Les Meilleurs Albums de 2018

The essay I opened this post with last year was about how streaming services make it feel like you’re never going to keep up with the endless stream of new music, that because we’re aware of every new album drop — thanks to the “What’s New” tab on our streaming service of choice — it feels like there’s always something you’re missing out on, and that it feels hard to know exactly what is the best or what you might have missed. I didn’t realize how much I would feel that until this year, when I felt guilty for spending time with things like Speak No Evil or my 40th spin of singles off the A Star Is Born soundtrack instead of whatever the hot new album was that week. Keeping up with new music was always a chore-by-choice, and always felt insurmountable; the end point of all music of all time being on a computer in your pocket is that you feel an obligation to get to all of it. It’s enough to make you lose your mind.

But the main thing it makes you is ruthless. There’s not enough time to listen to stuff you don’t like, and you’re less likely to take a risk on stuff outside of things you already know. That feels like it stands counter to what we’re trying to do with this website and this company; we’re asking you to spend a whole month with a single album, and attempt to appreciate it as much as the people who chose it do. It’s a tall order, and it’s amazing that so many people take this ride with us.

That said, there’s still the endless stream of good music, and trying to navigate to the good is tough. Streaming services try to program you by using their algorithm to steer you toward music a series of 0s and 1s thinks you’ll enjoy based on the time you played Post Malone’s “White Iverson” when you were drunk. We don’t do that here: We’re just a staff and a roll of contributors trying to tell you about music we like. We try to make some sense of the stream. There is no algorithm.

With that in mind, here is the final piece of our year-end coverage. We’ve already covered the most overlooked albums, the best music books, and the best albums in the genres of rap, country, metal, jazz, electronic and shared what our staff liked about this 365 day period colloquially known as 2018. Here are the top 40 albums of 2018, as voted on by a cabal of our regular contributors — music lovers, one and all — and our staff. Before you tweet at us, it’s a different voting bloc than those that make the individual lists. This is why the best country album of 2018 is lower than the No. 2 album from that list here. Because we believe in these albums, we’re carrying as many of them as we could in our store, under the tag of Best of 2018. We believe all of them are worth being in any record collection.

This isn’t everything we loved in 2018, or everything you should pay attention to. But we hope it’s close. —Andrew Winistorfer