Top 21 Albums for ’21: Danno Picks His Top Albums of 2021

By Daniel J. Springer

The past year has been quite strong in a lot of elements that one would most assuredly not want to highlight for anything. Mainly, of course, the ongoing COVID-19 wars have caused most of these multifaceted negatives that professors in several depressing disciplines will be puzzling over and arguing about for decades to come, but generally speaking, 2021 was nothing to write home about, except that it was a decent bit better than 2020, aka The Year That Lasted 80 Years.

However, for those searching for light at the end of the tunnel, faint glimmers of hope and bright sunny smiles from amidst the seemingly endless morass, music was certainly (and very thankfully – can you imagine if not?) a very big plus in the world this past year.

So, for those who don’t have all day to do this like I’m (un)lucky enough to be able to do (unlucky as in I listen to a lot of absolute garbage in a given day), we’re going to go over some of the best albums of the year-that-was in this article.

Now, as far as criteria, the main thing is that I personally enjoyed these albums, just so that’s out of the way. Extra points were given for albums that I think reflect the times or are otherwise culturally relevant.

So, let’s begin the countdown from #21.

21. Griffith James – Comfortably High
In his full-length debut that was both touched by COVID-19 and seemingly an angel that has blessed his continued existence, LA-based indie artist Griffith James has created something very special with indie darlings Tennis. Initially, when James was invited by Tennis to record at their home base in Denver, this wasn’t even supposed to be an album but just a couple of songs. While many artists have called their debut LP a lifetime in the making to the point of it becoming banally cliché, James has truly done it with this record.

James in his lifetime was raised in a group that became a religious and personality cult over time, forcing him to run away at 18. A life on the streets of Seattle and San Francisco followed, with his eventual salvation coming from a Buddhist monk in the former. These experiences are vividly captured on this brilliantly produced record, with the artist laying bare his feelings on organized religion, falling in love with sin, and generally finding oneself. Griffith James obviously has on Comfortably High.

20. Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss the Most
It’s very hard to capture the moments even in memory of the joys that make life worth living. That is, before everything all falls apart, which it most certainly has on the macro level and does all too regularly after the most fleeting momentitos of joy for pretty much all of us. The Chicago-based Tasha in her sophomore LP captures these types of glorious albeit fleeting flickers of time in an unpredictable yet poignant fashion, giving us a reminder of what makes life worth all the trouble at its very essence.

It’s funny how the mind and memory work. On the one hand, horrible experiences are laughed about later or sung about endlessly in songs. The smiles, happy puppy dogs, moments of love, and giggles with friends are harder to memorialize. In this, Tasha has done an amazing job and has given us all a little something to cherish.

19. The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
The War on Drugs have always existed in a rather nebulous zone stylistically, a rather thick gray area betwixt love and hate, physical and emotional, tattoos and virgin skin. On this latest album, lead singer Adam Grundicel is once again hopelessly asea in the doldrums, only hoping for what’s to come and his finding the great savior, most often noted as “babe” on this or any past record.

While this odyssey, like the actual production of the record itself, seems so grandiose and hopelessly epic, it does work in spectacular fashion on a sonic and emotional level. Even through some of the lyricism can border a bit on the cliché, one can’t help but cry out with him through this latest semi-quixotic audio adventure in seeking fulfillment.

18. Durand Jones & The Indications – Private Space
Ask any popular band and they will tell you – keeping your fans but updating your sound is a major challenge. Enter Private Space, the Indiana-bred, New York-based band’s third LP. Stylistically, it’s definitely an update, with the band on a handful of cuts opting for a more disco and dancefloor vibe that’s more Chic than Marvin Gaye.

However, that’s merely what you get at the door on Private Space, as the best songs on this LP are the vintage soul joints that made a name for the band. While American Love Call was one of the best albums of 2019, this is the band’s strongest outing on an album to date.

17. Black Midi – Cavalcade
In 2019, this hyper-talented, UK-based band put out their debut album Schlagenheim, and to be honest, it sounded less master of their craft than a very gifted college garage band trying to figure things out. On this record, Black Midi are making a serious case to be the best post-punk band around.

Cavalcade is both far more ambitious and sweeping than the previous run out, and far more focused in that mission. In fact, to call the album post-punk does the album a major disservice, as the tangible taste of jazz within the cocktail makes it a truly satisfying drink of darkness.

16. Snail Mail – Valentine
In her second full-length outing, Lindsey Jordan is sending a bit of balm to all those wounded by love and affection. Which, if you need it pointed out, is everyone. Valentine is a documentation of love in its many states, with the focus being on the neglected and out-of-order. But there’s a lot going on here in this love letter on love itself, with the black of bedrock and the glorious pink of bliss thrown in to give the canvas vibrance and fullness.

In the end, it might seem a bit hefty and glum to be focusing on the natural state of love as being mainly that of disrepair. But is that not true for most of us?

15. St. Vincent – Daddy’s Home
The shapeshifter alien of the music world, Annie Clark, was back at it in 2021 with another morphology that took a trip into vintage 1970s rock and soul chic. Not a single detail from the notes to the vocal carries to the outlandish wardrobes are unaccounted for, brought lovingly to your experience in a most meticulous fashion.

While a tribute to some of the rock legends that she adores, the record is also intensely personal in that it’s both a rumination on her father’s incarceration and her own deep-seated fears of becoming a parent herself. This is an album that truly shines even bathed in the sepia and grain of yesterday’s photographs long lost.

14. Tyler, The Creator – Call Me If You Get Lost
Let’s just face it right here: Tyler, The Creator is the best around in hip-hop, and he’s only getting better. In 2019, the still-maturing artist was growing into his boots in a way, which of course didn’t prevent him from also making one of the year’s best albums in Igor.

Whereas that record was intensely personal and introspective, befitting the young man’s age and emotional outlook, Call Me If You Get Lost reflects a more assured, macrocosmic outlook. What’s fascinating about this record is the mixtape format, which gives the listener a look both into the Tyler of now and a trip back to his early days of releases.

13. Julien Baker – Little Oblivions
It’s been rather surprising to see this album missed by many of the music “critterati” in the larger publications here at the year’s end. As opposed to previous outings where a stripped-down sound gave the artist her calling card, Little Oblivions gives Baker a more expansive canvas and tools to work with.

Many seem to still express the idea that Baker’s work shows the limits of where she can go musically and that she’s somehow the little sister to Boygenious partners Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. This record puts such arguments to bed.

12. Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime
One of the most gifted guitarists of today, the Tuareg Nigerian artist is a very local blast from the past in an exceedingly vivid present. Whereas listening to this LP might be picturing an alternative universe where Jimi Hendrix didn’t die at 27 and took a trip to Africa to record with Ali Farka Toure a la Ginger Baker’s adventures with Fela Kuti and Afrika 70 back in the day, this would be a much more locally rooted affair in reality.

Moctar gathered with his bandmates in the backyard of a friend’s house in Niger late last year, with a crowd naturally gathering during their impromptu session, dancing and swaying with them as the sounds burst into the Saharan nighttime air. The result is Afrique Victime, a highly expansive, experimental, and extravagant tour-de-force on West African traditional stylings punctuated with unbelievable moments of psyche that give it a touch of Hendrix and the best days of the Zamrock era further south in Africa.

11. Idles – Crawler
The Bristol-based band over the course of time has become a kind of emeritus chair in the department of post-punk, but this very textured and daring album that seemed to rise straight out from under our feet is a testament to the band’s exploratory and defiant nature. This album is hard to get a grip on even for the seasoned listener, but the satisfaction is very much there if you let it grow with a few listens.

While that most certainly makes it almost the antithesis of their last LP, Ultra Mono, which debuted at #1, that does not a bad album make. In fact, this is one of the absolute best of the year in the rock category, but it’s grown folks’ biz.

10. Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World
This is a band that’s been on the rise in the indie world with their previous releases, but it never seemed to go much beyond top spots on SubmitHub and such, as the duo were mainly releasing singles and mixtapes. Enter Mercurial World, which is Magdalena Bay’s proper debut album.

This record has a vintage amorphous aspect that makes you feel like you somehow grew up with it but are in fact hearing it for the first time. The careful delivery in the synth-centric arrangements and songwriting style make it familiar to those amongst us who can remember the aughts and 90s in music, but its overall navigational guide is firmly rooted in the contemporaries and pop artists of right now.

9. Adele – 30
One of the most anticipated LPs of the year certainly didn’t disappoint, as Adele delivered what might be her most personal and diversely constructed full-length to date. The album serves as Adele’s (presumably happening later) explanation to her young son on what divorce is. Clearly still struggling with the duality of being both not married and a mother, Adele throws in poignant moments of recordings with her son as she opens up to him about how she feels in conversation with clearly larger problems on her mind.

The instrumental arrangements on this LP are both beautiful and strikingly subtle, given the counterpoint of having the best vocalist of her generation still absolutely belting home runs in the big moments. This just might be Adele’s best yet in an already stupefying career of success.

8. Genesis Owusu – Smiling with No Teeth
There’s really no way of describing this record. On his professional debut, the Australia-via-Ghana artist delivers a record that’s an opus to unbridled expression, freeform creation, and a genre-free world. Punching his vocals from singing to rapping to literal directing on the record, this is no mere “Australian hip-hop” LP, with explorations of jazz, soul, punk, and even folk during a wild yet controlled ride in avant-funk.

Consider this the anarchist side B of the current rebellion to the normative boredoms of mumble rap and the dying dominants on the commercial side of hip-hop. Now for side A and the guns of the Nararone, we come to #7.

7. Little Simz – Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
In what’s unquestionably hip-hop’s most sweeping and masterclass album of 2021, we see the artist on her third LP neither half- nor mis-stepping in any way. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is superlatively produced, diverse in sound selection, and in a word, epic. On the lyrical front, we see a fully grown Little Simz ruminating down to the bone with introspection over everything from soaring full orchestras down to very pared-back beats. In the process, she’s cemented herself as the UK’s preeminent hip-hop artist, a landmark in the world today.

For those looking past the metronomic monotony of the trap and mumble sound that’s run roughshod over mainstream hip-hop for seeming eons, Little Simz is the modern assassin carrying the revolutionary banner for the golden age of hip-hop’s restoration.

6. Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee
As far as artists go in the new generation coming up and reaching primetime, one doesn’t have much to think about when selecting the captain of the team in Korean-American Michelle Zauner. While she wrote a New York Times best-selling rumination on her mother called “Crying in H-Mart,” which was published earlier this year, she also put out an album that’s high on considerations for album of the year.

Jubilee is a buffet of subgenre sonic exploration rooted in the artist’s shining previous outings in the indie sense. Whereas Zauner till recently had felt trapped by her own songwriting on dour subjects and elegies on sadness in other works, this record is a break from the mold, a shining celebration of joy that breaks both the listener and the artist out of the critics’ dungeon.

5. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Carnage
It’s hard to find a more admirable thinker and seasoned musician in the world than “Aussie punk pioneer turned global emotional mirror and truth-teller” Nick Cave. His modern works are pensive, almost brooding reflections on the state of the world, with his most recent being the haunting Ghosteen from 2019.

Enter Carnage, which is so spot on in the age of pandemic, political parody, and abject sadness that it hurts almost worse than the real thing. Almost. A record that’s for neither the faint of heart nor the impatient, it might be Cave’s best work in a long and very storied career.

4. Silk Sonic – An Evening with Silk Sonic
The common complaints that have been aired about this record fall into a few exceedingly half-assed critical areas. One is that the album is a mere 70s golden age of funk and soul retread. The other is that the record should be longer. Finally, you have the (mostly clickbait) “it’s just not that good” or some similar piece of lazy internet barf.

In short retort: no, now get out. This record is an instant classic, which had a hype that was somewhat out of control and bound to eventually attract the lazy above-mentioned upchuckery. Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak have created an incredibly fun, infectious album of vintage funk and soul rooted firmly in modern sensibilities that will stand as a mighty monument forever.

3. Turnstile – Glow On
In the modern audioverse, rock and especially its very angry younger brother hardcore have become almost an afterthought. That is, a relic to their supposed past glories and conquests left to old people in their now ill-fitting leather vests to ruminate upon. For those paying attention, this supposed norm might have just gotten smashed to bits on Turnstile’s third LP, Glow On.

Produced by Kenny Beats, this record is all the things that make rock great: passion, groove, and absolutely epic riffs. While it’s certainly not a crossover record, there are little touches of soul that make this more than a straight hardcore record and elevate it into the top rock album of the year, if not the overall #1.

2. Joan as Police Woman with Tony Allen and Dave Okumu – The Solution Is Restless
On Joan Wasser’s latest and ninth career album, there’s no amount of space on an extra-large canvas that’s left unexplored. Born of a few sessions in Paris with dearly departed Afrobeat father Tony Allen and The Invisible’s Dave Okumu that metastasized into a masterclass full-length, the artist here creates an unforgettable blend of deep colors and darkly glimmering images of sumptuous depth.

The Solution Is Restless feels less like Wasser and her esteemed company created it from scratch but more like they pulled it directly from inside your spine. Haunting and refreshing, dusty and factory new, sitting in the dark weeping and smiling in the sunshine of eternality, this is both Joan as Police Woman’s opus and a fitting venue for Tony Allen to do his unmatched syncopated stylings, further cementing his legacy as one of the all-time greatest.

1.Floating Points with Pharoah Sanders and The London Symphony Orchestra – Promises
In what’s not merely album of the year but one of the most original and haunting pieces of audio that’s been created in many of them, one cannot be faulted for staring a little too long at the collaboration on this record trying to comprehend what you’re looking at before even taking the dive in. Jazz saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders is now over 80, and admits that he doesn’t even really listen to music at all anymore, but rather the stuff that others don’t listen to, like the waves in the water.

Enter British producer Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, one of the most respected up-and-coming names in dance music. Shepherd, who composed this stunning continuous 46 minutes of emotional dissonance, was able to both get the London Symphony Orchestra to play it and also get the man listening to what we take for granted to strap on his sax once again.

The result is a record that can at points run mumble so low that it might make the listener check the speakers to make sure they’re on. However, there are the crescendos, which are earth-shattering expansions of the cosmos, leaving the psyche still there, but merely floating with gravity’s pull. The addition of Sanders both on his instrument of choice and in rumbling melodic interludes of thought merely puts the platinum sheen on this mighty colossus, a record for the ages.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
(The Rest of the Top 40)
Faye Webster – I Know I’m Funny haha
Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
The Weather Station – Ignorance
El Michels Affair – Yeti Season
Sault – Nine
Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg
Black Country, New Road – For the First Time
Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
Shame – Drunk Tank Pink
Iceage – Seek Shelter
Madlib – Sound Ancestors
Low – Hey What
BadBadNotGood – Talk Memory
Lucy Dacus – Home Video
Olivia Rodrigo – Sour
Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
Squid – Bright Green Fields
Twice – Taste of Love
Lana Del Rey – Blue Bannisters

The Author
Daniel J. Springer (aka “Danno”) is the creator, host, writer, editor, and producer of The Drop with Danno, broadcasting nightly on GFN 98.7 FM in Gwangju and 93.7 FM in Yeosu, 8–10 p.m. Prior to this, he was a contributor to several shows on TBS eFM in Seoul, along with being the creator and co-host of Spacious and White Label Radio on WNUR in Chicago. You can find “The Damyang Drop,” his monthly collaborative playlist with The Damyang House, on YouTube and Spotify.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter: @gfnthedrop