iNFLUENTIAL aLBUMS
OF THE 2010S
week of 1/3/20
Sometimes there are albums that leave an indelible connection to their time and place. A record that transcends the ordinary and takes on an enchantment all it’s own. In this special section we are taking a look back at the albums that shaped our times. Join us as we wax nostalgic for the music that inspired, bewildered, and changed the direction of the art form over the last decade.
January 26, 2010
Beach House
Teen Dream
Sub Pop
A friend once told me that every Beach House record is just an extension of the only Beach House album. While that snarky statement is not entirely unwarranted, it’s not entirely accurate. I would prefer to say that Beach House is the most consistently confident band working today. They’re uncompromising in their vision, which is to provide wistful indie-pop. They’re influential to me in this way, never swaying from the core dreamy pop that grounds them, opting to slowly evolve with each release. I would argue that every Beach House album is better than the last because of this evolution, but Teen Dream was the first album to show just how grandiose and emotional the duo can be. It’s an album of loss, and Victoria’s wonderous vocals have never seemed as urgent as on these tracks.
Favorite Track: “Take Care”
May 24, 2010
Sleigh Bells
Treats
Mom + Pop
What do you get when you combine a hardcore punk guitarist with a former teen pop sensation turned elementary school Spanish teacher? Sleigh Bells of course! Comprised of former Poison the Well guitarist Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss, former member of teen pop band RubyBlue, Sleigh Bells is the ultimate odd couple. This polarity is precisely why they were able to put out some of the most unique pop music of the ‘10s. Krauss’ sweet as candy pop vocals and sing-song melodies, Miller’s distorted shredding, and the addition of electro and hip hop beats, yields some truly original and addictive ear candy on debut Treats.
Favorite Track: “Infinity Guitars”
June 21, 2010
Kvelertak
Kvelertak
Indie Recordings
Metal heads burn up a lot of brain oil trying to draw fine line distinctions between band’s sounds. However, these efforts have been mostly thwarted in the ‘10s, which were dominated by a cohort of bands too brilliant and brutal to be confined within a single category. Bands like Gojira, Ghost, Tribulation, and Code Orange treated the sonic conventions and genre designations of the previous decades like individual colors to be mixed and blended in order to create their masterpieces, rather than distinct mediums of art in their own right. While there have always been bands who worked to free themselves from the marginalizing effect of being pegged with the modifiers death, black, thrash, or doom, Norway’s Kvelertak broke through the gates of this decade at lightning speed, turning all this nomenclature nonsense into instant roadkill. Their self titled debut was a raucous combination of black, speed metal, hardcore, southern rock and a dozen other influences into a rolling fireball of fatal devil-may-cry fury. I remember reading reviews of the album at the time and thinking how amusing it was that the journalist penning the piece couldn’t pin the band’s sound down no matter how much they hemmed, hawed, and flailed in their attempts to wrestle this sweaty, toothy beast into submission. Kvelertak has since moved in a more progressive direction with their sound, and while they may no longer be as brash or evil sounding, their self-titled debut still set a high watermark for the decade to come and is worth remembering for both the tone and influence, but also how hard it flat out rocks!
Favorite Track: “Sjøhyenar (Havets Herrer)”
October 19, 2010
Zach Hill
Face Tat
Sagent House
I consistently hear Zach Hill cited by artists as an influence on their work more than ten years after his last solo release hit the iTunes store (or wherever you were torrenting music from in '09-'10). Most recently, in a Blacker Face interview on the CHIRP Radio podcast. The album dropped around the same time that Hill formed Death Grips with MC Ride and Andy Morin, and the immediate success of the project caused his solo career to lapse into indefinite hiatus. However, if this is the last album we get under Hill’s own name, so be it, because it is a dumbfounding, whiplash inducing, skeleton run through a surprisingly hot course of jagged terse beats, back-masking vocal samples, saw tipped guitar chords, and undertow like grooves, all designed to either kill you or make you 100% weirder for having survived. You come out the other side a changed person after experiencing it. Think Brian Eno doing an interpretation of Foreigner in series of glitching gifs and you’ll be in the right headspace for this album. Ten years on and it’s still a god damned masterpiece.
Favorite Track: “House of Hits”
November 22nd, 2010
Robyn
Body Talk
Konichiwa
Is there a song that better sums up the 2010’s than opener “Dancing On My Own”? No matter how many times it’s blasted at the bar or the club, on the radio, or live at Pitchfork with ten thousand people singing along, it still conjures up a mix of emotions that perfectly sum up the decade where we all got lost in our personal space and virtual innerselfs. A collection of the best tunes off the two volumes of Body Talk, released in tandem earlier in the 2010, Robyn dropped this platinum pop masterpiece right in time for Christmas shopping madness (an ingenious marketing scheme that still hasn’t been successfully repeated). But economic skills aside, Body Talk not only captures an essence of music’s changing vanguard: relying mainly on disco tinged EDM based tracks for its pop sheen instead of the classic R&B grooves of the previous two decades; it perfectly reflects the attitudes of a youthful culture with tracks like “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do”,“Call Your Girlfriend”, and “We Dance To The Beat.” Capturing the imagination of the LBGTQ+ community, the pop loving teen contingent, music aficionados and critics, and a whole generation of future musicians is no easy feat and the Swedish star did just that with this wondrous collection of pop gems. There’s a reason she didn’t come back with another solo record for eight years. Some things deserve to be kept sacred, and Body Talk not only captured a moment in culture and music, it perpetuated the influence for years after.
Favorite Track: It should be “Dancing On My Own” but “Indestructible” is a true self-confidence inspiration.
December 14, 2010
Off!
First Four EPs
What started as a way for the former Black Flag frontman, Keith Morris, and some friends to blow off steam quickly turned into a full-time gig for the aging vanguards. The ‘10s were a great decade for hardcore punk and there are so many albums that deserve a spot on this list, including Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic, Pissed Jeans’ Why Love Now, and Trash Talk’s Awake EP to name a few, but this collection of the First Four EPs from Off! helped light the fuse for these other acts, in my opinion. With its raucous buzzing guitars and socially maladjusted themes, Off! helped bridge the sentiments and sonic conventions of the angry garage rock and melodic hardcore of the Bush era, with the dark and disillusioned DIY punk of Obama’s tenure. This collection sets the tone of so much of the preceding decade of underground music and is still the most definitive example of the band's sound.
Favorite Track: “Darkness”
February 14, 2011
PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
BMG
PJ Harvey was one of the few artists from the ‘90s alternative boom to still have any steam left in them at the outset of the decade. Her iconoclastic and morose sound holds untold depths and it is this defiant streak of hers that has given her music such longevity. In some ways, Let England Shake felt like the culmination of her career up to that point. An achingly sour depiction of her native country in the aftermath of the First World War that showed the late, great empire in precipitous decline due to the folly of pride and adherence to dead and dying systems of authority. It’s a twisted record with a long shadow and many lessons to teach about our shared past and innumerable warnings for our impending future.
Favorite Track: “The Last Living Rose”
September 12, 2011
St. Vincent
Strange Mercy
4AD
Annie Clark's St. Vincent emerged over the past decade as one of the seminal rock and pop acts of the present era. While her best album is undoubtedly 2009's Actor, her 2011 album Strange Mercy is the point where she fully realized and embraced her singular voice. Stripped back production, with gauzy angular guitar work cut with piercing shards of distortion and electronics, integrating traditional pop flourishes like piano riffs and back up choruses with drum machines and vocal effects, it's as inviting as it is suffocatingly strange. I've always appreciated Clark's lyrical themes of people trapped by circumstance and subsisting on passive rebellion as it offers a window into the unintended cruelties and thoughtless acts of others, all of which add to the burden of daily living. Paired with album art that makes the themes depicting the horror of our shared societal confines all the more explicit, this is a fantastically realized album and the true beginning point of Clark's ascent into the current pop pantheon.
Favorite Track: “Strange Mercy”
October 18, 2011
James Blake
James Blake
ATLAS
Glitchy, yet ethereal, the producer’s breakout album was a huge leap towards a sound that helped further the retro-soul revival of the 2000s. James Blake’s work is decidedly inhuman, but on the self-titled debut he was able to capture the heart of a new genre -> electronica-soul. At times melancholic, yet pervasively tender, it’s my opinion that his work here is low-key one of the most pivotal releases of the last 10 years.
Favorite Track: “Limit to Your Love”
December 9, 2011
Macintosh +
Floral Shoppe
Beer on the Rug
Floral Shoppe, the ninth album by Vektroid, aka Ramona Andra Xavier, released under the name Macintosh +, was the definitive document of the vaporwave scene, and probably the most stylistically significant record of the past decade. Chopping and screwing samples of Diana Ross with easy listening and soft rock into a bewildering patchwork of clashing time signatures and badly appropriated rhythms, it's an affected headspace that foretold the impossible way that time would become both condensed and distended in the coming years. As well as the general sense of surrealness that the internet has introduced into our living world. It's an album brimming with sounds both instantly familiar and disturbingly foreign, which feels like an episode of sleepwalking upon initial encounter. Now that vaporwave is part of our common musical lexicon, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary this album was when it dropped, and how prescient it continues to be as the years roll on.
Favorite Track: “Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”
April 24, 2012
Death Grips
The Money
StoreEpic
If your decade list doesn’t include The Money Store, you’re doing it wrong. Death Grips are one of the more darkly aggressive hip hop acts to emerge this side of a Memphis horrorcore mixtape, and The Money Store, while not their most uncompromising release, is likely their most fully realized. Combining the avant-guard surrealism of Zach Hill’s math rock rhythms with sputtering industrial samples and MC Run’s uniquely unnerving flow, the emergence of Death Grips over the past decade was like being punched square in the face by a deep web forum spun off of Something Awful due to moderator infighting. Despite its vagrant qualities, The Money Store rides the line between tastelessly obscene and incorrigibly innovative. It’s exceedingly rare for an album this willfully extreme to gain any mainstream notoriety, and yet it is their only release on a major label. Love it or hate it, The Money Store will forever reign in infamy.
Favorite Track: “I’ve Seen Footage”
June 5th, 2012
Japandroids
Celebration Rock
Polyvinyl
Vancouver rock duo Japandroids are far from the most original band in the world, but they have kept the flame for anthemic rock alive at a time when it was so close to burning out. Japandroids’ brand of punk-flavored heartland rock has, more likely than not, served as the soundtrack to countless nights out for the thick-bearded, horned-rimmed glasses wearing, PBR guzzling twenty and thirty somethings trying to navigate this scary and weird stage of life called adulthood. This record rocks hard and harkens back to the ‘80s college rock we all know and love like Husker Du and The Replacements and also offers some glimpses of Springsteen-esque storytelling. Think of them as The Hold Steady’s punkier, hazier, carefree little brother!
Favorite Track: “Younger Us”
June 19, 2012
Fiona Apple
The Idler Wheel...
Epic
I’m firmly in the cult of Fiona Apple. I have been since “Shadowboxer”. I’ve owned countless bootlegs and I probably smugly told people that listening to the lost, Jon Brion produced, version of Extraordinary Machine is necessary to understand the Free Fiona movement. But, in truth, I don’t believe any of us knew what Fiona’s world is like until 2012. The album is a scattered and anxious collage of alto monologues, with her most sparsely composed music to date serving as the doorway to our John Malkovich-esque portal. We’ve always known her world is one of neuroses and isolation, and even though it’s the only album we received in the ‘10s from her - it’s the most Fiona Apple-ish of Fiona Apple albums, and that’s a damn fine thing.
Favorite Track: “Hot Knife”
August 18th, 2012
Parquet Courts
Light Up Gold
Dull Tools
There isn’t an indie rock fan alive who didn’t fall in love with the pure levity that came with the first listen of Parquet Courts second studio record Light Up Gold. The Brooklyn, by way of Austin, quartet had perfectly seized the sloppy, discordant sound the whole scene had been missing for a decade and laid it all out in one perfect, easily digestible record of pure delight. Then, in distinct Parquet Courts form, they spent most of the rest of the decade trying to buck the sound that made them semi-famous by stripping their essence down and experimenting with it’s very core, before returning to form last year with the epic Wide Awake!. However, Light Up Gold was the linchpin that formed hundreds of bands. Teens took their garages in its wake, thinking “I can play like that!” (before realizing you have to really know how to play to sound like you don’t), and a plethora of jangle rock bands followed in the wake of this epically disjointed and inspiring album.
Favorite Track: “Stoned and Starving”
October 22nd, 2012
Kendrick Lamar
good kid, m.A.A.d city
Interscope
When everyone was paying attention to Mr. West, a soft spoken emcee from Compton (the bastion of West Coast hip hop) changed the game with concept record good kid, m.A.A.d city. An easily accessible story album chock full of the modern black experience, complete with humorous skits, battles with addiction, second thoughts on street violence, and of course young love. While Kendrick Lamar went on to release two of the best hip hop records of the decade in To Pimp A Butterfly and DAMN. it all started with GKMC and it’s simple, yet incredibly complex, themes. Lamar proved you didn’t have to talk gangster life, dealing, or pimping to make popular rap music, just quality production from the right collaborators (i.e. Dr. Dre, Pharrell Williams and plenty of other top producers), an honest approach to life on the street, and a sense of irony so thick on tracks like “Backseat Freestyle” it’s tough to see past. While some would argue that Kanye was the most influential rapper of the decade, it was Lamar that quietly became the face of the new hip hop generation in the decade that saw hip hop solidify itself in the pop music landscape. The first rapper to win a Pulitzer. An inspiration to musicians across the genre spectrum.
Favorite Track: “Sing About Me, I’m Dying Of Thirst”
December 21, 2012
Perturbator
I Am the Night
The '10s were the last decade that could comfortably embrace '80s nostalgia. And boy did it ever. I'm not going to enumerate all of the ways that we relived the pop culture of Reagan's America over the last year, instead, I'm going to point out the fact that a dark synth-pop producer out of France was able to make one of the more sonically penetrating albums of the past decade by cribbing from John Carpenter's playbook. Perturbator's I Am the Night is the manifestation of a cyber-dystopia in sonic form. A damp, cityscape inhabited by black monolithic concrete skyscrapers, desperate denizens, and looming corporate authoritarianism. It's tight blooming sinister synths cascade over preciously fragile electronic rhythms, while a stalking beat nips at the listener's earlobes. It's a sound that feels familiar because it emerges from a future glimpsed as a nightmare thirty years ago, that today consumes our daily lives. I encourage you to consider a digital detox in the near future, but not before giving I Am the Night a spin on whatever corporate surveillance device also runs your media player.
Favorite Track: “Retrogenesis ”
June 11, 2013
Deafheaven
Sunbather
Deathwish
George Clarke and Kerry McCoy may not wear corpse paint, praise Satan, or earn even the slightest hint of respect from the “true kvlt metal” community, but Deafheaven, love them or hate them, nearly catapulted black metal into the mainstream with Sunbather. For the first time ever, a black metal/black metal adjacent album gained serious traction in circles not associated with the scene or even metal in general. Deafheaven seamlessly combine black metal, shoegaze, and post rock to create this genre-bending masterpiece that introduced extreme music to a much wider audience.
Favorite Track: “Dream House”
January 9, 2014
Nails
Unsilent Death
Southern Lord
Nails may be one of the most influential bands to emerge in the past decade. Their synthesis of harsh punk and death metal hit the underground like a wrecking ball, pulverizing all sensibility of restraint and good taste, and emerging victorious despite push back from certain elements within the indie rock press. Unsilent Death is their best recognized album, and with good reason. It’s an ugly, passionately pugnacious record that takes multiple listens to appreciate fully. Due to the heat of their anger and the relentlessness of their approach to music, they have inspired countless powerviolence and grindcore acts in their wake and have generally moved the needle on what can be considered extreme in hardcore punk and heavy metal. Unsilent Death was a massive underground hit upon release, and from my vantage point, it’s notoriety will only grow in the ensuing years.
Favorite Track: “Unsilent Death”
January 21, 2014
Against Me!
Transgender Dysphoria Blues
Total Treble
The punk world caught fire in 2012 when Against Me! founder Laura Jane Grace announced she was transitioning and the ensuing two years was full of speculation: would one of the 2000’s most popular punk bands continue. Then came Transgender Dysphoria Blues, a deep dive into Grace’s psyche and experience. A record that would inspire countless people dealing with gender dysphoria and at the same time endear the general punk audience to Grace’s outsider status and emotional plight. Intentionally or not, Against Me! opened the door for acceptance in a traditionally machismo fueled genre. Six years later and the opinions toward gender dysphoria, transitioning, and transgendered individuals has completely turned around. Once in absentia all around us, trans pride is alive and strong in the punk community and beyond. Though there is still a huge road to travel in the realms of acceptance and eliminating violence toward members of the trans community, large steps have been made over the course of the decade. Would it have happened without Transgender Dysphoria Blues? Possibly. But that doesn’t change that it is an incredibly rocking and inspiring record about the struggles of coming to terms with life as the gender you were always meant to be.
Favorite Track: “Black Me Out”
March 18, 2014
The War On Drugs
Lost In The Dream
Secretly Canadian
Admittedly, I enjoy A War On Drugs 2017 release, A Deeper Understanding, more than their 2014 breakout. But, this album was more influential in proving rock isn’t dead. From the opening two chords of “Under the Pressure”, I felt a wave of euphoria I hadn’t since my father played Petty or Springsteen on the old shitty radio in the garage - probably while working on a car or some other blue collar thing. It’s not just nostalgia, either. The meticulous production, with endless layers of gradual crescendos, add to the altogether timeless sound of my favorite band of the 2010s.
Favorite Track: “Under the Pressure”
February 9, 2015
Father John Misty
Love You, Honeybear
Sub Pop
Admittedly, I enjoy A War On Drugs 2017 release, A Deeper Understanding, more than their 2014 breakout. But, this album was more influential in proving rock isn’t dead. From the opening two chords of “Under the Pressure”, I felt a wave of euphoria I hadn’t since my father played Petty or Springsteen on the old shitty radio in the garage - probably while working on a car or some other blue collar thing. It’s not just nostalgia, either. The meticulous production, with endless layers of gradual crescendos, add to the altogether timeless sound of my favorite band of the 2010s.
Favorite Track: “Under the Pressure”
January 20, 2015
Sleater-Kinney
No Cities to Love
Sub Pop
From the raw riot grrrl days of their self-titled debut and Call The Doctor to the classic-rock leanings of The Woods, Sleater-Kinney have been critical darlings since their inception in 1994. Their decision to go on an indefinite hiatus in 2006 left a huge void in the indie rock world . I was especially devastated since I had a very uncool childhood and didn’t discover them until 2007. I feared that I would never have a chance to see them live and did the best I could to soothe myself by listening to Wild Flag’s album and watching Carrie Brownstein transition to comedy on Portlandia. Sleater-Kinney’s reunion and release of No Cities to Love had an undeniable impact on my life. I was not only finally able to see my favorite band live, but their new album was actually good, even great! No Cities to Love finds the band as energized as ever picking right back up where they left off 10 years prior. It is hard to not be cynical about band reunions since they are often blatant cash grabs, but Sleater-Kinney has proven that they are still relevant and have plenty more to say.
Favorite Track: A New Wave
June 17, 2016
Mitski
Puberty 2
Dead Oceans
Mitski is best artist. Period. Her work is amongst the most relatable penned this decade while being simultaneously some of the most brilliantly textured I've had the pleasure of reviewing. Every time I listen to one of her albums, I find some new deep dimension to appreciate. Picking just one of her albums as a stand-in for her entire catalog is a daunting task, but if there's one collection of songs that are up to said task, it's Puberty 2. From the soberly sweet and somber "Happy," to the cool baptsimal resonance of "Thursday" to the painfully prostrate love letter "Your Best American Girl," the record is brimming with cuts that speak to the aspiration and incomparably humble experience of present-day American life. What Norman Rockwell did for their parents with his paintings, Mitski accomplishes for Millennials. Crafting portraits of not just who they are but who they wish to be. They're not always pretty pictures to look at, but they're always earnest and honest, sometimes, oftentimes, painfully so.
Favorite Track: “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars”
March 30, 2018
Kacey Musgraves
Golden Hour
MCA
Similar to my 2015 pick, this album perfectly encapsulates falling in love. In contrast to the former’s use of sarcasm and irony, Kacey Musgraves just wonders for 46 straight minutes at how lucky she is. Musically, this was a breakthrough country-pop sorely needed. Disco and vocoders bring the album dangerously close to glistening combustion, but her steadfast commitment to love keeps everything together
Favorite Track: “Slow Burn”
April 27, 2018
Janelle Monáe
Dirty Computer
Bad Boy
Dirty Computer is filled with hit after hit expressing a point of view shared by much of her generation. She hits home on black lives matter, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights. As a member of all those groups, she is a voice for many people of our generation. Bringing all that messaging with a cool smile and pop hook after hook. The declaration that we won’t be made to feel bad for having fun and enjoying life. The pairing of message, craftsmanship, and joy makes this album a work of art. The music is so good, you might need to watch Monáe’s "e-motion picture" of the same name to put the messaging of the lyrics in sharp relief. It brings together all the amazing music videos from the album into a seamless sci-fi story. Monáe has worked within the framework of a concept album before, namely Archandroid, which was also a great release of this decade. But I have to stand for this album. The cultural context of all the movements, especially her coming out as pansexual and making "Make Me Feel" an anthem for that often overlooked part of the LGBTQ+ community makes this an album I couldn't imagine my decade without.
Run the Jewels
1, 2, & 3
Hip hop had a great decade. Arguably, every decade since the ‘90s has been a good decade for hip hop, but the ‘10s were the decade that it eclipsed both pop AND rock in every meaningful measure of popularity. While Chance and Kendrick may have made more green, I don’t think anyone dominated with as much style and consistency as El-P and Killer Mike with Run the Jewels. They dropped three massive, extinction-level event albums in the ‘10s, and will be soundtracking house parties from now until the sun explodes with their juicy smack-talking flows and bad-ass funk-rock fireball beats. For these reasons and so many others, RTJ 1, 2, & 3 deserve spots on this list.
Favorite Tracks “Banana Clipper,” “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck),” “Early,” “Don’t Get Captured”