The Best Albums of 2015
The Top 20:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie and Lowell
1. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie and Lowell
A return to the beautiful folk music, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.
2. Tame Impala - Currents
Best psych-rock album of their career. Now with soul and R&B added to the mix. Best pure music of 2015.
3. Joanna Newsom - Divers
Most unique talent in pop music. These are startlingly beautiful, fiercely inventive songs, couched in the metaphysical, touching on the universal, born from a deeply personal place. Love her or hate her, you have to respect her.
4. Deradoorian - The Expanding Flower Planet
Expanding on Dirty Projectors’ avant gardeisms, she bravely eschews the traditional language of pop music to create her own pictures and conversations.
5. Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, funkiest album to date. All the good of Animal Collective; none of the bad
6. Arca - Mutant
Most challenging non-dance dance music of the year, Unique, abstract viewpoint that embraces strangeness, ugliness, and beauty equally.
7. Jamie XX - In Color
It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packing them tightly into a glittering ball.
8. Viet Cong - Viet Cong
With music sounding this raw, vibrant and strikingly different than most modern music, yet achingly familiar to those of us that remember the first wave of post punk, this band continues to grow and tap into something exciting.
9. Aphex Twin - Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2
More of the sophisticated, complex geniosity of RJ.
10. Eartheater RIP Chrysallis
It’s as if they had raided The Anthology of American Folk Musicbut only absorbed the songs about ghosts.
11. Sleater - Kinney -- No Cities to Love
The songs are short, taut and lethal, harking back, if anything, to their earliest albums. But they’re more complete songwriters now.
12. HEALTH - Death Magic
HEALTH’s commitment to making the brain flush dopamine through sensory overload is unfailingly undermined at every turn by their commitment to an aesthetic that’s oppressive, suffocating, bordering on malevolent.
13. Scuba - Claustrophobia
The sonics are dazzling. Rattled keys, wind chimes, rubbed wineglass rims, half-heard voices, and all manner of incidental rustle serve to make the music leap from the speakers.
14. Thee Oh Sees - Mutilator Defeated at Last
Their 14th psych-rock album packs everything they’re good at into one concentrated effort: frenetic rock, pulsating psychedelia and buoyant melodies.
15. Lakker - Tundra
Lakker weave voices in the style of sacred music into contexts where they wouldn't normally be heard. The resulting effect is spit-shined patches of perfect sonority that make the noise sound brighter, like there’s something alive inside it.
16. Deerhunter- Fading Frontier
New old school sound; tight when they need to be, loose enough to explore the cosmos. And Cox being Cos, its always smart.
17. Kurt Vile - b'lieve i'm goin down
The hardest working slacker in rock; strong humorous album slightly below Smoke Rings…
18. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit
By channeling her anxiety into shaggy, relatable and catchy songs, she’s made a compulsively listenable rock n’ roll record.
19. Milo - So the Flies Don't Come
Most interesting rapper today; which he manages to capture Nietzche-esque nihilism with the comic simplicity of the shrugging emoticon.
20. Ought - Sun Coming Down
You can hear their art school forebears - Wire, Mission of Burma, the Fall - running through their music. But its performed with an intensity and modernity that is their own.
And the 60 Runners up:
- Protomartyr - Agent Intellect
- Speedy Ortiz - Foil Dear
- Circuit des Yeux - In Plain Speech
- Six Organs of Admittance/William Tyler/ Bishop-Orcutt-Corsano, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Yo La Tengo, Caught on Tape, Bardo Pond - Parallologram comp.
- Julia Holter - Have You in My Wilderness
- Masayoshi Fujita - Apologues
- Blanck Mass - Dumb Flesh
- Bjork- Vulnicura
- Chelsea Wolfe- Abyss
- Gun Outfit - Dream All Over
- Six Organs of Admittance - Hexatic
- Pinkish Black - Bottom of the Morning
- Mount Eerie - Sauna
- Holly Herndon- Platform
- Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass
- Tom Carter - Long Time Underground
- Matana Roberts - Coin Coin chapter 3
- Earthly - Days
- Pearson Sound - Pearson Sound
- Rival Consoles- Howl
- Prurient - Frozen Niagara Falls
- Bop English - Constant Bop
- Kowloon Walled City - Grievances
- FIS - The Blue Quicksand is Going Now
- Battles - La Di Da Di
- Bell Witch - Four Phantoms
- Wrekmeister Harmonies - Night of Your Ascension
- Container - LP
- Alif - Aynama-Rtama
- Shye Ben Tzur, J. Greenwood and the Rajasthan Express - Junun
- Peacers - Peacers
- Sambra Touré - Gandadiko
- Low - Ones and Sixes
- Laura Marling - Short Movie
- Michael Chapman - Fish
- Hot Chip - Why Make Sense?
- United Bible Studies - The Ale's What Cures Ye
- Ballak Sissoko/Vincent Segal - Musique de Nuit
- Master Musicians of Bukkake - Further West Quad Cult LP
- Ghostface Killah / BADBADNOTGOOD - Sour Soul
- Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Tragedy
- Wand - 1000 Days
- Sunn 0))) - Kannon
- Garden of Worms - Idler Stories
- Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society -Automaginary
- Archy Marshall - A New Place to Drown
- Tomeka Reid Quartet - Tomeka Reid Quartet
- Rabit - In Communion
- InAeona - Force Rise the Sun
- John T. Gast - Excerpts
- Lychgate - An Antidote for the Glass Pill
- M.E.S.H. - Piteous Gate
- Hieroglyphic Being - We are not the First
- Myrkur - M
- var. - Hamiltion sdtk.
- Carter Tutti Void - f(x)
- William Parker - For Those Who Are, Still
- Jlin - Dark Energy
- Vince Staples - Summertime 06
- Yo La Tengo - Stuff Like That There Also great comp/releases this year: Elvis Costello-Unfaithful Music and Soundtrack Album, Bruce Springsteen-The Ties That Bind; The River Collection; Christian's Catch Hell-various
