The 200 Best Albums of the 2010s - Pitchfork

Posted: 08 Oct 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

300/Atlantic

54.

Young Thug: Barter 6 (2015)

Young Thug went from the face of rap's inter-generational wars to one of its elder statesmen with unsettling speed. Just a few years ago, when he first emerged as a leader of Atlanta's melodic new school, his contortionist flows and frenzied yelps were a novelty; today, his stylistic progeny dominate the charts. Still, Barter 6, Thug's de facto debut album, remains his most cohesive project to date. Alternately paranoid, introspective, and tongue-in-cheek, he glides over production by Wheezy and London on Da Track. Although the release was attended by some high-profile drama (the name was an obvious, if inscrutable, subliminal aimed at his former idol Lil Wayne), Thug sounds inordinately focused, easily out-rapping guests like T.I., Boosie BadAzz, and Young Dolph, all of whom deliver memorable turns on songs like the creeping "Can't Tell" and the stormy "Never Had It." He's remained prolific since then but, following plenty of leaks, label drama, and personal setbacks, Thug has yet to recapture the purity of that moment. –Rawiya Kameir

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

Planet Mu

53.

Jlin: Black Origami (2017)

Indiana footwork innovator Jerrilynn Patton, aka Jlin, once said that "the literature for experimental music is blank pages." Her steely second album is a testament to this out-of-box thinking. Charged with a constant feeling of discovery, it offers no real hierarchy of sound, as the well-oiled polyrhythmic parts clatter, woosh, and glitch together with balletic ease. Black Origami sounds like real life, like industrialization collapsing and recalibrating, generative and alive.

"I call it Black Origami," Jlin has said, because "all those folds and bends that you go through in your life, that is what folds you into that piece of origami. You start off as this blank sheet of paper, this innocent thing. And then life starts bending and folding, bending and folding." In her own folding, she establishes herself as one of the most forward-thinking contemporary composers in any genre, and one of the most human. –Jenn Pelly

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

Virgin/Parlophone/DFA

52.

LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening (2010)

Before he entered the hibernation that was supposed to be his grand exit, LCD Soundsystem lifted up every last commandment James Murphy believed in: Get newly baptized under the disco ball, change who you are if it helps someone fall in love with you, never make a hit, take one last shot at your critics, then leave the stage forever.

This final album from the band—the story went—was full of stakes and climaxes and last-goodbyes. "It was a music of desperation," Murphy once said of "All I Want," the beating heart of the record, a song so stuffed with feeling it ends with Murphy crying, "Take me home." He sings again of home at the very end of the record, as if heaven or a wine-bar proprietorship calls him hither. Of course, in the real world, where LCD Soundsystem reunited and made another good album seven years later, the "take me home" motif now scans a little more like a drunk guy in the back of an Uber after a long night. The saga of This Is Happening and the band's final concert at Madison Square Garden fizzes in the mind like a dream, too cathartic and momentous to ever be real. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

Pampa

51.

DJ Koze: Knock Knock (2018)

DJ Koze doesn't sing on his records, but his personality nevertheless shines through with every wonky beat—and electronic music's premier troublemaker with a heart of gold was never more lovable than on Knock Knock. His productions have always been somewhat at odds with the sorts of Ibiza mega-clubs he's often booked to play—intimate instead of bombastic, squirrelly instead of grandstanding—and Knock Knock makes the most of his idiosyncrasies: A Bon Iver sample puts a campfire-folk spin on glitchy deep house; Lambchop's Kurt Wagner gurgles sweetly through Auto-Tune. Much of the album's jewel-toned sampledelia is decidedly laid-back, with chopped-up soul over easygoing drum breaks, but there's no missing the mainstage triumph of the Gladys Knight-sampling disco-house anthem "Pick Up," a bittersweet breakup anthem that, heard amid a throng of 10,000 souls dancing in unison, is simply life-affirming. –Philip Sherburne