Year-End Lists
Staff Picks: The Albums and Songs We Loved in 2021
The late, great Lester Bangs once wrote that we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. And he was basically right until Lil Nas X came sliding down the stripper-pole to Hell. Oh, 2021. You rocked us like a damn sociopath. What an insanely exciting, emotional, and reinvigorating year for music. President Biden took office and made Olivia Rodrigo an ambassador. We had Hot Vax Summer and Sad Girl Fall (Taylor’s Version.) Live music came back and Dave Grohl never left. Noobs ruled songwriting. Doja Cat ruled the planet. We brought back the electric guitar (all the rumors are true, baby), 2000s pop-punk, and Adele. We freed Britney. Halsey freed the nipple. And we all somehow found out about a Baltimore rock quintet called Turnstile. It’s all in SPIN‘s lists for Best Songs of...
Our 21 Favorite Concerts of 2021
Ah, 2021 — the year live music (mostly) roared back. After 18 months of livestream drudgery, it felt like unicorns dancing on a rainbow every time someone so much as plugged in a guitar. It was a year of “post-vax concert stories,” where every show was a hard-won reunion, a triumphant homecoming, and a victory all at once. Strangest of all, it was the year when we found ourselves getting misty just being able to look out at a crowd, marveling at the gift of singing shoulder-to-shoulder with someone other than our cats. Okay, so we’re still a little sentimental. The point is, in a year when every show was a grand slam of catharsis and joy, it was slightly painful to narrow this list down. But after not getting to do one at all in 2020, we are ecstatic and proud to give you some of the highe...
The 30 Best Songs of 2021
A pair of rappers pulling off the best Tom Tom Club sample since Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” (G Perico & Rucci), an iconic New Wave band trafficking in tongue-in-cheek nostalgia (Duran Duran), a blackgaze act embracing their love of vocal harmony (Deafheaven), and psych-rockers using the shopping mall as a metaphor for capitalist greed (My Morning Jacket) — SPIN‘s 30 Best Songs of 2021 offer something for everyone. For our latest year-end track recap, we kept our overall sorting process the same as 2020: For a cut to be eligible, it needed to be one of two things: 1) a stand-alone single released in 2021 or 2) part of an album issued in 2021. 30. Beatrice Deer – “The Storm” The sound is so simple that, at first, it feels almost formless: a primal drum groove, shards of metallic elect...
The 30 Best Albums of 2021
Back in June, SPIN published The 30 Best Albums of 2021 (So Far), rounding up everything from mainstream rock to experimental hip-hop. Six months later, we’re back with our year-end recap — and it’s interesting how, even though the stylistic balance has stayed consistent, the picks themselves haven’t. While this list also covers a lot of ground, only six of those earlier records wound up in our final tally. Below, you’ll find massive R&B collaborations (Silk Sonic), trendy pop breakouts (Olivia Rodrigo), big-ticket indie-rock (The War on Drugs), prog-metal giants (Mastodon), and acclaimed indie-rap (Benny the Butcher & Harry Fraud). Looking back at Pandemic Year Number Two, when the music industry forecast seemed to shift on a daily basis, perhaps these changes are only fittin...
The 20 Most Interesting New Artists of 2020
With most indie venues closed due to the pandemic and many record stores altering their business methods, it was a challenging year for music discovery. Luckily, we live in the Internet age, where a glowing album review, trending social media post or intriguing Bandcamp tag can instantly connect fans to their next favorite band. As the music world remained stuck in quarantine limbo, upcoming songwriters had more time than usual to record, hype, network and livestream — and it’s safe to say we all needed the distraction. To cap off the year’s depressing madness with a glimmer of optimism, we gathered this list of our 20 Most Interesting New Artists of 2020 — from indie-pop to Afrobeat. Where there are fresh sounds, there’s hope. Anjimile The trendy comparison for Anjimile is Sufjan Stevens,...
The 30 Best Albums of 2020
After a deluge of canceled or delayed tours, drive-in experiments, Bandcamp Fridays and bedroom livestreams, we’re finally here. Yay? It’s hard to celebrate much of anything in 2020. But one encouraging sign from the music industry has been the number of artists innovating on the fly — figuring out ways to sustain their careers through the madness. And as fans, at least we’ve had new albums to help us process our continuing semi-apocalypse. Having (mercifully) reached the end of this awful year, we have even more perspective on the functionality of a great record. The 30 we’ve assembled here have prompted us to dance, helped us grieve, made us laugh, or even just allowed us to escape into a transportive riff or soundscape. We assume they did the same for the artists themselves. Let us reme...
