#45. Danny Brown - XXX
He raps like he's losing his mind, his jeans are too skinny for 50 Cent, and his haircut is too hipster for.. hip-hop at large, basically. But Danny Brown's debut mixtape is one of the most complex and interesting in recent memory. On side one, he gets 'drunk as fuck' feels 'irritated when [he's] not sedated' and gives incredibly detailed oral sex. On side two, it all catches up with him, he's compromised by his neuroses and XXX becomes a powerful concept album.
#44. Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation
It takes a lot to stand out in the market of warbly, lo-fi indie-emo, but Trevor Powers nails it here. Tackling soaring crescendos and widescreen emotions with a childlike sense of innocence and security, this is 2011's answer to The Antlers' Hospice or Perfume Genius' Learning.
#43. Wild Flag - Wild Flag
2011 absolutely stunk for supergroups. Superheavy? Smith and Burrows? Lou Reed and Metallica? So once again, I find myself thanking some higher power for Sleater-Kinney, half of whom make up Wild Flag. More than any other rock band in 2011, Wild Flag were fun, exciting and utterly free of pretension.
#42. Araab Musik - Electronic Dream
Took the current belt-holder for Least Cool Genre - wassup, big room trance - and turned it into something essential, sometimes by simply laying his own ideas over entire songs: Kaskade, Deadmau5, Ian Van Dahl. Pretty brave in a year where every other notable hip-hop producer was just pushing out instrumental tapes.
#41. Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Sounds every bit like an old Nuggets tape buried under the shed and recovered sometime around 2030. Unlike too many other releases owing a debt to a bygone age, UMO succeeds simply because the quality of the songwriting is so consistently high.
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