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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

The best albums of 2017 were made by artists ready to lay the groundwork for a counter-cultural movement.

The 25 Best Albums of 2017
Photo: Nedda Afsari

No less than eight of our top 10 albums of 2017 were made by black artists or women. In a year that saw the rise of the alt-right and the floodgates opening in Hollywood for sexual harassment and assault claims, that matters. Because while it’s been hard to define 2017 as anything but the first year of the Trump presidency, the last 12 months have brought a surge of progressivism and social awareness—and the volatile political climate has made those expressions of awareness more raw and visceral.

Björk turned her pastoral-sounding Utopia into a subtweet against abusive men, Vince Staples strived to push his boom-bap rap further into territories of experimental electronica, and Kendrick Lamar backed off the heady, groove-heavy sound of his Tipping Point opus To Pimp a Butterfly for the balled-fist immediacy, and musical accessibility, of Damn. Kendrick also collaborated with U2, for his album and for theirs, a gesture that represented the kind of genre border crossing that was commonplace in a year backdropped by Trump’s repeated efforts to wall us off from the rest of the world.

These shifting genre and cultural dynamics didn’t play to everyone’s strengths: Country superstar Brad Paisley, whose 2009 album American Saturday Night improbably captured the optimism of the early Obama era better than any other recording of the time, fumbled his latest opportunity to address the present political moment, instead carping about “selfies” and the shame of regretting sex the morning after on Love and War. Other artists, like the embattled Kanye West, seemed to recognize that this wasn’t their moment, and sat out the year almost entirely.

The best albums of 2017, meanwhile, were made by artists ready to lay the groundwork for a counter-cultural movement, a push back against our political quagmire, forged in collaboration, experimentation, internationalism, and polemical intent. And it obviously helped when the people making that art were in the position to feel the affects of the oppression that the Trump years threaten. We all benefit by listening to them. Sam C. Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

25. Nelly Furtado, The Ride

Nelly Furtado’s refusal to play to type makes her something of a pop maverick—impossible to pin down but also improbably distinct. The singer-songwriter has always been a bit of a shape-shifter, adapting to her sonic surroundings, whether they be the chirp-hop sound collages of early collaborators Gerald Eaton and Brian West, the Bhangra beats of Timbaland, or the smooth indie-R&B stylings of Blood Orange. Furtado’s sixth album, The Ride, opens with a cold splash of water to the face, the aptly titled “Cold Hard Truth” announcing a new musical approach, courtesy of St. Vincent producer John Congleton, whose plodding beats, guttural guitar tones, and funky low-end provide a refreshing counterpoint to Furtado’s signature adenoidal sound and sonorous pop hooks. “Don’t say you know me, just cue the band,” Furtado quips on “Tap Dancing,” and fittingly, The Ride feels a lot like the debut of a new rising star. Sal Cinquemani

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

24. Harriet Brown, Contact

Few artists have been as successful at channeling Prince’s ineffable weirdness as Harriet Brown. From the pitch-shifted rap on the “Intro” to the slippery synth solo at the end of “Cryptid,” Brown’s debut album, Contact, is both erotic and deeply eccentric—a unique stylistic pairing that’s been in tragically short supply since Prince’s death last April. But Brown is no mere impersonator. He rearranges his patchwork of ’80s and ’90s R&B influences to stitch together a sound of his own, as esoteric as it is soulful. “Sometimes I feel like I’m an alien on your planet,” Brown sings on “ESP,” his falsetto bending almost comically around the last word so that he sounds—and, on the album cover, looks—like he’s telling the truth. Fortunately for him, this kind of starman funk is exactly what Earth has been missing. Zachary Hoskins


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

23. Higher Brothers, Black Cab

There’s evidence to suggest that the growing popularity of Sean Miyashiro’s 88rising media company is slowly supplanting the K-Pop wave of the early 2010s as the face of Asian popular music in the West. The company’s YouTube channel has become a promotional machine for Japanese-Australian R&B singer Joji and Korean-American house DJ Yaeji. But the main focus of 88rising has been the legitimization of Asian hip-hop, in particular Indonesian trap nerd Brian Imanuel (a.k.a. Rich Chigga) and Chinese rap group Higher Brothers. Their debut, Black Cab, is loaded with universally accessible beats and flows, but the lyrics engage with specifics of Chinese culture. Opener “WeChat” is named after a social media alternative to Facebook and Twitter (both banned in China), while “Made in China” boastfully flips a derogatory phrase—and still pokes fun at unbound nationalism. But it’s the massive, squelching bass and charismatic hook of “Wudidong” (literally “bottomless hole”), a gleefully nihilistic ode to consumerism (“Nikes, Adidas are my offerings to the bottomless hole”), that aligns Higher Brothers with a certain strain of irresistible, maximalist rap. Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

22. Robyn Hitchcock, Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock turns out to be a perfect title for the singer-songwriter’s 21st solo album, not because it offers any kind of comprehensive summary of his oeuvre: His 40-year career has been far too weird and eclectic for a single 35-minute album to accomplish that. Rather, it’s because it’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which this was Hitchcock’s first solo album following the demise of his seminal post-punk band the Soft Boys in the early 1980s. Credit goes to producer Brendan Benson, himself a brilliant power-pop impresario, who cold-called Hitchcock and convinced him to return to the Soft Boys’s straight-ahead, guitar-heavy, psychedelia-tinged style. Hitchcock responded to the challenge by ditching acoustic guitars almost completely and writing some of his hookiest songs in years, from the Revolver-evoking “Autumn Sunglasses” to razor-sharp guitarical blasts like “Time Coast” and “Virginia Woolf.” Wily as ever, the Englishman nods to both his newly adopted home of Nashville and his mercurial persona with the infectious honky-tonk sendup “I Pray When I’m Drunk.” Jeremy Winograd


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

21. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator

Alynda Lee Segarra was already well-versed in the folk tradition defined by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. In preparation for The Navigator, her sixth album with Hurray for the Riff Raff, she decided to seek out a much broader understanding of what folk music means, in particular exploring her Puerto Rican heritage, traveling both to the economically troubled island and the Bronx, where she grew up. The result of her journey is a concept album about a crusader against cultural erasure and gentrification. Named Navita, her story is told as much through boldly eclectic musical touchstones as it is through narrative. The concept of Americana toughened by an urban sensibility defines ramshackle highlights like the infectiously zippy “Living in the City” and the woozy singalong “Life to Save.” They clearly draw from the tradition of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Lou Reed, in the process highlighting a connection between Navita and the downtrodden street-rat characters that often populate those artists’ songs. But Segarra’s uncompromising incorporation of Latin rhythms into songs like “Rican Beach” and “Finale” underscores her message—the rallying power of folk music transcends cultural barriers—even more profoundly. Winograd

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

20. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy

Josh Tillman would sound magnetic reading the dictionary. On Pure Comedy, his third album as his debonair, smart-alecky alter ego Father John Misty, Tillman gamely tests that adage—not just by rattling off big words, but by combining them into a series of long, weighty theses about what he sees as the corporate-dictated technological “horror show” that is modern society. That’s up to and including a “10-verse chorus-less diatribe,” as Tillman himself puts it on the 13-minute “Leaving LA.” The album’s mostly stripped-down piano and acoustic guitar-based arrangements never distract from his rants, but they sure make them pleasant to listen to, from a eulogy for a social media-wielding warrior, “Ballad of the Dying Man,” to a vision of a collapsed society all too easily reborn in its former image, “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution.” But even at the album’s poppiest (“Total Entertainment Forever”), Tillman is still singing about horrors: “Plugged into our hubs/Skin and bones.” This is “comedy” of the very blackest kind. Winograd


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

19. Valerie June, The Order of Time

Valerie June’s music doesn’t sound like that of her Americana contemporaries. She opens The Order of Time with little more than a whisper; later, she hums and scats to a droning banjo figure on “Man Done Wrong,” and disappears into spectral ambiance on “The Front Door.” Sonically, the album is out of step with the stark, affected twang that marks so many Nashville productions, and that sense of vibe makes her album richer, more distinct. She’s equally comfortable with formally precise blues and R&B numbers and with songs like “Astral Plane,” which shimmers and floats, airy and untethered. That tension, between songs with earthbound grit and songs of ethereal mystique, fits well with her lyrical concerns, which consider the concrete nature of love, loss, and hard work alongside a more mystic focus on inner light, connections to a spiritual realm that transcend place and time. Josh Hurst


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

18. Thundercat, Drunk

Before his third album, Drunk, multi-genre bass virtuoso Thundercat was best known for his work with Erykah Badu, Suicidal Tendencies, Flying Lotus, and Kendrick Lamar. Moving from the frenetic, Zappa-esque noodling of “Captain Stupido” to liquid funk (“Them Changes”), hazy R&B (“Walk on By”), and lo-fi synth-pop (“Jameel’s Space Ride”), Drunk pulls off its genre-straddling ambitions with a slacker’s nonchalance: Its 23 tracks are short but not fragmentary, seemingly effortless but never tossed off. And when yacht-rock icons Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald appear on the single “Show You the Way,” it’s both appreciably hipster-ironic and a bona fide match made in heaven. With Drunk, Thundercat unites the markers of late-1970s music geekery with the short attention span and absurdist humor of contemporary internet culture. And the result is one of the year’s most charmingly idiosyncratic musical statements. Hoskins


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

17. Taylor Swift, Reputation

In the run-up to the release of her sixth album, Reputation, Taylor Swift was excoriated by fans and foes alike for too often playing the victim. The album’s lyrics only serve to bolster that perception: Swift comes off like a frazzled stay-at-home mom scolding her disobedient children on “Look What You Made Me Do” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” But it’s her willingness to portray herself not as a victim, but the villain of her own story that makes Reputation such a fascinatingly thorny glimpse inside the mind of pop’s reigning princess. Swift has proven herself capable of laughing at herself, thereby defusing the criticisms often levied at her, but with Reputation she’s created a larger-than-life caricature of the petty, vindictive snake she’s been made out to be. By album’s end, Swift assesses her crumbling empire and tattered reputation, discovering redemption in love—only Reputation isn’t so much a rebirth as it is a retreat inward. It marks a shift from the retro-minded pop-rock of 2014’s 1989 toward a harder, more urban aesthetic, and Swift wears the stiff, clattering beats of songs like “…Ready for It?” like body armor. Cinquemani

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

16. Kamasi Washington, Harmony of Difference

Genuine uplift has been hard to come by in 2017, with the residual effect that media which manages to organically evoke such sentiment feels all the more essential. Created to soundtrack a piece in this year’s Whitney Biennial, Kamasi Washington’s soaring six-song suite certainly gains something from the visual pairing—soundtracking a crisply shot companion film that solidifies the album’s themes—but also functions just fine on its own. Mounting gradually across its 30-odd minutes, it delicately threads in one sonic motif after another, building steadily on this foundation while taking time to strike out onto various melodic side roads. This all comes together at the soaring apex of “Truth,” whose warm chorus of voices again communicates the power of diversity with wordless aplomb. A morsel of an album in comparison to Washington’s massive, sprawling The Epic, Harmony of Difference again confirms the tenor saxophonist as a traditionalist with a insistently modern approach, reworking tradition in grand, audacious fashion. Jesse Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

15. SZA, Ctrl

Few recent debuts have been as consistent as that of SZA, who accomplishes the even rarer feat of constructing an assured album around themes of anxiety and self-doubt. Sleek and sly in its production, cool and certain in its lyrical articulation of nagging insecurity, Ctrl manages to bundle dull, quotidian concerns into a shiny pop package. SZA refuses to replicate familiar subject matter or deal in well-worn clichés, instead offering confessional personal narratives that also sound universal. These compress sprawling, diaristic accounts of struggle and confusion into models of songwriting concision, collectively detailing a sustained battle against perception and expectations. Most of these come courtesy of the singer herself, as tracks like “Clocks” and “20 Something” describe in fine detail the self-applied apprehension of time gradually bearing down on you. In a year when so many pop albums are produced by committee, via boilerplate templates paying lip service to hot-button issues, the frank airing of emotional concerns carried off on Ctrl feels entirely refreshing. Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

14. Tyler, the Creator, Flower Boy

Tyler, the Creator’s obvious talent has always been undercut by an insistent immaturity, with callow, prankish antagonism proving a continued obstacle to his artistic development. With Flower Boy, rap’s resident enfant terrible has finally found a way to channel his hostility, on an album that still retains his inherent unruliness and intensity. Tyler taps into the internal reservoir of insecurity and doubt motivating his anger, expanding his range and revealing new creative layers in the process. Building on the glimmers of tuneful sweetness found on 2015’s Cherry Bomb, the album finds existing horrorcore inclinations mixing freely with polished electro jazz, hard-edged psychedelia, and hazy R&B. Surprisingly smooth but still never easily digestible, its diverse palette provides insight into the wide variety of sources influencing a mounting wave of paradigm-fracturing rappers, helping to spearhead the genre’s fervent push into new modes of expression. Cataldo


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

13. Joe Henry, Thrum

Joe Henry has won widespread acclaim—and a few Grammys—for his sensitivity as an album producer, working primarily in the American roots idiom. He saves his wildest adventures and his biggest subversions for his solo work. Thrum may be his best, a wild and wooly collection that crackles with energy, tracing out familiar forms without ever feeling beholden to genre or convention. Ballads like “The Glorious Dead” sound like lost pages from the Great American Songbook, recognizable in their structure but a bit tattered around the edges. “The World of This Room” can only be described for how it moves: Each verse fades to silence before roaring back to life, a little pricklier and more explosive each time. Album closer “Keep Us in Song” sounds like an old railroad tune, at least until it opens itself up with symphonic sweep. The song’s lyrics sound a note of desperation but cling to love amid the ruins—hard-won hope to finish off a sprawling, demanding, and invigorating album from a true original. Hurst

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

12. Fever Ray, Plunge

Karin Dreijer dealt in abstractions and icy, brooding atmospherics on her eponymous 2009 debut, but Plunge finds her aggressively blunt. The Swedish singer-songwriter incorporates oddly playful beats—recalling her work in the Knife’s Deep Cuts era—into an album unafraid to tackle political and sexual themes head-on. She demands free abortions and clean water on “This Country,” while chiding desire in the distraction-prone digital age by singing, “Tell me something sexy and I’ll log off my whatever.” Dreijer largely abandons the disquieting pitch-shifting that gave Fever Ray its ominous atmosphere, and she doesn’t mince words on this album, her prurient boldness made most explicit on “To the Moon and Back” as she yearningly wails, “I want to run my fingers up your pussy.” On “Falling,” she calls for both a “queer healing” and a primal lust that makes her feel “dirty again.” At a time when disturbing news is rapidly delivered on a never-ending cycle, Dreijer insists that relief from mental anguish is best channeled through physical touch. Josh Goller


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

11. Björk, Utopia

Following her emotionally devastating 2015 breakup album, Vulnicura, Björk returns to bliss with the majestic Utopia. Stretching past the 70-minute mark, this sprawling album offers a sensory experience adorned with flutes and harps and propelled into sublime rapture by the Icelandic singer-songwriter’s intimate, otherworldly vocal in songs that appear alien at first blush but upon repeated listens convey profound truths that seem plucked from a collective field of consciousness. “Blissing Me” finds Björk reveling in the thrill of infatuation, describing a new lover as someone whom she kisses with her “whole mouth,” even as she maintains enough self-awareness to wonder, “Did I just fall in love with love?” And yet, in her euphoria, she doesn’t completely abandon the darker side of romance. The painful breakup—from husband Matthew Barney—that informed Vulnicura, manifests again on “Sue Me,” where she insists that no amount of legal wrangling and melodramatic discord should come before their daughter, a sentiment echoed on “Tabula Rasa,” in which she demands children break free from the “fuckups of the fathers,” a prescient notion for an era that’s at last reckoning with toxic masculinity. Goller


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

10. Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 3

Run the Jewels routinely delivers nimble, rapid-fire bars with the kind of towering bombast that belies the trenchant social consciousness that’s often resided at the heart of their lyricism. At the inception of Killer Mike and El-P’s tag-team project, their braggadocio was turned up to almost cartoonish levels. But Run the Jewels 3 finds their outsized social commentary emblematic of the socio-political climate that would unfurl throughout 2017, where nuance and subtlety are routinely drowned out by unhinged, furious bluster. It’s fitting, then, that in this third effort they’ve unleashed their most pointed salvo to date. The political appropriation and distortion of religious iconography to justify overblown rhetoric—not to mention the willful ignorance pervading the highest ranks of power—is taken to its outlandish extreme in “Talk to Me,” as El-P spits, “You think baby Jesus killed Hitler so I’d just whisper?” Killer Mike takes on kneejerk outrage-culture in “A Report to the Shareholders/Kill Your Masters,” the second half of which is given added anarchic flair with a guest spot by Zack de la Rocha. All told, the unrelenting energy and dynamically confrontational wit of the album serves as a call to arms against the lunacy of modern-day America. Goller


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

9. The Magnetic Fields, 50 Song Memoir

The knock against Stephin Merritt and company’s latest long-sit is the lack of “company” in the equation: Where 1999’s 69 Love Songs varied its three-CD sprawl with rotating vocalists, Merritt’s sad-sack monotone is all we get for five discs on 50 Song Memoir. But, then, per the title, this is Stephin’s story: The songs each correspond to a year in the prickly 50-year-old songwriter’s life, and it wouldn’t really make sense for anyone else to tell it. Merritt the aesthete understands this, and so he indulges in songs that wouldn’t really make sense for anyone else to sing: It’s hard to imagine “A Cat Called Dionysus” being such a laugh riot without his deadpan pivot from “He hated me” to “I loved him,” and only Merritt could find musicality amid the drolly listed maladies on “Weird Diseases.” What 50 Song Memoir has in common with 69 Love Songs is that it’s one of the Magnetic Fields’s most consistent albums. Merritt’s lyrical concepts hold together as albums better than his aesthetic ones—and duration only helps the charm of his offbeat writing to sink in. Mac

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

8. LCD Soundsystem, American Dream

As a meditation on impermanence, American Dream focuses on the ends of things: friendships stretched thin to the point of dissolving, the creeping lines in one’s face signaling the departure of youth, passion devolving into the prosaic through sheer repetition. Witty and acerbic as ever, James Murphy remains keenly insistent that youth is wasted on the young, and that the futile clarity of hindsight is one of life’s cruelest jokes. Sleep and wakefulness again play major roles in the music, with Murphy lamenting how advancing age causes us to increasingly sleepwalk through our lives. American Dream plays out like an enhanced take on 2005’s “Losing My Edge”: indulging in the defeatism of growing too old to be “dangerous” anymore, while presenting an endearing cantankerousness at the thought of what passes for art these days. Murphy’s perpetual existential crisis is ultimately rendered most vividly on the title track, a chronicling of a disorienting morning after an unfulfilling one-night stand that reflects how the most promising dreams fade in the pale light of day. Goller


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

7. Lorde, Melodrama

Lorde’s 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, was a snapshot of disaffected youth punctuated by sardonic black humor beyond the New Zealand singer’s years. Functioning in a similar fashion as Adele’s numerically titled efforts, Melodrama captures Lorde on the cusp of adulthood, at a remove from the overnight stardom prompted by her first album. Fame has the potential to keep creative minds hermetically sealed away from their former lives, their worldview myopic and out of touch with the rest of society, but the opposite seems to be true here. Whether it’s due to the consequences of that notoriety or simply the result of the inevitable maturation afforded by the nearly four years in between albums, the inner life Lorde reveals on Melodrama is richer and, in many way, more accessible than the one presented on Pure Heroine. With its tales of drunken meet-cutes and messy mornings after, Melodrama is an unexpected house-party record—thematically, if not sonically. But whether it’s a party record disguised as a breakup album or a breakup album disguised as a party record, it’s cathartic, dramatic, and everything else you could want an album titled Melodrama to be. Cinquemani


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

6. Sheer Mag, Need to Feel Your Love

Sheer Mag’s Need to Feel Your Love is a stiff punch in the mouth that chews up anachronistic forms from the 1970s—disco, soft rock, arena rock—and spits them back out as something urgent and dangerous. Opener “Meet Me in the Street” is the most ferocious, teeth-rattling rock protest song in recent memory, powered by Kyle Seely’s furious fuzzed-out riffing and Tina Halladay’s piercing, throat-shredding vocals. Revolutionary fervor abounds: On one of the album’s most memorable cuts, Halladay warns “rich men in their white skin” to “expect the bayonet.” But even when she’s just singing about fucking (the deeply soulful title track and the the disco burner “Pure Desire”) or plugging in and rocking out (the righteously pissed “Turn It Up”), Sheer Mag attacks their material like a raging inferno. Winograd


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

5. JAY-Z, 4:44

The most socially conscious album of the year comes from rap’s premier elder statesman, a formerly welcome guest at the White House who anticipated 2017’s most important trend: how the court of public opinion would overturn the cultural regression of the 2016 election by finally waking up to the realties of bigotry, misogyny, intolerance, and hate. But that’s only half the story, because JAY-Z’s 4:44 is also a response to fellow White House exile Beyoncé, whose 2016 album, Lemonade, publicly pilloried Jay for infidelity. The twinned purposes of a political and a personal manifesto lead to an outpouring of knowledge, whether it be the suggestion that the best way for successful black people to escape the pervasiveness of institutionalized racism is by investing in the future of their culture, and their family, or the dedications to the women in Jay’s life, including his closeted mother, the wife he knows he wronged, and the daughter he’ll one day have to explain his actions to. The album ends with “Legacy,” delivering a universal message: The desire to see beyond the present troubles and plan for what comes next. Mac

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The 25 Best Albums of 2017

4. HAIM, Something to Tell You

It may seem like a low bar to clear, but when was the last time a pop-rock album managed to keep the tempos upbeat, the percussion driving, and the melodies memorable for over 30 minutes? Haim’s second album, Something to Tell You, manages the feat. Move its pristine opening sequence to the late 1970s or early 1980s and watch it compete convincingly with the Pretenders’s go-for-broke debut, or 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, or even Blondie’s Parallel Lines. But HAIM’s album came out in 2017, a time in which pop albums aren’t especially known for brevity, so the group tack on an extra few tracks, including a soberingly self-satisfied lead single, and a cavernous hymnal of a coda—both lovely but decidedly slower. Thankfully, the level of craft never wavers: With an amount of help that shouldn’t be too overstated from producer Ariel Rechtshaid, the Haim sisters have come up with a well-tooled sound, one that’s immaculate and immediate, chockfull of vintage keyboard patches, slap bass, and Linn drum—and that uses all of its affects in service of the songs. Mac


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

3. Vince Staples, Big Fish Theory

Addressing both the swagger and hints of guilt that arise from achieving fame and fortune, Vince Staples continues to deliver his incisive, nihilistic rhymes in a grim deadpan on Big Fish Theory. But whereas his debut, Summertime ’06, backed his caustic bars with sparse, moody production, here he stitches together an eclectic swath of electronic influences that range from techno to industrial. Whether it’s the shuffling Burial-esque dubstep of “Crabs in a Bucket,” the pulsing electro-funk of “745” or the glitches and stutters of “Homage,” Staples’s electronic experimentation—assisted by the likes of guest producers Justin Vernon and Flume—results in an album that’s perpetually changing shape, aggressive and urgent one moment, finessed and introspective the next. Though he’s an artist who rose to fame on vivid retrospection, Staples uses futuristic production to fully engage a present cultural landscape that, despite his individual success, he still finds dark and unnerving. Goller


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

2. St. Vincent, Masseduction

St. Vincent’s Masseduction has all the hallmarks of a big, glossy chart-topper, but all the polish in the world can’t mask the manic desperation that churns just beneath its gleaming surface. Make no mistake: Although this is the most polished and melodically direct album Annie Clark has made to date, it’s still plenty weird and frequently sad. It’s an album about desire run rampant, unquenchable and unfulfilled; “I can’t turn off what turns me on,” she sings on the title track, a prisoner to her own flesh. That tension provides the emotional grounding for songs that overflow with humor and imagination. “Pills” subverts the peppy language of TV advertisements to highlight chemical dependence; “Savior” embraces Prince-style kink, but a role-playing savior can’t bring real redemption. “Los Ageless,” the booming first single, is the key to the whole album, riding along on a steely beat, chronicling love that’s soured into obsession and control. Eventually, Clark breaks down screaming: “Oh, my Lord, we really did it now!” Her anguish is recognizable to anyone who’s ever felt like they’re drowning in their own need. Hurst


The 25 Best Albums of 2017

1. Kendrick Lamar, Damn

Kendrick Lamar’s fourth album is less grandiose and novelistic than 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly. But it’s still a Kendrick Lamar album, which means that it’s packed with lyrically dense meditations on death, God, fame, responsibility, and the African-American condition—and it’s also sequenced so you can listen to the tracks in reverse order. Even if Lamar remains the biggest overachiever in hip-hop, though, he’s also thrown a bone to those listeners who miss the more straightforward hooks from 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. “Humble” and “DNA” are among his most club-ready bangers to date, pairing Mike Will Made It trap beats with the tireless flow of “Kung-Fu Kenny”; the Rihanna collab “Loyalty” fits right in with R&B radio while also expanding the genre’s thematic and emotional palate. Beyond the singles, Lamar narrows his focus from To Pimp a Butterfly’s dizzying kaleidoscope of styles to craft songs that sneak up on the listener, their solid construction belying layers of intricacy. At once accessible and demanding, a work of literary complexity with a mixtape-gritty presentation, Damn is Lamar’s third consecutive masterpiece. Hoskins

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