My Personal Top 10 Favorite Albums

The records that raised me, wrecked me, and rewired how I hear the world.

People always ask for my “desert island discs” like I’ve packed a sun hat and emotional stability. I haven’t. These aren’t comfort albums — they’re survival ones. They’re the records that cracked something open, rewired my spine, gave me language when I had none. Some are angry. Some are weird. Some are soft like bruises. All of them showed me that sound isn’t just entertainment — it’s protest, memory, inheritance, resistance. This isn’t a ranked list. It’s a scar map.

1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – Lauryn Hill (1998)
This isn’t just an album — it’s a baptism. Miseducation taught me that vulnerability is a weapon and that melody can be revolutionary. Lauryn Hill reclaims Black womanhood on her own terms: fierce, maternal, defiant, holy. Every track cuts. Ex-Factor still unravels me. Forgive Them Father still rebuilds me. It’s genreless because it had to be — no one label could hold the weight of what she was doing. This album let me see that you can be soft and still burn the system down. I’ve grown, changed, raged, and healed with it in my ears. It’s the record that taught me to write from the bruise, not the bandage. The blueprint. Still.

2. To Pimp a Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar (2015)
There are albums that reflect the world, and then there are albums that refuse it. This one does both. To Pimp a Butterfly is a full-body experience — jazz, funk, gospel, spoken word, and fury braided into a living document. I couldn’t believe how dense it was on first listen. Now I still can’t believe how much it gives with each return. Kendrick is a poet, a prophet, and a journalist of the spirit. Tracks like Alright and The Blacker the Berry feel like therapy sessions held in burning buildings. This album made me sit in my own contradictions, and then write my way out of them. “Every Black artist after this,” I once wrote, “owes him a thank-you or a fight.”

3. Sawayama – Rina Sawayama (2020)
This album sounds like my brain on any given Tuesday: chaotic, nostalgic, furious, fabulous. Sawayama is where Y2K pop meets nu-metal rage meets queer cultural therapy. I wasn’t ready for how hard it hit. STFU! is a polite middle finger dressed as a banger. Dynasty makes me want to kick down a family tree. And Chosen Family? It makes me cry in public every time. Rina builds a maximalist world where being “too much” is the exact right amount. I love how she doesn’t flatten herself for palatability. She explodes. She commands. She reminds me that being a queer woman of colour in pop — or anywhere — means refusing every box you’re handed. This one belongs in a museum and a basement rave.

4. Bikini Kill – Bikini Kill (1992)
My feminist awakening came through a blown-out amp and a photocopied zine. This EP was a grenade in my headphones. Bikini Kill didn’t care if they were on-key — they cared if they were heard. Rebel Girl still makes my heart punch itself. The sound is raw, messy, imperfect — which is exactly why it works. It taught me that protest doesn’t need polish, that a scream is a sentence. Kathleen Hanna was the first person I heard who sounded mad and right. This wasn’t music to dance to — this was music to kick a door open with. I still go back to it when I forget what it feels like to tell the truth at full volume.

5. Visions of Bodies Being Burned – clipping. (2020)
This album is terrifying — and I mean that as the highest praise. It’s industrial hip hop filtered through horror film logic, where every beat sounds like a basement light flickering. Daveed Diggs’ flow is scalpel-sharp, and the production feels like someone’s wiring nightmares into your brain. Body for the Pile? I dare you to listen to it alone. What I love is that the violence here isn’t spectacle — it’s critique. It points directly at the systems we live under and says: This is what they do. This is what they’ve always done. No romanticizing. No resolution. Just beautiful, brutal honesty. It’s a hard listen. It should be. Some truths are supposed to make you uncomfortable.

6. Fetch the Bolt Cutters – Fiona Apple (2020)
This album is what it sounds like when a woman finally stops editing herself. Fiona turns every breath, every creak of a chair, into music. It’s not clean. It’s alive. The rhythms stumble on purpose. The piano sounds like it’s chewing glass. The lyrics? Sharp enough to draw blood. I love how unvarnished it is. Shameika reminded me of the weird girl I used to be. Under the Table gave me the spine to say no — loudly. Bolt Cutters doesn’t try to seduce you. It shows up in your kitchen at 3am and tells you everything you’ve buried. It’s messy, brilliant, and absolutely free. The kind of record that makes you want to write — or scream — or both.

7. The ArchAndroid – Janelle Monáe (2010)
This one redefined what pop could do. Janelle made a sci-fi funk opera about love, oppression, and androids — and somehow, it worked. More than that: it soared. Tightrope still gets me hyped. Cold War wrecks me. What I adore about this album is how unapologetically maximal it is — orchestras, raps, interludes, choral arrangements, all orbiting the story of Cindi Mayweather, a queer android messiah. It’s Afrofuturism, queer joy, protest, and precision, all wrapped in danceable armor. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking, Holy shit — she’s rewriting the rules while making them sing. Nobody else could’ve made this. Nobody else has tried. A blueprint for being uncontainable.

8. A Seat at the Table – Solange (2016)
This is the album I turn to when I need to feel held without being told to smile. A Seat at the Table is grace made sound — soft, sharp, and full of quiet strength. Solange gave us space to grieve, to rage, to rest. Cranes in the Sky is weightless sadness. Don’t Touch My Hair is a masterclass in gentle boundary-setting. It doesn’t push. It doesn’t posture. It just is. And that, in itself, is revolutionary. The production is stripped down and lush at the same time. It breathes. It listens. For me, this album was a reminder that radical doesn’t always mean loud — sometimes it means refusing to explain your existence. Sometimes it means whispering the truth and letting the world come closer.

9. Arular – M.I.A. (2005)
When I first heard Arular, it felt like someone had finally built a soundtrack for the global diaspora inside my head. It’s anarchic, political, chaotic — a mixtape made on the edge of a border. M.I.A. wasn’t here to be nice. She came to fight — with beats, with words, with neon. Bucky Done Gun still makes me want to set things on fire and dance in the embers. Sunshowers is a lyrical Molotov. What I love is how M.I.A. never diluted herself to be understood. She made the world learn her language. I play this album when I need courage, swagger, or a reminder that protest can sound like joy and fury fused. It’s revolutionary in a way that still feels dangerous.

10. Room 25 – Noname (2018)
This album feels like an after-midnight conversation with someone smarter than you — someone who makes you laugh, makes you think, and then breaks your heart a little. Noname raps like she’s reading your diary back to you in perfect cadence. Room 25 is jazzy, intimate, and devastating. Blaxploitation is cultural critique wrapped in a joke. Don’t Forget About Me is so raw it should come with a warning. I love how she never raises her voice — she doesn’t have to. Her words carry all the weight. There’s no ego here, no spectacle — just a woman telling the truth and trusting you to keep up. It’s tender, political, and impossibly cool. A whisper that hits like a punch.