Earbuddy's 50 Best Albums of 2018

The follow-up to the Mercury-nominated Immunity, framed as a journey from a dystopian city to a forest and back and shaped by meditation. Hopkins produced, engineered and mixed it himself, and it moves from the coarse techno of “Emerald Rush” to choral music and solo piano.

Austin Brown of Parquet Courts recorded it on the same Tascam eight-track that made Light Up Gold. Computer-voice interludes rewrite the Smiths into a lament about using a computer for everything, “Jack in Titanic” takes apart a learned male role, and Ben Hozie called technology the moral issue of the time.

Recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Auckland by a band that met studying jazz. Ten power-pop songs with tight harmonies and Elizabeth Stokes’s lyrics about overthinking and distrusting romance, starting with a title track that refuses to believe love is a good idea.

Their first album in eight years, recorded at Machines with Magnets in Rhode Island and nearly as long as their previous two combined. Slower and more atmospheric than their grindcore past, with “Satan in the Wait” and “Ocean Song” past seven minutes and Alexis Marshall preaching over the noise, and more menacing for it.

Hecker improvised for several days with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso in a temple outside Tokyo, then processed their strings, woodwinds and percussion. It is his most spacious record, ancient court instruments and digital distortion in an uneasy conversation, shaped by talks about negative space.

Brian Borcherdt of Holy Fuck scrapped a polished studio version because, he said, they couldn’t find that haze, and rebuilt the record from live takes in small rooms, starting with “Seasons” in a Toronto basement. Quiet, close and the opposite of his other band.

Josiah Wise, once a choirboy in Baltimore, made it after a love affair ended, and described it as returning home and realising he carries home with him. Lush, gospel-rooted and sung with operatic force, with Clams Casino, Katie Gately and Paul Epworth among the collaborators.

The trio made it themselves in their Hoboken rehearsal space, with no engineer and no rehearsal, letting songs build for up to a year, and James McNew assembled it in Pro Tools from loops and unused film-score pieces. The title bends Sly and the Family Stone’s, and the calm was a deliberate answer to a loud year.

Recorded over two years in studios around the US, usually at the end of tours, in the same stretch in which he made a duets album with Courtney Barnett. Seventy-eight unhurried minutes, including the ten-minute “Bassackwards”, with Kim Gordon adding guitar distortion to the end of “Mutinies”.

Seventy-eight minutes, sixteen tracks and a guest list that runs from Róisín Murphy and José González to Kurt Wagner of Lambchop. “Bonfire” is built on Justin Vernon’s voice from Bon Iver’s “Calgary”, “Pick Up” loops Gladys Knight, and Stefan Kozalla’s ear holds the whole crate together.

Matador tied the title to Samuel Beckett, whose bleak humour it heard in Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s lyrics. Recorded in Gothenburg and mixed by Randall Dunn, it is the Danish band at its most expansive and romantic, with horns and strings, and Sky Ferreira duetting on “Pain Killer”.

Recorded in Oakland with their longtime producer Jack Shirley, and titled with a phrase from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Their most melodic record: black-metal blasts give way to piano, clean vocals, long guitar solos and a guest vocal from Chelsea Wolfe.

Made after his cousin and Pivot Gang co-founder John Walt was stabbed to death on a Chicago train in 2017, and it opens with Saba singing ‘I’m so alone’. Patient, jazz-tinged and devastating, with “Prom / King” retelling their shared history up to the night Walt went missing.

Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth made it mainly with David Wrench, with SOPHIE and Faris Badwan of the Horrors on the two poppiest singles. It ends with “Donnie Darko”, an 11-minute suite that drifts from psych-pop into strobing disco, and in between it is about friendship, anxiety and life on screens.

Liz Harris wrote and recorded these piano-and-voice songs in a week and a half at a winter residency in Wyoming, and stopped when she came down with a fever. It lasts 22 minutes, and she refused to add more. The last chord of “Breathing” gives way to a coal train passing.

Each of the nine tracks is named for a Black woman Shabaka Hutchings chose over the British monarchy, from his great-grandmother Ada Eastman to Harriet Tubman and Doreen Lawrence. Saxophone, Theon Cross’s tuba and two drummers make a political jazz record you can dance to, the high point of the London scene.

A south London debut named after the BBC’s Sunday hymn programme, with its oldest song written in 2014 above a pub in Stockwell. Recorded at Rockfield, it is snarling and funny, its bravado shot through with doubt, and “One Rizla” is the song critics kept picking out.

Jason Pierce had no budget for the studio album he wanted, so he made it alone at home in London, moving levels bit by bit for months, and critics marvelled that it still sounds orchestral. “I’m Your Man” builds gospel verses into a full chorus, and the first Spiritualized album in six years is tender about mortality.

Written and recorded through 2017 in their basement studio in Edinburgh, and their tightest, most melodic record: gospel and soul hooks over abrasive electronics, still unsettled and political. It won the Scottish Album of the Year award, the band’s second.

Eleven songs in 30 minutes, each titled as a chapter of a story taken from the 13th-century romance Flamenca, about a woman locked in a tower by a jealous husband. Produced with El Guincho, it sets flamenco palmas beside samples of Justin Timberlake and Arthur Russell, and “Malamente” was the breakout.

Alex Turner wrote it at a Steinway Vertegrand in a spare room of his Los Angeles house that he called the ‘lunar surface’, and the chords suggested a lounge singer. He built the model on the cover himself. Swapping riffs for piano and a hotel on the Moon split critics, and the nerve of it is why it is here.

Four years in the making, with her longtime friend Mica Levi producing. Piano chords and loose drum hits leave room for a plain, close voice, and the title track is a duet with Coby Sey over little more than a drum and piano loop. Small love songs that sound unfinished, and huge for it.

Two discs, one for the world as Washington sees it outwardly and one for how he sees it inwardly, with a third hidden inside the CD and LP. Thundercat, Miles Mosley, Terrace Martin and his father Rickey on flute are in the band, and critics heard a more focused follow-up to The Epic.

Written mostly in New York between 2016 and 2017, and the heartbreak record after the sermon of Pure Comedy: shorter, less sardonic, more exposed. Josh Tillman produced it with Jonathan Rado of Foxygen, and the piano-and-strings ballads, from “Mr. Tillman” to “Please Don’t Die”, are the warmest he has made.

Named after a line by Etel Adnan about an aviary full of shrieking birds, which Holter took as a picture of 2018. Ninety minutes and fifteen songs of strings, horns, bagpipes and medieval-sounding voices, ‘the cacophony of the mind in a melting world’ in her phrase. Demanding, and the most ambitious thing she has made.

Damon McMahon scrapped a first version and started again with Chris Coady, mostly at Electric Lady. The songs deal with growing up, friends who ended up in prison, masculinity, his father, and his mother, diagnosed with terminal cancer as recording began. The murk of his earlier records cleared, and “Miki Dora” is the proof.

An 80-minute double album, written and produced by Mike Haliechuk, who also wrote every lyric, with Damian Abraham singing lead on 13 of the 18 tracks. The rest go round the band and its guests, J Mascis and Mary Margaret O’Hara among them, and the music runs from hardcore into krautrock, dance, psych-pop and Owen Pallett’s strings.

The title is a palindrome built around the pupil inside the iris. Alexandra Drewchin sets harp arpeggios and modular plucks against technoid stabs and crushed black metal, sings across three octaves up to whistle tones and brings in Moor Mother on “MMXXX”. Uncomfortable at times, and held together by her voice and her wordplay.

Dev Hynes described it as an exploration of his own and many kinds of Black depression, and of the anxieties of queer people and people of colour. Sixteen loose tracks of soul, R&B and downtempo, with Janet Mock speaking on five of them and “Dagenham Dream” going back to his East London childhood.

Héloïse Letissier cut the persona down to Chris, explaining it as feeling bolder and stronger, and released the record in French and English editions. The reference points named were Cameo, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, and critics heard a sweatier, more muscular funk-pop album about lust, power and gender.

Surprise-released by Warp in September, co-produced with Justin Raisen, and the record where critics heard an experimental outsider become a songwriter. It runs from ambient collage and noise to soul and rock built on a big scale, with trumpet, cello and James Ferraro’s grand piano in the mix.

Sophie Allison’s studio debut kept the intimacy of her bedroom recordings and added a band, with Gabe Wax producing. Her own notes trace an arc of romanticising someone: “Still Clean” is where she realises she has been waiting for nothing, and “Scorpio Rising” is where the act of being cool and detached falls apart.

Most of it was written before his father, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, died in January 2018, and “Playing Possum” sets his father’s voice against his mother’s as the peace offering his father never heard. Hugh Masekela, who died two weeks later, is sampled on the closer. Short, warped, deliberately unpolished, and his most personal record.

Meg Remy made it with about 20 people, among them Toronto’s Cosmic Range and her husband Max Turnbull, and turned disco, funk and glam into songs about abuse of power, revenge and pollution. Her cover of Fiver’s “Rage of Plastics”, arranged with its writer Simone Schmidt, is the hinge of her most accessible record.

Joe Talbot said they threw out a first batch of songs written under pressure to remake Brutalism. What replaced them is furious and open at once: “June” is about the stillbirth of his daughter, “Danny Nedelko” is named for an immigrant friend, and Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” sits in the middle of the punk.

Self-produced in Philadelphia, and their warmest, most ambitious record, with strings, lighter grooves and harmonies around Frances Quinlan’s elastic voice. The songs keep returning to men’s misuse of power, and one line, ‘So strange to be shaped by such strange men’, comes back on more than one track. Quinlan painted the cover.

Phil Elverum called it part two of A Crow Looked at Me, recorded alone in the Anacortes room where Geneviève Castrée died. The six songs reach past hospitals to a music festival, his mother, the paintings of Nikolai Astrup and a Kerouac documentary, and on the title track ‘people get cancer and die’ rides a melody as open as pop.

“It’s Okay to Cry” opens it with SOPHIE’s own voice and, in its self-directed video, her face on camera for the first time, widely read as her coming out as a trans woman. From there it runs through the plastic shocks of “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping” to the nine-minute “Whole New World / Pretend World”.

Made in Melbourne with Burke Reid and her live band, with Kim and Kelley Deal singing on it. Several songs answer back: “Nameless, Faceless” quotes a troll and paraphrases Margaret Atwood on men fearing that women will laugh at them. It is smaller and grungier than her debut, and tender where it counts.

Cut in Nashville in about a week with Collin Pastore and her band, and built on purpose as an arc that, in her words, ‘starts out dark and ends hopeful’. It moves from the breakup of “Night Shift”, one of the year’s great songs, through lost faith in “Nonbeliever” to a grandmother’s death in “Pillar of Truth”.

Five short sessions over eleven months, no producer in the usual sense, and Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 on hand to stop things being overdone. The duo stopped limiting themselves to what they could play live, put James Barone’s drums on every track and made their loudest, darkest record, with the haze intact.

Self-funded with tour money and made in about a month because, she said, she needed an album to pay her rent. Phoelix produced all of it, and the songs follow her move from Chicago to Los Angeles, a short relationship and the comedy scene she found there, in verses that are dense, funny and frank about sex and race.

Written in their Melbourne rehearsal room and recorded live over two weeks in northern New South Wales on Liam Judson’s portable rig. The title is a vast open-cut mine; the band said it meant standing at the edge of the unknown and finding something to hold on to. Three interlocking guitars carry anxious songs in the Go-Betweens line.

Seven tracks, 21 minutes, every beat by Kanye West, the first of the seven-song albums he produced in Wyoming that year. Long announced as King Push, it was renamed for what Pusha T called ‘the luxury of time’, and there is no filler in it: exacting verses over sample-heavy loops, and nothing else.

Monáe stepped out of the Cindi Mayweather android saga for her most personal record, released with a 46-minute ‘emotion picture’ of the same name. Brian Wilson, Grimes, Zoë Kravitz, Pharrell and Stevie Wonder all turn up, and critics heard a joyful, frank pop-funk statement about Black and queer womanhood with Prince all over it.

Her first album in eight years began, she said, in a Los Angeles club, hearing DJ Koze’s “XTC”. Made mostly with Joseph Mount of Metronomy, sequenced in the order the songs were written and described by Robyn as ‘a diary in grief’, it is softer and more club-rooted than Body Talk, and “Missing U” is the way in.

Lindsey Jordan wrote 30 songs for it while finishing high school and signing to Matador. Ten made it, produced by Jake Aron, whom she chose for his pop sense, and all of them are built around her guitar. It is a debut about longing and confusion by an 18-year-old, and critics made “Pristine” its anthem.

Low spent the better part of two years working sketches from Duluth up with BJ Burton at April Base in Wisconsin, and came out with the boldest record of their 25 years. It opens on the ruptured loop of “Quorum”, buries the harmonies in static, and ends on “Disarray”, the plainest pop song they have made.

Fourteen songs in 32 minutes, made again with Patrick Hyland, who avoided distortion and left most of her vocals single and unharmonised. Mitski said she was writing fiction this time, starting from the image of someone alone on a stage under one spotlight, and critics heard big feelings packed into very small spaces, from the disco piano of “Nobody” on.

Danger Mouse approached the band himself, and A. Savage liked that a producer of polished pop made no obvious sense for a record built on punk and funk. Cut at Sonic Ranch in Texas over the winter, it chases the rage and glee of Black Flag and Gorilla Biscuits, and “Total Football” turns a football system into a manifesto for the collective.