The results are in for one of our favorite traditions! We asked our writers, editors, and photographers what albums they couldn't stop listening to this year. Collectively, the responses covered nearly 100 albums and reminded us just how broad and diverse the roots music world is. Our top 15 albums of the year, below.
Click through each post to read the whole review and thank you for supporting and reading No Depression all year long!
15. Margo Price – Hard Headed Woman
Hard headed women are forever causing trouble in country music history, but very few of them own their narratives. Margo Price does. On her latest, Hard Headed Woman, Price returns to a classic country sound reminiscent of her early albums full force, but plants her feet firmly on her own turf, terms, and technical prowess. – Meredith Lawrence
14. Willi Carlisle – Winged Victory
Willi Carlisle’s ardently Queer, class-conscious take on country-folk traditionalism gets wilder and friskier on Winged Victory. It feels relatively easy to crown Winged Victory as the high-water mark of Carlisle’s recorded output, but that feels almost besides the point. The journey that he’s taking us on, about the past, present, and future of folk music’s meanings and possibilities, is quite simply essential. – Kyle Peterson
13. Amanda Shires – Nobody's Girl
Nobody’s Girl is a documentation — a historical record, perhaps — of the time just after the relationship fell apart for good. Reclamation has been a crucial part of healing for Shires, and it was her goal in making Nobody’s Girl. It is her memory of what happened, all the blistering details, the moments she felt the wind knocked out of her, the messy and sometimes funny stumbles back into a social life, the shattering of parts that must be pieced back together, the guilt-ridden condition of motherhood, the ways she fell short as much as the ways she felt wronged. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, the cracks are visible. Still, they’re striking in their beauty, and the end result is stronger and more resilient. – Maeri Ferguson
