My Top 50 EPs of 2021
For
a long time, I'd wanted to make a list of the year's best EPs, but 2020 was the
first time I actually did. I remember I got close in 2018 but I got scared off
by all of Kanye West's 7-song G.O.O.D. Music releases that were explicitly
positioned as 'albums' and it felt like the always ambiguous line between
albums and EPs was just too blurry at that moment. And I nearly didn't do the
list this year for a similar reason. Several artists had releases that were
explicitly presented as albums that ran under 25 minutes (Vince Staples,
PinkPantheress, etc.) and quite a few things labeled an EP were over 30
minutes, including #1 on this list. And sometimes artists will take pains to
call a record something ambiguous like a “project” or “tape” to kind of sidestep
the binary entirely.
Using
EPs to release an album in installments and/or compile EPs into an album are
pretty commonplace these days (H.E.R. was nominated for Album of the Year at
the Grammys twice with compiled trios of EPs). And I didn’t include EPs where
all of the songs were later collected in the artist’s 2021 full-length like
Carly Pearce of Turnstile, although I’m sure some of these EPs will be folded
into albums in 2022. Here’s a playlist of every EP on the list that’s available
on Spotify.
1. Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux
Tales
On her last album, 2015’s Reality Show, Jazmine Sullivan cast herself as an introvert on the couch watching the antics of people on reality TV. So it was a little surprising that her more sexually frank next project would sound she’s been out having her own adventures. But it works well for her artistically, she’s always had incredible vocals but there’s more personality and experience and humor in these songs than ever before – at one point Sullivan and Ari Lennox harmonize beautifully on a song that rhymes “sit on it” with “spit on it.”
2.
Tierra Whack – Rap?
Tierra Whack packed 15 songs into 15 minutes on 2018’s Whack World, the rare EP-length album that was so dense and impressive that it really felt like it deserved to be classified as an album. Then for three years Whack sporadically released singles and features, and a few months ago made the now-standard young rapper tweet threatening retirement, before we finally got multiple new projects: two 3-song EPs in the last two weeks with possibly another following this week. Pop? has some cool melodic experiments, but Tierra Whack rapping is obviously the main attraction.
3. Mannequin Pussy - Perfect
Mannequin Pussy had an eventful year, releasing an EP in their new trio lineup and having two of their songs featured on HBO’s Mare Of Easttown (as played by a fictional band in the show). Mannequin Pussy’s three full-length albums range from 17 to 25 minutes long, so it’s a little funny to think of them even doing an EP, but in any case brevity suits them. Kaleen Reading is one of my favorite drummers working today, her fills on “To Lose You” totally elevate the song. By the way, the top 3 on this list are all Philadelphia artists, so it’s been a good year for EPs from Philly.
4. Lucky
Daye - Table For Two
Lucky Daye’s already announced his second album that’s coming in 2022, but this year he released a great little collection of six duets with female singers, including Ari Lennox, Yebba, and Queen Naija, that was nominated for 2 Grammys. And it featured “Falling In Love” with Joyce Wrice a few weeks before it appeared on her full-length, one of my favorite albums of the year.
5.
Beauty Pill - Instant Night
Beauty Pill’s third EP, Please Advise, was high on this list last year, and in 2021 the fiercely original Washington, D.C. band were on a roll, releasing the Tattooed Love Boys and Instant Night EPs. The latter’s title track was originally released just before the 2020 election and opens with a sample of Trump administration ghoul Stephen Miller, but it’s less a political song than a piece of existential terror with a political context. And the new song “You Need A Better Mind” was recorded in a single take at the end of a session and displays the remarkable musical chemistry that this band has cultivated over the years.
6. Leisure Sport - Title Card
7. Tems -
If Orange Was A Place
Wizkid was already a major star before “Essence,” but the other artist on the song, Tems, was far less well known, at least outside Nigeria, before it became one of the biggest songs of 2021. And the EP she released in September has some Afrobeats sounds on it but also shows how great her voice can sound in a more American R&B context, particularly on the Brent Faiyaz duet “Found.”
8. Beabadoobee
- Our Extended Play
Beabadoobee’s Fake It Flowers was one of my favorite albums of 2020, and she got to work pretty quickly on a follow-up produced and co-written by Matthew Healy and George Daniel from her Dirty Hit labelmates The 1975. And it feels almost exactly like you’d expect a Beabadoobee/The 1975 collaboration would sound like, which works for me because I love them both, although there are a couple moments where it feels so obvious that she’s singing Matt Healy lyrics and he might as well have kept the song for his band.
9. Repelican
- Tough Light
10. Benny
The Butcher - Pyrex Picasso
Griselda built their brand on frequent shorter releases, and after my favorite rapper on the label had a big rollout for 2020’s Burden Of Proof, he went back to shorter projects with this year’s The Plugs I Met 2 and Pyrex Picasso, and the breezy brevity really suits Benny.
11. The
Alchemist - This Thing Of Ours 2
The Alchemist does so many beats for so many artists these days that I imagine he can just put out a solo album with whatever guest MCs he wants at any time. This year, instead of a proper full-length, he released two EPs, with the latter featuring great appearances from Vince Staples, Danny Brown, and Mike.
12. Madeline Kenney - Summer
Quarter
Madeline Kenney released a great album, Sucker’s Lunch, in the summer of 2020, and when her plans to tour in support of it were canceled by COVID-19, she stayed home and worked on an EP. While her albums have had great backing musicians and producers including the members of Wye Oak, Summer Quarter is the first thing Kenney’s put out that’s totally solo and self-produced, and it’s cool to hear what she’s capable of her own, I love the guitar textures on this record. Later this year she also released a great single, “I’ll Get Over It.”
13.
Counting Crows - Butter Miracle Suite One
I have a big soft spot for the ‘90s stuff by Counting Crows, and have also been pleasantly surprised at how well their later stuff has held up. And they decided to roll out a new project this year with a ‘suite’ of 4 songs that are strung together into a continuous whole. This is not a band I would expect to pull that sort of thing off but it totally works here, and “Angel of 14th Street” is a really striking song.
14.
Miguel - Art Dealer Chic 4
The first three Art Dealer Chic EPs that Miguel released in early 2012 launched his greatest single “Adorn” and paved the way for Kaleidoscope Dream, and I think are one of the best modern examples of how EPs can help shape an artist’s career and build anticipation for their next move. So it was exciting that Miguel finally put those three EPs on streaming services this year, and then released a 4th chapter to the series, which includes “Triangle Love,” a collaboration with TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek.
15. Lee
Ranaldo - In Virus Times
A lot of the EPs released in the past two years are pandemic projects that people did while they had extra time at home. I kind of cringe at the title of Lee Ranaldo’s In Virus Times, but I really like the record, which is just a 20-minute suite of acoustic guitar instrumentals. I always kind of wanted a whole album in the vein of “Here” from Ranaldo’s 1998 album Amarillo Ramp, so this kind of fulfills that desire.
16. Kelly
Rowland - K
I don’t think Kelly Rowland’s ever gotten enough credit, for her contributions to Destiny’s Child or for her solo career, and she hasn’t released in album in 8 years. So I was happy to get this EP that sounds like she never missed a step, in just 6 songs there’s a nice variety here, from clubbier songs like “Crazy” to the acoustic slow jam “Speed of Love,” hope this means more music is on the way.
17. Laura
Jane Grace - At War With The Silverfish
One of the depressingly bittersweet things about 2021 is at this point some artists have done multiple COVID-19 quarantine records. Against Me frontwoman Laura Jane Grace released a solo album written at home in 2020, Stay Alive, and then this past summer she followed it with a 7-song EP of home recordings. At War With The Silverfish is, unlike Stay Alive, however consciously not another record about the pandemic, but it’s a really impressively varied and musically inventive DIY home recording.
18.
Callista Clark - Real To Me
Callista Clark is a teenage girl who plays guitar and writes her own country songs, signed to Taylor Swift’s old label Big Machine and recorded her debut EP with Swift’s first producer Nathan Chapman. But to her credit, Clark doesn’t write or sing much like Taylor Swift and I hear a lot of potential in this EP, the guitar leads on “Heartbreak Song” and the vocal harmonies on “I Don’t Need It Anymore” are so good.
19. Saweetie
- Pretty Summer Playlist: Season 1
Saweetie’s had this weird career where she’s continually becoming more famous and doing things that established rappers do, like having her own McDonald’s meal and hosting an awards show, but her label comes off as nervous about releasing an album and keeps putting out singles and EPs (her 4th EP is due out in January and I heard her refer to it as a “pre-project” in a radio interview the other day). And part of that seems to be down to her inarguably subpar rapping and performing, like they’re keeping her in rapper boot camp until she can get to that confident novice Cardi B level that seems to still evade her. But Pretty Summer Playlist addresses all of that in a novel way by pairing her up with up-and-coming artists, and it works well for her, “Seesaw” with Kendra Jae has become a breakout hit and “Talkin’ Bout” with Loui has probably the best verse of Saweetie’s career so far.
20. Cravism
& Maya Diegel - Caryatid
21. John
Linnell - Roman Songs
They Might Be Giants have made more whimsical high concept songs and projects over the last 40 years to even begin to count, so it’s amusing to think that sometimes one of the band’s two singer-songwriters has an idea that doesn’t quite fit under the TMBG umbrella and becomes a solo record. Previously, John Linnell released the very conceptual EPs State Songs (later expanded to a full album) and House of Mayors, and this year’s Roman Songs may genuinely be one of the nerdiest things he’s ever pulled off: four tracks sung entirely in Latin.
22. Rebecca
Black - Rebecca Black Was Here
In 2011, Rebecca Black was the 13-year-old aspiring pop singer whose song and video “Friday” became a viral hit for its clumsy amateur approximation of Top 40 pop. And despite becoming an object of widespread mockery at a very young age, Rebecca Black seemed to maintain a pretty good attitude about everything and kept making music. And in 2021 she released a 10th anniversary remix of “Friday” that kind of embraced her place as an unintentional forebear of the ‘hyperpop’ genre, and the EP of new songs she released a few months later is genuinely good, catchy, well constructed pop music, really a great place for this whole saga to wind up at.
23.
Clare Dunn - In This Kind Of Light
Clare Dunn is a singer/guitarist who spent most of the 2010s signed to MCA Nashville, releasing singles that dwelled in the lower reaches of the country charts and never got to the point of releasing an album. Since going independent, she’s released five EPs in the last two years, so maybe the EP is just her chosen form, or she’s just still trying to build up an audience for an eventual album. But her second EP of 2021, In This Kind Of Light, was really excellent, I got really into “Fool Moon” the other night while I was drunk.
24.
Gallant - Neptune
Neptune is a back-to-indie project for Christopher Gallant III after two great albums on Warner Bros. that really didn’t get the attention they deserved. Over the course of his career Gallant has kind of veered between an arty global pop sound and a more conventional R&B sound, but he’s great at both, and Neptune leans toward the latter with collaborations with Brandy and VanJess.
Kawhi Leonard is one of the NBA’s most quiet and even-tempered superstars, someone who doesn’t use social media or relish the public-facing parts of his job. So it was a bit of a surprise when he got on Instagram Live for the first time this year to announce that he’d be releasing a rap compilation album. A few months later, he kicked off the Culture Jam project with a 7-song EP, and as far as DJ Khaled-style compilations go, it’s pretty good, with appearances from Rod Wave, Gunna, Wale, NBA YoungBoy, and Ty Dolla Sign. I think that someone who secured a championship for the Raptors should cash in his Toronto clout and hit Drake up for a verse, though.
26. Blu DeTiger
- How Did We Get Here?
27. Joywave - Every Window Is A Mirror
28. Midland - The Last Resort
29. Jorja Smith - Be Right Back
30. Cordite Tracker - Dopamine_DDOS
31. JoJo - Trying Not To Think About It
32. Christine And The Queens - Joseph
33. John Wells - Luckee World
34. Nothing But Thieves - Moral Panic II
35. Lauren Jauregui - Prelude
36. Cornerian Flight Academy & badgalreidy - Red Star City
37. Billy Idol - The Roadside
38. Pinkshift - Saccharine
39. Kaytranada - Intimidated
40. JPEGMAFIA - EP2!
41. Travis Denning - Dirt Road Down
42. Cordae - Just Until
43. 21 Savage - Spiral: From The Book Of Saw Soundtrack
44. Devin Dawson - The Pink Slip
45. Vic Mensa - I Tape
46. Clare Dunn - Real Thing
48. Ringo Starr – Change The World
49. Daya - The Difference
50. JJ Wilde - Wilde
On her last album, 2015’s Reality Show, Jazmine Sullivan cast herself as an introvert on the couch watching the antics of people on reality TV. So it was a little surprising that her more sexually frank next project would sound she’s been out having her own adventures. But it works well for her artistically, she’s always had incredible vocals but there’s more personality and experience and humor in these songs than ever before – at one point Sullivan and Ari Lennox harmonize beautifully on a song that rhymes “sit on it” with “spit on it.”
Tierra Whack packed 15 songs into 15 minutes on 2018’s Whack World, the rare EP-length album that was so dense and impressive that it really felt like it deserved to be classified as an album. Then for three years Whack sporadically released singles and features, and a few months ago made the now-standard young rapper tweet threatening retirement, before we finally got multiple new projects: two 3-song EPs in the last two weeks with possibly another following this week. Pop? has some cool melodic experiments, but Tierra Whack rapping is obviously the main attraction.
Mannequin Pussy had an eventful year, releasing an EP in their new trio lineup and having two of their songs featured on HBO’s Mare Of Easttown (as played by a fictional band in the show). Mannequin Pussy’s three full-length albums range from 17 to 25 minutes long, so it’s a little funny to think of them even doing an EP, but in any case brevity suits them. Kaleen Reading is one of my favorite drummers working today, her fills on “To Lose You” totally elevate the song. By the way, the top 3 on this list are all Philadelphia artists, so it’s been a good year for EPs from Philly.
Lucky Daye’s already announced his second album that’s coming in 2022, but this year he released a great little collection of six duets with female singers, including Ari Lennox, Yebba, and Queen Naija, that was nominated for 2 Grammys. And it featured “Falling In Love” with Joyce Wrice a few weeks before it appeared on her full-length, one of my favorite albums of the year.
Beauty Pill’s third EP, Please Advise, was high on this list last year, and in 2021 the fiercely original Washington, D.C. band were on a roll, releasing the Tattooed Love Boys and Instant Night EPs. The latter’s title track was originally released just before the 2020 election and opens with a sample of Trump administration ghoul Stephen Miller, but it’s less a political song than a piece of existential terror with a political context. And the new song “You Need A Better Mind” was recorded in a single take at the end of a session and displays the remarkable musical chemistry that this band has cultivated over the years.
Wizkid was already a major star before “Essence,” but the other artist on the song, Tems, was far less well known, at least outside Nigeria, before it became one of the biggest songs of 2021. And the EP she released in September has some Afrobeats sounds on it but also shows how great her voice can sound in a more American R&B context, particularly on the Brent Faiyaz duet “Found.”
Beabadoobee’s Fake It Flowers was one of my favorite albums of 2020, and she got to work pretty quickly on a follow-up produced and co-written by Matthew Healy and George Daniel from her Dirty Hit labelmates The 1975. And it feels almost exactly like you’d expect a Beabadoobee/The 1975 collaboration would sound like, which works for me because I love them both, although there are a couple moments where it feels so obvious that she’s singing Matt Healy lyrics and he might as well have kept the song for his band.
Griselda built their brand on frequent shorter releases, and after my favorite rapper on the label had a big rollout for 2020’s Burden Of Proof, he went back to shorter projects with this year’s The Plugs I Met 2 and Pyrex Picasso, and the breezy brevity really suits Benny.
The Alchemist does so many beats for so many artists these days that I imagine he can just put out a solo album with whatever guest MCs he wants at any time. This year, instead of a proper full-length, he released two EPs, with the latter featuring great appearances from Vince Staples, Danny Brown, and Mike.
Madeline Kenney released a great album, Sucker’s Lunch, in the summer of 2020, and when her plans to tour in support of it were canceled by COVID-19, she stayed home and worked on an EP. While her albums have had great backing musicians and producers including the members of Wye Oak, Summer Quarter is the first thing Kenney’s put out that’s totally solo and self-produced, and it’s cool to hear what she’s capable of her own, I love the guitar textures on this record. Later this year she also released a great single, “I’ll Get Over It.”
I have a big soft spot for the ‘90s stuff by Counting Crows, and have also been pleasantly surprised at how well their later stuff has held up. And they decided to roll out a new project this year with a ‘suite’ of 4 songs that are strung together into a continuous whole. This is not a band I would expect to pull that sort of thing off but it totally works here, and “Angel of 14th Street” is a really striking song.
The first three Art Dealer Chic EPs that Miguel released in early 2012 launched his greatest single “Adorn” and paved the way for Kaleidoscope Dream, and I think are one of the best modern examples of how EPs can help shape an artist’s career and build anticipation for their next move. So it was exciting that Miguel finally put those three EPs on streaming services this year, and then released a 4th chapter to the series, which includes “Triangle Love,” a collaboration with TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek.
A lot of the EPs released in the past two years are pandemic projects that people did while they had extra time at home. I kind of cringe at the title of Lee Ranaldo’s In Virus Times, but I really like the record, which is just a 20-minute suite of acoustic guitar instrumentals. I always kind of wanted a whole album in the vein of “Here” from Ranaldo’s 1998 album Amarillo Ramp, so this kind of fulfills that desire.
I don’t think Kelly Rowland’s ever gotten enough credit, for her contributions to Destiny’s Child or for her solo career, and she hasn’t released in album in 8 years. So I was happy to get this EP that sounds like she never missed a step, in just 6 songs there’s a nice variety here, from clubbier songs like “Crazy” to the acoustic slow jam “Speed of Love,” hope this means more music is on the way.
One of the depressingly bittersweet things about 2021 is at this point some artists have done multiple COVID-19 quarantine records. Against Me frontwoman Laura Jane Grace released a solo album written at home in 2020, Stay Alive, and then this past summer she followed it with a 7-song EP of home recordings. At War With The Silverfish is, unlike Stay Alive, however consciously not another record about the pandemic, but it’s a really impressively varied and musically inventive DIY home recording.
Callista Clark is a teenage girl who plays guitar and writes her own country songs, signed to Taylor Swift’s old label Big Machine and recorded her debut EP with Swift’s first producer Nathan Chapman. But to her credit, Clark doesn’t write or sing much like Taylor Swift and I hear a lot of potential in this EP, the guitar leads on “Heartbreak Song” and the vocal harmonies on “I Don’t Need It Anymore” are so good.
Saweetie’s had this weird career where she’s continually becoming more famous and doing things that established rappers do, like having her own McDonald’s meal and hosting an awards show, but her label comes off as nervous about releasing an album and keeps putting out singles and EPs (her 4th EP is due out in January and I heard her refer to it as a “pre-project” in a radio interview the other day). And part of that seems to be down to her inarguably subpar rapping and performing, like they’re keeping her in rapper boot camp until she can get to that confident novice Cardi B level that seems to still evade her. But Pretty Summer Playlist addresses all of that in a novel way by pairing her up with up-and-coming artists, and it works well for her, “Seesaw” with Kendra Jae has become a breakout hit and “Talkin’ Bout” with Loui has probably the best verse of Saweetie’s career so far.
They Might Be Giants have made more whimsical high concept songs and projects over the last 40 years to even begin to count, so it’s amusing to think that sometimes one of the band’s two singer-songwriters has an idea that doesn’t quite fit under the TMBG umbrella and becomes a solo record. Previously, John Linnell released the very conceptual EPs State Songs (later expanded to a full album) and House of Mayors, and this year’s Roman Songs may genuinely be one of the nerdiest things he’s ever pulled off: four tracks sung entirely in Latin.
In 2011, Rebecca Black was the 13-year-old aspiring pop singer whose song and video “Friday” became a viral hit for its clumsy amateur approximation of Top 40 pop. And despite becoming an object of widespread mockery at a very young age, Rebecca Black seemed to maintain a pretty good attitude about everything and kept making music. And in 2021 she released a 10th anniversary remix of “Friday” that kind of embraced her place as an unintentional forebear of the ‘hyperpop’ genre, and the EP of new songs she released a few months later is genuinely good, catchy, well constructed pop music, really a great place for this whole saga to wind up at.
Clare Dunn is a singer/guitarist who spent most of the 2010s signed to MCA Nashville, releasing singles that dwelled in the lower reaches of the country charts and never got to the point of releasing an album. Since going independent, she’s released five EPs in the last two years, so maybe the EP is just her chosen form, or she’s just still trying to build up an audience for an eventual album. But her second EP of 2021, In This Kind Of Light, was really excellent, I got really into “Fool Moon” the other night while I was drunk.
Neptune is a back-to-indie project for Christopher Gallant III after two great albums on Warner Bros. that really didn’t get the attention they deserved. Over the course of his career Gallant has kind of veered between an arty global pop sound and a more conventional R&B sound, but he’s great at both, and Neptune leans toward the latter with collaborations with Brandy and VanJess.
Kawhi Leonard is one of the NBA’s most quiet and even-tempered superstars, someone who doesn’t use social media or relish the public-facing parts of his job. So it was a bit of a surprise when he got on Instagram Live for the first time this year to announce that he’d be releasing a rap compilation album. A few months later, he kicked off the Culture Jam project with a 7-song EP, and as far as DJ Khaled-style compilations go, it’s pretty good, with appearances from Rod Wave, Gunna, Wale, NBA YoungBoy, and Ty Dolla Sign. I think that someone who secured a championship for the Raptors should cash in his Toronto clout and hit Drake up for a verse, though.
27. Joywave - Every Window Is A Mirror
28. Midland - The Last Resort
29. Jorja Smith - Be Right Back
30. Cordite Tracker - Dopamine_DDOS
31. JoJo - Trying Not To Think About It
32. Christine And The Queens - Joseph
33. John Wells - Luckee World
34. Nothing But Thieves - Moral Panic II
35. Lauren Jauregui - Prelude
36. Cornerian Flight Academy & badgalreidy - Red Star City
37. Billy Idol - The Roadside
38. Pinkshift - Saccharine
39. Kaytranada - Intimidated
40. JPEGMAFIA - EP2!
41. Travis Denning - Dirt Road Down
42. Cordae - Just Until
43. 21 Savage - Spiral: From The Book Of Saw Soundtrack
44. Devin Dawson - The Pink Slip
45. Vic Mensa - I Tape
46. Clare Dunn - Real Thing
48. Ringo Starr – Change The World
49. Daya - The Difference
50. JJ Wilde - Wilde
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