Honorable Mentions

Freddie Gibbs and Madlib—Bandana

Freddie Gibbs works really well on aggressive, hard-hitting production, which made his 2014 collaboration with Madlib work so well for me. Bandana shifts its beats out of Gibbs’ sweet spot and more into Madlib’s zone. It’s adorned by even dustier, more sample-based production, often forgoing percussion entirely. It doesn’t connect with me as much as Piñata did, but I love the pair too much to cast it aside entirely.

Slaughter Beach, Dog—Safe And Also No Fear

As Modern Baseball—one of my favorite bands ever—shuttered and went their separate ways, I resisted migrating to their most public point of resurfacing: Jake Ewald’s Slaughter Beach, Dog project. But Safe And Also No Fear is strong—not nearly as rousing or clever as MoBo, but certainly enough crossover DNA that it scratches a similar itch. Songs like “Good Ones” and “One Down” allow Ewald to flex his songwriting chops.

BROCKHAMPTON—GINGER

The stunning achievement of the group’s Saturation series was that they made a large cast of characters sound both cohesive and consistent. As the group has grown apart (physically), some of that magic is lost. GINGER, for me, succeeds less as a whole than it does as a delivery vehicle for a few songs I really liked.

Young Thug—So Much Fun

Aptly titled. I’m endlessly fascinated by Young Thug as a person and an artist. He’s never really produced a full project that I’ve loved, but I hope he keeps succeeding like this.

Wilco—Ode to Joy

Jeff Tweedy, even late in his career and occasionally operating in low gear, can still write one hell of a song.

10. Rex Orange County—Pony

I saw so much potential in Rex Orange County in 2017. Fresh off guest work on Tyler The Creator’s Flower Boy, he released Apricot Princess, a kind of mixtape of disparate tracks to capitalize on the buzz and hold people over until he could assemble a proper album. While recognizing they weren’t doing much with each other (which I think was the intention), they worked for me. I thought he had the song of the year, as well as several other promising pieces.

Pony feels like an artist failing to understand what created his buzz, and therefore guessing (incorrectly). The production here is refined in a generic kind of way, and the songwriting pulls far too many punches that earlier work did not. Regardless, there are still some diamonds in the rough, and I think the 21-year-old still has a promising future. “10/10” and “Pluto Projector” are ones I return to.

09. Big Thief—U.F.O.F.

If any indie band “won” 2019, it has to be Big Thief. The Brooklyn group released a pair of critically acclaimed albums this year, picking up scores of new fans and inevitably leading to an inflection point that saw them became the most talked-about band in music for a day or two when someone from the New York Times decided they’d heard enough unchecked praise for their downtempo folk vibes.

Anyway, I think they’re pretty good. U.F.O.F. sounds celestial and far-off, yet not too foreign. If you’d told me these guys emerged from a weird space-oriented cult in rural Alabama, I’d have believed you.

08. Signals Midwest—Pin

I have to admit being disappointed to discover Signals Midwest’s return after three years was an album that’s just 18 minutes long, including a studio version of a previously released acoustic demo. But what Pin lacks in breadth it makes up for in maturity. It’s not the Cleveland band’s loudest album, but it’s their most refined. Its six songs may include their two or three most well-written.

Lead singer Max Stern is one of the most earnest and heartfelt songwriters working right now. This attitude oozes through the music. He’s always seemed grateful for the creative outlet, and it makes for much more engaging music. And the kind that’s easy to support.

07. Billie Eilish—When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Cut from the cloth of younger pop stars like Lorde, Billie Eilish crash landed in 2019, making it cool to drape yourself in dark clothes and just be kind of weird. The album’s intro features the 17-year-old (at the time of release) removing her retainer, complete with saliva slurping noises. What follows is 42 minutes of the year’s best pure pop album.

On When We All Fall Asleep, Eilish has pinpointed her niche so precisely, obliterated it so fully, and cashed in so successfully that one can’t help but wonder what’s next. As we speak, major labels are frantically prepping the next goofball goth. Eilish returning to this sonic menu will immediately seem overdone. What comes next? It’s fair to worry, but there’s enough talent on display here that I’m confident she’ll find a future.

06. Kevin Abstract—ARIZONA BABY

Producer Jack Antonoff left his fingerprints all over two of the year’s biggest releases: Taylor Swift’s Lover and Lana Del Rey’s Norman F*****g Rockwell. It’s fascinating that his third contribution of 2019 was a solo album from a member of a rap collective/boy band.

Gone are much of the indie rock influences Abstract bounced off of on American Boyfriend—in its place, more standard Antonoff fare: beleaguered guitars and sunny synths. What it creates is a kind of personal, boutique pop album. Antonoff and Abstract meet in the middle, the former bringing a guiding poptimist hand and the latter proving a colorful cast of collaborators and a strong sense of world building. “Georgia,” “Baby Boy,” and “Peach” are all standouts.

05. Bon Iver—i,i

After dropping his most obtuse, impressionist album in 2016’s 22, A Million, Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon returns in 2019 with perhaps his least cloistered work. Here, Vernon’s vocals sit on top of the mix, front and center, with less of the falsetto that’s become a hallmark of his work with Bon Iver. Couple that with choice lines of pared-back complexity and you have a few moments of searing clarity. On “RABi” he sings, plainly, “Well, it’s all just scared of dying.” There’s less searching, as well. Vernon is reflective, even grateful: “Sunlight feels good now, don’t it?”

04. 100 gecs—1000 gecs

The key to unlocking this bizarre entry came in Jon Caramanica’s New York Times Popcast episode. I think when the internet blew the glass ceiling off the music world, many of us figured by 2019 we’d be listening to some bizarre explosion of bleeps and bloops. This never happened, which allows something that does sound like that to rise to the top. 1000 gecs is absolute madness, a 23-minute acid trip of electronica, dance music, and Warped Tour-influenced punk rap. As Caramanica points out, there is stuff that sounds like Cascada, stuff that sounds like 3OH!3, and stuff that sounds like Soulja Boy.

There are one-liners, speaker-warping beat drops, and sounds I can’t even properly identify.

The average runtime of each song is just over two minutes, which sounds brief. In reality, it’s even more frenetic, because each song contains a list of ideas within itself. It sounds like 1,000 things Gorilla Glue’d together and then distilled into some kind of futuristic concentrate.

If this elevator pitch doesn’t grab you, I promise the album won’t either. This is what Dance Dance Revolution would have sounded like if it came out in 2076.

03. Vampire Weekend—Father of the Bride

I can’t believe this is only #3, but it speaks to how strong the top of 2019 was for me. The unfortunate timing is reminiscent of their last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, which was tremendous but got trumped by Yeezus.

MVOTC felt cultured and packed to the brim with allusions, a kind of musical New York City Public Library. It was textured and cramped in all the best ways, a knot of lyrics. Six years later they’re back with something else entirely. Father of the Bride is light and airy, leaning on jam-band melodies and airy spaces. It’s reinforced by its artwork—colorful illustrations centered in white space. If MVOTC was their Brooklyn loft, FOTB is their house in the Hollywood hills. It’s no coincidence lead singer Ezra Koenig switched coasts between the two projects.

There’s not a string of songs in 2019 (or maybe even this decade) better than the first seven on FOTB, and it’s a trait that hurts the album as much as it bolsters it. (The latter half loses some steam.)

Keonig opens things with “Hold You Now,” a duet featuring Danielle Haim, before casually sliding into “Harmony Hall,” arguably the best piece of music written in 2019. It’s a prancing plea for help, a tale of “wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified.”

While saving space for some of the band’s classic sense of humor (there’s a song called “Unbearably White”), they’ve created something reflective of our currently place lyrically, while providing the sonic salve for the same situation. “I don’t want to live like this,” sings Koenig over rollicking pianos. “But I don’t want to die.”

02. Lana Del Rey—Normal F*g Rockwell!

Diehard Lana Del Rey fans will disagree with my stance on her career. I loved Born To Die but have been largely disappointed with everything since. Her trajectory has been a theme of this blog. (I have written about this a lot.) Because of this, there was nothing more cathartic than NFR coming in 2019 and bringing Grammy-worthy Lana back to me.

Del Rey has always been a songwriter first and foremost, but her writing has also typically been the kind of thing that could be described as “kitschy.” NFR saw her shed that as well, as she leveled-up to one of music’s premiere writers with a complex dissection of the very type of thing she used to casually prop up.

While American pastiche has always served as some kind of rigid backdrop to her career-long Great American Stage Play (to varying levels of success), NFR springs to life in her ability to interact more dynamically, and critically, with these ideas. While early hit “Video Games” told the tale of a distant companion, “Mariner’s Apartment Complex” circles back to clear things up: “They mistook my kindness for weakness.”

“The Greatest” is my favorite song of 2019, a perfect decade finale, and perhaps Lana’s best piece of songwriting yet. “The culture is lit and I had a ball,” she exclaims before welcoming a distant guitar solo. “I guess I’m singing off after all.”

“Kerosene in my hands. You make me mad, on fire again,” she snarls on “Cinnamon Girl.” “All the pills that you take—violet, blue, green, red to keep me at arm's length—don't work.” The Jack Antonoff production peels back the superfluous elements. It sounds sparse, almost minimalistic, which allows her improved strength as a writer to blister at the surface throughout the album’s 67 minutes. The finale, “Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have—But I Have It” was recorded without a click track, a five-and-a-half minute confessional set to a meandering, haunting piano and tales of “monsters still under my bed that I could never fight off.”

“The poetry inside me is warm like a gun,” she confesses on “Bartender.”

I believe her.

01. PUP—Morbid Stuff

Doesn’t it feel like the “self care” thing has gotten a bit overblown?

Sure, recognizing your personal limits and taking care of yourself is good (and Morbid Stuff doesn’t argue otherwise), but also sometimes it feels good to punch your skull through a sheet of drywall or do a gainer off the roof of your apartment building. Sometimes it’s helpful, or at least cathartic, to just be angry.

And so Morbid Stuff is a loud, angry party. I don’t know that it’s quite narcissistic or masochistic, but I think it’s clear things are broken—we’re broken—and a solution isn’t coming, at least in the immediate future. Might as well make the best of things and dance around in the flames, no? PUP, as any good punk band will do, takes this concept to the furthest extreme: “I hope the world explodes. I hope that well all die. We can watch the highlights in hell, I hope they’re televised,” they quip on “See You At Your Funeral.”

Despite all the rage, it’s still a party, after all. The instrumentation is precise and the group is stellar at gang-vocal, sing-a-long choruses—some of which do find space to be tender. “I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t care about nothing but you,” they sing on 2019 standout “Kids.”

It’s a 36-minute, 11-song blitz of energy that doesn’t let up on potency.

“And I'm losing interest in self-help,” they scream on the wall of sound titled “Full Blown Meltdown.” “Equally bored of feeling sorry for myself. It's been a couple of days since I've had a full blown meltdown, but I'm still a loser and always will be, so why change now?”

There’s a scene in Honey Boy where the character playing a fictionalized Shia LaBeouf is in rehab and a therapist suggests he go out to the woods and scream as loud as he can. That’s what Morbid Stuff is. We can work on fixing ourselves tomorrow. Tonight, let’s holler in the forest.

Favorite Albums of 2019