Coming off the back of a surged popularity in R&B Pop, as well as an underground revival of Hip-Hop/Rap music, the early 2010’s burst into the scene as a space for standardised Pop music with no thematic elements, shared with a scene of Hip-Hop/Rap music that was spilling into the mainstream. This would continue until the middle of the decade, where a clear shift in Pop music was taking place.

With streaming platforms becoming popularised and a plethora of new artists coming onto the scene, traditional Pop album sales (with a few exceptions) were falling, and a new era of alternative Pop music would begin to a great success. Hip-Hop/Rap was also seeing the effects of the streaming age, with the mixtape format becoming repopularised on streaming service Soundcloud, and a new generation of Rap lovingly referred to as 'soundcloud/mumble rap’ would dominate the scene, and infiltrate the charts.

This decade was not a continuation of the one prior, but a reinvention. The underground music industry still remains- available online through leaked .zip files. Only now, it consists of artists innovating genres across the board, the likes of which had not been seen since electronic music emerged onto the scene. Labels and artists such as PC Music, Young Turks, Arca, Sophie, Death Grips and Iglooghost have all brought to the table sounds of the future, noise that has never existed in any format and continues to develop constantly.

Aside from innovation, prior artists still uphold their own and continue their excellence within respective genres. The decade saw the return and continuation of artists such as D’angelo, Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Beyoncé and Rihanna still at their peak form- and in some cases, better than ever. This list takes into consideration the innovation, excellence in respective genres, cultural impacts and overall themes of the albums released between 2010 and the end of 2019.