We heard it again and again in 2015: This year in music is so good that any attempt to make sense of it is going to be a fool's errand. And it's true. We always agonize over our year-end lists, but we agonized harder over this one than we usually do. There are albums that at least a few members of your Stereogum staff absolutely loved that aren't represented on this list. There are albums that once felt like all-time classics that are buried in the lists's second half. So it goes. We are living through a great time for music -- for music from just about every possible cultural strata -- and it's a full-time job just to keep up with all of it. That means plenty of great music is going to go unrecognized. It also means our list is straight-up top-to-bottom gold.
If there's a lesson from 2015's top 50 albums, it's this: You can never be too famous to push yourself. There are plenty of relative unknowns in the group -- DIY home-recording auteurs, underground extreme-metal blood-churners, edge-of-noise experimenters. But especially in the upper reaches of this year's list, you will find plenty of people who were already famous when 2015 began. None of them found their way onto this list by making the same sorts of music they've always made. All of them found new ways to tinker with their voices, to make them even more powerful.
In our countdown you'll find rap stars who got weird and intense and expressive. You'll find pop stars who retooled their sounds for maximum effectiveness. And you'll find indie stars who took apart what they were already doing and put it back together in strange and different ways. All of them took risks, and all of those risks paid off.
In a rare-for-us twist, the Stereogum team who put together this year's list is almost the exact same as the one who put together last year's: Me, Scott Lapatine, Michael Nelson, Chris DeVille, Gabriela Tully Claymore, James Rettig, and Ryan Leas. The only addition is Peter Helman, the site's intrepid new staff writer. So even though this year's list looks nothing like that of last year, it's not because of staff turmoil. It's because of musical turmoil. It's because 2015 looks like no other year in musical history. Let's celebrate it. --Tom Breihan
50 Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness (Domino)
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Julia Holter's experimentalist pop symphonies have always been gorgeous, but in the past, even the catchiest of her compositions had a tendency to float off into airy abstraction. Have You In My Wilderness, on the other hand, has an immediacy to it, tethering her to reality in a way that feels liberating instead of constricting. There's no conceptual framework, no Greek tragedies or MGM musicals, just Holter and her own idiosyncratic vision, that shapeshifting voice pushed to the front of the mix where it belongs. As she cries on "Sea Calls Me Home," "It's lucidity! So clear!" It's exhilarating. —Peter
49 Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden Of Delete (Warp)
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All of Daniel Lopatin's music sounds like someone tossed the entire internet into a blender. But on Garden Of Delete, it doesn't liquefy all the way, and the leftover pieces are jagged, bringing a new heaviness into his hypnotic synth-drone smoothies. In the tangle of apocrypha surrounding the album, Lopatin says that it's a collaboration with an alien going through puberty, and there's something of that in the way these tracks veer off into ugliness like an adolescent voice-crack. But this is no immature work; this is an artist in complete command of his craft. In the Garden Of Delete, Daniel Lopatin is G.O.D. —Peter
48 Kurt Vile - b'lieve i'm goin down... (Matador)
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After the primary colors and stoner dad contentment of 2013's Wakin' On A Pretty Daze, it seemed we were in for a different kind of Kurt Vile from now on: older, happier, family man. Then you get an album called b'lieve i'm goin down..., and it kicks off with an existential spiral of the I-don't-recognize-myself variety, the stunning "Pretty Pimpin." In moody, drifting songs like "That's Life, Tho (Almost Hate To Say)" or "Wild Imagination," Vile's back to evoking the overcast Coal Country days of his home state Pennsylvania. It might be a smaller work, but it suits him better. Vile always works best in greyscale. —Ryan
47 Beach House - Depression Cherry (Sub Pop)
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The narrative surrounding Depression Cherry isn't particularly interesting, just a very good band making another very good album. But to dismiss it as "just another Beach House album" would be a disservice to what it really is: a paring back of the sweeping grandeur to reveal the bittersweet humanity underneath. On first listen, it sounds surprisingly small. But that's also its greatest strength — instead of pulling you into an expansive universe of sound, it meets you on your level, makes room for your emotions. Bloom made me feel like I was flying, but Depression Cherry offers me a hand up. —Peter
46 Sorority Noise - Joy, Departed (Topshelf)
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There are many inspiring moments on Joy, Departed, the kinds of isolated flickers of genius that most triumphant rock music is made of: fiery guitar squalls, drum fills that hit like avalanches, roaring swells of bombast, and especially Cameron Boucher's clever, heart-wrecking turns of phrase. These details are so plentiful and so frequent that it's possible to appreciate the album on a micro level, as a series of nonstop thrills, without ever zooming out. But the big picture, an honest portrait of pressing through addiction and depression, is worth meditating on long after the endorphin rush is gone. —Chris
45 Viet Cong - Viet Cong (Jagjaguwar)
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The Artists Formerly Known As Viet Cong make post-punk for the 21st century. Not the slick, too-cool-for-school version of early '00s NYC, but the stuff born of crumbling post-industrial landscapes throughout North America. Viet Cong is claustrophobic music, corroded and corrosive simultaneously, pounding through clattering layers of guitars and drums that sound like old machinery moving in fits. In "March Of Progress," "Silhouettes," and "Death," chiming guitar arpeggios and retro synths cut through the wreckage, like little weapons of precision built to lacerate 21st century overload. They're the little glimmers of hope on a bleak album, visions of the future amidst the wasteland. —Ryan
44 Speedy Ortiz - Foil Deer (Carpark)
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Most were first introduced to Speedy Ortiz and Sadie Dupuis' tongue-tied lyricism by way of 2013’s Major Arcana, a noisy rock album that honed in on heartbreak. Foil Deer is a worthy follow-up, but not because it showcases similar anxieties. This is an empowered collection of songs that take the total bummers of 21st century existence and pose solutions, all while investigating a dextrous new sonic landscape that the band can call their own. The instrumentation on Foil Deer is calculated and playful, reasserting that Speedy is one of the best young rock bands in the game — if not the best. —Gabriela
43 Chris Stapleton - Traveller (Mercury Nashville)
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Chris Stapleton spent a long time as a cog in Nashville’s country-music machine, writing hits for people like Kenny Chesney and George Strait. Now, after duetting with Justin Timberlake and winning an armful of trophies at this fall’s CMA Awards, he’s the toast of the town. To get there, he had to link up with Sturgill Simpson/Jamey Johnson producer Dave Cobb and make a gale-force Southern-rock album that challenges every piece of conventional Nashville wisdom. On Traveller, Stapleton is hard and craggy and intense, his voice huge and ancient and elemental. It’s rare to hear someone put out an old-school outlaw-country album this confident and fully-formed, and it’s even more rare to watch that album take over the world. —Tom
42 Deerhunter - Fading Frontier (4AD)
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Last year, Bradford Cox got hit by a car, and he came out of the resulting depression with his gentlest, most comfortable collection of songs yet. Fading Frontier isn't a happy album, exactly — there's still anxiety and uncertainty and a nagging preoccupation with the looming specter of mortality. But those are all essential parts of human existence, and it seems that Cox has made peace with them. That maturity could translate to a lack of urgency, and Fading Frontier doesn't feel like a statement on the level of something like Monomania. But when you've got songs this good, who cares? —Peter
41 Girlpool - Before The World Was Big (Wichita)
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The world is fucking huge! That realization usually hits us sometime in our teens, and we start to come to terms with the fact that we'll never get to go everywhere we want to go or do everything we want to do. It's such an old way of thinking when we're so young — setting ourselves up for disappointment before anything even happens — but it's a thing that we humans do, and Girlpool's debut often feels like yearning for a life that's too short. The duo is out there seeing the world now, but this album was mostly written before any of that seemed like a possibility. They sound both impossibly young and already weary. That's a bad place to be, but it's our natural state. —James
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40 Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle (6131)
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Julien Baker is only 20 years old, but the songs on Sprained Ankle sound like the stories of someone who has lived hundreds of lives before this one, which is to say: It’s an impossibly sad album. Fortunately, Baker’s heartache runs as deep as her faith, and that dichotomy is parsed over the course of these nine songs, all of which stand alone in their beauty but offer a sense of relief when bundled together. Sprained Ankle might make you melancholic, but it will also remind you of the lasting, saving power of music. It’s one that you will return to when you find yourself in crisis. —Gabriela
39 Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of Style (Matador)
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The most immediate comparison you'll make listening to Car Seat Headrest's Teens Of Style is Julian Casablancas: Frontman/mastermind Will Toledo processes his Reed-y vocals through a wall of walkie-talkie-style distortion, slightly submerging even his most impassioned screams and lending a sense of menace to even his most laconic verses. It's the same trick employed by Casablancas on the Strokes' first two LPs, although Teens Of Style feels both more ambitiously constructed than those albums, as well as more chopped-and-screwed. It brings to mind proto-Strokes deconstructionists Guided By Voices as well as post-Wilson psych-scapers the Flaming Lips, as that band transitioned from 1995's Clouds Taste Metallic to 1999's The Soft Bulletin. It's an indie-rock record in the old-school sense (it was even released on Matador!), but it's been a long time since I've heard an old-school indie-rock record that I've loved so unreservedly, or so much. —Michael
38 Björk - Vulnicura (One Little Indian)
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Björk seems to be doing fine now, but she wasn’t fine when she recorded Vulnicura. The album documents the period of time she spent splitting up with Matthew Barney, her longtime partner and the father of her daughter. And it’s an album of such all-consuming sadness and anger that it can be hard to listen to. But it’s also Björk’s best work in more than a decade. She worked with out-music producers Arca and the Haxan Cloak and recaptured some of the rippling, string-drenched majesty of her masterpiece Homogenic. And in her fiery vocals, she gives off a colossal sense of strength, even as she sings about falling apart. —Tom
37 Fred Thomas - All Are Saved (Polyvinyl)
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Fred Thomas has been an overlooked entity for years. His work with Saturday Looks Good To Me and his previous solo albums contain the same kind of sprightly, gut-clenching realizations as All Are Saved, but this one still feels special. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances that led to the creation of this particular set of songs at this particular time, but it's pivotal and political and exactly what we need. Thomas roots through his memories and open wounds, balancing nostalgia with a pin-pricked realism — by album's end, if he's not closer to healing, he's at least made a lot of revelations along the way, and helped us make some of our own, too. —James
36 Rae Sremmurd - SremmLife (EarDrummers/Interscope)
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In its way, this album is nearly as pure and focused as the Ramones’ self-titled debut. These two brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi make infernally catchy swag-rap anthems, and that is all they do. Tracks like this don’t often make for compelling albums, but Rae Sremmurd pulled it off by cranking out 11 straight bangers and never once leaving their comfort zone. Even the guests — Young Thug, Big Sean, Nicki Minaj — have chirpy, excitable voices that fit in perfectly with what Rae Sremmurd do. And producer Mike Will Made-It supplies the simple-but-sophisticated bleep-rap beats that the duo’s hooks deserve. —Tom
35 Kamasi Washington - The Epic (Brainfeeder)
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It sounds like homework: An abstract jazz triple album. But The Epic is a revelation not because of its length or scope or even the caliber of the players who get to solo all over it. Instead, it’s friendly and approachable without being pandering or compromising. It’s funky and melodic, and it even when it builds up to a screaming catharsis, it feels earned and organic. There are choirs and strings all over this thing, and the textures switch up often enough that it stays interesting for three straight hours. And it’s spaced-out spirituality runs as deep as that of Flying Lotus, Washington’s label boss. —Tom
34 Horrendous - Anareta (Dark Descent)
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The Philadelphia trio Horrendous are nominally modern-day practitioners of old-school death metal — most evident in their retro instrumental tones and production touches — but they've expanded the parameters and possibilities of that subgenre, so that their output today feels less like a throwback and more like a long-overdue course correction. For all its studiously atavistic elements, Horrendous' third LP, Anareta, might be the catchiest metal album of 2015. Throughout Anareta, Horrendous are fearlessly reaching skyward, peeling off guitar leads that climb like clock towers or church steeples. There's nary a dud to be found on this album — not a single song here that I couldn't genuinely call "my favorite," assuming superlatives weren't limited to a single entity. Likewise, while Anareta may not be at the top of this list, I'm still pretty comfortable calling it "my favorite" just the same. —Michael
33 Chvrches - Every Open Eye (Glassnote)
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These Glaswegian synthpoppers avoided the dreaded sophomore slump by steering right into it. This time around, they recorded the same sort of music as they made on their debut, doing it on the same equipment, in the same studio. They once again produced it themselves. The crucial difference this time: They did everything better than they’d done it before. This time around, the drums kick harder, the keyboards sparkle brighter, and the choruses embed themselves even deeper into your consciousness. A song like "Clearest Blue" feels custom-built to set festival audiences aflame, but it still has that old homespun glow to it. They know what they’re doing. —Tom
32 Yowler - The Offer (Double Double Whammy)
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Maryn Jones leads All Dogs, a band that channels some of her ferocious musings into catchy, honest punk songs. But when all of that snarling frustration has been unburdened, what’s left over and where does it go? Yowler is Jones' solo project, and her debut release The Offer is a beautiful and hushed, almost intimidatingly personal collection of songs that feel like they’ve trickled down from a wellspring of emotion to make a home in the heart of anyone who bothers to listen. —Gabriela
31 Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free (Southeastern)
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This former Drive-By Trucker has been steadily and quietly improving since he first went solo in 2007, and we’re now to the point where he completely overshadows his old band. This album does a great job showing why. Isbell’s lyrics are warm and incisive and empathetic — quick, economical sketches of people in go-nowhere towns who rarely get to hear themselves depicted with this level of real-talk dignity. And his music is intuitive and lived-in. Isbell’s miles-deep baritone can be conversationally pleasant on the verses, but when he hits the chorus, it always wells up into something huge. —Tom
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30 The Staves - If I Was (Nonesuch/Atlantic)
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There is so much tender beauty in this album. If I Was is a document of resilience, of soldiering through the remains of an obliterated love and finding the courage to do it all over again. It's one of the greatest albums of its kind — even speaking as somebody in a happily committed marriage, this music just about made my year by virtue of its exquisite beauty. The Staves sing with power and delicacy, they write songs with a sweeping vision, and the arrangements they crafted with Justin Vernon make me want to abuse so many adjectives. I'm going to keep coming back to this one for a long time. —Chris
29 Ought - Sun Coming Down (Constellation)
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"If post-punk speaks the language of disaffection, then don’t call Ought a post-punk band." That’s how I introduced Ought when we published a Q&A with the band this year. It’s easy to listen to Tim Darcy’s wry vocal inflection and find cynicism in it, but Ought’s music swallows angst and spits it back out in the form of life-affirming songs. They seek to inspire. Sun Coming Down is an impulsive, interpretive ode to existence that, on particularly bad days, reminds me of all that I have left under this big, beautiful, blue sky. —Gabriela
28 Eskimeaux - O.K. (Double Double Whammy)
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O.K. is extremely personal, but it's also universal. Sometimes, everyone needs to be told that it's alright to be sad, to be lonely, to be scared. But none of that would land if the music didn't sound so big while feeling so small. I'm talking about the way Gabrielle Smith's voice swells to a full-bodied cry as she sings "every time I'm freaking out" on "I Admit I'm Scared," or the moment midway through "The Thunder Answered Back" when everything drops out except the drums and vocals. These are songs and emotions too big for a bedroom to hold; you feel them in your bones. —Peter
27 Sleater-Kinney - No Cities To Love (Sub Pop)
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They came back roaring. The greatest punk band of the late-’90s and early-’00s didn’t have to make any music; they could’ve toured for years on past glories and Portlandia recognition. Instead, they gave us 10 songs of feverish, desperate urgency. Musically, they went full-bore, keeping the tangled intensity of their last album, the psych-rock experiment The Woods, but streamlining those sounds into power-pop anthems with strangled-robot guitar effects. And once again, they’re completely locked-in with one another, generating riffs and grooves with the sort of chemistry few bands throughout history can match. It’s like they never left. It’s beautiful. —Tom
26 Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass (Spacebomb)
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Welcome to the world of Natalie Prass. It looks a lot like ours, but it's all painted in bright smears of blue and light pink. There are a lot more horns. The year of the '70s singer-songwriter never really took off, but Prass certainly did, and that's mainly due to the boundless creative energy she exhibits on her debut, where the limits are only as high as her ambition. By crafting ornate, grandiose arrangements about heartbreak and loss and desire, she imbues all of these emotions with the dramatic flair they deserve. —James
25 Drake - If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (Cash Money)
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If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late doesn't have Drake's biggest song of the year ("Hotline Bling") or his best ("Jumpman"). Questions lingered about how many of these words he actually wrote and how much that matters. The "mixtape" is so grey, so muted, so devoted to aesthetic over accessibility that beyond its flawless opening sequence it sometimes feels like an impossibly dreary slog. All those qualifiers, yet in some sense this project ruled my year. Drake has become a master purveyor of music you can just as easily put on a party or escape into during a moment of introspection. His taste remains impeccable, his musical intuition is only getting sharper, and via sustained domination he has wormed his way into the consciousness of a generation. I kept returning to this music all year, playing it over and over again, living with it. It became my default, and I'm not the only one. —Chris
24 Tribulation - The Children Of The Night (Century Media)
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Purism in metal tends to produce more bands aping greatness than the genuine article, but on their fourth LP, Sweden's Tribulation have delivered one for the ages. The Children Of The Night contains 10 songs and comes in at some 57 minutes, and there's not a wasted second. Every song has a hook (or several) that might be the best hook I've heard this year. Every song has an Olympian guitar lead. The progressions throughout are totally unexpected and always satisfying. It often reminds me of Metallica's 1986 monument Master Of Puppets, partly because of its construction, ambitions, melodies, and force. But also like Master, The Children Of The Night feels like the product of a confident band in complete control of their estimable powers. —Michael
23 Blur - The Magic Whip (Warner Bros.)
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As 2015 closes, it's still easy to feel some residual daze at the notion that we actually, finally have a new Blur record. What was vindicating but still somewhat shocking is that it proved what all us Blur diehards suspected for 12 or 16 years: This was a band whose reunion would have meaning, would have something new and vital to say. The Magic Whip makes good on that in surprising ways. There are flickers of moments from throughout Blur's past, filtered through years spent apart, through middle age, through a new decade. Set against the backdrop of the album's Hong Kong roots, The Magic Whip has dislocation and loneliness, tracing melancholic signals sent back and forth across the world. But then there's "Ong Ong," something of real exuberance and joy, or something like peace in closer "Mirrorball." Hopefully those feelings carry them forward, and we hear more new Blur before another 12 years pass. If not, this one was worth the wait. —Ryan
22 Joanna Newsom - Divers (Drag City)
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Last year Joanna Newsom appeared in Inherent Vice, a Paul Thomas Anderson film adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel. Newsom's releases are met with the same breathless anticipation reserved for auteurs of their ilk, and rightly so: All three of them have applied a singular vision to many dense, wondrous works that give you a lot to think about and even more to feel. On Divers, Newsom's latest and arguably greatest, the newly married singer/composer/harpist fixates on time's relentless march and the way true love raises the stakes. As ever, her ideas are presented in meticulously crafted song-suites laden with historical and literary Easter eggs and sung in her unflinchingly distinctive quakes and quivers. The approach could not be farther from the middle of the road, but the sentiment could not be more universal. —Chris
21 Shamir - Ratchet (XL)
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Shamir is one of the breakout acts of 2015, and for good reason. Ratchet is one of the most self-assured, immediate debuts we've seen this year, full of his idiosyncratic takes on experiencing youth in Las Vegas -- not exactly a town known for fostering a vibrant arts scene. There's poignance in "Demons" and "Darker," glorious shit-talking in "On The Regular" and "Call It Off," and both yearning and genuine transcendence in the rise of "Youth" and "Head In The Clouds." It's almost impossible just to single those out as highlights, though -- from the moment the curtain rises on a glittering, mirage-like playground in the desert in "Vegas," every second feels essential. It's one of those albums that plays like a premature greatest hits collection. —Ryan
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20 Screaming Females - Rose Mountain (Don Giovanni)
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There's no other way to say it: This album kicks so much ass. Instead of rattling around your brain, the hooks on this thing punch right through your skull. Screaming Females sound less ragged and more polished, and to some, the sanding down of their punk edges could be a disappointment. But that polishing leaves them a towering rock machine, every one of Marissa Paternoster's guitar heroics and defiant wails perfectly calibrated to make you want to go stomp a dragon in the teeth. And if that makeover paves the way for something like "Wishing Well," a downright pretty alt-pop song that still manages to shred, I'm all for it. —Peter
19 Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp (Merge)
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Over the years, Katie Crutchfield has proven herself a master of the form: '90s-inflected, nasally, home-recorded punk. Ivy Tripp is yet another subtle but meaningful step forward from what she's been doing in various iterations for a decade now. It's the perfect fall record: the crunch of leaves, the crisp morning air can be felt in every note. It's the sound of stumbling and brushing the dirt off, feeling like shit, not knowing where to go or what to do next. It's a record for wanderers, for those of us who are unable to or refuse to settle down. —James
18 Future - DS2 (A1/Freebandz/Epic)
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You will never hear a sadder album about getting high with strippers. Last year, when Future’s pop-star aspirations were sputtering, his pregnant fiancée Ciara left him, allegedly because of his infidelity. So he crawled to the bottom of a cup of lean and spent three (great) mixtapes honing a new sound — ravaged, garbled, zooted, paranoid. And then he made this, an album of digital codeine blues that sounds like the moment you’re convinced your hangover is never going to clear up and you just want to die. And it banged hard enough that it made him a rap god. —Tom
17 Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge)
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There are no half measures in the world of Titus Andronicus, least of all on The Most Lamentable Tragedy. If Patrick Stickles is going to write a sprawling opus about his battles with manic depression, you best believe it will be sprawling, and that it'll have room for a handful of their best songs — "Fatal Flaw," "Dimed Out," and "Fired Up" are all instant classics — right alongside a cover of "Auld Lang Syne." Fittingly for a band that can make DIY venues feel like stadiums, The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a paradox: as demanding as it is rewarding, dense and overwrought as it is raw and furious, as life-affirming as it is confessional and tortured. It's driven by a runaway ambition almost unheard of in rock music these days. Hardly any of Titus' contemporaries are attempting this kind of scope, and if they are they probably aren't getting away with it. Titus is more than getting away with it. They're making some of the most vital music of their generation. —Ryan
16 Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - Surf (Self-Released)
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Instead of following-up his critically-acclaimed mixtape Acid Rap by bashing us over the head with another jittery, anxiety-ridden vision, Chance The Rapper took the road less traveled. He got a bunch of his friends together in a studio — both total unknowns and certified celebrities — and they created Surf, a hope-fueled collection of songs that can brighten the most dismal day. Chance outdid Acid Rap by refusing to take the spotlight. Instead, he introduced us to a slew of new stars and put to rest the tired mythology that true art is only ever born of pain and torture. Sometimes, when it’s done right, the best art is made out of towering feelings of pure, unadulterated love. —Gabriela
15 Tame Impala - Currents (Interscope)
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"Let It Happen" was the anthem and the guiding principle. On Currents, this generation's biggest rock band finally caught up with poptimism, proving for the bazillionth time that you can be a maniacal studio-rat control freak specializing in transcendent psych-pop opuses and still, like, listen to the radio sometimes. Tame Impala's epiphany is not a radical or novel concept at this juncture in music history, but on these roller-rink jams and laser-light-show power ballads, it feels like a revelation. —Chris
14 Jenny Hval - Apocalypse, Girl (Sacred Bones)
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It’s impossible to encapsulate the various themes that Jenny Hval invokes on her anthemic offering, Apocalypse, Girl, but above all else, this album is an exploration of sexuality. "I’m six or seven and dreaming that I’m a boy," Hval sings on "Sabbath," before interrogating exactly what it means to be that: a girl displaced by her own body and the carnal desire that it inspires. Hval's sound is performative and spoken-word heavy, but her earnest, prose-driven monologues inevitably descend into melodic choruses. Hooks jut out like elbows and knees in the tangled bed sheets of her narration as she questions what true intimacy should look like: "It would be easy to think about submission, but I don’t think it’s about submission. It’s about: holding and being held." —Gabriela
13 The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die - Harmlessness (Epitaph)
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There's a parable that's often recited in addiction counseling and made famous by The West Wing that goes something like this: A guy falls into a hole and can't get out. A doctor and a priest pass by and give him a prescription and a prayer, and then his friend walks by and jumps down into the hole with him. "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." And the friend says: "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out." The World Is... is that friend, and Harmlessness will help you find a way out. It's not the kind of music that will change the world, but it might just change your life. —James
12 Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop)
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You have to buy into Father John Misty. There's no way around it. Josh Tillman's alter-ego is arrogant, petulant. He's an asshole. And he's singing songs that are ridiculous in their lushness, stuff that would be intentionally saccharine were it not for the sarcasm and critiques leveled left and right. This is the brilliance of the whole Father John Misty project, though: Tillman has a gift for incisive wit and brutal observations, but they're turned inwards as often as outwards. I Love You, Honeybear deconstructs him as a person while deconstructing human relationships in the 21st century. The self-lacerations all lead us to that cripplingly moving, spare final moment of the album where he relays the moment he met his wife: "I've seen you around, what's your name?" The beauty of I Love You, Honeybear is that it wickedly cuts through all the bullshit, but what it finds underneath is certain universal things we all want. And there's something there that makes the album one of the most hopeful of the year, in its way: If it can happen for that jerk, well, there might just be a chance for all of us to be happy. —Ryan
11 Jamie xx - In Colour (Young Turks)
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In Colour opens with a feint: "Gosh" begins with an irregular heartbeat rattle, and then that synth comes in and dropkicks you with one of the year's most beautiful melodies, sounding like heartbreak experienced from a faraway space station. Much of the record continues apace, offering alternate-reality melancholic club music. The clouds clear for moments of triumph like walk-home-at-sunrise jam "Loud Places" (better than any song by the xx, by the way) and "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)." Most of it, though, inverts dance music from communal experience to deeply interior personal journeys, the stuff of synapses firing on long, lonely walks. —Ryan
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10 Deafheaven - New Bermuda (ANTI-)
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Were Deafheaven openly courting metal traditionalists with New Bermuda, after alienating so many of them with 2013's Sunbather? Maybe they were. The high percentage of thrash/speed/death riffs on display here certainly suggests a band attempting to prove its mettle (or, um, metal). But Deafheaven employ those sounds in wholly unfamiliar contexts, resulting in an experience that is at once disorienting and thrilling. I hedged at first, but with the benefit of a few months' hindsight, I'm comfortable saying New Bermuda is a better album than Sunbather — a verdict substantiated by the band's recent live shows, at which the old songs sounded ever-so-slightly two-dimensional in contrast to the sensory-overloading new ones. Like metal's best-ever albums — from Master Of Reality to Appetite For Destruction to Blackwater Park to Marrow Of The Spirit — New Bermuda embraces the genre's primary elements while expanding beyond them as though they were merely dollops of paint on a palette rather than lines in which to color. New Bermuda is not paying tribute to anyone, not seeking any particular approval. It is a distinct, decisive, masterful work of art. It doesn't exist to be admired, however; it exists to elevate you, to astonish you, to envelop you. For Deafheaven, New Bermuda is a triumph. For you, though, New Bermuda is a gift. —Michael
09 Jim O’Rourke - Simple Songs (Drag City)
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On one hand, Simple Songs is one of 2015's most classicist records. But Jim O'Rourke has spent two decades as one of indie's most mercurial fringe characters, and this is an outsider's interpretation of the classic rock canon. At first it comes off with the warmth and intimacy of '70s singer-songwriter tradition, but with subtle influence from his jazz and experimental work and impeccable performances by a group of musicians from his adopted hometown of Tokyo, Simple Songs is a pristinely tangled eight song collection that continues to yield revelations in its minor ruptures months later. This isn't the kind of album that dominates the year in terms of conversation or narrative, but it's a small-scale masterpiece rich enough to sustain us if O'Rourke waits another 14 years to release a new pop album. —Ryan
08 Colleen Green - I Want To Grow Up (Hardly Art)
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For a generation that has their attention being pulled in 10 different directions at once, I Want To Grow Up may very well serve as our guiding light to confronting our stunted emotions, learning how to focus on what matters, and coming out on the other side all grown up. Colleen Green's mind clicks at a hyperactive pace; whether she's combing through knotty intimacy issues on "Deeper Than Love" or celebrating the use of "TV" as an emotional sedative, she's funny and insecure and occasionally depressing, but always wholly understandable. I Want To Grow Up is comfort food, knowing that there's someone out there grappling with all these feelings that sometimes sound too hollow to address head-on: It's OK to be in your head all the time, but it's probably not the healthiest option. But, also, do whatever you want. It's your life. —James
07 Hop Along - Painted Shut (Saddle Creek)
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Every discussion of Hop Along begins with Frances Quinlan's voice. It's a force of nature, yes, but it's also human, often painfully so, and she uses it to relate stories of humanity in all its rawness and imperfection, its ugliness and its grace. The band match her thorny intensity with knife-sharp guitars and rhythms, see-sawing from sweetness to noise, building to moments of musical and emotional catharsis that detonate with the force of a land-mine. So much of Painted Shut is about feeling small, feeling weak, letting people down and being let down, but Hop Along turn that into something explosive and strong and beautiful and triumphant. Powerlessness has never sounded so powerful. —Peter
06 Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop/Marathon Artists/Milk!)
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Here’s something crazy to consider: This magnificently confident collection of head-buzz riffs and pointed observations is Barnett’s debut album. She’s been with us for a few years, and 2013’s The Double EP worked like an album, but this is the first time she’s headed into the studio to make a full-length statement. If you’ve heard "Avant Gardener," you won’t be surprised at how smart and funny it is, but you might be surprised at how hard it rocks, all this intelligence compressed into raggedly tuneful power-pop that would kick your ass even if you didn’t speak English. She’s already at the top of her game — This Year’s Model-era Elvis Costello reappearing in the form of a badass Australian stoner lady with a better record collection than anyone you know. I can’t wait to hear what she does next. —Tom
05 Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)
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Carrie & Lowell was touted as a back-to-basics album due to its acoustic inclinations, but really it's unlike anything else in Sufjan Stevens' catalog: singleminded in sound and substance, its hope overpowered by despair, its narrator's previous flights of fancy not just grounded but gone splat. Stevens' reckoning with his estranged mother's death is a work of gorgeous simplicity, as if his only respite from emotional turmoil was to craft something streamlined and detail-perfect. It sounds like the calm, but it feels like the storm. —Chris
04 Vince Staples - Summertime ’06 (ARTium/Def Jam)
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"Youth was stolen from my city that Summer and I'm left alone to tell the story," Staples wrote in a post featuring the recontextualized Joy Division artwork that marks his debut. "This might not make sense, but that's because none of it does. We're stuck. Love tore us all apart." Summertime '06 is an ambitious double album that paints Staples' Long Beach upbringing in bleak terms; its relatively short length in comparison to other double albums only highlights how young he still is. It's the portrait of a community, one that's built on an untenable, perpetuating cycle of violence and pain. Staples makes it clear that he's only one voice of many, but he forgoes the tendency to pack a rap debut with guests, instead creating a singular, often claustrophobic vision whose most notable feature is an uncredited Future sample. He inhabits sharply realized characters from his hometown, slipping in between them seamlessly, and puts himself and his world up to the microscope: "Will your name hold weight when the curtains close?" he asks on "Señorita." Because of '06, Staples' surely will. —James
03 Carly Rae Jepsen - E•MO•TION (604/School Boy/Interscope)
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E•MO•TION initiates with a saxophone trill, a call-to-arms before Carly Rae Jepsen sets the mood with a commandment: "Take me to the feeling!" This isn’t really an album about being in love so much as it is about feeling like you could be in love if that other person would just release their inhibitions and give in to you. And when the chase is over and your heart is broken into billions of tiny, reflective pieces, E•MO•TION has the defiant post-breakup bangers to put you back together again. Jepsen doesn’t achieve this through lyrics alone; this is an album built on blown-out, titanic production that hearkens back to pop songs of the past, and it repurposes long-since retired motifs for this millennium. The horns ("Run Away With Me"), the slap bass ("When I Needed You"), the sultry, cascading synth lines ("All That"). On E•MO•TION, these sounds coalesce to create something all at once familiar and totally new. Like when you catch yourself falling in love all over again, but it feels like it’s for the first time. —Gabriela
02 Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath/Interscope)
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A lot going on here: The consensus Best Rapper Alive faced the pressure of equaling or surpassing his instant-classic debut album, backing up the monumental boasts of the most talked-about verse in recent memory, staying true to his God/his people/his heroes/himself amidst fame and fortune's endless barrage of devilish temptations, and, oh, delivering a profound creative statement on behalf of black America just as a horrifying series of events boiled over into a modern Civil Rights movement. Kendrick Lamar answered that chaos with more chaos.
You cannot put this album in a bow tie. Whereas good kid, m.A.A.d. city, with its familiar redemption arc, was billed as "a short film by Kendrick Lamar," the labyrinthine To Pimp A Butterfly reminded us that the world is much bigger than a cinema screen and life is much messier than a movie. A knot of neuroses writ large by a cast of musical luminaries, it sounded like a crate of old jazz, soul, funk, rock, and hip-hop records subjected to the forces that left Kendrick screaming in a hotel room and then splattered across the full length of a compact disc. Loving it was complicated. —Chris
01 Grimes - Art Angels (4AD/Eerie Organization)
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Contrary to the prevailing notions, the philosophical antithesis of poptimism is not rockism, but auteurism. Even our most celebrated border-defying visionaries — from Kanye West to Taylor Swift to Beck — employ departments of collaborators, contractors, specialists, and secret weapons. In that respect, Art Angels is the opposite of a pop album: Claire Boucher didn't delegate or commission anything here; she outsourced a couple of key features (Aristophanes on "SCREAM"; Janelle Monáe on "Venus Fly"), but wrote, composed, performed, recorded, produced, and engineered everything else herself. That is not, in and of itself, some inherent virtue. We've got more than enough isolated GarageBand mechanics generating infinite universes of myopic, monotonous music. Art Angels is not myopic or monotonous — it's spacious as a stadium; as polished as a Porsche on the showroom floor. It feels alien at points, but it doesn't seek to alienate anyone: Even at its most combative, it's asking you to fight alongside it, not against it.
In that respect, Art Angels is very much a pop album. And it kinda sounds like pop music, too! But pop music doesn't sound like this. Art Angels leaves me scrambling for comparisons, and returning not with E•MO•TION or 1989, but Yeezus and Nevermind. Closer still: Art Angels reminds me of Garbage's self-titled debut album — a genre-agnostic postmodern blur of dance music, shoegaze, new wave, industrial, alt-rock, trip-hop, and whatever the hell else was at hand — with Boucher playing the roles of both Shirley Manson and Butch Vig. Garbage was seen as something of a sweet but insubstantial confection upon its release, but that album turned 20 this year, and its anniversary was justly celebrated — not so much because it eventually signaled some alternative direction for popular music, but because it was (and remains) defiantly singular: the product of strong personalities, creative individuals, and technical wizards blending previously incompatible sounds into an unexpected, immediate, wholly other new one. It rejected definition and reached listeners just the same — and over the course of two decades (and counting), it stayed with many of those listeners, and found lots more, too.
Of course, Art Angels is both weirder and more urgent today than Garbage was in 1995. It’s better, too. And if you don't think it'll be here 20 years from now, you're wrong. By then, it'll be seen as a blueprint, early evidence of a new paradigm: experimentalism as populism; processed synthetic sound as raw human emotion; studio-genius auteur as universal pop star; singular as plural; future as present. In 2035, Art Angels will sound just as good as it did in 2015. And in 2015, nothing sounded better than Art Angels. —Michael
