From Snail Mail to CupcakKe, Earl Sweatshirt to Jon Hopkins, these are the very best albums of the year Mitski photo by Savanna Ruedy, Earl Sweatshirt photo by Steven Taylor, Snail Mail photo by Sisilia Piring, Playboi Carti photo by Robert Kamau/GC Images, Ariana Grande photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage, Robyn photo by Heji Shin, SOPHIE photo by Charlotte Wales, Matty Healy photo by Magdalena Wosins

A breakdown of Japan's thriving netlabel scene—a web-native realm where artists create their own aesthetic rules and distribute their music as they please. Artwork by inumoto and featured on the cover of Go-qualia’s Girl of Synesthesea, the first release by Japanese netlabel Bunkai-Kei Records London online label PC Music has become a much-buzzed-about—and divisive—entity over the course of 2014 v

Drift off with Beach House, Cocteau Twins, Grouper, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and more With many of the lists we’ve assembled over the past few years, the parameters have been clear. To be considered Britpop, for example, a record had to be guitar-based, from the UK, and released during a certain period. We can argue endlessly about what’s a mixtape and what’s an album, but in assembling t

Though our culture of fast distraction seems hell-bent on crushing the album beneath its endless scroll, the form remains a pillar of art, something to aspire to. In music, when you want to make a statement, you make an album. Still. And right now, those statements are perhaps more varied and fluid than ever before. In the following list, you will find full-length declarations of self-worth sung t

This year, music was all about context: artists addressed a tumultuous world or created a new one, pushing boundaries in voice and instrument. Pop stars parsed love and heartbreak, electronic producers found inspiration around the globe and in their backyards, and hip-hop morphed and changed at light speed. As voted by our staff and contributors, here’s our list of the 100 Best Songs of 2017.

Channelling Southern rap, house music, and lush orchestral pop, the third release from Yusuke Kawai as tofubeats is one of the best J-Pop releases of the year. Yusuke Kawai could have settled into the J-Pop background. The Kobe producer became a breakout name in the country’s netlabel scene in the late 2000s, creating high-energy breakcore often centered around anime samples under the name DJ Newt

At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it. For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in musi

Lil Peep is not the boy you take home to meet your mother. He may look like a scuzzed-up Justin Bieber but, with his copious face and neck tattoos (including one of Lisa Simpson scorched into his Adam’s apple) and a penchant for lyrics about cocaine and suicide, he makes Justin Bieber look like a picture of pure innocence. The 20-year-old Long Island native is a devotee of both trap wildman Waka F

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. Featuring David Bowie’s haunting last rites, a Parisian revolution, an all-powerful Beyoncé, a dancing robot, a weeping Naomi Campbell, a kid from “Stranger Things,” a bunch of sheep in a gym, and more This year, music videos proved once again to be one of the most malleable mediums w

Shake Appeal is Pitchfork deputy news editor Evan Minsker’s survey of loud, gnarly, garage-style rock‘n’roll. Back in the summer, he listed 20 favorites from the first half of the year. Here’s some more from the past six months, listed in alphabetical order. Put ‘em all together and you’ve got a list, if you’re into that sort of thing. ** Ausmuteants: Band of the Future (Aarght)On their fourth alb

Featuring your picks for the best (and worst) in the world of music We’ve already picked our faves of 2016, so now here are your picks for Top Albums and Top Tracks, along with Most Underrated and Overrated Albums, Best New Artists, Best Live Acts, and Best Social Media Presences, plus your answers to some burning either/or questions. Top 50 AlbumsFrank Ocean: Blonde/EndlessRadiohead: A Moon Shape

Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, David Bowie, Beyoncé, Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, Bon Iver—who didn’t release a record this year? These are the best of a challenging, rewarding, overall epic year. The album has never seemed stronger. Artists have never had more ways to express themselves, from one-off Soundcloud singles to social media posts to live streams of video. Yet in this world of plenty, t

Radiohead, David Bowie, Savages and the other artists who made waves this year Here’s a brief list of what could plausibly be considered “rock” in 2016: digitally manipulated sound fragments, free-jazz freakouts, emo spoken-word, octogenarian baritone, a song that sounds like a vintage Disney soundtrack, and warped variants on all manner of light ’70s sounds—plus, of course, plenty of punk, post-p

From Frank Ocean to Chairlift to Solange, here are the best and brightest releases of the year This week, we’re doing year-end genre lists that correlate with how genres appear on Pitchfork. The following list of 20 records includes both pop and R&B, but it’s fair to say that in 2016, the lines between these spheres (and others) were blurrier than ever. R&B continued to embrace electronic textures

From Nicki and Beyoncé’s ecstatic Coachella road trip, to David Bowie’s haunting interstellar hallucination, to Oneohtrix Point Never’s epic LARP-ing battle, to Charli XCX’s psychotic death-by-selfie freak show, to Kendrick’s powerful levitating act, here There are many ways to make a great music video. You can offer an artful spin on the cultural unrest and political strife of the day, as Kendric