The best albums of 2021

If most albums described as "indie-pop" these days sound like pensive Sofia Coppola movies with muted color palettes, "Juno" is like one of those cartoons where anvils don't result in brain hemorrhages, but spurts of gold stars and scrunched-up accordion bodies.

Drawing from the traditions of feel-good songwriters like Natasha Bedingfield and Y2K trendsetters like Missy Elliott, Californian newcomer Remi Wolf has created a technicolor world with its own interior logic.

Although her lyrics allude to darker plot points, like alcoholism and her fear of abandonment, an issue can be addressed here with a cheeky punchline or a surreal group chant. Wolf seems to think in squiggles, not linear progressions, and it led to one of the year's most lively and refreshing releases.

When Insider asked Tinashe to name a song that best represents "333," her second album as an independent artist, she selected "Small Reminders," a poignant ode to her own power.

"Doing me, so I stay on my own / When I get to the top, it's a wrap," she sings in the first verse. "Ain't nobody telling me shit about shit, and that's that."

Since severing ties with her label in 2019, Tinashe has been able to flex her musical muscles like never before. She's happy to bounce between genres, experiment with elaborate production, and select collaborators based on gut instinct, rather than "clout or numbers or who people would expect me to work with."

"I just want to focus on what makes the song sound better," she said.

Naturally, "333" is an aural translation of her newfound freedom. The adventurous tracklist traverses a range of tastes and influences, from sparkly pop and R&B to sumptuous jazz and even EDM. Tinashe doesn't sound indecisive, but rather empowered; her elastic vocals thrive in each domain. If it feels good, she makes it sound good.

Despite its title, "Blue Weekend" paints everyday dreams and anxieties in dazzling, varied hues — including the confident red smolder of "Smile," the punky hot-pink streaks of "Play the Greatest Hits," and the rich earthy tone of "No Hard Feelings."

To achieve the album's grand emotional scope, Wolf Alice worked episodically. For each song, the band said they selected a movie or TV show trailer that represented a precise, pinpointed feeling. Then, they would mute the clip and play the track on top to make sure their energies aligned.

"We'll be like, 'We want the feeling of putting your head out of a car window' or 'the feeling of running towards a festival tent where you can hear music in the distance,'" bassist Theo Ellis told NME. "And then a producer just goes, 'Fuck off,' and we spend three months trying to figure it out."

This explains how "Blue Weekend" sounds like the soundtrack for a chaotically genius coming-of-age drama, like the 1999 cult classic "Go," or perhaps a more polished season of "Skins." It may have been a laborious process, but it paid off.

Clocking in at just 22 minutes, Vince Staples' fourth LP is a triumph of cohesion and brevity.

Produced entirely by Kenny Beats, "Vince Staples" scales back the punch of previous hits like "FUN!" and "BagBak" in favor of sparse beats and grayscale instrumentals, casting a brighter spotlight on Staples' trademark wit.

The Long Beach native is one of the most distinctive and incisive rappers working today. On "Vince Staples," the substance of his lyrics hasn't changed dramatically, but the stripped-down surroundings allow Staples to cut straight to the heart of his narratives, sharpen the delivery, and discard the accessories.

Fittingly, his self-titled album is the barest and most mesmeric self-portrait in his catalog.

"After spending the last five years writing about grief, I wanted our follow up to be about joy," Michelle Zauner said when she announced her third album as Japanese Breakfast.

The result, "Jubilee," is a Gushers-like burst of candied guitar riffs and colorful electropop. Even in her shadowy moments, Zauner seems determined to find streams of light. The dark fatalism of "In Hell," for example, is adorned with plinky synths and triumphant horns.

Much like the fabled pursuit of happiness, "Jubilee" is an album that insists upon movement — rushing, bubbling, sometimes receding. Whatever the pace, Zauner refuses to keep still. Even the closing ballad "Posing for Cars" starts slow, but works itself up to an ecstatic release.

Joy is not a permanent state, it seems, but a quest.

Listening to "Collapsed in Sunbeams" feels like passing notes with your best friend during math class.

Arlo Parks is a warmhearted songwriter, mixing blanket statements of optimism and support ("You shouldn't be afraid to cry in front of me," "You're not alone like you think you are") with specific details and personal stories.

Throughout the album, she name-drops everyone from a friend named Millie who loves "apricots and blunts" to rock band frontmen Thom Yorke and Robert Smith. She openly describes struggles with unrequited love ("Eugene") and self-doubt ("Violet").

Parks paints herself as a close confidant, so that when she offers generic pieces of advice like, "You gotta trust how you feel inside and shine," it doesn't sound cliché, but sincere.

This is best represented by "Black Dog," the album's sixth and best track, which begins with an exquisite one-line love letter: "I'd lick the grief right off your lips."

In the chorus, Parks captures the deceptive calm of a friend's depressive episode, offering comfort in the form of a few basic requests ("Let's go to the corner store and buy some fruit," "Just take your medicine and eat some food"). She understands how painful it can be to simply exist, but how worthwhile it is to try.

With her official debut album, Marie Ulven transforms late-night spirals into mosh pit-primed bangers and arena-ready anthems.

The Norwegian singer-songwriter, better known by her stage name girl in red, rose to fame as a prophet of "bedroom pop," writing honestly about queer desire and mental illness.

"If I Could Make It Go Quiet" examines what those emotions and experiences might sound like if you left the house and everyone knew your secrets. Ulven, who is the sole songwriter credited on all 11 songs, splatters her psyche across the tracklist. Her lyrics are as candid and gutsy as ever, but now, the production matches her lack of restraint.

Lucy Dacus' third solo album is a collection of stories from her Christian upbringing in early-aughts Virginia, packaged as a lush rock album.

It has also been hailed by critics as a "brilliant coming-of-age memoir," "a powerful post-adolescent text," and "a straight-up masterpiece."

"Home Video" boasts the most tactile, striking imagery in Dacus' tenure as a celebrated songwriter. She takes us from vacation bible school in summer 2007, where she falls for a fellow camper who writes bad poetry and blasts Slayer in the bunk ("VBS"), to a bar during her freshman year of college, where she sits across from her friend's long-absent father and feels a set of nails digging into her knee ("Thumbs").

Each song plays like a short film, projected onto the inside wall of your chest instead of a theater screen. You can't technically see it, but you can feel it.

Lil Nas X could have stuffed an entire tracklist full of glowy hits like "Call Me by Your Name" and "Industry Baby," and it would have been delightful.

Instead, he delivered an impressively varied debut album, bounding gracefully in between bright acoustic guitar, trap beats, diaristic emo-pop, and stadium balladry — infusing each mood with warm melodies and glossy production fit for any top pop star.

"On 'Montero,' Lil Nas makes vulnerability look easy," Insider's music editor Courteney Larocca wrote in our review. "It's like he believes making confessions about heartbreak or reflecting on his younger self's suicidal ideations is just what you do when you're drinkin' with your friends."

She added, "If 'Montero' is a house party, Lil Nas doesn't stay dancing in the living room or drinking in the kitchen; he's also the wallflower sharing secrets with a close friend in the corner, the guy sneaking off to the bedroom with his crush, and the loner dipping his feet into the pool out back."

Lindsey Jordan opens her second album as Snail Mail with a simple, shouted, soul-crushing question: "So why'd you wanna erase me, darling valentine?"

Like much of "Valentine," the title track is a plain-spoken plea for love masquerading as an eruption.

While other beloved indie prodigies like Clairo pulled back this year, retreating deeper into minimalism, Jordan expanded her musicality. She preserved her intimate songwriting while taking on more risks and taking up more space, wrapping her once-whispered secrets in strings, synths, electric guitar shredding, and razor-sharp hooks.

The result is an album more energetic and engrossing than her debut, enabling her vivid lyrics to demand the attention they deserve. The bigger sound of "Valentine" matches Jordan's big feelings, like she's grabbing your hand and jumping overboard into heartbreak.

"Doesn't obsession just become me?" Jordan sings knowingly in "Forever (Sailing)." The answer is an emphatic yes.

Finneas O'Connell is widely renowned for his work with Billie Eilish. In fact, he has produced every song his little sister has ever released, surrounding her distinctive voice with dental drills and dog barks.

O'Connell's official debut solo album "Optimist," released under the mononym FINNEAS, still boasts those eccentric sound effects, textured harmonies, and dreamy chords he's best known for.

But the album's observations, punchlines, and appetites are thrilling in a uniquely FINNEAS way. All 13 songs were written and produced by O'Connell alone, and each one bears his bluntly poetic brand of insight, whether he's yearning for the nostalgic pleasures of a past relationship, rolling his eyes at his own life, or struggling to make sense of mortality.

In 2018, few could have predicted Doja Cat's rise from cannibalistic cow cosplay to the upper echelons of pop stardom. But Doja didn't succeed by rejecting her reputation as an edgelord. Instead, she embraced and refined its appeal.

Though one could argue she still has plenty to prove, "Planet Her" plays like a victory lap. The album is almost lazily good. Doja is a natural entertainer, able to shift her flow at a moment's notice and adapt to any terrain, from the Afrobeat vibe of "Woman" to the '80s sparkle of "Kiss Me More."

Doja succeeds because she keeps things fun, freaky, and completely void of pretension — to the point where practically every song sounds like a hit.

Jazmine Sullivan's fourth album contains just eight full songs, and yet, "Heaux Tales" brims with enough power, passion, and perspicacity to fill a feature-length film.

Sullivan's pearls of resplendent R&B are strung together by spoken-word interludes from different women. They manage to clash and complement one another simultaneously, exposing strengths and shortcomings in each perspective: "Ari's Tale" is an ode to carnal desire, whereas "Rashida's Tale" warns of its destructive effects; Precious withholds sex from "broke" men to assert her high self-esteem, while Amanda weaponizes sex to cope with her lack of it.

By lending her platform to real-life stories of romantic travails, which exist alongside her own nuanced confessions, Sullivan offers more than a musical experience. "Heaux Tales" becomes an emotional exorcism, a space to unburden without fear of censure or shame.

"It's the visceral interludes from women in Sullivan's orbit that give the project the feel of a Terry McMillan novel, or a community of complicated Zolas made dimensional through song," Clover Hope wrote for Pitchfork, which named "Heaux Tales" the best album of 2021.

"As liberating as it is to be naked, there's no erasing the fear part, nor the circle of trust it takes to say the quiet parts out loud," Hope continued. "'Heaux Tales' wins because Sullivan holds the therapies of sisterhood sacred, confident no one can take them away."

Ashe's official debut album shares its creator's real name, as well as her moxie.

Despite Ashe's knack for trendy pop songwriting (she has previously penned tracks for stars like Demi Lovato and Niall Horan), the arrangements on "Ashlyn" are often grandiose, sometimes whimsical, existing somewhere in between Laurel Canyon in the late '60s and Alice's Wonderland.

The lyrics are similarly bold, full of unflinching confrontations with psychological abuse, wasted potential, and survivor's guilt.

"What if I don't get to make a second album? There's no promise of tomorrow," the singer-songwriter previously told Insider. "There's no guarantees that I get to do this again. So I might as well just write the album I want to write."

True, it's difficult to imagine many other artists who could combine these elements with such grace.

Ashe's nimble songwriting and ethereal vocals work like witchcraft, encouraging you to lean in, not look away. In the face of both love and loss, "Ashlyn" asks us to open our hearts wider.

"If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power" is the album Halsey was born to make, and she'll tell you so herself.

"Seven years ago I was 19 and in an apartment in New York working on my debut album and waxing poetic about wanting to make a record that felt like 'industrial pop à la Nine Inch Nails,'" Halsey wrote on Instagram. "I was not brave enough nor experienced enough to nail such a conquest."

Indeed, their debut album "Badlands" attempted to construct a fortress of admissions and oaths inside an avant-garde electro-pop landscape.

The ambition was bold and exciting, winning Halsey a legion of young fans and a handful of admiring critics (this one included). But their execution was admittedly uneven.

Now, Halsey has found the perfect home for her signature raw-heart lyricism, provided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (yes, of the aforementioned rock band Nine Inch Nails). She seems thrilled to rip into her own chest, thrashing and thriving amid serrated guitars and sinister synths.

"If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power" is expertly wrought, but for those of us on the receiving end, it's a primal experience. Even the calmer moments, like the closing ballad "Ya'aburnee," speak to instincts and urges, not reason.

Halsey never claims to have all the answers. By embracing the process, rather than leaping towards an idealized end result, she created her fullest and most fascinating album yet.

"Inside" is ostensibly a collection of 20 comedy songs, performed for Bo Burnham's latest Netflix special, which was filmed in solitude throughout the first year of the pandemic. Burnham is the sole person credited for direction, editing, writing, and musical production.

The robust tracklist contains several certifiable bops, including "FaceTime With my Mom (Tonight)," "Shit," and "Sexting," which boast the kind of gleaming, pseudo-R&B-inspired production that pop stars are clamoring to commission on a daily basis.

Burnham makes earworm creation look effortless, pairing the perfect piano chords with atmospheric harmonies and casually brilliant rhymes ("Emojis only, we don't need phonetical diction / We'll talk dirty like we're ancient Egyptians").

In truth, every single song is catchy, even (perhaps especially) the unhinged interludes about Jeff Bezos. From a purely aural perspective, "Inside" has all the makings of a classic pop album.

But from a psychological and cultural perspective, the album also includes challenging ideas about oppression, complicity, mental health, and performance.

Songs like "That Funny Feeling," "Goodbye," and "All Eyes On Me," which ranked at No. 15 on Insider's list of the year's best songs, combine self-referential lyrics with broad existential fears to create a spectacle that's both uncomfortable and cathartic.

Burnham may bill himself as a comedian, but with "Inside," he achieves what all great songwriters strive to accomplish, exposing his own underbelly to make his audience feel less alone.

Taylor Swift's fourth album "Red" has long held a unique position of power over the singer's disciples. Since its release in 2012, the audile mosaic of passion and heartbreak has sparked more critical acclaim, fan worship, and lyrical analysis than perhaps any other in Swift's extensive catalog.

In fact, Insider named "Red" the best album of the 2010s.

To rerecord an album so beloved, already so genius in its concept and construction, is a formidable undertaking — and to make it even better is an extraordinary feat, even for Swift, who's built her empire by weaponizing memories, taking old details and reframing them anew.

"The new 'Red' is even bigger, glossier, deeper, casually crueler," Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield wrote in his five-star review. "It's the ultimate version of her most gloriously ambitious mega-pop manifesto."

"Needless to say, Swift doesn't need to be doing this. Remaking the oldies is the kind of project you associate with someone who's run out of gas, not an artist this prolific," he continued.

"But that's the amazing thing about 'Red (Taylor's Version)' — it's a tribute to how far she's traveled, but it makes you even more excited for where she's heading next. This is the golden age of something good and right and real. And for Swift, the golden age is really just beginning."

In the wake of "Igor," which earned Tyler, the Creator his first Grammy Award and the most critical acclaim of his career, the rapper-slash-provocateur returned with "Call Me If You Get Lost," a masterstroke of immersion that triumphantly builds on the success of its predecessors.

It's an album that sits at several intersections: old-school rap and modern pop; explicit lust and puppy love; bravado and self-awareness; the bombastic charm of Tyler's early work and the warm vulnerability of his latest creations.

Tyler has always thrived in moments of tension, and the glow of his current reputation lends itself to this strength. Though he's free to enjoy the spoils of his ascent, he must also grapple with growing pains and ghosts of his past selves.

"I was a teener, tweeting Selena crazy shit / Didn't wanna offend her, apologize when I seen her," he raps on album highlight "Manifesto." "Back when I was tryna fuck Bieber, Justin / I say with my chest out, you say with your chest in."

Though "Call Me if You Get Lost" is Tyler's most mature work to date, he hasn't sacrificed his talent for eye-popping lyrics and twisted turns of phrase. Instead, his fearless introspection has become the selling point.

"Solar Power" isn't the album that Lorde fans were expecting. But as Larocca noted in our review, it's the exact album Lorde needed to make; anything else would have been disingenuous.

"In the years since 'Melodrama,' Lorde retreated back to her home country of New Zealand. It's clear she's taken the time to sit with her pain, her sadness, her existential vertigo, and emerged with a newfound emotional maturity," Larocca wrote.

"'Solar Power' explores that very path, settling into a quiet acceptance that sometimes life's simplicities are all we can focus on as we barrel toward an uncertain future," she continued. "We take photos of our pets. We show up at nail salons after taking 10 milligrams of THC. We dance in living rooms and jump off cliffs, letting our partners and the ocean hold us until we need to come up for air."

"This isn't an album for the big moments of life, the heartaches, the teen angst. Instead, it folds itself into the cracks between. As the sun rises and the day begins, as the summer takes its flight, this is where this album shines brightest. In those transitory moments that make up the bulk of life, when you're suspended in the middle of your past and future. It's for being high at the beach, or driving down a backroad at sunset with the windows wide open. It's for when you come to the realization that the only person who can save you is yourself."

Olivia Rodrigo's spectacular debut is so much more than a breakup album. "Sour" is about some boy in the same way it's about the DMV employee who conducted the teenager's driving test.

These characters are merely catalysts for the explosions of angst, grief, self-doubt, and spite that Rodrigo takes great care to examine.

By redirecting her focus inward, studying the reaction instead of the spark, Rodrigo reminds us that disappointment and betrayal can be combatted with a strong sense of self; that it's a triumph to remain honest and tender in a messy, cruel world.

Read the full essay crowning "Sour" as Insider's album of the year here.