Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Motown
42.
Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (2010)
Then, now, and forever, love makes people go a little crazy. Even Erykah Badu, goddess of unbothered R&B, is not immune. Throughout Return of the Ankh, her only proper album of this decade, she offers up conflicting desires with the unfiltered realness of a drunk dial. She pines for a long-distance love with lusty teenage angst. She laughs about fucking around on a besotten boyfriend. She cautions would-be suitors on a song called “Fall in Love (Your Funeral),” which works in lines from Biggie Smalls’ cold-blooded classic “Warning.” At one point, her frustrations make her contemplate gunplay.
But for every moment of blind passion here, there is an equal and opposite moment of contemplation: On the psychedelic 10-minute suite “Out My Mind, Just in Time,” she evolves from a doting, codependent lover to a solo superhero in tune with her own worth. The arrangements, largely based on the comforting grooves of ’70s soul, add an element of analog time travel to her cosmic funk. Though a record all about the vagaries of the heart may not be a new idea, in Erykah Badu’s hands, it never gets old. –Ryan Dombal
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Columbia/Parkwood
41.
Beyoncé: Lemonade (2016)
The first thing Lemonade delivers is wrath: Infidelity has ruptured not just marriage but a whole life. Beyoncé, the world’s most powerful woman, is gleeful to set streets on fire, throw off her wedding ring, shit-talk with her girls to abandon. If Lemonade’s first 10 minutes has a headline, it would be that Jay-Z, dummy that he is, really did cheat. But then everything builds to something more profound, more complete: a prayer about how love can fracture the self. Suddenly we’re in Texas, in stadiums, on plantations; a Led Zeppelin beat is next to a reggae sample. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” appears next to a James Blake feature.
Lemonade feels like an exercise in dissonance, the act of holding two warring ideas in your head and in your heart: You can love someone but also hate them, adore your father and also resent him, want to cry and twerk at the same time. One woman can feel all of this—and more—at once, Lemonade suggests, because that’s how confusing life and grief and history is. It exalts the mundane as profoundly spiritual: being black, being a woman, feeling confused, feeling grief, trying to forgive, feeling sexual. In all those, together, is the healing. –Hunter Harris
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Vinyl Me, Please | Apple Music | Tidal
Asylum/Atlantic
40.
Charli XCX: Pop 2 (2017)
After cowriting and appearing on Iggy Azalea’s hit “Fancy,” Charli XCX could have easily shipped out to Los Angeles to record Max Martin cast-offs forever. But instead, Charli began to construct her own little weird pop utopia from the ground up, turning to the squelchy, hyper-synthetic sounds of producers like A.G. Cook and SOPHIE. The Pop 2 mixtape, Charli’s best full-length to date, is the brilliant culmination of all that effort: a nonstop avant-garde party built for fembots and fog machines. Over the sound of her hissed “XCX” and “It’s Charli, baby” signatures, she pulls in multiple collaborators on each track, like the filth-loving rapper CupcakKe and the rising dance princess Kim Petras. Throughout, she solidifies her mastery of the strange, wonderful new pop world she continues to build. –Hazel Cills
