Best albums of 2015

1) U.S. Girls - Half Free

This album was the biggest and best surprise of my year, one I listened to on a whim, almost by accident, by a band I'd never heard of before (turns out they've been around for years). Half Free deserves praise every bit as breathless as that heaped upon this year's many "major statement" albums, even though it's a very different sort of record: just eight nearly flawless pop songs, and one haunting interlude, each different from the last, from the carnival-esque reggae of "Damn That Valley," to the Blaxploitation funk of "Window Shades," the bar rock of "Sed Knife," to the slinky new wave of "Navy & Cream," and the epic disco of closer "Woman's Work." And yet it all hangs together.

2) Neon Indian - VEGA Intl. Night School

With time, the wave of once-hip bands Neon Indian came up among has become a popular punching bag for Internet music jerks not unlike myself, and I'm not really sure why. The whole "chillwave" thing (and the beach bum lo-fi boom that occurred alongside it) produced, at the least, a lot of exceedingly fun music, even if few of those albums will likely be remembered as classics. VEGA Intl. Night School, however, might be just that. It's certainly the most ambitious album any former chillwave artist has released, and it succeeds on every level. The key, as usual, is the songs: the plastic reggae grooves of "Annie" and "61 Cygni Ave," the way the bassline changes the chords in "Slumlord," the processed keyboard riffage all over "Street Level."

3) Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

To Pimp a Butterfly is probably the greatest artistic achievement released by a musician in 2015, almost objectively so — but it's not number one on my list because it hasn't necessarily defined my year the way it has the cultural moment. It's the pop music equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon novel, or a T.S. Eliot poem, or (more appropriately) of Taylor Branch's multi-volume Civil Rights tome America in the King Years. It's the best of several examples provided in 2015 of an Album-as-State of the Union address. It wraps its arms around several decades of recorded music, from jazz to funk to gospel to the Neptunes. And, although it plays best as a capital "A" Album, straight through, the great misunderstanding of its reception is the idea that it's not stacked, floor-to-ceiling, with as many absolute jams as the Carly Rae Jepsen album that would have landed at the 13th spot on this list.

4) Deafheaven - New Bermuda

New Bermuda plays like a harder, darker rebuttal to the passages of soaring beauty to be found on Deafheaven's brilliant previous album, 2013's Sunbather. Pounding, seething tracks like "Brought to the Water" and "Luna" are contrasted with contemplative, pastoral sections, and with the curveball of the final track, "Gifts to the Earth," which marries George Clark's harsh black metal vocals to relatively straightforward indie rock.

5) Beach House - Depression Cherry / Thank Your Lucky Stars

My favorite band released two albums in as many months and told us all they weren't supposed to be viewed as companions to one another — because they aren't. They still share one spot on this list because I'm a "more is more" kind of person when it comes to Beach House. Depression Cherry is the better of the two, and one could easily make a stronger album by cherry picking the nine best cuts between the two of them, but having them both around allows us to hear a looser, more playful side of Beach House, and I'm more than okay with that.

6) Nicolas Jaar - Pomegranates

Pomegranates is a casual sprawl: 20 tracks juxtaposing strange sounds — electronics or manipulated field recordings (it's often hard to tell the difference) — with fragile, Satie-indebted piano pieces. Though its conception as a "soundtrack" to the film The Colour of Pomegranates suggests formality, its variety (and its surprise release, for free) confirm otherwise: this album is a gift, not the follow-up to Jaar's solo Space Is Only Noise, nor the next phase for him after the dissolution of Darkside. It's Jaar letting his hair down and letting us in to hear him messing around, beautifully.

7) Mary Halvorson - Meltframe

The first time I heard Meltframe's opening track — Oliver Nelson's "Cascades," reduced to a pounding sludgefeast punctuated with frantic stair-tumbles up and down scales — I fell in love with it. Here was jazz that sounded, if you weren't paying attention, like some pale hesher kid shredding in a guitar center. When I went back and listened to Nelson's original, my appreciation only grew. Many of the album's other tracks, all of which are reinterpretations of classics, press more conventional jazz buttons, but each stands on its own — Mary Halvorson is the best kind of virtuoso, one who remakes everything she touches in her image, in her voice.

8) Vince Staples - Summertime '06

Staples' album takes on similar themes to those on Kendrick's To Pimp a Butterfly, but where that album moved outward, devouring all kinds of sounds, Summertime '06 feels like a set of dark, diamond-hard, inward gazing variations on a single aesthetic. It's an album of moments — the watery guitar loops and gunshots that open each half of the double album; Staples' syllable-popping delivery of the little hooks on "Norf Norf," "Get Paid," and "Jump Off the Roof"; and maybe most of all, the haunting spots where female voices suddenly break in: the Spanish rant on "Loca," the whispers underpinning "Dopeman," and Jhene Aiko's no-nonsense verse on "Lemme Know."

9) Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass

I developed a routine this fall of making a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, listening to an album or two while drinking it, maybe doing some homework. A specific category of "coffee albums" quickly developed around this habit, typically mellow singer-songwritery fare. Natalie Prass's self-titled debut is the queen of these coffee albums. My favorite track is the dreamy, drifting "Reprise," but every one of these string-drenched soulful songs is worthy of obsessing over.

10) Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

Honeybear asked a lot of big questions: Does art — particularly pop songs, pop art — convey anything really real, or only artifice? How do we make meaning out of the empty vacuum of existence? "Why don't you move to the Delta?" But it's also a really funny album, the funniest of the year — and Misty's weird, cynical singer-songwriter shtick can't hide the colorful variety in his songwriting and arranging, or the emotion embedded deep within his lyrics.

11) Twerps - Range Anxiety

I'm not sure I've heard a more pervasive argument against technically adept singing than this album of groggy morning indie pop love songs. The tunes make their cases in pitchy boy-girl tradeoff leads, and sometimes in impish full-band backing vocals too — and those flat New Zealander accents are the bee's knees. Plus every track is a master class in jangly guitar hooks.

12) Tame Impala - Currents

Currents sits at a weird intersection between a very "classic rock" idea of a great album and today's revisionist critical embrace of disco, DJ culture, and '80s dance pop/R&B as wellsprings of inspiration. Like every 70's rock opus, Currents includes an eight-minute epic ("Let It Happen"), only said epic also happened to be its totemic dance party of a lead single. For fun, catch how similar the bouncing groove on "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" is to Justin Timberlake's "Senorita."

Best songs of 2015

1) "The Three Sides of Audrey and Why She's All Alone Now" - Nicolas Jaar

While Pomegranates, the full-length Jaar put out this year, was a consciously laid-back piece of work, the tracks Jaar has been dropping concurrently on his series of Nymphs singles have had a more evident seriousness of intent. "Audrey" is brilliant from the second it starts, with what sounds like friendly aliens sighing. It goes on to traverse an eerie terrain of martial percussion, chopped samples, and Jaar's own hushed vocals. No track this year matched it elliptical beauty for me.

2) "Trust Me Danny" - iLoveMakonnen

It's not really a hit, and it's not really well rapped or sung, and the beat's pretty repetitive, and I don't really know what this thing's about either. (Dealing drugs maybe?) For some reason, though, I love it. I think I could listen to Makonnen shout the title over the chorus for hours straight. Dude's got a stranglehold on some ineffable sort of hook-craft.

3) "Kill v. Maim" / "Realiti" - Grimes (tie)

2015 was an excellent year for music, with a scary flood of outstanding albums hitting stores and streaming services in its final months. This means that one album topping a lot of publication's year-end lists, Grimes's Art Angels, is notably absent from mine. I just haven't listened to the thing that much yet. These two tracks, however, do stand out to me immediately as masterpieces: "Kill v. Maim" for being utterly badass, and "Realiti" for its colossal, melodic chorus, which tells the truth: "every morning there are mountains to climb."

4) "Just Like You" - Chromatics

The secret lies in Ruth Radelet's delivery of the title line: "He looks just like you," whispered, reaching your ears through an aural fog of echoing drums and droning synths. Who wouldn't want to hear that? Maybe when they said Dear Tommy would be out in time for Valentine's Day, they meant 2016?

5)"Snakeskin"/ "Breaker" - Deerhunter (tie)

These advance singles for Deerhunter's Fading Frontier are pretty different from one another, but they're both great. (They're different from the rest of the album, too.) "Snakeskin" takes the more strident vocal approach Bradford Cox has adopted since Halcyon Digest, and marries it to a swampy, processed funk strut, creating an anomaly in their catalog. "Breaker," on the other hand, is another perfect indie rock song from a band that could drop them like pennies if they wished, this one dressed up in affecting harmonies from both Cox and guitarist Lockett Pundt.

6) "Genocide" - Dr. Dre

Compton saw Dre coming out of hiding to try his hand (and succeed) at the sort of cinematic, multitudes-containing hip-hop album that Kendrick and Kanye have perfected. Even among an astonishing opening run of songs, "Genocide" stood out hard and threatened to suck the air out of the rest of the album. It's all in that beat, which seems to chew up all Dre's previous G-funk classics and spit out an utterly modern monster.

7) "Lovetrap" - Soko

Ariel Pink remained understandably silent this year after least year's double album Pom Pom, but we still got one perfect Pink pop song this year with this gem of a co-write/duet with French model/musician Soko. The awkward-creepy science fiction verses (which reference Pink's 2012 track "Kinski Assassin") only serve to highlight the effervescence of the chorus.

8) "Hotline Bling" - Drake / "HOTLINE BLING BUT YOU CAINT USE MY PHONE MIX" - Erykah Badu (tie)

If You're Reading This It's Too Late was one of the bigger releases I mostly slept on this year (others included Future's Dirty Sprite 2, Sufjan's Carrie & Lowell, and the aforementioned Art Angels), but I still got my Drake fix, thanks to "Hotline Bling." It's sort of a throwback to the 2011 Drake of Take Care, but 2011 Drake was awesome too. Erykah Badu's mixtape cover is a brilliant companion to the original — possibly even better, with its seven-minute length, altered chorus, and funny voicemail section.

9) "Gertrudis, Get Through This!" - Mourn

We don't always talk about punk rock in terms of craftsmanship, which is a shame. Case in point: this track, a perfectly fine, taut rocker that gets launched into the stratosphere by a drum break: a short fill, punctuated by a hi-hat hiss, barely stopping in time, then a moment of breath-catching space — just rhythm guitar, then that stops too — and then a second fill, this one straight out the John Bonham playbook, brings the rhythm section back in to bash through the rest of the song.

10) "Back to the Future (Part I)" - D'Angelo

Maybe the most understated standout from D'Angelo's Black Messiah, which was the best album of 2014, though it was released after many year-end lists (hence this track's inclusion here). His smooth vocal phrasing masks the painful nostalgia of the lyrics, which seem to long for the time lost in the 14 gap years D'Angelo spent in existential wilderness after Voodoo.

11) "Another One" - Mac Demarco

DeMarco's EP Another One (I refuse to acknowledge the idea of a "mini-album") was the definitive album of my summer, but at the end of the year it feels a little slight compared to the year's major releases, offering small, exceedingly listenable pleasures rather than galvanizing challenges. The title track, however, is one of DeMarco's best songs, its forlorn little electric piano melody bringing his experimentation with keyboards to its fullest fruition yet.

12) "Wouldn't You Know" - Royal Headache

Royal Headache's Australian soul-punk onslaught remained intact on this year's High, the follow-up to their 2012 debut, but "Wouldn't You Know" was the sort of departure I hoped for from them: a straight-up R&B ballad, underpinned by a deceptively complex, yet subdued instrumental, which allowed the ache in Shogun's vocals to shine through.

13) "Depreston" - Courtney Barnett

A perfect song for driving through the flat landscapes of central Minnesota — which, if you squint, might just look like the flat landscapes of Australia, right?

14) "Multi-Love" - Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra have always been sort of a weird mix of things: a retro psychedelic group with the instrumental prowess to jam for days, but also a studio rat project for leader Ruban Nielsen, who has the pop chops to construct catchy songs out of otherwise mismatched parts: hip-hop breaks, brittle '60s guitar licks, Bee-Gees-high vocals. The title track to Multi-Love saw Nielsen leaning on the funkier side of the equation, with a rich keyboard melody and lyrics that split the difference between heartfelt and knowingly melodramatic.

15) "Dopamine" / "Bent (Roi's Song)" / "Mire (Grant's Song)"(tie) - DIIV

These three advance tracks from DIIV's long-awaited second album point the way toward a 2016 hopefully just as exciting as 2015 was. They all hit the same sweet spots: layered, chiming, guitars, propulsive rhythm section, a sound somehow both hazy and distinct. In other words, these songs provide what good DIIV songs have always provided, only more of it.

Best Minnesota album of 2015

South - Hippo Campus

Best Minnesota song of 2015

"Midway" - Bad Bad Hats

Austin Gerth is a member of the class of 2016 at Concordia College. He also writes for Concordia's student blog, The COBBlog; and Concordia's student newspaper, The Concordian.