Pitchfork is spending this week publishing a bunch of Best of the Decade (So Far) lists, thereby generating material for insular music nerd debate for presumably the rest of the decade. It’s hard to describe the relationship between music “fandom” and Pitchfork. It’s like something that we hate, and we all knowingly hate, but at the same time feel obligated to listen to, if only to point out how much we hate it. It would be like IGN on games if anyone took IGN seriously.

So having observed all of that, I’m going to play directly into it by coming up with my own list of my favorite records of the decade so far. I actually don’t take much issue with the content of Pitchfork’s list so much as the arrangement (though there are some exceptions—Real Estate and The Weeknd don’t belong on the Best Of anything, ever). And I do want to stress that these are my favorite records, not the best records. I may come across as opinionated on music if you talk to me, but my stance is that you only get out of music what you bring into it. Music, like most entertainment, is an entirely subjective experience and your sense of enjoyment is no more or less valid than anyone elses, even if you’re getting that enjoyment from something that is otherwise universally reviled. Incidentally you’re probably going to see less arguments for musical aptitude on this list and more what these records actually mean to me. Also note that there are tons of records outside of these from this period in time that I absolutely love.

This list is also not going to be in a particular order because I don’t think that’s an extremely productive way of organizing your thoughts unless it happens extremely naturally.

Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me

This is a nearly two-hour behemoth of a record that I was only able to truly appreciate years after its original release and after having immersed myself in Newsom’s earlier, slightly more accessible work. I don’t know how much time I’ve put into this album at this point, since I have at least three different versions of it and only one of them keeps track of plays, but I do know that every song here is gold.

Good Intentions Paving Company
Does Not Suffice

Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City

The testament to my love of this record is that it’s been in my truck cd player for well over a year now and I haven’t even been tempted to remove it. A lot of music critics seem to look back at that one special album that felt like something of a soundtrack to either how they felt or how they lived when they were teens/young adults, and whenever I listen to Modern Vampires I always get the impression that that is what this record is going to be like for me, when I think back to right now.

Step
Hannah Hunt

EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

I was at a very different stage in my life when I first heard this record (which was lol, just three years ago) and I say that because, at the time, all of the things I said about Modern Vampires of the City I would have said about Past Life Martyred Saints. It seemed to capture the “spirit” of my generation better than any record I’d ever experience. It was while I was looking up reviews for EMA’s 2014 album that I started to reevaluate how exactly I felt about Saints, and I now think it’s best summed up by a quote I found on thevpme.com:

“(EMA) Erika M. Anderson’s 2011 debut ‘Past Life Martyred Saints’ was a brutal raw emotionally bruising affair. It was certainly not an album for the faint- hearted, referencing subject matter such as DV and self-harm and saw EMA teetering on the precipice of despair before defiantly pulling back.”

California
Red Star

La Dispute – Wildlife

Wildlife is an album that fully realizes the melodic posthardcore sound while utterly defying its tropes and stereotypes. This isn’t a catalog of marketable teen angst, or grievances with society. This is a concept album about a narrator searching for something. The songs contain heartbreaking stories and personal suffering, but are presented in a way that is entirely non-confrontational. It’s open to all ideas and viewpoints, it wants to understand rather than to judge and condemn, and through understanding the narrator manages to obtain, if not quite answers to the questions haunting them from the start of the record, then at least a sort of sense of peace with the chaotic and the unknown. This is what I come to if I’m ever in need of any kind of an emotional cleansing.

A Departure
King Park

mewithoutYou – Ten Stories

Ten Stories is a concept album about circus animals escaping a train crash and discovering existentialism. Ten Stories is also meticulously, almost intimidatingly constructed. The lyrics are a constant stream of literary, historical, and geographical references. The songs share a kind of poetic continuity where the meaning of one can only be inferred from information presented in another, earlier song. And that’s just the lyrics, music-wise songs rarely end in the same genre they begin in (which is very appropriate to the themes of the record). It’s certainly not the single best album that mewithoutYou has recorded (that is Brother, Sister) but it is the perfect capstone to their overall development as a band up to this point.

Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume
Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes

Destroyer – Kaputt

Speaking of intimidating. Dan Bejar has, at this point, recorded something like 10 LPs under the Destroyer name, and plenty more with collaborative projects like Swan Lake, The New Pornographers, and probably some names I’m not even aware of. He has been releasing music steadily since the mid-90’s, so it came as a bit of a surprise when his latest album, Kaputt, appeared as a complete reinvention of his music. Some elements remain, of course; his stream-of-consciousness lyrical storytelling, his percussive, not-quite-spoken word vocal delivery. But it’s redirected here at Kaputt’s commitment to atmosphere. It doesn’t feel like it’s from an entirely different time and place so much that it feels as if it is an entirely different time and place.

Savage Night at the Opera
Suicide Demo for Kara Walker

Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, Ultra

Channel Orange may have been Ocean’s public breakthrough, but I’m of the opinion that Nostalgia, Ultra is superior in almost every way. It’s the quintessential millennial singer-songwriter/R&B album, and it’s practically a manifesto on how to write this kind of music (love, sex, relationships) without being, well, a jerk about it. CoughTheWeekndcough.

Strawberry Swing
We All Try

Ty Segall – Slaughterhouse/Twins/Sleeper/etc

I’m cheating here, but more than any other artist I’m aware of, Segall has managed to be extremely prolific in the 2010’s while maintaining and consistent if not increasing level of quality. There are definitely distinct “essential” Segall albums, but they also pretty much happen to be all of his latest releases, in order. I tried to just pick one here, but I can’t. If Segall was about individual records, he wouldn’t be releasing them at a pace of 2-3 per year.

Diddy Wah Diddy
The West

Lower Dens – Nootropics

There’s something about the music of Lower Dens that’s just fundamentally (thoughtfully?) lonely, as if it’s made to be listened to in the dark at 3 AM when you can’t make yourself sleep. It’s not uplifting, but it’s not exactly depressing either, or even especially melancholy. It is extremely musically interesting, and probably requires headphones or some kind of surround sound to be properly experienced. Threads of songs start in different places before they combine and collide in unexpected ways over its course. The ambient sections perhaps drag on a bit, but it really works for the way that (I think) the music is meant to be approached.

Brains
Propagation

Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do

First of all, I’m really proud of myself for being able to type that entire title from memory. But yes, this is really just the best sing-songwriter album to come out in recent memory (though has competition from the likes of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake and Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt, both of which I adore and the latter I nearly put on this list). It’s inventive, and the lyrics dig deeper into their subject matter than the bubblegum romance we’re used to getting.

Every Single Night
Werewolf

There are so many honorable mentions but I’m going to cut myself off there, because I would have a hard time including any of them without having to include a lot more and I don’t want this journal to turn into a tome (so many ambient and metal records I wanted to talk about). So there you go, comment on my choices, disparage my taste, talk about music that you like (it needn’t belong to the past decade) or do whatever you want really.