For our 11th annual Highlighting feature, we split the year into TWO pieces -- January to June and July to December. Each list contains 10 artists/releases for a total of 20 in total for 2018.

Please keep in mind that, since we have no magical all-seeing Palantír (that was for you, Tolkien fans), our predictions for "First-Half" 2018 includes albums that often get pushed into the latter part of this year (for which we won't count again for the second part), or even into 2018. The same goes for not listing certain new albums because they weren't announced until after we made our list... (Like Lecrae's, which was announced after our staff made their picks of known 2018 releases)