The year isn’t over yet (nor is the world, for that matter), and already, music publications are engaged in the annual ritual of deciding which songs and albums represent the very best the year had to offer.
As ridiculous as it is for a publication to assert that one album was the objective best of the year, we love these lists because they always contain plenty of great music, and there are always some surprises in there that we hadn’t heard yet.
Some of us at Evolver.fm have taken it upon ourselves to assemble all of these lists, painstakingly, into Toma.hk playlists, so you can listen to as many tracks as possible, regardless of which services you subscribe to, where you live, or where the artist or label decided to distribute the song online. And if we couldn’t find it there, we embedded it from Spotify. We found almost every album on all of these lists, though. Whew.
If you see something you like, buy it twice. Give a copy to someone else for your holiday of choice. (Also, a note to bands: Never release anything in December if you want to see your name on one of these lists.)
Cool? Cool. Here we go. You can work your way through this daily-updated list with the arrows or jump to any list directly (you might have to wait for the page to load completely):
- Amazon’s Best Music of 2012
- American Songwriter’s Top 50 Albums of 2012
- Decibel Magazine’s top 40 LPs of 2012
- Drowned in Sound’s Favourite Albums of 2012: 50-6
- Filter’s Top 10 of 2012: Staff Picks
- Gorilla vs. Bear’s Songs of 2012
- Idolator’s Top 10 of 2012: Staff Picks
- KCRW DJs’ Best Albums of 2012 (new)
- MetaCritic 2012 Music Critic Top Ten Lists
- NME’s 50 Best Albums of 2012
- NPR’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2012
- Paste’s Top 50 Best Albums of 2012
- The Pop Sucker: The 15 Best Albums & EPs of 2012
- The Quietus Albums of the Year 2012
- Pretty Much Amazing Best Songs of 2012
- Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums of 2012
- Said The Gramophone’s Best Songs of 2012
- Spin’s 50 Best Albums of 2012
- Stereogum’s Top 50 Albums Of 2012
- Time’s Top 10 Songs Of 2012
Did we miss any? Of course we did. We’ll keep updating this beast of a thing, but in the meantime, if you notice that we’re missing a particularly good list, please let us know.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Jason Anfinsen)