The 50 Best Albums of 2021

Slinky, smart, and gloriously down-and-out, St. Vincent’s latest brings us back to the New York of the Velvet Underground and the Factory’s waifs, leaving us to lounge among the glitter and the grit. Our generation’s rock & roll chameleon, Annie Clark delves into her formerly incarcerated father’s record collection to deliver Bowie- and Prince-esque tunes that are simultaneously utterly her own, weaving in brass and backup singers, while still reflecting that sepia-tone-tinted musical era. The record’s throwback appeal is made all the more delicious because we know Clark will only inhabit this skin until the next one, making the anticipation even greater to see where she heads next. —B.E.

Staring down 60, the Austin singer-songwriter continued on his recent streak of stunners by delivering a career high point with this collection of sharply told tales of wrinkled equestrians, ashamed murderers, disenchanted Iraq War veterans, and long-stewing flirts set to a West Coast, Petty-inspired roots rock from longtime collaborator Ross Hogarth. “Cashing in on a 30-year crush,” McMurtry sings, most memorably, on the instant-classic opener, “Canola Fields.” “You can’t be young and do that.” Nor can you be young and write an album as wise, witty, and emotionally generous as McMurtry’s latest. —J.A.B.

Is it Drake’s best album? Well, no. (The line to argue Take Care versus Nothing Was the Same versus If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late starts over there, bro.) But Certified Lover Boy is still a highly enjoyable cruise on autopilot from modern pop’s most charming blob of resentment and self-pity. Expensive samples, platinum guests, bitter bars about exes and frenemies — Drake hits all the familiar notes that have made him one of the most popular artists on the planet, and then some. He also remakes Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” as a Lonely Island-worthy comedy rap hit, just to show he can. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll listen again and again. —S.V.L.

Jhay Cortez got his start almost two decades ago, as a 14-year-old whiz kid who wrote and produced for some of the biggest acts in Puerto Rico. While he’s had massive breakthroughs, such as his 2020 Bad Bunny collaboration “Dákiti,” he hits a new peak on his sophomore album, Timelezz, and goes harder than he ever has before. He throws his full weight into the brash, unblinking bars of “Los Bo,” shows off his slinky wordplay on the up-tempo bounce of “Kobe en LA 2.0,” and teams up with Skrillex to keep pioneering reggaeton’s elecro-wave on “En Mi Cuarto.” —J.L.

This ascendant South Korean boy band elevated their sound and image this year with The Chaos Chapter: Fight or Escape, a repackaging of their sophomore studio album, The Chaos Chapter: Freeze. All five members of Tomorrow X Together got writing credits on the album, delivering their first English-language song with the infectious “Magic,” while incorporating arena pop rock into their already high-energy sound on “0X1=Lovesong (I Know I Love You).” The highlight is the TikTok-viral ballad “Anti-Romantic,” a tender tale of heartbreak realism that showcases the group’s impressive vocal and emotional range. —K.K.

Producer Alchemist and rapper Boldy James reconnected for the hard-nosed, slugging Bo Jackson, a follow-up to last year’s The Price of Tea in China. The second half of “Double Hockey Sticks” is spooky as a haunted house, while “Brickmile to Montana” is bludgeoning and thunderous; both demonstrate that James is still focused on delivering cold-eyed stories of drug dealing and shoot-outs in an unchanging tone. The beat in “First 48 Freestyle” channels some of the grandeur of early-2000s radio rap, but even this opulent setting can’t shake James’ focus — or make him bother to write a chorus. “Thuggin’ in the concrete jungle, planet of the apes,” James raps. “Every step I take, I take a risk, I can’t make one mistake.” —E.L.

As much as Maiden fans wish the band would rehash warhorses like “Run to the Hills” or “The Trooper,” the long-running headbangers have never looked back. Senjutsu, their 17th album, is their most progressive masterstroke yet. They still play the sort of hypnotic, vaguely Celtic riffs that made them famous, and frontman Bruce Dickinson could still win a John Henry-like battle with an air-raid siren, but, as on 2015’s The Book of Souls, they have elevated their songwriting with more intricate structures and smarter lyrics than when they started out 40 years ago. Senjutsu’s longer epics (“Hell on Earth,” “The Time Machine”) are the best here — the group gets lost in the journey and brings listeners along with them — proving Iron Maiden are still innovators as much as they are legends. —K.G.

“Hasta la que no hablan español se pasan enviando ‘OMG,”” Myke Towers raps in the first dazzling verse of many on his second studio album. True indeed: Lyke Mike is the kind of lyrical showcase that makes you want to tell a friend about, especially if your taste in hip-hop skews toward the classics. The Puerto Rican star flows with effortless confidence, stacking bars with a flair that’s as much Big L as Tego Calderon. Myke floats over synth-string stabs on “Sr. de los Cielos”; dances deftly around a salsa sample on “Pin Pin”; spins a casually unforgettable hook on “Cuando Me Ven”; tangles with a horn loop on “Papa Johns.” All 23 tracks show an MC whose verbal athleticism is too elite to ignore. —S.V.L.

“Tenderpunk” is how singer-songwriter-producer-engineer Sarah Tudzin describes her music as Illuminati Hotties, and the group’s superb third album, Let Me Do One More, is as sweet, scrappy, silly, and sincere as that label suggests. Riffs and wicked one-liners rain down on songs like “Mmmoooaaaaayaya” and “Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth,” but Tudzin’s equally shrewd, and devastatingly honest, on the country-tinged “u v v p,” the acoustic ballad “Growth,” and the love-in-the-end-times stunner “Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism.” Let Me Do One More isn’t just loud, fast Illuminati Hotties, but it is — to crib a line from the excellent opener “Pool Hopping” — “all rippers, no more skippers.” —J.B.

Arriving 10 years after her career in country music got started, the Texas singer’s debut succeeded by putting her story as a Black artist in a historically lily-white genre front and center on biographical songs like “Different” and “Love My Hair.” Guyton’s music made her aspirational sense of pride and determination feel universal, as she brought together country, soul, gospel, and rock and sang with a relatability and gravity that felt resolutely common and uniquely her own. It made sense that the most popular track on Remember Her Name was “All Americana,” the best song 2021 had to offer about celebrating our diverse national character with one shared voice. —J.D.

Leave it to rock’s most indefatigable cheerleader, Dave Grohl, to come out of a depressing pandemic with uplifting “na-na-na” refrains, hand-clap hooks, and an album’s worth of lyrics about hope and persevering. On the Foo Fighters’ 10th album, the sextet flexes its pop chops, experimenting with loops (“Medicine at Midnight”), gospel-choir backup vocals (“Making a Fire”), and glassy, jazzy strumming (the ballad “Chasing Birds”). On each of the record’s nine tracks, Grohl’s optimism seems to serve as the band’s inextinguishable beacon, and they’ve ended up sounding even looser than usual this time, like they’re having the time of their lives. They may call it “medicine,” but its side effects are infectious. —K.G.

Topaz Jones’ second album is a boogie-funk-inflected meditation on Black identity, with overwhelmingly pretty tunes that illustrate topics like love, family dysfunction, and clichés. “Ooh, you think you’re masculine because of rap/I know that you’re pacifist, it’s just an act,” he raps on “D.I.A.L.” Jones proves himself a searingly introspective writer that fleshes out numerous angles of a given topic, but he’s adept enough to let melodic joy and buoyant rhythms overtake his navel-gazing lyrics. To accompany Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama, Jones co-directed an impressive short film that delineates in visual terms — short performances, interviews with elders like Black Thought, and archival video clips — how the modern Black experience eludes simple stereotypes while updating community traditions. —M.R.

On Stand for Myself, Yola built on the stylistic range of 2019’s Walk Through Fire, sprinkling in hints of disco and humid Memphis soul to complement her folk-rock leanings. Her second album with collaborator Dan Auerbach, Stand for Myself, sees Yola taking hold of her agency as a writer. “A coward in the shadows, no view from above,” she sings in the scorching title track. But no more: Yola also rails against divisive governments and tokenism, while celebrating her sexuality and cherished friendships. It’s top-level stuff from one of contemporary pop’s greatest singers, who just so happens to also be one of its sharpest songwriters. —J.F.

With Shiesty Season, Pooh Shiesty scored one of the biggest mixtape debuts in years. The Memphis rapper and Gucci Mane protégé espouses an unyielding stream of brittle gunshot boasts, dropping frequent references to Draco assaults, popping off at snitches and the murder game with a plainspoken bounce flow. “You know who took that shit from you, come get it back in blood,” he growls on “Back in Blood,” his hit single with Lil Durk. While Pooh Shiesty fed the rap world’s bottomless appetite for unforgiving trap hammers, his real-life situation hewed too close to rap fantasy: As of this writing, he sits in prison, facing years of incarceration over firearms and assault charges. —M.R.

The British-Nigerian rapper’s fourth album seamlessly incorporates grime, hip-hop/soul, and old-school R&B (the Smokey Robinson sample in “Two Worlds Apart” goes down just as smoothly as the “Jodci and cherry wine” she mentions in its lyrics). Simz flows hard and thinks deep, dropping brags like “Might be a brat for a bit/Fuck your blunt, man, I want my spliffs,” while humanizing her outsize confidence in moments that offer a realist take on careerism and processing personal traumas, particularly the standout “I Love You, I Hate You,” a searing message to her absentee dad that turns her anger into a power source. —J.D.

For their debut as Silk Sonic, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak approached Seventies soul with the exacting standards and attention to detail of a German automaker, obsessing over period gear and collaborating with guys who were actually there, including Bootsy Collins. Given the level of fussiness, it’s remarkable how loose, funky, and fully realized An Evening With Silk Sonic is. Mars’ and .Paak’s interests, talents, and comedic sensibilities blend seamlessly, whether proposing romance, rapping a bit, or coming up with specifics-laden complaints like “Got her badass kids runnin’ ’round my whole crib like it’s Chuck E. Cheese/Put me in a jam with her ex-man in the UFC.” Eighteen months into a pandemic, their commitment to precisely engineered pleasure feels pretty damn good. —C.H.

Adult Mom’s Stevie Knipe has been one of indie rock’s most consistently stellar songwriters for years now, with gems like Sometimes Bad Happens and Momentary Lapse of Happily. But Driver is the band’s true breakthrough album, with intimately emotional guitar tunes like “Wisconsin” and “Breathing.” Knipe hits the twists and turns of twentysomething queer-punk romance, even when they go for confessions like “The only thing I’ve done this month is drink beer and masturbate and ignore phone calls from you.” —R.S.

Still Over It is by turns bruised and bruising, vulnerable and vindictive, stocked with songs full of no good, very bad men and calculating women always looking to slip a knife into Walker’s back. In a world full of sharks, the singer is forced to sharpen her teeth — in a pair of lethal duets, “No Love” with SZA, and “Unloyal” with Ari Lennox, Walker commits to no-strings-attached pairings and promises to break things off at the first sign of trouble. But it’s the softest song on Still Over It that hits the hardest. That’s “Session 33,” a beatless acoustic ballad that captures the vicious merry-go-round of a toxic relationship. “A house is not a home when no one’s there,” Walker sings, nodding to Luther Vandross. “So alone, no one’s there/Should I move on since no one’s here?” —E.L.

Moments into her second album, Valentine, Lindsey Jordan delivers the coolly disaffected lines of “Ben Franklin,” her voice curling in over a seesawing bass line and a few surprising, tinseled synths. The song is somewhat of a departure from the spiky indie rock on Lush, the earnest collection of bruised, openhearted elegies she released in 2018, when she was just a teenager. But “Ben Franklin” is indicative of the confidence on Valentine, which follows a three-year period during which Jordan spent time in rehab, grappled with fame, and eventually found catharsis through her music. It’s a fuller, clearer, and more forceful LP, though her writing remains as unnervingly mature and crushingly vulnerable as ever. —J.L.

A legend in the world of underground hip-hop, Madlib has for decades been keeping the tradition of sampladelic suite-making alive on resplendently stoned, beautifully crafted albums, like 2004’s landmark MF Doom collab, Madvillainy. This time out he’s working with electronic producer Four Tet, and the result is one of his finest mind-warps yet. “Dirtknock” magically flips some bass pokes and vocals from mumbly first-gen post-punks the Young Marble Giants into something deeply funky, while the album-closing “Duumbiyay” creates an exploratory jazz motif from a primordial proto-rap recording by children living in a Harlem housing project in the 1950s. As its title implies, Sound Ancestors is an album where the entire history of recorded music feels eternally up for grabs. —J.D.

The Toronto singer-songwriter’s debut album is a haunted meditation on grief written in the wake of reeling after his friend Smoke Dawg was murdered in 2018. But When Smoke Rises is much more than a collection of devastating ballads, though it’s also that: the 24-year-old used the record as a staging ground for his playful, striking colliding of genres and traditions, from sparse piano torch singing and folk strumming to hip-hop and spoken-word sound collages. But what remains most striking about this immaculate debut is Mustafa’s arresting, quivering vocals and his gut-punch portrayal of grief so all-encompassing that, as he sings on “Capo,” he can’t even scrub it off in the shower. J.A.B.

For an album named after a movement of aggression, Punk is remarkably soft. Sometimes Young Thug is crude when he’s delicate (“I wanna lay with you every night and we never bone”), but he’s direct about his anxieties (“I came from nothin’ but that ain’t how the world see me”). Navigating his childhood traumas, complicated relations with the law enforcement, and his responsibilities as a wealthy community figure, Thug shows skill in the tender without sacrificing the fun of his oeuvre. Complete with some of the best work this year from his contemporaries J. Cole, Drake, Doja Cat, and Gunna, Punk traverses levity and darkness with tact. —M.C.

Mabiland’s second album, Niñxs Rotxs, deepens and enriches the R&B en español that’s continued to claim space in the Latin music industry, and also takes listeners on an emotional journey that blends neo-soul, rap, hip-hop, and R&B. Through her melodious soundscapes built for deep thinking, the Colombian multihyphenate shapes a narrative of a “broken” girl — reflected in the album title, aesthetic, and lyrics — and carefully lays out the internal battles that come with the experience. She strays from commercial pop reggaeton, opting instead for soft undertones of nu-funk, experimental instrumentation, and sequence selections that hold her stories together. Tracks such as “Niñxs Rotxs” are rooted in self-reflection, while “Ashé” and “WOW” act as powerful reclamations of pro-Black protests. —J.M.

Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman has followed what’s become a familiar path from bedroom folk to a fully realized musical vision. On Ignorance, the textured sound channels folk, jazz, orchestral music, and rock through a slippery rhythmic sense that reflects the real-time meditative quality in her lyrics. Ignorance is largely about the slow, inexorable destruction of our nautical world (“I should get all this dying off of my mind/I should really know better than to read the headlines,” she sings on “Atlantic”). But it’s just as much about reveling in the fleeting beauty amid the collapse, making for music that proves subtlety can sometimes be a more effective political weapon than shouting. J.D. 

In some ways, Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime sounds both like an inversion of rock & roll and the purest rock record to come out in recent years. The Tuareg singer-guitarist has dispensed with the genre’s structural hallmarks — there’s rarely a backbeat (and, hell, most of the songs aren’t even in your typical 4/4 rhythm) — but he shreds on his guitar more fluidly and passionately than practically any six-string hero to grace the cover of a guitar mag in recent years. When he puts his guitar in the spotlight, as on “Taliat” or his unplugged (and wholly un-Clapton-like) “Layla,” it feels like the rest of the music is following him. And when his voice and guitar work together on the title cut, the effect is truly transcendent. —K.G.

Carly Pearce had her 30s all planned out, then her life imploded with a high-profile divorce and the death of a dear collaborator. The Kentucky singer could’ve hidden from the spotlight, but she turned her grief and emotion into the instant-classic EP 29 (and the expanded version 29: Written in Stone), chronicling that transitional age with courage, empathy, and humor. She acidly warns the “Next Girl” about a playboy ex, allows herself to be really “Messy,” and mourns her dashed dreams in the devastating title track. “The year that I got married and divorced/Held on for dear life but still fell off the horse,” Pearce sings with a sigh. Here’s to being OK with not being OK. —J.F.

Here’s the Dry Cleaning elevator pitch: Imagine a Londoner quietly reciting witty and cynical monologues about John Wick and feeling “poisonous rage” while the Smiths or Joy Division play their most hypnotic songs in the background. As an abstract, the group’s music could either sound disastrous or compelling, but luckily for Dry Cleaning, both frontwoman Florence Shaw and her bandmates have a way of playing off one another that can make their avant-garde/romantic/absurd audio plays curiously transcendent. New Long Leg, their first full-length, overdelivers the drama on 10 smartly textured tracks produced by PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish. It’s music that both demands and deserves undivided attention. —K.G.