The Best Hip-Hop Albums of the 2010s

Flying Lotus produced the opener, Thundercat plays the bass on it and George Clinton sings the hook, so Wesley's Theory sets the terms before Kendrick has said much at all. What follows is a jazz band and a rapper arguing for seventy-nine minutes without resolving anything. Top Dawg and Interscope released it in March 2015; Best Rap Album followed at the 2016 Grammys.

Most of it was assembled at Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu with a rotating cast of writers kept on call around the clock. Runaway spends nine minutes on one repeated piano note, hands the middle to a Pusha T verse, and then closes on three minutes of wordless vocoder screaming. Roc-A-Fella put it out in November 2010, straight after the worst year of his public life.

Subtitled A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar on the sleeve, and built like one, with the skits carrying plot rather than filling time. m.A.A.d city switches beat halfway through and gives the back end to MC Eiht, a Compton elder brought in to date the story properly. Spotify's twelve-track edition is the original; the Deluxe its artist page promotes adds two remixes.

Killer Mike and El-P gave it away as a free download in October 2014 and sold it physically through Mass Appeal, which is why it counts as an album here rather than a mixtape. Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck) drops Zack de la Rocha over a beat that lands like a fire door slamming. Spotify's edition appends Blockbuster Night Pt. 2 as a twelfth track.

Rick Rubin was brought in weeks before the deadline to strip the record back to bone, and Daft Punk hold production credits on four of the ten songs. Blood On The Leaves sets Nina Simone singing Strange Fruit against a TNGHT horn blast, and the join between them is left deliberately ugly. Def Jam shipped it in a clear case with a strip of red tape and no artwork.

Warp Records carried this in 2016 and Paul White produced most of it, a British beatmaker with no interest whatever in trap drums. Ain't it Funny loops a horn figure that behaves like a car alarm while Brown's voice cracks somewhere above it. The title comes from the Joy Division song, which took its own name from the J.G. Ballard novel.

Madlib built every beat here from obscure soul and library records, and Gibbs raps across them like a man with somewhere to be. Thuggin' rides a loop that keeps dropping a beat, and the flow never once adjusts to accommodate it. Gibbs described the project as a gangster Blaxploitation film on wax; the closing title track stacks six guests, Mac Miller among them.

Noah 40 Shebib's production is the whole argument: drums pushed low, everything smeared with reverb, singing and rapping given equal weight. Marvins Room is a drunk phone call with almost no percussion under it, and half the decade copied that template. It won Best Rap Album at the 2013 Grammys. Spotify drops the apostrophe from the track title, and Drake's own page pushes the Deluxe over this edition.

No I.D. produced almost the whole double album, which Def Jam issued in June 2015 behind a blank black sleeve. Norf Norf runs on a sub-bass line, a hi-hat and nothing else, and Staples delivers the hook flat, refusing to sell it. Twenty tracks about being sixteen in Long Beach, with not one moment of nostalgia anywhere in them.

Tyler wrote, produced and arranged all twelve tracks himself, then won Best Rap Album at the 2020 Grammys and told the press room the category felt like a backhanded compliment. EARFQUAKE gives the hook to a pitched-up voice and the second verse to Playboi Carti, over an organ that never settles anywhere. Border case: closer to soul and pop than to rap, which was his point.

Otis Redding is credited as a featured artist, because Otis is assembled almost entirely from Try A Little Tenderness, cut to pieces and thrown back at you in a different order. Much of the record was cut in hotel rooms across Europe and Australia and mixed loud enough to hurt. Spotify bills the artist as JAŸ-Z and titles it Watch The Throne, so search on that.

Epic released it in July 2015 and it gave Future his first number one on the Billboard 200, with Metro Boomin, Southside and Zaytoven supplying most of the beats. Thought It Was a Drought opens slurred and unhurried, the bassline barely moving while the hi-hats triple around it. Only the nineteen-track DS2 (Deluxe) is on Spotify; the original eighteen-track edition is not there.

Ten tracks, half an hour, and Earl produced most of them himself under the name randomblackdude — a deliberate retreat after the crowded guest list on Doris. Grief buries the drums beneath a detuned organ and leaves the vocal dry and close, like a voice memo nobody was meant to hear. Spotify keeps the full title, An Album by Earl Sweatshirt and all.

Seven tracks, twenty-one minutes, every beat by Kanye West, and a sleeve photograph of Whitney Houston's bathroom that West has said cost eighty-five thousand dollars to license. Infrared closes the record with an accusation pointed at Drake that set off a fortnight of rap news. The drums are thin on purpose here; the samples do all the shoving.

Quality Control and 300 put this out in January 2017, the same month Bad and Boujee reached number one on the Hot 100 and gave the group its first chart-topper. Metro Boomin's beat is patient to the point of emptiness — an eight-bar loop, a lot of silence, and Offset's triplets doing the job a melody would normally do. Thirteen tracks, no filler interludes.

Interscope put this out in December 2012, when Chief Keef was seventeen, and Chicago drill reached the national charts with it. I Don't Like is Young Chop's blueprint: a three-note synth figure, a kick pattern full of holes, and a hook that is mostly refusal. Kanye West's remix of it landed on the G.O.O.D. Music compilation Cruel Summer the same year.

Atlantic issued it in April 2018 and it made Cardi B the first solo woman to win Best Rap Album at the Grammys. I Like It is built on Pete Rodriguez's 1967 boogaloo I Like It Like That, with J Balvin and Bad Bunny switching languages over the horns. Border case: this is pop-rap engineered for radio, and it is better for admitting as much.

Inflo produced the entire thing — ten tracks in thirty-five minutes — and the Mercury Prize shortlisted it in 2019. Venom sets a clipped string ostinato against a rant about being underrated as a woman in rap, and there is no chorus anywhere in it. Simbi Ajikawo is from north London, which puts her outside the American frame the rest of this list assumes.