2021 has been a great year for music. So many of my favorite artists have released projects this year, and I’ve also found new favorites. What follows is my personal list of the top five albums released this year that stood out among the rest. If you have missed any of these, I highly urge you to check them out.
5. Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast
It’s been quite a year for everyone’s favorite Bryn Mawr alum, Michelle Zauner. With her band Japanese Breakfast she earned two Grammy nominations: Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album for Jubilee. Her memoir Crying in H-Mart, a New York Times Bestseller, made it onto The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2021” list. She is completely deserving of all the hype, and Jubilee is a standout from this year’s album releases. From the invigorating and lighthearted “Be Sweet” to the heartbreaking “In Hell,” Jubilee demonstrates Japanese Breakfast’s reckoning with both light and dark emotions, searching for joy while still honoring grief.
4. Little Oblivions by Julien Baker
Julien Baker’s third album, Little Oblivions, is grander and fuller than her sparse first two, which were understated and acoustic. By embracing a full band, Baker has elevated her exceptional lyricism to new heights, and much of this album has been on repeat for me this year, especially “Favor.” Baker continues to explore extremely dark topics such as her addiction and suicidal ideation, which makes Little Oblivions not an easy listening experience by any means but still an incredibly rewarding one. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about lines like “Cause I don’t need a savior, I need you to take me home” (from “Relative Fiction”) and the painfully visceral “I’ll wrap Orion’s belt around my neck / And kick the chair out” (from “Heatwave”) since I first heard them. When I need to have a complete breakdown, I turn on Julien Baker and let it all out.
3. Sling by Clairo
When Clairo adopted a dog, I did not know how much this decision would alter my life. Her sophomore album Sling, inspired by her relationship with her dog Joanie, is a stunning meditation on what motherhood and domesticity mean from the perspective of a woman in her early 20s. Clairo contends with questions about what it means to bring a person into the world and to raise someone, and it’s almost unbelievable that someone so young can have such a mature grasp on this subject matter. The production on the album is stunning, and Clairo’s breathy vocals imbue the album with intimacy and tenderness. Since the album’s release, I have not been able to stop thinking about the line, “Rushing so I can beat the line / But what if all I want is conversation and time?” which I think encapsulates modern early-20s life in startling simplicity. “Zinnias,” the track that includes the titular word (contained within the simple yet heart-wrenching line, “I could wake up with a baby in a sling”) shows us Clairo contemplating what life as a suburban mother could look like, which I relate to immensely as a young woman. Sling explores these questions in a way I have never quite seen before in art, and has given us something that feels truly fresh.
2. Home Video by Lucy Dacus
I had been anticipating Lucy Dacus’s third album, a meditative and introspective reflection on her coming-of-age, for a while leading up to its release. From upbeat pre-releases “Brando,” “VBS,” and “Hot & Heavy,” to the devastating “Thumbs,” a wrenching takedown of a partner’s absent father, I knew that Home Video had a range of emotions in store for me. The pain of growing up is rendered expertly and lovingly by Dacus. Her past is looked back on with tender compassion for her younger self. The album’s final track, the almost eight-minute-long “Triple Dog Dare,” is a detailed portrait of the fraught friendships queer people have in childhood. First hearing the lines, “I’m staring at my palms / Red, ruddy skin, I don’t understand / How did they betray me? What did I do? / I never touched you how I wanted to” almost brought me to my knees. In song after song, we see how fiercely Dacus loves the people in her life, and it’s impossible to walk away without wishing that she was your friend too.
1. Red (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift
As a longtime Taylor Swift devotee, I have been eagerly anticipating the Red re-recording since before its announcement. The original Red remains one of my top Taylor albums, so of course Red (Taylor’s Version), featuring her more mature vocals, never-before-heard songs, and the long-awaited ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” claimed its inevitable position as my favorite album of the year. Spanning a variety of genres, the vault tracks lend an even fuller context to Red’s original project: showing us a raw portrait of a heartbroken 21-year-old. Nine years removed from the first album’s release, Taylor’s Version shows us once again the value of a young woman taking up space and being honest about her pain in an almost-overwhelming range of sounds and colors.