My 50 Favorite Albums of the Decade: 2010-2019

Part of the joy of being one man with a blog and not an important publication is that I don't feel any pressure to make an albums list that contextualizes the decade.  Nobody's reading this, so I don't need to fit anything in because it's "important" or "groundbreaking."  No, this list is only concerned with what "slaps" and "goes hard."  The real criteria was slightly more complicated, but only slightly.  In choosing my favorite albums of the decade, I thought about the records that meant the most to me at the time they came out, but often an album can seem great in the year of its release and then you never return to it.  So I also made sure to give credit to the albums that I returned to most often and the ones that still held up when I did my relistening throughout this year in preparation for this list.

They say that the music somebody listens to in their adolescence is the era that resonates the most with them and for me that's true, because if I had to choose, I'd probably say I enjoyed the music of the 2000s more than I enjoyed what the 2010s had to offer.  But that's not to say I didn't think this was a good music decade.  You could stretch the list you're about to read out to 100 picks and it would still include albums I love.  The early part of the decade saw the bombast of the 2000s give way to sleeker, more electronic based sounds, which led many writers to declare that rock music was dead. But really, it was just that great rock music was coming from different places.  Particularly in the last half of the 2010s, there was a boom of women making excellent DIY, punk, and music indebted to 90s alt-rock.  Meanwhile, as rap became the dominant force in our culture, and pop continued to be embraced more as a genre worthy of serious consideration, both scenes gave us terrific examples of the form.  Music was thriving all around, and it's ultimately a good thing that the wealth is being spread and not coming from the traditional modes of yore.

So let's celebrate all the 2010s had to offer...

The rules: In order to maximize the amount of variety on this list and ensure that certain artists don't clog it up, I've limited myself to one album per act.  If a certain artist made albums under two different projects -- like Julian Casablancas with The Strokes and The Voidz, for example -- they would both be eligible.  For my yearly lists, I usually consider EPs, but for this decade list I didn't really include EPs into consideration.  There is one exception, but that EP feels so massive and made such a splash that it's basically an album.  And in this day and age, a mixtape is the same thing as an album so naturally those are included.  Other than that, the window of eligibility includes anything released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2018

How do you sum up 2018 when it comes to music?  You can't, so I'll give a list of just a few of the phases of music discourse from this year: Kanye West produced five albums in five weeks, Drake and Pusha T had a beef in which a secret child was revealed, Beyonce and Jay-Z released a surprise album that everyone forgot about three days later, Eminem had a psychotic break in a Youtube video, Travis Scott rapped "She thought it was the ocean, it's just a pool," critics tried to convince us that The 1975 are good.

So yeah...it was a wild year.  Let's just get to the list.

The rules: Everything is the same as usual.  The window of eligibility for this list is anything released between January 1, 2018 and now.  This list can include albums, mixtapes, EPs, and anything in between.  I'm praying that nothing substantial comes out in the twilight hours of the year.  You never know with surprise releases these days...

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2015

2015 felt like a more enjoyable year for music than 2014.  There's always good stuff to find in any year, but there was more of it this year and it was better.  I could stretch my list out to 40 albums and it would still only consist of records I liked quite a bit.

This year also had more albums that seemed to grab the entire internet at large.  Of course, the one that towered above the rest was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, which is currently running laps around everyone else on end of the year lists.  But there was also stuff like Sufjan Stevens, Jamie xx, Tame Impala, Deafheaven, and Father John Misty.  There was even a jazz album that the big blogs loved! (I haven't had the time to sit down with Kamasi Washington's triple album The Epic in full, but the bits I've heard of it certainly make the praise seem warranted.)

My top 20 only represents a fraction of the diversity of greatness we saw in 2015, but I'm still satisfied with how it turned out.  There's rap, punk, R&B, pop, old favorites, exciting newcomers, and an out-of-left field choice or two.

The rules: Due to the constant changing of the way music gets released, anything can be an album for the sake of this list.  You especially have to play fast and loose given the fact that many rap mixtapes function as albums anyway.  So LPs, mixtapes, 40-minute songs, EPs if they're good enough -- they're all albums to me!  If something got released in another country in a previous year, but got an American release this year, it works on a case-by-case basis (although there are no examples of that this year).  Otherwise, the eligibility window is that the album has to have been released between January 1, 2015 and today.  That means that D'Angelo's Black Messiah, which came out at the very end of 2014 but has appeared on many publications' lists this year, will not show up here.  (Plus it was my number 5 last year, since I actually wait until the end of the year to finalize my lists.)  So now with that bit of business out of the way, on to the actual list...