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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

If ingenuity and craft are legitimate measures of success, then the rumors of the LP’s demise are indeed greatly exaggerated.

The 25 Best Albums of 2015
Photo: Mia Mala McDonald

Every year, around this time, the gifts get wrapped, the trees get trimmed, and we declare the album dead…or undead…or less dead than we thought. Speaking of broken records, Adele’s recent sales coup—selling more albums in one week than anyone in history, and then setting another record seven days later by becoming the first artist to sell over one million copies of the same album in two different weeks—quashed the notion once and for all that consumers aren’t interested in the long format. Turns out they just need more reason than ever to shell out the cash. And like we do every December, we’re giving you 25 of them. While many are as heart-wrenchingly personal as 25 (which, no, did not make our list), not all of them are of the bombastic, wind-blown, parody-friendly variety. Joanna Newsom upped the stakes by scaling back on the whimsical Divers, Kendrick Lamar made the socially conscious personal on the timely To Pimp a Butterfly, and ’90s mainstays Janet Jackson and Björk made unexpectedly understated comebacks this year with Unbreakable and Vulnicura, respectively. Adele’s latest juggernaut may have already outsold all four of those titles combined, but if ingenuity and craft are as legitimate measures of success as Nielsen SoundScan figures, then the rumors of the LP’s demise are indeed greatly exaggerated. Sal Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

25. Disclosure, Caracal

Or, the sophomore slump sidestepped successfully, though even the lads themselves feel the pressure (“Echoes”). Notably more downbeat, shady, and, yes, “Nocturnal” than their name-making Settle, Disclosure stays true to their roots, paying homage not to the EDM headliners who they’re increasingly compared to, but rather the paragons of deep-house realness they learned from. Be it in the gospel initiative of “Holding On,” the magisterial clattering of “Magnets,” or the juicy compression of “Willing & Able,” Caracal keeps a tight focus on the elementals: unpredictable basslines, committed vocalists, synthesizer lines that counterpoint the melody instead of beating listeners into submission. If “such repetition” is truly giving them “cause for concern,” they could’ve fooled us. Henderson


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

24. Jason Derulo, Everything Is 4

For his second great pop album in as many years, Jason Derulo keeps to his winning formula of precision-tooled three-minutes-and-change bangers and ballads, organically adapting it to up-to-the-minute contemporary trends, and even anticipating a few. Lead single “Want to Want Me” embraces the ballistics-grade synth attack of Taylor Swift’s 1989, while “Cheyenne” offers a better Off the Wall-era MJ update than the Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.” Derulo could’ve chosen to coast his way through a satisfying Talk Dirty follow-up on these more in-vogue nostalgist impulses, but instead he flavors Everything Is 4 with impeccably judged gambles like “Broke.” The song brings together Stevie Wonder’s chain-gang harmonica and Keith Urban’s down-home banjo to locate a shared blue-collar lineage in two distinct Southern milieus, and its bonkers production—a mashup of country, gospel, and dubstep—proves Derulo exceptionally gifted at allowing influences of pop music’s past shape its progression in the present. Sam Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

23. Laura Marling, Short Movie

It can be difficult, especially in a modern landscape where music seems to grow more loud, captivating and abundant every year, to adequately appreciate the humble pleasures of someone strumming tunefully on an acoustic guitar. With Short Movie, Laura Marling manages to cut through the noise, releasing an album that stands as one of the year’s most quietly captivating, as well as one of its most relevant statements on contemporary sexual politics. Packed with low-key feminist anthems and sly takedowns crafted with tuneful wisdom and biting wit, Marling’s latest, most ambitious album boldly confronts pressing issues of equality and freedom, without the singer-songwriter ever needing to raise her voice above a righteously assured medium tone. Jesse Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

22. Ashley Monroe, The Blade

Not since Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has a country artist released an album so totally sure of its own craft, so deserving of its place in a contemporary country field that will never be as accommodating toward it as it should be. Miranda Lambert’s watershed could be seen as more high-concept (both an affectionate ode to the pleasures of small-town Southern living and seething critique of its rampant sexism), but The Blade has its own discreet agendas as well. Monroe’s album is feminist not for turning a shotgun on male oppressors, but for owning their vices: The narrator of “If the Devil Don’t Want Me” moans that “there ain’t enough whiskey,” while the one of “I’m Good at Leavin’” brushes off “I do’s” for “hony-tonks and bars.” On an album full of cutting gestures, finding feminine agency in identification with folly might be its deepest. Mac

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

21. Selena Gomez, Revival

Selena Gomez’s pointedly titled Revival represents yet another transformation for the Disney princess turned teen-pop singer turned semi-serious indie actress. “I’m reborn in every moment, so who knows what I’ll become?” she says during the title track’s spoken-word introduction. “It’s my time to butterfly,” she goes on to sing, the word “butterfly” serving as both a state of being and an intransitive verb. While in the world of female pop singers the metaphor of emerging from a cocoon, and the concept of maturity in general, is usually analogous to the shedding of one’s clothes (as it most certainly is here, with Gomez posing nude on the album’s cover), there’s an emotional nakedness throughout the lyrics as well. Gomez’s approach to more serious subject matter, whether it’s a refreshingly sincere, unaffected take on a well-worn topic (“Sober”) or her unapologetically anti-feminist stance on lead single “Good for You,” embodies a newfound sophistication. Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

20. Joanna Newsom, Divers

A twee, elfin-voiced harpist working in a singular style of oddball minstrel pop, Joanna Newsom has long been marked out for her eccentric qualities, the whimsical effervescence of her music taking precedence over its adventurous, experimental qualities. Scaling back from the gargantuan triple album Have One on Me and the epically pitched scope of Ys, she continues to mine a complex, inimitable vein of erudite songcraft, undergirding her music’s warbling fantasy structures with real emotional heft. The results may sound fantastical and light as air, but the lyrics operate in a decidedly realistic manner, taking on heavy concepts of grief and devotion while maintaining a miraculous deftness of touch. Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

19. Björk, Vulnicura

Let’s be honest: Björk, more than any chanteuse, needs no tangible catalyst to trigger emotive seizures in song form. She’s felt violently happy about the backs of men’s freshly shaven necks, imagined herself a girl-shaped fountain of blood, promised a volcano eruption just below your aeroplane simply so you would know that some day you’ll blossom. Losing the man whose dick once inspired an entire album of the porniest Christmas music ever penned? Well, you may as well go ahead and strap some LED lederhosen onto the Tsar Bomba. If you ever wanted Björk to get close to a human, the raw hurt at the heart of Vulnicura gives you the motherlode. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, disoriented, ashamed. Not just her best album in ages, but her most shockingly unfiltered. Henderson


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

18. Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment, Surf

During a year that saw most major rap stars (Kendrick, Future, Drake) open up about their inner turmoil in dark, disorienting settings, Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment elected to do the opposite with 2015’s warmest, most ebullient mixtape. Trumpet lays beds of wah-wah guitars, jubilant horns, and vintage R&B harmonies for an assortment of friends, including Busta Rhymes, Quavo, and Big Sean, to spit shamelessly silly, upbeat rhymes about pushing through hardship (“Slip Slide”) and being true to yourself (“Wanna Be Cool”). Chance the Rapper regularly steals the show, his hyperactive sing-song flow equally at home slagging off the groupies of “Familiar” and giving props to his grandma on gospel-juke showstopper “Sunday Candy.” With the playful spirit of De La Soul and an array of summery influences ranging from the Beach Boys to Chet Baker, Surf is a jolt of serotonin, the perfect antidote to rap’s ongoing woe-is-me phase. James Rainis

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

17. Young Thug, Barter 6

It was a big year for the rap single, with a trio of hits by unlikely crossover star Fetty Wap opening the floodgates for more would-be street singles to enter the mainstream. Unfortunately, Young Thug’s screamingly strange rap-singing didn’t quite catch that commercial wave. But Thugga was way too busy following the singular path of his own creative muse to worry about crafting one breakout hit anyway, and we’re better for it: His mixtapes—Slime Season, its sequel, and Barter 6—represent a talent every bit as exciting as Lil Wayne’s was during his own mixtape-crushing heyday, and arguably even stranger. Barter 6, in particular, offers essentially the perfect canvas—minimalist productions, unobtrusive guests—to mount a formal showcase of irreverent wordplay, high/low vocal expulsions, and genuine technical ability. Confining all that to the space of one single almost seems too limiting for rap’s premiere experimentalist. Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

16. Purity Ring, Another Eternity

Indie acts working in the maximalist mode of the rap banger is nothing new, having been done to excess, and with a markedly low level of success, in the years since Sleigh Bells’ 2010 debut. Few artists, however, have managed to modulate bombastic musical spectacle so efficiently against lyrical introspection, the external noise making the sweet-voiced contemplation of emotional wreckage sound all the more bracing. The resulting arsenal of songs on Another Eternity feels doubly stormy, the music strident, ever-changing, and routinely tempestuous. Singer Megan James steadies the ship through the measured delivery of vocals that operate in a completely different register, their pained earnestness always seemingly in danger of being consumed by Corin Roddick’s heaving instrumentals. Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

15. Erykah Badu, But You Caint Use My Phone

No one finds more beauty in the words “work in progress” than Erykah Badu. She flourishes in the rough draft, generously and directly inviting those on her wavelength to share hers. A mixtape mostly in name only, as it’s as much guided by concept as almost any of her legitimate albums, But You Caint Use My Phone is the closest Badu has gotten to pure artistic improvisation since her underrated, amorphous jam session Worldwide Underground. If that flip-phone-era EP marked neo-soul at a crossroad, this hasty set (almost certainly conceived to buttress Badu’s visionary cover/reworking of Drake’s “Hotline Bling”) is the free-associative equivalent of a session hunched over your smartphone, rouletting your way from New Edition to Groove Theory, sending bees weaving aimlessly away from your honey. Henderson


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

14. Viet Cong, Viet Cong

From the crystalline, cavernous timbre of their sound, to the empty signifier of historical violence they chose to go by, Calgary’s Viet Cong has rendered comparisons to Joy Division unavoidable, and now, mere months after their self-titled debut, they’ve announced they’re retiring the moniker, just as Joy Division did after Ian Curtis’s suicide. It’s a sign of the times that Viet Cong did so in response to public censure of the sort unseen by their arguably more odiously named forebears. Also, while the production is pure Martin Hannett, the songwriting is equal parts Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, Thurston Moore via mid-’90s Sonic Youth, and Spencer Krug of any instantiation. It’s a sign of the band’s ingenuity that these disparate parts are streamlined with as much brittle, nihilistic swagger as on Viet Cong. One can only hope they have at least a Closer in them before their inevitable synth-pop rebirth. Benjamin Aspray

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

13. Janet Jackson, Unbreakable

The last legitimately worthwhile Janet Jackson album was going on 15 years ago, and the last great one closer to 20. Even “No Sleeep,” Unbreakable’s lithe lead single, didn’t signify any grand ambitions so much as an amiable meeting point between Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s Minneapolis sound and a contemporary R&B that happens to resemble it without much effort. But as is the case with many of Janet’s best albums, the whole is more compelling than the constituent parts—specifically, the democratic parceling out of its roiling 4/4 rave-ups and clubby midtempo dance tracks. The best section is a three-song ballad suite toward the end that harkens back to the continuous play of The Velvet Rope or even Rhythm Nation, but throughout, there’s nary a moment wasted on this graceful legacy album. Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

12. Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion

Carly Rae Jepsen’s sophomore effort, Emotion, has rightfully been compared to Taylor Swift’s 1989. Both draw on the music of the years their creators were born to craft near-perfect pop albums that somehow manage to sound contemporary. There are few key differences, however, that distinguish Emotion from Swift’s similarly retro blockbuster. For one, songs like the sax-fueled “Run Away with Me” and the sublime R&B slow jam “All That” (a collab with Dev Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid that sounds like it was recorded in 1985) revel in the glory of the ’80s in ways 1989 only hints at. Jepsen’s album is more evolution than reinvention: While Swift’s country roots were effectively scrubbed from her latest album, songs like “Boy Problems” and “I Really Like You” will sate Jepsen’s fans who have a hankering for a sugar rush a la “Call Me Maybe.” And with its breathy verses, deep-house groove, and pitched down vocals, the standout “Warm Blood” also affords Emotion something conspicuously absent from 1989: sex appeal. Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

11.Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique, Love Is Free

Unlike 2010’s Body Talk EPs, where the frustrating sense of an abbreviated creative statement could be forgiven by the assurance that Robyn’s vision would be fulfilled by further volumes, or last year’s Do It Again which served as a complement to Röyksopp’s The Inevitable End, Love Is Free feels comparatively tossed off, merely a bridge between Robyn 2.0 and an incarnation of the dance-pop icon we—and she—haven’t yet imagined. But if there’s a distinguishing feature that differentiates Love Is Free, a collaboration with keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late Swedish producer Christian Falk, from both Do It Again and Body Talk, it’s that the songs on the singer’s latest mini-album take a decidedly more purist approach to the retro stylings that were hinted at in her previous work. Whether it’s the acid-house “Love Is Free,” the Italo-disco “Got to Work It Out,” or a cover of Loose Joints’ “Tell You (Today),” the five tracks here allow Robyn to dip more directly into her influences than ever before. Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

10. Kamasi Washington, The Epic

As everyone who’s caught his sprawling live show already knows, jazz bandleader Kamasi Washington’s maximalism will not be contained, and that, ludicrous as it may sound, even a three-hour label debut broken down into three volumes titled “The Plan,” “The Glorious Tale,” and “The Historic Repetition” and given the title The Epic still ever so faintly suggests the tip of the iceberg that sunk the RMS Titanic. “Change of the Guard”? That might be an overstatement, but there’s something undeniably thrilling about an artist who doesn’t seem to dislike a single reference point. Washington, better known as Kendrick Lamar’s go-to arranger, pulls not a single punch as he draws from big band, fusion, swing, and bebop traditions, pays homage to Malcolm X, Ray Noble, and Claude Debussy, and overlays heavenly choral and string arrangements to send the entire enterprise into orbit. Henderson

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

9. James McMurtry, Complicated Game

James McMurtry has been one of rock’s master storytellers for a quarter of a century, and his talents as a lyricist and raconteur have never been in sharper focus than on his ninth album, Complicated Game. Made up of largely of acoustic-guitar-based, downbeat compositions (the album’s only attempts to rock are the spitfire single “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” and the light boogie “Forgotten Coast”), Complicated Game plays almost like a collection of short stories set to music. Tales of an illegal late-night fishing trip (“Carlisle’s Haul”), a family from Oklahoma reinventing itself in New York City (“Long Island Sound”), and a war veteran returning home only to find economic desperation (“South Dakota”) are all spun with impeccable narrative detail and subtle but powerful social commentary. As a result, the album represents a modern-day peak for rock and folk’s rich story-song tradition. Winograd


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

8. Titus Andronicus, The Most Lamentable Tragedy

If you thought sprawling, 90-minute rock operas about characters with split personalities went out of fashion shortly after the Who put out Quadrophenia in 1973, well, you’re probably right. But such an overambitious concept has been uncool for so long that it’s apparently become punk, and Patrick Stickles and Titus Andronicus, modern-day torch carriers of the DIY punk ethos, have proven, unequivocally, that the two ideas are far from incompatible with The Most Lamentable Tragedy. Built around a storyline that represents Stickles’s struggles with bipolar disorder, the band adapts, across 29 tracks, a broader view of rock ‘n’ roll than ever before, from teeth-gnashing hardcore (“I’m Going Insane”) to Springsteen-inspired bar-band rock (“I Lost My Mind,” “Fatal Flaw”) to dramatic piano balladry (“No Future Part V”). The Most Lamentable Tragedy is an unabashedly epic, classic rock album, in the radio-format sense. Thank God that Titus Andronicus didn’t shy away from the pomp and circumstance that such an undertaking entailed. Winograd


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

7. Shamir, Ratchet

“Ratchet” seems to have broadened beyond its origin as a slur for tacky young women, but even without a pejorative undertone, it refers to a basic excessiveness of self-presentation. To see it affixed to Shamir Bailey’s debut album, then, is ironic. As produced by Nick Sylvester, Shamir’s music is hook-laden dance-pop at its leanest and most demure. Suave synths, squawking sax, and cowbells combine beneath the Vegas native’s soft-but-not-fragile confidence as house music primed for house parties. Much has been made of Bailey’s distinctive countertenor, mainly because of the way it seems to express his gender-queer identity as an aesthetic virtue (despite his insistence to the press that it’s really no big deal). Ratchet’s abiding theme of ditching girls and guys alike to “go out and make a scene” seems to make it an existential virtue too: The gender binary is simply more wretched excess of which Bailey has blissfully unburdened himself. Aspray


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

6. Miguel, Wildheart

Hopscotching from cooing love ballads and tormented identity anthems to salacious hook-up fantasies and grimy hate-sex confrontations, Wildheart seems for most of its length like a breakup album, a wide-spanning post-mortem on one relationship’s intense highs and lows. This impression persists until the clouds part on the closing track, “Face the Sun,” a declaration of renewed dedication that recontexualizes everything that’s come before it, confirming this grab-bag collection of emotionally turbulent material as a single defined statement on the shaky equilibrium of sustained commitment. All this on an album that simultaneously taps into the wistful mythos of California’s equivalently dramatic hills and valleys, where starry-eyed dreams and old ghosts commingle to form the evocative backdrop to this tumultuous tale of modern romance. Cataldo

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

5. Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear

No one else makes music like Josh Tillman, a.k.a. Father John Misty, a pseudo-cult leader who combines a singer-songwriter’s earnest aesthetic with Prince’s flamboyance and a talent for satire as dry as dirt. I Love You, Honeybear—truly catchy, truly hilarious—finds Tillman playing equal part folk hero and sarcastic balladeer. As he spins acoustic tall tales decrying both the impossibility of love and the impossibility of living without it, it’s unclear whether even Tillman knows where his character ends and he begins, creating a living monument to the 21st-century musical celebrity, a bizarre amalgamation of talent, confession, and obfuscation. How fitting that he rose to national attention performing his ennui ballad “Bored in the U.S.A.” on Letterman, featuring a player piano, a laugh track, and jokes about subprime loans. Like that famous performance, I Love You, Honeybear is at once tragic, heartfelt, cathartic, and tremendously funny, proving the old adage: There’s little difference between laughter and tears. Jesse Nee-Vogelman


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

4. Vince Staples, Summertime ’06

Vince Staples incited the wrath of the hip-hop police with a tweet that dismissed the influence of the classic rap canon on his music (“In 1999 I was 7 years old and toy story 2 had just dropped you niggas really think I was worried about hip hop?”), but on his monstrous, unrelentingly dark double album, Summertime ’06, is worthy of that very canon. Sure, its production eschews samples and scratching for Latin rhythms (“Senorita”), gloomy house beats (“Surf”), and twisted Yeezus-indebted electronic pulses (“Hang N’ Bang”), but lyrically it’s a no-frills dive into the psyche of the young black male, conflicted about romance and rapping to white audiences who wouldn’t dare step foot in his neighborhood. Like the rap legends he says haven’t influenced him, Staples burns down the past and creates a sound that’s more dangerous than they ever imagined—a hip-hop story as old as the genre itself. Rainis


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

3. Grimes, Art Angels

Whereas Claire Boucher’s past work as Grimes felt intentionally obscured, perhaps as a way to hedge against her undeniable pop instincts, Art Angels is shamelessly open. Boucher seems to have indulged her every whim: the dive-bomb guitars on the nü-metal-gone-right of “SCREAM,” shoegazing phasers slicing up the bubblegum hooks of “Flesh Without Blood,” the wistful K-Pop of “Pin.” At every turn she’s challenging herself to invent a new sonic palette, a new mashup of genres. It never feels shoehorned or forced, since Boucher has internalized her influences, as eclectic as any Internet traveler’s music library on shuffle, and repurposed them into a work that feels welcoming in its experimentation rather than exclusionary. Art Angels is the sound of a truly self-styled pop star emerging from the bedroom, as delightfully weird as ever. Rainis


The 25 Best Albums of 2015

2. Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

Courtney Barnett doesn’t waste even a second getting down to business on Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. As soon as the needle drops on the album’s opening cut, “Elevator Operator,” she immediately embarks, in a laconic Aussie brogue, on a verbose slice-of-life tale replete with a great journalist’s eye for detail over an invigoratingly upbeat bed of wiry guitars and buzzing Wurlitzer. The result is the wittiest, rockingest, most life-affirming song that’s probably ever been written about a guy considering jumping off a roof. That infectious energy rarely lets up on the rest of the album, and Barnett never lets her wry, rambling wordplay, at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, get in the way of fashioning maddeningly catchy vocal hooks. “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you,” she claims over a ferocious guitar stomp on the single “Pedestrian at Best.” But we might have to anyway: Sometimes I Sit and Think is undoubtedly one of the most exciting debut rock albums to come along in ages. Winograd

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The 25 Best Albums of 2015

1. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly

Few albums in recent memory have seemed so intensely timely and vital as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. For America, 2015 has been a year of violence and awakening. On his third LP, Lamar addresses both equally and with a deftness that crystalizes his reputation not only as the greatest MC of his young generation, but also as a dynamic political voice and the country’s social conscience. Coupling his poetic lyricism and lofty intellectualism with a tremendous musical ambition that combines funk, jazz, and unprecedented vocal flexibility, it’s no surprise that To Pimp a Butterfly stands after just nine months as a modern classic. “Alright” is already a canonical anthem of hope for justice and faith in future redemption. “King Kunta” is the rare song as equally applicable to the club as to the scores of protests sweeping urban America. To Pimp a Butterfly is more than the best album of the year; it’s an awesome chapter in the making of a legend. Nee-Vogelman

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