Soundtrack to the End of the World
The 25 Best Albums of 2016
Let’s get this out of the way: the year was a grease-fire from the get-go. With society in all corners of the world devolving into chaos and unrest, it was hard to find reprieve from the myriad injustices, inequalities and insanity that gripped Planet Earth, 2016 A.D. Generation-defining cultural figures died, the neoliberal world order collapsed, xenophobia and nationalism spiked to levels not seen since World War II, facts and fake news jostled for credibility, and — Jesus H. Christ — Kleptocracy grabbed the United States by the pussy.
As a calm harbor in the tempest, or, in many cases, as a live report from the eye of the storm, the album experienced a renaissance in 2016 unlike any we’d seen in the post-Napster world. Music’s biggest stars unveiled tent-pole releases, and whiz-kid newcomers ascended quickly to great critical acclaim and commercial success. Everywhere you turned, someone in music had something to say — and, more importantly, something worth listening to. Here, we highlight the 25 best releases from a year that could go down as one of the best ever for music, even as it went down as one of the worst ever for modern humanity.
25. Little Seeds // Shovels and Rope
Just when you thought the husband-and-wife indie-folk trope appeared to have outstayed its welcome, in comes Shovels and Rope to showcase a storytelling verve that crackles and hums with all the pacing and depth of a hard-boiled neo-noir. That’s the Americana that Shovels and Rope inhabits on Little Seeds, a joyous romp of a harmonicas-and-hand-claps record that brings out the best in both parties, through dust-drenched harmonies and heartland-true choruses. Traversing the spectrum of emotion in a way that only the best records truly can, this is a period piece that transcends its context to create something urgent and compelling. As catchy as it is meditative, it’s a reflection of its era, a testament to their talent and a bluesy, boozy star-turn.
24. A Moon Shaped Pool // Radiohead
Let’s get this out of the way first: You’re wondering how a relentlessly gorgeous and precious record by an established powerhouse record with no shortage of relentlessly gorgeous and precious records in their back-catalogue only shot as high as #24. It’s a testament to how stacked 2016 was in career-defining, world-changing musical works that weren’t made by Radiohead. A Moon Shaped Pool is chill, subtle music during a year that was anything but. It exists apart from time and space, as great art often does. As immersive and escapist as its morose soundscapes are, it was the soothing background music that filled the myriad cracks and all-too-few breaks in 2016’s unyielding attack on order and decorum. For all its melodic complexities, A Moon Shaped Pool harkened back to a simpler time, when angst was more fashionable than full-on panic, making its decidedly downcast, elegiac tone sound damn near uplifting.
23. Untitled Unmastered // Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 all-time magnum opus To Pimp A Butterfly set a new standard for rap, redefined what it could say, what it could mean, how it could sound, and how it could feel. It’s an impossible shadow to escape, even as it elevated K-Dot to Voice Of A Generation-level status in a way few albums in any genre ever could. Expectations of what will surely follow in his discography have been raised to an unattainable pitch, so it makes sense that Kendrick would dial things down by casting an unvarnished companion piece for his next offering rather than a true followup. Scoff if you want and call it a collection of undercooked B-sides, but even the 28 year-old cipher’s jazzy, Thundercat-infused near-misses hit the speakers like the gospel. Where Kendrick Lamar goes from here is anyone’s guess, but his journey on the road to enlightenment has made true believers out of everyone along for the ride — even this pit-stop is more interesting and engaging than 99% of his peers.
22. Black America Again // Common
It’s been a while since we last saw Common reach the peak of his powers. After a scattershot past 15 years with brief peaks and long valleys, a few detours into acting, Common reemerged in 2016 with a bold, politically-charged vengeance on Black America Again. A sprawling, superb rumination on the state of race relations in a tense, nerved society, Common (mostly) drops his lover-man persona to deliver some of the most direct hits to the streets in years. A rapper’s rapper draped in 70s soul, Common’s ethos stays clear-eyed and full-heart while taking on the pay gap, police brutality, structural inequality and interpersonal relationships above a sturdy foundation of solid sampling and the occasional John Legend guest spot. Not content to rest on his laurels, with Black America Again, Common returned to make powerful music when we least expected him to, but right on time and when his righteous voice was most needed.
21. The Impossible Kid // Aesop Rock
The 40 year-old human thesaurus and rhyming dictionary Aesop Rock shows no signs of slowing his flow — and hip-hop is all the better for it. A heaping helping of throwback New York rap, Aesop’s unparalleled verbal acrobatics reach euphoric heights, necessitating a second-screen experience with footnotes to appreciate its brilliance. The topic list is as exhaustive as an internet message forum — Aesop even manages to craft the all-time best rap song about a cat in “Kirby,” for good measure. The beats are pure turntable, and compliment his delivery without ever getting lost in it. For old-school purists, its relentlessly satisfying, and a refreshing palette-cleanser from the Drake-era Instagram-rap that’s saturated the airwaves in the past half-decade or so. Aspiring rappers could look to The Impossible Kid to see how to earn rap cred without losing your street cred.
20. Emily’s D+Evolution // Esperanza Spalding
The label “prodigy” carries with it weighty and unyielding expectations. Esperanza Spalding, Berklee College of Music alum and bass virtuoso, has made a career of shape-shifting and side-stepping to make impossibly excellent music that combines magical runs of instrumentation to clever turns of phrase to time-signature-inverting song structures. On Emily’s D+Evolution, Spalding essentially invents Prog-&-B, an album that sounds like the lovechild of Rush’s 2112 and Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid. The album’s peekaboo hooks and lyrical sleight-of-hand provide more than enough thrills to reward repeated listening. The barrier to entry into this plane of music-making is high, and the degree of difficulty is even higher, but Esperanza Spalding sticks the landing and scores a handful of 10.0’s to the discerning listener.
19. 22, A Million // Bon Iver
Justin Vernon’s journey from a recluse in the woods strumming his sadness to charismatic collaborator with a taste for auto-tune has been as surprising as its been satisfying. Long removed from the single-track monochromatic heartache of “For Emma, Forever Ago,” Bon Iver’s 2016 release incorporates the disarming beauty of his previous two LPs with the electromaximalism he first flexed as the secret weapon on Kanye West’s 2010 masterpiece “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” That he manages to continue to grow his audience and produce music of uniform — if not necessarily better — quality throughout his career, all while his music goes through software updates with each successive release, is a beacon of hope for people who hope that they’ll be allowed to grow up in public after spending years in the shadows.
18. 3001: A Laced Odyssey // Flatbush Zombies
Yes, Chance the Rapper dropped Acid Rap in 2012. But Flatbush Zombies, in 2016, dropped actual all caps ACID RAP. The preposterous outfit from Brooklyn incorporates elements of Mad Lion, Gravediggaz and the A$AP Mob to craft a supreme conceptual piece that illuminates sex, drugs (lots of drugs) and violence with a youthful vigor and biting wit rarely heard in concurrence with each other. The soulful hooks and spacious verses tee up zinger after zinger, and by the time you reach the meandering yet enthralling 13-minute album closer “Your Favorite Rap Song,” you begin to accept their braggadocio as mere statement of purpose — the sort of profound self-confidence and wisdom one can only reach after two tabs and a blunt.
17. In My Mind // BJ the Chicago Kid
Armed with the voice of an angel and a melodic sensibility that draws more from musical theater than contemporary R&B, BJ the Chicago Kid stepped out of the shadow of fellow Chicago street-preacher Chance the Rapper to bring one of the year’s most inspiring major label debuts. In My Mind, an endlessly alluring smorgasbord of soul crooning, is packed to the brim with impeccably-arranged vocal runs, bedroom grooves and rafter-shattering pleas for positivity. From the cathedral-sized “Jeremiah Says,” to the deal-sealing “Turning Me Up,” In My Mind forges a spectacular whirlwind of artistic excellence. The lyrics are straightforward, universally appealing and delivered with the confidence of an artist who may be early into his career, but already demonstrates the maturity to let the music speak for itself.
16. Still Brazy // YG
The spirit of west coast G-Funk is alive and well with YG. As deft and dexterous as any hip-hop record could dare to be, there’s nothing adventurous about YG and DJ Mustard’s lethal one-two punch of hard-hitting verses and Death Row-indebted beat-making. Still Brazy doesn’t set out to reinvent the wheel, merely to refine it — build it rounder, faster, lighter and better. YG’s follow up to the excellent My Krazy Life wasn’t just an improvement on the former, it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of SoCal hip-hop past and present. And, oh yeah, there’s the scathing yet sadly prophetic “Fuck Donald Trump,” a scalding five-minute cut that went from an early-warning diss-track against a demagogue to a call-to-arms against the worst demons of our declining society. Other artists have climbed aboard the #NeverTrump bandwagon, but YG started the engine, even as it rides forward in the face of a headwind with no relief in the forecast.
15. Awaken, My Love // Childish Gambino
Where were you the first time you heard the beat drop on “Me And Your Mama,” the sky-searing opening Salvo off Childish Gambino’s hard reboot that added several additional hyphens to Donald Glover’s already offshore barge full of them? Prince may have died earlier this year, but Gambino’s rap-free freakout proves the torch has been passed to capable hands. When Glover reemerged this year after a couple of years off in the wilderness, he gifted the world with his long-gestating half-hour weekly FX series Atlanta, an impossible-to-classify masterpiece of character-building, mood, satire, social commentary, wit and off-hand existentialism. It’s a hit, a critic’s darling, and is already taking home award-season hardware. Then, mere weeks later, he bequeathed “Awaken, My Love,” an extremely-easy-to-classify masterpiece of P-Funk, psychedelia, soul, character-building, mood, satire, social commentary, wit and casual genius. Glover himself views the two as companion projects, and, taken as such, give the 33 year-old polymath a legitimate case for winning the award for “The Guy Who Had The Best 2016,” in a year when so many people had the exact opposite.
14. Freetown Sound // Blood Orange
An ear for pop candy has never been in short supply with Dev Hynes — a.k.a. Blood Orange — who’s songwriting and production credits include standout work for artists like Tinashe, Solange, FKA twigs, Florence and the Machine, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kylie Minogue. The man who knows his way around a hook better than damn near anyone befuddled damn near everyone by creating an album almost completely devoid of hooks. Instead, Hynes crafts a thematic work dedicated to inner beauty, particularly the inner beauty within the people who’ve had theirs dismissed or decried. Freetown Sound is a bold, challenging record that experiments with samples and structure, an album so loaded with ideas that it’s tempting to say the album could’ve been even stronger had he just saved a few for his next effort, and fully fleshed out the ones that fit the best. Still, Freetown Sound establishes Dev Hynes as a man who has a singular voice all his own, and doesn’t need anyone else to sing on his behalf.
13. The Life of Pablo // Kanye West
The frustrating, maddening birth and Kansas City Shuffle release of 2016’s entry into the Kanye canon perplexed and angered an anxious nation of fans and foes alike. The endless reworks. The parade of album titles. The bizarre press tour. It all felt like Kanye was stringing us along, playing us, extending the margins of what a Capital-P Pop Star could get away with in the era of subscription-only streaming. Kanye’s perfectionism yielded a 20-track assault on the senses that buried some of the best music of Yeezy’s career. With the clarity of hindsight, it’s clear that Kanye West — the man, not the character or the artist — was furiously attempting to document his descent into darkness in the only way he could. Any attempts to analyze what’s driven Mr. West to the brink — drugs? a psychotic break? depression? the oppressive weight of fame? — are all merely speculative. What remains definitive is the chill-inducing “Ultralight Beam,” a plea for salvation as urgent and blissful and technicolor as any song released in the past decade, and a procession of nearly-equal masterpieces “Waves,” “Wolves,” “No More Parties in LA,” “Saint Pablo” that document a world-weary soul fraying at the edges, hoping to just finish his masterpiece before his art and sadness consume him. In that sense, The Life of Pablo is the most 2016 album, and through that lens, it makes more sense than we thought, and more sense than we wish it did.
12. Blank Face LP // Schoolboy Q
The fourth record from sinister rap mastermind Schoolboy Q is unquestionably the finest of his career, and a hard-hitting blast of good-natured evil-doing that bends brilliance into social deviance. It doubles down on reinverted gangsta tropes and pulls no punches. The beats bounce between G-Funk, soul and trap while transporting the listener far away from the everyday and into a nightmarish upside-down world of smoked-out backrooms, coked-out drug dealers and a sense of dread that’s both nihilistic and life-affirming. There’s no wasted bars or excess energy — just raw, gritty rap done right. The guest appearances are enough to fill the entire FADER Fort, but this is clearly Q’s circus, and as both ringmaster and stuntman, he delivers in spades.
11. Ology // Gallant
Good lord. That voice. It’s impossible to make mention of Christopher Gallant without bringing up his sky-scraping, flame-throwing tenor first, second, third, fourth and fifth. On his debut, Ology, Gallant shatters glass and expectations amidst a mushroom cloud of vocal radiance that lays Agent Orange waste to his crooning competition. The staggering strength of his vocal runs sounds like he’s trying to uncork champagne with every chorus. “Weight In Gold” is a cathedral-sized slow-jam that’s best listened to at ear-splitting volume in your car after a long night downtown. “Skipping Stones” is a gorgeous soul ballad duet. “Bone and Tissue” will take the paint off walls. If his lyricism is a bit self-centered, overwritten and under-cooked, the sonic force of the delivery will make you forget. If he ever turns his writer’s eye outward or develops a cohesive worldview beyond “I’m screaming into the abyss,” Gallant will be primed for ascension into the pantheon of all-time R&B greats.
10. Konnichiwa // Skepta
A firecracker of a talent who spent years toiling in the shadows of the UK Grime scene, Skepta’s skittering wordplay finally had its moment in the sun in 2016 with Konnichiwa. The Mercury Prize-winning record (besting David Bowie! In Britain!) swept up audiences across both sides of the Atlantic, with high-profile shout-outs from Drake and Pharrell Williams (who has a guest verse here on the ear-worm “Numbers”) only underscoring the point: We’d slept on Skepta long enough. Konnichiwa is an uncompromising tour-de-force that comes out swinging and lands body blow after body blow, and grows in power with each repeated listen. No other record in 2016 matched the anxious energy and brash bravado of Skepta’s kicking-and-screaming revitalization of Brit-hop, bringing Grime into the limelight and carving a new avenue down which aspiring artists will no doubt try to follow.
9. Atrocity Exhibition // Danny Brown
There is no rapper in the game like Danny Brown. The spiritual heir to ODB, the Detroit spitter draws as heavily from MC5 and Motor City Punk as he does from Eminem. As dexterous and just-a-shade-shy-of-unhinged as his verses are, the beats on Atrocity Exhibition bang as hard as anything laid to tape in 2016. Brown discusses his own mental instability, his scare-quotes-recreational drug use, his tug-of-war between maturity and recklessness, and the darkest corners of the modern black experience in America with equal aplomb. A true original who feels like he was dropped in from a spaceship a la Ziggy Stardust, Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition is an abrasive listen, but no less an enjoyable one. The music will transport you to his own altered state and alternate universe, but it is his unique, uncanny ability to treat every bar like it’s the last he’ll ever record that sells you in and keeps you returning to it whenever the current universe gets a bit too rough to bear.
8. We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service — A Tribe Called Quest
The list of musical legends lost in 2016, all assembled, would’ve made for arguably one of the finest musical festival bills in human history. Phife Dawg, the playful foil to Q-Tip’s cerebral musings in landmark hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, was among the painful losses endured. Faced with this heartache, Tribe rallied to release their first LP in 17 years, and uncorked their swan song — yet another masterpiece to add to their lofty catalogue of classics. It is of this era, with its topical treatments of Trump and Black Lives Matter, and Kendrick Lamar and Anderson .Paak guest spots, but the beats, rhymes and life of the material presented hearkens back to Tribe’s 90s heyday. As fresh, layered and jazzy as long-suffering fans could’ve hoped for, this bittersweet reunion cements their legacy without ever retracing its steps. Q-Tip and Co.’s comeback finds everyone throwing 98 on the gun one last time, and the world is more complete for it, even as the gaping void left by Phife’s passing is impossible to fill.
7. Stay Gold // Butch Walker
It’s become cliche to proclaim “Rock is Dead,” but if it’s not dead in 2016, it’s definitely running on fumes. The art form’s been exhausted, with few interesting places left to take it. Butch Walker’s triumphant Stay Gold offers aficionados of fist-pumping anthems and cry-into-your-beer ballads a hopeful ray of light over the dim landscape. Walker’s record, a loose concept album dedicated to aging and loss, is equal parts hope and regret, saloons and strip-clubs, yacht rock and trailer park — and it’s damn near perfect. If Stay Gold doesn’t exactly forge new territory for the blue jeans and leather jacket-clad masses, it at least unearths the hidden gems that have been left undiscovered and undisturbed for some time. It’s the sound of a veteran craftsman’s refusal to act his age, even as he only seems to get better with it.
6. Lemonade // Beyonce
It’s hard to overstate Beyonce. A record-setting, era-defining superstar who’s every move is both exhaustively scrutinized and effusively praised —she’s the LeBron James of music, and even then, we might be selling her short. If anything, Beyonce is the Millennial Beatles — ostensibly a pop artist who started with radio catnip and then continued to grow by leaps and bounds with each successive release, getting weirder, deeper, more political, more personal and more vulgar over the course of her career. Lemonade’s firestorm entry into 2016 stopped the internet, stomped all over the Super Bowl halftime show (does anyone even remember that Coldplay headlined?), caused a spike in HBO Now subscriptions, single-handedly saved Tidal, and made people think very different things about Red Lobster. All this would threaten to overshadow the music if it wasn’t so damn exceptional. Not a note out of place, not a word without purpose, Beyonce examined marriage, infidelity, feminism, blackness and cultural appropriation with urgency and intensity, all while subverting the pop genre and changing (again) the way we expect and evaluate album releases by major artists. There were better records made this year, but there were no more important records made this year — and Lemonade will undoubtedly continue to cast a considerable shadow over the pop landscape for years to come.
5. Coloring Book // Chance the Rapper
Can rap move you to tears, convert the non-believers, and force inescapable smiles out of even the most hardened and cynical of souls? Can it do it all over the span of one free mixtape? We wondered this as we anticipated the drop of Chance the Rapper’s third independent effort. Coloring Book, the wise beyond its years — Chance is just 23! — musical moonshot is a full-on double rainbow that lasts for 13 full songs and doesn’t stop until you’ve melted into a pool of your own astonishment. After last year’s impressive stylistic detour with The Social Experiment, “Surf,” it was clear that Chancellor Bennett had his sights set far beyond beats and verses, and straight into something more magical. Coloring Book is Lil Chano from 79th’s glorious ode to salvation, black excellence, summertime, friendship, unity, graciousness and — above all — gospel that, when it peaks, is indistinguishable from experiencing astral projection and ASMR for the first time, at the same time. Chance the Rapper went from goofball punk to the pied piper of Gen-Z optimism in 2016, and perhaps the only thing more thrilling than the music he’s already given us, is the possibility that he’s merely scratching the surface of his prodigious talent.
4. Prima Donna EP // Vince Staples
After the breathless breakthrough of Vince Staples’ double-album Summertime ’06, a record so tight and committed to its vision that it felt like it’d been a decade in the making, it seemed as though Staples could go literally anywhere else with his career and it would be deemed a “departure.” Then, with Prima Donna, Vince Staples doubled down on his dark nihilism by essentially compressing the entirety of that landmark LP into 20 densely-packed minutes of unrelenting death, violence, and gripping horror — taking his casual lyrical and thematic brilliance to its logical conclusion. Its sharp bleakness stands apart from his oft-compared peer Earl Sweatshirt, by turning his creative eye outward instead of receding back into his own head. Personal and political without being expressly personal and political, Staples makes his manic rhyming sound casual, and imbues his one-note flow with a charisma that reveals itself in the details. A ruthlessly efficient six-pack of songs that says its piece and gets out, we once again find Vince Staples on the cusp of something … even if no one is really sure what that something will be, or where the 23 year-old west coast wunderkind will turn his eye to next.
3. Endless + Blonde // Frank Ocean
The most feverishly anticipated album of 2016 belonged to perpetual enigma Frank Ocean, an R&B crooner with the smoothest tenor this side of John Legend, and the most articulate lyrical mind this side of Kendrick Lamar. Predecessor Channel Orange was a runaway success, a double-album of impossible beauty and impenetrable depth. Ocean could’ve followed it up with a big-budget smash that topped charts forever and entrenched him firmly in R&B’s mainstream. Instead, Ocean zagged into the avant-garde while crawling into the recesses of his inner monologue. It would be a risky, eyebrow-raising effort if the music wasn’t so genuinely earnest, compelling and gorgeous. By dropping two records in a weekend just at the breaking point before the world was ready to give up hope — the deluge of Frank Ocean memes during the advent leading up to the album drop were proof of a starved fanbase ready to lose their collective shit after yet another release date postponement — Ocean satisfied the congregation, silenced the doubters, and reaffirmed our belief that great art can’t be rushed, can’t be faked, and can’t be underestimated. Frank Ocean is 2016 America’s R&B Poet Laureate. And for as much as we told him we needed him, Blonde proved we needed him even more than we knew we could.
2. Malibu // Anderson .Paak
From a purely musical standpoint, you’d be hard-pressed to find an artist who rose farther, faster than Anderson .Paak. After becoming a certified scene stealer on Dr. Dre’s comeback effort Compton, the 30 year-old singer-rapper-multi-instrumentalist engulfed us in Southern California sunshine on Malibu. Released in January, it rendered many Album of the Year talks moot before they even had a chance to begin. A 16-song masterwork of throwback soul, contemporary R&B, old-school hip-hop and cool jazz, .Paak bends genres against their will and ties it all together with his tequila-and-weed-soaked voice and singular ear for style. As confident and charismatic a performer as any working musician, Anderson .Paak’s gift is his ability to charm and cast spells on his audience. Malibu’s opening seven-song run was the most enjoyable 25 minutes of music released this year, only matched by the breezy James Brown via Kendrick Lamar stunner “Come Down,” and “Celebrate,” the closest thing in style and quality to “Sitting at the Dock of the Bay” released in decades, possibly ever. After a successful stint on the summer festival circuit, and a second solid release with Madlib-lite beatmaker KNxwLedge under the moniker NxWorries, Anderson .Paak’s star continues to rise, and when he’s topping charts and filling arenas in 2020, we’ll all point to Malibu as the place where the whirlwind quest began.
1. A Seat At The Table // Solange
With impeccable versatility, a tasteful ear, and a keen observational eye, Solange Knowles’ A Seat At The Table won 2016 almost as much by what it wasn’t as by what it was. The secret weapon of Solange’s succulent collection of songcraft was its ability to stay on-brand, on-message and on-point from start to finish. Vocal histrionics checked themselves at the door. The beats didn’t bang, they hummed. The lyrics weren’t overwrought, they were carefully curated. The production’s sparse complexity bares more than a passing resemblance to D’Angelo’s 2014 jaw-dropped Black Messiah. Solange keeps things fresh by creating a masterpiece of tone and atmosphere that never blurs into monotony. The blunt force trauma of scathing verses are delivered with a tender sweetness that blunts their impact yet enhances their effect. And then, there’s the songs, “Weary,” “F.U.B.U.,” “Don’t Touch My Hair,” and the otherworldly young-adult-in-2016 anthem “Cranes in the Sky,” as silky and seductive as any pop music creation this century. A Seat At The Table is more than just a celebration of #BlackGirlMagic in all its glory, more than just a standout R&B album, it’s a statement of purpose and perfection that establishes Solange Knowles as one of the 21st Century’s great pop artist — every bit the equal as her big sister — one who makes thoughtfulness sound effortless, and sharp social criticism go down smooth. It’s the best album of the year, and — along with the aforementioned Black Messiah and To Pimp A Butterfly — on the Mount Rushmore of albums released this decade.
