The Sydney Morning Herald's Top 20 Albums of 2017

We’ve been anticipating *I Love You Like a Brother* since the Melbourne singer/songwriter’s 2016 *B-Grade University* EP. Her style of rumbling indie pop, combined with clever turns of phrase and glass-half-empty outlook, is irresistible and addictive. The opening trio kicks like a mule: “Every Day’s the Weekend,” “I Love You Like a Brother,” and “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder” are clattering and cleansing indie perfection. Lahey expands her sound palette on “Let’s Call It a Day” and “Awkward Exchange,” but retains the catchy “woah-ohs” and lines like, “Who knew this turnaround would be so quick/But I figured it out/You’re just a bit of a dick.”

There’s a strong current coursing through Gang of Youths’ second album. It’s a document of transformation told through a steady rush of epic rock. “Fear and Trembling” kicks off with the crashing power of the E Street Band. And like a young Boss, vocalist Dave Le’aupepe searches for spiritual and philosophical truths buried in the past. “The Heart Is a Muscle” reveals hard-earned truths. “Our Time Is Short” and “Say Yes to Life” are emotional rearview-mirror reflections. If Gang of Youths’ goal was to inspire others to search for their own patch of peace, they’ve succeeded.

On her sophomore album, Japanese Breakfast\'s Michelle Zauner seeks grounding in an unlikely place: outer space. Her evocative metaphors and hefty subject matter find lightness in shimmery, spacey electronics, most potently on the expansive, krautrock-like opener \"Diving Woman.\" She deals with femininity and sexuality in synth-pop reveries like \"Road Head\" and the Auto-Tune-enhanced \"Machinist,\" and cuts deep into trauma (\"The Body Is a Blade\") and grief (\"Till Death\") by finding comfort in ‘90s indie guitar pop, fluttering keyboards, and gentle wafts of mournful horns.

Japanese Breakfast's 'Soft Sounds From Another Planet' is less of a concept album about space exploration so much as it is a mood board come to life. Over the course of 12 tracks, Michelle Zauner explores a sonic landscape of her own design, one that's big enough to contain her influences. There are songs on this album that recall the pathos of Roy Orbison’s ballads, while others could soundtrack a cinematic drive down one of Blade Runner's endless skyways. Zauner's voice is capacious; one moment she's serenading the past, the next she's robotically narrating a love story over sleek monochrome, her lyrics more pointed and personal than ever before. While 'Psychopomp' was a genre-spanning introduction to Japanese Breakfast, this visionary sophomore album launches the project to new heights.

“It’s self-titled.” The three-word answer is all that Jen Cloher requires to describe her new album, a letter in triplicate addressed to themes of Music, Australia and Love. It’s the most honest album she’s ever written. Jen likes best to tell the truth. 'Jen Cloher' is the culmination of a period of artistic and personal growth in which the artist took her rightful place as the punk-rock figurehead of Melbourne’s famous DIY music scene. The NIDA graduate is now an outspoken advocate for artist rights, a label boss and band-leader, she also happens to be the partner of an internationally acclaimed songwriter. Cloher’s politics and her fascinating life-story are enough justification to take notice here, but it’s the music that will have you returning to this album again and again. Cloher says: “It’s a classic rock album, recorded live in one room with minimal overdubs… I’m not too good at going into descriptive language around my own music but I suppose it is intimate without ever feeling too precious.” The bulk of Cloher’s album was recorded in October 2016 by Greg Walker amidst the rolling greenery of rural Australia. The band that first played together on Cloher’s acclaimed third album, the Australian Music Prize nominated In Blood Memory, are now bold and assured. These are songs of distance and songs of driving, they are split here and there by the melodic intricacy of guitarist Courtney Barnett while drummer Jen Sholakis and bassist Bones Sloane add weight and space, playing only what is needed, leaving room for the songs to breathe, transform and soar. The record was completed in March 2017 with Tom Schick at Jeff Tweedy’s famous ‘Loft’ Studios in the depths of Chicago’s winter.

R&B singer Kelela’s deeply personal debut LP does just what it says on the label. Over beats from Jam City, Bok Bok, Kingdom, and Arca—which swerve from warped and aqueous to warm and lush to icy and danceable—Kelela turns her emotions inside out with a sultriness and self-assuredness that few underground artists can muster. She’s tough and forthright, tender and subdued on songs about breakups (“Frontline”), makeups (“Waitin”), and pickups (“LMK”)—and the way she spins from one mode to the next is dizzying in the best way possible.

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.

Intended as an examination of 21st-century femininity and masculinity, Laura Marling’s sixth album drills into her friendships and relationships with absorbing intimacy. Musically, it’s one of her finest records too. She consistently finds a captivating balance between immediacy, nuance, and adventure—whether she’s plucking cascading acoustic melodies on “Nouel” or creating a suspenseful union of hushed electronic beats, filmic strings and snaking electric guitar on “Don’t Pass Me By.”

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.\"

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.”

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.

On their second album, Wolf Alice continue to draw their cues from ’90s alt-rock. They do it with such adventure and panache that it never becomes simple mimicry, though. The melody and dissonance of shoegaze are fashioned into aching, beautiful tributes to passed friends and relatives (“Heavenward,” “St. Purple & Green”), “Yuk Foo” mauls misogyny with punk fury and wit, while the title track is an epic journey in stoner rock. Out front, singer/guitarist Ellie Rowsell is an increasingly assured presence, skillfully inhabiting the many moods of her rivetingly personal lyrics.