Which Modern Country Albums Do Critics Like Best?

Music critics pretty much know everything, right? OK, some of the albums on this list of the best reviewed albums of the 21st century are forgettable, and a few more come from artists we needed to Google, but the country albums listed are all A+ efforts.

Stacker did the hard work of compiling data from Metacritic to rank 100 albums from every genre of music. The score you'll find below is the Metascore, which is an aggregation of critic reviews.

To be eligible, an album needed to have seven or more reviews. EPs, box sets, reissues and compilations were not considered.

Albums from 2004 and 2021 bookend country music's contributions to this list — a list filled with pop, hip-hop and rock, but you won't need to scroll far to find a country gem from 2015 at No. 84.

From there, you'll rediscover a great Jamey Johnson album from 2010, a near-perfect Taylor Swift album and a comeback album from a Mount Rushmore artist (at No. 4).

We could spill all the country albums here, but that'd rob you of memories with out-of-genre greats like Bob Dylan, Outkast and Kendrick Lamar. If modern country music has taught us anything, it's that the modern country music fan is not all country, all the time.

We will spoil the scores, however: There are no 100 Metascores on this list, and there's just one 99. Country music's top album scored a 97, which means there is some critic out there who is just a hater. That's cold!