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Noisey UK's 25 Best Albums of 2014: 10-1

From grime to Grouper, these were the records that made our year.

Here we go then, the final hurdle. We've done our tracks, we've done albums 25 to 11. Now for Noisey's 10 best albums of the year, painstakingly selected by our staff and freelancers, with the votes totted up in a beautifully colour-coordinated spreadsheet.

We're using "album" in the loosest possible sense here, because frankly we couldn't give a shit about what does and doesn't come out on a piece of plastic and sold in HMV, as long as it exists and it's longer than one song - we're counting it.

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Anyway let's get going.

10. The Square - The Formula

Two big things happened in grime this year. The first was an overhaul in production which saw a loosening of some of the defining 16-bit constraints of the genre while still indisputably keeping to its 140BPM lineage. These new grime instrumentals felt like a huge sonic leap forward for a genre that often reuses and refixes riddims that are over a decade old. The other was the rise of a new tranche of MCs, a generation younger than the genre’s originators. For the first time in a few years it felt like there were a few personalities in grime who had the ability and charisma to take the genre forward. The likes of Stormzy, Novelist, Cas and Izzie Gibbs.

Without putting too fine a point on it, the instrumental stuff seemed to come from the hipster side of grime, lots of FACT readers peering over DJ booths and that kind of thing, whereas the MC stuff was coming from people too young to step foot into a nightclub, on the streets of East London, Lewisham and Birmingham.

The Square have kind of brought those two sides together, these spectacularly talented little shitbags, mostly still in school, combine incredible flow, genius verses and robust ingenuitive production. Together they’ve made hundreds of tracks this year, but what you get on The Formula is a perfect snapshot into what grime sounds like now and a template for the years to come. Sam Wolfson

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9. Run The Jewels - RTJ2

RTJ2 was probably the most offensive record of 2014. Two angry veteran rappers, wandering through their troubled and imagined future of America, pointing at shit they don't like - politicians, gang bangers, police, you, me, your dog - and ripping it three new buttholes with the type of bars that made you buy the record just so you could hide behind it. As El-P says early on, “Runs The Jewels is the answer, your question is WHAT’S POPPIN’?” Joe Zadeh

8. Freddie Gibbs and Madlib - Piñata

With copious amounts of trap rap hitting the Internet everyday, the self-proclaimed last real gangsta, Freddie Gibbs needed a way to stand out from the crowd. While he’s proven his ability to gobble up snare-rolls and 808’s in the past, it was when he was introduced to loop-digging, Stones Throw favourite Madlib that Gibbs received his crowning moment. Having made the acquaintance of the psychedelic producer via his manager, Gibbs received a beat CD from the Oxnard native and got working.

The resulting album Cocaine Piñata (renamed Piñata upon release - for obvious reasons) lands a million miles away from the heady Madlib releases that preceded it, notably Madvillainy (with DOOM) and Jaylib (with Dilla). In contrast to the mythology of Madvillainy, Piñata is very real, it’s down to earth. Unlike 90% of the rap music on shelves, you won’t find yourself questioning a word that Gibbs spits.

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But this doesn’t mean that it’s some straightforward rapping-about-rapping that you’re going to get bored of: Gibbs’ flow is utilised like some epic guitar solo as he wraps his words around these obscure loop based instrumentals, all the while remaining succinct and unambiguous. With its one word titles and perfectly, yet surprisingly, matched beats and rhymes, Piñata came out the gate with a timeless, instant classic feel. Grant Brydon

7. Caribou - Our Love

For a moment, Caribou looked set to have the album of the year. Then the record came out and it was clear that no song could be better than “Can’t Do Without You”, because that would be impossible. But that’s not to say Our Love isn’t a brilliant record. I mean, it’s in our list for a reason.

The record focuses on a very specific aspect of romance: the part when it’s been trundling on for a while, decades even, and marital discomfort and domestic bliss are both tugging at each other for dominance. I can’t say those are feelings I’ve experienced myself; I’m only twenty-two years old and, LOL, I’ll probably never own a house much less a feeling of domesticated bliss that slowly unravels. But the way Dan Snaith writes his songs, the hope and warmth he layers into every track, grants his emotions the power to transcend from his mind into anyone who listens. You experience the intimacy. Feel his heart tugging and waning. I listen to this record and want to marry the love of my life and buy matching furniture sets.

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Our Love is brilliant because, where other artists tackle very obvious aspects of love – obsession, jealousy, loneliness – Caribou has made something more accomplished and hard to pin down. It’s mature and real and, rather than being forced down your throat and jabbed forcefully into your heart, Our Love is a journey through the macrocosm of romance, one to sink into and mull over. Some of it is fucking boring, true. But that Jessy Lanza feature, “Our Love Will Set You Free”, the record’s title track, and “Can’t Do Without You” are better than most artist’s entire musical outputs. G’wan Dan Snaith. Ryan Bassil

6. Grouper - Ruins

Ruins, Liz Harris’ first album proper since 2008’s Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill, is that rarest of birds in 2014: a piano and vocals-only record that wasn’t recorded by a pop opera prick off The Voice.

Throughout the LP, she continues the process of stripping away the layers of fuzz and tape hiss that cloaked her previous work. However, it is by no means a crystal clear pro-tools addled record, with Harris’ voice still oscillating in and out of focus and diegetic clangs and scratches littered throughout. This increased clarity allows her compositions to breathe more and render the negative space all the bolder, which is no bad thing - naysayers who might have accused her of cloaking mediocre songs in unnecessary effect and bluster will be summarily shut down.

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In a year dominated by hyper-maximalism (SOPHIE, PC Music et al) and a ‘reheated gloop of knackered old tropes’ (endless blog-house remixes and tepid indie-dance crossovers), Harris’ morose minimalism is a stark, unflinching ray of miserable sunshine. Dan Canetti

5. Alex G - DSU

Ever since The Libertines packed away their winkle-pickers, critics have been keen to declare guitar music “dead” or, at the very least, a dead horse that hundreds of bands attempt to flog on a weekly basis. But then someone like Alex G will come along with a sound so unique that everyone who comes into contact with him seems to fall in love, and a massive egg is thrown in the faces of those who said it couldn’t be done.

Barely in his twenties, Philadelphia’s Alex Giannascoli dropped DSU via Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes in June, catapulting him from the understated realms of Bandcamp - where he had formerly existed as a hidden-gem for those who cared enough to look - to a massive feature spread in Rolling Stone, a release with UK label Lucky Number Music and a headline European tour. Not exactly shit for somebody who, 12 months ago, was mostly playing basement shows and dropping bedroom demos.

It’s not hard to see why, though. DSU is a collection of simple, well-crafted songs that bury their way into your heart, soul, imagination and iTunes “most played” section with the subtle ferocity of a new crush. For those reasons, DSU isn’t just one of the best guitar-pop records of the year, but one of the best records of the year, period. Emma Garland

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4. Taylor Swift - 1989

It’s hard to separate this album from the campaign around it, because it was such a perfect campaign - sequenced and executed with military precision yet played out like the girl-next-door popping over with some 4-track recordings she’s been working on. Every little piece: interview, magazine cover, track release, special edition polaroid, gently revealing quote, came together at just the right moment so the world’s interest never ebbed. It really deserves an accolade all of its own.

But if you do take away all of that, and just press play on a blank CD with 1989 burned onto it, what do you hear? Most of these songs aren’t exactly epics, there is to my mind no “Drunk In Love” moment here, where an artist so perfectly nails their very being. Instead you get these carefully constructed first-person reactions, little cross-sections taken at different stages of relationships, these very precise moments where things are transient, not on the ascent or descent, which is a sort of dummies way of look at human emotion, but the exact sum of the confusing often contradictory feelings you have in real relationships.

You could sum up the reasons this record is so popular with three words: attention to detail. I know it’s boring to say, but many of the biggest pop acts of today, on songwriting alone, don’t have anywhere near as much finesse as the ones of past. One Direction’s biggest hits don’t have a patch on Duran Duran or even Robbie Williams. Sam Smith’s spent a lot of time this year comparing himself to Whitney Houston, which is like comparing the best most spectacular sex of your life with making a ring with your thumb and forefinger and sticking a finger in and out.

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But Taylor’s record is full of the care and attention that pop deserves. These aren’t just verses and choruses but rainbow cakes of perfectly layered parts that all go to form something more delicious than the individual parts. I’ve listened to this record most days since it came out, and I’m not even a bit bored with it. The songs are exceptionally rich, with fingertips that lightly brush past 80s references and 00s production but never grab on, instead reaching a sound separate from both the past and the present. Sam Wolfson

3. PC Music - DISown Mix

Opening with sped-up classical piano and segueing into ten minute sets from A. G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition and Kane West, the PC Music DISown Mix is a veritable showcase of everything we all love or hate about the no-rules glitch orgy that defines the sound of 2014’s most divisive label.

Despite being responsible for some of the most clinical branding of all time, the artists of PC Music (whoever they may be, it could quite conceivably be one guy mucking around on a laptop) still manage to produce some of the warmest, sweetest sounds this side of the Atari. Danny L Harle serves up what sounds like music from The Sims played underwater. And Nu New Edition throws down ten minutes of pitched up R&B that could be the score for a Nintendo game about Salt-N-Pepa.

Arguably the most on-point segment comes from GFOTY. With lyrics that could be text conversations cut up and rearranged by a millennial William S. Burroughs who cares about emojis more than words and Britney more than beat poetry, GFOTY is like a sincere hug from a bratty teenager. It’s vapid and existential in equal measure.

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And, if you hate it, remember that it’s entirely reflective our culture of brand-bumming and “I must consume everything all at once” instincts. It’s music that nobody asked for, but everybody needs to hear. So next time you’re wondering what the future sounds like, listen to this, because it literally is “Can you get me a can?” repeated over an elaborate string section.

2. Dean Blunt - Black Metal

Dean Blunt isn’t for everyone, but I reckon he knows and relishes this. It explains why everything that surrounded this year’s Black Metal felt like booby traps laid to deter the passing listener. From the title of the record, which boldly hints at an extreme subgenre he never even dips in, to the blank and opaque blackness of the front cover, and the list of reasons that came on an accompanying letter of poetry, titled “Excuses When Your Album Flops”, which included: “My album was under shipped”, “My album leaked” and “I made this album for myself”.

Continuing on from last year’s beautiful record The Redeemer, Black Metal continued with the schtick that if you don’t want it, you won’t enjoy it. It's a hypnagogic fresco of 70s American rock loops, Autechre-like noise, ambient dub, baroque, jazz, synth. It’s the most diverse thing I heard in 2014. And with his fragile and jarring voice at the front of it all, verbalising topics from black empowerment and white iconography, to valium benders and scrapes with the popo, it is both intensely musical and weirdly amateurish.

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You should expect as much from such a provocative don. First time I ever saw him play, as one half of the now defunct duo Hype Williams, atop a stage completely cocooned in impenetrable smoke and bursting strobes, they stretched out the word “banana” from Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback girl” over a warbling sub bass for about ten minutes, until it felt like some sort of slowed and throwed oratorio to pop culture. This year, during shows for Black Metal, I’ve heard stories of him crying on stage during free jazz improv performances inspired by the antics of Ornette Coleman, with a brick shithouse bouncer stood guard next to him the entire time.

You couldn’t make up Dean Blunt. His interviews are rare and surreal, he’s never around, and anything we know about him, is something he wanted us to know. He’s got that invisible, untouchable and aloof aura that artists just don’t have anymore. The true alien, the mysterious other. The vibe that makes it hard to believe Dean Blunt actually exists unless he’s standing on a stage in front of you. Here’s to another year of him being the weirdest and most talented motherfucker in Britain.

1. Ratking - So It Goes

There's a moment on So It Goes which I think best captures the record as a whole. On the song "Remove Ya" there's a sample of what sounds like a police officer arresting a youth. The kid demands to know what's going on, the cop replies, "Because you're a mutt". Wiki jumps in with glee: "I'm a mutt, you's a mutt, we some mutts." When the record first came out at the start of the year it bristled my sensibilities, but after the past year of police brutality America, it feels like some kind of perverse scream of solidarity.

That's not to say that Ratking are social commentators, much less geographical ones. They're from New York but that informs everything and nothing about them as a group. Their music sounds more like west-coast stoner rock, south-London doss pop and intense Detroit techno as much as it does a classic New York rap group. Yet there is something in their sound that is heavy with the ID checks and mistrust that comes with growing up as a kid in the world’s biggest city, the flecks a society brushes away.

So many great records are born from the tension between the principle players - the unease between Marr and Morrissey, Pete and Carl, Dizzee and Wiley has led to some of the most spectacular collaborations of all time. With Ratking too, there’s a version of that, Wiki basically lives life by the seat of his pants, so even his most carefully considered verses feel wild and off-kilter. Sport is a statistics-obsessed neat freak who makes the most outlandish production through meticulous tinkering and then there's Hak, a mild-mannered New England art student who only gave rapping a go because Wiki persuaded him to.

That blurring of personalities, the wavering resistance to the establishment, it all goes to make a record that feels both powerful and lost. To me it is the sound of lying flat on a pick-up truck, as sounds come in and out of focus, staring up at the sky, disoriented but for passing street lights and the occasional plane, totally out of control of where you’re going, having no idea if you'll ever make it off. I can identify with that. Without a shadow of a doubt the record of the year. Sam Wolfson

Here is a final recap of all 25 albums of the year…

25. Ricky Eat Acid - Three Love Songs
24. Leighton Meester - Heartstrings
23. Stormzy - Dreamer's Disease
22. Future - Honest
21. Badbadnotgood - III
20. TV Girl - French Exit
19. PLO Man - Trushmix 61 Podcast
18. Sleaford Mods - Divide and Exit
17. Isaiah Rashad - Cilvia Demo
16. Todd Terje - It's Album Time
15. Ought - More Than Any Other Day
14. Wiley - Snakes and Ladders
13. FKA Twigs - LP1
12. Nothing - Guilty of Everything
11. Mac Demarco - Salad Days
10. The Square - Formula
9. Run The Jewels - RTJ2
8. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Piñata
7. Caribou - Our Love
6. Grouper - Ruins
5. Alex G - DSU
4. Taylor Swift - 1989
3. PC Music - Disown Mix
2. Dean Blunt - Black Metal
1. Ratking - So It Goes