Earbuddy's Best Albums of 2016: The Top Ten

Named after both the Joy Division song and the J. G. Ballard novel, made mostly with the English producer Paul White and released by Warp three days ahead of schedule. Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt share “Really Doe” over a Black Milk beat. Rolling Stone called the album ‘the year’s most thrilling cry for help’.

Her first album as Anohni, co-produced with Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, whose ecstatic electronics she wanted as a foil for harder lyrics. These are protest songs about drone warfare, surveillance, capital punishment and climate change, and “4 Degrees” was released to coincide with the Paris climate talks in 2015.

Mitski and Patrick Hyland played every instrument between them, with drum machines under the guitars and saxophone on “Happy”, a song she said is about happiness always leaving. On “Your Best American Girl” she used the tropes of white-guy punk rock, she said, as a Japanese girl who ‘can never be an American girl’.

Jonny Greenwood wrote string and choir parts for the London Contemporary Orchestra, whose players used plectrums on “Burn the Witch”, and Nigel Godrich recorded the band to tape in Oxfordshire and at La Fabrique in Provence. The eleven songs run in alphabetical order and end with “True Love Waits”, first played live in 1995 and finally on a studio album.

It arrived with an hour-long HBO film, told in chapters from “Intuition” to “Redemption” and threaded with Warsan Shire’s poetry, and at first streamed only on Tidal. The Washington Post called it a ‘furious song cycle about infidelity and revenge’, and Jack White, Kendrick Lamar and a prison song recorded by the Lomaxes all have a part in it.

Will Toledo’s first real studio album with a band, produced by Steve Fisk after eleven albums recorded at college and put out on Bandcamp. The 11-minute “Ballad of the Costa Concordia” sits at its centre, and Matador destroyed the first CD and vinyl pressings after Ric Ocasek refused a borrowing from the Cars.

Recorded live to tape at Vox Studios in Los Angeles with Justin Raisen, and laid out as two sides: the punchier rock songs first, the long, slow ones after. “Sister” and “Woman” both run past seven minutes, and Olsen said that if the record had a theme it was ‘the complicated mess of being a woman’.

Solange worked long jams into songs in New Iberia, Louisiana, then finished them in Los Angeles with Raphael Saadiq, who had handed her the music for “Cranes in the Sky” eight years earlier. Master P narrates the interludes, her parents recall their encounters with racism, and it became her first No. 1 album in the US.

Bowie made it in secret in New York with Tony Visconti and Donny McCaslin’s jazz quartet, and Visconti said they listened to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and set out to avoid rock’n’roll. It opens with the ten-minute title track and came out on his 69th birthday, two days before he died of cancer.

Released under his own Boys Don’t Cry name the day after the visual album Endless, and also handed out on CD inside a free magazine at pop-up shops in four cities. Spare songs that look back at love, loss and growing up: André 3000 raps on “Solo (Reprise)”, and “White Ferrari” borrows from the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere”.