Culture

The 11 Best Months of the Year to Release Music If You Want It on a Year-End List

Britney Spears's brand new Britney Jean probably won't crop up on any notable album-of-the-year lists. Same goes for pretty much any album released between mid-November and December 31.

By Zach Schonfeld
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

Britney Spears's brand new Britney Jean likely won't crop up on any notable album-of-the-year lists. That's in part because it's, by most critical accounts, a  rather dreadful record; one takedown, by Vulture's Jody Rosen, calls Spears "antimatter in a belly shirt" and "[maybe] the most boring person on the planet," and that's one of the kinder ones.

But Britney Jean probably never had much of a shot to begin with, because the major lists have already been published, in more than a few instances.

Consider the record's release date: November 29. That was last week. When the big publications start unveiling their year-end lists at the very start of December (thus finalizing them the week or two prior), virtually any album released between mid-November and New Years Day lands in a critical dead zone.

And so it's been in 2013. SPIN's refreshingly unpredictable list arrived Monday, as did Paste Magazine's. The next day, Stereogum and Rolling Stone followed suit. So did NME and Buzzfeed (if you count the first of presumably several genre-based lists). The AV Club's picks arrived yesterday. Today's date, recall, is December 6. Even by recent standards, that's mighty early, and critics have noticed:

Perhaps the collision of the start of December and the first week back from Thanksgiving made for too convenient timing to ignore. Then there's the promise of a lengthier December vacation, for critics and publicists alike. But also, of course, it has become a race.

And it hasn't always been this way. As recently as 2005, SPIN published its list on December 31, in the weaning hours of the year (though the print issue was out by then); Pitchfork did the same. And just a decade ago, a December release for a big record wasn't all but unheard of. That month in 2003, for instance, saw the arrival of The Diary of Alicia Keys, Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell Pt 2, Ruben Studdard's Soulful (remember—this was 2003). Such timing today seems a prehistoric relic.

So what's the solution? Ban December album releases altogether (these days there are fewer and fewer)? Push the lists forward until they land on Halloween? Tabs Out Podcast, a noise- and experimental-focused podcast (which kindly inspired this headline), prompts a better idea. Just rename the damn lists:

Humbly, then, we invite publications (the few that haven't already gone live with their picks) to employ more precise language. In that spirit, what are your favorite albums of the first 11 months of 2013?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.