Top ten albums of 2021

In our household albums are always 100% unstreamed, played from start to finish, never shuffled, and usually played from manufactured CDs or from purchased digital files that are burned to CDs.

In alphabetical order by artist:

Elbow – Flying Dream 1

Kurt Elling – SuperBlue

Márcio Faraco – L’électricien de la ville lumière

Fleet Foxes – Shore

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders – Promises

Hiatus Kaiyote – Mood Valiant

Gretchen Parlato – Flor

C. Tangana – El Madrileño

The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore

Yebba – Dawn

Honorable mentions:

Lady Black Bird – Black Acid Soul

Ride the Cyclone: The Musical

Jon Hopkins – Music for Psychedelic Therapy

While we welcome the new, let’s remember the old — especially those sometimes obscure pieces of music that insist on remaining unforgotten. Here are the 2020 and older albums on high rotation in 2021:

Teresa Cristina – Canta Cartola (2016)

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher (2020)

Djivan Gasparyan – Ask Me No Questions (1994) and Apricots from Eden (1996)

Hiatus Kaiyote – Choose Your Weapon (2015)

Natalia Lafourcade (all)

Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings (2018)

SAULT – UNTITLED (Rise) (2020)

This Is The Kit – Off Off On (2020)