Top 50 Albums of 2015

50. The Epic

Kamasi Washington

Brainfeeder

Staging a near-three hour, triple LP named The Epic as your label debut album is quite an audacious undertaking, but if maybe only a handful of people could make that work, Kamasi Washington proved he is one of them. Most well known for his work with Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, jazz saxophonist Washington assembled a ten-piece band and composed a modern work that lives up to its name’s promises. At three hours, it works because it refuses to compromise and lets Washington and company release all that they feel they need to. The Epic’s most important moments come in its final third, addressing head-on the same black themes as Washington did with his previous collaborators. However, through his dedication to the size and momentum of the album, all three discs become essential as the work ebbs and flows in its movements.

Songs: “Change of the Guard,” “Leroy and Lanisha,” “Malcolm’s Theme”

49. On Your Own Love Again

Jessica Pratt

Drag City

The precision with which 28-year-old Jessica Pratt channels the folk sound of the ’60s on On Your Own Love Again is astounding. From the fuzzy production to the rich tones of her fingerpicked guitar tunes to her traditional singing, Pratt created an album that could put her in conversation alongside Baez, Mitchell, and Dylan. Her fairly strict adherence to these bygone artists presents an implicit struggle in listening to the album. New challenges old and old challenges new as songs that sound like folk standards yet were written and recorded today open up a dialog between the 1960s and the 2010s. On Your Own Love Again does double duty, not only reminding and honoring these foundational artists, but also providing a breath of fresh air amidst the last few years’ relentless obsession with the 80s.

Songs: “Strange Melody,” “Moon Dude,” “Back, Baby”

48. O.K.

Eskimeaux

Double Double Whammy

Rounding out forays into experimental, noise, and drone, Eskimeaux, the name under which Brooklyn musician Gabrielle Smith has been releasing music since 2007, decided on the very fashionable bedroom pop style for her Double Double Whammy debut LP. With help from The Epoch, a Brooklyn art and songwriting collective, O.K. swells with intimate harmonies, lively drum tracks, and personal, poetic lyrics. On O.K.’s best songs, Smith has the combined moodiness of Porches., simplistic beauty of Frankie Cosmos, and wide appeal of Feist. And that sort of inclusiveness is indicative of Eskimeaux’s collective approach.

Songs: “Folly,” “Broken Necks,” “I Admit I’m Scared,” Alone at the Party”

47. Peanut Butter

Joanna Gruesome

Fortuna Pop! / Slumberland Records

The internet says we aren’t as good at multitasking as we think we are. Either we’re increasingly taking on more and more as a result of the availability of so much at our fingertips, or that availability is causing us all to develop some inherent form of ADHD, or probably both. That feeling of absolute overwhelm can be heard all across Joanna Gruesome’s shoegazy punk Peanut Butter. The Welsh quintet pack as many ideas as possible into their under-three-minute, pop-oriented tracks. Often their most appealing moments double as their most challenging: trashy drums, dissonant guitars, abrupt melody shifts, piercing vocals. Whether these things reveal their beauty to listeners is contentious; but one thing is for sure, blink and you’ll miss it all.

Songs: “Last Year,” “Honestly Do Yr Worst” “Psykick Espionage”

46. Have You In My Wilderness

Julia Holter

Domino

The consistency heard on Have You In My Wilderness is of such a certain kind that it is nearly dismissive. The danger in singer-songwriter Julia Holter’s latest album is that it almost sounds too easy to be considered great. Feathery and ethereal are two common qualities to her baroque-inspired tunes. Despite retaining the atmospheric gentleness of her last record Loud City Song, the arrangements and instrumentation are livelier on Have You In My Wilderness. Unobservant listeners could fall prey to the slickness on …Wilderness, but as Holter sways elegantly to her chamber compositions it is clear that she is more than adequately filling the void left by St. Vincent and fellow chamber pop artists that have recently shifted towards more electronic scenes.

Songs: “Feel You,” “Silhouette,” “Sea Calls Me Home,” “Have You In My Wilderness”

45. Simple Songs

Jim O’Rourke

Drag City

Simple Songs is very deceptive and humble in name. In fact, “Simple Songs” is a complete misnomer for the album created in Jim O’Rourke’s return to his arty, singer-songwriter work. On one hand, O’Rourke’s choices of subjects and lyricism are relatively simplistic; he calmly delivers repetitive short verses with even shorter lines. Yet, on the other hand, these lyrics are just a vehicle for the real star of the album, the meticulous instrumental arrangements. O’Rourke uses the interplay between strings, keys, frequent upright bass and more to compose unique song structures and rich, folk jazz sonic landscapes with expertise.

Songs: “Friends With Benefits,” “These Hands,” “All Your Love”

44. Shinerboy

Gnarwhal

Exploding in Sound

The first song on Shinerboy comes in at half volume for the first two minutes, and acts as a primer for the next twenty six minutes’ aural onslaught. With breakneck rhythm shifts, tense tempo changes, and incoherent shouting, Shinerboy is completely unhinged. Gnarwhal takes its interest in raw, emo-leaning sounds and contorts them into visceral math rock jams. The most compelling thing about the album, though, is how loose and fun they make their extremely tight and technical playing come across.

Songs: “It’s Cute and They Match,” “That’s Not Of Course,” “Babes R Babes”

43. Product

SOPHIE

Numbers

Despite featuring a majority of tracks that had been previously released over the last two years, compiled together the tracks on Product showcases just how good the UK producer SOPHIE is at making weird, blown out club hits. It’s equally odd marketing scheme — being sold along with various fictional fashion items and even a plastic contraption looking awfully like a butt plug — is almost besides the point. However, in conjunction with the pitch shifted, high velocity synth ballad closer “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” Product’s mission statement, if you will, fully crystalizes. When the song ends without ever introducing a percussion track, it confronts expectations head on, just like the SOPHIE persona itself. Why would a male producer choose a commonly female name when its so much tougher to succeed in music as one, why release an album of songs that are already easily accessible not on one? SOPHIE and Product ask these questions not to answer them, but to debate why they need to be asked in the first place.

Songs: “BIPP,” “LEMONADE,” “JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE”

42. Cocksure

Laura Stevenson

Don Giovanni

Laura Stevenson is such an efficient storyteller. Not only through her songwriting, but through her delivery she confesses just enough to hook you in. Then, by way of her infectious choruses and huge, power-chord laden riffs, she blows you away. On Cocksure’s contagious, quick hitting anthems she makes a bunch of attention grabbing impression that end up lasting way past the end of the album.

Songs: “Jellyfish,” “Happier, Etc.,” “Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me”

41. Never Were The Way She Was

Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld

Constellation

For their latest ventures, frequent Arcade Fire collaborators and vanguard indie arrangers Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld decided to band together to compose a very unique album. Only using saxophones and violins, respectively, the two master instrumentalists build extremely moving pieces. The techniques on display throughout Never Were the Way She Was make their sums even more astounding when it is understood that the recording was all done live and organically, showcasing just how much talent and chemistry exists between Stetson and Neufeld.

Songs: “The Sun Roars Into View,” “In the Vespers,” “Never Were the Way She Was”

40. Sprinter

Torres

Partisan

Torres’s Mackenzie Scott injects gothic overtones into her music with the deftness of a Lykke Li or Karin Dreijer. Still, the darkness in Torres’s Sprinter often comes through much more subtly, as a result of its hard rock core. Nothing was quite as evocative and visceral this year as Sprinter’s three biggest tracks, “Strange Hellos,” “Sprinter,” and “Cowboy Guilt.” The songs strut by on the swagger of Scott’s midrange snarl and guitar work, as well as her unapologetic songwriting.

Songs: “Strange Hellos,” “Sprinter,” “Cowboy Guilt,” “The Exchange”

39. Natalie Prass

Natalie Prass

Spacebomb

Singer-songwriter Natalie Prass has spent time touring as a backing vocalist for Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, probably picking up some indispensible musical guidance along the way. But with her self-titled debut, recorded way back in 2012, she shows that she was always more interested, and destined, for success at the front of the stage. Natalie Prass has all the makings of a big budget production, but with the help of friend and pop auteur Matthew E. White and local recruitment from the VCU jazz program, Prass constructed the albums lush textures on little to no budget at all. Thankfully all the pieces came together, because Natalie Prass is such a great introduction for the artist. Taking cues from baroque and jazz, the album is as ornate as it is instrumentally varied. Between Prass’s pristine Disney singing and the instrumentation, songs take on the size of full orchestras, and her songwriting carries just as much weight.

“My Baby Don’t Understand Me,” “Birds of Prey,” “Christy,” “It Is You”

38. Dry Food

Palehound

Exploding in Sound

When I saw Palehound perform earlier this year, I swear it was the closest I would ever get to seeing Liz Phair in concert. Ellen Kempner, frontwoman of Palehound, brings all the grit and wit of a 90s grunge star. Still, on Dry Food, her debut full-length album, she shows that she would have outclassed nearly every grunge guitarist were she around at that time. Kempner shares a lot with artists from the bygone genre, unaffected, almost spoken, delivery and a penchant for minor chords. Her backing band, too, fits the mold for a successful grunge band. But Kempner’s superior guitar work, ambition for upending her song’s established tempos, and more personal, confessional lyricism bring her into the best of the present.

Songs: “Healthier Folk,” “Cinnamon,” “Dry Food,” “Seekonk”

37. White Men Are Black Men Too

Young Fathers

BIG DaDa

It would be hard to find a group that cultivates as much contagious energy as Young Fathers. Their bass is always palpable and their vocals — whether sung, rapped, or chanted — are always inciting. Young Fathers usually incorporate some extra thing in their best songs to take them above and beyond what is expected. White Men Are Black Men Too manages to do that with every track. The album plays like a fictional riot where dancing and jumping around are just as prevailing as social and political unrest. And in White Men Are Black Men Too’s world, the two aren’t so separate, or fictional for that matter. After all, what’s having progressive, world changing views without being motivated to act on them?

Songs: “Shame,” “Rain Or Shine,” “Liberated”

36. Hyperview

Title Fight

ANTI-

For their third album, Hyperview, Title Fight scaled back the hardcore style of their previous releases in favor of a dreamier, subtler sound. Some found the simpler, quieter instrumentation to be a retreat, dampening Title Fight’s punchy aggressiveness. Rather, the band’s shoegaze turn shows maturity in their ability to find beauty in restraint. The distinctive mixture of hazy, distorted vocal production and sometimes absolutely clear, instrument mixing bridges the small gaps between dream pop and shoegaze, and even incorporates strong elements from their own prior oeuvre.

Songs: “Murder Your Memory,” “Chlorine,” “Your Pain Is Mine Now”

35. Ivy Tripp

Waxahatchee

Merge

It takes approximately 45 seconds to fall completely in love with Waxahatchee’s new album on each listen. Katie Crutchfield, one-time sole member of her now fleshed out group, finishes her first verse, an expectedly objective, poetic look at a relationship, over a buzzing organ and an interspersed whining guitar bend. These are new sounds for Waxahatchee, but the song feels resolutely at home in her hands. Since her previous album, the bedroom recording Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield enlisted a more permanent backing band and Ivy Tripp takes full advantage of their addition. Crutchfield is still the driving force to Waxahatchee, but the rest of the instrumentation give her music even more power and conviction. Take “<” (pronounced “Less Than” like the mathematic symbol), which features one of the coolest musical moments of the year in its erratic chorus drum solos. Played over Crutchfield repeatedly drawling “You’re less than me / I am nothing,” the drums don’t undercut, but accentuate her dizzying, self-deprecating jabs. On Ivy Tripp Waxahatchee’s conviction is a strong as ever, and with the added bandmates, so is her music.

Songs: “Breathless,” “Under A Rock,” “La Loose,” “Air,” “<”

34. Me

Empress Of

Terrible, XL

Empress Of is part of revival movement of young, female singers reclaiming female sexuality through their music. Yet, unlike previous endeavors in the mainstream, this time the music feels much more like it’s made by women for themselves and not to fulfill some fantasy of the male audience they were equally engineered for. Under the Empress Of name, singer Lorely Rodriguez writes alt R&B songs validating her wants and needs rather than succumbing to those that others expect or want from her. They are more straightforward than her peers fka twigs, Bjork, and Kelela, but just as provocative and assured. Already, aspects of this collection of artists’ music has infiltrated pop, with songs from Alessia Cara, Selena Gomez, and Hailee Steinfeld exploring similar themes going huge.

Songs: “Everything Is You” “Kitty Kat,” “Need Myself,” “Icon”

33. Time To Go Home

Chastity Belt

Hardly Art

Time to Go Home is the soundtrack to acid washed jean jackets, cuffed pants and Converses kicking up dust on a midnight hang at a flood light-lit baseball field, and sweaty, muggy garage and basement shows. Lines like the reverb-slathered “Everything is beautiful / Because we’re delusional” off of the album’s stellar title track, paint such a vivid picture of these teenaged/young adult settings that its hard to hear Time to Go Home any other way. The pristinely toned guitars, sheepish tempos, and thick vocals manufacture an inescapable haze of mixed memories and nostalgia, establishing an atmosphere like nothing else released this year.

Songs: “Drone,” “Why Try,” “IDC,” “Time To Go Home”

32. Age of Transparency

Autre Ne Veut

Downtown

Under his stage name Autre Ne Veut, alternative R&B singer and producer Arthur Ashin is completely liberated and uninhibited. He soars wildly over the top of his already expansive tracks with an admirable amount of unrestraint. Age of Transparency, the second part in a trilogy of albums from the musician concerning the hypocrisy of humanity in the context of social media and capitalism, plays out like an R&B artist’s maximalist wet dream. Ashin recorded the instrumentation live and then toyed with the individual elements, cherry picking and warping them into looping, juttering whirlwinds. It’s amazing that he manages to hold these songs together because between his singing performances and grand production they all sound like they are seconds away from completely falling apart. Nevertheless, he holds them together with the album’s constants, the gorgeous keys and bass that ground the more synthesized contributions back to Earth.

Songs: “On And On (Reprise),” “Switch Hitter,” “World War Pt. 2,” “Over Now”

31. Depression Cherry

Beach House

Sub Pop

I wish I could go back in time to the age of my middle school and high shool dances and take Beach House’s Depression Cherry with me. The stellar collection of dream pop ballads is the perfect score for every one of those dances’ last songs. Depression Cherry’s blend of apprehension, fleeting happiness, and melancholy precisely describes the mix of feelings when that final song begins. And album centerpiece “Sparks” best puts that mixture into words, “And then it’s dark again / Just like a spark / And then it vanishes / No one around / And then it comes again / Just like a spark.” Beach House’s consistency was questioned by some as being a symptom of stagnation because of the relative sameness of their last few albums. But when a group does something this well, each additional album showcases them further honing their craft — which might become tougher to realize as they get better and better.

Songs: “Sparks,” “Space Song,” “PPP”

30. If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

Drake

Cash Money, OVO Sound, Republic

Over his entire rapping career, but especially in the last few years, Drake has cemented his popularity through the endless quotability of his hooks. At this point, it is inevitable that with a new Drake album will come a handful of new lines to add to the very intertwined rap and internet vernaculars. Still, with If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Drake outdid even himself. The quickly released mixtape — hell, the mixtape cover alone — put Drake well on his way to the near meme status he now holds. Sure, he maintains the “Versace” flow across the whole album — which could probably run as one long track in another world. But he knows exactly which producers (and possibly ghostwriters) to employ to come up with infinitely repeatable lines like “Oh my god, if I die I’m a legend” and “I was running through the 6 with my woes.” These phrases didn’t just last the whole year, they established an entirely new language, and they put Drake at the top of the mountain as its sole translator.

Songs: “Legend,” “Know Yourself,” “Preach”

29. A Distant Fist Unclenching

Krill

Exploding in Sound

At their best, the now-defunct Krill wrote beautifully constructed songs exploring the weird recesses of otherwise ordinary bouts with anxiety. A Distant Fist Unclenching, the band’s retroactive swan song, provided both the best work of the Krill’s career and, because of the members’ decision to retire the band altogether this past October, the perfect send off for the cult-followed group. Lead singer and bassist Jonah “Jon” Furman has a peculiar way of writing songs with abstract lyrics that, nonetheless, pack the emotional punch of a hearing a diary entry from someone who knows exactly what you’re going through. Behind his Kermit meets Kurt Cobain vocals, guitarist Aaron “Ron” Ratoff and drummer Ian “Bob” Becker played soothing warm guitar leads and subtly tricky rhythm sections imbibing A Distant Fist Unclenching with a compelling fusion of oddness and heart, fitting for anyone who’s ever been called “different” like, without a doubt, Krill had.

Songs: “Phantom,” “Torturer,” “Tiger,” “Brain Problem”

28. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

Earl Sweatshirt

Tan Cressida, Columbia

I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside just sounds like the product of someone who hasn’t left the house in weeks. Even in Samoa Earl Sweatshirt wasn’t as distant and removed as he is on album single “Grief,” which he wrote at the end of a three week stint spent completely within his house. Handling practically every aspect of the album, Earl created a distinct, singular aesthetic that every one of his prior works has only hinted at. Extremely sparse, introverted beats and accusatory, controversial bars become heartbreaking in Earl’s hands. He only gives 30 minutes of music, but he’s so unrelenting in those 30 minutes that it would be tough to imagine the album being any longer. His aim is sharply focused; by taking care of the production he made scruffy beats that would accentuate his free verse style and eliminate the want for traditional hooks or choruses.

Songs: “Huey,” “Mantra,” “Grief,” “Wool”

27. Before The World Was Big

Girlpool

Wichita

Equipped with only a couple of guitars and intentionally shrill singing voices, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad have capitalized on the trend of the simple, demo-style songcraft. The duo writes universal aphorisms out of everyday anecdotes, and their minimalist recording style allows everything they do include on Before The World Was Big to mean exponentially more. The title seems to invoke a fond recollection for childhood, and everything else about the album — from the vocal melodies to the two-chord riffs — supports that interpretation.

Songs: “Ideal World,” “Before The World Was Big,” “Chinatown”

26. Sound & Color

Alabama Shakes

ATO, Rough Trade

Sound & Color was probably the most unexpectedly great album of 2015 for me. Of all the big, highly anticipated follow-ups slated for 2015 (Purity Ring, Deafheaven, Father John Misty, to name just a few), Alabama Shakes’ new album wasn’t as far up on my list. But while many others seemed to come and go, Sound & Color, on the strength of its academic cross-section of blues, soul, and garage rock, stuck around for the whole year. Previously, frontwoman Brittney Howard was the main focal point of her band, her songwriting and crazy range much more interesting than the rest of the components of the Shakes’ tracks. On Sound & Color, everyone in the group stepped up with more dynamic instrumentation and varied structures, contributing to an album’s worth of hits.

Songs: “Sound & Color,” “Don’t Wanna Fight,” “Gimme All Your Love,” “Shoegaze”

25. Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

Courtney Barnett

Milk!, Marathon Artists, Mom + Pop

Courtney Barnett has a profound talent for telling painfully funny and often heartbreaking stories about the mundane. Otherwise completely overlooked and unexplored people and circumstances get put under a microscope in Barnett’s clever, poignant storytelling dedicated to the everyday. Whether an unhappy corporate worker, projections of a deceased estate, or — more often than not — herself, Barnett mines her subjects with a rare measure of compassion. Over the warm, crunching riffs and driving classic rock inspired compositions on Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, she gives humanity to ideas usually thought about in merely in statistics.

Songs: “Elevator Operator,” “Pedestrian at Best,” “Depreston,” “Dead Fox”

24. Choose Your Weapon

Hiatus Kaiyote

Flying Buddha

Hiatus Kaiyote, an Australian quartet whose unique sound may only be rivaled by its poetically resonant name, made some of the best genre-defying contemporary jazz this year in Choose Your Weapon. The album’s mystical combination of swanky neo-soul, complex worldly arrangements and Chicago footwork-referencing production give its 69-minute runtime a very focused sense of variety. Atop the album’s genre collage, lead singer and guitarist Nai Palm’s voice glides like that of her jazz spiritual ancestry, while referencing everything from old video game systems to Miyazaki films. In listening to the album, it’s seems as if the band travelled through time — carefully picking their favorite sounds from each decade — and coalesced their findings into a dynamic composition all their own.

Songs: “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk,” “Laputa,” “Breathing Underwater,” “Molasses”

23. Escape From Evil

Lower Dens

Ribbon Music

With Escape From Evil, Lower Dens has become one of the more compelling dream pop outfits simply by ratcheting up the liveliness of the genre’s usual laidback verve. Lower Dens is still dream pop at heart — the synths and ethereal vocals make that abundantly clear. Yet, their driving drum tracks and striking accompanying guitar lines make for busier, more immediate songs than those of their contemporaries. Add in the dynamic, folk-tinged harmonies, often both gorgeous and ambitious in the same swooping strides, and Escape From Evil pushes Lower Dens in an interesting needed direction while resuscitating the dream pop genre overall.

Songs: “Sucker’s Shangri-La,” “To Die in L.A.,” “Company”

22. King Push — Darkest Before The Dawn: Prelude

Pusha T

G.O.O.D. Music, Def Jam

Darkest Before the Dawn was supposed to be just a brief prelude to his delayed King Push album. Still, its quick, half-hour runtime reminds of the stranglehold Pusha T has on the throne of top lyricist currently rapping, and, as a result, proves to be one of the best albums to come out this year. The new president of G.O.O.D. Music’s crash course in rap writing is as unrelenting as it is confounding. Pusha T delivers so much in any given line, you could pick just one and spend the rest of the album’s length trying to decipher it alone. On Darkest Before the Dawn he continues to rap over sparse, unsettling beats, but with the added benefit of some The Dream hooks and more appropriate features than its strong but inconsistent predecessor My Name is My Name. As he said on the late 2014, non-album cut “Lunch Money,” he certainly is the only dopeboy quotable.

Songs: “Untouchable,” “M.F.T.R.,” “Crutches, Crosses, Caskets,” “F.I.F.A.”

21. Foil Deer

Speedy Ortiz

Carpark

Following a string of outstanding breakout showcases by all-girl, girl-fronted, and girl-featuring bands from this years SXSW, many critics and publications quickly dubbed 2015 as the year rock evolved into a women-dominated field. In her own words, Speedy Ortiz founder Sadie Dupuis has stated just as much. “For the first time in my life, it’s starting to feel like rock music is a girls’ club,” Dupuis said, at the forefront of this extremely welcomed shift, “And it’s refreshing!” Doing a benefit tour for Girls Rock Camp and introducing a concert hotline to assure safety at their shows, the members of Speedy Ortiz have embraced all the positive aspects rock’s girls’ club. Not the least of Speedy Ortiz’s big year, either, was their new album Foil Dear, which saw Dupuis’s unique, cryptic songwriting get even more charged without sacrificing any of the aspects that make it so enticing. Similarly, the band expanded upon their signature style with poppy-er and twangy-er elements, melding her indecipherable yet hooky choruses, drummer Mike Falcone and bassist Darl Ferm’s tumbling rhythm sections, and Dupuis and guitarist Devin McKnight’s wiry, anxious dueling guitars.

Songs: “Raising the Skate,” “The Graduates,” “Puffer,” “Swell Content,” “My Dead Girl”

20. The Courage of Present Times

Sonnymoon

GLOW365

The textures on The Courage of Present Times are so fine and detailed that it’s nearly an insult to Sonnymoon, and yourself, to listen to the album merely through headphones. It takes full-sized speakers in a big enough room to capture the true size of the atmosphere created by the explosively produced flavor of experimental pop The Courage of Present Times inhabits within. The natural swoon of Anna Wise, most well known for her appearances on Kendrick Lamar’s last two albums, soars above and dives under producer Dane Orr’s intoxicating swirl of electronic soul and psychedelic beats inspired as much by Dirty Projectors as Flying Lotus.

Songs: “Blue,” “Grains of Friends,” “Sex for Clicks,” “Trust Fall”

19. Fetty Wap

Fetty Wap

RFG Productions, 300 Entertainment

The greatest element to New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap’s meteoric rise in 2015 is how he shrugged off the typical markers of industry success and still lasted past his first hit. Despite a Drake cosign on the second huge single off his self-titled debut, Fetty dodged the vulture-esque megastar’s influence and kept the creation of his album close to the vest. The result was a front-to-back rollercoaster ride on top of a rainbow oozing with personality. Even through making his versions of Future (“Boomin’”) and Justin Bieber (“Time”) tracks, his confidence in trying his hand at current radio mainstays adds to his own style. With the help of his Remy Boyz partner Monty and RGF Productions squad, his ballads double as bangers and bangers double as ballads. Fetty’s ad-libs and highly self-referential lyrics on Fetty Wap create an insular atmosphere so fun once you break into it, it’s utterly impossible to get back out.

Songs: “Trap Queen,” “679,” “Again,” “My Way,” “Time”

18. Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper

Panda Bear

Domino

Most notably on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, Noah Lennox, as Panda Bear, takes directly from himself and expounds upon it by melding his brilliant experimental tendencies from his last masterpiece, 2007’s genre-creating Person Pitch, with 2011’s more lyrically and vocally minded Tomboy. Structured as completely singular ideas strung together by seamless radio transmission-mimicking effects, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is a structural departure from the always-evolving Person Pitch. By incorporating the upfront vocal production and clearer lyricism of Tomboy, Panda Bear’s newest album is a new type of beast. Panda Bear experiments on a song-to-song basis, separating his variability into lone-standing chunks. Each track takes one sonic premise — often dealing with his affinities for Beach Boys harmonies, 90s hip-hop beats, and Krautrock — and stretches it to its limit. As a result, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper tackles more conceptual territory across the immediate and suppressed songs, alike. Despite not eclipsing Person Pitch, Lennox came as close as non-humanly possible to doing so with Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, while undertaking just as challenging a project.

Songs: “Sequential Circuits,” “Mr Noah,” “Boys Latin,” “Tropic Of Cancer,” “Lonely Wanderer”

17. Garden of Delete

Oneohtrix Point Never

Warp

Garden of Delete is brash, fidgety, and erractic, just like the nature of adolescence electronic drone producer Daniel Lopatin based his most recent album under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on. After being recruited by Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden to open for their co-headlining tour — subsequent to Death Grips’ abandonment of yet another touring commitment — Lopatin was reminded of the heavy guitar-driven nu metal music on which he grew up as an teenager. He started working on “cyberdrone” pieces, which developed into Garden of Delete. The result is a moody tapestry of scratchy sounds, jumping from influence to influence, while simultaneously honoring and expanding upon his favorite childhood genres.

Songs: “Ezra,” “Sticky Drama,” “I Bite Through It”

16. Apocalypse, girl

Jenny Hval

Sacred Bones

On the spoken word album opener “Kingsize,” experimental writer and composer Jenny Hval talks extensively about a rotting banana. It’s a confrontational metaphor, but something expected to be found in a poem or novel, not in a song. Through this, she reminds of another provocative, challenging art pop artists, Laurie Anderson. Both often aim to upend gender expectations in their patriarchic, heteronormative societies. Voice manipulation and vocoder work in tandem with their philosophical lyricism to promote still-progressive ideas of equality. Yet, on Apocalypse, Girl, Hval strays a bit from the comparison by focusing much more solely on the album’s apostrophe. By creating a delicate, emotive collection of songs, she examines the gendering of feelings and their perceptions. Apocalypse, girl’s whispy jazz and crushing climaxes make a case for embracing insecurities and asking questions over the one-note assuredness of testosterone driven compositions.

Songs: “Take Care of Yourself,” “That Battle Is Over,” “Heaven,” “Sabbath”

15. Ten Love Songs

Susanne Sundfør

Warner Music

The ten songs on Ten Love Songs are technically love songs, in that they all deal with the subject of love. Where many pop singers might take a more straightforward approach to love songs, Susanne Sunder, instead, finds inspiration in unconventional depictions of love’s messier sides. Images of physical violence and emotional strife dominate Sundfør’s stark lyrics strewn across alternatingly soft verses and soaring hooks. Ten Love Songs is so grandiose, by the time album centerpiece “Memorial” transforms from another huge synthpop ballad into a brief take on a classical movement the shift is not unexpected. It is still, like the album as a whole, just as stunning.

Songs: “Darling,” “Fade Away,” “Memorial,” “Delirious”

14. Vulnicura

Björk

One Little Indian

Vulnicura is Björk’s best album in at least a decade, and she made it so by returning to form and commiting to push the envelope — which, can be said to be nearly the same thing. Taking her avant pop sensibilities and converging with the dark, experimental producers Arca and The Haxan Cloak, Björk was able to create a spectacular, complete body of work in Vulnicura. Singing string arrangements, trip hop beats, and avant vocal melodies, by now standards of Björk’s music, are all at their best here. “Devastating” does not begin to describe the effect of her theatrical take on classical music for the 21st century, or the detail in which she explores the break up that influenced the album.

Songs: “Stonemilker,” “Black Lake,” “Mouth Mantra”

13. Surf

Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment

Independent

Surf was the byproduct of each of the members of Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment wanting to give back to their loved ones. The young, Chicago-native musicians crafted a joyous, celebratory collection of songs and made them accessible to anyone who would be positively affected by them. They wrote soulful, colorful songs like gospels for their grandparents and newly born children, and everyone in between. By releasing the album as a free download on iTunes (the first of it’s kind), the album did numbers record setting numbers as gigantic as its tracks.

Songs: “Slip Slide,” “Wanna Be Cool,” “Windows,” “Sunday Candy”

12. Full Communism

Downtown Boys

Don Giovanni

“Why is it that fear always wants us to go looking for more? So when people are brown, when people are smart, white hegemony wants us to go looking for this third thing. Why is it that we never have enough with just what’s inside of us? Today we must scream at the top of our lungs that we are brown, we are smart.” Downtown Boys’ lead singer Victoria Ruiz delivers this charged speech as an intro to single “Monstro” off her band’s debut album, providing a mission statement not only for the band, but for anyone similarly fed up with today’s social injustices. Continued across the rest of its hard-hitting 23 minutes of “bilingual political dance sax punk,” Full Communism is as fueled by Ruiz’s contemptuous snarl as its two-minute, brass- and percussion-blasted tracks.

Songs: “Wave Of History,” “Monstro,” “Future Police,” “Poder Elegir,” “Dancing In The Dark”

11. Ratchet

Shamir

XL

Describing Shamir is counterproductive, so everything that comes after this sentence — and, now, what is contained in this sentence, too — is hypocritical. Starting with what is precedented about Ratchet, the album is one of those rare feats in dance-centric albums: cohesive yet not repetitive, wholly engaging on its own, progressive yet totally pop. Shamir’s blend of hip house and alternative dance captures the best of all their peers, from Zebra Katz to LCD Soundsystem. Where Shamir strays is in their voice. Identifying as genderqueer (neither male nor female), Shamir’s voice, considered countertenor, defies gendering. Other notable artist have straddled the line of androgyny, such as Milos of Rhye and Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, but Shamir is probably the first artist in which this distinction is such an important part of their identity. This fluidity courses through Ratchet in not only Shamir’s voice, but in the smooth, funk grooves continuously served up on each successive track. Genderqueer ideas include the belief in the relative ease that would come with abandoning the rigidity of socially constructed genders, and on Ratchet, Shamir makes it sound just that easy.

Songs: “On The Regular,” “Call It Off,” “Demon”

10. E*MO*TION

Carly Rae Jepsen

604, School Boy, Interscope

After the wild success of her first big single “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen was faced with the unique challenge of trying to follow-up possibly the biggest pop song of the decade so far. On E*MO*TION, the effervescent pop singer took the minute, in-between feelings she explored on the Kiss single, and wrote an entire album dedicated to them. As a writer, Jepsen perfectly captures the overwhelming nature of these relatively small emotions, while also admitting to their simultaneous importance and insignificance. As a singer, she makes everything down to her facial expressions heard through her voice. Enlisting a star cast of contributors, Jepsen extrapolated an incredible amount of depth and poignancy out of these microscopic details.

Songs: “I Really Like You,” “Gimmie Love,” “All That,” “Your Type”

9. Morning / Evening

Four Tet

Text

The Morning side to Four Tet’s two track Morning/Evening is so good on its own that the Evening side could have been 20 minutes of silence and the album would have still probably ended up somewhere on this list. Instead, however, he included another song of nearly as good quality and Morning/Evening sits in the top ten. Morning/Evening is all about lasting power. After his grandmother passed in 2013, Kieran Hebden, the man behind Four Tet, looked through a Hindu music record collection he inherited from his late grandfather and found the inspiration for his next album. Looping vocal samples from Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar, he produced two ambient-inspired tracks synergizing raga and electronic. The consistency of the skittering drum programming playing underneath the duration of the two tracks, the high register synths, and the interstitial dancing arpeggios all speak to that intersection of lasting power when things seem to come and go haphazardly.

Songs: “Morning”

8. The Most Lamentable Tragedy

Titus Andronicus

Merge

Rock is not the thriving metropolis that it used to be. With countless ways to release and find music, artists can afford to explore smaller niches, knowing someone, somewhere will be into the same things as themselves. So, what is there to make of one of this generation’s more popular rock groups undertaking such an album as the epic The Most Lamentable Tragedy? No doubt the brainchild of the band’s founding and only consistent member, Patrick Stickles, The Most Lamentable Tragedy is an hour and a half, five act rock opera acting as a metaphor for manic depression. Stickles suffers from manic depression, among other things, and its clear through the extensiveness of the album that he used it to sort through the disorder and provide an outlet for others as well. The Most Lamentable Tragedy is dense, time consuming, and often overwhelming, but it’s also incredibly rewarding, and full of really damn good music.

Songs: “Fired Up,” “Dimed Out,” “More Perfect Union,” “Fatal Flaw,” “Into the Void (Filler)”

7. No Cities To Love

Sleater-Kinney

Sub Pop

It’s only right that in a year in which Rock and Punk have become “girl clubs” the hugely important Sleater-Kinney reunited and also put out an album of as high a caliber as anything they put out in their original run as a band. On the heels of the creation of Ex Hex by longtime collaborator Mary Timony, rock legends Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss got back together and ushered in a new wave of riot grrrl-influenced acts early in January of 2015. The year in music never looked back, but also kept the album in mind the whole time. No Cities to Love embraces a glossy, post punk riff-centric sound and is filled wall-to-wall with punchy, stadium-sized anthems ready to inspire another generation of rockers.

Songs: “Surface Envy,” “No Cities To Love,” “A New Wave,” “Bury Our Friends”

6. In Colour

Jamie xx

Young Turks

Like indicated by its spiraled, rainbow-colored album cover, In Colour features a variety of shades. Both in musical styles and emotional spaces, Jamie xx resides at the center of it all and lets his music emanate in all directions. From summer club hits to experimental techno to anti-party, introspective grooves, Jamie xx did it all on In Colour, and did it all perfectly. Somehow each song, each piece of the proverbial tapestry that is In Colour succeeds — and despite having huge hit singles, no color overshadows another. Every song archetype and every emotion carried within it is afforded equal care and attention. And from the opening building handclaps and vocals samples of “Gosh” to the closing shimmer on “Girl,” the album is absolutely beautiful.

Songs: “Gosh,” “Loud Places (feat. Romy),” “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”

5. Viet Cong

Viet Cong

Jagjaguwar, Flemish Eye

Viet Cong’s self-titled debut opens with the thundering syncopation of war drums. They are perplexingly blown out in mixing while sounding clear and clean as to what they could be. The drums usher in a lone, repeated verse, which provides the thesis of Viet Cong: “Writhing violence essentially without distortion / Wired silent, vanishing into the boredom /Deliberately made to disintegrate / Difficult existence.” It’s raw and harsh, but its curtness is somewhat beautiful. To be able to explain such a condition in so few poet terms — that sound no less, from a musical standpoint, so aurally related — is no less pleasing than a love poem that accomplishes the same thing with different words and a more saccharine subject matter. The tension in the ultra thin, industrial production and the constant, chanted vocals dealing with death, disintegration, and devastation is so obsessively done that it only really gets released in the final half jam of the 11-minute closer “Death.” It’s a daring move, and only an album this meticulously engineered could pull it off. The result becomes the most tragic rock music you still might want to get up and thrash around to a bit.

Songs: “Pointless Experience,” “Bunker Buster,” “Continental Shelf,” “Silhouettes,” “Death”

4. Divers

Joanna Newsom

Drag City

Joanna Newsom has stated that Divers is thematically about the concept of time, especially considering the way it transforms as a result of dedicating all that you have of it to another person. A line that pops out ahead of its peers is the repeated “Time is taller than Space is wide,” from the sci-fi storytelling on “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne.” While scientifically incorrect, the futuristic adage speaks to the spiritual importance the vastness of time has over the physically larger space with which it exists. No matter how expansive space continues to become, the passage of time guarantees that ideas, feelings, emotions will repeat themselves. With “Divers,” Newsom compiles these concepts into a unified — meticulously composed — piece of work, as relevant to hundreds-year old Lenape villages and World War II infantry divisions as to contemporary lovelorn listeners and futuristic time-traveling colonies.

Songs: “Sapokanikan,” “Leaving the City,” “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” “Time, As A Symptom”

3. Summertime ‘06

Vince Staples

ARTium, Def Jam

Summertime 06 can easily be argued for as the greatest album of 2015, let alone the greatest rap record of 2015. In a year in which the polarized forces of Kendrick Lamar and Drake seemed to dominate, Vince Staples nonetheless crafted one of the more superior albums, and captured the sonic zeitgeist better than either of his peers. Summertime has the Future hook, the Jhené Aiko chorus, and the sung ballad. Yet, across the album’s graphic, autobiographical tracks (probably very incriminating when considering the timeline and whatever the statutes of limitation are), Staples’ haunted perspective penetrates not only his jaded storytelling, but the new, deep bass West Coast production from the likes of No I.D. and Clams Casino, all by now his most impactful signatures.

Songs: The Whole Damn Thing

2. Art Angels

Grimes

4AD

As the time since Grimes released her unlikely 2012 internet hit Visions continued to grow, anticipation for a new album from the enigmatic pop auteur and producer created by Claire Boucher became increasingly more out of control. Yet, with Art Angels, she achieved the impossible by shirking all the buzz. Sensing the impossibility of creating another song as perfect as “Oblivion,” Boucher completely embraced her pop interests and put together an all around bigger and better record then her previous. Taking on Aqua, Kelly Clarkson and Max Martin, Enya, and Anime, Boucher manages to trace her conception of pop music while transcending it at the same time.

Songs: “California,” “Flesh Without Blood,” “Kill V. Maim,” “Pin,” “Venus Fly”

I. To Pimp A Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar

Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath, Interscope

Following D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Kanye West’s Yeezus, To Pimp A Butterfly is an unapologetically black, necessarily black album from a prominent, mainstream voice in popular music. Lamar’s fans transcend identifiers such as race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; over the past three years, he built up so much support that his every next move, including details on his next album, saw widespread speculation and heavy anticipation. Showing maturity, Lamar challenges his audience to be active, whereas his previous work — as much as it bounced — was a passive listening experience. On To Pimp A Butterfly, he uses his well-earned status as the current king of hip-hop to deliver a strong, brave, emotionally charged message. It’s clear in its bite, it’s razor sharp, and it’s wholly focused — not one track wastes a moment of its one-hour-and-20-minute runtime; all offer their own thesis relating to Lamar’s recurring themes.

Songs: “King Kunta” “Alright,” “The Blacker The Berry,” “i (Album Version)”