This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.
Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years:
Also, a show I organized at MoMA PS1 this past March for Downtown Boys and Priests, who are making some of the most compelling politicized music in America right now.
Gun Outfit: Possession Sound (2010)
I got deep into Gun Outfit when they released Hard Coming Down. They're a fairly common band on paper: Olympia punks making understated guitar rock influenced by gold-hearted country and folk. But I'd group them in with Parquet Courts as young bands representing a kind of intellectual Slacker-dom that's pretty rare nowadays—they sound especially romantic to me, having grown up as an overachiever, basically, with a lot of quantifiable goals ("read this", "hear that", "intern here", "pitch there", etc). Their music calms me down and makes me laugh and think.
Merchandise: "Become What You Are" (2012)
These have been strange years for me, ages 20 to 25. I can say with confidence that I have been at least three different people. I work on staff at Pitchfork now, but when 2010 started most of my watershed music experiences were linked to deep listening at my intensely pro-underground college radio station, WNYU 89.1 FM. I was a junior and interning at SPIN, which was still in print. Things I associate with 2010 include listening to Theater of Eternal Music for the first time, reading Yoko Ono's Grapefruit and Patti Smith's memoir, and bartending shows/mopping floors at quasi-legal warehouse venues in Brooklyn and Queens. I somehow managed to be living at a dormitory at the intersection of Soho and Little Italy, an area full of musical ghosts and unfathomable excess, and my bedroom had this unbelievable 14th-floor view of Downtown Manhattan.
I would sit on my bed and stare out the window listening to records—a lot of Cat Power's Dear Sir, Arthur Russell's Calling Out of Context, the Zola Jesus EPs. I'd look out at this sea of lights and buildings (mostly banks, I presume) and try to wrap my head around what would happen after college aside from being in a lot of debt. Get up, flip the record, keep thinking about this part of the city, how it had changed so irreversibly and how I would, too—never fixed to just one thing, always morphing, like New York is supposed to. I changed more from 2010-2014 than any other part of my life and I'm sure most people would say the same of their "early 20s." Point here being: Everyone should have a song like this, coded with ideas about individualism and self-manifestation and growing—by an idea-drunk band of weirdos named after a Fugazi song with a singer who sounds like Morrissey—to soundtrack this totally fucking insane, uncertain period of adulthood and I def. cried the first time I heard it. I don't have windows anymore, but I do have this song.
Albums
1. Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel
2. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange
3. Merchandise: Children of Desire
4. Waxahatchee: American Weekend
5. Robyn: Body Talk
6. Drake: Take Care
7. Grimes: Visions
8. Beyoncé: Beyoncé
9. Majical Cloudz: Impersonator
10. Deafheaven: Sunbather
11. Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
12. White Lung: Deep Fantasy
13. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
14. Swearin: Swearin
15. Body/Head: Coming Apart
16. Cat Power: Sun
17. Gun Outfit: Possession Sound
18. Zola Jesus: Conatus
19. Iceage: You're Nothing
20. Milk Music: Cruise Your Illusion
Songs
1. Robyn: "Call Your Girlfriend"
2. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
3. Merchandise: "Become What You Are"
4. Grimes: "Oblivion"
5. Frank Ocean: "Bad Religion"
6. Deafheaven: "Dream House"
7. Julia Holter: "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art"
8. Drake: "Worst Behaviour"
9. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
10. Perfect Pussy: "I"
11. Antony and the Johnsons: "Cut the World"
12. Japandroids: "The House That Heaven Built"
13. Dum Dum Girls: "Lord Knows"
14. Lana Del Rey: "Radio"
15. Kendrick Lamar: "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe"
16. Dirty Projectors: "Dance for You"
17. Priests: "Personal Planes"
18. Allo Darlin': "Tallulah"
19. Perfume Genius: "Mr. Peterson"
20. Shellshag: "1984"