The sweeping compositions were a huge shift from his debut Before her albums were world-stopping cultural events, before a surprise release meant “pulling a Beyoncé,” there was After the majestic ballads and clear-eyed heartache of her third album, On their fifth album, Deerhunter linger in the dark recesses of the mind. Sampha grieves by expressing his sorrow as well as molding it into new forms. The arrangements, largely based on the comforting grooves of ’70s soul, add an element of analog time travel to her cosmic funk.
He’d had the time, space, and resources to develop an uncanny fluidity among his band members, who’d known one another since high school; they benefited from years of church and R&B gigs, and the encouragement of a network of local elders and heroes. With Chronik, Tempa T and the now deceased Esco on the frontline, they frequently appeared on Roll Deep’s Rinse FM show, and depending on who you spoke to, were either a breath of fresh air or a jarring presence.
In a list of 20 best grime songs, Dizzee could very easily take up half the list, so picking the album seems the smartest move. It’s serious work—done thoroughly, more work than any fulltime critic has time for. The atmosphere was so lazy that Bejar could hardly be bothered to bring his tongue to his teeth to voice a “th” sound; as a result, he exquisitely “summed sroo the books on your shelf.”Underneath the listless arrangements, Bejar settles into his bon vivant character.
“Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,” Ocean sings on “Solo,” capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Undeniably prolific by 2014, he’d amassed a cult fanbase but most of the world didn’t yet know him.
–Hanif AbdurraqibDespite the desires of her label, Sky Ferreira refused to be molded into the next coy pop princess.
And then there was “Flawless,” which sampled Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 In 2016, the hinge year of a grotesque age, Frank Ocean’s cars were his confessional booths. A plateau of pleasure-pain, Few songwriters articulate wanting quite like Mitski. Moving from English folk to Jamaican reggae, and from dark comedy to just darkness, she examines the nature of conflict itself and the raw human tragedy that lies at its center. He sings of his fingertips and lips burning as he chain-smokes through his nerves, ending with a lilting outro—“Forrest green, Forrest blues/I’m remembering you/If this is love, I know it’s true/I won’t forget you”—that captures the peculiar, melancholic longing of the closet.
That ringing sensation in your head from the crossed streams of cable news and political discourse? By the time The post-punk hero of the decade wore pink stilettos onstage and made monogamy sound as appealing as anthrax. Discovery of an old tape in Bahir Dar, a tourist hotspot in northern Ethiopia, in 2013 ignited Mergia’s dormant career in the West, capped by Elysia Crampton’s experimental electronic music unearths deep personal truths in surprising places. Spurred by a breakup but ultimately about much more, By the time the record came out in 2015, Jamie Smith had already made two LPs with the xx, remixed an album by the legendary musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron (later loaning a sample from the project to Drake for a Top 10 hit), and released a solo track called “All Under One Roof Raving” about the communal ethos of the UK underground. But Grande, with immeasurable strength, managed not only to throw off the covers but to return to center stage with It’s rare for a musician to sell out arenas based on the strength of singles, but Bad Bunny was doing exactly that, around the world, even before his outsized, wacky persona was noticed by most English speakers in America. Eliot was beloved far beyond the Alabama DIY scene they rose in. After breaking through with 2012’s delightful and funny Alabama Shakes’ second album begins with a song about an astronaut who has been shot into space on a mission to find a new planet where the human race can settle and start over. don’t feel so daunting and boundless when they’re “processes”; they take on a structure that they lack as experiences. On It’s hard to imagine the decade without Angel Olsen’s magnetic howl.