These are my personal Top 10 Best Albums of the Year.  The rankings of these records only reflect my personal enjoyment of each album.

10. Sons of Kemet - Black To The Future

Sons of Kemet is a great jazz outfit that hails from London. Their style of jazz embraces heavy meditative grooves, a distinct tuba as a bass, and an entire array of percussion instruments. The group does a great job incorporating a diverse set of features from many genres of music. Every vocal performance gets an elevated groove and instrumental backdrop that only Sons of Kemet could ever deliver. They are easily one of the most exciting jazz outfits to enter the new decade.

9. Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introverted

Little Simz is one of the best rappers out of the UK right now. This album not only has bars, but great musical passages and production all over. All of the musicians on this record played their instruments off, and it helps to make the album a lot sharper musically. Little Simz’s ability to paint strong emotional vibes as a songwriter gets stronger with each album.

8. JPEGMafia - LP

With each listen of each version of LP comes a new production trick or songwriting choice I find having to notate and study. Despite the album being so incredibly catchy, it’s like an onion that I have to keep peeling. The bars are icy, yet pure flames. The beats deliver pure heat, while having really unique sounds layered into it. His style of delivering sounds gets so chaotic and memetic at times that it forces me to stop for a moment of silence and digest what in the world I just heard. Despite it all, I feel like the coldest goon when I listen to it in my car. It’s complex, but still very much bumps in the whip.

7. Tyler the Creator - Call Me If You Get Lost

Tyler absolutely snapped on this album in the most hip hop way possible. After the future one man Broadway musical that was Igor, I had no idea what musical direction he was going to take. Like the very best, he kept it back to basics, but made it distinctly Tyler, the Creator. His bars are sharper than ever, and this album has some of my personal favorite Tyler the Creator beats of all time. Tyler is going for the very top, and nobody is going to stop him.

6. Backxwash - I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses

This album is absolutely crushing. Montreal rapper Backxwash feeds the dark side of my soul once again with harrowing performances, cutting lyrics, and absolutely terrifying production. Despite the harsh sounds and screaming on the record, it gives a special gothic energy that sets a new bar for horrorcore and dark rap music.

5. Irreversible Entanglements - Open The Gates

Irreversible Entanglements is a Philly Jazz collective. I am a huge fan of Moor Mother’s rap albums, including the ones that also came out this year. However, I think her best work is with her jazz musician friends as Irreversible Entanglements. It’s such a wonderfully groovy free jazz record with amazing spoken word passages all over. I love the production and the deep cuts on the album. The massive Water Meditation was so ambitious and groovy, that it didn’t even feel like 20 min passed by. Overall the record is a patient listen, but a very gratifying one for sure.

4. Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders, & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises

This album is absolutely gorgeous sounding from the very first second. Pharaoh Sanders is one of the greatest saxophonists of our time. Give him all of the flowers while he is still here, as he is really only one sax player you get in one lifetime. Right from the first movement, each phase is so detailed and wondrous and easy to get lost into. Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra do a great job creating the wondrous backdrop for Pharaoh Sanders’s amazing soprano sax playing. This album is one of the most hypnotic musical projects I’ve heard this year.

3. Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready

This album gave me nightmares for a week, so it has to be on here by default. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, and no doubt Kristin is a once in a generation musical genius. It just unironically terrorized me for a week after I listened to it, but I expected that. I loved Caligula even though that album also gave me terrorizing nightmares for a week. Listener discretion could not be more emphasized for this project. If you’re not in the proper headspace, Lingua Ignota’s music can actually mess you up. She is not for the faint of heart, and the themes of her musical project are incredibly real and traumatic topics that come from a real place. Her music is incredibly powerful, and just jaw dropping.

2. Injury Reserve - By The Time I Get to Phoenix

This album was such a sad sendoff to Groggs. With his sudden passing during the recording of this record, I didn’t know exactly what Injury Reserve would do. Listening to this album was like listening to my friends process and deal with the seven stages of grief after of one of their closest friends suddenly passed away. Each song is beautifully chaotic and each performance is painfully sad. Having followed this group since their first mixtape in 2015, Injury Reserve sat on a throne of their own in Hip Hop for the short amount of time that they were all together. To completely depart from their trademark rapping style and pop song structures into these windy, progressive cathartic and glitchy performances is a bold artistic move that comes from a really skillful and artistic place. RIP Groggs.

1. Spellling - The Turning Wheel

This album is Narnia. It is Paradise: The Musical. If this album was fully developed into a Broadway musical, it would win a Tony for Best Musical. This artpop album is a wondrous Reading Rainbow style musical that I never want to end. Every vocal performance and instrument in each song on this record is so perfectly produced and recorded, it blows my mind. I love the poetic lyrics on the record and how mystifying the imagery can get in this. I love how much this album shamelessly embraces joy as an emotion worth feeling, and how that joy of making music and art can grow far beyond just the people playing and performing on a stage.

Just My Opinion

Top 10 Best Albums of 2021