There are certainly existential questions to ask about The Album in an era where the platforms-that-be are trying to steer the direction of music towards fragments of songs. But if this list is any indication, it remains as vital a form as ever.
Here are the best albums of the s so far. Travella slots right into the canon of the breakneck tradition with Mr Mixondo. Working in a genre that already feels eons ahead, DJ Travella somehow blasts singeli even further into hyperdrive. Vampire Weekend have lost their illusions, buried their remains, and built a memorial to young adulthoods lived in New York, a mausoleum made of towering peaks and charmingly precious lyrics.
The characters Koenig sketches may be rarified, but Only God Was Above Us makes the sadness universal: his futility in the face of war, his increasing resignation to the realities of aging.
Such truths hang on; everything else is fodder for the subway rats. Jaimie branch was at war for the world. On Sundial , she deploys her piercing intellect and rapier wit to interrogate everything from the failings of post-BLM America and the nature of fandom to problematic beauty standards. Her honey-smooth voice loops lazily around jazzy grooves as she jumps between radical political critique and merciless self-reflection, with some of her prickliest barbs aimed at those who see themselves on the right side of history.
But leave it to Blood Incantation, hailing from the head-shop-speckled foothills of Denver, to bring things back to basics while simultaneously blasting off into the future. With its Greatest Hits of eye-dilating pseudoscientific conspiracies, Hidden History of the Human Race is proudly absurd, its labyrinthine death metal riffage contracting and expanding spacetime at once, throttling us into lightspeed one second before opening up an ambient black hole the next.
