NPR Music's 40 Favorite Albums Of 2018 (So Far)
Let's face it: We live in an era dominated by playlists. Whether you listen to one of the chart-defining destinations on Spotify, let YouTube's algorithm be your guide, follow a friend's listening habits or create your own mixtapes, the idea of listening to an entire album in one sitting becomes increasingly quaint by the day. With thousands of great songs available at the tips of our fingers (not to mention that skip button), sitting through anything but an irresistible chorus can feel like a bridge too far. It's almost as if spending 30 minutes with a record requires an irrational attachment bordering on obsession.
So, for the moment, we're leaning into obsession. When we surveyed our panel of public radio writers about the best albums of the past six months, we asked them a single question: What is your one favorite album of 2018 so far? We weren't interested in the consensus constructed by second- and third-place votes; there will be plenty of pixels for that in December. Without further ado, let's talk about the passions.
's is a lesson in archetypes. In the 1970s, the Chicana L.A. punk pioneer of The Bags proclaimed herself a "": a woman who, like certain chrome alloys, becomes only moreunbreakable when tempered with fire. On , Bag paints complex portraits of nameless (brown by default) individuals with characteristic pith and violence-girl riffs. On "Invisible," a man who drinks too much holds himself together for his daughter and craves invisibility, a state many immigrants inhabit to survive, only to remain invisible to the American public eye. On "The Sparkling Path," Bag alludes to escape by suicide, urging a message of survival beyond the kind of magical thinking for the oppressed who seek fulfillment beyond a lack of food, water and, most pressing of all, shelter. And on "," she enlists the help of Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill) and Alison Wolfe (Bratmobile) to . In other songs, Bag is herself again, defending her blue hair against on "" or delivering the starkest gut punch against self-loathing in "Etched Deep": "All that rubbing at the pages / Won't make them white," she says to us and to our history. There's no performative Twitter-shock at the plight of brown people on this album. There's only the solemn self-vindication of a woman too long kept in the dark by ostensibly radical punk. "White justice," after all, "just isn't just."
