what was the best year for music in the 2010s

They were all awesome, but 2015.

2015 but a lot of my fave albums of this decade came out in 2010 too

2010 - probably best Kanye album, Big Boi, VW - "contra", Ariel Pink - "Before today"

probably 2015

worst were 2013 and 2014

I'm feeling 2018 or 2016 at the moment. 2016 defs feels like one of the "big" years

Lol I def just voted 2015 and then read the responses

one of the first three

i gave up on new music in 2017. curious to see if anyone likes that year.

2010 was a year if big favourites for me.

2017 was the year I had the greatest number of favorite things, but 2015 had some higher highs.

voted 2015 without a second thought

2016 towers gigantically imo

I had a blast in 2010, the age of UK funky and post-dubstep (before that went a bit shit). Got some great clubbing memories of seeing the likes of Jackmaster and Oneman around then.

Went for 2015. There might have been years with more albums I enjoyed overall (13, 17 and 18 were very strong) but it's hard not to pick the year that gave us Ten Love Songs, Emotion, Wildheart, Art Angels, To Pimp A Butterfly, Kiddo, Vulnicura, Natalie Prass, Have You In My Wilderness, Reality Show etc.

2011 is easily my least favourite year. There's not a whole lot I still revisit that I loved at the time. Kaputt, Wounded Rhymes, On A Mission and Konkylie are the obvious ones.

2015 for me too, as it happens - it was the year that I engaged the most fully and rewardingly with new music.

2011, I think. I was writing about music and discovered a whole world of new stuff.

voted 2016 for several reasons but chiefly bc of Lemonade, A Seat At The Table and “Into You”

2015 for albums / 2016 for tracks

Runner-up year would probably be 2011 for both.

I have no idea what year things came out.

Can’t someone show me a year-by-year Pazz and Jop index or something?

It's all a blur tbh.

2013 is a personal favorite year of mine, even though I'm not sure I'd call it the best.

2014 might be the worst though.

I think either 2012, 2015 or 2018

So p&j ceased to exist in 2019 iirc? And the singles are unranked but here it goes:

P&J top 10 albums 2010-2019

2010

1 Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
2 LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
3 Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
4 Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid
5 Vampire Weekend - Contra
6 Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
7 Beach House - Teen Dream
8 The National - High Violet
9 Sleigh Bells - Treats
10 Black Keys - Brothers

2011

1. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l
2. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
3. Jay-Z and Kanye West - Watch the Throne
4. Wild Flag - Wild Flag
5. Tom Waits - Bad As Me
6. Adele - 21
7. Destroyer - Kaputt
8. Drake - Take Care
9. Bon Iver - Bon Iver
10. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

2012

1. Frank Ocean - Channel Orange
2. Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid, m.A.A.d City
3. Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
4. Japandroids - Celebration Rock
5. Miguel - Kaleidoscope Dream
6. Tame Impala - Lonerism
7. Swans - The Seer
8. Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music
9. Grimes - Visions
10. Beach House - Bloom

2013

1. Kanye West - Yeezus
2. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
3. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
4. Beyoncé - Beyoncé
5. Chance the Rapper - Acid Rap
6. My Bloody Valentine - m b v
7. Haim - Days Are Gone
8. Janelle Monáe - The Electric Lady
9. Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze
10. Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer Different Park

2014

1. D'Angelo - Black Messiah
2. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2
3. The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
4. St. Vincent - St. Vincent
5. FKA Twigs - Lp1
6. Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
7. Taylor Swift - 1989
8. Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire for No Witness
9. Spoon - They Want My Soul
10. Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues

2015

1. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
2. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think - and Sometimes I Just Sit
3. Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion
4. Grimes - Art Angels
5. Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love
6. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell
7. Vince Staples - Summertime '06
8. Kamasi Washington - The Epic
9. Jamie xx - In Colour
10. Father John Misty - I Love You - Honeybear

2016

1. David Bowie - Blackstar
2. Beyoncé - Lemonade
3. A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service
4. Chance The Rapper - Coloring Book
5. Solange - A Seat At The Table
6. Frank Ocean - Blonde
7. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
8. Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker
9. Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of Denial
10. Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo

2017

1. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN
2. SZA - CTRL
3. St. Vincent - Masseduction
4. Lorde - Melodrama
5. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - The Nashville Sound
6. War on Drugs- A Deeper Understanding
7. Slowdive - Slowdive
8. Jay-Z - 4:44
9. LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
10. Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm

2018

1 Kacey Musgraves — Golden Hour
2 Janelle Monáe — Dirty Computer
3 Cardi B — Invasion of Privacy
4 Mitski — Be the Cowboy
5 Robyn — Honey
6 Pusha T — Daytona
7 Noname — Room 25
8 Low — Double Negative
9 Parquet Courts — Wide Awake!
10 Lucy Dacus — Historian

I’m not picking 2015 and 2011 as my favorite based on the p&j top 10 but if I were only to choose based on the albums in here I’d still say 2015 and 2011 were my favorite ones.

Looking through all those old Pazz and Jop top 10s is kinda like looking at pictures of old friends. some of them you still cherish deeply, others you see and you can't believe you used to spend time with them

Voted for 2016 on the strength of Battle Trance, Branca, Bombino, Horse Lords, Sarah Louise, Tanya Tagaq, Astronoid, and Mitski. 2014 was pretty great too: Nels Cline Singers, Julia Wolfe, Noura Mint Seymali, Botanist, Jute Gyte, Owen Pallett, Thantifaxath, Zorn's Testament of Solomon, Frisell, Brian Blade, John Luther Adams, ... hm, might have even been better.

2017. I really liked that Slowdive reunion album.

I'm leaning toward 2018, but a large part of that may be that I just don't remember much further back. There are a bunch of albums in those P&J lists that I'm amazed came out less than a decade ago.

i went through the trouble of finding files on my computer w/ the shortlists i would put together for the annual ilm trax ballots to hopefully get a sense of how i perceived each year of music at the time

and after looking thru all of that... it feels pointless to try picking one year. there's plenty of great music coming out on each given year that's stylistically diverse enough to defy easy narratives. and if we try to define a year by the shifts, trends, movements that were developing then, well, many of the more exciting of those are hard to pin down to a specific year anyway. "it's all a blur tbh" indeed

It's all a blur tbh.

― pomenitul, zondag 9 augustus 2020 0:19 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Think it's between 2017 and 2018 for me.

2017 stood out as a terrific year for albums I like, which is the most relevant metric IMHO.

my gut is telling me 2012

made a list of my favorite albums of the decade a bit ago and 3 of the top 10 were from 2015, so probably 2015.

most years were pretty good to be really real

we should poll some of those P&J results tho, because some of those are just completely unrepresentative of the years in music as i experienced them

According to my own list, it's 2015 or 2016; overall the decade was as solid as any other.

we should ignore & consign those p&j results to the grave of irrelevance where they belong

wow, such punk.

40% of my itunes top 25 most played are from 2013, no other year comes close in that particular contest

For anyone still deciding (like me), here are the top 10s from past ILX album polls

2010:

10. ERYKAH BADU — New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
9. ROBYN — Body Talk
8. SLEIGH BELLS — Treats
7. KANYE WEST — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
6. ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI — Before Today
5. VAMPIRE WEEKEND — Contra
4. JANELLE MONÁE — The ArchAndroid
3. THE-DREAM — Love King
2. LINDSTRØM & CHRISTABELLE — Real Life Is No Cool
1. BIG BOI — Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty 

2011:

1 Destroyer - Kaputt
2 PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
3 Katy B - On A Mission
4 Beyonce - 4
5 Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
6 Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
7 DJ Quik - Book of David
8 Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels
9 Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust
10 tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

2012:

1 Miguel - Kaleidoscope Dream
2 Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city
3 John Talabot - Fin
4 Dawn Richard - Armor On
5 Grimes - Visions
6 Taylor Swift - Red
7 Chromatics - Kill for Love
8 Jessie Ware - Devotion
9 Frank Ocean - Channel Orange
10 Goat - World Music

2013:

1 Haim - Days Are Gone
2 Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
3 My Bloody Valentine - MBV
4 Beyoncé - Beyoncé
5 Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time
6 Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires Of The City
7 The Knife - Shaking The Habitual
8 Paramore - Paramore
9 Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer Different Park
10 Kanye West - Yeezus

2014:

1 D'Angelo and the Vanguard - Black Messiah
2 Taylor Swift - 1989
3 FKA twigs - LP1
4 Owen Pallett - In Conflict
5 Tinashe - Aquarius
6 Aphex Twin - Syro
7 YG - My Krazy Life
8 The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
9 St. Vincent - St. Vincent
10 Todd Terje - It's Album Time

2015:

1 Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly
2 Susanne Sundfør - Ten Love Songs
3 Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion
4 Grimes - Art Angels
5 Dawn Richard - Blackheart
6 Miguel - Wildheart
7 Jazmine Sullivan - Reality Show
8 Vince Staples - Summertime '06
9 Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete
10 Julia Holter - Have you in my Wilderness

2016:

1 KING - We Are KING
2 A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service
3 David Bowie - Blackstar
4 Beyoncé - Lemonade
5 Solange - A Seat at the Table
6 Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
7 The 1975 - I like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it
8 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Ears
9 Dawn Richard - Redemption
10 Shura - Nothing's Real

2017:

1 Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.
2 Susanne Sundfør - Music For People In Trouble
3 SZA - Ctrl
4 Charly Bliss - Guppy
5 Slowdive - Slowdive
6 Jlin - Black Origami
7 Richard Dawson - Peasant
8 Fever Ray - Plunge
9 Kelly Lee Owens - Kelly Lee Owens
10 Paramore - After Laughter

2018:

1 Low - Double Negative
2 Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour
3 Robyn - Honey
4 Julia Holter - Aviary
5 Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer
6 Mitski - Be the Cowboy
7 The 1975 - A brief inquiry into online relationships
8 Autechre - NTS Sessions 1-4
9 sun-el musician - africa to the world
10 The Beths - Future Me Hates Me

2019:

1 Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising
2 Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell!
3 Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
4 Big Thief - U.F.O.F.
5 Carly Rae Jepsen - Dedicated
6 Octo Octa - Resonant Body
7 Tinashe - Songs For You
8 Ariana Grande - thank u, next
9 Big Thief - Two Hands
10 Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

a balm for the eyes in comparison!

here are the top 10s from past ILX album polls

2014 for me if I had to POO.

2018 and 2015 are my faves, in that order

the latter really only hampered by gr*mes

This is fun. I apparently started keeping google docs of records I bought/listened to in '09, so here are my faves from 2010 - 2012 (only looking at those for now since I remember them being particularly pivotal years for me, musically):

2010
Xiu Xiu, Dear God, I Hate Myself
Mount Kimbie, Crooks & Lovers
Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma
Erykah Badu, Nu-Amerykah Part Two
James Blake, CMYK EP
James Blake, The Bells Sketch EP
James Blake, Klavierwerke EP
Big Boi, Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Fantastic Mr Fox, Evelyn EP
Teebs, Ardour
Eskmo s/t
Actress, Splazsh

2011
Low, C’mon
James Blake, s/t
Jonwayne, Bowser
Lapalux, Many Faces Out of Focus EP
Liturgy, Aesthetica
Forest Swords, Dagger Paths (reissued in '11)
Young Montana, Limerence
Shlohmo, Bad Vibes
Balam Acab, Wander/Wonder
Rustie, Glass Swords

2012
Shigeto, Lineage
Shlohmo, Vacation EP
Grimes, Visions
Actress, R.I.P.
Ryan Hemsworth, Last Words EP
Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes
Mirel Wagner, s/t

It's got to be 2010, what an incredible year for my personal canon. I would have thought 2012 would have been stronger without looking back.

2011 is close behind though!

Here are RYM's top 10s, 4 the lulz:

2010

1. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
2. Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma
3. Beach House – Teen Dream
4. Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me
5. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
6. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
7. LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening
8. The National – High Violet
9. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
10. Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid

2011

1. Danny Brown – XXX
2. C418 – Minecraft: Volume Alpha
3. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
4. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972
5. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
6. Grouper – A I A: Alien Observer
7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica
8. Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy
9. Kendrick Lamar – Section.80
10. Giles Corey – Giles Corey

2012

1. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
2. Death Grips – The Money Store
3. Swans – The Seer
4. Franck Ocean – channel ORANGE
5. Tame Impala – Lonerism
6. Beach House – Bloom
7. Lil Ugly Mane – Mista Thug Isolation
8. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel…
9. Death Grips – No Love Deep Web
10. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

2013

1. Kanye West – Yeezus
2. Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork
3. Tim Hecker – Virgins
4. Deafheaven – Sunbather
5. Ichiko Aoba – 0
6. Jon Hopkins – Immunity
7. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
8. Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven
9. Gorguts – Colored Sands
10. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels

2014

1. Swans – To Be Kind
2. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Piñata
3. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2
4. D'Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah
5. Sun Kil Moon – Benji
6. Death Grips – Niggas on the Moon: The Powers That B Disc 1
7. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – I'm in Your Mind Fuzz
8. Masakatsu Takagi – Kagayaki
9. Flying Lotus – You're Dead!
10. Widdly 2 Diddly – LISA Soundtrack

2015

1. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
2. Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell
3. Death Grips – The Powers That B
4. Carly Rae Jepsen – EMOTION
5. Death Grips – Jenny Death: The Powers That Be Disc 2
6. Travis Scott – Rodeo
7. Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness
8. Joanna Newsom – Divers
9. Earl Sweatshirt – I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside
10. Mgła – Exercises in Futility

2016

1. Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition
2. David Bowie – Blackstar
3. Frank Ocean – Blonde
4. Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
5. A Tribe Called Quest – We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service
6. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo
7. Death Grips – Bottomless Pit
8. Car Seat Headrest – Teens of Denial
9. Swans – The Glowing Man
10. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree

2017

1. Tyler, the Creator – Flower Boy
2. Mount Eerie – A Crow Looked at Me
3. Brockhampton – Saturation II
4. Kendrick Lamar – Damn.
5. Brockhampton – Saturation III
6. Shoji Meguro – Persona5 Original Soundtrack
7. Keiichi Okabe & Keigo Hoashi – NieR: Automata Original Soundtrack
8. Angelo Badalemnti – Twin Peaks: Limited Event Series Soundtrack
9. Brockhampton – Saturation
10. Lorde – Melodrama

2018

1. Kids See Ghosts
2. Daughters – You Won't Get What You Want
3. Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs
4. Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy
5. Pusha T – Daytona
6. Denzel Curry – TA13OO
7. Against All Logic – 2012-2017
8. MGMT – Little Dark Age
9. Death Grips – Year of the Snitch
10. JPEGMAFIA – Veteran

2019

1. Tyler, the Creator – Igor
2. Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
3. JPEGMAFIA – All My Heroes Are Cornballs
4. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Bandana
5. FKA twigs – Magdalene
6. Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!
7. Little Simz – Grey Area
8. black midi – Schlagenheim
9. British Sea Power – Disco Elysium
10. Danny Brown – uknowhatimsayin¿

saturation indeed

I don't go to RYM but I take it's just a playground for the Fantano/4chan crowd, yeah?

Yes and no. Once you move past the top 40, it becomes considerably more interesting in terms of potential finds. You should check out our very own RYM thread. We recently discussed this very problem.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

2. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think - and Sometimes I Just Sit

2 A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service

9. Earl Sweatshirt – I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

10 Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

7 The 1975 - I like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it

Album titles got really wordy in the 2010s.

RYM used to be way better pre-fantano. Several music subreddits like indieheads and RYM have been negatively affected by his influence imho.

That said I agree RYM is better when you get rid of the top 40 or so, the best way to find stuff you might like in there is to follow at least 20 people that give 5 stars to albums you find interesting and sort by friends’ ratings.

the best way to find stuff you might like in there is to follow at least 20 people that give 5 stars to albums you find interesting and sort by friends’ ratings

Sound advice.

To compare this is the top 10 albums of all time based on the ratings of 30+ people I follow:

1. The Velvet Underground & Nico - s/t
2. Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
3. Coltrane - a love supreme
4. MBV - loveless
5. Talking Heads - remain in light
6. J dilla - donuts
7. Pharoah Sanders - karma
8. The Velvet Underground - s/t
9. Talk talk - laughing stock
10. Kate bush - hounds of love

There’s no Pink Floyd in the top 40, OK computer which is #1 on the usual list is also missing. Kid A is in #27 instead of #2.

The two albums that are also in the rym top 10 from those are velvet underground and nico and loveless. I’m actually not against that top 10 as the best of all time and I find the overall top 40 very agreeable. I Imagine I follow a couple of people who are big into Leonard Cohen as I have two of his albums in the top 40 and, even though I don’t hate them I don’t think I’d have them in a top 100. I need to follow more people into Stereolab.

2018 or 2015 if we're going by ILM-type music though I gotta confess 2012-2014, my peak k-pop/j-pop listening years, brought me so much pure pop pleasure and euphoria.

2013 was the rare year (post-teens) with four albums that have been ongoing steady sources of pleasure for me: Stara Rzeka, Cate Le Bon, Fire! Orchestra and A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw

These guys and Beirut are the Bram Stokers of Eastern European folk music.

I added up stuff from my personal decade canon just now.

2014 has a strong lead for singles/tracks -- not what I expected.
2010, 2012, and 2015 are tied for albums.

Adding the totals together, 2010 is my overall winner.

If I include reissues, the winner changes to 2012. But I probably should not include those. So it's 2010.

The numbers go down a lot starting in 2016 despite many strong favorites in the past 4-5 years.

most of my favs of the decade came out in 2010-2013 though that's probably mostly because i was spending more time keeping up with new releases back then

voted 2011 because of kaputt

Stara Rzeka is the Eastern European Bram Stoker of American Primitive guitar.

I'm cool with that.

2015 for me.

Wolf Alice - My Love Is Cool
Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion
Grimes - Art Angels
Failure - My Heart Is A Monster
Veruca Salt - Ghost Notes
Sleater Kinney - No Cities to Love

i think i'm basing my 2012 entirely on how much i enjoyed Scott Walker's 'Bish Bosch' and Swans' 'The Seer' at the time. That said BB came out right at the end of the year, and I have major issues with Swans these days and can't really listen to them any more. So maybe 2013 is a better year? Shaking The Habitual came out and it seemed to solidify everything I was into up to and including that point.

I should really keep all my EOY ballots in a single spreadsheet

Three makes a trend: Why did Hawk and a Hacksaw, Nicholas Jaar and Aram Bajakian all create alternate soundtracks to Parajanov films between 2013-2015? Are there more?

imo This makes more sense as a current reassessment as opposed to just re-reading the way we thought in January of the following year. A lot of the music that makes me feel some nostalgia today is the same stuff that fell outside of my top 10s at the time, or discoveries from a year or two after their release.

I guess that's a plus for RYM -- all of those top 10s are current.

Is no one gonna vote for 2014 lol

personally, 2010 by a landslide

I'll certainly consider 2014, for Neneh Cherry alone

Stara Rzeka is the Eastern European Bram Stoker of American Primitive guitar.

And was involved in at least two excellent albums in 2017 (Zimpel / Ziolek and The Luminous Guitar Craft of Alameda Duo).

Why do people dunk on millennials.

Is no one gonna vote for 2014 lol

I did. D'Angelo, Aphex Twin, Run the Jewels, Grouper, Spectral Lore, Robert Rich, John Luther Adams, Behemoth… All albums I still listen to.

Ziolek's upcoming collaborative project, Clinamen, is excellent. Kinda moving towards Owen Pallett art-song territory.

I'm a fan. The Alameda 4 record (2018) is wicked as well.

yeah that is the ziolek pinnacle imo (a controversial belief i'm sure!)

2015 for me.

Wolf Alice - My Love Is Cool
Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion
Grimes - Art Angels
Failure - My Heart Is A Monster
Veruca Salt - Ghost Notes
Sleater Kinney - No Cities to Love

― peace, man, Wednesday, August 12, 2020 3:51 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

forgot about Screaming Females - Rose Mountain

every year is a best year for music

- Bob Marley

But since ILM polls are all about Year of Impact I will go with 2012, which was a ground zero year for me, musically speaking.

The 00s were the first decade I was no longer really on top of the music I liked. I started buying fewer and fewer cds. Only after I got internet at home in 2008, I slowly started getting back into gear. YouTube, last.fm and Spotify on the listening side, and FreakyTrigger, The Singles Jukebox and yes, ILM on the reading side were instrumental in this. But it wasn’t until late 2011 that I started actively exploring new genres and downloading new music.

In 2012, not only did I get into Kpop, much more importantly I discovered Ghanaian azonto and in its slipstream all kinds of other African pop, and it blew my mind. I never looked back, almost literally.
(Lots of this was actually music from 2011 or even earlier, but hey: year of impact)

Anyway, Bob Marley was right. Silly poll.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

So I pulled up the Top 25 "Best of the Decade" Albums & Tracks lists I made at the end of 2019 -- gave each Top 10 appearance a score of 2 and each "next 15" appearance a score of 1. Here's how the combined scores hashed out:

2010: 6
2011: 8
2012: 6
2013: 11 (7/11 from Albums)
2014: 9
2015: 7
2016: 14 (11/14 from Tracks)
2017: 4
2018: 5
2019: 0

Interestingly my top 2 albums were both released in 2010 and my top 2 tracks were both released in 2011.

A bit odd that the first Stsra Rzeka album gets so many mentions since it was basically the 2nd SR album + To Pimp a Butterfly that caused me to vote for 2015

does everyone actually remember what year stuff came out or do you look it up? cuz honestly I could not tell you if something came out in 2014 or 2016

lousy smarch albums

I look it up unless it's one of my GOATs.

xp

I have no idea when most things came out

Mine was 2011 because of this astounding run:

Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter One
Corrupted - Garten der Unbewusstheit
Hallock Hill - The Union
Blues Control & Laraaji - FRKWYS Vol. 8
Petrels - Haeligewielle
Rob St. John - Weald
Roly Porter - Aftertime
Dean McPhee - Son of the Black Peace
Destroyer - Kaputt
Meg Baird - Seasons on Earth

Yikes.

I can definitely reel off release dates for albums released before I was born much easier than I can the 2010s.

2013