I’m actually sort of shocked at how narrowcast my list ended up this year. I feel like I listened to a lot of stuff in a lot of different genres, and liked plenty of it. But as albums, I just didn’t find very many that really stuck with me. Which is odd, because I’m normally an ‘album guy’ more than a person who focuses on individual songs. But this year, the vast majority of albums I really loved fit into a fairly small range of indie rock and indie pop LPs that all sound pretty similar. Some are a big more ‘big shimmery guitar’ records. Some are a bit more punk-influenced. Some are a bit more electronic. But I’m not going to pretend they don’t sound pretty similar.
Still, taste is taste and I’m not going to pretend that I loved Cameron Winter or Geese or Bad Bunny when I actually didn’t. These aren’t necessarily the best albums of the year. They’re just the ones I personally actually loved.
I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists pretty close to nothing, so please go and actually buy the music you love.
1. Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky
There’s a wonderful sort of wisdom that comes from being just a bit older than your past self. And that’s what makes Welcome to My Blue Sky such a delightful record. It’s an opportunity to the listener to dwell in that exact space, to breathe it in deep and let it fill you completely. So I’m sure it will hit hard for people who are themselves approximately this age. But it has a different resonance for those of us who are far removed from that particular mid-20s period of evolving self-awareness. Who maybe feel a bit of bemusement that it all seemed so important at the time. But who also have maybe internalized the passage of time so much that we lost that bit of ourselves that really did feel these things so strongly.
Listening to this record is an invitation to remember. The waves of guitars offer a sort of gauzy highway between past and present, letting me sit here in my home—playing with my kids, doing laundry, watering the plants—while also sharing space with my own past self: newly in love, ready to move across the country to start grad school, full of doubts and excitement. I want to reach out and give him a hug. Tell him that we do end up having a very good life. I can’t do that of course, and there’s a deep wistfulness to the feeling. Except that I can give him a hug, because he is me, and we’re both sitting here listening to a beautiful record together.
2. IDER – Late to the World
IDER have an incredible gift for sharing their interiority—inviting us as listeners inside their dreams and fears. Late to the World is their best work yet. It’s an album about drifting slightly out of phase, the sense that everyone else has their life together and everything sorted, while you’re not even sure how to figure out why everything keeps going wrong. It’s defined by beautiful harmonies, synths that are big and bold, and the desire to show your self the sort of compassion that you feel for others.
The softer songs are good, but it’s really the high-octane ones that really shine, I think in part because they communicate just how much ‘growing up’ is really just a theory of movement. You don’t necessarily figure things out. You just keep going, and hope that you can sort out why in the process. Songs like Attachment Theory, You Don’t Know How to Drive, and Late to the World make that feel like a very kinetic thing.
3. Gordi – Like Plasticine
I have loved everything released by Gordi ever since her debut EP back in 2016. This record is no exception. The most impressive thing about it is the range of the performance. She moves from contemplative to dance-pop to posthuman electro-noise to tender ballad. But everything still feels deeply connected. Based on the bits and pieces she’d released over the past few years, I was anticipating something a little more pop-forward. This really isn’t that. There’s a dance tune, but this is a much more atmospheric, occasionally even dissonant, record than I expected. Which was a really nice surprise.
It doesn’t quite match her best work, which is why it’s ‘only’ a top five record for me this year. But realistically, nothing she could have done would have been able to replicate the emotional punch of Our Two Skins, which is an extraordinary album in its own right but which meant a lot to me personally because of when I heard it—in summer 2020, when I desperately needed a record to restore my faith in humanity and in the future. So it’s probably not surprising that my favorite song on this record (PVC Divide) is actually about her experience as a doctor during the pandemic.
4. Girlpuppy – Sweetness
I was introduced to girlpuppy by someone who said I’d like it because “it sounds like Phoebe Bridgers.’ And yeah, it really does. But honestly, I think I LIKE this more than any Phoebe-related album except for maybe her debut. It’s just really good! The main adjectives that come to mind are pretty soft: things like wistful, heartfelt, thoughtful, contemplative, tender. But it’s not a soft record at all. She just has an incredible knack of evoking the struggles of being human in a world that sometimes feels like it was designed to delimit and deny every real expression of humanity.Which is really to say, if Phoebe Bridgers is the most obvious referent, it’s really just part of a long tradition of singer-songwriters baring their soul for our sake.
5. Indigo De Souza – Precipice
There’s a lot of 90s nostalgia out there in pop music these days, and as a 90s kid myself I certainly don’t hate it. But there’s always a risk of taking nostalgia too far, and I think that’s especially true with alternative rock, which was already itself a pretty nostalgic genre, and whose blend of aggression and terror at being discovered as insufficiently authentic makes it a pretty difficult target for nostalgia bombs. Indigo De Souza is one of the few folks who is really doing it well.
This album wasn’t particularly well reviewed which I think is wild. My best guess is that the negative feedback is itself rather nostalgic—the sort of ‘indie artist sells out!’ stuff you got when Liz Phair made a pop album. It’s true that this doesn’t have quite the same level of abrasiveness as her previous records but I don’t think it sounds remotely polished (in the negative sense). It’s just a great pop record full of bangers, full of big feelings and big hooks, and entirely unapologetic about it.
6. Blondshell – If You Asked for a Picture
My feelings about this one are pretty similar to how I felt about my #1 record. Just like Momma, Blondshell draw heavily on that gauzy 90s guitar sound, but layering them on top of what feel like some very mid-aughsts indie rock chord progressions. Which…I’m certainly not going to complain about that. It’s not the most sonically innovative record, but the playing is great, the production is great, and the songs are great.
7. James McMurtry – The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy
More than two decades into my James McMurtry fandom, I have a pretty good idea what to expect from his albums. They are always thoughtful, literate, deeply incisive, revealing. He’s among the very best storytellers in all of music (just as his father was one of the best storytellers in print). There’s always a pretty high baseline and then it’s just a question of how well he executes. And in this case, the tunes are pretty good. It’s certainly one of his most beautiful records. He’s never been afraid of writing a lovely song, exactly, but he’s never leaned in quite as heavily as this. I’d offer two mild negatives, which drag it down just a bit. The first is that his lyrics sometimes lack his usual deftness. There are few songs that feel just a little too on the nose (Annie, Sons of the Second Sons). The other mild downside comes from the two covers that bookend the album. The first of which is not very good and particularly ill-fitted tonally with the rest of the album. The latter of which is nice and feels like it could have been a McMurtry original.
8. René Najera – Painted Life
A sort of atmospheric house fusion record, which manages to be both glitchy and gauzy at the same time. More than anything, it evokes the feeling of riding the subway in a city you’ve never been to before. You have no real idea where you are, everything looks slightly foreign and strange, but also still somewhat familiar. You’re in constant motion, without being quite sure where you’re going or what it will be like when you get there.
9. The Beths – Straight Line Was a Lie
I think this is pretty clearly their best album yet. I’m not sure it’s my favorite, but if not it’s close. The power pop essence is still there, but they’ve expanded the range a lot, drawing in some lovely acoustic elements, some bigger and more explosve movements, without losing any of the incredible lyricism that conveys deep emotions in endlessly clever ways.
10. Jay Som – Belong
I guess there was a memo for everyone to record a shimmery indie rock album with 90s alt guitars and early 2000s pop punk sensibilities? Because there were probably like 50 of them out this year. I guess that’s just how musical memory works. And I’m not going to complain because that’s all right in my wheelhouse and I really liked a lot of the records. As you can tell from their placement on this list.
11. Rosalía – Lux
The consensus #1 album of the year, and very justifiably. I certainly appreciate the incredible skill that went into it, the audaciousness of the effort, and the quality of the songs. I can’t quite say that I love actually listening to it. But it’s also one of those albums that you probably have to give yourself six months, or maybe six years, before you can really judge it. And even if it never fully wins me over, the extraordinary thing about this record is just how *little* it needs any of us to love it. It just is what it is, and is completely impervious to judgment.
12. Allo Darlin’ – Bright Nights
Just a very pleasant album to spend time with. There’s nothing here that really blows me away like there were on some of their previous records, but every song is enjoyable, and I always feel happy after listening to it. Very happy to have Allo Darlin back in my life, after an extended time away.
13. Beach Bunny – Tunnel Vision
My favorite album of the last decade is Young Enough by Charly Bliss. This album feels like a spiritual successor—both tonally and in terms of theme. It doesn’t reach nearly the same heights, partly because it just feels a little too tightly-wound, but it’s still a heck of a fun ride. Which actually is pretty much word-for-word what I said about Charly Bliss’ own followup to Young Enough last year. And that feels about right.
14. Lily Allen – West End Girl
The first time I listened to West End Girl I tweeted:
That first listen felt like climbing a mountain. I wasn’t sure I had the emotional energy to handle it again. Or the tolerance for listening to someone observe their own humiliation in such excruciating detail.
I’m happy to say that I did return to it, and have continued to enjoy it. The songs themselves are just great pop songs, as you’d expect. And while listening is still an emotional journey, the prurient elements fade a bit the more you stick with it, allowing the deeper sense of pathos to ring out a little clearer.
15. Loscil – Lake Fire
A brooding record full of songs about fires that swept across the pacific northwest in the past few years, leaving skies dark and air polluted.
