My Favourite Albums of 2021
Featuring Cassandra Jenkins, Japanese Breakfast, Tyler, the Creator, and more!
Here is my annual list of my favourite albums of the year! Last year I had 50, this year I have 18. Why the downgrade? 1) I listened to less new music this year than last year. 2) These were the albums I truly loved! There were a lot that I really, really liked… but didn’t quite love. I may have been able to stretch this list out to 50 if I included them, but why bother? I wanted to write about the stuff I truly enjoyed this year. And I hope that you will enjoyed reading my thoughts :)
For my list of favourite songs click here.
Is it Thug’s strongest album? No.
Are there some stinkers here? Yes. “Livin It Up” comes to mind, as it feels like it was written specifically to be used for a Bud Lite Seltzer commercial.
Does it live up to the promise of punk-influence sound suggested by its title and Thug’s truly excellent Tiny Desk Concert? It does not.
But it’s still a new Young Thug album. And that’s not nothing! And it’s not like Thugger isn’t trying anything new here. On the reflective “Die Slow,” he reveals more about his past than he has previously in his entire discography. “Stupid/Asking” is Thug presenting a new level of heartbreak and emotional honesty. And tracks like “Peepin Out the Window” and “Day Before” are both shockingly somber musings on mortality.
And if you like a lot of his recent output, there’s plenty of good stuff to be found here for that as well. Perhaps I’m such a fan that I’m more inclined to mark Thug on a curve, but at the end of the day there weren’t many albums out this year that sounded better to my ears.
Standout tracks: Stressed, Stupid/Asking, Peepin Out the Window
17. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage
Nick Cave continues his late career winning streak with the help of longtime collaborator and bandmate Warren Ellis. The music on Carnage is as cold and menacing as the austere cover art and blunt title would imply. Yet it is undeniably beautiful. Like a marble statue brandishing a knife. It splits the difference between the haunting elegies of his recent Bad Seeds work and the X-rated fairy tales from his Grinderman side project. And it does so while infusing some of the most politically urgent lyrics of Cave’s long career. “A protester kneels on the neck of a statue/The statue says, "I can't breathe"/The protester says, "Now you know how it feels"/And he kicks it into the sea,” he menaces on “White Elephant.” That’s one hell of a lyric 64-year-old man to sing in 2021.
Standout tracks: Carnage, White Elephant, Lavender Fields
16. Backxwash - I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES
If you only knew Backxwash from her Twitter account where she’s more likely to crack wise on the trending topic of the day, or praise stuff like Carly Rae Jepsen and Coldplay’s first album, then you might surprised by the music the Zambian-Canadian artist puts out. Fresh off a Polaris Prize win for last year’s God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It, she returns with her most punishingly nihilistic, yet stylistically exhilarating, album yet. With her signature combination of death metal influences and heavy sampling, Backxwash stares into the abyss and tries to process what stares back. Marginalized people dying everywhere. A racist prime minister. The pervasive, corroding effects of organized religion. It’s enough that ending it all seems like a viable alternative to continuing on (warning: suicidal thoughts are topic she addresses bluntly throughout). But Backxwash continues onward, fighting back with angry, righteous, and powerful tomes for troubled times. This resilience is best personified in the album’s most striking sample: the chanting of a sangoma, a traditional Southern African healer, featured throughout “666 IN LUXAXA”. As Backxwash raps about injustice against a menacing backdrop, the chants continue before all of the despairing squalls clear and the chants are the only sounds left. Perhaps the abyss can be escaped.
Standout tracks: TERROR PACKETS, SONG OF SINNERS, 666 IN LUXAXA
15. Mach-Hommy - Pray For Haiti
I feel like I listened to a lot less hip hop than I do in a typical year. Especially, for lack of a better term, “alternative hip hop.” That being said, I made sure to check out Mach-Hommy’s new tape after seeing the overwhelming praise it received. Rest assured, the praise was deserved. A potent mix of mysticism, ethnography, and stunting. Hommy’s pen is poisonous, taking no prisoners. And his co-pilot on the project, Westside Gunn, proves his curatorial acumen once again helping pick out some maddeningly nasty production. Any beat made by Conductor on this project is a perfect 10, guaranteed. I’ve seen Pray For Haiti be called Mach-Hommy’s most accessible work yet, which I don’t think is a sleight because the more popular he gets the better.
Standout tracks: Makrel Jaxon, Stellar Ray Theory, Kriminel
14. The War on Drugs - I Don’t Live Here Anymore
I think it’s important that there are bands out there making great music that my Dad would enjoy in the hypothetical situation he ever sought out new music to listen to. Adam Granduciel and company, you are doing the world a valuable service.
Standout tracks: Victim, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, Wasted
13. Mega Bog - Life, and Another
The urbane apocalyptic cocktail jazz stylings of Destroyer, meets the manic woman-on-the-verge histrionics of U.S. Girls, meets the moody, earthy tones of Big Thief. Erin Birgy follows in the tradition of many great indie songwriters of composing inscrutable lyrics that nonetheless feel pregnant with meaning.
Standout tracks: Crumb Back, Butterfly, Ameleon
12. Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime
Mdou Moctar is a rockstar in the truest sense of the word. Hailing from the Azawagh region of Niger, he is the brightest name in the bountiful genre of Tuareg guitar music. Afrique Victime, his electric sixth studio album is his international breakout, but he’s been a trailblazer and star for years now. Even starring in his own version of Purple Rain (called Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It) placing himself in the Prince role. That might sound like an act of wild hubris if he wasn’t able to back it up with some of the most exciting and inventive guitar work since the Purple One himself. Easily capable of creating stunningly beautiful hymns like “Bismilahi Atagah,” wailing torch songs like “Taliat,” and fiery missives like the titular track, Moctar shows his range and his mastery of the six-stringed instrument.
Standout tracks: Asdikte Akal, Afrique Victime, Bismilahi Atagah
11. Lucky Kilimanjaro - DAILY BOP
Tokyo pop outift Lucky Kilimanjaro just wants you to have a really good time. According to their website (or at least the Google translation of their website), the theme of their music is, "dancing every day of the year". This spirit is evident in the title of their third album DAILY BOP. It’s also evident in the music which is, in a word, infectious. Every song is bursting with joyous energy and fizzing over with life. Each one has at least one hook that is destined to burrow into your brain and roost there for months. There was no other album I went to this year when I needed to boost my mood or just have a little dance party while I did the dishes.
Standout tracks: エモめの夏 (Emo-eyed Summer), アドベンチャー (Adventure), ペペロンチーノ (Peperoncino)
10. Tyler, the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
I always had Tyler kept in the “artists I admire more than I really love” box. CALL ME WHEN YOU GET LOST is the first project of his that I love front to back. Unpopular opinion, but Tyler has only in spurts been able to perfectly synthesize the part of him that is a generationally talented rapper with the part of him that is an arty weirdo. It happened occasionally on Flower Boy, but the two realms felt weirdly at arms length on IGOR. Well, CALL ME gives you two great flavours that taste great together. Tyler gets indulgent on tracks like “SWEET” and “WILSHIRE” while delivering the real rap goods in a series of blistering tracks that rarely exceed three minutes. The features are all varied and uniformly excellent, and while some have called the DJ Drama ad libs and faux-mixtape construction corny, phony, or just annoying, I think it’s great. I always lose it when Drama bellows “We on a yacht. A young lady just fed me French vanilla ice cream. We all got our toes out, too” on “HOT WIND BLOWS”. There is so much character, humour, and inventiveness to this album that I both admire and love it.
Standout tracks: LEMONHEAD, LUMBERJACK, HOT WIND BLOWS
9. Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World
If you go to Magdalena Bay’s website you will be greeted with an approximation of a tricked out Angelfire circa 2003. Once there, you are greeted with several options including playing an arcade-style game based on their new album or simply pressing a button that says “click for vibes.” It can all feel a bit… put upon. But in a year that saw “vibes” reach its nadir, Magdalena Bay made an album that is so much more than that. Yes, much of Mercurial World is spacey and perhaps “vibey,” but it’s also a busy, sometimes panicky album. Take “You Lose!” an impeccably crafted number that melds video game bleep and bloops, acoustic guitar strumming, and anguished background screams. It’s a lot of things, but it’s definitely not “a vibe.”
Magdalena Bay’s early 2000s retrofeitishism may be genuine, but it’s also a front to disguise a thorny and disaffected core. There’s a nary song on here that has a relationship that isn’t actively disintegrating. They might be having fun, but the duo is online enough to know the truth: it sucks on there.
Standout tracks: Secrets (Your Fire), You Lose!, Hysterical Us
The first time I heard a Porter Robinson song was when I was a teen and a friend of mine showed me this viral video from 2012 Burning Man that was a clip show of women hula hooping with a camera-equipped hula hoop. I found the video kind of neat and catalogued the song in my mind: “Language” by Porter Robinson. I stowed that name away in a file in my mind that contains many of the EDM-names of yesteryear like Hardwell and Armin Van Buuren. Music that I would hear from my dorm hallway in first year. Music that still gets millions of streams, but has firmly been left behind by the cultural zeitgeist. And I did this because, well, that’s just the type of music I associated with someone who got picked to soundtrack a Burning Man clip show of bikini-clad women hula hooping.
When I listened to his comeback single “Get Your Wish” last year, and then all of Nurture, his first album in seven years, earlier this week, I discovered that he has been in the wrong file all along. There’s the sky-high dopamine chasing rushes of the early-tens EDM yes, but Robinson clearly has more in common in terms of lyricism and songcraft with the various bedroom pop weirdos who also came of age in that era. Tracks like “Lifelike” and “Wind Tempos” also imply that he has been listening to a lot of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
The final result is a bracingly vulnerable work; pained, nostalgic, and hopeful. It might strike some as a bit syrupy, but Robinson’s striking compositions and evocative use of pitch-shifted vocals make the whole thing hum.
Standout tracks: Musician, Get Your Wish, Look at the Sky
Not only do Turnstile carry the torch for the D.M.V. area’s legendary hardcore scene, they expand its scope with a brightened palette and inclusionary mentality. Every song on here is bursting with primal energy, often melding ferocity in bold and unexpected ways with dream like textures. The quintet traverses throughout all different types of terrains: the aquatic (“UNDERWATER BOI”), the skies above (“FLY AGAIN”), and even outer space (“ALIEN LOVE CALL”). All of it endowed with the life-affirming powers of hardcore.
Standout tracks: DON’T PLAY, UNDERWATER BOI, WILD WRLD
Finding it hard to write about this one. Dacus has a better voice than most indie rockers, is much better writer than most indie rockers, and just straight up makes better music that most indie rockers. This is just high quality music! Go listen to it!
Standout tracks: VBS, Thumbs, Brando
5. Illuminati Hotties - Let Me Do One More
Illuminati Hotties frontwoman Sarah Tudzin refers to her brash yet emotionally open indie rock as “tenderpunk.” If this dissuades you from listening to it (honestly, it would for me), be not afraid. Tudzin’s music is nowhere near as corny as this neologism.
The buzzy, rollicking opener “Pool Hopping” packs a lifetime of social and romantic insecurity into one summer’s day. Lead single “MMMOOOYAAAHHH” recounts the scatterbrained frustrations and indignities of our late capitalist era. The ‘50s rock-n-roller “U v v p” is a winsome tale of unrequited love featuring country Western spoken word outro by Big Thief’s Buck Meek that brings to mind The Simpsons’ Space Coyote. From dead dogs to mean goth fitness instructors, the world doesn’t make a lot of sense. Let’s try and be nice to each other and grow from these unfortunate experience. Or at least “pretend it’s growth” as she intones on the album’s final song. Maybe punk is tender after all.
Standout tracks: Pool Hopping, MMMOOOYAAAHHH, u v v p
4. Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee
Michelle Zauner aka Japanese Breakfast, has a lot to be joyous about these days. It’s hard to think of an artist who had a better year professionally. She became a best-selling author. Soundtracked an acclaimed video game. Was nominated a Grammy for Best New Artist. And released her most popular album yet with Jubilee: another sterling collection of dreamy indie rock gems. Grief and insecurity were arguably the two largest themes on her previous records. With Jubilee, as implied by the title, Zauner wanted explore joy and celebration. As she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar: “It was really the most unexpected and surprising I could go.”
It’s interesting to read all of this because there is still a lot of sadness and heavy topics in play here: co-dependence, estrangement from her father, and of course the death of her mother which was at the centre of her previous works and her memoir. “Hell is finding someone to love/And I can't see you again” might the most heartbreaking line Zauner has ever written in a catalogue full of them.
Not that joyful, right? Well, there is sense of overwhelming joy, I might even say freedom, in the production and arrangement of this album that was previously untapped in Zauner’s work. The Japanese Breakfast hallmarks are all there (those glistening slide guitars on “Kokomo, IN” come immediately to mind) but part of a broader palette of new ideas (the chugging ‘80s soundscape of “Be Sweet,’ the horns on “Paprika” and “In Hell,” the instrumental finale on the closing track “Posing for Cars”).
I’ve been a fan of Japanese Breakfast since Psychopomp. When I first started writing these lists in 2017 I named Soft Sounds from Another Planet my favourite album of the year. I don’t love Jubilee quite on the level of Soft Sounds, but still love it quite a lot. I would call it Zauner’s most accomplished piece of musicianship yet. For most artists a year like this would be their peak. I have the utmost faith that Zauner will be able to surpass it.
Standout tracks: Be Sweet, Posing in Bondage, In Hell
3. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ - The Makin’ Magick II Album
Remember when everyone first got Facebook and we all liked pages that were like, “At night cant sleep, Morning cannot wake up” or “I HATE IT WHEN MY FOOTS ASLEEP.” You ever get an unscratchable itch of nostalgia and go look at these old likes and remember a simpler era, while simultaneously thinking about the unstoppable march of time. What if you were able to capture that specific emotion, and you were also then able to dance to it. That’s what DJ Sabrina's music is like.
The term “hauntology” was originally coined by theorist Jacques Derrida to talk about the “ghosts” of elements from our collective past. In the 2000s it was adapted for media theory to refer to works that deal with cultural memory and the persistence of the past. In the words of Mark Fisher we are, “haunted by the ghosts of futures that failed to happen.” In turn, we create art were we are eternally bound to return to these times where these futures were still possible. I cannot think of a musician that better captures the feeling of the hauntological better than DJ Sabrina.
Her use of sampling and motifs flittering in and out of songs feels like the very musical representation of the concept of past elements eternally reoccurring in our daily lives. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s hyper-nostalgia. The past can never be recovered, but it can never truly go away either. Her sounds might be inspired by the plunderphonics of artists like the Avalanches and the house/nu-disco of artists like Daft Punk, but it transcends both by a canny, and very online, sensibility regarding the indelible mark cultural artifacts leave on us. In an interview with Rate Your Music, she lists these artists as primary influences right alongside Hansen and Hannah Montana. Through reinterpretation and modulation, cultural refuse can live on in ways never thought imaginable.
Standout tracks: Don’t Miss that Flight, Being Alone, Music
2. SPELLLING - The Turning Wheel
Kate Bush probably is never releasing another album so we need to cherish this one.
Okay, perhaps that’s a bit glib. As you can tell by the fact that I have listed this as my second favourite album of the year, I think of this more highly than just being a Kate Bush stand-in. SPELLING, aka Tia Cabral, has been making some of the most boldly inventive art pop around for the past few years. I found her previous effort, 2019’s Mazy Fly, to be impressive certainly, but it didn’t set my world on fire. I was immediately blown away by The Turning Wheel. Right off the bat, with the opening suite of strings and piano featured on “Little Deer,” I got the sense that I was about to listen a major artistic achievement.
The absolute command Cabral has of orchestration and sequencing led to me believe she must have had some sort music school training. I was surprised to find that, while she does have an MFA, that this was not the case. Art in the visual sense appears to be her first passion (and as of fairly recently was still working as an elementary school art teacher), but she has seamlessly transposed these talents into making blindingly brilliant art pop.
Cabral wears many masks throughout The Turning Wheel. A sorceress on “Queen of Wands,” a soothsayer in love on “The Future,” a bullied child on “Boys at School.” What all of these characters and facades have in common is they allow Cabral to confess her desires and insecurities on her own terms. Backed on every track with instrumentation that is as finely detailed as a faberge egg.
Cabral’s real magic trick? Having such fussy music feel so fluid and free. Sounds unwinding into each other, never feeling stultifying or stuffy. No album this year has been a greater gift to re-listen to. Discovering new moments and flourishes every time. Listening to the The Turning Wheel is always a fresh and exciting adventure.
Standout tracks: Little Deer, The Future, Boys from School
1. Cassandra Jenkins - An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
Whenever I write these lists I think the hardest album to write about is always my favourite one. I really fall back on, “you just got to listen it! Take my word for it!” Well luckily I already wrote about this album so I can recycle some thoughts!
This was the first album of 2021 that I truly fell in love with, and as the year closes, it’s the one I still love the most. A free flowing combination of singer-songwriter folk-indie and smooth jazz. If you’re possibly wary about this combination, don’t worry. The sweeping saxophone sounds are a wonderfully complimentary backdrop for Jenkins’ reflections of everyday life and her emotional state. The stunning centrepiece of the album “Hard Drive” is an absolute triumph. Jenkins recalls conversations she’s had with friends and circles these discussions back to the mantra repeated throughout: “In this life/the mind is just a hard drive.” As a listener, the first time I heard it I was deeply stirred and moved. And every subsequent listen to it, I’ve been stirred in a different way, discovering something new. It reminds me of Prefab Sprout’s I Trawl the Megahertz with it’s combination of spoken word/poetic lyricism and lush instrumentals.
Despite clearly displaying her influences in her music, the album is not copying anything. It’s actually about as far from derivative you’re likely to hear in an album these days. It’s a wholly original work that, despite it’s 7-song track list, feels sprawling. Jenkins gathers up all of her grief and confusion and builds it into a world that can be inhabited. This is music that stands the test of time. Music you can grow with. Music you can listen to and find something in at every stage in your life.
Standout tracks: Michelangelo, Hard Drive, Ambiguous Norway