So we’ve come to that time once again. The end of the year, that watershed season for critics and fans across the internet. This is when lists are made.

In this case, only a Top 10. Some sites go as far as top 50s, top 100s, but where’s the value in a list that long? What’s the tangible difference between having the 41st best album of the year and the 42nd? There is none, it’s an empty gesture of search-engine-optimising, all-inclusive, self-rewarding nonsense. Like, look at all the albums we listened to and liked this year! See how comprehensive we are and how much we love music and stuff that we put them all together in order like this! Yay, we’re just like John Cusack in ‘High Fidelity’! Huh, no, we’re not a corporately funded global brand that trades in commoditising and quantifying something that should in essence be free and formless.

Hacks. But anyway, I’ve compiled my own such list, limited to the ten best full-length listens of the year. Just like last year it’ll be without order, no top place, just ten great albums that you should do yourself a favour and listen to.

(Also: The Wildcard's 10 Favourite Albums of 2014)

The Honourable Mentions:

Wolf Alice – My Love Is Cool
Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer
Marlon Williams – Marlon Williams
Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy
Kamasi Washington – The Epic
Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free
Calexico - Edge of the Sun
Keith Richards - Crosseyed Heart
Dead Weather - Dodge and Burn
Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass

The Ten:

Tame Impala – Currents

“It's always around me, all this noise but not nearly as loud as the voice saying: ‘Let it happen’”

A couple years back, Tame Impala was a full blown psych rock band and the best in the business at that. By 2015 it was Kevin Parker’s solo project – which it always pretty much was – stripped back and bare. Yet this record was anything but sparse. A gorgeous and funky production, taking on all sorts of sounds and ideas and emerging with a record that’s far more synth than it is electric guitar but with all the same grooves. A fantastic album of toe-tappers and head-nodders.

Kurt Vile – b’lieve i’m goin’ down…

“What's there to feel but totally whacked”

This guy is as reliable as they get. He’s got that laidback stoner-wisdom vibe down pat and it just so happens that he’s a guitar wizard as well. This latest effort is less wizardly and more wise, strolling through a set of tunes built on these rambling picked rhythms, letting them go wherever feels right. It’s a great chill-out album that touches on a bunch of different ideas. An accepting sigh and a warm shrug of the shoulders.

Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf

“Mine's is hand-made, pan fried, sun dried, Southside, and beat the devil by a landslide”

A collaborative effort that featured heavy contributions from a bunch of folks but in particular Chance the Rapper, who is deservingly still riding the wave of his own 2013 debut album. It was released unexpectedly as a free download on iTunes and was graciously lapped up by an adoring audience. For good reason. Chance is the MVP here but he lets several others shine too on a record that’s at times jazzy, at times gospel and almost always joyous and hopeful.

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

“No one here is taking notice. No outline will ever hold us. It's not a new wave, it's just you and me”

And with this, quite possibly the best rock band of the 90s returned to top form with a record worthy of everything that they’ve done before. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss have lost nothing during Sleater-Kinney’s disbanded years, returning with all the same urgency, passion and earnestness that has always made them so great. This is no mere reunion album. This is a fresh and fierce burst of post-punk rock and roll. Brilliantly played and exactly what 2015 needed.

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

“Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me”

The second FJM record since Josh Tillman ditched the tragic singer-songwriter thing and reinvented himself – fascinatingly – as an ironic tragicomic hip-jester. There’s an open flow to what he does that made his first album such a raucous event but on his second he turns the sarcasm, the satire and the sardonic distance in upon himself. It’s a collection of songs about love, openly embracing the concept and baring himself open in the process, finding such a poignant intimacy that you’d never have imagined possible from his last album, and somehow he does it without losing the FJM banter. Oh and the songs are top notch too.

Gary Clark Jr. – The Story of Sonny Boy Slim

“I’ve got a girl who’s down to ride… with me. Damn she looks good on the passenger’s side… with me”

Clark was back this year, taking his blues in all new directions. It’s the kind of thing that’ll enrage the purists but the fact is that all music evolves and the blues was well in need of a jump-start (and I say this as a die-hard purist myself). He goes funky, he goes R&B, he goes hip hop and he goes gospel but beneath it all are those incendiary blues licks that have made this guy such a flag bearer of guitar heroism. When you’re as talented and uninhibited a musician as this fella is, genre is just a buzzword.

Vince Staples – Summertime '06

“Hope you understand, they never taught me how to be a man only how to be a shooter, I only need the time to prove it”

This is what hip hop used to be. This is what it is beginning to return to. Sharp social commentary, in this case with a tragic and severe amount of autobiography in it. An incredibly focussed and determined debut from a fully-realised voice. Vince drops these defiant tracks of gansterism, ripping through bars like a man possessed, only to then switch it up with the kind of heart-breaking love song that defies the usual machismo that comes from this stuff. Gunshots and tear-stained sweaters.

Kacey Musgraves – Pageant Material

“And I'll try to sleep but just lie here awake. I've stopped counting sheep, now I just count the days…”

Country music gets the worst kind of rap in New Zealand, mostly by people who never listen to it anyway. Of course you’ll hate it if your only idea of it is the absolute trash that gets played on the US radio. But just as in the 70s with the Outlaw Movement, there are a few names out there putting the quality back in the music. Kacey Musgraves is first and foremost among them. Unlike the Outlaws though, she’s not wearing her rebellion on her sleeve/bandana. Instead she’s going with the “float your own boat/pick your own daisy” mentality. If you don’t like it, that’s no worry of Kacey’s. But you’re missing out on some of the boldest, sweetest, best-written and sneakily revolutionary music of the year.

Fuzz – II

“Teeth twisting in the heatwave/Day dreaming of a clean wave”

This one’s for the head-bangers among us. Ty Segall’s side project puts the eerie heaviness of early Black Sabbath right back into our ears where they belong. The riffs are sharp and crunchy, the songs range from rapid-fire punk to quarter-of-an-hour long proto-metal instrumentals (well, just the one of those) and a flurry of brutalising bangers in between. They really tightened the tunes this time, upping the stakes with a double album that’s well worth air-drumming along with.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

“I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence. Sometimes I did the same”

This is the one, the most unanimously received album of 2015. K.Dot was already a superstar of hip hop after his adored debut but with TPAB he skyrocketed himself into ‘voice of a generation’ status with his stunning tracks of personal reckoning and societal justice. Probably the best written set of lyrics you’ll find from this year, as well as the finest set of contributors – the musical stabs, beats, backdrops and beds are incredible. It’s rare that an artist shoots for the moon with a grand creative statement and it’s even rarer when it pays off and more.