Mid-year Top 40 albums of 2018

This is a pretty loose ranking of my favorite records of the year. The first eight or so are records I know will rank highly at the end of the year. From there, the rest of these are all good, but my estimation of each could rise or fall considerably over the next few months. Anyway, this has been a really good year for music so far, based on this and some of the many fine records that, as I'm typing this, I realize could have made the list.

1. Superchunk – What a Time to Be Alive
2. Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar
3. Kamasi Washington – Heaven and Earth
4. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 – Black Times
5. Neko Case – Hell-On

6. Tracey Thorn – Record
7. Sons of Kemit – Your Queen Is a Reptile
8. Sunshine Boys – Blue Music
9. Kali Uchis – Isolation
10. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Hope Downs
11. CHAI – Pink
12. Hollie Cook – Vessel of Love
13. Django Django – Marble Skies
14. Jessica Risker – I See You Among the Skies
15. Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
16. LITHICS – Mating Surfaces
17. Fatouma Diawara – Fenfo
18. Jorja Smith – Lost & Found
19. Alice Bag – Blueprint
20. Gretchen’s Wheel – Black Box Theory
21. FACS – Negative Houses
22. Albert Hammond Jr. – Francis Trouble
23. Cheer-Accident – Fades
24. Ashley Monroe – Sparrow
25. Field Music – Open Here
26. Olivia Chaney – Shelter
27. The Well Wishers – A View From Above
28. Jason Moran and the Bandwagon – Looks of a Lot
29. Beach House – 7
30. The Orange Peels – Trespassing
31. Rhye – Blood
32. Michael Simmons – First Days of Summer
33. Superorganism – Superorganism
34. The Last Poets – Understand What Black Is
35. Calexico – The Thread That Keeps Us
36. Femdot – Delacreme 2
37. Tune-Yards – I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life
38. Lykke Li – So Sad So Sexy
39. Carpenter, Smith & Jones -- Petty
40. Poster Children – Grand Bargain!