The Best Album From Every Year of the 2020s So Far

Published Oct 17, 2026, 4:53 PM EDT

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While the golden age of albums might be over, if there ever was a golden age (one potentially killed by streaming, or maybe killed a bit earlier, with the jump from vinyl to CDs), albums do still get released. They're not the only way to consume music, but a good many serious artists keep on putting out studio albums as the primary way of getting their music out there.

And in the 2020s, there have still been some great albums, even if there might not be quite as many as you'd find year by year in, say, the second half of the 1960s, or throughout the 1970s. The following releases will hopefully show the decade’s still got a lot to offer, because this is a rundown of the best album from each year of the 2020s so far.

7 'We Will Always Love You' (2020)

The Avalanches

To acknowledge the obvious first, the best album by The Avalanches remains Since I Left You (2000), which is potentially one of the greatest albums of all time, no joke. It was famously assembled almost entirely from samples, and the commitment to making music out of pre-existing music hasn’t been followed exactly in later albums by The Avalanches, but the duo (with plenty of guest musicians on all their subsequent albums) has continued sampling quite a lot, and making great music regardless.

Enter We Will Always Love You, which isn't widely regarded as a masterpiece, but should be. In time, it might well have a similar reputation to Since I Left You, and it definitely deserves that, because it’s almost just as good. How about this: if you're a fan of Daft Punk, Since I Left You is Discovery, and We Will Always Love You is Random Access Memories. If you're a fan of both electronic music-focused duos, look inside your heart. You'll know such a claim to be true.

6 'Mercurial World' (2021)

Magdalena Bay

2024 will be gotten to shortly, but it was a strong year for music that saw the release of Imaginal Disk, which was the second studio album by Magdalena Bay, and an improvement upon their first album, Mercurial World. But if you're going year by year, and highlighting only one album for every year, then something like Imaginal Disk is at a disadvantage, while Mercurial World benefits from being released during 2021, which was a quieter year for truly great music.

That all might sound like preamble to justify calling a middling album a great one, but it should be stressed that even if Imaginal Disk is more impressive, Mercurial World is still a pretty fantastic debut. Magdalena Bay does weird yet compelling – and undeniably catchy – things within the realm of the pop genre here, but it’s also got enough by way of alternative elements to make calling it “just” pop feel misleading. It’s a pretty great album, with highlights track-wise including the likes of “Secrets (Your Fire),” “You Lose!,” and (especially) “Chaeri.”

5 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' (2022)

Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar peaked in 2015. It is okay. It’s like Kanye West doing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010, and being in a position where he can never top it. The same can potentially be said about Frank Ocean doing Blonde in 2016, but unlike West and Lamar, Ocean has not even attempted to release an album as a follow-up, at least at the time of writing. It’s a shame. Even something half as good as Blonde would be amazing.

This is an album that’s about half as good as 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, but half as good as an absolute masterpiece is ultimately pretty great.

Take a look at Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, for example. This is an album that’s about half as good as 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, but half as good as an absolute masterpiece is ultimately pretty great. The other Kendrick Lamar albums of the 2010s are probably superior, too. Like, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is also a masterpiece, and Damn., while not as good, can still be admired for showcasing Kendrick Lamar’s capacity to be approachable and borderline-radio friendly. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is him getting a bit strange and ambitious once again, and even if it’s not as conceptually amazing or satisfying as Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and To Pimp a Butterfly, it still well and truly does enough things right to be worth a listen if you’ve enjoyed any prior Kendrick Lamar albums.

4 'Javelin' (2023)

Sufjan Stevens

Like with Kendrick Lamar, there are plenty of other great Sufjan Stevens albums from the past decade or two, but it’s harder to pick out a single magnum opus for Stevens. 2005’s Illinois is probably the best candidate, given how emotionally ambitious it is, and for the fact that it feels like a true epic (or whatever the music equivalent of an epic is), but then 2015’s Carrie & Lowell is also a masterpiece, albeit a more emotionally consistent one, being about loss, grief, death, and countless other heavy topics.

Javelin scratches a similar itch, but instead of being about a parent passing away, it’s about a loved one passing away, ending a romantic relationship. This makes Javelin an album about the difficulties of love and the difficulties of dealing with the empty feeling that comes when a loved one is gone. To call it devastating would be a massive understatement, with it being – both musically and lyrically – easily one of the most intensely emotional albums of the decade so far, without a doubt.

3 'No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead' (2024)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

As mentioned before, there were a surprisingly large number of great albums in 2024, and it’s probably been the best year of the decade so far for music. So, in acknowledging that, here are some honorable mentions: Charli XCX’s Brat (because of course), the aforementioned Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay, Songs of a Lost World by The Cure, and Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us. Oh, and Kendrick Lamar released another well-received album: GNX. Further, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess blew up this year, almost feeling like a 2024 release as a result, though it did initially come out (whilst not receiving as much attention) in 2023.

But the best album of 2024 is one that you can no longer find on streaming, because the band have principles and have always been politically/socially conscious, to put it mildly. That band is Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and they’ve specialized in making absorbing music for troubled times since the 1990s. No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead is the band making an album about the ongoing Gaza war, with a title that speaks for itself. The music is instrumental, not to mention ominous, beautiful, powerful, and any other number of sweeping adjectives you want to throw at it. It’s thematically and sonically heavy-going stuff, but incredibly rewarding and bold if you're willing to engage with it.

2 'Lonely People with Power' (2025)

Deafheaven

The heaviness found in Javelin comes about because of how sad and emotionally intense it is, while the heaviness in No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead has to do with its political/social message and the unapologetic bluntness of it all. Then you come to Deafheaven’s Lonely People with Power, and this one’s just plain heavy in terms of sound, since the band here is a black metal one.

What it comes down to is that this sounds loud, even if you have the volume down, and also, you can’t really make out the lyrics. But even if you don’t usually think of yourself as a fan of that kind of music, Lonely People with Power might well still have something to offer for you. There’s a lot here to get lost in, and alongside 2013’s Sunbather, it’s an album that shows how Deafheaven is a good entry point if you want to get into this sort of metal.

1 'No Bad Memories' (2026)

The Avalanches

At the time of writing, 2026 is not over, so this might be a bit premature, but oh well. No Bad Memories is a phenomenal and currently very new album, and it’s another one by The Avalanches. If you're scratching your head, seeing The Avalanches take a spot for 2020, and now again being in the spot for 2026, and you're wondering if this whole ranking was just an excuse to gush about The Avalanches, then you'd be right. Congrats. You’ve been played.

This is Avalanches o’clock now. It’s The Avalanches and no one else. There is no escape. Listen to this duo’s music. Listen to it all, even (or maybe especially) the stuff that was released before the 2020s. Few musical acts active right now are as exciting, with the loneliness and isolation of the music on We Will Always Love You being perfect for the way the world was in 2020, and the nostalgia of No Bad Memories being absolutely perfect in 2026. It’s a look at the early days of the internet, and maybe the period right before the internet felt like it was everywhere, and so it’s ahead of the curve in terms of being nostalgic about the early to mid-2000s, because you're going to start seeing nostalgia for that everywhere in the next few years or so. The Avalanches are thinking ahead while thinking behind/back in time. What an act, and what music.