The 50 best albums of 2021

This list is drawn from votes by Guardian music critics – each critic votes for their Top 20 albums, with points allocated for each placing. Check in every weekday to see our next picks, and please share your own favourite albums of 2021 in the comments below.

50

Agnes – Magic Still Exists

The Swedish pop star’s long-delayed fifth album embodies the platonic ideal of pop disco, steeped in Gaga (invigoratingly stern vocals about freeing one’s mind and body), Abba (piano stomps and trills), Donna Summer (the thumping 24 Hours) and Queen (melodramatic balladry). It transcends pastiche on the strength of her songwriting (you could swap almost anything here on to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia) and the going-for-broke intensity of it all. LS

49

MØL – Diorama

Blending the blast beats and acid-gargling glottal mayhem of black metal with the uplifting, even sentimental guitar dynamics of shoegaze, “blackgaze” has become a vibrant corner of heavy music – and Danish quintet MØL became one of its best exponents with their second album. The moody breakdowns allow the explosive choruses to land all the more righteously, with vocalist Kim Song Sternkopf – a survivor of faith cults as a child – venting majestically into the mic. Tracks such as Serf bring in a groove metal sensibility to help it all swing. BBT

48

Lucy Dacus – Home Video

Some of the year’s best musical storytelling lived in the Virginia songwriter’s third record, her writing newly amplified by subtle hints of pop propulsion and grit that evoked how Elliott Smith expanded his sound. Dacus reflects on her teenage years – of church and bible camp, of budding queer desire amid a culture of shame and damnation, of the fantasies that let her escape these limitations – with such tender curiosity that these vignettes feel less like fixed memories than forensic crime scene reconstructions. Read the full review. LS

47

Chai – WINK

The truly self-assured rarely make a noise about it, and so it is with the third album by Japanese girl group Chai. To blissed-out, dreamy synth-pop that buoys you along like a lazy river – occasionally spiked by classic rap throwbacks and arcade-game electro – the four-piece dreamily hymn the joys of food, self-acceptance and protest, nurturing their own laid-back take on pleasure activism. LS

46

Stephen Fretwell – Busy Guy

A songwriters’ songwriter beloved of Elbow and Arctic Monkeys, Stephen Fretwell was washing pots in a Wetherspoon’s pub, his music career having flatlined amid fatherhood. He hauled himself up and gave music another shot, apparently at the cost of his marriage. So these songs are the work of a truly inveterate musician, and it shows – Fretwell has such a natural facility for an affecting turn of melody, his simple fingerpicked guitar made eerie by the subtle ambient tones that sit behind it. BBT

45

For Those I Love – For Those I Love

Poignant memories seem to lengthen and soften as we age, but this album is a reminder of how much jagged heft they have when you’re looking back after just a few years or months. David Balfe, 30, reflects on a dead best friend, poverty, trauma and the intense vibrancy of young friendships and creativity, in long recitations set to music that reaches towards techno and house. “You’re told you need to grow cold to grow old,” Balfe says, but he remains charged up with human warmth on these songs. Read the full review. BBT

44

Black Country, New Road – For the First Time

You don’t tend to get many Top 5 charting albums from bands who blend klezmer, post-punk, jazz and prog with lyrics about failed romance at a science fair, but Black Country, New Road managed it. That success is testament to how particular and fresh their sound is amid the ordinary boys of British indie, further helped by a really arresting frontman, Isaac Wood. Whether it’s really him or a persona, he is haughty, easily hurt, lustful, clumsy and incurably romantic – a wonderful, flawed character. Read the full review. BBT

43

Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt – Made Out of Sound

For this album, made remotely last year, guitarist Orcutt improvised to Corsano’s drum tracks, observing the waveforms as he recorded “so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down”, he said. It’s reminiscent of a surfer’s mentality, and Made Out of Sound feels thrillingly like the trusty unpredictability of broaching the sea: absurdist guitar begets quieter contemplation; burnished riffs harden and soften, then collapse. Throughout, the open-ended sense of beauty is undimmed. LS

42

Gojira – Fortitude

Metal’s potential for thunderous anger makes it the most naturally expressive music to vent the fear, confusion and even shame of the climate crisis. “The greatest miracle is burning to the ground,” laments Joe Duplantier with bafflement and urgency, singing about the Amazon but perhaps also the entire planet. Other songs are direct rallying cries to save Earth (Into the Storm, Sphinx); Another World turns jaded and escapist, but is offset by The Chant, whose hearty chorus is the kind of thing a post-apocalyptic band of survivors would sing while rowing across a flooded city. Fortitude is an album that surveys humanity’s idiocy, but also its tenacity. BBT

41

Eris Drew – Quivering in Time

The joyous ecclesiastical energy of house enriches your soul on listening to this full-length from the US producer, which also chimes with the desire for optimism and gregariousness amid the waning pandemic. Like a lot of the best underground dance artists in recent years (Skee Mask, Anz etc), she firmly embraces the breakbeat-driven sound of the early 90s – Ride Free even has the same Peter Fonda sample as Primal Scream’s Loaded – and further enriches those busy, cymbal-heavy rhythms with zesty detailing: rave melodies, declarative vocal samples, penetrating bass notes. Read the full review. BBT

40

Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over the Country Club

Who is Lana Del Rey really? The question that has animated her decade-long career has sometimes riled her, but the first of two albums she released this year turns introspective to consider the matter. Was she happiest as a 19-year-old waitress listening to Kings of Leon, as she sings in stunning falsetto on White Dress? Is she most herself as a sister, a lover, a star, an adopted Californian – or embracing her wanderlust and escaping all that? The myth and melodrama, at least, remain unchanged on a Lana album made with an unusually light touch. Read the full review. LS

39

Hayley Williams – Flowers for Vases/Descansos

With pop-punk surging this year, Paramore’s influence may never have been stronger – but the band’s flag bearer continued to burrow away from incandescent rock into stranger, subtler sounds. Williams’ second solo album in two years observed the dying days of her marriage, and how the reliability of sadness became its own sort of safe harbour. That strange sense of comforting desolation hums through in acoustic guitar and ghostly piano, although Williams’ innate way with a vocal hook provides the defiant life force. LS

38

Goat Girl – On All Fours

The south London quartet’s debut was garage rock with a touch of psych; this sophomore album grandly scaled that second element up, using synths to crack open a portal out of the drab, repressive everyday. The bigger ambition was partly predicated by one member surviving cancer, and the band don’t shy from big questions about life and death: the climate crisis, capitalism and the struggle to be allowed one’s truth and identity are among the topics broached. BBT

37

Erika de Casier – Sensational

Any crush has a delicate alchemy, and liable to lurch towards obsession or revulsion as the fantasy of someone duels with the reality. On the second album by the Portuguese-born Danish songwriter, her would-be lover may be a braggart who is rude to waiters, but that smile is irresistible: what are you gonna do? Her minimalist take on turn-of-the-millennium R&B shivers with sensitivity, essaying every heart flutter and gut punch in plush bass, glassy percussion and elegant strings, while De Casier’s coy delivery brims with a beguiling sense of mystery. Read the full review. LS

36

Aya – Im Hole

This is the kind of slippery, funny, explosively creative record that perhaps could only be made in the UK. Yorkshirewoman Aya Sinclair mulches various bits of club culture in to a fetid, sweating mass – grime, breakbeat, drill, the off-kilter electronics of Autechre, the hyper-contemporary bass shudder of the late Sophie – and threads vocals through it, her surreal non sequiturs and body horror hovering on the edge of rap. BBT

35

Aly & AJ – A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun

It’s one of pop’s sweetest narratives: former child stars escape the machine to make a great, offbeat record. Fourteen years after their last album, one-time Disney performers Aly and AJ softened their synth-pop pedigree in this dreamy collection of west coast pop-rock, a vision of Robyn-gone-Laurel Canyon that also might sate anyone left hoping for a bit more brooding from this year’s Kacey Musgraves album. LS

34

The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore

The psychedelic, shoegaze-y haze has gradually lifted from Adam Granduciel’s band, burned off under a rising sun as their success has grown. He now stands in the midday of his career, with this fifth album fully embracing bright, mainstream classic rock. Powered by those distinctive WoD backbeats, which match the tirelessness of Granduciel’s search for love, perspective and contentment, these songs are huge in scale: both the arrangements and the strength of feeling. Read the full review. BBT

33

PinkPantheress – To Hell With It

In the TikTok phenomenon PinkPantheress’s micro-pop gems (only two songs on her debut project exceeded two minutes), classic drum’n’bass samples double as nagging memories and overwhelming rushes of adrenaline, swirling around lyrics about obsession and disappointment made more sinister by her innocent, breathless voice. Fourteen years ago, Burial’s transient, lonely, sodium-lit sound became associated with the experience of sitting on the night bus. PinkPantheress makes music befitting another after-hours rite of passage: that bleary-eyed, rueful stumble through bright lights and swarming crowds as you try to hold it together. LS

32

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

The New Yorker’s second album is almost confrontationally still: brass like wisps of smoke, guitar a gentle thrum, softly puddling cymbals. Once the aftershocks of a loss have settled, Jenkins takes stock of what’s gone for good – Ambiguous Norway orbits her memories of David Berman, whose band Purple Mountains she was set to tour with prior to his death – and how learning how to trust again might yet retrieve her stolen sense of peace. LS

31

Low – Hey What

Low’s last album, 2018’s Double Negative, was a total reinvention 25 years into a virtually undented career – a staggering achievement for any band. Yet somehow Alan and Mimi Sparhawk transcended it with this follow-up, bridling its predecessor’s swashbuckling noise until it splintered, and contrasting it with electronic reimaginings of the forlorn atmospherics that made their name. The sheer invention contrasted devastating lyrics about hitting a wall – drawn from the couple’s experiences dealing with Alan’s depression – imbuing these static hymns to limits and perseverance with a superhuman sense of determination. Read the full review. LS

30

Greentea Peng – Man Made

There’s a wonderful sense of liveness to this record, evoking a dive bar with a fug of weed smoke sitting at shoulder height. On stage is London-born Aria Wells, whose delivery is natural and improvisatory: vowels that bend drowsily downwards, or rap flow that sits on top of the beat without being too fussily precise. Behind her a band shuffle through a selection of grooves – reggae, neo-soul, hip-hop – that add up to a sensual, instinctive album that you could imagine Amy Winehouse making on a different timeline. Read the full review. BBT

29

Clairo – Sling

A strong self-preservationist streak ran through several highly anticipated albums by pop’s young women this year, with the likes of Billie Eilish, Lorde and Kacey Musgraves opting for lower-key sounds that poured cool water on heightened expectations. Among them was Clairo, whose second album left behind bedroom electro-pop for perfectly turned miniatures of Carole King’s warm classicism. Irrepressibly, sweetly funky, it sounded like music for pushing the furniture back and dancing on the living room rug – and Clairo’s lyrics, about breaking with relationships that no longer served her, underscored that joyful intimacy. Read the full review. LS

28

Kacey Musgraves – Star-Crossed

Every stage of a breakup is sung in chronological order here: marital worries, hope for the relationship being good enough, worsening arguments, split, poignant staring at old photos, perspective gained, exciting/depressing ventures on to dating apps, eventual feeling of true freedom. Swerve a couple of tepid chillout-compilation moments and along the journey you alight at some of Musgraves’ prettiest songwriting, nicely leavened with her straight-talking, wearily dismayed tone of voice. Read the full review. BBT

27

St Vincent – Daddy’s Home

It was perhaps slightly overshadowed by its backstory: Annie Clark’s father’s release from prison, which, for some listeners, cast the entire record in an unsympathetic light. But its lyricism was much richer than one man, and its 70s-inspired music richer still: psychedelic soul, cabaret songcraft, prog ballads, cosmic funk. Clark remains a highly literate and shapeshifting songwriter, where half the fun is working out how much is ironised and how much is real. Read the full review. BBT

26

Mogwai – As the Love Continues

In a feat of lockdown recording, Dave Fridmann produced Mogwai’s 10th studio album over Zoom and Atticus Ross directed an orchestra in Budapest via remote connection from Los Angeles. The classic Mogwai physicality remained undimmed by these virtual limitations, however, swerving between twinkling beauty (Dry Fantasy) and pleasingly barbed dirges (Ceiling Granny), and chucking in a new bag of glitter (Supposedly, We Were Nightmares) for good measure. Happily for all involved, it became their first UK No 1 album. Read the full review. LS

25

Madlib – Sound Ancestors

A relatively austere and serious release from the collagist hip-hop beatmaker, letting his fabled samples really stretch out and inhabit the songs instead of chopping between them – a result of Kieren “Four Tet” Hebden arranging the album. There’s still room for Madlib’s trickster energy though, as found in a chaotic blurt of mayhem-inducing rap duo MOP. The title track is spiritual jazz, but that genre’s mood pervades the entire album, as Madlib communes with more than half a century of sound. Read the full review. BBT

24

Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever

On her second album, Billie Eilish not only defied the tacit assumption that there’s nothing less appealing than complaining about the ravages wrought by fame but reinvigorated the cliche by toying deliciously with concealment and exposure. She sings about sexual fantasies and clandestine assignations and the power she can wield to keep her partners quiet, flexing her ability to carry on in secret – despite manifold violations of her privacy – as if it were a coveted jewel. She and her collaborator brother Finneas brought the same thrill to intimacy as they did to adolescent fears on her debut, tracing the scope of Eilish’s newfound commitment to her own pleasure in dreamy golden-age classicism and hormone-spiking techno. She let her listeners share in sensation even if the details were off-limits. Read the full review. LS

23

Floating Points, London Symphony Orchestra and Pharoah Sanders – Promises

Promises is an album that rewards patience. Not only was it Pharoah Sanders’ first major recording in a decade – and a record five years in the making itself – but its nine movements unfolded with a rare subtlety. A chiming refrain written by Sam Shepherd (AKA Floating Points) and played by the LSO sparkled like dawn’s first light, its sense of potential undimmed over 45 minutes of repetition. Sanders’ saxophone playing, lightyears softer than the blazing attack that made his name, activated that magic. The harmony between them generated its own sense of orbit, with cello and violin solos and the moving spectacle of Sanders’ singing voice balanced in a kind of celestial harmony. Read the full review. LS

22

Laura Mvula – Pink Noise

After enduring the humiliation of her old label dropping her with a seven-line email, Mvula donned the musical equivalent of shoulder pads – namely the 1980s’ gated drums, pugilistic bass and immaculately buffed synths – for this supreme display of confidence against the odds. The stylisation never comes at the expense of heart, either: Mvula delves deep as she searches for freedom in desire, art and within her own body, stretching her voice into majestic, wild anthems of liberation. Read the full review. LS

21

The Coral – Coral Island

Few of their peers from the 00s indie boom are so hale and hearty; 20 years into their career, the Merseyside band made their most ambitious album, and one of their best. It’s a double concept album about a seaside resort, and captures those towns’ blend of buckets-and-spades buoyancy and out-of-season malaise; gorgeous harmonies flow through jangling psych-pop and touches of northern soul, though there’s also creepy rockabilly emanating from the ghost train and ballads for lonely fishermen at the end of the pier. Read the full review. BBT

20

Arooj Aftab – Vulture Prince

The year’s biggest musical revelation came from Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab, who set traditional Urdu ghazals (and an adaptation of a poem by Rumi) amid harp and strings that rippled and ran as clear as a fresh stream. In her rich, meditative vocals, Aftab weighed the beauty of a single phrase and tenaciously addressed existential disappointments; her small ensemble shapeshifted between intricate filigrees and paring back to make a virtue of space. Made in response to the death of her younger brother, and released into an unprecedented global experience of grief, Vulture Prince was a refuge for solace and contemplation. LS

19

Dave – We’re All Alone in This Together

“It’s like flying first class on a crashing plane,” Dave says of his fame and wealth at the outset of his second album. Few rappers have sounded so ill at ease with critical and commercial success as him – even when firing off bars about gorgeous women, there’s a wary, jaded tone to his voice. And in many ways, nothing has changed: he remains angry at the government over immigration and social mobility, and relationships certainly haven’t got easier. “Love’s a film and I’m just flicking through the parts I’m in.” That sense of a man looking down at his own life is Dave’s tragedy, and what makes his tracks such, well, psychodramas. Read the full review. BBT

18

Turnstile – Glow On

The compressed, febrile sound of 80s punk rock is resurrected for this terrifically entertaining record, where the jams are not just kicked out but also sent off the nearest cliff. The monstrous chug of cock-rock rhythm guitar underpins lead lines made for whipping a mane of hair around to, and Brendan Yates’s vocals have something of Perry Farrell’s yelled pronouncements to them. But there’s a dream-pop softness, too – not least in two songs with Blood Orange guesting – that adds emotional range. BBT

17

Tirzah – Colourgrade

The intimacy of new parenthood, where the world shrinks to a few rooms, is expressed in a new singular language by the south London musician (she also evokes the strangeness of those circumscribed Covid lockdowns). Breath, touch, kisses and sleep fill her songs, which conjure dub, hip-hop, post-punk and folk as if trying to remember them from a previous life. This album has the kind of utterly natural beauty that other artists strive towards, but will never reach because of that very striving. Read the full review. BBT

16

Deafheaven – Infinite Granite

For their most mainstream album yet, the band’s screams abated, the drums slowed their gallop, and the guitars took on a prettiness that recalled Coldplay at times. For certain metalheads, these are unforgivable sins and Deafheaven remain a divisive band – but for the rest of us, this is a stirring blend of arena rock and shoegaze that seems to fill the sky. Read the full review. BBT

15

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – Carnage

The spirit of Scott Walker fills this idiosyncratic and brilliant album, which pumps with blood as bright and oxygenated as its red cover text. Freed from the occasionally sentimental and over-sumptuous backings of recent Bad Seeds albums, Cave and Ellis stalk off into a wilderness fringed with cyberpunk detritus: strange bits of production prowl at the edges of these violent songs. In its second half, the sky turns gentler as Cave ponders ageing across four ambient ballads: “I’m 200 pounds of packed ice / Sitting on a chair and in the morning sun” is as good an image for the inevitability of death as you’ll find. Read the full review. BBT

14

Lil Nas X – Montero

One of the most proudly queer pop records ever released, where sex isn’t veiled in metaphor but detailed right down to where the ejaculate lands. Lil Nas X writes wittily about lust and witheringly about his rivals, but there are also frank admissions of loneliness and doubt as he navigates his way into the lasting fame that is assured by his stunningly good top line melodies. Read the full review. BBT

13

Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee

Michelle Zauner (pictured above) weaves beguilingly strange fantasies of how fulfilment might look throughout her third album as Japanese Breakfast. The rapturous Paprika considers how it would feel to “stand at the height of your powers” as an artist, but other songs about desire – for other people, and for life – explore agency and submission in striking shades of grey. The musical roles on Jubilee are just as mutable, shapeshifting convincingly from New Order-era pop to the brassy filigrees of early 2010s indie, and the arrangements give Zauner space to wonder. LS

12

Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales

The power struggle between reason and desire fuels the Philadelphia songwriter’s fourth release, which intersperses soulful swagger and forlorn blues with interludes by women describing what they mean by owning their sexuality. Sullivan’s compassion resonates in how freely her interviewees express what some might see as contradictions (threatened with a sex tape leak, the subject of Ari’s Tale shrugs, “That dick spoke life into me”). And her own songs could be righteous – Pick Up Your Feelings snaps impatiently, and she makes no bones about her own pleasure on the languid On It – but they’re also transparent about the ways that freedom and dignity don’t always look how you might expect. “I just want to be taken care of / ’Cause I’ve worked enough,” she sings on The Other Side. LS

11

Sam Fender – Seventeen Going Under

The North Shields songwriter’s second album starts with a grim image of teenage desensitisation: a chronically ill parent, snuff videos, fist fights and arrests; rinse and repeat. The forecast hardly improves across Seventeen Going Under, on which hope is elusive amid Fender’s bitter depictions of feeling trapped by political alienation and inherited bad habits. And yet the sheer force of feeling in this record – tenaciously euphoric sax a la Springsteen, tempos that bob like a featherweight boxer hungry for their shot, a reckless taste for the epic – indicates a life force that won’t be stamped out so easily, one that, going by the rabid response to the album, has mass revivifying potential. Read the full review. LS

10

Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime

In Mdou Moctar’s world, riff and rhythm count but the solo is king. His grounding in the nomadic Tuareg style of assouf (desert blues) made him a popular option on Niger’s wedding circuit, but the guitarist breaks from convention by always doggedly following his fingertips to some place new. A decade’s worth of refinement has led to Afrique Victime, which streamlines the hooky onslaught of Moctar’s 2019 breakout LP, Ilana: The Creator, into something more well-rounded. Bassist and producer Mikey Coltun’s sequencing affords breathers between levee-breakers, giving necessary hush to introspective ballads Bismilahi Atagah and Tala Tannam, while allowing the molten psychedelia of Taliat and Asdikte Akal to sprawl. True to the music’s Saharan origins, there’s ample space here. Sometimes Mdou’s voice is barely above a whisper before the band join him in skyward invocations. Read more. Gabriel Szatan

9

Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams

As the beginning of 2021 marked almost a full year of the pandemic, many of us were experiencing some sort of impact on our mental health. So when Arlo Parks released her debut album in January, she found herself chiming with universal concerns. Addressing issues that had been triggered or exacerbated by lives stuck inside four walls – unrequited desire, sexuality, poor body image, prejudice, betrayal and depression – Parks emerged as an empathic, comforting voice. What makes Collapsed in Sunbeams so effective is that the music is the striking inverse of her themes – light, airy, her conversational voice vulnerable and childlike. Her songs are delicately but cleverly constructed, with ear-worm choruses and generous hooks; soulful, folky tones, gentle R&B and jazzy drumming; a shimmering sea of balm-like sound beneath which lurk those lyrical depth charges. Read more. Dave Simpson

8

Olivia Rodrigo – Sour

Not since Britney Spears shimmied her way down a hallway dressed in school uniform has a debut single had such an immediate cultural impact: within four days of Olivia Rodrigo releasing Drivers License, the song had broken Spotify’s record for the most single-day streams for a non-holiday song; it would spend nine consecutive weeks at No 1 on the UK charts. Like Spears, Rodrigo also got her start with Disney, however, Rodrigo’s pathway to pop dominance wasn’t built on dance routines and Max Martin-penned bangers. Sour is an intimate, barbed, anxious and brilliantly crafted debut album about the butchery of heartbreak and the emotional hurricane that is being a teenager. Picture Rodrigo swooping in wearing a cheerleader outfit and Doc Martens while brandishing a baseball bat, her face still wet with tears. Read more. Alim Kheraj

7

Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg

Dry Cleaning frontperson Florence Shaw captures a generation’s internal monologue like never before: those bitchy, distracted, utterly unmindful thoughts that a consciousness poisoned by city life and digital media is powerless to stop. Shaw doom-scrolls through her own life, yet the London band’s debut album is often breezy and full of little situation comedies; her humour given ample space by the sturdy guitar-bass-drums trio who cleave to varied strains of stoner-garage rock. Ultimately there’s a profound poetry in how her observations hang together, a reminder that something can be built from the dumb flotsam of ordinary life. Read more. BBT

6

Sault – Nine

On Sault’s fifth album in two years, spoken-word interludes baldly state the reality of racism in the UK while lyrics tell impressionistic stories that teem with loss and hurt, knives and guns. Yet the music offers transcendence: tightly melodic, luxuriously layered, instantly memorable without being cheaply infectious. London Gangs nods to the Chemical Brothers, grainily retro R&B, X-Ray Spex, hushed nu-folk and Auld Lang Syne. Bitter Streets is soulful 60s lounge music with a tricksy beat. The exquisite title track is pared-back psychedelic soul, proggy folk, cosmic Beatles and also none of those things. If you like the sound of Nine, apologies. Sault only made it available to stream and download for 99 days after its initial June release. Back then, the group said some of them hailed from “the heart of London’s council estates”, where the majority “get trapped in a systematic loop where a lot of resources and options are limited”. The unexplained erasure of Nine feels like a way to defy that lack of agency – proof that if Sault want to tightly control the distribution of their work, that’s their prerogative. Read more. Rachel Aroesti

5

Tyler, the Creator – Call Me If You Get Lost

Call Me If You Get Lost is a decadent and luxurious showcase of Tyler’s reverence and nostalgia for music’s past – Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, lovers rock, Houston R&B – channelled into his own present and future. Also central to this album’s beauty is the fact that Tyler can rap, crafting engaging tales out of deft, intentional flow. He has always been a romantic, but here he bears a softer side than ever, forced to recognise that love, so often, is about timing. “Come get lost with me,” Tyler offers on Blessed, late into an album that has already guided the listener through a bright, expansive and occasionally sentimental world, with the tracks melding into one another in true mixtape fashion. So often, we focus on beginnings and endings. Here, Tyler masterfully reminds us that life is all about the journey, growth, confusion, pain and magic in between. Read more. Tara Joshi

4

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Tamara Lindeman’s fifth album as the Weather Station had a lightning-in-a-bottle quality that nothing she had released previously could quite prepare you for. At the end of 2018, she said, she was driven “insane” by reading a New Yorker article by environmentalist Bill McKibben, written as California burned during the most destructive wildfire season in history. She subsequently poured her anger and grief into the 10 songs on Ignorance. The lyrics occasionally slipped into something approaching straightforward protest songs but, for the most part, they entwine “climate grief” with what sound like words about a failing relationship to startling effect. She also shifted her musical focus, bringing in a new expansiveness and gloss – synths, disco beats, strings, sax and flute that carry a distinct hint of jazz about them. In purely melodic terms, these are Lindeman’s strongest songs to date, filled with nagging hooks and gracefully unforced-sounding tunes; the sound is smoothly, warmly appealing: you could imagine singing along to them if the lyrics didn’t keep belting you in the gut. Read more. Alexis Petridis

3

Little Simz – Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

Introversion is considered synonymous with shyness, but on Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (an acronym of her nickname), Simbiatu Ajikawo demonstrates that she has no shortage of bold, cinematic vision. She makes up for a lack of travel during the pandemic by stamping her musical passport with the influences of a wide diasporic sound. Her Nigerian heritage is in fine hip-winding display on Point and Kill (featuring Obongjayar), while Protect My Energy layers motivational mantras over 80s Miami drums, balancing out the record’s heavier moments with a keen sense of play. And she is newly generous here with her vignettes of family life, driven by the desire to recalibrate her post-pandemic priorities as an aunt and sibling. On Little Q, she reconnects with a cousin on the other side of the Thames to learn more about his near-death brush with knife crime, while I Love You, I Hate You sees her attempting to find peace with a father who has disappointed her and to ensure she does not carry that fear of rejection into a new relationship. It seems to be working: I See You’s old-school R&B is blissful with sleepy Sunday morning vulnerability, while How Did You Get Here is a tearjerking stocktake of the artist’s journey so far. A gospel choir frames her determination and gratitude: “I’m the version of me I always imagined when I was younger.” Read more. Jenessa Williams

2

Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend

Wolf Alice singer Ellie Rowsell has called Blue Weekend her least autobiographical album: whatever the inspiration, it tells a convincingly lived-in story of embracing nihilism following the rupture of friendships and romantic relationships. “I take you back / Yeah, I know it seems surprising,” she thunders on Lipstick on the Glass. It’s here that Wolf Alice come into their own as adept musical shapeshifters, using their broad influences to explore the extremes of alienation: there are woozy fantasies, self-destructive ragers; stunning anthems of anxiety. Big, confident pop-rock albums are rare these days – and their demise hardly bemoaned – but there’s an undeniable pleasure in finding one adventurous, ambitious and human enough to remind you why they used to be so essential. Read more. LS

1

Self Esteem – Prioritise Pleasure

In a pop landscape that often seems to be bottling it all up inside, Rebecca Taylor’s second solo album marked a hugely relatable uncorking of a lifetime’s worth of festering emotions, as well as her evolution into an out-and-proud pop star who dissects her emotions in pin-sharp, often darkly funny and always physically rousing testaments. The sheer heft and physicality of the album, all Yeezus beats and elastic melodies, is balanced by her ability to zoom in on the minutiae of life, paired with her economical wit. Often, Taylor is joined by a small choir of friends who reiterate and cosign her emotions: their presence anchors lead single I Do This All the Time, with its swelling coda of “I’ll take care, I’ll read again, I’ll sing again, I will” transformed into the ultimate act of defiance against those who once compelled her to diminish her desires and shrink her personality. After nearly two years of cooping up big emotions in restricted spaces, the bold, brash and beautiful Prioritise Pleasure hit like sweet relief. Read more. Michael Cragg