good kid, m.A.A.d city
2012
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
★ 8.6
Browse by time · decade
2010s
2010 – 2019
Showing 23 albums from the 2010s
Channel Orange
2012
Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.
★ 8.2
Random Access Memories
2013
They put the drum machines away and hired session players who had made the records they grew up on. Giorgio Moroder narrates his own life.
★ 6.8
1989
2014
Swift named the record for the year she was born and dropped country entirely, writing straight synth-pop for the first time.
★ 5.8
Bon Iver, Bon Iver
2011
Every song is named after a place, and some of the places do not exist. The cabin has been replaced by horns and pedal steel.
★ 5.7
Lost in the Dream
2014
Adam Granduciel spent two years and a dozen studios on it, mostly rerecording parts he had already finished, in the grip of severe anxiety.
★ 5.7
Run the Jewels 2
2014
They gave it away free online, as they had the first one, and Killer Mike's verse about being stopped by police arrived weeks before Ferguson.
★ 5.7
Watch the Throne
Jay-Z and Kanye West
2011
They recorded much of it in hotel suites around the world to stop it leaking, and the gold sleeve was designed by a Givenchy designer.
★ 5.6
Helplessness Blues
2011
Singer Robin Pecknold scrapped a finished version and started over. The title song is about not wanting to be anyone special.
★ 5.4
Teen Dream
2010
Recorded in a converted church in upstate New York, and built almost entirely from an organ, a drum machine and a slide guitar.
★ 5.4
The Suburbs
2010
Win Butler and his brother grew up outside Houston, and the record is built around driving through places like it as teenagers.
★ 5.4
Trouble Will Find Me
2013
Two sets of brothers make up the band around the singer, and his brother filmed a documentary about following them on tour.
★ 5.4
Halcyon Digest
2010
Bradford Cox, the singer, wrote the last song for a friend who had just died, and it ends by simply stopping partway through.
★ 5.0
Morning Phase
2014
Beck's father wrote the string arrangements, as he had on Sea Change. It won Album of the Year and Kanye West objected onstage.
★ 5.0
Pure Heroine
2013
Lorde was sixteen, recording after school in an Auckland studio, and the tracks are built from almost nothing but voice, bass and finger snaps.
★ 4.9
Brothers
2010
The Black Keys took two people and a lot of noise to Muscle Shoals, and came out with the record that filled the arenas.
★ 4.5
Reflektor
2013
They recorded part of it in Jamaica with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem producing, and David Bowie sings on the title track.
★ 4.3
Section.80
2011
He put it out himself with no label, about the generation born under Reagan, a year before anyone outside Los Angeles knew his name.
★ 4.3
Shields
2012
They threw away a year's work and began again. All four of them write, which is why nothing quite resolves the way you expect.
★ 4.3
Thank Me Later
2010
Drake had been a teenage actor on a Canadian school drama, and made a record that raps and sings without marking where one stops.
★ 4.3
Benji
2014
Mark Kozelek uses real names throughout, and the deaths in it are real deaths in his family. Almost nothing is dressed up as metaphor.
★ 4.0
Modern Vampires of the City
2013
Rostam Batmanglij pitched the vocals up and down until they sound like other people, which is why the record keeps slipping out of focus.
★ 3.1