The Guardian's 50 Best Albums of 2021

A eulogy for a dead friend, David Balfe’s stirring debut combines lyrics on class, death and despair with clubland highs and hope.

Full of 90s and 00s nostalgia, from Destiny’s Child to Café del Mar, the Danish artist’s second album boasts witty lyrics, outlandish soundscapes and beautiful pop melodies.

The bliss of Musgraves’ Grammy-winning Golden Hour sours on this follow-up, with a breakup narrative that is a little too tidy.

Madlib channels a deep, intertwining lineage of Black music through Sound Ancestors like folklore oration, storytelling with the sorcery of a beatmaker who knows how to make an instrumental really sing.

Nostalgic without bitterness or regret, the melodies pour out of this double album themed around the titular resort.

Cave’s rich writing and Ellis’s dense sounds form a reliably potent picture of locked-down end-times and the fantasy of redemption.

The London singer-songwriter’s warm, conversational and observant debut justifies the hype.

On their third and best album, the London four-piece embrace a more polished, widescreen sound that serves their sharp writing on late-20s anxieties.

The sound of an artist coming into her own, Rebecca Taylor’s remarkable second album as Self Esteem mixes the intimate and conversational with the unabashedly dramatic.