My Favorite Albums of 2016
A wise person gave me some advice this spring about the best way to approach fatherhood. “Just slowly let the layers of ‘cool’ slide away,” he offered. “It’s kinda freeing.” Since I was at best a moderately cool person, with few layers to shed, I figured this would be a piece of cake. Sure enough, losing my edge has been far and away the most delightful part of 2016. I love being a dad — it’s blissful and silly and fulfilling in all the ways I’d heard about but couldn’t really understand until it happened. I think about who I was before April 6th and laugh at the idea of ever going back.
But here we are at year-end list-making time, and I’m feeling just a touch less sure of my picks. I spent far fewer nights out at shows this year, and the majority of my Bandcamp/Soundcloud discovery time at home has been converted to dearly needed sleep hours. I’m sure I missed out on some records that I’ll flip out over when I catch up in 2018. There’s also the fact that this is a dark, scary time in the world at large, and ranking my personal taste in new music feels fairly irrelevant. (What else is new?)
Anyway, here are my 50 favorite albums of the year. Not the most important, the best, or anything so definite as that — just the ones that I loved the most. All of these albums moved me, taught me, took me somewhere else for a while. Also, due to their inclusion on this list, they are all officially dad-rock as fuck. Sorry about that, and thanks for reading.
(Previously: My favorite albums of 2015 and 2014.)
1. Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool (XL)
A Moon Shaped Pool is a near-perfect emotional swandive of the type that Radiohead once pulled off with some regularity, and that few rock bands in the past decade (including Radiohead themselves) have been able to repeat. The sadness it explores is subtle and deep: What happens when you’ve spent your adult life pursuing certain ideals — romantic, aesthetic, political — only to notice too late that not much is improving, and some important things might be broken beyond repair? It’s Radiohead’s most intimate album, the one with the least distance between what Thom Yorke says and what he means. He remains better than just about anyone at making something beautiful out of crushing disappointment. If that’s not an apt skill for 2016, I don’t know what is.
In the end, though, this is my Album of the Year for a simpler reason. Radiohead were my favorite band when I was 16, and for many years after that, but I realize now that at some point I stopped expecting them to make new albums of this caliber. I certainly never thought I’d hear a studio recording of “True Love Waits” this decade, or that a song so familiar could still knock me right over. Being proved wrong felt as meaningful, in its way, as anything I heard this year.
Recommended reading: My review from May, and this tweet from later that afternoon.
2. Frank Ocean, Blonde (Boys Don’t Cry)
When I told a friend this summer how much I was loving the new Frank Ocean, he laughed and said something like “Of course you do. It’s basically a Radiohead album.” There’s an argument to be made that Blonde is Frank’s Kid A, down to the way it plunges into a weird limbo around its halfway point. (“Nikes” is “Everything in Its Right Place,” “White Ferrari” is “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” “Facebook Story” is “Treefingers” … I could go on.) It can be a hard album to listen to in order, and he seems to want it that way: You think you know where you’re going, then he smacks you in the head with something else. But like Kid A, the album uses those jarring detours to intensify the mood of the tracks around them, to spectacular effect. When he lets you in on his internal melody, you hold your breath.
At its core, Blonde is a ghost story: It’s about the ways we romanticize our past selves, and the challenges this can pose to living in the present. He knows “We’ll never be those kids again,” but he can’t stop thinking about what it was like when we were. That same unresolved, seductive quality has kept me coming back to this album again and again since its release.
Recommended reading: Essays by Rachel Handler and Doreen St. Félix, plus the other pieces linked here.
3. Mitski, Puberty 2 (Dead Oceans)
Mitski sharpened her songwriting and upped her ambition this year in all the ways I hoped she would after 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek — a strong record that nonetheless sounded at times like a first draft of something bigger. Well, here it is. There’s not a single wasted gesture on Puberty 2, whose scenes unfold with such quiet control that the effect when she leans into a wild, surging chorus never fails to floor me. If Dylan can win a Nobel for “Desolation Row” (and rightly so), Mitski deserves some high literary honor for the opening one-two punch of “Happy” and “Dan the Dancer,” where a pair of unequal relationships shed unexpected light on each other. Nor does she ease up the stakes after that, or at any point in Puberty 2’s taut 31-minute running time. No one in indie rock is creating art this stunningly focused, this fiercely human, right now. Listening to Mitski gives me hope for the future.
Recommended reading: Essays by Hazel Cills and Eric Torres.
4. Rihanna, Anti (Def Jam)
The year’s most exceptional pop album came from someone I used to think of as an elite singles artist. It’s been easy to fall back into that habit in the months since Anti’s release — easy to remember Rihanna’s 2016 as “Needed Me” and “Work” and “This Is What You Came For,” all of which have done heroic work on the charts. But those songs tell an incomplete story. Taken as a whole, Anti advances Rihanna as one of modern pop’s most compelling characters, with none of the occasional anonymity of her earlier hits. You know exactly who she is when you listen to this album: She’s self-assured, over it, proud of her complications. Even her drunk-dials are aspirational. The layers of confidence and vulnerability in her performance are anything but phoned-in — for lack of a better word, she sounds real. Whether or not she ever makes an album this consistent again, right now she’s on a remarkable creative high.
Recommended reading: Essays by Meaghan Garvey, Doreen St. Félix, and Sinead Stubbins.
5. Car Seat Headrest, Teens of Denial (Matador)
It’s rare for an artist to make back-to-back appearances in my annual top 10, in part because few people can generate that many great ideas in under two years. That’s not a problem for Will Toledo, who seems to write future-classic choruses the way others tweet. Last year’s excellent Teens of Style won me over by synthesizing tricks learned from Brian Wilson, Michael Stipe, Robert Pollard, and other 20th-century sages. This year, he surprised me with a new sound that’s entirely his own. Practically every other song on Teens of Denial is a show-stopping epic. “1937 State Park,” “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia,” “Cosmic Hero,” “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” — lesser artists would bullshit their way into an entire album off of one song that good, but Toledo keeps 'em coming, one spiritually searching crescendo after another.
Recommended reading: Sasha Geffen’s interview with Will Toledo.
6. David Bowie, Blackstar (ISO / Columbia)
There was nothing beautiful about David Bowie’s death in January from liver cancer, a cruel and impatient killer that I am sorry to have some family experience with. But his final album is flat-out gorgeous, as much of a masterpiece today as it was in those shocking days last winter. Like every great Bowie LP, it’s a concept album about the rich irony of being trapped inside David Bowie’s mortal body, with the twist that the old cage might actually rattle free this time, and then what? It’s a letter to the unknown and an elegy for us earthlings, themes which it shares with Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker and other farewell notes. But unlike any of them, Blackstar is uniquely hell-bent on pushing forward into the new. There are ways in which a dying Englishman got closer than anyone this year to picking up where Flying Lotus’ and Kendrick Lamar’s cosmic voyages of 2014 and 2015 left off. That’s absurd and wonderful, and very Bowie.
Recommended reading: Rob Sheffield’s superb 'On Bowie,’ and Brian Hiatt’s Rolling Stone feature on Bowie’s final years, to which I contributed a small reporting assist.
7. Solange, A Seat at the Table (Saint Heron)
If Solange had chosen to release a short EP composed of “Weary,” “Cranes in the Sky,” and “Mad” — her elegant dialectical trio about the emotional costs of oppression — that would have been enough for a spot on my ballot. When your Side A begins with three songs that brilliant, the rest is icing. But the other songs and interludes on A Seat at the Table are much more than that: They add specificity and context to her vision, making this one of the year’s most rewarding albums for repeat listening. It helps, too, that it’s such a musically cohesive set, going deep on a warm shade of neo-soul that’s one of my favorite sounds in the world. On many days in this wearying, maddening fall, this felt like the only record that made sense.
Recommended reading: Doreen St. Félix’s review.
8. Saba, Bucket List Project (self-released)
9. Jamila Woods, HEAVN (Closed Sessions)
In some ways, these two young Chicago poets are complementary opposites. Saba’s rhymes rush forward in double time while Jamila Woods lingers lovingly on each jazzy phrase; she’s into mantras and minimalism, he’s a loquacious narrator. But both of them are interested in the complex weight of hope, and they’re working on parallel planes of lived experience. While the two albums are more than worthy on their own, together they provide a vibrant portrait of America at a crossroads. The highlight is Woods’ “Blk Girl Soldier,” a radical anthem that Saba co-produced: “Look at what they did to my sisters, last century, last week,” she pleads. I’ve returned to both artists often through the year, wishing for their words to resound in an uncaring nation.
Recommended reading: Essays by Doreen St. Félix and Tirhakah Love.
10. Kaytranada, 99.9% (XL)
Another attractive option in times as grim as these is to turn up the beat and tune out everything else, at least for a while. Kaytranada met that need this year with style and grace. Charismatic strangers waltz through 99.9%, but it’s always Kay’s show, and his vocal guests often sound more comfortable here than they do on their own albums. He’s such a gifted producer that I couldn’t help armchair-A&R-ing him into imaginary sessions with half the other artists in this Top 10. If his next album doesn’t feature Frank Ocean, Thom Yorke, or Rihanna, it’ll be a small shame. In the meantime, we’ve got this album, which delivered more pure pleasure per second in 2016 than any other. Maybe that means it should have been my Number 1? I’ll be busy listening to “Glowed Up” on repeat until I figure it out.
Recommended reading: Doreen St. Félix’s review.
dededos
origamiaround
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
izzy806
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
areudirty
