Critics' Top Albums of 2018
By: Thomas Calhoon
It's that time of year again: list season. Well, technically list season starts in mid-November and is over well before Christmas. It's hard to keep up with every critic and publication putting out their lists, so I decided to collect all the lists I could find into one spreadsheet so I could find out which albums critics liked the most this past year. I gathered lists from 112 different publications, totaling over 1100 different albums and over 4100 individual entries. Once all of these lists were in the spreadsheet, I gave each album on each list a score based on the album's list placement and the length of the list. The maximum score an album could receive per list was 50 points. Below are the top 50 albums of the year based on those scores. If you want to know more about how my scoring system works, click here. Enjoy, and have a great new year!
50. serpentwithfeet - soil
475 PointsIncluded on 21 ListsAverage List Placement = 25.05"Combining classical instrumentation with intrepid electronic production, Soil is breathlessly dramatic, perfectly mirroring the theatricality of Wise's soul-filled voice and giving the album a sonic fingerprint that stands alone even among the current expansion of R&B's stylistic scope. As haunting as it is warm and as spiritual as it is humanist, soil is an ambitious vision of the complexities of modern relationships under the pressures of a society that seeks to destroy love that it doesn't understand."
-via Popmatters
49. Vince Staples - FM!
499 PointsIncluded on 21 ListsAverage List Placement = 21.95"FM!, with its short club crunchers and radio-show theme, is a satire of the way rappers’ violent pasts can become exploited spectacles: “White fans at the Coachella, hey … Either I’ma make the news or make a play,” he raps on opener “Feels Like Summer.” Staples marbles materialist bravado with eulogies for slain childhood friends on each track, floating somewhere between dead-serious old-head and ignorant troll, a.k.a. his comfort zone. It’s his unfailing ability to capture that feeling, of both the sun-kissed beach and the summertime gang violence behind it, that sustains him as a hip-hop firebrand without ever dumbing down."
-via FLOOD
48. DJ Koze - Knock Knock
512 PointsIncluded on 16 ListsAverage List Placement = 16.25"Like Willy Wonka in a straw hat, DJ Koze guides you through this technicolor playhouse of a record on a fixed track, moving from street-level grime into clouds of chirpy, cherubic harps and flutes within the album’s first few seconds. And while there is darkness lurking here and there throughout Knock Knock, there never seems to be any real danger. Instead, we’re invited to join the German producer in his carnival of delights, feasting on R&B and house, and nodding along to sunny hip-hop that sounds as much like Atlanta in the early ’90s as it does the Hollywood Hills in 2018. This is dance music in the broadest possible sense, a postmodern assemblage of sounds that on the surface don’t have much in common but together suggest a hundred different ways to move your body."
-via A.V. Club
47. Iceage - Beyondless
520 PointsIncluded on 19 ListsAverage List Placement = 21.63"To love Iceage is to love sleaze, and the Danish quartet provides sacks of it on their fourth album. Ringleader Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is at his debauched best, his accent-laden drunken drawl spinning tales of rowdy kids with STDs on their tongues (“Plead the Fifth”) and ill-advised co-dependence (the excellent “Pain Killer,” which features Sky Ferreira). The band, and Rønnenfelt, are not so much unhinged as they are unbridled, and their willingness to say and play whatever they want pays off in spades on “Showtime,” a booze-drenched story about the lead of a play who blows his brains out, and the ungrateful, uncaring patrons who care only for their loss of the cost of the ticket."
-via Flavorwire
46. boygenius - boygenius
558 PointsIncluded on 21 ListsAverage List Placement = 22.67"After being approached by the same labels, releasing acclaimed albums in similar genres, participating in the same tours and festivals, and steadily rising to fame in similar circles over the past couple of years, indie singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus were not only destined to befriend one another but to create together. Earlier this year, the trio formed under the cheeky name “boygenius” in Los Angeles to write and record a six-track EP in just four days. Every musician leads the vocals of one track while the remaining three sound entirely collaborative."
-via Consequence of Sound
45. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
562 PointsIncluded on 20 ListsAverage List Placement = 20.75"Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has a gentle quality about it that few metal acts would even risk, much less actually pull off. The album has a pleasant lushness that even Sunbather lacked, and it’s paced in a way that actually allows you to enjoy its soothing ambient moments before it frantically pushes the pace again. Deafheaven are chameleons of sound — continually challenging what a metal band can sound like and questioning what metal at its very core needs to be and what it needs to reject."
-via Consequence of Sound
44. Khruangbin - Con Todo El Mundo
574 PointsIncluded on 21 ListsAverage List Placement = 20.38"Con Todo El Mundo sees Khruangbin lifting inspiration from under-discovered funk and soul sounds of the Middle-East, particularly from Iran. Con Todo El Mundo is the sort of dazzling fuzz guitar and heavy drums mixtape that you wish someone would compile for you. For us, it is undoubtedly 2018s most heady soundtrack of classic soul, dub and psychedelia."
-via Bleep
43. Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
577 PointsIncluded on 18 ListsAverage List Placement = 17.33"Deviating from the thrash-math havoc of their previous output, Providence, Rhode Island’s Daughters broke an eight-year absence of recorded material with You Won’t Get What You Want, a high-volume stress ball of pulsating bass rhythm and artfully conceived and unrelenting panic, segments of which could exist in Scott Walker’s eerily composed and terror-iced latter-day oeuvre. With the band’s rejuvenation evident, this departure from signature plays on tension, an underlying metronomic pulse as sounds rupture and wind, crawl or bleed."
-via No Ripcord
42. Spiritualized - And Nothing Hurt
583 PointsIncluded on 23 ListsAverage List Placement = 23.87"The cleverest trick in the Spiritualized repertoire is the band’s ability to make big operatic rock music sound small and inviting. And Nothing Hurt is loaded with artistic flourishes, with bells, chimes, strings, and horns augmenting the band’s guitar/bass/drum core. But Pierce once again carefully manages to avoid losing the listener. There’s a measured grace to the record’s nine tracks. They take many shapes, from soul (“I’m Your Man”) to sleepy boy-girl dream pop (“Let’s Dance”), druggy psychedelia (“On the Sunshine”), and space rock (“The Prize”). But the fun comes in watching the songs slowly unfurl from their simple origins into something fuller."
-via Consequence of Sound
41. Kids See Ghosts - KIDS SEE GHOSTS
584 PointsIncluded on 20 ListsAverage List Placement = 17.00"Arguably Kanye’s best team-up since ‘Watch The Throne’, ‘Kids See Ghosts’ saw the prolific 41-year-old partner up with regular collaborator Kid Cudi to craft a condensed and focused record which oozed plenty of vibrancy and vulnerability. “I don’t feel pain anymore / Guess what, babe? I feel freee,” Ye sings with gusto (and an added “SCOOP!”) on the appropriately-titled ‘Freeee (Ghost Town, Pt. 2)’ – and this thrilling, unabashed sense of freedom is precisely the kind of quality that made ‘Kids See Ghosts’ one of the best listens of 2018. As NME noted, ‘Kids See Ghosts’ sounds “suitably ghostly and supernatural – [it’s] a brief glimpse into another world.” And it’s a world you’ll want to visit time and again."
-via NME
