Top 100 Music Albums of the 2010s by FlorianJones
Anything with a write-up was in my top 50 at the end of the decade, in December of 2019.
As of today (June 14, 2022), 6 of those original top 50 have dropped into 51-100. None of them have dropped off the list entirely.
- Chart updated: 06/14/2022 23:15
- (Created: 11/26/2014 05:57).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
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Over twenty years into their careers, new Low music comes with expectations. You don’t exist in the music scene for that long without having a reputation of some sort or another, and since the beginning Low have been known to be quiet. Double Negative’s first impression was that of an outlier. This is music that was clearly intended to be loud. The production is heavy with static and feedback to the point that it often drowns out vocalists Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. These are the kind of sounds that make you question the condition of your speaker cones. Sonically, Double Negative appears to be a sharp left turn for Low, but ideologically the production is a perfect fit. Making music dubbed (to the band’s dismay) slowcore, Low has always been methodical, subdued, and prolonged. Their music asserts that negative space is an instrument unto itself. On previous recordings, that negative space was silence. But silence as an ideal is never perfect. As evidenced by John Cage, silence becomes whatever surrounds you – the hum of a fan or the cough of a passerby. Double Negative is a new interpretation of that silence. Here the spaces are filled with excess. We’re hearing chaff typically left on the cutting room floor – the sound of maxed out monitors and guitar strings left to vibrate between the notes. Loops of sound swell and collapse with each beat. Low find expressive beauty in this noise, and moments of clarity hit with greater catharsis than ever before. [First added to this chart: 04/26/2020]
Why High Violet? Of all visible color, violet’s wavelength is the shortest, or highest frequency: an interesting detail that probably has no bearing on this album’s title. Due to the historical rarity of violet dyes, violet has long been perceived as a high-class color. Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but The National have always written about class. They aren’t a built from nothing success story. They have degrees. They had desk jobs. These men are white collar Americans. Like most of us, they found that world disaffecting, but like few of us ever will, they managed to leave it behind. Yet, sometimes making it as a band isn’t enough. Inadequacy, emptiness, sorrow – those feelings can stick with you, and they’re woven throughout The National’s career – here they are most clearly laid out on Sorrow. Not five minutes into High Violet, Matt Berninger hits us with “Sorrow found me when I was young. Sorrow waited. Sorrow won.” It’s a monumental moment: a complete loss of hope. Given the band’s decision to perform this one song for six hours straight as part of an installation at the MoMA PS1 (later released in the box set A Lot of Sorrow) I take it the band understands both the weight of the song and the inherent humor in its melodrama. High Violet isn’t all gloom, but The National understands catharsis. In order to feel release, you must first feel confined, as though everything has been lost. That point is Sorrow. But fittingly, the brightest song on High Violet is closing track Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks. At this point in the album, they’ve mourned it all, and all that’s left is to cry. It’s the final release. [First added to this chart: 01/20/2015]
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The recent release of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen is said to be the conclusion of a trilogy, a trilogy that started six years ago with Push The Sky Away. Treating albums as a trilogy is an intriguing concept – a concept that feels both cinematic and literary. Those traits are fitting for Cave, a renaissance man most well known for music, who also has extensive experience in cinema and literature. To a degree, the trilogy was derailed after tragedy befell Cave’s family, leaving the ghost of his late son hanging over the Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. Push The Sky Away is a predominantly bleak affair (most Bad Seeds albums are), but in comparison to its successors, it feels almost playful. Cave has an incomparable knack for making profound statements that on initial glance read as a joke, and that’s on full display in Push The Sky Away. Nick Cave always sounds divorced from time, so when he pulls in such distinctly contemporary reference points as Wikipedia or Hannah Montana, it catches the listener off guard. It’s almost unnerving, and it feels like the only response is to laugh a little. There’s no one else that can do this the way Cave can.
What slight hint of levity there is on Push The Sky Away is understandably lost on the other albums in the trilogy, but they still feel connected by their aesthetic similarities. Each of these three albums is progressively more minimal than the last. The extremes this is taken to on Ghosteen seem logical given the spoken word nature of Cave’s grieving, but that path was set long before he had reason to grieve. The nine songs on Push The Sky Away have flourishes here and there, but in each case, the song is driven by a steady and unwavering backbone right from the start. These very skeletal foundations are slow, and often quiet, but heavy with inertia. It feels as though they’re backed by the unstoppable weight of a freight train. It takes confidence to leave something like that alone. It’d be an easy thing to underestimate, but building too much on top would quickly degrade the structural elegance. Cave delivers these simple pieces with aplomb. Once again, he makes work unlike anyone else, because he is unlike anyone else. [First added to this chart: 06/22/2017]
Death has often found itself at the center of Nick Cave’s work. As far as I can tell, there’s never been much rhyme or reason to this repeated motif (beyond a presumably innate fascination with death) that is, until Skeleton Tree. In July of 2015, Cave’s fifteen-year-old son Arthur stumbled off a cliff to his death. While these eight songs were written before this tragedy, several ad-libs and overdubs were recorded in the aftermath, and there’s no denying the shadow Arthur’s passing casts over the proceedings. Many of Nick Cave’s dreariest works are notable for savage and unruly characters rendered through guttural howls. Here his vocals spill listlessly over the music. He is consumed by grief. Both musically and lyrically, Skeleton Tree is awash with an unsettling sorrow, but not entirely without redemption. The penultimate Distant Sky is a much needed spot of warmth. The harrowing duet seems to frame the characters as a husband and wife pushing forward in search of peace, leading to the closing line “Soon the children will be rising, will be rising. This is not for our eyes.” The lyric is ambiguous, but Cave’s female accompaniment lends it an air of hopeful confidence. [First added to this chart: 06/22/2017]
I still don’t have any need to talk about this album. Phil Elverum experienced a trauma that many people will likely never comprehend. In the wake of that trauma, he wrote. Prior to releasing A Crow Looked At Me, Phil admitted that he doesn’t consider this album music. Maybe he doesn’t even consider it art, but he felt compelled to make it. There’s a tremendous generosity to his actions. Not many people would open up to the public about such things. Phil did, and his work speaks for itself more than any writer ever could. [First added to this chart: 10/24/2017]
Much of what I’ve written for this list is retrospective. That’s the point of it after all. I’m looking back on the decade, and in some cases that means looking back nearly the whole ten years. In the case of Miss Universe, it means looking back less than ten months. This album is still too fresh to contextualize retrospectively, and I can’t frame it in the context of a discography either, because this is the discography. Miss Universe is Nilüfer Yanya’s debut album, and it’s just about as fully realized as debuts come. The cover is unassuming (not much more than two small photographs amidst a broad swathe of beige) but the music paints Nilüfer as larger than life. These songs are big. If you didn’t know what the singles were, I reckon you’d be hard pressed to guess them. That isn’t because the choices are surprising, but because each is legitimately worthy in its own right. There’s also the question of which iteration of Nilüfer would her label see as most marketable. In pseudo-opener In My Head she’s guitar rock’s next big riff slinging virtuoso. On Tears, the album’s most jittery pop tune, guitar takes the backseat to infectiously danceable percussion. That song is immediately succeeded in the tracklisting by Monsters Underneath My Bed. Stripped of the frills found on most other tracks, Monsters Underneath My Bed serves as an elegant display of Nilüfer’s diverse vocal capacity. She flits between rich textural lows and elegant highs with incredible dexterity. Paradise and Melt take that vocal depth and place it atop a jazzy saxophone backdrop for songs that glide and swerve around the listener. As eclectic of a listen as Miss Universe is, every track still distinctly belongs to Nilüfer. These songs are undeniably hers, and that is perhaps the biggest surprise of all – she’s so fresh on the scene that she’s just now releasing a debut, and her artistic voice is already just as finely tuned as her physical one. [First added to this chart: 04/26/2020]
2011 was the year of revivalism. Painting with broad strokes, that’s a negative statement. Revivalism is typically derivative. It often presents itself in the form of rehashed concepts with utter disregard for originality. Yet, using those same broad strokes, many of the year’s best works were revivalist. Part of what sets Kaputt apart is that it’s not entirely clear what’s being revived. We’ve got almost as much saxophone as we do vocals from frontman Dan Bejar. A few minutes into Savage Night Night at the Opera, we’re treated to a short but sleek guitar solo. We’ve got backup singers sounding like the girl groups of 1960s Detroit. Downtown gives us a taste of the kind of swelling synths that brought fame to New Order. Song for America sports an adult easy listening drum beat with pride. Suicide Demo for Kara Walker opens with a charmingly beautiful flute solo. Resting at the album’s heart is a well selected title track where all these features coalesce into a swirling amalgam of everything Dan Bejar so clearly loves. On paper, Kaputt is all over the map. Bejar’s borrowing from everything sumptuous and smooth with no regard for time or place of origin, yet somehow, everything feels entirely at home. Even aspects almost doomed to feeling kitsch are elevated by Bejar’s unyielding sincerity. At the end of it all is Bay of Pigs (detail). Functioning as a deconstruction of what’s at play on the rest of the album, this nearly twelve-minute statement builds itself up from a meandering start to a bombastic conclusion, for not only the song, but the entire album. [First added to this chart: 09/11/2015]
Bon Iver’s 2007 debut was a small affair. It was a grand musical statement told predominantly in whispers by a single man left alone. The first half minute of Perth from sophomore record Bon Iver, Bon Iver could almost convince you that the ensuing album was to be the same. It wasn’t. Perth, it turns out, is one prolonged crescendo. It opens at first with a delicately strummed guitar, but before we even hear Justin Vernon’s sweet falsetto, a snare drum marches into the mix. The track builds and builds and builds. First there’s a full drum kit and electric guitars; then violin and viola, alto and bass saxophone, trumpet and French horn. According to the liner notes, over fifty instruments appear on Bon Iver, Bon Iver played by a dozen individuals – a stark contrast to the seven out of nine tracks on For Emma, Forever Ago that featured only Vernon himself. From here on out, Bon Iver is a community affair. But for all that did change, it’s remarkable what didn’t. The music is still unmistakably Bon Iver. Justin Vernon’s rich baritone and graceful falsetto multitrack through each other with ease. His lyrics are as impenetrable as ever, but their evocative nature taps into something vibrant and universal. Bon Iver has become the de facto sad white man music, but nothing precludes it from being about anybody or anything. It’s driven by feeling, and despite our varying circumstances, it’s virtually impossible to not feel something when listening. Bon Iver, Bon Iver is rich, warm, and inviting. This is as sincere and human as music gets. [First added to this chart: 01/20/2015]
When Sufjan first released samples from Carrie & Lowell, people pegged it as a return to his folk roots largely left behind on 2010’s electro-spaz-out The Age of Adz. That couldn’t have possibly been more reductive. This album is anything but a step backwards for Sufjan. While it is true that on the surface this sounds most like a return to 2004’s quietly magnificent Seven Swans, in his works from that era, Sufjan frequently veiled emotion behind biblical allegories such as The Transfiguration, or historical accounts like John Wayne Gacy Jr. Here, Sufjan doesn’t completely forego that tendency (hello John My Beloved) but he certainly cuts back. Carrie & Lowell takes its name from Sufjan’s stepfather and his recently deceased mother; a mother who abandoned him as a child due to her struggles with substance abuse and schizophrenia. As the description would suggest, this album is Sufjan at his most vulnerable. It’s the most sincere and utterly beautiful album Stevens has penned in a career defined by beauty and sincerity. [First added to this chart: 03/19/2015]
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Top 100 Music Albums of the 2010s composition
Year | Albums | % | |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | 11 | 11% | |
2011 | 6 | 6% | |
2012 | 7 | 7% | |
2013 | 5 | 5% | |
2014 | 9 | 9% | |
2015 | 15 | 15% | |
2016 | 13 | 13% | |
2017 | 12 | 12% | |
2018 | 7 | 7% | |
2019 | 15 | 15% |
Artist | Albums | % | |
---|---|---|---|
|
|||
Kendrick Lamar | 4 | 4% | |
Tame Impala | 3 | 3% | |
Frank Ocean | 3 | 3% | |
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | 2 | 2% | |
Vince Staples | 2 | 2% | |
Earl Sweatshirt | 2 | 2% | |
Angel Olsen | 2 | 2% | |
Show all |
Top 100 Music Albums of the 2010s chart changes
Biggest climbers |
---|
Up 41 from 52nd to 11th Black Up by Shabazz Palaces |
Up 34 from 82nd to 48th Reflections by Hannah Diamond |
Up 26 from 99th to 73rd Moth by Chairlift |
Biggest fallers |
---|
Down 35 from 26th to 61st Pom Pom by Ariel Pink |
Down 28 from 21st to 49th The Age Of Adz by Sufjan Stevens |
Down 24 from 48th to 72nd Benji by Sun Kil Moon |
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Other decade charts by FlorianJones
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Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
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02/17/2018 15:30 | Davy | 448 | 87/100 | |
06/28/2017 17:14 | weston | 78 | 87/100 | |
02/20/2017 19:20 | Seab | 2,018 | 93/100 | |
06/01/2015 22:53 | Applerill | 976 | 75/100 | |
04/15/2015 13:21 | andy_hunter | 87 | 88/100 |
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Nice! I agree 2015 was the strongest year so are. And I like the stuff you've thrown at the end.
Excellent Chart!
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