5. MUNA - Saves the World
MUNA's second album had a mountain to climb - how do you follow-up a towering debut like About U? - but instead of attempting to do so it kind of took a detour and scaled a different peak, a climb more about endurance than the height of the summit (has this metaphor fallen off a cliff yet?). Some of the sheer unbridled emotion of that first album is scaled back here into something more muted and introspective - it's an album about finding ways to face heartbreak head-on, rather than folding to it completely. The production in general is a little less impressive this time, but the songwriting and lyricism in its hyper-specificity is pretty jaw-dropping start to finish. Hard to pick a favourite lyric, but Stayaway comes close - "Any little misstep, I'll be at your doorstep, talkin' bout forgiveness, giving you my heart back, just so you can break it one more time before I say... I gotta stay away." Fuck. That is, obviously, the best song here by quite a distance and a total
affair.
Cherry pick: Stayaway, Navy Blue, Never, It's Gonna Be Okay Baby
4. Marina - Love + Fear
Widely derided online, but Love + Fear (although a clear step down from the thrilling glory of Froot) is not a bad album - at times it's a really very good one. Her voice now is fully transformed into an instrument and she sounds imperial here. Clearly things did not quite go to plan with this record - it's a made-for-radio affair without anything that sounds like a radio hit, and her personality sometimes goes missing behind the live laugh love platitudes - but songs like End of the Earth and the brilliant To Be Human thoroughly knock and add something new to the Marina repertoire.
Cherry pick: Handmade Heaven, Enjoy Your Life, Believe In Love, To Be Human,End of the Earth
3. KAYTRANADA - BUBBA
Hypnotic club beats from some mysterious future where exclusively beautiful people dance all night long. Thank god for an album that understands the value of keeping the record spinning and the night going - no toilet breaks here (except for the shit Estelle track obv), only killer features from a roster of names which reads like a who's who of underrated R&B brilliance - Tinashe, Kali Uchis and VanJess, to name just a few. BUBBA isn't just a command to the dancefloor - it's a statement of intent from an artist who's only just begun showing the world what he's capable of.
Cherry pick: 100%, Taste, Go DJ, What You Need, The Worst In Me
2. James Blake - Assume Form
James Blake was not on my radar before this album. I still haven't backward-investigated, and in fact I'm scared to because the quality of Assume Form is so high I can't imagine how it could match up - this is a record executed with such delicacy and tenderness and love that playing it almost feels like an intrusion. And how rare to hear a work about falling in love, devoid of heartbreak and with only a few sporadic nods to the anxiety of falling, and to feel such intense, heightened emotion. It's a mood piece rather than an everyday listen, but Assume Form is the kind of once-in-a-career record most artists would kill for.
Cherry pick: Assume Form, Mile High, Barefoot in the Park, Can't Believe the Way We Flow, Don't Miss It
1. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell!
As if it could be anything else. Consider NFR! a full circle moment - almost a decade after Lana had critics thinking they were so smart for concluding that Lana Del Rey must be a character as opposed to the
real artistic voice behind the music (and dutifully roasting her for it), this
character now has them eating out the palms of her hands. This is, objectively, her best record - a masterpiece which can enjoyed start to end (Bartender? I don't know her!), boasting multiple career-bests and elevating her artistry to such a high level that looking back on her lyricism and storytelling from Born to Die and Ultraviolence now feels borderline comical.
Cherry pick: Love Song, The Next Best American Record, Cinnamon Girl, Doin' Time, California