The Best Albums of 2019

A former country singer became an anime master, heartland rock’s long-serving king embraced folk balladry and cinematic strings, and a young female pop (super)star arrived, draped in over-sized Louis Vuitton gym shorts. It’s all to say, 2019 was exceptionally—and refreshingly—weird for the world of music.

Solange Knowles abandoned traditional song structure entirely on her career-making When I Get Home while Ariana Grande and Sharon Van Etten took enthralling sonic traipses through their own mental wellness on Thank U, Next and Remind Me Tomorrow, respectively. The Red Headed Stranger and the Boss broke hearts, revealing their anxieties as each meditated on legacy and mortality, and FKA twigs warped heartache and depression into the most glinting sounds of tomorrow imaginable. 17-year-old Billie Eilish became the new auteur of the teenage wasteland as her When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? LP smashed through the public consciousness.

There’s little musical overlap between all of these releases—Eilish transformed the sounds of a slurp from removing her Invisalign into an intro while Vampire Weekend manage to fit an iLoveMakonnen interpolation into a song that sounds like Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”—but each stun in their honesty. Extreme lyrical confession is the mode du jour, and the real winners are us, the listeners. These are the best albums of 2019: