Last year, I opened our Best Albums of 2016 list with an essay about how I was glad the era of the genre provincialist was dying. That, in 2016 (and 2017, natch), it was not possible to pretend like all of the best music available in a given year came from a single genre of music.

This year, looking at our list of the 30 Best Albums of 2017 as compiled with ballots by the VMP staff and some of our writers, the thing that sticks out—besides the genre hopping—is that while 2017 might not have had a clear, critical consensus number one album—or at least one that Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Spin et. al can agree on—it had a higher percentage of albums that were amazing than most years I can remember. But it also makes me wonder if along with the days of genre provincialism being diminished, that maybe the opportunity for an album to demonstrably stake its place—like say, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy did in 2010—as that year’s most daring, capital A album has also disappeared.

Because streaming services have given us everything all the time, they also make us more aware of new releases than we’ve probably ever been. And because albums don’t leak like they used to—which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned—we all get new albums at the same time. Which means there’s a weekly scramble to assess what is new, and worth your time. And because every week there’s a turn over at the top of Apple Music and Spotify, it’s hard to not feel like you’re missing out on something if you spend a second week worshipping at the altar of a now-old new album you think is great. So things fall into a pile of things you liked, and then you move onto the flashy new thing. The shelf life for an album at the top of the charts, your hearts, and your queue has gotten smaller than it’s maybe ever been.

In some ways though, that new reality makes lists like this—and every other Best Albums of 2017 list you’ve read this month already—more important. Because I’ve always looked at these as an opportunity to learn where someone/someplace ranks the albums they think are important, and use them as a roadmap for my own reassessment of an album I maybe only streamed half of. The din is only getting louder; let us cut down some surface noise for you and help you enjoy the music of 2017 in a new light. These 30 albums are the ones we think were the best of that endless roar of new music.—Andrew Winistorfer