The Top 50 Albums of 2013

Presenting our Top 50 Albums of 2013. At the end of the list you'll find our individual contributors' personal top 10 albums and tracks. Don't forget to check out the My Year in Music feature in The Pitch, where our writers and editors run down their personal highs and lows of 2013.

My Name Is My Name

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At a time in pop music where immediacy counts more than ever, Pusha T’s official debut album got pushed back so many times that it had started to become the rap-world shorthand for a project left to die on the shelf. But instead of becoming a liability, My Name Is My Name’s repeated delays ended up becoming an advantage. Pusha’s bluntly unadorned flow has always been best suited to skeletal arrangements (revisit the decade-old “Grindin’” if you need a vivid reminder), so My Name dropping into the thick of a craze for minimalist rap worked out pretty well for him. As one of the more ardent affiliates of Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music crew, it’s not surprising that the album shares some of Yeezus’ stark sonics, but the beats are more comfortably luxurious. With so much experience working with stripped-down sounds, Pusha has become a master of making a lot out of very little. Push never oversells his songs, but listen through My Name enough times and you start uncovering the wealth of subtle hooks it has hiding in plain sight. —Miles Raymer

Pusha T: "Numbers on the Boards"

Loud City Song

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"Try to make yourself a work of art/ Like me," sang Julia Holter, the experimental L.A. pop singer, on her debut record, the one based on an ancient Greek play. This year's Loud City Song is the first Holter record to be made outside of her bedroom, but compared to that early sentiment, it feels especially external. The album is based on the 1958 Parisian musical Gigi, but was also inspired by Holter's life in the city—it is set distinctly within the context of the urban pastoral, conjuring the ambient noise of a bustling metropolitan area through swarming horns, or images of patrons walking on the streets with a cool-sung cabaret piece. Loud City Song thus feels big, alive, and more ambitious than anything Holter has done, working with free jazz instrumentation of trombones, strings and double bass to explore a new sense of theatricality. One of her most miraculous talents is how she takes these high concepts and keeps them inviting and unpretentious while still requiring valuable patience and a certain steadiness of mind to appreciate the record as one full, cohesive, and uplifting piece. —Jenn Pelly

Julia Holter: "Maxim's I" (via SoundCloud)

Major Arcana

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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Major Arcana, it’s that retroactivity doesn’t need to be of the museum-display variety. The sophomore album by Massachusetts’ Speedy Ortiz strains the strangled chords and corkscrew interplay of 90s guitar heroes like Helium’s Mary Timony, Polvo’s Ash Bowie, and Chavez’s Matt Sweeney into jaggedly axed anthems. But singer/guitarist Sadie Dupuis’ syrup-and-snake-venom inkwell overflows with here-and-now urgency, as does the whole album’s spring-loaded tenseness. “Tiger Tank” strikes a harrowing harmonic itch that Dupuis’ vocal melody circles but refuses to scratch, and “Gary” lurches between darkness and dawn like a synesthesia-stricken vampire. “Plough”, on the other hand, is a singsong cipher that pits pop hooks against pinprick riffage and a disorienting falsetto trill that taunts logic. Nirvana’s In Utero celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2013, but Major Arcana is the real celebration—as well as the overdue prompt to mutate or die. —Jason Heller

Speedy Ortiz: "No Below" (via SoundCloud)

Nonfiction

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James Hinton’s debut as the Range, Nonfiction, came out of nowhere. What it did not do was come out of nowhere to floor you, knock you backward, or slap you in the face. The effect was more like the polite dosey doe you dance when bumping into a stranger. "Oh, um." "Heh." "Sorry." "Yep." Nonfiction will pass without incident if you let it, but it managed to graze many of the year's trends—a re-exploration of grime, of breakbeats, and of drum & bass—while maintaining its personality and isolation. Sampladelic music is rarely so self-contained. The interjecting voices—mostly anonymous grime MCs—don't feel like conversations but footnotes, references to outside texts. Nonfiction pilfers many of its samples from deep-crate YouTube clips, but the album avoids commenting on technology or media consumption. Hinton mined the service like you would a zine, a pirate radio station, or any other mercurial broadcast that feels like it's beamed directly to you: by internalizing its strangeness and mimicking its appeal. —Andrew Gaerig

The Range: "Metal Swing" (via SoundCloud)

Matangi

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Let's have a brief moment of stock-taking: 2013 is a year in which Jay Z is recording advertisements for smartphones and Kanye West is recording minimalist industrial rap as means of revenge against the fashion industry. The two men duking it out for the title of Soul King are both white, and the de rigeur style of rapping is… singing. Beyoncé is on track to sell a record number of an album she didn't even promote. Who could blame Maya Arulpragasam for making an album that feels a bit strange? Matangi sounds like M.I.A.'s spiritual side picked a fight with her inner rebel, her inner rebel slapped back and then they cracked up about it and hopped in bed to create a record full of humor. Amidst the grimy lurch and clatter of these beats—her best since Kala—is a rare, relaxed version of M.I.A. saying some truly left-field, whimsical stuff. She's making fun of Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft; she's rattling off lines like, "there's 36 Chambers in my Wu-Tent," and, "my blood type is no negative"; she's singing her own loopy, off-key version of a bedroom jam over a Weeknd beat and calling it “Sexodus”. And for once, everyone else is making her seem relatively normal. —Carrie Battan

M.I.A.: "Come Walk With Me"

Slow Focus

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Fuck Buttons’ debut, 2008's Street Horrrsing, featured distorted, near-black-metal vocals along with the expansive, low-tech electronics, letting the listener know there were humans in the room. Then came 2009's Tarot Sport, a less duct-taped collection that found Benjamin Power and Andrew Hung disappearing a bit into the background, exploring electronic music more head on without entirely tightening the seams. Four years later, they offered up their self-produced third album, Slow Focus, a finely polished collection that matches the shiny decadence of the jewels on its cover. It's also the moment Fuck Buttons removed their fingerprints entirely from the equation, giving us alien, otherworldly sounds to mull over with less noise-rock mediation. And it's a revelation. The music’s as muscular as ever, it's just more efficient—maximalist minimalism?—and no matter how many times you listen to these seven tracks, you discover previously unlit corners. Unlike the past compositions, there's no levity or moments to catch your breath: Each song's pile of colorful synthesizers and deep, dark percussion adds up to a go-for-broke anthem, and they obviously haven't reached their limit. The way the duo's learned to layer and accrue detail, you get the sense that these whirling, pulsing pieces could snowball endlessly, growing larger and more beautiful each second, blowing off the roof only to diagram the sky. It's cool songs from Tarot Sport were played at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. Too bad this wasn't ready for it. —Brandon Stosuy

Fuck Buttons: "Brainfreeze" (edit) (via SoundCloud)

The 20/20 Experience

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Just like Jon Hamm's "bubble"-encased Drew Baird character on "30 Rock", we let Justin Timberlake get away with so much. His 2013 started strong (we'll get to that in a moment) but his bit part in an excellent Coen Brothers movie was overshadowed by a leading role in one of the worst major studio films of the year (trust me, I saw it), not to mention an album that managed to offend domestic abuse survivors and HBO viewers in one fell swoop. His most fervent admirers (trust me, I'm one of them) could only hide their eyes with embarrassment. "I'm not cut out for it," Timberlake bitterly complained about the avalanche of late-year criticism to GQ in a piece titled "#Hashtag of the Year", a confirmation of his ubiquity in the face of all odds. A resolute showman who spent the first phase of his nearly two-decade career facing constant scrutiny, it can sometimes seem that Timberlake's main goal isn't to be good—it's to be liked.

"Drink You Away" be damned, though, Justin Timberlake continues to be liked (loved, by many) and the first volume of The 20/20 Experience provides plenty of reasons why. Sure, just writing down some of the album's most notable conceits—the best nü-metal deep-cut weeper since Limp Bizkit covered the Who, a power ballad about looking at yourself in the mirror, the only Michael Flatley-meets-Miami Sound Machine mashup you ever need to hear—might suggest that a few pairs of Bad Idea Jeans were worn in the studio. And yet, along with Timbaland and J-Roc (who were more or less left for dead after that embarrassing "electronic" Chris Cornell album), Timberlake ended up with one of the year's most enjoyable pop records, a document of endless musical largesse that earns its 70-minute runtime with lush sonics and a moony-eyed fixation on monogamy so hopelessly corny that it ends up coming across as totally endearing. It's disappointing that Justin Timberlake didn't put out two great albums in 2013, but as hindsight (har har) suggests, that one of them ended up being very good is nothing short of a miracle. —Larry Fitzmaurice

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"

Trouble Will Find Me

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The National couldn’t have been more out of step with 2013’s pop-worshipping zeitgeist. As the hippest of the hip in indie-rock circles tripped over themselves to pay homage to Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, here was a band steadfastly committed to the thankless task of delivering excellent National albums. It’s tempting to take Trouble Will Find Me for granted*,* now that the National is a couple of records removed from its “beloved underdog” period. On previous records like Boxer and High Violet, the National staked its claim as the preeminent chroniclers of office-bound and apartment-confined urban drone-ism. These guys are Springsteen for people named Dylan and Skylar who worry about their 401K’s going bankrupt like Frankie and Mary fretted about the factory shutting down. On Trouble Will Find Me, the National faced the challenge of maintaining this creative momentum as it entered the band’s middle age, and responded with a record imbued with similar uncertainties about what happens to life once it starts to slow down. The fear of loss—whether it’s the loss of love, security, or a sense of  purpose—haunts this record, sometimes literally (like on “Demons”, which invite Matt Berninger to “stay down”) but mostly figuratively (like on the amazing “Pink Rabbits”, where a drunk still pines for a woman who has long since forgotten him). Trouble Will Find Me might not have bowled listeners over when it came out in May, but for many of us it continued to linger, as National records do, revealing new truths and soothing old wounds, an out-of-step record perfectly suited for out-of-step listeners. —Steven Hyden

Woman

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Anonymity made for a perfect introduction to the elegantly minimal soul confections of Rhye, the duo of singer Mike Milosh and producer Robin Hannibal. It sharpened the peculiarly acute intimacy of absence, which is the softly beating heart swaddled in the gentle instrumental folds of Rhye’s debut, Woman. Hannibal’s tracks have a priceless offhanded grace, whipping the warmest, lightest froth from creamy pianos and synths, saucy horns and slinky basses, and effervescent drums popping off cushiony strings.

The smooth, porous strains let Milosh’s multitracked voice, a thin and chilly slip that moves as lightly as a hummingbird, penetrate deeply. Milosh inhabits his highest range as freely as most of us chitchat, and while he’s not a demonstrative singer, he’s precise. Saccharine and sexy, bold and timid, it’s hipster R&B for xx rather than R. Kelly fans; a point of view distinct from Jamie Woon’s techno-leaning existential angst or the Weeknd’s dark, strident drive.

The heartbreakingly lovely “Open” blossoms in a lush bouquet of Vivaldi-like strings, glowing brass and scintillating harp before a sax licks out as the spongy bass line drops, and Milosh flows out of his wordless hum and starts to bounce. He sounds so authentically beatific that I long misheard “Mmm, but stay” as “Namaste,” and it totally worked. Beyond a dazzling opening stretch including “The Fall” and “Last Dance”, deep cuts like “One of Those Summer Days” extend the quiet storm into stately oceanic depths. “Don’t call me love unless you mean it,” goes an indelible refrain tucked amid the feathery disco-funk of “Shed Some Blood”, which perfectly sums up the coquettish blend of tenderness, sensitivity, and insolence that sets Rhye apart. —Brian Howe

Rhye: "Open"

Love's Crushing Diamond

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Jordan Lee said that he felt powerless while he watched his loved ones hurting. He doesn’t divulge many other details about what he went through, but here’s what we know: He quit his job in Boston and moved in with a friend in St. Louis. There, he wrote songs about what he’d been going through, which makes Love’s Crushing Diamond Lee’s therapy. His lyrics are economical, beautiful, and sometimes crushingly sad. They tell stories, but the characters are faceless and the details are vague. There are bursts of semi-specifics, like the line on “Golden Wake” about Lee quitting his job. “That Light That’s Blinding” paints the portrait of someone sweating out toxins, feeling like dying, and, yes, seeing a blinding light. “I couldn’t stop it from washing over you,” Lee sings to his struggling loved one.

He worked for months to envelop his words with warm, gorgeous string arrangements, and he dotted everything with field recordings: wind chimes, creaking floors, the flicker of a lighter, the sound of kids’ toys, and the muted twinkle of an old piano. Lee moved around a lot while working on Love’s Crushing Diamond, collecting the small bits of sound that pop up throughout the album. His nomadic inclinations also turn up in his lyrics: “I’m on the slow train rollin’ through that city,” he sings. While traveling, he looks inward, singing, “My mind is muddled, our hearts are empty, my body seems so temporary.” It’s a fragile album with delicate sonic dressings. On the first and last track, Lee sings that “the river only knows to carry on.” The phrase seems to embody two related ideas: Trauma is inevitable, but letting go and moving forward is paramount. —Evan Minsker

Mutual Benefit: "Advanced Falconry" (via SoundCloud)

Light Up Gold

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Light Up Gold is record-collector-rock for record-collector-rock-collectors, 34 gone-too-quick minutes of chin-stroking, bowl-cashing, amp-ruining, Socrates-dying-in-the-fucking-gutter punk. Parquet Courts are staunchly image-conscious about not having an image whatsoever, and on Gold, they perhaps accidentally dial in on that miracle middleground between art school and the CBGB’s bathroom, Malkmus and "New Rose".

What pushes the trio beyond their peers is a preternatural ability to locate the exact second when teenage kicks give way to a realization of their place in the world—the time when you critically analyze the deeper meaning of the junk in your pockets. The first 5:42 of the record, among the best 1-2 punches of the year, outlines the alpha and omega of their response to their life station: sarcasm and nostalgia. “Master of My Craft” blasts “Ex-Lion Tamer” through Jonathan Richman’s car stereo, with co-frontman Austin Brown’s manifesto sounds made via cut-up method from a publicist’s Linkedin account. Then a single drumstick click smash-cuts into “Borrowed Time”, on which Andrew Savage perfectly encapsulates inspiration arising from squalor—thoughts dripping on his head from the ceiling.

Then there’s the dopey majesty of “Stoned and Starving”, the “Hallogallo” of slack-jawed bakedom, barreling into an unknown future where you’re still high as fuck. It’s 2013’s “Nothing Ever Happened”, if everything actually did happen right behind you and you were too completely blazed to turn around at the bodega counter. “I don’t know too much, I just got the keys,” Brown sings on “Yr No Stoner”. Now, to find the car. —Eric Harvey

Parquet Courts: "Stoned and Starving" (via SoundCloud)

LongLiveA$AP

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Although it seemed like the long-awaited culmination of a two-year narrative when it came out, A$AP Rocky's proper debut surprisingly managed to, in many ways, set the tone for the year ahead in hip-hop. It is a cool album, exactingly deliberate and consistent in its construction, yet effortless in its handle on the zeitgeist. Other rappers borrowed the album's visual aesthetic and made album covers in grayscale; other kids borrowed the A$AP look and flooded rap shows in their screen printed shorts. And make no mistake, it's Rocky's love of screwed down vocals specifically that helped the effect seep into the DNA of so many Soundcloud producers. LongLiveA$AP projects a sense of unruffled self-assurance and flawless taste that's easy to latch onto. Many of its best moments hinge on other artists—Drake and Kendrick Lamar's breezily confident verses on "Fuckin' Problems", a succession of scene-stealing guest spots on "1 Train", Skrillex's batshit production on "Wild for the Night", the eerie juxtaposition of Santigold and Clams Casino on "Hell", Gunplay's demand for a porterhouse steak—but these never fail to read as anything other than an expert work of curation on Rocky's part. Whether he's rapping slick bars about fashion, bluntly dismissing racial prejudice, or simply ceding the stage to his talented friends, he's at the center of things, the image of unflappable coolness. And rap, it happens, is pretty great when it's acting cool. —Kyle Kramer

Tomorrow's Harvest

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Considering they update their official website as many times in a decade as Perez Hilton does in a day, 2013 must have felt like a four alarm fire for Scotland’s Boards of Canada. From the release of their fourth full-length in 15 years as well as the corresponding reissue of their major EPs and LPs, through to an accompanying marketing campaign that prompted BoC fans to roll out their tinfoil hats, protractors, and astrology wheels in the name of a fresh clue, the brothers Sandison enjoyed a prolific year that thrust them back into the spotlight and cemented their status as a legacy act. Tomorrow’s Harvest is neither as deep nor as nuanced as their previous records, but it should go down as a worthy contribution to that legacy. In addition to magnanimously calling back to some of the brothers’ biggest moments (see: “Palace Posy” as a companion piece to 1998’s “Aquarius”, “New Seeds” to 2006’s “Dayvan Cowboy”, etc.), it also offered up a new shade to Boards of Canada’s sound, one that married their familiar whirly-gigging synths and loping rhythm sections with yawning horrorshow arpeggios and a faint undercurrent of dread. It's thrilling to hear these new themes of death and decay slowly seep into the dominant dewey-eyed late-90s nostalgia narrative; one wonders what they’d sound like if they went digging even deeper into the dirt. —Mark Pytlik

Boards of Canada: "Reach for the Dead" (via SoundCloud)

Immunity

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Jon Hopkins practiced self-hypnosis for a decade before he finally got it, right around the time he started on his fourth full-length, Immunity. The British electronic producer and composer’s output has always had a trancelike, meditative quality—from Opalescent’s gentle guitar tones to the horror-cinematic soundscapes of 2010’s Monsters (and, in between, his work with Brian Eno and King Creosote)—but it wasn’t until Immunity that everything clicked into place for Hopkins both mentally and musically, almost like lock and key. The album even begins with the sound of Hopkins unlocking his studio door before settling into a beat that scuffs up his pristine ambience with a new intensity.

The video for Immunity highlight “Open Eye Signal” perhaps best demonstrates this. A kid skateboards smoothly through time and space, the camera focusing on the scene’s grit: his black eye and bandaged wrist, a flaming tire, a man on fire, abandoned townships. His constant forward motion is soothing to watch even as moments of unease keep it from being just another beautifully shot video. Between the piano interludes of “Breathe This Air” and labored breaths permeating the crunchy, simmering “Collider”, Immunity also lurches from pretty to pinprickly, taking the listener on a similarly fantastic journey through Hopkins' brilliant mind. —Harley Brown

Jon Hopkins: "Open Eye Signal" (via SoundCloud)

The Bones of What You Believe

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“I am gonna come for you with all that I have,” Lauren Mayberry sings on “Gun”, from Chvrches’ full-length debut. Such a forceful sentiment might sound overbearing if The Bones of What You Believe wasn’t so insistently and so genuinely compassionate, if the synths didn’t sound so massively sparkly on “Tether”, if the choruses of “The Mother We Share” didn’t scale monumental heights. Before forming Chvrches, these three Glaswegians all had a jump on becoming jaded insiders: Iain Cook and Martin Doherty paid dues in Aerogramme and the Twilight Sad, respectively, and Mayberry, in addition to serving time in a twee-folk act, had studied music journalism. Yet, there was something refreshing and deeply moving about Chvrches in 2013. They wore their hearts on their sleeves and risked falling on their faces, but Bones succeeds precisely because it sounds so musically and spiritually generous. These songs are far too ambitious to be mere comfort food, and the trio are too concerned about each and every one of you to care much about any particular trends or scenes. —Stephen M. Deusner

Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"

Muchacho

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The gatefold of Muchacho features a detail shot of a Nudie suit. The background is dark, and there’s a peacock framed by light purple flowers. It’s not nearly as colorful or garish as Gram Parsons’ iconic drug cornucopia pattern. This one’s unassuming, feasibly the sort of thing you could wear out of a Western clothing shop without looking like a cartoon cowboy. Matthew Houck is embracing his country roots, but he never plays them up to the point of honky tonk hucksterism. Fiddles, piano, pedal steel, even horseshoe-clopping percussion are all implemented on his new album, but they’re never the focal point. Houck’s band on Muchacho have chops, but they never show off. When Kyle Resnick plays his trumpet, the sound doesn’t blare—it’s nestled beneath Houck’s ragged, seemingly sleepy vocal. Everything’s tempered, supplemental, and gorgeously produced by John Agnello.

Muchacho is full of allegory, with lyrics about “the wounded master,” rolling away the stone, the shepherd, the lamb, and so on. These are reasonably common lyrical tropes in country and folk traditions, and Houck balances those moments with more familiarly contemporary imagery. On “Down to Go”, he sings about partying to numb the hurt, and all the while, he openly acknowledges the social stereotypes that come with being a heartbroken country balladeer. While his friends tell him he’ll write some great music about his heartache, he points out that he’s still hurting, “aching and ornery.” Over Ricky Jay Jackson’s looming pedal steel, he paints a picture that’s bruised and familiar. It makes sense why this album’s origin story—Houck's break up and trip to Mexico—is frequently referenced when Muchacho is discussed. The record's sentiments and backstory pair well, sort of like For Emma and Justin Vernon’s Wisconsin cabin. —Evan Minsker

Phosphorescent: “Song for Zula” (via SoundCloud)

Engravings

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No-one does atmosphere like Forest Swords. The Manchester producer excels at evoking shades and shadows, slippery feelings, and the yawning, life-sized chasm between doom and triumph. On his debut album Engravings, he fulfills the early promise of his 2010 EP, Dagger Paths, by carving out a fully inhabitable world from such fertile matter. Throughout, the drums are slow and steady, observing time in an offhand yet hypnotizing manner. Pipes call out in celebration, and in warning. Guitar lines curl ominously. All criss-cross in what feels like a deeply meaningful yet undefinable way. Forest Swords is not interested in telling a story, it seems, but in making the listener an unquestionable part of it. Like its predecessor, Engravings occupies nameless territory. One minute it sounds like a forgotten Eastern folk music, the next the soundtrack to a Leone western, and the next again like the future memories of music our children’s children will one day have. It’s this fluidity that is at the heart of the album’s power. Nameless, placeless, timeless: Engravings rejects boundaries and scrabbles to unearth the subconscious instead. —Ruth Saxelby

Forest Swords: "The Weight of Gold" (via SoundCloud)

Truant / Rough Sleeper

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Right as our year-end assessment was about to go live and the calendar year of 2013 gave way to 2014, a time when music writers, publicists, and editors are off-duty, the mysterious electronic music producer known as Burial slipped his latest release, Rival Dealer, out into the world, with no press or forewarning, just beyond a Year-End list’s grasp. Ever since he emerged in 2005, the man known as William Emmanuel Bevan (unless…) has operated according to his own tenets. At the end of 2012, for instance, he released the staggering two-track, 25-minute “Truant/ Rough Sleeper”, which continued to resonate through this year. Comprised of crackling, forlorn, hoar-frosted etudes that faded together into a dream-logical suite, Burial’s acumen isolated these voices calling from a post-Skynet world and made them into something harrowing yet ultimately redemptive. You could hear Burial’s netherworld sound seep into the music of underground producers as well as bigger names like Skrillex. And—if you listened closely—you could also hear Burial in the intermission music for Kanye West’s Yeezus tour. —Andy Beta

Amygdala

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For years DJ Koze has been a closely guarded secret, a savant of silly, machine-tooled funk. Following almost a decade of remixes and sporadic singles, the solo collection Amygdala blew his cover. A long, ink-smudged love letter to dance music, friends, and living gently, its excesses are charming: rhythms tumbling off one too many glasses of wine, fidgety synths too cavalier with scented candles. The lightly stepping "La Duequesa" features steel drums and swelling Motown strings. There's a weird-uncle vibe to the proceedings, from the preposterous art to the normally pompadoured-and-leather-jacketed Matthew Dear singing "It's a serious world/ I'm a magical boy." Later, another Dear track offers Koze acolytes a mantra: "When I notice the world is falling apart/ I will run a bath." For naught, though, as our meetings are now overrun, extra folding chairs required, sheet cake expenditures up 29%. It is Koze's fault, and he will be softly chided. —Andrew Gaerig

DJ Koze: "Track ID Anyone?" [ft. Caribou] (via SoundCloud)

Anxiety

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2013 may very well stand as the year the word "literally" lost its meaning, or at least the year where it was redefined to include its misuse as a tool for melodramatic overstatements. Autre Ne Veut's Anxiety is a crashing, clanging, caterwauling expression of this sort of literally. It is music for literally feeling torn apart inside, for literally feeling like the world is collapsing. It is not safe; it is not proper; it is not tastefully reserved. It's very real and very raw. In a year in which blogs were littered with electronically tinged distortions of R&B and synthpop in a similar vein to Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety discarded the form's prevailing principle of slick prettiness for uninhibited, pure emotion. Sure, the results are melodramatic, but that's how big emotions are portrayed. You don't stand in front of the mirror and think "someday I'm gonna die" to yourself, as singer Arthur Ashin does on "Gonna Die" and not play it up a little, even if you totally mean it. You don't curl up in bed and whimper "don't ever leave me alone" into the phone with any sort of decorum. Anxiety is fists-clenched, teary-eyed catharsis, whether in the feedback screeches and false optimism of "Counting", the careening guitar riffs in the back of "Ego Free Sex Free", or the crescendoed crash of tour de force opener "Play by Play". The intensity is unrelenting, and the effect is staggeringly beautiful. There's literally nothing quite like it. —Kyle Kramer

Autre Ne Veut: “Play by Play” (via SoundCloud)

Monomania

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On the last few Deerhunter records, grit and gloss have struggled to split the available sonic real estate. For every set of shimmering and uplifting chords, weirdo-equilibrium had to be restored using a blast of feedback or a flood of woozy delay-pedal-washes. With Monomania, the Atlanta-based band’s sixth LP and first without longtime bassist Josh Fauver, the grit gets the upper hand. Here, singer/guitarist Bradford Cox appears to have swapped out his cherished Stereolab and Echo & the Bunnymen LPs for the collected works of Royal Trux, playing up his band’s already established yen for gristly garage rock and dabbling in the loose and bluesy vibes of 70s Rolling Stones. But even though nearly every track is pushed into the red, Monomania ranks among Deerhunter’s most subdued efforts. The distortion masks what is otherwise a set of fairly introspective breakup songs, with Cox singing about getting ditched (“Back to the Middle”), obsession (“Monomania”), and some fantasized dominant/submissive relationship dynamics (“Dream Captain”). It's not a record that pleased all the band's fans, particularly those who prefer their epic space-rock turns, but it's a compelling left-field turn that shores up Deerhunter's other big strength: Unpredictability. —Aaron Leitko

Deerhunter: "Monomania"

Excavation

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Most of what you’ve heard about Excavation, the second album by London producer the Haxan Cloak, is probably true: An instrumental concept record about the slow slide or sudden drop into death, these are 51 rather harrowing minutes, filled with forlorn strings and dismal noise, collapsing rhythms and macabre vocal cuts. The bass is plangent and massive, padding clicking beats and gray layers with the tonal dominance of drone metal. During “Miste”, a character struggles to catch his breath against the string-painted creep of mortality; during “The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)”, a beat mimics a heartbeat but soon stumbles over itself, ultimately fading against a backdrop of hair-rising oblivion. Without a word, Excavation alternately conjures drowning, suffocation, heart attacks, and sheer senescence—a chronicle of suffering and uncertainty, rendered in exquisite existentialist onomatopoeia. This is Burial, making good on the name, or Demdike Stare, slipping into grimm robes.

But the end-to-end thrill of Excavation comes not from Bobby Krlic’s fatalistic fixation. Rather, throughout these 11 tracks, there’s a constant sense of surprise, a reveling in the musically unexpected that suits the subject matter. The pieces shift suddenly into hopeful radiance or plummet without warning into their own abysses. For all of Krlic’s determinism, Excavation is paradoxically nebulous, as though the producer is, with this music, feeling his way through life toward its inevitable, unpredictable end.  —Grayson Haver Currin

The Haxan Cload: "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)"

Run the Jewels

28

If Killer Mike’s El-P-produced R.A.P. Music went over like a modern day Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, where West Coast microphone fiend Ice Cube ducked out of N.W.A. and traveled East to lay down intractable political screeds with Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team, then Run the Jewels, the pair’s self-titled debut as a group, is “Burn, Hollywood, Burn”: Cube and P.E. reuniting in song to show that they’ve shared a message all along. Mike and El’s album-length mind-meld zeroes in on bleak gallows humor as the common ground between the Definitive Jux founder’s scorched dystopian grit and the ATLien’s wizened country paeans. The beats favor the claustrophobic but swinging production of El’s 2012 end-of-the-world dance party Cancer 4 Cure, and the punchline game’s perpetually set to “immolate” (El: “You wanna hang? Bring your throat/ I got stools and a rope.” Mike: “I stand on towers like Eiffel/ I rifle all of your idols.”). Run the Jewels documents an improbable pairing going unbelievably swimmingly, a rap nerd’s fantasy draft brought to ball-busting life in a volley of clenched-fist threats and side-splitting snark. —Craig Jenkins

[Run the Jewels: "Banana Clipper" [ft. Big Boi]]

The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight...

27

Neko Case has always seemed less a songwriter than an atmospherically generated force of nature: a voice with the richness and warmth of a chinook sweeping down from the Rocky Mountains, an utter disregard for societal convention, a volatility that must be borne out of a cyclone hanging with menace over the Indian Ocean. And yet The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight…, her most vulnerable and human record to date, is also her best. Case’s balance of tender and tough has never been more delicate, and her eye for keen observation only grows truer with time: a mother’s frayed nerves finally splitting at a bus stop, a stack of faded calling cards left to gather dust in a shoebox, a puffy-sleeved relic from decades past. Her indelible voice forms the core of every song, whether it’s flecked with harmony or swaddled by blooming horns or standing alone, nearly naked; its clarity can be disarming. But she hasn’t lost any of her bite: whether picking bits of bully from her teeth and shredding gender constructs on “Man” or refusing to puke up sonnets on “Night Still Comes,” Case retains the ferocity that grants her albums their visceral thrill. Bile-soaked poems be damned—she remains miraculous. —Jamieson Cox

Neko Case: "Man"

Overgrown

26

James Blake emerged in a string of singles and EPs made from alien alloys of singer/songwriter fare, classical music, solemn gospel, pop R&B, and the softest, sultriest strains of dubstep. When it came time for his first LP in 2011, he abandoned the R&B samples that had made him trendy, emphasizing his austere but opulent production style and the indie choirboy side of his musical persona. Those who wished for more “I Never Learnt to Share”-style grandeur, less “Lindesfarne” twee got just what they wanted on second album Overgrown, where the frilly piano-man is relegated to little corners like “Dim”. Most of the record is given to shadowy, imperious electronic soul, with dubstep lingering in the halftime drums and swimmy sub-basses. The cool subtlety of the music is offset by some of his hottest, most brash vocal performances—take the falsetto-prone singer’s new adventures in vocal fry, like the spine-chilling low-register plunge of the word “constellation” on “I Am Sold”. It's a gesture that lets us know exactly what time it is there: nighttime. While deeply reflective and sad, the music seethes pure sex, and not even RZA musing about the fingertouch of a newborn kid dilutes the vibe. —Brian Howe

James Blake: "Retrograde"

Nothing Was the Same

25

Nothing Was the Same is a feat of maturity. It boasts a stylistically broad array of singles but gleams like a single piece of crystal when consumed in full. Drake’s rapping is at its tightest; he’s chosen his guest features wisely and sparingly. With the help of producer pal Noah Shebib, he's learned to edit himself down to a restrained 13 tracks. The muted beats and themes cascade effortlessly. Which makes it all the more thrilling to catch the little flashes of Drake's diminishing oafishness, the geeky roughness around the edges of such a gorgeously spun and scrupulously chiseled piece of work. "A few bottles on the table,” he whispers. “A few waters." Drake is still the only rapper concerned with keeping his friends hydrated while they're turning up, and too loyal to stop them from fucking up the best music videos of the year with their teenage-boy buffoonery. It’s impossible to hear Drake moan, “Peaking, I'm peeeeaking" without blushing and averting your eyes in shame. He just wants some head in a comfortable bed? Cringe. There's the Drake we’d almost forgotten, the guy who charms with his fumbles and who is not quite self-aware enough to realize he can't pull off a line like that yet. It’s our good fortune that he probably never will. —Carrie Battan

Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home" [ft. Majid Jordan]

R Plus Seven

24

If Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project leaned on the reset button for 2011’s Replica, on R Plus Seven there’s a natural continuation of thought. This isn’t exactly a career summary, but it does bring back some of the vapor-trail electronics of earlier OPN efforts while also building out a few of the crackpot concepts of that prior record. On certain tracks those worlds collide. Lopatin isn’t so much interested in malfunctioning circuitry as he is in the primitive ways of machines at the birth of computing. It can be simultaneously thought-provoking, funny, and startling, but it’s not a patchwork of thoughts loosely stitched together; there’s a warped logic to the way transitions happen, from manic machine noise to bubbly bass tones to snippets of deranged chatter. R Plus Seven is an uncannily accurate embodiment of the kind of second guessing your brain indulges in late at night after a long lack of sleep, where you need to loop back on things just to be sure they actually happened. —Nick Neyland

Oneohtrix Point Never: "Zebra" (via SoundCloud)

Double Cup

23

DJ Rashad focuses on a regional scene—Chicago footwork—with its own way of dancing, moving, and emphasizing rhythmic structure, and then sees what else he can weave into its DNA: bounce rap (“Pass That Shit”), jungle (“I'm Too Hi”), house (“Leavin'”), hardcore techno (“Acid Bit”), and R&B (“Only One”). That he molds these styles to fit some brilliant drum programming is the key to his success; all you have to do is isolate the snares and follow their unpredictable, but eminently danceable paths to get an idea of just how snatch-your-breath these beats are at the core. And the melodies he strings together to wash over them—piano and synthesizer chords that jump from hover to shudder; cut-up mood-altering vocals from Tupac in Juice mode (“I Don't Give a Fuck”) or peak-disco First Choice reconfigured by Shep Pettibone for the dawn of house (“Every Day of My Life”)—coats a gleaming veneer of recognizable, personality-driven order over a huge engine of what seems like chaos. But it's chaos you can move to, once you figure out how. —Nate Patrin

DJ Rashad: "Every Day of My Life" [ft. DJ Phil] (via SoundCloud)

Cerulean Salt

22

You've probably met some of the people in Katie Crutchfield's songs. You might even be one. Eavesdropping on entwined couples through paper thin walls? Sitting in the car, sifting through stems and seeds? Waking up next to somebody who'll be sleeping through the morning? You've been there; you've done that. Crutchfield has a way of making the early-20-something tableaus of Cerulean Salt—her second LP as Waxahatchee—feel impossibly (and sometimes uncomfortably) real. The people of Cerulean Salt drink too much, fight too easily, feel too deeply, make promises too big to keep. With just a few words, Crutchfield places these characters among all-too-recognizable scenery: hollow bedrooms, closets clogged with empty bottles, riverside consolations in pickup flatbeds. Cerulean Salt was recorded quickly, at her parents' place in Alabama, an urgent-sounding record about people who aren't getting where they want as fast as they'd hoped. So they get through the days the only way they know how, ruled by seasons and inexplicable sadness, opting for misery over dispute. Sound familiar? —Paul Thompson

Waxahatchee: "Swan Dive" (via SoundCloud)

Cupid Deluxe

21

Dev Hynes is one of those artists who fortifies his own identity by inviting other musicians to bask in the coral glow of his vision. Cupid Deluxe is ostensibly a reclamation of his own turf after a year in the background as a go-to writer and producer for the likes of Sky Ferreira and Solange—and he would not have been wrong to try to seize a bit of glory for himself—but he still chose to keep the more anonymous Blood Orange moniker instead of breaking out under his real name. He remains a shadowy figure even on his boldest album, communicating in breathy whispers or casual background chatter and ceding much of his ground to his guests. Call it shyness or humility or grace, or just call it savvy: Cupid Deluxe is proof that Hynes is more effective working in a collage of subtle shades than with force. His friends have never sounded as slick as they do in his calm, self-assured company—Samantha Urbani achieves new heights of sultriness; Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth is suddenly a soulful presence; rapper Despot harnesses the throwback coolness of a Beastie Boy. Let Hynes put his fingerprints on your work and together you’ll turn to gold. —Carrie Battan

Blood Orange: “You're Not Good Enough” [ft. Samantha Urbani] (via SoundCloud)

Jai Paul

20

As of this writing, 673 people have signed an online petition imploring Jai Paul's label, XL Recordings, to release his debut album. "The 'leak' was seriously the best album of this year," insists the petitioner, referring to 16 demos that unceremoniously surfaced on Bandcamp in April only to be swiftly removed and denounced by both Paul and XL amidst rumors of a stolen laptop. Though the notoriously painstaking London artist—who works with his bassist and brother Anup—has only released two singles over the course of the last two and a half years, the global breadth of the petition’s signees suggests a wide reach, including fans in France, Korea, Colombia, and New Jersey. This cosmopolitan base matches the music that makes up this not-album, from its samples of both traditional Indian music to snatches of "Gossip Girl" dialogue, from its Princely guitar solos to all those half-drunk beats that wear their Dilla love with pride. Unfortunately, even if the petition hits 10,000 signatures, it probably won't change much. Indeed, by all accounts, XL would like to see a proper Jai Paul album most.

Even considering the surrounding controversy, these tracks give us insight into an artist who doesn't seem like a machiavellian internet hype-master as much as a doubter, a tinkerer, an idealist. In his only interview thus far, from 2011, he said, "Music to me was just a hobby and, in a way, I didn't care about showing it to anyone." And that internal struggle—so elusive in our show me, show me, show me social media world—plays out in these songs, where he sings, perhaps prophetically, "In the company of thieves/ Will I stay or will I leave?/ Will they steal away my life?/ Will I go down without my fight?/ I might." Paradoxically, Paul's apparent ambivalence toward a music industry that's desperate to support him has only stirred the fervor of those willing to drop £7 on a shady looking Bandcamp page. When he's ready, we will be, too; if he's not, at least we've got something. —Ryan Dombal

Jai Paul: "Jasmine" (via SoundCloud)

Doris

19

When Earl raps, he gazes far off into the distance, so cosmically bored is he by our interest. Watch him on “Sway in the Morning,” at god knows what hour, slumped in front of a fluorescent-lit table: This freestyle is an industry rite of passage, and yet this one is different, precisely because Earl is there, and everyone, in that moment, exists to please him. Sway plays beat after beat; Earl, with the contemptuous purity of a teenager, waves each one away.  "What would you prefer?" Sway asks courteously, his industry-vet eyes narrowing with the effort of getting inside Earl's head. When he drops "Drop It Like It's Hot (Remix)", a grin cracks Earl's face; his head bops goofily. The physical relief that washes over Sway's body, as he leans back, is palpable.

This is the relationship Earl has to the world: We want, more than anything, to hear him rap. We will stand and wait expectantly for minutes, years. Frankly, it's awkward, maybe even a little pathetic. Being a functioning teenager, he doesn't exactly relish handing expectant adults what they're waiting for, and thus the first voice we hear on Doris belongs, hilariously, to Frank Ocean's cousin.

This ambivalence is the dance of Doris, the story of Earl Sweatshirt: How do you do what you want when strangers seem to want it even more badly than you do? "Don't nobody care about how you feel," Vince Staples teases on the intro to "Burgundy". "We want raps." Sooner or later, he's going to have to give up the goods. So he sighs, leans in, opens his mouth.

The second he does, our anticipation justifies itself. Quite simply, there hasn't been a more viscerally enjoyable and economical rapper working in years. Earl's POV leaps from the front seat of a car into the sky in a single line ("Ride dirty as the fucking sky that you praying to"); family communications break down into a series of sound effects ("Mama often was offering peace offerings/ Think, wheeze, cough, scoff, and then he's off again"); Earl sprouts a ballooning gut and morphs into a fattened hedonist (You know me, drugs out front the telly/ I'm couch-drunk, ready to fuck/ Count 'fetti and bucks/ Count loud as I slap loud cross the belly"). Try wrestling free of the line "hard as armed services/ y'all might'a heard of him" once he utters it.

But Earl's heart is in here, too—his father, his mother; that fabled camp for troubled teens, being outed by Complex; girls, fame, puppy love, being true to yourself. "Breaking news that's less important when the Lakers lose/ There's lead in that baby food," he deadpans on "Hive". He can tell you are a little dumb, maybe. But he'll oblige, eventually. He even assented to Sway at last, unleashing a verse so devastating that Sway nearly doubled over when it was finished. Earl's verdict? "That was butt." —Jayson Greene

The Electric Lady

18

Early on, Janelle Monáe rarely exhibited doubt or vulnerability, not only because she is a bona fide Icon, but also because there has always been another, important correlative to her vibrant self-expression: like any science fiction author, she uses her medium to explore deeply rooted social ills and present an alternative vision of how the revolution might look. Her first EP and LP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and The ArchAndroid, were vast in scope, and the futuristic dystopian epic they told—that of Cindi Maywether, a cyborg fugitive hunted for the crime of falling in love with a human—was an entertaining but tightly packed narrative. Monáe, while adept and self-assured, had some difficulty getting her work to resonate with an audience not already receptive to concepts like "identity politics" or "Afropunk."

With The Electric Lady, the masterful, guest-packed double album she's called a prequel to ArchAndroid, Monáe hit her stride. The record is still fearless and luxurious, but now it's accessible, too; songs like "Dance Apocalyptic" and Miguel duet "Primetime" still resonate without metaphorical context, but the narrative is there if you want it. The powers of "Q.U.E.E.N." ("Are we a lost generation of our people?/ Add us to equations but they'll never make us equal") and "Ghetto Woman" (a paean to her mother's uphill battle) are self-evident. Nearly every track pulls its own weight, both individually and in the context of a larger work about inequality and spiritual rebellion. Her Electric Lady isn't a robot, she's an evolved life form. That distinction turned a highly sophisticated, empirically likable work into an organic classic—one that lets people in. —Devon Maloney

Janelle Monáe: “Q.U.E.E.N.” [ft. Erykah Badu] (via SoundCloud)

Days Are Gone

17

It's all there in Este Haim's bass face. It really is. When so many rock bands—you know, those things with guitars and drums and hooks you can remember—can seem hopelessly self-defeating, shamed, bored, or worse, Haim make no apologies. They're excited about their own songs enough to look like shocked tiger cubs taking their first swim while playing them. This enthusiasm is contagious, and it's why these three sisters from L.A.'s San Fernando Valley are responsible for the most appealing pop-rock record since Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

Days Are Gone chronicles the mistakes, triumphs, and confusions our hearts go through as we navigate our 20s, with Este, 27, Danielle, 24, and Alana, 22, bridging the gap between young-adult and adult-adult. Their harmonies and vacuum-packed arrangements put forth a unified front as they try to escape dependency on "Let Me Go" (replete with a wriggling guitar solo) or snub-out some lying son of a bitch on "My Song 5" as a snap beat gives their middle fingers some extra swagger. The hot emotions are tempered with contemplation, vulnerability; "Go Slow" simmers with an ache reminiscent of Kate Bush—another performer who's never been afraid to show her feelings on her face. Meanwhile, the shaggy "Honey & I" gloriously splits the difference between those twentysomething Sundays when all you want to do is sleep and the Fridays when you can't close your eyes. "Love wasn't what I thought it once was," sings Danielle, looking past teen dreams with her head high, "I'm not afraid no more." And just as the track seems poised for an ecstatic conclusion, it dials back cautiously. This is growing up. —Ryan Dombal

Haim: "The Wire"

Dream River

16

Twenty-three years on, Bill Callahan somehow found a way to whittle down his craft yet again. That in and of itself would be a feat on this remarkable run, spanning from his last album as Smog, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, and reaching to what might be an apex or else a stunning vantage point here. After the questing/questioning of 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and the arid landscapes of 2011’s Apocalypse, two albums stripped yet full of open-spaces and silences, what was left to pare down?

What distinguishes Dream River from his previous albums is nearly imperceptible. Callahan still uses the percussion of Brian Beattie, the arcing timbre of flautist of Beth Galiger, and the Cheshire Cat-like psychedelic guitar of Matt Kinsey. Callahan’s cinematographer’s (or is it a cartographer’s?) eye remains sharp; he still sings of eagles and wildlife, the contours of rivers, the pinging of winds, in much the same way that an Edu-period haikuist might perceive an interior state by gazing upon the outer world. Though did Bashō ever write about the taste of pilgrim guts?

Throughout Dream River, the dominant image is of a parabola: the trajectories of javelins and arrows, of gulls and buzzards in flight and landing, the easeful touchdown of small planes, of love itself. And, arching over it all, the movement of time’s arrow. No matter the heights achieved, one must always plummet back down. But when Callahan sings, “Time itself means nothing/ But time spent with you,” there’s a sense of love within. “I always went wrong in the same place/ where the river splits towards the sea,” he sings on the song that serves as the album’s heart, “Small Plane”, finally realizing that he could instead merge into something larger. Callahan has long been indie music’s itinerant musician, but for the first time in his music, there’s also a sense of home. —Andy Beta

Night Time, My Time

15

Let's get one thing straight from the start: that image over there on the left is not supposed to turn you on, it's supposed to make you feel gross. Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time is emboldened by the power to make you feel icky, constantly balling up our cultural obsessions with voyeurism and confession and live-tweeted female breakdowns only to hock them back in our faces like poison spitballs. "It ain't your right," she sneers early on overtop a tarnished, motorik beat, and you almost get the feeling that she's talking about our right to be listening in on such intimate declarations at all. A minute later, through a clenched jaw: "I'll only warn you one time/ I've got a stilted view." It's not just empty provocation. This record is not polite, this record does not wait for permission; reality show casting directors take note because this record did not come here to make friends.

Night Time, My Time is blown-speaker, smeared-lipstick pop—would-be radio hits with that last topcoat of paint left incomplete. It's a little bit retro—"Omanko" is jet-lagged Suicide; "I Will" is Blondie with overgrown roots; "24 Hours" is a song I am bummed John Hughes did not get to hear before he died—but its overall sensibility is undeniably 2013. The unfinished-basement textures are the work of Producer of the Moment/Most Valuable Ex-Hippos Member Ariel Reichstadt, and if it had a kindred spirit in the many things he had a hand in this year it was Charli XCX's True Romance—another record that seethed and blushed and oh-my-God-ed and just felt at all times unapologetically alive. But Night Time, My Time gave us the added bonus of long-delayed gratification: a brave and uncompromising artist who'd languished so long in the dentist office waiting room of the music industry finally hears her name called—and finally gets a chance to bare her fangs. "The way I was before, I'm not her anymore," Ferreira surges on "Heavy Metal Heart", flinging off each syllable with wild abandon, like she's shaking off the last scales of old skin. —Lindsay Zoladz

Shaking the Habitual

14

Of all the ways The Knife have provoked audiences over the years—trading in sprightly synth-pop for dread-ridden electro-goth, crafting impenetrable found-sound operas about Charles Darwin, turning up at awards shows in attire that puts Björk to shame—words have never been their weapon of choice. But on Shaking the Habitual, words are what matter most. Even as it pushes the Swedish duo to uncompromising extremes (this album doesn’t so much clear the dancefloor as tear a fissure right through it), the album stands as the Knife’s most humane, compassionate work to date. It’s a concept album but, instead of thrusting its narrative upon you, it asks that you take control of your own. Throughout the 96-minute record, Karin Dreijer Andersson can be heard talking about “stories” the way Gollum talks about rings—as a precious and empowering life-source. For Karin and brother Olaf Dreijer, stories are the building blocks of history as it is told—and, conversely, the instrument through which centuries-old socio-economic power structures can be dismantled.

Of course, the Knife recognize that’s a tall order for any single album, so they dutifully lead by example, bulldozing their ice-sculpted sound and reshaping it into percussive belly-dancer thrusts, extended sound-collaged drones, and hot-wired techno. But the clamor ultimately works in service to a clarity of vision, a philosophical throughline that connects the Knife to a roll call of radicals ranging from Margaret Atwood and Judith Butler to Fugazi and Salt-n-Pepa. Quoting the latter, Olaf sings, “let’s talk about gender, baby, let’s talk about you and me,” just as the nine-minute electro-punk gut-puncher “Full of Fire” comes to a sudden halt. Here, such jarring gestures signal not the end of the story, but your cue to start telling yours. —Stuart Berman

The Knife: "Full of Fire"

Wakin on a Pretty Daze

13

Kurt Vile gets a lot of ink for being a supremely chill, modest family man, so what could possibly inspire him to say something like, “in this day and age, ‘punk ideals’ are totally irrelevant”? Specifically, punk idealists who took issue with his decision to license a year-old song to Bank of America, a windfall that required no work whatsoever and allowed him to support his wife and buy better diapers for his daughter. Did Patrick Stickles not get the joke on “Puppet to the Man”? But in a more general sense, it’s a realization that gets described more tactfully throughout Vile’s masterful fourth LP, the lightbulb moment when all those old designs for life, including your own, just don’t apply to reality anymore.

None of these revelations come quickly during Wakin' on a Pretty Daze: On the opening quasi-title track, Vile rouses himself from slumber, laughing at people and machinery who feel like anything they have to say is particularly urgent. On the album’s closer, he spends 10 minutes trying to distill a lifetime of joy and pure pain into a “Goldtone” lasting no more than a split second. In between, Vile’s music is in a wakeful, meditative state, both searching and confident in the manner of a guy who’s learned to trust his life experience rather than someone else’s pat advice. Meanwhile, his blue-collar roots are no longer the stuff of PR one-sheets in “KV Crimes”, a cowbell-led parade through the streets of Philadelphia worthy of Rocky and “Snowflakes Are Dancing”, which earns its telltale rhyme of “Springsteen” and “pristine”. It all unfolds at the pace of life itself, a virtuoso work that sounds so effortless that even a supremely chill, modest family man can’t help but testify on "Was All Talk", “making music is easy, watch me!” —Ian Cohen

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Acid Rap

12

At a passing glance of a Tumblr timeline it'd be easy to mistake Chicago's Chance the Rapper for any number of new jack blog-savvy revivalist rappers struggling their way around high-pitched Pharcyde chatter and "93 Til Infinity" instrumentals. And certainly the production on Acid Rap, with its sampled nods to J Dilla and Tribe Called Quest, leans towards that sort of single-minded throwback. But as a rapper, Chance's nostalgia is immersive, not constructed. It's telling that he openly cites the influence of under-heralded West Coast crew Freestyle Fellowship, a collective that emphasized perpetual stylistic reinvention on a micro level (and provided the big bang for both Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief's elastic flows). So where the A$APs of today pick up hand-me-down and watered down cadences and beat at them repeatedly and the Joey Badasses struggle through existing patterns that are usually far above their competency level, Chance is going back to the point of origin and rebuilding the old styles from scratch. Every track here is kicked in a different cadence—usually jazzy and always frantic—and it's striking to hear that model applied by a young rapper whose raw foundational material is Kanye and Eminem. He's using the same toolbox as the greats but drawing on very different blueprints.

Chance's writing takes a similarly expansive approach to history. For a 20-year-old, Chance's point of view is oddly melancholic and sentimental, but this perspective only strengthens his narratives. He writes with a vivid sensory memory—you can smell the blunt guts or hear the fireworks and mistake them for gunfire in his words. It's a paradoxically level-headed approach on an album where the performance is so unhinged and the second line is "the acid made me crazy." But maybe the title—and Chance's whole Woody Woodpecker meltdown rap style—is a bit of a misdirect. Acid Rap isn't about the trip, it's about the flashbacks. —Andrew Nosnitsky

[Chance the Rapper: "Chain Smoker" ]

Psychic

11

Psychic is a declaration of psychedelic liberation. It’s the sound of lava lamps being unplugged, black light mushroom posters trashed, and wah-wah pedals pawned. It’s Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrington re-imagining Pink Floyd if Ricardo Villalobos substituted for Syd Barrett. Leave it to a Brown graduate to elude all stoner cliché. Every college freshman to alternate bong rips and guitar riffs has vainly toyed with the conceit of updating Dark Side of the Moon. Most experiments wind up as morbidly embarrassing as Trustafarians with dreads.

Darkside are brazen enough to lay it down flat in the title of their project. The heartbeat thump, lunar spacing, and spooky post-production clatter ring the same alarms. You hear the reverberations of Meddle’s 22-minute trip, “Echoes”, but they’re re-routed through a vapor trail of krautrock, trip-hop, Italo-disco, and minimal techno. If the narcotic canon was constructed for isolated journeys, Psychic is communal, funky and loose, the by-product of ideas emerging from jams. Dave Harrington’s falsetto levitates closer to Off the Wall than another brick in it. Jaar contributes the Gauloises rasp expected from a former scholar of French deconstructionism. His grooves are propulsive and his imagery is spare: paper trails on mountains, fruits on a table, wooden houses to live in, herbal palliatives sempiternal in bloom.

The fear and interior bug-outs are swapped for neon-fringed skylines, meditative clarity, crowded dancefloors and empty freeways. Psychic is as cosmopolitan and refined as its Ivy League pedigree would intimate. It gets sweaty without losing its cool. It envisions an ambulatory future from a waxen past. Now someone needs to figure out what movie it syncs up best with. —Jeff Weiss

Darkside: "Golden Arrow" (via SoundCloud)

Reflektor

10

I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your hurdy-gurdy out the window because you want to make something real. And for three records now, that’s what Arcade Fire have been making in earnest, mostly at the sacrifice of something cool. This time they searched the streets of Haiti and Jamaica and brought back rala music and reggae. They found James Murphy and mixed in disco. They dug up some Kierkegaard, whose essay titled “The Present Age” has this skeleton key passage: “…A passionate age pushes forward, establishing new things and destroying others, raising and tearing down. A reflective, passionless age does the opposite, it stifles and hinders, it levels.”

Arcade Fire found their reality in this new Reflektive *Age—*one of both stifling inaction and now paralytic technology—and that reality is on trial all throughout the band’s massive double album. They’ve had a referendum on disaffection since “Wake Up” and technology since “We Used to Wait”, but on Reflektor it all comes to a head, mashed up in a super-saturated, kaleidoscopic double LP. One minute the rhythms plod like a 12” disco edit played at half speed, the next they explode into a carnival street party. If Arcade Fire have been accused of being too moody and mawkish in the past, this is, at last, a record that’s more for the feet and body than it is for an aching heart. They wrote their big arena songs early in their career, and they can now fill the enormous space they carved for themselves like a polyglot band, fluent in many languages—sentiment and irony, Italo disco and island syncopations, English and French—to try and balance their inflated presence on the world stage. They will never be a cool band. They will never quit these pretentious things. They keep digging tunnels, looking for that damn connector. —Jeremy D. Larson

Arcade Fire: "Reflektor"

Silence Yourself

9

Savages are serious. If you don’t believe it from the music, there are CAPS LOCK MANIFESTOS on their Facebook and website and an earnest missive to individual identity right on the front cover of Silence Yourself. But all that text and pretense is just static that fades to nothing when you press play on this band’s debut, which is bracing and sharp enough to cut through the noise of daily life and deliver all of the band’s messages more effectively than any of the metadata that comes with it.

Savages clearly draw their most important influences from the immediate post-punk era. It’s there in Ayşe Hassan’s razor-toned bass, Fay Milton’s tight, economical drumming, and Gemma Thompson’s guitar, which swings between riffs and peals of shattering noise on a dime. Jehnny Beth’s howl has that spirit, too. But Savages are much more than just some echo of the years-ago post-punk revival; they're also a band, locked in with each other, never wasting a note, and honest enough about their sound that they don’t bother with genre exercises like sneaking in a disco beat or dub passage. They cut the album in a series of live takes in the studio in the hope of capturing some of their stage show’s raw energy, and it’s a testament to their quality as a band that it’s not a gimmick. That chance to feed off each other is essential to Silence Yourself’s dark power.

This is not an easy kind of music to make memorable, and dynamics are important to the way Savages do that. “City’s Full” and “Shut Up” seem straightforward enough at first glance, but they twist and turn in sophisticated and subtle ways that are hard for a group to master and harder to simulate when you’re recording in separate rooms. Savages may have post-punk aesthetics, but they have classic rock chops, and that matters. It makes their seriousness something to take seriously. —Joe Tangari

Savages: "Husbands" (via SoundCloud)

Impersonator

8

Two years ago, Devon Welsh hadn't found his voice. After a couple of small-run releases, he and Majical Cloudz partner Matthew Otto released an album called II in 2011. The Canadian duo's aesthetic back then was fairly similar to how many of their peers sound now: smooth, distant electronics with snippets of fuzzy samples, and motifs rooted in R&B and weirdo-pop alike. That same year, the pair were featured on "Nightmusic", a track on close friend Claire Boucher's breakout LP as Grimes, Visions; Welsh and Otto's contributions to the song blended in so well that it was hard to tell if they were even there at all. Considering the 10 tracks that make up Impersonator, though, it's hard to imagine these guys blending into any sort of background. This is music about fear and uncertainty presented without any trace of fear and uncertainty.

Any one song on Impersonator consists of a just a few warm tones along with maybe a soft backbeat or some processed guitar or strings thrown in for texture. These sounds can be inviting or chilly, sometimes simultaneously—but they can't help but feel like window dressing for Welsh's dramatic baritone, which serves as the project's nakedly emotional anchor. His words can be uncomfortably direct, breaking language down to its most basic form to communicate a message. The songs are almost invigoratingly vague; closing track "Notebook" sounds like a diary entry, though it's hard to tell whose diary it's from. What he says feels raw, but he remains out-of-reach enough to present his and Otto's unique art as a canvas possessing all the enveloping blankness of one of Welsh's signature white T-shirts. —Larry Fitzmaurice

[Majical Cloudz: "Bugs Don't Buzz"]

Random Access Memories

7

As much as they’ve strived to protect their mystique, to the point where we know more about their robot helmets than the people behind them, Daft Punk have always been very open about their intents. “Da Funk”, “Digital Love”, “Robot Rock”—these weren't just songs, they were skyscraping neon billboards advertising the duo’s sound and vision. With Random Access Memories, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo provide us with an even more intimate look at their creative process, by essentially compiling a curated mix of their greatest inspirations. Except instead of simply putting together a bunch of tracks by their most beloved artists, they went out and hired their idols to appear on new songs of their own.

As such, RAM plays out like a nostalgia-trip-as-theme-park-ride, a dizzying journey through the past 40 years of pleasure-center-pushing pop. The phone-book-length liner notes list at least five iconic recording studios and a small army of veteran soft-rock session players, making the gatefold vinyl sleeve less an indulgence than a practical necessity; when you play this album on iTunes, the display may as well show all the money spent on it with each passing second. And yet, as much as the record harkens back to a bygone golden age of limitless budgets and cocaine-encrusted console boards, the utopian sonic ideal it presents—with psychedelia, prog-rock, disco, electro, indie-pop, house, and even the odd trap beat all fusing into the same blissful frequency—could only be realized today.

The spare-no-expenses approach yields such an embarrassment of riches that even this summer’s most indelible Pharrell-fronted dancefloor seducers are the mere crust for a Paul Williams hero sandwich. But the transitions from sleek, Chic funk to theatrical orchestro-disco opuses and back feel as smooth as the station-to-station glide of a vintage Harmon/Kardon receiver. And the luxuriant sonic details are ultimately secondary to the earworm melodies that materialize in all sorts of surprising forms: the Julian Casablancas cameo “Instant Crush” makes it clear that Daft Punk are better at writing latter-day Strokes songs than the latter-day Strokes are at writing Daft Punk songs; the Panda Bear collab “Doin’ It Right” yields the “My Girls” sequel that Centipede Hz disavowed; while “Fragments of Time” sees house producer Todd Edwards performing stellar Steely Dan karaoke in lieu of a presumably unavailable Donald Fagen. But the most illuminating insight into Daft Punk’s craft comes through the voice of perhaps their greatest influence. On the documentarian funk-fusion of “Giorgio by Moroder”, the Italo legend reveals the rationale behind his oft-imitated aesthetic: “I wanted to do an album with the sounds of the 50s, the sounds of the 60s, of the 70s, and then have a sound of the future.” With Random Access Memories, Daft Punk show that the best way to pay respects to a hero is not to merely emulate their sound, but to make their strategies your own. —Stuart Berman

Sunbather

6

Drunk texts, filmic interludes, a real-time drug deal, and an obsession with money—this is neither Drake nor Kendrick, but rather Deafheaven, the California band behind one of this year's most moving rock records. On Sunbather, Deafheaven radiantly fuse post-rock, shoegaze, and black metal into an aggressive swell of pastel-shaded guitars, blast beats, and confessional screams. But those mixed-in rap tropes are telling. Perhaps more than any other group making widescreen guitar music this year, Deafheaven were triumphantly post-genre. The band's approach is singular in its warm duality—a downpour of emotional energy with drama, melody, and blaring light. The sounds get under your skin like a second skeleton.

The primary theme of Sunbather is a conflicted relationship with wealth—not relating to the abundance around you but still desiring the unknown. The crushing momentum of "Dream House" and "Sunbather"—both symbols of all the things frontman George Clarke does not have—feels like the weight of sinking reality. But you could hear this as American Dream music, songs that struggle for a space of self-creation, because even with its harrowing themes, Sunbather prioritizes a dark beauty. There are spoken-word passages, including a reading from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There are the sounds of a preacher in downtown San Francisco shouting at a crowd, projecting a most unfortunate Judgment Day. And there is also the voice of a nervous, broke Kerry McCoy, the band's guitarist and songwriter, doing a drug deal (he had been using opiates at the time). Clarke encouraged McCoy, also his best friend of over a decade, to sample the meeting; "It's raw and soul-bearing," Clarke said, "The evils of hell mixed with one's own personal hell [of] addiction and self-worth." This is a small, street-level piece in the grand picture of Sunbather, but its directness helps make everything click. For an album that can feel supernatural, Sunbather is in essence uncannily grounded. —Jenn Pelly

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Old

5

On 2011's XXX, Danny Brown perfected one of the more compelling personae in music: an unhinged oddball with a funny haircut and a funnier voice who had an insatiable hunger for drugs and sex—and plenty of highly creative ways to tell you all about it. XXX was party music but it was never just party music; there was an undercurrent of darkness and danger and a little regret, even as Brown pursued his vices with gusto. Listening to it reminded me of a line on Neil Young’s album Tonight’s the Night, about a hopeless junkie named Bill who was up on a hill and who was "having a ball rolling to the bottom." XXX felt like watching that tumble in action— thrilling and frightening and voyeuristic in equal measure.

But the rapper on XXX, as multi-faceted as he could be, turned out to be hiding someone even more interesting: Danny Brown. There’s still party music on Old, but it also includes more reflective songs. The album’s title was brave and felt like a dare: In this line of work, age usually equals death, but Brown—a virtual unknown toiling away in Detroit until he was 30, who had years away from the spotlight to practice, write, think—doesn’t shy from it. He knows that hip-hop is youth culture and wonders how to grow old within it. Not so long ago this was a purely hypothetical question because hip-hop itself was still just a baby. But the last decade we’ve seen it answered by different artists in different ways.

On Old, this is how Danny Brown goes about it: You look back on your life and find joy and regret and pain and try and figure out what it all means. You think about where things went wrong and what you were subjected to and where you fucked up. You find collaborators to help you bring your concerns to life. You don’t let go of youthful excess and you allow yourself to do some stupid shit sometimes, to remember what it feels like, and because it’s still fun. You remember who’s important. You have some laughs. You endure. —Mark Richardson

Danny Brown: "Kush Coma" (via SoundCloud)

mbv

4

We are in peak reissue/reunion culture for people who are afraid that the new will never be as good as the old. A similar fear reverberated around the world on February 2, when My Bloody Valentine let loose their first new album in 22 years. You remember where you were. You remember the 403 errors. The desperation: “hi can someone pls DM me a working link thx.” It’s just 10 months later, and the very act of downloading mbv feels nostalgic. That’s how fast things move now. Not for Kevin Shields, of course. That’s not his tempo.

For a generation raised, drugged, and sexed on Loveless, the stakes were pretty high; for those who came into Loveless retroactively, there was a secret hope that mbv could be their own Loveless—a long shot. Because Loveless in 2013 is just a simulacrum, and the Gen-X’ers know that. They were there in '91 and lord that patina of authenticity over the latecomers. There’s an imprecise feeling for all who missed the introverted bliss of Loveless, and the entire microculture of shoegaze that went with it. Kids can co-opt the vibe of the 90s, but the genuine article will always be absent, drowned in the wake of time.

In an unprecedented occasion, mbv connected the old and the new. At first, the album seemed to exist only in reference to the band’s heyday, with its monogrammed title, entirely analog recording, and mythical arrival. From the opening flourish of “She Found Now” it sounded just like a proper My Bloody Valentine record: those dropped tunings, that gated reverb, those heartbeat drums, Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher cast once again as Ghost Who Sings 1 and Ghost Who Sings 2. But then mbv started to bend into the present, revealing that it wasn’t a continuation of Loveless at all. This album is for the kid who’s home on a Friday night blowing smoke through a dryer sheet in a dorm room and the parent who’s doing the same in their home office because their child is sleeping.

It’s a new blueprint for making a sexy, druggy, rock'n'roll record. These are how guitars work: They hang like tendrils for Shields and Butcher to float through, they drone imprecisely around a pitch like a bagpipe, they make harmonics that floss your equilibrium. And these are how songs go: They shift around from chord to unrelated chord just to make you dizzy, or sometimes they do nothing for three-and-a-half minutes except get a little bit louder. In just nine songs, they manage to detach from the 90s and float in the ether, there for any generation to claim as their own. —Jeremy D. Larson

My Bloody Valentine: "Only Tomorrow"

Settle

3

It felt like every time I went shopping this year, I heard a Disclosure song. There is a certain primness to Settle that makes the debut album from young British brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence appealing to the people who decide what you hear when you buy clothes. Every element in a Disclosure song—every click, every kick, every bubble, every whoosh—fits just so, attaining a level of tailored togetherness that is both humbling and aspirational.

That delicately presented perfection could also make Settle too faceless to linger in your memory: A mannequin dressed like the coolest person you know is still nothing but a shiny hunk of plastic. But I frequently get completely lost in this album—in the sweep of "Latch", in the whispers of "Defeated No More", in guest vocalist Eliza Doolittle's elongated vowels, in the operatic sighs of "Help Me Lose My Mind". Settle has its own motives, but I turn to it to get sucked into the undercurrent of my own mind.

Dance music has long been therapy, the dancefloor a place for redemption and salvation. But I only danced to Disclosure once this year; instead, I played this album over and over in transit—when riding the subway or walking or flying, in those rare moments when I didn't feel like I was being swallowed in noise, both literal and figurative. There, its therapeutic values remain; when I listen to Settle, the thing I hear loudest is the space. —Jordan Sargent

Disclosure: "Latch"

Yeezus

2

Kanye West premiered "New Slaves" by projecting his likeness onto buildings around the world. Turns out that moderately audacious publicity stunt (by his standards) was mere foreshadowing for the riskier ambitions of Yeezus, where he projects his most combative and caricatured self for 41 frenzied minutes, virtually taunting those who fail to meet him on his own terms.

In turn, Yeezus increased that cohort drastically. The singles got nowhere near as much rotation as the purposefully provocative talking points. “Strange Fruit”, apartheid, and the Civil Rights sign were given new power through perversion. "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves" dismissed nuanced political debate for righteous rage. And instead of showing gratitude for his impending fatherhood, Kanye gave us morally bankrupt songs like "Hold My Liquor" and "I'm In It" that doubled as preemptive cop-outs from any future custody battles. Since its release in June, Yeezus has been outsold by J. Cole's hedge-betting Born Sinner... and cosigned as a masterpiece by the guy who made Metal Machine Music.

Kanye might be a bit little iffy on the specifics, but there's no doubting Yeezus' thesis: There's a war going on outside, and you don't have to turn your dial too far from "Ellen" to see it. Both musically and politically, this album bears the strain and tension of an increasingly stratified America, one that leaves the disappearing middle class a howling void. Unlike the star-studded opus My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus is harsh and minimal, aligning itself with scavengers and subversives who accentuate Ye’s most daring impulses: Daft Punk (in taser-tag Human After All mode), witch house wastrels Salem, Chicago drill MCs King L and Chief Keef, and cocky production innovators including Hudson Mohawke, Gesaffelstein, Young Chop, Arca, and Evian Christ.

Hip-hop's fundamentally altered landscape is proof enough that Kanye constructed his perfect doomsday device with Yeezus: Once “On Sight” judders to life, everything sounds radioactive, with an unpredictable blast radius that stretches past pop music—things will never be the same for croissants, Toyota Corollas, Deepak Chopra, or 300, to name a few. But more than anything, it ends up mutating the guy closest to it, and Yeezus finds the 21st century’s most fascinating musical figure powered by poison and poisoned by power. I guess every supervillain needs his theme music. —Ian Cohen

Modern Vampires of the City

1

"Ya Hey" is, like so much of Modern Vampires of the City, something at once tender and impossibly grand—a break-up song about God. "Oh, sweet thing," Ezra Koenig coos. "Babylon don't love you." Then comes an even more backhanded kiss-off: "But you love everything."

You love everything. The same could (and has) been said of Vampire Weekend, with and without the italicized sneer. Back in 2007, when their self-titled CD-R first started making its way beyond Columbia's campus, you'd have been hard-pressed to read something about them that didn't balk at their cultural omnivorousness—an Ivy League indie-pop band that name-checks Lil Jon and Peter Gabriel in the same sustained breath? Half a decade later, it is equally hard to imagine this same fact surprising anybody. As Modern Vampires showcases, a transformation has taken place within Vampire Weekend—they've grown into a mature, ambitious band whose music is now both airier and weightier than it used to be. But a broader cultural shift has occurred, too. The lines that used to separate different kinds of music are starting to look more and more old-fashioned, and the rigid identities by which people used to make musical taste a game of us-vs.-them are crumbling like old buildings. We are moving in the direction of a place where everybody is allowed to love everything.

And the album's more lighthearted moments—the crash-pop of "Diane Young" or the half-rapped, harpsichord-kissed Souls of Mischief nod "Step"—feel like an anarchic celebration of this. But there's also an unshakable sense of gravitas anchoring these songs. Multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij (who co-produced with the ubiquitous Ariel Rechtshaid) is as eloquent with atmosphere as Koenig is with words; every track on here has its own weather. The arrangements on career-to-date peaks like "Obvious Bicycle" and "Hannah Hunt" are meticulous but well-ventilated—chatter drifts in, as if through an open window, providing hazy backdrops for Koenig's lyrical searching.

"I'm not excited, but should I be?/ Is this the fate that half of the world has planned for me?" a disillusioned narrator sings in "Unbelievers", glancing around at a shitty job market, mounting student loans, and a culture that likes to blame all its ailments on the helpless young. On Modern Vampires, Vampire Weekend reject the narrative that has been used to describe their generation: In the clock-smashing slow-motion of "Hannah Hunt", somebody takes the Paper of Record—you imagine it's turned to one of those Trouble With Millennials articles—and tears it into pieces.

But this record also tears up the narrative that has up until now defined Vampire Weekend. Modern Vampires is such an overwhelmingly humane album that it makes all those words that used to stick to them (elitist, pretentious, preppy) seem outmoded, too. Maybe what this album is really breaking up with is dogma—anything that limits the scope of your perspective and what (or who) you can love. It believes in nothing so much as this moment, speaking in pitch-shifted tongues, and finding its own heaven in the Cloud. —Lindsay Zoladz

Vampire Weekend: "Step"

(See next page for contributors' top 10s)

Carrie Battan

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Jai Paul: Jai Paul
3. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
4. Young Thug: 1017 Thug
5. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
6. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
7. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
8. Best Coast: Fade Away
9. Gesaffelstein: Aleph
10. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
2. A$AP Ferg: "Shabba" [ft. A$AP Rocky]
3. Chief Keef: "Citgo"
4. Migos: "Hannah Montana"
5. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
6. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
7. Young Thug: "Picacho"
8. Lil B: "Look Like God"
9. BC Kingdom: "Lockup"
10. Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"

Molly Beauchemin

ALBUMS

1. Savages: Silence Yourself
2. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of The City
3. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
4. Kanye West: Yeezus
5. Haim: Days Are Gone
6. Bill Callahan: Dream River
7. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
8. Drake: Nothing Was The Same
9. Darkside: Psychic
10. Danny Brown: Old

TRACKS

1. Kanye West: “I’m In It”
2. Deafheaven: “Dream House”
3. Savages: “She Will”
4. Majical Cloudz: “Childhood’s End”
5. A$AP Rocky: “Fucking Problems” ft. Kendrick Lamar, Drake, 2Chainz
6. Bill Callahan: “Small Plane”
7. Haim: “Days Are Gone”
8. Vampire Weekend: “Ya Hey”
9. Atoms For Peace: “Ingenue”
10. Vampire Weekend: “Everlasting Arms”

Stuart Berman

ALBUMS

1. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
2. Fuck Buttons: Slow Focus
3. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
4. Kanye West: Yeezus
5. Polvo: Siberia
6. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
7. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
8. Swans: Not Here/Not Now
9. Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight...
10. Ty Segall: Sleeper

TRACKS

1. The Knife: “Full of Fire”
2. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “Higgs Boson Blues”
3. Haim: “The Wire”
4. Kanye West: “New Slaves”
5. Kurt Vile: “Goldtone”
6. Yamantaka // Sonic Titan: “One”
7. Daft Punk: “Touch”
8. Deafheaven: “Dreamhouse”
9. Arcade Fire: “Reflektor”
10. Foxygen: “No Destruction”

Andy Beta

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Bill Callahan: Dream River
3. Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven
4. Disclosure: Settle
5. Kyle Hall: The Boat Party
6. L.I.E.S. Presents: American Noise
7. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
8. Boards of Canada: Tomorrow's Harvest
9. The Flaming Lips: The Terror
10. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time

TRACKS

1. Rhye: "The Fall (Maurice Fulton Alt Mix)"
2. Drake: "Hold On We're Going Home"
3. Leisure Connection: “Jungle Dancing”
4. Disclosure: “Help Me Lose My Mind” (feat. London Grammar)
5. Jeremy Greenspan: "Drums&Drums&Drums" / "Sirius Shake"
6. Syclops: “Sarah's E With Extra P”
7. Beautiful Swimmers: “Big Coast”
8. Kurt Vile: “KV Crimes”
9. Insanlar: “Kime Ne”
10. Kyle Hall: “Crushed”

Patrick Bowman

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Run The Jewels: Run The Jewels
3. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
4. Vampire Weekend: Vampires In The City
5. Rhye: Woman
6. Joanna Gruesome: Weird Sister
7. Haim: Days Are Gone
8. Danny Brown: Old
9. Cate Le Bon: Mug Museum
10. Young Galaxy: Ultramarine

TRACKS

1. Ellery James Roberts: "Kerou's Lament"
2. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
3. Torres: "Honey"
4. Gesaffelstein: "Pursuit"
5. Pusha T: "Nosetalgia" (feat. Kendrick Lamar)
6. Big Black Delta: "Side of The Road"
7. Run The Jewels: "Run The Jewels"
8. Tim Hecker: "Virginal II"
9. Miley Cyrus: "Wrecking Ball"
10. Sky Ferreira: "You're Not The One"

Jonah Bromwich

ALBUMS

1. Thundercat: Apocalypse
2. Various Artists: The Music of Grand Theft Auto V
3. Shlohmo: Laid Out
4. Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
5. Deerhunter: Monomania
6. Ty Segall: Sleeper
7. The Jet Age of Tomorrow: The Jellyfish Mentality
8. Danny Brown: Old
9. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
10. Classixx: Hanging Gardens

TRACKS

1. Thundercat: “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”
2. Twin Shadow: “Old Love/New Love”
3. Kanye West: “Bound 2”
4. Deerhunter: “Pensacola”
5. Daft Punk: “Touch”
6. Shlomo: “Out of Hand”
7. Giraffage: “Close to Me”
8. Lorde: “Buzzcut Season”
9. Ciara: “Body Party”
10. The Jet Age of Tomorrow feat. Mac Miller: “Juney Jones”

Harley Brown

ALBUMS

1. Disclosure: Settle
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
4. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
5. Mount Kimbie: Cold Spring Faultless Youth
6. Jon Hopkins: Immunity
7. Gesaffelstein: Aleph
8. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
9. Lorde: Pure Heroine
10. Zachary Cale: Blue Rider

TRACKS

1. Kurt Vile: "Wakin on a Pretty Day"
2. Forest Swords: "The Weight of Gold"
3. Darkside: "Paper Trails"
4. Duke Dumont: Need U (100%)
5. The Haxan Cloak: "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)"
6. Kanye West: Hold My Liquor
7. Atoms For Peace: Ingenue
8. Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
9. Vampire Weekend: Unbelievers
10. Lorde: Tennis Court

Ian Cohen

ALBUMS

1. Deafheaven: Sunbather
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Local Natives: Hummingbird
4. Kurt Vile: Wakin On A Pretty Daze
5. Los Campesinos!: No Blues
6. The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die: Whenever, If Ever
7. Autre Ne Veut: Anxiety
8. Crash of Rhinos: Knots
9. Baths: Obsidian
10. Sigur Ros: Kveikur

TRACKS

1. Deafheaven: “Dream House”
2. Crash of Rhinos: “Opener”
3. Youth Lagoon: “Mute”
4. The 1975: “Sex”
5. Autre Ne Veut: “Play By Play”
6. Drake: “Hold On We're Going Home”
7. Iron Chic: “Spooky Action At A Distance”
8. The Wonder Years: “There, There”
9. Balance & Composure: “Reflection”
10. The Dangerous Summer: “Catholic Girls”

Jamieson Cox

ALBUMS

1. Disclosure: Settle
2. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
3. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
4. Kanye West: Yeezus
5. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
6. Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight...
7. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
8. A$AP Ferg: Trap Lord
9. Lady Gaga: Artpop
10. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time

TRACKS

1. A$AP Ferg: "Shabba"
2. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
3. Ciara: "Body Party"
4. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
5. Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"
6. Haim: "The Wire"
7. Janelle Monáe: "PrimeTime"
8. Katy Perry: "Birthday"
9. Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"
10. My Bloody Valentine: "Only Tomorrow"

Grayson Haver Currin

ALBUMS

1. Lonnie Holley: Keeping a Record of It
2. The Necks: Open
3. SubRosa: More Constant Than the Gods
4. The Dead C: Armed Courage
5. Castevet: Obsian
6. Wooden Wand: Blood Oaths of the New Blues
7. ÄÄNIPÄÄ: Through a Pre-Memory
8. Inter Arma: Sky Burial
9. The Haxan Cloak: Excavation
10. Torres: Torres

TRACKS

1. Lonnie Holley: Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants
2. The Body: "Ebb and Flow of Tides in a Sea of Ash"
3. Wooden Wand: No Bed For Beatle Wand / Days This Long
4. Earl Sweatshirt: Burgundy
5. Bill Callahan: Small Plane
6. Kurt Vile: "Too Hard"
7. SubRosa: Fat of the Ram
8. CocoRosie: Roots of My Hair
9. William Tyler: Hotel Catatonia
10. Jenny Hval: "Mephisto in the Water"

Stephen M. Deusner

ALBUMS

1. Hiss Golden Messenger: Haw
2. Phosphorescent: Muchacho
3. The National: Trouble Will Find Me
4. Brandy Clark: 12 Stories
5. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
6. Eleanor Friedberger: Personal Record
7. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
8. Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park
9. Kanye West: Yeezus
10. Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe

TRACKS

1. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky” feat. Pharrell
2. Chvrches: “The Mother We Share”
3. Phosphorescent: “Song For Zula”
4. Jason Isbell: “Elephant”
5. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “Higgs Boson Blues”
6. Guy Clark: “My Favorite Picture of You”
7. Robin Thicke: “Blurred Lines” feat. Pharrell & T I
8. Eleanor Friedberger: “When I Knew”
9. The National: “Pink Rabbits”
10. Brandy Clark: “Stripes”

Ryan Dombal

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
3. Jai Paul: Jai Paul
4. John Wizards: John Wizards
5. Disclosure: Settle
6. Devendra Banhart: Mala
7. Volcano Choir: Repave
8. Haim: Days Are Gone
9. Arctic Monkeys: AM
10. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Worst Behavior"
2. Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"
3. Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
4. Benoit & Sergio: "Adjustments"
5. Kanye West: "Blood on the Leaves"
6. Disclosure: "Latch" [ft. Sam Smith]
7. Dillon Francis: "Without You" [ft. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs]
8. Chance the Rapper: "Chain Smoker"
9. Jai Paul: "Str8 Outta Mumbai"
10. FKA twigs: "Water Me"

Tim Finney

ALBUMS

1. Paramore – Paramore
2. The 1975 – The 1975
3. Beyoncé – Beyoncé
4. Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer, Different Park
5. Om’mas Keith – City Pulse
6. Haim – Days Are Gone
7. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
8. Chance The Rapper – Acid Rap
9. Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time
10. Dawn Richard – Goldenheart

SONGS

1. Ciara – Body Party (Remix ft. B.O.B. and Future)
2. Hannah Wants & Chris Lorenzo - Kneadin'
3. Mariah Carey ft. Miguel - #Beautiful
4. Rudimental – Baby
5. Toyboy & Robin - Jaded
6. Kingdom ft. Kelela – Bank Head
7. Joe Moses ft. Tory Lanez – Fresh Out
8. Mafikizolo ft. Uhuru – Khona
9. Donae’o ft. Carnao Beats – Gone In The Morning
10. B5 – Say Yes

Larry Fitzmaurice

ALBUMS

1. Disclosure: Settle
2. Deafheaven: Sunbather
3. Kanye West: Yeezus
4. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
5. Haim: Days Are Gone
6. Drake: Nothing Was The Same
7. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
8. Kurt Vile: Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze
9. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
10. Phosphorescent: Muchacho

TRACKS

1. Ciara: "Body Party"
2. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
3. Disclosure: "Help Me Lose My Mind" (feat. London Grammar)
4. DJ Rashad: "Let It Go"
5. Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
6. Arcade Fire: "Reflektor"
7. The Juan Maclean: "Feel Like Movin'" (feat. Nancy Whang)
8. Mariah Carey: "Beautiful" (feat. Miguel)
9. Kanye West: "Guilt Trip"
10. Arctic Monkeys: "Do I Wanna Know?"

Andrew Gaerig

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. James Holden: The Inheritors
3. DJ Koze: Amygdala
4. Various Artists: Night Slugs Allstars Vol. 2
5. Livity Sound: Livity Sound
6. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
7. Logos: Cold Mission
8. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
9. Bill Callahan: Dream River
10. Maxmillion Dunbar: House of Woo

TRACKS

1. The Range: "Metal Swing"
2. Sophie: "Bipp"
3. The Mole: "Lockdown Party (DJ Sprinkles Crossfaderama)"
4. Autre Ne Veut: "Play by Play"
5. DJ Rashad: "Let It Go"
6. A$AP Ferg: "Shabba (Remix feat. Shabba Ranks, Busta Rhymes, and Migos)"
7. Glass Candy: "Warm in the Winter"
8. Haim: "The Wire"
9. Pev: "Aztec Chant"
10. Tessela: "Hackney Parrot (Special Request VIP)"

Corban Goble

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
3. Beyoncé: Beyoncé
4. Haim: Days are Gone
5. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
6. Deafheaven: Sunbather
7. Lorde: Pure Heroine
8. Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park
9. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
10. Ariana Grande: Yours Truly

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Worst Behavior"
2. Kanye West: "Blood on the Leaves"
3. Lorde: "Royals"
4. Florida Georgia Line: "Cruise (Remix)" (ft. Nelly)
5. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
6. Miley Cyrus: "We Can't Stop"
7. Drake: "Come Thru"
8. Vampire Weekend: "Ya Hey"
9. Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"
10. A$AP Ferg: "Hood Pope"

Jeremy Gordon

ALBUMS

1. Marnie Stern - The Chronicles of Marnia
2. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
3. Kanye West - Yeezus
4. Yo La Tengo - Fade
5. The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
6. Smith Westerns - Soft Will
7. Haim - Days Are Gone
8. Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer Different Park
9. M.I.A. - Matangi
10. Caitlin Rose - The Stand-In

TRACKS

1. Vampire Weekend - "Step"
2. Smith Westerns - "Varsity"
3. Phoenix - "Bourgeois"
4. Kanye West - "I'm In It"
5. Haim - "The Wire"
6. Marnie Stern - "Noonan"
7. The Knife - "Full of Fire"
8. Ariana Grande - "The Way"
9. Ducktails - "Ivy Covered House"
10. Lana Del Rey - "Young and Beautiful"

Jayson Greene

ALBUMS

1. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
4. Danny Brown: Old
5. The National: Trouble Will Find Me
6. Torres: Torres
7. Phosphorescent: Muchacho
8. Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
9. Bill Callahan: Dream River
10. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City

TRACKS

1. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
2. Vampire Weekend: "Ya Hey"
3. The National: Pink Rabbits
4. Majical Cloudz: Turns Turns Turns
5. Kurt Vile: Goldtone
6. Torres: "Honey"
7. Daft Punk: "Doin' It Right" [ft. Panda Bear]
8. Future: "Karate Chop"
9. Kanye West: I Am A God
10. Daft Punk: "Touch"

Eric Harvey

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
3. Rhye: Woman
4. Haim: Days Are Gone
5. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
6. Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
7. Quadron: Avalanche
8. Iron & Wine: Ghost on Ghost
9. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
10. Kanye West: Yeezus

TRACKS

1. Haim "Falling"
2. Phoenix "The Real Thing"
3. Kanye West "New Slaves"
4. Courtney Barnett "Avant Gardner"
5. Homeboy Sandman "The Plot Thickens"
6. A$AP Rocky f. Drake & Kendrick Lamar "Fuckin' Problems"
7. Majical Cloudz "Turns, Turns, Turns"
8. Rhye "Hunger"
9. Parquet Courts "Stoned and Starving"
10. Vampire Weekend "Hannah Hunt"

Jason Heller

ALBUMS

1. Locrian: Return to Annihilation
2. Chelsea Wolfe: Pain Is Beauty
3. Speedy Ortiz: Major Arcana
4. The Body: Christs/Redeemers
5. Deafheaven: Sunbather
6. Subrosa: More Constant Than the Gods
7. Kinit Her: The Poet & the Blue Flower
8. Savages: Silence Yourself
9. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
10. My Bloody Valentine: mbv

TRACKS

1. Deafheaven: “Dreamhouse”
2. Oranssi Pazuzu: “Vino Verso”
3. Prurient: “Through the Window”
4. 4. Kinit Her: “Hyperion”
5. 5. Bill Callahan: “The Sing”
6. Drug Church: “Donny’s Woods”
7. 7. Vår: “The World Fell”
8. 8. Night Birds: “Born to Die in Suburbia”
9. 9. Windhand: “Woodbine”
10. 10. Germ: “Butterfly”

Marc Hogan

ALBUMS

1. Beyoncé: Beyoncé
2. Deerhunter: Monomania
3. Paramore: Paramore
4. Danny Brown: Old
5. M.I.A.: Matangi
6. Disclosure: Settle
7. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
8. Charli XCX: True Romance
9. Various Artists: Saint Heron
10. Camera Obscura: Desire Lines

TRACKS

1. Courtney Barnett: “Avant Gardener”
2. Kingdom: “Bank Head” ft. Kelela
3. Paramore: “Still Into You”
4. M.I.A.: “Come Walk With Me”
5. Drake: “Hold On, We're Going Home” ft. Majid Jordan
6. Deerhunter: “Monomania”
7. Kacey Musgraves: “Follow Your Arrow”
8. Janelle Monae: “Q.U.E.E.N.” ft. Erykah Badu
9. Arctic Monkeys: “Do I Wanna Know?”
10. Neneh Cherry: “Blank Project”

Brian Howe

ALBUMS

1. Phoenix: Bankrupt!
2. James Blake: Overgrown
3. Kanye West: Yeezus
4. Rhye: Woman
5. Richard Buckner: Surrounded
6. Jon Hopkins: Immunity
7. Disclosure: Settle
8. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
9. The Field: Cupid's Head
10. Camera Obscura: Desire Lines

TRACKS

1. Kanye West: "Blood on the Leaves"
2. James Blake: "Retrograde"
3. Rhye: "Open"
4. Phoenix: "Trying to Be Cool"
5. Richard Buckner: "Mood"
6. Jon Hopkins: "We Disappear"
7. Bill Callahan: "Summer Painter"
8. Disclosure: "White Noise" [ft. Alunageorge]
9. Blood Orange: "Chamakay"
10. Camera Obscura: "William's Heart"

Steven Hyden

ALBUMS

1. Deafheaven: Sunbather
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Bombino: Nomad
4. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
5. Kurt Vile: Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze
6. Fuck Buttons: Slow Focus
7. Palms: Palms
8. Ashley Monroe: Like a Rose
9. The National: Trouble Will Find Me
10. Haim: Days are Gone

TRACKS

1. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
2. Palma Violets: “Best of Friends”
3. 3 ASAP Rocky: “Wild for the Night”
4. The National: “Pink Rabbits”
5. One Direction: “Little Black Dress”
6. Kanye West: “Black Skinhead”
7. The Dangerous Summer: “Catholic Girls”
8. Drake: “Hold On, We’re Going Home”
9. Queens of the Stone Age: “I Sat By The Ocean”
10. Eric Church: “The Outsiders”

Craig Jenkins

ALBUMS

1. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Danny Brown: Old
4. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
5. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
6. Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
7. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
8. Paramore: Paramore
9. Jai Paul: Jai Paul
10. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels

TRACKS

1. Daft Punk: Get Lucky ft Pharrell
2. Kanye West: New Slaves
3. My Bloody Valentine: Only Tomorrow
4. Chance the Rapper: Juice
5. A$AP Ferg: Shabba ft A$AP Rocky
6. Justin Timberlake: Pusher Love Girl
7. Darkside: Golden Arrow
8. Volcano Choir: Byegone
9. Deerhunter: Monomania
10. Beyoncé: ***Flawless

Kim Kelly

ALBUMS

1. Agrimonia: Rites of Separation
2. The Ruins of Beverast: Blood Vaults -- The Blazing Gospel Of Heinrich Kramer (Cryptae Sanguinum -- Evangelium Flagrans Henrici Institoris).
3. Cloud Rat: Moksha
4. Yellow Eyes: Hammer of Night
5. Sacriphyx: The Western Front
6. Wormlust: The Feral Wisdom
7. Atlantean Kodex: The White Goddess (A Grammar of Poetic Myth)
8. Inter Arma: Sky Burial
9. Cult of Fire: मृत्यु का तापसी अनुध्या
10. Bolzer: Aura

TRACKS

1. Ruin Lust: "Tethered and Lashed"
2. Agrimonia: "Talion"
3. The Ruins of Beverast: "Daemon"
4. Blood Ceremony: "Lord Summerisle"
5. Darkthrone: "Leave No Cross Unturned"
6. Autopsy: "Mangled Far Below"
7. Oranssi Pazuzu: “Olen Aukaissut UudenSilmän”
8. Moloch: "Vomit Phobia"
9. Arckanum: "Dolgrinn"
10. Dread Sovereign: "We Wield the Spear of Longinus"

Zach Kelly

ALBUMS

1. Disclosure: Settle
2. Deafheaven: Sunbather
3. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
4. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
5. Pissed Jeans: Honeys
6. Kanye West: Yeezus
7. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
8. Chastity Belt: No Regerts
9. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
10. The Haxan Cloak: Excavation

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
2. Deafheaven: "Dreamhouse"
3. Rhye: "Open (Jeff Samuel Faded Mix)"
4. Disclosure: "Latch [ft. Sam Smith]"
5. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
6. Chief Keef: "Citgo"
7. Jai Paul: "Str8 Outta Mumbai"
8. Pissed Jeans: "Cafeteria Food"
9. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: "Higgs Boson Blues"
10. Windhand: "Woodbine"

Kyle Kramer

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
3. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
4. Autre Ne Veut: Anxiety
5. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
6. Haim: Days Are Gone
7. Volcano Choir: Repave
8. Pusha T: My Name Is My Name
9. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
10. Propain: Ridin' Slab

TRACKS

1. Kanye West: "Hold My Liquor"
2. Autre Ne Veut: "Play By Play"
3. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
4. Migos f/ Drake: "Versace (Remix)"
5. Future f/ Miley Cyrus & Mr. Hudson: "Real and True"
6. Haim: "The Wire"
7. Sky Ferreira: "24 Hours"
8. Lil Durk: "Dis Ain't What You Want"
9. Ciara: "Body Party"
10. James Blake: "DLM"

Jeremy Larson

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Dawn of Midi: Dysnomia
4. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
5. Bill Callahan: Dream River
6. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
7. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
8. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
9. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
10. Julia Holter: Loud City Song

TRACKS

1. Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"
2. Haim: "The Wire"
3. Bill Callahan: "Small Plane"
4. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
5. The Knife: "A Tooth for an Eye"
6. Superchunk: "FOH"
7. Parquet Courts: "You've Got Me Wonderin' Now"
8. Colin Stetson: "High Above a Grey Green Sea"
9. Chance The Rapper: "Paranoia"
10. Oozing Wound: "New York Bands"

Aaron Leitko

ALBUMS

1. Laurel Halo - Chance of Rain
2. Kurt Vile - Waking on a Pretty Daze
3. Roomrunner - Ideal Cities
4. Stellar Om Source - Joy One Mile
5. Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin
6. KMFH (Kyle Hall) - The Boat Party
7. Connections - Body Language
8. Kelley Stoltz - Double Exposure
9. Priests - Tape Two
10. Steve Moore - Pangea Ultima

Mike Madden

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Deafheaven: Sunbather
3. Denzel Curry: Nostalgic 64
4. The Men: New Moon
5. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
6. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
7. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels
8. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
9. Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
10. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap

TRACKS

1. Denzel Curry: "Threatz" (feat. Yung Simmie and Robb Bank$)
2. Daft Punk: "Lose Yourself to Dance" (feat. Pharrell)
3. Future: "Karate Chop" (feat. Casino)
4. Deniro Farrar: "Big Tookie"
5. Chance the Rapper: "Good Ass Intro" (feat. BJ the Chicago Kid)
6. Daft Punk: "Doin' It Right" (feat. Panda Bear)
7. Drake: "All Me" (feat. 2 Chainz and Big Sean)
8. 2 Chainz: "Feds Watching" (feat. Pharrell)
9. Majical Cloudz: "Childhood's End”
10. Austra: "Home"

Devon Maloney

ALBUMS

1. Haim: Days Are Gone
2. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
3. Yamantaka//Sonic Titan: UZU
4. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
5. Savages: Silence Yourself
6. Paramore: Paramore
7. Kanye West: Yeezus
8. Speedy Ortiz: Major Arcana
9. Bent Shapes: Feels Weird
10. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt

TRACKS

1. FKA twigs: “Water Me”
2. Janelle Monae: “Q U E E N”
3. Haim: “The Wire”
4. Majical Cloudz: “Childhood's End”
5. Priests: “Leave Me Alone”
6. Sky Ferreira: “I Blame Myself”
7. Waxahatchee: “Swan Dive”
8. Savages: “She Will”
9. Kanye West: “Blood on the Leaves”
10. Arcade Fire: “Reflektor”

Jillian Mapes

ALBUMS

1. Beyonce: Beyonce
2. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
3. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
4. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
5. Disclosure: Settle
6. Charli XCX: True Romance
7. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
8. Queens of the Stone Age: Like Clockwork...
9. Kanye West: Yeezus
10. Arctic Monkeys: AM

TRACKS

1. Sky Ferreira: “I Blame Myself”
2. Nine Inch Nails: “Everything”
3. Beyonce: “Blow”
4. Carly Rae Jepsen: “Take a Picture”
5. Ciara: “Body Party”
6. Neko Case: “Man”
7. Charli XCX: “You (Ha Ha Ha)”
8. Parquet Courts: “Master of My Craft”
9. Haim: “The Wire”
10. Big Black Delta: “Side of the Road”

Marc Masters

ALBUMS

1. Wolf Eyes: No Answer : Lower Floors
2. Mike Shiflet: The Choir, the Army
3. Rashad Becker: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I
4. Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Bonnie "Prince" Billy
5. Hair Police: Mercurial Rites
6. Peter Kolovos: Black Colors
7. Mazes: Ores & Minerals
8. Graham Lambkin / Jason Lescalleet: Photographs
9. Okkyung Lee: Ghil
10. Lee Noble: Ruiner

TRACKS

1. Retribution Gospel Choir: "Seven"
2. Dan Friel: "Valedictorian"
3. Blank Realm: "Falling Down the Stairs"
4. Glenn Jones: "Bergen County Farewell"
5. Scott & Charlene's Wedding: "1993"
6. Mazes: "Bodies"
7. The Mantles: "Reason's Run"
8. William Tyler: "Cadillac Desert"
9. Generationals: "Spinoza"
10. Deerhunter: "Back to the Middle"

Evan Minsker

ALBUMS

1. Protomartyr: No Passion All Technique
2. Thundercat: Apocalypse
3. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
4. Mikal Cronin: MCII
5. Thee Oh Sees: Floating Coffin
6. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
7. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
8. Bill Callahan: Dream River
9. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
10. Danny Brown: Old

TRACKS

1. Courtney Barnett: "Avant Gardener"
2. 2 Chainz: "Feds Watching" [ft. Pharrell]
3. Bill Callahan: "Small Plane"
4. Thundercat: "Heartbreaks + Setbacks"
5. Fuzz: "Fuzz's Fourth Dream"
6. Protomartyr: "Feral Cats"
7. My Bloody Valentine: "She Found Now"
8. Perfect Pussy: "I"
9. Parquet Courts: "Stoned and Starving"
10. Beck: "I Won't Be Long (Extended)"

Matthew Murphy

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
3. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
4. Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight...
5. Forest Swords: Engravings
6. Polvo: Siberia
7. The Haxan Cloak: Excavation
8. Savages: Silence Yourself
9. Veronica Falls: Waiting for Something to Happen
10. DJ Koze: Amygdala

TRACKS

1. Vampire Weekend: “Hannah Hunt”
2. Daft Punk: “Touch”
3. Forest Swords: “Thor's Stone”
4. Fuck Buttons: “Brainfreeze”
5. Pissed Jeans: “Bathroom Laughter”
6. Yo La Tengo: “Ohm”
7. Foxygen: “San Francisco”
8. Deafheaven: “Dreamhouse”
9. Disclosure: “Latch”
10. My Bloody Valentine: “New You”

Nick Neyland

ALBUMS

1. The Haxan Cloak: Excavation
2. Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven
3. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
4. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
5. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
6. These New Puritans: Field of Reeds
7. Mountains: Centralia
8. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
9. James Holden: The Inheritors
10. Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

TRACKS

1. My Bloody Valentine: “Only Tomorrow”
2. FKA twigs: “Water Me”
3. Haxan Cloak: “The Mirror Reflecting Part 2”
4. The Knife: “Full of Fire”
5. Disclosure: “Latch”
6. Youth Lagoon: “Mute”
7. Pharmakon: “Crawling on Bruised Knees”
8. Sophie: “Bipp”
9. David Bowie: “Where Are We Now”
10. Factory Floor: “Fall Back”

Andy O’Connor

ALBUMS

1. VHÖL: VHÖL
2. Deafheaven: Sunbather
3. Prurient: Through the Window
4. Power Trip: Manifest Decimation
5. Vulgar Fashion: Vulgar Fashion
6. Death Grips: Government Plates
7. Youth Code: Youth Code
8. Da Mafia 6ix: 6ix Commandments
9. Celeste: Animale(s
10. Vaura: The Missing

TRACKS

1. Prurient: You Show Great Spirit
2. Deafheaven: Sunbather
3. In Solitude: Pallid Hands
4. Bill Callahan: Small Plane
5. The Field: Cupid's Head
6. VHÖL: The Wall
7. Omar Souleyman: Wenu Wenu
8. Pharmakon: Crawling on Bruised Knees
9. Death Grips: Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)
10. French Montana: Trap House

Joel Oliphint

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Bill Callahan: Dream River
3. Jason Isbell: Southeastern
4. Rhye: Woman
5. Volcano Choir: Repave
6. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
7. Phosphorescent: Muchacho
8. Joel RL Phelps & the Downer Trio: Gala
9. Yo La Tengo: Fade
10. My Bloody Valentine: mbv

TRACKS

1. J. Cole: “Power Trip (feat. Miguel)”
2. Bill Callahan: “The Sing”
3. Vampire Weekend: “Ya Hey”
4. Lorde: “Royals”
5. Kurt Vile: “Wakin on a Pretty Day”
6. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
7. Yo La Tengo: “Ohm”
8. Wooden Wand: “No Bed for Beatle Wand/Days This Long”
9. Haim: “The Wire”
10. Way Yes: “Colerain”

Renato Pagnani

ALBUMS

1. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
2. Drake: Nothing Was the Same
3. Holy Ghost!: Dynamics
4. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
5. The National: Trouble Will Find Me
6. Classixx: Hanging Gardens
7. Charli XCX: True Romance
8. Kanye West: Yeezus
9. A$AP Ferg: Trap Lord
10. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
2. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
3. Majical Cloudz: "Turns, Turns, Turns"
4. Holy Ghost!: "It Must Be the Weather"
5. Shy Girls: "Under Attack"
6. Autre Ne Veut: "Play By Play"
7. Gucci Mane: "Hell Yes"
8. Meek Mill: "Lil Nigga Snupe"
9. Sophie: "Nothing More to Say / Eeehhh"
10. DIANA: "Born Again"

Nate Patrin

ALBUMS

1. Danny Brown: Old
2. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels
3. Ka: The Night's Gambit
4. Action Bronson & Party Supplies: Blue Chips 2
5. DJ Rashad: Double Cup
6. Prodigy / The Alchemist: Albert Einstein
7. Thundercat: Apocalypse
8. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
9. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
10. Savages: Silence Yourself

TRACKS

1. Kanye West: “Black Skinhead”
2. Neko Case: “Man”
3. Classixx: “All You're Waiting For” (feat. Nancy Whang)
4. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
5. Disclosure: “White Noise” (feat. AlunaGeorge) (Hudson Mohawke Remix)
6. Kingdom: “Bank Head” (feat. Kelela)
7. A$AP Ferg: “Shabba” (feat. A$AP Rocky)
8. King Khan & the Shrines: “Idle No More”
9. M.I.A.: “Bring the Noize”
10. Kurt Vile: “KV Crimes”

Jenn Pelly

ALBUMS

1. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
2. Body/Head: Coming Apart
3. Merchandise: Totale Nite
4. Deafheaven: Sunbather
5. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
6. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
7. Gun Outfit: Hard Coming Down
8. Nuclear Spring: Nuclear Spring
9. Julia Holter: Loud City Song
10. Milk Music: Cruise Your Illusion

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
2. Perfect Pussy: "I"
3. All Dogs: "Say"
4. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
5. Swearin': "Dust in the Gold Sack"
6. Iceage: "Ecstasy"
7. Speedy Ortiz: "No Below"
8. Radiator Hospital: "Our Song"
9. Pharmakon: "Ache"
10. Joanna Gruesome: "Secret Surprise"

Amanda Petrusich

ALBUMS

1. Nathan Salsburg: Hard For To Win and Can't Be Won
2. Hiss Golden Messenger: Haw
3. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
4. Steve Gunn: Time Off
5. Various Artists: Let Me Play This For You: Rare Cajun Recordings
6. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
7. Various Artists: The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records Vol. 1
8. J. Cole: Born Sinner
9. Bill Callahan: Dream River
10. A$AP Rocky: LongLiveA$AP

TRACKS

1. Vampire Weekend: “Hannah Hunt”
2. Kurt Vile: “Wakin on a Pretty Day”
3. Chance the Rapper: “Chain Smoker”
4. A$AP Rocky: “Fuckin' Problems” (feat. Drake & Kendrick Lamar)
5. Bill Callahan: “Small Plane”
6. Kanye West: “Black Skinhead”
7. Haim: “The Wire”
8. Iceage: “Ecstasy”
9. Migos: “Versace”
10. Justin Timberlake: “Mirrors”

Amy Phillips

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe
3. Jai Paul: Jai Paul
4. Lady Gaga: ARTPOP
5. Beyoncé: Beyoncé
6. Sleigh Bells: Bitter Rivals
7. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
8. Icona Pop: This Is... Icona Pop
9. Haim: Days Are Gone
10. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

TRACKS

1. Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"
2. Bastille: "Pompeii"
3. Lady Gaga: "Do What U Want" [ft. R. Kelly]
4. Young Galaxy: "Pretty Boy" (Peaking Lights remix)
5. Disclosure: "Latch"
6. Pulp: "After You"
7. Daft Punk: "Doin' It Right" [ft. Panda Bear]
8. Sky Ferreira: "Heavy Metal Heart"
9. Los Campesinos!: "What Death Leaves Behind"
10. Kirin J Callinan: "Love Delay"

Mike Powell

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Bill Callahan: Dream River
3. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
4. Kurt Vile: Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze
5. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
6. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
7. Eleanor Friedberger: Personal Record
8. Ashley Monroe: Like a Rose
9. DJ Koze: Amygdala
10. DJ Rashad: Double Cup

TRACKS

1. Autre Ne Veut: “Play by Play”
2. Haim: “The Wire”
3. Majical Cloudz: “Bugs Don’t Buzz”
4. Deafheaven: “Dream House”
5. Rhye: “Open”
6. Crystal & S. Koshi: “Break the Dawn”
7. Glass Candy: “Warm in the Winter”
8. A$AP Ferg: “Shabba”
9. Protomartyr: “Jumbo’s”
10. Daughn Gibson: “Kissin on the Blacktop”

Mark Richardson

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
4. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
5. Disclosure: Settle
6. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
7. Bill Callahan: Dream River
8. Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven
9. Danny Brown: Old
10. DJ Koze: Amygdala

TRACKS

1. Young Galaxy: Pretty Boy Peaking Lights Remix
2. Bill Callahan: Small Plane
3. Vampire Weekend: Hannah Hunt
4. DJ Koze: NooOoo ft Tomerle & Maiko
5. Disclosure: Latch
6. Kanye West: New Slaves
7. Lady Gaga: Dope
8. Youth Lagoon: Mute
9. Daft Punk: Giorgio by Moroder
10. Beyonce: Blue

Jordan Sargent

ALBUMS

1. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
2. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
3. Disclosure: Settle
4. Miley Cyrus: Bangerz
5. Kanye West: Yeezus
6. Justin Timberlake: The 20/20 Experience
7. inc: no world
8. Ariana Grande: Yours Truly
9. Fall Out Boy: Save Rock and Roll
10. Janelle Monae: The Electric Lady

TRACKS

1. Rudimental: Baby [ft. MNEK & Sinead Harnett]
2. Duke Dumont: Need U (100%)
3. Robin Thicke: Blurred Lines [ft. Pharrell & T.I.]
4. Miley Cyrus: We Can't Stop
5. Drake: Hold On, We're Going Home
6. Kanye West: Bound 2 [Live on Fallon]
7. 2 Chainz: Feds Watching [ft. Pharrell]
8. A$AP Ferg: Shabba [ft. A$AP Rocky]
9. Ty Dolla $ign: Paranoid [ft. Joe Moses]
10. Paramore: Ain't It Fun

Ruth Saxelby

ALBUMS

1. Kelela: CUT 4 ME
2. Glasser: Interiors
3. Laurel Halo: Chance of Rain
4. Tirzah: I’m Not Dancing EP
5. Sampha: Dual EP
6. DJ Rashad: Double Cup
7. The Knife: Shaking The Habitual
8. Visionist: I’m Fine EP
9. Mount Kimbie: Cold Spring Faultless Youth
10. Forest Swords: Engravings

TRACKS

1. Autre Ne Veut: "Ego Free Sex Free"
2. DJ Rashad: "Let It Go"
3. FKA Twigs: "Papi Pacify"
4. Majical Cloudz: "Childhood Ends"
5. Pure X: "Thousand Year Old Child"
6. Grouper: "Vital"
7. Blondes: "Elise"
8. Drake: "The Motion" [feat Sampha]
9. Deptford Goth: "Guts No Glory"
10. Darkstar: "Hold Me Down"

Ryan Schreiber

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. DJ Rashad: Double Cup
3. Danny Brown: Old
4. Darkside: Psychic
5. Disclosure: Settle
6. Jai Paul: Jai Paul
7. Burial: Truant / Rough Sleeper
8. Kelela: Cut 4 Me
9. Ty Segall: Sleeper
10. Pusha T: My Name Is My Name

TRACKS

1. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
2. Kanye West: Blood on the Leaves
3. Ciara: Body Party
4. Todd Terje: Strandbar
5. Disclosure: Latch
6. Sophie: Bipp
7. Sky Ferreira: I Blame Myself
8. James Blake: Retrograde
9. Kingdom (feat. Kelela): Bankhead
10. A$AP Ferg: Hood Pope

Hank Shteamer

ALBUMS

1. RVIVR: The Beauty Between
2. Haim: Days Are Gone
3. Carcass: Surgical Steel
4. Diarrhea Planet: I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams
5. Queens of the Stone Age: …Like Clockwork
6. Suffocation: Pinnacle of Bedlam
7. Black Sabbath: 13
8. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
9. The Men: New Moon
10. Gorguts: Colored Sands

TRACKS

1. Daft Punk: "Get Lucky" [ft. Pharrell]
2. RVIVR: Spider Song
3. Haim: "Don't Save Me"
4. Francis and the Lights: "Betting On Us"
5. Diarrhea Planet: "Babyhead"
6. The Men: "Half Angel Half Light"
7. Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"
8. Kvelertak: "Kvelertak"
9. Queens of the Stone Age: "My God Is the Sun"
10. Butter the Children: "Spit It Out"

Katherine St. Asaph

ALBUMS

1. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
2. Throwing Muses: Purgatory/Paradise
3. Charli XCX: True Romance
4. Laura Marling: Once I Was an Eagle
5. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
6. Goldfrapp: Tales of Us
7. Haim: Days Are Gone
8. Dawn Richard: Goldenheart
9. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
10. Kanye West: Yeezus

TRACKS

1. The Knife: "Full of Fire"
2. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
3. Jessie Ware: "Imagine It Was Us"
4. Goldfrapp: "Thea"
5. Charli XCX: "Set Me Free"
6. Patrick Kelleher: "Put Out the Lights and Cry"
7. Disclosure feat. AlunaGeorge: "White Noise"
8. Katy B: "5 AM"
9. M.I.A.: "Come Walk With Me"
10. Daft Punk feat. Pharrell: "Get Lucky"

Brandon Stosuy

ALBUMS

1. Deafheaven: Sunbather
2. Julianna Barwick: Nepenthe
3. Burial: Rival Dealer
4. Agrimonia: Rites of Separation
5. Kanye West: Yeezus
6. Forest Swords: Engravings
7. Darkside: Psychic
8. Inquisition: Obscure Verses for the Multiverse
9. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
10. Power Trip: Manifest Decimation

TRACKS

1. Deafheaven: “Dream House”
2. Perfect Pussy: “I”
3. Kanye West: “I’m In It”
4. Drake: “Worst Behavior”
5. Majical Cloudz: “Bugs Don’t Buzz”
6. Prurient: “You Show Great Spirit”
7. A$AP Ferg: “Shabba” [Ft. A$AP Rocky]
8. Iceage: “Ecstasy”
9. Joanna Gruesome: “Sugarcrush”
10. Waxahatchee: “Swan Dive”

Joe Tangari

ALBUMS

1. Savages: Silence Yourself
2. Thee Oh Sees: Floating Coffin
3. Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight
4. Julia Holter: Loud City Song
5. Sigur Ros: Kveikur
6. Suede: Bloodsports
7. Yamataka // Sonic Titan: UZU
8. Vieux Farka Toure: Mon Pays
9. Bombino: Nomad
10. William Tyler: Impossible Truth

TRACKS

1. Thee Oh Sees: “I Come from the Mountain”
2. Neko Case: “I'm from Nowhere”
3. Suede: “It Starts and Ends with You”
4. Julia Holter: “Horns Surrounding Me”
5. Dieuf-Dieul de Thies: “Na Binta”
6. Bombino: “Amidinine”
7. Kanye West: “Black Skinhead”
8. Yamantaka // Sonic Titan: “One”
9. Arctic Monkeys: “Fireside”
10. Savages: “City's Full”

Paul Thompson

ALBUMS

1. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
2. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
3. Kanye West: Yeezus
4. Deafheaven: Sunbather
5. Disclosure: Settle
6. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
7. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
8. Haim: Days Are Gone
9. Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
10. M.I.A.: Matangi

TRACKS

1. Courtney Barnett: "Avant Gardener"
2. Chance the Rapper: "Paranoia"
3. Haim: "Falling"
4. Young Thug: "Picacho"
5. Omar Souleyman: "Wenu Wenu"
6. Migos: "Versace"
7. Kanye West: “Blood on the Leaves”
8. Vampire Weekend: "Step"
9. Lil Durk: "Dis Ain't What U Want"
10. Bill Callahan: "Small Plane"

David Turner

ALBUMS

1. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
2. Lil Durk: Signed to the Streets
3. 2 Chainz: Based on a True Story II: #MeTime
4. DJ Mustard: Ketchup
5. Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven
6. M.I.A.: Matangi
7. Problem: The Separation”
8. Migos: Young Rich Niggas
9. Jay Ant: Blue Money
10. Omar Souleyman: Wenu Wenu

TRACKS

1. Drake: "Started From the Bottom"
2. Lil Durk: "Dis Ain't What You Want"
3. Chance the Rapper: "Juice"
4. Meek Mill: "Lil Nigga Snupe"
5. 2 Chainz: "Where U Been?"
6. Migos & Rich the Kid: "Jumpin Like Jordan"
7. YG: "Im 4rm Bompton"
8. Selena Gomez: "Come And Get It"
9. Sage the Gemini: "Red Nose"
10. Rich Gang: "Tapout"

Jeff Weiss

ALBUMS

1. Danny Brown: Old
2. Thundercat: Apocalypse
3. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
4. Darkside: Psychic
5. Kevin Gates: The Luca Brasi Story/Stranger Than Fiction
6. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels
7. Forest Swords: Engraving
8. DJ Rashad: Double Cup
9. Juicy J: Stay Trippy.
10. Shlohmo: Laid Out

TRACKS

1. Grizzly Bear: “Willcall (Marfa Demo)”
2. Kevin Gates: “4:30 A.M.”
3. Duke Dumont: “100% (Need U)”
4. Chester Watson: "Phantom"
5. Rocko: "U.O.E.N.O. Remix” ft. Future & A$AP Rocky
6. Migos: “Chinatown”
7. A$AP Ferg: “Shabba/Shabba Remix”
8. Classixx: “All You're Waiting For”
9. Schoolboy Q: “Collard Greens” ft. Kendrick Lamar
10. Problem: “Like Whaat” ft. Bad Lucc

Douglas Wolk

ALBUMS

1. Kanye West: Yeezus
2. My Bloody Valentine: mbv
3. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
4. Kelela: Cut 4 Me
5. Melt Banana: fetch
6. The Ex & Brass Unbound: Enormous Door
7. Alex Chilton: Electricity By Candlelight
8. M.I.A.: Matangi
9. Quasi: Mole City
10. Yo La Tengo: Fade

TRACKS

1. Haim: “The Wire”
2. Kleenex Girl Wonder: “Migration Scripts”
3. David Bowie: “Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)”
4. Petula Clark: “Cut Copy Me”
5. Girls' Generation: “I Got a Boy”
6. Busta Rhymes: “Thank You”
7. Miley Cyrus: “We Can't Stop”
8. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
9. Superchunk: “F.O.H.”
10. Perfect Pussy: “I”

Lindsay Zoladz

ALBUMS

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
2. Kanye West: Yeezus
3. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
4. Jai Paul: s/t
5. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
6. Neko Case: The Worse Things Get the Harder I Fight The Harder I Fight the More I Love You
7. Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
8. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
9. Haim: Days Are Gone
10. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual

TRACKS

1. Haim: “The Wire”
2. Kanye West: “New Slaves”
3. Vampire Weekend: “Hannah Hunt”
4. Disclosure feat. Sam Smith: “Latch”
5. Lorde: “Royals”
6. Autre Ne Veut: “Play by Play”
7. Miley Cyrus: “We Can't Stop”
8. Torres: “Honey”
9. Perfect Pussy: “I”
10. Drake: “Hold On We're Going Home”