The 50 Best Albums Of 2017

10. Aldous Harding
Party

Earlier this year Aldous Harding described, during a long interview, a period where the real and the horrific imaginary began to bleed into one another. She feared of looking up and seeing a crack in the sky, of it seeming to be a foot away, of being able to reach up and knock on it like the low ceiling of a basement, light streaming through the rafters. Party, Harding's second album, brings its listeners there, to that terrifying, useful, liminal between-space. Through viscous, plump lyrics — "what if birds aren't singing, they're screaming?" and "stones smell good when you cuddle them" and "swell does my skull" — minimalist instrumentation and her contortionist voice, the cracks in our own worlds are given clearance to seize the wheel we're afraid to give them. Party helps us not feel so alone in our loneliness, and in our attempts to be ourselves regardless.

Part of the power that animates is that it documents Harding seizing her own, costs be damned. The songs here deal with reconciling ambition — for success, for happiness, for truth — to the sacrifices it requires and the craggy paths we walk to get anywhere near it. They deal with terrifying and fleeting love, with recognizing the moments that make us happy and the painful hillside