The 50 Best Albums of 2017
From Fever Ray to Kendrick to King Krule, the album as an art form took on new resonance this year. These are the best of the best.
Though our culture of fast distraction seems hell-bent on crushing the album beneath its endless scroll, the form remains a pillar of art, something to aspire to. In music, when you want to make a statement, you make an album. Still. And right now, those statements are perhaps more varied and fluid than ever before. In the following list, you will find full-length declarations of self-worth sung through the languages of R&B and goth, political rebellion both rapped and screamed, musical memoirs backed by beats and guitars, and multidimensional dreams of escapism by way of pulsing synthesizers. Here are the 50 best albums of 2017.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Yaeji contains multitudes. On her first two EPs, the New York City-based producer flirts with hip-hop cadences and pounding club house beats. She recites hypnotizing lyrics about the most mundane observations, switching effortlessly between English and Korean to take advantage of the melodic structures of each language. And she raps in a combination of whisper and spoken word, positioning her voice as both intimate and distant. With each new song, Yaeji sounds more comfortable embracing the binaries that exist within her identity and her music. On EP2, she reveals the full spectrum of her interiority, seamlessly moving between uneasiness and confidence. At 24, she seems to understand how opposites aren’t necessarily contrary, and that they’re often interconnected. –Michelle Kim
Listen: Yaeji, “raingurl”
Open Mike Eagle has spent this decade distinguishing himself as one of the greatest underground rappers in Los Angeles. On his fifth solo record, the tightly wound Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, Eagle reverts back to a childhood in Chicago spent partly in the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, at one time the largest block of public housing projects in the country. Over 12 songs, Eagle explores our relationship to physical spaces and traces the slow, accretive drip of American racism as it flows through city councils and federal housing policy. He’s an inimitable writer: On “Brick Body Complex,” one building is personified as a battered man. There are tantalizing moments of fresh air, but the album largely captures the claustrophobic sound of a society as it crumbles. –Paul A. Thompson
On Rocket, the singer-songwriter formerly known as Alex G employs lovingly recorded violin and piano on tender, country-leaning jaunts. He also cranks up the distortion and bass for the Death Grips-adjacent screamathon “Brick” and cloaks his voice in a misty Auto-Tune effect on the wistful “Sportstar.” Those two tracks, which rank among the strangest and best he has recorded, arrive side-by-side smack in the middle of the album, breaking up its gentler moments with a blast of surrealism. Alex G’s songs have always had more swimming beneath the surface than they show on first play, but Rocket sees him broadening his formal range to new, bizarre, beautiful peaks. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: (Sandy) Alex G, “Sportstar”
Brimming with bangers, ballads, and boss-bitch aphorisms, Kehlani’s sublime studio debut uses pop-kissed R&B to sing the story of a relationship. But the Oakland native isn’t given to desperate, tear-soggy pleas. Instead, the 22-year-old offers odes filled with wisdom, self-confidence, hard-won vulnerability, and lyrics that dissect the psychology of her romantic affairs. The all-class effort simply sounds amazing, too: From jazzy two-stepper “Keep On” to the glossy “Distraction” and delightfully giddy “Get Like,” the album’s sleek brightness is heightened by the contrast of Kehlani’s husky vocals. With all due respect to the album’s title, the singer sums herself up best on the catchy “CRZY”: “If I gotta be a bitch, I’ma be a bad one.” Clearly. –Rebecca Haithcoat
Listen: Kehlani, “CRZY”
Dust is Laurel Halo’s loosest offering yet, orbiting out from its oddball-pop epicenters to the point of near-chaos. The producer’s music has always been exploratory, knitting together synth-pop, Detroit techno, and jazz with a singular, continuous voice, and that process feels particularly gleeful here. Her vocals and lyrics are, just like the instrumentals into which they’re woven, another site of play: The voicings of Halo and her collaborators—notably Klein and Lafawndah on the standout single “Jelly”—recall as much the experiments of Meredith Monk as they do a more tightly laced pop single. Meanwhile, her stylized lyrics lean into nouveau-Beatnik territory as she asks questions like, “Did this ever happen/Do you ever happen?” over stretched-out dub. But even if Halo dips unapologetically into weirder and more challenging zones than she has before, Dust is also, on some level, a genuinely fun album—one that bears the stamp of its creator’s limitless curiosity. –Thea Ballard
Listen: Laurel Halo, “Do U Ever Happen”
With a few simple changes—cranking the volume, singing a little louder, adding drums—Girlpool made the leap from a promising indie rock band to an essential one with their second album, Powerplant. Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad retain all the appeal of their signature saw-toothed vocal harmonies and surrealist nursery rhymes here, but they deploy these strengths for more ambitious endeavors. The writing is haunting, funny, and intimate—see: “I faked global warming just to get close to you”—and each song on Powerplant builds up its own fully fleshed out world of subtle gestures, heartbreaks, and emotional thrills. When tasked with confronting how big and scary the world gets the second you grow up, Girlpool did more than just meet the dangers head-on. They conquered them. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Girlpool, “It Gets More Blue”
Whereas many of her contemporaries use analog synth technology to pursue bleep-bloop abstraction, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith takes her weapon of choice—a relatively rare, ergonomically beautiful 1970s system named the Buchla Music Easel—and weaves it into a rich, colorful tapestry of sound.
The Kid, her fourth full-length album, is a concept piece of sorts, its four sides tracing the passage of a human from childhood to old age. “In the World” and “I Am Curious, I Care” are whorling fractals of sound that find Smith pondering themes of innocence, experience, and life’s interconnectedness, her voice multi-tracked into an otherworldly chorus. At its best, The Kid feels like a profound embrace of life, even when, by the end, it’s staring death square in the face. –Louis Pattison
Lil B has built a career on quantity, and his albums are usually defined by cherry-picked highlights. Black Ken breaks this cycle. It is still abundant, stuffed with an hour and 39 minutes of the Based God rapping and singing over self-produced electro-funk beats, but the album is also a defining statement throughout. It feels difficult to nail down a specific hit, partially because he expertly cycles through so many modes. Lil B is sometimes the undeniable party starter, distilling club bangers into easily shouted catchphrases about going dumb and turning up. He’s also quietly introspective, reflecting on his unique position in the culture as an internet icon who is famous but not rich. Elsewhere he’s aggressive, offering the ultimate kiss-off anthem with “Bad Mf” and airing out his beef with Soulja Boy on “The Real Is Back.” This thing is the total package—even the skits are funny as hell. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Lil B, “The Real Is Back”
On Infinite Worlds, Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko creates her own brand of indie rock out of journeys both literal and figurative. Many of the New York-based artist’s tracks mix French—which she spoke in her home country of Cameroon—with English. This amalgamation of language is familiar to those who are torn between two worlds, struggling to remember old practices in a new culture. From “Fear & Force,” which finds her hiding in small spaces, to the interlude “Mal à L’aise,” which gets its title from the French word for “discomfort,” Vagabon faces dark emotions head-on. The central questions of the album are about home, how we attempt—and sometimes fail—to find it in new places and in the people we love. Vagabon doesn’t find a definitive answer to these questions, but her process of searching is a joy to observe. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Vagabon, “Fear & Force”
Zola Jesus’ Nika Danilova personifies a certain kind of anxious dread in her music, one steeped in a goth-pop lineage that resonates through catharsis. Okovi, her fifth full-length, is a return to the singer’s more avant roots after the pop feint of 2014’s Taiga. Its operatic balance of dark ambient iciness, wavy post-industrial bass, and blood-drawing string sections is immediately gripping, barreling over any attempts at casual half-listening. But when those production touches underpin boldly straightforward reckonings with mortality, depression, and powerlessness, there’s no concealing the intent. Through her defiant voice, Danilova is searching for a place in the world before the afterlife claims her. –Nate Patrin
Listen: Zola Jesus, “Exhumed”