The Best Albums of the Decade So Far (Pt. II, 20-11).
Vita Contemplativa continues to do the 2020s
Read Part I (30-21) here.
Thanks for tuning back in as Vita Contemplativa continues to count down the best albums of the last five years. Without any ado, here’s #20-11:
20. Magic Oneohtrix Point Never Oneohtrix Point Never
There’s no one left in contemporary electronic music of comparable stature to Oneohtrix Point Never (real name Daniel Lopatin). He’s the closest thing the Millennials have to a Vangelis, or an Aphex Twin—sometimes he’s so far out on his own, he seems like he’s been beamed in from another planet. Whether it’s basically inventing Vaporwave with his Chuck Person’s Eccojams, turning in scores for Sofia Coppola and the Safdie Brothers, or hopping from one varied studio album to the next (all great, though 2013’s R Plus Seven and 2011’s Replica seem to me like the real lasting classics), he’s everywhere inimitable and yet totally recognizable. On Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, he finally took his characteristic palate (retro-futurist arpeggiators, tinny MIDI ware, glitching samples spun from old commercials, et al.) and launched them into the pop stratosphere. The result was his most accessible album, and a kind of meta-discourse on his entire way of warping sound and genre, but more importantly one of the most re-playable recordings of his career.
19. Manning Fireworks MJ Lenderman
Yes, it’s surely dangerous putting something so new on a list like this (the record’s barely a month old), but even with all the hype that’s greeted Lenderman’s latest, I feel pretty safe calling it great. Certainly the guy’s best record so far. Extremely likely to last—though of course cultural prophecy is a fool’s game. Still, it’s the clearest and most characteristic thing he’s made, one of those records where a promising artist gets a chance to make a bid for something bigger, and absolutely nails it. His own guitar playing has never been better (see: “Rudolph”, the end of “Wristwatch”) and his songwriting still feels as idiosyncratic and unmistakably American as Randy Newman or Neil Young (a Canadian, sure, but a Yank in all the ways that really count). Every song is memorable and solidly-crafted. And check the way he sets up his big, anthemic break-up song, the purest pop song he’s ever penned—by having the girl in question help him sing the chorus. That’s a class act and a hell of a statement, in one.
18. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You Big Thief
A classic double album: the band gets big, holes up, relaxes, starts indulging its experiments, and produces a too-long record that succeeds anyways, mostly cause it’s charming and fun. Though in Big Thief’s case, it may just be their best effort as a full band. In one sense, they’re the best band in America—despite their easy groove and communication, mostly because they get to play Adrianne Lenker’s once-in-a-generation songs. And though it may not be as consistent as 2017’s Capacity (probably their one cohesive record), Dragon New Warm Mountain has enough fantastic songs in between the padding and the one-offs to be a great record itself. A few—“Red Moon,” “Simulation Swarm,” “Little Things,” “Certainty”—are enough on their own to argue for what the whole record as a whole ultimately argues: that Adrianne Lenker is probably the songwriter of her generation. There’s plenty of time for that to play itself out, but at the moment I can’t think of a better bet.
17. Blue Rev Alvvays
In which these accomplished twee Canadians lift off into pure power-pop heaven. Sure, it could be a little less shoegaze (we want to hear your voice better, Molly!) but the too-washed-out sound is ultimately only something to quibble over. The tunes, the licks, the changes, are relentless—the hooks read like a treatise on decades of rock-as-pop, where everything from Big Star to The Smiths to Oasis comes to a head, in the band’s impeccable sugar-sparkle haze. I admit I would never have picked Alvvays to become this kind of GREAT ROCK N’ ROLL BAND™, but here we are. Just you try playing “Easy on Your Own” or “Belinda Says” and see if you don’t feel yourself lifted a little bit off the ground. There are anthems, and then there are anthems. And these twee kids somehow figured out the secret, god bless them.
16. SUGAREGG Bully
By rights, Bully should’ve been to all the foppish pop-punk bands of the aughts (All-American Rejects, etc.) what Nirvana was to 80s hair metal: a proper reckoning, a this-is-how-you-actually-do-this sign to all the previous decade’s poseurs. Alas, they remain woefully underrated and ignored. But at least we have some great records, the best of which is probably this one, 2020’s SUGAREGG. They’ve since moved on to cleaner, sheen-ier pastures, but it’s here that Alica Bognanno achieved an absolute apotheosis of the enormous, sheer sound she’d been working through since her apprenticeship to the legendary producer Steve Albini. Not unlike Kurt Cobain himself, Bognanno is an effortless hook-maker and tune-writer, in the guise of a vocal-cord-shredding rock screamer. On SUGAREGG, her voice snarls and howls its way across the endless great licks and walls of guitars like she was born doing it.
15. BRAT Charli XCX
Nothing left to be said about Brat. Its bizarre, brief, unifying role in the zeitgeist will probably keep media studies types busy for years—the music has at this point been all but overshadowed by the spectacle of it all. But the spectacle is already fading—soon Brat Summer will be a faint whiff of a memory. What will last is the record itself: one of the best, most charming Big Pop records of this century. It may well end up eventually seeming a bit shallow, lyrically; the investment in Charli as a persona will surely ebb, the same way everything does. And what will be left? Beats, tunes, sounds, songs. Which is, after all, what really made the whole Brat thing work the way it did. “Talk talk” and “Club classics” and “Von Dutch” will be playing in clubs and making people move their asses for a very, very long time. The rest is noise.
14. Mind Palace Music @
Though originally released in 2021, the secretive, vaguely freak-folk duo @’s one record finally had a little real success after its 2023 re-release on Carpark Records. It’s a weird little triumph, largely recorded in separate places, tracks overlaid and added ad-hoc. The two singers, Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak, seem equally enamored of twee 90s New York, soft-rock 70s California, and midi approximations of Ren-Faire recorders—their pure voices combine and play off each other the way old-fashioned singer-songwriters used to. There’s an essential sweetness to their short songs, though the songs rarely sit still long enough to repeat, instead finding off-kilter ways to interrupt or change at the moment they threaten to develop into something simpler. Best of all may be the closer, “My Garden” where their mix of shifting rhythms, Rose’s wonderful looped vocal riffs, and the duo’s funny little suite of instruments all reach a perfect state of equilibrium. It doesn’t sound quite like anything else made this decade. Or any other, for that matter.
13. Girl With Fish feeble little horse
The great fuzzy indie rock album of the decade so far. If you can imagine sardonic, twee in-jokes cooed over slabs and squalls of distorted guitars, filtered through the occasional digital glitch—you’ll get somewhat close to what this album puts across. There’s a healthy dose of mid-American emo rock in the rhythm section, but as with so many of the most interesting rock records in recent years, what really makes Girl With Fish worth the attention is an unflagging pop sense. The band does go all-out pretty from time to time (“Slide”, “Heavy Water”) but more often than not (“Pocket”, “Freak”) their pop instincts keep leading them—like The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and many after them—back to their love of sheer noise. It’s a fine lineage, one they’ve come to represent better than any young band this decade.
12. how i’m feeling now Charli XCX
I’ve said it before in this Substack, and I’ll say it again—this, the most underrated and least listened-to record in her catalogue, remains Charli’s best. Brat may be a little more focused, more channeled into purely danceable and memorable pop moments, but how i’m feeling now is still the more adventurous and romantic record, the moment that hyperpop finally became actual Pop, and Charli stretched out and figured out how to fully collaborate with great producers. The pretentious reading would be that it’s a definitive statement on the place of electronic music in pop music. The better reading would be that Charli just wanted her music to be sincere and fun, and that her way of getting there had a lot more to do with actual experimentation and forward-thinking production than any other pop star of her stature.
11. Desire, I Want to Turn Into You Caroline Polachek
Of course, of all the widescreen, enormous Pop records of the last five years, the highest honor has to go to Caroline Polacheck. After 2019’s Pang, the former Chairlift singer was on her way to becoming the most self-reliant and original weirdo in “underground” pop (her music is self-released, not major label), a title she made real with Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She’s given to elaborately thematizing her song sequences, to lyrics that make little sense outside of her own little world. It could be insufferably pretentious but the woman is just a bit too strange and self-contained to risk going that far. It ends up being incredibly original and a little bit awkward (sincere originality often is), and always just out of reach. But then there’s that voice, and everything she’s learned to do with it. She may be the first popular singer since Bjork to use her instrument in a totally unique and totally instrumental way. It’s one of the great artistic coups of the decade.
Thanks again for tuning in. The final part of list will be here next Friday. Until then, look out for a new post earlier in the week.
I'm impressed with the depth of your engagement with new music! Very useful reference point - I look forward to seeing the Top 10!
I love “Billions” and “detonate” from the last two albums. All the songs on Desire still keep my ears piqued… I like that description “too self contained to risk insufferable pretentiousness” … sounds about right