150 Best Albums of 2018

The biggest selling vinyl album of 2018 had a picture of a cassette on its cover. It was also four years old, much newer than its closest competition. The Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack sold 84,000 vinyl copies, according to Neilson Music, just barely inching out Michael Jackson’s 36-year-old Thriller for first place; next in line came 41-year-old Rumours, 49-year-old Abbey Road and 34-year-old Purple Rain. Almost all 14 vinyl albums exceeding 50,000 vinyl copies sold were old, though Panic! At the Disco ‘s 2018 Pray for the Wicked did squeak into 10th place. Artists on Guardians of the Galaxy included such up-and-coming acts as Blue Swede, the Five Stairsteps, Rupert Holmes, the Raspberries, Redbone, the Runaways and 10cc. Basically it was a K-Tel compilation.

Of course, vinyl buyers were even more a niche audience then than now (when presumably Taylor Swift and maybe BTS dominate the category), and those sales probably aren’t indicative of anything bigger. On the other hand, a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Americans could well be forgiven for trying to escape to a saner, safer past (while Americans who voted for him claimed to want to “make America great again” theirownselves — the past they hoped to revive, inasmuch as it had ever happened at all, was just a lot longer ago.)

“The power of pop music in 2018 is its insistence on going backward to go forward, on excavating the past to fetch and reclaim values we’ve forgotten,” wrote Jason King on Slate at year’s end, making sure to point out that he meant not the seemingly tongue-in-cheek revival of Toto’s “Africa” (returned to radio by Weezer after they’d already covered “Rosanna”) or a fan campaign to boost Mariah Carey’s 17-year-old Glitter up the iTunes chart but rather “releases that force us to rethink what we already think we know of the pop music past”; e.g., newly unearthed John Coltrane performances and bare-boned Prince demos. King connects the re-evalulation such artifacts enable with “Amiri Baraka’s concept of ‘digging,’ the groovy act of excavating history to produce a better present and future.”

Carl Wilson also brought up Weezer’s “Africa” resurrection at Slate: “I suppose it’s karma that in a year when people got all excited about a has-been guitar band covering a chunk of ’80s meme-schlock, the song that’s topping tons of year-end lists would be a Twitter-era version of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ the nadir of Billy Joel–ness.” That’d be Pitchfork‘s and The Ringer‘s song of the year, “Love It if We Made It” by British indie-pop band the 1975, not a historical laundry list as far as I can tell — or maybe it is, with its reference to Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and all; I’m not on Twitter, so how would I know? Either way, five years later, now that Fall Out Boy have literally updated “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and Billy Joel just returned from retirement after decades mercifully away., it somehow all fits.

In October 2018 I wrote a piece for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages about how recently all sorts of pop, hip-hop and country artists — Lauren Alaina, Jason Aldean, Anne Marie, Charli XCX with Troye Sivan, New Kids on the Block, Redman — had been putting out songs and filming videos that expressed explicit nostalgia for the ’90s or even ’00s, which until that point it hadn’t occurred to me was even possible; I also wondered what an ’00s costume could possibly look like. Two months later Rob Sheffield wrote a presumably much higher-paying piece for Rolling Stone about how Lauren Alaina, Jason Aldean, Anne Marie, Charli XCX with Troye Sivan, Redman (somehow Rob left out his beloved Boston homeboys the New Kids) and a couple other artists (Maxwell doing “1990x” and “country singer Jimmie Allen…pining for the gold old days of Matchbox 20” a half decade before sexual assault allegations derailed his career) had recently… well, you get the idea. Not to mention how stores had costumes now for all those long-gone 20th Century decades.

To be fair, Sheffield definitely picks up on some movie references in the music videos that I wasn’t aware of, since I don’t see many movies. “Nineties fever is everywhere this year,” he rejoices, quoting Vanilla Ice and Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath about the ’90s being where nostalgia will end, since there hasn’t been a Nirvana since and nobody knows what to call subsequent decades anyhow. Chart whisperer Chris Molanphy countered in Slate that Panic! At the Disco were in fact an example of ’00s nostalgia themselves — apparently “High Hopes” was a comeback? — though I gotta come clean here; if I’d gone on a game show and the host asked me what years were most representative of that band’s career, I would have lost all the money.

Stop Motion Orchestra Lightworks

Of course, looking backwards in time is not the only way music dealt with the early Trump era, if that’s what it was doing. “2018 was the year we had to stop plugging our ears and shaking our heads ‘no, no, no, no, no,’ and understand that, for the foreseeable duration, we are stuck,” Wilson wrote to lead off Slate’s annual Music Club roundtable, so “a lot of this year’s music was aligned with a grudging acceptance that we live in the worst timeline.” Reading music critics’ analyses of 2018, I was struck by recurring references to self-help and mental health. “Music can be a balm even in the darkest hours,” wrote Music Club panelist Ann Powers, who gravitated toward recordings creating “connections with close, beloved community, a world within a world”; “audiences who craved to live in the world they’ve built”; artists “nurturing alternatives in whatever cracks and alleys possible.”

Her fellow Music Clubber Rawiya Kamier felt that, as “perhaps the predictable result of this hellscape of a year,” acts like Mitski, Snail Mail and Kacey Musgraves were pivoting toward “earnestness, away from the reigning intangible detachment.” I’m not quite sure how, say, Musgraves mood-musicky Golden Hour — first-place-winner in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll despite being the increasingly alt-leaning country singer’s dullest album since her self-released demo days, Christmas record included — was more sincere and emotionally direct than what she’d done before, unless that just means vaguer lyrics. I do like the intermittent disco glitter, though Wilson’s Olivia Newton-John comparisons seem a stretch. And of course ONJ never placed in, much less topped, P&J; even if “Physical” justifiably got a couple votes in 1981, it wasn’t enough to rank even among that year’s 25 best singles in critics’ minds. P&J-wise, Musgraves’ win mostly reminds me of the acoustic-atmospheric Wilco/Beck/Flaming Lips top three of 2002, the year after 9-11: More dark hours in need of balm.

Swedish dance-pop diva Robyn, back in the racks after several reported years of depression and psychoanalysis, also moved other critics while leaving me even colder than Musgraves; John Vetesse at WXPN’s The Key lauded her album Honey for “wrestling with emotions and loss”, while Maura Johnston in the Slate Club praised “Robyn’s existential trauma shape-shifting into something resembling hope, or at least enough of a breather from life’s woes to hit the beach.” The album placed fifth P&J in a year when the top five were all made by women, though second place Janelle Monáe came out as nonbinary a few years later. (The other two were Cardi B and Mitski.)

The staff of Tiny Mix Tapes, introducing their 50 favorite albums of the year, concluded that “our music was a palliative means of upkeep,” and “we needed this maintenance because we needed healing, and we needed healing because we needed resolution, and we needed resolution because we can only give and take so much.” The editors at Blare magazine, setting up their own top 50, observed that music “went out of its way to be a distraction for anyone dealing with heartbreak, anxiety, or isolation and loneliness.” Back at Slate, Jason King singled out “Gambian-Swedish chanteuse Seinabo Sey” for not only her strong display of “Jazmine Sullivan self-confidence,” but also “values like self-care, self-examination, compassion, and steely self-determination.” That’s a whole lot of selves!

“This was the year where I found so much music that allowed me to depart briefly from the world and return to it renewed,” wrote Slate clubber Hanif Abdurraqib, citing Shawn Mendes and emo veterans the Wonder Years but happy to see rappers still serving as the Black CNN. Matthew Phillips, a junior at USC and lifestyle editor of the Daily Trojan, broke from running down what he considered a “high-water” year in hip-hop to recommend albums by indie mainstays Car Seat Headrest and Ezra Furman that “focused on themes of depression, mental illness and queer relationships, a far, far cry from Scorpions’ ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’ or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ — which, if those comparisons seem incongruous, fit to him because he considers the indie pair “rock.” Which is his right.

I’ll spare you my own mental travails at the time (if you’re interested, I spent too long on them while reflecting on music of 2016), except to say that I’ve had enough couch treatment to know therapy talk when I hear it. In times like these — and here in 2024 I very well might be talking about the next several years as well — hiding under the covers and wishing it would all go away strikes me as a perfectly sane response, at least if you don’t overdo it. Though fortunately not everybody did that. In October of 2018, even Taylor Swift went so far as to endorse Democrats for the first time, in part because Martha Blackburn’s “voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.” (Insert obligatory sentence about what I hope that bodes for 2024.)

Hip-hop-infused British jazz combo Sons of Kemet put out a great album where they named every track after a Black woman of world-historical importance, starting with band leader Shabaka Hutchings’s great grandmother Ada Eastman. Hip-hop-infused Oakland jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s “Free, Black and 21” was a roll call of young Black police victims, and jazz-rap-adjacent outsider-art improviser Eugene Holley recorded top-of-dome rants called “I Snuck Off The Slave Ship” and “I Woke Up in a Fucked Up America” way better than anything Wesley Willis ever did. Chicago-via-Brooklyn folk-rock neonatologist Rich Krueger busked an ode to an American demagogue who yearned to be a dictator (Huey P. Long, but still) and one demanding “kiss the ass of the woman who should have been president/There ought to be a law against stupid.”

In “Muslim Jewish Resistance,” Marc Ribot’s jazz-punk trio Ceramic Dog shouted “never again, we mean it!” at fascists-they-know-when- they-see-ones surnamed Trump and Netanyahu, and in “Fuck La Migra” (= U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) they defended so-called “illegals.” Riton & Kah-lo, the Mekons, Alela Diane, Third Root and Yuzo Iwata did border or immigration songs of their own. Quebec metal futurists Voivod had a nightmare about “A microchip implanted under your skin” resulting in “No privacy, no dignity, no self whatsoever/This entity, identity, you’re a bar code number.” The song started out with a prehistoric virus spreading everywhere, so a couple years later it might well have counted as a vaccine conspiracy theory, but in 2018 it just seemed like they had their ears to the ground.

Jerusalem In My Heart Daqa’iq Tudaiq

Not that I’m suggesting that should necessarily make a difference. I’m writing this the week Toby Keith died, days after Taylor Swift plugged her upcoming album (gasp!) instead of ending Gaza’s ethnic cleansing at the Grammy Awards. And yet almost a decade into an era with democracy in critical condition, especially as a straight white cis-male sixtysomething at least tangentially complicit in this state of affairs, I have to keep reminding myself of some things that I came into this game knowing instinctively (and used to shout from the rooftops, or at least from pages in the Village Voice and Creem): Ethics isn’t aesthetics; bad people can make good music; agreeing with songs isn’t the same as liking them; a critic’s mandate isn’t automatically to serve as St. Peter’s gatekeeper casting litmus-test judgments on moral transgressions. Which doesn’t mean I can’t express disgust at, I dunno, Kanye West wearing a Burzum T-shirt. That never wasn’t fair game. But as Wesley Morris put it in a definitive New York Times magazine piece in October 2018, lately “we’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” There’s a difference, or at least used to be. Even now, we might consider keeping that in mind.

Anyway, those were just a few protests that stood out to me (most but not all represented in my 150 Best Albums rundown); you may well have your own examples. Enough music critics liked Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino’s Black Lives Matter-associated “This Is America,” or at least its video, to help it win the Pazz & Jop Poll’s singles competition. “Conscious, socio-politically motivated artists followed the path of The Philharmonik and his genius, important self-titled debut album,” claims whoever wrote a seemingly unsigned 3000-word Ringleader magazine essay arguing that 2018 was hip-hop’s greatest year ever. But they don’t seem to name names — oddly, because in the rest of the essay they name lots of names, many of which I’m clueless about. Right before the conscious sentence, there’s one about how “the bubble rap movement began to take shape with positivist lyricists like Tobi Lou, Hugh Augustine, Warm Brew, Rexx Like Raj, and Dave B.” — So, are those the socio-political guys? When I google “bubble rap” I get a whole page of links to some Veggie Tales ditty for little Christian kiddies; spell it differently, of course, and there’s bubble wrap to protect fragile items in packages you mail. So I’m stumped. And here I always assumed bubble rap was L’Trimm!

Nonetheless, Ringleader’s ringleader insists that “Never before in any genre” (any genre!) “has such an unprecedented onslaught of high-profile and artistically innovative releases come to our ears over such a short period of time,” and “the underground hip-hop scene has never been stronger, more wide-ranging, and more talented,” and “the future of hip-hop was undeniably, firmly rooted by a wide-ranging, diverse, broad, and innumerable collection of classicists and experimentalists, transcendentalists and purists, multi-disciplinarians and one-trick-ponies, lyricists and melodists, instrumentalists and vocalists, producers and jacks of all trades. In no way has any year other than 2018 ever before delivered hip-hop in so many ways at such a large scale.” Whew! Consult the essay for an interminable (as if I should talk) stream of specifics, but for what it’s worth, the competition years-wise is said to be 1988, 1994-1996, 2000 and 2008.

Counting singer-rappers Saweetie and Janelle Monáe as half each and flipping a quid on electronically assisted grime MCs, I count more or less 17 hip-hop albums in my own top 150, most of them in the bottom third. My 1988 list has 18 (fortunately I added them up when I did the writeup); combined 1994/’95 list more or less 11; 2000 almost definitely 18; 2008 “11 albums total by my count, but none in the top 25” according to my accompanying address. Which, given margins of error, puts 2018 approximately on par with the most hip-hoppy of those years — though there’s no guarantee at all that certain other years didn’t have more. Just not sure which ones, off hand.

Thing is, I also don’t get the idea that Ringleader’s best-rap-year-ever opinion, as well-considered as it seems, was a widely accepted one. Opinionists I’ve consulted seem quite sure that the streaming boom had helped hip-hop take over the pop chart (according to Billboard and Neilsen 50 of the year’s 75 most-streamed songs and eight of 10 biggest albums were by rappers, as were the six highest-selling album-release weeks of the year, plus Drake spent more than half of 2018 atop the Hot 100) and that it was a particularly fruitful time for young women MCs (my tally has City Girls, Cupcakke, Bhad Bhabie, Bali Baby, Cardi B, plus maybe Israeli dancehall toaster Miss Red way up in my top 10 and two aforementioned r&b singer-rappers.) But I’ve seen nobody else claim hip-hop overall was at an all-time peak, especially with so many screamo-mumblers sliming their way from Soundcloud into the spotlight — “a hip-hop aesthetic that, to put it kindly, probably won’t be remembered as the genre’s best moment,” as Maeve McDermott put it in her USA Today takedown of 2018 pop hits.

Or will it? DJ Louie XIV at Vanity Fair seems tickled by “fantastically bizarre success stories” like Sheck Wes’s “brash “’Mo Bamba’, XXXTentacion’s emo lament ‘Sad!,’ and Kodak Black’s zany ‘Zeze,’ all previously implausible crossover pop smashes” as he sees it, often breaking into the top 10 straight off Spotify playlists such as RapCaviar with no help from top 40 radio; not to mention by how Travis “Scott’s ‘Sicko Mode (feat. Drake)’ was completely non-traditional in structure, split into three distinct movements, smash-cutting into one another with no central hook to speak of” — a whole new kind of hit. “Mo Bamba,” Louie emphasizes, took a year and a half to hit paydirt.

But again, not everybody was so amused. “2018 sucked for music big time!,” exclaims someone calling themself jab625246 on the Top Ten site’s Top Ten Worst Years For Music page. “Mumble rap and depressing pop music were still polluting the airwaves,” jab grumbles. “People started listening to 6ix9ine, Kodak Black, and XXXTentaction who were terrible rappers and terrible people.” Another commenter on the page takes it even further: “This year is the new worst year for music. It used to be 2017, but, because mainstream music gets at least 1 million times worse every year, it’s now 2018. Every year, in music, is always worse than the last. It’s been this way since 2010.” Q.E.D.! They go on to call Drake, Ariana Grande, Cardi B, Post Malone, Justin Bieber (“yes that piece of crap on legs is STILL popular”), Lil Pump and Shawn Mendes “talentless bums.” Did I mention that this person’s CB handle is NickelbackLinkinPark4Eva?

Self-proclaimed Christian historian Nathanal Bright, on his blog Edge Induced Cohesion, goes so far as to chart out ten specific reasons music was horrible in 2018 — 11 counting honorable mention “Album Bombs.” That is, “a phenomenon where the release of an album led to most or all of its songs charting on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time,” which apparently causes all sorts of other problems. Two of his reasons had to do with Drake, who Bright complains not only monopolized the pinnacle of the Hot 100 with “mostly unimpressive songs” but also convinced fellow rappers and r&b singers that “the fastest way they could gain clout was to have Drake as a feature.”

Another three reasons involved what Bright calls “Reprehensible Human Beings,” particularly “various emo rappers” — with XXXTentacion, shot to death at 20 in his home state of Florida in June, at the top of the pile partly because “despite the inconvenience of being dead most of the year after he was murdered, he still managed to place 3 hits on the Year End list (of Billboard‘s top 100 songs of the year), and all of them are terrible.” Other felonies on Bright’s docket: Bad Latin Music, Boring Pop Music, Boring White Rappers, Message Songs missing the mark, and Just Go Away Already (directed at not only Drake, but also Maroon 5).

Well okay, I’m sure I could find Internet randos saying just about anything — doesn’t make it right, right? But what if I told you my friend Frank Kogan, one of the best music critics ever, wrote on his blog at the end of 2018 that “by one definition of ‘pop’ — poppy-sounding stuff that’s popular or at least semi-popular — Anglo-American pop these days is worse than at any other time in my life and has been for a decade (though maybe the earlier part of the decade qualifies as another time in my life; I don’t know)”? But, Kogan freely admits, that’s only part of the story. “By another definition of ‘pop’ — stuff in styles that are popular from all over the place, especially including hip-hop — pop is doing great, even in Anglo-America, and even with K-pop having an off-year. His single of the year? “I Shyne” by Lil Pump and Carnage. Three singles by 15-year-old Dr. Phil breakout “cash me outside” queen Bhad Bhabie, two by future federal prison inmate 6ix9ine, and one each by Sheck Wes and Cardi B make his top 15.

My own top 10 singles at the time, while we’re on the subject: Dev “Rock On It”; Baba Commandant & the Mandingo Band “Wasso”; Bella Thorne “B*tch I’m Bella Thorne”; Bhad Bhabie feat. Lil Yachty “Gucci Flip Flops” (Kogan’s #12); Bali Baby “Backseat” (Kogan’s #20); Zack Knight x Jasmin Walia “Bom Diggy”; Faren Rachels “Uber Driver”; Samantha Fox “Hot Boy”; Mylene Farmer “Rolling Stone”; Saweetie “Pissed.” That nine of those feature women singers is…not unusual.

I’d list my favorite EPs but they haven’t been a separate Pazz & Jop category since 1994 (in 1995 they were replaced with “compilations,” apparently for rave-dancer purposes) so they’re all included among the albums below. I count 15 (though none in the top 50), which I figured was a pretty decent amount until I looked back at my 1983 post and counted 26. I adore the cute little buggers (especially in those rare instances when they come out on irresistible 10-inch vinyl), always have. Though the format’s long history somehow didn’t stop Stereogum from declaring 2018 The Year of the EP; in fact, Chris Deville even wrote an essay about it: “Subjectively, more EPs caught my attention than ever in 2018. I can’t remember a year in which so many of my favorite releases were so short, when artists seemed to be putting so much care into their briefer dispatches. Many of them were advertised as EPs without all the fuss about classification, yet they felt like landmarks all the same.”

Records he names include indie-woman super-trio Boygenius’s debut six-songer, audiovisual rapper Tierra Whack’s (way too gimmicky I’d say) 15 one-minute songs in 15 minutes, Vince Staples’s theoretically summer-themed 22-minute FM, a “meta career report card” six pack by brainy undie rapper Open Mike Eagle, and a seven-song-apiece series on Kanye West’s clunky-acronymed GOOD label courtesy people like Pusha-T, Teyana Taylor, Nas, and West’s own Kid Cudi collaboration Kids See Ghosts. Deville’s definitions, though, strike me as imprecise — “an album is the definitive creative statement; an EP is more minor and not to be confused with a mini-album, a major work at EP length; a mixtape is part of a messier, less official canon.”

Personally, definitions spelled out in old P&J bylaws (okay, invitation letters) have always served me fine: An EP is any record with three or more songs adding up to less than 20 minutes of music; between 20 and 25 minutes is up to the voter’s discretion, but I’m inevitably going to go with “EP” for those. Two songs or fewer is a “single”; “mini-LP” and “mixtape” (and now apparently “project”) are marketing jargon but until record labels start paying my bills that’s not my concern.

With Napster né Rhapsody paying my bills I’ve never Spotified, so it was news to me when I read a 2018 Liz Pelly Downstream column from The Baffler about how “Every week, Spotify releases two-track EPs through its Spotify Singles program, recorded at various Spotify Studios locations around the world. It’s a foray into Spotify-branded content, with each EP usually featuring one original song and one cover—sometimes partnering with the stars, other times acting as a tastemaking vehicle.” For one thing, again, I don’t care what Spotify calls them — if they’ve got only two songs, those are singles, not EPs!

Second, Pelly’s description of what the NY Times reportedly dubbed “Spotify-core” doesn’t exactly inspire a deep dive: “muted, mid-tempo, melancholy pop,” a “dismal, small-pop sound” inspired by whispery Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish laments, serving as pleasant unobtrusive filler on playlists called “Chill Tracks” or “Sad Songs” or “Mood Buster.” A producer who’s worked on such fodder tells her the formula “has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it,” “really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses.” Made not to be blasted out of car speakers or dance party amps, but rather absorbed alone, by osmosis, through headphones, where songs can segue unnoticeably into each other without harshing the listener’s mellow. (Have you never been mellow?) Almost like ASMR, Pelly suggests.

Or maybe like, I dunno, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. Which is fine. I like the album well enough to put it on my own list, just inside the bottom 20. A couple facebook friends not too long ago suggested it might be the worst Pazz & Jop winner this century (or something along those lines), and I wouldn’t go that far, if only because there have plenty of winners since Y2K that I have no use for whatsoever. At least Golden Hour generally feels pretty and warm, occasionally even energetic enough to induce dancing. “Kacey is content to travel lightly. It’s why her music sounds so fluid and free,” wrote Lindsey Zoladz in the Slate round robin, selecting it her favorite record of the year. Carl Wilson, who also says it’s his top album of 2018, likes “its sunnily stoned disposition” and Daft Punk electrobeats and necessary departure from “Musgraves’ status as the kind of artisinal-country artist that critics and other listeners use to pretend they don’t have a bias against the genre.” 

Which interpretation of unstated motives is interesting, since Musgraves’ 2013 major label debut (after four obscure teenage albums she put out by herself or via CDBaby) charted two songs on the country chart higher than any on Golden Hour, and in fact Golden Hour‘s only legitimate hit, the just barely top 20 “Rainbow,” didn’t chart until 2019, after three earlier singles stalled in the 30s. Same Trailer Different Track is still top five for me for 2013; at the time, I’m pretty sure it topped my P&J ballot. In 2015, I have her underrated-by-backlash Pageant Material top 50, and in neither year does my list lack other country candidates, including from Nashville’s mainstream.

The list below is farther out, country-wise — old-weird-Americana eccentrics (probably too eccentric for Americana actually) A Pony Named Olga, 3Hattrio, the Nude Party, New Reveille, Heathen Apostles and Merle Hazard (whose almost Tom Lehrer- if not Ben Bernanke-worthy “Fiscal Cliff” and “Inflation or Deflation” I maybe should have mentioned in my current events lesson up above) before you get to an actual country radio star, Ashley McBryde, just inside the top 100. And give or take the Pistol Annies and Hippie Annie aka Ashley Monroe, neither of whom has ever scored a top 30 country radio single where they weren’t guests of Blake Shelton, the only two other such stars on my list, Brothers Osborne and Runaway June, actually place lower than Musgraves. Yet I’ve never been opposed to commercial country — in the ’00s, it dominated my listening and writing as much as any genre out there, as my album lists from that decade should bear out. So Musgraves was never a token for me. I just prefer her less stoned.

Actually, if any genre surprises me on the list below, it’s my longtime punching bag indie rock, or whatever it’s called these days. Discounting, which maybe I shouldn’t, Japanese zeuhl-prog troupe Kōenji Hyakkei and 68-year-old Pere Ubu keyboardist turned ambient chamber-nuke experimentalist Allen Ravenstine, that still leaves six such albums in my top 16 alone: decades-on Dutch anarchists the Ex (more current events?), all-female Manchester debut post-punk quintet Ill (as in “sick” not “Roman number for 3”), all-female London debut post-punk trio Bas Jan, Virginia’s Wingtip Sloat whose 40-song semi-compilation somehow crosses early Eno and Wire with rural roots regionalisms, aforementioned politically minded neo-no-wave fusionists Ceramic Dog and aforementioned Berlin polkapunkabilly crazies A Pony Named Olga. Add Utah desert-folk prospectors 3Hattrio (led by 70-year-old Hal Cannon), Boston via New York noisies Guerilla Toss and Moscow gloomies Human Tetris in the Top 40, and you don’t even have to include industrial, metal or prog to conclude rock of a subterranean origin enjoyed quite a year in my determination.

Which is not to downplay the electronic (arguably four of my top five), jazz-identified (more old people! though not always!) and/or global releases (Bollywood soundtrack top 20, three African albums top 40, three Brazilian between 35 and 50) also spotlighted high on my honor roll. Or top 25 Michelle Blackwell merging Southern Soul with go-go from her native D.C., or top 35 Cha Wa keeping Wild Tchoupitoulas/ Magnolias second-line Indian funk alive and strutting in New Orleans, or top 45 Tucka merging Southern Soul with “swing out” from his likewise native Louisiana. Or all the selections further down, which continue to generously represent nearly every style I’ve named so far and then some. Some of us need more than soft-focus self-help to keep us sane. Though hey, I won’t pretend long walks in the woods and prescribed pharmaceuticals don’t help too. Feed your head.

1. Mr. Fingers Cerebral Hemispheres (Alleviated Netherlands)
2. Sons of Kemet Your Queen is a Reptile (Impulse!)
3. Hieroglyphic Being The Red Notes (Soul Jazz UK)
4. Riton & Kah-lo Foreign Ororo (Last Gang/Riton Time Europe)
5. Miss Red K.O. (Pressure Germany)
6. The Ex 27 Passports (Setanta UK)
7. Kōenji Hyakkei Dhorimviskha (Skin Graft)
8. Dax J Offending Public Morality (Monnom Black Germany)
9. Ill We are Ill (Box UK)
10. Wingtip Sloat Pure and Swell: The Lost Decade (VHF)
11. Henry Threadgill Double Up Plays Double Up Plus (Pi)
12. Ceramic Dog YRU Still Here? (Northern Spy)
13. Sun-El Musician Africa to the World (El World Music South Africa)
14. Allen Ravenstine Waiting for the Bomb (ReR Megacorp UK)
15. A Pony Named Olga Ave Maria (Saustex)
16. Bas Jan Yes I Jan (Lost Map UK)
17. Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (T-Series India)
18. Kim Wilde Here Come the Aliens (Ear Music)
19. Confidence Man Confident Music for Confident People (Amplifire Australia)
20. Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette After the Fall (ECM)
21. 3Hattrio Lord of the Desert (Okedokee)
22. Meat Beat Manifesto Impossible Star (MGM)
23. Niagara Apologia (Principé Portugal)
24. Michelle Blackwell Body of Work (Blackwell Entertainment)
25. Stop Motion Orchestra Lightworks (Egg Helmet)
26. Voivod The Wake (Century Media)
27. Ali Shaheed Muhammad/Adrian Younge The Midnight Hour (Linear Labs)
28. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids An Angel Fell (Strut Europe)
29. Harriet Tubman The Terror End of Beauty (Sunnyside)
30. Guerilla Toss Twisted Crystal (DFA)
31. Bamba Pana Poaa (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
32. Cha Wa Spyboy (UPT Music)
33. Human Tetris Memorabilia (Human Tetris Russia)
34. Khalab Black Noise 2084 (On The Corner UK)
35. Robespierre Garden of Hell (Shadow Kingdom)
36. Senyawa Sujud (Sublime Frequencies)
37. PinioL Bran Coucou (Dur Et Doux France)
38. Steve Coleman Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1 (Pi)
39. Bixiga 70 Quebra Cabeça (Deck/Traquitina Brazil)
40. Jako Maron Les Experiences Elektro Maloya de Jako Maron (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
41. The Nude Party The Nude Party (New West)
42. Tucka Working With the Feeling (Hit Nation)
43. Hedvig Mollestad Trio Smells Funny (Rune Grammofon Norway)
44. P. Adrix Álbum Desconhecido (Principé Portugal EP)
45. Rattle Sequence (Upset the Rhythm)
46. Teto Prada Pedra Preta (Mamba Rec Brazil)
47. Crack The Sky Living in Reverse (Loud & Proud)
48. Makaya McCraven Universal Beings (International Anthem Recording Company)
49. Mylene Farmer Désobéissance (Stuffed Monkey France)
50. Heavy Baile Carne De Pescoço (Heavy Baile Sounds Brazil)
51. Busdriver Electricity is on Our Side (Temporary Whatever)
52. Träden Träden (Subliminal Sounds Sweden)
53. Civic New Vietnam (Anti-Fade Australia EP)
54. Surgeon Luminosity Device (Dynamic Tension UK)
55. Third Root Trill Pedagogy: Summer Semester (Third Root EP)
56. Satan’s Satyrs The Lucky Ones (Bad Omen)
57. The Mekons 77 It is Twice Blessed (Slow Things UK)
58. Merle Hazard Tough Market (Merle Hazard EP)
59. Orphaned Land Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs (Century Media)
60. Milo Budding Ornithologists are Weary of Tired Analogies (Ruby Yacht)
61. Ambrose Akinmusire Origami Harvest (Blue Note)
62. Clutch Book of Bad Decisions (Weathermaker Music)
63. Molchat Doma/Молчат Дома Etazhi/Этажи (Detriti Germany)
64. Mast Thelonious Sphere Monk (World Galaxy/Alpha Pup)
65. ST 37 ST 37 (Super Secret)
66. Cabbage Nihilistic Glamour Shots (Skeleton Key UK)
67. Cauldron New Gods (The End)
68. RS Produções Bagdad Style (Principé Portugal EP)
69. City Girls Period (Quality Control)
70. Riot V Armor of Light (Nuclear Blast)
71. Maisha There is a Place (Brownswood Recordings UK)
72. New Reveille The Keep (Loud & Proud)
73. Maggotron Lectro Space Ghetto (Debonair)
74. Wax Chattels Wax Chattels (Captured Tracks)
75. Red Baraat Sound the People (Rhyme & Reason)
76. The Coup Sorry to Bother You: The Soundtrack (Anti-/Interscope)
77. Ekuka Ekuka (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
78. The Nightingales Perish the Thought (Tiny Global Productions UK)
79. Heathen Apostles Bloodgrass Vol. I & II (Ratchet Blade)
80. Thy Catafalque Geometria (Season of Mist)
81. The Night Flight Orchestra Sometimes the World Ain’t Enough (Nuclear Blast)
82. Madder Mortem Marrow (Dark Essence/Karisma Norway)
83. Northern Haze Siqinaarut/ ᓯᕿᓐᓈᕈᑦ (Aakuluk Canada)
84. Xenomy Polish Space Program (Hessle Audio UK)
85. Black Rat Dread Reverence (Shadow Kingdom)
86. Amnesia Scanner Another Life (Pan Germany)
87. Masta Ace & Marco Polo A Breukelen Story (Fat Beats/Spaghetti Bender)
88. Mouse On Mars Dimensional People (Thrill Jockey)
89. J.D. Allen Love Stone (Savant)
90. Nürnberg Skryvaj (Death Shadow)
91. Jon Hassell Listening to Pictures: Pentimento Volume One Ndeya Europe)
92. Ashley McBryde Girl Going Nowhere (Atlantic/Warner Nashville)
93. Elysia Crampton Elysia Crampton (Break World)
94. Bright Dog Red Means to the Ends (Ropeadope)
95. Warmduscher Whale City (Leaf UK)
96. Bad Rabbits Mimi (Bad EP)
97. Jerusalem In My Heart Daqa’iq Tudaiq (Constellation Canada)
98. Captain Black Beard Struck By Lightning (Melodic Rock)
99. Lauren Morrow Lauren Morrow (Lauren Morrow EP)
100. Nicole Mitchell Maroon Cloud (FPE)
101. Nightmares on Wax Shape the Future (Warp Europe)
102. Trick Daddy and the Dunk Riders Dunk Ride or Duck Down! (X-Ray)
103. We Out Here (Brownswood Recordings UK)
104. Pistol Annies Interstate Gospel (RCA Nashville)
105. Pusha T Daytona (G.O.O.D. Music EP)
106. Elza Soares Deus É Muhler (Deck/Polysom Brazil)
107. Haley Georgia First Rodeo (Haley Georgia EP)
108. Kamasi Washington Heaven & Earth (Young Turks)
109. Uniform The Long Walk (Sacred Bones)
110. DJ Lilocox Paz & Amor (Principé Portugal EP)
111. Jlin Autobiography: Music from Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography (Planet Mu Europe)
112. Cupcakke Ephorize (Cupcakke)
113. Baba Commandant & the Mandigno Band Sira Ba Kele (Sublime Frequencies)
114. Salad Boys This is Glue (Trouble In Mind)
115. Granville Automatic Radio Hymns (Granville Automatic)
116. Sacral Rage Beyond Celestial Echoes (Cruz Del Sur Italy)
117. Bhad Bhabie 15 (Atlantic)
118. High Priestess High Priestess (Ripple)
119. Bali Baby Baylor Swift (Twin EP)
120. Kali Uchis Isolation (Virgin)
121. Dream Wife Dream Wife (Lucky Number)
122. Wytch Hazel II: Sojourn (Bad Omen UK)
123. Rich Krueger Life Ain’t That Long (Rockink)
124. Cardi B Invasion of Privacy (Atlantic/KSR)
125. Patricia Vonne Top of the Mountain (Bandolera)
126. Alela Diane Cusp (All Points)
127. Anna Vaus The California Kid (Espola Road EP)
128. Ashley Monroe Sparrow (Warner Bros.)
129. Lucifer Lucifer II (Century Media)
130. Kacey Musgraves Golden Hour (MCA Nashville)
131. Toni Braxton Sex & Cigarettes (Def Jam)
132. Wayne Shorter Emanon (Blue Note)
133. Chromeo Head Over Heels (Big Beat/Atlantic)
134. Black Milk Fever (Mass Appeal)
135. Bad Sports Constant Stimulation (Dirt Nap)
136. Brothers Osborne Port Saint Joe (EMI Nashville)
137. Deena Abdelwahed Khonnar (Infiné France)
138. Satan Cruel Magic (Metal Blade)
139. Saweetie High Maintenance (Icy/Artistry Worldwide/Warner Bros. EP)
140. Runaway June Rumaway June (Wheelhouse EP)
141. Charlie Puth Voicenotes (Atlantic)
142. Oliver The Crow Oliver The Crow (OTC)
143. Marlowe Marlowe (Mello Music Group)
144. Little Mix LM5 (Syco/Columbia)
145. Open Mike Eagle What Happens When I Try to Relax (Auto Reverse EP)
146. Janelle Monáe Dirty Computer (Atlantic)
147. Spiders Killer Machine (Universal Music)
148. Christine and the Queens Chris (Because Music)
149. Daphne & Celeste Save the World (Balatonic)
150. Yosarrians Ambition Will Eat Itself (Repton UK EP)