The season for year-end best-of lists is upon us, which means it’s time to count down the year’s best albums from a staggeringly huge list of excellent 2013 releases. From Reznor’s digital reinvention to Kanye’s messianic delusion, from Arcade Fire’s Haitian voodoo to Queens of The Stone Age’s cathartic darkness and back again, our speakers got quite a workout this year – now we’re taking a look back at the best of the best.
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20 Best Albums of 2013
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20. CHVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe
Released: Sept. 20
Label: Virgin
The Bones of What You Believe is the sound of artists self-vivisecting for your pleasure, taking personal turmoil to the jumbotron with a demand to explore the disconnects we’ve hidden ourselves behind in the digital era. Avoiding guitars almost entirely, this unabashedly sincere work of indie pop is clean, sharp and exquisitely produced.
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19. Red Fang - Whales and Leeches
Released: Oct 15
Label: Relapse
Honing their burly-riffed excellence, these Portland rock churners continue to distill what they do best with each release. With nods to Sabbath, Soundgarden and Neurosis, Red Fang fully embrace their responsibility to provide the soundtrack to crushing beer cans and picking through ashtrays for workable butts.
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18. The National – Trouble Will Find Me
Released: May 18
Label: 4AD
Midtempo misery has found its home, and The National have become jedis at poignancy. Guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner frame Matt Berninger's baritone gravity with renewed boundary, while letting a little light into the sad darkness of their past offerings. With a slight pop flirtation and compact emotional urgency, Trouble Will Find Me is the perfect album for understated melancholy. Come on feel the sighs.
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17. Lorde - Pure Heroine
Released: Sept. 30
Label: Universal
17-year-old New Zealand pop savant Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O'Connor is the current queen of the airwaves, with her hit "Royals" bitch-slapping the status quo of music culture. Her debut album is no filler vehicle, however, showcasing a sultry, savvy and impossibly catchy star in the making who doesn’t rely on Miley's theatrics or Katy's tits. Pay attention to this one.
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16. Sigur Ros - Kveikur
Released: June 18
Label: XL Recordings
Taking more aggressive approach this time around, Sigur Rós supplements dreamy, aching atmospherics with a sense of poppy mysticism, and they’re all the better for it. Their most noise-driven and heavy record yet eschews the sanctity of delicate symphonic arrangements, allowing the enchanting post-rockers a chance to get their rocks off, in their own way.
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15. Janelle Monáe - The Electric Lady
Released: Sept. 6
Label: Bad Boy
Janelle Monáe’s meticulous insistence on maintaining her impenetrable robotic shell may be holding her back at this point. The Electric Lady, her wonderful second album, is an instant-classic R&B and soul album, laced with jazz and gospel and a nod to Ziggy-era Bowie, but is begging for a hair-down embrace of warmth. We’re enthusiastically on the bandwagon nonetheless, thanks to an album that concretes our belief that Janelle has the makings of a superstar.
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14. David Bowie - The Next Day
Released: March 8
Label: Columbia
Bowie’s first album in a decade is a showcase of the Thin White Duke’s creative genius, an emotionally engaging rollercoaster of potential future classics with an untethered sense of sonic flexibility. Moving fluidly between styles in a surprisingly accessible framework, The Next Day is rife with playful nods to the Bowie mythos, and we can’t help the poignance of feeling that it’s a perfect a setup to be Bowie’s swan song. Aided by longtime producer Tony Visconti and longtime session musicians, The Next Day could very well be a new beginning for Bowie - but if it’s the final chapter, it’s a beautifully fitting one.
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13. Sound City Players - Sound City: Real to Reel
Released: March 12
Label: RCA
Ever wondered what Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails and Queens of The Stone Age would sound like as one band? The soundtrack to Dave Grohl’s Sound City documentary features a barrage of artists who recorded at the legendary Los Angeles studio writing and recording new songs together on the spot. These names speak for themselves: Joshua Homme. Paul McCartney. Trent Reznor. Stevie Nicks. Corey Taylor. Alain Johannes. Rick Springfield. Krist Novoselic. The list goes on, and the collaborations are incredible.
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12. Arcade Fire - Reflektor
Released: Oct. 28
Label: Merge
Deeply indulgent, entirely committed and absolutely awesome, Reflektor is quite possibly Arcade Fire’s Achtung Baby moment, a turning point of artistic evolution and relevance that concretes the band’s flexible commercial permanence. Employing James Murphy's post-punk palette & modern-dance production acumen and splicing in Caribbean rhythms with barely a nod to rock n’ roll, Win Butler and friends have made a bizarre, brash and groundbreaking record that overwhelms, inspires and weirds you the fuck out. And that’s a great thing.
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11. Russian Circles - Memorial
Released: Oct. 29
Label: Sargent House
Chicago’s instrumental crush groovers Russian Circles returned with their strongest offering yet in 2013, an evolutionary leap for the entirety of post-metal within a more polished and fluid step for the band. At a sharply concise 38 minutes rife with imaginative arrangements and magnificent compositions, Memorial presents an elaborate menagerie of otherworldly sound, a direct call to action for any band who may have previously called these wizards peers.
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10. Atoms For Peace - Amok
Released: Feb 25
Label: XL Recordings
Thom Yorke’s perpetually melancholy brand of dance-addict glitch-jitter is given a proper indulgence with help from Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco and Flea, resulting in a gorgeous celebration of counterintuitive beat patterns, subtle organics and digital manipulation. Amok has nothing to offer the guitar-loving analog disciples of the Church of Grohl & White – while not entirely free of guitar, it is a headphones album through and through, a collection of digitized schizophrenic beat designs one might listen to while preparing to impersonate someone with advanced Parkinson’s on the dancefloor.
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9. Portugal. The Man - Evil Friends
Released: June 4
Label: Atlantic
Rock’s weirdest quintet moved into Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton’s house in Los Angeles early this year, emerging with a pop-flirting album of pure psychedelic genius. The band's most accessible and radio-friendly material yet still sounds entirely Portugal, the vortex of trippiness and mysticism always tugging at the seams. Good luck getting these melodies out of your head.
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8. Clutch - Earth Rocker
Released: March 15
Label: Weathermaker Music
These are grown-ass men in their forties, swinging like an ’86 Mike Tyson on their new album Earth Rocker – eleven tracks of pure piston-pumping juggernaut uppercuts of devastating excellence. No fat, no hesitation, just raw muscle and smirk. Neil Fallon and Co. didn’t just hash this one out in the studio, opting instead to plot out every moment before entering The Machine Shop in Belleville, NJ, where they would finish the process with veteran producer Machine. At Machine’s urging, the band established the same energy arc on record that their remarkable live show delivers. As a result, Earth Rocker captures a live essence that carries the listener through a balanced journey, an album full of A-sides that finds Clutch at their finest. Superior programming. Superior hardware. Superior firepower. Find this album and blast it righteously.
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7. Pearl Jam - Lightning Bolt
Released: Oct. 11
Label: Monkeywrench
“I found my place, and it’s alright,” Eddie Vedder declares on Getaway, the danceable lead track from Pearl Jam‘s tenth album Lightning Bolt. “I got my own way to believe.” And now, at last, the rock veterans have given us a new way to believe in them. Through marriage, children, loss and the ever-intensifying complexity of our modern world, the sounds on Lightning Bolt are evidence of considerable change having taken place in Pearl Jam members’ worlds, but the record carries a less wearisome weight than its predecessor, and reinvigorates the spirit we felt dimming or adrift in Backspacer. We’re not mired in literalism this time around, and Vedder’s lyrical angles are now set on honest assessment of damage and a rekindling of soul with a steadier confidence, a more determined destiny. Welcome back, boys.
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6. Kanye - Yeezus
Released: June 18
Label: Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam
Shocker: Kanye West is an antagonistic asshole narcissist. He concretely confirms such a statement with Yeezus, a collection so sincerely deluded and self-worshipping you can’t help but love its bravado. It’s a progressive clash of textures and sounds, dance-mandate beats and bouts of free-fall silence that fit more cohesively alongside a Death Grips release than anything coming from the Hip-Hop bin, and Kanye's most honest work yet amid a wash of Godzilla-sized egomania. Yeezus is an intensely polarizing release, with no middle ground for "okay" – you're either going to love it, or hate the almighty shit out of it. Outrageous, violent and misogynistic lyricism? Check. Red-level sonic overload polished by superproducer Rick Rubin? Check. Primal screaming over what 'Ye describes as a “super low-bit” sound with completely dissonant mid-song interludes? You bet your ass. It's a deliciously challenging forty-minute run for the invested, wherein Frank Ocean and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon mix with samples from Brenda Lee to Indian film scores to Hungarian rock. It's all over the place, held together by a progressive command of intensity and dark-dancefloor aggression.
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5. Tricky - False Idols
Released: May 28
Label: False Idols
Welcome to the best sex record of 2013. An enormous step forward for the Massive Attack alum, False Idols presents a deeper maturity, a stronger confidence and an embrace of nuance that’s downright erotic. Tricky enlists Francesca Belmonte, Nneka Egbuna, Fifi Rong and The Antlers’ Peter Silberman for vocal textures through impossibly enchanting tracks like “Nothing’s Changed,” “Is That Your Life” and beyond, playing with dissonant sonic layers, spacious darkness and the sweetest kind of gravity. Get naked with this one.
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4. Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks
Released: Aug. 30
Label: Polydor
New Wave for the industrial grind. After a three-year NIN hiatus, Trent Reznor returns with the industrial juggernaut we’ve all missed - but trades the rage and danger for a minimalist approach, programmed beats and… happiness? It’s an unexpected and polarizing ride for longtime fans, but through strong songwriting, impeccable production and a determination not to rehash past anger, Reznor has made the transition from grim & bitter screaming mess of aggression to a limitless, if slightly understated, atmosphere of digital ticks, blips and tension. Hesitation Marks refers to the preliminary wounds made during a suicide attempt, the blade’s caress before going in for the kill. It’s an appropriate title for an album that shows little fang but plenty of menace beneath a hypnotically inventive surface.
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3. Arctic Monkeys - AM
Released: Sept. 6
Label: Domino
Shedding all signs of the jittery Yorkshire adolescence the band was first defined by, The Monkeys returned to Joshua Homme’s alchemy lab in the deserts of Joshua Tree, California to “brown the garlic,” as frontman Alex Turner explains, and in the process extracted a spin of nineties hip-hop, seventies dark-rock and enchanting melodic inventiveness that makes AM easily among 2013′s most enthralling releases. The results are incredible, and no stylistic accident, but rather a carefully architected construction of the strongest survivors in their creative process. There are bands who remember the power of an album. The impact of that first riff, that initial collar-pop verse and guarantee of greatness to follow, the right uppercut of a second song to take hold and pull you deeper, hijacking the hips.
Turner has found a specific intent of the heart, and along with his Monkeys he has climbed to the very top of their mountain, in the process evolving into one of rock n’ roll’s greatest hopes.
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2. Eminem - Marshall Mathers LP 2
Released: Nov. 4
Label: Shady/Interscope
Before Eminem dyed his hair back to blonde and fell back in love with rapping, there was little argument to be made against the notion that Marshall Mathers is the single greatest flowmaster alive. Now, with the Marshall Mathers LP 2 delivering white-knuckled lyrical acrobatics over nearly two dozen tracks, the deck is impossibly stacked in EM’s favor. Nobody comes within screaming range of his lyrical devastation or his rhyme execution, whether he’s documenting Stan's little brother coming back to chop Slim Shady into Slim Jims, rapping over Joe Walsh or the Beastie Boys or launching from Rick Rubin’s finest groundwork in years. The greatest release of Eminem’s career is upon us, and the entire cast of the autofellating rap game of 2013 just took a backhand to the face.
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1. Queens of The Stone Age - Like Clockwork
Released: June 4
Label: Matador
The nightmare carousel grinds back into motion. More real, raw and direct than ever before in both production and composition, …Like Clockwork is the long-awaited studio return of a revamped QOTSA. While 2007′s Era Vulgaris was a razor-sharp whipcrack in a vortex of cool, beyond the signature sexual chocolate …Like Clockwork is a trip of honest fragility bleeding through deeply layered textures and harmonies, a pendular swing volleying between forlorn vulnerability and fire-christened renewal.
