With another year approaching its conclusion, it’s that time once again to take stock of the past eleven months in new music. In years past, we’ve confined our albums-of-the-year assessments to the preferences of our opinionated and passionate staff of writers. But this year, we’ve changed things up a bit, in the spirit of ensuring that our end-of-year selections represent a more accurate consensus among the broader Albumism community. Sure, our team’s respective picks still figure prominently, but equal weight has now been afforded to our readers’ choices, per the poll we circulated a few weeks ago, which inspired thousands of responses.

So without further ado, we’re thrilled to reveal our combined staff & readers’ picks for the 50 Best Albums of 2018! We encourage you to explore the list via the album cover index below and be sure to click each album cover for more information, including full album streams and accompanying videos. Enjoy!