The Best Albums of 2021

[Celerity]

Leftfield R&B, rave euphoria, ambient jazz—the RA staff and contributors pick their favorite albums of the year.

https://ra.co/features/3950






Album of the Year

DAIS RECORDS

Space Afrika - Honest Labour



Listening to Honest Labour feels like street lights burning onto tired retinas and long nights of feeling small in a big city. On their sophomore album, producers Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid created a series of nocturnal meditations, a series of nineteen short tracks bleeding into one another, in tribute to their hometown of Manchester. The duo's instrumentation is replete with field recordings of urban white noise, balanced by resonant cellos, hazy guitars and spectral guest performances with fragments of profound conversations—as if overheard from the night before—resulting in the audio equivalent of subconscious dreamscape.

Put simply by Inyang and Reid themselves, Honest Labour is "an album about love and loss." The track "Indigo Grit," for instance, abruptly ends just as the speaker is about to explain the difference between liking and loving someone—a fleeting snippet of wisdom lost just before listeners could grab hold of it. But as with any inquiries into life’s most existential questions, the artists weren't intending to arrive at any conclusions. Through their album, they embraced the sheer mystery of the human experience, remaining at the mercy of their emotions just like the rest of us.

Listen:

Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud



4AD

Erika de Casier - Sensational



It's difficult to think of any other record this year that united more people from across different electronic music scenes than Sensational. Building on the Danish artist's Y2K R&B obsession and backed with lush yet subdued production from collaborator Central, it is a quiet storm of plucked strings, ornate piano and pitter-patter drums. De Casier's hushed voice alternates between vulnerable and sarcastic, full of biting phrases and memorable one-liners: "You gotta be polite if you wanna roll with me." It’s the kind of music that's made for both memorable dance floor moments and cryptic Instagram captions directed at you-know-who.

Listen:

Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud


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