50 Best Albums of 2013

There's old-school, and then there's "Man, it would rule if someone would invent electricity" old-school. Beck's "album" of sheet music turned out to be a sly collection of folky swing tunes, steeped in Beck's absurdist wit. One ukulele ballad, "Old Shanghai," even became a YouTube hit.

The Lips return to the apocalyptic acid punk of their Eighties albums, with monkish meditation, darkening-plains rumble and scouring electronics. It's what happens when psych heroes find the hard-won honesty in whoa-dude revelation.

This duo's third set of psychedelic electronic rock gets pretty dark, but its wordless tension-and-release journeys are no less majestic. It's filled with tsunamis of corroded synthesizer noise and industrial beats — like the soundtrack to a dystopian sci-fi movie, or real life in 2013.

Once again, the avant-R&B rebel proved the raw power of her global-cauldron dance beats and hater-blasting lyrics. Matangi takes on her bird-flipping 2012 Super Bowl scandal and even has a tender lover's jam in "Come Walk With Me," finding revelation by living out contradiction.

After four years away, the mod Scottish boys jump back into the game swinging hard. Right Thoughts has many of their friskiest tracks ever, long on witty high-energy blasts of rhythm-guitar lechery.

Hey, you got Mumford & Sons in my EDM! Swedish producer Avicii slyly celebrated electronic music's stateside boom by combining vintage roots music and energetic house beats. It's an exuberant cross-cultural good time, and thanks to anthems like "Wake Me Up," it never lets up.

This New York-via-Tennessee singer mixed blues, soul, country, string-band folk and gospel while the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach added old-school ambience. It's the sound of a rookie doing her own thing like no retro-soul singer since Amy Winehouse.

"I'm cold and I'm cold and I'm cold and I'm stubborn," Savages' Jehnny Beth informs us on the band's debut. With the repetitive insistence of a howitzer and the urgency of an air-raid siren, these four women made some of 2013's scariest, most thrilling noise, finding new worlds of terror and stress in Eighties U.K. post-punk.

Odd Future's brightest cult star lives up to his reputation as an unholy verbal wizard on his long-awaited debut album. He also upends it — pushing past the amoral bomb-lobbing that won him notoriety with a newly introspective style, perfectly suited to third-eye-opening beats courtesy of Pharrell, RZA and Earl himself.

Releasing your major-label rap record the same day as Kanye took balls. So did staying true to hip-hop's vaunted edutaining tradition with a set of hypersmart, excellently self-produced tracks that recall, well, vintage Kanye in their ability to dramatize the tension between Hov-size career ambition and post-Pac truth saying.

Pearl Jam's 10th album is a brooding, pissed-off set — great news for fans. Lots of Lightning Bolt's best moments are downtempo, including "Sirens," their own haunted take on the PJ-inspired power-ballad subgenre. But let's be clear: The killer punk-metal rant "Mind Your Manners" should be played extremely loud.

The amiable country dude's latest is called Fuse for a reason — only Taylor Swift has done so well synergizing dance-pop drive and countrypolitan pump. Urban yokes Eighties guitar flash and Euro beats to tight-crafted Nashville songs about cars and girls and girls in cars — classic images given a fresh polish.

The fifth LP from the resplendently mellow Vile is a beautiful sinkhole of meditative guitar mysticism. The meandering tunes roll along on craggy, ambling licks and the wisdom gleaned from whiling away his days in a "shame chamber" — quite contentedly, it would seem, judging by how pretty these songs are.

The So So Glos are Brooklyn kids — the kind who actually grew up there, a band of brothers brimming with boyish energy and burn-down-the-house exuberance. Even when the songs on their third album are full of darkness and doubt, they jump to the pogo-punk style of Rancid or Green Day, but with a Clash-style sense of mission.

In a year of great Nineties-indebted, female-fronted indie-rock albums (see also: Swearin', Speedy Ortiz), Katie Crutchfield's stood out. It's full of rubbed-raw heart-to-hearts about hanging with other miserable young people, waiting for the fun part to begin, and starting to get the suspicion this might be the fun part.

It's just seven songs but still felt like a breakthrough, mixing the noise-pop buzz of Best Coast's 2011 debut with the swarming melodies and emotional payoff of last year's The Only Place. It's where Bethany Cosentino's love of Patsy Cline meets her love of My Bloody Valentine, and it suggests she's growing as a songwriter by the month.

The country-rock firecracker's sixth LP is full of bold arrangements and hot guitars (courtesy of My Morning Jacket, among others). It's also a tour de force of intense, big-chorused songwriting. In other words, plenty more than just a big voice. But, damn: That's one knee-bucklingly magnificent voice.

The cockier half of the Clipse didn't choose to go solo — he had to after his brother found God. Pusha, in turn, found Kanye West, whose stark and twisted production helped make My Name Is My Name feel like a more lyrically focused companion piece to his own Yeezus. It's the year's sharpest hit of street philosophy.

On their debut, this Glasgow trio made indie-weaned synth-rock that hit with as much big-box thwump as Rihanna or "Roar." Singer Lauren Mayberry throws herself into stalker-pop come-ons, and nearly every song is bright and cutting and almost scarily impassioned.

On their debut, these three harmonizing Los Angeles sisters found an elusive art-pop sweet spot between TLC and Kate Bush — and won over indie kids and teenyboppers alike. "The Wire" plays like a great lost Eighties radio hit. But "My Song 5," with its broken beats and snaky flow, is the hook-mad high point.

After a decade-plus making smart folk pop, this duo of Canadian twins took a leap into radio-hungry dance beats. Their songwriting stayed sharp and revealing as ever, and on "Closer," they show up all the billion-dollar divas with a disco burner about "how to get you underneath me" that is one of the year's sweatiest singles.

For this raw cross-cultural jam, Omara "Bombino" Moctar — a hot-shit guitarist from Niger — hooked up with Black Key Dan Auerbach, who produced the LP with a crate-digging R&B/psych vibe. It's full of hypnotic fuzz, and the cosmic country of "Tamiditine" conjures Workingman's Dead – if it'd been made in the Sahara desert.

This charmingly matter-of-fact 25-year-old Texan makes commercial country sound artistically fertile again. Singing about a friend with benefits ("It Is What It Is") or weed smokin' and same-sex kissing ("Follow Your Arrow"), she's ballsy, traditional and pop. Call her the millennials' Loretta Lynn.

Amid all the foam-finger hub-bub, Miley made an excellent pop record. Bangerz is full of country-flavored slow jams and dirty beats like "Do My Thang" and the ace Future duet "My Darlin'." She drops top-shelf electro hooks and navigates coming-of-age conundrums, bringing depth and vulnerability to one hell of a party.

The second mixtape from this 20-year-old Chicago MC is the ultimate in psychedelic hip-hop. Chance spins Lil Wayne-meets-Hendrix language swirls punctuated by the real-life observations of a kid who grew up in a world where "it's dark a lot . . . easier to find a gun than it is to find a fucking parking spot."

Sir Elton reunites with rock & roll curator T Bone Burnett and old writing partner Bernie Taupin for a return to classic piano-man form. Mixing singer-songwriter balladry, music-hall storytelling, corner-church testifying and parlor-room nostalgia, it's the sound of a legend with his showbiz guard dropped.

On the sequel to his 2000 masterpiece, Eminem taps the maniac genius who first scared America into submission — Stan's little brother even came back to murder Mr. Mathers. But on "Headlights" he made peace with his estranged mom in what's gotta be Slim Shady's huggiest moment ever.

It's the noise-rock Chinese Democracy — 22 years in the making and utterly throttling just the same. MBV's third LP echoed their landmark Loveless with new shapes and colors, but the same deceptive tunefulness. And "Nothing Is" is nothing less than the art-rock equivalent of crazy-strong hash.

The French indie-pop group didn't come through with hits on par with "1901" or "Lisztomania." Phoenix did something even cagier, rolling out sleek, savvy songs that took apart fame, fashion and coolness from the inside, without scrimping on their space-rock whoosh, surging melodies and wry New Wave pout.

Ferreira's Eighties-weaned diva pop recalls no-nonsense Nineties alt-rockers like PJ Harvey and Shirley Manson, setting love-wracked disclosures to grungy guitar static, electronic gauze and computer-groove churn. When she sings about her "heavy-metal heart," she's not kidding: The woman works well with machines.

Marling is the most compelling singer-songwriter of the U.K. roots-revival scene, with a voice that conjures young Joni Mitchell. Kicking off with a heart-surgical seven-song opening suite, her fourth LP is the record Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis might have made after kicking Justin Timberlake to the curb.

On the first Nine Inch Nails album in five years, Trent Reznor threw a dance party at the edge of oblivion. Songs like "Came Back Haunted" and "All Time Low" combine the gnarled-gear drive of vintage NIN with the ice-storm atmospherics that Reznor has brought to his recent soundtrack work.

This Knoxville girl gave us a juicy old-school honky-tonk set wrapped in pedal steel, full of characters as real as your neighbors and sung with Dolly Parton soul and sass. But when Monroe suggests ganja and whips and chains to her man on "Weed Instead of Roses," it's clear this isn't your grandma's country music.

The year's most gripping hip-hop street-life narratives came from a crazy-coiffed Detroit native with a gift for vivid introspection and a taste for wild beats, from the Detroit techno of "Dubstep" to the avant-trap of "Side B (Dope Song)." It doesn't get much more disturbingly real than the raw-sex chronicle "Dope Fiend Rental."

Bowie's first trip in 10 years gets more fascinatingly weird the longer you listen (see the sly Leonard Cohen parody "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die"). But it's the naked emotion of "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" that sums up The Next Day — loud, melodic, intense, with the man pushing his thin white voice into the stratosphere.

Thom Yorke's side band moves your body, even as it does Radiohead-ishly unnatural things to your mind. Joined by Flea and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Yorke has rarely sounded so freewheeling vocally, and the music's marriage of live improvisation and studio mixology gives him a rich, shifty palette to play off.

With Kanye breathing fire in rarified air, Drake is the people's rapper, a smart kid conflicted about his fame, heart, family, everything except his mic potency. But what makes his lonely fantastic voyage matter is its emotional weight, which gets crucial amplification from Noah "40" Shebib's whirlpool beats.

This U.K. brother duo may still be too young to get into some of the clubs where their music is bumping. But they're steeped in disco history ("White Noise" could be an old-school techno classic). Settle sounds like an anthology of great club singles, using guest vocalists and stylistic jumps to flow like an expertly curated party tape.

Nineteen-year-old U.K. singer-songwriter Bugg is an acoustic revivalist with the guts to shake up the traditions he loves. On his debut, Bugg gave '62 Dylan, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers a cocky Oasis charge, while packing his songs with sharp observations about street-fighting strife and coming-of-age confusion.

The songs on Parquet Courts' breakthrough are fast, brief and laugh-out-loud funny. These Brooklyn dudes take inspiration from the Nineties vibe of Pavement or Archers of Loaf, hitting their slack-ass glory in the climactic guitar groove "Stoned and Starving," where picking out snacks in a bodega feels like an epic quest.

The songs Fogerty wrote in Creedence Clearwater Revival are as embedded in the American grain as any in rock & roll. But this collection of recut CCR hits and solo tracks — recorded with fans like Bob Seger, My Morning Jacket, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert and Foo Fighters — shows how vital and relevant his songwriting remains more than 40 years after it owned the radio. Fogerty updates his Vietnam War missive "Fortunate Son" for the Iraq-Afghanistan era backed by the Foos, belts out "Born on the Bayou" alongside Kid Rock, unspools the ballad "Someday Never Comes" with roots rockers Dawes, and gets locked in a guitar duel with Brad Paisley on the underrated solo gem "Hot Rod Heart." The result is a wonderful conversation of an album — not to mention a damn good time.

On its fifth album, this quintessentially British band moved to L.A., took inspiration from old Aaliyah hits and glam Bowie, and made a spiky, slinky beast of a record, perfect for that moment in the evening when you just realized that maybe that seventh drunk text you sent to your ex-girlfriend wasn't such a hot idea. The album was reportedly inspired by Alex Turner's breakup with model and TV host Alexa Chung, and songs like "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High" and the achingly slow "Do I Wanna Know" are full of slow-simmering heartache. The careening "chip-shop rock & roll" (as Turner called it) of previous records was replaced by a creeping desert-rock paranoia. And the frayed party's-over lullaby "Mad Sounds" might've been the sweetest Velvet Underground echo of Lou Reed's final year.

These Brooklyn guys have spent the past decade building their rep as the most resplendent sadsters in indie rock, a band whose ornate music matches the Cure-size heartache of singer Matt Berninger. But on the best record of their career, they pare back that richly ornamental sound to reveal its black-candy pop core. Berninger moans his afflicted romantic entreaties like a man drowning in too much merlot and just enough Leonard Cohen, over tensely coiled rhythms and hazy guitar shimmer. The National's fast songs have never had such immediate surge, and their slow ones have never had such elegiac power. "If you want to see me cry, play Let It Be or Nevermind," Berninger sings on "Don't Swallow the Cap," nailing the album's ambition to make mood-swing rock with old-school gravitas.

"We don't care/We aren't caught up in your love affair," declares 17-year-old New Zealand pop savant Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O'Connor on her hit "Royals," a bitch-slap to status-driven music culture on behalf of every cash-strapped kid (and grown-up) exhausted by it. Lorde's debut album ended up ruling the pop charts anyway, thanks to a sultry, swaggering, hip-hop-savvy, fully grown voice and stark synth jams as earworm-y as Miley's or Katy's splashiest hits. Set against the music's minimal throb, Lorde's languidly aphoristic lyrics balance rock-star swagger and torqued-up teenage angst, so lines like "We're hollow like the bottles that we drain" or "We're so happy, even when we're smiling out of fear" have a rattle-nerve pathos and power like nothing else going in 2013.

Josh Homme came back after a life-threatening illness, called up some rock-star pals (Dave Grohl, Trent Reznor, Elton John) and revived his mordantly arch-metal outfit to kick out creepily torrid, darkly suave Camaro rock like only he can. Homme combines menacing riffs and glammy refinement, sounding like Bowie reborn as a winking dark lord of the underworld. "Fairweather Friends," featuring Grohl and Sir Elton, is a grunge-grease bitchfest. On "I Sat by the Ocean," Homme crushes riffs and mellows out with "a potion to erase you." Yet for all the awesomely negative vibing and genuine twistedness (see "If I Had a Tail"), Clockwork hit with an everydude heaviness that's getting rarer and rarer these days. Plus, the king of Queens still has the best hard-rock falsetto of his generation.

Seventy minutes of wide-screen dance rock co-produced by LCD Soundsystem retiree James Murphy, the Grammy-grabbing, high-aiming, arena-filling, indie-earnest family band does what the Clash, Talking Heads and so many before it have done: reconnect rock to its dance-floor soul. There are flashes of glam, punk, disco, electro, dub reggae and Haitian rara. Being Arcade Fire, there's also emo dramatics and cultural critiques (staring at screens: don't do it!). Of course, the haters hated; the chin-scratchers debated the politics of the album's Caribbean undercurrents. But that ability to provoke actual feelings is what makes this great. And no release this year had a more entertaining rollout brouhaha. Stephen Colbert called them pretentious to their faces; they laughed too. And then the party started.

The sound of a 71-year-old Beatle getting back in the ring. McCartney plays to his strengths: Wings-like glam rock, Little Richard howls and, yep, some remarkably Beatlesque pop tunes and George Martin-ish arrangements (thanks partly to Martin's son, Giles, who produced several tracks). "Early Days" challenges lingering misconceptions about McCartney's role in the Beatles ("I don't see how they can remember/When they weren't where it was at"). Sir Paul also engages 21st-century pop with sharp ears, bringing in young-gun producers like Paul Epworth, Mark Ronson and Ethan Johns. He even rocks a quasi-rap flow and some giddy, Gaga-style stadium chants on "Queenie Eye." As Macca understands better than almost anyone, rock & roll is fueled by a hunger for good times and an ageless exuberance.

Now that the pop world has caught up with what Daft Punk were doing 15 years ago, naturally the French electro pioneers decide to rip it up and start again. So they spend most of Random Access Memories doing lush Seventies-style studio funk fusion, not at all unreminiscent of Steely Dan or Average White Band. Is it a strange move at the height of the EDM era? Yes. (Any album that can fit in appearances by the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, German disco godfather Giorgio Moroder and Seventies shlock-pop king Paul Williams is working on its own terms.) Is it awesome? Mais oui. And for all the lovingly detailed live-band touches, Daft Punk prove they're still pop fans at heart with "Get Lucky" — an instant disco classic where Pharrell and the great Nile Rodgers raise their cups to the stars.

Kanye's electro masterpiece is his most extreme album ever, which is saying something. No wonder the late, great Lou Reed embraced Yeezus, since it's basically the Metal Machine Music concept translated into futuristic hip-hop, all industrial overload and hypertense egomania and hostile vibes. The music is part Eighties synthblitz dark wave, part Jamaican dancehall. But it's all Kanye, taking you on a guided tour of the dark shit inside his brain. He rages about racial politics ("New Slaves"), he demands his damn croissants ("I Am a God"), he comes on like a robot sex machine ("I'm in It"). He kibitzes with the Lord, who agrees Kanye is the shit. And he ends with the Seventies-soul send-up "Bound 2," maybe the most audacious song he's ever written, not to mention the most beautiful.

The first two Vampire Weekend albums showed off a sound unlike any other in rock: a precocious mix of indie pop, African guitar grooves and wry, boat-shoe-preppy lyrics that were sometimes too cute for their own good. But with Modern Vampires of the City, they went deeper, adding scope and ambition to all the sophistication. In 2013, no other record mixed emotional weight with studio-rat craft and sheer stuck-in-your-head hummability like this one. It's one of rock's great albums about staring down adulthood and trying not to blink — that moment where, as singer Ezra Koenig puts it, you realize "wisdom's a gift/But you'd trade it for youth." The music is sculpted and subtly bonkers, with orchestral sweeps balancing hymnlike beauty and dub-inflected grooves. Koenig earns those Paul Simon comparisons thanks to vivid lyrics about youngish things in crisis — the unemployed friend who can't find a reason to shave in "Obvious Bicycle," the weary couple soldiering through the road-trip epic "Hannah Hunt." Then there's Koenig himself, filling songs like "Worship You" with religious allusions, evoking the search for meaning and faith with wit and skepticism. The album's fog-over-New York cover reminds us just how hard that search has become. The music makes it feel worth the heartache just the same.