102. Azealia Banks – Broke with Expensive Taste (2014)
From cowboy hats and mermaid tails to Illuminati imagery, Haitian advocacy, and spiritual symbolism around the Yoruba and Vodun, with her tongue sometimes in cheek Azealia Banks professes to have all the answers, and when it comes to music she just might be the one. Beyond the Fantasea and Slay-Z mixtapes, Broke with Expensive Taste remains her first and only fully-fledged release, and it still brims with big beats and abundant promise. Rangy and lewd, on ‘212’ one of the decade’s standout songs, lolling against a brick wall, the edging climax almost masks Azealia’s snap and snarl.
101. Mac DeMarco – Salad Days (2014)
Channelling his out-of-time but effervescent and endlessly fresh blend of psychedelic slacker rock, on Salad Days Mac DeMarco refined his sound while dragging gently at its borders, shrewd and sensible and always charming, dropping couplets like the falling of autumn leaves on a sunny day.
100. Solange – A Seat at the Table (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘Less a moment than a process – a few of these songs, notably ‘Rise’ and ‘Cranes in the Sky’, stretch back years – A Seat at the Table is a living monument, a tangible exhalation, a handsome and timely devotional in the name of healing and self-worth. Solange emanates from the centre of these soul figures, kaleidoscopic, even psychedelic, but steadily clearing the view.
While she moves effortlessly and breaks down the delineations between the private and public spheres, the most explicitly political content is to be found in the interludes: Solange’s father Mathew Knowles recalling the racial discrimination of his childhood, Master P expounding on community and belonging, black entrepreneurship and ambition, pain and value in an imperfect world, and Solange’s mother Tina Lawson extolling black beauty and expressing pride in her cultural heritage, which does lead directly into the subject of the sensitive and tactile ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’.
Yet the interludes don’t exist to make Solange’s point for her, captions to explain her conceptual art or merely adding volume to her silky soprano and spacious beats. Rather they reflect and reverberate through what is an intimately personal record, deepening the sense of lived experience. Even ‘Mad’ gestures towards reconciliation with self, realising that righteous anger too can be owned, passionately felt and forcefully expressed and adroitly and lovingly for the sake of love let go.’
99. Quercus – Nightfall (2017)
June Tabor, Britain’s finest folk singer, alongside Huw Warren on piano and Iain Ballamy on tenor and soprano sax, interpret the tradition and classics from Dylan to Sondheim austerely and trenchantly, quickening the pulse and tingling the spine.
98. Samaris – Black Lights (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘An Icelandic trio making this sort of music can readily conjure local icons and images, alongside a keen and closely drawn if capricious sense of place: cold nights in padded overcoats against the swirling wind, Faxaflói bay providing the backdrop as busy lights hum dimly in the distance. It is a liminal space between trendy dance clubs and rawest nature, but on their third album Samaris sound fully formed, more than the sum of their influences, beyond the mere evocation of atmosphere or mood.
Vocalist Jófríður Ákadóttir – who has been cited by Björk as one of her favourite current artists – clarinettist Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir and programmist Þórður Kári Steinþórsson, writing for the first time solely in English and recording between Reykjavik, Berlin, and Ireland, have made a record at once eloquent and hypnotic. Through the stuttering beats and ambient electronics emerge private anthems of loss and longing, beacons blinking out before home, bodies unfurling and dissipating beyond the reach of a warm touch. Black Lights tells of two people falling out of sync, and moving tentatively but resolutely while still hearing old echoes and seeing old shapes. There is room for hope too on tracks like ‘R4vin’ and ‘Gradient Sky’ – the latter the shortest track on the album as well as the standout – even where it resides in memories that will not soon be forgotten.’
97. Dizzy Fae – Free Form (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘Any preconceptions one might have going in to Dizzy Fae’s debut mixtape – whether owing to her name, the ordinary nature of mixtapes, or the alternative R&B catchall she falls under – are utterly dispelled within the first few phrases of the opening song ‘Her’, which begins as a lush and airy piece of musical theatre. ‘She taught me everything I know’, Fae confides, her voice knowing and mellifluous, over glistening and swelling and seafaring synths which she swoops and swoons to meet and meld with, the crunch and drag of footsteps providing the percussion and her voice the contours as the song edges towards its crescendo and Fae repeats ‘Can you feel the isle of snow carved beneath?’.
A classically trained musician who studied opera and dance at two Twin Cities institutions, the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Arts and TU Dance, a fledgeling solo star who performed with The Internet, Kehlani, Empress Of, and supported Lizzo and Toro y Moi before this first mixtape release, what really distinguishes Free Form beyond its freewheeling attitude to genre is the composed, performative approach through which Dizzy Fae roots the project. ‘Johnny Bravo’ is a sleek and urbane take on 80s synth-pop, replete with breezy insights and evocative imagery, like ‘Lighthouse boy, you see that girl light up? / She always glows pink, so you can disguise the fact that she’s always feeling blue’. ‘Canyon’ oscillates inside a plasma globe, its wiry filaments, electric glow, and the steady snap of percussion sustaining a soaring soul vocal.
Most of the tracks are lushly produced or co-produced by Minnesotan contemporaries Alec Ness, Su Na, Sen 09, and Psyum. There are wobbly basslines, funk and jazz and new wave cues on ‘Booty 3000’ and ‘Baby Pillz’, a zither-like, eastern-infused melodic line on ‘Kosmic Love’, and pensive late-night R&B on ‘Temporary’. ‘Indica’ – a song about falling in love for the first time with a woman, transposed as the second half of ‘Her’ for Dizzy Fae’s music video bow – makes use of pitch-shifted vocals to figure vulnerability, pitting Dizzy Fae right where she belongs, amid the alarums of synths and slow-throbbing bass, in the middle of contemporary trends with an unusual mastery of form and emotional register.’
96. Young Thug – Barter 6 (2015)
Jeffery was brimming with personality and the Slime series by turns slick and sulphurous and outré, but Barter 6 remains the most rounded release from the decade’s most supple and innovative vocal stylist. Beyond ‘Constantly Hating’, so airy and rubbery and wet it still sounds like a mirage, Barter 6 offers Thug’s best batch of raw and smooth.
95. Frankie Rose – Interstellar (2012)
Opening as a disembodied voice on an astral plane, polishing in ‘Pair of Wings’, ‘Had We Had It’, and ‘Night Swim’ a steadily gleaming core, on Interstellar Frankie Rose melds the sounds of 60s surf pop and proto-punk with 80s synthesizers and new wave, like The Cure gazing out over the Florida Keys or Blondie gone celestial.
94. Noname – Room 25 (2018)
Jazzy rhythms and vintage soul lay the backing for Noname’s tale of twenty-first century adventure and peril, in which public and interpersonal trappings make way for a process of romantic and artistic becoming.
93. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today (2010)
High-spirited, fuzzy and warm, Ariel Pink’s heteroglossic Hollywood reanimates old forms. ‘Round and Round’ and ‘Beverly Kills’ provide the knockout one-two punch.
92. Sean McCann – Music for Private Ensemble (2013)
On Music for Private Ensemble Sean McCann took a brisk step away from his early experimental noise pieces, synths and drones and the cassette culture of the previous decade, moving easily in the space of contemporary classical composition. The four arrangements here feature over a hundred layers of carefully edited instrumentation, McCann playing an array of strings, keys, woodwind and percussion while sampling the unavailable orchestral remnants. What comes is characterised by the steadying force of McCann’s violin, tactile and yielding, by fluttering and billowing glockenspiel, dimly lighted French horn, reiterating cello, and a gentle choral conclusion – in ‘Arden’, the third movement of the final piece – built up by McCann from the vocals of Kayla Cohen.
91. Tirzah – Devotion (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘Trained in the harp, working a day job as a designer for a print agency, with production by Micachu which teeters and disorients and lilts, on Devotion, her debut album, Tirzah provides a model of intimate, understated, singer-songwriter R&B. The record works by a process of repetition: most of its songs are built around loping and stuttering, looping, low frequency keys, punctuated by hi-hats and the fuzz and rumble and occasional glimmer of synthesizer, music which serves to buttress Tirzah’s lovesick and lovelorn themes. Innocent, clear-sighted, yet still with a touch of menace, again and again Tirzah ostensibly addresses a lover, although some of these songs double as messages to herself. Occasionally she seems to occupy both sides of a dialogue, or in the tumult and uncertainty of separation inhabits both spaces, one and the same: the gesture remains familiar, whether to hold on to something worth saving, or to finally let go, to say when or say forever, each in an attempt to make whole.
It is difficult to say who conjures the better trick: Micachu whose production so thoroughly unsettles the plainspokenness of Tirzah’s lyrics, or Tirzah who manages to straddle these loops with her frank and thin but still dexterous, modulating voice. ‘Do You Know’ circles the plughole, unsure whether to drain or let sink. On ‘Gladly’ a four-note synth loop and steady percussion sustain a song full of clarity and hope, Tirzah’s voice hovering above the mix, the odd twinkling key reaching out before the lushly drenched bridge. Muted trumpets provide an air of cautious triumph on ‘Holding On’, with an instrumental interlude offering momentary resolution. The brashly gleaming opening to ‘Basic Need’ gives way to breathy percussion and a shape-shifting vocal which inhabits all of the spaces between R&B, gospel, and soul. Power chords and pitch-shifted vocals distort ‘Guilty’ almost to the point of incomprehensibility until the song is finally subsumed by guitar, pacing keys and a simple entreaty from Coby Sey provide the building blocks to the title track, ‘Go Now’ mines ‘Are You That Somebody?’ by Aaliyah and ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’-era Destiny’s Child for a slightly grimy, funky, late-90’s R&B sound but without the uplift, and the lurching, buzzing synths which give way to wet lubricated keys make album closer ‘Reach’ a dense and misty final plea for communication.’
90. Kali Uchis – Isolation (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘From Motown soul to Brazilian bossa nova, from West Coast psychedelia to swinging sixties London with a tropical twist, on Isolation, her debut album, Kali Uchis glides and bounds through a palette of sounds rooted in and richly evocative of the past, globetrotting with one eye on home, lingering in the sun of the late afternoon. There are traces of Marvin Gaye (‘Body Language’) and even Roy Orbison (‘In My Dreams’), Amy Winehouse-inspired, schematized takes on vintage soul and R&B (‘Feel Like a Fool’, ‘Killer’), Robyn-esque electropop (‘Dead To Me’), while features bring their own flourishes to the mix: rapper BIA brings the flash to the sleek and bubbly ‘Miami’, ‘Just a Stranger’ with Steve Lacy moves with a warped and chopped funk, ‘Tyrant’ with Jorja Smith is kaleidoscopically transient, on ‘Nuestro Planeta’ amid dashes of disco Reykon offers his characteristic blend of reggaeton, and Bootsy Collins and Tyler, the Creator provide the star turns on ‘After the Storm’. There are instrumental plumes too, for instance in the flute on ‘Body Language’ or the brass ends which punctuate ‘Killer’.
But though they play their part these features flicker in and then out, wafting on the breeze: it’s in Kali’s hands that the whole coheres. Aside from her impeccable taste and an ability to seamlessly blend genres, vocally she’s always up to the task, mingling and melding with and sustaining her songs. ‘Gotta Get Up’, styled as an interlude, is a standout for its whoozy atmospherics and tangible daydreams. Isolation is on the one hand about the push and pull of family, home and the familiar, on the other about escapism, and reconstituting as a means of preserving the self. There are pensive moments, like on ‘Tomorrow’ where the sun strains to keep the clouds at bay; ‘Flight 22’ is a love song which forebodes disaster; on ‘Dead To Me’ she’s a touch sarcastic, for she might be the one who’s still obsessed; while ‘In My Dreams’ featuring Gorillaz is so hyper it’s dizzying. In the end Kali Uchis comes through, showing that with sharpness, deft, and an easy disposition, she’s more than capable of seizing opportunity on her own terms.’
89. Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019)
Bill Callahan’s longest album to date foregoes pungency to find profundity in the wide pastoral, in the wake of marriage, fatherhood, and his mother’s death proffering an ample, gently uplifting take on family life.
88. Chromatics – Kill for Love (2012)
Chromatics are one of the most influential and evocative bands of the decade, setting the mood on cinematic highlights from Drive to Twin Peaks. To name those pictures is to give the right contour to Kill for Love, which eschews the Italo disco of earlier releases more firmly in the direction of dreamily impulsive synth-pop. It’s a grandiose, quixotic offering from Johnny Jewel, Ruth Radelet, and Adam Miller and Nat Walker on guitar and drums, swooning on the threshold with late-night ennui and a stately languor.
87. Grimes – Art Angels (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘First appearances can be suggestive, but they rarely tell the full story of a work of art: Visions too tended to blur in the middle across early listens, with ‘Infinite ♥ Without Fulfillment’, ‘Genesis’, ‘Oblivion’, and ‘Symphonia IX’ providing the hooks, and it’s the same sort of thing on Art Angels thanks to ‘Laughing and Not Being Normal’, ‘California’, ‘Flesh without Blood’, and ‘World Princess Part II’. Art Angels soon emerges however not only as Grimes’ most conscientious album to date, but as her most strident and upbeat, retaining her otherworldly atmospheres and idiosyncratic song structures, still eminently danceable, all while charting a new course through twanging guitar country, lush neo soul, and shimmering punk pop.’
86. Marie Davidson – Working Class Woman (2018)
On her first album for Ninja Tune, sneering and sarcastic, the French-Canadian producer uses accented spoken word to skewer life in and around the club. There’s the inebriated come-ons of club revellers, the mind-bending exhaustion of routine overwork, and in the downtime moments of loneliness and lovelorn ennui, all set over icily throbbing techno, pneumatic industrial, and more accessible electroclash beats. Sometimes the lyrics are scattered, questions begging their answers or statements of indefinite intent, other times their observations are taut and compressed like a Symbolist poem by Alexander Blok. Like a tunnel crawl through broken glass with dim lights in the distance, Marie Davidson’s fierce wit provides the connecting thread.
85. Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘After collaborating with ANOHNI, FKA twigs, David Byrne, and Iggy Pop, and composing his first soundtrack, to the Safdie brothers’ neon-clad crime caper Good Time, the first Oneohtrix Point Never album for three years has been described as folk horror, suitably cinematic while capturing its manner of composition and prevailing mood. Between work on his other projects, Daniel Lopatin retreated to suburban Massachusetts, to a glass-clad Airbnb out in the woods. He made much of his album there, alone and feeling under observation, the windowpanes at night alit with kamikaze moths. But you could just as well throw ‘space’ in front of the genre descriptor, because if there’s something down-home and makeshift about Age Of, that doesn’t halt or hamper its interstellar reach.
Age Of attains folk horror histrionics and palpable moments of dread, but as usual Lopatin draws from a broad palette of musical styles and cultural ephemera. In his hands ephemera become stranded in space, carved out or crystallised, detritus is redesigned or rediscovered as high culture, and prevailing trends, the spirit of the age, are spread out and made to go swimming. Age Of for the first time foregrounds Lopatin’s vocals, usually autotuned so that they attain a robotic intimacy, with support from ANOHNI and Prurient. James Blake provides additional production and mixing, Kelsey Lu features on keyboards, and especially on the second half of the album, Eli Keszler takes over on drums. Age Of has another life as part of Lopatin’s MYRIAD project, a multimedia stage production which played at Park Avenue Armory as part of the Red Bull Music Festival, an ‘epochal song cycle’ in four parts which figures a group of artificial intelligences who in the distant future lounge about parsing the history of human recording, seeking the banality in the beauty of our ongoing decay.
Album opener and title track ‘Age Of’ springs to life with a synthesized cross between a koto and a lyre, before rapid arpeggiated harpsichords transport us and we wind up in a baroque, austere and stringent. Somewhere amid the boing-boing of the synths the baroque gets smoothed out, like a string quartet performing inside of a mall elevator, until the gloop and gunk and then a final barrage of sound overcomes the edifice. The track is typical of the album in being so forthright, while mining traditional forms for a queasy resonance. ‘Babylon’ is a pitch-shifted country ballad, both ode and elegy to the modern city, the looped guitar riff which shackles ‘The Station’ gives out and rolls off into the nether, and on ‘Black Snow’ descending bass and percussive clicks give way to an R&B vocal on televisual static, societal demise, and impending apocalypse.
‘Toys 2’ swirls and swells inside its temple block beakers, a slow-moving, pensive instrumental composed as the score to an imaginary film, the sequel to the early-90s clunker Toys starring a CGI Robin Williams. As the sheen wanes in the second half, its sound is too inert to be described as ennui, too glazily abstract to be portrayed as melancholy. ‘Warning’ is all faltering breath under shimmering sitar, ‘We’ll Take It’ wades through the radioactive wreckage, fiery sparks, industrial hammering and welding, squelching percussion and trammelling waves of synth interrupted by fragments of a MADtv sketch, where a minister-cum-car salesman exuberantly hawks his wares to a compliant young couple, and ‘Same’ stars ANOHNI, despairing and crashing, whose lyrics on the themes ‘As above, so below’ and ‘Dust to dust’ offer the most overt instance of the spiritual undertone to Oneohtrix Point Never’s music. The slinky and radiant ‘RayCats’ refers to a scientific proposal around genetically modified cats, bred to change colour in proximity to nuclear radiation. ‘Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen’ is a quiet celebration of the household. And ‘Last Known Image of a Song’ is dark and stellar, but it abides rather than forebodes, for Age Of might be grim and sometimes isolated, but it’s never desolate, always suffused with human inclinations.’
84. Ariana Grande – Sweetener (2018)
Sweet are the sweets, and while Ariana Grande never sins, on Sweetener the tumult of personal experience and newfangled production tricks bolster her soprano while imbuing her art with a fighting spirit. Sensuous downtempo ballads jostle willingly for space alongside trap and house influences and R&B-infused pop that glistens and radiates.
83. Iggy Pop – Post Pop Depression (2016)
No great downer after the demise of The Stooges, on Post Pop Depression with Josh Homme, Dean Fertita, and Matt Helders the garage rock is tethered but the band still find their groove. Meanwhile Iggy’s voice takes front and centre, richer and fuller than ever before, by turns embittered and sage-like, harking back to his Berlin period, replete with toxic impressions and snatches of Beat poetry. As good as this was, thankfully it wasn’t the last of Iggy’s career.
82. Kamasi Washington – Heaven and Earth (2018)
On Heaven and Earth accompanied his eight-piece ensemble The Next Step and other assorted Los Angeles musicians, orchestral horns and strings and an elysian choir, Kamasi Washington swells up like plumes of soft smoke from within the sax-led jazz tradition.
81. Future – DS2 (2015)
Woozy, languid, and brooding, on DS2 Future bottled lightning amid downpours and lit sparks between downing soporifics. It’s his most consistent album, though its best track ‘Real Sisters’ was saved for the deluxe edition.
