End of the Year Awards

#1 Album: Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues In the spring of 2011, the stakes appeared to be set impossibly high for Fleet Foxes. Their debut LP was a massive critical and popular success that shot them into the upper echelon of indie stardom almost overnight;...

Not all of your favorite songs made the cut for WVAU’s Top 10. Here are 10 honorable mentions, with music by Smith Westerns, Wild Flag and Neon Indian.

#2 Album: St. Vincent – Strange Mercy It is more than understandable that Annie Clark is perhaps the most lusted-after woman in indie-rock today (she tops the list of Stereogum‰'s top indie crushes of 2011), but for slightly less obvious reasons than one might...

#3 Album: Bon Iver – Bon Iver “This is not a place,‰” Justin Vernon coos on the album’s glacial introduction, “Perth.‰” Bon Iver’s first album (2008’s haunting For Emma, Forever Ago) is largely associated with its creation during his...

#4 Album: EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints Past Life Martyred Saints is an album that encompasses the feelings of disappointment and creeping failure that singer EMA experienced after moving to California to become an artist; her own account being that of...

#5 Album: M83 – Hurry Up, We‰'re Dreaming M83 takes its name from Messier 83, a galaxy 15 million light years away, and that‰'s precisely where Hurry Up, We‰'re Dreaming inhabits. From its dreamlike interludes to its expansive synth melodies to Anthony...

#6 Album: tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l This year’s lists of best songs and albums feature a fair amount of work from solo musicians, or at least bands with a strong leading presence (your M83s and your Girls, for example). The bedroom-recording boom of the...

#7 Album: Yuck – Yuck The main complaint against Yuck, as written by bloggers or lamented by WVAU executive board members (past and present), goes something like this: “I don‰'t know man, if I wanted to listen to music from the nineties, I‰'d listen to (insert...

#8 Album: Fucked Up – David Comes to Life There is hardly any aspect about the band Fucked Up that isn‰'t in some way polarizing or complicatedly multifaceted. Citing dysfunction as a source of their namesake, you can understand how seemingly self-contradictory...

#9 Album: Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams Churning out beach-washed riot girl anthems, the Dum Dum Girls have given 2011 Only In Dreams, an album that isn’t afraid to express innermost female laments while simultaneously becoming a gut-punching rock gem....