Prince is charging fans to stream a new track, “Boyfriend.” God forbid the man be paid for his music. But Prince’s business practices are so well-documented in their horribleness I can’t be bothered to link any examples, but I can’t blame the guy for trying. He just doesn’t “get it,” try as he might. It’s been boondoggle after boondoggle. I used to play along and suffer through each one, thinking “oh, surely to goodness he’s wised up by now.” Nope. It’s a rough world out there for pop stars who became superstars decades ago. Radio won’t touch you. MTV, hahaha. Blogs only buzz about what’s handed to them by the hippest PR machines. What’s left for the Madonnas and Princes of the world? Superbowl performances have already come and gone. The best you can hope for is touring that back catalog and an audience that politely allows you to “play a new one” without shuffling off to the beer stand indignantly.

As a long-time Depeche Mode fan, I’ve been less than enchanted by the band’s last few records to put it lightly. A few glimpses of glory here and there but mostly, well, not. I was expecting more “meh” from the new single, “Heaven,” but I find myself reinvigorated a bit as a fan. Try as it might, it’s hard for Depeche Mode not to sound like Depeche Mode, and “Heaven” doesn’t sway too far from the tried and true formula. What’s interesting to me about the new single is that it doesn’t really sound like a single. It’s subversively dark, which could be the mark of a band that’s powerful enough not to need “singles” the way bands used to- as promotional machines to propel future album sales. It’s become more of an announcement- a statement of intent. But I quite like the notes Dave Gahan chooses to sing; they are unexpected and alluring. This rendition of the song shows that, despite being beholden to so much studio trickery, Depeche Mode are just as invested emotionally in their live songs as bands who’ve strapped on guitars. [via Stereogum]

There’s now a video for the Sky Ferreira track Lost In My Bedroom, which was one of my favorite singles of 2012.

I don’t think Tug Baker has an enemy in this world. I can’t say the same about many people I know. In addition to his Top 15 albums listed here, Tug has compiled his 100 favorite tracks of 2012, which you can find over at his music blog, About Today, which you should check out anyway, as it’s a veritable horn ‘o plenty of streaming new jams.

15. Diiv, Oshin (Captured Tracks)
I love you, shoegaze. Forever.

14. Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man (Capitol)
A less ambitious record than her previous two outings but still achingly beautiful.

13. Japandroids, Celebration Rock (Polyvinyl Records)
I did not care for the first few Japandroids albums, but this one is pure driving with the windows down singing at the top of your lungs goodness.

12. Laurel Halo, Quarantine (Hyperdub)
In a year full of great indie pop records, this one is probably the most challenging with its minor keys and atonal nature and sci-fi bent, but damn if it isn’t interesting as all get out. And definitely the best album cover of the year.

11. Frank Ocean, channel ORANGE (Def Jam Records)
Odd Future-graduate gone Grammy-nominated. Forget the hype around his sexuality or whatever, this is still a pretty terrific album.

10. Cloud Nothings, Attack On Memory (Carpark Records)
Say what you will about Steve Albini’s production values, but it’s safe to say that he served this stripped-down indie-pop band well when they wanted to infuse some loud, angsty noise on this new record.

9. Grimes, Visions (4AD)
I may or may not have danced around my house alone with this album on. I won’t tell.

8. Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music (Williams Street Records)
Killer Mike once again proves that he’s the realest rapper alive. Politics and proverbs come together to make this both a historically-inspired yet forward-looking hip-hop record.

7. Chromatics, Kill For Love (Italians Do It Better)
Did you flip out over the Drive soundtrack? Well, this is the sound that inspired it. If you’re looking for atmospheric pop vocals over some chilled out beats and driving guitar plucks and reverb out the wazoo, this is your jam.

6. Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan (Domino Recording Co.)
While desperately missing the vocal stylings of Angel Deradoorian, this more David Longstreth-led follow-up to the critically acclaimed Bitta Orca is a contemplative work bursting with ideas and sublime melodies.

5. METZ, Metz (Sub Pop Records)
In a world awash with indie rock, every year I look for the best record that is loud, fast, and hard as a rock, and this year, METZ debuted with some post-punk and hardcore goodness that is all those things.

4. Death Grips, The Money Store (Epic)/No Love Deep Web (self-released)
The noise-rock drums and jazz-esque arrangements of Hella’s Zach Hill and Andy Morin meet the mad (in terms of both temperament and sanity) hip-hop yawps of Stefan Burnett (aka MC Ride) in difficult but fascinating ways. Forget what Refused said, this is the shape of punk to come.

3. Frankie Rose, Interstellar (Slumberland Records)
After spending time in three great indie rock groups (Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Chrystal Stilts), Frankie Rose and the Outs did a little noise pop record that was pretty good. But kicking out The Outs and going full new-wave indie pop with Interstellar was the best decision she could make. There are so many great earworms here that never once feel like they achieved such catchiness with cheap tricks.

2. Tame Impala, Lonerism (Modular Fontana)
I’ve loved this Australian psych-rock three-piece since their 2010 debut Innerspeaker, but it’s a testament to how well-crafted this sophomore release is that I’ve had several friends who poo-pooed Innerspeaker who have been converted byLonerism’s overblown sonic grooves.

1. Sharon Van Etten, Tramp (Jagjaguwar)
Sometimes albums by a young singer-songwriter can be equally fascinating and cringe-worthy. After all, these are people trying to figure out relationships, who they really are, and life in general. They can be vulnerable, messy things. But Van Etten’s inner turmoils are focused through some terrific production by The National’s Aaron Dessner (with some haunting background vocals by Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner), keeping that raw intimacy while never once having anything to embarrassed about.

Patrick Wall’s skills are as varied as they are impractical.

KNEE MEETS JERK: In Which a Beleaguered Music Journalist Attempts — and Fails — to Identify Ten Records Released Between December 2011 and December 2012. That Were Better Than All Other Releases in the Same Time Period. Listed in alphabetical order. Results subject to change.

Daniel Bachman, Seven Pines (Tompkins Square)
It’s easy to get lost in Daniel Bachman’s engrossing instrumental compositions, sounds piling upon each other in deliberate phases and creating a strangely meditative tension. Rooted in the American Primitive style of acoustic guitar — comparisons to Jack Rose, another American Primitive stylist who, like Bachman, split time between Virginia and Philadelphia, are both easy and earned — Bachman is one of the young virtuosos furthering and redefining the school, his long-form works ghostly and pastoral, familiar and known but buzzing with fresh experience.

Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph)
Converge, some twenty-two years into its career, is the Webster’s definition of American hardcore, delivering cyclonic, mosh pit-chaotic punk and blistering, unrelenting thrash in brutal, bloody two-minute bursts. But All We Love’s lengthier cuts — the surprisingly melodic “Coral Blue,” the doom-metal-imbued “Glacial Pace,” the meticulously architected “Sadness Comes Home” — display a remarkable complexity, setting the band apart from its innumerable imitators and supposed peers.

EL-P, Cancer 4 Cure (Fat Possum)
I was halfway through a street fight metaphor of my own — about how if Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music was the knockout punch, El-P’s Cancer for the Cure was the crushing, gut-loosening, guard-dropping body blow that made the haymaker hit that much harder — when I saw that Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene made the same connection. Damn it.

Brian Eno, Lux (Warp)
Here’s the thing about Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: It doesn’t really fit Eno’s definition of ambient music, laid out in the album’s liner notes. (“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” Eno wrote in 1978. “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”) Simply, Music for Airports is too interesting, its elemental drift too fascinating to be ignored. In the same way, Lux betrays Eno’s definition: Each of its four just-under-twenty-minute sections fades and disappears as the next emerges, quietly and unobtrusively, tonally and texturally different and containing only the faintest hints of what transpired previously. There’s too great a reward in Lux‘s lush, absorbing ambiance, too vast a musical adventure lurking just underneath its restrained, dulcet palette.

Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes (Warp)
Steven Ellison could have gone bigger, could have pushed his firmly calm but furiously knotted and infinitely complex beatworlds toward total atomization. But compared to his body of work — most especially the brilliantly byzantine Cosmogramma — Until the Quiet Comes tightens the reins, peeling away layers from his maximalist instrumental hip-hop and organizing its tracks into a gracefully flowing sequence. Ellison’s hallmarks — a fractal, spidering cascade of starry, phantasmal melodies and prickly, feverish rhythms no human hands could play over a hip-hop’s bedrock knock-and-thump — still factor heavily into the equation, but Ellison’s restraint is key in the Quiet’s maniacal balance of elegance and turbulence. Though the laptop and sampler are his instruments of choice, Quiet still possesses improvisatory, loose feel of jazz, a connection to his august lineage. Like his great-uncle John Coltrane, Ellison is moving his medium into new places by detaching it from traditional mores and splintering it into new forms — and creating a sound and genre entirely unto himself.

Ab-Soul, Control System (Top Dawg)
Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d. city (Aftermath)
Schoolboy Q, Habits & Contradictions (Topdawg)
“Y’all actin’ like that TDE don’t run L.A.,” Q boasts on “There He Go.” Surprisingly, that was an undersell. In a year where rap’s established superstars stumbled— Rick Ross’ God Forgives, I Don’t was wildly uneven; Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music was just plain B.A.D.; Big Boi’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumours was an absolute mess; Nas’ Life Is Good was an out-of-character, puff-chested bitch session — under its own music-for-the-one-percent duress, the leaders of the new school rose to the top. But the Southern California Top Dawg Entertainment-endorsed Black Hippy clique shone the brightest, three of its crew members — Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar — releasing three of hip-hop’s top four records of the year. (Only Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city bests Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music.) Ab-Soul’s Control System is the headiest and most sonically expansive of the bunch, the anything-goes Soul both the most mystical and most grounded emcee of the crew, doling out brawny beatdowns and belly laughs in equal measure. The exciting, risk-taking Q’s Habits & Contradictions is the most fun of the bunch, mixing bud smoker’s party anthems (“There He Go,” the A$AP Rocky-starring “Hands on the Wheel”), spirited trunk rattlers (“2 Raw”) and socially conscious gangbangers (“Raymond 1969”), steeped in hardcore and wholly lacking in irony.

But then there’s Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. City, the most important major-label rap album in a decade, an art-rap opus on par with rap’s all-time great debut records: Illmatic; Ready to Die; Doggystyle. (Last year’s Section.80 was more a mixtape manifesto — albeit an incredible one — than a proper album, in hip-hop parlance.) “Highly anticipated,” in fact, doesn’t begin to cut it; the last of the Black Hippy crew to release purist-appeasing solo discs (Jay Rock released his last year), and a Pitchfork- and XXL-driven media push accelerated the hype machine to Large Hadron Collider levels. But even stripped of its luxurious guest spots (Drake, Dr. Dre) and production credits (Just Blaze, E-40, Pharrell), good kid, m.A.A.d city succeeds, mostly on Lamar’s lyrical strength alone. Though largely gone is Section.80’s prevalence of Lamar’s polysyllabic machine-gun rat-a-tat vocal juggle, it’s replaced with an impeccable eye for storytelling and detail, navigating the still-mean streets of his native Compton with a fly-on-the-wall, documentary style. The singles — the woozy “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and the radiant “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” — are worth the price of admission, but the real artistic richness is in m.A.A.d city’s suites: the steeped-in-soul “The Art of Peer Pressure”; the closing one-two gut punch of the sprawling “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Real.” Lamar’s elevated, educated gangsta rap is as pimp-connectable as the most vicious N.W.A. tracks, yet potent poignant enough, filled with enough rich detail to blow the dust off any cracked soul — speaking both picturesquely and honestly of Lamar’s darkly storied hometown and genre. It’s not entirely without fault — closing track-cum-coronation “Compton” feels tacked on; the SoundCloud masses too often murder the “Backseat Freestyle” beat; Drake is still, well, Drake — but even without the hype, this one is still potent and smart enough to rise to the top of the pile.

So it turns out Q wasn’t exactly right. TDE doesn’t just run L.A. TDE’s running the whole game. Everyone else is just playing catch-up.

Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music (Williams Street)
Much hay has been made about the political — or apolitical, depending on how you choose to look at it — side of Killer Mike’s agit-rap. But to focus solely on R.A.P. Music’s political affectations — Reagan, the War on Drugs, Obama, prison privatization — is to do it a disservice. While Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city is greyscale and dour, R.A.P. Music is freewheeling, fly and fun, a perfect balance of playful, powerful and persuasive. At heart, it’s a love letter to not just hip-hop, but all black music as religious experience, a concept-less concept record stretching from slave calls to Ellington to Nas. A vital piece of work, R.A.P. Music captures fully the richness of all black musics. (Or, as Mike says, “every music that’s been born on this continent from a group of people that were brought here in chains.”) It is, as the man says on the stellar title track, jazz, funk, soul, gospel. It’s sanctified sex. It’s player Pentecostal. It’s what his people need — the opposite of bullshit. This is church — his church. Front pew. Amen.

Kowloon Walled City, Container Ships (Brutal Panda)
A BRIEF LETTER TO MY TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD SELF ON KOWLOON WALLED CITY’S CONTAINER SHIPS WILL BE HIS FAVORITE RECORD OF 2012.

There’s no easy way to say this. You’re going to have a rough year, dude. At the end of it, you’ll be 30 and still poor, your career still stalled, your psychic wounds of the previous twelve months not yet healed. Worse, you won’t really be sure if you learned anything, if you really grew up at all.

If your rubric for your favorite record is that it’s the one you really connect with, for whatever reason — and it is — then this Kowloon Walled City — named for the relatively lawless and dismantled Hong Kong burg that consisted of massive, interlocking buildings blanketing several acres — record, a sprawling mass of impossibly heavy bummer jams, will be it.
“Bad days come again after all,” you’ll hear Scott Evans howl over the din — an impossible amalgamation of Helmet and Low — of “’50s Dad.” God, you’ll think, ain’t that the truth.

Loincloth, Iron Balls of Steel (Southern Lord) (Jan. 17)
Loincloth’s Iron Balls of Steel shouldn’t be as good as it is. The combination of band name and album title evoke a sub-Metalocalypse yukfest. Further, Iron Balls of Steel — and I still cringe at that name — comes nine years after the band’s only other studio fruit, a two-track seven-inch. Further still, the pedigreed band — it features members of cult-favorite heavies Confessor and Breadwinner — in the meantime lost founding guitarist Pen Rollings, considered the most critical to the band’s crushing, technical metal. But Iron Balls of Steel proves it possible for metal’s essential caveman-ness to coexist with its brainier impulses, mocking both metal’s humorless façade — hence the shlocky titles — and math-metal’s numbing maximalism. But it’s no joke record, pairing brutal brain-scramblers that exhaust themselves in little over a minute with uncharacteristically patient longer works that strive for a narrative, even emotional, arcs, captivating motifs and glimmering textures. Dizzyingly nimble, Loincloth still cops power-of-the-riff underground tropes that limit it to a niche appeal. But for those tuned to that niche, Iron Balls of Steel is essential.

The Men, Open Your Heart (Sacred Bones)
Compared with the virulent, pulverizing Leave Home, Open Your Heart is relatively accessible, a muscular and dynamic cycle through barnstorming classic hardcore and indie rock (“Turn It Around”; “Please Don’t Go Away”), searing punk (“Cube”), beer-chugging country (“Country Song”) and muscular krautrock (“Oscillation”). (Though it lacks what might be the best and most accessible Men song, “Kyle Keays,” which appeared on a KEXP-filmed live set.) Open Your Heart imbues Leave Home’s raw power with more melody and structure, beefing up its rhythm section to really let the band’s twin-guitar attack rip. It’s not hard to imagine Open Your Heart sitting alongside the most essential of the SST, Touch and Go and Homestead catalogs, but The Men avoid stale classicism by weaving together their disparate influences with a nuanced touch.

Karriem Riggins, Alone Together (Stones Throw) (Oct. 23)
The final track on Alone Together is called “J Dilla the Greatest.” Pair that with Riggins’ Detroit background, the thirty-four-deep track list and that Stones Throw logo on the top left-hand corner, and, yeah, Alone Together bears more than a passing similarity to Dilla’s landmark Donuts. Like Donuts, Riggins’ Alone Together is an ostensibly happenstance sequence of alien, brain-wracking beat puzzles. But where Donuts carried an emotional weight, Alone Together is sprightly and playful, crisscrossing hip-hop and jazz (Riggins is an acclaimed jazz drummer), yes, but knuckle-dragging bicycle rock, flashy blaxploitation funk, prissy instrumental pop and experimental Detroit techno. Like Donuts, the funky and freewheeling Alone Together’s high points (the heavenly “OOOOOOOOOAAAAAAA,” the slick and funky “Because”) are affecting but brief, and its whole is absolute front-to-back joy.

Swans, The Seer (Young God)
Michael Gira has said that The Seer took 30 years to make. In a way, that’s true: The Seer encompasses all the places Swans have ever been, journeying through post-rock, electronic soundscapes, haunting acoustic beauty, punishing noise, and a Panzer tank division’s worth of percussion. At more than two hours long, it’s an endurance test that doesn’t feel like one. The Seer is Swans’ ecstatic, darkly beautiful magnum opus.

Bo White, Same Deal/New Patrones (Kinnikinnik)
Charlotte’s Bo White spent a year cobbling together this tribute to narcocorridos true-crime folk and Mexican banda singer Sergio Vega, imbuing Same Deal with startling nuance and awesome, if at times grisly, imagery. With expansive indie rock tempered by Afrobeat and David Byrne weirdo-pop, new treasures are revealed with every listen.

BONUS ROUND: Twenty-Four Great Songs From Albums Not on the Above List
A$AP Rocky, “Goldie”
Alpoko Don, “Get My Paypa Dog”
Fiona Apple, “Hot Knife”
Big K.R.I.T., “Boobie Miles”
Burial, “Kindred”
Clams Casino, “Swervin’”
Dirty Projectors, “Gun Has No Trigger”
Four Tet, “Pyramid”
fun., “We Are Young”
Hammer No More the Fingers, “Lil’ Tifton”
Menahan Street Band, “Lights Out”
The Men, “Kyle Keays”
Miguel, “Adorn”
Pelican, “Lathe Biosas”
People Person, “Astoria”
Pussy Wizard, “Fazzze It Out”
Ramphastos, “Warsaw”
Savages, “Husbands”
Schooner, “Locked In”
Dylan Sneed, “Beautiful Noise”
Andy Stott, “Numb”
Sun Kil Moon, “Lonely Mountain”
Sharon Van Etten, “Joke or a Lie”
Y.N. Rich Kids, “Hot Cheetos & Takis”

HONORABLE MENTION/APOLOGIES TO: Action Bronson, Rare Chandeliers (Vice); Alabama Shakes, Boys and Girls (ATO); Oren Ambarchi, Sagittarian Domain (Editions Mego); Antibalas, Antibalas (Daptone); The Bad Plus, Made Possible (Eone); Baroness, Yellow & Green (Relapse); Big K.R.I.T., Live from the Underground (Def Jam); Blut Aus Nord, 777: Cosmosophy (Debemur Morti); Ravi Coltrane, Spirit Fiction (Blue Note); Deftones, Koi No Yokan (Reprise); Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan (Domino); Justin Townes Earle, Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now (Bloodshot); Earth, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II (Southern Lord); El Ten Eleven, Transitions (Fake Record Label); Floating Action, Fake Blood; Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! (Constellation); Heems, Nehru Jackets (Greedhead); Horseback, Half Blood (Relapse); Jealousy Mountain Duo, The Home of Easy Credit (Blunoise); Damien Jurado, Mariqopa (Secretly Canadian); Kaki King, Glow (Velour Recordings); Lambchop, Mr. M (Merge); Lost In the Trees, A Church That Fits Our Needs (Anti-); Maserati, Maserati VII (Temporary Residence); The Menahan Street Band, The Crossing (Daptone); Mono, For My Parents (Temporary Residence Ltd.); Bob Mould, The Descent (Merge); Narrows, Painted (Deathwish Inc.); Organos, Concha (Minus Sound Research); Pallbearer, Sorrow and Extinction (Profound Lore); Jeff Parker Trio, Bright Light in Winter (Delmark); Pinback, Information Received (Temporary Residence Ltd.); Pop. 1280, The Horror (Sacred Bones); Pussy Wizard, Fuck Jams Vol. 1 (Fork & Spoon); Ramphastos, Southern Gothic (Post-Echo); Roc Marciano, Reloaded (Decon); Savages, I Am Here (Pop Noire); Christian Scott, Christian aTunde Adjuah (Concord Jazz); Ty Seagall Band, Slaughterhouse (In the Red); Shearwater, Animal Joy (Sub Pop); Shovels and Rope, O Be Joyful (Dualtone); Solange, True (Terrible); Spaceghostpurrp, The Chronicles of Spaceghostpurrp (4AD); Sun Kil Moon, Among the Leaves (Caldo Verde); Sunshone Still, ThewaytheworldDies (Potato Eater); Those Lavender Whales, Tomahawk of Praise (Fork & Spoon); Titus Andronicus, Local Business (XL); Torche, Harmonicraft (Volcom/The Orchard); The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know (Fat Cat); Sharon Van Etten, Tramp (Jagjaguwar); Zebras, Zebras (Secret Records)

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED RECORDS I DID NOT CARE FOR: Bat for Lashes, The Haunted Man (Parlophone); Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory (Carpark);  Death Grips, The Money Store (Epic);  Grimes, Visions (4AD); Frank Ocean, Channel Orange (Def Jam); Japandroids, Celebration Rock (Polyvinyl); Santigold, Master of My Make-Believe (Atlantic)

Drew Harkins is currently following some sort of bizarro, modernized version of Don Draper’s esteemed trajectory, replete with passels of women, ankle-bearing suits, and ad campaigns … without all that inconvenient identity theft nonsense.

1. Japandroids, Celebration Rock (Polyvinyl)
They aren’t long; all the weeping and the laughter. Hold damn tight onto those days, because one morning in your late 20’s you’ll wake up and realize that your hair is already half-grey, the career you dreamed of is stalled in second gear, you’re not paying off your debts, you fail to keep a steady girlfriend, and over the past decade you’ve become increasingly more enamored with partying than your own potential. Ennui’s a bitch, bro.

2. Beach House, Bloom (Sub Pop)
I still don’t get the trajectory of this band. Trust me; I saw them in 2008 and I thought they sucked. But seriously? With every album, Beach House manages to do the same infuriatingly ineffable and inexplicably good thing with basically the same exact effect every single time, but even better each go ’round. I’m too lazy to put a finger on what they do, so I’ll just call it “wet dream Muzak” and go eat some Jolly Rancher™ hard candies while feeling smug.

3. Best Coast, The Only Place (Mexican Summer)
I still don’t want to sleep with Bethany Cosentino. I just want to go over to her house and be all like, “Yo Beth-dog! Quit being a bummer! Let’s go to the beach and eat popsicles and listen to Hüsker Dü and heckle dudes in cargo shorts YOU KNOW IT WILL BE FUN.”

4. Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion 3 (Circumvent)
Lorem ipsum izzy dolor sit axl amet, consectetur slash adler adipisicing duff ole beich elit, sed bombastic braidlocks booze do eiusmod slash reprise tempor sorum spaghetti incididunt stinson ut grandiose labore et dolore abortion corporeal magna opus aliqua. Ut denim enim ad minim maximum rock n’roll veniam venereal, quis nostrud nostradamus exorcism exercitation ullamco laboris laborious brownstone nisi november rain ut aliquip lana del rey appetite ex ea destruction commodo commode civil war consequat. Duis shannon hoon aute alcoholica auteur irure heroin dolor sic semper tyrannis in reprehenderit reprehensible in violation voluptate velit esse quam videri cillum dope dolore eu fugiat grunge rock nulla jungle pariatur. Excepteur sucks sint occaecat cupidatat cocaine non proident, sunt in sweet child of my mea culpa qui officia deserunt desecrate mollit anim id est laborum of love.

Psyyyycheeee.

5. Tennis, Young & Old (Fat Possum)
The Black Keys are now in the business of giving swagger lessons. Witness Keys drummer Patrick Carney’s production of this album. Singlehandedly, he took Alaina Moore’s coquettish twee and turned it into a diva-worthy croon. Intricate melodies, expanded horns, minor shifts and sly backing vocals take the husband-wife duo of Tennis from white girl garage doo-wop to true blue-eyed beach soul. There’s also something particularly dense in play this time; increasingly more melancholy than blissful and wistful. The honeymoon may be over, but they’re still holding on.

6. The Men, Open Your Heart (Sacred Bones)
Mission of Burma made another great album. Todd Rundgren produced it and the guys from Thin Lizzy showed up in the studio.

7. Sleigh Bells, Reign of Terror (Mom + Pop)
If Treats was like the start of a good relationship, all fireworks and sex and whiskey, then Reign of Terror is more like the end of a good relationship, when your life is a walking Steve Earle song and you’re both sniping at each other via text message and thinking, “How the fuck can you be sleeping with that person?”

Anyway, Alexis Krauss is super hot. I mean, what the shit? One minute she’s all edgy co-ed-cum-Mousketeer, the next thing you know, she’s on some next-level indie Cindy Crawford-slash-Elvira vampiress tip. She even makes breast implants look sexy, and insert boner pun here and we’re done.

8. Dwight Yoakam, 3 Pears (Warner Bros.)
I was at Goodwill the other month, doing some thrifting because I’m a total hipster and I happened across a pair of vintage Wrangler premium patch jeans. These things were TOTALLY fucking boss – straight-up butt cut, stretchy cotton/denim blend, and basically like the pair my bull-riding friend Kenneth wore when he called our math teacher “honey” in college.

So there I am in a thrift store off White Horse Road in Greenville, stomping around in some bunk-ass L.L. Bean southwestern-style winter jacket, prancing to and fro all willy-nilly like a fruitcake and swiveling on my heels in front of a mirror with a full mammaltoe going on, singing “Little Sister” and pretending I’m Dwight Yoakam. Then this old black woman saunters behind me and gives me that total “SMH @witepeople” thing that old black women are awesome at doing. I’d never felt so white in my life.

**Bonus Life Tip**: Never ask a girl to go “thrifting” with you on your iPhone, because it auto-corrects to “thrusting.” On second thought, always do that.

9. Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan (Domino)
I don’t really know what to say here. Dave Longstreth is IKEA monkey.

10. Justin Townes Earle, Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now (Bloodshot)
“I know a lot about girls, particularly wild women. I know a lot about dope. I know a lot about guns. And actually, I know a lot about clothes. I just try to take those things and mix them in.” – Justin Townes Earle

11. Jack White, Blunderbuss (Third Man)
Jack White could shit on a microphone and it would probably still be worth a couple listens.

Wild Nothing – Nocturne
Like M83’s Saturdays = Youth, Wild Nothing’s Nocturne tugs at the heartstrings of my ’80s childhood and my ’90s twee indie pop infatuation.

Tennis – Young & Old
This album makes me want to lay in the grass on a sunny Summer day with nothing to do.

Marina & The Diamonds – Electra Heart
I am a sucker for a British chanteuse with a broken heart and a dark, wry wit backed by over-produced club-ready beats.

DIIV – Oshin
I hear elements of Ride, The Cure, and a slew of other “dream pop” bands I’ve loved for years.

Chromatics – Kill For Love
It is dark, seductive and preys on all my weaknesses like the perfect temptress.

Kaki King – Glow
Gorgeous guitar instrumentals that will break your heart over and over.

Japandroids – Celebration Rock
Raucous, unapologetic straight forward guitar-based indie rock with heart and soul.

Cloud Nothings – Attack on Memory
Catchy power-pop with nods to early Emo as well as Jawbreaker, et al.

Lana Del Rey – Born to Die
Over-produced, over-hyped vapid and trite pop exactly how it should be done.

Saint Etienne – Words and Music
A synth laden dance-floor album about being in love with music.

Top Singles*
Breaking the Yearlings – Shearwater
Lost in My Bedroom – Sky Ferreira
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards – Tame Impala
Emmylou – First Aid Kit
Losing You – Solange
Threads – Now Now
Silver Spring – Lykke Li
Atomic Age – Parlour Tricks
I Wanna Go Out – Teen Mom
OKAY Cupid – Kitty Pryde
Dreamers – Savoir Adore
Disparate Youth – Santigold
Heartbreaker – The Walkmen
212 – Azealia Banks
Backlines – Stars

(*My personal rule is that my top singles can’t be on any of the albums in my top album list.)

Kerry’s previous lists: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008