Our Ten Favorite Albums Of The Decade
The 2010s is coming to a close, and with it a turbulent era that saw streaming finally crowned king of music consumption coupled with hip-hop becoming the most lucrative genre (as opposed to rock) for the first time. To celebrate, the music team has voted for their favorite albums of the past ten years, and the list (perhaps unsurprisingly) reflects the new music status-quo, with hip-hop having the lion’s share of entries in the list. There are good showings from other genres, alongside some interesting omissions: there’s no Kanye, Beyonce, Solange, BTS, Taylor Swift, Rihanna or Drake, all of whom made significant cultural and commercial impacts in the 2010s.
So here it goes, the music team’s favorite albums of the last decade.
10. “Awaken, My Love!” — Childish Gambino
While Donald Glover had been in public eye for many years in his numerous different guises as comedian, actor, rapper etc., it was 2016’s album “Awake, My Love!” that saw his musical persona Childish Gambino truly capture the attention of music critics. With a liquid mix of psychedelic soul, r&b and funk, Glover continued to forge the heady legacy of groove pioneers such as George Clinton and Sly Stone into the modern era. It is a genuine textural trip, with ever shifting rhythms and instrumentation calling back to the heyday of funk, all the while masterfully immersed in contemporary production. And on top of this is the most unique instrument of all: Glover’s voice. At times crooning, at other times screaming, and at all moments being monumentally playful, one must wonder why this is the first album he has spent singing instead of rapping. 2018 may have seen Glover’s biggest cultural splash with the single and music video for ‘This Is America’, but “Awaken, My Love!” proved that Childish Gambino might be the greatest of his many personalities.
9. The Suburbs — Arcade Fire
Indie pop-rock darlings Arcade Fire entered the decade on the coattails of two commercial and critical successes: ‘Funeral’ and ‘Neon Bible’. As such, the pressure was on for the Montreal group to live up to their promise for their “difficult third” album, though any doubts of their prowess were laid to rest when the album was dropped to universal acclaim. ‘The Suburbs’ is a taut, melancholic exploration of its namesake, whose influences stretch from the jaunty storytelling of The Kinks to the cathartic noise guitar of Sonic Youth, with Neil Young and David Bowie thrown in for good measure. Equal parts warm production and icy world view, the LP went on to win album of the year at the 53rd Grammy awards.
8. Malibu — Anderson .Paak
Like his contemporaries Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino, Anderson .Paak mines the history of American soul, jazz, r&b and hip-hop for his 2016 release ‘Malibu’. It’s an arresting synthesis of styles, with a continuous laid-back groove at its heart. In fact what might make it truly standout from its peers is how .Paak manages to couple this laid-back soul with a fiery social commentary (and that smoky voice). In the background we have some of modern production’s best, with Robert Glapser, Madlib and Kaytranada all helping make the grooves that extra bit groovy. As a result, ‘Malibu’ is a stone-cold modern classic.
7. DAMN. — Kendrick Lamar
Having already delivered two widely acclaimed concept albums in ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ and ‘Good Kid, M.A.A.D City’, Kendrick Lamar’s next offering to the hip-hop world was 2017’s ‘DAMN.’. The LP’s concept was twofold. Firstly, on a lyrical level, the album focused on explorations of universal themes and emotions, each highlighted in the stylized track titles (e.g. ‘LOYALTY.’). The second concept was the deliberate, cyclical flow of the album. Not only were opposing emotions placed in juxtaposition in the running order (‘PRIDE.’ Vs. ‘HUMBLE.’, ‘LUST.’ Vs. ‘LOVE.’ etc.), but the album was designed to be heard both forwards and backwards, leaving behind a more traditional album listening experience and embracing a modern age of play-listing. This is no more evident than in the closer ‘DUCKWORTH.’, where a gunshot heard at the very end of the song explicitly references the opening track ‘BLOOD.’ before a reversed montage of the entire track listing plays out to finish the album. At the same time as these heady concepts, the album also embraces the predominant Trap sound of the decade, mixing syncopated high hats with deep bass and psychedelic flourishes. It’s this mix of high concept and commercial sound that lead to the album receiving the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, making it the first non-jazz or classical work to earn the accolade.
6. Blonde — Frank Ocean
2012’s ‘Channel Orange’ was a rare beast — an emotionally raw and honest album that went platinum and launched its creator from ghostwriter to crossover superstar. Its follow-up was years in the making, and a victim of numerous legal battles that stalled its release. This gestation period only lent to the fevered appetite of Ocean’s fan base, who lapped up ‘Blonde’ with aplomb when it was dropped in 2016. Whereas ‘Channel Orange’ had been a veritable hit-parade, ‘Blonde’ was seemingly designed to undermine any commercial expectations that the audience (and industry) might have had. There is hardly anything in the way of a hit single, rather it is a fully immersive album intended to be listened to as one whole piece. Once you press play on the opener ‘Nikes’, you’re sucked into a muted, reverb drenched world where one track bleeds into another; before you realize, you’ve passed an hour with Ocean’s blissed out and experimental vocals floating on clouds of quiet jazz guitar, church organs and synthesizers. The running time is largely beat-less, with the atmosphere and voice being the predominant focus. Lyrically, Ocean touches upon everything from drugs, to mental health, to his sexuality. And it’s with the latter theme that there’s an overt tension — the singer seems at odds with society’s binary expectations on the matter. This tension is best exemplified in the deliberate ambiguity of the album’s title, this being one of the few words in the English language to have both a masculine form (“blond”, that can be found as the metadata title on most streaming platforms) and a feminine (“blonde”, that can be seen on the cover art). As such, ‘Blonde’ stands as a psychedelically immersive record, that’s deliberately subverting commercial, as well as societal, expectations.
5. Blackstar — David Bowie
Despite huge commercial success and a constant willingness for innovation, all of Bowie’s releases post-1980 lived in the shadow of his critically adored 70’s oeuvre. In fact, with every new release there was one cliché that reigned supreme: the latest album was Bowie’s best since 1980’s “Scary Monsters And Super Freaks”. It is perhaps poetic then that Bowie’s final album, 2016’s ‘Blackstar’, is not only his best since “Scary Monsters…”, but a contender for THE best release in his discography (hyperbole be damned). Much has been written regarding the timing of the album’s release so close to Bowie’s death (is that stilted breathing throughout ‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore’ actually his death rattle?) but that epochal timing only adds to the power of an already viscerally beautiful record. Sonically, the album is a frenetic synthesis of experimental jazz rock, tortured syncopated beats and gnarly synthesizers provided by Donny McCaslin’s band. It is certainly one of Bowie’s most musically out-there creations, and while that might make it sound like a deliberately pretentious and difficult record, ‘Blackstar’ succeeds in the fact that it all sounds very natural. It is not trying to emulate past glories (something the previous LPs ‘Heathen’, ‘Reality’ and ‘The Next Day’ may have been guilty of) but is an organic entity with a personality and sound of its own. The music (and musicians) are given room to stretch and fill the space, while Bowie himself sounds totally at ease in his new environment. His voice is an instrument that helps to form the landscape rather than just sit atop of it. Often crooning, warbling and harmonizing at the same time, the multi-layering of his voice is interwoven with all the instrumentation, adding to the unity and fullness of the record. Which is why this record works so well; Bowie sounds like part of the music and within a band rather than a separate mythical entity. His greatest work had always been achieved with collaborators (Mick Ronson, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp to name a few) and he finally found some more muses with Donny McCaslin’s jazz group. As a result, the album is absolutely peppered with glorious moments of coherence: the slow emotional build of ‘Lazarus’ that climaxes with a wonderful saxophone solo; the stuttering rhythms of the title track; the melancholy of ‘Dollar Days’. It all flows beautifully together. Jazzy, trippy, spacious and dense, ‘Blackstar’ feels like the record Bowie had been trying to make for 30 (or more) years, and is an incredibly engaging roller-coaster even when heard in a vacuum separate from its creator’s mortality.
4. 21 — Adele
To say that the songs from Adele’s sophomore effort were omnipresent in the early 2010s might be an understatement. One could not move for ‘Rolling In The Deep’ or ‘Set Fire To The Rain’ being played out of a radio or TV set for what felt like years. And while it may be easy for any self-professed music snob to turn their nose up at such commercialism (in November 2019, ’21’ topped Billboard 200’s decade-end chart as the bestselling album of the 2010s) one can’t deny that the album is filled to the brim with exemplary pop songwriting. Adele didn’t unearth new territory with her writing style, but she refined an old tradition for a new generation that was clamoring for something authentic yet easy to digest. She provided a hungry audience with songs of heartache that you could genuinely sing along to. One can also not ignore the powerful and simplistic beauty of Adele’s vocal delivery, whose natural resonance only serves to elevate the inherent melody of the compositions. Is ‘Someone Like You’, the piano ballad jewel in the album’s crown, overplayed? Absolutely, but this is the fate of a track (and album) that simply ticks all the right boxes. And to think, Adele was only 21 when this all went down. Quite the feat.
3. AM — Arctic Monkeys
“That’s magic in a cheetah print coat, just a slip underneath it I hope…wraps her lips round the Mexican coke, makes you wish that you were the bottle” croons Alex Turner on ‘Arabella’. This is clearly not the scrawny teenage singer from Northern England that catapulted the Arctic Monkeys into fame in the 2000s, but a smirking and flirting wordsmith with tongue in cheek and mind in the gutter. Turner’s lyrics had never seemed infantile, and he’d never shied away from gritty subject matter, but this was the first time they’d been so smoldering, sleazy and adult. However, underneath this freshly nurtured bravado there’s still a sensitive songwriter, one that is utterly infatuated with a love interest (or perhaps numerous interests as the case may be) and just wants to be loved in return. This odd duality of hopeless romantic and rock-star attitude is the constant center of ‘AM’, all the way from blockbuster opening track ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ to closer ‘I Wanna Be Yours’. Interestingly, the latter was not penned by Turner, but by Britain’s favorite punk-poet John Cooper-Clarke, asserting that the band hadn’t forgotten their British roots during their excursions in LA. Lyrics aside, the band swaggers with an assortment of muscular glam rock riffs, delivering perhaps their finest set of songs since their first two LPs. Simply put, the Monkeys aren’t afraid to really rock it out; ‘AM’ is the sound of Alex Turner and band fully embracing rock-stardom and excelling in every aspect.
2. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? — Billie Eilish
For most of the 2010s, the mantle of Queen of pop had been passed around many worthy suitors. From Adele to Beyonce to Taylor Swift, all have had a significant claim to the throne, but the very end of the decade was unequivocally ruled by Billie Eilish. With an outrageous fashion sense, a Gen Z attitude and a panache for the macabre, Eilish seemingly captured the imagination of every teenager the world over, as well as their older siblings and parents. The reasons behind this meteoric rise to super-stardom are manifold, and all are manifested in Eilish’s debut album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’. Written and produced with her older brother Finneas, the music present on the LP clearly benefits from a positive and fertile creative process away from the tendrils of the wider music industry. As a result, the album shimmers with subversive originality in both songwriting and production. Hits like the pop-goth ‘Bury A Friend’ showcase a morbid curiosity with death and betrayal that has rarely (if ever) been present in chart music. Elsewhere, ‘Xanny’ treats Billie’s whispered vocals with an alienating tremolo affect. Visually, videos like ‘When The Party’s Over’ eschew the industry’s usual drive for an overtly cute tween image in favor of the sinister and nightmarish. What’s surprising is that this gothic vision is not marginalized or niche, but producing gold and platinum records. ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ is the sound of the mainstream shifting its axis and accepting an off-kilter and dark sound that encapsulates a grisly outlook on the strange times we live in, all the while being enormously catchy and deliriously entertaining.
1.To Pimp A Butterfly — Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar is adored by different sects of music fans for different reasons: for hip-hop heads it’s his lyricism and flow; for pop music aficionados its his ear for a catchy melody; for music critics it’s his ability to make an album in an age when this is severely old-hat. All of these elements are present on ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’, a deeply reflective work about fame, the music industry, and race in modern America. Focused around a central poem that is slowly revealed throughout the track listing, the album can be seen as a series of vignettes that have Lamar questioning his own morality having achieved fame and the subsequent battles with temptation, alongside how his new status might distance him from his origins within the black community and how this distance causes “survivor’s guilt”. The heaviness and depth of these themes has had some critics dubbing the album as “existential” hip-hop, giving Lamar an almost academic status among his contemporaries. Sonically, the LP takes amble influence from the history of African American music, wearing the clothes of its forefathers with pride. There is a persistent jazz sway across most tracks, with wild horns and syncopated rhythms at the forefront. Elsewhere, funk rears its head with a George Clinton feature on opener ‘Weasley’s Theory’, while ‘King Kunta’ is homage to James Brown’s masterpiece ‘The Payback’. In the midst of this patchwork of musical history, Lamar manages to etch his own place by penning the anthem ‘Alright’. An ode to the black community’s struggle with police brutality, the chorus has been heard as a rallying cry at protests across North America ever since its release, its message of optimism shining through in a particularly troubled decade. Equal parts emotive and thought provoking, ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ showcases a musical vision which gives credence to the claim that Lamar is the most important artist of the 2010s.
