If there were any doubts that Kendrick Lamar dominated 2015 critically, this should lay those to rest.
Our former sister paper Village Voice released the results of its annual critics' survey, Pazz + Jop, today. The project tallied votes from nearly 500 music journalists, who voted for up to 10 of their favorite songs and albums of the year.
Lamar's sprawling, messy, gorgeous opus To Pimp a Butterfly dominated the album list, earning nods from more than 40 percent of the nearly 500 voters. The second-place finisher, Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit, received 43 fewer votes than TPAB.
To Pimp a Butterfly came out in early 2015, and it continued to dominate the hip-hop conversation months after its release. Reception went somewhere from "instant work of genius we don't understand yet" to "flawed, unlistenable mess" to "labyrinthine masterpiece" over the course of the year.
Two songs from TPAB also cracked the top 10 singles list — "King Kunta" and "Alright," which notched number two and four on the list. Drake's inescapable "Hotline Bling" came in first, and The Weeknd's jam "I Can't Feel My Face" came in second.
Check out the full results here, and browse the massive data set here.