The A.V. Club’s 20 best albums of 2018

By The A.V. Club, Clayton Purdom, Alex McLevy, Katie Rife, A.A. Dowd, David Anthony, Annie Zaleski, Marty Sartini Garner  |  December 18, 2018 | 12:00pm

Image: Photo: The BethsPhoto: Beach HousePhoto: Georgia Anne MuldrowPhoto: SabaPhoto: Neko CaseGraphic: Libby McGuire Music Features Best Of 2018

10. Mitski, Be The Cowboy

Mitski has always excelled at zeroing in on the essential, emotionally lacerating parts of her songwriting narratives. But on her fifth album, Be The Cowboy, her perspective is even sharper, as she explores the ways isolation and companionship intersect and diverge. The brassy indie-pop pirouette “Me And My Husband” muses about the changing contours of marriage over time. Elsewhere, on “Lonesome Love,” a song about the power certain people have over us, Mitski has a melancholy ache in her voice as she wonders, “Why am I lonely for lonesome love?” In contrast, the ways insecurity and external validation influence our motivations creeps into “Nobody,” on which she admits, “And I know no one will save me / I just need someone to kiss.” In accordance with these insights, Be The Cowboy’s music is also crisper and more realized. Perforated rhythms and ghostly synths tangle with marching horns on “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?” while scorching guitars brand “Remember My Name,” and “Come Into The Water” hews toward quieter, Beach House-caliber dream-pop. [Annie Zaleski]

9. DJ Koze, Knock Knock

Like Willy Wonka in a straw hat, DJ Koze guides you through this technicolor playhouse of a record on a fixed track, moving from street-level grime into clouds of chirpy, cherubic harps and flutes within the album’s first few seconds. And while there is darkness lurking here and there throughout Knock Knock, there never seems to be any real danger. Instead, we’re invited to join the German producer in his carnival of delights, feasting on R&B and house, and nodding along to sunny hip-hop that sounds as much like Atlanta in the early ’90s as it does the Hollywood Hills in 2018. Koze will fill the space with a familiar scent—the rubberiness of Merriweather Post Pavilion, the flowering birdsong of El Guincho—then move quickly along to the next room, allowing just a hint of the ambience to linger in the air while he works on the next attraction. This is dance music in the broadest possible sense, a postmodern assemblage of sounds that on the surface don’t have much in common but together suggest a hundred different ways to move your body. [Marty Sartini Garner]

8. Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs

Earl Sweatshirt used to talk the best shit, but it’s scarce on Some Rap Songs. The one-time Odd Future avatar’s not concerned with some nebulous antagonist but rather fading friends, an absent father casting a long shadow, and his own restless, multiplying inner demons. This is hip-hop at its most hermetic, the drawn blinds and days-long benders of his last LP now constituting an entire internal universe, a cosmos of refracted samples and serpentine, beneath-the-beat bars. And yet Earl explores his own depression and grief with such searing clarity and sonic invention that it transforms the journey into the broadest, most human record of his career. It’s a cathartic listen that begs repeat plays, a cycle composed of smaller loops, each coming unglued like a bunch of Alchemist beats disintegrating Basinski-style. On “Azucar,” from deep within his fortress, he raps, “Shook tradition, did it my way / No sense in looking at the sky.” Sometimes it’s better inside. [Clayton Purdom]

7. Ezra Furman, Transangelic Exodus

The cover of Ezra Furman’s Transangelic Exodus features the singer-songwriter’s eyes reflected in the rearview mirror of what one can only assume is a vintage muscle car, his expectant gaze fixed on a faraway point on the horizon. It’s an apt image for the romantic restlessness that drives this inspired concept album, charting the emotional journey of angelic queer lovers on the run from the law. Transangelic Exodus is very much in the “anywhere but here” spirit of Bruce Springsteen, but is less beholden to the classic-rock sound; the album’s metallic percussion in particular adds an industrial flavor, and Furman is just as likely to burst out into frenzied spoken word (“No Place”) as belt out an anthemic chorus (“Suck The Blood From My Wound”). It’s a vital, passionate, theatrical record that reinvents the all-American archetype of the brooding rock ’n’ roll rebel in its own leather-and-lipstick-clad image, leaving the homophobes and the pigs choking on its dust as it speeds off along a lonely desert freeway. [Katie Rife]

6. Yves Tumor, Safe In The Hands Of Love

A lot of our best artists seek to blow up notions of genre, but few do so with the vocabulary-flouting agnosticism of Yves Tumor, who evokes comparisons to everything from chillwave and Oneohtrix Point Never to Stones Throw and Björk. It doesn’t help that he shuns interviews, specific biographic details, and description in general. But look—or, rather, listen: If the artist possibly born as Sean Bowie whispered of a far-off place on his first record and described it more clearly on his second, he transports us there on Safe In The Hands Of Love, creating a series of blown-out, gravity-defying loops capable of expressing anxious warmth (“Economy Of Freedom”) and keening sensuality (“Honesty”)—and those are just the first two tracks with words. Indeed, the further addition of vocals clarifies the pop ambition and thematic concerns underlying all of Yves Tumor’s work, evoking a fried-circuit dystopia in which human connection and intimacy is still possible, and still worth it, no matter how painful. How else are we supposed to know we’re still alive? [Clayton Purdom]

5. The Armed, Only Love

Describing the music of Only Love is a fool’s errand. The Armed keeps its motivations hidden, as well as its membership, but there’s a beauty in all that ambiguity. Though the Detroit band enjoys taking the piss out of music press, those actions serve a larger point, which is that its music must be met on its own terms. The result of this disinformation campaign is Only Love, a record that joyfully explores the sonic space between Converge’s Jane Doe and the disorienting electro-pop of Fever Ray. That Converge members have played a part in The Armed, with drummer Ben Koller featuring on Only Love and guitarist Kurt Ballou producing, has only fueled speculation that this is actually a Converge side project, but none of that is important. What matters is that Only Love sounds unlike anything else happening in aggressive music. The Armed deploys a full-court press in terms of its music, pushing everything to 11 and letting its underlying, pop-indebted soul bleed through all the noise. Pair that all with its intense music videos and an unparalleled live show, and the result is a band, and an album, that is impossible to understand but remains endlessly intriguing. [David Anthony]

4. Anna Calvi, Hunter

Like PJ Harvey at her ’90s best, Anna Calvi’s Hunter is dark and mysterious, wild and free, the sound of feral feminine energy powerful enough to crush repressive power structures into dust. Her ferocious, operatic, erotically charged vocals and gender-fluid lyrics—“I’ll be the boy, you be the girl / I’ll be the girl, you be the boy / I’ll be the girl,” she repeats like a mantra on the seductive “Chain”—conjure the secret depths and endless horizons of queer desire, backed by thunderous bass, romantic strings, skeletal percussion, and bright blasts of electric guitar. It’s a primal feminist manifesto in song that, appropriately enough, came with a written manifesto as well, expressing Calvi’s intent to “explore a more subversive sexuality, which goes further than what is expected of a woman in our patriarchal heteronormative society.” Further, yes, but also deeper, higher, and through, to a blindingly bright new world. [Katie Rife]

3. Saba, Care For Me

The title reads like a cry for help, and maybe that’s what it is. Saba wrote Care For Me in the wake of a personal tragedy: the murder of his cousin and mentor, Walter Long Jr., who was stabbed to death by a stranger last year. That loss is all over the record (“Jesus got killed for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat” he breathlessly declares on the opening track), but it’s by no means the only topic of conversation. As if left exposed by his grief, the Chicago rapper opens up about everything, from destructive relationships to feeling isolated and insecure in his celebrity to a roiling rage toward an America that abandons and demonizes black youth. “We cannot bury all the fucked-up shit we been through,” he raps on “Calligraphy,” a kind of mission statement for this whole confessional album, and the diaristic, therapeutic logic of its storytelling. Meanwhile, the production is mellow and melancholy and shimmering, the piano and lonely saxophone answering every nakedly revelatory verse. Vulnerability can be a four-letter word in hip-hop, but it’s earned prominent placement in Saba’s rich emotional vocabulary. [A.A. Dowd]

2. Neko Case, Hell-On

In the delightfully startling artwork for her seventh album, Neko Case is wearing a crown of lit cigarettes, pulling her hair back from her shoulder to reveal a small fire raging there above the album’s title: Hell-On. The words could mean a number of things, but they feel, above all else, like a verb: like what you do when you lose your house to a fire, as Case did while recording the album, like life in 2018 generally. It’s certainly what these songs are doing as they fight to find beauty and feminine strength in a world working hard to obscure them. Like Björk, Case draws both most powerfully from the natural world: “When I am dark and I am down, as dark and down as I am now / The only thing that makes me smile is to remember / That I’m beloved of the wild,” she sings on closer “Pitch Or Honey.” A lifetime of influences, experiences, and collaborators pour into Hell-On, making Case’s songs grow ever wilder and unclassifiable. It suits her better, if we say so. [Kelsey J. Waite]

1. Beach House, 7

You can either fear the unknown, or you can embrace it. Beach House has spent the last 13 years worshipping it, each new song and album a dance of devotion to an unnamable, immutable creative force. After following it down to its most elliptical and interior on 2015’s Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars, where else was there for Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally to go but outward? 7, the dream-pop duo’s most collaborative and extroverted album yet, springs forth with an urgent and unpredictable energy. It plunges you into dense, interstellar shoegaze (“Dark Spring”), then grounds you in stargazing grunge balladry (“Pay No Mind”), before sending you on a mechanical 808 track through the woozy “candy-colored misery” of “Lemon Glow.” And those are just the first three songs. Breaking from a long partnership with producer Chris Coady, Legrand and Scally began assembling 7’s immersive arrangements in a new home studio before finishing them off with space-rock experimentalist Sonic Boom, a.k.a. Peter Kember of Spacemen 3. The shake-up paid off spectacularly. Together they’ve crafted a towering psych record that plays like a radio response to otherworld transmissions like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless or This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End In Tears. You can try to drift off in its dark, dreamlike textures, but like those seminal albums, 7 will keep prodding you to witness its mysteries up close. It will keep asking you to search its layers, to savor each image flying by—to give yourself over to the moment. And by now Beach House has well-proven that, whatever the next moment holds, they’ll see you through it. This is a band you can trust with your life. [Kelsey J. Waite]