30 Best Albums of 2010

Def Jam

Teflon Don is the Miami MC's best album yet: a sleek, seductive portrait of a badass rapper living a life of South Florida luxury. Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake, and Erykah Badu make cameos, and Ross shows why he's a rapper's rapper, dropping quotable rhymes — "I wanna walk in the image of Christ / but that bitch Vivica nice" — in his bassy, bulldozer flow. Ross shows some range, rhyming about his dad's battle with cancer, and his coke-kingpin fantasies are even more compelling than usual: "I think I'm Big Meech, Larry Hoover!" he bellows, on "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)," creating one of 2010's best hooks while name-checking two notorious drug barons.

• Jody Rosen's Original Review
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Albums, Singles, Movies and more

Def Jam

In 2010, the Roots kicked ass five nights a week as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and teamed up with John Legend for the Seventies-soul tribute Wake Up! But their most impressive accomplishment this year was How I Got Over, the best album of their two-decade-long career. It's an expansive and thrillingly funky album about hard times that tosses in street reportage and gospel uplift — as well as dashes of indie rock from guests including Joanna Newsom, Monsters of Folk and members of the Dirty Projectors.

• Nathan Brackett's Original Review
• Video: Up Past Midnight With The Roots: Hanging With Jimmy Fallon’s New House Band

Reprise

Emo's reluctant princes follow The Black Parade with a magnificent album about vampires, rock stars, and rock-star vampires. It's a blazing, pissed-off record — but it's also MCR's poppiest disc yet. Amid synth bursts, Gerard Way slings glam-punk raps ("Planetary (Go!)" and mighty singalong hooks ("Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)"), sounding like Lady Gaga's goth-punk brother.

• Melissa Maerz's Original Review
• Video: My Chemical Romance Perform Tracks From Their New Album

Verve

The first album in eight years from the J. Geils Band singer proves nothing can kill Wolf's charm, musicality and youthfulness. Wolf is the passionate impresario of his own musical world, sharing his love of classic country, soul and R&B with anyone who cares to listen. His enthusiasm is contagious on a series of duets: "The Green Fields of Summer" is a striking acoustic song where Wolf and Neko Case exude stark, autumnal beauty, and "It's Too Late for Me," is a lighthearted country lullaby about growing old that could have been written in 1955, with Wolf and Merle Haggard sounding like old running buddies quietly congratulating themselves for outracing the sunrise yet again.

• Anthony DeCurtis' Original Review
• Feature: Peter Wolf Picks the Best Live R&B Songs

Secretly Canadian

The second album from these Brooklyn synth wizards overflows with art-pop nuggets ("Ambling Alp"), Afro-beat updates ("Mondegreen"), and tropical party jams ("O.N.E.") There's nothing Yeasayer touch that isn't transformed by their mix of sweetness, swirling psychedelia and sturdy pop hooks.

• Video: Yeasayer's "O.N.E." Video

Merge

The Chapel Hill punk lifers helped jumpstart the indie revolution of the Nineties, but unlike most of their peers, they didn't burn out or get cynical — they just waited until they had a great album's worth of songs. Their first album in nine years matches their 1994 classic Foolish, full of frantic pogo-along energy and Mac McCaughan's Fogerty-style wiseass wisdom. It's a lesson in musical and emotional commitment — knowing what you do, knowing the people you do it for, and then doing it to death. Long may they 'chunk.

• Jon Dolan's Original Review
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Albums, Singles, Movies and more

DGC/Interscope

TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek is indie-rock's most visionary producer — the Phil Spector of 21st century Brooklyn. His solo project is a great headphone record that's also staggeringly groovy, with soulful guest vocals from TVOTR's Tunde Adebimpe, Karen O, and David Byrne, and a blend of gothic synths and sleek beats. It's the sound of a studio rat loosening up and basking in the discotheque's glitterball glare.

• Will Hermes' Original Review
• Feature: TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek on His Poppy New Disc

31 Tigers

The Florida singer-songwriter writes rhymes as witty and cutting as Kanye's ("If I wake up married, I'll have to annul it/Right now my hands are in his mullet"). "Yes to Booty" (chorus: "When you say yes to beer/you say no to booty") is a honky-tonk anthem about not wanting to sleep with drunk dudes, but country's 21st-century answer to Roger Miller also gets dead serious: see the moving "Heroin Addict Sister."

Merge

Britt Daniel is the best kind of minimalist: the kind with endless hooks in his pocket and endless tricks up his sleeve. On Transference he builds elliptical, indelible songs from off-kilter drum patterns, cheap organ squeals, vocal harmony shards, and zipgun-taut guitar riffs. There's a new-ish infatuation with trippy, dubby studio effects, and Daniel tosses them around like a high-strung Lee Perry. This is head music for folks who get bored quick.

Def Jam

The OutKast rapper's solo debut is a nasty, future-funk odyssey, done the way George Clinton used to do it: stretched-out grooves, cavernous bass boom, gutbucket guitar and thick electro thump, all held together by Big Boi's whiplash rhymes and pimper-than-thou style.

• Jody Rosen's Original Review

Reprise

Turbulent, distorted — and one of the most intimate albums Young has ever made. Most of Le Noise is jagged, solo electric guitar, but even when Young goes acoustic on "Love and War," his lifelong determination — "There've been songs about love/I sang songs about war/Since the back streets of Toronto" — is plenty loud.

• David Fricke's Original Review
• Gallery: Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield and More at the Bridge School Benefit
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Albums, Singles, Movies and more

N.E.E.T./Interscope/XL

The backlash against M.I.A.'s high jinks — that graphic "Born Free" video and her beef with The New York Times — distracted everyone from the fact that her biggest provocations in 2010 were sonic. Maya's art-punk noise and electro beats made for the most abrasive protest music in recent memory.

• Rob Sheffield's Original Review
• Gallery: M.I.A.'s Best Looks

RCA

The best arena-rock album of the year. The backwoods doo-wop flair of "Mary" and country-U2 yearning in "Back Down South" catch the Kings at the perfect midpoint between pure pop and down-home. And the staccato "End," Sundown's first song, sounds like a new beginning.

• Will Hermes' Original Review
• Gallery: Kings of Leon Through the Years

Sub Pop

Victoria Legrand's sexy vocals are hazy and androgynous, like a stoned late-night heart-to-heart in which no one's sure who is sleeping where. Beach House sharpened their sound and hooks on their third album — what's surprising is that it only made their music more mysterious, more magical.

Atlantic

Mr. Bawitdaba finally cuts the Bob Seger record of his dreams. This Rick Rubin-produced classic-rock throwdown is pure Detroit drive-time 1975: From hard-nosed arena anthems to winsome country rock to blue-collar boogie, Rock shows a versatility — and depth — no one thought possible back in his Bullgod youth.

• Alan Light's Original Review
• Video: Watch a Clip From Kid Rock: Born Free

4AD

These moody Brooklyn rockers could have coasted with a repeat of their 2007 breakthrough, Boxer, but Violet is riskier and craftier, opening up their poetic guitar reveries with a late-Beatles sense of experimentation. Matt Berninger sings "Bloodbuzz Ohio" like a barfly who thinks you can't tell how terrified he is.

• Will Hermes' Original Review
• Video: The National Live at Bonnaroo 2010
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Albums, Singles, Movies and more

Cherrytree/Interscope

Body Talk began as two sugar- shot EPs; by the time the full-length dropped, it felt like a greatest-hits package. The Swedish diva's beats and tunes smoke her American competition. So does her wit: See "Fembot" and the secretly poignant "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do."

• Christian Hoard's Original Review

Big Machine

Speak Now proves that Swift is more than the world's biggest country singer — at 21, she's a one-woman song factory with a rock & roll heart. There are tracks about celebrity studs, but what matters is how she can command a deep-freeze soft-soul ballad like "Enchanted" or a Phil Spector-style rocker like "Long Live."

• Rob Sheffield's Original Review
• Gallery: Taylor Swift's Rise to Fame

Rounder

Folk-blues idealism — recorded on a mono tape machine, in places like a Georgia church and Sun Studios — with a very modern anger at the world after the crash. When Mellencamp sings "A Graceful Fall," he channels a pride and rage as fresh as last night's business reports.

• Will Hermes' Original Review
• Video: Mellencamp Performs "Save Some Time to Dream" On Letterman

Warner Bros./Third Man

This isn't so much an LP as it is a rush of metallic-blues spasms — and the best excessive-rock fun of the year. Jack White is the back-seat guy here — a singing drummer — but he leads by example: His Bonham-like force propels the zigzagging guitars and Alison Mosshart's Gothic-siren incantations.

• David Fricke's Original Review

DFA/Virgin

James Murphy convenes his team of New York punk-funk troopers for a heavy-duty breakup album, tunneling out of the emotional wreckage with the help of Nancy Whang's keyboard glimmers and Pat Mahoney's monster drums. Murphy testifies about adult love gone bad ("I Can Change") over a host of electronic dance styles, while the goofball anthem "Drunk Girls" offers a motto for casual lovers everywhere: "I believe in waking up together."

• Jody Rosen's Original Review
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010

Aftermath/Interscope

"Let's be honest, that last Relapse CD was ehhh," Eminem rapped on Recovery, which turned out to be the post-rehab victory lap that the schlocky Relapse wasn't. Dominating radio, Eminem was back on top in 2010, but he was also older and wiser: a scared dad who'd been to drug-addict hell and made it back with his rhyme skills intact. When he pledges to stay sober on the hit "Not Afraid," you know the man is hellbent serious.

• Jody Rosen's Original Review
• Gallery: Eminem: A History in Photos

Rounder

Keep waiting, Jimmy Page — he's not coming back. Plant followed up his dreamy roots-romp Raising Sand (2007) with an album that was edgier and rootsier: Plant and his bandleader, guitarist Buddy Miller, pursue ancient songs and modern tangents with a black-light glow on this psychedelic exploration of blues and country, covering Los Lobos, Townes Van Zandt, the slow-core band Low and public-domain gospel as if they are all stops on the true road to nirvana.

• Will Hermes' Original Review

Cash Money/Universal

Arriving after three years of mixtapes, guest spots and merciless hype, the debut LP from the Canadian actor- turned-rapper delivered the goods with sumptuous beats, airtight rhymes and nuanced introspection. Drake's sleepy, soulful flow gave his morning-after reflections on the high life an undercurrent of irony. He's the definitive star of hip-hop's tortured post-Kanye era: a guy who can't quite decide if "I've been up for four days gettin' money" is a brag or a burden.

• Jody Rosen's Original Review

XL

Contra was the album where Vampire Weekend discovered they could do just about anything: dubby, slo-mo gorgeousness, clattering pseudo-punk, African guitar riffs, choral swells, songs that rhyme "horchata" with "Aranciata" and "Masada." Ezra Koenig wrote dense lyrics about young love and Third World strife, but no matter how meditative he got, his melodic skills never failed him: Rarely do songs this lushly produced feel so buoyant or seem to zip by so quickly. By the time you marvel at the spacy ballad "I Think UR a Contra" or get "Your sword's grown old and rusty/Burnt beneath the rising sun" (from "Giving Up the Gun") stuck in your head, you realize these guys are as much about pure pleasure as anything else.

• Video: Vampire Weekend Talk Contra

Mercury

What does Jamey Johnson keep under all of that hair? Songs. Nashville's gruffest and grittiest star turns out to be its most reliable traditionalist, a Music Row pro who can write a song for every emotional season. Johnson pulled out a whole slew of them — 25, clocking in north of 105 minutes — for his double-disc fourth album: acoustic confessions and rugged boogie blues, big weepers and grim reapers, cover tunes and novelty ditties, not to mention "California Riots" and "Playing the Part," a pair of fiercely funny, unrepentantly redneck swipes at the frou-frou blue states.

• Will Hermes' Original Review
• Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Albums, Singles, Movies and more

Merge

Arcade Fire don't do anything small — so leave it to the Montreal collective to make an album of vast, orchestral rock that locates the battle for the human soul amid big houses and manicured lawns. The Suburbs is the band's most adventurous album yet: See the psychotic speed strings on "Empty Room," the Crazy Horse rush of "Month of May," the synth-pop disco of "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)." Win Butler and his wife, Régine Chassagne, sing about suburban boredom, fear of change and wanting to have a kid of their own — always scaling their intimate confessions to arena-rock levels and finding beauty wherever they look.

• Rob Sheffield's Original Review
• Photos: Arcade Fire Rock Madison Square Garden

Decca

Two rock giants, one largely forgotten, rekindle a friendship and make music that ranks with their best. Producer T Bone Burnett delivers his most spectacular production in memory, filled with shining steel guitar, chortling brass and gospel-time choirs. Ultimately, it's Russell's voice that shines brightest, drawing on the entire history of American popular music in its canny, vulnerable, knowing croon.

• David Fricke's Original Review
• Feature: Leon Russell: The Master of Space & Time Returns

Nonesuch

The duo boil it down on their best record yet: vivid tunes stripped bare and rubbed raw, with hot splashes of color and hooks popping through like compound fractures. "Howlin' for You" smears gnarly blues over a glam beat cribbed from Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2," while a cover of Jerry Butler's broken-hearted hit "Never Give You Up" takes Dan Auerbach's falsetto-flashing soulman persona to the next level. It's rock minimalism pushed to the max.

• David Fricke's Original Review

Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam

With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West made music as sprawlingly messy as his life. When he wasn't feuding with Matt Lauer or bugging out on Twitter, Kanye was building hip-hop epics, songs full of the kind of grandiose gestures that only the foolish attempt and only the wildly talented pull off. The more he piled on — string sections, Elton John piano solos, vocoder freakouts, Bon Iver cameos, King Crimson and Rick James samples — the better the music got. Never has Kanye rhymed so hilariously ("Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh?/I put the pussy in a sarcophagus") or been so insightful about his relationship-torpedoing faults. From the bracing prog-rock of "Power" to the spooky grandeur of "Runaway" to the shape-shifting "Hell of a Life," he made all other music seem dimmer and duller. Is the album dark? Sure. Twisted? Of course. But above all, it's beautiful.

• Rob Sheffield's Original Review
• Gallery: Kanye West's Career Highs and Lows