Best of 2017

The Young Folks’ Top 50 Albums of 2017

50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 21-11 | 10-1

40. Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds from Another Planet

After spending last year’s Psychopomp reflecting on her mother’s death, Michelle Zauner continued to turn the focus inward on her latest project, the introspective, sci-fi Soft Sounds from Another Planet, her second album under the Japanese Breakfast moniker. Pulling from an array of influences, she has married shoegaze, electronic beats, and even orchestral swoons, creating a vivid tapestry of sounds over which to bare her soul. This smooth, sleek album is the sort of ambitious effort that we would expect from a seasoned artist. Zauner’s songs have always been occupied with big ideas, and now she has the aesthetic grandeur to go along with her existential lyricism. – Brian Thompson

39. Wolf Alice – Visions of a Life

While Wolf Alice’s first outing, My Love is Cool, worked as an introduction to their style – a sort of hybrid of introspective shoegaze and sneering punk rock, their second record Visions of a Life demonstrated just how casually skilled Wolf Alice is at crafting their sound and communicating it with gusto. The album beings with a strange one-two punch of the dreamy “Heavenward,” shortly followed by “Yuk Foo” in which lead singer Ellie Roswell shrieks that “you bore me to death” and “I don’t give a shit.” That splash of acid is followed by a pop song (“Beautifully Unconventional”) and the romantic, optimistic “Don’t Delete the Kisses.” That switch-up between each track continues throughout as we get other mixes of rock, whispered thoughts, and near ballads. It’s a grab-bag of bold, unique sounds that never fail to keep your interest, and it leaves us wondering what big steps their next album will take. – Beth Winchester

38. Thundercat – Drunk

Equal parts enigmatic and down-to-earth, Thundercat seems to use the hipster atmosphere of low-fi R&B to find new ways to tell the woes of a hopeless romantic. Not only does it sound sincere and far beyond the music of his commercial contemporaries, it’s also incredibly funky. His third studio album is a 23-track opus about the thoughts and travels of a man thinking about his place in the world while deeply intoxicated. In fact, intoxicating is one of many adjectives that could describe Drunk as it’s flooded with dreamy synthesizers, jazzy drum beats and Thundercat’s fast fingers on his six-string bass. His soulful falsetto carries the quirky ramblings of “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)” and the modern heartbreak of “Friend Zone,” where he’d rather button-mash as Johnny Cage than get shut down by a girl he pines after. That’s the wonder of Thundercat, the musicianship of Isaac Hayes and Steely Dan for the meme generation. – Jon Winkler

37. Waxahatchee – Out in the Storm

Since her work with P.S. Eliot, Katie Crutchfield’s songwriting has had a tendency for sameness. Her light, lo-fi alt-folk sound is unique and beautiful, but her melodies are often hard to differentiate from each other. With Out in the Storm, the best album Crutchfield has put out at this point, she corrects this by upping the tempos, making more of a racket, and just writing a better group of songs. With a louder, more punkish sound (courtesy of producer John Agnello) steering these tracks, she shows a rougher, angrier side of herself lyrically. “When I think about it, I wanna punch the wall,” she sings on “Brass Beam.” On the opener, meanwhile, she belts, “Everyone will hear me complain/Everyone will pity my pain.” – Matt Rice

36. Laura Marling – Semper Femina

With her sixth album, Semper Femina, Laura Marling gives us something effortless. Each song is amazingly well crafted, where simple melodies and an easy, gentle sound hide deeper, more complex themes. Marling is a songwriting master, the bareness of these songs only showing just how good she is at her craft. Songs like “Nouel” sound amazingly simple but in their simplicity, serve as multiple things: a tribute, a paean, an elegy. Marling grapples with ideas of womanhood and femininity, exploring them in multitudes throughout the tracks. Gentle and soft but never flimsy, Marling proves her worth and crafts these tracks in such a precise, pointed way that’s perfect to dig into, take apart, and explore. – Katie Gill

35. Taylor Swift – Reputation

To say that Reputation is a change in direction for Taylor Swift—a former country star turned America’s—the world’s—pop princess turned polarizing fallen angel—is an understatement. Where her old works were guitar strums and piano keys (or, in the case of 2014’s 1989, airy synths and 80s flair), her sixth LP is musical weaponry: pounding bass, staccato vocals, trap beats. But Swift’s appeal has never lay in what her songs sound like; she’s a songwriter, first and foremost, and a damn good one at that. And rest assured: her love affair with love, her penchant for drama, her killer bridges—everything that combines to give her a lyrical prowess unlike any other pop icon in recent memory—show up in full force, elevating the record from a fairly standard 2017 pop album into a mega-selling, critically successful phenomenon. No one, particularly after the album’s lead single and lyrical and sonic outlier “Look What You Made Me Do,” thought Reputation would ever be the comeback album Swift needed it to be after years of PR hell. But proving the doubters wrong? I guess that’s something Old Taylor and New Taylor have in common. – Drew Norman

34. Alt-J – Relaxer

Released relatively quietly over the summer, Alt-J’s third record received less widespread attention than their previous efforts, but if you gave the album a chance you were hit with something truly memorable. While Alt-J has always produced odd aural textures with their work, the songs on Relaxer were even more layered and unexpected than what had come before. While there may not be many marketable singles here, what you get instead is an album that works as a remarkably cohesive single piece of art that takes you on an unusual, but fascinating journey. Even the “cover song” (a trivial description in this case) of “House of the Rising Sun” is made much more complex than would be expected. The sound is large and cinematic, which is emphasized by the accompanying music videos created for five of the eight album tracks. It’s hard to define exactly what Alt-J is doing, but you know that it’s something worth paying attention to. – Beth Winchester

33. The Magnetic Fields – 50 Song Memoir

In 1999, The Magnetic Fields released their masterpiece 69 Love Songs, an album that is exactly what it sounds like: Stephin Merritt’s three-disc tribute to the entire idea of love songs, an album that showed off the consistency of his writing and the band’s eclecticism in three nearly perfect hours of music.

Apparently, long-form conceptualism is good for the band, since 50-Song Memoir could easily be the band’s second best record. Here, it’s two-and-a-half hours on five ten-track discs, each song dedicated to a year in Merritt’s life. For many singer-songwriters, this would result in narcissism, but Merritt has more than himself in mind. On “‘69 Judy Garland,” he pays tribute to the Stonewall riots, which he far too young to be a part of. By the time he gets to the 1980s, his affection for synthesizers and John Foxx ought to be as relatable to aging post-punk kids as anything on The Mountain Goats’ latest. But when he deals with his personal life–a terrifying moment at a Jefferson Airplane show, an abusive stepfather, several failed relationships–magic happens, again and again, for an entire lifetime’s worth of songs. – Matt Rice

32. Foster the People – Sacred Hearts Club

As its name suggests, Foster the People has always created music that both empathizes with and uplifts listeners. This is especially apparent on Sacred Hearts Club, an album that shows the band “calling all the poets into battle” against the fear and hatred that seem so prevalent in modern America. Some of its songs are a testament to the beauty of human connection—e.g. the groovy single “Sit Next to Me.” Others discuss the dark side of human nature—e.g. the EDM-influenced “Loyal Like Sid and Nancy,” which mashes up allusions to everyone from Gatsby to Satan in an attempt to answer the timely question, “Why are we so far from love?” Yet all of its tracks share the same key elements: poetic lyrics, vocals that show off Mark Foster’s impressive range, and irrepressible energy. – Brittany Menjivar

31. Dua Lipa – Dua Lipa

One of the greatest pop albums of the year came from a newcomer: Dua Lipa and her self titled debut album. Dua Lipa is a pop masterpiece, equally brash and reflective, full of multiple pop bangers that fit perfectly at home with the 2017 pop music soundscape. It’s slightly tropical house, slightly EDM, but beautiful, husky, pop perfection. Cocky self-aggrandizing songs like “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” rest perfectly next to breakup anthems like “New Rules,” one of pop radio’s most underrated tracks this year. Her powerful and unique voice is the highlight of the album, bringing style and shine to each track, highlighting their lyrical prowess in the process. With the album, Dua Lipa establishes herself as a pop powerhouse and someone to definitely look forward to in 2018 and onwards.- Katie Gill