Welcome to another installment of Ask A Music Critic! And thanks to everyone who has sent me questions. Please keep them coming at steve.hyden@uproxx.com.
I’m already seeing 10th anniversary posts for 2015 albums. Some of my favorites from that year are Beach House, Deerhunter, Deafheaven, Viet Cong, Protomartyr, Royal Headache, and Thee Oh Sees. How do you rate 2015 for album releases and what’s some of your personal favorites? — Alex from Melbourne, Australia
Australia! I love Australia! I hope you don’t mind, but I edited out the “u” in “favorites,” so as not to confuse my American readers. I also removed all the adorable koala bear noises from your email, so we can stay focused on the task at hand.
I have also noticed the rush of mid-2010s nostalgia lately. Lots of people apparently are looking back fondly on the final year before the Trump era. For me, it was the year I turned 38. Was I ever so youthful? My cheeks were so rosy, my beard so free of gray. I was personally invested in the first season of Mr. Robot and I tolerated hearing “Uptown Funk” every 15 minutes. Pretty heady time.
Musically speaking, I regard 2015 as a solid year, but not an all-time year. If there’s an overarching trend, it’s that a lot of artists put out good (or really good) albums, but not necessarily their best albums. Let’s start with some of the acts you mentioned. Depression Cherry is considered a really good Beach House album, but probably not as good as Teen Dream. Fading Frontier is a worthy Deerhunter release, but few would put it above Halcyon Digest. New Bermuda is a good effort by Deafheaven, but Sunbather is their definitive LP. The same can be said of several other indie or indie-adjacent artists — Lana Del Rey, Sufjan Stevens, Kurt Vile, Car Seat Headrest, Wilco, Jason Isbell, and Joanna Newsom all did good work in 2015, but you would likely pick a record from a different year as your personal favorite.
As far as my own personal favorite LP of the year, I want to briefly hold off on answering that question. In the meantime, let’s take a wider view of the year, so we can really marinate in the 2015-ness of it all.
THE BEST-SELLING ALBUM OF 2015: ADELE’S 25
This one doesn’t require a personal value judgement. It’s all about the hard, cold data. And in 2015, nobody moved more units than Adele, who sold just over eight million copies of her third album. Because she only seems to put out new music every five years or so, it’s easy to forget amid the nonstop media onslaught of megastars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé that Adele has owned the nation’s minivans for the past 15-plus years. The silent majority of mothers can’t get enough of this record.
THE CRITICAL CONSENSUS FAVORITE OF 2015: KENDRICK LAMAR’S TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY
As my friend Rob Mitchum shows in his annual spreadsheet charting year-end lists, Kendrick killed it with music writers in 2015 in a way few artists ever replicate. He landed in in the Top 10 on 15 different publication lists, far more than any other artist that year. (Courtney Barnett came closest, landing in the Top 10 on 10 lists with her debut album Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit.) Even more impressive, Kendrick topped seven of those lists and landed at No. 2 on five more.
(It’s worth noting that Charli XCX’s Brat was even more dominant in 2024, landing in the Top 10 on a whopping 29 lists, with 12 No. 1’s.)
THE MOST 2015 ALBUM OF 2015: HAMILTION (ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING)
We’re moving into the subjective categories now, but just barely. Is there a better choice for most 2015 record than the project that inserted Lin-Manuel Miranda into our grills for all eternity? One of my most lasting memories of the year is reading a different thinkpiece every other day by some media professional who lucked into an absurdly expensive Hamilton ticket, and came away waxing rhapsodic about the experience in terms that seemed histrionic in the moment and in retrospect are sort of silly. I can’t imagine what it was like to be a high school kid in 2015 who was involved in theater. This record is either your life or the bane of your existence.
2015 ALBUM THAT AGED THE BEST: DESTROYER’S POISON SEASON
Ten years ago, I would have grouped this with all the indie and indie-adjacent acts who put out good (or really good) albums in 2015, but not necessarily their best album. A decade later, however, I have talked myself into at least considering that this might be Dan Bejar’s finest. It gives you all the elements that you want from a Destroyer album — there’s the “bar band” Destroyer, the “yacht rock” Destroyer, there’s the “chamber music” Destroyer,” there’s the “making arcane references to Escape From New York and Billy Joel” Destroyer. Poison Season rules.
(The flaw in this argument is that my favorite Destroyer album changes depending on whichever Destroyer album I played most recently. But that’s a conversation for a different day.)
2015 THAT AGED THE WORST: BEACH SLANG’S THE THINGS WE DO TO FIND PEOPLE WHO FEEL LIKE US
2015 was an unusual year for me in the sense that I didn’t publish an official year-end list. I lost my job in October after the website I was working for was unceremoniously shut down. (Actually, I technically still had a job since I was under contract. I was just paid to do nothing until the contract expired eight months later. Best job I ever had.) However, I did post a list on the social media app former known as Twitter, and this album was at the very top. When I still was being paid to write in 2015, I described it as “a mix of nostalgia and forward-looking optimism communicated via fearlessly shiny riffs and florid clichés redeemed by the all-in conviction of a true believer.” I’ll take 2015 Me’s word on that because I have not listened to this record in at least five years.
Honorable mention: On a more macro level, Tobias Jesso Jr.’s Goon is notorious as a 2015 flavor of the month that aged like milk. And I feel okay saying that because Jesso went on to a successful career as a pop songwriter and producer. (He has two credits on 25, which I assume bought him a large house or a fleet of expensive cars.) So he can take the heat. Regarding Goon, I initially liked its throwback retro rock sound, which evoked Todd Rundgren or Randy Newman’s most accessible moments. And then I interviewed Jesso and found that he was — how do I say this respectfully? — a bit of a simple-minded himbo. The conversation made me like the record less, which is a less common phenomenon for me than you might think.
MOST INFLUENTIAL 2015 ALBUM: CHRIS STAPLETON’S TRAVELER
Country music is in the midst of a mainstream commercial moment in the mid-2020s, and it’s striking how much of that music resembles this record. At the time it was considered somewhat of an outlier, a neo-traditionalist hit that racked up Nashville industry awards in what felt like a rebuke of the dead-eyed bro-country hordes. But now it just sounds like the establishment. A burly-voiced quasi-outlaw type with genuine pop bonafides, Stapleton set a template that artists like Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Luke Combs and (to a lesser degree) Morgan Wallen later took to the bank.
Honorable mention: My second favorite record of 2015 — and the one I have certainly played the most — is Currents by Tame Impala. It’s hard to overstate how much indie rock, pop and even R&B and hip-hop sounds like this album. It’s easily one of the touchstone indie-adjacent releases of the past 10 years. And it felt like that was preordained when it came out. I hung out with Kevin Parker in an L.A. diner for a profile before Currents dropped, and he already seemed bewildered by the success he hadn’t yet fully experienced. “I used to smoke weed and I don’t even smoke weed anymore,” he told me, “because, it’s like, the world’s intense enough as it is.”
MOST MEMORY-HOLED ALBUM OF 2015: DONNIE TRUMPET & THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT’S SURF
On Rob’s annual year-end spreadsheet, this is the 29th most critically acclaimed of 2015, right before Jason Isbell, Deerhunter and Beach House and just ahead of Wilco, Earl Sweatshirt, Chris Stapleton, and Kacey Musgraves. You could ask 100 music fans to name one song from this album, and I doubt you would have greater than a five percent hit rate. It has been wiped off the face of the planet. I think it’s a ska record? The title sounds like the name of a ska record? I could just press play, I guess, but I don’t want to.
The album’s original appeal stemmed from the group’s connection to Chance The Rapper, who might be the most memory-holed superstar of the 2010s. So, Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment suffer from the double memory-hole, a devastating predicament to be sure.
Honorable mention: It seems cruel to pick on possible ska bands when Dr. Dre put out Compton, generated glowing press for about three days, sold almost 300,000 records, and then convinced the world that none of it really happened.
[One more special category before I get to my favorite album of 2015,]
MY PERSONAL MOST HATED ALBUM OF 2015: FALL OUT BOY’S AMERICAN BEAUTY/AMERICAN PSYCHO
This band has pissed me off for years by being irredeemably terrible, with a uniquely grating and obnoxious singer and a bad habit of taking the worst aspects of emo and pop and turning them into inedible sonic shit sandwiches. But I was singularly offended when they dared to call their 2013 comeback LP Save Rock And Roll, which is sort of like claiming that the United States military “saved” Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. But then they really crossed the line with this album, which unleashed their most annoying (and annoyingly popular) song ever, the crushingly ubiquitous “Centuries,” a favorite of the sadomasochists who pick the bumper music on sports telecasts.
Seriously, if you take nothing else from this column, remember this: Fuck Fall Out Boy.
[Sorry, I’ll finally answer your question now.]
MY PERSONAL FAVORITE ALBUM OF 2015: FATHER JOHN MISTY’S I LOVE YOU, HONEYBEAR
You know that list I mentioned earlier, the one with Beach Slang at the top of it? This album wasn’t even on it! 2015 Me was not smart! I dread discovering what 2025 Me is like in 10 years.
source https://uproxx.com/music/what-are-the-best-albums-of-2015/
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