The following list, sorted alphabetically, includes rock albums found on Pitchfork’s main year-end tally as well as an additional 14 LPs that did not make that list but are just as worthy of your time.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Jagjaguwar

Angel Olsen: All Mirrors

With each record, Angel Olsen’s music grows grander and darker, and on All Mirrors, she spreads her leathery wings and nearly blots out the sky. Her most dramatic release yet, All Mirrors telegraphs to us in Andrew Lloyd Webber-sized gestures: When Olsen's voice ascends an octave on “Lark,” the accompanying drum resounds like a cannon aimed at a fortress, and the dive-bombing glissandos from the orchestra mimic debris streaming around her. Over the album’s inky expanse, Olsen tries out an entirely new, gothic corner of her record collection: The Cure’s Disintegration, Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Even at its gauziest, however, Olsen’s music still thrums with anxiety; her version of dream-pop is unsettled by existential terror, which prickles to the surface of “Too Easy” and “What It Is” like fever sweat. –Jayson Greene

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

4AD

Big Thief: Two Hands

By the time Big Thief released U.F.O.F. this past May, you might’ve thought they deserved some time off: It was their third album in four years. But not five months later came Two Hands, which is as much an exorcism as its predecessor. Violence ripples through these songs like a vein of quartz—“Rock and Sing” might be a children’s lullaby about lost souls, “The Toy” an intimation of great evil. Warmed by humming amps and the presence of four bodies pressed in close, the album unspools as effortlessly as a campfire session—stray counterpoints, offhand vocal harmonies, tiny details dancing like shadows on the treeline. At a time when it feels like no patch of ground is immune from either flood or fire, Two Hands draws a circle and creates a refuge there. –Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

4AD

Big Thief: U.F.O.F.

Like white light refracted through a prism to reveal an array of colors, ordinary words and phrases—wrinkled hands, silver hair, clear water—take on new meanings when sung by Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker. U.F.O.F, the first of two stellar albums the band released this year, sounds at once exploratory and wise, as if they are both seeing the world with fresh wonder while explaining the way things have always been. On bulked-up folky rock songs like “Jenni” and “Betsy,” Lenker’s winding voice twists through a dense weave of vine-like guitars and brittle drums, acting as a sonic anchor while the rhythm swirls around her. The lyrics are elliptical yet striking, so successful at filling you with what feels like an ancient longing that it sometimes feels like you’re discovering a new language entirely. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

Saddle Creek

Black Belt Eagle Scout: At the Party With My Brown Friends

Katherine Paul, aka Portland’s Black Belt Eagle Scout, creates rock music in delicate soft focus. Her second album, At the Party With My Brown Friends, offers a serene glimpse inside her world—or at least a serene-sounding one. Led by a majestic vocal melody, opening track “At the Party” celebrates the strength inherent to Indigenous peoples while still mourning the marginalization that makes it so. “You’re Me and I’m You” pays homage to her mother’s open heart and Native Alaskan heritage, with close-mic’d vocals and brushed drums adding to the intimate feeling. Not every song on the album is as clear in its intention—Paul’s half-finished thoughts provide a dreamy sense of stasis throughout—but all are deeply felt. –Eric Torres