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I’m an “album guy,” one of those relics that prefers to listen to music as the artist intended — front-to-back, warts and all, and over and over and over again. I’m also someone who buys the records I really like, which makes it easy to tell when it’s a particularly good year for music: I simply have less money to spend on bills.

By that criteria, 2017 is a pretty damn good year so far. I’ve purchased 19 albums, putting me on pace to crush last year’s total of 27. I’ll make ends meet somehow.

Two quick notes before getting to the list:

There are a ton of noteworthy albums on the horizon, so I’m almost certain my end-of-2017 list will look nothing like the one below. Coming soon are records by artists previously featured on SOMETHINGGOOD (St. Vincent, Courtney Barnett, Rostam and Declan McKenna); as well as some musical heavy-hitters like LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, The National, Vampire Weekend and Randy fucking Newman.
Embedded at the bottom of this post is a playlist with nine of my 10 album selections. The new Passion Pit isn’t yet on Spotify, but you can get the album with a single tweet supporting scientific research.