Every Angel Olsen album ranked
Rock music—and especially its Indie subgenre—has historically been a very male-dominated field, but since the early 2010s, pretty much all of the best guitar music has been made by women.
Thanks to artists like Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Marika Hackman, Phoebe Bridgers, Julia Jacklin, Waxahatchee and plenty more, we are living through a golden age of guitar music. One of the finest artists working in this space is Angel Olsen. Blending her beguiling voice with intense, personal, and poetic imagery and a restless, creative spirit, she is a shape-shifting and mercurial performer who is always looking to expand her musical horizons, incorporate new energy and elements into her music and push the boundaries of her talent onto greater heights.
First making a name for herself as a backing singer working with Will Oldham / Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the world quickly realised that Olsen’s voice was too powerful, too arresting and singular to be confined to a career in a supporting role. Olsen is a leading lady. Her songs are movies, often masterpieces, and she is the star of the show. Across the six albums she has released, she has written comedies and tragedies, explosive action sequences and psychedelic, experimental scenes, each more powerful and thought-provoking than the last.
A captivating live performer, with a strong visual presence on stage that grabs you as much as her music does, Olsen has been recognised as one of the preeminent artists working today. She has collaborated on great songs with other talents like Sharon Van Etten (‘Like I Used To’), Mark Ronson (‘True Blue’), and has performed with Courtney Barnett, Wilco and Cass McCombs, among others.
With six studio albums to her name, Olsen has not released a bad record yet. When you listen to her body of work, you can hear a sense of progression, an experimental drive onward into new sounds and territories, but even from the very first album, you can hear that there is great talent here. You can rank her albums in almost any order, and the listing would never go from “worst to best” but only “from the very good to truly incredible”. Even the collection of off-cuts, outtakes, and covers she released in 2017 on the compilation Phases would stand up against most other people’s much-toiled-over albums.
Every Angel Olsen album ranked in order of greatness:
‘Half Way Home’ (2012)
With her debut album and her only record not released through indie label Jagjaguar, Olsen launched her career with a strong collection of songs that signalled she was a true talent with both her words and the way she gets them across.
There is already the blueprint here that Olsen would expand on in later albums. ‘The Waiting’ shows her talent for captivating story songs and is supplemented with some surprising guitar detours and backing vocals, while ‘Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow’ reveals the outer reaches of the most worldly and arresting elements of her voice.
She alternately sounds like she is drifting in on a hundred-year-old recording playing on a broken radio at times on this album and like she is being beamed into existence from the future.
Burn Your Fire For No Witness (2014)
More built up than her debut album, Olsen takes a step towards a fuller rock sound on this release in songs like ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’, which is unapologetic and driving in its energy. ‘High & Wild’ is a mix of every Angel Olsen song to come, with an electric groove and stop-starting drums. Her voice drifts in between whispers and shouts to get her story across. ‘Stars’, as well, toys with tempo and energy levels, while ‘White Fire’ is an ethereal dream that drifts across your mind on a wave of smoke.
While the songs stand up, the production and mastering are very muddy and age the album badly, though. Olsen’s voice is buried deep in the mix. It’s not separate from the music but blended into it as if it were just another instrument. At times, she breaks through the murk—’High & Wild’ gives glimpses of the full power of Olsen’s voice and is one of the times that it breaks free from the confines of the music around it on the album to take centre stage—but the nuance that would define her later work is lost to the swampy mix throughout.
Whole New Mess (2020)
Returning halfway home to the sound of her debut album, Whole New Mess sounds like a more mature, confident and assured update on that original work. In fact, it is actually an update on the album that came immediately before it: All Mirrors.
Recorded in a converted church in 2018, this is Olsen’s most stripped-back work by far. Featuring just her huge voice and her guitar, Whole New Mess is like a shadow album of the songs inside the songs on All Mirrors. It’s a hazy and atmospheric work that cuts to the bone and can chill you to your core. The artifice and energy from that earlier album have been stripped away to just leave the skeletons of the songs, and there is nowhere for the beating emotional heart in the songs to hide as a result.
My Woman (2016)
Sonically, this was a radical step up from Olsen’s previous album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness. Elevating her voice in the mix and cleaning up the guitar sounds allows more room for each of her lyrics, her voice, and her arrangements to breathe, shine, and show the world her exceptional talents.
And shine they do. Songs like ‘Never Be Mine’, ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’, ‘Not Gonna Kill You’, ‘Heart Shaped Face’ and, especially, the anthemic, building, aching and brilliant ‘Sister’ were not only the best songs that she had released up to that point, but have remained among her career highlights almost ten years and three albums later.
Big Time (2022)
Perhaps Olsen’s most mature album, this is the culmination of all the work that she’s done so far, and it is built up of everything that she has experimented with and triumphed with over the course of her career. Restless as ever, though, she still brings in plenty of new elements.
Carrying over the grandeur of All Mirrors while returning to a more traditional instrumental palette, Big Time is home to some of Olsen’s most important-sounding songs. The title track is a timeless, anthemic, and deeply affecting performance, while the opener ‘All the Good Times’ is a brilliant slow-burn exercise in great songwriting, great singing and, from her backing band, great playing. ‘All the Good Times’, ‘Ghost On’, ‘Through the Fires’ and ‘This Is How It Works’ rise and fall like the tides of the sea. Olsen’s voice is just as powerful as any mighty wave and can drag you into the undertow and under the surface with just as much unexpected intensity at any time.
‘Chasing The Sun’ balances heartbreaking strings, tender piano and Olsen’s all-powerful voice. Alternately breathy and spare or shockingly loud, piercing, and deeply affecting, her voice gets down into your bones. You don’t come out of these songs feeling the same way as when you went into them.
All Mirrors (2019)
Olsen’s magnum opus, a concept album of sorts, is a marked departure from her sound so far. She’s perfected both the angsty Indie rocker (‘Shut Up Kiss Me’) and the emotional, building guitar ballad (‘Sister’) last time out, so pushed into a new frontier here with synths and keys replacing guitars as the driving sonic forces on the album. With the addition of live strings to enhance all the emotion in the songs as well, her sound has really expanded on this album beyond anything we had heard before.
Epic in scale and scope, Olsen is almost intimidating at times in her singing. Her voice starts out as a hushed whisper on opener ‘Lark’ before erupting into shocking canon-fire life with an omnipotent roar. She repeats the trick on the space age and scorelike title track a song later, while elsewhere, there are moments of real tenderness and levity on slow songs like ‘Tonight’.
Not everything on the album is as intimidating and cacophonous as the two openers or as brooding and moving as ‘Tonight’; there are still upbeat numbers like ‘What It Is’, as well, but even these feel grander and more ambitious than anything Olsen had done before.
