2017 was as strong a year for music as any other. I don’t remember a year since I got deeply into music circa 2006 where I wasn’t treated to an abundance of great albums, from the flat-out entertaining to the boundary busting. In that sense, the year needs no greater introduction than any other. These were the albums which made their finest mark on me during 2017.

EnglishTapas — 10. English Tapas

SLEAFORD MODS

The Mods continue their shit-hot streak as Britain’s most essential contemporary band, one of an unrelated Transatlantic collective of acts camped in the intersections of punk, hip hop and electronic and showing that angry blokes aren’t always regressive (see Run The Jewels, Death Grips, Young Fathers). As excoriating as ever with an ever-increasing dose of musicality, Jason Williamson’s poetry is as caustic as ever, Andrew Fearn’s beats remain as deadheaded. Tracks like “Carlton Touts” and “Drayton Manored” rank among their finest. Brexit unsurprisingly racks up the mentions; a better track on the matter than “B.H.S.” is yet to be written. The Foreign Secretary and the culture which absurdly allows him to continue operating in politics is skewered on “Moptop,” not for the first, or one suspects last, time. This is no reshaping, more of the vitally needed same from the foremost chroniclers of Cameron’s Britain, now dealing, like the rest of us, with the aftermath of Dave’s voyage into the sunset.

Bjork’s first collaboration with Venezuelan electronic maestro Arca, 2015’s “Vulnicura,” proves to be a dry-run against her aptly-named new album. Arca’s percussion still snowballs with sound and momentum like a comet trapping interplanetary debris in its orbit, but where there were strings there is now an arsenal of flute and birdsong, an astonishing, wide-eyed sonic backdrop to the latest morphing from a master thereof, on her tenth record proper. In contrast to his shard-sharp trademarks and the apocalyptic leanings of Arca’s own self-titled 2017 album, “Utopia” is euphoric from the opening of the stunning “Arisen My Senses” onwards. Bjork moulds vocal form in as investigative a fashion as ever on “Body Memory” and “Sue Me,” the sort of tracks which go a long way to justifying the record’s whopping 71 minutes. This is a transcendent work of avant-garde music from an artist still setting herself impossibly high standards, with the assistance of one of the decade’s most groundbreaking electronic artists.

I was done with Jay. Notwithstanding the fact that he has never recorded two great albums in a row, the respective messes that were “The Blueprint 3” and “Magna Carta Holy Grail” made it seem unlikely that capitalism’s favourite rapper could ever again elevate the artform over the commerce. A lot happened in between to get us here in 2017, with my most surprising record of the year. This became a must-hear when I was paralysed by the deft provocations and thundering keys of “The Story of O.J.” and its jaw-dropping visual. Anyone who doubts the value to hip hop albums of sticking to one producer need look no further than the magic No I.D. works on this album. I was still scoffing when I heard Jay cite “Illmatic” as an influence, but he nails that, from the golden age feel of the music (“Marcy Me” is a major throwback), to the concise length of the album. Nothing feels overdone, so often a problem for Hov, and every track seems to come stacked with something genuinely insightful, none more so than the confessional title track. Like Beyonce’s “Lemonade” and Solange’s “A Seat At The Table,” the record is as much about America as it is any family feud. Jay had my music quote of the year when asked what he would say to anyone who accurately surmised that we all got three top-notch albums out of Jay’s unthinkable infidelity; “the three of us went into that elevator as great artists.”

BellWitch — 7. Mirror Reaper

BELL WITCH

My choice for top metal recording in 2017. First of all, let’s just say that that is hands down the album artwork of the year. “Mirror Reaper” builds spectacularly upon the considerable promise of the 2015 album “Four Phantoms” from the guitarless Seattle funeral doom outfit. Few bands have ever committed the feel of mourning to a record as perfectly, all the rawer on this one as it follows in the wake of the death of former drummer Adrian Guerra. Implementing enhanced elements of post-rock, the record, conceived as one 83-minute track, is still markedly a doom record, one in which chord progressions and segues between movements alike move like the shifting of tectonic plates or the creeping of lava. When remaining founder member Dylan Desmond sings clean, he still devastates, unleashing atmospheric angel dust. The undoubtedly purposeful flickers of light separate it from so much doom music. This is hugely ambitious and beautifully realised, one to be heard before it should be talked about. Attention will deservedly grow for this band.

PureComedy — 6. Pure Comedy

FATHER JOHN MISTY

When former Fleet Foxes drummer and rather prolific folk artist Josh Tillman reinvented himself as Father John Misty, high priest of acidic sarcasm and stab-happy cultural criticism, an album like this didn’t seem round the corner, but his third under the moniker seems likely to prove his best in my book. Employing folk structures with lush orchestration, Tillman’s lyrics evoke Bill Hicks as much as anyone. The same acerbic take on entertaining ourselves to death with a burgeoning cult following, I was one of the converted he was preaching to when I was lucky enough to see his excellent live show last year. Reluctantly appointed as a spokesperson against the 45th President when “Pure Comedy” dropped barely three months after inauguration, the lyrics are the main pull here. The opening lines of the title track provide one of the all-time great opening sections out of the gate, and nobody who hears the opening of “Total Entertainment Forever” is likely to forget that imagery either. The epic centrepiece “Leaving LA” is the centre of gravity, borrowed straight from the aforementioned Hicks’ “Arizona Bay” playbook, and it’s between that and the inadvertently centrist “Two Wildly Different Perspectives” for a track to rival the previous two Misty albums’ “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” and “Bored In The USA” in terms of songs with the most crossover potential. The album meanders and will lose anyone not sold on its thematics, but the orchesteral arrangements sound good enough to eat and sometimes become the best thing about a track, as on “I’m Growing Old On Magic Mountain.” “In Twenty Years Or So” ends the record on a hopeful note which might seem out of place at first, but then again, that’s another Hicks trick. The man was forever telling us life was a ride, something the Misty character is likely to empathise with.

Set in Bryneich in medieval Britain, a kingdom stretching as far into Scotland as the Forth and down through Northumberland and Durham, the freaky folk of Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Richard Dawson on the visionary “Peasant” positively bristles with literary heft. Packed with madcap group choruses and odd instrumentation (is that a synth on “Prostitute”?!), the album shouldn’t be underestimated for its folk riffage, tangled guitar drawing influence from Indian qawwali music which unfurls into something glorious at least once a track. Dawson expressed that he had no interest in doing a “Game of Thrones” album and it shows (HBO’s motherlode is better suited to folk metal anyway, a genre mystifyingly never utilised in its promotional material). This, with its tales of everyday characters, is something more fundamental and homespun, like the tales, fictional and otherwise, inherited by generations. Although often twisted, sometimes a tad nightmarish, it examines community and the interactions between people and fate. To me, it studies the relationship between the English and their land, a resurgent topic in our Brexit age, a musical contemporary to Ben Wheatley’s hallucinogenic “A Field In England” and Paul Kingsnorth’s gripping novel “The Wake.” Moreover, it does so uniquely, one of the most inventive folk albums of recent times, one of two triumphant folk achievements at the centre of this list.

ADeeperUnderstanding — 4. A Deeper Understanding

THE WAR ON DRUGS

Nobody would have envied Adam Granduciel for having to follow up 2014’s immaculate, Springsteenian opus “Lost In The Dream.” He chooses to do so with a collection of ten tightly-wound, skyscraping compositions, which are ever edging towards climaxes that sometimes occur, but often don’t need to. “Thinking Of A Place” is the best example; the epicentre of the record is a becalming epic which progresses through its sections with the speed and strength of snowflakes. Its big climax constantly appears to be in the rear view mirror rather than out in front. Granduciel’s lyrics similarly evaporate on contact with air, and regularly reoccur, but they feel far more powerful than they mean. So many of the records on this list push at the boundaries of modern pop music but none pack as many sing and hum-a-long moments. It seemed unthinkable that this could be bigger than its predecessor, yet it somehow is; witness the statuesque peaks of “Strangest Thing.” The crystalline guitar lines of “Holding On” and “Nothing To Find” splutter apart like heartbeats. Call it love songs from the Rust Belt if needs be, but this is an almighty slab of Heartland rock, towering tracks which left the other big indie comebacks of the year from The National and Fleet Foxes in their shadow. Where to next take a sound so heavily indebted to 80s rock is unclear; but Granduciel evidences an immense control and deftness to sculpt this amazing record from such tried and tested cues.

The greatest musical twist of the year came with Alejandro Ghersi’s decision to commit his voice to his records for the first time, with the encouragement of his collaborator and friend Bjork. Having already marked himself out as a most single-minded producer with previous full-lengths “Xen” and “Mutant,” this self-titled effort is his most wondrous yet. The voice of the London-based Venezuelan is a marvel; delicate and haunting, it adds a touching vulnerability to the regular barbarism of his atmospherics and feels like the final piece needed to complete Arca’s vision. Singing in his native Spanish only renders the effect all the more alien to these untrained ears, yet all the more powerful for the fact that he can conjure such limitless emotion without formal meaning. At its finest the album effortlessly evokes the “Silencio” scene in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” one of the most affecting in cinema, which is also testament to some of the man’s most widescreen productions to date, as they occur here. The listener cannot doubt the intimacy of much of this album, but will come away bearing signs of the almost violent yearn which has been ever-present in Arca’s music, but now seems to claw its way through the maelstrom in the form of the human voice, revealing itself in all its tempered majesty and luminescent necessity, a touch of irony for an artist whose work with the visual artist Jesse Kanda has been heavily rooted in the physical rather than the aural form. Little is as satisfying as following an artist and still being there when they reach the very top, and though it has taken only a short span of albums for Arca, what is laid out on this record bares the amount and weight of living behind it.

“Culture” is a far cry from the string of gimmicky hits which propelled America’s now biggest hip hop group from (famously) the north side of hip hop’s reconvened capital in Atlanta to current superstardom, such as “Versace,” “Look At My Dab” and even the latter-day “Pipe It Up.” Dismissed as such since day one, things turned with the super-smash “Bad and Boujee,” a track and video impossible to tear away from. I didn’t listen to any song more in 2017, and it powers this album alongside the not so much earworm as earsnake that is “T-Shirt.” After giving us the Dab, Takeoff, Offset and Quavo give us the album. Everything that makes “Culture” their ultimate artistic statement is missing from last week’s sequel “Culture II.” That is to say, whether accidentally or not, the album is measured by the inch, the guests (Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz, the fourth Migo Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert) are spare and seem selected with care and only the most elite beats are allowed, whether from trap wonder boy Metro Boomin (“Bad and Boujee”), the veteran Zaytoven (“Big On Big” is luxury beatmaking which bursts at the seams) or a host of the finest complementary artists (the way Ricky Racks laces “What The Price” is a personal fave).

The tripled up flow which brought Migos to attention is there, but they are undervalued as MCs at your peril; this is mainstream hip hop at its most charismatic, each rapper displaying unquantifiable magnetism and a diversity of technical approaches. Then there are the ad-libs, that other calling card, the frequency of such signatures being enough to display how creative these guys are at brand-building. The way they add to the end of one another’s bars runs us through the spectrum, whether adding humour or merely an inimitable texture to the track. How they execute this so effectively, across every track, is why it would fascinate me to witness their working arrangements in the studio. If these tracks were tossed up casually, as golden age heads seem insistent on thinking, then that is more impressive in its way as a display of artistic singularity at work. Everything I hear here suggests a process realised to perfection. Rarely has an entire album, as a piece of music but also as a pop culture spectacle, felt as correct. Whatever happens in the Migos story from here, those like myself who spent so many hours with “Culture” in 2017 will continue to fly its flag.

This album instantly finds Lamar in his most paranoid and worrisome vein, turning his potential legacy over and over in his hands for a near hour, all too aware of the heaviness of the ability to craft that legacy which still also rests in those same hands. It is not the experimental, confrontational, mind-bending, best-of-decade titan of a record that “To Pimp A Butterfly” was, but it seems to me critics have found difficulty in expressing exactly what to say about it while simultaneously recognising its importance. What is most surprising about that is that the album’s intro seems to give the game away before even the sample of Geraldo Rivera of Fox News is employed to pantomime effect. For me the album is about the assassination of Kendrick Lamar, an event which doesn’t seem unlikely in the current American tinderbox. Look at that title. We hear the event at the outset, and we then hear an album-long pondering, in virtuosic style, of the exact destiny of the young and highly successful black artist in the USA.

We hear it over an undoubtedly expensive selection of beats. Eyebrows would have been raised by Mike Will Made It, but “DNA” seemed to be everybody’s favourite track on the album, a pyrotechnic opening gambit. “Humble,” a technicolour lead single, sounds precisely like the sort of cartoonish carnival theme primetime Eminem, the last rapper to sound this electric on track, used to enlist Dr Dre to open his own records with. Even a U2 feature on “XXX” ends up seamless. Lamar is still popping wheelies on the zeitgeist, but at a variety of paces and sometimes with great subtlety. The reversal of the tracklist on the album’s recent special edition suggests structural interplay as well as anxiety at one with the central theme I picked out earlier. The duality of the juxtaposed song titles is notable (“Pride” followed by “Humble,” “Lust” followed by “Love”). Call it a tour de force. Fidelity is a major consideration, on the Rihanna-featuring “Loyalty” and the heavenly pop of “Love,” perhaps Lamar’s most accessible track ever and a gorgeous one to boot. The record closes with some trifecta; the Alchemist-helmed “Fear” is the simmering 8-minute suite where Kendrick pointedly cleanses himself of the album’s narrative scuzz and distills soup for the soul from the resulting miasma. “God” is one of the most inexplicably tear-jerky cuts in hip hop history. The closing (or opening) “Duckworth” is startling story-telling hip hop, all the crazier for being true.

The paradox of “DAMN.” is that while a more conventional record on the surface, albeit still an expansive one, it may be more complicated a creation than the flamethrown free-jazz and verbal gymnastics of “To Pimp A Butterfly.” Nobody came away from that one unscathed by its intentions; the album was never about Kendrick Lamar. This one is initially more mystifying but slowly reveals itself as a study of the artist, encased in the magma of 2017, very sure of what is behind him but not of the implications for what may come next and quite how brutal they may be on both a personal and physical level. One of the most incredible things about this album’s ability to dig under the skin is that shortly after its release I dreamt that Lamar was murdered and awoke from one of the most emotionally distressing dreams I can remember having. It is the believability of it amid the chaos of our decade which chills to the core, something this artist at the very peak of his powers, on a Dylan-esque run of albums to cite an equivalent example from another decade of sheer tumult, seems to understand well and which he stores at the forefront of his mind on the most fascinating and endlessly explorable character study of this and many years.