60. FKA twigs – LP1 (2014)
Smoky, sinewy, taut but unconstrained, on her first full-length FKA twigs combined state-of-the-art electronics and sleek R&B with elements of grime and trip hop dug out and polished up closer to home. The result was an album that placed her not just ahead of the pack but on a different track altogether, armed with mallet and chisel.
59. The-Dream – Terius Nash: 1977 (2011)
Three acclaimed albums established The-Dream as the most grandiloquent R&B artist since Prince, but failed to result in commercial glory. Successful sure, but The-Dream remained just as well known for his songwriting and production credits. In late August 2011, the embers of summer, he released this mixtape for free, under his birth name Terius Nash, with the year of his birth as the title.
Seen as a stopgap while work on IV Play haltingly progressed, it went largely unheralded, even after Def Jam released it commercially at the end of 2012. Yet it shows a version of The-Dream that’s loose and intimate, allowing his songwriting to flourish. The first five songs are especially strong, tactile and a little bit world-weary but cool and alluring. ‘Wake Me When It’s Over’ abounds in ironic wordplay, free-form crooning exalts the end of ‘Ghetto’, and amid bright synths as he defiantly and drunkenly elaborates his feelings upon the wedding of a former lover, ‘Wedding Crasher’ stands as The-Dream’s defining moment.
58. Jolie Holland & Samantha Parton – Wildflower Blues (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘Opening with a rollicking cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘You Are Not Needed Now’, one might expect that this is where Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton – co-founders of The Be Good Tanyas, reuniting for the first time since Holland’s 2008 album The Living and the Dead, three years after two car accidents left Parton requiring brain surgery for an aneurysm behind the left eye – will more or less end up: in something folksy and rootsy, with handsomely executed harmonies, outlined by Holland’s utterly distinctive trill, and with the occasional swagger and rock. But Holland’s solo work has always pushed at genre boundaries, never more so than on 2014’s wide and rumbling Wine Dark Sea, and any thought that this might be a down-home roots retread is dashed by the next song, the title track ‘Wildflower Blues’, a scuzzy jam firmly in the milieus of psychedelia and early-90s grunge.
There’s soul-infused R&B, jazz flourishes, gospel vocals, fuzzy 60s garage rock, laid-back rockabilly, songs that veer towards dream pop and new-age, and even an instrumental ragtime closer, on what are finely-wrought mostly original lovelorn compositions, with a cover of ‘Jocko’s Lament’ by Michael Hurley and a reworking of Bob Dylan’s ‘Minstrel Boy’ featuring new verses evoking the poets Steven ‘Jesse’ Bernstein and William Blake. The result is a record that’s deeply meditative at the same time as it’s transitory, happily informal and offhand, roving but not quite restless, surprising even on repeated listens, an effortlessly elegant and endlessly pleasant trip in the company of old friends.’
57. David Bowie – Blackstar (2015)
David Bowie didn’t need to contrive his own immortality, but on Blackstar while exploring the sonic outreaches he constructed a work of art in the liminal space between life and death.
56. Zola Jesus – Okovi (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘A dense forest suddenly permeated with shafts of light, the subject matter of Zola Jesus’ fifth album Okovi – death, drowning, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, the specifics coalescing as an attack on the body to be resisted at all costs – might sound dark and depleting, but this is music infused with measure and balance, a sense of space and steady hope. ‘Doma’ is a rebirth, the first sight of a clearing, its lyrical chants and repetitions recalling Zola Jesus’ breakthrough Stridulum, but instead of menacing drums and driving synths, an industrial clash and clamour, we are out in the stillness of nature, awestruck and enveloped by a choral piece.
Those pummelling percussive beats do make their presence felt on ‘Exhumed’, along with jagged strings and a lyric in counterpoint, which is a plaintive entreaty against being submerged by grief perversely framed as the act of swallowing one’s tongue. ‘Soak’ is written from the perspective of a serial killer’s victim, who wrests back control by choosing to die, an allegory for the entire record. ‘Ash to Bone’ features lovely loping, diving, swallowing strings as Danilova’s vocals soar above and the chaotic hum of percussion and bass bubble underneath, a more oblique sort of hymnal. ‘Witness’ – the first of two songs about a close friend’s suicide attempts – interpolates Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ on cello, viola, violin, and double bass, boasting some of Danilova’s most affecting vocals.
‘Veka’ emerges gradually, through abstract ambient rustle and stretched, pitch-shifted shunts of Russian poetry, into a hypnotic piece on the theme of legacy, a temporal change of tack, before the club breakout at the close, the dance floor and flickering lights a fitting destination and climax. ‘Wiseblood’ keeps time, ‘Remains’ gives in to the swirl and pace of life, and ‘Half Life’, the elegant and optimistic instrumental closer, embodies a rebuilding of the edifices of life and self. ‘Okovi’ is an old Slavic word meaning ‘shackles’, but here Zola Jesus still finds room to stretch and breathe.’
55. Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden of Delete (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘Where R Plus Seven played as skewed vignettes of modern America, bleak and breaking, slightly wistful, but still bearing shards of hope, Garden of Delete – the title a play on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych as well as on the name of God – is the most intimate object in Daniel Lopatin’s catalogue. Grungier, scuzzier, regenerating a panoply of adolescent influences, the record captures a particularly ferocious form of teenage angst, but there are also moments of wry or guffawing awareness, and those that depict the graceful coming together of self.’
54. Danny Brown – XXX (2011)
A full-colour introduction to Danny Brown’s addictive, anxiety-laden and sometimes comically absurd interior, packed with some of the decade’s hardest bars.
53. Nicole Dollanganger – Observatory Mansions (2014)
Recorded in her bedroom or bathroom pushing through a plethora of plush animals, bottled keepsakes, and old dolls, Nicole Dollanganger’s Observatory Mansions – her fourth self-release, preceding Natural Born Losers which saw her affiliate with Grimes and the Eerie Organization – is of a piece with her body of work, haunting and captivating, flinty but glimmering dimly as light on an old photograph or something abandoned and ensconced. Self-consciously and stylistically but never falsely or ironically white trash, she draws her material from ‘sleepy towns and cemeteries’, littered streets, dilapidated apartments, stained upholstery, deserted theme parks, and daytime TV, wringing out elegies in the form of laments for the living dead.
Which is to say all of us, for as she unfolds on the title track, ‘Time scurries away from us like field mice / Out through the holes in our walls / Lost to the dark night’, before her voice carries faintly over the top, half pleading, half conjuring, lingering as she enacts, ‘Heal me up again’. There is raw violence here which her swooning and coddling voice neither masks nor forgives, but over wary synth lines, the occasional forlorn guitar, and the thrash and clang of distant percussion, she manages to find beauty and delicacy in perseverance, in the fact and the materiality of life. Her lyrics are archly observed, wistful, witty, and rooted in a keen sense of place, which evokes her Ontario hometown and seems capable of resuscitating the past to move thinly in the present. Observatory Mansions has the stagnant glow of nowhere to go and a golden evening.
52. Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘A collaboration in the grandest sense – sold on the name of Chance the Rapper, only the extraordinarily generous Chance provides his music for free; introducing the world to the elegant and dexterous playing of Donnie Trumpet; but equally highlighting the other members of The Social Experiment, Peter Cottontale as the musical director, Nate Fox on keys, and Greg Landfair Jr. on drums, alongside a host of featuring artists from Big Sean and Busta Rhymes to Janelle Monáe and Noname Gypsy – Surf was the soundtrack to a blissful summer, endlessly verdant live variations on rap, jazz fusion, soul, and gospel.’
51. Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘Whether enacting and envisioning flickering gender transformations or observing more passively, rapt on the platform of a big city subway, standing at the back of church in a small Norwegian town, or lying in bed with one hand on her cunt and the other clutching a placidly soft dick, Jenny Hval sparks the consciousness, writing self-revelatory music in a conversational tone with a political edge. For their candid language and sudden insights, some of the lyrics on Apocalypse, girl are enough to laugh out loud. Hval whispers in spoken-word paragraphs that soar into pristine moments of song, over a superficially skeletal accompaniment that withholds a wealth of bubbling detail, new age and barrel organ melodies, cello, harp, bass, and Mellotron interspersing with stretches of electronic noise.’
50. Animal Collective – Painting With (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘A few days before the release of the record’s sweaty and squelching first single ‘FloriDada’, Animal Collective premiered Painting With through the speakers of Baltimore-Washington International, looping the slightly surreal and hitherto unspecified music – best heard through the building’s bathrooms, pre-security observation areas, and post-security lounge – until 6 pm in the late afternoon.
The band have called Painting With their ‘Ramones record’, ‘short songs with a homogenous energy […] something where the first song revs up the engine, and it kind of just cruises after that’. But while the comparison is apt it could just as well be today’s Music for Airports, ‘able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular’, ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’.
The relentless onrush of overlapping voices, spouting and sloshing synthesizers, and buzzing and hiccuping beats can be by turns disorientating, fist-pumping, or strikingly danceable, but they’re not without uncertainty or doubt, and in the right mood and with the right atmosphere, the whole thing coheres to provide a certain still. Perhaps more than any other Animal Collective record Painting With harks back to The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground, and even 60s and 70s singer-songwriter influences, yet it feels completely of the moment, finding balance amid busyness and bombardment, sensuously and with a sense of fun attuned to modern life.’
49. Blood Orange – Negro Swan (2018)
Culturedarm said: ”First kiss was the floor’, Dev Hynes sings on Negro Swan opener ‘Orlando’, and as he got up he seems to have carried some of the world with him. There’s a weight to this music, feelings of anxiety and alienation and exhaustion, themes of black identity expressed through music, hair, and skin, of performative masculinity, of political and societal and psychic distress. Hynes discusses childhood beatings based on race and gender or sexual nonconformity, there are brief references to police brutality and mass shootings, and Hynes delves into personal locales from the run-down East London borough of Barking and Dagenham where he grew up to the covered-but-still-porous legacy of Manhattan’s Minetta Creek. Yet none of this specificity and none of this darkness provides the right contour for the sheer pleasure of listening to Negro Swan. Dev Hynes seems able to reflect at the same time as he absorbs, to float on the breeze as a model for sturdy self-realisation: Negro Swan is yielding and unhurried even as it bristles with life, gently buoying its listener.
The sonic palette is broad and encompassing: Hynes casually finds the connecting threads between the easy funk and celestial R&B of Sign o’ the Times-era Prince and the shoegazing psychedelia of early Smashing Pumpkins, between the freewheeling soul of Marvin Gaye and the dreamy soundscapes of Air and the Cocteau Twins. There are robust rap features and one major coup in the appearances of A$AP Rocky, Project Pat, and Puff Daddy, with the train-track percussion and pitch-shifted samples of ‘Chewing Gum’ – a song about tiredness and ennui set upon images of oral sex, which loops the refrain from the mid-90s Memphis underground classic ‘Lookin’ for Da Chewin” by Kingpin Skinny Pimp – providing that tune with its hard edge. But moments like these sit happily alongside the Robert Wyatt-inspired, woodwind infused ‘Take Your Time’, and the smooth opening to ‘Jewelry’, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Beach Boys’ ‘Cabin Essence’.
‘Hope’ – on which Puffy positions himself as hip hop’s first purveyor of faltering intimacy – and ‘Runnin”, highlighted by the soaring vocals of Tei Shi and Georgia Anne Muldrow, make explicit some of the lingering tensions on the album, anxiousness dispersed by messages of optimism and encouragement and self-belief. There are jazz flourishes notably on ‘Saint’ and ‘Jewelry’, and on ‘Holy Will’, a partial cover of the Clark Sisters’ ‘Center of Thy Will’ featuring Ian Isiah and Eva Tolkin, high-definition gospel with on outro of glimmering synth. There’s a choral quality to ‘Dagenham Dream’ which turns the tables on violence and coercion, while ‘Minetta Creek’ and ‘Smoke’ possess a sleek, urbane and chattering New York City feel. Finally acoustic guitar breaks through the din and Hynes repeats, ‘The Sun comes in, my heart fulfills within’, but whatever he’s found, Negro Swan shows he’s more than capable of giving.’
48. Jessy Lanza – Oh No (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘Tonally and atmospherically Oh No plays like the composite of decades’ worth of R&B, bolstered by beefier keys, strident electronic patches, wetter and splintering beats which push the palette in the direction of footwork and house, and Lanza’s voice, an arresting admixture of Japanese pop and new wave, replete with coquettish exclamations and inhalations and breathy groans. The synth patterns – with Lanza joined by Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys on production – threaten to run away with themselves, only for Lanza to lure them into step and ultimately bring them under her control. Shimmering, sad, perfect for summer, Oh No is precariously irresistible.’
47. KIDS SEE GHOSTS – KIDS SEE GHOSTS (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘Kanye West’s project over the early part of the summer seemed to be to take the zeitgeist for throwaways, for short attention spans and a sort of fickleness and contrariness to which he contributed more than most, and to capture its liberating qualities in forms resembling works of art. So – subsuming the world of EPs and mixtapes – we had five short albums in the space of a month, which aside from Kanye’s own releases saw him produce for Pusha T, Nas, and Teyana Taylor. If Pusha T’s Daytona was the stripped-back statement of intent, KIDS SEE GHOSTS – Kanye’s collaborative album with Kid Cudi, a waif-like arthouse kindred spirit – sought to show that even a brisk twenty-four minutes could be mind-bending and inquisitive, an evolution in style at the same time as it’s gloriously freeform.
It’s bold and brash in its production, full of buzzing strings, clattering drums, straining keys, and strummed guitar, its movements and interpolations strike at the gut rather than seeking to alter the mood, and its lyrics are for the most part playful and introspective. ‘Feel the Love’, with an extemporaneous verse from Pusha T and Cudi’s self-assuring pronouncements, sees Kanye play the mad scatter, spluttering gunfire. ‘Fire’ features stunted brass and chain gang percussion, ‘4th Dimension’ samples Louis Prima’s ‘What Will Santa Claus Say’ to delirious effect, and ‘Freeee (Ghost Town, Pt. 2)’ abounds in staggered rock dynamics. ‘Reborn’ with its minor keys, melancholy but still sustaining, and chug-along percussion gives way to a couple of stark confessionals, Kanye forthright while Cudi blurs hauntingly into the music.
The title track ‘Kids See Ghosts’ is all quivering spectres: amid the bubble and drip of the beat, and the oscillation of what sounds like synthesized castanets, the shiver and subtle change of rhythm midway through Kanye’s sinuous verse marks one of the most thrilling moments of his career. ‘Cudi Montage’, with firebrand guitar courtesy of Kurt Cobain’s ‘Burn the Rain’, wraps up the record on the note of a modern-day spiritual. All of these songs deal in some way with loss, with feelings of public condemnation and abandonment, with depleted and deteriorating mental health, and with the attempt to overcome and navigate some way out, an intermittent struggle but an effort always worth celebrating.’
46. Robyn – Honey (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘Robyn is one of the all-time great artists at conveying and embodying what’s always seemed like a decidedly youthful form of romance. Let’s put it between her and Ronnie Spector, separated by very different career arcs, Robyn starting especially young but finding her voice by seizing the sort of control over her music Spector could scarcely dream about, and by the fact that while Spector sung rhapsodically barely in the first flush of love, Robyn has borne instead love unrequited and on the way out. That’s from coquettish yet caustic takes like ‘Bum Like You’ and ‘Love Kills’, to the forlorn anguish of ‘Be Mine’, to ‘Every Heartbeat’ which rapt in the throes of heartbreak stumbles and tumbles and barely holds on, and even to ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ which finds Robyn adopting dual roles, ostensibly the other woman but relating intimately through experience to the woman scorned, and ‘Hang With Me’, tender but ever wary.
She hasn’t been gone for so long: in the meantime she’s released EPs with Röyksopp and as La Bagatelle Magique, featured on records by Neneh Cherry, Kindness, and Mr. Tophat, and her label Konichiwa Records has signed and released music by its sole other artist, Zhala. But though age is but a number and concepts of age changing fast, still Robyn’s first solo album in eight years has been anticipated with eagerness as well as a sense of wonder, over the sort of Robyn we’re going to find as she nears forty and grapples with the death of her longtime friend and collaborator Christian Falk. Does the popular love song have an expiry date, can a different sort of heartache still sustain moments of bliss?
While Robyn’s crystallised songs of young love and youthful ardour are universally relatable and intimately wrought, even as an artist Robyn has always held her reserve. In songs of longing it was never you she was looking at, and as you took surreptitious glances across the club floor she was alone wrapped up in thoughts about someone else, even if there was always the implicit invitation to dance. By contrast on Honey Robyn enters into more of a negotiation with her audience: its songs are unhurried, at times they bear traces of weariness and worry, but they are each suffused with an inviting warmth. Unafraid to mine a long history of dance trends and subcultures, Robyn intuitively melds their disparate pieces into a sturdy yet flexible, seductive and enveloping whole.
‘Missing U’ eases its listeners in through shimmering electropop, vintage Robyn with a psychedelic twist, on a song whose meditation on loss doubles as a message to Robyn’s fervent fanbase. ‘There’s this empty space you left behind / Now you’re not here with me’, Robyn sings breathlessly, but ‘All the love you gave it still defines me’, a message of courage and resolve, cuts quietly through the murk. Featuring Zhala, ‘Human Being’ inhabits a future of artificial intelligence, over fraying, distending synths and dull thudding drums Robyn still managing to find her sense of rhythm. ‘Because It’s in the Music’ is pure disco, steady bass and Robyn’s sinewy vocal preventing the confection from becoming sickly sweet.
‘Because It’s in the Music’ forms a sort of trio with ‘Baby Forgive Me’ and ‘Send to Robin Immediately’, the songs seguing into one another and affording different visions of the disco-led late night: ‘Baby Forgive Me’, whose backing vocal follows on from ‘Because It’s in the Music”s song-within-a-song, sounds like a road song or saloon song in the manner of ‘One for My Baby’, detached but seeking intimacy, a mellow mood with a modern R&B sensibility on which wind chime synths are buttressed between back-and-forth cowbell; while on ‘Send to Robin Immediately’ the entreaty ‘Baby forgive me’ becomes less persuasive and more direct. Produced by Kindness, ‘Send to Robin Immediately’ interpolates Lil Louis’ house classic ‘French Kiss’, amid the thick buzzing atmosphere offering tail-end twinklings of hope.
‘Honey’ is a towering achievement that suffuses the rest of Robyn’s work, trickling over and through the extent of the album, offering tactile and tensile support. Its synths come in waves, silky and fragrant, Robyn’s brisk vocal surfing effortlessly over the top. ‘Honey’ really encapsulates a newfound softness and generosity to Robyn’s music, as well as necessitating a new word, a new concept, a new process: something that figures a song which sounds like its foodstuff. ‘Between the Lines’ draws overtly from early 90s house music, ‘Beach 2k20’ offers a taste of the tropics through discrete parts, and the slick 80s synth-pop of album closer ‘Ever Again’ opens out with an upbeat lyric full of optimism and liberty hard-won. ‘Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again / I’m only gonna sing about love / Ever again’, Robyn sings with a pulse, knowing full well that the two are inseparable, and that the pitfalls and passions of love have always been her theme. Love can be fickle, but in the moment of love its unsullied, pristine: love lasts, and art endures, and when Robyn moves the world gasps and ogles at her agility then strains to keep up.’
45. Sharon Van Etten – Are We There (2014)
With a thick tread and an even gait, Sharon Van Etten stomps and sways through the shards and embers of old edifices, steadily rebuilding in her wake. ‘Tarifa’ with its slow burn and stretched-out, sunburnt harmonies proved perfectly suited for the Roadhouse and a late-night climax on Twin Peaks.
44. Grimes – Halfaxa (2010)
Dark and woody synthscapes, laden but carried on a profusion of spirits, in the run from ‘Devon’ through ‘Dream Fortress’ to ‘World ♡ Princess’ which serves as the centre of Halfaxa, Grimes darts between wan intimacy and wanton menace in a process of artistic self-realisation.
43. Frank Ocean – channel ORANGE (2012)
Scuzzy and free mood pieces and torch songs which shine a flickering light over Ocean’s personal life at the same time as they set classic soul and funk aglow, on channel ORANGE impeccable songwriting provides the space for virtuosic solos, notably on ‘Pyramids’, which pulls the stones out of ancient Egypt in the service of a distinctly modern motel mythos.
42. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead! (2014)
Concentrating his unique blend of home-brewed electronics, hip hop, and fused jazz, on You’re Dead! Flying Lotus took us on a rollicking, kaleidoscopic ride through the neon nether.
41. Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Stripped-down and laid bare and all but flayed after the electronic deviation of The Age of Adz, on Carrie & Lowell with sometimes excruciating intimacy Sufjan Stevens dwells on the death of his mother, plucking out from harrowing loss moments of solace and grace.
