OutKast briefly reunited for mostly-festival dates in 2014, but otherwise, the 2010s was the first decade since they formed where they weren't an active, dominant group. Andre 3000 became elusive, dropping guest verses here and there and hinting at a solo album that still hasn't happened. Meanwhile, Big Boi took the opposite route, becoming a very active solo artist who frequently toured and released three full-length albums and a collaborative EP with Phantogram. Not everything he touched this decade turned to gold, but his debut solo album Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty remains on par with a lot of his work with OutKast. Sir Lucious Left Foot sounded like the future when it arrived in 2010, with its thick rubbery basslines that -- from Big Boi to LCD Soundsystem to Gorillaz -- were very in style at the time, and that was no small feat for a rapper whose first significant album came out in 1994. Popular Atlanta rap went in a very different direction a few years later, but Sir Lucious Left Foot still sounds fresh, and it's still home to some of the most fun songs Big Boi's written since Stankonia.

From the moment OutKast introduced the world to Killer Mike (first on a deep cut on Stankonia, then on the gigantic single "The Whole World"), it was obvious that a new Southern rap great was born. He popped up a couple other times during Southern rap's early 2000s mainstream boom, scoring his own minor hit with "A.D.I.D.A.S." and lending his voice to Bone Crusher's massive "Never Scared," but Mike quickly ran into issues with his major label, and his career took a hit that wasn't easy to recover from, despite releasing plenty of great material in the years that followed. Mike was already settling into his role as an underground hero on 2011's PL3DGE, when he met an unlikely collaborator who would help him reach the heights he was always destined for: New York alt-rap icon El-P. The pair were introduced by Adult Swim's Jason DeMarco, and they immediately struck up a friendly and artistic relationship that led to El-P producing all 12 songs on Killer Mike's 2012 album R.A.P. Music, rapping on one of them, and inviting Mike to rap on a song on the El-P album Cancer 4 Cure that came out one week later. I don't know who would've guessed that Killer Mike's Atlanta drawl would've sounded so good over El-P's futuristic, outsider production, but it resulted in Killer Mike's best solo album by a landslide. From the trunk-rattling assault of "Big Beast" to the incisive political commentary of "Reagan," R.A.P. Music saw Killer Mike perfecting everything he had been spending his entire career working towards, and El-P's focused production tied it all together in a way that was more cohesive than any previous Killer Mike album. The pair connected so well that they decided to stop releasing solo albums and form a group together, Run The Jewels, who went on to dominate the 2010s musical landscape -- within and outside of rap -- and who became a bigger deal than either of these two veteran artists ever were in the past. It's been a long time coming for both of these guys, and as a duo responsible for some of the decade's best rap music, Run The Jewels deserve the fame. But with all due respect to the Run The Jewels name, Killer Mike and El-P's best music together came out before RTJ was formed, on R.A.P. Music.

Even from the early days of Odd Future, a lot of people had pegged Earl Sweatshirt as the group's most skilled rapper, and Earl continued to make good on that promise, peaking with the steel-cutting bars of 2015's I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside. What I don't think anyone predicted, though, is that Earl would put traditional rapping on the back burner in order to become the most psychedelic, experimental artist to emerge out of the Odd Future collective. He first took the unexpected turn on 2018's excellent Some Rap Songs, a swirling, sound-collage song cycle that furthered Earl's ability as a producer and took his music to mind-bending new heights. He proved the new direction was no fluke on 2019's Feet of Clay, which feels a little more immediate than its predecessor, if only because we're now more used to the path Earl began paving on 2018's monumental Some Rap Songs.

Atlanta trap became one of the most prevailing trends in 2010s hip hop, and though trap wasn't always an album game -- at least not in the traditional sense -- there's a good argument to be made that if there's one definitive 2010s trap album, it's Future's DS2. Titled as a sequel to his buzzed-about 2011 mixtape Dirty Sprite, DS2 came after Future tried to go mainstream with two just-okay major label albums, and then reverted back to his mixtape roots and put out the unstoppable run of Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights that eventually led to him making this proper studio album in the same druggy, rough-around-the-edges style. It was a big hit, but it wasn't Future trying to go pop; he made pop come to him. Various tracks from the three preceding mixtapes ended up on DS2's deluxe version (the deluxe version is really the one to get), and every other song on the proper album is just as good. One of the big shifts in rap in the 2010s was rapping about doing lots of drugs, rather than selling them, and DS2 sounds like a rap album that's been doused in a bottle of Robitussin. It's sexed up, drugged up, melancholic, angry, and all kinds of fucked up, and Future delivers every mood with conviction over gorgeous, innovative production from some of trap's key producers (Metro Boomin, Southside, Zaytoven). Within what remains a very crowded subgenre -- including countless subsequent releases by Future himself -- DS2 still stands out as a masterpiece.

Nicki Minaj's major label career did not get off to the smoothest start. After a promising mixtape run and a verse on Kanye's "Monster" that would cement her legacy even if she never recorded another word, Nicki released two so-so albums (Pink Friday and Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded) that seemed like ploys to make Nicki famous in the teen pop world and didn't do a ton of favors for her career as a rapper. (It led to the whole Summer Jam thing, which, now in the age of poptimism, is almost crazy to think even happened.) But then, at the tail end of 2014, Nicki dropped The Pinkprint, the most crucial thing she released since "Monster" and the most masterful album of her career. In case you had forgotten during the era of "Starships," The Pinkprint reminded you not just that Nicki could rap, but that she remained one of the greatest rappers of her generation. And The Pinkprint wasn't just a return to rap. It proved Nicki could make a classic album that was rap, R&B, and pop. It shows off a deep, personal side, a fun lighthearted side, and a side where Nicki assures you she's nothing to fuck with. It's not perfect (the silly "Anaconda" and the flimsy radio-pop of "The Night Is Still Young" don't do it many favors), but the highs far outweigh the lows, and the deluxe version makes up for the clunkers on the main album. (Bonus track "Shanghai" still stands as one of the decade's hardest and most inventive songs by a rapper of Nicki's popularity.) It's a bold move naming your album after one of the most classic rap albums of the past 20 years, but Nicki earned the right and then some.

Before "alt-R&B," before Rihanna covered Tame Impala and every indie artist covered Frank Ocean, there was The ArchAndroid, the momentous debut album from Janelle Monae. Janelle featured psych-pop lifers of Montreal on the album, and made her own psychedelic classic with "Mushrooms & Roses." The Big Boi-featuring "Tightrope" was as groovy as anything on the Big Boi album from that same year, and Janelle made her own OutKast-y song with the great, "Bombs Over Baghdad"-esque "Cold War." She also channelled Bowie, Prince, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, George Clinton, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and tons of others into this album that seamlessly hopped between R&B, soul, rap, funk, rock, psychedelia, art pop and more. In some ways, The ArchAndroid predicted the genre-crossing path that music as a whole would take throughout the 2010s, and it's impossible to talk about this decade's musical cross pollination without mentioning that this album did it first. Like Bowie, Janelle proudly wore her influences on her sleeves and paid direct homage to her heroes, and she still does so to this day. But also like Bowie, she managed to do all of that while cultivating a persona that was uniquely her own. And it's all laid out on her first and still-best album The ArchAndroid.

Well before releasing her eighth album ANTI, Rihanna was well established as a generation-defining R&B star, but she'd never really released a great album. For most of her career, that was fine. R&B in the 21st century is pop, and pop is a singles game. But by 2016, some of the most instant-classic albums in the world were coming from stars like Kanye, Beyonce, and frequent Rihanna duetter Drake, so Ri knew she had to do it too. And with ANTI, she did. The atmospheric, downtempo "alt-R&B" craze had also fully risen from the underground to the mainstream at this point, and the EDM-pop direction Rihanna had taken on her last couple albums was already sounding outdated, so Rihanna proved that -- like Beyonce had done on her 2013 self-titled album -- she could do that sound just as well as (or better than) anyone. She nabbed a guest spot from rising indie-R&B singer SZA a year before SZA released her own masterpiece. Drake, who already started embracing atmosphere and minimalism on 2011's Take Care, reprised his role as Rihanna duetter on one of the best duets they ever released, "Work." Dark, moody songs like "Desperado," "Needed Me," and "Yeah, I Said It" truly beat the era's underground R&B singers at their own game. ANTI was an anti-pop record in other ways too. "Same Ol' Mistakes" is a cover of psych-pop band Tame Impala's "New Person, Same Old Mistakes," and even Kevin Parker agrees her version is now the definitive version. And Rihanna added in her dose of psych with the trippy ode to weed "James Joint." Then there's "Love on the Brain" and "Higher," which channel raw, vintage soul in a way that wasn't trendy, and they remain two of the albums best and most emotionally bare tracks. It's easy to peg ANTI as the album where Rihanna hopped on a hip bandwagon, but it's much more than that, and it only sounds better as it ages.

Part of Danny Brown's appeal is that he's always been a deeply weird rapper, and his weirdness was at its best on Atrocity Exhibition. The album was primarily produced by Danny's frequent collaborator Paul White (plus some contributions from Evian Christ, Black Milk, Petite Noir, The Alchemist, and Playa Haze), and even if Danny didn't rap a word on it, Atrocity Exhibition would be one of the decade's best electronic albums. It's his most musically innovative LP production-wise, and Danny rose to the occasion by matching these beats with some of his most out-there bars and most memorable hooks. Totally berserk songs like "Ain't It Funny," "Golddust," and "Dance in the Water" barely sound like hip hop at all, but then in the midst of all that, Atrocity Exhibition includes one of Danny's best traditional rap songs: "Really Doe." As a posse cut with Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Earl Sweatshirt, it's almost like a spiritual sequel to A$P Rocky's "1 Train," and it reminds you that, while Danny loves to make abstract, experimental music, he loves (and is really good at) making real-deal rap too.

After emerging out of the hazy, short-lived subgenre of cloud rap (remember cloud rap?), A$AP Rocky inked a deal with a major and his official debut studio album Long. Live. ASAP became an instant classic. It remains a snapshot of its time, but also timeless. At the turn of the decade, super mainstream rap was getting stale and a new generation of hungry, game-changing rappers took to the internet to get their new sounds out there, whether or not major labels would care. Seven of them -- Kendrick Lamar, Joey Badass, Yelawolf, Danny Brown, Action Bronson, Big K.R.I.T., and Rocky himself -- teamed up for the moment-defining posse cut "1 Train," which lives on Long. Live. ASAP. It might be weird to think now, but in early 2013, those rappers were all pretty much on the same level and all still relatively underground, and "1 Train" marked the moment they teamed up and said they're ready to take over the world. Kendrick, who had just released good kid, m.A.A.d city only three months earlier, also appeared on "Fuckin' Problems" alongside Drake, who was still proving himself at the time and didn't fully have his head in the clouds yet. Together (plus a hook from 2 Chainz), they came up with another moment-defining song and Rocky's biggest hit. Kendrick associate Schoolboy Q (who Rocky aided about a year earlier on his breakthrough single "Hands on the Wheel") returned the favor on "PMW." Skrillex, who was in the process of leaving brostep (remember brostep?) behind and proving himself as a Serious Artist, made some pretty serious art when he teamed with Rocky for the bass-wobbling rap of "Wild for the Night." And indie-friendly artists like Santigold, Florence Welch, and Danger Mouse lent their talents to the album, which not only sounded good but helped position Rocky as an artist who wanted to stay loyal to indie even as he entered the mainstream. The guests were clearly a major part of Long. Live. ASAP, but Rocky carried a ton of the album's weight himself too. As he has gotten increasingly psychedelic on later albums, Long. Live. ASAP remains Rocky's best pure rap album and it contains some of the best rapping of his career.

When Tyler, the Creator started this decade off as a member of the rowdy skate-rap crew Odd Future and the brains behind the dark, shock-rap mixtape Bastard, who would've thought he'd end it with the gorgeous, lovelorn, experimental soul song cycle IGOR? It's hard to pick a top Tyler album, especially when Bastard and Goblin are definitely his most influential, and maybe it's recency bias to pick IGOR, but IGOR deserves it just because he took such a gigantic leap and stuck the landing. It's full of huge guests like Solange, Kanye West, and Santigold, but no one -- not even Tyler -- really ever takes the spotlight. Everyone's voices swirl into one big melting pot of sounds along with Tyler's inventive production, and the whole thing almost acts more as a mood piece than a rap album. That said, further listens reveal storylines and lyrical depth and traces of the unique personality that Tyler won the world over with a decade ago. It sounds absolutely nothing like his breakthrough works, yet it's unmistakably the work of no other artist, and that's no small feat.

Of all the hip hop groups and collectives that emerged this decade, there are perhaps none that have had more influence, cultural dominance, and growth than Odd Future. And within Odd Future, perhaps no (technically former) member had a more unique and thrilling rise than Earl. Once the teenager whose mother caused him to be absent for the group's instant rise to fame, Earl is now the avant-rap wizard who intentionally works more with abstract underground artists than with the now-famous rappers he once called peers. And the major turning point was 2015's I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside. Less experimental than his two latest works but much more unconventional than everything before it, I Don't Like Shit made it clear that Earl wasn't interested in following the path to stardom and instead he opened the doors for a career where his fans would embrace his most unexpected creative decisions. It's a dark, personal, introverted album, and it's got some of the best bars and punchlines of his career. His two more recent albums saw Earl experimenting with the very idea of what a "bar" could even be, but I Don't Like Shit is still rooted in some time-honored hip hop traditions. It occupies a middle ground between the Earl who wants to rap his ass off and the Earl who wants to make sonic achievements in music, and that remains a very appealing place for Earl to be.

Noname combines rap, spoken word, and live-band jazz on one of the most creative hip hop albums of the decade. To Pimp A Butterfly may have opened the doors for jazz-rap's comeback this decade, but Noname isn't following in Kendrick or anyone else's footsteps on Room 25. Her roots in poetry are obvious from listening to these songs, and her experience with slam poetry and spoken-word puts her in a different lane than most of her peers. But make no mistake, Noname is a rapper; Room 25's got the bars and the punchlines to go up against any of the more "traditional" rap albums released this decade. It's also got the glistening keys and the dizzying basslines to go up against any of the best jazz albums. It's hard not to mention that, as I write this, Noname is publicly talking about quitting rap. It'd be a bummer to see such a talented artist call it a day at a career peak like the one Noname has been on, but even if she does, Room 25 will live on as a true gem.

After releasing two of the decade's most breathtaking, fleshed-out, intricately arranged hip hop masterpieces, Kendrick Lamar went back to the basics and made the stripped-back, hard-hitting DAMN., an album that largely sounded more like 1995 than 2017. For a lesser artist, this would be an obvious setback, a suggestion that they were out of ideas or unable to reach the ambitious heights of their previous work. For Kendrick Lamar, it's still one of the very best albums of an entire decade. DAMN. isn't a sign of Kendrick slowing down; it actually escalated him to new heights, thanks to some of the most immediate songs he ever wrote, including his first No. 1 single, "HUMBLE." DAMN. could seem like an easy move for Kendrick, but it was actually a risky one. At the height of mumble rap, he proved he was talented enough to still dominate the rap world with the old school mentality of DAMN. And though the songs on DAMN. are his most simple songs since the pre-good kid, m.A.A.d city days, he approached them with the larger-than-life charisma he started to develop in GKMC's aftermath. And he snuck in stuff that the pre-GKMC Kendrick could have never pulled off, like the nearly-eight-minute, three-part suite "FEAR." that would've fit on either of DAMN.'s two direct predecessors, or the jaw-dropping album closer "DUCKWORTH.," where Kendrick told the origin story of a lifetime.

Kudos to SZA for sticking to EPs for a large chunk of her early career, because by the time she made her debut album, she was prepared to release a masterpiece. She was one of the early adopters of the "alt-R&B" sound that took off in the early 2010s, and she was good at it from the start, but with more and more new artists in this style emerging by the day, the stakes were higher if you wanted to stand out. And as many of SZA's peers kept doing what they were doing, she made a gigantic leap with her debut album Ctrl. Some of the usual downtempo, atmospheric R&B of her EPs is on Ctrl, but there's also raw, guitar-oriented singer/songwriter songs bookending the album ("Supermodel" and "20 Something"), upbeat indie pop ("Prom"), hazy neo-soul ("Drew Barrymore"), tasteful radio pop (the Travis Scott-featuring "Love Galore"), and more. And the musical diversity is matched by forefronted vocals and a lyrical depth that was mostly absent from the EPs. When a genre booms like R&B did in the 2010s, you need a real sense of personality to stand out. On Ctrl, SZA has more personality in her pinky than most of her peers have in their whole bodies.

Just around midnight on Friday, December 13, 2013, after many major year-end lists were already published, Beyonce changed the game with that digital drop. She released her self-titled album immediately to iTunes, without any warning, resulting in perhaps the most innovative major album release since Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows. It started the trend of surprise releases and the trend of visual albums, but most importantly, it brought the burgeoning "alt-R&B" genre to the mainstream and established Beyonce not as a waning star, but as a creative leader with her ear to the ground. Beyonce didn't invent alt-R&B just like The Beatles didn't invent psychedelic rock, but in both cases, a new bar was set for the genre once larger-than-life superstars got their hands on it. The cold, dark, atmospheric direction that R&B had been going in just sounded better when Beyonce did it. The album featured Frank Ocean (one of the pioneers of the sound) and Drake (an early adopter of the sound), but Beyonce's best interpretations of this then-new form of R&B were done with no guests at all ("Haunted," "Partition," "Jealous"). Beyonce also rapped ("Flawless," bonus track "7/11"), made sexed-up synthpop ("Blow"), continued to perfect the heart-wrenching balladry of 4 ("Heaven"), threw in a stadium-sized anthem for good measure ("XO"), and dabbled in a handful of other styles of music on what remains her most experimental album to date. She also sang of everything from unrealistic beauty standards to vivid depictions of her marriage with Jay-Z, to her miscarriage, to the birth of their first daughter Blue Ivy, and she sampled a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speech on feminism that quickly became a major milestone in the decade's mainstreamization of feminism. Beyonce is lyrically powerful and musically adventurous, both of which made it a significant risk for an artist of her popularity. It could have gone down as the album where a pop star yearned for more creative freedom but failed to leave an impact. Instead, it cemented Beyonce as the kind of musical force we so rarely see, respected as a high-brow artist by critics and one of the single most significant pop stars of our time.

The world is littered with talentless stars and with uncharismatic virtuosos, but every once in a while we're gifted with someone like Cardi B, who was born to be a star and who just so happens to be impeccable at her craft. Once "Bodak Yellow" swept the nation, it wasn't a question if Cardi would achieve stardom but when. And even though her success was a given, we've still seen great potential tainted by botched album rollouts, so it's no small feat that Cardi's official debut album neared perfection. There are no songs where she sounds out of her comfort zone, no throwaway radio bait, no filler, no out-of-place favors from big-name guests (if anything, Cardi quickly eclipsed nearly every guest on the album); it’s just a consistently great album that proves Cardi has lyrical depth and a grasp on a wide variety of music. Of its 13 songs, at least ten of them feel like moment-defining singles. "Bodak Yellow" was the song of 2017, "I Like It" -- which helped open up English-speaking audiences to the already-rich world of Latin trap -- was the song of 2018, and even those two can't overshadow the many other memorable songs. It was an album that felt like a classic upon arrival, and that feeling has only strengthened since.

Drake was corny from the start -- it was often part of his appeal -- but if you were still clowning Drake by the time he released Take Care, you just weren't paying enough attention. An enormous leap from anything he had had done before it and still better than anything he's done since, Take Care remains one of the most purely gorgeous and massively influential albums of the decade in any genre. He was arguably the first major artist to realize that the dark, atmospheric, indie-friendly "alt-R&B" was about to break, and he recruited alt-R&B pioneer The Weeknd to help him achieve his own version of that sound on Take Care. Though his most crucial collaborator is not The Weeknd but frequent Drake producer 40, who helmed the majority of the songs on Take Care and helped Drake craft the sound that Drake copycats have gone after for years. Together (along with a few other producers and some very key guests), Drake and 40 made an album that has it all. "Over My Dead Body" is the kind of tell-all intro track that we'd see several other rappers channel this decade. "Headlines" is one of the finest string-laden epics this side of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. If you weren't already on board with The Weeknd from his mixtapes, "Crew Love" proved how powerful his music was. "Take Care" took the already-cool Jamie xx remix of the already-cool Gil Scott-Heron song, added in Rihanna, and turned it into something accessible and danceable enough for anyone. "Marvins Room" remains Drake's finest execution of atmospheric, post-James Blake R&B. "Buried Alive Interlude" helped introduce Kendrick Lamar to the mainstream a year before he released good kid, m.A.A.d city, and for that, you can thank Drake later. "Lord Knows" has one of the most triumphant Just Blaze beats of the decade. "The Real Her" has one of the best verses from the elusive Andre 3000 of the decade. At the risk of just listing all 18 songs, I'll stop here, but Take Care has no filler. It just celebrated its eighth birthday last month, and it still reveals more of itself with every listen.

For someone who's been called an anti-rapper, it's interesting that Vince Staples' most monumental work thus far is stepped in hip hop tradition. Vince's "anti-rapper" tendencies were more exposed later on, and he's released some excellent music that defied traditional rap, but before all that, he proved he could master the type of rap album that rap fans have sought after since Illmatic. Summertime '06 is one of those storytelling rap albums that drop you right into the artist's own life and city, and paints a vivid picture of the people, places, and experiences that made them. Production-wise, it's a bleak, minimal album (helmed almost entirely by veteran Chicago producer No I.D.), and the vision for the sonics on this album is as focused as the vision in Vince's raps. For most artists, an album this carefully constructed is the kind of thing you might spend your entire career building towards. For Vince, it was a launching point.

It's safe to say that Kanye had a pretty weird decade, and given where things have gone, MBDTF feels now like both an omen and a reminder of days gone. It's a fascinating bridge between two parts of his career: the lush, cinematic orchestrations and aching melodicism that characterized his aughts output are merged with some of the darkness, ugliness, and sadness which would fully flower on Yeezus. And on top of being a particularly interesting benchmark in the career arc of perhaps our most interesting popular artist, oh yeah, it also has a very strong case as his flat-out best album. The opening five-song run, from "Dark Fantasy" through "Monster," is completely staggering--his powers as a producer, his curation of collaborators, the sheer force of talent on these songs is completely exhilarating. The second half isn't much of a comedown--songs like "Hell of a Life" and "Devil in a New Dress" have aged into stone cold classics, easier to take for granted than some of the bigger swings here but just as muscular and satisfying. And then there's "Runaway," which for my money is still The definitive Kanye song, his healthy bluster and self-pity leveraged against one another into something that captures his specific brilliance with incredible singularity, messy and big and funny and sad and glorious, almost too much for one song to contain. In light of recent events, the irony of the album closing with an extended Gil Scott-Heron passage is considerable. But Kanye has always been full of contradictions, which for a while it seemed like he was all too happy to lay bare. No album in his discography captures the thrill of those contradictions like this one.

Once "Beyonce's indie sister" who took Bey and Jay-Z to that fateful Grizzly Bear show, Solange finally lived up to the potential that she had since at least 2008's Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams on her elegant, meticulously crafted 2016 album A Seat At The Table. She was still interested in both indie and R&B (Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth contributes to the album about as much as R&B/soul vet Raphael Saadiq, and guests include fellow indie/R&B crossover acts Sampha and Kelela), but she wasn't straddling the line between those genres so much as she was blurring it completely. A Seat At The Table is one of the decade's best R&B albums, best soul albums, best indie/alternative albums, and probably best a few other things too. It's got the classic, live-instrumentation feel of '70s soul, but it never feels retro and it always feels forward-thinking. It's an album that celebrates black culture and rages against the racism that still tries to attack the culture today. Solange calls it a "project on identity, empowerment, independence, grief and healing," and all of those themes and emotions are felt throughout A Seat At The Table, from the powerful spoken word interludes to the songs themselves.

Frank Ocean could've been a pop star if he wasn't so disillusioned about how the whole system works, and as Blonde proved, the more he shied away from fame, the better his music got. Its 2012 predecessor Channel Orange remains a near-perfect classic, but Frank Ocean doesn't want to be perfect, and that's what makes this weirder, more flawed followup feel even more special. When Frank came to NYC in support of Blonde to headline Panorama, he put on one of the weirdest headlining festival sets I've seen this entire decade. He made the massive feel stage feel intimate, without ever feeling too small. That's how Blonde feels too; the album sees Frank making pop music on his own terms, following his heart and ignoring what major labels and the Grammys and the radio are telling him to do. The result is a raw, bare-bones singer/songwriter album that's almost more like Elliott Smith (who he interpolates on this album) than like the kind of modern R&B he helped define on his earlier projects.

Abrasive, experimental music can always be found in the underground, but it's often even more exciting when a genuinely popular, pop-friendly artist risks everything at the height of their fame and releases an overtly experimental album, and that's exactly what Kanye did with Yeezus. His previous album was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the album that proved Kanye was capable of pulling off a true pop music masterpiece. It remains one of the best-reviewed albums of the decade, and it's home to some of his biggest songs. He kept the momentum going the following year with his Jay-Z collab Watch the Throne, and the year after that with his Cruel Summer compilation, and he came into 2013 with absurdly high anticipation for his next proper album. Instead of delivering anything at all like MBDTF, he put out this dark, abrasive, industrial-inspired album with no pre-release single and still no song (besides album closer "Bound 2," the one Yeezus song that sounds like Old Kanye) you could picture hearing on pop radio. Where MBDTF was the kind of album that seemed like it was written to be critic proof, Yeezus is an album that Kanye knew would be divisive, and that could have ended up as a massive failure. But like many great pop masterminds before him, Kanye figured out how to interject these more difficult songs with hooks that became as memorable as the MBDTF songs. Next to all the loud, buzzing synths and thunderous drums, Yeezus has some of Kanye's most incisive lyricism too. Before he he started making inconceivable statements about slavery in late 2010s, "New Slaves" compared slavery and segregation to present-day racism, and "Blood on the Leaves" married a pitched-up sample of Nina Simone's recording of anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" to unrest in Kanye's own life (and booming synths that solidified TNGHT as one of the decade's most beloved beatmaking duos). In addition to TNGHT, Yeezus saw Kanye working with underground electronic musicians like Arca and Evian Christ, and other trailblazing singers/songwriters like Frank Ocean and Justin Vernon, and Yeezus helped position Kanye as a superstar with a mutual appreciation between him and the underground. Yeezus put a lot of smaller artists on the map, and it also earned Kanye more respect from the experimental music community than you usually see from someone as pop-friendly as him. The one thing it didn't do, is change the direction that mainstream rap would head in. For better or for worse, Yeezus was the first Kanye album that didn't spawn tons of imitators, and at least partially for that reason, there's still nothing else in the world like it.

If there was ever doubt Kendrick Lamar reached the head of the rap totem pole, his 2015 LP To Pimp a Butterfly all but confirmed it. A grand, ambitious leap from the already-masterful storylines and Compton-based cultural dissections on his sophomore album good kid, m.A.A.d city three years prior, To Pimp a Butterfly showcased Kendrick diving headfirst into the modern black musical canon, experimenting with free jazz, funk, soul, and spoken word nostalgia -- all the while creating a sonic palette unmatched by just about any other rapper in the current era. Throughout the album’s 79-minute runtime, Kendrick brings along black musical legends of generations past (such as George Clinton, Ronald Isley, Snoop Dogg) to craft an almost post-nostalgic sound. Moments like the frantic, avant-jazz instrumentals on “For Free (interlude),” or the bouncy funk elements on “These Walls” and “Complexion (A Zulu Love),” pay homage to the past while pushing forward something new altogether. Kendrick also proved himself to be one of the most inimitable lyricists in modern rap, through his instantly-recognizable flow to his stellar wordplay and memorable storytelling. From weaving together unforgettable stories of selfishness and greed (“How Much A Dollar Cost”) to internalized racism (“The Blacker The Berry”) and journeys from self-hatred to self-acceptance (“u” and “i”), Kendrick balances many relevant topics within society at large, in a way that feels both urgent and timeless. And then there's "Alright," which -- after Trump got elected -- became the uplifting and hopeful anthem of a generation. Above all else, the album is representative of Kendrick’s own personal growth, as the sequence of the album, with the help of a recited poem interspersed throughout the record, documents his journey from a young man on the streets of Compton, to a famous rapper seeking to free many young men from the struggles he also faced.

It's tempting to compare Beyonce's transition from girl group member and singles-oriented artist to Album Artist to previous similar examples like Sgt. Pepper's or Thriller, but the evolution that Beyonce underwent in the 2010s is nearly unprecedented. When she released 2011's 4, you could have mistaken the album's classic soul vibes as an admission that Beyonce was retiring from world domination and settling into a more relaxed phase of her career, but in hindsight it was the turning point that opened the doors for the Queen Bey to make whatever music she wanted. Her 2013 self-titled album was a daring, adventurous album that took the burgeoning "alt-R&B" movement from the underground to the mainstream and single-handedly changed the way major pop stars release their records. It breathed new life into her career and secured her legacy as one of the all-time greats, and then it all culminated in Lemonade. As a highly ambitious but lean, accessible, no-filler album that incorporates just about every relevant genre of music in the 21st century, Lemonade can almost seem too perfect, like it was designed in a lab to win Album of the Year at the Grammys (despite being robbed by Adele, who agreed Beyonce should have won). And it's easy to get cynical about that kind of thing, but Beyonce is far from the only person who attempted to make a potential masterpiece like this. She's just one of the few who pulled it off.

The onset of free internet rap mixtapes in the late 2000s and early 2010s threatened to overtake the stagnant rap mainstream of the time, and transformation was complete with the release of Kendrick Lamar's major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city. It was an obvious classic upon arrival -- every hook weaved seamlessly into the song and drilled instantly into your brain, every musical arrangement was finessed to the point of perfection, every bar was delivered with exceptional skill, and every lyric left you hanging on Kendrick's every word as he told you his story of growing up in Compton. It had the narrative arc of Illmatic, the attention to musical detail of Aquemini, and the widespread impact and accessibility of The Eminem Show (which it very recently topped as longest-charting hip-hop studio album on the Billboard 200), and looking at it now, it's very obviously on the same level as all three of those albums. good kid, m.A.A.d city almost immediately changed the game for both rising and already-popular rappers. After it came out, it felt like almost everyone tried to up their game to compete with it. It united old school and new school, underground and mainstream, indie fans and rap fans. (Throughout the course of one cohesive album, good kid, m.A.A.d city worked in rising superstar Drake, ever-powerful producer/tastemaker Dr. Dre, underrated Compton vet MC Eiht, and a Beach House sample.) It remains stunning that Kendrick pulled this all off, but what's even more impressive is how effortless it is to listen to. Sometimes the "best" albums are high-brow to the point of difficulty, but good kid, m.A.A.d city is one of those rare all-time classic albums that's as musically innovative as it is culturally impactful as it is fun to listen to. good kid, m.A.A.d city wins this decade because it satisfies on every level. It defied almost every major musical trend and impacted almost all of them too. The only other rapper that could've taken this top spot would've been Kendrick himself with To Pimp A Butterfly, an album that's as near-perfect as good kid, m.A.A.d city in an entirely different way. You can -- and people will -- spend a lifetime debating these two albums. For us right now, nothing captured the complete essence of the decade like good kid, m.A.A.d city did.