2019 is coming to a close, so you might be asking, "What are the best albums of the decade?
According to Pitchfork's ranking of this decade's best LPs, Frank Ocean released the best album of our time with Blonde.
The experimental R&B musician exploded onto the scene back in 2012 with his debut album channel ORANGE and lead single "Thinkin' Bout You." Just before the album's release the singer wrote a letter on Tumblr, detailing a romance with a man. It went viral, and changed the face of hip-hop and R&B forever.
He followed that critical success up in 2016 with Endless, an exclusive visual album available to Apple Music subscribers, thereby fulfiling his contract to his record label. A day later, he surprise-dropped Blonde indepently, and a worldwide hush seemed to settle as we all sat down and listened.
"Frank Ocean is the hinge artist of our time, the true voice of a generation because he takes long silences," writes Pitchfork. "The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. 'Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,' Ocean sings on 'Solo,' capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Blonde is one synonym for American."
That wasn't the only nod to the rule-breaker. Frank Ocean's debut album channel ORANGE sits at #10 on the list. Other notable albums include Beyoncé's self-titled at #3, Robyn's Body Talk at #8, and Charli XCX's Pop 2 at #40 on the list.
Check out Pitchfork's best of the decade lists here.
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