Critics’ choice: The year’s top albums

Del Rey

Lana Del Rey has emerged, at 34, as “the poet laureate of a world on fire,” said Amy Phillips in Pitchfork.com.

Her fifth album combines elements that will be familiar to longtime fans: “Lynchian dreamscapes of haunted prom queens and suburban ennui, meditations on the death of the American dream, Old Hollywood glamour,” and “the agony and ecstasy of bad men.” Here, though, her airy “psych-folk” sound is more focused, she has widened her lens to offer an L.A.-rooted view of the growing climate crisis, and “her songwriting at last goes toe to toe with the grandeur of her ideas.” With her narcotized vocals, her reliance on piano-based ballads, and her refusal to join other female pop stars in peddling self-empowerment, Del Rey has become “a genre unto herself,” said Rob Harvilla in TheRinger.com. During this past decade, “no one wrote about the American dream with more cutting perception.”

Eilish

Billie Eilish makes music that “understands how adolescence can feel like a horror movie,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. On the 17-year-old’s remarkable debut album, most every track consists of just a few elements: Eilish’s “quiet, breathy voice,” a beat, an electronic bass line, and “just enough keyboard notes to sketch a melody.” But all are “death-haunted,” all have a sense of looming suspense, and many suggest how “the ordinary can suddenly be pierced by the ghastly or the absurd.” The album, recorded in her bedroom with her brother serving as producer, “felt like it instantly transformed pop,” said Carl Wilson in Slate.com. And given Eilish’s talents for melody and mood, she “seems like she’ll be creating unmissable art for as long as she cares to.”

Twigs

“sound designs worthy of Renaissance architecture.” Twigs hasn’t forsworn the use of jarring industrial sounds or echoes of hip-hop, said Craig Jenkins in New York magazine. Magdalene and its accompanying videos represent “an effortless braiding of high-brow electronic art-pop, carnal soul music, and lurid modern dance.” It is one woman meeting the particular challenges of her life “with regal grace, prideful eccentricity, and forthright sensuality.”

Olsen

Angel Olsen’s latest is “a towering, tempestuous” album on which “nearly every song has calms and storms to match Olsen’s soaring voice,” said Jem Aswad in Variety. Having previously established herself as one of the decade’s most promising singer-songwriters, the Asheville, N.C.–based indie-rock artist enlisted a 14-piece orchestra to turn All Mirrors into a record that “at nearly all points sounds really, really big.” Though Olsen is still singing about toxic relationships, “this time around, she escapes their destruction and finds not just happiness but catharsis,” said Max Freedman in PasteMagazine.com. Her new orchestral sound reaches “extraordinarily goose bump–inducing heights.”

Woods