Best Albums of 2010
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted FantasyMaximalism as a moral argument: every excess on the record is also its subject, and it never once buckles.Read the review
Teen DreamThe haze burns off, the songs arrive, and the band goes from promising to essential in one record.
Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. RagerDarker, heavier and more coherent than the first one. The best album he has made.
Distant RelativesTwo catalogs that should not fit, welded together by the best set of beats either of them had that decade.
Speak NowWritten entirely alone at twenty, and the ambition of that shows in both directions.
InnerspeakerA debut made in a beach house on the Australian coast that sounds like 1969 recorded through water.
Thank Me LaterA nervous, expensive debut that hits its marks and never quite sounds like the mixtape that earned it.
RecoveryIt sold more than anything else that year and aged worse than almost anything else in the catalogue.
RebirthA rock album by a man who cannot play, sing or write one, delivered a year late and fully committed.