25. All Them Witches - Dying Surfer Meets His Maker (2015): the third album by the Nashville blues-rock outfit remains their most varied, and therefore their most interesting. Dying Surfer is an extremely loose concept piece that - sort of - tells the tale suggested by its title, although it does so in a totally abstract way. Indeed, these are songs that deal more with ideas of death and the afterlife in general. On the musical side the influence of their home city is more than apparent, with sighing slide guitar work, harmonica solos, violin backing and melodic electric piano all provided by Allan van Cleave. Credit too must go to Ben McLeod for his guitar lines - drawing on a vast range of tone and ensuring that, while a lot of this comes close to metal, he always twangs rather than bludgeons. Drummer Robby Staebler and bassist Charles Michael Parks, Jr. round things out with a cavernous-sounding rhythm section, and the end result is deep, mournful and mystical. Opener Call Me Star is a haunting acoustic ballad that gives way to the much heavier El Centro and Dirt Preachers, while Open Passageways and Talisman showcase the group's breadth of sound. The best is saved until last, however, on Blood and Sand/Milk and Endless Waters, a spacy, shifting, seven-minute ballad showcasing McLeod's best work.
24. Diablo Swing Orchestra - Pacifisticuffs (2017): the trouble with having a trained opera singer as your lead vocalist is that, at some point in their career, they will realise that there is more money to be made in opera. So it was for Swedish metal collective Diablo Swing Orchestra, who parted ways with original singer AnnLouice Lögdlund for that reason in 2014, losing an integral part of their sound in the process. Pacifisticuffs, as a result, sounds very different to their previous three albums - but that's mostly a good thing. While Lögdlund's vocals were often impressive, it sometimes felt as though the band as a whole were relying on them to the detriment of their musical contributions. Kristin Evegård steps in to fill the gap here and the result is a much tighter, more coherent and - dare I say it - mature record. The album still fits into the vaguely defined avant-garde metal genre, but the sound is much more cabaret than classical. That adds up to a whole lot of fun as the brass section blends with thrashing guitars on Interruption, Evegård is backed up by a full gospel choir on Climbing the Eyewall and Daniel Håkansson takes over on lead vocals on Karma Bonfire, sounding like Elvis on steroids. The genre-bending of earlier releases is still given some room as well - with hints of bluegrass on Knucklehugs, calypso on Superhero Jugganath and disco on Jigsaw Hustle. Lots of albums are unique, but this is more unique than pretty much any other.
23. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake! (2018): for a long time, punk was the last frontier of rock for me; the one corner of the genre that I could not access, no matter how open-minded my approach. Yet towards the rear end of the decade, artists started crawling out of the woodwork and started making sense. A lot of the rock albums on this list are punk by style or at least by influence, and Wide Awake! is the best of them all. The reasons why I like this album are varied, and go a long way to explaining why I haven't liked punk in the past: first and foremost is the musicality, in particular Sean Yeaton's gloriously melodic bass work that drives all of the tracks here, or the tuneful organ of A. Savage - a far cry from the ultra-basic crashing chords that usually typify the genre. Then there's the gentle humour that is so often lacking - hearing Austin Brown drawl in his New York accent through metaphors based on European football tactics from the '70s on Total Football elevates this on its own. It's political in all the right ways, on the likes of Violence and Before the Water Gets Too High, and the way the tracks cascade from one to the next means that, after a couple of repeat listens, the effect is like watching a favourite film and looking forward to the best moments each time. It is, all in all, a very pleasant listen - as Brown sings us off on Tenderness, sounding more like Mungo Jerry than Johnny Rotten, it leaves you wondering whether you've been listening to punk at all, and yet still ticks all the right boxes.
22. Aldous Harding - Designer (2019): quirky female singer-songwriters are far from a new phenomenon. From the founding mothers Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, through Kate Bush and Tori Amos, to Joanna Newsom, there's a lot of good stuff out there. Aldous Harding, though, is more interesting than most. Born in Lyttelton, New Zealand, a town with a population of less than 3,000, Harding channels the kind of loneliness yet cosiness that can only come from living in the furthest corner of the world into nine introspective, lyrical and occasionally wonderfully weird tracks. She's fleshed out the sometimes tortuous, ultra-stripped-back voice-and-guitar sound of her earlier career: from the very beginning of Fixture Picture, with its thwacking drums and vocal harmonies, it's clear that this will be a much more upbeat and uptempo album. The title track throws in a playful xylophone melody, Zoo Eyes adds a flute backing, and Shape of the Planets has touches of almost funky strings. The result is that, when the instrumentation is pared back, on the likes of piano dirge Damn, guitar dirge Heaven is Empty and the closer, other piano dirge Pilot, it all feels a bit more significant, exclusive and intimate. The standout, though, is lead single The Barrel, the kind of esoteric, deceptively creepy and ultimately naggingly groovy tune that most songwriters of this breed can only dream of conjuring up.
21. Niko Is - Chill Cosby (2012): yet another rap album that strays about as far as possible from the genre's origins while still acknowledging the past, Chill Cosby was a marvellously assured debut mixtape from Brazil born, Orlando based rapper Nikolai Paiva. His USP is simple enough - he's a chill guy, and will proceed to tell you exactly how chill in great detail. The song titles alone are testament to his one-track approach - Chillusions, Chilluminate, $100 Chill... it might seem like beating a dead horse on paper, but the result is actually far more entertaining than it has any right to be, thanks to Niko's incessantly clever wordplay and infectious enthusiasm. By the end, it's hard not to feel relaxed, thanks to both his "chillosophy" (yeah, there's rather a lot of that) and the lush, orchestral, soul-influenced musical backing. Action Bronson pops up on Steffi Graf, one of the more uptempo numbers, Barracuda verges on a hazy trap beat, Stars is just effortlessly mood-improving and Wink & the Gun sounds like something out of a '70s cop show. Things peak in the middle, though, with Crazy, a reworking of Patsy Cline's 1961 country classic, with lyrics about moving on, moving up and the importance of loving yourself. With not an angry word to be heard, nor a note out of place, Chill Cosby is one of the most admirably positive rap albums ever made. Now more than ever, we need music like this.
20. Igorrr - Savage Sinusoid (2017): it's hard to know where to even start with this one. Perhaps a bit of background would help: Igorrr is brainchild of French experimental musician Gautier Serre, a mad scientist of a producer who decided to forge his own path after he found the process of running his music by his bandmates was limiting his creativity too much. He cites his influences as Bach, Chopin, Aphex Twin, Portishead and Cannibal Corpse, and manages to sound like all of them at once. Oh, and the project is named after his pet hamster. So far so bizarre, but Savage Sinusoid is actually by far his most accessible album - with the idea fleshed out to a full group, eliminating all use of samples and clips, the result is a much more cohesive, enjoyable and, yes, listenable record than previous works such as Nostril and Hallelujah. The real star is vocalist Laure le Prunenec, who showcases a quite staggering range between black metal and bel canto, a modern-day Diamanda Galas and only slightly less terrifying. While screamed vocals generally turn me off, their effect here adds humour to the proceedings. Songs about spaghetti, houmous and horses nestle alongside achingly beautiful piano-and-voice compositions - Problème d'Emotion and Au Revoir are as haunting as it gets, ieuD sees Serre hammering away at the harpsichord and Cheval features genuinely virtuoso accordion. There's room for sitars, lutes, electronics and primary school recorders. It's frantic, eclectic, really quite absurdist, and there is absolutely nothing else in the world that sounds anything like it.
19. Kill Bill - RAMONA (2014): 51 utterly charming minutes of bedroom rap out of South Carolina. The lower East Coast is a bit of a wasteland for rappers, really - Pusha T is the only other example that comes to mind - but with Pharrell and Timbaland hailing from Virginia, there is something of a tradition of producers. And the production does do a fair bit of the lifting on RAMONA. Kill Bill is, by his own admission, something of a nerd, and that comes to the fore here musically, with samples pulled from anime soundtracks, Japanese jazz and retro video games. And while none of that should resonate with me at all, it's hard not to feel a vague nostalgia for another time and place while listening. It's backed up lyrically as well, Kill Bill seemingly riding the crest of a wave with his happy-sad examination of his own mental health, his insecurities around adulthood and the ways in which he tries to help himself: all things that are very much in the public consciousness today, but maybe were less so even five years ago. He does so with an admirable eloquence as well, his southern drawl occasionally deceiving the depth of it all. Tracks like Backwoods, Pork, Abandoned 2 and Then There's Me strike that balance perfectly - staying catchy while making you both laugh and cry; Good Luck Chuck is a modern take on the Appalachian murder ballad tradition of Kill Bill's home region; and Conversations with Gravity is the kind of beat that just does not leave your head. A shout out, too, to Dream Eater: "I had a dream that I had woke up / It turned out to be a nightmare" is perhaps the best opening line of any song of the last ten years.
18. Die Antwoord - TEN$ION (2012): the South African electronic rap trio exploded onto the scene at the tail end of the 2000s, and proceeded to go from strength to... well, they actually dropped off pretty hard after 2012. 2014's Donker Mag wasn't bad but felt like a step back, 2016's Mount Ninji and da Nice Time Kid is already largely forgettable, and there's still no sign of their long-awaited fifth and final album, which seems to have stalled amid a wave of unsavoury accusations and unconvincing rebuttals. So their best will remain this sophomore effort, which struck the perfect balance between their low-budget beginnings, the futuristic aesthetic they tried to move onto, the characters they built for themselves and a knowing sense of humour about the fact that it was all for show. There was something truly original about how they emerged as a band of misfits claiming to be for real - products of the working-class Cape Town suburbs - and for a while it was very hard to tell if that was true. Of course in this day and age there's little room for mystery and they were soon exposed as art-school graduates who had tried similar things in the past under different identities with less success; in recent years they've become increasingly standoffish about how genuine they are, tried harder to shock and be different. But TEN$ION gets it right in being a legitimately fun ride through the weird and wonderful world the group created, and with a significant upgrade on the musical side as well. Never Le Nkemise 1 gets us going with an African choir and dubstep beats, singles I Fink U Freeky and Baby's on Fire are club-ready, Fatty Boom Boom is propelled by clattering tribal percussion and DJ Hi-Tek Rulez deserves to pass into legend. It wasn't to last, but there was a moment back then when Die Antwoord seemed destined to stay at the top for a long time.
17. Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe (2011): of the various criticisms levelled at the decade's music, perhaps the most valid is that no truly new movements have arisen for some time now - everything has merely been a development of what has gone before rather than breaking new ground. I would stake a claim for an exception, though, when it comes to vaporwave. Okay, so the premise doesn't get it off to a great start - the reappropriation of '80s and '90s mood music into a new and alienating context. But it's the way the artists go about it that makes it special, and arguably deserving of a label as the decade's legacy for future music ideas. By stripping, rearranging, and remixing those long-forgotten tracks, vaporwave artists create music that is both nostalgic for a past that never happened and evocative of today's increasingly disposable, automated, impersonal society. Floral Shoppe is a seminal vaporwave project from Oregon's Ramona Xavier, created and released when she was just 19. Forget the associated memes, forget those who supported it purely ironically, forget the vast torrent of low-quality, no-effort imitators that followed in its wake - Floral Shoppe deserves far more praise than it gets for starting a movement and proposing a new approach to making music. ブート (Boot) sets the scene with juddering electronics - sounding, intentionally, like a broken computer disc. This is followed by by far the best known track, リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュ (Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing), a dreamy, surreal seven minutes of plodding keyboards and slurred vocals, before a long cool down - the highlight being the huge-sounding ECCOと悪寒ダイビング (Chill Diving with ECCO) and a grind to a halt on 月 (Moon) and 海底 (Seabed). We live in a world that looks more and more like the future that was promised to us - and vaporwave is the soundtrack for that world.
16. Ghost - Meliora (2015): always quick to polarise, Ghost released their third album in 2015 to equal measures of praise and derision. The derision is (just about) warranted - serious metal fans claiming that the band's music doesn't really match up to their visual or thematic aesthetic. A metal band who don't play metal, some would say. Scooby Doo chase scene music, many others have said. But I'm on the side of praise, and it's because to my mind the critics have missed the point: Ghost, with their papally robed, skeleton face-painted frontman Papa Emeritus and supporting cast of masked "nameless ghouls" were always trying to be all of those things anyway. They're like the Die Antwoord of rock music, and they pull it off better than that group because while, again, identities were revealed a while ago - Papa Emeritus is actually a former synth-pop artist called Tobias Forge - they roll with the punches and play it all for laughs, regularly "replacing" Emeritus with new frontmen who are clearly all still Forge and adding to the Ghost mythos through promotional films. Of course, Meliora wouldn't be as high on this list as it is if the music didn't back things up. As it opens, the Scooby Doo comparisons seem to be valid, as a creepy-camp theremin melody kicks things off, but this soon gives way to the pounding drums and crushing guitars of Spirit and From the Pinnacle to the Pit. These lead into the softer rock of Cirice and He Is, and the rest of the album follows suit, by turns heavy and brooding, majestic and mesmerising. It is, in short, an album full of nice touches: an extra guitar ramping up the final chorus of Cirice, a spine-tingling piano line on Mummy Dust, thunderous timpani rolls and soaring strings on He Is, an Elton John-esque keyboard breakdown on Absolution and a full choir on Deus in Absentia. Cheesy? A lot of the time yes, but Ghost own it. And as an aside, with this being the fourth and final Swedish act on the list, to add to the best song of the decade and the best Eurovision winner, it's probably time to crown the Swedes the world champions of music for the last ten years.
15. Jamie xx - In Colour (2015): five years in the making, it was worth waiting for this frankly ludicrously accomplished bit of electronic wizardry from the button-pusher behind The xx. James Smith had always been something of a perfectionist - struggling to finish music and abandoning several projects prior to this having collaborated with such names as Diplo and Richard Russell. His micro-managing approach works, though, on In Colour, which provides an incredible scope and depth of sound, production techniques, and vocalists. It's a very British album - even a distinctly London one - evocative of dimly-lit streets and rainy nights and warehouse raves and occasional moments of bleak beauty. The production sways between the bare minimum and almost overwhelming breadth - the likes of Gosh and Stranger in a Room are sparse, tense, and lovely tracks that make the fuller, richer sound on I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times), The Rest Is Noise and the closest we get to a proper The xx-style pop song, Loud Places, all the more vibrant. Smith's The xx bandmates crop up, in fact, individually on Stranger in a Room and Loud Places, while Yung Thug and Popcaan put in some of the more enjoyable performances of their careers so far. But this is still very much Smith's album, a mash of his influences from steel drums to acid house bass to minimalist electro pop that, as pretty instrumental love song Girl fades out, cannot help but leave you wanting more. The videos are well worth a watch, too.
14. Death Grips - Exmilitary (2011): there is some music that simply defies classification. Death Grips are one such act - the Sacramento trio riding the line between punk, rap, electronic and purely experimental. And while their sound has started to gravitate firmly towards the latter in recent years, this debut mixtape is testament to how eclectic their approach once was. Exmilitary is a furious onslaught of barely controlled noise, sonic experimentation and the throat-splitting vocals of frontman Stefan "MC Ride" Burnett: Beware gets things rolling with a recording of a Charles Manson interview before Burnett roars in with the song's cryptic, anthemic hook - "I close my eyes and seize it / I clench my fist and beat it / I light my torch and burn it / I am the beast I worship". The album's lyrical content follows on in much this vein, a succession of abrasive, abstract raps that are the perfect match to the other side of things: the production work of Zach Hill and Andy Morin. Samples from '50s garage rock, '60s psychedelia, '70s prog, '80s hip hop and '90s alt rock fight for air alongside the electronic insanity of Hill and Morin, plus a high-school marching band's drum corps. The result is an incessant, head-banging 50 minutes that is far catchier than it really should be - from Guillotine, Spread Eagle Cross the Block and Takyon (Death Yon), all of which set a breathtaking pace, through the more measured Culture Shock and almost vaporwave style 5D into a slightly slower ending on I want it I need it and Blood Creeping. A reminder that there are still new ideas to be had within the medium of music.
13. Jack White - Boarding House Reach (2018): while Jack White may have seen his biggest successes in the previous decade, it was in the 2010s that he finally dropped all pretense and established himself as an out-and-out solo artist. Unfortunately, this seemed to coincide with him taking his foot off the pedal somewhat. Under the flag of The White Stripes, he redefined rock music and what could be done with simply guitar and drums. With The Raconteurs, he created some of the most perfectly-formed old-school rock tunes of all time. The Dead Weather, too, was an interesting project, creating a murky, Southern blues sound. But while his first two solo releases, Blunderbuss and Lazaretto, are both fine albums, they also feel like an amalgamation of everything that has come before and, ultimately, a bit safe. There was a point where it seemed as though the most daring thing he would do this decade was a collaboration with fellow Detroit outsiders Insane Clown Posse to cover Mozart, seemingly without much irony. So Boarding House Reach came as a welcome surprise; a truly experimental collection of tracks drawing on far more diverse influences than any of his previous work. Opener Connected By Love provides a teaser of what to expect - on the surface, a fairly straightforward slow blues number, but with throbbing electronics and recklessly processed choral vocals. Indeed, electronics are a dominant theme here, with Corporation and Respect Commander sounding almost like house tracks, albeit processed through a vintage rock filter, Ice Station Zebra going down a funk route and What's Done Is Done following up on the opening track's tone. Abulia and Akrasia, Everything You've Ever Learned and Ezmerelda Steals the Show can barely be considered songs, mixing spoken word sections with instrumental tomfoolery, and Humoresque closes the show by reviving lyrics from a now-forgotten writer named Howard Johnson set to Anton Dvořák's 1894 composition. It's not perfect, but it's so exciting to hear White trying again.
12. Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition (2016): I was recently watching the cinematic version of The Who and Elton John's Pinball Wizard (the high point of all of their careers, by the way) when something occurred to me: 40% of the musicians involved in that died before their time. It's not something that has happened to many who have come to fame beyond the '90s - raised awareness of the risks of such a reckless lifestyle, as boring as it may seem, probably saving a lot of lives. But over the past couple of years, a trend has emerged in the hip hop community, seemingly not a month going by without another young, promising artist turning up dead, usually by overdose, suicide, or both. For a long time, it looked as though Danny Brown could go the same way following a string of increasingly concerning public appearances and a devil-may-care attitude to drink and drugs reflected in his lyrics. Fourth album Atrocity Exhibition, though, feels like a genuine turning point for him both musically and emotionally. Because while the hyperactive hedonism of previous releases remains, and is still just as much fun as before, it's all tempered with self-reflection and an explanation of how he got to this point. You can't have the high without the hangover, and the album lurches chaotically between the two, starting with the jittery, agitated Downward Spiral, through the bristling Really Doe, the frantic Ain't It Funny and the gruelling White Lines, as paranoia and psychosis seem ready to set in. But there's light at the end of the tunnel, as Brown wraps things up in a much more relaxed, positive mood on Today, Get Hi and Hell For It, suggesting he is starting to come to terms with his self-medication behaviours and looking at how he can heal. All in all it's an emotionally draining listen, aided by jolting, abrasive production, but Brown's lyrical flair is what really elevates this to the level of greatness. He's lived fast, and may or may not die young, but with Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown's legacy should be assured.
11. De Staat - Bubble Gum (2019): had I allowed more than one album per artist on this list, De Staat would surely have had two or three in the mix, and their best just misses out on the top ten. Hailing from Nijmegen, a staunch socialist outpost of a city on the fringe of the Dutch bible belt, the five-piece group have never really played by the rules. Bubble Gum is their fifth studio album, and finally drops all masquerade of being part of the Benelux alternative movement in favour of fully embracing the ultra-slick Kraut Rock sound that had crept into 2013's I_CON and 2016's O. It's packed with moody, spiky, but ultimately infectious tunes, politically charged lyrics and moments of devastating musical might. The opening KITTY KITTY is propelled along by a thudding bass line and harsh electronics over a relentless beat as frontman Torre Florim decries all that is wrong with the games played by those in power today. The likes of I'm out of Your Mind, Pikachu and Level Up ramp up the pace with almost Krafwerk-style synths from Rocco Hueting and Florim practically crooning on top. Credit, too, to Tim van Delft's rock solid drum work and the inventive licks from Vedran Mircetic's lead guitar - taking as much of a back seat as he ever has in the group's sound but somehow never having seemed so vital; Jop van Summeren rounds out the sound with pulsating, effect-soaked bass. Mona Lisa and Luther take things to the next level with the atmospherics, but the best track by far is centrepiece Phoenix, a truly apocalyptic soundscape of crashing, crushing synthesisers evocative of Vangelis and again featuring disarming sensitivity from Florim's vocals. De Staat have continued to get better with each release, and Bubble Gum has set the bar even higher - it's almost hard to imagine what they're going to sound like moving into the next decade. For now, they're setting the world on fire.
Into the home straight now...
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