A decade is an arbitrary measurement. They seem confined, these neat little symmetrical 10-year runs, but it’s only in hindsight that we define them, that their signifiers and trends and shorthand become codified. In reality, there are bleeds, the timbre and events of one chunk of time sliding over the border into another. If you’re seeking to characterize any period while you’re still living it, chances are that’s what you’ll see: the murkiness, the things that hang around or are just bubbling up, not yet having the distance to look back and tie a bow around history. Still, when that history is written for the 2010s, it feels as if it might still be looked at as a messy, transitional time — socially, politically, culturally.
This is the kind of shaggy, undefinable decade that feels like a passage between two eras, when the seeds sown in the ’00s came to fruition but when we have no clue where the hell we are going from here. You could feel dislocation and disorientation just about everywhere. This was the decade when most millennials reached adulthood — the generation that absorbed one kind of end-of-the-century optimism in the ’90s, then inherited a post-9/11 and post-recession America. People call us a lost generation, the ones who grew up in the final days of the old way of life, and the ones who grew into a new technological era whose social implications we still don’t totally grasp, no matter how passé thinkpieces on internet culture might seem now. It was a decade that harbored political hopes for a better civilization, then great challenges to a more humane future that have yet to be defeated. We have all of history in our pockets, but everything from here only feels more uncertain.
You could hear all of this in the music being made this decade, and you could see all of it in how the industry changed and how we consumed art. A recession and the technological realignment that came with smartphones impacted people’s ability to create and share music; it impacted how we perceive our mutual cultural experiences. What once seemed limitless last decade, with the advent of MP3s and music blogs covering smaller bands, has now fallen into diminished, depleted structures.
Your options for finding music are wildly expansive and theoretically endless thanks to streaming, but it creates silos. The same way the internet in general once seemed an entity of lawless possibility, a gigantic democratic mechanism, but eventually drove people towards those that simply agreed with them, it’s hard to pinpoint the true scope of new music now. Is an artist big because they headline festivals or have a movie sync? Are they big because sites like this write about them? When actual sales have decreased more than ever, the value and prominence of the work became harder and harder to fully understand. More and more, we seem to have conversations about how anyone but the most obviously successful — the celebrities — can make a sustainable life as an artist.
This new frontier also meant there were opportunities for bold experiments, as well as the sneaky business manipulations of the past taking new forms. Digital culture allowed for unprecedented levels of direct communication between artists and their fans, and it allowed artists to sidestep traditional apparatuses more than ever. The surprise release became an in-vogue method for an established enough artist to unveil their latest work. Much like the old-world maneuvering with radio play and charts, gaming streaming numbers became a crucial element of major pop artists’ business strategy, to the point that it impacted the creative side of things too. Famous singers and rappers started delivering bloated albums just to juice their plays; playlist placement became a boon for rising artists, the fake ubiquity of plays racked up by one list left on loop in some coffee shop somewhere leading people to strive towards a kind of sad, deflated rendition of what we once hoped a monogenre could look like.
We’re on the cusp of changes that could irrevocably alter our perception of pop music and how it operates. We’re exiting a decade in which people began to ask what an album had to be, anyway. Artists could drop it directly onto your phone; artists could upload to streaming platforms but keep editing and tweaking after the fact, turning it into a living, breathing thing. They might not think about the arc or story of an album anymore, when all it’s really about is the big singles anchoring a mushy 24-song tracklist on Spotify. They might find it pointless when infinite access and the invisible hand of the algorithm make it harder than ever to earn someone’s attention and ears, let alone money. There are many reasons to feel cynical about how music is being made and consumed. But that’s the transitional era. One could just as easily imagine, or hope for, a future in which artists aren’t in need of corporate patronage — whether labels or streaming companies — where somehow these new developments allow for a more fluid expression and creation of music.
The transitions are not just about business and functionality. They are also hinges in a story, spiritual reckonings. In the 2010s, we definitively entered the era in which all the old foundational artists of our notion of pop have started to die from old age. We lost legend after legend and, not to be morbid, it’s not going to get better in the next decade. There are always aged, beloved artists passing away, and new ones rising up — from new backgrounds, in new genres, who know how to manipulate the new landscape better. But this is a more significant sea change. All of that history we carry in our pockets weighs even more now. All those canonized, influential names from the ’60s and ’70s, the people who set the stage for so much of what came after, won’t be with us much longer. In a shaky time for the industry, and in a shaky time for society, we’re losing our formative idols and heroes.
Amidst it all — what we are watching slip away, what we don’t know about what’s to come — there is a lot to celebrate. In the face of a whole lot of threatening circumstances — late capitalist dystopia, the rise of right-wing extremism, apocalyptic climate change — it’s easy to feel like this generation’s going to be the one to see the world end. Every generation probably feels that, and they still create. So artists did that in the ’10s — those old icons leaving one last piece of wisdom while aging veterans and new voices tried to clarify their experience, to give us all some kind of connectivity and commiseration in tenuous times.
As much as we could disappear into our own corners, that’s what a lot of the best music this decade did: It communicated from further than ever before. Artists could rise to prominence in small towns and tell stories outside the industry’s urban hubs. Woodsy indie singers could appear on the biggest rap albums of the year. People crossed over between genres by creating hybrids, putting sounds — and their origins, and their listeners — in contact with one another. Rockers became dependent on a festival bubble that threatened to pop, becoming road warriors that took their music to far-flung locales. Those of us who grew up in the early file-sharing days became adults, savvy at navigating the web — knowing it was still possible for one person who felt alone in one corner of the world to find a kindred spirit, and that something new, some new sound, could someday come of that.
While the narrative of this decade is still cohering, there are those albums that stood out, the works that captured a moment and will, someday, be the markers that help us look back and make sense of something as macro as a catastrophic election and as micro as changes in local music scenes. There are works where people melted down history into a new sound, and albums where people refined their own interpretation of history; there are albums that aligned with great social change and albums that grappled with personal grief. For a period of time that felt constantly in flux, there was music that touched every part of the similarly messy spectrum of human experience. These are the albums that defined the decade as we lived it. —Ryan Leas
100 Future – Pluto (Epic / A1 / Free Bandz, 2012)
Future easily could’ve been a one-hit wonder, remembered for singing the hook on a song that wasn’t even his own. At the beginning of this decade, Future was merely a minor Atlanta mixtape star with Dungeon Family connections, known outside of town mostly for warbling on YC’s 2011 earworm “Racks.” But on his proper debut, Future proved that he could do anything: riot-starting anthems like “Same Damn Time,” lovesick balladry like “Turn On The Lights,” hypnotic strip-club reveries like “Magic.” He could transform standard Atlanta rap into his own psychedelic melodic playground. He could reshape the city in his own image. And in the years that followed, that’s exactly what he did. —Tom Breihan
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music
99 Car Seat Headrest – Teens Of Denial (Matador, 2016)
“It’s the new economy, we have nothing to offer and we sleep on trash,” Will Toledo sighs on “The Ballad Of Costa Concordia,” the 11-minute manifesto of Car Seat Headrest’s first proper album for Matador after years of Bandcamp releases. Teens Of Denial is an expression of adolescent angst that you haven’t outgrown, or the millennial disposition. What could’ve been written off as whiny or scrappy on Car Seat Headrest’s previous collection, Teens Of Style, is given new life with a full band and a clear concept. With this album, Toledo became something of a heroic poster boy for existential dread, assured in his emptiness and ready to validate our anxieties. —Julia Gray
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
98 PUP – The Dream Is Over (SideOneDummy, 2016)
Stefan Babcock found out that his vocal cords were shredded. He was told that he couldn’t scream onstage in a punk band every night anymore. “The dream is over,” his doctor said. So what did Babcock do? He screamed about it. The Dream Is Over is one big, glorious, life-affirming scream of an album, packing approximately 1,000 therapy sessions’ worth of anger and self-loathing and bile, 10,000 cathartic gang-shouts, and 100,000 melodic pop-punk hooks into its frenzied half-hour runtime. And against all odds, PUP made it look easy. That’s something worth screaming for. —Peter Helman
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
97 Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop, 2015)
Courtney Barnett’s first studio album opens with an awkward conversation about suicide, and it ends with an awkward conversation about a funeral. In between, the LP crams in nearly a dozen finely observed short stories about people struggling through quotidian life, with Barnett as our bemused but incisive narrator — sometimes a character, sometimes not. It’s a writerly triumph, but it’s also a triumph of straight-up songcraft. Barnett proves her guitar-hero bona fides, knocking out blazingly ragged solos and serrated power-pop hooks that only make her stories richer. That first song ends with a young man proclaiming that he’s only visiting a downtown rooftop because he delights in being able to look at the world. Barnett, clearly, can relate. —Tom
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
96 Colleen Green – I Want To Grow Up (Hardly Art, 2015)
Here’s a novel idea: a bratty power-pop record about not wanting to be a brat anymore. Colleen Green spends I Want To Grow Up desperately seeking maturity. Both the pursuit itself and the skill she brings to her craft suggest she’s farther along than she thinks — social anxiety, fear of abandonment, and television dependency notwithstanding. In an album-closing epiphany, Green declares, “I can do whatever I want.” By that point she’s already proven it. —Chris DeVille
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
95 Wye Oak – Civilian (Merge, 2011)
The line with Wye Oak used to be that they were one of the few young bands making guitar music interesting, making it feel fresh, at the opening of the ’10s. After Civilian, they began upending their style. That was because they had perfected something here: an autumnal, nocturnal kind of indie rock that was personal and emotive and yet had so many subtle shades that listeners could allow their imaginations to run wild and create their own stories within it. Jenn Wasner’s yearning vocals and fiery guitar work intertwined with Andy Stack’s tumbling then anxious percussion, the duo finding a sound that was raw and elemental and haunting, injecting newfound mystery into forms we’d thought spent. —Ryan
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
94 Purity Ring – Shrines (4AD, 2012)
Shrines lives on the borderline between pop and esoteric. Its creeping and crisp production would end up influencing a lot of mainstream music in the decade that followed it, but Shrines by itself is compellingly weird. Purity Ring’s Megan James and Corin Roddick made a universe unto themselves, a world of lofticries and obedears and fineshrines. The duo’s vocabulary is arresting and unforgettable, filled with menace and vibrant beauty around every corner. It explores parts unknown, a space that still feels utterly alien to this day. —James Rettig
HEAR IT: Spotify | Apple Music
93 Hop Along – Painted Shut (Saddle Creek, 2015)
Francis Quinlan doesn’t sing, she erupts. She doesn’t tell tales, she