Slant Magazine's 25 Best Albums of 2017

In the two years since *To Pimp a Butterfly*, we’ve hung on Kendrick Lamar\'s every word—whether he’s destroying rivals on a cameo, performing the #blacklivesmatter anthem *on top of a police car* at the BET Awards, or hanging out with Obama. So when *DAMN.* opens with a seemingly innocuous line—\"So I was taking a walk the other day…”—we\'re all ears. The gunshot that abruptly ends the track is a signal: *DAMN.* is a grab-you-by-the-throat declaration that’s as blunt, complex, and unflinching as the name suggests. If *Butterfly* was jazz-inflected, soul-funk vibrance, *DAMN.* is visceral, spare, and straight to the point, whether he’s boasting about \"royalty inside my DNA” on the trunk-rattling \"DNA.\" or lamenting an anonymous, violent death on the soul-infused “FEAR.” No topic is too big to tackle, and the songs are as bold as their all-caps names: “PRIDE.” “LOYALTY.” “LOVE.” \"LUST.” “GOD.” When he repeats the opening line to close the album, that simple walk has become a profound journey—further proof that no one commands the conversation like Kendrick Lamar.

Pushing past the GRAMMY®-winning art rock of 2014’s *St. Vincent*, *Masseduction* finds Annie Clark teaming up with Jack Antonoff (as well as Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sounwave) for a pop masterpiece that radiates and revels in paradox—vibrant yet melancholy, cunning yet honest, friendly yet confrontational, deeply personal yet strangely inscrutable. She moves from synthetic highs to towering power-ballad comedowns (“Pills”), from the East Coast (the unforgettable “New York”) to “Los Ageless,” where, amid a bramble of strings and woozy electronics, she admits, “I try to write you a love song/But it comes out a lament.”

“WE IN YEAR 3230 WIT IT,” Vince Staples tweeted of his second album. “THIS THE FUTURE.” In fact, he’s in multiple time zones here. Delivered in his fluent, poetic flow, the lyrical references reach back to 16th-century composer Louis Bourgeois, while “BagBak” captures the stark contrasts of Staples’ present (“I pray for new McLarens/Pray the police don’t come blow me down because of my complexion.”) With trap hi-hats sprayed across ’70s funk basslines (“745”) and Bon Iver fused into UK garage beats (“Crabs in a Bucket”), the future is as bold as it is bright.

Lean in close, HAIM has something important to say. On their second album, the sister trio—Alana, Danielle, and Este—explore sounds and eras while deepening their emotional connection. “Want You Back,” “Little of Your Love,” “Found It in Silence,” and “Ready for You” will resonate with fans of the first LP—all sweet melodies, catchy rock and pop hooks, and gonna-work-it-out feels. HAIM also unfurl swashes of vintage ‘80s/‘90s pop (“Nothing\'s Wrong” and “You Never Knew”) and confessional showstoppers (“Night So Long”) that, when combined with their crush-note lyrics, consistently hit the sweet spot.

Between 2014 and 2016, Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag announced themselves with three EPs that explosively bonded lo-fi punk energy, stadium-sized hooks and Tina Halladay’s gale-force voice. Both political and personal, this full debut returns to that base formula while broadening their sonic palette too. Opener “Meet Me in the Streets” is a typically bracing, riffed-up call for revolution, but the band’s impeccable songcraft also lets them venture into swaggering funk (“Need to Feel Your Love”) and heartbroken, jangling folk (“Until You Find the One”) with highly satisfying results.

A tear in the firmament. Beyond the noxious haze of our national nightmare - as structures of social justice and global progress topple in our midst - there lies a faint but undeniable glow in the distance. What is it? Like so many before us we are drawn to the beacon. But only by the bootstraps of our indignation do we go so boldly into the dark to find it. And so SHEER MAG has let the sparks fly since their outset, with an axe to grind against all that clouds the way. A caustic war cry, seething in solidarity with all those that suffer the brunt of ignorance and injustice in an imbalanced system. Both brazen and discrete, loud yet precise, familiar but never quite like this - SHEER MAG crept up from Philadelphia cloaked in bold insignia to channel our social and political moment with grit and groove. Cautious but full of purpose. What is it? By making a music both painfully urgent and spiritually timeworn, SHEER MAG speak to a modern pain: to a people that too feel their flame on the verge of being extinguished, yet choose to burn a bit brighter in spite of that threat. With their debut LP, the cloak has been lifted. It is time to reclaim something that has been taken from us. Here the band rolls up their sleeves, takes to the streets, and demands recompense for a tradition of inequity that's poisoned our world. However, it is in our ability to love - our primal human right to give and receive love - that the damage of such toxicity is newly explored. Love is a choice we make. We ought not obscure, neglect, or deny that choice. Through the tumult and the pain, the camaraderie and the cause, the band continues to burn a path into that great beyond. But where are we headed? On NEED TO FEEL YOUR LOVE, they makes their first full-length declaration of light seen just beyond our darkness. Spoken plainly, without shame: It is love. This - is SHEER MAG. Music by Sheer Mag Produced by Hart Seely Mixed by Hunter Davidsohn at Business District Recordings Mastered by Josh Bonati at Bonati Mastering NYC Released by Wilsuns Recording Company WRC-092

Four years after Lorde illuminated suburban teendom with *Pure Heroine*, she captures the dizzying agony of adolescence on *Melodrama*. “Everyone has that first proper year of adulthood,” she told Beats 1. “I think I had that year.” She chronicles her experiences in these insightful odes to self-discovery that find her battling loneliness (“Sober”), conquering heartbreak (“Writer in the Dark”), embracing complexity (“Hard Feelings/Loveless”), and letting herself lose control. “Every night I live and die,” she sings on “Perfect Places,” an emotionally charged song about escaping reality. “I’m 19 and I\'m on fire.\"

The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir chronicles the 50 years of songwriter Stephin Merritt's life with one song per year. Merritt sings vocals on all 50 songs and plays more than 100 instruments, from ukulele to piano to drum machine to abacus. Unlike his previous work, the lyrics are nonfiction—a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis).

After the storm comes a clearer, brighter morning. In 2015, Björk channelled a painful breakup into the dark, tumultuous *Vulnicura*. On this follow-up, she turns toward warmth and optimism. With flutes and harps weaved around glitchy electronics and sampled voices, her music is as expressive and unique as her vocals. “The Gate” welcomes love back into her heart amid a hymnal, delicate soundscape, and the sense of a new dawn is accented in the birdsong that hops across graceful flute melodies on the title track. “Sue Me” returns to the sorrow and recrimination of broken love, but where there was once vulnerability and despair, Björk now seems charged with resilience.

Utopia is the ninth studio album by Icelandic singer-musician Björk It was primarily produced by Björk and Venezuelan electronic record producer Arca and released on 24 November 2017 through One Little Independent Records. The album received critical acclaim from music critics for its production, songwriting, and Björk’s vocals, and later received a nomination for Best Alternative Music Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, becoming Björk’s eighth consecutive nomination in the category. Utopia is an avant-garde and folktronica album. With fourteen tracks in total, the album clocks in at 71 minutes and 38 seconds, making it the longest of Björk's studio albums to date. Björk began working on Utopia soon after releasing Vulnicura in 2015. Upon winning the award for International Female Solo Artist at the 2016 Brit Awards, Björk did not appear as she was busy recording her new album. In an interview published in March 2016, Björk likened the writing to "paradise" as opposed to Vulnicura being "hell... like divorce." Speaking to Fader in March 2017, filmmaker and collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang said that he had been involved with Björk on her new album, stating that "quite a bit of it" had already been written, and that the "new album's gonna be really future-facing, in a hopeful way that I think is needed right now."

As its title suggests (albeit a little backhandedly), *Flower Boy* explores a softer side of Tyler, the Creator. Not that he wasn’t thoughtful before, or that he’s lost his edge now—if anything, the dark wit and internal conflict that made *Goblin* a lightning bolt in 2011 has only gotten richer and more resonant, offset by a sound that cherry-picks from early-\'90s hip-hop and plush, Stevie-style soul (“Garden Shed,” the Frank Ocean-featuring “911 / Mr. Lonely”). “Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” he raps on “Where This Flower Blooms.” “Dye your hair blue, s\*\*t, I’ll do it too.”

Until a late flurry of percussion arrives, doleful guitar and bass are Solána Rowe’s only accompaniment on opener “Supermodel,” a stinging kiss-off to an adulterous ex. It doesn’t prepare you for the inventively abstract production that follows—disembodied voices haunting the airy trap-soul of “Broken Clocks,” “Anything”’s stuttering video-game sonics—but it instantly establishes the emotive power of her rasping, percussive vocal. Whether she’s feeling empowered by her physicality on the Kendrick Lamar-assisted “Doves in the Wind” or wrestling with insecurity on “Drew Barrymore,” SZA’s songs impact quickly and deeply.

You don’t need to hear Taylor Swift declare her old self dead—as she does on the incendiary “Look What You Made Me Do”—to know that *reputation* is both a warning shot to her detractors and a full-scale artistic transformation. There\'s a newfound complexity to all these songs: They\'re dark and meaningful, catchy and lived-in, pointed and provocative. She\'s braggadocious on “End Game,” a languid hip-hop cut with Ed Sheeran and Future, and then sassy and sensual on “…Ready for It?” and “I Did Something Bad.” But songs like “Call It What You Want” and “Delicate” bring Taylor\'s many emotional layers together and confront the dynamic between her celebrity and personal life: “My reputation’s never been worse/So, you must like me for me,” she offers. It all makes for a boundlessly energetic, soul-baring pop masterpiece—and her boldest statement yet.

“I feel weird,” repeats Stephen Bruner on “Captain Stupido”. That’s encouraging because the leftfield moments have always lent his jazz/funk/soft-rock fusions singular charm—even here when he meows through “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)”. By those standards, the melancholy “Walk On By”, with its pensive verse from Kendrick Lamar, and “Show You the Way”—co-starring soft-rock icons Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins—feel irresistibly straightforward, but their velvet melodies are as beguiling as Bruner’s falsetto harmonies.

Josh Tillman’s third album as Father John Misty is a wry and passionate complaint against nearly everything under the sun: Politics, religion, entertainment, war—even Father John Misty can’t escape Father John Misty’s gimlet eye. But even the wordiest, most cynically self-aware songs here (“Leaving L.A.,” “When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay”) are executed with angelic beauty, a contrast that puts Tillman in a league with spiritual predecessors like Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson. A performer as savvy as Tillman knows you can’t sell the apocalypse without making it sound pretty.

'Pure Comedy', Father John Misty’s third album, is a complex, often-sardonic, and, equally often, touching meditation on the confounding folly of modern humanity. Father John Misty is the brainchild of singer-songwriter Josh Tillman. Tillman has released two widely acclaimed albums – 'Fear Fun' (2012) and 'I Love You, Honeybear' (2015) – and the recent “Real Love Baby” single as Father John Misty, and recently contributed to songs by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cudi. While we could say a lot about 'Pure Comedy' – including that it is a bold, important album in the tradition of American songwriting greats like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Leonard Cohen – we think it’s best to let its creator describe it himself. Take it away, Mr. Tillman: 'Pure Comedy' is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence. Something like that. 'Pure Comedy' was recorded in 2016 at the legendary United Studios (Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Beck) in Hollywood, CA. It was produced by Father John Misty and Jonathan Wilson, with engineering by Misty’s longtime sound-person Trevor Spencer and orchestral arrangements by renowned composer/double-bassist Gavin Bryars (known for extensive solo work, and work with Brian Eno, Tom Waits, Derek Bailey).

Robyn Hitchcock stands among the most energized and ambitious recordings of the iconic troubadour’s four-decade career. The album sees Hitchcock casting familiar shapes into surprising new forms, the sci-fi fueled sounds and visions that first stimulated his work now ribboned with experience and hard-earned wisdom. The album, Hitchcock’s 21st studio recording, was recorded in Nashville, TN, with producer Brendan Benson (The Raconteurs) and backing by fellow Music City players that include guitarist Annie McCue, bassist Jon Estes, and drummer Jon Radford. Harmony vocal contributions include Emma Swift, Grant Lee Phillips, Gillian Welch, and Wilco’s Pat Sansone.