w h o k i l l by TuneYards

w h o k i l l, the second full-length from Tune-Yards, the Oakland-based project of Merrill Garbus, came out on 4AD on April 19, 2011, and it sounds like nothing else that year. Garbus builds her songs from the tools she favors, loop pedals, ukulele, lo-fi percussion and a voice that can swing from a coo to a war whoop in a single bar, then stacks them up, knocks them over and stacks them again. "Gangsta" and "My Country" are the proof: jittery, joyful and a little bit menacing, with rhythms that lurch and stomp instead of settling down.

Critics fell hard. The Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll crowned it the best album of 2011, and in 2014 Pitchfork put it among the 100 best albums of the decade so far. It followed Bird-Brains, and Nikki Nack came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.