The Best Albums of 2019

Nick Cave has the best-reviewed major album of 2019

For the second time in four years, Nick Cave has topped our final list of the year's highest-scoring albums. He joins Kendrick Lamar as the only artists in Metacritic's 19-year history to be repeat winners of our album of the year honors.

Cave's previous top-ranked album, 2016's Skeleton Tree, was recorded around the time of the death of Cave's teenage son. This year's double album Ghosteen deals in part with that loss, and finds' Cave stretching his legs musically into more electronic and minimalist territory, forgoing percussion on many of its tracks (and even music altogether on the spoken-word "Fireflies").

Overall, it was an especially strong year for women. Cave, whose album is our highest-scoring release since 2015, is actually an outlier; eight of our 10 highest-scoring albums of 2019 came from female artists.

You'll find their names along with the rest of the year's top artists below. Our final ranking of the best full-length studio albums (in Metacritic's database) released during 2019 is determined by their Metascores, which represent an average of all reviews by professional critics at the time of each album's original release. Note that live albums, reissues, EPs, box sets, multi-artist soundtracks, and other compilations are excluded from this chart, though they are listed separately a bit further down this page

The 40 best-reviewed albums of 2019 (min. 15 reviews)

... and the rest of the top 40:

Album/Artist			Score	Stream It	Buy It
11		Bandana by Freddie Gibbs & Madlib	88
12		Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest by Bill Callahan	88
13		U.F.O.F. by Big Thief	87
14		Reward by Cate Le Bon	87
15		Purple Mountains by Purple Mountains	87
16		Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey	87
17		Remind Me Tomorrow by Sharon Van Etten	86
18		thank u, next by Ariana Grande	86
19		House of Sugar by (Sandy) Alex G	86
20		Dogrel by Fontaines DC	86
21		Life Metal by Sunn O)))	85
22		Two Hands by Big Thief	85
23		Miss Universe by Nilüfer Yanya	85
24		On the Line by Jenny Lewis	85
25		Crushing by Julia Jacklin	85
26		Any Human Friend by Marika Hackman	84
27		It Won't Be Like This All the Time by The Twilight Sad	84
28		Eton Alive by Sleaford Mods	84
29		The Practice of Love by Jenny Hval	84
30		The Book Of Traps and Lessons by Kate Tempest	84
31		Western Stars by Bruce Springsteen	84
32		Quiet Signs by Jessica Pratt	84
33		ANIMA by Thom Yorke	84
34		Thanks for the Dance by Leonard Cohen	84
35		Cuz I Love You by Lizzo	84
36		Athena by Sudan Archives	83
37		uknowhatimsayin¿ by Danny Brown	83
38		A Bath Full of Ecstasy by Hot Chip	83
39		Forevher by Shura	83
40		At the Party with My Brown Friends by Black Belt Eagle Scout	82

What about albums with fewer reviews?

Here is a look at the albums that received extremely positive reviews, but not enough of them to qualify for our list above. (In other words, consider them the year's best under-the-radar releases.) Albums on this list received 7-14 critic reviews. (Titles with fewer than 7 reviews are excluded from all year-end charts.)

Album/Artist			Score	Stream It	Buy It
1		Gold & Grey by Baroness	91
2		Jimmy Lee by Raphael Saadiq	90
3		Eve by Rapsody	90
4		Psychodrama by Dave	90
5		We Are Not Your Kind by Slipknot	89
6		War Music by Refused	88
7		Caligula by Lingua Ignota	88
8		Midsommar (Original Score) by The Haxan Cloak [Bobby Krlic]	86
9		Punk by Chai	86
10		There is No Other by Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi	86

Albums released between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019 with 7 or more reviews (15 or more for the first chart) in Metacritic's database were eligible for inclusion. Reissues and other older material, EPs, live albums, holiday albums, greatest hits albums, multi-artist soundtracks, and other compilations are excluded from the above lists. The Metascore is a weighted average of scores from top professional critics, on a scale from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). Albums are ranked by Metascore prior to rounding. All scores on this page are from December 19, 2019.

More bests and worsts

If you read the fine print under our list of high-scoring albums above, you noticed that reissues, compilations, live sets, and other album types were excluded from our best-reviewed albums charts (which are intended to include only new full-length studio albums). Here are the highest-scoring "disqualified" albums of the year:

Best-Reviewed Reissues, Box Sets, and Compilations of 2019 (Min. 7 Reviews)

Album/Artist			Score	Stream It	Buy It
1		1999 [Super Deluxe Edition] by Prince	100
2		Abbey Road [50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] by The Beatles	99
3		Tunes 2011-2019 by Burial	96
4		No Other [Deluxe Edition] by Gene Clark	94
5		Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings [Box Set] by Bob Dylan	90
6		Dead Man's Pop [Box Set] by The Replacements	89
7		Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 by Various Artists	88
8		Originals by Prince	88
9		DJ-Kicks by Laurel Halo	86
10		Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon by Spoon	84

Thousands of albums are released each year, and most of those don't even make their way to reviewers; as a result, the vast majority of the awful albums recorded each year do not show up on Metacritic. However, there are always some major releases this year that fail to impress critics, and we now share with you the 10 disappointing albums receiving the worst reviews in 2019:

The Lowest-Scoring Albums of 2019 (Min. 7 Reviews)

Album/Artist			Score
1		LP1 by Liam Payne	44
2		Harverd Dropout by Lil Pump	46
3		Weezer [Black Album] by Weezer	53
4		Jesus Is King by Kanye West	55
5		Head Above Water by Avril Lavigne	55
6		Closer Than Together by The Avett Brothers	56
7		Why You So Crazy by The Dandy Warhols	56
8		California Son by Morrissey	57
9		No. 6 Collaborations Project by Ed Sheeran	57
10		Rise by Hollywood Vampires	57

What do you think?

What were your personal favorite and least favorite albums of 2019? Let us know in the comments section below, and don't forget to vote for your favorite albums of the year in our Best of 2019 User Poll. And for more of 2019's best albums, see which titles critics are including on their year-end top 10 lists, or view our list of this year's best debut albums. We also have a round-up of the best albums of the entire decade.