Summary: Hear us count down through the top 25 most popular albums in this year's poll. It's always hard to predict how our audience will vote in our year-end polls for the best music. NPR has a large group of listeners with wildly varying tastes. But this year was even harder to call because we had an unusually large pool of contenders for Album Of The Year. In the end listeners picked Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires Of The City as the year's best album. No other record came close. It drew more than twice as many votes as the next closest record, Arcade Fire's Reflektor. Daft Punk's Random Access Memories followed closely in third place, with The National's Trouble Will Find Me and Lorde's Pure Heroine wrapping up our top five. (You can see the others that made the final list below). Lorde led a trio of debut albums in the top ten, each fronted by female singers (the others were The Bones of What You Believe by CHVRCHES and Days Are Gone by HAIM). Listeners seemed less interested in let's-get-a-band-together guitar rock this year and more interested in studio efforts, like the carefully composed songs from bands such as Vampire Weekend or Atoms For Peace. There was a lot of love for dance and pop, with albums from Daft Punk, Janelle Monae and Justin Timberlake in the top 25. At No. 7, Kanye West's Yeezus was the lone hip-hop album to appear in the top 25 (you'll find more in the top 100 listener picks we list at the bottom of the page). You can hear us count down through the top 25 most popular albums in this year's poll with the link above, or scroll through the list below. You can see the top 100 albums at the bottom of the page and download a pdf of the full list.
