Chronological & then highly arbitrary list of ten albums that were my "favorite" this year

It was a cliché to talk about the 2020-ness of 2020, so I'm loath to mention that 2021 kept up with that same energy. But, as the previous trip around the sun was, this too was a strange year. Like all facets of life, my music listening habits were askew. Unlike 2020's hundreds of mileage spent listening to music on long, hot runs, my legs just didn't have it in me this year. Or when they did, I wanted to listen to podcasts like a big dork. The benefit to listening to tons of music pods is you can think about music a ton, but the downside is you spend less time listening to music. And the tastemakers on your pod end up impacting what you listen to. I guess that's not really a downside so much as an interesting observation. Last year I started listening to Steven Hyden & Ian Cohen's Indiecast pod, and Cohen's AOTY ended up also being mine. That was only a taste - my whole top ten (spoiler alert) is more or less Cohencore, which is a joke that like 12 people on the internet would get. Pods! Community!

Anyway, I want to run through some albums I enjoyed (and, in the case of Jan-August, vaguely remember enjoying) and talk about what was going on that month as to excuse how it seems like I only listened to fourteen new things this year.

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