My Ten Best Albums of 2017

This article originally appeared on this site.

I would like to say—without irony, and perhaps at the risk of sounding as if I’m drafting a suicide note—that it has been a true and remarkable pleasure to write about music and culture for The New Yorker in 2017, and especially to share that work with a readership so intelligent and game. The job occasioned some strange days. I shared a carton of lo mein with the photographer William Eggleston. I slept (poorly) in Donald Trump’s childhood home. I found another person who resembles the same celebrity I resemble. I reconsidered Dave Matthews Band and Phish. I heard Bruce Springsteen sing on Broadway. I watched the poet Morgan Parker get a tattoo. I listened to the same John Mayer song on repeat, during a very long car ride across Cuba. I wrote an awful lot of goodbyes.

For me, 2017 was mostly about survival, or figuring out how to balance a fear of the future with continued existence in the present. Over the summer, I discovered a young British singer named Nilüfer Yanya, whose second EP, “Plant Feed,” features just three songs but seems to contain several universes of feeling. Her “Golden Cage” is the track I listened to the most this year. Lyrically, it’s concerned with the strange second period of mourning that often follows that first, more predictable collapse—when a person is no longer flailing against time and circumstance but, rather, reckoning with what she’s left behind. “You’ll never know now,” Yanya sings to her ex-lover, in a round, elastic voice. She’s an aspirational mix of disaffected and engaged, swatting her hair from her lip gloss, gently rocking her shoulders. “It’s kind of about looking forward, but also still being stuck in one place. Wanting to move on, but not wanting to,” she told Pitchfork. Emotional limbo being both scourge and savior, I found it deeply alimental.

Taylor Swift released “Reputation,” her sixth record, which at first seemed like a dopey collection of pop songs about how tired she is of being famous but turned out to be an earnest ode to true love and all its redemptive thrills. Swift is interesting for often appearing vulnerable and calculating at the same time—even her ad-libs are delivered with a cheerleader’s precision—but on “New Year’s Day,” the album’s coda and best song, she’s merely present. “I stay,” she announces. Her voice is unequivocal, accompanied only by piano. She offers a clarification, just in case: “When you’re lost and I’m scared and you’re turning away.” It sounds like a promise, and it is—her intention is to weather any storm, regardless of how uncomfortable things get—but it’s also an assertive proclamation, in which she’s telling us exactly what kind of girl she is. Swift can be subtly manipulative in this way, absolving herself of blame when her relationships curdle. She stays, man—it’s on you to not to be a huge baby and mess everything up. This is one of her most endearing and relatable qualities. “I want your midnights, but I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day,” she promises. I believe her.

In April, the rapper Kendrick Lamar released his fourth record, “DAMN.,” which caused everyone within earshot to go briefly and justifiably nuts. Lamar is one of the most vital and dexterous musicians we have, and “DAMN.” is a particularly nimble indictment of our disquieting times. On “DNA,” he samples noted gasbag Geraldo Rivera—who, in 2015, witlessly suggested that Lamar “has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years”—as both retribution and evidence. Lamar is a personal writer—many of his new songs are rooted in a kind of spiritual crisis—but his purview is so expansive and instinctively political, it made listening to him feel as necessary as reading the newspaper.

I also jammed to a lot of Alice Coltrane—especially “World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,” a posthumous collection of devotional music and Sanskrit chants. (Coltrane recorded the pieces at her ashram in Agoura Hills, California, between 1982 and 1995; Luaka Bop produced and released it as a double LP and cassette last spring.) I was temporarily capsized by several serendipitous discoveries, like a 45 of the Antiguan Calypso singer King Short Shirt, which I impetuously bought on a trip to Memphis and quickly came to require. I arrived late to Ethiopian jazz, particularly to the exceedingly lovely Mulatu Astatke. Over a long weekend in Berlin, I picked up an astounding LP by Les Filles de Illighadad, a group led by the guitarist Fatou Seidi Ghali and the vocalist Alamnou Akrouni, of rural Niger.

Below are my ten favorite full-length releases of 2017, in no particular order—and my favorite song from each. I am grateful for them. Wishing you and yours a beautiful holiday.

Big Thief, “Masterpiece”

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Jake Xerxes Fussell, “What in the Natural World”

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Mdou Moctar, “Sousoume Tamachek”

SZA, “Ctrl”

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Kendrick Lamar, “DAMN.”

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The War on Drugs, “A Deeper Understanding”

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Bjork, “Utopia”

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The Weather Station, “The Weather Station”

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Migos, “Culture”

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John Moreland, “Big Bad Luv”

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