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The best albums of 2016 so far

The best albums of 2016 – so far

This article is more than 7 years old
The best albums of 2016 so far

The year is half over and it’s time to take stock of all the brilliant albums made in 2016, from Beyoncé’s fizzing pop to Anohni’s anguished protest music

Afro Celt Sound System – The Source

The group’s first album in a decade toned down the electronica of earlier incarnations for a more acoustic, but no less propulsive, approach.

What we said: It’s an often giddy mashup: nowhere else will you hear a female African chorus alongside Gaelic rap and jazz bagpipes. Yet the group also conjures moments of beauty like Mansani Cissé/Tàladh, where harp, kora and lyrical vocals entwine majestically.

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Anohni – Hopelessness

This protest album dared to tackle everything from Obama to climate change, and sparkled through the production of Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never.

What we said: Perhaps that’s the most peculiar thing about Hopelessness: when Anohni sings about mass graves and drone strikes, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. It can be strangely empowering. For all its bleakness, Hopelessness leaves you feeling anything but.

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David Bowie – Blackstar

Bowie’s swansong dazzled critics upon release, and seemed even more poignant when he died shortly afterwards – leaving messages of goodbye in his songs.

What we said: You’re struck by the sense of Bowie at his most commanding, twisting a genre to suit his own ends … It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music.

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Be – One

An ambient drone album powered by 40,000 bees, this record transcended its roots as an art project to become something joyous and revelatory.

What we said: One is a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year’s most beguiling offerings.

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Beyoncé – Lemonade

With this empowered sixth album, Bey turned the spotlight on the flaws in her marriage – with shocking and powerful results.

What we said: On much of Lemonade, Beyoncé sounds genuinely imperious. She’s not the only major pop star willing to experiment and push at the boundaries of her sound, but unlike efforts by others, Lemonade feels like it was made by someone very much in control. On Lemonade, Beyoncé sounds very much like a woman not to be messed with.

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Christine and the Queens – Chaleur Humaine

A mainstream star in France, Héloïse Letissier showed the Brits how to do it with an album inspired by gender fluidity and avant-garde theatre.

What we said: Chaleur Humaine is a rich and rewarding album that works whichever way you slice it. If you want to take it as an extended musical treatise on queer identity and non-binary sexual orientation, there’s plenty here to keep you occupied. If you just want to treat it as a collection of beautifully wrought pop music, then it functions fantastically as that, too.

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Drake – Views

The rapper could claim to be the defining pop artist of the moment with this eclectic – often humorous – collection of songs.

What we said: Views isn’t a perfect album – some judicious pruning of the less impactful tracks would make it more easily digestible, and there are certainly moments when you start to wish Drake would cast his gaze a little further afield than his own navel – but nothing about it suggests that his position is anything other than unassailable for the foreseeable future.

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Fay Hield and the Hurricane Party – Old Adam

Stories of witchcraft and betrayal – not to mention a Tom Waits number – made up Hield’s first solo album in several years.

What we said: Hield is a folk scholar as well as a singer, and the new set offers an intriguingly varied selection of narrative songs that “help us explore rights and wrongs”. Classy and entertaining.

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James Blake – The Colour in Anything

The electronic producer’s third album was an accomplished portrayal of digital anxiety and millennial unease – wrapped in that gorgeous voice.

What we said: Nowadays, your vocal style is your calling card more than ever – and Blake’s is not only distinctive, it’s peerless. It’s magical in its evocative powers, and like Arthur Russell, he can summon a sort of joyful sadness that seems to transcend the song itself.

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Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

Sprawling, inconsistent and with the tendency to make its creator look like a plonker, Kayne’s seventh album still had high points that only he could reach.

What we said: When The Life of Pablo is good, it’s very good indeed. What it isn’t is consistent. Perhaps it’s the sound of a man overreaching himself. Perhaps it’s the document of a mind coming increasingly unglued: you can find plenty of evidence here to support that interpretation.

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Knifeworld – Bottled Out of Eden

The prog-tinged psychedelia of Knifeworld’s third album was even more adventurous and cheerfully skewed than 2014’s stunning The Unravelling.

What we said: Students of this stuff will spot shades of Gong, Henry Cow, XTC and Shudder to Think lurking amid the angular rhythmic twists and elegantly perverse arrangements, but frontman and ex-Cardiac Kavus Torabi’s greatest skill is his ability to cram incisive but wonderfully alien melodies into every misshapen sonic nook. This is a big, vivid, lysergic joy.

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Margo Price – Midwest Farmer’s Daughter

Price poured her life story into this debut album – from losing her baby to her attempts to buy back the old family farm.

What we said: There’s an explicit debt to predecessors such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, and it’s no surprise that the album has come out on Jack White’s Third Man records; it’s an album for whom “authenticity” is crucial, but it’s all the better for it.

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Megadeth – Dystopia

Megadeth’s 15th album was a blistering return to form to the state-of-the-art bombast and refined technicality of past glories.

What we said: It’s the sense of conviction that seals the deal: MegaDave sounds fired-up and furious throughout, spitting venom on acerbic diatribes such as Post American World and Fatal Illusion, and delivering The Emperor’s vicious hooks like a shrewd veteran with the wind very much back in his sails.

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Parquet Courts – Human Performance

The Brookyln alt-punks spruced up their sound and embraced melody for this fifth album, yet retained their spiky edge.

What we said: Human Performance wears its pre-punk to post-punk influences proudly. If guitar music is condemned to skulk in the margins for the time being, it might as well do so sounding as spiky and agitated as this.

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PJ Harvey – The Hope Six Demolition Project

Polly Harvey travelled to Afghanistan, Kosovo and the grimmer parts of Washington DC to find inspiration for the follow-up to 2011’s Let England Shake.

What we said: The Hope Six Demolition Project is full of moments where the experiments unequivocally work, to pretty devastating effect. Even when they don’t, it’s still a hugely enjoyable album, potent-sounding, stuffed with tunes great enough to drown out the occasional lyrical shortcomings.

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Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

The Oxford band’s string-addled ninth album proved they’re a group whose creative forces are in constant motion.

What we said: Radiohead’s previous attempts at creating a rousing call to arms have been hobbled by their innate pessimism. Here, however, the stuff about how the future is inside us and people have the power sounds authentically stirring.

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Rihanna – Anti

Rihanna’s eighth album could be unsure of itself – but it was a rare instance of a mainstream star daring to experiment, and the results sometimes paid off.

What we said: In a risk-averse world, there’s something brave about Anti, and at its best, its daring pays off: it remains to be seen whether it represents a momentary swerve off-piste or what you might call a complete Ri-Ri-invention.

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Skepta – Konnichiwa

Packed with singles, Skepta’s fourth album embodied the thrilling UK grime revival – and had one eye on the other side of the Atlantic.

What we said: On the basis of Konnichiwa, any uneasiness Skepta feels about his current artistic position is unfounded: for a man apparently in limbo – and for all the complaints about his workload he relates on Text Me Back – he carries himself with real confidence throughout.

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Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith – A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke

US composer Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Vijay Iyer combined for this charismatic, delicate meeting of trumpet and piano.

What we said: In his eighth decade, the pioneering US trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith is stepping even harder on the gas … this intimate conversation swells from interesting to enthralling as it unfolds.

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The 1975 – I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It

The 1975’s second album could be ludicrously over-ambitious, but there was no denying Matt Healy knew his way around a mainstream pop tune.

What we said: You’re left with an album that fancies itself as a challenging work of art, but turns out to be a collection of fantastic pop songs full of interesting, smart lyrics, but also peppered with self-conscious lunges for a gravitas it doesn’t really need. Whether that makes it a success or a failure depends on whose metric you use.

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