The 25 Best Albums of the 2010s

Tuareg, hyperpop, footwork, psychedelia, and more.

Index of all best albums of the decade posts.

In the 2010s, the rise of streaming deprioritized albums in favor of singles or multi-artist playlists for every genre and mood. And yet, the new availability of music also meant that practically, more albums from more places were available to more people than ever before in history. It’s now easy to find music from past decades with just a search term, or to dip into releases from just about every nation on earth. The biggest albums reach fewer people, but albums which would have reached no one are now easy to find and fall in love with.

Given that, it seemed only right for the decade to include a number of things I’m relatively sure most readers won’t have heard of. Big name albums define every decade (and some of those are on here too) but the 2010s is perhaps most distinctive in its delightful musical fragmentation.

25.
July Talk (2012)
July Talk

The harder varieties of alt rock had long since been displaced as a major mainstream genre by the 2010s. But of course it still had its proponents. July Talk’s Peter Dreimanis has a sandpaper rough blues voice that sounds like he’s channeling Son House. Leah Fay Goldstein responds to his rumbling pleas and imprecations with a high nasal counterpoint, while the band—guitarist Ian Docherty, bassist Josh Warburton, drummer Danny Miles—ties grunge blues riffs into knotty songs structures which make it clear someone’s been listening to a lot of Pixies. The band isn’t breaking new ground, but you don’t necessarily need to innovate when you can write visceral juggernauts like “Headsick,” or can deliver a line like “My guns and ammunition do very different things” with enough lascivious authority that it sounds like the entendre isn’t even double. There’s a time when this album would have made July Talk college radio legends. I like it even more because that time has passed, and the band doesn’t seem to care.

24.
Body Talk (2010)
Robyn

“Fembots have feelings too,” Swedish dancing machine/queen Robyn vocalizes on her electropop masterpiece Body Talk. That’s an iconic AI summary of the album’s cyborg message; track after track explores the lust, love, and heartbreak of the universe’s most sensitive robot technology. “Dancing on My Own” is a dancefloor tragedy told from the perspective of that abandoned vending machine in the corner; “Time Machine” is about how even the sad Terminator can’t take back their harmful words no matter how much it might wish it could; and of course “Fembot” is an anthem for all horny droids everywhere (“Plug me in and flip some switches.”) The artificial soundscapes make the emotions throb all the more desperately, the way Spock’s outbursts are more sexy and compelling because they bust through his logical controls. I’m not saying they’d love Robyn on Vulcan, but I am saying that despite themselves, they’d understand.

23.
The Sky Untuned (2019)
Laura Cannell

The title of Laura Cannell’s The Sky Untuned is a reference to the unhearable mystical music of the spheres, and the album exists somewhere between The Wicker Man and the drones of Pauline Oliveros; it’s witchy haunt music for an interminable sabbath of stasis and staring at bugs. Cannell worked on a number of projects which combined traditional British folk and early music, but this album to my ears is her most abstract and avante garde, which also makes it her most unsettlingly atavistic. The overbowed violin, with odd tunings and detunings—and the spooky, piercing double recorders on “Landmark” and “Organum”—creates a sound of sawing, fingernails-on-chalkboard anti-music, the call of misshapen owl-things pursuing you as you scamper with the small creatures through the underbrush. The whole album was recorded in one take at St Andrew’s Church, Raveningham, Norfolk, UK, and you do wonder that Christ himself didn’t descend to chuck her and her gloriously unholy spirit out.