Critics' Top Albums of 2018

10. SOPHIE - OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES

1259 PointsIncluded on 39 ListsAverage List Placement = 15.31

"With her debut album OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES, SOPHIE very much achieved her unique aim of making music that sits perfectly on the radar of nationwide mainstream radio appeal, yet turned it on its head by smuggling in some very rubbery and experimental latex clad ideas of what makes commercial pop music something for people to fetishise to the nth degree. This is the sort of album we can see bursting any preconceptions and made up minds on what makes SOPHIE's music such an addictive pill to swallow."

-via Bleep


9. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!

1400 PointsIncluded on 42 ListsAverage List Placement = 16.21

"If there were any doubt that Parquet Courts would maintain an edge even when produced by Danger Mouse, it’s squelched at the tail-end of Wide Awake!’s opening track, “Total Football,” when A. Savage screams, “And f*ck Tom Brady!” In America, no risk is greater. Recorded in New Orleans, the politics of the album are clear and present, anti-Trump, yeah, but mostly anti-capitalist. But Wide Awake!’s greatest successes and most welcome surprises come in moments of poignancy, mostly on “Tenderness” and “Freebird II,” an ode to a drug-addicted mother. “When I think about you I see a person who/Hasn’t existed for a long time,” Savage sings, coming to terms with his mother’s fate."

-via Flavorwire

8. Cardi B - Invasion of Privacy

1557 PointsIncluded on 45 ListsAverage List Placement = 11.71

"It becomes evident upon even the first listen to Invasion of Privacy that there’s something truly substantial behind Almanzar’s rags-to-riches story: a tireless work ethic and raw talent in spades. With lyrics like “This that collard greens, cornbread, neckbone, back fat/ Get it from my mama and you don’t know where your daddy at” on the Project Pat-sampling “Bickenhead”, Cardi asserts her own identity while putting haters in their place. Her flow is acrobatic and nimble, and her wordplay is frequently hilarious. She’s also unafraid to showcase a more vulnerable side on tracks like “Be Careful”, warning a cheating boyfriend of the damage he’s capable of doing. With the bar set this high, we can only imagine where Almanzar will take us next. And we like it like that."

-via Consequence of Sound

7. Idles - Joy as an Act of Resistance

1692 PointsIncluded on 42 ListsAverage List Placement = 9.55

"Joy as an Act of Resistance is my album of the year. I’m not a 30-something Englishman dissatisfied with the state of the nation, yet I feel it all. And more importantly, I believe it. There’s always a degree of showmanship in rock’n’roll, even punk, yet on Joy… every word rings true. It’s visceral, poisonous, vulnerable and heart breaking. Simultaneously wry, cheeky, hilarious and, I can’t resist, joyous. It’s growling, spitfire vocals on top of urgent, thundering rhythms and searing guitars. It’s the best lyrics I've heard in years... ‘If someone talked to you / The way you do to you / I'd put their teeth through / Love yourself’.

It leaves me tense yet happy every time."

-via Double J

6. Robyn - Honey

1715 PointsIncluded on 54 ListsAverage List Placement = 14.44

"All hail Robyn. The Swedish pop royalty returns after too many years away, and it’s with a bite-size album of the year’s most tasteful pop. The inclusion of “Honey” is satiating for all the fans who first heard a small snippet of it years ago on an episode of Girls, but it’s lead single “Missing U” that plays to all of Robyn’s strengths. It’s a song general enough for fans to believe Robyn’s whiled away the years while missing them, but specific enough to possibly be about the passing of Robyn’s longtime collaborator, Christian Falk. That play between the specific and the universal has always been Robyn’s strength, especially when paired with a track made for melting on the dance floor."

-via Flavorwire

5. Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour

1720 PointsIncluded on 44 ListsAverage List Placement = 9.36

"Expanding her sonic repertoire with such anti-Nashvillian devices as a vocoder and disco beats, Kacey Musgraves may well be accused of reaching for a wider pop audience with Golden Hour. Yet with this ambitious album Musgraves has also delivered her most personal and heartfelt work. This isn’t a Taylor Swift-level reach for pop superstardom; this is the work of a maturing artist who, at all of 30 years old, has expanded her millennial world view. It all starts with one of the year’s best singles, “Slow Burn,” a subtle progression from her youthful rebellious tone, and while its begins with pure acoustic country instrumentation, atmospheric keyboards and strings lead you into a broader American landscape."

-via Spectrum Culture

4. Low - Double Negative

1801 PointsIncluded on 49 ListsAverage List Placement = 13.06

"In 2018, Low turn twenty-five. Since 1993, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – the married couple whose heaven-and-earth harmonies have always held the band’s centre-have pioneered a subgenre, shrugged off its strictures, recorded a Christmas classic, become a magnetic onstage force, and emerged as one of music’s most steadfast and vital vehicles for pulling light from our darkest emotional recesses. But Low will not commemorate its first quarter-century with mawkish nostalgia or safe runs through songbook favourites. Instead, in faithfully defiant fashion, Low release its most brazen, abrasive (and, paradoxically, most empowering) album ever: Double Negative, an unflinching eleven-song quest through snarling static and shattering beats that somehow culminates in the brightest pop songs of Low’s career. Double Negative is a record perfectly and painfully suited for our time. Loud, contentious and commanding; Low fights for the world by fighting against it."

-via Fopp

3. Pusha T - Daytona

1976 PointsIncluded on 57 ListsAverage List Placement = 13.04

"In a lean, unblinking 21 minutes, Pusha-T delivers a sharp and hypnotic rhapsody, wasting nary a second with bloat or dallying. The wordsmith drips swagger and effortlessness, even as it’s clear he’s been unyieldingly precise and demanding of every note and syllable. Kanye West has spent most of 2018 digging (or filling in) a deep and heavily marked grave in which to toss his legacy, but he still lends his singular brilliance as a producer to every track on DAYTONA, making us all wish he’d shut up, step into the background, and just become a supporting player for more genuinely exciting and vibrant artists like Thornton."

-via Consequence of Sound

2. Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer

2422 PointsIncluded on 67 ListsAverage List Placement = 11.72

"Dirty Computer is the most enjoyable album of 2018. That’s pretty paramount at a time that’s essentially been one hard slug to the gut after another, and Monáe knows this. While she’s game on hosting the Thursday night rager until the break of dawn on Monday, she’s also insistent on “keeping things real,” which is why every song comes with a lesson. Now, in lesser hands, this could have quickly devolved into some queasy timeshare pitch on politics, but instead, the whole thing comes off like a celebration. Of what? Change, and lots of it. With Dirty Computer, the future isn’t unwritten or worth fighting for; the future has already begun, and it hardly feels like science fiction."

-via Consequence of Sound

1. Mitski - Be the Cowboy

2455 PointsIncluded on 66 ListsAverage List Placement = 10.56

"There are a lot of unhappy people in the songs on Mitski’s new album. Some of them are Mitski herself, but not all. Belying the usual assumption that any woman who writes first-person lyrics is singing about herself, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter has said that many of the songs on Be the Cowboy are experiments in writing fiction. Let’s call it a successful experiment. She imagined her fictional character as “a very controlled, icy, repressed woman who is starting to unravel.” The songs here aren’t as straightforward as that, however: Mitski is a master of insinuation and inference. So when she sighs heavily at the start of “Me and My Husband,” and then sings on the chorus, “We are doing better / It’s always been just him and me / Together,” you can practically see the narrator’s tight, forced smile as she clings to a self-identity that is fully invested in a mate who has lost interest. Sometimes the unhappy people on Be the Cowboy seem to revel in their own discomfort. Really, though, reveling in discomfort is something Mitski has always done well: She examines and parses it with a rigor that is somehow clinical and poetic. Whether she’s singing about herself or creating stand-ins that feel just like real people, Be the Cowboy shows why she is fast making herself into one of the most interesting songwriters of her generation."

-via Paste

Thanks for looking through this list. I hope you enjoyed it, and found out about some new stuff! Let me know what you thought! If you want to contact me, you can find me on Twitter @thomascalhoon or you can email me at calho074@umn.edu .