Created in three weeks in a basement studio by core duo Syd Tha Kid and Matt Martians, plus a cast of producers and guests including Janelle Monaé and Vic Mensa, it packed more perfect melodies into its 12 tracks than anything else this year.

We had heard some good shit from The Internet before, but nothing that came near the consistent brilliance of ‘Ego Death’. But at the start of 2015, we still weren’t expecting the best album of the year to emerge from an R&B-oriented offshoot of LA’s skate-rap brat pack Odd Future. Has a genre ever mutated so far and so fast as R&B in the first half of the 2010s? From mainstream hits and classic slow jams to twisted, trap-edged ‘future’ and ‘cloud’ strains, R&B has gone through revolutions and proliferations that are only really comparable to rock ’n’ roll in the ’60s. Anyway, here it is – our end-of-year countdown of the 50 best albums of 2015. Okay, except maybe the Miley Cyrus album. Every single one of our Top 50 albums of the year is worth listening to all the way through in the right order, as the artist intended. This year brought us career-high comebacks from long-serving artists, genuinely great debuts from the new generation and a brace of incredible second and third albums by younger artists establishing themselves as the icons of the future. But there’s one thing that our list of the year’s best albums does prove, and it’s this: despite the successive revolutions wrought by downloads and streaming, the 67-year-old LP format is still inspiring musicians. Now that artists can collaborate in seconds across the world, create music on their phones and get people listening to it without any need for the media, the practice of spotting patterns and trends in the music scene gets more futile with every passing year. Some people think that nobody listens to albums any more.

Jay z albums 2015