The 20 Best Albums of the 2010s (So Far) (original) (raw)

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The end of 2014 also meant the end of the first half of the 2010s, a decade thus far marked by unforgettable full-lengths in a variety of genres. Although the past five years have included a…

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift poses at the Guess Portrait Studio during 2013 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2013 in Toronto, Canada. Larry Busacca/GI

The end of 2014 also meant the end of the first half of the 2010s, a decade thus far marked by unforgettable full-lengths in a variety of genres. Although the past five years have included a wealth of unbelievable albums, these 20 were the ones that we could not stop playing, the song collections that have defined this decade and will bring their influences in the back half of the 2010s.

Check out what the Billboard.com staff chose as the 20 best albums of the 2010s so far by clicking the link below!

Lana Del Rey, Born To Die
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No one sounded like Lana Del Rey when she released Born To Die. She mixed and matched sounds and styles at will, with girl-group pop and martial hip-hop beats rubbing against string sections and guitar lines that channeled ’60s westerns. Somehow Del Rey knit it all together with her swooning delivery and lyrics that might have been pulled at random from B-grade noir films.

James Blake, James Blake
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James Blake helped invent a genre — a strange musical splinter cell that incorporated the broken angst of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, hollow dubstep, and glacial electronics. Now the world is crowded with his followers, but few have matched his alluring combination of minimalism, processed-falsetto, and ghostly soul.

Mumford & Sons 'Sigh No More'
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Would this decade’s mini-folk revival have happened without Mumford & Sons’ debut album, Sigh No More? Quietly released in the U.S. in February 2010 and humbly debuting at No. 127 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the folk opus continued to gain momentum in the years to follow thanks to epic, undeniable sing-alongs like “Little Lion Man” and “The Cave.” Sigh No More is stacked with ornate melodies that whisper to the listener and beg to be replayed, as well as anthemic choruses that have been blared across festival fields in the years following the album’s release.

Jason Aldean, "My Kinda Party"
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If you skim Jason Aldean’s catalogue, you’ll find chest-thumping tracks along the lines of “Hicktown” and stylistic boundary-pushers like his version of “Dirt Road Anthem” — the song that made country radio safe for hip-hop. But Aldean’s albums tell a different story. My Kinda Party is full of sturdy songs relying on traditional country tropes: guitars, close harmonies, intimate and conflicted examinations of small-town life. Who says you can’t push a genre in new directions and hold down its center at the same time?

Lorde, "Pure Heroine"
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Lorde captivated U.S. audiences the moment we heard her admit, “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh,” but the New Zealand teenager’s debut album, Pure Heroine, proved that she had much more to offer than one lament about never being royal. Pure Heroine exists in the darkly lit club scene often visited by the xx, but its protagonist is observing rather than imbibing, trying to decipher love and land at an age when most are attempting to get their SAT scores up to snuff. By the time album closer “A World Alone” completed its moving portrait of intimacy in a cold world, it was clear that Lorde’s first artistic statement had been fully realized — and that an enduring new star had been born.

Disclosure, "Settle"
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In recent years, dance music has struggled to be both commercially successful and critically respected. The brothers in Disclosure get to have it both ways on their debut album, a savvy updating of club sounds from the ’90s and early ’00s. These boys aren’t just about the beat — Settle also shows their keen ear for talented vocalists, as the track list reads like a who’s who for the next generation of premier English singers: Jessie Ware, Sam Smith, Aluna Francis, Jamie Woon.

Justin Timberlake, "The 20/20 Experience"
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The great thing about The 20/20 Experience is how unexpected it was — not just in terms of Justin Timberlake’s long-awaited return to popular music, but in terms of its sonic DNA. The steely allure of “Sexyback” and his status as a single male each years behind him, Timberlake came back as a lovesick adult, bouncing old-school soul ideas off of his best bud Timbaland and writing a modern-day symphony for his beloved, Jessica Biel, that stretched for over an hour. We all grow up, but few do so as stylishly as JT.

Kacey Musgraves "Same Trailer Different Park"
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In the last two decades, country has moved into the mainstream step by step, with help from Garth Brooks, LeAnn Rimes, Shania Twain, and Taylor Swift. These artists helped open the door; Musgraves burst through it with Same Trailer, Different Park, which caused a slow-growing sensation and resulted in a best new artist Grammy nomination. The tolerance-preaching “Follow Your Arrow” nabbed the headlines, but the album is a cohesive unit, carefully constructed, immaculately produced, and gorgeously sung.

Taylor Swift, ‘1989’ (2014)
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Red is the album that all Swift’s subsequent releases must be measured against. She never needed to make an official announcement about leaving country for pop; on Red, she straddled both with ease. Most surprising of all, she pushed both forms in new directions on “I Knew You Were Trouble.,” a glorious concoction of pop, country, and dubstep that remains Swift’s most daring artistic moment.

Vampire Weekend, "Modern Vampires of the City"
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On the one hand, Vampire Weekend’s third album is an experiment: with its reliance on pitch shifting, darker tones and the first appearance of an outside producer (Ariel Rechtshaid), Modern Vampires of the City forges a bold new path. On the other hand, Modern Vampires finds the band doing what it has always done: crafting effervescent pop music, with Ezra Koenig’s voice radiating warmth and constantly squeezing syllables into undetected pockets of air. The truth is, the LP exists somewhere in the middle of those two diagnoses, as the group’s well-tested foundation was used to build an altogether enchanting new structure.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver
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Whereas the songs of Bon Iver’s majestic debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, were written in a cabin and never intended to be shared, the 10 tracks on Bon Iver sound like they were written for the world, each unfurling their hushed undertones and evolving into universally affecting chants. Justin Vernon’s gentle quiver was paired with Bon Iver’s most expansive production to date, offering hymns (“Holocene”) and horn-driven soft-rock (“Beth/Rest”) that somehow coexisted pristinely. Like the nature scene composed on its album cover, Bon Iver deserves to be admired, bathed in, and appreciated for its unyielding beauty.

Daft Punk, "Random Access Memories"
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Daft Punk belongs to a very select group of artists successful enough to pretend that the last 15 years of declining record sales and recording budgets never happened. Luckily for listeners, they don’t squander the opportunities at their disposal, and Random Access Memories is as ambitious as any album in recent memory. Daft Punk famously imported session players from many of the great pop records of the ’80s, and they introduced a whole new generation to the endlessly inventive guitar playing of Nile Rodgers. For that alone, we should thank them.

Jay Z & Kanye West, Watch The Throne
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Every aging rocker gets the chance to record a duets album. How many established rappers get the same privilege? Just the fact that Kanye West and Jay Z were able to make this album is something to celebrate, but the great songs on it — unpredictable and self-congratulatory, reflective and over-stuffed — happen to be an added benefit.

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
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All those who claimed that rock died long ago just needed to look northward to our Canadian brethren: Arcade Fire morphed the most American of motifs, suburban malaise, into an indie-rock chorus that conquered the mainstream. From the surging, guitar-packed “Ready To Start” to the Regine Chassagne-led dance party “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” to the fist-pumping sob of “We Used To Wait,” The Suburbs showcased a grown-up version of Arcade Fire’s lost kids on 2004’s Funeral, and although they still have everyday problems, those ordinary troubles never sounded so captivating.

Drake, "Take Care"
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If you turn on the radio and flip to the hip-hop/R&B station, you’re sure to hear one of two things: a song by Drake, or a song by someone that Drake has helped out with his increasingly-legendary co-sign. Switch to country radio, and you might hear Sam Hunt, who is clearly influenced by Drake; move over to pop radio, and you’ll find Drake disciples there as well. Few artists have exerted more influence in the 2010s — he injected an unprecedented level of melody into hip-hop and helped collapse the distance between the underground and the mainstream. And the sprawling Take Care is (so far) his crown achievement.

Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city
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“If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?” Kendrick Lamar asks on “Poetic Justice,” from his towering 2012 debut album. Aside from the striking image and internal rhyme, the line offers Lamar as that flower — a hyper-intelligent, sensitive soul who has survived the harrowing mechanics of gang violence. good kid, m.A.A.d city boasts excellent rhymes from one of hip-hop’s most promising new stars, but makes the upper reaches of this list because of its riveting storytelling: a Möbius strip that builds Kendrick up into a wild child freestyling in a backseat and breaks him down to a lost kid pleading to have his life mean something, the album has no dishonest moves.

Frank Ocean 'Channel Orange'
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Channel Orange marked Frank Ocean as the first post-Drake soul man. This means he’s happy to write a track for elite stars or to release a barely-finished song on the internet, to channel the gravity of Stevie Wonder and Mary J. Blige or to write a goofy track about Forrest Gump. And he’s as comfortable criticizing his own love as he is expressing it. Following the head-turning Nostalgia, Ultra mixtape, Channel Orange arrived on a wave of hype, and surpassed the wildest of expectations.

Adele, 21
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21 may be about a breakup, but Adele’s sophomore album represents the moment that the world fell in love with the big-voiced Brit — and for good reason. The follow-up to 19 is bookended by two supreme singles, “Rolling In The Deep” and “Someone Like You,” but every second in between is just as essential, which is why 21 became one of this decade’s biggest phenomenons from a sales standpoint. People needed to own the stomping soul of “Rumour Has It,” the broken plea of “Don’t You Remember,” the prolonged piano strut of “One And Only”; and although Adele has been endlessly compared to various U.K. pop figures, she proved herself to be as singular on her second album.

Beyonce, Beyonce
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The first revelation of December 13, 2013: Beyonce had just released a new album, without any warning, on iTunes. The second revelation of December 13, 2013 (or very soon after that): Beyonce has just released the best album of her career. Following the deservedly acclaimed but commercially disappointing 4, Beyonce went back into the lab under cover of darkness and returned with a blockbuster, a complex full-length detailing her status as a mother, wife, woman and icon. Beyonce was called a “visual album” because she packaged the LP with a music video for each song, but the images of sex, love, pleasure and pain within the songs also make the album Beyonce’s most evocative to date.

Kanye West, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’
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Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is brimming with unforgettable singles like “Power,” “Runaway,” “All of the Lights” and “Monster,” yet West’s fifth album is much more than its collection of searing beats and nasty guest appearances. MBDTF is the complete, utterly candid portrayal of a polarizing musical genius, a man unafraid to curse off SNL and equally unflinching in his admission that he is lost in the world. Many moments on MBDTF stun, from the opulence of the “Devil In A New Dress” beat to the “What’s a black Beatle anyway, a fucking roach?” line in “Gorgeous,” but the sum of these parts is otherworldly.

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