The Best Country Albums of the 2010s

A songwriter's decade of Nashville cuts came due all at once: Dave Cobb co-produced for Mercury Nashville, and the record took the 2015 CMA Album of the Year and a Grammy for Best Country Album. Tennessee Whiskey, an old George Jones number, gets rebuilt as a 6/8 soul ballad, Stapleton singing it like Muscle Shoals never shut. After this, gravel voices were suddenly signable again.

Album of the Year at the all-genre 2019 Grammys, produced with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian for MCA Nashville. Slow Burn opens it on a fingerpicked acoustic figure, then lets pedal steel and synthesizer swap places until you stop hearing the border between them. Border case, flagged openly: this is where 2010s country shades into pop, and Musgraves made the crossing sound inevitable rather than cynical.

The title tips its hat to Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and the record earns the nerve: Dave Cobb produced it for High Top Mountain and Thirty Tigers. Turtles All the Way Down opens with reptile aliens, Jesus and LSD inside a courtly countrypolitan croon that could pass for 1975 until you parse the lyric sheet. Spotify's edition appends Panbowl as a bonus track.

Isbell wrote most of it weeks out of rehab, determined this time to remember the making of it, and Dave Cobb kept the arrangements bare on Southeastern Records, the label Isbell owns. Cover Me Up swells a full step on the line about sobering up, and rooms have hollered at that spot every night since. The Americana wing's songwriting bar has sat here ever since.

Two discs, The Nerve and The Heart, twenty-four tracks on RCA Nashville, produced by Frank Liddell, Eric Masse and Glenn Worf — a divorce album that refuses to pick one mood. Tin Man strips down to voice, guitar and a distant steel while Lambert tells the Wizard of Oz character he is better off without a heart. It won her a fifth straight ACM Album of the Year.

Kentucky shipped its answer to Nashville in August 2017 on Childers's own Hickman Holler imprint through Thirty Tigers, with Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson producing. Feathered Indians hangs a melody that sounds a century old on sawing fiddle and Telecaster while Childers's Appalachian tenor bends every vowel out of true. The traditionalist revival's second wave — and its best pure singer — starts here.

Jay Joyce produced it loud for EMI Nashville, and it became Church's first Billboard 200 number one. Springsteen is the keeper: a phone-number-on-the-arm memory song that borrows arena moves — the whoa-oh coda, the canyon-sized snare — from the man it names. Mainstream Nashville spent the rest of the decade chasing this record's blend of outlaw posture and rock tonnage.

Before the pop crossover there was this: Mercury Nashville, co-production from Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, and a Grammy for Best Country Album. Merry Go 'Round spins Mary, marry and merry through a banjo lope while small-town pieties get picked apart line by line — country radio flinched, and the CMAs gave Follow Your Arrow Song of the Year anyway. The decade's sharpest major-label debut.

Grammy voters handed it Best Americana Album, another Southeastern Records release, with the 400 Unit finally billed as the road band they are. If We Were Vampires — which took Best American Roots Song the same night — treats mortality as the whole point of a marriage, sung barely above a whisper over acoustic guitar. Dave Cobb produced; the anger elsewhere on the record is very 2017.

Written as a letter to the newborn son Simpson barely knew, self-produced for his Atlantic debut with the Dap-Kings horns punching through — it won Best Country Album at the same Grammys that nominated it for all-genre Album of the Year. In Bloom slows Nirvana to a string-swept soul crawl; Simpson called it a pure homage to Kurt. The list's furthest border case, kept on purpose.

Cut live to analog tape at Sun Studio in Memphis and mixed at Ardent, this was the first country record Third Man ever released — Price pawned her wedding ring to help pay for the sessions. Hands of Time opens the album with six minutes of flat, unflinching autobiography while the band creeps in one instrument at a time. Nashville's rejection letters aged badly.

Ten years of Music Row staff writing went into these twelve songs, produced by Dave Brainard for the tiny Slate Creek label in October 2013. Pray to Jesus pairs a gospel shrug with a lotto ticket over an acoustic shuffle — economy-of-line writing the majors passed on until the critics forced the issue. She co-wrote Mama's Broken Heart in the same stretch; the leftovers beat most A-sides.

Three voices, one shared divorce docket: Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley cut it for RCA Nashville and took it to number one on the Top Country Albums chart. Got My Name Changed Back turns the courthouse paperwork into a western-swing gloat, fiddle and dobro trading grins underneath the harmonies. A side project in name only — the writing is meaner and funnier than most main careers.

Red-dirt Oklahoma's flagship band, recorded with producer Wes Sharon at 115 Recording in Norman, and their first album to reach the Billboard 200. Good Lord Lorrie introduces the recurring character Evan Felker kept writing across records, her story riding a fiddle line that never quite resolves. The Texas-Oklahoma circuit packed dance halls on these songs for years while Nashville pretended not to notice.

The arena mainstream's future arrived on River House and Columbia Nashville in June 2017: Hurricane went to number one on Country Airplay, and the album eventually tied Come On Over's fifty-week run atop the country chart. Hurricane stacks its chorus like a storm cell — quiet bar-scene verse, then everything at once. We link the original, not the This One's for You Too deluxe that swallowed it a year later.