The albums that defined
the 2010s.

The 2010s are streaming's first full decade, and music opens up. Genre walls collapse. Hip-hop becomes the dominant pop format, period — and pop, in turn, absorbs hip-hop's rhythms, its chord-free production, its conversational vocals. Beyoncé reinvents the album as event with Lemonade. Frank Ocean reinvents it as mystery with Blonde. Kendrick Lamar makes To Pimp a Butterfly and the Pulitzer-Prize jazz-funk-rap album becomes a thing that exists.

The decade rewards listeners who can hold contradictions: the most ambitious mainstream pop ever made and the most fragmented underground at the same time. Sufjan Stevens makes Carrie & Lowell on a laptop. Taylor Swift makes 1989 with the most expensive pop production team alive. Both are great. Country gets weirder. Indie gets quieter. Rock retreats to its niche but the niche is excellent.

Where to start: To Pimp a Butterfly for the decade's most ambitious record full stop, Lemonade for pop as auteur cinema, Blonde for headphone music as a statement of self, Currents for the bedroom-disco crossover that influenced everything after, A Crow Looked at Me for the singer-songwriter record that hits like nothing else in this century. The 2010s catalog is enormous; these are the doors back into it.