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Zeitgeist 2018 is here! Our roundup of the year in music, with guest mixes from some of our favorite artists, playlists of 2018′s most-discussed acts, popular tracks, and good music longreads. 

Explore it all. 

It’s Zeitgeist time! We’re back with our annual collection of the year’s best music. Alongside the most-posted artists and videos of the year are two new features:

First is a reflection from some of the people who defined the year in emerging music. We asked artists featured in our Stack newsletter for their favorite music discoveries of 2017. Their answers—songs, videos, mixes, books, experiences—are collected in the Stacks section.

The next feature is exclusively for current Hype Machine supporters: a playlist containing the most popular tracks of the year according to data from the supporter community.

Dive in!

New feature: check your profile to buy favorites on Bandcamp and join them in supporting the Transgender Law Center today

Featured album: Kalbells, Ten Flowers

The solo debut from Brooklyn-based composer and visual artist Kalmia Traver is a celebration of self: finding the strength, time, and space to express freely and fully. She started writing Ten Flowers during a period of creative retreat, apart from Rubblebucket, her band of nearly a decade, and following a battle with ovarian cancer. Traver spent two wintry months in her childhood home of Taftsville, Vermont, and emerged with 27 demos. Ten of them bloom here in collaboration with fellow Vermonter Ryan Power. The record is colorful, cathartic, and beyond easy classification. Traver's spirited vocals shine over a bed electronic production accented by whistles, woodwinds, percussion, and field recordings. It's out on NNA Tapes.

Featured album: Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Diaspora The music of virtuosic, social-political-minded trumpeter and composer Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah fuses past, present and future. He tells The New York Times, "if I can marry the sound, then it shows that really people are not just compatible, but we’re the same. Our heart is the same.” With Diaspora—the second album in his Centennial Trilogy marking the hundredth anniversary of the first commercial jazz recordings—Scott honors the sounds of his youth in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans, while pushing beyond contemporary boundaries, incorporating elements of post-bop, trap and electronics in a style he calls "stretch music." It's out on Ropeadope.

Premiere: Slow Dancer, In A Mood

Slow Dancer is the recording project of Melbourne's Simon Okely, social worker by day, sensitive crooner by night. As circumstance would have it, Okely is primarily a nocturnal songwriter, and his sophomore LP, In A Mood, has that laid-back sense of someone getting lost in the after hours. Inspired by the '60s and 70's rhythm and blues records his parents used to play, Okely sings in an earnest timbre, arranging songs that breezily flow between soft guitar strums and swells of organ, strings, and synthesizer. Nostalgic, wisftul, the album "seeps into your consciousness rather than grandstands," says Noisey. It's out on ATO Records.