Best Albums 2021 | commonpeople

50

LIMINAL SOUL
Kedr Livanskiy

Livanskiy's music is for acid trips in dark clubs. Less dance oriented and more hypnotic than ever, Liminal Soul creates depth and space around you.

Best tracks: Posmotri nas Nebo, Boy, Your Turn

49

DEATH OF A CHEERLEADER
Pom Pom Squad

If 2020 was the year of reviving disco, 2021 was the year of reviving 90s rock-pop, and Pom Pom Squad were amongst the best revivalists.

Best tracks: Head Cheerleader, Lux, Crying

48

PARADIGMES
La Femme

With a vintage filter over their mix of psychedelic rock, 60's pop and jazz instruments, Paradigmes is chic, sexy and fun in all the French right ways.

Best tracks: Paradigmes, Cool Colorado, La Sang de mon Prochain

47

SLING
Clairo

Sling is Clairo's statement of the artist that she wants to be, pushing towards indie and away from pure pop. It is also deeply personal and honest.

Best tracks: Amoeba, Blouse, Bambi

46

CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
Tyler, the Creator

Although still full of great ideas, after the masterpiece that was Igor, Tyler's newest feels like a step back to his old themes of women, money, and cars.

Best tracks: Wusyaname, Lumberjack, Lemonhead

45

PRIORITISE PLEASURE
Self Esteem

Music about self-affirmation tends to be cheesy and cliché, but Taylor is able to subvert expectations and create something fun, creative, and meaningful.

Best tracks: I do This All the Time, Prioritise Pleasure, Moody

44

FRIENDS THAT BREAK YOUR HEART
James Blake

Blake found his way back after the disastrous Assume Form on this dark electronic exploration of disappointment, betrayal, and confidence.

Best tracks: Say What You Will, Famous Last Words, Life is not the Same

43

STAR-CROSSED
Kacey Musgraves

One more step further away from country and closer to Carly Rae Jepsen's alt-pop, Star-Crossed paints with pastel colors over the gloom of separation,

Best tracks: Justified, Breadwinner, Star-Crossed

42

IRA
Iosonouncane

Jacopo Incani gave a 180 turn in his latest album, trading his indie-folk for dark atmospheric electronics in a meditative exploration of migrations.

Best tracks: Hiver, Ashes, Jabal

41

EL MADRILEÑO
C. Tangana

Even with the deducted points for traditional toxic masculinity themes, this album is a creative reinterpretation of the whole history of Spanish music.

Best tracks: Tú me Dejaste de Querer, Nunca Estoy, Párteme la Cara

40

SOUR
Olivia Rodrigo

Although Rodrigo's album is part 90's pop-rock and part Gen Z's R&B, it is far more interesting when it channels Garbage, No Doubt, and Elastica.

Best tracks: Good 4 U, Brutal, Deja Vu

39

MENNESKEKOLLEKTIVET
Lost Girls

A collaborative album between two of the most creative minds in Norway, it's like a stream of consciousness in the lyrics and on the musical ideas.

Best tracks: Menneskekollektivet, Real Life, Losing Something

38

FAR IN
Helado Negro

Not only this is Lange's most collaborative album to date, it's also his most accesible and fun, a shiny synth-pop that invites to the dancefloor.

Best tracks: Gemini & Leo, Outside the Outside, La Naranja

37

30
Adele

"Divorce, baby, divorce". That's how Adele summed her fourth album, in which she let us peek at her most intimate desolation after a separation.

Best tracks: To be Loved, My Little Love, Hold on

36

KICK III
Arca

From the five albums that are part of their Kick project, it is the most electronic experimental one, the one that embodies better Ghersi's ethos.

Best tracks: Bruja, Incendio, Joya

35

CHEMTRAILS OVER THE COUNTRY CLUB
Lana del Rey

Although it's quite a downgrade from Norman Fucking Rockwell! and it's her "white album" for the wrong reasons, del Rey's poetic voice is undeniable.

Best tracks: White Dress, Let me Love you Like a Woman, Chemtrails over the Country Club

34

GLOW ON
Turnstile

Knowing that they are punks at heart, Turnstile allow a broad range experimentations with metal, shoegaze, even R&B. They dictate the rules.

Best tracks: Mystery, Holiday, Blackout

33

-IO
Circuit des Yeux

-io is Haley Fohr's most ambitious (and at the same time, most accessible) project to date. Almost a rock operetta, it's huge in its alt-orchestration.

Best tracks: Dogma, Vanishing, Sculpting the Exodus

32

SHADE
Grouper

Hazy vocals that are barely understandable, lo-fi raw production, an unfiltered guitar, and above all, the emotional depth of musical poetry.

Best tracks: Unclean Mind, Kelso (Blue Sky), Ode to the Blue

31

LET ME DO ONE MORE
Illuminati Hotties

Irreverent, defiant, and just plainly cool. Sarah Tudzin's music is funny but clever, the kind of album that delivers laughs and "yeahs" but with brains.

Best tracks: MMMOOOAAAAYAYA, U v v p, Knead

30

PROMISES
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra

Built around a motif of seven tingling notes, Promises is an exploration of sound possibilities, mixing contemporary classical, jazz and electronics.

Best tracks: Movement 1, Movement 6, Movement 5

29

HEAUX TALES
Jazmine Sullivan

Sullivan offers a superb concept album about womanhood standing against patriarchal oppression through sorority and subversion of role expectations.

Best tracks: Lost One, Pick Up Your Feelings, Girl Like Me

28

ULTRAPOP
The Armed

Don't judge this album by its name... or by its cover. Ultrapop is the best and most daring hardcore rock album we've heard in some time.

Best tracks: An Iteration, Average Death, All Futures

27

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH
Spirit of the Beehive

The lo-fi quality in their recordings make them sound eerie and discomforting, a smart balance between analog and digital creepiness.

Best tracks: The Server is Immersed, I Suck the Devil's Cock, There's Nothing You Can't Do

26

ANY SHAPE YOU TAKE
Indigo de Souza

De Souza's particular voice, which sounds as if it would break at any moment, gives a particular sense of vulnerability to her dirty indie rock.

Best tracks: Hold U, Real Pain, Kill Me.

25

JIKAN (時間)
Betcover!!

One of the best examples of the inventiveness in Japanese alternative music, Betcover!! mixes jazz and shoegaze, making them dance together in a smart, yet meditative and emotional way.

Best tracks: Kaiten・Tenshi, Kitsune, Shima

24

BLUE BANISTERS
Lana del Rey

Much more focused than Chemtrails, Lana's second album of the year gives us the Lana that is able to transform her personal stories and her vintage color palette into broader ideas about life in the XXI century.

Best tracks: Text Book, Arcadia, Black Bathing Suit

23

AN OVERVIEW ON PHENOMENAL NATURE
Cassandra Jenkins

Jenkins excels at her detailed recount of the mundane little moments, and her ability to find knowledge and emotional depth in them, so running into a security guard or a driving lesson, are transformative.

Best tracks: Hard Drive, Michelangelo, Crosshairs

22

HOME VIDEO
Lucy Dacus

The songs are still brilliant chronicles of Dacus' personal life; an inspired rethinking of her teenager diaries, but now they are paired to a bolder, more complex sound that gives a hazy aura to her narrations.

Best tracks: Thumbs, VBS Hot & Heavy

21

COMFORT TO ME
Amyl & the Sniffers

Raw punk music! The intense energy never decays for a second, and the combination of dirty guitar riffs and Amy Taylor's electrifying performance make for one of the most thrilling listenings of the year.

Best tracks: Guided by Angels, Hertz, Freaks to the Front

20

COLOURGRADE
Tirzah

Tirzah deconstructs what a love ballad is and focuses on the possibilities of what it could be. By adding extra-worldly experimentations, she is designing a musical language of her own.

Best tracks: Send Me, Sink In, Tectonic

19

DEACON
Serpentwithfeet

Deacon is a collection of R&B ballads that celebrate love in all its forms, but, above all, celebrate a world where two black men are able to love each other totally freely, a world that, sadly, is still part-fiction.

Best tracks: Fellowship, Same Size Shoe, Heart Storm

18

FATIGUE
L'Rain

In Fatigue, Taja Cheek explores the possibilities that music as a medium can offer to covey her stories, with songs that range from 10 seconds to 6 minutes, from simple loops to intrincate orchestral instrumentations.

Best tracks: Find it, Two Face, Suck Teeth

17

TO SEE THE NEXT PART OF THE DREAM
Parannoul (파란노을)

In the age of algorithms dictating what to listen to, a random guy from Seoul making experimental lo-fi shoegaze in his bedroom and posting it to Bandcamp is the best finding anyone can hope for.

Best tracks: Aleumdaun Sesang, Huincheonjang, Anallogeu Sentimentallijeum

16

SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT
Little Simz

Simbiatu Ajikawo not only proves that her verses are hot and fierce in personal narrations of how her identities have been shaped, but contrary to what the title suggest, she exploded the scope of her sound.

Best tracks: Introvert, Woman, Point and Kill

15

COLLAPSED IN SUNBEAMS
Arlo Parks

Parks' voice is like a balm, most of the time soft and soothing, but it can burn if what is needed is quick reinvigoration. A collection of R&B ballads that deal with burn-out, mental health, and kindness.

Best tracks: Black Dog, Caroline, Hope

14

HEY WHAT
Low

Trust master experimenters of Low, with almost 30 years committed to their craft, to be able to sound industrial and ambient at once. Distorted melodies that are disorienting and brutal but also ethereal and hypnotic.

Best tracks: Days like These, White Horses, More

13

BRIGHT GREEN FIELD
Squid

Squid's debut is quite a stimulating experience, powerful enough to make us transit through a diverse emotional palette through its length: anger, exhilaration, frustration, and the particular joie-de-vivre punk.

Best tracks: Narrator, Paddling, Pamphlets

12

IGNORANCE
The Weather Station

Sometimes more is actually more, and adding a full band for support just opened infinite doors of possibilities for Tamara Lindeman, who crafted an album that is as inventive as it is sophisticated.

Best tracks: Atlantic, Robber, Parking Lot

11

JUBILEE
Japanese Breakfast

This is how you change gears to move from interesting to essential. Jubilee is expansive and catchy, an indie-pop album that shines with original instrumentations, but without losing Zauner's rock energy.

Best tracks: Be Sweet, Savage Good Boy, Paprika

10

MERCURIAL WORLD
Magdalena Bay

This should have been the album for Grimes to do instead of Miss Anthropocene to keep advancing her blends of alt-electropop in the clever and funny direction she had before Elon arrived. But Mercurial World is ubiquitous to the point of condensing a bit from every decade: yes, it could sound like Chvrches, but also like MGMT and of course a bit like Spice Girls, and somewhat also like Scritti Politti as well.

Best tracks: Chaeri, Secrets (Your Fire), You Lose!

9

AFRIQUE VICTIME
Mdou Moctar

Only those amazing guitar playing skills would have been enough reason to give praise for this album. But the way he pair traditional tishoumaren music, the so-called "desert blues" from the Tuareg, with psychedelic progressive rock is quite the way to put North African music in the international radar. In a time of decolonializing our music libraries, what better way to do it with an album about colonialism?

Best tracks: Afrique Victime, Chismiten, Tala Tannam

8

NEW LONG LEG
Dry Cleaning

Although it would be a stretch to say that Florence Shaw is taking a spoken word mixed with music in the way that Casandra Jenkins or Self Esteem did this same year, it would also be hard to say that she is singing. Her stale approach to performance also lacks the irony of Faye Webster, here we are facing utter exhaustion of the world, "do everything, feel nothing". But hey, those guitar riffs do give a good contrast.

Best tracks: Scratchard Lanyard, Unsmart Lady, Strong Feelings

7

VULTURE PRINCE
Arooj Aftab

For most of its length, Vulture Prince is stripped to simple arrangements of strings and keys accompanying Aftab's sorrowful voice. It is the feeling of loss and grief what is central to the album, an emotional homage to her late brother and her way to cope with death. Yet, in all this simplicity there's such a complex mix of references (not only musical, but also literary and mystic) to achieve such magical beauty.

Best tracks: Mohabbat, Diya Hai, Baghon Main

6

I KNOW I'M FUNNY HAHA
Faye Webster

The album title might be deceiving, it is only when you hear it sung in her dead-pan style in the title track that it all makes sense. Her way to cope with vulnerability is detachment, it is the "lol" added after texting "I love you" to make sure that the other person doesn't freak. Yes, there's a sense of sad comedy to it all, but above all, the lyricsm makes this very specific moments incredibly relatable. She's very clever haha.

Best tracks: I Know I'm Funny haha, Cheers, Better Distractions

5

CAVALCADE
Black Midi

How do these young men starting their 20's manage to play in such a virtuoso way? And how is it that they have achieved such a sense of musical abstraction to blend their classical and jazz training with avant-garde experimental progressive rock? An impressive amount of elements that are deconstructed, assembled and rebuild into a surrealist sonic mural that requires several listenings to start making sense.

Best tracks: John L, Slow (Loud), Chondromalacia Patella

4

I DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
The War on Drugs

For a band not at all interested in reinventing the(ir) wheel, it's so fascinating how they manage to find new iterations of the same sound in every new album. Granduciel & co. just keep polishing what has worked for them on introspective rock ballads about wandering lost and finding, if not yourself, at least moments of wisdom. With this attention to detail and pristine production, it's hard to say that it's more of the same.

Best tracks: I don't Live Here Anymore, Living Proof, Change

3

VALENTINE
Snail Mail

Lindsey Jordan not only refined her sound and achieved bigger and bolder arrangements, but she also managed to mature her lyric style while keep talking about the love woes of a young queer woman. There is little doubt that contemporary indie rock is been heavily owned by women (Bridgers, Olsen, Van Etten, Dacus), and Snail Mail is making sure that she is at the front of that disruptive squad.

Best tracks: Valentine, Ben Franklin, Madonna

2

CRAWLER
Idles

If they already proved how powerful they were using their music as a political weapon, Crawler goes inward and shows that they are a band that could also offer powerful music about what's personal. Focusing on frontman's Joe Talbot's drug abuse and the car accident that almost killed him, we get a version of the band less impulsive and more focused, but still as abrasive as always with their powerful punk.

Best tracks: The Beachland Ballroom, Car Crash, MTT 420 RR

1

SEEK SHELTER
Iceage

You could argue that 2021 wasn't an as good year for music as 2020 or 2019, but we'd rather say that it was a solid year that lacked a bomb album, a "Norman Fuckin' Rockwell" or a "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" that would pass easily into history. Instead, this year we went for a choice out of the box, an album that not many other media tipped, but one that shows that punk rock is alive and kicking with strength. Seek Shelter is the most mature and accomplished album of a band that for a whole decade has only gifted us with five solid punk albums. Opening with what could be their most anthemic track to date, Shelter Song includes a gospel choir and words of comfort to alleviate the meaningless and the absurdity of life. But surprises won't stop in an album that has moments with a jazz saxophone, harmonica, or tingling crystals. If they toyed with Britpop in previous albums, here they take a full plunge in 90s rock, and lead singer, Elias Rønnenfelt, opens his dead-pan usual performances to some hints to dramatism and intensity, to showcase his possibilities as a rockstar. In any case, this won't be the album that will get them to stardom, especially in a day and time when rock is so out of favour in the mainstream, but this perhaps might be the album that pushes them to a certain sort of cult in their alternative niche.

Best tracks: Shelter Song, Vendetta, The Holding Hand, Gold City, High & Hurt.