Top pop music albums
1. Sault, “Untitled (Black Is)” and “Untitled (Rise)”: Little is known about the Black British collective, but the group’s sinuous, entrancing music speaks for itself. “(Black Is)” and “(Rise),” the third and fourth albums the group put out in 16 months, are uniformly excellent, and “(Black Is)” is the best. A proud, resilient statement of faith in the face of racial injustice, it insists, on “Hard Life,” that “things are gonna change.”
2. Waxahatchee, “Saint Cloud”: Katie Crutchfield, the singer who records as Waxahatchee, returned home to Alabama to explore her Southern roots and embrace the country-flavored narratives of heroes like Lucinda Williams. Embracing sobriety, the tight, catchy songs like “Can’t Do
Much” hit their targets precisely, rising above Crutchfield’s perfectly good previous work.
3. Run the Jewels, “RTJ4?”: The fourth and best of the hardhitting albums by Killer Mike and his rapping and producing partner EL-P challenges America to face up to a history of racism and address it with appropriate empathy and anger. “You so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me,” Mike rhymes on “Walkin’ in the Snow.” “Until my voice goes from a shriek to a whisper: ‘I can’t breathe.’”
4. Fiona Apple, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”: The title track to Fiona Apple’s fifth album (and first in eight years) comes from a line spoken by Gillian Anderson in the Belfast crime series “The Fall.” In Apple’s case, the bolt cutters were fetched because the time had come to get out of self-imposed isolation and release this gloriously clattering, funny, angry, bighearted and free-spirited music into the world. Expectations were met.
5. Bob Dylan, “Rough and Rowdy Ways”: “I sing the songs of experience like William Blake,” Bob Dylan whispers in “I Contain Multitudes,” evoking Walt Whitman, while name-dropping Anne Frank, Indiana Jones and the Rolling Stones. “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is playful and profound, shimmying and swaggering as it dispenses decades of accrued wisdom.
6. Taylor Swift, “Folklore” and “Evermore”: Swift gifted fans with two surprises composed in quarantine. Both team her with producer-arranger Aaron Dessner of The National as she steps off the superstar treadmill to make “cottagecore” music with a no-gloss feel. Is the indie-friendly sound necessarily better than her pure pop approach? No. But it’s exciting to hear her stretch her formidable songwriting skills as she pushes forward creatively.
7. Lil Uzi Vert, “Eternal Atake”: The North Philly-born rapper refined his emo rap approach on the sensitive “I’m Sorry” and interpolated the Backstreet Boys on the hit “That Way.” In collaboration with the Philadelphia beatmakers collective Working on Dying, it’s the best work yet from one of the most wildly creative figures in all of pop music.
8. Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band, “Just Like Moby Dick”: What good is a Top 10 list without a sleeper? Mine is by the 77-year-old Lubbock, Texas, pianist and visual artist Allen, whose “Abandonitis” was my third most played song on Spotify this year. “Just Like Moby Dick,” which features Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton, steel guitar great Lloyd Maines and singer Shannon Mcnally, is full of wry, looselimbed songs about ghost ships, Herman Melville, vampires - and dreamers hoping to shake a pain that just won’t go away.
9. Dua Lipa, “Future Nostalgia”: British singer Dua Lipa delivered the stuck-at-home dance party album of the year. Consciously drawing on 1970s and 1980s pop-funk, from disco producer Giorgio Moroder to Madonna. It would be underselling “Future Nostalgia” to call it mindless fun. Mindful fun is more like it, keenly aware that in anxious times, the value of a good dance is substantial.
10. Bruce Springsteen, “Letter to You”: Springsteen reached back to his beginnings here, drawing inspiration from the death of the leader of his first band. The songs are sturdy and selfreferential, taking into account what’s been lost with the passage of time while appreciating the good fortune of still being able to lead a rock-and-roll band in pursuit of communal catharsis.