter and guitarist Adrianne Lenker sings over a carefully plucked arpeggio. It’s a potentially unsettling scene. Is he holding the narrator down in a flare of consensual passion—or are we witnessing something more sinister than that, as the eerie stillness of the music might suggest? Lenker twists the ending: “His head was a temple,” she finishes, a play on words that conveys surprising tenderness but leaves the question unresolved.

Capacity is strewn with similarly vivid images and fearless acknowledgements of ambiguity. In “Watering,” a woman almost seems to take pity on a man who stalks and assaults her, fixating on his tears, which make him “like a child.” “Black Diamonds,” the album’s most straightforward romantic love song, uses the same comparison to opposite effect. “C’mon let me make a man out of you / I could gather you and you’d tell the truth / You could cry inside my arms like a child,” Lenker sings affectionately. These lines point to another of the leitmotifs that characterize Big Thief’s elegant songs, this one about the reciprocal power of maternal love.

Lenker approaches her subjects intimately and honestly, without allowing empathy to overpower moral conviction, or vice versa. It is tempting to discuss Capacity purely in terms of her devastating ability as a writer. But Big Thief are also remarkably inventive musicians, quietly testing the limits of their nominal genre, undergirding the intensity of Lenker’s storytelling with understated potency of their own. “Mythological Beauty” thrums with kinetic energy; “Shark Smile” swaggers like Springsteen; “Objects” follows a circular rhythm that’s far trickier than it seems on first listen, a subtle reminder that three of Big Thief’s four members attended Berklee College of Music. They avoid the indulgence and rigid formalism that sometimes plague music-school grads, however, lending each song musical complexity to match its emotional nuance, without ever devolving into showiness.

Audaciously, Big Thief called their first album Masterpiece. With Capacity, they’ve really made one. — ANDY CUSH

Read our interview | Listen on Spotify

In a year defined by an emboldened white supremacist movement and a president who seemed to implicitly cosign it, no one had a more vital voice than Kendrick Lamar, who explored the ever-present bigger questions about who we might be as a country in his exigent fourth studio album DAMN. Central to that exploration was the Californian artist’s focus on hyper-locality, casting Compton as a canvas where an operatic narrative laid bare the symbolic guts of America; what he found in his community and within was poverty, love, struggle, heart, bluster, swagger, spirit and beauty. (“I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA,” he declaims fervently on “DNA.”) In humanizing himself and those around him with stunning detail—”Duckworth” imagines what might have happened if label head Top Dawg followed through with a robbery at a KFC where Kendrick’s father was working—he gave us all a template of how to be, all his cadences on a spitter’s four-alarm fire. And he made it look sexy. Put a period on that. — JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

Read our review | Listen on Spotify