Hey everybody! Long time no post. If you enjoyed this break from my musical musings, I apologize. But I MUST MUSE! It’s in my blood. The musing, that is. In this latest installment of my seemingly never-ending countdown of my 100 favorite albums from the 2010s, we look back at a pair of hip hop classics, the birth of a slacker icon, and so much more…

40. Rich Gang – Tha Tour: Part I (2014)

Even though he was only 22 in 2014, Young Thug had already taken a long and winding journey through major label hell – signed to two major labels at once, one of them screwing him with a $30k deal (yes, “k” as in thousand). But on Tha Tour: Part I, Thugga’s crew mixtape with fellow Atlantan Rich Homie Quan and Cash Money Records founder Birdman, none of this turmoil seems to be touching him. The album swells with woozy confidence, thanks to the lush, organ-fueled R&B grooves contributed by a murderer’s row of Atlanta trap producers. Thugga and Quan share the stage equally, with the latter’s sturdy tenor proving to be the ideal foil for our star’s effortlessly melodic squawks. The lyrical content is your standard rap ego-trip fodder – sex, money, guns, repeat. And Birdman’s flex-happy interludes up the self-mythologizing ante even more, boasting about gold toilets and having 600 songs in the can. It turns out this was exactly the kind of fantastical comfort zone the group’s star needed. “I come through smoking loud like a whistle / Looking down from the cloud like a rearview,” Young Thug shares, making us believe he’s on top of the world despite all the uncertainty in his life. We never did get Tha Tour: Part II, but we’re lucky this bolt of lightning struck once.

39. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo (2011)

Before record labels, fashion brands, and Cameron Crowe & Richard Linklater films found ways to monetize it in the 1990s, the concept of a “slacker” was its own kind of cool. The way Bob Dylan lazily dropped those “Subterranean Homesick Blues” cue cards back in 1965, it seemed like the guy barely gave a shit, and didn’t we love him all the more for it? It’s this image that comes to mind when I listen to Kurt Vile’s deceptively ramshackle 2011 masterpiece Smoke Ring For My Halo. The man delivers every lyric of these stoner folk songs in a gentle mumble – from the sarcastic “Society Is My Friend” to the romantic “Baby’s Arms.” But instead of coming off like some half-assed bedroom album, SRFMH creates a compelling headspace. Vile’s slacker vocal stylings are a put-on; we know he could hit all these notes with authority if he wanted to. But I say bring on the role-playing – there’s something captivating about this singer who sounds like he doesn’t care if anybody hears him, who just wants to get some things off his chest and then go to bed. Something strangely and indisputably cool.

38. Ty Segall – Twins (2012)

This Bay Area garage rocker was quite prolific in the ’10s – in 2012 he released three LPs alone, each a lo-fi amphetamine-addict jamboree with its own distinct personality. Twins, the second of this trio, spoke to me the most because it’s the catchiest. Like most of Segall’s efforts, there’s plenty of Stooges-inspired sonic vandalism going on. But Twins isn’t out to bludgeon. It’s stacked with the kind of high-octane hooks that come from deep dives into the British Invasion or the Nuggets box set. Segall’s raw, reedy voice is made for this stuff; at times he sounds like a wet-behind-the-ears John Lennon, honing his chops in the dive bars of Munich. Where its predecessor Slaughterhouse took its name to heart with an aggressive sonic approach, Twins keeps its melodies relatively pristine, whether they’re sweetening the hyperactive hard rock of “You’re the Doctor” or taking flight on the stunning closing ballad, “There Is No Tomorrow.” Segall has made a lot of great music since, but this remains the one my ears and adrenal glands love the most.

37. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)

On the first single of his major label debut, Kendrick Lamar raps about being alone in his childhood bedroom, nursing a shot and dreaming of adoring fans. One voice in his head tells him that he should dive in a swimming pool full of liquor. Another says that he’s noxious and on the wrong path. It’s a compelling, heartbreaking metaphysical struggle, and only one kind of conflict that arises on good kid, m.A.A.d city, the rapper’s concept album about growing up with all the cards stacked against you. He falls in love, gives in to peer pressure, almost gets arrested and watches his friend commit murder, all while ignoring the voicemails from his mother (who isn’t worried about him; she just wants the car so she can leave the house). Words spill from Lamar’s mouth in a flow that’s second nature; every time he spits 16, it sounds like he could go for 160. Which makes his incisive personal and sociological observations all the more powerful, woven through laid-back loops that belie his tumultuous roots.

36. Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019)

When Bill Callahan released his sixth LP under his given name, I had just started reading Jane Austen for the first time, injecting Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice straight into my bloodstream. Of all the ways these classics moved me, I was especially struck by the quietness of their romantic denouements. When Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy finally profess their love for one another – after 250 pages of nervous misunderstandings in drawing rooms – it’s over in a minute. No grand gestures are made. Their feelings are enough. On the loose, unassuming double-album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, Bill Callahan channels Austen’s straightforwardness about love. Six years removed from his previous album – the more traditionally lovestruck Dream River – Shepherd found the artist reflecting on the joys of being a husband and father, more rooted in his bliss, performing humbly arranged songs in his home studio as if his wife had requested them via a note on the fridge. “The panic room is now a nursery / And there’s renovators renovating constantly,” he shares on “Son of the Sea,” finding peace in the ebb and flow of domestic life. For the majority of his career, Callahan has been more of a wandering cowboy type, philosophizing about life’s grandest mysteries, with the dramatic instrumentation to match. So it was especially moving to hear him speak plainly, as a man grateful for finding his people, and for the way they’ve shepherded him home.