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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

As our list attests, if album-as-format is dead, it’s enjoying one hell of an afterlife.

The 25 Best Albums of 2013
Photo: Universal

Let’s put “the good old days” of recording history in perspective. As a decent rock ‘n’ roller in 1963, you’d be lucky to sell enough 45s to even dream of getting the opportunity to lay down an LP. A decade later, you’d be warned that concept albums were “just a fad.” So take your industry doomsaying and put it up against our selection of the 25 best albums of the year, most of them premised on the old-fashioned notion that listeners will sit through the whole thing. Case in point: In 2013, the reigning king of hip-hop worked with Rick Rubin, Daft Punk, and the ghost of Nina Simone on a dense, droning album that advertises its conceptual daring at every turn, is very hard to sit through, and landed near the top of our list.

So, while television eminences sputtered on about the year’s messier pop-culture moments (Lily Allen’s war on hip-hop! Miley Cyrus at the VMAs! “Accidental Racist”!), musicians across musical idioms played the album format in interesting ways, whether as a novel (Laura Marling’s Once I Was an Eagle), a sonic self-redefinition (Drake’s Nothing Was the Same), a nonfiction song cycle about romantic tension with your bandmate (the Civil Wars’ self-titled LP), or even a stoned-out entry in an ongoing serialized saga (Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady).

If the traditional long-player format remains sustainable from an artistic standpoint, we can take further encouragement from sales. Consider a week in late June, when the year’s most pretentious hip-hop album (Yeezus) appeared the same day as the year’s least pretentious hip-hop album (Born Sinner). Both went gold almost immediately. The market has spoken: If album-as-format is dead, it’s enjoying one hell of an afterlife. Ted Scheinman

Editor’s Note: Check out our list of The 25 Best Singles of 2013.


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

25. Little Boots, Nocturnes

Like on her debut (and countless dance-pop treasures before it), the hooks and rhythms on Victoria Hesketh’s sophomore effort, Nocturnes, burrow farther and farther into your brain with each spin. If the strength of 2009’s Hands was its variety, though, Nocturnes’s is its consistency, with a more focused attention on electronic dance music. The ’80s is a decided touchstone, from the sliced-and-diced vocals of “Every Night I Say a Prayer” to the electro-Kate-Bush hook of “All for You,” and while the album stumbles slightly when it directly apes past dance subgenres rather than slyly nodding to them within the context of a more contemporary EDM sound, its highlights, like opening track “Motorway,” which pairs the time-honored theme of escape from a small town with cool synth pads and a subtly propulsive undercurrent, and the rollicking single “Broken Record,” make it easy to keep Nocturnes stuck on repeat. Sal Cinquemani

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

24. My Bloody Valentine, m b v

How do you follow a miracle? If you’re My Bloody Valentine, you don’t bother, especially when your own miracle, 1991’s Loveless, becomes such a colossal, money-sucking commercial failure that it makes you question whether these ignorant philistines were worth all the trouble in the first place. Or at least that’s what you did until earlier this year, when—without fanfare—you decide the world might finally be ready for another one. While m b v may not have the genre-shaking influence of its predecessor, it’s no less perfect for failing to foment the same kind of slow-burning revolution. It astonishes not by establishing a new musical lexicon (as its predecessor did), but by revealing just how much more can still be done with it. Blue Sullivan


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

23. The Civil Wars, The Civil Wars

The unique vocal and theatrical symbiosis that distinguished the Civil Wars from their contemporary-folk peers always seemed a bit too good to be true, and the duo’s very public breakup during an abbreviated European tour suggested that such intimate musical collaborations can only last so long. The Civil Wars, recorded as the duo’s relationship disintegrated, reflects the fragile tensions that inevitably develop in long-term partnerships and the desperate, confused attempts made to salvage them. Those tensions render the album a more muscular production than 2011’s Barton Hollow: the Rick Rubin-produced “I Had Me a Girl” features a razor-sharp electric guitar that slices through the Civil Wars’ signature honeyed harmonies, and “The One That Got Away” finds Joy Williams and John Paul White pushing one another toward new extremes of vocal range. Light spots like the uptempo “From This Valley” leaven the album’s lyrical weight and allow one to hope that this tightly wrought collaboration won’t be the group’s last. Annie Galvin


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

22. Chvrches, The Bones of What You Believe

The V in their name, inserted to make it easier to find them on the Internet, may be a tell that Chvrches hail from the 21st century, but everything else about the icy fortress of sound that the Scottish trio constructs on The Bones of What You Believe is mainlined straight from the ’80s. The band appropriates both the misty synthesizers of Cocteau Twins and the laser-sharp pop sensibilities of New Order, welding them together to create stomping anthems. “Lies” channels the glaring swagger of Depeche Mode, while “Gun,” underpinned by the crystalline fragility of Lauren Mayberry’s voice, glistens with a vast yearning reminiscent of Kate Bush. Like breath hitting crisp air, Chvrches are a fascinating meeting of human warmth and brutal cold. Mark Collett


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

21. Lightning Dust, Fantasy

In my review of Web Therapy, I mentioned that the worst piece of advice I ever received was from a well-intentioned but misguided friend who told me that “feelings are just chemicals.” Lightning Dust’s Amber Webber must have received similar false comfort from a friend, but actually bought it hook, line, and sinker: “Whisper to me that you’ve had enough/Apologize that you’re not in love/If it’s just the chemicals in our brains/Stop, stay,” she pleads on “Diamond,” the opening track of the Canadian duo’s third album. Webber makes similar such laments about fading love throughout the album in a quivering, reverb-cloaked vibrato backed by partner Joshua Wells’s sparse, minimalist arrangements of ominous, creeping synths, Wurlitzer, and occasional acoustic guitar. The hooks are memorable and often mesmerizing, like on the enchanting penultimate ballad “Agatha.” If the songs on the first half of Fantasy trigger the chemicals in your brain, the captivating tracks that make up the second half implore you to submit to them completely. Cinquemani

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

20. Laura Marling, Once I Was an Eagle

Once I Was an Eagle marks a turning point in 23-year-old wunderkind Laura Marling’s career, as she’s departed from albums that boast a few standout singles to a format that possesses the structural integrity of a novel or, say, the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Opening with a six-song suite that probes the contours of a failed relationship, the album nestles variations like the stripped-bare murder ballad “Undine” among numbers like “Love Be Brave” that revisit the themes and echo the unifying guitar figure of the initial suite. On closer “Saved These Words,” Marling sings, “Thank you naïvety for failing me again.” That failure has produced an artifact testifying to the achievement of a maturing virtuoso of minimalist folk, just beginning to come into her powers. Galvin


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

19. Fuck Buttons, Slow Focus

This year found Fuck Buttons holding the birds-eye seat atop the dying embers of two genres. They ascended just as indie transformed from an artistic movement to a wise career decision. And when the alt-rock squares were dismissive of electronic music as somehow less “real,” Fuck Buttons were forging furious and fearless audio murals on their laptops. With parts cut from post-rock, smoky electronica, indie rock, shoegaze, downbeat, and noise, Slow Focus was “post-genre” in the boldest and most thrilling sense. As their lazy contemporaries were throwing Pro Tools down the kitchen sink, Fuck Buttons yielded their influences like surgical instruments, transforming an autopsy into an act of pure creation. Sullivan


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

18. Charli XCX, True Romance

Charli XCX’s biggest hit, Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” co-written by and featuring the U.K. singer, wasn’t included on her debut, True Romance. Which might explain in part why the album, despite being backed by a major label, barely made a blip on the mainstream radar. But the album is chock-full of potential pop smashes superior to almost everything released by Katy, Miley, and Gaga this year, the crunchy, lo-fi electro-pop of early singles “Stay Away” and “Nuclear Seasons” complemented by the more radio-ready, just-left-of-center bubblegum pop of tracks like “Take My Hand” and the Gold Panda-sampling “You (Ha Ha Ha).” The result is a postmodern pastiche of ’80s-inspired synth melodies and standard Top 40 lyrical tropes juxtaposed with pitch-shifted vocals and growling, subterranean basslines from the end of the world. Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

17. Death Grips, Government Plates

One of the amusing paradoxes of our current musical landscape is that, while the modern world continues to be miserly with good news, most of the artists who blight our radio stations and streaming services remain almost maniacally committed to turning that frown upside down. Not Death Grips. Four releases in, the Sacramento band continues to startle and provoke by refusing to compromise or resort to silly shock tactics. Actually, the latter isn’t always strictly true (as the NSFW cover art to their last album attested), but Death Grips’ latest, Government Plates, proves they don’t need arch juvenilia to shake you when a schizophrenic collage of filthy beats, shattered synths, and found-sound nightmare fuel will do just fine. Add the howling antiflow of indie’s most mesmerizing frontman, and you have the most galvanizing end-times advocacy since Fear of a Black Planet. Sullivan

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

16. Arctic Monkeys, AM

The Arctic Monkeys moved to sunny California, borrowed some heavy beats from West Coast G-funk, and laid down one of best British rock albums of the decade. It’s moody and heavily textured, full of slinky riffs, shimmering falsetto choruses, and the belated libido of the last few minutes of a boozy party. “R U Mine?” might be the friend-zone anthem of the year, but the glam-rock “Arabella” and eery “Knee Socks” are equally worthy of being played on repeat. Alex Turner’s absurd precocity has matured into a canny sneer that lets him rip off the Fab Four on “No. 1 Party Anthem” and totally get away with it. Caleb Caldwell


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

15. Local Natives, Hummingbird

With their sophomore effort, Local Natives forgo the uptempo, radio-friendly jams of their 2010 debut in favor of a more reserved, introspective style. Remarkably reflective in its lyricism and subtle aural gestures, Hummingbird tells a handful of stories about confronting life’s myriad inevitable obstacles (loneliness, self-doubt, the death of loved ones). The album fluidly cycles through a range of powerful emotions without ever feeling overwhelming, from the gentle, harmonious sway of early highlight “Ceilings” to the fastidiously affecting ballad “Colombia.” On the latter song, vocalist Kelcey Ayer cautiously croons, “Every night I ask myself, am I giving enough?” The answer is a resounding yes. Mike LeChevallier


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

14. J. Cole, Born Sinner

The year’s least flashy rap album may also be its best. Born Sinner comes on slow, but it’s as close to greatness as J. Cole himself—on the verge, but still playing it cool, even as he dissects chronic misogyny and rappers who enslave themselves to chains of white gold. At the mic, he’s a better raconteur than ever, complicating his stories with bits of misdirection that hit as hard as any of the disc’s bass drops. On “Chaining Day” and elsewhere, he raps about slavery as sharply as anyone, but the real villain of Born Sinner is the dog within, whether you’re Superman cheating on Lois Lane or (more often) MLK cheating on Coretta. Then there are the college-educated, sneaky-freaky ladies, and a local minister who pays a congregant for brains. The second half of the album is in part a tribute to Cole’s two main models, Nas and 2Pac, down to conspicuous mid-’90s-sounding hooks from TLC and James Fauntleroy. Craft and community storytelling aside, the only other album of 2013 that boasts as many internal rhymes-per-minute is Eminem’s. Scheinman


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

13. Kurt Vile, Wakin on a Pretty Daze

On 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, Kurt Vile displayed a proficiency for crafting dreamy, lo-fi pop soundscapes that clocked in at, on average, not much longer than five minutes. Never one to repeat himself, though, he changed things up considerably on the superior Wakin on a Pretty Daze, an ambling assemblage of songs filled with hazy, hypnagogic melodies (the opening and closing tracks hover around the 10-minute mark). With more articulate production courtesy of John Agnello, as well as an even more laidback, stream-of-consciousness lyrical flow, the album boasts a treasure trove of assured, free-spirited tunes that stands, at least so far, as Vile’s artistic zenith. LeChevallier

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

12. Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You

Neko Case’s sixth album finds the alt-folk siren at her most wistful, and though the humorous candor from Middle Cyclone persists, there’s a strong sense that The Worse Things Get is the flashpoint of her longstanding existential crisis. Case in point, “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” where all non-vocal accompaniments are stripped away and, likewise, humanity’s hateful narcissism is distilled into one heartbreaking bus-stop anecdote. Certainly, The Worse Things Get is another blistering chapter in the singer’s musical narrative, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a masterful display of her ability to internalize and poeticize the pain, self-deprecation, and tiny tragedies she observes in everyday life. Kevin Liedel


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

11. Janelle Monáe, The Electric Lady

On The Electric Lady, Janelle Monáe resumes her celebration of cyborgs, space travel, and the cathartic powers of groove-worthy dance beats, curating what initially feels like a grab-bag full of genre samples into a sustained paean to the flexibility of R&B as an art form. Comprising suites IV and V of Monáe’s Metropolis saga and featuring copious references to her android alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, The Electric Lady risks overdoing it with the conceptual posturing; however, highlights like the effervescent “Dance Apocalyptic” and the slow-burning, synth-punctuated “PrimeTime” require no prior knowledge of Monáe’s sci-fi cosmology to work their magic. On the title track, Monáe casually drops the couplet, “Come on, get in/My spaceship leaves at 10,” suggesting that she’s got better places to be, but that everyone’s welcome along for the ride. Galvin


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

10. Pet Shop Boys, Electric

While one set of European electronica heroes spent the year getting rich off barely tweaked disco nostalgia and ironic robot outfits, Pet Shop Boys were taking an easy and well-earned career victory lap with one of the best dance albums of 2013. The key words in that description are the two that distinguish Electric from the chart-crushing opus by those adorable French retro-futurists: “dance” and “2013.” This isn’t a nostalgia cruise through the sounds of its creators’ lost youth, but rather a daringly foolhardy effort to communicate with the kids in their own blissed-out lexicon. For this task, Electric brought the man most perfectly suited to marrying ’80s electro-pop classicism with genre-straddling EDM modernism, Stuart Price. More importantly, the duo brought a collection of wry and wonderful earworms that are every bit as huge as Price’s canyon-sized sound. A reminder that classic songs don’t have to arrive already frozen in amber. Sullivan


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

9. Drake, Nothing Was the Same

Nothing Was the Same is less a leap forward than a luxuriant, bittersweet reflection on the view from the top. Drake, the Canadian master of confession-rap, cuts the usual sharp lines, and his lamentations have never felt so knowing, nor more tuneful; Kendrick and Cole can sing, but Drake (as Slant’s own Calum Marsh observed in Esquire) has gone post-808s on us, with tasteful but unapologetic recourse to Auto-Tune and a sense of artistic confidence to counter his romantic vulnerabilities. Corners of the album sound like Kid Cudi on a very, very good day, and the stoned but slick cohesion in the album’s construction and production gives the lie to Drake’s signature self-pity. He doesn’t need a handful of guest MCs, and he doesn’t want our sympathy either—just the chance to give us mellow ear-gasms, which he does on nearly every track. Scheinman

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

8. The National, Trouble Will Find Me

Trouble Will Find Me is a black-tie affair, formal and reserved, but it gracefully extends the intricate, sometimes hermetic formula of the National’s last two albums into a general invitation. The album’s haze of harmonies and damp, layered production techniques demand repeat listens, but it’s the arrangements that reward that patience. The orchestration is complex, but never overtly avant-garde. The experimental flavors are subtle: mixolydian scales, jazz chords, polyrhythmic drumming, quiet oboe, and french horn. The tension is no longer raw, but it’s still there, simmering below the surface of tracks like “Sea of Love.” And don’t let Matt Berninger’s shadowy baritone and opaque lyrics fool you: When he mumbles, “I’m having trouble inside my skin,” on “Slipped,” that’s exactly how he likes it. Caldwell


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

7. The Knife, Shaking the Habitual

Dense, visual, and unapologetically aimless, its social conscious half-concealed below a mixed artifice of ubiquitous and macabre imagery, Shaking the Habitual is probably the album David Lynch had in mind when he made Crazy Clown Time. A combination like that could easily be clunky in the hands of a lesser band, but the Knife has always possessed an innate ability to make their creepy inclinations sound both pretty and interesting. Thus, when broken, nightmarish chimes and Karin Dreijer Andersson’s androgynous drone come slinking out of the fog four minutes into “A Cherry on Top,” it’s like a sonic Grand Guignol, as captivating as it is frightening. Liedel


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

6. Typhoon, White Lighter

The existential urgency underpinning Typhoon’s debut, White Lighter, can be traced back to a single moment in frontman Kyle Morton’s childhood: when “a different bug must have bit my leg,” as he sings on “The Lake,” transmitting a bad case of Lyme disease, crippling his immune system and filling him with the sense that his life could end abruptly at any instant. “Every star is a possible death,” he sings on an album whose focus widens from the intensely personal to the cosmic on any given song. Recorded by upward of a dozen musicians, each track is a mini-symphony, modulating layers of strings, horns, percussion, and voice, and executing shifts in tempo and tone with surprising grace. For an album so deeply concerned with mortality, Morton’s ability to manage thematic gravity without sounding maudlin feels revelatory.Galvin


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

5. Disclosure, Settle

From the disco fantasy of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories to the roller-rink soundtrack that was Classixx’s Hanging Gardens, 2013 was a good year for the dance album. No entry, however, was as unadulterated or unapologetic as Disclosure’s Settle. Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence feel no compulsion to water down their house tastes, leading to funky, muscular cuts like “Latch,” where percussion opens and snaps shut like a syncopated bear trap, and “January,” a liquefied, Italo house-inspired jam whose rapid-repeat bassline is pure sex. The album’s title, then, is not so much a recommendation for calm, but the Lawrence siblings assuring listeners, “Relax, we got this.” Liedel

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The 25 Best Albums of 2013

4. Kanye West, Yeezus

In a year where Jay-Z definitively crossed over from esteemed elder statesman to distracted, detached relic, Kanye West fully assumed his mantle as rap’s biggest star, issuing both ever-more boneheaded public statements and an album that communicated his sputtering feelings with far more directness. As raw and straightforward as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was sparkling and expansive, Yeezus is another self-deifying shrine to an artist so much more sensitive than his stature should allow, turning everything he releases into a messy blend of the personal and the political. Never has this been clearer than on stellar songs like “New Slaves” and “Blood on the Leaves,” which conflate personal and historical traumas into one chaotic mixture, communicating both the insidious, lingering effects of a racist culture and the unmistakable imprint of an artist who refuses to be quieted by his own insecurities. Jesse Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

3. Lorde, Pure Heroine

Few things are more dire than the lyrical scribbling of 16-year-olds, as my own buried marble notebooks can surely attest. But New Zealand teen Lorde manages to be both precocious and perceptively relevant on her debut album, a portrait of desiccated youth on par with Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring in terms of on-the-ground significance. Full of strikingly concise, surprisingly mature pop songs, Pure Heroine conveys the exhaustion of growing up in a hall of mirrors, the usual difficulties of identity formation further confused by the hollow expectations of a fame-obsessed, copycat culture. There’s nothing inherently groundbreaking here, the sort of rebellion that’s been into practice put by teen-pop artists for decades, but rarely have those proclamations been issued with such impressive articulation and grace. Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

2. Arcade Fire, Reflektor

Swathed in the various sounds of punk, disco, art-rock, and pop, Reflektor wears its experimentation remarkably lightly for such an ambitious album, certainly better than frontman Win Butler wears his ironic disco suit. Drawing its rhythmic impetus as much from vocalist Régine Chassagne’s Haitian heritage as from analog-era dance floors, there’s a consistent theme of the redemptive possibilities of music and dance: “If there’s no music in heaven, then what’s it for?” Butler sings, drawing on the Greek myth of Orpheus, a musician who attempted to rescue his wife from death using the power of his songs alone. The billowing electronic landscape, surreal as any Hades, and egregious running time might cause some fans to agree that “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” but Reflektor is a defiant, successful celebration of the album as a conceptual statement in an era of easily consumed singles and reductive lyrics. Caldwell


The 25 Best Albums of 2013

1. Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

In the halcyon days of the British Empire, there was a tradition among explorers of strange and uncharted lands to exhibit upon their return a so-called “cabinet of curiosities,” a hodgepodge of keepsakes, decontextualized and random but fascinatingly foreign. Vampire Weekend’s first two albums similarly possessed a magpie’s eye for the unusual, but with little that was revelatory below the surface charm of the unfamiliar. Modern Vampires of the City, by contrast, finds the band looking closer to home, as frontman Ezra Koenig traces a lyrical road trip across the U.S., from Providence to Phoenix. Scoring sardonic deconstructions of the rock-n’-roll myth with Dick Dale-style guitars (“Diane Young”), novelistic half-sketches of peripatetic romance with loping Gershwin-esque strings, (“Hannah Hunt”), and even a confrontation with the man upstairs with church organs and semi-ironic gospel choirs (“Ya Hey”), Vampire Weekend seems to have finally exhausted their wanderlust, and come home wiser, more soulful and more vital than ever. Collett

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