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The 25 Best Albums of 2019

The more borders you cross, the more potential for discovery—and 2019, as eclectic a year as any, has demonstrated that.

Lana Del Rey
Photo: Slate PR

In times of divisiveness, it’s nice to see one cultural front actually willing to disregard its self-defined borders. With Rolling Stone recently handing their album of the decade honors to a non-rock artist, Kanye West, and Pitchfork dedicating a whole week to (mostly positive) reviews of Taylor Swift’s discography, change seems to be afoot. And as a publication that’s always prized a broader definition of popular music than most—and viewed the divide between “popular” and “indie” as overblown—Slant sees this as a welcome development.

So, in the spirit of “Old Town Road” and its year-defining horse/Porsche similitude—and of the growing embrace of a democratized music criticism—our best albums of the year hail from all over the map. Veterans Bruce Springsteen and Madonna tether our list to popular music’s past, even as both artists challenge their established sounds, and sitting comfortably alongside those legends are many of their younger counterparts (Alex Cameron, Carly Rae Jepsen), hewing perhaps even closer to forms their forebears helped popularize.

There are also artists on our list who crash together their disparate influences with the guide of a less discernible compass (FKA twigs, Holly Herndon, even Tyler, the Creator) in pursuit of arriving at a music that’s genuinely new. And, pointedly, a love and appreciation for those mavericks doesn’t have to preclude us from falling for the rock-guitar pyrotechnics of bands like Big Thief or the Regrettes, nor for the blockbusting hip-hop beats of Freddie Gibs and Madlib. The more borders you cross, the more potential for discovery and surprise—and 2019, as eclectic a year as any, has demonstrated that. Sam C. Mac


I Made a Place

25. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I Made a Place

The word “apocalyptic” is frequently applied to Will Oldham’s work, and with good reason: His worldview has been haunted by some unnameable or just unnamed cataclysm, from the recent past or lurking over the horizon. I Made a Place finds his fascination with catastrophe and collapse alive and well, though the subject is addressed here more elliptically than on past albums. Instead of a dystopian depiction of civilization’s collapse, the album is autumnal in its resignation to death as a necessary part of life. Oldham is, for all his oddities, a deeply human songwriter, and throughout I Made a Place his tone is alternately celebratory and comforting. Seth Wilson


Jaime

24. Brittany Howard, Jaime

Brittany Howard’s Jaime is a true solo album in every sense—not just musically intrepid and distinct from her work with Alabama Shakes and Thunderbitch, but also intensely personal in a way that the album would only make sense coming from her alone. Howard bravely confronts the memories at the very core of her being, from her family being victims of a racist hate crime (“Goat Head”) to her first crush on a girl (“Georgia”) to the liberation of religious epiphany (“He Loves Me”). Befitting of an album that deals with the multitudes of Howard’s racial, sexual, and religious identity, Jaime is musically fluid and eclectic as hell. Disparate styles crash into each other and become something new; funk melds into power pop on “Stay High” and then hip-hop on “Baby.” “Short and Sweet,” a sparse Billie Holliday-like ballad, is followed immediately by “13th Century Metal,” which pretty much sounds like its title. This is prime musical postmodernism. Jeremy Winograd

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Igor

23. Tyler, the Creator, Igor

Just when we thought we had Tyler, the Creator figured out as a shock-rapper, he zigs and zags in wilder and more fulfilling directions. The Odd Future leader followed up his soulful Flower Boy, which also happened to out him as queer, with an even deeper, more confident dive into his R&B influences and lovesick feelings. “Earfquake,” originally written for Justin Bieber and Rihanna, is a credible step into pure pop. The more windy “A Boy Is a Gun” and “Are We Still Friends?” reveal layers of the searching, complicated desire that once seemed impossible from hip-hop’s favorite cockroach eater. Paul Schrodt


Closer To Grey

22. Chromatics, Closer to Grey

The Chromatics have always looked to the cinematic past through an apocalyptic lens. De facto frontman Johnny Jewel is deeply influenced by classic horror film scores by composers such as John Carpenter, Tim Krog, Charles Bernstein, and Angelo Badalamenti. The group’s nostalgia trips continue on Closer to Grey, but the album also finds Jewel stretching beyond these familiar touchstones. “Move a Mountain” is run through with elements of elegiac folk, and “Touch Red” and “Through the Looking Glass” are two of the group’s most chilling and sparse tracks to date. Jewel and company are more unabashed in their approach this time out, even right down to the album’s indiscriminating track sequencing, a welcome change for the typically fastidious band. Closer to Grey is another haunting synth-pop house of mirrors that transcends the nostalgia of the Chromatics’s prior work. Kyle Lemmon


Proto

21. Holly Herndon, Proto

Rejecting the trend of using algorithms to recreate the work of past composers, electronic musician Holly Herndon, artist and technologist May Dryhurst, and developer Jules LaPlace instead set about to create a different kind of collaborator to make something new. Together they birthed Spawn, an “AI baby” who interprets sound to create her own music. Like any child, first she had to learn language, and throughout Proto Herndon documents that learning process: a choir sings a line for Spawn to sing back on “Evening Shades (Live Training), while on “Birth” Spawn’s attempts at mimicry recall the gurglings of a baby. For all the new technology used to create Proto, and despite its moments of ecstatic electronic maximalism, the album is in many ways Herndon’s most deeply human: Voices cry out in unison, ritualistic and primal, and on songs like “Crawler” we hear the crunch of leaves underfoot, the soft patter of rain. Perspective shifts throughout, but it’s the songs that seem to be sung from the point of view of a machine striving to feel more alive that are the most deeply affecting. At one point, a robotic voice laments her loneliness on “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt,” expressing her desire to belong in processed arpeggios that shimmer with feeling. Anna Richmond


U.F.O.F.

20. Big Thief, U.F.O.F.

The first of two stellar albums Big Thief released this year, U.F.O.F. is less immediate and rhythmic than the subsequent Two Hands. It’s all ambience and texture, unfolding like a reverie, with chiming acoustic guitar arpeggios and cooing melodies so natural and easy that they sound like they sprung up from the ground or out of the trees. Singer-songwriter Adrienne Lenker’s songs don’t so much progress as they circle mesmerizingly around themselves, and the best of them—“Cattails,” “Century,” “From”—seize on sing-songy melodic motifs with repetitious snake-like structures that become almost like mantras. Lenker and Buck Meek’s guitar work is sparkling throughout, with every pluck and strum sounding sonically optimized. This is an album as difficult to categorize as it is easy to listen to. Winograd

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How Do You Love?

19. The Regrettes, How Do You Love?

Despite the challenges of finding something original to say about romance, the Regrettes’s How Do You Love? harnesses the band’s infectious enthusiasm for their material to make the familiar sound new again. Though it’s not driven by a cohesive narrative per se, their second album is conceptually orientated around the birth, growth, and collapse of a relationship, charting a romance as it moves from the first stirrings of love to its painful dissolution. By the closing title track, a rave-up with a shout-along chorus, singer-guitarist Lydia Night has been through the darkness and come out the other side. The message seems to be that love is difficult, but not impossible, and the rewards are sublime. Throughout, these songs depict human connection in all its messy glory, making the case that the glory is worth the mess. Wilson


Titanic Rising

18. Weyes Blood, Titanic Rising

On her fourth album as Weyes Blood, Natalie Mering bathes 21st-century dystopia in the ineffable glow of purpose and hope. Mering’s music feels familiar, as her soundscapes boast grandiose strings and rousing piano redolent of ’60s baroque pop and her stoic contralto brings to mind the great Karen Carpenter. In spite of its pop nostalgia, Titanic Rising possesses an anxious undercurrent. Mering discerns how the postmodern age tarnishes precious values, from online dating’s commodification of love to the trivialization of the planet’s welfare as a partisan quarrel. “Everyone’s broken now and no one knows just how/We could have all gotten so far from truth,” she laments at the breathtaking climax of “Wild Time.” But even when staring down the chaos of our world, Merling refuses to cower in her smallness and instead revels in the miracle of existing in the precarious and fleeting present. “Don’t cry, it’s a wild time to be alive,” she advises, bravely marveling in the spectacle of the here and now. Sophia Ordaz


Help Us Stranger

17. The Raconteurs, Help Us Stranger

The Raconteurs were initially billed as an outlet for Jack White to step outside of the self-imposed sandbox of the White Stripes. But coming after a period during which White’s work—as both a solo artist and with the Dead Weather—has become increasingly untethered from his original no-frills ethos, the Raconteurs’s first album in 11 years, Help Us Stranger, feels like a robust return to form for the musician. But the Raconteurs shouldn’t just be viewed through a White-centric prism. There’s no better contemporary rock example of two halves of a songwriting duo, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, uncannily counterbalancing the other’s strengths and weaknesses than White and singer-songwriter Brendan Benson. Almost every track here is another example of one that would never have reached the same heights without the contributions of each band member. Winograd


Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3

16. Todd Snider, Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3

If Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night is the definitive statement from conscious white America on the aspirational progressivism that greeted the Obama years, Todd Snider’s Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 is a comprehensive assessment of wherever we’re at in the Trump presidency. Snider shows just how long the writing’s been on the wall with a dozen mostly beleaguered-sounding acoustic songs whose magic trick is to seem tossed off, when they’re actually rigorous and literary. The pared-down arrangements intensify a never-unearned focus on lyrics: Snider starts one of his signature story-songs with “Well, come gather around and I’ll sing you a song of a crazy old world that was coming along/Until some fool made the decision to turn on the television” before threading the needle from Neil Armstrong to MTV and The Apprentice. And since Snider understands that only entertainers’ messages reach the masses, he invests the album with a wry sense of humor and makes room for a few earnest, impeccably tuneful sing-alongs. The showstopper is “Watering Flowers in the Rain,” about a roadie who says he used to work with Elvis, until things took a turn: “Nobody ever believes a word I tell ‘em.” It’s an ode to the sad guy with a rambling story who may have something true to tell you. Mac

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Legacy! Legacy!

15. Jamila Woods, Legacy! Legacy!

Jamila Woods imbues her sophomore effort, Legacy! Legacy!, with a multitude of intertextual meanings and nods to her artistic predecessors. With the exception of “Frida,” which is dedicated to famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, each track bears the name of a black artist, musician, or writer, assembling an illustrious creative lineage stretching from Muddy Waters’s Southern blues to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism. Being given this kind of insight into a cross-section of Woods’s influences is a small but mighty pleasure for all that it reveals about her creative process, but the musician takes it one step further, presenting the songs here as dialectical tribute, not merely homage. Ordaz


Bandana

14. Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, Bandana

Bandana is a peanut butter and chocolate-type collaboration, a pairing where each member accentuates the strengths of the other. Madlib’s beats prove to be the perfect palate for Freddie Gibbs, whose direct and aggressive style cuts to the bone. “Palmolive” is a standout, with special guests Pusha T and Killer Mike dropping by to chip in some excellent verses, but this album doesn’t need extra hands to make an impression. “Flat Tummy Tea” is the album’s conscience, pairing a gag line (“I be all in these bitches’ stomach like flat tummy tea”) with an excoriating history of American slavery. Madlib’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink beats match Gibbs’s blistering delivery with some chilly atmospherics. Wilson


Western Stars

13. Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars

Like a latter-day Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen teases out the boundaries of traditional Americana on his latest album, turning the sentiment of that form against itself. Springsteen has, of course, seen the earnestness of his blue-collar anthems co-opted by unqualified and unthinking patriotism for much of his career. But on Western Stars, he baits that particular trap himself: Ornate orchestral arrangements and emphatic vocal performances herald vaunted American iconography, from trains to wild horses to John Wayne and winding highways. It all sounds idyllic and romanticized, until it doesn’t: “I’ve got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone” starts one of several character studies that chip away at the polished, countrypolitan veneer of an album whose individualism is knowingly compromised by a doggedly sustained self-image. The skeleton key of this whole set, though, is the title track, about an over-the-hill TV cowboy reduced to doing commercials who comes to grips with what his life has amounted to. The Boss further solidifies parallels between his ideal of the American West and its performative double with “Hello Sunshine”—which quotes the instrumental from Midnight Cowboy’s theme song—a sly gesture that links that film’s sense of American disillusionment to Springsteen’s own. Mac


Madame X

12. Madonna, Madame X

With their naïve—some might say crude—expressions of bloody-hearted empathy, there’s something almost Björkian about songs such as “God Control” and “Killers Who Are Partying.” English is, of course, Madonna’s first language, and lyrics like “I’ll be Africa/If Africa is shut down” are received with less generosity when one’s claws are already out. We expect pop stars to stay in their lane, but Madonna is at heart a rock auteur, with all of the inclinations toward upending the status quo and expressing a singular vision that designation implies. Inspired by her time living in Lisbon, where she was surrounded by musicians and art in a way she hadn’t been since her pre-fame days in the East Village, Madame X plays like a musical memoir, sometimes literally: “I came from the Midwest/Then I went to the Far East/I tried to discover my own identity,” she sings on “Extreme Occident.” The album is far from her creative zenith, but it’s her most fearless effort in at least 15 years—the sound of an artist who’s got no more fucks to give. Sal Cinquemani

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A Bathfull of Ecstacy

11. Hot Chip, A Bathfull of Ecstasy

With A Bathfull of Ecstasy, Hot Chip does with hip-hop what the Talking Heads did with soul. The group’s electronic flourishes sometimes obscure what a crack band they are, but Hot Chip works a groove like nobody’s business. Lyrically, they unpack human emotion better than anyone this side of Kendall Walton. Opening track “Melody of Love” is a slow burn that, by the time it reaches its galloping bridge, is like having a five-lane highway all to yourself. Elsewhere, “Why Does My Mind” nods at the Pixies as singer Alexis Taylor grapples with the pain of being human, while the closing track, “No God,” celebrates that same idea. Hot Chip’s music is almost like secular gospel, a joyous examination of life, warts and all, that comes down firmly on the side of humanity. Wilson


The Practice of Love

10. Jenny Hval, The Practice of Love

“I hate ‘love’ in my own language,” Jenny Hval says on the title track of her seventh album, a spoken-word exchange between herself and Lasse Marhaug about the notion of reproduction and its impact on humanity. Although Hval has admitted to feeling some anxiety about dealing with love as a theme when she’s spent so much of her career focusing on anything but, on The Practice of Love she explores the concept with closely observed specificity. Over propulsive, trance-influenced musical backdrops that lend a disarming sheen to its raw lyrics, Hval analyses the presence—and lack—of love in nature (“Lions feat Vivian Wang”), in pregnancy and childlessness (“Accident”), and in communion with the dead (“Six Red Cannas”). Her lyrical style, equal parts allusive and up-front, makes for an exposing, raw album, as disquieting as it is dazzling. Richmond


Miami Memory

9. Alex Cameron, Miami Memory

Australian singer-songwriter Alex Cameron has a reputation for taking on the personae of darkly comic characters, but on Miami Memory he more or less portrays himself, and with revelatory results. Amid the jokes about porn stars making ends meet and threatening to leave someone for a “motherfucking futon couch” in Kansas City, there’s an abiding sweetness here that’s both surprising and comforting coming from someone with Cameron’s cynical streak. “I’m still drunk, but I still can spot the sky/Yeah, I’m drunk, but I still know there’s an almond in your eye/Making sure I’m high,” Cameron sings in a deliciously smooth Bryan Ferry-like croon to an apparent lover (perhaps his real-life girlfriend, actress Jemima Kirke, whose influence is all over the album). While Cameron leans on retro pop-rock trappings and colorfully satirical narration, there’s never any doubt that his uniquely charming, filthy personality is front and center. Schrodt


Immunity

8. Clairo, Immunity

Produced by former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, Immunity is steeped in warm acoustics, a sharp pivot from the synth palette that Clairo, née Claire Cottrill, has previously favored. Disparate elements—muted guitar strumming, watery piano, harpsichord—are integrated harmoniously throughout the album. Although they employ a variety of timbres, the songs’ meticulous arrangements shy away from polyphony, permitting only one instrument to take the lead at the time. The effect is impressionistic, paradoxically austere and lush. Up close, each texture is isolated and distinctly separate from the next, but take a couple steps back and everything coalesces into a seamless, highly chromatic composition. Ordaz

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Purple Mountains

7. Purple Mountains, Purple Mountains

Purple Mountains is nothing short of a suicide note from erstwhile ’90s indie-rock stalwart David Berman, who was found hanged in his apartment less than a month after the album’s release. This long-gestating batch of songs—the first new music from Berman since the breakup of the Silver Jews in 2009—is downright rollicking at times, like on the barrelhouse “That’s Just the Way That I Feel” and the bouncy “Storyline Fever.” Which almost makes the lyrics more chilling. Reading them on the page, Berman’s hopeless state of mind couldn’t be clearer: estrangement from his wife on “She’s Making Friends, I’m Turning Stranger,” existential dread on “Margaritas at the Mall,” and any number of one-liners throughout that practically telegraph Berman’s impending suicide. It would make for a completely perverse listen if it weren’t for the sensitive, utilitarian production by Woods’s Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earl, who populate the album with chummy acoustic guitars, simple, clinical guitar and synth lines that sound like grinning through tears, and Berman’s flat, laconic delivery, which blurs the line between sincerity and sarcasm. Talk about whistling past the graveyard. Winograd


Father of the Bride

6. Vampire Weekend, Father of the Bride

A lot has changed in the world of Vampire Weekend since the band released their last album, Modern Vampires of the City, in 2013. Most significantly, frontman Ezra Koenig’s main songwriting partner, Rostam Batmanglij, announced in 2016 that he was leaving the band. Approaching the release of their fourth album, Father of the Bride, with apprehension, then, would be a reasonable stance. Fortunately, it’s unfounded, as the album is overstuffed with the pristine production, sickly sweet melodies, and audaciously off-the-wall genre-bending that’s sustained the band long enough to remain arguably the most commercially relevant of the popular 2000s indie bands that are still standing. Winograd


Dedicated

5. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated

Carly Rae Jepsen’s fourth album, Dedicated, is a carefully calibrated attempt at brand extension, reprising the effervescent pop of her last two albums while at the same time acknowledging that the 33-year-old is now a full-grown woman. For the most part, Jepsen succeeds at threading that needle. The album’s lead single, “Party for One,” initially felt like a retread, its opening strains nodding to “Call Me Maybe” and its whirling strings and bouncy keyboards acting as if not a day has gone by since her last album, 2015’s Emotion. As the closing track of Dedicated, however, the song clicks perfectly into place, a declaration of independence that bookends an album’s worth of frustrated desire: “I’m not over this, but I’m trying.” Cinquemani


Anima

4. Thom Yorke, Anima

Both of Yorke’s previous solo efforts, 2006’s The Eraser and 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, lacked the musical and lyrical cohesion, not to mention the sonic punch, that has driven Radiohead’s best work. Like those albums, Anima largely eschews guitar altogether; only album closer “Runwayaway” features a discernible guitar sound, and even that’s heavily processed. But Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums. Wilson

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Ghosteen

3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Ghosteen

Released four years after the accidental death of the singer’s 15-year-old son Arthur, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’s Ghosteen explores with immeasurable generosity the line that separates magical thinking and faith, and the contradiction between the individual pain of grief and the universality of death. Sonically, the album isn’t unlike its predecessors, Push the Sky Away and Skeleton Tree, each propelled by Warren Ellis’s unearthly, pulsing synthesizers rather than a traditional rhythm section. Although most of Skeleton Tree was written before Arthur’s death, it’s often interpreted as being marked by a ghostly presence thanks to those weightless, searching synths. And while they’re still very much present here, Ellis and Cave create an ambient field where all of the ambiguities of grief and hope can exist at once. Richmond


Magdalene

2. FKA twigs, Magdalene

A distinct feminine energy pulses through FKA twigs’s shimmering sophomore effort, Magdalene. Coming off the back of a major public breakup with actor Robert Pattinson and a period of ill-health which left her creatively and physically depleted, twigs made it her mission—both in the writing of this follow-up to 2014’s LP1 and in the extraordinary wushu and pole training she undertook for her Magdalene tour—to embrace her pain. There’s little sense on Magdalene that twigs believes there’s an ideal way to be; all she can do is learn how to accept her own contradictions as a necessary part of growth. The album is a knotty meditation on the process of separating self-perception from public perception, and of twigs’s reclamation of her body and work as hers and hers alone. Richmond


Normal Fucking Rockewell

1. Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell

Norman Rockwell’s vision of America defined much of the 20th century, with illustrations that often depicted a sentimental—some might say naïve—interpretation of American life. Despite its parodic title, though, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell doesn’t so much subvert an idealistic notion of the American dream as perform a postmortem of it. On “Venice Bitch,” which is rife with references to quintessential American icons like Robert Frost, Del Rey pines for a world that had already coughed its last gasp by the time she was born. And she wistfully delivers a eulogy for both pop culture and the planet itself on the apocalyptic “The Greatest”: “The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball,” she laments with a shrug. Distilled to their barest elements, the songs reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. Del Rey has long cemented her status as a cult icon in the vein of a Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, whose influence on the title track is unmistakable, and she inspires the kind of fanaticism that often leaves her detractors perplexed. With Norman Fucking Rockwell, however, she’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute. Cinquemani

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