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best-rap-album-covers-of-the-2010s-network For most artists, an album this carefully constructed is the kind of thing you might spend your entire career building towards. Here we get saxophones, flutes and trumpets, soulful backing vocals, and layers upon layers of synthesizers on which Bejar kf his stream-of-conscious lyrics, sounding all the more romantic with this lush backing. On some songs, he doesn't even rap at all. When we were putting together this list, we kept wondering if there was a way to include all the great music Burial put out this decade, though he hadn't really released an album that would make sense to include. Their second album, Netwkrkwas an equally fierce best rap album covers of the 2010s network.

Six years later, the album foreshadows the state of a generation addicted to technology because of the internet, and the rise of one of the greatest cultural forces to emerge in recent years— Joshua Kellem.

Star-studded and critically acclaimed, it was perhaps the first rap album from a legendary name in Golden Era hip-hop to be crowdfunded by fans, signifying a further shift away from the major label-dominated status quo that many artists have complained choke the creativity out of the genre. One of the best albums of , Rap Or Go To The League finds 2 Chainz balancing his usual ostentatious flexes with rationales for how and why the drug game and rap game feel so closely related and like the only options for accruing wealth in a rigged system.

Shortsighted rap fans had lumped Joey Badass into a neo-nineties lane based on his earlier work but All American Badass was the moment he shed that reputation and let it be known that he had his own voice. The deeply political album explores police brutality and other facets of racism over production that accentuates the best aspects of the classic New York sound for a new generation. Nas may never be able to match the gritty honesty of his debut — though not for lack of effort on his part — but he got closest with the autobiographical Life Is Good.

Danny Brown has said that he looked to push the boundaries with his second album XXX ; mission accomplished. Rodeo is when Travis Scott officially entered the realm of mainstream stardom. Rodeo gave the very idea of punk-rap a voice on the Billboard charts. His skills are on full display throughout R. Music , which is chock full of Afrocentric themes and incisive commentary on racism. The Roots have always pushed boundaries, struggled with the contradictions of modern life in America, and above all, valued the lyrical abilities of Black Thought as the primary focus and guiding light of their music, but somehow, on the album that invites more outside voices to the mix than perhaps any other in their catalog to that point at least proportionally , How I Got Over may well be their most consistent, most cohesive, and most poignant work of the decade.

Where anyone else would be satisfied merely aping their influences or fitting in with their peers, Vince slashes at the constraints of modern sounds with his dagger-like sarcasm, opening new avenues for the genre to explore.

His tenure on Def Jam may have dimmed that future somewhat, but as a bridge between the old and the new, Return Of 4Eva stands proud. Cilvia Demo is a heartfelt coming-of-age project that defies the rap debut archetype. His southern-fried poetic flourish over soulful production, making Cilvia Demo one of the very best TDE offerings. Countless artists have blown up off of Instagram, but no one did it like Tierra Whack.

In fact, it feels like so much has happened that it's easy to focus on all the crazy things and forget all of the good stuff — and the music that's been released in the past decade is definitely some good stuff.

Streaming has completely changed not only how we consume music, but how artists create music. Many artists also have more creative control over their work than ever before, which has led to some serious masterpieces being created in the last ten years.

We've rounded up the albums with the most innovative sounds — artists whose work will stand up in the years to come beyond being a time capsule of the s. None of them sound the same, yet they share an original and timeless quality that will ensure their legacy stands the test of time. In no particular order, here are the albums from the s that will never go out of style. Fiercely protective of her privacy, Queen Bey hasn't given an on-camera interview since before promoting The Lion King earlier this year.

Then, Lemonade gave us a visually stunning album that combines dance, spoken word poetry, and original music to tell a narrative about betrayal, revenge, and forgiveness. With this album's wholly original "maximalist' sound and sincere meditation on ego and fame, there's no denying Kanye West is as frustrating and he is innovative.

He has since launched a fashion line, lead pop-up church services, and made a laundry list of questionable decisions — but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy remains his masterpiece. We have come to expect reinvention from Taylor Swift. With each consecutive album, she either playing into or against a public persona that's been forged by tabloid-fodder. But it's 's that plays to all of Swift's strengths: catchy synth-heavy sounds, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that wink at her public relationships, and unabashed bubble-gum pop music.

It felt like there was a seismic shift in the pop music landscape when Adele released her soulful, blues-inspired sophomore album, all inspired by one relationship. While the charts had been mostly dominated by dance music in the previous decades, Adele's aching and timeless ballads on 21 changed what we expected from modern pop songs.

Even after his more somber follow-up, Blonde, Frank Ocean's debut album still feels as startlingly original as it did when it was released in 2o Channel Orange combines musical styles like funk, psychedelics, and jazz to convey stories about unrequited love like "Thinkin Bout You" and the haunting "Bad Religion. Remember when we knew Lady Gaga as the girl in the meat dress? In , still a ways away from becoming Ally Maine, Gaga was at the peak of her avant-garde work.

Lyrically and thematically out there, the elctro-dance album probably wouldn't have worked if it didn't have its underlying message of self-acceptance and empathy. You would be forgiven for thinking that the album that catapulted her to fame, Golden Hour, is Texas-born Musgrave's first album, but its actually a reinvention of sorts. The lovable cynic of her early work gives way to a dreamy optimist in this country album. Underneath the genre-blurring exterior was a natural knack for songwriting that tons of bands only dream of.

The fast-paced Joyce Manor is just one fan fave after another; if Joyce Manor ever release a best-of, they could probably include every song on this LP without turning any heads. And it all leads up to "Constant Headache," the first stone-cold classic they ever wrote and possibly still their finest moment as a band.

At 3 minutes, it's about twice as long as most other songs on this album. It's a little slower, really giving Barry Johnson's words room to breathe, and it peaks with a stripped-back bridge, where everything drops out except bass and vocals, as Barry delivers one of the best one-liners ever sung about the emptiness of a one night stand.

As long as kids are getting drunk and breaking each other's hearts, there will be a need for songs like this one, and "Constant Headache" remains one of the best. Each album since her breakthrough Bury Me At Makeout Creek has been more ambitious, more distinctive, and more accessible than the last, and it's not everyday you see an artist progress this drastically and this rapidly. Be the Cowboy is one of those purely indie records that can and did compete with mainstream pop, the way tons of indie bands did in the previous decade.

But it's also an innovative, forward-thinking record and not at all a throwback to a previous era of music. It's one of a kind. After her first two great records, she knocked it out of the park on Strange Mercy , which pushed her "art" and "pop" sides to new levels and helped establish her as perhaps the most innovative guitarist of her generation.

Five decades into rock existing and guitar being its primary instrument, Annie Clark practically reinvented the way the thing is played, and she applied her distinct, unparalleled riffage to euphoric pop songs like "Cruel" and "Northern Lights.

Vincent also covered underground heroes like Big Black and The Pop Group , and by the time Strange Mercy had fully settled in, it was obvious that she had become an underground hero herself. Not unlike The Gaslight Anthem before them, The Menzingers' formula was simple: take the melodic punk of bands like The Bouncing Souls and Rancid, throw in a dash of Springsteen's blue collar heartland rock, and tell the stories you know.

And with On the Impossible Past , The Menzingers wrote a record so instantly classic that it rivaled all of those aforementioned forebears, and it still does. On the Impossible Past takes place in diners, parking lots, muscle cars, rooftops in Brooklyn that were covered in bad graffiti, and at parties thrown by some guy named Chris.

It's steeped in nostalgia, and full of highly specific stories, like an old photograph. Like with any memories, some of those details are probably a little romanticized -- especially when you're singing about the kinds of nights you'll never remember -- but On the Impossible Past doesn't feel fake or dishonest.

Even if you can't relate to the depictions of small town American life, the feelings are nearly universal. From self-doubt to self-medication, from young love to broken hearts, On the Impossible Past taps into life experiences than can happen just about anywhere, and it does so in such a way where your brain starts to blend your own fuzzy past with the vivid settings in The Menzingers' songs.

These are the kinds of songs that can really mean a lot if they find you at a rough point in your life. But even if they don't, they'll likely linger in the back of your head anyway, just because they're so damn catchy. Without the usual support from within the country music machine, Sturgill Simpson rebelliously burst on to the music scene in with his second album that helped usher in a new era of "alt-country" and that ended up being embraced by the mainstream and alternative music fans alike.

Like his album, this one was produced by Dave Cobb who also worked with fellow movement leader Jason Isbell in and before going on to put his mark on many of our favorite albums in this subgenre Chris Stapleton, Colter Wall, John Prine, Amanda Shires, and Brandi Carlile to name a few.

Appealing to indie rock, folk and country music fans, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music introduced many of us to Sturgill's psychedelic outlaw country and deft lyricism, complete with album highlight cover of When in Rome's "The Promise. It's turtles all the way down the line. Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me remains the favorite Touche Amore album of many fans, probably in part because it's one of their most personal. It's the kind of Best Rap Album Covers Of The 2010s Tab album you write when you're going through a rough patch, and the kind of album that thousands of fans will connect to when they're going through their own rough patches.

But what do you do when you've already written that record, and now you're happy, and you're worried about hurting your legacy? In Touche Amore's case, you write a record about how hard it is to write when you're happy, and about worrying what your legacy will be in the future. And, in Touche Amore's case, you end up making an album that cements your legacy in the process. It's a little reductive to say the album is only about those things -- there are also more personal songs like "DNA" where Jeremy Bolm sings about the fear of becoming his father -- but it is definitely a dominant theme.

And it turns out his writing can be just as powerful when he breaks the fourth wall as when he's caught up in his own inner turmoil. The production is gorgeous thanks to Brad Wood, who's also worked with Sunny Day Real Estate, mewithoutYou, and more , the melodies are stronger than they ever were before, and the band played tighter than they ever did before. Even more so than on Parting the Sea , Touche Amore blurred the line between hardcore and post-rock on Is Survived By , coming out with songs that are fast like the former but ebb and flow like the latter.

It was an album that paired especially well with Deafheaven's Sunbather , which came out on the same label the same year, and had similarly watercolor-y artwork to Is Survived By , both of which were designed by Touche's Nick Steinhardt.

Deafheaven may be black metal and Touche may be hardcore, but both combined melody and aggression in ways that were similar more often than they were different. Is Survived By came out six years ago at this point, and because there's so much music out there, I don't listen to it these days as much as I did in But as soon as I hear that opening drum fill on album opener "Just Exist," I'm transported right back to the place I was the very first time I clicked play on this masterpiece.

Pallbearer proved they were a force to be reckoned with on their trad-doom reviving debut Sorrow and Extinction , and they proved their ambitions were limitless on their third album, 's Heartless , which saw Pallbearer pushing their sound to two different extremes, from digestible sludge-pop to sprawling prog. And right smack in the middle of those two albums is Foundations of Burden , the sweet spot between where they started and where they are now.

They're still a trad-doom band on this album, but you can tell from songs like "Worlds Apart," "Foundations," and especially "The Ghost I Used to Be" that Pallbearer were getting interested in crafting great pop melodicism, not just copying Sabbath and Candlemass riffs.

And on "Ashes," Pallbearer begin to venture outside of metal with a glistening nugget that's more like Sigur Ros or Bon Iver than like any doom band. When we were putting together this list, we kept wondering if there was a way to include all the great music Burial put out this decade, though he hadn't really released an album that would make sense to include.

Conveniently, he released this compilation in the very last month of the decade, and if you wish Burial made a third album, this is probably it. Given its length and the fact that it's a double album, this might be his fourth album too. Since Untrue , Burial has remained at the top of his game and has continued to write innovative music that is a clear step forward from his early material but retains enough of the distinct Burial sound that you always know who you're listening to.

The songs have gotten longer, darker, weirder, and more experimental, yet they still contain moments of immediate bliss. And on Tunes to , nearly all of Burial's post- Untrue work -- including major highlights Kindred and Rival Dealer -- is here in one place, artistically sequenced in the way Burial thought would flow best, not necessarily chronologically. Hearing the comp start to finish is a time-consuming, sometimes-taxing experience. But it's worth every second.

Cloud Nothings emerged out of the buzzed-about lo-fi boom of the late '00s, but with Attack On Memory , they ditched all of their trendy traits and came out with the best and most widely-loved record of their career. It ditched the lo-fi indie pop of their early work in favor of abrasive post-hardcore, and it tied together elements of various '90s rock bands -- from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Weezer to Sunny Day Real Estate -- in a way that felt both like the nostalgia dose you didn't know you needed and the freshest new rock record around.

It helped bring all of this music back into the indie rock zeitgeist, but Attack On Memory doesn't succeed just because it helped kickstart a sea change within the genre. It holds up today as one of the most brilliant, impassioned, and endlessly listenable rock records released this decade. The world is littered with talentless stars and with uncharismatic virtuosos, but every once in a while we're gifted with someone like Cardi B, who was born to be a star and who just so happens to be impeccable at her craft.

Once "Bodak Yellow" swept the nation, it wasn't a question if Cardi would achieve stardom but when. And even though her success was a given, we've still seen great potential tainted by botched album rollouts, so it's no small feat that Cardi's official debut album neared perfection. Of its 13 songs, at least ten of them feel like moment-defining singles. It was an album that felt like a classic upon arrival, and that feeling has only strengthened since. There might not be a more accurately titled album on this list than Celebration Rock.

It's exactly what this album does; it celebrates the pure thrill that you can only get from rock and roll. Every song except the initially underrated album closer "Continuous Thunder" is turned up to 11 and played like the two members of Japandroids are challenging each other to play just a little bit faster.

They've said they included all the "whoa"s because they were trying to think of how fans would sing along at shows. It felt like a breath of fresh air in , when stuff like art rock and psych-pop was still dominating indie rock, and -- along with Cloud Nothings' Attack on Memory -- it helped open the doors for modern indie rock to embrace music that actually rocked. It holds up after all these years not just because it rocks so hard, though, but because underneath all the ruckus, Japandroids conveyed enough raw emotion to shake the hearts of anyone who listened to the core.

Post punk sounds and industrial towns go hand in hand. With a half-sung, half-shouted delivery, Casey is a true original, spewing literate bile that is usually funny, bleak and thoughtful all at the same time, while his three talented bandmates match his words with dark, powerful, exceptionally well-crafted music.

Their second album, Under Color of Official Right , has them firing on all cylinders with Casey pointing his lens at, among other things, coastal invaders of his Detroit, absentee dads, local politics and inter-band dynamics.

The first time we saw Julien Baker play, she was opening first of three for The National side project EL VY , and she was added to the show long after it sold out, so it was safe to say no one had bought their tickets to see her. Her debut album Sprained Ankle had just come out a few weeks earlier, and when Julien performed her then-little-known songs from that album, with nothing but her own guitar and voice, she silenced the crowd for her entire set, including hundreds of people who were likely hearing her for the very first time.

It was instantly clear at that show that Julien and Sprained Ankle had a bright future ahead of them, and that's exactly how things turned out. By the time Julien signed to the larger Matador Records and released the even more widely acclaimed Turn Out the Lights , Sprained Ankle already felt like a classic. Now, Julien regularly headlines bigger rooms than the one we saw her open for EL VY in as a solo artist and as a member of boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus , and it's all because of the doors Sprained Ankle opened.

With her many covers and collaborations , she's helped bridge the gap between '90s emo, classic folk and country, modern indie, and more, and she has become a force of her own in the process. We're already starting to see new artists emerge that cite Julien as an influence, and it's not surprising at all. Julien's music, especially on Sprained Ankle , has felt like a breath of fresh air within all of the aforementioned styles of music and beyond. After Foxing released their crowdpleasing debut The Albatross but before they released 's genre-defying art rock magnum opus Nearer My God , they put out Dealer , the most meditative album in their discography thus far.

Nearer My God is Foxing's most experimental album, but Dealer is probably their most "difficult" -- so to speak -- and it's definitely their most consistently gorgeous. The album is as lush as the greenery on the artwork, and without the in-your-face parts of the other two albums, it relies on pure sonic beauty and Conor Murphy's storytelling to keep you hooked, which it has no trouble doing.

Dealer made it clear that Foxing were not going to be pigeonholed, and it helped open the doors for them to eventually make an album like Nearer My God. It's so much more significant than just a stepping stone on the path to Nearer My God , though. Half a decade later, and there still hasn't really been album in or outside of the emo scene that sounds like it.

Drake was corny from the start -- it was often part of his appeal -- but if you were still clowning Drake by the time he released Take Care , you just weren't paying enough attention. An enormous leap from anything he had had done before it and still better than anything he's done since, Take Care remains one of the most purely gorgeous and massively influential albums of the decade in any genre.

Though his most crucial collaborator is not The Weeknd but frequent Drake producer 40, who helmed the majority of the songs on Take Care and helped Drake craft the sound that Drake copycats have gone after for years. Together along with a few other producers and some very key guests , Drake and 40 made an album that has it all. If you weren't already on board with The Weeknd from his mixtapes, "Crew Love" proved how powerful his music was. At the risk of just listing all 18 songs, I'll stop here, but Take Care has no filler.

It just celebrated its eighth birthday last month, and it still reveals more of itself with every listen. Just around midnight on Friday, December 13, , after many major year-end lists were already published, Beyonce changed the game with that digital drop. She released her self-titled album immediately to iTunes, without any warning, resulting in perhaps the most innovative major album release since Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows.

She also sang of everything from unrealistic beauty standards to vivid depictions of her marriage with Jay-Z, to her miscarriage, to the birth of their first daughter Blue Ivy, and she sampled a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speech on feminism that quickly became a major milestone in the decade's mainstreamization of feminism.

Beyonce is lyrically powerful and musically adventurous, both of which made it a significant risk for an artist of her popularity.

It could have gone down as the album where a pop star yearned for more creative freedom but failed to leave an impact. Instead, it cemented Beyonce as the kind of musical force we so rarely see, respected as a high-brow artist by critics and one of the single most significant pop stars of our time. At the turn of the decade, LCD Soundsystem were living pretty comfortably. And like tons of great bands after releasing a widely-acclaimed album, the band was faced with a decision: where do they go from here?

As the band headed into the studio to record their upcoming third LP, Murphy hinted in interviews that it might be the last LCD Soundsystem album, which only further raised expectations. Cosmogramma probably remains the most innovative Flying Lotus album, but Until the Quiet Comes is the most blissful, and -- in this decade of "chill" -- the most of its time.

It still has the psychedelic, future-jazz freakouts, wacky Thundercat basslines, and show-stealing Thom Yorke guest appearance of its predecessor, but here that's all wrapped up in a more minimal, subdued package. And this time there's a show-stealing Erykah Badu guest appearance too.

If Cosmogramma is the chaotic acid trip that no one at the beginning of was prepared for, then Until the Quiet Comes is the comedown we've all been on since.

Sunbather might be the album that made Deafheaven metal's biggest critical darlings of the s, but its followup New Bermuda is even better. The big talking point surrounding New Bermuda when it came out, was that it was a much heavier album than Sunbather.

Sunbather took a lot of influence from shoegaze and post-rock and often sounded as pretty as its pink cover art, which was not unrelated to the cynicism the album was met with from many metalheads. But New Bermuda came with black artwork and riffs that were descended from Slayer and s metalcore.

It was a tougher, meaner, more traditionally metal version of Deafheaven, as if to convince the haters that they are a true metal band, or maybe to challenge some Sunbather fans with a more alienating album. But New Bermuda isn't just better than Sunbather by default because it's a heavier album, and it's selling the album short by only talking about how it's Deafheaven's heaviest.

It also has some of Deafheaven's prettiest post-rock parts, and some of their most memorable, melodic riffs. Deafheaven didn't just get heavier, they also got better at everything they do. It doesn't just give you heavy, baby; it gives you more of everything.

I may not understand much Spanish, but the otherworldly beauty of Rosalia's voice is a universal language. Co-produced by ex-hipster darling and Bjork collaborator El Guincho, the album is based on a 13th-century Occitan novel called Flamenca , and tells the story of a toxic relationship. The record samples both Justin Timberlake and Arthur Russell and speaks to fans of both. Things slow down in "Cordura," a religious experience in under three minutes.

Since the album's release, Rosalia's popularity and collaborator list have continued to grow, and she's still just getting started. We can't wait to see what she has in store for the decade to come. Apart from dropping the just-as-great M3LLX EP shortly afterwards, twigs faced many setbacks, including serious health issues, which forced her to take a five-year break between albums.

It's not art because it's beyond art; it taps into the single universal certainty of our existence, that it has an end, and that someone will be left behind to pick up the pieces and continue on. As an album, as an act of love, or as a candle held against the darkness, it's a singular work, in this decade or any other. Baroness have gone through lots of lineup changes and a nearly-fatal bus crash that threatened to end the band's career, but no matter what happens, they persevere in one form or another.

Blickle had been with the band since day one, and his intricate yet overpowering style became a key element of their sound, and once Adams joined for the making of 's Blue Record , the interplay between his and Baizley's voices and guitars became crucial to the overall sound on Baroness.

It's the kind of double album where each disc has its own distinct vibe, and where a band takes advantage of the extra wax to try out just about every idea that comes to mind. They've got the two catchiest songs of their entire career heavy alt-rock anthems "Take My Bones Away" and "March to the Sea" alongside some downright pretty balladry "Twinkler" , danceable rock "Little Things" , psychedelic art rock "Collapse" , and still so much more.

It completely defies the limits of heavy metal, but as far as how daring and uncompromising it is, it's metal as fuck. It's the past decade of heavy music's best answer to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness , and like that album, it aims to be a classic and succeeds. Taking inspiration from life experiences both recent and old, Kozelek creates a stunning mosaic of a mid-life crisis, where mortality can seem to lurk around every corner, and where the past becomes even more distant with each day.

This decade, Kozelek developed a stream-of-consciousness lyrical style that can more closely resemble a therapy session than traditional songwriting -- with ideas that usually stem from small observations that grow into something much larger -- and he perfected that style on Benji. On Benji , Kozelek holds a magnifying glass up to his most intimate thoughts, before drawing back the glass to reveal much more universal concepts.

What can I say about The King of Limbs that I didn't already say in my lengthy defense of the album last year? It somehow became the most underrated album of Radiohead's career, regularly placed last or second to last behind Pablo Honey in rankings of the band's discography, but it remains a huge gem that's like nothing else Radiohead has done before or since.

It sounds like a live-band interpretation of the electronic artists Thom Yorke loves and collaborates with like Burial and Four Tet, and feels like a spiritual sequel to the trip-hop-informed Kid A.

The more widely loved s Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool is great, but that's an easy album for Radiohead to make. On The King of Limbs , they were taking risks and pushing the envelope, and the results remain thrilling. For three decades in a row, she has pushed the envelope of electronic art pop, and this decade birthed three essential additions to her already vast, impressive catalog: 's Biophilia , 's Vulnicura , and 's Utopia.

Eardrums, we never had a doubt. Beautiful, crushing, and innovative, m b v proves some things are actually worth the wait. Bring on the next album By , he had started his own label, temporarily parted ways with his backing band the Unit, and written Southeastern , his first of two highly emotive solo albums that dug into personal struggles and conveyed Isbell's tell-all lyricism with some of the most gorgeous melodies of his career.

The second of these albums was 's Something More Than Free , and after that Isbell reunited with the Unit and released 's The Nashville Sound , combining the powerful songwriting of his two recent solo albums with a harder rocking edge. All three feel like they're part of a trilogy and all three are essential, but something puts Something More Than Free justttt over the edge. The songs on this one just tug at the heartstrings a little harder, and "24 Frames" might be the most instant-classic song he ever wrote.

If someone ever builds a hall of fame for 21st century folk-rock, that song alone deserves a plaque. I wouldn't have predicted this when their debut album arrived in , but Tame Impala somehow became the go-to reference point for psychedelic pop in the latter half of the s.

Rihanna covered them on ANTI , and when major pop acts like Harry Styles and Post Malone and a Paramore side project and even Michelle Branch decided to make things a little trippier, Tame Impala always sounded like the most direct influence. And their influence spread so wide all because the songs on Currents were that good and had that much staying power.

As we speak, Tame Impala are finally set to release Currents ' long-awaited followup in early , and even as that album continued to get delayed, the songs on Currents never aged. Like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and Oracular Spectacular and Merriweather Post Pavilion before it, Currents became the new standard for synthy, 21st century takes on '60s psych-pop, and it still hasn't been dethroned.

That's a pretty impressive feat when you consider how many imitators it's spawned, and how big a lot of them are. Currents just has that special something that keeps it on top. The s saw many veteran bands coming out of hibernation to reunite and make great records, but Swans were the rare reunited band whose new music was sometimes actually better than the music they made the first time around.

This was never truer than on The Seer , a two-hour epic double album that's as majestic and beautiful and horrifying as anything Swans did during their initial run, and then some. Its centerpiece is its minute title track, and once that song sucks you in, the lengthy running time is up before you know it.

Swans have basically become a collective with a revolving door lineup over the years, and on The Seer especially, the guests brought as much to the table as the core members. The Seer is also just the most carefully constructed, most pristine sounding album of second-era Swans, if not of the band's entire career.

Swans are a band where filth is always to be expected, but on The Seer , the filth somehow sounds so clean. Part of Danny Brown's appeal is that he's always been a deeply weird rapper, and his weirdness was at its best on Atrocity Exhibition. The album was primarily produced by Danny's frequent collaborator Paul White plus some contributions from Evian Christ, Black Milk, Petite Noir, The Alchemist, and Playa Haze , and even if Danny didn't rap a word on it, Atrocity Exhibition would be one of the decade's best electronic albums.

It's his most musically innovative LP production-wise, and Danny rose to the occasion by matching these beats with some of his most out-there bars and most memorable hooks. Totally berserk songs like "Ain't It Funny," "Golddust," and "Dance in the Water" barely sound like hip hop at all, but then in the midst of all that, Atrocity Exhibition includes one of Danny's best traditional rap songs: "Really Doe. Way back in when Nightmare Logic came out, I used to say it solidified them as my favorite modern thrash band.

Even then, I was underselling it. Power Trip are one of the best thrash bands, period. They regularly play shows with the bands who defined this genre in the s, and they hold their own next to all of them. It's important to celebrate originality and the act of breaking ground, but to quote Drake, "It ain't about who did it first, it's about who did it right," and Power Trip did it very, very right.

Nightmare Logic gives you all the thrills that you got from the best of s thrash and crossover thrash, but it continues to feel like a new album. At this point, they've been in the game for over ten years and they have their own festival.

They're tastemakers, signifiers of cool, and they don't seem like they're going anywhere any time soon. I won't be surprised if they've got an even better album in them, but for now, Nightmare Logic is already going down as a classic. For years, U. Girls were, for all intents and purposes, Meg Remy and a sampler. And it was great. With In a Poem Unlimited , however, she took her vision -- a mix of girl groups, disco, new wave and searing feminism -- and gave it the full band treatment.

Backed by Toronto collective Cosmic Range that includes her husband, Slim Twig , Remy sounded more powerful and assured than ever, with her best batch of songs to date. A mad as hell call to arms, the album proves that sonically, there can be strength in numbers, too. It's no secret that rock music was a little retro-obsessed this decade, but there are ways to make retro feel fresh, and one of those ways is connecting the dots between various past eras and scenes and sounds and tying them together in new ways.

And that's something Australia's Courtney Barnett has been doing her entire career. Lyrically, she's one of our generations Next Dylan's, and musically she's psychedelia, punk, grunge, slacker rock, and more all at once. She can sound like as much as she can sound like , but that's what makes her seem so modern.

In an era where the internet makes music more readily available than ever, Courtney Barnett sounds like someone who has absorbed an over-abundance of it. Even more importantly than all of that, though, is that she's just a natural-born great songwriter, and that was clear from her very first two EPs, which got compiled as The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas and functioned as her "debut album" for a lot of listeners, especially here in America.

Some of the best songs she's ever written are on this release "Avant Gardener," "Anonymous Club" , and it remains fascinating to hear just how distinct and compelling her music was from the get-go. Before becoming one of the decade's most beloved indie rock bands, Hop Along grinded their way through the punk and DIY scene, playing tons of tiny rooms and opening for seemingly any band who asked.

They aren't openers anymore -- now they headline decent sized venues on the regular -- but back in the first half of this decade, Hop Along were a well-kept secret. They hadn't really gotten much indie hype machine buzz yet, but they spread like wildfire thanks to good old word of mouth.

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