The 50 Best Albums of 2021

The albums that got us through a very strange year, featuring Tyler, the Creator, Adele, Jazmine Sullivan, Playboi Carti, and more

By Pitchfork

December 7, 2021

Graphic by Callum Abbott. The Weather Station photo by Daniel Dorsa, Jazmine Sullivan photo by Amy Sussman/FilmMagic, Tyler, the Creator photo by Para Griffin/Getty Images, Faye Webster photo by Pooneh Ghana, Playboi Carti photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images.

2021 was a very weird year, to put it mildly. With some of the most anticipated albums from music’s biggest stars falling just a little flat, the most engaging and innovative music came from unexpected quarters. Breakout artists like L’Rain, Dry Cleaning, and Arooj Aftab put themselves on the map and set high expectations for whatever they do next. Favorites like Jazmine Sullivan, Low, and the Weather Station moved from the margins into the spotlight with career-best releases. More than ever, great music was there to be found if you looked hard enough. These are the 50 best albums of the year.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Spinster

50.

Yasmin Williams: Urban Driftwood

Yasmin Williams coaxes mesmerizing compositions from her guitar by using her entire body. She deftly plucks the strings positioned across her lap like a keyboard, and adds percussion by playing the kalimba mounted at her guitar’s bottom and knocking her wrist against the instrument’s surface. Her technique is virtuosic and timeless, but also crucially grounded in the desire to communicate something meaningful about the present. Williams’ second album, Urban Driftwood, is a testament to her talent—a contemplative balm with an expressive emotional core. –Quinn Moreland

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Luminelle

49.

Magdalena Bay: Mercurial World

The internet-obsessed rollout for Magdalena Bay’s debut album featured Y2K-style websites, meta music videos, and hallucinatory TikToks—playful gateways into one of the most distinctive pop records of the year. The L.A.-based duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin make music splashed with markers of the past: vaporwave, G-funk, and Max Martin-sized pop are all touchstones for Mercurial World. There are wobbly sugar rushes and glitched-out ballads, but the album reaches its apex on “Chaeri,” a melancholic ode to a crumbling friendship where Magdalena Bay deliver pathos and electro-pop perfection all at once. –Eric Torres

Further Reading: Magdalena Bay Are More Online Than You

Iron Works

48.

Ka: A Martyr’s Reward

The past sticks like plaque onto Ka’s music. The rapper’s penitent songs zoom in on the residues of bygone eras of New York—the blood, dregs, and traumas beneath the city’s pressure-washed surfaces. On his sixth solo album, he remains a dazzling lyricist, packing his verses with breathtaking wordplay. But while his previous records borrowed their conceptual frames from movies, religion, and mythology, allowing him to rap from a slight remove, A Martyr’s Reward draws primarily from Ka’s own life experience, finally allowing him to play his own main character. As he evokes New York’s many histories, his own story resonates right alongside them. –Stephen Kearse

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify

deadAir

47.

dltzk: Frailty

A heavyweight from SoundCloud’s gloriously chaotic digicore scene, the 18-year-old New Jersey producer dltzk (pronounced “delete zeke”) had an electrifying run this year. Their debut record, February’s Teen Week, offered an explosive ride through adolescence, featuring EDM and jungle drums, bitcrushed vocals and glitchcore stutters, even a sample of Avril Lavigne. Their madcap “dariacore” compilations—think Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” on speed, with lightning-fast breakbeats and screamo—kicked off a mashup micro-genre over the summer. But the culmination of dltzk’s boundless creativity thus far is Frailty. More melodically-minded and refined than their previous work, the nearly-hour-long opus trafficks in emo, shoegaze, and Passion Pit-style indietronica, just to name a few whiplashing styles. All the while, it retains the same thrilling experimentalism that has quickly become this limitless artist’s signature. –Cat Zhang

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

4AD

46.

Helado Negro: Far In

For years, Roberto Carlos Lange’s music-making process was a solitary one, his songs and albums assembled alone in his apartment, like jigsaw puzzles. The artist borrowed words from writers like Isaac Asimov and Jamaica Kincaid, solicited strings and horn tracks from friends, and recorded ambient sounds in liminal states—filtering it all and examining how the results reflected his own sense of being. But the success of his sixth album, 2019’s This Is How You Smile, left Lange burnt out and looking for deeper connections: with his partner, his friends, and his surroundings. Far In, largely conceived in the West Texas desert, is Lange’s most accessible record yet. Stressing a sleek, clean-toned palette, Lange collaborated with dozens of artists who contributed strings, winds, drums, and electronics. Far from shutting others out with an inward gaze, the album is an invitation into his orbit, a beacon of light beamed out into the universe, drawing you in towards its warmth. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Further Reading: Helado Negro Is Dancing Out the Anxiety of Modern Life

Hyperdub

45.

aya: im hole

Throughout aya’s debut album, voices rush the ear and then denature. Half-sung, half-shouted words slip in pitch, puddling into an artificially low register. “Come over/We can fuck the void out of each other,” she chants, multi-tracked high and low, both channels scoured raw and loaded with grit. The UK musician’s melting electronics and sour club progressions slink around an emptiness that threatens to obliterate the self as it dares you to consider that we’re all just bricolage plastered together from haphazard experience, trash in orbit around the gaping hole. –Sasha Geffen

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Technicolour

44.

Sofia Kourtesis: Fresia Magdalena EP

What was a house producer to do during a time when many clubs still lay dormant? For Berlin-based Peruvian musician Sofia Kourtesis, the answer was obvious: Make an EP so astoundingly bittersweet that it would tug at the heartstrings even when experienced on the crappiest of laptop speakers. Fresia Magdalena—the title is a reference to her mother, while standout track “La Perla” is dedicated to her late father—is above all else personal, a marriage of electronic inspiration and human commotion across five beautifully cathartic songs. –Ben Cardew

Saddle Creek

43.

Hand Habits: Fun House

Meg Duffy’s contributions to the indie rock world are manifold, having loaned their ranging guitar textures to Perfume Genius, Kevin Morby, Weyes Blood, and plenty more. On Fun House, Duffy’s third album as Hand Habits, they show off some limber songwriting of their own. Duffy’s reflections are gentle and nuanced: “Aquamarine” is a deceptively wistful number wrapped in a charging rhythm, while “Graves” stands out as an elegant acoustic foray. As Duffy works through ideas of memory, self-determination, grief, and shifting identity, these songs imbue the search with a sense of comfort. –Allison Hussey

ECM

42.

Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy

Jazz maestro Vijay Iyer articulates the urgency of protest without shirking the sentimental on this album recorded with longtime collaborators Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey. Iyer’s pin-heeled piano work hot-steps around in search of a sacred chord to alight upon, leaving shallow punctures across your heart as Oh and Sorey’s storm-flung rhythm section executes stomach-lurching shifts. Volatility abounds: The raucous paean “Combat Breathing” honors Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter with music that’s by turns fluid and transfixed, the sound of righteous fury opening channels for electricity to course between the many. –Jazz Monroe

Sargent House

41.

Lingua Ignota: Sinner Get Ready

Kristin Hayter’s voice, stacked tall atop itself, holds you from a terrifying height. On her latest album as Lingua Ignota, she reckons with devotion and loneliness in rural Pennsylvania, using its spare landscape and its musical and religious history as the fertile backdrop for her work. Between Appalachian instruments and prepared piano, she sings like she’s on the cusp of physical collapse, running her voice ragged only for it to surge into a roar. The point where exhaustion snaps into adrenaline is her starting ground. From there, she traces the contours of human faith, gumming the jagged edges where it breaks. –Sasha Geffen

4AD

40.

Erika de Casier: Sensational

Erika de Casier sings in the light, airy way you might absentmindedly hum along to a tune on the radio. Styles like Y2K R&B, breakbeat, and UK garage echo throughout Sensational like sonar, coalescing in spacious tracks that are allergic to lily-gilding. From two-step bangers to a ballad about a hypebeast’s obsession with wavey garms, de Casier assembles her genre patchwork with sotto voce assurance. –Owen Myers

Hyperdub

39.

Loraine James: Reflection

Reflection is always surprising, from the errant percussive barrage of the title track to the sibilant rap and aquatic dub of “Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery” to the vertiginous IDM of “Self-Doubt (Leaving the Club Early).” But the fluidity of London electronic experimentalist Loraine James’ third album peaks on the penultimate “Running Like That.” Starting off with the angelic voice of Eden Samara, the song might initially be mistaken for one of Cocteau Twins’ weightless confections, were it not for the persistence of the grinding drums. James’ wild sleight of hand here—masking the beat’s hectic energy with Samara’s cool, calming voice—crystallizes her daunting, and thrilling, unpredictability. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Freedom Sounds

38.

Navy Blue: Song of Sage: Post Panic! / Navy’s Reprise

As Navy Blue, Sage Elsesser makes rap music that’s spiritually weary, as if he’s processing the anguish of past lives in real time. On the strength of two stunning projects released within months of each other, the Brooklynite solidified his status as an intuitive link between generations of independent hip-hop. Song of Sage: Post Panic!, which came out on one of winter’s darkest days, had him ruminating on what it means to survive as a young Black man in the era of George Floyd; Navy’s Reprise, presented amid spring’s bloom, is more restorative—not exactly hopeful, but it seems to at least acknowledge that hope can exist. On both, Elsesser flows over a series of inviting loops that follow in the lineage of Madlib, DOOM, and Dilla, his thoughts drifting between everything from depression to gentrification to what he ate that day. This is stream-of-consciousness rap with a purpose, as personal as it is profound. –Ryan Dombal

Further Reading: Navy Blue Needs to Get a Few Things Off His Chest

Planet Mu

37.

RP Boo: Established!

In a year when pioneering Black producers passed away at a heartbreaking clip—RIP Lee “Scratch” Perry, Paul Johnson, and K-Hand—the return of Chicago footwork legend RP Boo felt like a life preserver. His fourth album, aptly called Established!, eschewed the minimalism of his previous work, instead offering a set of dancefloor fillers tracing the roots of footwork through careful, uproarious samples: the swing of gospel and swagger of early-’70s funk, rap’s macho peacockery, the fierce ecstasy of house. After two decades behind the boards, Boo is still making tracks that make the ears (and ass, and feet) work. Long may he reign. –Jesse Dorris

Smalltown Supersound

36.

Lost Girls: Menneskekollektivet

Menneskekollektivet is Norwegian for “human collective,” and Norwegian experimentalists Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden duly summon a sound larger than themselves on their first album as Lost Girls. Over churning house beats, keys and guitars tangle and detune; hypnotic arrangements sprawl to 15 minutes long. Hval’s spoken-word vocals are like eavesdropping on someone’s inner monologue. She muses on the strangeness of lockdown, meditates on the nature of fiction. In one song, she quotes a 1984 poem written by a computer program, which seems fitting: Collaboration, Lost Girls suggest, is itself a kind of artificial intelligence—greater than the sum of its parts, spitting out an endless and uncontrollable stream of ideas, sounds, and desires. –Philip Sherburne

Hopeless / Snack Shack Tracks

35.

Illuminati Hotties: Let Me Do One More

Sarah Tudzin does her sharpest songwriting when she’s got an axe to grind. On Let Me Do One More, her second album as Illuminati Hotties, she dishes up snarky takedowns of industry big-shots, capitalist sheeple, and West Coast health goths, but it’s the self-owns that best showcase her lyrical wit: leaning away during kisses, burning Pop-Tarts, sporting matching sneakers like a dork. Alternating between folk-punk ballads and power-pop rippers, Tudzin cracks open an oversized champagne bottle of fun and feelings, a celebration of maybe almost figuring herself out. –Nina Corcoran

Atlantic

34.

The War on Drugs: I Don’t Live Here Anymore

The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel yet again channels and transforms the once-maligned sound of big-ticket mainstream rock circa 1987. The songs he writes are about heavy things—love, death, loneliness—but, whatever the subject, they always circle back to memory, our deeply flawed process for storing and retrieving the past. Granduciel’s characters are haunted by where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, and he surrounds them with discarded fragments of music history that become special because of how he remembers them. –Mark Richardson

Further Reading: The War on Drugs Find Lightness on the Edge of Town

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

ANTI-

33.

Xenia Rubinos: Una Rosa

Raw spirit courses through Una Rosa, Xenia Rubinos’ third and best album. Thematically split into halves—one fiery, the other cool—it offers a commanding blend of Latin rhythms, icy synths, and live-wire vocal takes. Rubinos contends with spectres of life and identity—the liminality of being a Caribbean woman in the United States, the inevitability of death and grief—as she slices through their omens with a cleaver. At times, Una Rosa feels like an ideal version of a modern-day telenovela: dramatic and juicy while never losing sight of its necessary commentary. –Gio Santiago

Further Reading: How Drag Queens, a Flower Lamp, and Cuban Ballet Inspired Xenia Rubinos’ New Album

Columbia

32.

Adele: 30

On 30, Adele fetched the bolt cutters. Prying herself free from her marriage, as well as the expectations that come with being the mother of a young child—nevermind those of being one of the biggest pop stars on the planet—she conjured up her most musically adventurous album yet. Over the course of an hour, we hear Adele as a torch singer, a quiet storm seductress, and an inconsolable mess, sobbing on the phone in a voicemail snippet so private it hurts to hear. Songs like the wrenching “My Little Love” and the gale-force “To Be Loved” examine the high cost of putting yourself first, while the galvanic “Hold On” stumbles haltingly towards the light. For a generation that has grown up with Adele, 30 charts a way for exploring new dimensions of adulthood. –Amy Phillips

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Wikset Enterprise

31.

Wiki: Half God

New York rapper Wiki’s music has always felt locally sourced, but never more so than on Half God. The lyrics read like an index of classic Big Apple signifiers—Mets caps, yellow cabs, spicy chicken sandwiches—though Wiki’s main preoccupation is with the ways his city is losing its character to gentrification. On several tracks, he takes the interlopers in his Lower East Side neighborhood to task: “What I can’t understand or get through to me is, after all the schooling you did, don’t know what community is?” From Half God’s rooftop vantage, Wiki towers over them all. –Will Gottsegen

Further Reading: Live From Wiki’s New York, With Love

American Dreams

30.

Claire Rousay: a softer focus

Scattered throughout Claire Rousay’s a softer focus are snippets of her daily life: the sounds of a typewriter, a blaring swirl of cicadas, barely audible conversations. Swathed in swells of drone, half-remembered melodies, and strings saturated with melancholy, these prosaic sounds become monumental, activating a powerful sense of nostalgia for moments of quiet reflection and human connection. The abstract pieces on a softer focus are made potent by their suggestive familiarity, each sound a potential trigger for our own memories—happy, sad, or, more likely, somewhere in between. –Jonathan Williger

Age 101

29.

Little Simz: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert plays out like a hero’s journey where Little Simz’s ultimate opponent is herself. Over cinematic production, from warm soul to groovy Afrobeat, the virtuoso rapper outlines the tensions that wrestle within: her introversion versus a calling to make political, public-facing art; living as a “London-born estate girl” in the glitzy entertainment industry; warring sentiments of anger and empathy toward her once-absent father. She then dutifully concedes to these polar forces, acknowledging that she wouldn’t be who she is without them. –Michelle Kim

Further Reading: How bell hooks, Hiking, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s Inspired Little Simz’s New Album

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Saddle Creek

28.

Spirit of the Beehive: ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH plays like it was recorded on a recycled VHS, with ghostly echoes of whatever late-night ephemera was originally on the tape bleeding through. For their fourth album, Philadelphia’s Spirit of the Beehive made their already expansive sound feel even more hallucinatory, blending psychedelia, shoegaze, and scuzz with newly prominent electronic trappings. At their core, these are delicate pop songs, but they’ve been dissected and plastinated, like corpses in a human body exhibit. The spectacle is unnerving, to be sure, but it’s strangely engrossing too. –Evan Rytlewski

ANTI-

27.

Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air

On her first release for eclectic indie mainstay ANTI-, experimental noise poet Moor Mother transmits radical messages softly. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is far more hushed than her harsh dispatches of the past. The album nods to ’90s R&B, ambient, and cosmic jazz, and is packed with features from her expanding artistic community including Alabama’s Pink Siifu, and members of her own Philadelphia-based collective, Black Quantum Futurism. Moor Mother mines the same wreckage that she has always confronted—particularly the prolonged effects of intergenerational trauma—but here, she conquers it in a state of relative tranquility. –Madison Bloom

Further Reading: Moor Mother on How Her New Album Is a Gateway to Radical Thought

Backwoodz Studioz

26.

Armand Hammer and the Alchemist: Haram

As Armand Hammer, billy woods and ELUCID combine their powers to wax about racism, personal turmoil, and slap boxing, live from rap’s bleeding edge. Their latest album Haram cuts the tension and dark humor of the duo’s music with beats courtesy of California maestro the Alchemist, who meets them halfway with music as psychedelic as it is foreboding. woods and ELUCID have been speaking abstract truth to power for nearly two decades, but Haram broadcasts their poetic ambitions in widescreen. –Dylan Green

Saddle Creek

25.

Indigo De Souza: Any Shape You Take

Tapping into a deep well of human emotion, Indigo De Souza makes familiar experiences feel new. The North Carolina musician’s writing and delivery are so unguarded that you can’t help but relate, whether she’s screaming in anguish or reassuring a loved one that things will be OK. Her second album, Any Shape You Take, often feels like a series of battles as she fights off ghosts, both real and imagined, in an attempt to gain understanding. “I wanna be a light,” she sings, and when she shines, the brightness can be overwhelming. In fact, it’s all you can see. –Kelly Liu

Further Reading: Indigo De Souza’s Ultimate Indie Rock Glow Up

Warp

24.

Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8

Space 1.8 earns its astronomical title through frontier-breaking ambition. Its influences are distinctly throwback—Eric Dolphy’s investigations of the clarinet, both Coltranes’ search for an infinite cry—but the album isn’t content to replicate what worked in the past. London’s Nala Sinephro, utilizing both the harp and synthesizer, guides her band through a muted rumble that pricks the ears with both small deviations and seismic overtures alike. It’s heavy music delivered with a light touch. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Rough Trade

23.

black midi: Cavalcade

When their berserk live sets started going viral on YouTube a few years ago, black midi were hailed as the second coming of math-punk cranks like the Jesus Lizard. But with each passing year, that initial assessment seems increasingly off the mark. Countering their proudly inscrutable musicality with a newfound melodic elegance, Cavalcade makes it feel like we’re still discovering this band anew. These days, it’s more apt to think of black midi as the free-jazz Talk Talk, or the post-punk Scott Walker, or the symphonic Slint, or the art-school Primus—with each and every song, Cavalcade captures black midi in a perpetual state of spontaneous combustion and radical reanimation. –Stuart Berman

Merge

22.

Dawn Richard: Second Line: An Electro Revival

Dawn Richard has lived several musical lives over the last decade and a half, from Danity Kane to Diddy - Dirty Money to her experimentation as a solo artist, but Second Line: An Electro Revival marks her most exhilarating chapter yet. Richard’s power lies in her ability to intuitively skip across genres while dropping filthy bars over attention-seeking 808s or threading heartache alongside sparse instrumentation, and her sixth album is startlingly eclectic—bombastic house beats, strands of European classical melodies, and swoon-worthy R&B all take their place at the party. There’s a song for the line, the club, and the soul, and they all lead back to her native NOLA. After years of taking form, this is her genesis. –Tarisai Ngangura

Further Reading: From Bad Boy to Merge Records, Dawn Richard Reflects on Her One-of-a-Kind Career

Geffen

21.

Olivia Rodrigo: SOUR

In 2021, nobody did heartbreak better than Olivia Rodrigo. The 18-year-old pop phenom’s debut album already seems like a greatest hits collection, but it’s not just that the songs on SOUR’s A-side were inescapable throughout the year. It’s that everyone from teenage TikTokers to middle-aged music critics fell for its charms: the weapons-grade power ballads “drivers license” and “traitor”; the candy-coated kiss-offs “deja vu” and “good 4 u”; the teen angst manifesto “brutal.” When it comes down to it, sad girl shit is a universal language. –Amy Phillips

Further Reading: Who Owns the Teen Girl Aesthetic?

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Griselda

20.

Mach-Hommy: Pray for Haiti

At different points on Pray for Haiti, Mach-Hommy is a messiah in Vetements linen, a benefactor for relatives in need of money, a blockchain, and a lothario, all while he burrows into his Haitian heritage and love of rap history. His commanding voice, a subtly malleable croak, guides these cascading diversions: hardening for his deadpan punchlines, deepening when he speaks Creole, and lightening for his warm melodies. Ever since he started surfacing from rap’s underground about five years ago, Mach’s slipperiness has extended beyond his delivery and lyrics as he’s slapped exorbitant price tags on his records and mostly avoided press. It’s tempting to say he’s embracing accessibility with Pray for Haiti given his reunion with indie rap standard bearers Griselda Records, the album’s widespread availability, and a handful of new interviews, but obfuscation remains his calling card. From the woozy production that slinks in and out of focus to his oblique, free-associative writing, he’s still an artful trickster. But he doesn’t withdraw into his coded world; he inhabits it, rendering it and himself in exquisite detail. Camouflage, he reminds us, isn’t just for hiding. –Stephen Kearse

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Rough Trade

19.

Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2

The latest cryptic transmission from British singer-songwriter Dean Blunt is unsparing yet beautiful in its quest for hope in an increasingly despondent world. Blunt refuses allegiance to any single ideology, preferring instead to sprinkle provocative questions about Black rage before vanishing into the shadows. He perfects this approach in the taunting yet empathetic final lines of “MUGU”: “Let it out, nigga, let it out,” he sighs, “show them crackers what you’re all about.” Black Metal 2 doesn’t concede any of Dean Blunt’s mystique, but it’s the closest to a straight answer he’s given yet. –Brandon Callender

Kranky

18.

Grouper: Shade

Grouper’s Liz Harris pulls you in close on Shade. Her new songs are characteristically intimate, offering quiet truths and rapturous noise that require close focus. The individual components feel familiar—the hushed vocals, tape hiss, and sound of fingertips sliding up guitar strings—but Harris’ fingerpicked melodies and gutting poetry manage to explore new depths of her bottomless sound. Lean in enough and you’ll hear her ponder the light and the clouds, contending with the gravitational pull of darkness: “Bury those thoughts real deep/Bury those bodies deep/Put us back to sleep.” It’s a crushing flash of insight delivered like a whispered secret. –Evan Minsker

Ba Da Bing

17.

Cassandra Jenkins: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Throughout An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, Cassandra Jenkins gracefully accepts life’s mysteries, singing of friendship, happenstance, and death in a hush while inviting a dreamy atmosphere to seep into her words. The music, in turn, is serene and meditative, sustained by the centripetal force of her perspective as a songwriter. Tragedy surrounds the album, as Jenkins recorded it just a few months after the death of her would-be tourmate, David Berman. But she does not push away the sadness. Instead, she welcomes it and renders it beautiful. –Matthew Strauss

Further Reading: Cassandra Jenkins’ Hypnotic Folk Music Turns Everyday Moments Into Monuments

10k

16.

MIKE: Disco!

The arc of NYC indie-rap hero MIKE’s journey over the last couple of years has seen him steadily trudging toward salvation, working with local peers including KeiyaA and Navy Blue. Together, they helped him piece together fuzzy snapshots of loss, gently burying the past beneath shattered loops. On Disco!, which MIKE produced on his own under his dj blackpower alias, he finally finds the slivers of light he’s been searching for in the reflection of luminous samples that bathe his self-affirming bars with a heavenly shimmer. He may have taken the long road to recovery, but here he gives himself permission to crack a smile again. –Phillipe Roberts

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Matador

15.

Snail Mail: Valentine

Considering its bounty of pleaded pet names—“baby,” “honey,” “sugar,” “darling”—Valentine seems to pick up the pieces of Lindsey Jordan’s bleeding heart right where she left them on Snail Mail’s 2018 debut, Lush. But while that album promised forever, the songs on Jordan’s sophomore record are wrapped in day-glo caution tape: “Nothing stays as good as how it starts,” she sings with a wariness that makes her hopeless obsessions all the more devastating. Her world has expanded in the last three years—“parasitic cameras,” relapsing, and rehab are all mentioned—and her lyrics are sharper and more intentional, if only to make room for it all. She is now accompanied by synths, string sections, and even a disco sample, but Valentine’s pop sheen never overshadows Jordan’s unflinching honesty. Her deep growl of a voice flickers and flares above taut arrangements—a reminder that even the neatest songs can’t hide the messiness of heartbreak. –Arielle Gordon

Further Reading: Snail Mail Can’t Help But Confess

Dead Oceans

14.

Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee

After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jubilee, her splashy third album as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner sucks up life through a crazy straw. She boosts her sound for a growing audience without smoothing over her idiosyncrasies, taking inspiration from the daily battle to tame one’s anxieties, from capitalist buffoonery, and even from the concept of inspiration itself. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers?” she sings. The answer is hers to divulge. –Olivia Horn

Further Reading: Japanese Breakfast Is Working the Pain Away

Domino

13.

Tirzah: Colourgrade

The voltaic second album from London electronic artist Tirzah revolves around a close-knit, labyrinthine, and slightly crooked emotionality. Working alongside collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, she reduces her formula to elemental parts in order to bring out a more tactile intimacy guided by improvisatory songwriting, looped samples, and ad-libbed vocals. The sparse impressions on tracks like the out-of-step “Beating” and the unsettled “Crepuscular Rays” are the result of years of friendship and community melted down into what sounds like a close, honest embrace. –Eric Torres

New Amsterdam

12.

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince

When the Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab started recording Vulture Prince, she had no plans for an elegy. But then her brother died, as did a close friend. In tracing the shape of these new absences in her life, her mind went to the Urdu ghazals of her childhood, music and poetry filled with boundless, near-erotic longing for God. Aftab reimagined these ghazals, scored for only soft, stringed instruments—harp, stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, some violin. These sounds call clearly to each other across moonlit space, and Aftab’s voice cuts a path through the darkness in front of it, one line, one footfall, at a time. Jarred out of time, her grief (and ours) softens and grows overwhelmingly beautiful. –Jayson Greene

Further Reading: Get to Know Arooj Aftab, the Defiant Singer Who’s Reimagining Traditional South Asian Music for Today

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Secretly Canadian

11.

Faye Webster: I Know I’m Funny haha

Faye Webster strikes an unusual balance to keep her fourth album in motion: self-effacing and lovesick, but also knowing and a little cocky. Nothing much happens in these songs because nothing much needs to; Webster’s internal monologue is winsome and cutting enough to keep people occupied, and she knows it. “I like your songs even though they’re not about me,” she tells a love interest. When they’re together, she apologizes for being the first one to nod off, and when she’s by herself, she sleeps with the lights on to feel less alone. If she has to be sad, she’s going to be in on the joke. –Anna Gaca

Further Reading: Faye Webster on How a Shade of Blue, Her Boyfriend, and This One Animal Crossing Song Inspired Her New Album

4AD

10.

Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg

One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her own script. This album is not the type to be nominated for a Grammy, but it really ought to get Emmys for writing and acting. The lyrics infest your brain with quotables that reverberate for days, but more than the words it’s Shaw’s intonation that’s so funny and so heartbreaking: the grudging cadences, the way she can inject an unreadable alloy of earnestness and irony into an inanity like “I can rebuild.” The self-portrait painted here is of a burned-out shell drifting numbly through a life that senselessly accumulates irritations, humiliations, discomforts, chores, and interpersonal skirmishes, offset by the tiny comforts of Twix bars and artisanal treats. There’s a personal dimension to the inner emptiness (a sapping break-up), but because New Long Leg’s release coincided with the depressive pall that swept over the world thanks to lockdown, Shaw’s interiority synced up perfectly with exterior conditions. It’s no coincidence that the most exciting rock record in years is about the inability to feel excitement. Within Shaw is a voice of a generation distilling how it feels to be alive right now: “Do everything and feel nothing.” –Simon Reynolds

Further Reading: Dry Cleaning’s Everyday Surrealism

AWGE / Interscope

Playboi Carti: Whole Lotta Red

Whole Lotta Red is an all-time heat check. Playboi Carti could have easily put out Die Lit 2, and everyone would have probably been fine with it. But that’s not how this Atlanta alien works. At just 25 years old, he has already reinvented his sound multiple times, from wavy plugg music to his baby voice era; whenever some SoundCloud copycats start to catch up, he jets toward new territory. On Whole Lotta Red, over blown-out beats that blend hypnotic melodies with drums that twitch and boom like a tweaked-out Godzilla, Carti yelps, shrieks, and croons as if he’s trying to exorcise a demon. Its meticulously layered-yet-effortless style will once again have all the wannabes scratching their heads for years. What a flex. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Matador

Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime

Mdou Moctar first riveted listeners as a wedding performer in his home country of Niger; his live recordings circulated over shared SIM cards. Since then, he’s continued to find electrified approaches to the vernacular music of his Tuareg background with uninhibited guitar. On Afrique Victime, his first release for Matador, Moctar chases lively arrangements even further while excoriating the traumatic legacy of brutal French colonialism in Africa. His solos rip like lightning bolts across a storm of melody and rhythm, with Mikey Coltun’s bass roiling in ecstatic complement. The band charges through energetic and lightly psychedelic numbers (“Chismiten,” “Ya Habibti”), and find more knots to untangle in their quieter asides (“Asdikte Akal,” “Tala Tannam”). Its title track is a pure thrill, detonating as Moctar’s cohort locks into a churning groove from his sung invocation and only growing wilder from there. Reports of the death of rock have been greatly exaggerated: Afrique Victime is a uniquely vibrant and kinetic recording, one that proves that the future of rock music exists far beyond what any genre or geographic borders can define. –Allison Hussey

Further Reading: How Eddie Van Halen, Homemade Hot Pepper, and a Simple Fuzz Pedal Inspired Mdou Moctar’s New Album

Fat Possum

The Weather Station: Ignorance

A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and environments, and an ear for melodies that dip, wind, and double back like trains of thought. After a few great albums, most of them sparse and muted, she assembles a band that can channel the exuberance of her era’s pop rhythms and twist them toward her own idiosyncratic ends. Far from dampening the music’s acuity and expressiveness, making them softly palatable, these new grooves accompany some of the sharpest songs of her career. Weather Station bandleader Tamara Lindeman might be tired of hearing Joni Mitchell comparisons at this point, but the resemblance is uncanny: Ignorance is something like her Court and Spark.

Not that it sounds much like Mitchell’s 1974 masterpiece. Where that album is warm and jazzy, Ignorance is single-mindedly propulsive, befitting songs concerned with the shrinking possibility of love on a planet hurtling toward collapse. Multiple percussionists provide an unflagging beat; strings, woodwinds, and electronic keyboards float above these girders like an iridescent sunset after a wildfire. Lindeman’s inimitable voice wanders the spaces between, taking in trees choked by buildings, birds alighting on rooftops, a world that hangs over her with the indifference of a secondhand jacket. Perhaps the comparison has more to do with the space Court and Spark opened in Joni’s canon, making room for the run of wonderful and profoundly strange albums that came next. After this, it seems, Tamara Lindeman can do anything. –Andy Cush

Further Reading: The Weather Station Battles Climate-Change Anxiety, One Song at a Time

Roadrunner

Turnstile: Glow On

After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been better primed to receive its 34 minutes of nonstop feeling. Is this post-hardcore? Pop hardcore? Streetwear Fugazi? Do you “have to see it live to get it”? No matter how you square their multitudes, Turnstile know that hardcore is fundamentally interactive music—you don’t just listen; you participate; together—and Glow On facilitates it. This might mean screaming along to the tidal hooks of “Mystery” and “Holiday” to lock in with a kinetic crowd. It might mean having a moment of connected introspection with lyrics like “I just need to know I’m working for the big prize” or “Can’t be the only one” or “Thank you for letting me see myself” (just like those Turnstilemaniacs nodding along in the sublime Turnstile Love Connection film). Or maybe it means allowing Glow On’s hypercharged riffs and blast beats—its synth arpeggios, sing-rapping, Caribbean rhythms, and Dev Hynes harmonies—to fluidly eclipse your misfit soul, clarifying that it belongs here. –Jenn Pelly

Further Reading: How Riley Gale, Go-Go Music, and Jet Li Inspired Turnstile’s Glow On

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Sub Pop

Low: HEY WHAT

Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers to our ears: a strange, circuitous journey that makes HEY WHAT feel like genuinely new territory. It is easy to imagine any of these 10 warped, noisy pieces of music in stripped-down arrangements. In fact, most of the songs tease that kind of delivery: Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices arrive in unison like folk singers, stripped of effects and clear in the mix, every word audible and sung in simple, hummable melodies. But with producer BJ Burton, Sparhawk and Parker interrupt and distort themselves, filtering their stark, psalm-like compositions through the kind of processing that makes a guitar solo squeal into feedback, or the sound from your speakers clip into static. It is a beautiful, adventurous album from a band who is letting their music fall into disorder and who, in doing so, have never sounded more in control. –Sam Sodomsky

Further Reading: Low Still Don’t Sound Like Anyone Else

Luaka Bop

Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises

It begins atomically, with a building block made of seven notes twisting around like a helix. Around this motif Promises blinks to life, a self-regenerating ecosystem in nine movements. This hybrid electronic/jazz/orchestral piece doesn’t feel composed so much as monitored by Sam Shepherd, the boundless electronic composer who performs as Floating Points. Whether arranging the London Symphony Orchestra’s oceanic swells or tapping out notes on a harpsichord that seems to be falling slightly out of tune, Shepherd lays down a framework for the eminent free jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders to follow and then thrillingly disregard.

Sanders is the central voice and shining star of Promises, his first major recording in a couple of decades, and one of 2021’s greatest musical gifts. He trots to one idea, floats to another, then sprints to a third, exploring the universe Shepherd has cast for him and spinning out new meanings for its restless, incessant seven-note central motif. This is the endless joy of Promises: listening to Sanders feel his way through this alien world as if newly born into it. It leaves such a unique impression that although you are listening to music, you are also witnessing its evolution. –Jeremy D. Larson

Columbia

Tyler, the Creator: Call Me If You Get Lost

Even by the maximalist standards of Tyler, the Creator’s previous albums, there’s kind of a lot happening on this one. Call Me If You Get Lost is a formal homage to aughts-era rap mixtapes. And it’s a concept record about luxury living narrated by the artist’s fur-capped alter ego, Sir Tyler Baudelaire. And it’s a reckoning with the shock-jock narrators of his early material. And it’s a rambling apology to the other two (possibly famous) members of a broken love triangle. But Tyler manages the conceptual overload using all the tools in his box, shuffling moods with beats that touch down in jazz, reggae, and bossa nova, and rapping like he hasn’t in years, free-associating over wild verses that sometimes pull on five or six story threads at once. You know the old advice about giving the task you need done right to a busy person? Maybe there's something to it. –Lane Brown

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Mexican Summer

L’Rain: Fatigue

In the hands of Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek, music can be nonlinear and unpredictable without sacrificing grooves and hooks. As L’Rain, her blend of hi- and lo-fi techniques spawns songs that call for a half-dozen genre descriptors—avant-garde, psych-soul, with a side of musique concrète?—and refuse to resolve in an expected way. Her second album, Fatigue, is a symphony of fleeting, hyper-specific sound, from the opulent keyboard arpeggios that open “Two Face” and the swampy bass driving “Suck Teeth” to the heartfelt guitar interplay on “Blame Me” and the ingenuous rhythmic repetition of the phrase “make a way out of no way”—a line borrowed from Cheek’s late mother, Lorraine—on “Find It.” L’Rain songs can be one small idea or 10 overlapping ones, 17 seconds or six minutes, built around a single loop or encompassing upwards of 20 players. The works on Fatigue mimic the nature of grief and change, the haze and backsliding and dark thoughts. Through these vivid fragments, Cheek’s worldview comes across clearly: The best way to achieve growth is through unhindered exploration. –Jillian Mapes

Further Reading: L’Rain Wants to Confuse You

RCA

Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales

On her previous album, 2015’s Reality Show, Jazmine Sullivan made it clear who her music was speaking to and intended for: women who hover outside the frame in a thick, stifling haze of stereotypes. Heaux Tales is a similar, vastly more ambitious corrective whose characters surrender to varying shades of anger, shame, sex, and abandonment. Vulnerability, as she sees it, is a cyclical, always uncomfortable, sisterly burden. But the simple act of owning and sharing each other’s flaws can beget something that resembles growth. Catharsis is possible because Sullivan chooses to amplify the ugly narratives women hold and reframe them as purges, and then package them as confessional R&B.

In this intimate space, she can embrace the power and duality of toxic love. “Girl Like Me” is both a meditation on the virtues of so-called ho living and a supervillain origin story where a cheater sparks her metamorphosis from good girl to maneater. She’s dismissive but maybe also desires protection. “You leave me with no choice,” Sullivan relinquishes. The album’s emotions live in steady disharmony that way. Next to the sublime detachment of “Lost One” is the orgasmic poetry of “On It” and the cold-shoulder eviction notice “Pick Up Your Feelings.” These songs conjure memories of disappearing soulmates and raging fuckboys who did or didn’t help you see yourself.

But it’s the visceral interludes from women in Sullivan’s orbit that give the project the feel of a Terry McMillan novel, or a community of complicated Zolas made dimensional through song. As liberating as it is to be naked, there’s no erasing the fear part, nor the circle of trust it takes to say the quiet parts out loud. Heaux Tales wins because Sullivan holds the therapies of sisterhood sacred, confident no one can take them away. –Clover Hope

Further Reading: Jazmine Sullivan on Shamelessness, Heaux Tales, and Her Biggest Year Yet

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal