--- title: Top 10 Albums of 2012 | TIME description: TIME music writer Douglas Wolk selects the best albums of the year. canonical: https://time.com/video/QWQtLSFt/ og:title: Top 10 Albums of 2012 og:description: TIME music writer Douglas Wolk selects the best albums of the year. og:url: https://time.com/video/QWQtLSFt/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QWQtLSFt/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Top 10 Albums of 2012 twitter:description: TIME music writer Douglas Wolk selects the best albums of the year. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QWQtLSFt/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Top 10 Albums of 2012 > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Top 10 Albums of 2012 [Watch (HLS stream): Top 10 Albums of 2012](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/QWQtLSFt.m3u8) (7:56)  _Published 2012-12-03. TIME music writer Douglas Wolk selects the best albums of the year._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:29 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Top 10 Albums of 2011](/video/KZ4po7n1/) ### The Top 10 Albums of 2011 [The Grammys: Best Musical Show Album](/video/jV4dnLhO/) ### The Grammys: Best Musical Show Album [Grammy Nominees: Album of the Year](/video/jsvXQKSa/) ### Grammy Nominees: Album of the Year --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] RAP music is a knock out album with Magenta that doesn't even hint a pop crossover. It's Puff Mane in a shirt, the work of an artist who knows how hard he would strike. [ MUSIC ] Azalia Banks doesn't have an official album out yet, Just this poor song, Taster. [ MUSIC ] She's got a taste for club beats, an X- rated sense of humor and a gift for spectacular multi- syllable rhymes. [ MUSIC ] I also recommend tracking down her online mix tape, Fantasy. [ MUSIC ] This is a grim grim album, but it's also a strangely biblical one. [ MUSIC ] John Darnell, the mountain goat singer and song writer, is still writing pointed empathetic lyrics about people who are lying in the gutter and aren't sure where the stars went. [ MUSIC ] The [ UNKNOWN ] is most of his characters are barely clinging to life and sanity, Darnell keeps expanding the sound around them. [ MUSIC ] This is a way to use a brilliant idea for a compilation and beautifully executed. [ MUSIC ] At 16 recordings of music and spoken word, and sometimes the places where music and spoken word overlapped, from the hey day of the American black power movement. [ MUSIC ] The Seer takes its time with listeners in pretty much the same way a cat takes it's time with a mouse. [ MUSIC ] It's got 11 songs on it, that add up to almost two hours. [ MUSIC ] Swans are New York City institution. 30 years ago they were playing grinding ugly noise, 15 years ago they were playing Quiet, solemn, beautiful dirges and now the third cap, the sound of a celestial sledgehammer descending. [ MUSIC ] The Ethiopian jazz saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria is in his 70's. He's been collaborating with the Dutch punk rock band The X Intermittently since 2004. [ MUSIC ] Now, that sounds like an unlikely combination. And in fact, they can barely communicate with each other in words. But, they have incredible musical chemistry. [ MUSIC ] Dave Longstreth's art work band Dirty Projectors takes a lot of risks. Not least the risk of being inseparably quirky. [ MUSIC ] But every steady gesture of weirdness or abrupt turn around in these songs ends up taking them some place thrilling. [ MUSIC ] Frank Ocean made waves by coming out shortly before his debut album did. But his sexuality isn't the big story about him. [ MUSIC ] He's an extraordinary singer song writer. An R & B original whose album sounds like nothing else around. [ MUSIC ] Kendrick Lamar's first major label album is both an elegy and a celebration. [ MUSIC ] It's an authoritative memoir of a lifetime spent immersed in the music that's changed the lives of everyone around him for better and worse. [ MUSIC ] He's absorbed so much from every major MC you can name but he can evoke any era and region and rap within a few seconds and his words are powerfully resonant. [ MUSIC ] This is a magnificent melt down of an album. [ MUSIC ] Fiona Apple's catastrophic states of mind. Translated into unnervingly perky tunes and precisely termed phrases. Polished until they gleam then flensed to a skeleton then polished again. [ MUSIC ] This is a very, very raw album, both musically and emotionally. [ MUSIC ] But it's also [ UNKNOWN ] and playful and self aware. And, Fionna Apple's voice sparkles in the unforgiving light of it's arrangements. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Top 10 Albums of 2012","description":"TIME music writer Douglas Wolk selects the best albums of the year.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QWQtLSFt/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2012-12-03T22:45:39.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/QWQtLSFt.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/QWQtLSFt/","duration":"PT7M56S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/QWQtLSFt/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```