My Top 50 Albums of 2025
Saturday, December 20, 2025
I've already posted my lists of my favorite singles, EPs, and TV shows of the year, but here's the big one. As usual, I made a Spotify playlist with one track from (almost) every album:
1. Saba and No ID - From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID
I interviewed No ID in 2023, just after he and Saba started releasing collaborative singles, and learned not just that an album was on the way, but how they'd met. When he was a Capitol exec, No ID tried to sign Saba (who declined and has remained staunchly independent for his whole career), and learned that Saba was actually the son of a Chicago musician he knew back in the day (R&B singer Chandlar, best known for the 2008 single "Never Thought"). So From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID feels like a beautiful intergenerational conversation full of Chicago's rich musical history, and the more I listen to it, the more I feel like it belongs up there in the pantheon of great No ID-produced albums like Resurrection, 4:44, and Summertime '06.
2. Pool Kids - Easier Said Than Done
I got into all three Pool Kids albums over the summer, and while I enjoy the more mathy arrangements on the Florida band's earlier stuff, it really feels like Christine Goodwyne's songwriting took a big leap forward on Easier Said Than Done and the band tailored the arrangements to the lyrics and melodies more. They're so good at just filling every song with interesting little musical details, like the bassline on the second verse of "Sorry Not Sorry" or the harmonies on "Not Too Late." Easier Said Than Done is the first Pool Kids album for Epitaph Records, tracked at the same studio as many grunge classics (Seattle's Hall of Justice), but it doesn't feel as openly nostalgic for the '90s alt-rock canon as a lot of records by young guitar bands these days, like they're trying to make the songs that only this band can make.
3. Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out
One of my more controversial opinions is that Hell Hath No Fury was not a particularly good album and Pharrell completely dropped the ball with his dinky toy instrument beats. So while I was looking forward to Malice's return to the mic, I was definitely not sure if I'd actually like the Clipse comeback album, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Pharrell understood the assignment this time and even got out of his comfort zone with some of the beats on Let God Sort Em Out. And that just sets the table for Malice to completely wreck shit, and inspire his brother to be at the top of his game as well. I'm still annoyed that Clipse did a Tiny Desk Concert and didn't make the song "All Things Considered" part of their NPR performance.
4. Madeline Kenney - Kiss From The Balcony
Kiss From The Balcony is more of a band record than Oakland singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney's four previous albums, with Kenney writing and recording every song with the same two musicians she's toured with. And it builds on their chemistry beautifully without sacrificing the increasingly heady, kaleidoscopic textures of Kenney's other albums. Drummer Ben Sloan is the solid rhythmic foundation of Kiss From The Balcony, but even his drums seem to float and flutter through the mix like Kenney's voice and guitars, it's such a delightful headphone record. "I wanna make this sound like a picture," Kinney sings on "Slap," one of the most vivid tracks on a painterly album.
5. Zara Larsson - Midnight Sun
Zara Larsson is one 2010s pop diva whose new music I never stopped checking for after her initial wave of U.S. hits a decade ago. She's always been a big star in her native Sweden, but her recent resurgence in America and the UK feels a Brat Summer that's more my speed, and she was just a teenager on those early hits, so she's only 27 now and it feels like she's actually just getting started. Her fifth album, with longtime collaborator MNEK as executive producer, hits right on target with euphoric dance pop like the title track and "Blue Moon," as well as entertaining curveballs like the Tiffany "New York" Pollard vocal loop on "Hot & Sexy," and the pair of introspective tracks towards the end, "The Ambition" and "Saturn's Return," that make it feel like a complete musical statement.
6. Amber Mark - Pretty Idea
Tennessee-born singer and multi-instrumentalist Amber Mark is seriously talented, and the two self-produced songs on her third album Pretty Idea make me think that she could (and perhaps should) go off and make a folky acoustic record completely by herself someday. Most of the album, though, is a more fleshed out, omnivorous R&B album, made with the help of two guys, John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, who've made a whole bunch of pop smashes with One Direction and Sabrina Carpenter. Pretty Idea isn't retro so much as it harkens back to an era when soul records and rock records were made with the same instrumentation and sometimes even the same musicians, and both genres benefited from that cross-pollination.
7. Ben Kweller - Cover The Mirrors
Ben Kweller is the same age as me. When we were 15, he was all over magazines and TV as the next-big-thing frontman of Radish, which I found inspiring as I played in some of my first garage bands. When he was 21 and I was 20, I got X's on my hands to see Kweller and Brendan Benson play in a little bar, and I put his song "Falling" on mix CDs for years after that. Now we're both dads in our 40s, but Kweller's teenage son Dorian died in a car crash two years ago. And it's absolutely crushing to listen to this guy I've sort of watched grow up work through this grief, but he hasn't lost that eternal boyishness in his voice, or his ability to find the humor and heart and hooks in whatever he's writing about, even when it's something that sad.
8. Pulp - More
I would've been fine with More feeling like just another one of Jarvis Cocker's post-Pulp albums, because I love a few of those, but More actually does feel like a Pulp album. A lot of it is the prominence of violins, which feels like a particularly deliberate choice given that Russell Senior is the only living member of the classic Pulp lineup that didn't have anything to do with More. And even though Cocker is still spelling out the word "love" and singing about Spike Island like he was in 1995, it doesn't feel like the band is trying to recreate the remarkable moment in time that was Different Class, they're just writing Pulp songs again.
9. Hayley Williams - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
Whenever people talk about 'the death of the album,' I just think about how much musicians and listeners alike are united in their love of groups of songs bundled together as a package deal. If the entire industry switched to only releasing singles, practically everybody would be miserable. Case in point: Hayley Williams celebrated her independence after completing a 20-year major label contract by tossing 17 songs out into the world, and thousands of fans made their own playlists of how those songs could be sequenced, inspiring Williams to go ahead and officially make it an album with running order. And it might be the album I listened to the most in 2025 because it became this fun interactive thing. There are things I like about my version of the album, but Hayley's feels like the definitive one now, especially after she added 3 more songs to that initial 17 that actually deepen the story at the center of the album. I don't think Ego Death's weird rollout is a template that could be repeated by other artists (in fact I hope nobody tries, it wouldn't be as fun a second time), but in a weird way I think it articulated how much more satisfying it is to have an album than just a bunch of songs.
10. Larry June, 2 Chainz & The Alchemist - Life Is Beautiful
2 Chainz has made a lot of great music, and it felt a bit like a capitulation to a certain kind of faux-underground (middleground?) rap snob for him to pivot to making an album with the Alchemist and California cult rapper Larry June. But it was the right change of pace at the right time, and I also really enjoyed the more conventional 2 Chainz project that followed, his Red Clay soundtrack album.
11. Aminé - 13 Months of Sunshine
Lots of artists have one big single at the beginning of their career that remains their calling card, for better or worse, as they get better and better at making albums for whatever fans stick with them for the long haul. Bands like Nada Surf earn hard won respect for a career like that, but I don't know if it ever really works the same way in hip hop -- arguably it did for Joe Budden for a while, but I think Aminé really deserves to be celebrated for the catalog he's built since his only Hot 100 hit, 2016's "Caroline." Of my 7 or 8 favorite hip-hop albums of 2025, pretty much all of them are produced by one person except for 13 Months of Sunshine -- it's harder to make a satisfying album that hangs together if you're assembling a record piecemeal from a dozen different beatmakers, but Aminé pulls it off because he has a great ear and a strong sense of what an Aminé song should sound like.
12. Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - A City Drowned In God's Black Tears
Brian Ennals send a compact disc to my house in 2009, and I thought he was a sharp writer back then and was pretty much the first person to write about his music. So I can't tell you how happy it makes me that he eventually hooked up with a very adventurous producer, became a truly fearless and profanely funny MC, and has a whole lot of other critics besides me singing his praises and can tour internationally off this stuff.
13. Turnstile - Never Enough
I don't know Turnstile so I don't have the same kind of relationship with their growing fame outside of a general hometown pride. But I've played in the same little Baltimore rooms they started out in like the Charm City Art Space and the Sidebar and never fail to get a kick out of seeing what huge festival or tour they're playing know. And I like that they can still play straight up hardcore but have all these other sounds in the mix too (dreamy synth interludes, songs that sound like The Police, Baltimore club music beats) that they don't shy away from stuffing into their records.
14. Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline turns 70 in a couple weeks, and I appreciate that my favorite living guitarist is still out here making great, even if we're no longer getting an album or two from him as a bandleader or solo artist every years like we did for decades. I've been more and more interested in the 9/8 time signature in recent years so I enjoyed hearing what Nels Cline does with it on both "The 23" and "Surplus."
15. The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie
One of my big obsessions this year was a radio station called The Gamut, which has no DJs and a library of 14 thousand songs just running on shuffle all day, of every genre and era, big and small artists. I think the artist that I got into the most because of The Gamut was The Beths -- I immediately fell for their 2020 track "I'm Not Getting Excited" when I heard it on the station, and a few months later the New Zealand band released a new album that consummated that love. Elizabeth Stokes has a great dry wit and relatable way of writing, but the whole band plays with a lot of personality and creativity.
16. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Phantom Island
A few weeks ago I was talking to my brother-in-law and sometimes bandmate John about music, as I often do, and he hadn't heard of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and I just sort of casually called them "probably the best band in the world right now," and he had to stop and clarify if I was joking, and I was not. I wouldn't say that any one of their albums singlehandedly makes that argument so much as the 27 albums they've released in the last 14 years. But Phantom Island, the Australian band's first album with orchestral accompaniment, makes a great case for the band's conventional melodic chops, even if tend to like their records with more gnarly psych/prog styles in the mix.
17. Bruce Springsteen - Tracks II: The Lost Albums
A whole lot of interesting archival recordings get unearthed or re-released every year, and I listen to some of it without ever really feeling motivated to do a 'best reissues' list or work that stuff into the lists I do make. But Bruce Springsteen releasing a box set of 149 songs recorded over the last 42 years, most of them unheard even by diehard fans, really felt like the most exciting event in new old music in 2025. Springsteen cares about the art of the album so much that even his outtakes are thoughtfully sequenced into discrete LP-length collections, each representing a particular sound and time period.
18. Flock of Dimes - The Life You Save
Jenn Wasner just has one of my favorite voices in the world, I'm excited every time she releases something. And while Wye Oak has evolved a lot from album to album, Flock of Dimes is arguably even more amorphous, feeling more like a band than a solo project on The Life You Save. Some tracks like "Instead of Calling" feel like the Americana record she's always seemed like she had in her, while others reflect some of the more modern modes she's worked in on Dijon and Bon Iver's albums this year.
19. Coco Jones - Why Not More?
In a year when R&B on the whole was thriving commercially, Coco Jones's long-awaited full-length debut was one project that I think deserved better, it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. A really thoroughly excellent album, though (YG Marley feature aside), she has a great sense of how to showcase her voice, and there's some really interesting, less radio-friendly stuff on here like "Hit You Where It Hurts."
20. Mick Jenkins & Emil - A Murder of Crows
I don't think Mick Jenkins gets mentioned enough as one of Chicago's modern greats alongside Chance and Noname and so on, he's been so consistent over the last decade and change. And the British producer Emil turns out to be a great foil for him, the jazzy dynamics really allow Jenkins to get more conversational with his flow and sometimes gradually build in intensity.
21. Dijon - Baby
Baby simulates what it's like to listen to an in-progress studio session before it's been cleaned up and mixed down -- bits of other vocal takes and room tone, mixing desk chatter, headphone bleed, levels that suddenly jump when a distortion effect is added, and drums that drop out when you think they're going to hit -- but arranged in an artful, deliberate way that lets you hear what these songs would sound like all clean and polished, and then adds all these other dimensions to them.
22. Rosalia - Lux
2020's Motomami put Rosalia right at the center of the reggaeton/Latin trap/whatever it's called international Spanish pop mainstream, but Lux feels like a statement: she's gonna let Karol G and Anitta keep making club bangers and go do something only Rosalia can do, singing in 13 different languages with the London Symphony Orchestra for an art pop song cycle about spirituality and God. It doesn't sound anything like her flamenco-based acoustic 2016 debut Los Angeles, but it feels a bit like a return to the more academic conceptual roots of her early music.
23. Bad Bunny - Debi Tirar Mas Fotos
If Rosalia took a deliberate turn away from trying to become the female Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny himself simply embraced his place at the forefront of popular music, incorporating some older Puerto Rican musical traditions into the style he's already mastered. Even though Debi Tirar Mas Fotos wasn't a commercial phenomenon on the level of Un Verano Sin Ti, it was far more acclaimed, which is what I really think is what tipped the scales to him getting that Super Bowl gig. It's my favorite Bad Bunny album because he does that weird gasp/inhale sound a lot less, though. At this point Bad Bunny's closest peer is Drake, and he's navigating that rarefied air in a way that Drake could probably learn from.
24. S.G. Goodman - Planting By The Signs
I imagine singing a duet with Will Oldham is the greatest endorsement you can get as a rootsy singer-songwriter from Kentucky, and his voice sounds great with S.G. Goodman's on "Nature's Child." But it was the spellbinding 8-minute closer "Heaven Song" that really knocked me out and unlocked Goodman's third album for me, and after that I went back and realized there are some other genius level songs on here, including the utterly charming "I'm In Love."
25. Lanie Gardner - Faded Polaroids
Faded Polaroids has what I consider the appropriate amount of pedal steel for a country album: almost constant, seemingly in every measure of every song. Country radio playlists barely make room for multiple women these days, much less two women with the same(ish) first name, so I don't know if Lanie Gardner will make it onto the charts alongside Lainey Wilson. But I'm rooting for her, this is the kind of supremely confident 18-song album you don't get from newer artists very often these days.
26. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
I would like to hear what Marcus Brown could do recording with a full band and/or a big pro producer someday, I think his lyrics and his voice are unique enough that it would still retain what people like about Nourished By Time. But I'm glad that he stuck with the sound of Erotic Probiotic 2 for his first XL Recordings album,
27. Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream
Taking my wife to see Florence + The Machine in 2018 fully converted me, I'm in awe of Florence Welch as a vocalist, especially live. And we're going to see her again in 2026, and Everybody Scream's lead single and title track seems custom made for the stage. But "You Can Have It All" is the one that really brings that classic Florence cathartic grandiosity, and her wit gets a little more cutting with each album, particularly on "Music By Men" and "One of the Greats."
28. Splitsville - Mobtown
Somehow I totally missed Splitsville's '90s/early 2000s heyday when I was a young Baltimore power pop enthusiast, but I'm glad I got hip to the band by the time they returned with their first album since 2003. Power pop isn't usually associated with socially conscious concept albums, but I love that they returned with something ambitious that wrestles with Baltimore's racial and economic equality far more than the average white Maryland band dares to.
29. Repelican - Dim Halo
Jon Ehrens has made so many records under so many names that I often don't know exactly how to recommend his music to other people. But Dim Halo is definitely one of his best and I'm glad I got to make it the focal point of a Spin feature a couple weeks ago, it's as lo-fi as a lot of his records but feels a little more purposeful in its sound, and the lyrics have a bit of a deeper existential meaning behind them than I'd realized before I talked to him about the album.
30. Cam - All Things Light
'Best one hit wonder' feels like a backhanded compliment, but "Burning House" is probably the best country radio hit of the 2010s by someone who didn't have any other big singles. And now that Cameron Ochs has a Grammy for her work on five songs on Cowboy Carter, she's getting a little of that spotlight back with the best album of her career. It's more of a folky Joni Mitchell record (my local AAA station loves "Alchemy"), but "Look At The Pretty Girls" is a great little pop country song that interpolates Adriano Celentano's "Prisencolinensinainciusol."
31. Little Simz - Lotus
I always thought SAULT was a little overrated, so I have to admit to feeling some schadenfreude that Little Simz made arguably her best album after falling out with Inflo (who borrowed a bunch of money from her to fund the first SAULT concert and didn't pay it back, apparently), rebooting her sound with a new producer, Miles Clinton James, and dragging Inflo all over Lotus.
32. Mobb Deep - The Infinite
There was a good Mobb Deep album three years before Prodigy died (and a good P solo album a few months before he died), so it never felt to me like there was unfinished business where I was really hoping for any posthumous projects. But Prodigy apparently left enough unreleased verses in the vault for Havoc and the Alchemist to put together an album that's as good as any of the group's post-'90s efforts, so I'm glad The Infinite exists, it was really my favorite of the whole Mass Appeal Legend Has It series that created so much excitement for aging rap heads this year.
33. De La Soul - Cabin in the Sky
There's a lot less of Trugoy on Cabin in the Sky than there is Prodigy on The Infinite, but this is another Legend Has It album that feels like a fitting sendoff for a classic group, Posdnous really stepped up to carry the album in Dave's honor.
34. Sun & Rain - Waterfall
I used to love to go to Out Of Your Head Collective events in Baltimore, and I've continued to enjoy the jazz/experimental releases Adam Hopkins has put out with the New York-based label Out Of Your Head Records since 2018. Waterfall is the first release from a quartet comprising saxophonists Travis Laplante and Nathaniel Morgen, guitarist Andrew Smiley, and drummer Jason Nazary, and I like how they sound together, I hope Sun & Rain makes more records.
35. Rose Gray - Louder, Please
There's no use in calling anybody the next Kylie Minogue when the first one is apparently going to live forever, but I was happy to hear a debut album from a newer artist who has a similar understanding of the durable pleasures of straight up disco in an age of edgy micro trend hyperpop.
36. Monaleo - Who Did The Body
One wedding and a funeral, Monaleo's real life September nuptials with fellow rapper Stunna 4 Vegas and her October major label debut that was surprisingly fixated on mortality, were the one-two punch that really broke Monaleo through to the mainstream in the fall of 2025. Her punchlines are still funny and ridiculous but the whole southern gothic vibe of Who Did The Body was an interesting creative statement, and she got some of Mike Will Made It's best beats in years. Even the song with Lizzo is really good!
37. Sloan - Based On The Best Seller
I don't begrudge any band for enjoying the career benefits of reuniting after a long breakup (ok, maybe I do begrudge LCD Soundsystem, who seemed to very deliberately go away just long enough to get bigger festival gigs when they returned). But I'm a lot more impressed with bands who just kept at it for decades without so much as a prolonged hiatus, especially Sloan, given that all four members write and sing lead on every album and none of them has really fallen off. Jay Ferguson is the Sloan songwriter who's really aging like fine wine, though, he's had the best tunes for a while now.
38. Superchunk - Songs In The Key of Yikes
Superchunk has had some longer breaks between albums than Sloan and some lineup changes, but I find their longevity similarly inspiring. And while Songs In The Key of Yikes isn't the definitive pissed off punk album of the second Trump term for me like 2018's What A Time To Be Alive was for the first term, Mac McCaughan is still writing songs like "No Hope" that, unfortunately, do speak to what 2025 has felt like for me. Not only is Superchunk now 50% female, it's 50% Lauras, with new drummer Laura King filling Jon Wurster's big shoes pretty well to form a new rhythm section with founding bassist Laura Ballance.
39. Marshall Allen - New Dawn
I can profess my admiration for middle-aged bands who've been making albums since the early '90s, but if you want to talk about longevity, jazz saxophonist Marshall Allen is on a completely different level. Last year he turned 100, and this year he released his first solo album, with the Guinness Book of World Records honoring Allen as the oldest musician to ever release a debut album and the oldest to release an album of new material. Of course, 'debut' is kind of a technicality -- Allen has been recording with the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1958, and leading the band since a couple years after Sun Ra's death in 1993. But New Dawn is an awesome record, especially the closer "Angels and Demons at Play," and I got to see the Arkestra up close this year when Allen was honored as a NEA Jazz Master, and also interviewed the Arkestra's new pianist Lafayette Gilchrist, both highlights of my year.
40. Willie Nelson - Workin' Man: Willie Sings Merle
Willie Nelson, who turned 92 this year, is another example of remarkable longevity, releasing two excellent albums in 2025. The latter, a tribute to his old friend Merle Haggard, is also a swan song for two longtime members of Nelson's band The Family, pianist Bobbie Nelson and drummer Paul English, and I get a little choked up every time Willie tells his sister to take a solo. In fact I love all the studio chatter that made it onto the album, with Willie happily saying "perfect" or "I think that was a pretty good cut" at the end of some takes. Even when "Workin' Man" comes to a slightly awkward stop, Willie says "we can fade it out in there somewhere," and instead of fading it out they just left it all in, which I think was the right decision.
41. Sam Fender - People Watching
I absolutely love Sam Fender's Geordie accent. I'll listen to him sing anything, but I appreciate the plainspoken but principled "I'm not preachin', I'm just talkin'" Darkness on the Edge of Town vibe he's cultivated on his third album.
42. PinkPantheress - Fancy That
I wish America cared more about PinkPantheress's songs that don't have Ice Spice verses. Sure, her reference points are unapologetically British (samples on Fancy That include Sugababes, Just Jack, and Basement Jaxx), but she makes her own beats and fashions her nostalgic Y2K moodboard into a unique aesthetic that she fully owns, nobody in America is really doing it like her.
43. Sparks - MAD!
After slowly getting into Sparks over the years, I dove into the entire catalog in 2025 just as the band's late period resurgence reached unlikely new heights -- in the UK, MAD! charted even higher than the album that made them an actual pop phenomenon over there, 1974's Kimono My House. I have to be in the right mood for the Mael brothers' droll lyrics and synth soundscapes, but they go down easier on albums like MAD! where the touring band adds guitar, bass and drums to most of the tracks.
44. Little Feat - Strike Up the Band
If Sparks isn't the quintessential cult band, it's Little Feat. The band announced last month that they're embarking on a farewell tour in 2026, and with only half of Little Feat's classic '70s lineup still alive, it's probably the right time. But whether Strike Up The Band is the last record album from the band, it's a lovely new chapter, with co-founder Bill Payne contributing a few songs (including "Bluegrass Pines," co-written with Grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter), and Gregg Allman protege Scott Sharrard channeling Lowell George's guitar sound about as well as anybody has on Little Feat's post-George records.
45. Chance The Rapper - Star Line
I actually liked Chance The Rapper's widely maligned 2019 album The Big Day, so you can take it with a grain of salt that I like Star Line too. But I'm glad Chance finally recovered his confidence from that album's cold reception, even if it took six years. The precocious high schooler who became the man people made fun of for being a wife guy is a divorced thirtysomething now, but Star Line has a hard won determination to it, no cynicism or bitterness.
46. Miguel - CAOS
Prince beamed with pride when George Clinton told him how much he liked Around The World In A Day, telling Rolling Stone, "You know how much more his words mean than those from some mamma-jamma wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter?" I feel like that's probably how Miguel felt when he got Clinton to appear on CAOS's closing track "COMMA / KARMA." CAOS didn't chart, even after his huge Billboard resurgence of his early hit "Sure Thing," and it didn't get particularly good reviews from my fellow mamma-jammas in glasses, but you can't tell Miguel shit because George Clinton gets it.
47. Sabrina Carpenter - Man's Best Friend
Sabrina Carpenter was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist for her 6th album, and that just means that she'd been working toward the Short n' Sweet breakthrough for so long that there was no way she wasn't going to come right back as soon as possible with album number 7. For those of us who actually listened to Carpenter before "Espresso" or even "Nonsense," it's gratifying to see her ascend to main pop girl status, but those hits really set the template for her ruthlessly self-aware blonde bombshell persona now, some of the albums before that are very good but much more earnest. Carpenter courted backlash with the title/cover art of Man's Best Friend, and the album feels a little less like a pop blockbuster by going all in on sounding like Olivia Newton-John's pre-Grease country albums, but somehow it all works and it feels like she's going to be here for a while.
48. Rip Van Winkle - Blasphemy
Being overwhelmingly prolific is fine and good when you're on your way up, but it's a lot harder to sustain interest in multiple albums a year when even your diehard fans have already heard more than they'll ever need from you. So I don't blame anyone for not noticing that Robert Pollard was on a genuine hot streak this year with the debut from Rip Van Winkle, his band with members of Joseph Airport, and the 43rd Guided By Voices album Thick, Rich & Delicious. Robert Pollard doesn't have a Thriller, and if he did, it wouldn't be Blasphemy, but it does have a great song called "This Is My Thriller."
49. Cardi B - Am I The Drama?
I don't mind Cardi B taking seven years between albums, she certainly gave us a lot of great singles and features in that time, but her long-awaited second album definitely feels Album #4 -- more to the point, the Album #2 and Album #3 that we never got were probably better than this. You can't keep a natural born star down, though, "ErrTime" and "Principal" and "Bodega Baddie" were worth the wait.
50. Justin Bieber - Swag
Swag would be higher on the list if it wasn't called Swag and didn't contain "Soulful" featuring Druski, the most embarrassingly thirsty thing a white artist has ever put on an album. But if Justin Bieber wanted to impress cynical critics like me with his taste, he did a pretty good job with the stuff he made with Dijon, Mk.gee, Tobias Jesso Jr., Carter Lang, and Eddie Benjamin on this album.
