The Top 50 Albums of 2016

40. Pinegrove – Cardinal
(Run For Cover)

When I listen to Cardinal, I can’t help but remember the feeling of a bus ride. The feeling of nostalgia that comes with an ending trip lingering and mixing with the anxiety and tired resignation of travel, of a time in the near future where my mind will be firing around everyday needs and worries that were briefly left behind but for now a last moment of reprieve. I am nowhere, suspended between point A and B. That is not to say that the memory is unpleasant (or Cardinal, for that matter) but nameless, existing in undefined spaces. On “Cadmium,” Evan Stephens Hall sings “Say what it is / It’s so impossible / But if I just say what it is / It tends to sublimate away.” This essence, this impossibility, the ephemeral, this is what Cardinal is concerned with exploring. It may seem futile at first—how can you capture the uncapturable?—but it manifests as a strikingly beautiful and vulnerable collection, a meditation on distance both physical or temporal. On “Size Of The Moon,” Hall is a ghost haunting a bedroom (and there’s probably a dozen youtube videos of him playing an acoustic version in one) filled with desperate questions and regret, “Old Friends” and “New Friends” to people forward facing and in the past, “Visiting” a longing to inhabit the same space as someone again. Perhaps it is no coincidence that when I picture this bus ride I am always moving through New Jersey, not too close but not far from home, near where Hall is from. Perhaps something lies in the mixture of car lights and street lamps refracting through windows, planes above and stars higher even, forest obscured in shadows just beyond the road. – Matt Perloff

39. Esperanza Spalding – Emily’s D+Evolution
(Concord)

Spalding’s fifth album is her masterpiece. The prodigious, multiple-Grammy winner has long been one of the leading lights of the contemporary jazz world, but on Emily’s D+Evolution she is working as if she’s never heard of musical genre. At certain points, you can trace ’70s R&B, progressive rock, jazz fusion and 21^st century dream pop all working together simultaneously, and yet it doesn’t sound like any of the above. More instructive comparisons would be with other artists that have reached equivalent levels of independent discovery —think, perhaps of late ’70s Joni Mitchell, or Prince at the peak of his ’80s powers. It may be the result of her flirtations with mainstream success in the past that she has adopted an alter-ego to perform through on this album—namely Emily, which is her middle name—but this is unmistakably the same Esperanza that we already knew, just with a few more years of exponential learning and growth. It is every bit as forward focused as anything being produced by Flying Lotus, Janelle Monae or Kendrick Lamar, and she is deserving of the same success. – Max Pilley

38. SubRosa – For This We Fought the Battle of Ages
(Profound Lore)

At turns intimate, grandiose, bucolic, melancholy, bitter, dour, and rapturous, SubRosa’s newest record For This We Fought The Battle Of Ages shows all the potential colors of doom and post-metal. Not many bands have survived the great collapse of post-rock and post-metal and those that have had to find some other, greater transcendent thing to justify their survival; for SubRosa, it is not the oft-cited violin in their musical repertoire, but instead how developed, evocative and dynamic their arrangements prove to be. This is as powerful and angry and forlorn and wicked and lovely as any metal record has any right to be and proves, again, the creative capacity for extreme and heavy music. Let’s see if they can top a masterwork like this. – Langdon Hickman

37. Khemmis – Hunted
(20 Buck Spin)

Hunted is electrifying. On their second album, the Denver doom metal quartet channeled classic rock and metal titans such as Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden, and in turn gave rise to the year’s most infectious riffs and melodies. Hunted was the result of a total group effort from Phil, Ben, Zach, and Dan during the album’s creation, and it’s wonderfully reflected in its five songs. Every moment is focused, exacted and executed in breathtaking fashion. – Cody Davis

36. Anohni – HOPELESSNESS
(Secretly Canadian)

Anohni has built a noteworthy catalog around desolate, minimally accompanied piano ballads, often focusing on her personal struggles with depression and gender identity. Needless to say, her move to an electronics-based solo project was quite a shock. But even more electrifying was her success within the genre as she co-produced jarringly innovative electro-pop alongside Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. The result is something akin to a sci-fi film soundtrack, but with soaring choruses and breathtaking vocal performances from the evocative singer. HOPELESSNESS also finds Anohni pushing herself as a lyricist, using her platform to critique patriarchal governments, climate change deniers, neo-liberalism and societal ills. It’s a heavy listen, but with some of the most beautiful and engaging sounds I’ve heard on a pop album, making one of the bleakest albums of the year one of its most inspiring as well. – A.T. Bossenger

35. Nicolas Jaar – Sirens
(Other People)

Nicolas Jaar burst into the internet music bubble in 2011 with Space Is Only Noise, a statement of intent album that immediately put him among the most sought-after electronic producers in the world. But he retreated, with his collaboration with Dave Harrington as Darkside the only major work he committed to for the following few years. Five years on, Sirens marks his return, and things have changed. He is hard to pin down—there are political statements on tracks like “History Lesson,” but they are alongside a bizarrely haunting downtempo doo-wop arrangement. There are beautiful piano pieces like 11-minute opener “Killing Time,” but which also include lyrics like, “I think we’re just out of time/Said the officer to the kid/Ahmed was almost fifteen and handcuffed.” Sometimes Jaar sings in English, other times in Spanish. Sometimes he is channelling rockabilly (“Leaves”), other times quite an aggressive form of post-punk (“Three Sides of Nazareth”). Each one of the six tracks on Sirens offers its own surprises, and represents an entirely different strand of musical history. Jaar is one of few who is comfortable to move among them all so freely, knowing that through his prism they will become something alluring and original. – Max Pilley

34. Diarrhea Planet – Turn to Gold
(Infinity Cat)

Certain things hold true for rock music forever: 1) The louder the better; 2) Distortion is a good thing; and, most importantly, 3) electric guitars are holy. Too often rock of the indie persuasion can err away from these truths, which we find to be self-evident, preferring instead a folk- and pop-indebted literary air. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but Diarrhea Planet reveals the power of reversing course on that matter, employing four guitars and a nearly constant bevy of lead guitar work, both harmonized and not. In doing, they reveal that guitars don’t have to lose a melodic or emotional sensibility, and that the power of music has always been in sound and not in words; the lyrics and vocals, they’re good, Replacements-style robust indie rock, but it’s the music where Diarrhea Planet let it shine, unflinchingly, for the duration. May more bands learn the power of this lesson. – Langdon Hickman

33. Preoccupations – Preoccupations
(Jagjaguwar)

The biggest news about Preoccupations early on in 2016 was that they had changed their name from the previous, more controversial moniker Viet Cong, first, and that they had released a new album, second. After shaking off the remnants of the bad press they’d received from a poorly chosen name, however, Preoccupations earned the opportunity to have a fresh start, offering a reminder of their prowess as a darkly innovative post-punk group. Their self-titled sophomore album (debut? It’s getting confusing…) is a step forward from their Viet Cong debut, mired less in intense shards of noise as it is a compelling blanket of gloom, as well as a newfound sense of pop accessibility. “Anxiety” and “Degraded” are among the band’s most immediate tracks to date, while the 11-minute “Memory” showcases their outsized ambition. It’s the bleakest of viewpoints packaged into a punk dance party. “We’re all dead inside,” sings Matt Flegel on “Stimulation. “We’re all gonna die.” That shouldn’t sound like a hit song, but here we are. – Jeff Terich

32. Swans – The Glowing Man
(Young God)

I admire The Glowing Man. As the final chapter in a trilogy which has long escaped words—if I were a religious person, I’d call it the voice of God—it has the burden of being the definitive entry. And, although it may not be that (not that I doubt their ability, but that’d be quite the task!), if you need an argument for why it’s still worth every merit you can throw, try “The Cloud of Forgetting” into “The Cloud of Unknowing” for the most breathtaking experience. – Ben Braunstein

31. Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide to Earth
(Atlantic)

Sturgill Simpson can no longer be reductively analyzed by a quick comparison to the classic country acts to which his music bears surface similarities. His sound, while maintaining certain genre traditions in instrumentation, takes on a broader range of influences (soul, chamber pop) on his third album A Sailor’s Guide To Earth. And the songwriting is deep-cutting, introspective and occasionally uncomfortable in a way that both Nashville and the alt-country Simpson is often associated with rarely achieve. Case in point: While numerous country acts could’ve written a rip-roarer like “You Can Have The Crown” from Simpson’s debut High Top Mountain, many couldn’t manage the Sailor’s Guide track “Breaker’s Roar,” a steel-guitar hymn about the fear of clinical depression.

The two conceptual conceits behind this album—Simpson’s longform message to his newborn son and a focus on ocean/nautical imagery stemming from his Navy service—give its nine songs a uniting cohesion that previous works lacked. From the tearjerker string-laden opening of “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” to the furious fuck-authority message of “Call to Arms,” Sailor’s Guide makes for a potent exploration of family, the daily labor required to maintain love (in various forms), and the fear of losing it. This is music for grown-ass men and women—a welcome surprise from the man plenty of music writers pegged as “the LSD country guy.” – Liam Green