The Top 50 Albums of 2013

At a time in pop music where immediacy counts more than ever, Pusha T’s official debut album got pushed back so many times that it had started to become the rap-world shorthand for a project left to die on the shelf. But instead of becoming a liability, My Name Is My Name’s repeated delays ended up becoming an advantage. Pusha’s bluntly unadorned flow has always been best suited to skeletal arrangements (revisit the decade-old “Grindin’” if you need a vivid reminder), so My Name dropping into the thick of a craze for minimalist rap worked out pretty well for him. As one of the more ardent affiliates of Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music crew, it’s not surprising that the album shares some of Yeezus’ stark sonics, but the beats are more comfortably luxurious. With so much experience working with stripped-down sounds, Pusha has become a master of making a lot out of very little. Push never oversells his songs, but listen through My Name enough times and you start uncovering the wealth of subtle hooks it has hiding in plain sight. —Miles Raymer

Pusha T: "Numbers on the Boards"

"Try to make yourself a work of art/ Like me," sang Julia Holter, the experimental L.A. pop singer, on her debut record, the one based on an ancient Greek play. This year's Loud City Song is the first Holter record to be made outside of her bedroom, but compared to that early sentiment, it feels especially external. The album is based on the 1958 Parisian musical Gigi, but was also inspired by Holter's life in the city—it is set distinctly within the context of the urban pastoral, conjuring the ambient noise of a bustling metropolitan area through swarming horns, or images of patrons walking on the streets with a cool-sung cabaret piece. Loud City Song thus feels big, alive, and more ambitious than anything Holter has done, working with free jazz instrumentation of trombones, strings and double bass to explore a new sense of theatricality. One of her most miraculous talents is how she takes these high concepts and keeps them inviting and unpretentious while still requiring valuable patience and a certain steadiness of mind to appreciate the record as one full, cohesive, and uplifting piece. —Jenn Pelly

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Major Arcana, it’s that retroactivity doesn’t need to be of the museum-display variety. The sophomore album by Massachusetts’ Speedy Ortiz strains the strangled chords and corkscrew interplay of 90s guitar heroes like Helium’s Mary Timony, Polvo’s Ash Bowie, and Chavez’s Matt Sweeney into jaggedly axed anthems. But singer/guitarist Sadie Dupuis’ syrup-and-snake-venom inkwell overflows with here-and-now urgency, as does the whole album’s spring-loaded tenseness. “Tiger Tank” strikes a harrowing harmonic itch that Dupuis’ vocal melody circles but refuses to scratch, and “Gary” lurches between darkness and dawn like a synesthesia-stricken vampire. “Plough”, on the other hand, is a singsong cipher that pits pop hooks against pinprick riffage and a disorienting falsetto trill that taunts logic. Nirvana’s In Utero celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2013, but Major Arcana is the real celebration—as well as the overdue prompt to mutate or die. —Jason Heller

James Hinton’s debut as the Range, Nonfiction, came out of nowhere. What it did not do was come out of nowhere to floor you, knock you backward, or slap you in the face. The effect was more like the polite dosey doe you dance when bumping into a stranger. "Oh, um." "Heh." "Sorry." "Yep." Nonfiction will pass without incident if you let it, but it managed to graze many of the year's trends—a re-exploration of grime, of breakbeats, and of drum & bass—while maintaining its personality and isolation. Sampladelic music is rarely so self-contained. The interjecting voices—mostly anonymous grime MCs—don't feel like conversations but footnotes, references to outside texts. Nonfiction pilfers many of its samples from deep-crate YouTube clips, but the album avoids commenting on technology or media consumption. Hinton mined the service like you would a zine, a pirate radio station, or any other mercurial broadcast that feels like it's beamed directly to you: by internalizing its strangeness and mimicking its appeal. —Andrew Gaerig

Let's have a brief moment of stock-taking: 2013 is a year in which Jay Z is recording advertisements for smartphones and Kanye West is recording minimalist industrial rap as means of revenge against the fashion industry. The two men duking it out for the title of Soul King are both white, and the de rigeur style of rapping is… singing. Beyoncé is on track to sell a record number of an album she didn't even promote. Who could blame Maya Arulpragasam for making an album that feels a bit strange? Matangi sounds like M.I.A.'s spiritual side picked a fight with her inner rebel, her inner rebel slapped back and then they cracked up about it and hopped in bed to create a record full of humor. Amidst the grimy lurch and clatter of these beats—her best since Kala—is a rare, relaxed version of M.I.A. saying some truly left-field, whimsical stuff. She's making fun of Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft; she's rattling off lines like, "there's 36 Chambers in my Wu-Tent," and, "my blood type is no negative"; she's singing her own loopy, off-key version of a bedroom jam over a Weeknd beat and calling it “Sexodus”. And for once, everyone else is making her seem relatively normal. —Carrie Battan

M.I.A.: "Come Walk With Me"

Fuck Buttons’ debut, 2008's Street Horrrsing, featured distorted, near-black-metal vocals along with the expansive, low-tech electronics, letting the listener know there were humans in the room. Then came 2009's Tarot Sport, a less duct-taped collection that found Benjamin Power and Andrew Hung disappearing a bit into the background, exploring electronic music more head on without entirely tightening the seams. Four years later, they offered up their self-produced third album, Slow Focus, a finely polished collection that matches the shiny decadence of the jewels on its cover. It's also the moment Fuck Buttons removed their fingerprints entirely from the equation, giving us alien, otherworldly sounds to mull over with less noise-rock mediation. And it's a revelation. The music’s as muscular as ever, it's just more efficient—maximalist minimalism?—and no matter how many times you listen to these seven tracks, you discover previously unlit corners. Unlike the past compositions, there's no levity or moments to catch your breath: Each song's pile of colorful synthesizers and deep, dark percussion adds up to a go-for-broke anthem, and they obviously haven't reached their limit. The way the duo's learned to layer and accrue detail, you get the sense that these whirling, pulsing pieces could snowball endlessly, growing larger and more beautiful each second, blowing off the roof only to diagram the sky. It's cool songs from Tarot Sport were played at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. Too bad this wasn't ready for it. —Brandon Stosuy

Just like Jon Hamm's "bubble"-encased Drew Baird character on "30 Rock", we let Justin Timberlake get away with so much. His 2013 started strong (we'll get to that in a moment) but his bit part in an excellent Coen Brothers movie was overshadowed by a leading role in one of the worst major studio films of the year (trust me, I saw it), not to mention an album that managed to offend domestic abuse survivors and HBO viewers in one fell swoop. His most fervent admirers (trust me, I'm one of them) could only hide their eyes with embarrassment. "I'm not cut out for it," Timberlake bitterly complained about the avalanche of late-year criticism to GQ in a piece titled "#Hashtag of the Year", a confirmation of his ubiquity in the face of all odds. A resolute showman who spent the first phase of his nearly two-decade career facing constant scrutiny, it can sometimes seem that Timberlake's main goal isn't to be good—it's to be liked.

"Drink You Away" be damned, though, Justin Timberlake continues to be liked (loved, by many) and the first volume of The 20/20 Experience provides plenty of reasons why. Sure, just writing down some of the album's most notable conceits—the best nü-metal deep-cut weeper since Limp Bizkit covered the Who, a power ballad about looking at yourself in the mirror, the only Michael Flatley-meets-Miami Sound Machine mashup you ever need to hear—might suggest that a few pairs of Bad Idea Jeans were worn in the studio. And yet, along with Timbaland and J-Roc (who were more or less left for dead after that embarrassing "electronic" Chris Cornell album), Timberlake ended up with one of the year's most enjoyable pop records, a document of endless musical largesse that earns its 70-minute runtime with lush sonics and a moony-eyed fixation on monogamy so hopelessly corny that it ends up coming across as totally endearing. It's disappointing that Justin Timberlake didn't put out two great albums in 2013, but as hindsight (har har) suggests, that one of them ended up being very good is nothing short of a miracle. —Larry Fitzmaurice

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"

The National couldn’t have been more out of step with 2013’s pop-worshipping zeitgeist. As the hippest of the hip in indie-rock circles tripped over themselves to pay homage to Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, here was a band steadfastly committed to the thankless task of delivering excellent National albums. It’s tempting to take Trouble Will Find Me for granted, now that the National is a couple of records removed from its “beloved underdog” period. On previous records like Boxer and High Violet, the National staked its claim as the preeminent chroniclers of office-bound and apartment-confined urban drone-ism. These guys are Springsteen for people named Dylan and Skylar who worry about their 401K’s going bankrupt like Frankie and Mary fretted about the factory shutting down. On Trouble Will Find Me, the National faced the challenge of maintaining this creative momentum as it entered the band’s middle age, and responded with a record imbued with similar uncertainties about what happens to life once it starts to slow down. The fear of loss—whether it’s the loss of love, security, or a sense of  purpose—haunts this record, sometimes literally (like on “Demons”, which invite Matt Berninger to “stay down”) but mostly figuratively (like on the amazing “Pink Rabbits”, where a drunk still pines for a woman who has long since forgotten him). Trouble Will Find Me might not have bowled listeners over when it came out in May, but for many of us it continued to linger, as National records do, revealing new truths and soothing old wounds, an out-of-step record perfectly suited for out-of-step listeners. —Steven Hyden

Anonymity made for a perfect introduction to the elegantly minimal soul confections of Rhye, the duo of singer Mike Milosh and producer Robin Hannibal. It sharpened the peculiarly acute intimacy of absence, which is the softly beating heart swaddled in the gentle instrumental folds of Rhye’s debut, Woman. Hannibal’s tracks have a priceless offhanded grace, whipping the warmest, lightest froth from creamy pianos and synths, saucy horns and slinky basses, and effervescent drums popping off cushiony strings. 

The smooth, porous strains let Milosh’s multitracked voice, a thin and chilly slip that moves as lightly as a hummingbird, penetrate deeply. Milosh inhabits his highest range as freely as most of us chitchat, and while he’s not a demonstrative singer, he’s precise. Saccharine and sexy, bold and timid, it’s hipster R&B for xx rather than R. Kelly fans; a point of view distinct from Jamie Woon’s techno-leaning existential angst or the Weeknd’s dark, strident drive. 

The heartbreakingly lovely “Open” blossoms in a lush bouquet of Vivaldi-like strings, glowing brass and scintillating harp before a sax licks out as the spongy bass line drops, and Milosh flows out of his wordless hum and starts to bounce. He sounds so authentically beatific that I long misheard “Mmm, but stay” as “Namaste,” and it totally worked. Beyond a dazzling opening stretch including “The Fall” and “Last Dance”, deep cuts like “One of Those Summer Days” extend the quiet storm into stately oceanic depths. “Don’t call me love unless you mean it,” goes an indelible refrain tucked amid the feathery disco-funk of “Shed Some Blood”, which perfectly sums up the coquettish blend of tenderness, sensitivity, and insolence that sets Rhye apart. —Brian Howe

Rhye: "Open"

Jordan Lee said that he felt powerless while he watched his loved ones hurting. He doesn’t divulge many other details about what he went through, but here’s what we know: He quit his job in Boston and moved in with a friend in St. Louis. There, he wrote songs about what he’d been going through, which makes Love’s Crushing Diamond Lee’s therapy. His lyrics are economical, beautiful, and sometimes crushingly sad. They tell stories, but the characters are faceless and the details are vague. There are bursts of semi-specifics, like the line on “Golden Wake” about Lee quitting his job. “That Light That’s Blinding” paints the portrait of someone sweating out toxins, feeling like dying, and, yes, seeing a blinding light. “I couldn’t stop it from washing over you,” Lee sings to his struggling loved one.

He worked for months to envelop his words with warm, gorgeous string arrangements, and he dotted everything with field recordings: wind chimes, creaking floors, the flicker of a lighter, the sound of kids’ toys, and the muted twinkle of an old piano. Lee moved around a lot while working on Love’s Crushing Diamond, collecting the small bits of sound that pop up throughout the album. His nomadic inclinations also turn up in his lyrics: “I’m on the slow train rollin’ through that city,” he sings. While traveling, he looks inward, singing, “My mind is muddled, our hearts are empty, my body seems so temporary.” It’s a fragile album with delicate sonic dressings. On the first and last track, Lee sings that “the river only knows to carry on.” The phrase seems to embody two related ideas: Trauma is inevitable, but letting go and moving forward is paramount. —Evan Minsker