Dazed's Top Ten Albums of 2013

Sky Ferreira—a hugely talented pouty-lipped waif with an old soul—wrested what was to be her debut full-length away from her label and convinced them to grant her a do-over. The result was recorded in less than three weeks, then mixed and released in a whirlwind of alchemy. *Night Time, My Time* is an impressive and muscular collection. After a series of singles and EPs, Ferreira exudes her L.A. cool all over *Night Time*, from her nude photo on the cover to her edgy delivery. Her dusky throat and pop-be-damned attitude puts her squarely between artists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Icona Pop, swerving between an injured coo and a bad-kitty snarl with smooth deftness. Whether she\'s belting out the wistful ballad “24 Hours” or the stomping hissy fit “Nobody Asked Me,” there’s an appealing anthemic quality to these songs, written by Ferreira and a songwriting team that incudes producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Charli XCX, Usher, Haim). She strays into Madonna’s fertile territory on tunes like “I Blame Myself” and reaches into the icy underworld of ‘70s postpunk pioneer Alan Vega on “Omanko,” a clear measure of her intentions. The girl’s got it.

Kelela Mizanekristos has previously experimented with indie, jazz, and metal while searching for an outlet for her voice. By setting the emotional expressiveness of ’90s R&B to the stark, adventurous sounds of UK bass music, she’s finally found the perfect formula. From the dank grime of “Enemy” to the title track’s snipped dubstep beats, the spaciousness of the music always allows Kelela’s melodic, love-bruised vocal to shine. As a result, *Cut 4 Me* never loses the biting point between invention and immediacy.

A few years removed from *Acid Rap*’s 2013 debut as a free mixtape, it’s surprisingly easy to hear impending greatness in Chance the Rapper. This hindsight comes, of course, well after the BET, Soul Train, and NAACP Image awards for best new artist, the Best Rap Album Grammy, hosting *Saturday Night Live*, the noted influence on rap demigod Kanye West’s *The Life of Pablo*, the friendship with the Obama family, the Kit Kat endorsement, and so on. But it’s here, across 13 genre-melding tracks (14, if you count the second half of “Pusha Man”), on the follow-up to 2012\'s debut *10 Day*. In the moment, Chance the Rapper’s aesthetics—a distinct singing voice stretched in all directions over a jazzy confluence of choir melodies, R&B guitar lines, vintage soul samples, trap drums, golden-era hip-hop beats, and Chicago juke music—were something of an outlier within his city\'s emerging drill music scene. “I dropped *10 Day* the same year Chief Keef started blowing up,” Chance told Apple Music’s Nadeska. “All the labels came into Chicago and the drill movement came up and it was a lot of pressure. Also around that time was when Chief Keef worked with Ye, so there was a big question of, \'Yo, you\'re the dude that super loves Ye, you’re quote-unquote “conscious rap.” You should be doing this stuff.\' So I just had a lot of pressure to bring something.” Chance would inevitably link with Kanye, but most who found their way to *Acid Rap* were looking for an alternative to drill. Which is not to say that Chance didn’t acknowledge the plight of his hometown. Topically, the second half of the album’s “Pusha Man” (colloquially known as “Paranoia”) is one of the most affecting songs of the period, with Chance singing, “Everybody dies in the summer/Wanna say goodbye?/Tell \'em while it’s spring.” Elsewhere, he uses his melodic croak to reminisce on the simple joys of childhood (“Cocoa Butter Kisses”), the man he’s becoming (“Lost”), and problems within his relationship (“Acid Rain”). *Acid Rap*’s guests are mostly voices just left of hip-hop center (Childish Gambino, Action Bronson, Ab-Soul), but Chance also made it a point to include Chicago speed-rap legend Twista and to introduce listeners to the young genius of Noname. So who then, by way of this 13-song conflation of sounds and voices, could have have known that Chance the Rapper would go on to become one of the most celebrated voices in hip-hop and a force of pop culture in his own right? The answer, simply enough, is anyone who would have listened.

For his debut release on the reputed Warp Records imprint, Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) draws somewhat on the compositional elements from his previous LP, *Replica*, but pushes them seamlessly to their breaking points—each track is a short film\'s worth of ideas and range. Referencing any number of touchstones from \'90s Internet culture to the subtle ambient works of Aphex Twin, to *Oxygene*-like swells of cinematic synths, the listener is left with almost zero ability to predict where a track will lead. Yet there\'s never the sense of being taken unexpectedly—Oneohtrix turns sound on its head to bring you to the place you\'re meant to go, which is sometimes many places at once.

If you’re thrown off by artists who zig when they’re expected to zag, you may be a bit taken aback by *Chance of Rain*. Halo’s first full-length release, 2012\'s *Quarantine*, turned heads by combining ambient-flavored electronics with a more conventional songwriting sensibility, as well as the Brooklynite’s own haunting vocals. So one might assume she\'d take a similar approach on the follow-up. Instead, Halo has eschewed vocals almost entirely on her second album, letting her fingers do the talking. Her deftness at layering electronics in an artfully atmospheric way is undiminished, but these tracks aren’t all about ambient synthscapes. “Dr Echt” revolves around what sounds like a heavily processed electric piano, while the closing track, “-Out,” is an old-school acoustic piano piece. Halo brings some beats to the party too, firing up cuts like “Oneiroi\" and the title tune with propulsive polyrhythms.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke delivers a brilliantly colored robotic carnival with his latest extracurricular endeavor, Atoms for Peace. Joined by a cadre of collaborators who supported his 2008 solo project—Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco, and drummer Joey Waronker—Yorke first led the group on an unstructured jam session. Then he spliced, manipulated, and reconstructed the recordings with the help of longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The psychedelic result is *Amok*: a set of funky, doctoral-level laptop rock that groove as hard as anything Yorke has ever made.