So, from music’s biggest names like Kendrick and Kanye to Odd Future glow-ups like Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, The Creator, here are the best hip-hop albums of the decade, as voted by the Paste Staff. You can stan for the ’90s golden era of hip hop, or maybe vouch for the 2000s boom, but you can’t deny the evolution of the genre in the 2010s. Sub-genres flickered up in America’s cities-trap remained king in Atlanta, drill music continued to bloom in Chicago, bounce informed the New Orleans sound and Houston artists like Solange and Travis Scott transformed underground chopped and screwed sounds for a pop audience. While this decade wouldn’t necessarily be categorized as hip-hop’s heyday (that’s what the 1990s are for, after all) it was a truly distinct time period in which rappers experimented and pushed the genre’s limits, perhaps more than in any hip-hop age before. This has been true for years and years, but it’s been particularly interesting to witness American hip-hop artists work through a decade that began inside a bubble of optimism, one that bursted in the second half of the 2010s. Where to begin when writing about the genre that defined the decade? Hip-hop remains one of our purest forms of protest and release.