10. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity (2016): there are a few artists on this list who may have deserved more than one album but no decision was harder to make than when it came to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Since emerging at the start of the decade, the Melbourne rockers have released a ridiculous 15 full-length albums, including five in 2017 alone; ear-melting excursion into Middle-Eastern scale cycles Flying Microtonal Banana and brain-melting excursion into African-style polyrhythms Polygondwanaland being my personal highlights. They also put out two extremely solid efforts this year, in environmentalist psychedelic freak-out Fishing for Fishies and straight tribute to '80s thrash metal Infest the Rats' Nest. But their best, for me, is the album that broke them out of merely being one of the best Australian alt rock groups and laid the foundation for all of their releases since, establishing the group as a proper global name. King Gizz love a concept, and Nonagon Infinity is one of their best - an album where the end of the last track joins up seamlessly with the beginning of the first, meaning it could, in theory, be played for eternity. And it's a pretty good choice for anyone who would want to try that. The opening bars of Robot Stop set the tone, a chugging, driving garage rock beat that reappears as a leitmotif on several other tracks and, of course, acts as the ending of metal-inspired closer Road Train. And the bits in between keep things interesting. Big Fig Wasp, Gamma Knife and People Vultures act as a kind of extended medley for the first half of the album, with themes and melodies cropping up in various places throughout, plus plenty of space-age sound effects, harmonica solos and brilliant vocal work from Stu Mackenzie. Things then get a little more experimental on the likes of the 7-minute Evil Death Roll, jazzy Invisible Face and two grooving tracks that throw back to the band's psych beginnings, Mr. Beat and Wah Wah. Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore battle as twin drummers, Joey Walker and Cook Craig create riff after memorable riff, and Ambrose Kenny-Smith and Lucas Skinner anchor things with deceptively tight organ and bass work. Play it over and over again, play it in reverse order, play it on shuffle, play all of the tracks at once... okay, so that last one probably wouldn't work, but the fact it's even a consideration is testament to how fun an idea this is, and how well it has been executed.
9. Jean Grae and Quelle Chris - Everything's Fine (2018): the decade was positively rife with introverted, intellectual, self-exploratory hip-hop albums - a few of them made this list - but head and shoulders above the rest is this collaboration by New York's Tsidi Ibrahim (Jean Grae) and Detroit's Gavin Tennille (Quelle Chris). Forget The Carters, this was the husband-and-wife event album of the decade. Everything's Fine is a satirical, acerbic and at times hugely sensitive trawl through the pressures and anxieties of modern life; a life in which, increasingly, it feels like the only way to self-express is to say that everything is fine, even though the world seems to make it increasingly hard for that to be true. Jean Grae and Quelle Chris explore that world in depth here, and no one is safe from their biting wit: from politicians and corporations to Instagram influencers and redneck racists, people from all sides of the coin come under deserved fire for their inherent ability to make life more complicated. And while some of those targets may seem obvious, the lyrics and concept are genuinely highbrow stuff: from the opening Everything's Fine, which uses a parodical game show setting to introduce the album's idea, through My Contribution to This Scam, in which Jean Grae and Quelle Chris trade bars about life's frustrations, big and small, to the likes of Peacock and Breakfast of Champions, intensely frank examinations of the mental health issues that so often build up under the surface veneer of everything supposedly being fine. There's plenty of musical variety as well: lead single Ohsh features a bumbling, bubbling bass line, House Call goes for full-on '90s-style G-funk, Scoop of Dirt is the biggest beat of the album thanks to heavily distorted keys and closer River is based around melodramatic piano, guitar, and the soulful vocals of Anna Wise. Comedians such as Nick Offerman, Hannibal Burress, John Hodgman and Michael Che add weight to the spoken-word interludes - often a sign of undercooked songwriting on rap albums, but here adding to the avant-garde tone of it all. The two rappers complement each other well, too, Jean Grae building layers of savage wordplay and takedowns, Quelle Chris remaining more deadpan and laid back. Rap really doesn't get much classier than this.
8. Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 2 (2014): and then there's Run The Jewels. Like Jean Grae and 
7. Queens of the Stone Age - ... Like Clockwork (2013): there has been some great music made by artists in huge physical or mental pain. Some of it came close to this list: John Grant, who produced some of his best work following his HIV diagnosis; Sephine Llo, who released I Your Moon in the aftermath of her husband's death; David Lamb, who recorded Brown Bird's final album as a farewell before his passing from leukaemia. The story behind ... Like Clockwork is truly astounding. Following routine knee surgery in 2011, Queens of the Stone Age main man Josh Homme ended up comatose for four months; he was actually pronounced medically dead on the operating table. This album was recorded shortly after and remains probably the group's second-best work - an affirming, defiant set of survival anthems borne of one man's unique experience. It's the sixth album released under the Queens of the Stone Age name: if I were to produce a list of this type for the previous decade, 2002's Songs for the Deaf would undoubtedly be in the top three, but this is a very different prospect, a result of a changed group and a changed leader. Listening to it again, I was surprised at how upbeat it all sounded - certainly more so than I remembered. Perhaps that's because it's the more solemn tracks that stand out: gothy piano ballad The Vampyre of Time and Memory and then the double closer of I Appear Missing and ... Like Clockwork, the latter two tracks being the moment where Homme tackles his experience most directly, with mentions of hospital robes and the brink of the abyss, and then a pondering of where to go next. But for the most part this is an album with a distinctly positive spirit. The opening Keep Your Eyes Peeled snarls along like the best of their middle period, If I Had a Tail and My God is the Sun strut and preen with the grooves of Homme's early work in the East Californian alternative scene. Kalopsia starts off atmospheric and spooky thanks to Trent Reznor's eletronics, but culminates in a sound more like Pearl Jam or Alice In Chains. The remaining two tracks, Fairweather Friend and Smooth Sailing, are undeniably catchy and not without their experimental moments; overall it's just an extremely polished and well-rounded album. Matters are helped by the return of some of Homme's best past collaborators: the ever-dependable Dave Grohl on drums and the ever-inventive Dean Fertita on guitar, while Nick Oliveri, who left the group under a cloud in 2004, returns to back things up on bass. Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan provides some grit, too, and Alex Turner and Elton John make interesting cameos. But for all the gloss, this still feels like an album that is deeply personal to Homme, tapping into the kind of feelings that very few people will ever know.
6. Triggerfinger - By Absence of the Sun (2014): the Antwerp power trio finally hit their peak with their fourth studio album, a slice of brash, brutal, bruising and downright loud garage rock. Game bashes down the door with its opening muscular riff, Ruben Block's guitar strings screaming, albeit never quite in protest, Mario Goossens hammering at his drums like a man possessed and Paul van Bruystegem anchoring things with a shuddering bassline. But what elevates this above the rest of their work, and makes it the highest-placed out-and-out rock album on the list, is Block's songwriting and vocal work. He never fails to be sensitive and melodic, even when positively wailing out the chorus of this opening battering ram of a track, and it's this heartfelt, crooning, sometimes sensual style that makes the rest of the album so special as well. Game is perhaps the best song, with its scorching guitar solo and sweaty lyrics, but there's really not much of a gap to the rest. Perfect Match is more or less a straight love song, albeit a very cocksure and sultry one, with a blues-rock riff and a stadium-ready chorus; the title track dials back the noise somewhat for its tuneful, road-trip sound; And There She Was Lying in Wait and Black Panic are as heavy as it gets, the latter an absolute juggernaut that descends into anarchic chaos at the end. For all the headbanging, though, the pervading theme is subtler: songs like Big Hole, Off The Rack, Splendour in the Grass and Trail of Love are all more melancholy, gentle, and the result is a much deeper, more varied album. Possibly the weakest tune is also the most interesting, Halfway There representing a departure into moody electronics, and Master of All Fears signs off with more searing riffing and howled vocals. This is a band on top of their game: they know they're good, and getting better, and they let their music do all of the talking. While Block may be the main creative force, he never dominates things, and the group work in perfect balance with each other throughout. From their sharps suits on the album cover, to the effortless swagger of their music and lyrics, rock really doesn't get much classier than this.
5. Father John Misty - Pure Comedy (2017): every once in a while, a song comes along that completely stops me in my tracks. Josh Tillman is a songwriter who had been on the edge of my radar as the brains behind Fleet Foxes, but as a solo artist writing under the Father John Misty nom de plume, he has become so much more. This album's title track left such an impression on me that it has been the only song in the past three years that I knew I had to learn to play right away - it just seemed like it could be important. Pure Comedy is a vast, epic piece dealing with the idea of human existence through the medium of just slightly left-field piano backing, swelling brass and strings and brilliantly poetic lyrics exploring the futility of life in the bigger scheme of things, but also condemning the way the human condition prevents us from making the most of it anyway. The subsequent album deals with similarly weighty themes: Total Entertainment Forever predicts the future of a human race totally devoted to ever more on-demand media, Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution takes a wry look at the potential hypocrisy of the environmental protest movement, Two Wildly Different Perspectives is Tillman's spin on the death of bipartisanship in the US and The Memo takes aim at big business with some of the album's best satirical barbs. Tracks like Ballad of the Dying Man, Birdie, A Bigger Paper Bag and When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay are less specific but nonetheless deeply philosophical, asking the biggest questions about mankind's purpose and existence. It's a songwriting approach that has often been criticised as self-congratulatory, but I disagree. In an artistic landscape where our films are three hour one-liner-and-fight-scene marathons (not a criticism of the Marvel output, by the way), our music is increasingly manufactured and hyperactive (not a criticism of pop music, by the way), and our literature seems doomed to irrelevance, it's perhaps jarring to come across an artist who is so unapologetically serious. And indeed this is to a fault at times: yes, Leaving LA needs to be long to make its point, but probably could have been shorter than 13 minutes, and sappy country ballad Smoochie could have been dropped altogether. But there's little else wrong with this, especially given how Tillman wraps things up: So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain being a sincerely whimsical song building to a stunningly beautiful musical conclusion, and In Twenty Years or So finishing on a genuinely optimistic note. And the title track elevates this to masterpiece status anyway. Most of the songs here are songs for our time. Pure Comedy is a song for all time.
4. Swans - To Be Kind (2014): for an album to be two hours long without ever getting boring, it has to be something pretty special. Swans emerged from the avant-garde "no wave" scene in the early '80s, and have released some of the most forward-thinking and accomplished albums of the past 40 years. To Be Kind is their thirteenth, and their third since reforming in 2010 after a lengthy hiatus. It is, at its core, a blues album, but it draws its inspiration from the swampy, muddy, rough-shod blues of Mississippi and Louisiana rather than the jazz-inspired, cosmopolitan sound of the group's native New York. This provides a much more sinister, esoteric, folkloric sound, something akin to stumbling on some arcane ceremony in the darkest corner of America's wilderness: centrepiece track Bring the Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture may stretch out for 34 minutes, but every second of it demands your attention; it builds bar by bar, phrase by phrase into a ritualistic frenzy that seems ready to crush you with the power of the sun itself. And then it breaks down into a meditative portrait of the titular Haitian revolutionary, frontman Michael Gira barking out lyrics in French and Spanish over a vaguely tropical backing. The song even merits its own cool-down coda in Some Things We Do, a minimalistic poem of a tune that drifts away into the void. To rewind a bit, it's the opening Screen Shot that sets the tone, starting out with a jittery bass line and incessant vocals from Gira, with the occasional stroke added to the sonic canvas - a funereal drum beat here, a chilling piano melody there - until the song explodes without warning into a full-scale shuffling blues-rock tune. Just A Little Boy, dedicated to Mississippi blues legend Howlin' Wolf, follows up with the album's most direct nod to its roots, with sinister slide guitar work by Cristoph Hahn and rock-solid swung drumming from Thor Harris. A Little God in My Hands is a madness-inducing, relentless seven minutes that culminates in eerie chanting; She Loves Us takes seven minutes just to settle into its groove, but rewards us with perhaps the album's catchiest rhythm and distinctly Asian choral vocals. Kirsten Supine slows things down again to almost a complete stop before Oxygen cranks up the tempo in the work's most straightforward rock song - albeit one with edgily atonal riffs and occasional bursts of chaotic brass. Credit here to guitarist Norman Westberg, doing so much while staying true to the limitations of the genre. Nathalie Neal and the closing To Be Kind are just desolately pretty pieces of songwriting, and both build from heartbreaking melodic sections to shattering, obliterating crescendos; legitimately, a soundtrack for the end of the world. To Be Kind is a transformative experience: listen to it, and you'll never look at music the same way again.
3. Major Parkinson - Blackbox (2017): at any other time in history, Major Parkinson would be the type of band that I would never have heard of. Obscure even in their native Norway, venturing rarely to other countries and passive when it comes to marketing, they would simply have come and gone without even entering my radar. But we live in the present, and this is why I truly believe there has never been a better time to be a music fan. And so, one day in early 2010, Spotify decided I had more or less exhausted everything worth hearing from the alternative rock scene of the American Northwest, and instead suggested I would enjoy something from the European Northwest. There are bands on that list that I still listen to regularly: Motorpsycho, Thulsa Doom, Audrey Horne, Kaizers Orchestra. De Staat cropped up in that period as well. And Major Parkinson. Their 2008 self-titled debut is just an incredibly solid artistic rock record, and 197 and Awkward as a Drunk are still among my favourite songs. Songs from a Solitary Home was the soundtrack to my first days at university, and Twilight Cinema the soundtrack to my last. And then, in 2017, they topped the lot with Blackbox. It's just a different beast - two years in the making, featuring the group's most expansive lineup, a full orchestral backing and a female-voice choir, the album whisks you away on a journey through the dark, frozen north; it's Scandinavian noir given a musical voice. Lover, Lower Me Down! announces the stylistic intentions with booming drums and a swirling, sinister synth backing; main man Jon Ivar Kollbotn growls along in the very depths of the male range as the music opens out into twanging guitars and shouted choral vocals. Night Hitcher picks up the pace a bit with maybe the work's most memorable chorus. Isabel - A Report to an Academy and Madeline Crumbles blend the dark aesthetic with something approaching pop songwriting, while Baseball is literally a 10-minute song called Baseball, that wanders around in gloriously aimless fashion, picking up and dropping themes as it goes. Before the Helmets and Strawberry Suicide are the band at their stripped back, intimate best, as Kollbotn does his best Tom Waits impression and violinist Claudia Cox lends her virtuoso skills to the mix. Founding member Eivind Gammersvik is as solid as ever on bass and Sondre Veland deserves a medal for working out drum lines to all the chaos, but a large slice of the credit must go to Lars Bjørknes for his synth, piano, organ and programming work - without him, this would not have sounded anything like the end result. As the closing title track builds to its thunderous orchestral conclusion, I can't help but be grateful that this weird and wonderful Norwegian masterwork found its way to me. It's also a world away from A Boat on the Sea, making guitarist Sondre Skollevoll the only artist to contribute fully to two albums on this list. Well deserved.
2. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015): there are some albums that simply transcend the medium of music. By 2015, Kendrick Lamar had already established himself as one of the best rappers around: his early mixtapes generating considerable buzz for both their complex, high-minded lyrics and unorthodox production. He stepped things up, though, in 2013 with Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, which realistically would have made the top ten of this list as well, a sprawling, meandering, but hugely astute concept piece following the last day in the life of a young LA gang member. To Pimp A Butterfly, though, leaves all of that behind. While Good Kid made a lot of pertinent and sobering comments on the quality of life for working-class black teenage men in Compton, To Pimp A Butterfly turns on modern-day society in its entirety. It's an approach not short on ambition, but Lamar just gets it right on every level. Barely five minutes in, on the opening Wesley's Theory and the following jazz-backed slam poem For Free?, he's already given tongue lashings to black exceptionalism, white supremacy and the failings of the American economic system - and there's another 75 minutes still to go. To listen to the whole thing in one go is like taking in a thesis on America; an exploration on all of the problems created from above and perpetuated down below. Greed, ignorance (wilful or otherwise), apathy: these are the root causes and Kendrick delves deep into the way they have come to characterise humanity as a whole. Tracks like Institutionalized, How Much A Dollar Cost and Hood Politics are the most overtly political; others, such as u and For Sale? represent something of a mid-album cool down as he turns his attention inwards, discussing in often uncomfortable detail the ways this obsession with the woes of the world has been detrimental to his own mental wellbeing. Cutting through the gloom, though, are the more optimistic tunes like These Walls, a tenderly erotic R'n'B ballad, and i, which remains the most self-affirming and accessible of all and, being placed second from last on the tracklist, does suggest a possibility of a better future. Yet with The Blacker the Berry and Alright, Kendrick sets out a defiant reminder that inequality and injustice are still at large, and have to be actively confronted. On the whole, it's a sophisticated work of songwriting, and it's backed up by consistently excellent instrumentals: collaborators ranging from Snoop Dogg to Pharrell to Anna Wise to Kamasi Washington to Sufjan Stevens, of all people. Funk legend George Clinton lends a hand and clearly had a sizable influence on the album's sultry, bass-heavy sound, as downbeat brass and jazzy keyboards add some flourish to the more traditional hip hop beats. Such is the diversity of backgrounds that Dr. Dre was called in to act as "executive" producer, and he tightens the screws just the right amount, resulting in a slick, mature, record that deserves to be remembered a century from now. It doesn't seem to have had much influence on rap music since, but that doesn't matter; crowds were singing the hook from Alright at protests across the States, and that does.
1. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010): a lot can change in ten years. A decade ago, I was still a teenager, making the kind of choices that would go on to change the rest of my life to date. I didn't listen to much rap, though. And ten years before that, Kanye West was doing much the same; having dropped out of community college, he was just emerging in the background of the US scene, selling beats for studio time and climbing the ladder with increasingly impressive credits. By the end of the '00s, he was among the biggest names on the planet. And ten years on from that, he's had something of a bumpy ride: various spells in mental health institutions, some concerning public rants and a bizarre love for Donald Trump have meant that his public life has overshadowed his generally still solid music. It remains to be seen where he will go from here - this year's Jesus Is King does point in a more positive direction - but for now we will have to settle for the fact that, in the middle of it all, he produced one of the best albums of any era and any genre. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, like many works of art, came from a place of turmoil. 2009 was the year things really started to (sorry) go west for Kanye, with his infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video Awards, the subsequent media fallout and then his cancellation of a joint tour with Lady Gaga. He retreated to the relative safety of Hawaii, and set about recording what remains his magnum opus. It's just ridiculous how good this is, from every angle; it doesn't so much ooze class as unleash a raging torrent of the stuff from beginning to end. While his public image may have been suffering, Kanye clearly still held clout within the industry - the feature list reads like a who's who of urban music and beyond for the time. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Rihanna, John Legend, RZA and Nicki Minaj - her verse on Monster is still the best of her career - all step up to add to the experience, while Kid Cudi, Pusha T and Bon Iver provide something more cerebral. The list of uncredited performers, while hard to verify, goes even further - names from Seal to Elton John to M.I.A. to Beyoncé have all been suggested. And so to the album itself: it's long, but never self indulgent; ambitious, but never too much; confident but never (quite) arrogant. Dark Fantasy gets us underway with an eerie spoken word intro, massive choir vocals and some of West's best lines of the whole piece. Gorgeous sets up a more accessible, pop-influenced section that continues with Power, All of the Lights and Monster, all successful singles and the latter featuring the best guest contributions from performers on top of their game. So Appalled takes on the exhaustion of the celebrity lifestyle while Devil in a New Dress, Hell of a Life and Blame Game provide a lifetime's worth of break-ups, make-ups and make-outs. Lost in the World and Who Will Survive in America close things out with a more introspective, political bent. And then there's Runaway, which builds from a melodramatic, single-note piano intro to dark, rumbling, pop-rap and then devolves into a five-minute autotune improvisation. In anyone else's hands, it would likely have been a disaster, but Kanye was in the zone here and the result is sensational. The music assault is relentless: nothing is considered too outlandish or overblown, and it all works. My Beautful Dark Twisted Fantasy changed my perspective on music in a way that very few albums do, and it seems to have done the same for a lot of the musicians who followed it. It is every bit as exciting today as it was in 2010, and if this period of music is remembered by one album alone, then let this be it.
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