Top 10 Albums of 2021: 3 Deaths, 2 Weddings, and a Pandemic, the Music That Got Me Through 2021

Yea it’s a Top 10 Albums of 2021 List!

No it’s not 10 albums long (it’s 9)!

Yes it also contains blurbs on 3 honorable mentions and 4 playlists! I contain multitudes, or something like that.

The truth is no one really cares about some random guy on the internet’ top 10 list for 2021, so I’m going to write this Top 10 list in a different way.

But it will be different in a way that actually doubles down on investing your time in some random White guy on the internet, as I effectively run up the tab of my reader’s goodwill like it’s Christmas night in a South Side Milwaukee dive bar.

The truth is, we all have our own top 10 lists every year. It’s just that the albums we like the most in any year, probably weren’t all released that year. Our personal lists aren’t as neat or clean cut as the critics who have time to find dozens if not hundreds of new albums each year.

This list is a bit of both: the top 9 albums that were released this year, that I found this year, and more importantly, carried my water at times when it was too heavy.

Basically, I’m going to contextualize the pop music I listened to this year within my own personal narrative. Here we go!

(But before we go, here is the playlist made up of the following 9 albums, the best 4 or 5 tracks from each album.)

Punk, Young Thug

The tone of Punk is set in the opening minute of its first track (“Die Slow”) with a startling spoken-word piece.

It is life, death and poetry over an almost Staind-like guitar loop and haunted backing vocals.

I stopped my dumb-lunges-that-I’m-bad-at-mid-lunge when this line ended,

“the lady had got in the car and just pulled off

…doing at like 60 miles per hour and ran my mom over…

she had a stroke and shit but she alright”

The fact that the next line is “I always was knew that I wouldn’t be gay”, which is presented more matter-of-fact than judgmental, is the kind of off-kilter, 1-2 of realness that pervades Thug’s music.

Heavily affected, arpeggiated guitar chords with minimal drums under a heartbroken, tremolo auto-tuned vocal make up the musical palette of the 20-song Punk.

Punk sits in its grief. I sit with it thinking of my brother, my uncle, and to be real, my cat of 10 years, who all passed away this year.

If Adele’s 30 is the heart-swelling, nostalgia reverence for the sadness of lost love, Punk is the sadness itself.

Where both Adele and Young Thug are cathartic in their ways – and sticking with Adele’s love of referencing movies (no particular movie, just movies) in her music – one’s music is a Romance, the other, a Tragedy.

Even in Punk‘s sillier moments (“Why you so stupid?” from “Stupid/Asking”) it is still heart-rending (“heard you went and fucked my friend, is you stupid?”)

Even at his most humble-brag “why is it so hard for you to cry when you’re rich” (“Livin It Up” with Post Malone & A$AP Rocky) Thug still wrenches pathos from every rap-sung lyric.

“I Love You More” is the apotheosis of the album’s pop-emo side, with the J Cole featured “Stressed” being the album’s hypest, arguably most traditional Hip Hop moment.

Of all the music on this list, Punk is the album most 2021 in its alienated anguish.

Sob Rock, John Mayer

How John Mayor was able to write an album as perfectly synth-sad, yacht-rocky as Sob Rock blows my approaching-middle-age mind.

I first listened to Sob Rock the weekend I was visiting my parents, 3 weeks after my brother – their son – died.

I turned the volume up in the air conditioned, lightly used interior of their Toyota RAV4, coasting 5 minutes down 94W from my parent’s house to Milwaukee’s Lake Shore Drive.

The sun was bright but a haze hung on the lake as a cool breeze blew softly across the grasses the city had reserved for public use in the 1890s when a, “nascent Park Commission instituted far-thinking policies to guarantee public access along Lake Michigan” (Shepherd Express), as I flew past the results of Milwaukee’s 1957 land reclamation project that is the city’s Veteran’s Park.

I took in the sights of my hometown, with its many ghosts, my mind cloudier with grief than whatever it was in the air – not quite fog – that the sunlight hung itself on.

Sob Rock belongs on a Lake. It is insular, a new car interior. It is as in-its-feeling as Tom Wambsgans reminiscing about his first sip of cold chardonnay after a long day at the office. Sob Rock is perfect in this way. Except for “Why You No Love Me” which is just…not ok.

An aside that is probably more important than the rest of this review:

• Is “Why You No Love Me” racist?
• Am I racist for thinking it’s racist? Why You No Love Me?
• It’s at worst racist and at best comical. I just can’t wrap my White man head around another White man kind of Asian-voicing his way through an entire song. A song on an album that in no other ways even hints at humor or hijinks. Sob Rock is a mostly earnest, heart-on-its-sleeve album that’s still coolly detached enough (“you should’ve been sad instead of being so fucking mean”) as to avoid over-boiling its melancholy into pure vapor, keeping its adult melodrama at a smooth Bourbon.
• And then, for 1 song, it is inexplicably a South Park musical.
• This is the paradox of Mayer.

You think Mayer understands what he’s doing with Sob Rock – he’s reflecting our reflection of him back to us, he’s in on the growing old joke but still ready to rock your dad-bod butts off (as Variety asks, “is it possible to wink and cry at the same time?”) – and “Why You No Love Me” makes you question it all.

Back to the lecture at hand…

The thing about writing music is that it finishing a song can always feel out of reach.

Joni Mitchell considers herself a “painter derailed by circumstance”.

Mitchell calls it “divine dissatisfaction” and says she can’t listen to her music (“I’d like to re-do the bass track on that or why did I put that read on that word?” she asks herself in a 2013 interview), the way she can enjoy looking at her paintings.

I understand this.

That’s right.

I am proclaiming to understand Joni Mitchell and specifically her preference of painting over the thing she is in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame for, her songwriting.

I certainly can’t speak to Joni’s process but I can attest to my own.

The music you write when you sit down to write is not entirely your choice. It’s very difficult to sit down and say, “I will write an uptempo, happy but not corny pop song ala Tom Petty”.

For John Mayer to be able to compartmentalize his creative forces, to push them through synths the 80’s would be jealous of, to make the yacht rock boomers wish they had made, is truly an impressive feat.

I don’t think a 6.1 rating on Pitchfork understands how difficult this is: creating a brand new sound for yourself on your 8th album.

It doesn’t hurt that this collection of songs may be stronger and more cohesive than anything he’s ever done.

Take The Sadness Out of Saturday Night, Bleachers

The best pop-rock album of the year is Bleachers’ 3rd full length effort, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night.

It leaves its heart on its sleeve for us to wipe our own nostalgic tears with.

It’s the album that almost makes you wish you were in your 20s again: late nights, adventures in the big city, a subway ride with a dead phone, changing cars with a hope and a prayer that you remembered the stop closest to your friend’s Crown Heights apartment.

Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night lives up to its title with all its anthemic, flag-waving, marching in the streets for your right to party ambitions.

That excited-to-be-alive feeling that Antonoff captures so well on Sadness is re-living my 20s and all the people from that time who made me who I was to become. One of my closest friends Julia got married this year. And her wedding, along with my own, are kind of the end of the era of our group of friend’s weddings. Her wedding was delayed twice, from April 2020, to April 2021, to October 2021. As we drank and danced to DJ King Otto in Minneapolis’ North Loop, it brought back all the night of Club Jager (before, several years later, everyone learned the owner supported White supremacists), of Honey (before it closed due to the pandemic), of the old Mortimer’s (which is just, a lot nicer now). The fact that all the establishments of our youth need detailed footnotes explaining their current status should be warning to any younger generation who thinks that their monuments will persist. Remember the monuments, but keep the people close.

By the time Bruce Springsteen features on “Chinatown” – does Bruce ever feature on anyone’s song? – your teenage self is going, “of course this collab exists because life is a magical experience and music is the most important thing in it” and your adult self is just nodding along gratefully, understanding the rarity of what its hearing.

WhenTtSOoSN (ok, I won’t initialize that again) isn’t making itself the darkhorse heir-apparent to the Boss’ pop rock throne, it’s jumping into the pool at the party fully-clothed with the Speaking in Tongues-esque “How Dare You Want More?”.

The next moment Sadness is the guy who brought his guitar to the party and is playing in the corner only for you to stop and go, “wait, is this actually good though? Is that…Lana Del Ray singing with him?”.

The album cover is a perfect Bruce homage by the way. But if there’s one thing that holds Sadness back from pop-perfection it’s the almost-too cutesy production. Bruce famously spent “3 weeks” per The Defiant Ones on a single snare drum sound for Born To Run because “sometimes you need to be indulged”.

So for Sadness to take a more indie, Arcade Fire-approach where the vocals are just little too quiet here, the drums just a little too fuzzy there, it feels like a contender falling into their old habits when the moment gets too big for them.

Sadness is still a classic – a shoot for the stars exodus of an album – but you wonder what it could’ve sounded like if they had pushed the production into the standards of Antonoff’s former band fun. or the Boss himself in his more studio-ambitious glory days.

Culture III, Migos

There isn’t anything particularly revolutionary about the third album in a trilogy. And there’s a lot that could’ve been left on the cutting room floor from Culture III. But it is the album that got me through most of my work days as our end of year budgets tightened with update after update of shipping delays and supply chain complications.

By the time you’ve received your 6th urgent(!) email from the 3rd different person today on whether the hardware in your PO will arrive by month’s end, it’s time for Culture III.

There is a capitalistic aggression present in the corporate offices of a Fortune 500 company that directly aligns with mainstream Hip Hop.

It’s the Office Space effect.

Not only is it funny to see white collar cube rats plotting escape to Lethal Injection era Ice Cube, but we day-job stiffs also subconsciously relate our own work experience to the capitalism-on-steroids attitude Hip Hop communicates better than any other musical genre.

While our rapper heroes get ahead in the game and us average employee struggles to tread water, we both a) live vicariously through their successes and b) simultaneously receive direct catharsis from the aggression-as-a-response-to-America present in “Hardcore Gangster Rap” (as all the adults around me hysterically called it when I was growing up).

In America, if you don’t work, you die. And so every work day – with its fire drills, it’s this-must-get-done-now emails, its dehumanizing hierarchy –  carries with it the added pressure of pure survival.

I’m in no way saying a job in IT is anything like the struggles of the hood.

I’m just saying no other music reflects America’s brutal capitalism back on itself as perfectly – or really, at all – as Hip Hop. And Culture III is the next cuban link in that chain.

How Long Do You Think It’s Going To Last?, Big Red Machine

Fleet Foxes, Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and two songs with Taylor Swift!?

Did someone create this album specifically for 37-year-old me?

I’m so glad artists are allowed to grow old with us now.

Justin Vernon gets to wait years between Bon Iver projects, while collaborating on side-projects galore, helping to ensure he doesn’t burn out and we get to keep listening to him. I wish the Boomers had this. Based on what we’re seeing on Get Back we could have kept The Beatles coming back together twice a decade had the idea existed that a band be able to stay together while *wait for it* they do other things *gasp*.

Speaking of my parent’s generation, they did get one thing right: the emphasis on the home stereo system.

The 3-song run of “Phoenix”, “Birch”, and “Renegade” just begs for a vinyl flip, deserving of a pause as the listener walks over to the living room stereo system, lifts the needle, and turns the record over.

The back half of the album – what would have made for a Sides C and D in previous generations – is not too be overlooked, and paints with all the greys and earthy greens of Vernon’s Bon Iver projects as though you’re watching the songs walk out of The North Woods on a foggy evening as you drive across the full width of Northern Wisconsin to Door County on the Thanksgiving eve.

There’s soft vocal palettes and punchy synths, followed by brazing vocal effects and soft, plucky nylon-stringed guitars. The experimental instrumentalism will bend the track, but just as it’s about to break, a soulful melody beckons you back to the snowy woods, making a wanderer of you once more.

An Evening with Silk Sonic, Silk Sonic

I’m not sure we deserve Silk Sonic. And so I approach An Evening with Silk Sonic with eyes averted and head bowed, so as not to scare it off, or vanish it back into the ether, so unsure I am of its existence.

And as soon as I’m brave enough to look it in the eyes, its excitement to see me leaps at me like the hugs of my nephews and niece meeting me at the airport. “Of course this would be fun!” I think, not sure what I was worried about, embracing my family as naturally as music comes to Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak.

This is as close as my generation is going to get to a 80’s era Michael Jackson x Curtis Mayfield collab album.

.Paak brings the 70’s Soul out of Bruno Mars, who turns around and adds a pop finesse on top of .Paak’s just-a-bit-funkier than mainstream compositions.

In a way, Silk Sonic is the best of both worlds. In another way, it’s the best of a lot of other artists’ worlds.

It can be a little frustrating to hear Bruno Mars so completely lift the sounds of entire sub-genres (ahem, “Please Me”, ahem, “Uptown Funk”, ahem “Finesse”), and just as the frustration grows into simmering resentment, you’re nodding your head and tapping your feet. He did it again.

If great artists steal, Mars & .Paak are Ocean’s-trilogy level thieves, and like an unexpected TBS airing of 11 or 13, give me some laundry to fold, snackies to snack on, and throw the remote away!

“Put On a Smile” is Silk Sonic’s “Inner City Blues”, “Leave the Door Open” is their “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”, “Fly As Me” asks what would happen if Booker T. & The M.G.’s met Skee-Lo. The duo doesn’t have to steal from Parliament as much as they just have Bootsy Collins on every song.

Where too many albums this year are opting for track lists well into their teens – a trend I am very much not Ocean’s 11 on a Saturday afternoon about – Silk Sonic gets to the point with their 9 song, 30 minute jam fest. To take a note from their brevity I’ll end this write up right here.

King’s Disease 2, Nas

If I’m happy that our indie Rock demigods can age with their fans more adeptly than previous generations, I’m doubly thankful our Rap gods can too.

I’ve been listening to Nas for the last 20 years, but rapping about Pedialite as a cure for hangovers, brunch on Sundays, and Zelle accounts? I’m relating to him now more than ever.

If Nas has one weakness over the years you could argue it was his beat selection. Not that he didn’t bring classic songs on every project, but that every other album or so he would include the kind of beats that might leave your head scratching (ahem, Chris Webber, ahem). It’s the kind of just slightly off-center miss that would ultimately dilute some of his more minor works.

Does King’s Disease 2 need “Count Me In”? Probably not. Is “Moments” a little on the nose at times? Sure. But then you hear a lyric like, “poverty is big business” and you think, “yea, I see why they kept that entire song”.

Nas’ lyrics were never the issue (“correctional facilities never do it correctly”, from “The Pressure”) but his ability on King’s Disease II to ride the beats with flows that incorporate modern influences of Migos triplets and Lil Baby smoothness, while staying definitively Nas, is impressive.

Nas proves an O.G. can learn new tricks, and then he shows it,

My whole career, I steered away from features
But I figured it’s perfect timing to embrace new leaders
Accepted my position as the Master Teacher

“Moments”

Besides a couple minor side-steps, King’s Disease 2 is among the most sonically cohesive albums Nas has put together in his legendary career. Musically it’s what people want when they say they want, “the old Kanye”, but updated for the post-trap revolution of the 2010s. Backpack with an edge, boom bap meets Queensbridge. Can you tell I’m an old White guy? When was the last time anyone said “backpack” rap?

That cohesiveness is thanks to Hit Boy, who is a Producer on all 15 of King’s Disease 2’s songs. Or rather, the musical cohesion on KD2 probably has a lot to do with the relationship Nasir Jones and Chauncey Hollis Jr. built over the course of KD2.

“It was all organic”, Hit Boy told Apple Music, “by the third session he was like, ‘nah bro, this is something different, we need to make this a whole thing'”.

Staying – and ending – on the Hit Boy interview tip – hearing him talk about bouncing back from being blackballed after GOOD Music and telling Kanye, via a New Rory & Mal interview, “I did a harder album for Nas than you did” is the energy we all need to get through the 5th and 6th waves of this pandemic.

“That’s what I had to take back…I fully understand my power”.

Good For You, Houndmouth

Influences abound on Houndmouth’s 4th album, Good For You.

Lead singer Matt Myers is at a turn, “Desolation Row”-Dylan when he sings, on “Miracle Mile”, “all eyes are fixed upon her Dixieland delight”, and at another, John Denver, when he cribs the singer-songwriter’s “Leaving On a Jet Plane” melody for the song’s chorus just a few seconds later; a melody he playfully subverts with a heartaching, Oberst-esque ending, “I never knew nothing”. Speaking of Bright Eyes, “bad breaks arriving in a limousine” is the most West Hollywood thing Conor never wrote.

The recurring, single guitar note pluck on the back half of “McKenzie” lifts the song into the toe-tapping ether while on Good For You’s lead single but last track, closing out the album a la “American Girl” from Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s debut, Myers is pure Joe Strummer when he sings, on the second verse, “Are you up? Why you grinning?”.

It’s hard to dance as close as Houndmouth does to the pop-rock flame and not get burned, but when you pull it off?

When you pull it off you make classic music, songs that seem to always have existed yet still feel fresh despite my best attempts to continuously replay them.

When you pull it off you get the lowkey anthem, “Cool Jam”, “this lonely star, it don’t flame like it used to” you hum along, seeing the lighters turn to cell phones over the years as your life plays itself like a heartbreak montage.

I listen to the album as I watch the cold winter sun set over Mississippi, winding its way into downtown Saint Paul in a milieu of blue, orange, and grey.

The river basin of Minnesota’s capital is a hidden gem. Minneapolis-ites don’t go there (I know, I lived in Minneapolis for almost two decades and probably could’ve counted the time I visited Saint Paul on my fingers), Prince never wrote about it.

But it is, at times, absolutely stunning.

To drive down the High Bridge towards downtown you are at once confronted – across the wide Mississippi river valley – the Basilica on the ridge, the Capital building dome lit behind it, and the entirety of the old-city downtown sprawled below you.

To ferry down Shepard road, it’s wide, nevery-busy parkways full of trees, grass, and space – right into the heart of Saint Paul’s downtown with Good For You playing on repeat is to find yourself, invariably, in the middle of some cinematic moment. You breath it in, your heart warms, the band plays on.

The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, Valerie June

I don’t know what I mean when I say that Valerie June’s music is the music of my soul.

I just know that it’s true.

I suppose I mean I wish I could write the music that Valerie June writes or that I’ve never been able to express myself with music as completely, as truthfully, as I would have ever liked.

Maybe it just means my soul is a cheap American rip-off, one in the long tradition of cheap American rip-offs; it’s just tatters and tears of everyone else’s culture blowing in the wind, and June’s music is all the best parts of America’s music – soul, folk, rock, r&b, Appalachia, church – distilled into something like Moonshine Soul. I am the copy of her copy of American music, I am the shaky-handed drinker at the foot of the hill, waiting for the next batch to be hauled down the mountainside.

Valerie June’s music is all those things, but more importantly than anything having to do with me, June’s 2017 debut The Order of Time and now her follow-up The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers contain within them the highest emotional peaks music is capable of.

They are heartache and hope, despair and defeat, they are a songbird and a ghost. Her songs are our ancestors, and the ones we’ve lost in this lifetime.

She told Rolling Stone in 2017,

[Songs] take me from my body and my earthly spot to my imaginary place – I call it imaginary, but maybe it exists, I don’t know – and it’s somewhere out in the ether

A White boy, raised in the late-80’s, early 90’s, on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the hoods of Milwaukee, feeling that the music of a female singer-songwriter from Tennessee, equal parts soul and folk, expresses his soul better than he could himself? Maybe that’s because Valerie June is writing from a place beyond herself, a place – maybe imaginary, the singer-songwriter says – where we all exist, where none of us exist.

I don’t really think very much when I am writing a song. The voices come to me, like when a composer writes a symphony. They sing to me and I sing to you what I hear.

Rolling Stone

To NPR, later that year, June expounded,

It’s similar to the way that composers hear a symphony in their head. They hear the strings, they hear the bass, the horns, everything…well with me, it’s usually not instruments that I hear, it’s usually voices and it usually starts with one voice.

“Most of the songs that I write for my records are songs that come to me while I’m out doing other things like gardening or washing dishes or whatever. “Astral Planes” came while I was cooking dinner and I was chopping onions and throwing them in the skillet to sautee and I heard the voice singing, “dancing on the astral plane and I was like, “wow, that sounds really neat”. Chop, chop, chop.”

NPR

I didn’t put much faith in energy before 2021.

The idea of people or places having energies – invisible auras – all their own? I didn’t invest in it very heavily.

Now I’m not sure life is anything but energies, rattling against each other, dovetailing into adoration or resentment.

After 2021 – after my own wedding, my close friend’s thrice delayed wedding, my brother’s funeral, my uncle’s funeral – I now see energy in everything.

Valerie June’s music is energy, pure and undiminished, it is water from the Smoky mountain spring.

Honorable Mentions, Playlists and My Wedding

Honorable Mentions

• Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee, this 2020 album got a 3-song update in 2021 and “Fire” – with it’s unbelievably catchy, aching Southern lament – found me in feelings more often than not this year.

• Women in Music Pt. III, by HAIM. I was something like .5% of all of spotify’s plays of this album this past year – or some calculation that was notable enough for them to tell me about it on my Wrapped. I don’t regret a single repetition of this 2020 album that, if albums could, would be allowed to make back-to-back Best of The Year appearances had I had my druthers about it.

• Mordechai Remixes, by Khruangbin. Mordechai is the band’s 2020 album. While this collection of remixes was released in 2021, it also effectively removes the drumming of Donald Ray “DJ” Johnson Jr.’s which is as critical to the pitch-perfect sound of the band as any of the legs – guitar, bass, drums – on its perfectly balanced three-legged stool. I’m mostly using this release to bring up the band’s 2018 pitchfork set on Youtube which may have the best “sound guy” performance of anything I’ve seen on Youtube, and, thankfully, features Johnson Jr. on drums.

Playlists and My Wedding

NewwNeww

The playlist I put all my favorite uptempo/happy/pop/rock songs for the year. 3 hours of Dan Auerbach, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande, Moon Taxi, Lucy Dacus, even some Mama Cass and a Noah Cyrus Bon Iver cover. It’s not the music of 2021, it’s the music of my 2021.

J + J Wedding

Wy wedding playlist! We edited it to this final version before handing it off to our DJ (who was also our chef) as we drove up the shore of Green Bay through Door County on the way to our island wedding. At one point in the night a friend demanded we, “liberate the playlist!” and we did, but towards the end we stuck religiously to the mid-2000s house party play list of Yung Joc, Juvenile, Soulja Boy, and J-kwon that was at the heart of our 20s, the decade in which one comes of age as a partyer.

My Top 100 Wrapped

In a year where I got married of course Beiber’s “Only One” would be on top.

Micah

The music we put together for my brother’s funeral.

• by Jordan Mark Sandvig
  • @jordansandviig on twitter and ig
  • jordansandvig@gmail.com