1. The War on Drugs

Lost in the Dream

(Secretly Canadian)

That one guy called it “beer commercial rock,” but listen: As much as Philadelphia loves its meathead guitar music, this third album by The War on Drugs is not that. Lost in the Dream is a soft, cozy, vulnerable batch of songs about loneliness, dread, suffering, disappearing, running on empty. There’s also glory — somewhere along the edges of the grand parade, revealed in the traces of the vanished, always alive in the fire that burns brightest in us and seeks that same blaze in others. Big electric guitars, too, but the tones are gloomier, the saxophones smoother, the keys more mournful, and the gorgeous expanses of melody and warm drone zoom out like so many roads to nowhere and everywhere. Over the last few years, we’ve seen TWOD’s Adam Granduciel go from playing in Kurt Vile’s band to, arguably, surpassing his former partner. Despite burdensome comparisons to Dylan, Springsteen and Petty, Granduciel’s emerged as one of the few captivating rock ’n’ roll musicians of our time. And Lost in the Dream is his most personal, most commanding work yet — an album we will return to in our finest and our darkest hours, because floating in its waves and winds there is something beautiful and true. 
—Elliott Sharp

2. Ty Segall

Manipulator

(Drag City)

Ty Segall’s no stranger to the City Paper Top 21, but with Manipulator, he’s achieved his highest ranking by a considerable margin. And he did it with an oh-so-slightly-archaic career move: making a double-album. Segall’s ambition has grown, but that doesn’t mean doing an HBO mini-series or hiring Rick Rubin to produce. Manipulator has that analog-machine-in-the-garage sound of his, and Segall’s still the master of T.Rex-meets-The-Stooges-meets-The-Archies. This time, instead of firing off three varied albums in one year, he’s pretty much combined all his interests and obsessions in one place. (Of course, he did have time to release another compilation, $ingles 2, last month.) Manipulator’s got all the Segall hallmarks — fuzz-and-falsetto fusillades (“Feel”), twisted anthems (“The Singer”), acoustic-led ruminations (“Don’t You Want to Know (Sue)”), even some funky rhythms (“Mister Main”). It’s easily one (or two or three) of the best records of the year. 
—Michael Pelusi

3. Ex Hex

Rips

(Merge)

2014 was … well, it was a rough year. Which is why the debut album from the D.C. power trio Ex Hex proved to be revelatory: Here were three women effectively thumbing their noses at ideas of Great Rock in favor of distilling power pop to its essence, and inserting just enough swagger to add hard-rock heft. Rips is by no means a paint-by-numbers homage to AOR’s glory days of working for the weekend while not being able to drive 55 — deeper listens reveal finger-flexing riffs and time-signature-defying drum fills. But no album better exemplified the radical act of ditching dudes and their dude-created problems in favor of hitting the road at top speed, with monster guitars blaring as the wind whipped through your hair and you sang along at top volume. 
—Maura Johnston

 

4. Run the Jewels

Run the Jewels 2

(Mass Appeal)

Recently, ?uestlove took to Instagram to issue a challenge for artists to “push themselves to be a voice of the times that we live in.” This sentiment rang especially loud and clear in hip-hop circles in the wake of two high-profile killings of Black men by police officers, followed by the failure of two grand juries to indict any of the officers involved. Despite the genre’s long anti-authoritarian tradition, most contemporary hip-hop is not in tune with the feeling of hurt, dismay and anger that many of its listeners have been experiencing recently. Enter Run the Jewels — Brooklyn rapper/producer EL-P and Atlanta-born MC Killer Mike. The duo’s second record combines dense, cacophonous beats and aggressive lyrics to create a thoroughly futuristic set of tracks that builds upon the foundation laid by hip-hop firebrands like Public Enemy and AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted-era Ice Cube. The songs on RTJ2 are not always overtly political, but when Mike pulls out a heart-wrenching narrative about being harassed and arrested by the police in front of his wife and children on “Early” — it becomes painfully clear that Run the Jewels is up to the challenge of articulating the intensity of the times.  —John Morrison

5. Sharon Van Etten

Are We There

(Jagjaguwar)

This is the most fun you’ll ever have getting emotionally eviscerated. Sharon Van Etten’s most cohesive album to date, Are We There is a catalog of turmoil, from the boredom of long-term intimacy to the struggle to end toxic relationships. This isn’t a love story, though, but rather an unforgiving, mesmerizing breakup album, whose centerpiece, the exquisite, six-minute jam “Your Love Is Killing Me,” sees Van Etten gutting herself for her tormentor. “You like it when I let you walk over me … You love me as you torture me.” Like its agonized lover, the album leaves you exhausted but exhilarated. Are We There also contains moments of dark hilarity, as when she slurs, “I washed your dishes but I shit in your bathroom” on “Every Time the Sun Comes Up.” If loving this album doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger. Or at least a little less dead inside.
—David Faris

 

6. St. Vincent

St. Vincent

(Loma Vista/Republic)

It’s been a pleasure to hear the touch of siren in Annie Clark’s crystalline voice, her affinity for strange imagery (snorting a crushed piece of the Berlin Wall) and her love of noise slowly emerge over the seven years of her solo career. On St. Vincent, she adds some welcome bounce to those guitar manipulations and melodies that make you want to sing along to cockeyed art-rock songs you can’t sing. At her best — “Prince Johnny,” “Huey Newton,” “Regret” — she makes you think, too. No one else is doing this: No one else can. 
—Dotun Akintoye

7. Spoon

They Want My Soul

(Loma Vista/Republic)

The latest update of Spoon corp.’s Staccato Rock Suite offers a peek into the quintessential romantic relationship while dodging the usual heartbroken bugs and features. They Want My Soul is more honest than that, concentrating instead on all the confusion, nostalgia and fury that comes with being with another person. On the stomping, gleefully bitter “Rent I Pay,” singer Britt Daniel spits, “Everybody knows just where you been going/ Everybody knows the faces you been showing,” and then glides into the dreamy, shimmering “Inside Out” with a melancholy recognition: “I’m just your satellite.” Throughout, we’re given relatable (and reliably catchy) glimpses into a love-and-loss story — “And you’re breaking and you tell me I’m your only friend/ And it starts all over again”— and by the album’s end it’s not rage, but a familiar tug on the heartstrings: “I knew your New York kiss/ Now it’s another place/ A place your memory owns.” Here, we can sing and sigh along. 
—Mikala Jamison

8. Angel Olsen

Burn Your Fire for No Witness

(Jagjaguwar)

Angel Olsen’s astonishing voice sends rock critics fumbling for better words than “mesmerizing” and “haunting.” The appeal of the singer-songwriter’s latest album, though, is how effectively she’s able to put that voice — equal parts trembling Roy Orbison, soaring Neko Case and defiant Johnny Cash — to work. The strengths of Burn Your Fire for No Witness are evident on its one-two opening shot, where Olsen deftly pivots from the sound of ghostly folk records creeping in from another room on “Unfucktheworld” to the more immediate indie rock of “Forgiven/Forgotten.” When those halves come together in service of Olsen’s lingering tales of loneliness and pleas to push back against despair, it makes a hell of an antidote for a year full of nothing but bad news. 
—Bob McCormick

9. Parquet Courts

Sunbathing Animal

(What’s Your Rupture?)

Is Parquet Courts still America’s favorite most recent “band that sounds kinda like Pavement?” The Brooklyn-based outfit did some work this year, releasing their third and fourth albums in the space of six months (besides Sunbathing Animal, they gave us Content Nausea under the name Parkay Quarts). More importantly, they’re leaving those Pavement comparisons in the dust. Sunbathing Animal is an art-rock smorgasbord: funny, Talking Heads-sounding love songs (“Dear Ramona”), anxiety-ridden freakouts (title track) and minute-long, creepy and cryptic tracks (“Vienna II”). And in between are all those smart, sharp indie rock songs that lured us to this band in the first place. Probably the most fun album of 2014. 
—Sean Kearney

10. FKA twigs

LP1

(Young Turks)

The debut album by this magical, musical British sprite was one of the year’s most enchanting revelations, a feast of airy vocals and spacey beats. Once a backup dancer for the likes of Kylie Minogue and Taio Cruz, FKA keeps things bumping throughout the trip-hoppy LP1 (much like her previous projects, EP1 and EP2). The first two tracks, “Preface” and “Lights On,” are a light appetizer to awaken the senses before we slide into mini-hits like “Two Weeks” and “Pendulum” for a heavy, decadent main course. And let’s finish up with “Video Girl” and “Give Up” for dessert, sweet and formidable as Black Forest cake. Actually, who are we kidding? This whole album’s a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries: daring, sensual and refreshing, and we’re left craving more. 
—Indira Jimenez

11. Courtney Barnett

Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas

(Mom & Pop)

One of last year’s most desirable imports, A Sea of Split Peas got a proper Stateside release in 2014 and promptly wooed everybody who’d slept on it the first time around. An Aussie singer-songwriter with clever lyrics, ball-of-yarn arrangements and a voice that does tender as well as it does brazen and blunt, Courtney Barnett has a sound so clean, and so classic, that comparisons come flying in from all corners — is she more like Dylan or Dando, Phair or Crow? — but most of them bounce right off. After all, it takes a singular talent to dream up a goofy, gorgeous line like “I’m breathing but I’m wheezing/ Feel like I’m emphysemin’/ My throat feels like a funnel filled with Weet-Bix and kerosene,” and sell it with a shrug and a smile. 
—Patrick Rapa

12. Flying Lotus

You’re Dead!

(Warp)

High-concept jazz/electronica/hip-hop records about premature death as a psychedelic trip aren’t supposed to be accessible, but Steve Ellison makes it so on You’re Dead! to dizzyingly beautiful effect. From the tolling bells that open the album through the erratic sonic tapestries that ground top-flight contributions from Kendrick Lamar and Herbie Hancock, this album envelops listeners in a proprietary language through which it must be understood. Very few jazz-derived crossovers are this explosive anymore, and in an era where abrupt deaths in the inner city are taking up national headspace, we should be paying attention to what Ellison is showing us. 
—Sameer Rao

13. Beck

Morning Phase

(Capitol)

Stripped of Beck’s characteristic electronic trickery and rapid-fire lyrics, Morning Phase is an easy-to-swallow capsule of contemplative woe designed for these days of dissatisfaction. Essentially a sequel to 2002’s Sea Change — the parallels are apparent even in the album art — Morning Phase is a more refined take, with Beck’s vocals free of that crying-for-hours congestion. If Sea Change was written after a nasty breakup, Morning Phase could be the product of a spiritual retreat among the Southwest’s red rock monoliths. Stark, philosophical lyrics (“Somewhere unforgiven/ Time will wait for you”) complement majestic orchestral swaths, making the songs feel both honest and curative. To keep an otherwise heavy album afloat (one track consists almost entirely of the word “isolation”), country-inflected songs like “Say Goodbye” and “Country Down” add some levity, even if the hurt is still there. 
—Paulina Reso

14. Strand of Oaks

HEAL

(Dead Oceans)

The fourth Strand of Oaks record is the rarest of rarities: a rock suite that demonstrates how rock music can literally save our lives. Timothy Showalter is a generous, empathetic guide, leading us from “Goshen ’97,” where a lonely kid sings Smashing Pumpkins songs in front of the mirror, to “Heal,” which finds salvation in Sharon Van Etten’s voice, to “JM,” a tribute to late Songs: Ohia mastermind Jason Molina that acknowledges how our heroes’ art can help us find the light even if they never find it themselves. Showalter’s sweet tunes remind us, in word and deed, why it all matters. 
—M.J. Fine

15. Temples

Sun Structures

(Heavenly)

Moppy-haired young things with a knack for stitching together the best bits of bygone genres and hanging them on a sturdy Brit-pop backbone, Temples is comfortable with that old, familiar sound — and they act brand-new making it. But it’d be unfair to classify the English quartet as some pious tribute act. Taut debut album Sun Structures has all the bright-day harmonies, pedal-warped guitars and Swinging London sensibilities to satisfy the psych-lite crowd, but there’s much more there if you stop and look. The roadhouse groove of “The Guesser” shares a seat with the Eastern-inflected “Sand Dance” and the dramatic “The Golden Throne,” which could score the next 007 flick; the energizing clap-along pace of “Keep in the Dark” and “A Question Isn’t Answered” would sound right blaring from the PA of an alien sports arena in a distant, acid-addled universe. What’s even better — all this translates uncannily well to the stage. 
—Drew Lazor

16. Sylvan Esso

Sylvan Esso

(Partisan)

Equal parts cozy and coy, Sylvan Esso’s fertile trans-genre cross-pollination (dub-indie? folkstep?) brought us electronic pop music on an invitingly human scale. Nick Sanborn’s homespun, bass-savvy beat work recasts Amelia Meath’s folksy, feisty Mountain Man warble — and vice versa — to yield some of the year’s purest pop pleasures (“Play It Right”) and teardrop-tender slow jams (the lilting shakers-and-heartbreak of “Coffee”) as well as — with the schoolyard-ready D.I.Y. tech-house of “H.S.K.T.” — perhaps 2014’s most improbably infectious dance party anthem. 
—K. Ross Hoffman

17. Real Estate

Atlas

(Domino)

Real Estate’s third full-length is a cinematic journey through the New Jersey suburbs: filled with perfect families, all of them sad. The songs on Atlas are tinged with a concrete but distant grief, like returning to your old ’hood to find everything the same. “And even the lights on this yellow road,” laments singer Martin Courtney, “are the same as when this was our town.” But if this record is invested in nostalgia, it also delights in simple joys, like talky guitar lines and breezy choruses that feel instantly familiar. The ’burbs are dull; that’s why you moved to the city.  
—Kate Bracaglia

18. Wye Oak

Shriek

(Merge)

This Baltimore duo’s fourth album is a stunning achievement, with woozy keyboards, stuttering beats and lyrics that manage to pull off the neat trick of being both clear-eyed and gorgeously poetic. That primary songwriter Jenn Wasner decided to do this all while eschewing the guitar — the instrument that had previously defined her band’s hazy pop Americana — makes Shriek even more wondrous. The dance-routine-ready shimmy of “Schools of Eyes,” the synth freakout that swirls around “Glory,” the slow-build-from-grogginess of “Before” — all of these sound like steps on a path toward self-discovery, one where the only way out can be found after the past has been set afire. 
—Maura Johnston

19. Lydia Loveless

Somewhere Else

(Bloodshot)

You could call Somewhere Else the best Lucinda Williams album of 2014, but that wouldn’t be fair to Williams, who released the wise and weary Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone seven months later, or to Loveless, whose third full-length is stunning enough to make you swear off all the other women whose tangy, twangy tunes turned your head before she came along. Nervy, melodic songs like “To Love Somebody” and “Verlaine Shot Rimbaud” wed raw heartache to tight riffs with such passion, such effortlessness, it seems nigh impossible to sustain over an entire career. But we’d love to hear Loveless try. 
—M.J. Fine

20. Mac DeMarco

Salad Days

(Captured Tracks)

Wisdom and reflection would be the last thing to expect from a guy who calls his own music “jizz jazz,” but there is some depth to what this 24-year-old, goofy, gap-toothed Canadian delivers on Salad Days. While still holding onto his wacky persona, DeMarco has created a collection of quirky pop songs that illustrate the sort of sly self-awareness that’ll leave any twentysomething nodding their head in agreement (i.e. “you’re no better off living your life than dreaming at night”). Salad Days is lyrically more serious than DeMarco’s previous releases, but his crooning voice and lo-fi aesthetic allow him to work that sweet spot between satirical and sincere. 
—Sarah Heizenroth

21. Hurray for the Riff Raff

Small Town Heroes

(ATO)

In all those classic murder ballads (and most of their modern reimaginings), women are always getting strangled, drowned and shot by men who then have the nerve to set the story to music and throw a woe-is-me cell block pity party. With a wry wit and a whiskey tongue, Alynda Lee Segarra calls bullshit on that tired, old template all over Hurray for the Riff Raff’s deep, dark and handsome sixth record, Small Town Heroes. “The whole world sings like there’s nothing going wrong,” she marvels on “The Body Electric.” Then she hints that she’s the hero here: “Delia’s gone but I’m settling the score.” Even at its grimmest, the album finds a way knock you over with rustic beauty and wary, weary hope.
—Patrick Rapa

 

 

About the List

As usual, we took the hollow exercise of ranking albums very seriously. We began by instructing our critics to submit lists of their 10 favorite albums of the year. Their responses were pasted into a spreadsheet. Points were assigned based on rank, frequency and critic credibility. Duplicates were combined. Sums were totaled. Math was afoot. Six days into the process, “sort data” was clicked and a greater list began taking shape. Wrongs were righted. Labels were looked up. Ties were broken via amateur augury (mostly owls). A final list appeared and all who saw it quaked for they knew its truth. Local artists received no special treatment. The War on Drugs crushed everyone fair and square. 
—Patrick Rapa

 

See Also:

• Local Artist of the Year
• More Great Local Music from 2014
• Rounding Out the Top 50
• Who Voted for What