Best Albums Of 2012 – Complete List

It’s finally done. After 31 days counting down what we thought were the best albums to come out this year and a parallel competition to try and win copies of them all, we finally revealed yesterday that *SPOILER ALERT* Beach House‘s Bloom was our favorite album to come out last year (feels weird to say that, right?).

We think that most of us can agree that 2012 has been a really great year for music, far beyond these 31 albums we’ve chosen as the cream of the crop. There are many more that could have made it on – you can expect to see some honorable mentions within a couple of weeks – but we had to cut it off at some point. Some albums on this list might not stand the test of time, but there are at least a handful that we really believe will. There have been a lot of exciting ideas, and we hope this means there’s more to come in 2013.

For now we’d just really like to thank everyone that’s followed our list, especially since our method is fairly unorthodox. But we do it this way because we feel that each of these albums deserve a special mention on a separate day. We want you to spend the time we did with them, in hopes that you’ll like that as much as we did. For your convenience, we’ve compiled all 31 albums in a list below, and we’ve included streams to all* the albums in playlist form through Spotify and Rdio.

If you’re interested, we’ve left our Reader’s Poll open a couple of more days for you to get your votes in. Be sure to do so, because we’ll be publishing the results in a couple of weeks!

You’ll be noticing a lot of changes in the coming months on this site, we’re hoping 2013 is a great year for us. But for now, just hit play on the playlist of your choice, and let the music cure your hangover.

* Unfortunately the albums from The Presets and Nedry weren’t available on Rdio.

Listen Before You Buy’s Top 31 Albums of 2012

1. Beach House – Bloom
2. Frank Ocean – channel ORANGE
3. Grizzly Bear – Shields
4. The xx – Coexist
5. alt-J – An Awesome Wave
6. Jessie Ware – Devotion
7. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
8. Tame Impala – Lonerism
9. Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It
10. Cat Power – Sun
11. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d. city
12. Sharon Van Etten – Tramp
13. Cloud Nothings – Attack On Memory
14. Chromatics – Kill For Love
15. Alabama Shakes – Boys & Girls
16. Passion Pit – Gossamer
17. Purity Ring – Shrines
18. Jack White – Blunderbuss
19. Death Grips – The Money Store
20. Chairlift – Something
21. Dirty Projectors – Swing Lo Magellan
22. POLIÇA – Give You The Ghost
23. How To Dress Well – Total Loss
24. DIIV – Oshin
25. Sigur Rós – Valtari
26. Sea of Bees – Orangefarben
27. Nedry – In A Dim Light
28. POP ETC – POP ETC
29. Hop Along – Get Disowned
30. Pepe Deluxé – Queen of the Wave
31. The Presets – Pacifica

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