Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2016

Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2016

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47.

March 25, 2016
Critic Score
82
4 reviews

46.

September 2, 2016
Critic Score
86
39 reviews

My Woman is a record coated in the sounds of radio’s past, a potpourri of classic rock gestures and doo-wop sway, yet Olsen’s mindset is anything but nostalgic.

44.

June 10, 2016
Critic Score
81
7 reviews

Huerco S. claimed he wanted to make something timeless. Both genuinely and emblematically, he’s done just that.

43.

June 17, 2016
Critic Score
85
30 reviews

It continues her infatuation with love, loneliness, betrayal, hunger, and the afflictions from both sadness and happiness.

42.

DJ Coquelin & MC Cloarec - JE M’EN TAPE
April 25, 2016
Critic Score
100
1 review

41.

May 6, 2016
Critic Score
81
38 reviews
The performances in these songs are as dramatic as they are musical: disarmingly direct, phenomenally compelling.

39.

May 6, 2016
Critic Score
76
21 reviews

Barwick’s music is lyrical, wordless, a poetics of negation and repetition. The scatter-worlds of play, ambiguity, and never-empty space. So it breathes, conjures.

38.

Ytamo - MI WO
March 18, 2016
Critic Score
80
1 review

37.

The Savage Young Taterbug - Shadow of Marlboro Man
January 29, 2016
Critic Score
80
1 review

36.

February 6, 2016
Critic Score
70
18 reviews

These tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.

35.

September 22, 2016
Critic Score
71
3 reviews
Unlike so many things, the song does not come to a stop, but to an end. And all you are going to want to do is get back there.

33.

May 19, 2016
Critic Score
74
4 reviews

32.

April 23, 2016
Critic Score
90
38 reviews

For all the scorn and fireworks, LEMONADE is maybe most remarkable for its capacity for healing ... It’s a work that relishes in the movement of emotionality, the contradictory wrecking-ball feelings that spring from disappointed love, that could turn you to drought if turned from. And it never loses its focus.

31.

April 22, 2016
Critic Score
80
13 reviews

Despite the complexities that make this such a multi-faceted and intrepid addition to the Modern Love catalogue ... Too Many Voices is an immersive experience that builds on the artists’ past without once holding them back.

29.

January 8, 2016
Critic Score
86
45 reviews
Which pop stars have lived or even remained relevant long enough to commemorate their own deaths in song? And who has done it so cannily, with as much shimmer, spunk, and rude humor, with as much life as Bowie did here? The album may or may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a heartbreaker, a miracle.

28.

Macula Dog - Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?
August 5, 2016
Critic Score
80
2 reviews

27.

April 8, 2016
Critic Score
80
28 reviews

Doubt, disbelief, and uncertainty are conjured across Love Streams, both as bludgeoning buildups and tumbling segues. 

24.

September 2, 2016
Critic Score
81
4 reviews

blisters is a shadowbox of foregrounds and backgrounds, plainspoken address versus skyward invocation, the injunction of intersecting folk performance styles (spiritual, musical theater, pop R&B) into the sparring tectonic movements of neophytic hyperobjects.

22.

Djwwww - Arigato
February 26, 2016
Critic Score
90
1 review

20.

Jeremih - Late Nights: The Album
December 4, 2015
Critic Score
76
11 reviews

Jeremih’s a night owl, not a lark, and on Late Nights: The Album — his first in a lustrum — he retreats even further from the spotlight he seemed predestined for, carefully crafting an album that surprisingly finds tranquility in the 28-year-old’s thrill-seeker ways.

19.

July 22, 2016
Critic Score
84
7 reviews

Crampton’s work adopts its own distinct language, and Demon City uses that language to relate, in her words, an “epic poem” — a resonant narrative of apocalypse and transformation.

18.

October 21, 2016
Critic Score
82
10 reviews
Fine-tuning the subversive attitude behind their naive front, KKB rides the narrow frequency that sits between uncritical pop product and art school radio, and in so doing manage to nonchalantly and charismatically critique their surroundings.

17.

November 11, 2016
Critic Score
84
3 reviews

Not quite abstraction and note quite representation, $uccessor is marked by its persistent attendance of texture and relationship in sound, placing them high above rhythm and melody.

16.

May 13, 2016
Critic Score
79
3 reviews

15.

May 13, 2016
Critic Score
78
29 reviews

Wrapped in a overwhelming number of influences, Oh No vaults across an infinity of cultural milieus to find itself. Soft and sensual, alone in a room of millions, Lanza weaves past and present, dance and desire as one in a dizzying, strenuous aesthletic attempt at its future.

14.

January 27, 2016
Critic Score
70
38 reviews

ANTI is folk music played in a video-drome circularly projecting a 360° image of sprawling, semi-wilderness on fire as a compassionate, loving apocalypse.

13.

August 26, 2016
Critic Score
77
11 reviews

12.

March 9, 2016
Critic Score
62
4 reviews

Like the works of its humble forebears Lil B and the venerable Soulja Boy, Lil Boat is the kind of music that does not need to make a case for its own value, only judged on the intangible, absurdist metrics of its self-contained universe.

11.

September 30, 2016
Critic Score
76
3 reviews
This is mood music, flecked with beauty and riven with hurt, a compelling, complex work that extends itself outwards, generously inviting the listener to share in its triumphs and disappointments.

9.

September 27, 2016
Critic Score
84
36 reviews
Danny Brown’s gift is that he imbues these barbaric tales with pathos and humor, burning his existence into the rap firmament, always and forever the “murder music orchestrator”.

8.

February 26, 2016
Critic Score
67
10 reviews

Pop music is often at its best when it seek to challenge its own established tradition, and imbued with a timeless feminine cultural residue, Vroom Vroom does just that. This is pop music reinventing itself, reasserting its autonomy.

7.

James Ferraro - Human Story 3
June 14, 2016
Critic Score
75
2 reviews

6.

September 30, 2016
Critic Score
82
25 reviews

The themes run from menstruation to vampires to capitalism to loneliness to pap smears, and any thread you pick can take you to the core. You have been invited in.

5.

August 19, 2016
Critic Score
75
18 reviews

His response to the crisis-ordinary is to take his time, to ask us to be patient. The first two songs on Endless aren’t even Frank Ocean songs, and the rest blur together with an anti-programmatic sort of dream sequencing.

5.

August 20, 2016
Critic Score
86
42 reviews

Blonde is of instances, of stretches and yawns, creativity in recreation, invisible labor, a time-lapse collapsed into one space.

4.

Arca - Entrañas
July 4, 2016
Critic Score
82
4 reviews

Entrañas is the unnameable us, the fireworks and the semi-automatics. It seeks uncovering and discovers trauma. It is elegy and bruise, sound and echo. It screams in the face of silence.

3.

February 14, 2016
Critic Score
77
36 reviews

“No, art is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

2.

Lolina - Live in Paris
May 6, 2016
Critic Score
73
3 reviews

1.

April 1, 2016
Critic Score
73
11 reviews
While his lexicon is coded, his syntax disconnected, and his sense-making sometimes inscrutable, Blunt’s underlying style could perhaps be best described as spatial. His odd, pointed cadences are exacerbated by lateral entryways and long pauses between lines, with a stream of rap tropes and side-door slang finding unexpected expression in the crevices of its post-genre flexing.
Original Source: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2016-favorite-50-music-releases
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