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Under the Radar’s Top 100 Albums of 2019 Put Aside Division and Toxicity and Get Lost in the Year's Best Full-Lengths





2019 was a divisive and toxic year for politics on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere, but can we all agree that the decade's final year was firmly a fantastic one for music? Probably not, but here at Under the Radar we certainly felt that way. So while we all stress about impeachment, never ending Brexit negotiations and the election of Boris Johnson, protests in Hong Kong and a trade war with China, immense forest fires in Australia and Brazil and the ever worrying threat of climate change-there was amazing album after fantastic album to get lost in. Whoever says full-length albums are a forgotten artform or that indie rock has been overcome by poptimism clearly hasn't heard 2019's best releases. Some notable artists even released two great albums this year.

As you've probably noticed, we've taken our time assessing which 2019 albums are the best, posting this list on the very last day of the decade. We're not overly concerned with being first, more with getting it right. Here we present a Top 100 Albums of 2019 list-whereas many other websites might opt for only a Top 50 or less-and our writers have done brand new write-ups on each of the Top 60 albums. Even then, there were some good albums that almost made the list, but didn't quite get on there, including 2019 albums by These New Puritans, TOY, Priests, Iggy Pop, Hand Habits, Telekinesis, Glen Hansard, Wand, Sudan Archives, Vivian Girls, The New Pornographers, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's Fishing for Fishies-so consider all those honorable mentions.

To arrive at Under the Radar's Top 100, 24 of our writers and editors (including myself and my co-publisher/wife Wendy) each submitted a list of their favorite albums of the year and were encouraged to turn in at least a Top 45. All-in-all 443 different albums were submitted for the vote, but to make the Top 100 an album had to be picked by at least three or more separate writers (our #1, for example, was picked by 21 of our writers and our #2 was chosen by 18 different writers). We then did a secondary vote to determine the bottom four, from a selection of 19 different albums that almost made the Top 96. It doesn't always shake out this way, but in 2019 my two favorite albums of the year were mirrored by the overall staff vote. So as we usher in a new year and decade, take time to reflect on 2019's best albums in our list section here. Let us know in the comments which albums were your personal favorites.

Check out the Top 40 here.

Check out #41-100 here.

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