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So, having got to the end of The Guardian's Top 50 albums of 2021, what have I learned?   Me?  Learning something?!?  Never!  All in all, I enjoyed the list and thought it was better than last year's offering - it introduced me to 48 new albums (up from 46 last year which shows I'm getting even less down with the kids), most of which I at least found interesting.  Best 10 As a sign that things are better than last year (when I had a best 5), I've gone for a best 10 this year - I liked all of these and will be making an effort to listen to them all again and I suspect quite a few of them could be growers. #50 : Magic Still Exists - Agnes #46 : Busy Guy - Stephen Fretwell #39 : Flowers for Vases/Descansos - Hayley Williams #37 : Sensational - Erika de Casier #20 :  Vulture Prince - Arooj Aftab  #13 : Jubilee - Japanese Breakfast #9 : New Long Leg - Dry Cleaning #8 : Sour - Olivia Rodrigo #3 : Sometimes I Might Be Introvert - Little Simz #1 : Prioritise Pleasure

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #1 : Prioritise Pleasure - Self Esteem In a pop landscape that often seems to be bottling it all up inside, Rebecca Taylor’s second solo album marked a hugely relatable uncorking of a lifetime’s worth of festering emotions, as well as her evolution into an out-and-proud pop star who dissects her emotions in pin-sharp, often darkly funny and always physically rousing testaments. The sheer heft and physicality of the album, all Yeezus beats and elastic melodies, is balanced by her ability to zoom in on the minutiae of life, paired with her economical wit. Often, Taylor is joined by a small choir of friends who reiterate and cosign her emotions: their presence anchors lead single I Do This All the Time, with its swelling coda of “I’ll take care, I’ll read again, I’ll sing again, I will” transformed into the ultimate act of defiance against those who once compelled her to diminish her desires and shrink her personality. After n

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #2 : Blue Weekend - Wolf Alice Wolf Alice singer Ellie Rowsell has called Blue Weekend her least autobiographical album: whatever the inspiration, it tells a convincingly lived-in story of embracing nihilism following the rupture of friendships and romantic relationships. “I take you back / Yeah, I know it seems surprising,” she thunders on Lipstick on the Glass. It’s here that Wolf Alice come into their own as adept musical shapeshifters, using their broad influences to explore the extremes of alienation: there are woozy fantasies, self-destructive ragers; stunning anthems of anxiety. Big, confident pop-rock albums are rare these days – and their demise hardly bemoaned – but there’s an undeniable pleasure in finding one adventurous, ambitious and human enough to remind you why they used to be so essential. I always think I like Wolf Alice but then I listen to them and I'm like "hmmm - do I really?".  So I was

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #3 : Sometimes I Might Be Introvert - Little Simz Introversion is considered synonymous with shyness, but on Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (an acronym of her nickname), Simbiatu Ajikawo demonstrates that she has no shortage of bold, cinematic vision. She makes up for a lack of travel during the pandemic by stamping her musical passport with the influences of a wide diasporic sound. Her Nigerian heritage is in fine hip-winding display on Point and Kill (featuring Obongjayar), while Protect My Energy layers motivational mantras over 80s Miami drums, balancing out the record’s heavier moments with a keen sense of play. And she is newly generous here with her vignettes of family life, driven by the desire to recalibrate her post-pandemic priorities as an aunt and sibling. On Little Q, she reconnects with a cousin on the other side of the Thames to learn more about his near-death brush with knife crime, while I Love You, I Hate

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #4 : Ignorance - The Weather Station Tamara Lindeman’s fifth album as the Weather Station had a lightning-in-a-bottle quality that nothing she had released previously could quite prepare you for. At the end of 2018, she said, she was driven “insane” by reading a New Yorker article by environmentalist Bill McKibben, written as California burned during the most destructive wildfire season in history. She subsequently poured her anger and grief into the 10 songs on Ignorance. The lyrics occasionally slipped into something approaching straightforward protest songs but, for the most part, they entwine “climate grief” with what sound like words about a failing relationship to startling effect. She also shifted her musical focus, bringing in a new expansiveness and gloss – synths, disco beats, strings, sax and flute that carry a distinct hint of jazz about them. In purely melodic terms, these are Lindeman’s strongest songs to date

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #5 : CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST - Tyler, The Creator Call Me If You Get Lost is a decadent and luxurious showcase of Tyler’s reverence and nostalgia for music’s past – Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, lovers rock, Houston R&B – channelled into his own present and future. Also central to this album’s beauty is the fact that Tyler can rap, crafting engaging tales out of deft, intentional flow. He has always been a romantic, but here he bears a softer side than ever, forced to recognise that love, so often, is about timing. “Come get lost with me,” Tyler offers on Blessed, late into an album that has already guided the listener through a bright, expansive and occasionally sentimental world, with the tracks melding into one another in true mixtape fashion. So often, we focus on beginnings and endings. Here, Tyler masterfully reminds us that life is all about the journey, growth, confusion, pain and magic in between. I've met Tyler

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #6 : Nine - Sault On Sault’s fifth album in two years, spoken-word interludes baldly state the reality of racism in the UK while lyrics tell impressionistic stories that teem with loss and hurt, knives and guns. Yet the music offers transcendence: tightly melodic, luxuriously layered, instantly memorable without being cheaply infectious. London Gangs nods to the Chemical Brothers, grainily retro R&B, X-Ray Spex, hushed nu-folk and Auld Lang Syne. Bitter Streets is soulful 60s lounge music with a tricksy beat. The exquisite title track is pared-back psychedelic soul, proggy folk, cosmic Beatles and also none of those things. If you like the sound of Nine, apologies. Sault only made it available to stream and download for 99 days after its initial June release. Back then, the group said some of them hailed from “the heart of London’s council estates”, where the majority “get trapped in a systematic loop where a lot of res

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #7 : New Long Leg - Dry Cleaning Dry Cleaning frontperson Florence Shaw captures a generation’s internal monologue like never before: those bitchy, distracted, utterly unmindful thoughts that a consciousness poisoned by city life and digital media is powerless to stop. Shaw doom-scrolls through her own life, yet the London band’s debut album is often breezy and full of little situation comedies; her humour given ample space by the sturdy guitar-bass-drums trio who cleave to varied strains of stoner-garage rock. Ultimately there’s a profound poetry in how her observations hang together, a reminder that something can be built from the dumb flotsam of ordinary life I'm aware of Dry Cleaning and think I'd heard some of these tracks before, but struggle to remember them.  And I've definitely not heard the whole album, so let's go for it.  And it starts off with a very hooky and quirky opening track - and if the h

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #8 : Sour - Olivia Rodrigo Not since Britney Spears shimmied her way down a hallway dressed in school uniform has a debut single had such an immediate cultural impact: within four days of Olivia Rodrigo releasing Drivers License, the song had broken Spotify’s record for the most single-day streams for a non-holiday song; it would spend nine consecutive weeks at No 1 on the UK charts. Like Spears, Rodrigo also got her start with Disney, however, Rodrigo’s pathway to pop dominance wasn’t built on dance routines and Max Martin-penned bangers. Sour is an intimate, barbed, anxious and brilliantly crafted debut album about the butchery of heartbreak and the emotional hurricane that is being a teenager. Picture Rodrigo swooping in wearing a cheerleader outfit and Doc Martens while brandishing a baseball bat, her face still wet with tears. Even someone as far from as being down with the kids as me was aware of Olivia and her album

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #9 : Collapsed In Sunbeams - Arlo Parks As the beginning of 2021 marked almost a full year of the pandemic, many of us were experiencing some sort of impact on our mental health. So when Arlo Parks released her debut album in January, she found herself chiming with universal concerns. Addressing issues that had been triggered or exacerbated by lives stuck inside four walls – unrequited desire, sexuality, poor body image, prejudice, betrayal and depression – Parks emerged as an empathic, comforting voice. What makes Collapsed in Sunbeams so effective is that the music is the striking inverse of her themes – light, airy, her conversational voice vulnerable and childlike. Her songs are delicately but cleverly constructed, with ear-worm choruses and generous hooks; soulful, folky tones, gentle R&B and jazzy drumming; a shimmering sea of balm-like sound beneath which lurk those lyrical depth charges One I've met, listene

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #10 : Afrique Victime - Mdou Moctar In Mdou Moctar’s world, riff and rhythm count but the solo is king. His grounding in the nomadic Tuareg style of assouf (desert blues) made him a popular option on Niger’s wedding circuit, but the guitarist breaks from convention by always doggedly following his fingertips to some place new. A decade’s worth of refinement has led to Afrique Victime, which streamlines the hooky onslaught of Moctar’s 2019 breakout LP, Ilana: The Creator, into something more well-rounded. Bassist and producer Mikey Coltun’s sequencing affords breathers between levee-breakers, giving necessary hush to introspective ballads Bismilahi Atagah and Tala Tannam, while allowing the molten psychedelia of Taliat and Asdikte Akal to sprawl. True to the music’s Saharan origins, there’s ample space here. Sometimes Mdou’s voice is barely above a whisper before the band join him in skyward invocations. In a change of style

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #12 : Heaux Tales - Jazmine Sullivan The power struggle between reason and desire fuels the Philadelphia songwriter’s fourth release, which intersperses soulful swagger and forlorn blues with interludes by women describing what they mean by owning their sexuality. Sullivan’s compassion resonates in how freely her interviewees express what some might see as contradictions (threatened with a sex tape leak, the subject of Ari’s Tale shrugs, “That dick spoke life into me”). And her own songs could be righteous – Pick Up Your Feelings snaps impatiently, and she makes no bones about her own pleasure on the languid On It – but they’re also transparent about the ways that freedom and dignity don’t always look how you might expect. “I just want to be taken care of / ’Cause I’ve worked enough,” she sings on The Other Side Never heard of album or artist - and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it, so we're really coming at thi

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #14 : Montero - Lil Nas X One of the most proudly queer pop records ever released, where sex isn’t veiled in metaphor but detailed right down to where the ejaculate lands. Lil Nas X writes wittily about lust and witheringly about his rivals, but there are also frank admissions of loneliness and doubt as he navigates his way into the lasting fame that is assured by his stunningly good top line melodies. I'm not a massive fan of Lil Nas - I appreciate he's breaking new ground and I admire the man's style, but I just don't particularly like what he does.  So I didn't have great expectations for this - and it possibly exceeded them in places, but not massively so.  He has attitude and style in spades (and I speak as someone who knows all about such things!) and it's amusingly rude in places, but it just doesn't push my buttons.  I have a slight suspicion that he wasn't really aiming for me as his

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Albums of 2021 #16 : Infinite Granite - Deafheaven For their most mainstream album yet, the band’s screams abated, the drums slowed their gallop, and the guitars took on a prettiness that recalled Coldplay at times. For certain metalheads, these are unforgivable sins and Deafheaven remain a divisive band – but for the rest of us, this is a stirring blend of arena rock and shoegaze that seems to fill the sky. Last time we met Deafheaven, I said (and I quote) " this is an odd one because I'd really like this with a different vocal style " - and from the sounds of the description above, it sounds like that's what I'm going to get.  And, having checked it out, it is indeed what we've got - The Guardian's description of " a stirring blend of arena rock and shoegaze" is pretty   accurate.  I can see that some of their original fans will be left shaking their heads thinking "what is going on here?&qu