The Best Albums of 2021
Written, Designed by Nathan Evans
After the global pause of 2020, the onslaught of new albums came in 2021. Some of the biggest artists in the pre-pandemic world finally got on with their campaigns, and it got downright silly. Kanye and Drake dropped in a seven-day period, Arca unloaded four albums in four days, and there were more same-day combos than can be counted for. Seriously, look at these individual release days and bask your eyes in the madness of it all:
April 16th - AJ Tracey, Conway the Machine, Young Thug, London Grammar and Fred again…
June 25th - Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat, Cautious Clay, Gaspard Auge of Justice, Hiatus Kaiyote, Juicy J, Modest Mouse, Sault, Ski Mask the Slump God
July 30th - Billie Eilish, Isaiah Rashad, Prince, Skepta
August 27th - Halsey, CHVRCHES, Big Red Machine, Westside Gunn
September 3rd - Drake, Lady Gaga, Little Simz, Rudimental
September 24th - Nao, Boys Noize, D Smoke, Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine
October 8th - BADBADNOTGOOD, Don Toliver, James Blake, Magdelena Bay, Porches
October 15th - Young Thug, Zack Fox, Remi Wolf, Pinkpantheress, Mac Miller, Kacy Hill, Finneas
Things got so messy that Adele had to park herself a month-long respite in the lead-up to release her album, a welcome breather that allowed us to assess what a spectacle of a year it was for music. From the great pause, came the great saturation.
Honourable mentions go to Injury Reserve’s freakish By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Amine’s joyous TWOPOINTFIVE, Arca’s incendiary KicK iii, Chief Keef’s booming trap army 4NEM. A Spotify playlist with all the albums listed are available at the end of the article.
Though less boundary-quaking than 2018’s soil, serpentwithfeet’s newest project Deacon is a concise and unwinding album filled with unwavering love and a soft-hued atmosphere.
That Fred again… is able to draw such sentiment and ecstasy from simple voice notes and samples of conversation is an astounding feat reminiscent of the heavy-hearted beatsmithery of Burial. Fred again…’s vision of dance music is more extroverted, but still has the capacity to take in the incidental beauty of the everyday.
Boldy James and The Alchemist always seem to come back to each other. Their fifth project in collaboration Bo Jackson appears to go through the motions on Bo Jackson, but it’s still quality brass-knuckled rap. Alchemist’s production is tense and soul-influenced, while James provides no vocal fireworks, instead using his unshakeable flows and dense lyricism. In the midst of Alchemist’s psychedelic beats, it’s sobering.
Made in the twilight hours in his New York apartment, Glass Lit Dream is an album reserved for the deepest of nights. Inspired by old gospel and experimental electronic music in equal measure, Dawuna brings a singular coalition of influences to create smouldering soul songs guided by the moon.
The achievement of Space Afrika’s third album is how it manages to create ambient music that is actively engaging from start to finish. Dark sonorous synths and abstract vocal performances of all flavours are riddled with sonic details that paint the picture of a congested city similar to that of its cover art. For the Guardian, Joe Muggs compared Space Afrika to Tricky, Burial and Dean Blunt, and there’s no higher - and more apt - likening.
Adapted from the author’s Clash review of James Blake’s Friends That Break Your Heart:
James Blake’s last album Assume Form marked another improvement in his career-spanning journey towards finding equanimity, breaking free of the mental turmoil he once swam in. Now romantically self-assured, Friends That Break Your Heart navigates the throes of the affecting friendships in his life. From that design brief, he has created an ethereal alternative to the cavernous Assume Form.
BERWYN’s first tape DEMOTAPE/VEGA was an intimate, lo-fi partnership between him and his keyboard, spinning tales of his street/immigrant come-up that bordered on soul-rap. 2021’s follow-up TAPE 2/FOMALHAUT expands on that with admittedly glossier production, but more impactful words and hooks.
Japanese anime soundtracks, noughties pop, Eurodance and the struggle to create are the key assets that make up Nurture. Patiently spending seven years on his second record, Porter Robinson conjured up tear-jerking, explosive and innovative EDM that enamelled into a beautiful album experience.
Backroad Gee’s delivery is a magnificent thing. The rapper’s guard dog-like bark is a turbocharger to any track he touches, and the 18 he gives us on his first mixtape show an impressive amount of places he can take it.
Like Flower Boy and IGOR before it, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST is Tyler taking out-of-fashion styles and modding them like one would an old video game - beefing up the sound quality for a new generation (WUSYANAME), and adding tweaks to mark it with his distinct stamp (LUMBERJACK, SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE). Touting more genre clashes than ever, including jazz fusion, boyband R&B, mixtape rap and bossa-nova, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST is as nomadic as its Russian hat-wearing, ocean-hopping protagonist.
You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down is the ideal compilation of King Krule. A live show of unique jazz-punk would be an enticing prospect if not for Covid cancellations, but his first live album puts all three of his records into one gloomy, ashen room.
Rather than having a glumfest of a live show, You Heat Me Up… employs looser takes that are more “punk” than “jazz”, where the studio versions are often vice-versa. Equally, Krule’s more considered studio vocals are swapped for gastric growls slinging out of his mouth with a thick London drawl. An early indicator of this is the raucous alternative version of ‘Cellular’, one of KEYMAG’s songs of 2020, and continues into the noticeably groovier ‘Comet Face’ and ‘Half Man Half Shark’. However, there is still some semblance of the slower, eyes-low cuts, as ‘Perfecto Miserable’, ‘The Ooz’ and ‘Underclass’ are given unrushed moments to build that wonderful, back-alley melancholy that only King Krule can provide. Though the insular dismal of a Krule record is lost with the experience of being in a room with others, there is the same level of appreciation for his one-of-a-kind collision of moods, if not more.
Eighteen years into the British rap veteran’s career, Conflict of Interest is Ghetts’ coronation album. The man possesses agility like few others in the UK, but bring a towel with you and expect to feel the spit flicking from his mouth as he rants poetically to you. On Conflict of Interest, he will catch you up with his career, put you on the ground when he was growing up surrounded by gangs, and get into the nitty-gritty of his most important relationships. It calls to mind his classic mixtape Freedom of Speech, but with an extra decade-plus of perspective, darker production and team-ups with the best in the business, including Skepta, Stormzy, Dave, Giggs, Pa Salieu and Ed Sheeran, but we’ll let the last one slide.
Rap’s greatest shitposter is a lowkey expert in classic hip-hop, and shows it through the buffet of styles he pulls together on his first project - ATL trap, Virginia N*E*R*D-style, West Coast bounce, a beat from The Alchemist. Zack Fox windmills through them all while barking out such lines as:
“I've been fuckin' up Huns like Mulan did”
“Playin’ with my bands, boy, I might just let that K pop”
“Pockets so deep it break space-time dimensions”
“I took the top off the whip, circumcision”
“Nigga try to swing, I hit him with a pedigree”
For services to comedy in rap, Zack Fox warrants year-end commendation.
Who knew that Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine were such film buffs? Thankfully they took their shared love of cinema of varying quality to another medium, and quilled a set of songs inspired by specific films they watched together.
More than just the expected cute references to the films, they spin off the beaten path to find new perspectives. On A Beginner’s Mind, Stevens and his protégé get into the mind of a reviled antagonist, envision the culture of a film’s world, and even dive into the meta-struggle of the actress that plays a character. To boot, the two create a sound that nestles between the homeliness of Carrie & Lowell and the synthetic brushstrokes of The Ascension. That is to say, it’s devastatingly gorgeous.
As the apparent end of Brockhampton draws nearer, the boisterous rap collective have made their best collection of tracks since the fabled Saturation trilogy. The opening quartet of Roadrunner is the best four-track run of any record this year, maximising their colour-swirling production, stellar verses and pop sensibilities. Immediately after, another dimension to the record is added with the inner thread of Joba’s reckoning with his father’s suicide. His approach to the topic is as affecting as ‘DEARLY DEPARTED’ from their previous record, firing out short thoughts to recreate the real-time horror and aftermath in grim detail. BROCKHAMPTON came onto the scene as the animated-yet-sensitive faces of young rap, but have been through a tempestuous number of years since. Happily, the crew have come out the other side making more punctilious music that’s just as creative.
Adapted from the author’s Clash review of Baby Keem’s The Melodic Blue:
Before The Melodic Blue, there was a thick fog swarming around who Baby Keem is, as he has not really allowed himself to be vulnerable and flesh out his humanity. His debut album penetrates that mystery with tracks that uncover more of his spectrum and show him to be one of mainstream hip-hop’s new experimenters.
Cleo Sol writes her life into song with all the soul-searching of a diary entry. The soul singer and Sault member has, if everything about the record hadn’t told you, recently become a mother, and the resulting high-intensity feelings are earnestly navigated on wax.
Here, songs are unhurried affairs, giving her the space to flesh out her thoughts on motherhood, looking back on key stages in her life to search for answers she needs today. She threads through heavy topics with levity and poise, and altogether builds a radiant songbook to chapter this formidable stage of her life.
The way Mustafa’s placed lines and planted voice illustrates vivid scenes is a blessing. His debut album When Smoke Rises is a set of grief-stricken narrative vignettes from his troublesome home in Toronto. A royal family of British talent help him in the form of James Blake, Jamie xx and Sampha, and fans of them should already be clued into how Mustafa has managed to take folk music to the gang-present streets of Canada’s largest city.
Grounded by an everlasting piano pattern, Floating Points’ sparse electronics, Pharaoh Sanders’ pained saxophone and the emotive strings of the London Symphony Orchestra all come together in waves to tapestry one of the most rewarding pieces of minimalist jazz in years.
No-one does it like JPEGMAFIA. The very best in his field, his follow-up to the masterclass All My Heroes Are Cornballs is another helping of his brain-rewiring form of experimental hip-hop. LP! does offer new hardcore hip-hop edges and pop-referencing moments, however.
The Offline Version specifically takes this spot for being slightly superior in its tracklist order, all-new material compared to the Online’s older bonus tracks, and the utterly bonkers soul sample on ‘HAZARD DUTY PAY!’. And, crucially, the bohemian gangster likens himself to more musicians than ever before, including Lana Del Rey, 2Pac, Harold Marvin, Frank Zappa, Beyoncé, Guapdad 4000, Seal, Sarah McLachlan, Henry Rollins, Joe Budden and Clay Aiken.
Indebted to an esteemed Mount Rushmore of legends - OutKast, Juicy J, UGK, even the R&B of Erykah Badu guide TDE rapper Isaiah Rashad on his second record. He’s been cooking up the album for the past five years, and the results fall off the bone like marinated ribs. Though he wears his influences on his sleeve, peer into his mumbled lyrics, and you’ll often find they don’t match the laid back vibe of the beats.
For example, on the Memphis banger ‘Lay Wit Ya’ he croaks out a flex of keeping a girl around on the chorus: “last year you was my bitch, now you my baby girl”. Stick with the lyrics, and you’ll discover the hidden darkness of his ongoing battle with drug addiction, addressed as coolly as what you’d expect from a standard verse from JAY-Z or Big Boi. The House is Burning is something of a paradox, then - the sound of being on a high while running away from it.
Through the noise of 2021, Erika De Casier’s coy serenades never escaped rotation. The Danish singer’s second album has the sheer audacity to be wholly reliant on the strength of its songwriting, and makes songs quiet and spacious to prove the point. Be it reverbed instruments or a sensitive line, she likes to leave things hanging in the air. Yet her songwriting is easy to latch onto, with the 2000s as its driving force alongside flairs of quiet storm, UK garage and even art-pop on ‘No Butterflies, No Nothing’. Lyrically, she also operates in the small, fixating on the minutiae of romantic melodrama such as having too high a workload for love and being bored of her man’s hypebeast behaviour. Where every other artist seems to focus on something grandiose and imposing, Sensational brings a slower, more reserved vision of R&B that is chipped from diamonds.
What seems on the surface like a low-stakes affair reveals itself to be Vince Staples’ best work yet. A casual 22-minutes suit his to-the-point writing style, as he raps about the malaise of his life getting ready to commit crime in the streets of Long Beach, California. Though he’s never strayed from the topic, the new angle highlights more interesting complications, and births some of producer Kenny Beats’ finest production - a set of clunky, lo-fi beats that have an intangible, almost haunted quality to them.
Casual strides forward and former favourites return to his fourth studio album. ‘ARE YOU WITH THAT?’ is evidence of Staples finally mastering the melodic track, while ‘TAKING TRIPS’ and ‘LIL FADE’ satisfies the hunger for a speaker-knocking moment of ease à la FM!. ‘SUNDOWN TOWN’’s second verse is a star pupil in a class of open-truthed verses, explaining how his activity has him searching for reasons to distrust even the slightest action: “When I see my fans, I'm too paranoid to shake they hands”. Vince Staples and Kenny Beats can stylistically do it all, but the flash of brilliance in what they struck upon will glow much longer than its cursory runtime.
To bat for Kanye West comes with a bevy of asterisks and caveats. Donda, as usual, came with enough controversy to fill a tabloid newspaper, alot of which will be forgotten once the next album cycle rolls around. Foremost is the inclusion of the abhorrent metal artist Marilyn Manson on a remix of ‘Jail’, however, a bonus remix is not integral to the album if you wish not to listen (plus, it’ll be funny when Manson does go to jail). The core album, though, is enough to spark a third career comeback in the vein of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
For disclosure, I thought Mr. West was past putting out works of brilliance at this point. However, Donda had more moments of sheer brilliance than any other album this year. After restricting himself to less than half an hour on his past three projects, Donda is an unchained odyssey that’s longer than all three of them put together, and like a homecoming parade, the full experience is awe-inspiring in scale and harmony.
Solo record #10 is an unavoidable reminder of the musicality that Kanye brings to hip-hop. He stomps down an invigorating drill switch-up on ‘Off The Grid’, jubilantly flips his favourite artist on ‘Believe What I Say’ and creates a tribute to the Lord as wondrous as ‘Ultralight Beam’ on ‘Jesus Lord’. Lastly, the touching melodies sung by Vory on ‘Jonah’, Don Toliver on ‘Moon’ and KayCyy on the original ‘Keep My Spirit Alive’ are hymnic.
I want to explore Donda deeper in a separate piece, as there is a thought-provoking meta-tussle between what Ye is saying and what can be read into his words in relation to his mental health issues. However, as a tribute to his mother, Donda does well to reflect the lengths Ye will go in honour of her.
Personally, I appreciate Little Simz’ testament of quiet confidence on Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, as too many mistake quietness for weakness. As she details, Little Simz takes her time to assess people, not wanting to open up to those not worthy, as she says on opener: “I study humans, that makes me an anthropologist”. But not being outwardly confident in a world that demands the boldest version of yourself constantly can sometimes make you question yourself, Little Simz has that journey.
Her fourth full-length explores the facets of her backstory to draw throughlines to her character. Her strained relationship with her dad taught her to be independent. Her Nigerian upbringing taught her to be ruthless and cunning. Nearly dying in the streets of London taught her to keep her guard up in an ongoing act of preservation. Her run-ins with love taught her to open up for the right person. You’ll surely think in the same way about your own character during the course of the runtime.
It helps, of course, that the album has some of the most sublime production of the year in collaboration with superproducer Inflo. It’s choreless to sink into the gold-encrusted neo-soul of ‘Woman’, the sonic cinematography of ‘Introvert’, the mighty instrumental circle of ‘Fear No Man’, the captivating Madlib-esque loop on ‘Two Worlds Apart’. Even the more introverted moments like ‘I See You’ still hold a splendour to them.
Quickfire lists are the only way of succinctly rounding up Sometimes I Might Be Introvert because so much of the record warrants celebration. Little Simz may not go out of her way to approach you, but she commands attention.