It’s been another big year for album releases. 2016 saw the swan song from two rock icons, David Bowie and Prince, as well as the welcome return of veterans Radiohead and the much-anticipated release by RnB stars Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. We round up, in alphabetical order, some of the best releases of the year.
A Moon Shaped Pool
Radiohead
From the death of David Bowie to the contentious US elections, the general consensus is that 2016 hasn't been a good year. My own personal contribution was the collapse of my engagement to the only woman in my life I genuinely thought I might spend the rest of my days, which made A Moon Shaped Pool – essentially a document of frontman Thom Yorke's break-up with his partner Rachel Owen who succumbed to cancer last week – infinitely more harrowing. But, oh, what a beautifully heartbreaking catharsis it is, documenting the chasms of existential terror that accompany a life-defining relationship crumbling around your ears. Album of the year and, possibly, of Radiohead's already-feted career.
* Adam Workman
A Seat at the Table
Solange
Her sister Beyonce got plenty of headlines and Grammy nods for her defiant, scene-altering Lemonade, but Solange emerged later in the year with a record so silky and downright pretty you almost forget that A Seat at the Table is itself as fiercely independent as anything out there. Black feminism is a common theme for both Knowles sisters, but Solange's latest – and best to date – is perhaps the most-cohesive statement of female empowerment yet. The running interludes with the long-forgotten Master P – an unappreciated pioneer of black empowerment in his own right – deliver one of the most-clever surprises of the year. But it is also a record unafraid to show vulnerability, as the jilted narrator of the knee-buckling Cranes in the Sky can attest.
* Kevin Jeffers
Azel
Bombino
Omara Moctar is not your typical guitar hero. The gangly rocker, who is known under the name Bombino, is often quiet and shy but when he straps the Stratocaster, he blazes a seductive sound harnessing the Tuareg blues tradition and the vintage rock of Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits. His third album, Azel, once again packed with his signature guitar heroics, however, is presented in a more focused and cleaner fashion – thanks to producer David Longstreth from the experimental rock group, Dirty Projects. With Azel, Bombino attempts to stretch the groove-laden style of Tuareg music led by luminaries such as Tinariwen. There are elements of reggae in Timidiwa, while Akhar Zaman boasts a compressed sounding guitar lead that sounds almost like a march of bag pipes. Dazzling and evocative, Azel is for those who want to delve deeper into music from the African continent.
* Saeed Saeed
Blackstar
David Bowie
As only Bowie's second album in more than a decade, fans and scholars were already poring over Blackstar's allusions to mortality when the musical icon died just two days after its release, which was symbolically timed to mark his 69th birthday. Departing with the safe but satisfying, guitar-driven sound of its predecessor – 2013's The Next Day, which was essentially Bowie-doing-Bowie – Blackstar called on jazz musicians to paint a freewheeling art-rock canvas as holistically inventive as any of Bowie's restless genre experiments of the past-quarter century. Just listen to the opening title track, a sprawling, 10-minute suite restlessly shifting through electro grooves, soaring sax solos, twisted auto-tune refrains, synth breakdowns and haunting, hymnal confessions. A final masterpiece from a genius bowing out with grace.
* Rob Garratt
Blonde
Frank Ocean
For a while, it seemed as though Frank Ocean's follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange was never going to come. Ocean didn't ease those fears by staying as far out of the spotlight as he could get. Then by August of this year, he had dropped two albums in the space of a few days. The first, Endless, basically equated to a content-dump to get out of his record deal so he could release the main event, the beautiful and tortured Blonde, on his own terms. Every second of Blonde feels poured over and scrutinised by a genius who is never satisfied. Ocean is a true auteur, and much of Blonde sounds like nothing else. Original and dense, it should keep fans satiated while we wait, however long, for his next work of art.
* Kevin Jeffers
Coloring Book
Chance The Rapper
Chance The Rapper's third mixtape, the gleeful Coloring Book, is a breath of fresh air. Still only 23, the prodigious Chicago artist has spent the three years since 2013's Acid Rap maturing well beyond his years, and isn't shy to share a little positivity with the world. The long-anticipated release surprised in that it is by many measures a gospel album, showing once again how Chance – famously independent and record label-free – isn't afraid to produce music on his terms. It is perhaps cynical to say that such a joyous record would be some bold deviation from the norm, but 2016 was a pretty cynical year, in which Coloring Book was a much needed ray of light.
* Kevin Jeffers
Emily’s D+Evolution
Esperanza Spalding
On her fifth album, which was four years in a making, uber-dexterous Grammy-winning bassist/singer Esperanza Spalding made a dramatic split from her jazz roots. Framed around the conceptual alter ego of Emily – Spalding's middle name – Emily's D+Evolution's makes the kind of chameleon-like turns that have earned ample comparisons to Prince. From the trashy, grunge sound of opener Good Lava to the off-kilter, bittersweet ballad Unconditional Love and the jagged, Radiohead-esque Rest in Pleasure, a sense of groove is never far away. Spalding's bass remains at the fore of the mix – her rhythm/lead hybrid style is especially potent in the smart, stop-start groove of Judas – but the real triumph here is her voice. Her commanding, emotive, witty, octave-leaping conversational delivery is a weapon more potent than her notorious musical chops. A masterful artistic statement from a most-singular talent.
* Rob Garratt
HITnRun Phase Two
Prince
This was released in the final days of 2015, so strictly speaking it shouldn't be on this list, but it deserves recognition as it now serves as the unwitting closing act of Prince's recording career. For sure, there will be several encores from the artist, who died in April, as soon as the doors to his fabled Paisley Park vaults are thrown open. Until then, HITnRun Phase Two is Prince's final curtain call. If David Bowie's Blackstar was a deliberate goodbye, Prince's unintended valedictory was declarative and definitive. Like much of his earlier work, it bounces between the glorious and the inglorious, between the epic and the insular, between rock and dance – but if you listen to the polemical Baltimore, the sumptuous Groovy Potential or the smoky sound of Revelation – you will recognise this as the work of an extraordinary man.
* Nick March
Starboy
The Weeknd
Canadian R&B star Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye’s third album bears the fruits of a gargantuan ego that much like, say, Kanye West, produced a singular vision that chuckled at the concept of compromise. This equates to even more hedonism and unrepeatable lines, but presented in a cup overflowing with pop nous. Some observers saw his recent break-up with model girlfriend Bella Hadid as a sizeable influence, but that’s to wildly miss the point: Tesfaye is more or less continuing what he has always done, now grossly magnified under the gaze of being a chart-topping A-lister. Cocksure attitude and all, he shouldn’t change a thing.
* Adam Workman
Two Vines
Empire of the Sun
The band's third album is an infectious piece of work. Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore, the core of the group, have clearly invested enormous amounts of time and energy into fashioning the distinctive aesthetic and retrofuture synth sound of Empire of the Sun, and this foundation translates into an album that rewards repeat listening. Two Vines is a near-perfect representation of a slow fuse, each track an incendiary that fizzles and eventually explodes into electronic life – from the anthemic nature of High and Low to the irresistible sweep of There's No Need. The pair broadened their perspective to collaborate with Wendy Melvoin (once of The Revolution, Prince's backing band) and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham. Both of those collaborations – Ride and To Her Door – are standout moments in an album of many imaginative electro-pop peaks.
* Nick March
