1. Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising One of the biggest joys in choosing an album of the year is in realizing that your ultimate selection is one you never would have predicted when the year began. I went into Titanic Rising with the opinion that Natalie Mering was a remarkable singer but an uncompelling songwriter; she impressed me with her memorable contribution to...

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2. FKA twigs - MAGDALENE The resurgence of FKA twigs has been a long time coming, and she’s clawed her way out from beneath a crippling medical condition and a publicly scrutinized relationship to rebirth herself, a journey that is represented metaphorically in the jaw-dropping video for her comeback single, “cellophane.” The song is a stunner in its own right, an uncharacteristically organic...

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3. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell! As much as she may deny it, Lana Del Rey has always seemed more like a character than a real person. Her music has largely concerned itself with a version of the American dream that is built on a romanticized sense of patriotism, an idealized vision of former glory, and an exaggeration of all-American stereotypes....

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This is the last batch of three before I become even more obnoxious by posting about my top three albums one day at a time. Catch up here if you’ve missed anything! ...

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Before we get into the single digits, catch yourself up on the rest of the list! I've arbitrarily shifted the next nine albums around so much that I honestly feel like any of them could have taken the title of my favorite album of the year at some point. I guess I sort of consider them all co-winners, which means each and every...

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In my mind, everything from here on out is required listening. I have played the hell out of every single one of the remaining twelve albums and, for the most part, still find them just as enjoyable as the first time. If you need to catch up with the rest of the list, check the tag before reading further. ...

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Merry Christmas! Here’s an opportunity to give yourself the gift of some new music. Missed out on anything so far? Check out 30-26, 25-21, and 20-17. We’re getting closer and closer to the top ten, which means that, from this point on, pretty much all of these albums feel like my babies. I highly recommend everything, regardless of the number in front of it....

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Be sure to catch up on albums 30-26 and 25-21 before diving into today's installment! I'm going to slow things down a bit by highlighting four albums instead of five. Maybe you'd like to spend Christmas Eve spinning them? ...

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If you missed yesterday’s post, you’ll probably want to give it a look before diving into the next five entries on my list of favorite albums of the year. Reading back over these, I feel like my write-ups don’t sound incredibly enthusiastic, but, rest assured, I do love these albums. It’s just that three of them fall into the category of beloved artists...

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This year, I honestly thought I wasn’t going to be able to get this done. It was difficult for all the usual reasons - the impossibility of ranking art, the even greater impossibility of trying to be objective about it, the question of whether it’s even valuable to do at all, etc. - but also because I haven’t written anything about music beyond...

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As promised, here are the remaining songs from this year (and one from last year, because I’m an idiot) that were particularly special or meaningful to me in their own way. Again, these are presented in alphabetical order. I also present to you, for the first time ever, a playlist of all 25 songs in both Apple Music and Spotify! No embeds because...

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Here we are again. I’m not going to over-explain my latest disappearance. I just didn’t feel like writing for most of the year. But I feel like writing now, and I enjoyed a lot of music over the course of 2019. So I’m back to make up for lost time with an all-out blitz of year-end content. Starting now, I’m making it my...

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