How can I sort music albums of the same year in iTunes?

This used to work like a charm (it is the way of sorting I have been using for 10 years). If it still does in iTunes, this was all broken a year ago with the new music app when Apple decided to summon AlbumSort to the year of release.

So where we used to have :

• 20140505 - album (2014)
• 20140423 - lead single (2014)
• 20091030 - album (2009)
• 20090905 - live album (recorded on that date but released in 2015)
• 20090823 - album (2009)
• 20090812 - single (2009)
• 20090506 - EP (2009)

i.e. AlbumSort shown in reverse ;

We have now :

• 20090905 - live album (recorded on that date but released in 2015)
• 20140423 - lead single (2014)
• 20140505 - album (2014)
• 20090506 - EP (2009)
• 20090812 - single (2009)
• 20090823 - album (2009)
• 20091030 - album (2009)

i.e. year of release in reverse then, for each year, AlbumSort in ascending order.

This makes me crazy, especially when you add to that the fact the iTunes deletes the sorting field (Album, Artist and Album Artist) each time one edits their related fields. I have been looking for a way to fix this for one year, without succedd. It feels like Apple wants to kill this field. I do not get it.

There's no direct way to do this in iTunes, but a chronologically correct sorting order can be set by setting the Sort Album value to a combination of the artist name and the release date. To use one example:

Obviously the first and third albums are more recent "archive" releases but for such cases I use the date of recording rather than actual release. The correct chronological order is then the result of sorting by Artist and by Title ... though note for this to work universally you need to apply this method of populating the Sort Album field to every album in your library. You need to put the release/recording date in yyyymmdd format for the sorting to work correctly; if you only want to sort by year and month you could use yyyymm (I use the full date since, for example, I have 12 Grateful Dead albums from May 1972 and 10 May 1977, and am sufficiently OCD to want them listed in the right order).