By skyforbes 
Written and curated by Tucker Pennington and Zach Weingarten.
Please listen to our 60–41 mix on SoundCloud below.
For many artists, it was tough narrowing down which album from their catalogue deserves a spot on this list. For Skee Mask, the choice was obvious. Of the 14 standalone releases he put out this decade, Pool is the obvious point of entry for newcomers. At nearly two hours, it expands at a rapid pace to incorporate every subgenre of techno that the German producer obsesses over. And “obsess” is the operative word here. Whether it’s the minutiae of deep house, the detail-obliterating break beats of drum and bass, or the otherworldly textures of his ambient pieces, Skee Mask’s compositions are crafted with a perfectionist’s touch. You can follow him down any number of rabbit holes on his follow-up EPs and albums, but nothing matches hearing someone so skillful pull off genre-pivots at this scale or pace. — TP
In moments of insecurity, what do we wrap ourselves in? What beliefs or institutions do we turn to for stability, comfort, or just a sense of normalcy? Hell, what beliefs or institutions have made it unscathed this century? The list of influences, inspirations, and elemental components that Honour cites in the credits for their debut album Àlááfíà are vast, and you can hear them being painfully stitched into songs throughout its runtime. Atmospheric samples are countered with scuzzy hip-hop beats that rip through the air like an air raid siren. But the weight this brings to the record reveals a deeper, more painful hollowness to it all. The bombast and haziness are a bluff. I believe the inspirations cited in the album’s dedication to the artist’s late grandmother are sincere, it’s just clear to me this amalgamation of sounds was made to cling a frayed tapestry of personal history more than anything. As we progress further into this century, we’ll continue to accrue more knowledge and become further atomized as we spread ourselves across myriad platforms and spaces, both physical and digital. Every subsequent generation will pay an exponential toll for those who came before them; Honour’s transient soundscapes are admirable and crushing in their ability to take a snapshot of the weight of existence this century doles unto us all. — TP
The starting notes of “To Appease” might have initially suggested that High Tide was the sister release of Still House Plants’ If I Don’t Make It, I Love U. But by “Crickets” it became clear that Able Noise were searching for more than a reinvention of the experimental rock moniker. They aspired for a total musical takedown, using the sounds and textures we took for granted as familiar and pleasant and reconfiguring them into something alien and unholy. At least, a sort of anglocentric interpretation requires that reactionary read of the album. In actuality, across the ten expressions of sound, the duo of Alex Andropoulos and George Knegtel flirted with atonality like commercial viability was a disease. High Tide never played like a lambast against our theretofore attachment; rather, it existed outside of the playbook, another culture that developed its own methods of irrigation without the influence of the West. Despite the apparent lack of sonic cross-communication, a system developed nonetheless, one that wriggled around our accustomed perspectives and broke new ground in ways yet to be determined. So keep trying to make sense of the simultaneity of “Garden” and “To Two,” and check back in with us in five years to see what we, and what the medium, have come to make of this. — ZW
If the 2010s were marked by the public learning that trans people existed, then the 2020s have so far been marked by the public making sure they don’t. The hollow, plastic bells that politicians and corporations rang out in faux solidarity have since shattered without a plan of restoration. 2014 saw Against Me! beg for acceptance on Transgender Dysphoria Blues, but the environment has grown exponentially more hostile since then. Even just one year later, G.L.O.S.S. demanded listeners to “Give Violence A Chance.” The oppressed only bend so long before snapping, and Bea MacDonald’s update to the trans punk ethos so far exemplified this more than any other record this decade. I Became Birds was anarchist in its message and venomous in its language. Across just six tracks, Home Is Where painted a jarringly vibrant picture of isolation, desolation, and self-immolation. MacDonald was operating on one single mantra: violence begets violence.
It’s difficult to remember how I Became Birds sounded back in 2021 because it’s since become completely subsumed by the present. In some sense, that speaks to the lasting quality of the band’s debut; in another, the enduring nature of hatred and persecution. As time marches on, and as the trans community continues to be swallowed up by social stratification and political demonization, Home Is Where’s debut rings out as a cathartic warning shot, an emotional purge before it became absolutely vital listening. But let me not try to synthesize it with my clunky, distanced words when Bea distilled it best: the past is never-ending.— ZW
Two halves sewn together: skins n slime.
Chapter I: Caregiver, or, Drone as a Symbol of Light; Chapter II: And also its Absence.
Oliver Coates processed his cello beyond detection in those 11 tracks. He stripped away the world around us and left us naked, only able to receive his direction as a guide for our own movements. He soundtracked the memories we had holed away. We hadn’t consciously tucked them deep inside, but my God were they unearthed. He soundtracked the life we hadn’t yet lived, too. A million possibilities, heavy and finite, flashed across our eyes. Every decision, no matter which we took, represented the death of 999,999 others. Infinite deaths, cyclically regenerated every second of every day. The past self’s fault for our arrival; the present self’s fault for everything else. We were helpless to make our own projections, to desperately seek how we fit into each of those crests and screeches and bliss and heartache. All of this from 11 variations on how to conceptualize the cello.— ZW
Pop Smoke had 12 days to celebrate his mixtape exploding in popularity and being in the top 10 of the Billboard charts. Twelve days to know he was the face of NYC drill and skyrocketing in popularity, taking over the future of rap. Tragically, he never got to see past those 12 days and know that Meet the Woo 2 would have been this generation’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a career’s worth of undeniable hooks, charisma, and beat-making distilled into a single project. The slithering, warped 808s and explosive snares were the perfect foundation for Pop Smoke’s immediately arresting voice, a deep, intimidating, confident, and melodic punch that cemented him as a legend in the making. It’s only natural to listen and envision what could have been following his murder, but I prefer to think back on those 12 days in 2020 when Meet the Woo 2 was the beginning of a new era in music. — TP
Many of the artists and albums found on this list are indebted to the legacy of David Lynch and his work as an artist, songwriter, and cultivator of dreamlike aesthetics. But if I had to choose one album to represent Lynch’s proclivity to emphasize musical performance — see the bands performing at the Road House in Twin Peaks: The Return or Dorothy Vallens’ nightclub act in Blue Velvet — it would be Perfume Genius’ Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Mike Hadreas has always shone brightest when he’s allowed to fully embrace the spotlight, whether it was the lonely quietude of Put Your Back N 2 It or the subdued pop glamour of Too Bright. His fifth album stunningly contorts and bends to fit a wide array of stages and moods. The nods to Lynch’s longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti might seem obvious, but these touches of Americana dream-pop throughout lend a sprawling quality to the album as each song drastically changes direction. The fuzzed out melancholy of “Describe” and the urgent romance of “Your Body Changes Everything” sound like songs from distinctly different albums, but Hadreas’ vocal performance intoxicates, and the twinkling ethereality of each track allows for sonic leaps to feel like an extension of a singular performer deftly pirouetting and expanding the realms of their stage. If Lynch taught us to submerge ourselves in the subconscious in order to hook in that big idea, then Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is a series of 13 different plunges downward that emerge and shimmer with uniform brilliance. — TP
Low evoked a future they couldn’t have known on HEY WHAT. The quasi-post-prog sound first captured on the band’s final album was indebted to the pandemic for its apocalyptic contextualization, but Low offered much more than the opportunity to purge our collective quarantined anxieties. In some sense, HEY WHAT was a time capsule to 2021, but it was also a presage to the technologic advancements (read: horrors) that were on the precipice. The roadmap to humanity’s interaction with, and immediate dependence on, artificial intelligence was all over Low’s goodbye. Their production was the cleanest it had ever been. The distortions were pristine and calculated — each time the sound dropped out it was as shocking in its abruptness as it was impressive in its premeditation. The vocals were so high in the mix they became a part of your conscience. But the lab-made noise that swirled around the human vocalizations resulted in complete uncanniness. Their experimental blend only grew more unnerving as the seams separating the elements grew more indiscernible. HEY WHAT burrowed deep and never left because once we decided to take it in, there was no way to stop it. — ZW
You can tell everything you need to know about a person by the way they treat animals. What’s your inclination, to grab a shoe, or a flat-laid paper towel? My dog cries out from across the room whenever I hold a flyswatter. Why do you think Jain monks wear those masks? Ultimately, our relationship with animals is a reflection of our relationship with each other. Even in our adoration of them, we’re inclined to hurt them.
The title of Alex G’s opus suggested a similarly cynical view, that humanity was so ill-equipped to save itself that only God himself could be bothered to save the animals. But the songs on God Save the Animals were more forgiving and gentle than this initially suggested. They were lived-in, shedding Alex G’s penchant for jaded bitterness. They marked a turning point from the Alex G that made DIY bedroom pop, which mirrored his early fans’ own depressive submersion, to an adult songwriter grappling with the intricacies of adult choices. God needed to save the animals not because of some grand humanistic abandonment, or even some larger deterministic apocalyptica, but because Alex G finally accepted humans into his life over and above animals. Just listen to fan favorite “Sarah” and then listen to the burgeoning classic “Miracles.” You’ll see firsthand that the animals now come second. — ZW
My collaborator said it best last year when he assessed that Two Star & The Dream Police would be forever tied to its release year. 2024 will be seen as a watershed moment: the year indie rock turned vibey. Distinct from chillwave and any other psychedelic-tinged bedroom music, Mk.gee’s brand of pop is both understated and vibrant. He’s somehow found a way to turn sophist-pop into stadium anthems, with his restrained yelps coinciding with a motley of pedal-effects that burst forth from hazy nothingness. But what makes Two Star & The Dream Police stick out even a year removed is how much you hear Mk.gee figuring out how to turn his minimalist ideas into explosive hooks. In 17 months, he would help Justin Bieber turn out a sprawling album of similar ideas, but flattened and made into an easily-digestible package. Before then, he was fumbling through an array of vibes and created a masterpiece. — TP
Few albums’ inclusion drew as much ire and controversy among our staff writers as Hundred Acre Wrist did, and justifiably so. At its most reductive, the entire Haunted Mound movement boiled down to a handful of white teens who were equal-parts inspired by their affinity for horror films as they were their own affinity for trap music. But what these guys offered was bigger than some maximalist smattering of the two. They pioneered a genre and created something novel without veering into being a novelty act (see The Garden or DJ Smokey). When we thought back to the 2020s, and the shaky, evolving musical landscape that accompanied it, we always found ourselves returning to Sematary and Ghost Mountain. And even though music historians rightfully point to Grave House as the initiation point, it was Hundred Acre Wrist that saw the Haunted Mound oeuvre confidently take shape. Chalk it up to maturation, chalk it up to the guidance of DJ Sorrow, but whatever the reason, Hundred Acre Wrist offered the blueprint for Sematary, Ghost Mountain, Hackle, Buckshot, and Turnabout to retread over and over again for the years that followed. So when you listen to Rainbow Bridge 3 or October Country and find yourself marveling at the fusion of influences and the pure disregard for conventionality, remember to light a vigil and say a prayer for the album that brought you there. — ZW
Way back in 2014, I was a high school junior falling into the rabbit hole of music, trading out everyone else’s taste for my own, learning that the album experience was the music experience. But with that came the rabid need to consume it all with zero regard for context or time or care. I raced through the discographies of (still) impenetrable artists with the confidence and assuredness of a veteran music writer. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was bearing witness to. I was misguided. So when I first listened to BLACK METAL, it was more of the same. “Oh,” I said with total, empowered ignorance, “he makes indie rock but sings bad. It’s cool.” I checked it off and went onto the next album, eager to misinterpret and over-criticize.
In the decade since, I’ve slowly come to terms with these mistakes, a lot of which I owe to Dean Blunt. In that same decade, he punctuated my own delusions with a body of work that would sooner die than conform. Album after album, song after song, each a surprise against the wider landscape of art but even more a surprise against himself. Yet he would come to betray even the consistency that came with being inconsistent when he released the only album sequel of his career, BLACK METAL 2.
Of course, the sequel forces the comparison to the original. In doing so, we were commanded to reconsider the context of the last decade of “Dean Blunt.” What’s changed, what’s to come. So what’s changed? What’s to come? Google a hundred essays on Dean Blunt and you’ll find yourself Googling a hundred writers, each searching for answers and plodding on about the shroud of mystery Dean engulfs himself in. But if this introspection is meant to do anything, it’s to compel us to give up and accept. BLACK METAL 2 didn’t provide comfort in the answers, it provided comfort in the intuition to let go. Its breeziness instilled a sense of passivity that washed over us whenever we returned. It served as a reminder that, buried beneath the volumes of possibilities, is only one question that needs answering: how does this make you feel?— ZW
An ode to frozen time. Milan Warmoeskerken’s first album to sound like this, Leave Another Day is what happens when an artist who previously mastered making the synthetic sound alive turns his focus outward. Relationships, ebbing and flowing, and the emotional inversions of bliss, jealousy, yearning, and aching — these are all set against dusty arrangements akin to Simon & Garfunkel tracks produced in a medieval chapel. The impact is a series of languorous songs that should reveal an intimate coziness. Instead, a chilled stillness, as if these emotional states are bleeding together into a fixed haze. A couple sitting still in bed, facing abulia and unable to move: Milan W. traces this still life with more than just a skillful hand. They impress each song with lived experiences that make Leave Another Day as immersive as it is soul-sucking. — TP
It can be easy to enter into an “arms race” mindset when submerging into the scene of Brazilian baile funk as a North American listener. Your virgin ears are forever changed when hearing the deranged samples, abrasive sub-bass, and frenetic melodies that chirp and scrape alongside your inner ear. And if you take the next step to translate the lyrics, you’ll be met with the absurdly profane and profanely absurd in equal measure. But once you’ve taken that first step, you’re addicted; you’ll want to hear the next, more extreme album that you can get your hands on. Take my experience with DJ K’s Panico No Submundo as a reminder to slow down and return to those gateway albums. Two years removed, and the shocking experimentalism I found harsh is gone; instead, there’s a melodic, almost measured approach. DJ K’s music is still wildly filthy and deranged, but at this point it comes across almost conservative in how it maintains clean synth lines and a mindset squarely focused on the dancefloor. I’m not saying it won’t scare away your coworkers if you share it with them, just that an attuned ear can appreciate it for more than what the airbrushed horror clowns on the cover hint at when you dive in. — TP
There are three albums on this list that center squarely on the guitar, each bearing little resemblance to the other two beyond their shared focal hero. One borrowed so heavily from the electronic genre that it bent the way we conceived the guitar’s possibilities; the other stripped music down to its barest form, outlining the skeleton of the instrument and experimenting in pure, ancestral fashion. Xavi’s NEXT occupied a center point between the two, relying on the acoustic guitar to be every instrument in the backing band. Save for two tracks on the album, NEXT featured only Xavi’s vocals and a flurry of acoustic playing — frantic strumming as the kick drum, slow and low plucking as the bass guitar, and long, drawn-out high notes as the keys and strings. Much in the same way that Xavi stretched the limitations of acoustic playing, he warped traditional, regional Mexican styles into a modernized and urban one, updating his heritage to an audience completely unfamiliar with it. NEXT was the total repackaging of Mexican culture with a global, chart-topping eye. For those who paid attention, it was a portal into another world, one more playful and explorative than our own. — ZW
I saw MJ Lenderman live last night. I used to think And the Wind (Live and Loose!) was one of those rare live performances that everyone involved in was lucky enough to capture. That there was magic in the air that night and the stars aligned for 60 perfect minutes. Irreplicable. It’s obvious in hindsight now that that magic is present in all of his performances. Even seeing it in person, there’s a suspended sense of disbelief in terms of what you’re actually seeing. Surely there’s some studio trickery. Maybe he’s lip syncing. He plays impeccably, offering little more than a smile and a sip of his canned beer in between songs. But it’s real, and it’s even better than what gets pressed to vinyl. And the Wind gave us a richer take on the Boat Songs highlights while hinting at where Manning Fireworks would take us. It was heavy without losing sight of Lenderman’s signature back-to-basics approach to songwriting. It was what we knew, showered in textures we didn’t know his music could use.
At the end of the show last night, the six-piece band covered “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” I’m holding out hope that this is some sort of cosmic indication that, just like Springsteen, And the Wind was the first of a dozen more live albums to come. — ZW
I’ve always wanted to attend that surprise Weeknd show in Uncut Gems. I’m not even that big of a Weeknd fan, but there was something so otherworldly about that specific showering of black lights, synths, proximity, and exclusivity. DFTK was our ticket in, no daydreaming necessary, no Manhattan penthouse required. We were on the ground floor to the new age, a fluorescent nexus between the underground and the mainstream. But it wasn’t just hot, it was entirely unique. Yung Kayo was as effortless on rage tracks (“YEET”) as he was on bop (“it’s a monday”) or freaked-out electronic music (“hear you”). Maybe this fluidity shouldn’t have come as any surprise for an up-and-coming YSL artist. In many ways, DFTK shared a bloodline with Barter 6, honing in on an idiosyncratic style that should have taken decades to perfect. But where Young Thug shrank himself to a disquieting degree of intimacy, Yung Kayo made himself as big as the world. Bigger, in fact. For a brief moment in space and time, Yung Kayo became light itself, a transformation that not even he himself has been able to replicate since. — ZW
To me, the peaks and valleys of this decade have actually felt more like points of compression followed by relief. Politically speaking, there’s not been many highs, just consistent lows. You’re either holding your breath to make it through, or you’re finally exhaling when this system isn’t bearing down on you. Realizing things routinely get worse and it’s more about “getting through” rather than “overcoming” takes lived experience, yet KeiyaA embodies it on her debut Forever, Ya Girl. The R&B singer/producer was only 27 when she unspooled this world-weary, intimate, and hypnotic collection of songs that detail the weights that our society encumbers Black women with. “I’m riddled with demons, it’s time to release them once and for all/I’m dealing with burdens I never deserved, yet I’m responsible/The wheels gon’ keep turning/And I’ma keep burning, so baby roll up.” These lines appear on more than one of Forever, Ya Girl’s 16 tracks, sometimes slightly altered, as if KeiyaA is constantly churning through the process of how to endure in an unfair world. This isn’t to say that the album is overly morose or self-serious; throughout it, her performance is often funny or nonchalant, and it’s what makes this release feel so miraculous. The squeeze put on KeiyaA by this world obviously exhausts her, but somehow she maintains a Zen-like ability to escape with her sanity intact, finding light in these brief songs that balance dense feeling with dreamy release. — TP
House music is as much about space as it is about sound. Where the music is being performed can dictate its flow, its tonal palette, and the people that are sharing in the communal experience. But as live music places shrink and scenes get flattened and commodified, it begs the question of where does deep house like Loidis’ One Day function? The answer seems to be in the music itself; Brian Leeds buries his grooves in cerebral fluid, shutting out locomotive grooves and aiming for a twitching, microscopic kineticism. It’s the kind of house music born out of isolation and a lack of space, but through its 67 minutes, it manages to expand and make room for itself through patience and repetition. By the time we reach “Why Do,” the mid-tempo finale, an equilibrium has been reached where the abyssal synths appear almost playful, and the issue of physical space is no longer an issue as Leeds invites everyone to join him in his heady whirlpool of house and techno. — TP
Listen after listen, we were never really able to wrap our heads around What Is Not Strange? Its slippery grip, comprised of near-formless ambient pieces and heavily structured baroque ones too, made for a completely evasive experience each and every time. This was music designed for a museum exhibit, heard only by those who sought it out enough to understand it. Even then, its current medium never felt apt. To stream it against the other albums of 2024 stripped it of its spiritual purity by assigning it some semblance of structured consumption. Even ranking it against other albums now feels like a betrayal to both its artfulness and its sense of confrontation.
Across each playthrough, it became apparent that Tashi Wada and Julia Holter themselves had their hands forced by the very act of formatting their pieces into a structured album. The sequencing of What Is Not Strange? was irrelevant. These were not songs that flowed naturally into one another, nor did their placement reveal some deeper juxtaposition in sound. They were fractals that coexisted across space but not time, crushed and mapped back into our world, conforming poorly to our liminal constraints. We would never know this album as it was designed to be known, but the very act of searching for that vision, for the possibility to one day sync with the two creators, even if wholly impossible, made each listen more confusingly enticing than the last. It was only through the now obviously futile exploration that we unearthed the vast limitlessness of our enduring ignorance. — ZW
Learn more about A Half-Decade in Review: The 100 Best Music Releases from 2020–2024