Music is a messy thing. There’s too much of it, too many genres, too many ideas, for anyone to make sense out of all of it — or even to hear all of it. The idea of imposing a narrative on 365 days of music, of making sense of a whole year, is a fool’s errand. Still, some years, stories and patterns and commonalities emerge. Trends cut across genre lines and become movements. New voices rise up and reshape the landscape in their image. Some years, you can start to feel like you’re making sense out of all of it. This isn’t one of those years.

Looking at Stereogum’s list of the year’s best albums, you won’t find a whole lot of common threads or shared ideas. There’s not one genre or aesthetic or feeling that dominates the whole thing. Instead, we’ve got a list that seesaws wildly between explosive joy and wizened self-aware depression and staring-out-windows indolence and feverish all-consuming rage. It’s a list where the world’s biggest pop star sits sandwiched between a pair of insurgent Atlanta rap bugout kings and a sharper-than-ice queer singer-songwriter expressionist, where a mob of previously-unknown crust-metal demons snuck into the top 10 ahead of many of the year’s most acclaimed albums. Stereogum is a site that’s known for covering indie rock, and you’ll find plenty of down-the-middle guitar-driven indie on our list. But you’ll also find elephantine stoner metal and slick Nashville country and disorienting future-R&B and brutishly minimal West Coast rap and splintered punk rock and shimmering retro-maniacal dance music. What I’m saying is: This list doesn’t make sense. And that’s a good thing. It shouldn’t.

Looking for common threads, only one thing jumped out at me: There are a lot of old motherfuckers on this list. Across genres and economic strata, crusty veterans had a good year. You’ll only find a small handful of debut albums on the entire top-50 list, but you will find plenty of artists who made their greatest impact a decade or more ago. For the most part, these veterans, whether we’re talking about scorched-earth storyteller Sun Kil Moon or studio-pop pro Jenny Lewis or Swiss metal boundary-smasher Thomas Gabriel Fischer (of Triptykon), these veterans have found new ways to get at the heart of what everyone liked about them in the first place. In an increasingly decentralized music business, maybe there are fewer people now standing between these people and the things they want to say. These musicians are evolving, but they’re also straying true to the selves we’ve known for a long time.

The Stereogum staff who put this list together is different from the one that put together last year’s list, which was different from the one the year before. This time around, we’ve got Gabriela Tully Claymore and James Rettig, both champions of new strains of DIY pop, and Ryan Leas, the young classic rocker who’s written so many great features for us. The list is as much about Stereogum’s staff as it is about the year in music itself. These are our favorite albums, not the ones that are objectively the best. (There is no objective best in something as personal as music.) And together, we’ve assembled a list that’s just as messy as the year it represents. We hope you find things that you haven’t heard, things that move you like they moved us. –Tom Breihan

50 Parquet Courts – Sunbathing Animal (What’s Your Rupture?)

Parquet Courts are the kind of chronically chill band that has been exhaustingly compared to Pavement, but on the apathy barometer, Sunbathing Animal should be regarded in the shadow of bands like Television. Songs like “Dear Ramona” and “Always Back In Town” display the same kind of structural rigidity found on Marquee Moon. Parquet Courts are smart, sure, but their new record isn’t as smarmy as Light Up Gold, and its lyrics are more pointed. There are a lot of questions to be found on Sunbathing Animal, many of which are rhetorical and go unanswered. “How is agency built in a life unfulfilled?” Andrew Savage sings on “What Color Is Blood,” before circling around to the choral line, “Excuse me as I slip on out.” These aren’t lessons on living, but rather tales of evasion — displacing the question in favor of never finding an answer. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

49 St. Vincent – St. Vincent (Loma Vista)

Sometimes self-titling a record several LPs into a discography is meant to signal a new phase of old things, a mid-career back-to-basics. Other times, it’s something like St. Vincent’s newest offering: an announcement, an arrival. Though St. Vincent wasn’t as shocking a step forward as Strange Mercy had been from Actor, it still feels like a destination toward which each of Annie Clark’s albums had been incrementally building. We couldn’t see it with the sinisterly sweet Actor or even with the sweetly sinister Strange Mercy, but this version of St. Vincent was always what was meant to be — this version, of colorless hair and sci-fi aesthetics and guitar and synth layers ranging from melted to glassy but always, always remaining sterile and ethereally chilly. Clark had steadily been on her way to becoming one of the luminaries of this era of indie, and this album — with mutated grooves like “Digital Witness” or reflections as moving as “I Prefer Your Love” — feels like the official coronation. –Ryan [LISTEN]

48 TOPS – Picture You Staring (Arbutus)

TOPS make the kind of music that should soundtrack the wind-down of the best day of your life. It’s impossible to listen to a record like Picture You Staring and not feel the corners of your mouth begin to curl upward. There’s something atmospheric and intimate about the record that recalls other Arbutus releases, but TOPS have a definitive pop streak that is toned down by Jane Penny’s vocals. Penny’s voice creeps into empty spaces, like slow-released vapor, intertwining with bold synth lines to create something simultaneously haunting and easy to listen to. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

47 Thou – Heathen (Gilead Media)

New Orleans produces sludge bands the way University Of Kentucky produces NBA-ready talent: with remarkable consistency and an unusually high standard of quality. NOLA sludge has been a premium product since 1988, when Eyehategod formed, but even among such a peer group, Thou stand out. The Louisiana band’s fourth full-length album, Heathen, layers grinding, industrial assault with explosive bursts and expansive webs of melody, and balances its gnarliest, hardest moments with passages of pastoral ambience. Pure sludge is cathartic noise, violence made sound, but in the hands of Thou, it feels like high art. Heathen is an album of tremendous sorrow, wonder, ugliness, and beauty — am inspiring thing to behold and even perhaps a masterpiece. –Michael [LISTEN]

46 Spoon – They Want My Soul (Loma Vista)

When you crank out great music as consistently as Spoon does, it can become story-less. You might find people trying to impose a narrative where there’s only an inhumanly unerring band with a seemingly infinite selection of hooks. The story attached to They Want My Soul was that it was the long-awaited “return to form” after the first moderately disappointing album of their reign, 2010’s Transference. See, this is crazy, because Transference is a gem in the catalog — a dusty and shambolic take on the typically well-oiled Spoon mechanism. Bogus narrative aside, it does make for a fine symbiosis with They Want My Soul, an album that’s perhaps Spoon’s shiniest, grooviest, most nocturnal release yet, and feels all the more so for its comparison point with Transference. Whether in the impeccable pop of “Do You” or the shimmery synths of “Inside Out” and “New York Kiss,” this is Spoon at the height of their powers but injecting a few new colors into the mix — mostly a range of luminescent blues that work as well on a humid night walk through Manhattan as they do on a humid night drive through Florida. –Ryan [LISTEN]

45 You Blew It! – Keep Doing What You’re Doing (Topshelf)

Keep Doing What You’re Doing reminds me of almost every song that I loved in middle school for adhering to what I would have deemed, “raw, unapologetic emotion.” The record is undeniably kind of sad, it’s maybe even a little angsty, but if we revoke the “Emo Revival” labeling from You Blew It!’s sophomore album, we’re left with a the kind of glaring honesty that feels uncomfortable, or at least jarring upon first listen. Regardless, Keep Doing What You’re Doing is a pop record built on bulletproof melodies and defiant one-liners that burrow their way into your subconscious, “You’ve made the list/ of people I won’t miss,” Tanner Jones sings on “Rock Spring.” Keep Doing What You’re Doing is so confessional that its specificity becomes relatable once you’re able to admit it. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

44 Sturgill Simpson – Metamodern Sounds In Country Music (High Top Mountain)

It’s not every day you come across a country album with a title like Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, or a country album that talks about hallucinogenics and, uh, “reptile aliens made of light.” The music on Sturgill Simpson’s sophomore outing isn’t always as idiosyncratic as its thematic eccentricities might suggest — Simpson’s also been praised for the way his music recalls the outlaw country tradition. Of course, on the other side of things you’ve got the warped psychedelic outro of “It Ain’t All Flowers.” In either case, Simpson brings a whole lot of gravity to his music; he’s one of those guys you just assume has seen some things, especially given the drugs he’s singing about. Bonus points for the fact that Simpson worked up a slow, yearning cover of When In Rome’s “The Promise,” where he plays it quiet until one big, powerful reading of the chorus toward the end, maybe the album’s most beautiful moment. –Ryan [LISTEN]

43 LVL Up – Hoodwink’d (Double Double Whammy/Exploding In Sound)

In my initial review of Hoodwink’d, I talked a lot about the bigger picture: how the album deals with human nature’s enormous capability for self-deception, and how the band uses mysticism and clever turns of phrase to acutely capture the malaise that plagues our entire generation. But what I neglected to talk about is just how fucking fun this record is to listen to. Since I wrote that, I’ve seen the LVL UP boys do their thing live a few times, and each time I come away with the same impression: These dudes know how to write a hook, they know how to inject it with just the right balance of levity and gravitas, and they know how to rock out. They’ve created a living, breathing classic with Hoodwink’d, one that recalls the past but feels urgently modern and deliriously enjoyable. –James [LISTEN]

42 Triptykon – Melana Chasmata (Century Media)

In his own way, Thomas Gabriel Fischer — fka Tom G. Warrior — was sort of a self-sabotaging Kozelek-ian troll this year: First, he slagged off his own new album, Triptykon’s doomy Melana Chasmata, saying, “[It] might be the most deficient post-Celtic Frost reunion album I have been involved in.” Then, he slagged off his tour mates, the very popular (and notoriously nice) At The Gates. Fortunately, Melana Chasmata is powerful enough to overcome such conflicts and doubts. In fact, it’s an album that revels in conflicts and doubts. Melana Chasmata is not a deficient album — it’s a towering, consuming vortex — but it is, in its way, tentative, morose, and wounded. Those are not emotions often displayed in metal, especially not when the music is presented with such a dichotomous roar. In a sense, Fischer’s uncertainty serves to underscore the album’s gravity. He shouldn’t be boastful or even necessarily sure of himself: He’s a serious artist, and Melana Chasmata is a serious work of art. –Michael [LISTEN]

41 Vince Staples – Hell Can Wait (Def Jam)

The major-label rap EP is having a minor resurgence mostly for economic reasons: Labels don’t want to pay a bunch to promote untested artists, so they float unpublicized mini-albums to see whether people react. In Vince Staples’ hands, though, the EP is something else. In seven songs and about 20 minutes, the young Long Beach rapper leaves behind his old Odd Future comrades, sneering dexterously over noisily minimal beats and sounding cool as fuck doing it. And with a song like “Hands Up,” there’s a political resonance to Staples’ intensity that pushes the whole project to another level. –Tom [LISTEN]

40 Tinashe – Aquarius (RCA)

Ever since “2 On” came out in January — and especially since Drake made his own version of the track in May — Tinashe has been rocketing toward urban pop’s A-List. The triumphant Aquarius is proof that she deserves her place in the pantheon. The album involves a who’s who of 2014’s top producers (DJ Mustard, Mike Will Made It, Detail, Dev Hynes, Stargate, Boi-1da, Clams Casino, DJ Dahi) and features guest verses from Future, A$AP Rocky, and Schoolboy Q, yet in contrast to your typically stilted and schizophrenic major-label debut album, Aquarius bends all those voices toward Tinashe’s own exquisite vision. It’s a sleek, sultry, understated take on R&B that draws from decades’ worth of history while still sounding fresh and forward-thinking. If there was any ground left between the so-called “indie R&B” movement and the mainstream, this collection closes that gap for good. –Chris [LISTEN]

39 Caribou – Our Love (Merge)

Caribou’s albums have always been electronic to various extents, but they seemed less like club music than what came to be known for better or worse as IDM — brainy experimental sounds better suited for reflective personal listening than dancefloor excursions. Our Love is not like that. The album sounds great on headphones, sure, and tracks like “Silver” and “Back Home” bloom into brilliant compositions on par with Dan Snaith’s most florid psych-pop and krautrock turns. But first and foremost, you can move to this music. Rhythm and repetition are the drivers, and Snaith being Snaith, they’re as breathtaking as his melodies and textures. He lets his sleek, futuristic loops gather momentum until heart, mind, and body are all aflutter. The few words he does deploy — sentences as simple as “I can’t do without you,” fragments as basic as “our love” — speak volumes. –Chris [LISTEN]

38 Horrendous – Ecdysis (Dark Descent)

The best present-day death metal tends to fall into one of two camps: forward-thinking avant-gardists (Gorguts, Morbus Chron) or old-school gods resurrected (Carcass, At The Gates). Horrendous are neither of those things: They’re a young American band playing in a traditionalist subgenre — they’re revisiting the buzzing, ultra-catchy style of old Swedish greats like Entombed and Dismember — but their second LP, Ecydysis, merely uses that as bedrock on which to build a new city. Actually, “new” is probably the wrong word: Ecydysis feels well-worn, soulful even, but unlike most Swedeath revivalists, it complicates those crushing riffs and that intoxicating guitar tone with textures, structures, dynamics, and melodies that recall nothing so much as Metallica circa Ride The Lightning. Ecydysis doesn’t just raise the stakes and standards for everyone else in the game; it’s a modern classic. –Michael [LISTEN]

37 Mitski – Bury Me At Makeout Creek (Double Double Whammy)

There’s a moment in Bury Me At Makeout Creek’s “Drunk Walk Home Alone” when 23-year-old Mitski Miyawaki’s voice quavers, eventually descending into metallic, contorted howling. That’s just one of many such moments of unbridled exasperation that define Mitski’s third album. Bury Me At Makeout Creek is filled with deafening pauses like these, when all sense of caution and resignation is shed. It isn’t an aggressive record, but there’s something self-aware and almost bitingly melancholic about it that negates the sweeter tendencies found on Mitski’s first two releases. Still, each track contains some sort of ripple, a slight suggestion that things are not as serious as they may seem. It’s easy to compare the lukewarm sentiment of Bury Me At Makeout Creek to the Liz Phair of Exile In Guyville, but it’s more audacious, and more fun, to argue that the album is reminiscent of Hole’s Live Through This. Bury Me At Makeout Creek is deeply personal and in no way instructive, but it might help save you from yourself. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

36 The Men – Tomorrow’s Hits (Sacred Bones)

Some people are starting to take the Men for granted. Or, rather, some people are actually starting to get annoyed with The Men. With the original novelty of “former hardcore band goes classic rock” having worn off by now, the fact that the Men keep churning out a record a year is looking, to some, like diminishing returns. Which is a shame, because Tomorrow’s Hits kills — shaved down to an expertly balanced eight tracks, it might be the tightest distillation of everything these guys are about right now. That means that while there’s all the ragged glory we now expect from them, there are also little modulations the band don’t get quite enough credit for. Tomorrow’s Hits is where the Men most fully commit to a raw, contemporary take on classic rock vibes and tropes, but it also has things like “Different Days,” which could almost be considered “garage krautrock.” The highlight is “Settle Me Down,” a ’60s pop detour that’s also the most gorgeous song the band have yet released. –Ryan [LISTEN]

35 Flying Lotus – You’re Dead (Warp)

For a while there, it seemed Steven Ellison would just keep spinning further and further off the face of the planet. But once he shot into the stars on Cosmogramma, and plunging into dreams and subconsciousness on the slightly more organic Until The Quiet Comes, now Ellison goes full-on space-age prog-jazz on You’re Dead!, an album that gets at all the really big, really mystic, really unanswerable questions about the moments of death and what comes next. More than any of his other work, You’re Dead! leans hardest on Ellison’s jazz interests, at times entirely leaving behind the electronic and hip hop production that first made his name. The result is the Flying Lotus album that perhaps takes the most effort to dig into, based less on any discrete songs and arriving at Ellison’s perennial goal of crafting one continuous piece over the course of an album. It’s a sinewy, strange trip, and as always, Ellison’s succeeded at making art that’s a convincing depiction of the unknowable. –Ryan [LISTEN]

34 How To Dress Well – “What Is This Heart?” (Domino)

Tom Krell started out his career by hiding himself in shrouds of mysticism, muffling his spectral R&B with vocal effects and lo-fi techniques and sending out only out-of-focus photos of himself. So it’s striking that Krell’s newest, best album is so emotionally naked, so exultant in its self-disclosure. On “What Is This Heart?”, Krell strips the effects from his voice and sings, passionately and eloquently, about hidden fears and deep needs, drawing as much psychic inspiration from emo as he ever did from R&B. Musically, the album is grand and majestic, with synths that layer up like sheets of glass. Altogether, it’s a pretty, pretty thing. –Tom [LISTEN]

33 Aphex Twin – SYRO (Warp)

In the decade-plus since the last proper Aphex Twin album, many have tried their hands at approximating the subliminal impact of Richard D. James’ uncanny twitch-float. Nobody has even come close. On SYRO, James clears out his vaults, showing us what he’s been doing during his time as a homebody father in an isolated village. And while his tracks don’t exactly sound like the future anymore, they still yank us out of the slipstream of time in much the same way. And now we get to hear, once again, how a master turns clanks and whirrs and bloops into emotional private symphonies. –Tom [LISTEN]

32 Future Islands – Singles (4AD)

Like the Men with Tomorrow’s Hits, Future Islands were going for some sardonic audacity when titling their fourth LP Singles. You know, this is some idea of pop music, some meta-notion of a singles collection, but not the kind of stuff that’d ever be mainstream today. Well, the joke is on them, or us, or everyone together, I guess: Singles actually did break the band in a big way, riding on the infectiousness of “Seasons (Waiting On You)” and their immediately immortal performance of it on Letterman back in March. While that song’s certainly a highlight, it’s not alone. True to its title, Singles actually feels like a glisteningly catchy but still take-no-prisoners greatest hits collection dropped in from nowhere. –Ryan [LISTEN]

31 Ty Segall – Manipulator (Drag City)

Ty Segall has devoted much of his career to finding the sloppy, fiery magic that can happen when a group of people play loud rock music in a room together. But his greatest triumph to date came when he ditched just about everyone else and made himself sound like a band. Segall recorded almost everything on his massive double album Manipulator himself. Along the way, he learned some new tricks: Conjuring grandeur with walloping choruses, injecting syncopation into his riff-rock onslaught, turning his howl into a potent glam-rock falsetto. And he did all this, miraculously, without losing the go-for-broke live-band immediacy that made him a force in the first place. Stay out of this guy’s way. –Tom [LISTEN]

30 Todd Terje – It’s Album Time (Olsen Records)

It’s Album Time, and not a moment too soon. After a decade of bubbling his way up through the ranks, Todd Terje turned his playful gurgles loose on a full-length project, and holy shit was it worth the wait. The Norwegian disco-house auteur made a dance music odyssey that felt like a cartoon, and not just because the album cover was a colorful doodle. There’s a giddiness in these songs that often gets squashed out in the pursuit of Serious Electronic Music. Yet It’s Album Time isn’t mere kids stuff. It has the air of a spectacular night out, every track fizzing and sloshing its way around the edge of a glass until it spills over into euphoria. They flow into each other expertly, too, playing out with a feel for mood and pacing so that the album never seems to get old. Even without ace 2012 single “Inspector Norse” tacked onto the end as an exclamation point, it’s a wonderful ride. –Chris [LISTEN]

29 Ariel Pink – pom pom (4AD)

It’s unfortunate that Ariel Pink’s 2014 will not be remembered as the year of pom pom, but rather as the year that Pink should have kept his mouth shut. I say this because pom pom really is an exceptional record — it’s difficult to make something as pointedly perverse as this sound both turbulent and sweet at the same time. pom pom is dripping in tongue-in-cheek references to the vapidity of L.A. culture, all the while grounding itself in Pink’s trademarked distressing version of Wonderland. All seventeen tracks boast the same childish buoyancy as Pink’s earlier projects, but there is something sinister about the album’s overall sentiment magnified by his uncompromising, explicit lyrics, that makes pom pom stand out and above. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

28 Fucked Up – Glass Boys (Matador)

“Warm Change,” the fifth song on Glass Boys, ends with a two-minute guitar solo and organ wash that could pass for the Who jamming in a basketball arena. The album is mostly more brutal than that, an onslaught of shimmering melodic guitars, shrill howls, and echo-booming drums that sounds like aging punk scrubbing his filthy conscience with the most majestic Brillo pad. Yet even as they scaled back their operatic ambitions in favor of (relatively) short, (relatively) sweet jolts of behemoth hardcore, there was an unmistakable classic rock swagger to Fucked Up’s latest. The end result suggested that Damian Abraham’s demons look a lot like Monsters Of Rock. –Chris [LISTEN]

27 Cloud Nothings – Here And Nowhere Else (Carpark/Mom + Pop)

Give me a recording of Cloud Nothings’ Jayson Gerycz drumming along to a click-track, and I could listen to it for hours, bare-boned. When Tom elected Here And Nowhere Else as Album Of The Week back in April, he too was fixated on this element of Cloud Nothings’ fourth album. There is something almost grossly ambitious about Gerycz’s technique that illuminates Here And Nowhere Else as an experiment in achieving optimum balance. Lead singer Dylan Baldi’s voice is almost grating, but anything more delicate would make the band’s punctual delivery sound less ferocious, tamer. Lyrically, Here And Nowhere Else could be considered angst-ridden, but all eight songs on the record pocket a kind of intensity that transforms sulking in the corner into an act of rebellion. –Gabriela [LISTEN]

26 Jessie Ware – Tough Love (Universal/Island)

When Jessie Ware debuted with Devotion two years ago, her music was pure understated simmer. Much of Tough Love maintained and even improved upon that aesthetic: the scintillating title track, the suave “Sweetest Song,” the sweaty Miguel bass flirtation “Kind Of… Sometimes… Maybe.” Elsewhere the album went full Adele, and never better than on “Say You Love Me,” a show-stopping torch song that proves Ware can be just as alluring when she lets it all hang out. Everything between those poles, from the Dev Hynes disco excursion “Want Your Feeling” to the surging synth-pop anthem “You & I (Forever),” was pretty sweet too. –Chris [LISTEN]

 

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