Presuming plans go ahead as scheduled, the next few months look set to be a hell of a party for emo, the shorthand misnomer for rock music’s most introverted sub-sect. After a seven-year hiatus, posterboys for modern emo, My Chemical Romance, are playing stadium shows again in June. Opening for Green Day on their global tour are scene veterans Fall Out Boy and Weezer. And Hayley Williams’ forthcoming solo album, Petals For Armor, made during her time out from the multi-platinum band Paramore, looks set to propel one of the genre’s most celebrated artists even further into mainstream consciousness.
That said, if plans are scuppered, it’s hard not to think that a summer spoilt – one spent inside – is an extremely emo thing to do.
Even more so than the many youth movements and music genres nobody can quite agree on the criteria for, few if any can agree on what emo actually is. It’s long been deployed as an umbrella term for a plethora of music acts with scarcely anything in common – a shapeshifting subculture, where often the only unifier is an act’s prevalence on bringing sensitivity to the forefront of their songwriting. Aesthetically, it’s varied: some do emo with an askew fringe. Some have tattoos all over their face. Emo unites acts as disparate as Seattle-born heartbreakers Sunny Day Real Estate, mega-selling cabaret-pop act Panic! At The Disco and fallen SoundCloud rapper Lil’ Peep.
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Complicating things further, few bands really want to be called emo anyway. Certainly not My Chemical Romance’s singer Gerard Way, who, with the music video for his band’s megahit “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”, set a blueprint for emo’s image of pale face, raven-black hair and perhaps a red tie, for almost 20 years. He told an interviewer in 2007: “I think emo is f***ing garbage, it’s bullshit. I think there’s bands that unfortunately we get lumped in with that are considered emo and by default that starts to make us emo… Put the records next to each other and listen to them and there’s actually no similarities.”
In his defence, just a year after Way said this, the Daily Mail correlated the suicide of 13-year-old Hannah Bond with both the band and the movement (“Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo” roared one headline). Like heavy metal before it, emo was singled out for the destructive behaviour of teenagers who’d found a home in a subculture that offered them community and a vehicle for self-expression. It’s no wonder that Way wanted to remove himself from emo connotations altogether, and he called time on My Chemical Romance in 2013.
And yet even if nobody can quite agree on what emo is or isn’t, most are in agreement as to when the thing came to be.
There are parallels to be found between the summer of 1985 and where western civilization finds itself right now. Then, as now, America was led by a President further to the right of what had come prior. Minorities found themselves hounded and persecuted. Previous big wins for freedom and equality began to be rolled back. Scarcely regulated big business towered over human rights.
At the same time, America’s capital, Washington DC, had carved out a reputation as the fulcrum of hardcore punk, an aggressive, no frills, high-speed mutation of its parent genre. The all-African-American band Bad Brains had lit the spark in 1977 and bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag and DIY labels such as the soon-to-be seminal hardcore punk label Dischord Records followed, forging a series of interconnecting highways that meant hardcore could traverse the United States, usually in the back of an old van.
And yet by 1985, those roads were approaching ruin. “Shows were becoming increasingly, moronically violent,“ Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye said at the time. “A lot of people were like: ‘f*** it, I’ll drop out, I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.’” Violence at hardcore shows became a backdrop for episodes of CHiPs and Quincy; M.E. Police raids were an unwanted fixture of hardcore shows. Something had to change.
Amy Pickering had grown up in the DC hardcore scene. She’d worked at Dischord. Legend has it that on day one, she tore down a distasteful poster in Dischord’s office that declared “no skirts allowed”. And yet, dissatisfied by the rot infesting her scene, by 1985 she was slipping into the drop-out crowd described by MacKaye prior. In a flurry of desperation, Pickering started making cut and paste random notes with the words “Revolution Summer” daubed on them. She began sticking them up around town. Posted them anonymously to other punks. “Revolution Summer” was an idea: a hope that Washington’s hardcore scene might reinvent itself. She provided the match. DC brought the fire.
“The idea caught on and came to life in conversations, group houses, punk shows and protests,” says Washington-based hardcore historian Mark Andersen, author of 2001’s Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capitol. “It was a rebellion against punk-as-usual and business-as-usual. We saw new musical styles, an opposition to ‘slam-dancing’ and skinhead gang violence, and a critique of the sexism of the scene. It embraced confrontational, creative protest, animal rights, vegetarianism and communal living.”
In June that year, local band Rites Of Spring released their eponymous debut album on Dischord. In a unique twist for hardcore, here was a band who sounded as angry with themselves as they did the world. The band would play just 16 shows and release one further EP, 1987’s All Through A Lie, but their groundwork is still considered influential. Along with fellow locals Beefeater, the all-women Fire Party – featuring one Amy Pickering – and MacKaye’s own equally short-lived Embrace, Rites Of Spring’s recorded work began to find acclaim for keeping the physicality of hardcore, only directing its gaze inwards as opposed to confrontationally out.
People started to call it “emocore”. Then “emo”. And that was that.
Bands influenced by events in DC that summer began igniting revolutions of their own across the US. In New York were Jawbreaker. In Chicago, Cap’n Jazz. In Arizona, Jimmy Eat World. The Midwest was particularly fertile ground, with Braid, The Promise Ring and the Get Up Kids springing up in quick succession. Many major labels, desperate to find their own Nirvana, the underground band who’d made a huge amount of money in the early Nineties, but unsure of what to do with this confessional, often deeply uncommercial music, found themselves confused and out of pocket during this era. But there were exceptions.
Among the most successful was Jimmy Eat World. They released their fourth album, Bleed American, in July 2001. It did okay. Then seven weeks later, 9/11 happened and the record was re-released as simply Jimmy Eat World. It went platinum and entered a realm no emo had yet entered. Dashboard Confessional appeared on the cover of Spin magazine and were dubbed “the future of emo”. And then, at the dawn of 2002, the NME put Jimmy Eat World on the cover, with wall to wall emo themed content inside (coverlined was an “Are YOU emo?” quiz).
Then came along My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, The Used and a host of other kohl-eyed men who understood that, then as now, the fandom of teenage girls could unlock superstardom, and emo really cashed in. It wasn’t popular with everyone. When My Chemical Romance headlined the metal leaning UK festival Download in 2007, they did so in front of a crowd who spent the majority of their set throwing bottles filled with urine at them. A year earlier, Panic! At the Disco had endured the same at Reading. And yet both bands, along with Fall Out Boy, owned the rest of the decade. When My Chemical Romance headlined Reading and Leeds in 2011, they did so to nothing but rapt adoration.
Emo in the noughties mutated in a host of interesting ways – the reggae-influenced pop of Ohio’s Twenty One Pilots (not as terrible as it sounds); the glacial, synth-led emo of Massachusetts Pvris; the neon pop punk of Houston’s Waterparks. But it says most about emo’s standing in pop culture that its influence even spread to hip-hop.
The “sad rap” wave that later emerged on Soundcloud towards the middle of the 2010s initially felt energised and exciting. Bones, aka Elmo Kennedy O’Connor – formerly known as Th@ Kid – began fusing old emo, metal and indie rock in 2012. O’Connor’s influence trickled down to emerging American artists like Lil Peep, Ghostemane and Yung Bruh/Lil Tracy. They began rapping over samples of the emo records they’d grown up with, the records they’d clung to through Columbine, 9/11 and the late decade financial crisis that had decimated their family units. They spat bars about heavy opioid use, depression and suicide and uploaded them to the internet at a frequency that betrayed the apathy innate within their music’s worldview.
But by the end, emo rap felt like a mirror being held up to the failings of modern society as its stars turned to dust. In January 2017, the rapper Lil Peep was described as “the future of emo” by Pitchfork. By November he was dead, aged 21, of a Fentanyl overdose.
Emo’s impact on the world has varied in its extremity, but there are few corners of the globe it hasn’t made it to. In LA, revival party Emo Nite was, for a few years, the most fun night out around, with big bands turning up for guest DJ sets and Skrillex and actors Kirsten Dunst and Kristen Stewart sneaking through the back door to get in. Elsewhere, the violence directed towards emos ascended dramatically throughout the last decade. According to reports, in 2012, Shia militias in Iraq – as part of a clampdown on what they deemed “Satanic western influences” – stoned to death “at least 14 teenagers” accused of adopting emo fashions. Figures vary, but some sources state as many as 90 teenagers were killed.
Harm against young people being different wasn’t limited to non-western countries, either. In 2007, 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster, sporting the aesthetic of your atypical modern emo, had been kicked to death by five males in a park in Bacup, Lancashire. Her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, who Sophie was killed protecting, survived after a coma. The tragedy helped bring the emo community together and The Sophie Lancaster Foundation, ran by Sophie’s mother Sylvia, can be found campaigning against hate at most major rock festivals today.
But there’ve also been reckonings that threatened to tear the community apart. In 2013, Ian Watkins of the Welsh band Lostprophets – an emo pop band at one point so popular and so beloved that their lyrics were commissioned to be carved into the paving slabs of Watkins’ hometown – was jailed for a long list of horrific offences including child and animal pornography, and worse. The reverberations from that case shone a light upon inappropriate behaviour within the rest of the scene.
1/50 50) Nils Frahm – Spaces (2013)
Nils Frahm’s music feels most alive when you’re witnessing it in concert, so it makes sense that Spaces, a collection of field recordings made over two years, is his most immersive and dynamic. The shifting energy is due to how no single performance is ever the same; the one constant is the German composer’s joy in creating sound, and the spaces in between. (RO)
2/50 49) Bill Callahan – Dream River (2013)
“I have learnt, when things are beautiful, to just keep on,” confides Callahan on the most laconic and nuanced album of his career. Warm grains of flute and fiddle run through the rich country soul. Masterful, minimalist storytelling guides us through summers spent painting boats and long nights in hotel bars. (HB)
3/50 48) Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018)
Twelve years after Arctic Monkeys released a debut album that shook the British rock scene out of its doldrums, the Sheffield boy wonders came up with this: a concept album about a luxury lunar resort that surgically removed the blues influences on AM and replaced them with lounge jazz and absurdist lyrics. It upset fans who wanted more of the same, and yet, frontman Alex Turner’s musical and lyrical meanderings mark one of the boldest moves by any rock band in recent memory. (RO)
4/50 47) Richard Dawson – Nothing Important (2014)
Richard Dawson was once a heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter, but by 2014, the Geordie’s outré folk had made him Britain’s leading avant-bard. On his breakthrough LP, malevolent instrumentals bookend a pair of 16-minute epics, bending from the ambitiously autobiographical title track to “The Vile Stuff”, a delirious tale of a boozy school trip gone awry. (JM)
5/50 46) Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness (2015)
Refreshing as summer rain, the avant-garde – and occasionally difficult – Californian artist’s fourth album sees melodies splashing merrily from her keyboard. Her pretty, literate vocals spin playful mysteries of faceless lovers in raincoats and strange women on remote shores. “It’s lucidity!” Holter teased. “So clear!” A ludic, lucid dream of a record. (HB)
6/50 45) Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time – 2013
Sky Ferreira did it her way. After years of label disputes about image and musical direction, the Californian finally decided to put her own modelling money towards financing her debut record, 2013’s Night Time, My Time. And what a record it is: melding Eighties pop with alternative rock, it brims with a wild vivacity, as squelching synths come up against gnashing guitars, vulnerable lyrics and often distorted vocals. “Everything is Embarrassing”, produced by Dev Hynes, is one of the songs of the decade. (PS)
7/50 44) Alabama Shakes – Boys & Girls (2012)
Combining rumbustious soul-rock with swampy blues grit, this four-piece from Athens, Alabama, were one of the most exciting sounds of 2012 thanks to their humdinger of a debut album. Gutsy and unrefined, Boys & Girls is indebted to a bygone era but somehow feels fresh. It’s underpinned by powerhouse frontwoman Brittany Howard’s astonishing voice – capable of both a piercing falsetto or a guttural roar. Barack Obama would subsequently invite the band to play at the White House. (PS)
8/50 43) Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer (2017)
When the documentarians of the future make films about the UK in the 2010s, you can bet they’ll put Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr on the soundtrack. The charismatic grime MC is bursting with all the self-aware anger, humour, confusion, vulnerability and creativity of his generation in multicultural urban Britain. (HB)
9/50 42) Todd Terje – It’s Album Time (2014)
After a run of spellbinding singles, the Norse disco maverick released this synthesis of the frivolous and cinematic: an album so casually virtuosic it seemed to have dropped out of an alien supercomputer. From crate digger space-funk to dance floor ecstasy (and a Bryan Ferry feature), It’s Album Time is endlessly replayable: a perfectly formed confection that requires no sequel. (JM)
10/50 41) Big Thief – Two Hands (2019)
There’s a kind of telepathy that develops when a band spends as much time together as Big Thief. The indie-rock band’s second album in the space of five months (the first being UFOF), was described as the “earth twin” and, indeed, they sound utterly grounded – to each other, and to their surroundings in the arid Chihuahuan Desert of Texas, near the Mexico border. In contrast to her fragile performance on UFOF, here Adrianne Lenker sings in lusty whoops and calls on “Forgotten Eyes”, while “Not”, the record’s dark, brooding soul, caterwauls with feedback screeches and a merciless, two-minute guitar solo that leaves you simultaneously devastated and enthralled. (RO)
11/50 40) Christine and the Queens – Chaleur Humaine (2014)
On her electropop-laden debut – the UK release of which meanders between French and English – Heloise Letissier explores the lonelinesses and triumphs of being queer. On “Saint Claude”, she steals glimpses of a feminine boy being mocked on a Paris bus, too ashamed to step in. On “Tilted”, she is newly defiant. “I am actually good, can’t help it if we’re tilted.” (AP)
12/50 39) James Blake – James Blake (2011)
Inspired by the “icy altitudes” of Joni Mitchell’s open-tuned confessionals, the dubstep producer took singer-songwriting into a compelling new landscape of minimalist clicks and autotuned emotion. He sang of “testing sounds/ For the deaf and the forest cold” and now describes his sparse, graceful debut as “a fractured diary” reflecting “a lack of something”. (HB)
13/50 38) Skepta – Konnichiwa (2016)
In 2016, the UK was in chaos. The EU referendum produced a shock result, David Cameron resigned as prime minister, and the arguing began, as a new harder-right politics emerged. The future felt bleak. In the midst of all this, Skepta – always wary of institutions – poured gasoline over the whole mess and lit a match. Konnichiwa is an album heavy with contempt for authority; a sizzling brew of jungle, UK garage and dancehall into which he pours all of his anger, frustration, fear and suspicion. (RO)
14/50 37) Bon Iver – Bon Iver (2011)
Where 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago was an exercise in sparse, solipsistic introspection, Justin Vernon’s follow-up is the sound of a man setting himself free and fully embracing the depths of his imagination. Less hermetically sealed than his debut, it’s exquisite in every way, with Vernon’s soulful falsetto woven into a gorgeous patchwork of jazz, folk, ambient and electronica. He would add more autotune to his voice on later albums; here it’s just perfect. (PS)
15/50 36) Ane Brun – When I’m Free (2015)
There’s a glorious elasticity of both sound and spirit to the Norwegian singer-songwriter’s seventh album. Gone is the feathery folk of her early releases as she flings open the doors to big timpani, hip hop rhythms and liquid Eighties bass lines. Lyrically, she celebrated the suffragettes and her own possibilities in the face of chronic illness. (HB)
16/50 35) Jamie xx – In Colour (2015)
A solo album from The xx’s most elusive member was the subject of rumour for a good few years; the reality was better than fans could have hoped for. In Colour is a lovingly crafted tribute to the rave; a kaleidoscope of beats and pulsing synths that stitch together the many moods you can find on the dancefloor, from the ecstasy of a drop to the melancholy of knowing the night must, at some point, come to an end. (RO)
17/50 34) Mitski – Be the Cowboy (2018)
Upon the release of Be the Cowboy, Mitski described how she had “f***ed with the form, almost in ways that make me uncomfortable” – hardly surprising for an artist whose songs pivot between lullaby-like calm and reckless, scuzzy urgency. Her fifth album sits to the left of just about every box you might try to put it in, those signature distorted guitars joined by bright, bold synths, organs and show-tune pianos. Lead single “Nobody”, with its almost aggressive vulnerability, is a masterpiece. (AP)
18/50 33) Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour (2018)
Three albums in, Kacey Musgraves worried that falling in love with her husband would affect her music. “I was a little wary,” she told The Independent last year. “I was like, ‘Man, I wonder if I’m gonna be able to write.’” She needn’t have worried. With synths and Daft Punk guitar licks added into the mix, her fourth album, which she dubbed “cosmic country”, is rich and ambitious with a subtle, psychedelic gloss, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year. (AP)
19/50 32) Björk – Vulnicura (2015)
For three decades, Björk has weathered professional belittlement, abuse and tragedy, always reiterating herself in song, as if it were normal to absorb so much. On Vulnicura, recorded amid a scrappy breakup, the Icelandic virtuoso snapped. Monstrous ballads meet shattered beats and siren strings, a cyclone propelled by the wisdom of age. When the dust settles, she sounds reborn. (JM)
20/50 31) Marianne Faithfull – Negative Capability (2018)
A breathtakingly brave and graceful testament from the ultimate survivor of patriarchal rock. Romance and realism, love and fear are held in perfect tension as the 71-year-old conjures shimmering myths of ye olde England, then tells a friend: “I do understand why you want no more f***ing treatment.” (HB)
21/50 30) These New Puritans – Field of Reeds (2013)
With 2010’s Hidden, These New Puritans fashioned dancehall and medieval heraldry into pop overtures. They re-emerged with something improbably subtle: a dreamscape shorn of excess pomp, beats and even consonants, with Jack Barnett’s voice remade as an instrument. Amid ineffable neoclassical, his shy croak elevates the record, the sound of a doomed romantic awash in the music of the heavens. (JM)
22/50 29) Anohni – Hopelessness (2016)
Released before Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, there was a dark prescience to this gleefully disruptive blast of electronica. Anohni jettisoned the gorgeous chamber pop which had brought her critical acclaim to make a radical ecofeminist wake-up call about the horrors of the violent patriarchy, drone warfare and global warming. (HB)
23/50 28) Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me (2010)
Newsom’s third album – an elaborate, six-sided odyssey whose musical palette blends harp, tambura and kaval with drums and electric guitars – heralded a noticeable change in her voice. The removal of vocal cord nodules had shaved the edges off its trill, and its new deeper, fuller sound suited an album as intricate and aching as this. “I found a little plot of land/ In the Garden of Eden,” she sings on one of its best tracks, “81”, seemingly poised on the edge of religious reverence. “It was dirt, and dirt is all the same.” (AP)
24/50 27) Fatoumata Diawara – Fatou (2011)
“Why did you cut the flower that makes me a woman?” sings the Malian artist on “Boloko”, the first African song to address female genital mutilation. Immigration and forced adoption are also challenged on a culture-shifting debut that brings a rare sweetness to the protest genre. The sensual power of Diawara’s lullsome voice and her shimmering guitar patterns remain hypnotic. (HB)
25/50 26) Arca – Arca (2017)
As “deconstructed club music” became a buzzword, electronic artists considered how to reassemble the pieces. One pitch for how that might sound – somehow futuristic yet familiar – came from Venezuelan producer Arca. The Björk and FKA twigs collaborator’s third album relaunched her zero-gravity sound world with a secret weapon: the bruised, disarmingly operatic voice of an angel in hell. (JM)
26/50 25) David Bowie – Blackstar (2016)
On his 69th birthday, two days before his death, David Bowie released perhaps the most extreme album of his career. Blackstar is more alien than Ziggy; as inscrutable as the deepest corners of the universe. He refuses to go quietly, whether making a joyous racket on “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” or adding eerie buzzes and whines to album closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away” where, faced with the nearness of his own death, Bowie engages in a final tussle with his own myth. (RO)
27/50 24) Adele – 21 (2011)
Earlier this year, Adele announced that she had split from her husband Simon Konecki. While some sympathised, others rejoiced at the brilliant break-up album that was surely on the cards. “Bunch of f***ing savages,” she joked in response to those gleeful fans. “30 will be a drum ’n’ bass record to spite you.” Cruel though it was, there was a reason for the gleeful reaction – Adele sings of heartbreak like nobody else. And never better than on 21, a sad, soulful masterpiece which on these shores is the best-selling album of the century. (AP)
28/50 23) Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (2013)
The French electronic pioneers brought funk back for the summer of 2013 with an album drawing heavily on the sounds of the Seventies and Eighties. Pretty much everything you need to know is in the opening salvo “Give Life Back to Music”; Daft Punk tend to pop up at times where other artists are grasping frantically for something new. Random Access Memories restarted the party with good old-fashioned craftmanship and Le Daft’s undiluted love for what they do. (RO)
29/50 22) Lana Del Rey – Norman F***ing Rockwell! (2019)
It is striking that Lana Del Rey – the greatest artist of her generation – creates art full of meaningful observations about men and women that are deeply unfashionable outside of an Esther Perel podcast. Del Rey desires to be desired; she likes it when her man makes her feel like a child; she “wants to die”. The longing for unconsciousness is still present in NFR (“I’m the void,” she sings on “Mariners Apartment Complex”) but her most playful record to date is as close to a celebration of her world-conquering status as you are ever likely to hear. (PS)
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30/50 21) Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Tiptoeing to the bleeding heart of Steven’s relationship with his schizophrenic, alcoholic mother, this is an album that faces difficult truths with hushed grace. The featherlight folk acquires a remarkable bioluminescence, as the artist finds hope in “signs and wonders, sea lion caves in the dark”. (HB)
31/50 20) Rihanna – ANTI (2016)
ANTI’s botched rollout – Rihanna was teasing the record for years before a leak prompted a hasty free release – seems strangely fitting for an album as joyfully scattershot and unrefined as this. Dark dancehall sounds flirt with hip hop and R&B, as the Bajan singer embraces her roots and slyly rebels against the pop tropes du jour. (AP)
32/50 19) Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (2010)
Having released arguably the Noughties’ defining rock album in Funeral, the Montreal six-piece began this decade with a record bathed in nostalgia. Loosely inspired by frontman Win Butler and his brother Will’s childhood on the outskirts of Houston, The Suburbs has much in common with Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, with its themes of familial responsibility and personal crises. The sound is expansive; there are lyrical and musical motifs throughout. If 2007’s Neon Bible was a little portentous and po-faced, this album offers moments of levity in tracks such as the shimmering synth-pop masterpiece “Sprawl II”. Nothing they’ve done since has been as good.
33/50 18) St Vincent – Strange Mercy (2011)
St Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, has a tagline for each of her albums. This one, her third, was “housewives on pills”, though that does little justice to a record that marries uncomfortable intimacy with a cool detachment, its obtuse stories of grief, loss and lust told through angular art-rock, frenzied guitar solos and bold melodies. (AP)
34/50 17) Nick Cave – Ghosteen (2019)
When his 15-year-old son died in 2015, Cave thought public grieving would be “impossible”. But he found unexpected relief in sharing his feelings with his fans. This ambient double album plays like a warm cloud of solace: direct about the agony and inevitability of loss, in awe of the love that helps us survive it. (HB)
35/50 16) Taylor Swift – Red (2012)
Red is the last album Swift released before it became impossible to discuss her work without mentioning the narrative around her as a person, not just an artist. Her turn of phrase – already impressive for an artist so young – improves immeasurably from opener “State of Grace” and leads the listener to the greatest song of her career to date: “All Too Well”. The analogies and references are less spelt out, too. Then there’s the song structure, the way these songs unfurl as she dissects – with scientific scrutiny – the most intimate details of a relationship, in order to find out where it all went wrong. Red shows Swift with a newfound confidence – and at times, weariness – that can only come with experience. (RO)
36/50 15) Frank Ocean – Blond (2016)
Brilliantly confounding, Blond keeps the spotlight fixed firmly on its creator’s voice. Tracks are stripped of any unnecessary embellishment, anything that might distract from Ocean’s hypnotic musings on love, sex and death. “Every day counts like crazy,” he sings on “Skyline To” – few lyrics capture quite so well the suffocating feeling of being dragged through life at breakneck speed. Blond is far less cohesive than its predecessor, Channel Orange, but does that really matter? Life is messy and confusing; Ocean makes all of it sound beautiful. (RO)
37/50 14) Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker (2016)
A passing comment in a New Yorker profile about being “ready to die” forced Leonard Cohen to tell fans that reports of his imminent death had been hugely exaggerated. Yet the album he was promoting, You Want It Darker, is as powerful a last testament as any artist could hope to release; Cohen’s weary utterances – “I’m ready, my Lord” – are delivered in that fathomless baritone, and his meditations on mortality are bleak, even for him. The fact that Cohen did in fact die just three weeks after its release makes those themes, although it didn’t seem possible at the time, even more poignant. (RO)
38/50 13) Solange – When I Get Home (2019)
The decade’s second great Solange album churns several deformed, jazzy aesthetics – including Brainfeeder’s gloopy electro-funk and the concoctions of DJ Screw – into a lustrous cloud of R&B. The result hints at Seventies soul voyagers like Stevie Wonder yet retains its future-shock, celebrating Houston futurism without pandering to fans of its explicitly political predecessor. (JM)
39/50 12) PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)
The spooky piano and PJ Harvey’s keening howls on the opening, title track of her eighth studio album are enough to signal this album isn’t a barrel of laughs. Yet her finely wrought arrangements – echoing guitars, beautiful melodies and samples that wrongfoot the listener with their cheerfulness – form a superb kind of juxtaposition with the album’s themes. Across 12 brisk tracks, she casts a despairing eye over everything from the conflict in Afghanistan to the mass casualties of the First World War; she sings in a kind of pleading tone, all the while knowing that humans are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. (RO)
40/50 11) Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
West has always been a complicated, divisive, frustrating sort of genius. Never is that more on display than on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a maximalist, genre-crushing album that looks both outwards and inwards – self-aware even in its most crowing moments – it breaks apart the myth of the American Dream. “The system broken, the school is closed, the prison’s open,” he sings on “Power”, one of the best protest songs of the century. Later, he adds, “They say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation/ Well that’s a pretty bad way to start a conversation.” So far, West has yet to write anything half as sharp about Trump’s nation. (AP)
41/50 10) Robyn – Body Talk (2010)
Robyn’s magnum opus barely even charted when it was first released at the dawn of the decade. It’s almost a compilation album of the three great EPs she released in one year, Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3. But, nearly 10 years on, it is rightly one of the most influential pop albums of the 21st century. Every popstar tries (and mostly fails) to emulate the silky dance-and-cry beauty of songs such as “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend”. (AP)
42/50 9) A Tribe Called Quest – We Got it From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)
After an 18-year break – and within months of co-founder Phife Dawg’s death – there were mixed expectations for ATCQ’s return. It arrived in the hubbub of election week, but the group rode into the melee like angry gods on horseback, firing out thunderous rebukes. The hip-hop odyssey delivers America’s existential reckoning, one equally suited to street protests or a recuperative headphone voyage. (JM)
43/50 8) Lorde – Melodrama (2017)
When you experience your first heartbreak, you feel as though you’re the only person to have ever felt pain like it. On Melodrama, written when New Zealand musician Lorde was 19 and on the cusp of adulthood, she indulges her heartache, grief, and self-pity with both tenderness and reckless abandon. This is pop music at its most precise – every synth and drumbeat fired off like a bullet from a sniper – but at its most unbound, too, finding brutal, beautiful new ways to sing about the most saturated of subjects: breaking up. (AP)
44/50 7) Kendrick Lamar – DAMN (2017)
Kendrick has always been a superb storyteller, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN is his odyssey, an album where he presents evidence of his greatness via a series of challenges: tests of loyalty, will, faith and perseverance. It’s an epic punctuated by schizophrenic changes in pace and track structure; all the while Kendrick raps as though he doesn’t need oxygen, and you realise his greatest battle has never been with his fans, or another rapper… he’s competing against himself. (RO)
45/50 6) D’Angelo – Black Messiah (2014)
After hit album Voodoo, D’Angelo almost died by various means, including addiction and a car crash. Fifteen years on, its follow-up arrived suddenly one Christmas: a grungy, deathly reanimation of the sexy, Soulquarian R&B he helped pioneer. Its #BlackLivesMatter-referencing lyrics reveal a man renewed yet still fluttering in the crosswinds of passion and vulnerability. (JM)
46/50 5) Beyoncé – Lemonade (2016)
When footage leaked of Solange Knowles hitting and kicking Jay Z in an elevator at the 2014 Met Gala, word was that the rapper had cheated on his wife, and was receiving the full force of her sister’s wrath. Two years later, Beyoncé seemed to confirm the affair as only she could: not with a statement, but with an astonishing concept album and accompanying 65-minute film. Dipping into genres as though they’re a dressing-up box, the singer traverses the whole spectrum of emotions as she grapples with the betrayal: “My lonely ear pressed against the walls of your world,” she sings on opener “Pray You Catch Me”. “Suck on my balls/ I’ve had enough,” she sings on “Sorry”. (AP)
47/50 4) Frank Ocean – Channel Orange (2012)
A few days before this album’s release, Frank Ocean released a Tumblr post where he spoke about how, aged 19, he fell in love with his friend, a boy. At the time, many interpreted the letter to mean Ocean was coming out as bisexual, when in fact he has never felt a need to put a label on his sexuality. Channel Orange’s ever-shifting nature – the lolloping bass and his meanderings between that exquisite falsetto and richer timbres – is a beautiful statement about the paradoxes we can find in our own identity. (RO)
48/50 3) Lana Del Rey – Born to Die (2012)
It’s easy to forget that before Lana Del Rey came along – back when Billie Eilish was barely in double figures – lo-tempo sad-pop was not the chart-hogging phenomenon it is today. Born to Die, a minimalist masterpiece, languid and lachrymose, changed that. The month of its release, a shaky performance on SNL prompted naysayers to write the singer off as a flash-in-the-pan, but the album – full of beauty, gloom and strange subservience – had staying power. As did Del Rey. (AP)
49/50 2) Solange – A Seat at the Table (2016)
Solange’s third album is so meticulous, so modernist in its approach to space and structure, that early listens could feel like walking admiringly around an exhibition. Then the lights go out, and a distant scream draws you into the shadows. Anguish is the true pitch of this quiet masterpiece, yet it’s impossibly graceful: an R&B battle cry of black art against white supremacy. (JM)
50/50 1) Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
By 2015, Kendrick Lamar was already a grandmaster stylist. But with To Pimp a Butterfly, the Compton rapper became a cultural institution, as if summoned by the decade’s converging flash points. There was the murmur of creeping fascism, the roar of a re-energised black rights movement, and its roots in racist police shootings broadcast and protested across an infernal social media landscape.
This all collided with a resurgent jazz sensibility in rap – brass, blue notes, manic freedom, melancholy – primarily via LA beat scene luminaries Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. Each contributes to this modern classic, as despairing and murky as it is lucid and fireball bright. Centrepiece “Alright” is now a civil rights anthem, but To Pimp a Butterfly plays less like a statement than a bad dream: conflicted introspection, vexed empathy and political irreverence meet pitch-black humour that jolts you awake, with the sense that without this music, we’d be lost. (JM)
1/50 50) Nils Frahm – Spaces (2013)
Nils Frahm’s music feels most alive when you’re witnessing it in concert, so it makes sense that Spaces, a collection of field recordings made over two years, is his most immersive and dynamic. The shifting energy is due to how no single performance is ever the same; the one constant is the German composer’s joy in creating sound, and the spaces in between. (RO)
2/50 49) Bill Callahan – Dream River (2013)
“I have learnt, when things are beautiful, to just keep on,” confides Callahan on the most laconic and nuanced album of his career. Warm grains of flute and fiddle run through the rich country soul. Masterful, minimalist storytelling guides us through summers spent painting boats and long nights in hotel bars. (HB)
3/50 48) Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018)
Twelve years after Arctic Monkeys released a debut album that shook the British rock scene out of its doldrums, the Sheffield boy wonders came up with this: a concept album about a luxury lunar resort that surgically removed the blues influences on AM and replaced them with lounge jazz and absurdist lyrics. It upset fans who wanted more of the same, and yet, frontman Alex Turner’s musical and lyrical meanderings mark one of the boldest moves by any rock band in recent memory. (RO)
4/50 47) Richard Dawson – Nothing Important (2014)
Richard Dawson was once a heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter, but by 2014, the Geordie’s outré folk had made him Britain’s leading avant-bard. On his breakthrough LP, malevolent instrumentals bookend a pair of 16-minute epics, bending from the ambitiously autobiographical title track to “The Vile Stuff”, a delirious tale of a boozy school trip gone awry. (JM)
5/50 46) Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness (2015)
Refreshing as summer rain, the avant-garde – and occasionally difficult – Californian artist’s fourth album sees melodies splashing merrily from her keyboard. Her pretty, literate vocals spin playful mysteries of faceless lovers in raincoats and strange women on remote shores. “It’s lucidity!” Holter teased. “So clear!” A ludic, lucid dream of a record. (HB)
6/50 45) Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time – 2013
Sky Ferreira did it her way. After years of label disputes about image and musical direction, the Californian finally decided to put her own modelling money towards financing her debut record, 2013’s Night Time, My Time. And what a record it is: melding Eighties pop with alternative rock, it brims with a wild vivacity, as squelching synths come up against gnashing guitars, vulnerable lyrics and often distorted vocals. “Everything is Embarrassing”, produced by Dev Hynes, is one of the songs of the decade. (PS)
7/50 44) Alabama Shakes – Boys & Girls (2012)
Combining rumbustious soul-rock with swampy blues grit, this four-piece from Athens, Alabama, were one of the most exciting sounds of 2012 thanks to their humdinger of a debut album. Gutsy and unrefined, Boys & Girls is indebted to a bygone era but somehow feels fresh. It’s underpinned by powerhouse frontwoman Brittany Howard’s astonishing voice – capable of both a piercing falsetto or a guttural roar. Barack Obama would subsequently invite the band to play at the White House. (PS)
8/50 43) Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer (2017)
When the documentarians of the future make films about the UK in the 2010s, you can bet they’ll put Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr on the soundtrack. The charismatic grime MC is bursting with all the self-aware anger, humour, confusion, vulnerability and creativity of his generation in multicultural urban Britain. (HB)
9/50 42) Todd Terje – It’s Album Time (2014)
After a run of spellbinding singles, the Norse disco maverick released this synthesis of the frivolous and cinematic: an album so casually virtuosic it seemed to have dropped out of an alien supercomputer. From crate digger space-funk to dance floor ecstasy (and a Bryan Ferry feature), It’s Album Time is endlessly replayable: a perfectly formed confection that requires no sequel. (JM)
10/50 41) Big Thief – Two Hands (2019)
There’s a kind of telepathy that develops when a band spends as much time together as Big Thief. The indie-rock band’s second album in the space of five months (the first being UFOF), was described as the “earth twin” and, indeed, they sound utterly grounded – to each other, and to their surroundings in the arid Chihuahuan Desert of Texas, near the Mexico border. In contrast to her fragile performance on UFOF, here Adrianne Lenker sings in lusty whoops and calls on “Forgotten Eyes”, while “Not”, the record’s dark, brooding soul, caterwauls with feedback screeches and a merciless, two-minute guitar solo that leaves you simultaneously devastated and enthralled. (RO)
11/50 40) Christine and the Queens – Chaleur Humaine (2014)
On her electropop-laden debut – the UK release of which meanders between French and English – Heloise Letissier explores the lonelinesses and triumphs of being queer. On “Saint Claude”, she steals glimpses of a feminine boy being mocked on a Paris bus, too ashamed to step in. On “Tilted”, she is newly defiant. “I am actually good, can’t help it if we’re tilted.” (AP)
12/50 39) James Blake – James Blake (2011)
Inspired by the “icy altitudes” of Joni Mitchell’s open-tuned confessionals, the dubstep producer took singer-songwriting into a compelling new landscape of minimalist clicks and autotuned emotion. He sang of “testing sounds/ For the deaf and the forest cold” and now describes his sparse, graceful debut as “a fractured diary” reflecting “a lack of something”. (HB)
13/50 38) Skepta – Konnichiwa (2016)
In 2016, the UK was in chaos. The EU referendum produced a shock result, David Cameron resigned as prime minister, and the arguing began, as a new harder-right politics emerged. The future felt bleak. In the midst of all this, Skepta – always wary of institutions – poured gasoline over the whole mess and lit a match. Konnichiwa is an album heavy with contempt for authority; a sizzling brew of jungle, UK garage and dancehall into which he pours all of his anger, frustration, fear and suspicion. (RO)
14/50 37) Bon Iver – Bon Iver (2011)
Where 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago was an exercise in sparse, solipsistic introspection, Justin Vernon’s follow-up is the sound of a man setting himself free and fully embracing the depths of his imagination. Less hermetically sealed than his debut, it’s exquisite in every way, with Vernon’s soulful falsetto woven into a gorgeous patchwork of jazz, folk, ambient and electronica. He would add more autotune to his voice on later albums; here it’s just perfect. (PS)
15/50 36) Ane Brun – When I’m Free (2015)
There’s a glorious elasticity of both sound and spirit to the Norwegian singer-songwriter’s seventh album. Gone is the feathery folk of her early releases as she flings open the doors to big timpani, hip hop rhythms and liquid Eighties bass lines. Lyrically, she celebrated the suffragettes and her own possibilities in the face of chronic illness. (HB)
16/50 35) Jamie xx – In Colour (2015)
A solo album from The xx’s most elusive member was the subject of rumour for a good few years; the reality was better than fans could have hoped for. In Colour is a lovingly crafted tribute to the rave; a kaleidoscope of beats and pulsing synths that stitch together the many moods you can find on the dancefloor, from the ecstasy of a drop to the melancholy of knowing the night must, at some point, come to an end. (RO)
17/50 34) Mitski – Be the Cowboy (2018)
Upon the release of Be the Cowboy, Mitski described how she had “f***ed with the form, almost in ways that make me uncomfortable” – hardly surprising for an artist whose songs pivot between lullaby-like calm and reckless, scuzzy urgency. Her fifth album sits to the left of just about every box you might try to put it in, those signature distorted guitars joined by bright, bold synths, organs and show-tune pianos. Lead single “Nobody”, with its almost aggressive vulnerability, is a masterpiece. (AP)
18/50 33) Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour (2018)
Three albums in, Kacey Musgraves worried that falling in love with her husband would affect her music. “I was a little wary,” she told The Independent last year. “I was like, ‘Man, I wonder if I’m gonna be able to write.’” She needn’t have worried. With synths and Daft Punk guitar licks added into the mix, her fourth album, which she dubbed “cosmic country”, is rich and ambitious with a subtle, psychedelic gloss, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year. (AP)
19/50 32) Björk – Vulnicura (2015)
For three decades, Björk has weathered professional belittlement, abuse and tragedy, always reiterating herself in song, as if it were normal to absorb so much. On Vulnicura, recorded amid a scrappy breakup, the Icelandic virtuoso snapped. Monstrous ballads meet shattered beats and siren strings, a cyclone propelled by the wisdom of age. When the dust settles, she sounds reborn. (JM)
20/50 31) Marianne Faithfull – Negative Capability (2018)
A breathtakingly brave and graceful testament from the ultimate survivor of patriarchal rock. Romance and realism, love and fear are held in perfect tension as the 71-year-old conjures shimmering myths of ye olde England, then tells a friend: “I do understand why you want no more f***ing treatment.” (HB)
21/50 30) These New Puritans – Field of Reeds (2013)
With 2010’s Hidden, These New Puritans fashioned dancehall and medieval heraldry into pop overtures. They re-emerged with something improbably subtle: a dreamscape shorn of excess pomp, beats and even consonants, with Jack Barnett’s voice remade as an instrument. Amid ineffable neoclassical, his shy croak elevates the record, the sound of a doomed romantic awash in the music of the heavens. (JM)
22/50 29) Anohni – Hopelessness (2016)
Released before Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, there was a dark prescience to this gleefully disruptive blast of electronica. Anohni jettisoned the gorgeous chamber pop which had brought her critical acclaim to make a radical ecofeminist wake-up call about the horrors of the violent patriarchy, drone warfare and global warming. (HB)
23/50 28) Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me (2010)
Newsom’s third album – an elaborate, six-sided odyssey whose musical palette blends harp, tambura and kaval with drums and electric guitars – heralded a noticeable change in her voice. The removal of vocal cord nodules had shaved the edges off its trill, and its new deeper, fuller sound suited an album as intricate and aching as this. “I found a little plot of land/ In the Garden of Eden,” she sings on one of its best tracks, “81”, seemingly poised on the edge of religious reverence. “It was dirt, and dirt is all the same.” (AP)
24/50 27) Fatoumata Diawara – Fatou (2011)
“Why did you cut the flower that makes me a woman?” sings the Malian artist on “Boloko”, the first African song to address female genital mutilation. Immigration and forced adoption are also challenged on a culture-shifting debut that brings a rare sweetness to the protest genre. The sensual power of Diawara’s lullsome voice and her shimmering guitar patterns remain hypnotic. (HB)
25/50 26) Arca – Arca (2017)
As “deconstructed club music” became a buzzword, electronic artists considered how to reassemble the pieces. One pitch for how that might sound – somehow futuristic yet familiar – came from Venezuelan producer Arca. The Björk and FKA twigs collaborator’s third album relaunched her zero-gravity sound world with a secret weapon: the bruised, disarmingly operatic voice of an angel in hell. (JM)
26/50 25) David Bowie – Blackstar (2016)
On his 69th birthday, two days before his death, David Bowie released perhaps the most extreme album of his career. Blackstar is more alien than Ziggy; as inscrutable as the deepest corners of the universe. He refuses to go quietly, whether making a joyous racket on “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” or adding eerie buzzes and whines to album closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away” where, faced with the nearness of his own death, Bowie engages in a final tussle with his own myth. (RO)
27/50 24) Adele – 21 (2011)
Earlier this year, Adele announced that she had split from her husband Simon Konecki. While some sympathised, others rejoiced at the brilliant break-up album that was surely on the cards. “Bunch of f***ing savages,” she joked in response to those gleeful fans. “30 will be a drum ’n’ bass record to spite you.” Cruel though it was, there was a reason for the gleeful reaction – Adele sings of heartbreak like nobody else. And never better than on 21, a sad, soulful masterpiece which on these shores is the best-selling album of the century. (AP)
28/50 23) Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (2013)
The French electronic pioneers brought funk back for the summer of 2013 with an album drawing heavily on the sounds of the Seventies and Eighties. Pretty much everything you need to know is in the opening salvo “Give Life Back to Music”; Daft Punk tend to pop up at times where other artists are grasping frantically for something new. Random Access Memories restarted the party with good old-fashioned craftmanship and Le Daft’s undiluted love for what they do. (RO)
29/50 22) Lana Del Rey – Norman F***ing Rockwell! (2019)
It is striking that Lana Del Rey – the greatest artist of her generation – creates art full of meaningful observations about men and women that are deeply unfashionable outside of an Esther Perel podcast. Del Rey desires to be desired; she likes it when her man makes her feel like a child; she “wants to die”. The longing for unconsciousness is still present in NFR (“I’m the void,” she sings on “Mariners Apartment Complex”) but her most playful record to date is as close to a celebration of her world-conquering status as you are ever likely to hear. (PS)
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30/50 21) Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Tiptoeing to the bleeding heart of Steven’s relationship with his schizophrenic, alcoholic mother, this is an album that faces difficult truths with hushed grace. The featherlight folk acquires a remarkable bioluminescence, as the artist finds hope in “signs and wonders, sea lion caves in the dark”. (HB)
31/50 20) Rihanna – ANTI (2016)
ANTI’s botched rollout – Rihanna was teasing the record for years before a leak prompted a hasty free release – seems strangely fitting for an album as joyfully scattershot and unrefined as this. Dark dancehall sounds flirt with hip hop and R&B, as the Bajan singer embraces her roots and slyly rebels against the pop tropes du jour. (AP)
32/50 19) Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (2010)
Having released arguably the Noughties’ defining rock album in Funeral, the Montreal six-piece began this decade with a record bathed in nostalgia. Loosely inspired by frontman Win Butler and his brother Will’s childhood on the outskirts of Houston, The Suburbs has much in common with Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, with its themes of familial responsibility and personal crises. The sound is expansive; there are lyrical and musical motifs throughout. If 2007’s Neon Bible was a little portentous and po-faced, this album offers moments of levity in tracks such as the shimmering synth-pop masterpiece “Sprawl II”. Nothing they’ve done since has been as good.
33/50 18) St Vincent – Strange Mercy (2011)
St Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, has a tagline for each of her albums. This one, her third, was “housewives on pills”, though that does little justice to a record that marries uncomfortable intimacy with a cool detachment, its obtuse stories of grief, loss and lust told through angular art-rock, frenzied guitar solos and bold melodies. (AP)
34/50 17) Nick Cave – Ghosteen (2019)
When his 15-year-old son died in 2015, Cave thought public grieving would be “impossible”. But he found unexpected relief in sharing his feelings with his fans. This ambient double album plays like a warm cloud of solace: direct about the agony and inevitability of loss, in awe of the love that helps us survive it. (HB)
35/50 16) Taylor Swift – Red (2012)
Red is the last album Swift released before it became impossible to discuss her work without mentioning the narrative around her as a person, not just an artist. Her turn of phrase – already impressive for an artist so young – improves immeasurably from opener “State of Grace” and leads the listener to the greatest song of her career to date: “All Too Well”. The analogies and references are less spelt out, too. Then there’s the song structure, the way these songs unfurl as she dissects – with scientific scrutiny – the most intimate details of a relationship, in order to find out where it all went wrong. Red shows Swift with a newfound confidence – and at times, weariness – that can only come with experience. (RO)
36/50 15) Frank Ocean – Blond (2016)
Brilliantly confounding, Blond keeps the spotlight fixed firmly on its creator’s voice. Tracks are stripped of any unnecessary embellishment, anything that might distract from Ocean’s hypnotic musings on love, sex and death. “Every day counts like crazy,” he sings on “Skyline To” – few lyrics capture quite so well the suffocating feeling of being dragged through life at breakneck speed. Blond is far less cohesive than its predecessor, Channel Orange, but does that really matter? Life is messy and confusing; Ocean makes all of it sound beautiful. (RO)
37/50 14) Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker (2016)
A passing comment in a New Yorker profile about being “ready to die” forced Leonard Cohen to tell fans that reports of his imminent death had been hugely exaggerated. Yet the album he was promoting, You Want It Darker, is as powerful a last testament as any artist could hope to release; Cohen’s weary utterances – “I’m ready, my Lord” – are delivered in that fathomless baritone, and his meditations on mortality are bleak, even for him. The fact that Cohen did in fact die just three weeks after its release makes those themes, although it didn’t seem possible at the time, even more poignant. (RO)
38/50 13) Solange – When I Get Home (2019)
The decade’s second great Solange album churns several deformed, jazzy aesthetics – including Brainfeeder’s gloopy electro-funk and the concoctions of DJ Screw – into a lustrous cloud of R&B. The result hints at Seventies soul voyagers like Stevie Wonder yet retains its future-shock, celebrating Houston futurism without pandering to fans of its explicitly political predecessor. (JM)
39/50 12) PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)
The spooky piano and PJ Harvey’s keening howls on the opening, title track of her eighth studio album are enough to signal this album isn’t a barrel of laughs. Yet her finely wrought arrangements – echoing guitars, beautiful melodies and samples that wrongfoot the listener with their cheerfulness – form a superb kind of juxtaposition with the album’s themes. Across 12 brisk tracks, she casts a despairing eye over everything from the conflict in Afghanistan to the mass casualties of the First World War; she sings in a kind of pleading tone, all the while knowing that humans are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. (RO)
40/50 11) Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
West has always been a complicated, divisive, frustrating sort of genius. Never is that more on display than on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a maximalist, genre-crushing album that looks both outwards and inwards – self-aware even in its most crowing moments – it breaks apart the myth of the American Dream. “The system broken, the school is closed, the prison’s open,” he sings on “Power”, one of the best protest songs of the century. Later, he adds, “They say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation/ Well that’s a pretty bad way to start a conversation.” So far, West has yet to write anything half as sharp about Trump’s nation. (AP)
41/50 10) Robyn – Body Talk (2010)
Robyn’s magnum opus barely even charted when it was first released at the dawn of the decade. It’s almost a compilation album of the three great EPs she released in one year, Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3. But, nearly 10 years on, it is rightly one of the most influential pop albums of the 21st century. Every popstar tries (and mostly fails) to emulate the silky dance-and-cry beauty of songs such as “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend”. (AP)
42/50 9) A Tribe Called Quest – We Got it From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)
After an 18-year break – and within months of co-founder Phife Dawg’s death – there were mixed expectations for ATCQ’s return. It arrived in the hubbub of election week, but the group rode into the melee like angry gods on horseback, firing out thunderous rebukes. The hip-hop odyssey delivers America’s existential reckoning, one equally suited to street protests or a recuperative headphone voyage. (JM)
43/50 8) Lorde – Melodrama (2017)
When you experience your first heartbreak, you feel as though you’re the only person to have ever felt pain like it. On Melodrama, written when New Zealand musician Lorde was 19 and on the cusp of adulthood, she indulges her heartache, grief, and self-pity with both tenderness and reckless abandon. This is pop music at its most precise – every synth and drumbeat fired off like a bullet from a sniper – but at its most unbound, too, finding brutal, beautiful new ways to sing about the most saturated of subjects: breaking up. (AP)
44/50 7) Kendrick Lamar – DAMN (2017)
Kendrick has always been a superb storyteller, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN is his odyssey, an album where he presents evidence of his greatness via a series of challenges: tests of loyalty, will, faith and perseverance. It’s an epic punctuated by schizophrenic changes in pace and track structure; all the while Kendrick raps as though he doesn’t need oxygen, and you realise his greatest battle has never been with his fans, or another rapper… he’s competing against himself. (RO)
45/50 6) D’Angelo – Black Messiah (2014)
After hit album Voodoo, D’Angelo almost died by various means, including addiction and a car crash. Fifteen years on, its follow-up arrived suddenly one Christmas: a grungy, deathly reanimation of the sexy, Soulquarian R&B he helped pioneer. Its #BlackLivesMatter-referencing lyrics reveal a man renewed yet still fluttering in the crosswinds of passion and vulnerability. (JM)
46/50 5) Beyoncé – Lemonade (2016)
When footage leaked of Solange Knowles hitting and kicking Jay Z in an elevator at the 2014 Met Gala, word was that the rapper had cheated on his wife, and was receiving the full force of her sister’s wrath. Two years later, Beyoncé seemed to confirm the affair as only she could: not with a statement, but with an astonishing concept album and accompanying 65-minute film. Dipping into genres as though they’re a dressing-up box, the singer traverses the whole spectrum of emotions as she grapples with the betrayal: “My lonely ear pressed against the walls of your world,” she sings on opener “Pray You Catch Me”. “Suck on my balls/ I’ve had enough,” she sings on “Sorry”. (AP)
47/50 4) Frank Ocean – Channel Orange (2012)
A few days before this album’s release, Frank Ocean released a Tumblr post where he spoke about how, aged 19, he fell in love with his friend, a boy. At the time, many interpreted the letter to mean Ocean was coming out as bisexual, when in fact he has never felt a need to put a label on his sexuality. Channel Orange’s ever-shifting nature – the lolloping bass and his meanderings between that exquisite falsetto and richer timbres – is a beautiful statement about the paradoxes we can find in our own identity. (RO)
48/50 3) Lana Del Rey – Born to Die (2012)
It’s easy to forget that before Lana Del Rey came along – back when Billie Eilish was barely in double figures – lo-tempo sad-pop was not the chart-hogging phenomenon it is today. Born to Die, a minimalist masterpiece, languid and lachrymose, changed that. The month of its release, a shaky performance on SNL prompted naysayers to write the singer off as a flash-in-the-pan, but the album – full of beauty, gloom and strange subservience – had staying power. As did Del Rey. (AP)
49/50 2) Solange – A Seat at the Table (2016)
Solange’s third album is so meticulous, so modernist in its approach to space and structure, that early listens could feel like walking admiringly around an exhibition. Then the lights go out, and a distant scream draws you into the shadows. Anguish is the true pitch of this quiet masterpiece, yet it’s impossibly graceful: an R&B battle cry of black art against white supremacy. (JM)
50/50 1) Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
By 2015, Kendrick Lamar was already a grandmaster stylist. But with To Pimp a Butterfly, the Compton rapper became a cultural institution, as if summoned by the decade’s converging flash points. There was the murmur of creeping fascism, the roar of a re-energised black rights movement, and its roots in racist police shootings broadcast and protested across an infernal social media landscape.
This all collided with a resurgent jazz sensibility in rap – brass, blue notes, manic freedom, melancholy – primarily via LA beat scene luminaries Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. Each contributes to this modern classic, as despairing and murky as it is lucid and fireball bright. Centrepiece “Alright” is now a civil rights anthem, but To Pimp a Butterfly plays less like a statement than a bad dream: conflicted introspection, vexed empathy and political irreverence meet pitch-black humour that jolts you awake, with the sense that without this music, we’d be lost. (JM)
The sense grew that despite emo being emotional, sensitive music, even it wasn’t exempt from some men within it taking advantage of their positions. Long Island’s Brand New, a band who for so long were viewed as the leading lights of modern emo, imploded in 2017 after singer Jesse Lacey was accused of soliciting nude photographs from a minor. Writer Jenn Pelly wrote in Pitchfork of the signs so many had failed to see. She described third-wave emo – “the 2000s mutation of the sound as sold at Hot Topic, as dialogued on Myspace and LiveJournal, and as broadcast on MTV” – as “a notoriously sexist commodity”. Many others fell. It was a brutal, messy, painful, yet necessary culling, mirroring the wider #MeToo movement.
Revolution Autumn doesn’t scan well at all – but there was a similar awakening within what was left of the modern emo scene to what occurred in Washington, DC, all those years ago. Now, there are new bands emerging, trying to build something from the ashes.
The buzziest name among them right now are Los Angeles quintet Spanish Love Songs. They owe much to Pennsylvania’s The Menzingers, a classic-if-underappreciated act from emo’s recent past. Both bands tell rich, literate, emotional stories – sometimes autobiographical, sometimes character studies – that chow down on the listeners’ bones. There’s a song on the former’s new album Brave Faces Everyone called “Loser 2” that describes the feeling of standing outside the house you grew up in, and features the lyric, “You know, if we weren’t bailed out every time by our parents, we’d be dead…” It’s not quite as poetic as anything from emo’s Eighties origins, but it’s equally introspective and relevant to the lives of the audience – millennials, trying to make their way in a world that barely gives a shit – who are drawn to their songs.
To borrow a lyric from Southampton’s Creeper, a band at the poppier and gothier end of emo’s new wave, “Misery never goes out of style…” But there’s more to this fresh blood than just introspection; the acts who are rising speak directly of the complexity of millennial lives. That might be Exeter trio Muncie Girls singing of mental health and the exhaustive wait for treatment (“Picture Of Health”), Blackpool’s Boston Manor and male suicide (“On A High Ledge”) or London’s Wallflower articulating the abyss of impending adulthood (“Magnifier”). These are bands trying to create a music scene within the craters formed by #MeToo and the conversation about toxic masculinity.
“Growing up, I always rejected the idea of what a ‘boy’ should do,” says Boston Manor’s Henry Cox. “I never liked football, I thought fighting was stupid and at age six I spray-painted my bike pink. I’ve always hated the term ‘man up’. I think it is such a damaging thing to say to little boys. A big problem that we have to tackle is men’s inability to seek help; it’s this ‘man up culture’ that is baked into young men from a young age that makes them think – it’s wrong to cry, it’s wrong to share your feelings and being vulnerable is weak.”
Thirty-five years on, emo is still with us, still misunderstood, still bearing its gooey bits, and still trying to be something better. Not that any of the bands involved with it would ever admit as much – but wasn’t that ever so.
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