Here it is, the big list. And because I never know when to stop but never have enough time to write about all the music I like, I've listed another 20 runners up at the end.
The 32-year-old-est album ever made.
24. Adeem the Artist, Anniversary
Adeem is at the forefront of a generation of queer country songwriters, and maybe what makes them so revolutionary is that you might not know that from listening to most of Anniversary, which sounds like forthright heartland singer-songwriter rock. Listen close and you’ll hear that Adeem hooks up with (and occasionally falls for) both men and women, and the most moving cut here is about a “One Night Stand” they wish would be more. “Don’t do us like Jesus,” they implore Christians on “Nightmare,” while “Wounded Astronaut” is an extended apology to the women they’ve wronged in the past that’s never self-serving. After all, the revolution begins at home.
23. Shakira, Las Mujeres La No Lloran
Like the Stones going disco or Madonna recruiting Nikki Minaj, she’s an aging pro trying to keep up with the times. On this hodgepodge built from previously market-tested singles (the oldest dating back to April 2022), she needs Rauw Alejandro and Ozuna—not to mention Bizarrap and the other assorted producers here— way more than they need her. But that’s now how it sounds, because it’s also a personal statement about her divorce, or so I gather from translations, and you know what they say about the hips of a woman scorned. Whether hating on bosses with Fuerza Regida or tag-teaming some beefcake with Cardi, this all sounds unmistakably like Shakira because her pan-Latin amalgam has always been a cheerfully inauthentic synthesis. Call that appropriation if you like. I call it pop.
22. Serengeti, KDIV
For nearly two decades, the rapper born David Cohn, a.k.a. Serengeti, has been sharing the story of his heavily Chicago-accented pal Kenny Dennis, a.k.a. David Cohn as well. He tried to retire his alter ego six years ago, but fortunately he’s backslid more than once—Kenny’s as bad at staying dead as Jason or Jesus. In the latest installment, Geti travels to Minnesota (which just so happens to be the home of one of his go-to producers, Andrew Broder) to meet up with his old pal, who’s thriving in his new environment. And here we learn the truth about Kenny’s beloved Jueles—or do we? Tune in to the inevitable KDV to find out. If none of this means nothing to you, go back to Dennehy, which introduces Kenny and his credo (“Favorite actor Dennehy, favorite drink O'Doul's/Bears, Hawks, Sox, Bulls”), And if that hooks you, you’ve got some catching up to do.
21. Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us
Following the much looser 2019 album Father of the Bride, these 10 compact songs, coming in at a taut 47 minutes, suggest a return to the clockwork-precise Vampire Weekend of the past. But the geegaw-crammed arrangements feel cluttered rather than curated, and intentionally so—these are cluttered times, after all, and Ezra Koenig is too self-aware an aesthete to think the fascists at the gates need another well-wrought urn to smash. Always thoughtful, often perceptive, increasingly loath to fully enunciate, Koenig recognizes the darker parts of history rising from the murk around him, musing on “how the cruel, with time, becomes classical,” without offering much solace. “I hope you know your brain's not bulletproof” is how he ends the one called “Pravda,” which he damn well knows is more than just the Russian word for truth.
20. Horse Lords, As It Happened: Horse Lords Live
An avant-garde instrumental rock band for folks a little leery of the excesses the tag “avant-garde instrumental rock” suggests—and also for folks a little apprehensive of the austerity with which minimalists can overcompensate for their chops-happy peers’ excesses. OK, maybe those are just my hangups, but this Baltimore quartet really knows how to balance their pattern repetition against their freeform excursions for an exhilarating tension; their music is taut but elastic. Culled from a series of European live performances, this collection offers “a mediated, sometimes obviously edited presentation of a live performance that strives for a certain level of idealization,” so obviously these guys are not about cutting loose. Owen Gardner’s guitar is sometimes as spiky as African desert blues (hold the blues) and sometimes more rockishly (pardon me, but it’s true) angular; Andrew Bernstein’s saxophone flaunts a brusque tone as his improvisations turn inward; Sam Haberman sets the parameters with his subtle but never delicate drumming; and bassist Max Eilbacher sometimes hews to the rhythms, sometimes works against them, and sometimes makes funny noises on his computer. When they played Icehouse last March I was even able to dance to it all, if a little awkwardly.
19. Sisso & Maiko, Singeli Ya Maajabu
Sisso is among the better-known producers of singeli, a Tanzanian dance music style supposedly derived from Zanzibar’s taarab (a style I know even less about) and so wildly sped up it should be measured in beats per second. Jamming live to Sisso’s beats on keys is Maiko, who vamps with ostinatos, doodles wildly on top, and occasionally runs a finger along the keys till he reaches the highest note, just to be funny. I’m told singeli is often tough-guy music, but the effect here is comic, even cartoonish. During the nearly six minutes of the frenetic, dayglo “Kazi Ipo,” I feel like a paper cone that’s been stuck into a cotton candy machine.
From what I can tell, Sarah Tudzin addresses her mother’s death more or less directly on three tracks here, particularly on the closer, “Everything Changes” (“When you lose someone”). But that loss hovers over the rest of the music, as loss will, and though it doesn’t dampen the bright timbre of Tudzin’s voice or dim the friskiness of her melodies, you start to wonder why it hasn’t—could the exuberant workaholism of “Can’t Be Still” be a coping mechanism? But life does go on, with petty moments like “Falling in Love With Someone Better” (and being disappointed that an ex might not know about it) or “You Are Not Who You Were” (“Feeling vindicated/I checked and you are not that famous”) balanced by the unconditional “I Would Like, Still Love You” and the ecstatic “Sleeping In,” about learning to coexist with someone who can be still. And Tudzin the studio ace never shows off behind the boards or tries to pass off expansive clutter as genius the way too many overrated dudes have. Maybe that’s because she earned her rep working on other people’s records to their specs. Maybe it’s because she’s not a dude.
For his first solo joint since 2015, the former Das Racist MC’s teams up with Chicago producer and fellow Indian-American Gaurav Napgal, a.k.a. Lapgan, whose indefatigable South Asian cratedigging manifests itself as an international miscellany that prizes novelty rather than exoticism. Heems doesn’t shy away from big statements here, and every critic (including me) just had to quote “How many likes will my hate crime receive?” from “Accent,” which also includes intricate rhyme twirls like, “It's easier to make a meme than to have a dream/’Cause to Heems it just seems that they deem as a scheme.” But he mostly reserves his introspection for Lafandar’s darker (and also excellent) companion piece, Veena, released later in the year. These are the free-associative thoughts of a creative guy closing in on middle age who wants to kick it with some pals (including Kool Keith, Open Mike Eagle, Quelle Chris, Your Old Droog, and Saul Williams), revel in his mic skills, and rep his hometown. As he puts it on “I’m Pretty Cool,” “I'm New York like Canal Street where Africans talk Mandarin.” Which is kind of a statement in itself, no?
16. Willi Carlisle, Critterland
Damn straight we lefties could use some real battle songs, and this “queer and a Communist” who’s ready to enlist “in the war that's ragin' between the haves and have-nots,” is happy to oblige. This folkie looks the contemporary world dead in the eye and refuses to blink, though he might occasionally give a wink and a smile. There’s real darkness here: a friend’s suicide letter that “used too many long words” and baffled the cops, the self-medicated look at mortality “When the Pills Wear Off,” and the seven-minute closer “The Money Grows on Trees,” a true crime ballad about peddling weed with police protection. But there’s hope too: If Carlisle’s ambivalent about the death of his father (“It’s still sad when bad men die”), he looks back on his humble ancestors and declares, “I won’t waste a single moment of the work that brought me here.” Me either, Willi.
15. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past Is Still Alive
Aging punks still awaiting the second coming of Joe Strummer probably weren’t expecting a queer Puerto Rican non-dude from the Bronx with an acoustic guitar to come closer to fitting the bill than any mere man, but it ain’t 1977 no more. Not to saddle Alynda Segarra, very much their own artist, with that sort of baggage, but Segarra does embrace rock heroics and political purpose with a verve few younger songwriters dare today. They’re a folk-punk visionary who bolsters their scope and intensity with sharp-eyed details from life on the road, of hopping trains and sleeping on buses, graffitiing oil cans and shoplifting dinner. And at 36, Segarra is old enough to mourn lost acquaintances and old enough to fret that other friends might join them, namechecking Narcan while noting “a war on the people” that has her peers ODing on fentanyl. They’re even old enough to worry about their own path forward, singing “I'm becoming the kind of girl/That they warned me about.” Or was that how they once felt in the past? Maybe both. The achievement of The Past Is Still Alive is to live up to its name, capturing our present tense as an accumulation of memory and experience.
If you can’t quite tune out global catastrophe as you go about your daily life, well, has Rosie Tucker got a song or two for you. How about the one that starts “I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet.” Or maybe you prefer “While Palantir sells us to LAPD/I get jealous when someone I know’s on TV”? Tucker’s tunes whirl about with memorable charm, commitment-shy as they flirt with fixed melodies. And while Tucker has lost some of the buzz that came from recording for Epitaph, an experience they understandably don’t seem completely over, they chirp too pleasantly and write with too much perspective to come across as bitter. Even when they follow up “Unending Bliss,” which they wish upon their foes, with “White Savior Myth,” a petty takedown of an unnamed indie star who “is skinny like a teen and exactly as depressed/And a genius.”
13. Carsie Blanton, After the Revolution
Times are so tough that even this good time gal is getting apocalyptic. She’s always been a left bohemian with a contrary streak, happy to spark a protest singalong, but she’s never acknowledged what we’re up against so starkly. The title track looks to a time when “you’ll be a better husband/I’ll be a better wife” and they can take a vacation, the self-explanatory “Watching the Empire End” (“I'm in the belly but I ain't the beast”) bides its time till that revolution comes, and the exhausted “Labour of Love” declares “Well, they oughta be afraid of us/Cause the whole world is made of us/People workin’ hard to get along.” (If you’d like to hear Blanton get even more direct, check out just-in-time-for-the-election release The Red Album, featuring “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch,” “You Ain’t Done Nothing (If You Ain’t Been Called a Red),” and—give ’em hell, Carsie—“The Democrats.”) But the song that puts a lump in my throat is “Caroline,” in which Blanton pledges to a newborn that “raisin’ babies” is “a bold hope that makes the world keep turning.” Well, when you put it like that…
“If he’s the greatest rapper alive, why can’t he find something more to rap about besides the fact that he’s the greatest rapper alive?” my critical superego asks. To which my fanboy id replies “MUSTAAAAARRRD!” Kendrick has always indulged in more grandiose Big Man fantasies than we pop egalitarians would like, and the whole Celebrity Deathmatch vibe of the Drake feud bummed me out. But I dig the candied Antonoff synths, the operatic soprano adding drama, how SZA and Luther Van sweeten the mood, how his boys have his back on the latter tracks, and all the weird noises the hardheaded MC makes as he never stops going in. Yes, thematically, this is a step back from the searching imperfection of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. But these are anxious times, and rarely has ass-clenched superstar paranoia sounded so engaging.
11, Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft
As brother Finneas pursues his love of lush textures and the star herself gets so torchy you might think she’s got another musical Billie on the brain, Eilish’s latest often hits soft. But it still does hit, with the singer finding comfort in her own body and fending off internet rumors as she… hmm, what’s that euphemism again? Ah yes, “explores her sexuality.” Sometimes, those explorations are sweet, as on the effervescent pop “Birds of a Feather,” but I’m more partial to the carnal “Lunch” (“it’s a craving not a crush”), the furthest into the red Billie has yet pushed her libido, at least until she popped up on that remix of “Guess” slavering about how she wanted to get in Charli XCX’s undies. In the year the pop girls raged and ruled, Eilish rarely grabbed a headline. No one called this “Hard and Soft Summer.” The way Charli coolly condescends to the masses or Chappell’s every move shouts GAYGAYGAYGAYGAY in ALL CAPS felt more culturally significant to pop connoisseurs. Taylor ruled the charts (again) and Ariana hit the big screen and Sabrina had all the normies on lock. But in the long run it’s the sincere weirdos (a term I use with the utmost respect) who always get the most love, and over the course of her three albums Eilish has set the 21st-century standard for growing up pop in public.
10. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis
On their own, the Messthetics, the rhythm section from Fugazi teamed with guitar whiz Anthony Pirog, already have more jam than most rockers gone improv. So it was exciting to hear that the trio had teamed up with one of the most ambitious young saxophonists in jazz (41 still counts as young in this context). Both with his regular quartet and as leader of the Red Lily Quintet, Lewis has shown himself to be one of those guys sharp enough to know that the choice between trad and avant is a false one. His sound is big and inviting without pandering, and he slides into the Messthetics’ groove so neatly you’d think he was a regular.
This year’s Professionalism Is Its Own Reward plaque goes to this collection of 14 perfect country songs, crafted with the cream of Music Row (namely writers/producers Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne) and covering all the old familiar ground with fresh perceptiveness. After the statement of purpose, “Country Music Made Me Do It” (“Everything that I've done wrong or I've done right”), Pearce gets stuck in and/or breaks free from dead-end relationships, sulks and gets over it, and, yes, sets a truck on fire. My personal favorite is the vulnerable “Pretty Please” (as in “tell me I’m…”), but I even reluctantly chuckle along to the prissy “Heels Over Head,” an eloquently mean-spirited jab at a girl who’s more fun in bed. The Chris Stapleton duet fought its way into the top 10; Nashville slept on the rest. There were so many Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Jelly Roll songs to play, after all.
8. Kim Gordon, The Collective
This is the second album Gordon recorded with producer Justin Raisen, a Sky Ferreira and Lil Yachty collaborator and therefore what you could call a designer of “long-shot pop.” Raisen supplies Gordon with something approximating trap beats, as long as you recognize them on the weirder edge of that continuum—think Playboi Carti’s recent oblong synthoids rather than the hypnotic malevolence of Metro Boomin’s ticka-tick-tick. Gordon then abrades these rhythm tracks with guitar and intones her typical short bursts of verbiage over top. The result is music unlike anything that the former Sonic Youth bassist (or anyone, I suppose) has recorded before; it’s plenty noisy, but also shaped by contemporary rhythms and a conversationally singsong sensibility that, despite her narrow vocal range, comes naturally to her. And whether she’s mocking supposedly put-on young men or running down her to-do list before a trip, she’s funnier than she’s been since Goo or so. Read Racket’s review of Kim Gordon’s June concert at the Fine Line here.
7. Tierra Whack, World Wide Whack
Her idea of a boast “I make a dollar every time my heart beats,” “my shit smell like Chanel,” or, best of all, “I sound great/When I’m singing in the shower,” the Philly rap miniaturist is eminently pleased to just be herself in a way we should all emulate. Her flow is self-consciously childlike at times, right down to a stuffy nose, but never twee, and she never wastes a syllable or a beat—a 58-track playlist of her complete works from the past eight years stretches just over two hours. Oh, and as recombinant faux docs go, Cypher, Chris Moukarbel’s absurdist supposed look into Whack’s world, is zanier (and fresher) than Pavements. Yet the flip side of her effervescence comes through on “Living is Difficult” (“so cold, so cold”) and in the casual thoughts of unaliving herself on “27 Club” that I hope we shouldn’t take too literally.
6. Jlin, Akoma
The Gary, Indiana, steel worker turned footwork production whiz has taken a turn for the highbrow in recent years, scoring dance pieces and collaborating with classical ensembles—maybe grant money’s easier to come by than regular DJ gigs, or maybe she’s just drawn that way. Yet as Jlin continues to edge away from the dance floor and toward the conservatory, with Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet among her collaborators here, she consistently yokes their contributions to her dominant framework, just as does with the Björk vocal she slices into segments for “Borealis.” And her moods vary more widely than you might expect: Sure, she can get ominous (dig “Summon”) but “Open Canvas,” which sneaks in a stately synth melody, and “Challenge (To Be Continued II”), with its simulated organic patterns, are downright playful. I won’t insist that you can dance to this, or you can’t. But you don’t have to follow every step in her rhythmic logic to recognize how hard she’s thinking.
5. Wussy, Cincinnati Ohio
This critics’ band (but never a Pitchfork band) has always been a little haunted, but with the death of guitarist John Erhardt in 2020 songwriters Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker turn downright funereal. It’s right there in the titles: “The Ghosts Keep Me Alive,” “Please Kill Me,” “Disaster About You.” It’s audible in the way Walker’s Midwestern deadpan cracks from deep within a well of echo on “The Great Divide,” or Cleaver mewls summarily “All the best decisions don’t add up to much.” And as befits a tribute to a guitarist, it’s in the guitars. Peg Wussy’s heavily layered shroud of guitar as shoegaze if you like, but admit that few of that genre’s practitioners are as conscious of how well-wrought lyrics can shape the way majestically arrayed instrumentation make us feel.
4. Sabrina Carpenter, Short n’ Sweet
“Espresso” is one of those truly effervescent pop hits that doesn’t care whether you like it or not, Carpenter’s delivery of “don't embarrass me, motherfucker” on “Please Please Please” never loses its bite, and the boastful “Taste” just gets better when you get to picture her gory duel with Jenna Ortega in the video. But it’s the non-singles that kept me coming back: Sabrina yearning for “a boy who's jacked and kind” or even one “who’s nice that breathes” on the countryish “Slim Pickings,” Sabrina indulging in dorky wordplay like “I bet we'd have really good—come ride on me, I mean, camaraderie” and “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” on “Bed Chem,” Sabrina lowering the emotional boom with “You don't have to lie to girls/If they like you, they'll just lie to themselves.” All year long I waited to crash down from this sugar high, but these perky confections stood firm, as fluffy and sturdy as a fresh meringue, as durable as the borrowed ’80s lite-funk to which they burbled along. So who gets credit for “Your car drove itself from L.A. to her thighs”? Song doctor extraordinaire Julia Michaels? Amy Allen, Carpenter’s co-writer on all 12 tracks? Or maybe the horny, lovesick goofball on the mic, a showbiz vet at 25 who’s learned a thing or two over her 13-year-career. We may never know. But I can tell you for sure it’s the goofball who puts it all across.
3. Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal
A fan of the 26-year-old Tampa-spawned eccentric f.k.a. Iamdoechii since she first introduced herself with “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” I admit I was worried that the biz had straightjacketed yet another innovator. After signing to TDE, she released a string of ill-fitting singles that suggested a label mismatch, with only the Kodak Black collab (ugh) a minor hit. But on this “mixtape” she simply loves her messy life and she raps her ass off about it. “I like pills, I like drugs, I like gettin' money, I like strippers, I like to fuck,” she boasts as she looks back at the past few years on “Denial Is a River,” where she doubles as a nerdy therapist who guides herself through a breathing exercise indebted to old-school beatboxing. Her reflections on mortality include “What if I choke on this Slurpee?” A sample of her dirty talk is “I open my spleen for you.” Her idea of a good time is “munchin' on the box while she watchin' Hulu." And if you haven’t watched this yet, you just gotta. And this. And this.
2. Various artists, Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola
A compilation of mostly decades-old Afropop? Isn’t that… cheating? Well I make the rules here, bub, and despite two familiar Congolese names (Samba Mapangala and Tshala Muana, their great ’90s records are streaming, check ’em out) all these tracks are new to me and—don’t front—you too. Yet to Kampire, a Ugandan DJ and part of the crew behind the Nyege Nyege festival and label (they put out the Sisso & Maiko album) these have nostalgic appeal, as they might to a queer party thrower in a country where gay sex is a capital crime. Sureshot opener Princess Aya Shara’s “O Wina Tienge” sets the tone with soukous guitars from Zaire trading elegance for the frisky, chattering melodies that appealed to Kenyan audiences, though the comp also dips into South African for added sass (the Township bubblegum of V-Mash’s “Naughty Boy,” the early kwaito of Di Groovy Girls). Artifacts of a simpler time? Not if you know your history. More like reminders that the beat goes on, in good times and bad.
1. Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future
An introductory recollection of childhood as a time of unappreciated freedom and everyday horror leads up to the story of the first time this unassuming genius saw her mom cry, and from there maybe you’re expecting the full story of Lenker’s life—this is a solo album after all. But she’s got something smaller and harder in mind: a breakup record as unique as she is. She gets philosophical about her broken heart on “Sadness as a Gift,” which accepts how pain deepens our lives while suggesting that those new depths also bring new pain, and she gets downright Dylanesque about it on “Vampire Empire.” But she can also make a commonplace lyric like “Don’t know what I’d do without you” register anew. While there’s less communal creation here than on a Big Thief album, the sympathetic accompaniment of Nick Hakim’s piano, Mat Davidson’s guitar, and especially Josefin Runsteen’s fiddle smooths that transition some. And just when it seems like she’s ready to close things out with the grimly acceptant carpe diem of “This whole world is dying/Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” she wants it darker, proceeds on to the forlorn “Ruined,” and leaves you broken inside. Read Racket’s review of Adrianne Lenker’s July concert at the State Theatre here.
Runners up: Hinds, Viva Hinds; Kali Uchis, Orquídeas; Beyonce, Cowboy Carter; Nia Archives, Silence Is Loud; LL Cool J, The Force; Yard Act, Where's My Utopia; Jamie xx, In Waves; Tucker Zimmerman, Dance of Love; Les Amazones d’Afrique, Musow Danse; Mach-Hommy, RICHAXXHATIAN; Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood; Usher, Coming Home; Vince Staples, Dark Times; Chromeo, Adult Contemporary; Swamp Dogg, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street; Mannequin Pussy; I Got Heaven; Morgan Wade, Obsessed; Brittney Spencer: My Stupid Life; Lollise: I Hit the Water; Denzel Curry, King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2.
