Although this year wasn’t quite as prolific as 2018, the last 365 days still provided a laundry list of quality projects for music fans to digest.
Earlier this week, we shared our favorite rap projects of the year; followed by our favorite R&B releases. And now, in an effort to show off our personal tastes, Shake, Meka, and I are sharing our individual lists.
Like the previous years, there’s overlap with some, but plenty of variation.
According to Apple Music, I logged a total of 2,754 hours of music in 2019. Do the math and that’s just about four months of music listening. Whether that’s a normal number for us diehard music lovers or if I need to add another hobby remains to be seen, but if there’s one thing I do know it’s that 2019 produced some amazing music.
Just weeks into the 2019, Boogie would release his Everything’s for Sale debut, and somehow someway the album remained my favorite throughout the entirety of the year across all genres. Candid stories about failed relationships along with brave accountability for his wrongdoings painted a project beyond enjoyable to listen for it’s 40-minute duration–well, outside of that Eminem verse.
Looking at the R&B side of things, spring and summer seemingly brought out the best from the genre. I found myself deeply immersed in SiR‘s Chasing Summer and Snoh Aalegra‘s ugh, those feels again. Amazing production as well as no desire to skip a song are just a couple reasons why these two albums close out my top three (in respective order).
Rounding out my top five, there’s Dreamville‘s Revenge of the Dreamers 3 and YBN Cordae‘s The Lost Boy. ROTD3 remained the highlight moment in a year that saw a number of great collaborations from duos, groups and more – Little Brother, Griselda, Xavier Omar and Sango to name a few. The epitome of a “middle child” in album in album form, Cordae himself stands another middle child in today’s music world. At such a young age, the DMV-bred rapper made quite the impression with his strong lyrical and story-telling ability used to display the mature and wisdom he carries – one far more than most adolescents his age.
Below you’ll find 50 albums that are among my favorites from my near four months of music listening this year. I would like to use our intro from our Favorite Rap Albums as a bit of a disclaimer of sorts and hope you find a new project to carry into the new year.
In addition to that you’ll also find 100 of my favorite songs from 2019. Each of these songs, whether big or small, have created some type of moment in my head that takes me back to a point in the long year that was 2019.
