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Stephen Thompson's Top 10 Albums Of 2012

Japandroids' music celebrates the joy of a life lived loudly.
Courtesy of the artist
Japandroids' music celebrates the joy of a life lived loudly.

The caveats practically write themselves at this point: Top 10 lists are subjective and inherently insufficient to sum up any given year in music. They capture the opinions of one person and one person only — think "favorite," not "best" — and are bound to reflect not only individual tastes, but also individual experiences over the course of a given year.

That said, it was a tremendous 12 months for upbeat music that reflected on aging and ennui in wise and wonderful ways. Japandroids and Spiritualized wouldn't seem like thematic cousins, but both thumbed their nose at mortality while celebrating hugeness. Best Coast dispensed a few sweet summer anthems, yet also took on depression by dragging it out into the sunlight, and Frank Ocean viewed troubled romance from every angle on what may well be 2012's most widely loved and agreed-upon album. Oh, and three of the year's very best songs wound up in Windows 8 commercials. What's with that?

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson
Stephen Thompson is a host, writer and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist and guest host on All Songs Considered. Thompson also co-hosts the daily NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created with NPR's Linda Holmes in 2010. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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