The Best R&B Albums of the 2010s

Boys Don't Cry, Ocean's own imprint, put this out one day after the visual album Endless discharged his Def Jam contract — the shrewdest business move any singer made this decade. Nights breaks in half at its hinge: the beat drops away, a guitar figure slows to a crawl, and the back end becomes a different song. The sleeve reads blond; Spotify lists it as Blonde.

HBO ran the hour-long film on 23 April 2016 and the record landed the same night, Tidal-only, before Spotify got it three years later. Don't Hurt Yourself hands Jack White a guitar and a Led Zeppelin sample — When the Levee Breaks, of all things — and the vocal is pitched to out-shout the drums. Border case: country, rock and Southern blues all get used.

Def Jam moved the release forward by a week after Ocean posted his Tumblr letter, so it went out digitally on a Monday night. Pyramids runs close to ten minutes and is two songs bolted together — a synth-disco epic about Cleopatra, then a slow motel coda with John Mayer playing it out on guitar. Border case: half of this is nearer funk than radio R&B.

Master P narrates the interludes, Raphael Saadiq co-wrote and co-produced across it, and the album gave Solange her first Billboard 200 number one. Cranes in the Sky was written years before the rest and sounds it: strings, a dry rimshot, vocal lines stacked in thirds that never resolve into a chorus. Twenty-one tracks, eight of them spoken interludes.

Given away free online in March 2011, produced almost entirely by Doc McKinney and Illangelo, and not sold commercially until the following year. Spotify carries two editions: the nine-track House Of Balloons (Original) is that March mixtape, and this is the ten-track commercial album, which adds Twenty Eight. Wicked Games is the pitch: one guitar figure, a falsetto that sounds genuinely unwell. Border case: a mixtape by origin, an album by every other measure.

Top Dawg Entertainment's first woman signee threaded voicemails from her mother and grandmother through the record, tucked inside Supermodel and 20 Something rather than given tracks of their own. Drew Barrymore rides a guitar loop that never quite lands on the beat, with the lead vocal doubled a fraction behind itself so nothing sits still. Spotify titles it Ctrl rather than the all-caps CTRL of the sleeve, so search accordingly.

Best R&B Song at the 2013 Grammys went to Adorn, which Miguel wrote and produced himself: a bassline, handclaps, one synth pad, and space doing most of the seducing. RCA let him clear his throat first with three Art Dealer Chic EPs across 2012. The falsetto is chasing Marvin Gaye and never pretends otherwise.

Young Turks issued it in August 2014 and the Mercury Prize shortlisted it that autumn; Arca co-produced most of the record alongside twigs herself. Two Weeks holds one enormous sub-bass note under a vocal pitched almost to breaking, then strips the arrangement bare for the last verse. Border case: closer to art-pop and club music than to anything radio called R&B.

Prince was working with Monáe before he died in 2016, and she has said the synth line on Make Me Feel came out of those sessions; it is the nearest thing to a Kiss sequel anyone has managed. Wondaland and Bad Boy released it, and it took an Album of the Year nomination at the 61st Grammys. Guitar stabs sit dry and uncomfortably far forward.

Odd Future's studio offshoot became an actual band here: Syd and Matt Martians plus Patrick Paige II, Christopher Smith and a teenage Steve Lacy, whose playing is all over it. Girl, with KAYTRANADA on the beat, drags the drums late and hands the melody to the bass. Nominated for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 2016 Grammys.

Dev Hynes named it for Freetown, Sierra Leone, where his father was born, and Domino put it out in 2016. Augustine sets a thin drum machine, a nylon-string guitar and a saxophone against lyrics that move from Saint Augustine to Trayvon Martin without changing register. Hynes plays nearly everything himself and keeps the drums deliberately small in the mix.

Eighth album, Roc Nation, delivered through Tidal in January 2016 after a year of leaks and delays. Same Ol' Mistakes is a straight cover of Tame Impala's New Person, Same Old Mistakes, kept almost intact. Higher is the better trick: barely two minutes, a swelling string sample, and a vocal so hoarse it keeps cracking, which is the entire point of it.

Mercury Prize winner for 2017, by which point Sampha had spent years as the voice other people borrowed — Drake, SBTRKT, Solange. (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano is voice and upright piano alone, written around the instrument in his mother's house, and the take leaves the pedal noise in. Young Turks released it. Nothing else here is that bare.

Warp Records, of all labels, carried this debut in 2017 — the home of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada suddenly running an R&B album. LMK is the thesis: a stuttering hi-hat pattern, a bass part that keeps sliding out from under the vocal, and a come-on delivered as a shrug. Border case: club production doing work a band once did.

Five years after Love Me Back, and after publicly walking away from music altogether, Sullivan returned to RCA with a set of character studies. Mascara is sung entirely in someone else's voice, a kept woman itemising her own upkeep over a slow, near-empty track. A Best R&B Album nomination followed at the 2016 Grammys. The most traditional singer here, and the strongest one.