80. Tink – Winter’s Diary (2012)
Tink was on such a roll by the summer of 2014, when Winter’s Diary 2: Forever Yours, her fifth mixtape in two years, was destined for year-end lists in Rolling Stone and Billboard, that in the autumn she signed a deal with Timbaland and Mosley Music Group, an imprint of Epic Records. Timbaland announced that Aaliyah had come to him in a dream, proclaiming Tink to be ‘the one’, and she seemed destined to become one of the Chicago rap scene’s biggest breakouts. Then Think Tink, her major-label debut, suffered repeated delays apparently at Timbaland’s behest, and the relationship turned sour and the album was cancelled. So a new spring: she took some time out, got out of her deal with Mosley, and started putting out new mixtapes.
Her latest, Voicemails, built around amorous and innately private and intense voice messages, could easily have made this list, as could Winter’s Diary 2, boasting in the longingly downtempo ‘Lullaby’ one of the lushest ballads of the decade. But whether it’s sentimentality alone or something less tangible, the pick remains the first Winter’s Diary, whose highlights in songs like ‘Can I’ and ‘Bonnie’ show Tink at her most sultry and caustic. Modulating her voice like the sudden crash of waves and their foamy retreat, alternately rapping and singing her mostly lovelorn lyrics, Tink compels her music with a sheer mastery of R&B mood and pacing.
79. Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (2015)
An ideal blend of babbling surf pop and skittering psychedelia, on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper Noah Lennox wraps blissed-out and sometimes wistful vocal harmonies in oscillating layers of gauze.
78. Holly Herndon – PROTO (2019)
For PROTO together with the digital artist and philosopher Mat Dryhurst and programmer Jules LaPlace, Holly Herndon created an AI named ‘Spawn’, feeding it for six months on musically-tuned vocalisations. The result is fractured, inquisitive choral music, which beyond the usual discomfit of human bodies butting up against social media mining and mass surveillance, for the first time sees Herndon attain the communal.
77. Rihanna – Anti (2016)
Antimatter that grinds away from the grist and mill of the pop cycle, here with a veneer of R&B and elements of dancehall and trap, Rihanna sounds hazily, huskily soulful.
76. Björk – Biophilia (2011)
Björk found pearls within the context of biomolecular science.
75. Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs (2018)
Cupping fragments and shards in the palm of his hand while he sifts through layers of sediment, on Some Rap Songs Earl Sweatshirt is both rip tide and murk, finding his way on his most rhythmic and soulful and vital composition. Tracks bubble and slurp, packed tight with his associative wordplay and assonance.
74. Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow (2011)
A zephyr wanders the grove and gets caught up in a flurry, a tempest swirling and billowing and landing far out at sea. On 50 Words for Snow Kate Bush’s restless piano plays off the fixidity of Steve Gadd’s drums, with occasional forays from guitars, bells, and double bass, chamber music while the snow settles and the roof creaks.
73. Prurient – Frozen Niagara Falls (2015)
A dramatic tour de force that loosely inhabits the realm of industrial noise music and sounds just like its title indicates: a swallow dive through the jagged bucolic, with the inevitable crack and seep.
72. Pusha T – DAYTONA (2018)
Pusha T dons goggles and leathers for a lesson in frictionless flow. Pointed by Kanye’s high-definition production, DAYTONA is punishing and plosive and packed with bars that hit.
71. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Rest (2017)
A disco-clad treatise on death and grief, hoisted by pristine synths, shrouded in sorrow and menace.
70. Tanya Tagaq – Retribution (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘One of the best and boldest of the steady spurt of acclaimed protest albums to be released in 2016 – many with overlapping concerns, specifically environmentalism, LGBT activism, feminism, and black or indigenous rights – Retribution takes its rhythms from the frenzy of accusation and the claustrophobia of anger, resentment, and distrust. With an all-encompassing palette running the gamut from folk and orchestral music to grunge and black metal, Tanya Tagaq’s fourth album is her fiercest yet.
The sounds the Inuk throat singer makes can be loosely described with reference to physiological processes: guttural growls, ominous gargling, animalistic panting which falters and protracts and becomes more recognisably human even as its hyperventilations leave us utterly transfixed. But Tagaq is almost overcoming her own body in order to make these noises, and the cumulative effect is impossible to translate.
The opening track ‘Ajaaja’ sounds like the spectre of youth, in tenuous dialogue with her ancestors even as their words unravel on the wind. On a couple of occasions Tagaq makes her warnings explicit, as on the eight-minute-long title track, which snaps ‘When mother grows angry, retribution will be swift’, and more beguilingly on ‘Cold Wind’, where half-tauntingly and half-teasingly, she explains ‘Gaia likes it cold’. But mostly Retribution is a frontal assault, full of impermeable percussion and pulled-apart strings, which gradually song by song strives to turn the tables, luring aggressors helplessly even if it is to a shared fate. On ‘Summoning’, the record’s nine-minute centrepiece which finds Tagaq reliably backed by Toronto’s Element Choir, she sounds at times pained, at others in the throes of ecstasy, and still at other moments surprisingly and not altogether sinisterly coy.
As Canada struggles more than ever with its history of indigenous abuse, the title Retribution markedly contrasts with the name of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate the role of old Indian residential schools. This network of boarding schools for indigenous peoples saw children removed from their parents and forcibly assimilated into the Christian mainstream. Over a hundred years, 150,000 children were placed in residential schools across Canada, leaving a legacy of alienation and exploitation, not to mention thousands of early deaths. Some of those who endured the system have spoken about recurring illnesses, of being thrown into cold showers every night, sometimes after being raped. Tagaq – who has suffered multiple sexual assaults and considers hydraulic fracturing ‘like earth rape’ – makes these intersections blisteringly apparent on ‘Cold Wind’ and her closing cover of Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’, which she gives a slow and steadfast, whispering and lingering rendition.’
69. Matmos – Ultimate Care II (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘Crafty and quietly subversive, Matmos’ tenth studio album – following in the tradition of earlier works like A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, which sampled medical procedures such as plastic surgeries, liposuctions, hearing tests, and orthopaedic bonesaws, and The Marriage of True Minds, which saw the duo drawing out the psychic visions of subjects put into sensory deprivation – is comprised solely of sounds produced with a Whirlpool washing machine.
The appliance’s name gives the album its title, and Ultimate Care II broadly covers the whirring and sloshing, the occasional blips and beeps of a full washing cycle, one thirty-eight minute track divided into nine excerpts. Sometimes – for instance for the duration of excerpt seven – they leave the machine more or less to its own devices, other times they rub, stroke, and drum upon its surfaces, using transducers to feed it with samples, aided by guest contributors including Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher and Sam Haberman of Horse Lords, Jason Willett of Half Japanese, and Duncan Moore of Needle Gun.
From such a conceit within the first minute Matmos conjure the most vivid landscapes, dense vegetation, tribal drums, and gushing streams. It’s a trick, an animating act, which they repeat throughout the record, from burgeoning wildernesses to droning dystopias their music humming with life. Even excerpts which feel more domestic, like the oiling and tinkering which characterises the onset of excerpt five, is interrupted and remoulded by incessant, insistent barks. M. C. Schmidt tumbled upon the concept lost one day in the Whirlpool’s rhythms, noting ‘It was a self-contained, very simple idea, but once you start examining anything, it gives and gives and gives. The shit writes itself as soon as you’re actually paying attention’.’
68. A Tribe Called Quest – We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)
This wasn’t simply a celebratory lap or an elegy for the recently departed Phife, but vintage Tribe built from the ground up for the modern era, brisk and bracing, straddling the future and the past and painting liberally from across the sound palette, encompassing and ultimately buoyant.
67. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
Whether you consider this an evolutionary step or an intermediate point between 808s & Heartbreak and Yeezus, this was Kanye West at his most maximalist, the last time he left all of the lights on for everybody.
66. Ambrose Akinmusire – The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint (2014)
An epic that unfurls through endless variations, winding and swinging and bubbling and screeching and setting the field of modern jazz ablaze, on The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint Ambrose Akinmusire’s full-bodied trumpet and the rest of his working quintet – Walter Smith III on saxophone, Sam Harris on piano, Harish Raghavan on bass, and Justin Brown on drums – are joined by Charles Altura on guitar, by flute and strings and a trio of featured vocalists, through dark soulful flights and socially informed spoken word. There are folk melodies and gospel harmonies amid the avant-garde jazz, on an album Akinmusire wrote and self-produced, amounting to one of the decade’s most uncompromising artistic statements.
65. Ian William Craig – Centres (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘A single voice in a vast cathedral, light refracting on four sides through stained glass, the shrug and hum of a submersible, the muffled rhythm of a steadily beating heart, Ian William Craig’s Centres is sometimes baroque, or monastic and cloistered, or like the strings and sinews of popular forms stretched out and carefully pressed, plucked, rubbed, or cut apart. Occasionally it veers towards folk or singer-songwriter territory, always graceful, but mostly this sounds like a cross between Craig’s FatCat/130701 labelmate Max Richter, under flowing water, and John Cale’s Paris 1919 wrapped in layers of gauze.’
64. A$AP Rocky – LIVE.LOVE.A$AP (2011)
A$AP Rocky’s debut mixtape was the foundational document not only for the artist but for the entire A$AP Mob as a collective, less a statement of intent than a heady atmosphere and an apparently spontaneous but all-encompassing aesthetic. Despite assorted highlights elsewhere and a growing introspection as he leans more heavily into psychedelia and discordant sounds, LIVE.LOVE.A$AP remains his strongest record.
Combining the influence of Southern hip hop with some of the emergent themes and manners of cloud rap, it’s grounded in the impeccably woozy loops and beats provided by A$AP Ty Beats, Beautiful Lou, but most of all Clams Casino, on the resounding ‘Palace’, the spectral ‘Leaf’, the trilling and throbbing ‘Wassup’, and ‘Bass’, low-frequency and impalpably gaseous. Any hack can write socially conscious lyrics, but few possess Rocky’s ear for cadence, his rapping languid yet emboldened and packed with internal rhymes. LIVE.LOVE.A$AP was enhanced too by A$AP Ferg and SpaceGhostPurrp’s career-high cameos. Through the occasional gnarl and menace, the first run from ‘Palace’ through ‘Purple Swag’ offers an almost impossibly chilled vibe for this or any other decade.
63. Jamila Woods – LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019)
Each song on LEGACY! LEGACY! is devoted to the life of an inspirational artist, mostly black, all of colour, all ‘other’ in their relationship to their form as well as to the wider world. So Jamila Woods shapeshifts in the company of Betty Davis, affirms in the name of knowledge Zora Neale Hurston’s unquenchable thirst, traces through Jean-Michel Basquiat the complexities and categorisations of fame, and on ‘SUN RA’ explores the cosmic outreaches of jazz while ‘MUDDY’ offers a transposed take, funky and soulful, on the electrified Chicago blues. In the process Woods pays tribute to black experience and black excellence, while finding the causeways and tributaries connecting these icons to her own life and the present flood.
62. Mount Eerie – A Crow Looked at Me (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘Working as The Microphones then as Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum’s music – often viewed as if from a shallow ridge, at a slight remove and in brief retrospect – has always sought to both embrace the elevate the moment. Imbued with rumbling organic sounds which belie their sparse instrumentation, his songs demonstrate a keen sense of place and an acutely sensitive, poetic, yet still decidedly modern sensibility. On recent albums Wind’s Poem, Clear Moon, Ocean Roar, and Sauna, his fragile but present voice has been increasingly encompassed by an unsettling, always alert ambience bridging the gap between lo-fi folk and the experimental outreaches of drone music and black metal.
How to square presence, a keen sense of place, and music of profound intimacy – with an atmosphere that now teeters on the verge of existential dread, salvaged by the through-line of the embrace of nature – with the stark fact of the loss of your partner? How to inhabit those domestic spaces which through the devastation of absence still imply the life, the shape, the fading warmth of another? After Geneviève Castrée, a cartoonist, illustrator, and musician, died of pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2016, her husband Phil Elverum began writing and recording songs in her room in an attempt to document the experience while providing some sort of testament.
The result at once coheres with the rest of Mount Eerie’s catalogue and stands utterly apart from the body of recorded music, an extended, harrowing, private, often overwhelming, mustering, still graceful look at death and grief. Pared back to acoustic guitar and the drip-drop of minimal percussion, bearing dates and grim specifics and symbols that double as spectres, devoid of possible interpretation but still passionately felt, A Crow Looked at Me ruins – for those of us who just have to bear its duration – the notion of music as escapism, baring the boundaries between imagination, empathy, and experience itself. Listen to ‘Real Death’, and how coping mechanisms, efforts to record and compute death, swoon and plummet in the face of death, in the modulation of Elverum’s voice in the long-flowing final verse, fond and desperate and clawing. Love and death: both are real and both enduring.’
61. Laurel Halo – Dust (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘From the wobbly synths of ‘Jelly’, to the jazzy ‘Arschkriecher’, to the djembe drums, rumba rhythms, and big band flourishes of ‘Moontalk’, Dust finds Laurel Halo incorporating a wider range of genre influences into the usually robust sonic palette of bleeps, buzzes, and hums, skittering kicks, and abstract synth patches, elements alternately layered and foregrounded to create urbane, street-level, and cave-like compositions of place. This is the least confrontational album she’s made: rather than enacting the process of negotiation, it’s about defining the fraught space, and then leaving if desirable or necessary. Lyrics read like diagnoses, accusations, and open-ended questions, of the moment yet it’s never quite clear whether they are being uttered or felt. Fragmented in the manner of collages and sound poems, they cohere on the level of mood rather than semantics.
On ‘Who Won?’ a lounge lizard smoothly utters non sequiturs on the themes of time, location, and access by password or phone number, a cross between a hotel receptionist and a would-be lover. On ‘Syzygy’, Halo sings ‘I said “Get up” / I said “Time for love”‘ in a tone that suggests the time has already passed, each figure locked in their own orbits. The later tracks on Dust seem to break out of the city into a rumbling, swooning nature, before album closer ‘Buh-bye’, a stumbling carousel, is finally overcome with a brassy sunset sheen. Dust features a stellar group of contributors, including Eli Keszler, Klein, Lafawndah, Michael Salu, Craig Clouse, and Julia Holter. It’s the sort of album you can dip into at any point, and it’s a lot of fun.’
