My favorite two hip-hop albums yawed towards what might have once been thought non-commercial, though it’s hard to say if that distinction will survive. A collaboration between MC Ride, the drummer Zach Hill, and the keyboardist Andy Morin, the Death Grips trio self-released “Exmilitary,” which has little use for anything that slows down time or blurs the edges. Start with the video for “Guillotine” and move on—the album is one long, wide-awake, multi-colored holler. Ishamel Butler, veteran of nineties group Digable Planets, brought his mysterious Shabazz Palaces to Sub Pop records and created “Black Up” with various unnamed collaborators. It’s a marvel of details that you can’t initially hear, but which eventually surround you as Butler raps, sounding no more wound up than he did twenty years ago. In the year of disorientation, Shabazz Palaces created the clearest, loveliest fog.

Illustration by Jim Stoten; photograph by Wayne Lawrence.

Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.