After eight years, five albums, and complete political and cultural upheaval, Lana Del Rey has risen to her greatest musical heights. When she first crash-landed into the public consciousness in 2011, breathily cooing about video games and blue jeans, the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant was engulfed in heated debates over her authenticity, whether or not she was in control of her creative output, and whether she deserved her success at all.
FKA twigs’ second album plays like an unsparing breakup manual for a distant species, some glamorous alien race presumably as brilliant at everything as she is: singing, producing, writing, dancing, seducing, exorcising, empathizing. MAGDALENE is an overwhelming collection of intimacies, a generous feat of communication that turns her specific pain (not all of us have to get over a breakup with a celluloid vampire) into communion.
Like white light refracted through a prism to reveal an array of colors, ordinary words and phrases—wrinkled hands, silver hair, clear water—take on new meanings when sung by Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker. U.F.O.F, the first of two stellar albums the band released this year, sounds at once exploratory and wise, as if they are both seeing the world with fresh wonder while explaining the way things have always been.
With each record, Angel Olsen’s music grows grander and darker, and on All Mirrors, she spreads her leathery wings and nearly blots out the sky. Her most dramatic release yet, All Mirrors telegraphs to us in Andrew Lloyd Webber-sized gestures: When Olsen's voice ascends an octave on “Lark,” the accompanying drum resounds like a cannon aimed at a fortress, and the dive-bombing glissandos from the orchestra mimic debris streaming around her.
In Solange’s vision of Houston, the streetlights are hazy, the liquor is dark, and the air is humming with dreams. The singer’s fourth album, When I Get Home, is a collection of reveries on family, history, and blackness—a love letter to her hometown. She finds solace in the frequent repetition of phrases and calls on powerful forebears for guidance, be they Alice Coltrane, Steve Reich, or DJ Screw.
By the time Bad Bunny dropped his debut LP on Christmas Eve 2018, the Puerto Rican star had already demonstrated fluency in the trap, R&B, and reggaetón sounds that dominate urbano music through a deluge of hit singles and features. But X 100PRE was the first time all of those musical sides—and more—were presented in a singular statement.
The most striking aspect of Helado Negro’s This Is How You Smile isn’t the dreamy production, with its lush acoustic guitars wound around intimately rendered drums. It’s not the field recordings that populate interludes like “November 7.” Nor is it the album’s introspective closer, “My Name Is for My Friends,” which splices ambient sounds with brief, cryptic dialogue.
The magic of Christian Fennesz’s work comes in the way he turns the minimal into the maximal, expanding tiny moments into huge sonic environments. When making Agora, his first solo album in five years, the experimental ambient producer was forced to work minimally—after losing his studio space, he was relegated to using headphones in a bedroom—and he translated these restrictions into one of his most oversized works yet.
Titanic Rising is vintage-sounding music for people who don’t want to live in the past. On her fourth album as Weyes Blood, L.A. singer-songwriter Natalie Mering coos laughably old-fashioned lines like “treat me right, I’m still a good man’s daughter” while referencing the cosmic loneliness of modern dating. You can parse out the weight, hope, and humor of Mering’s poetry, or you can sit back and let her dulcet tone and excellent taste in George Harrison-esque slide guitar wash over you.
We’re used to confronting a work of crushing sadness after the artist who made it has reached a better place. Stories of depression and despair are easier to take with full knowledge of the happy ending. Purple Mountains, the final album of new music from David Berman, released 26 days before he took his own life at age 52, offers no such luxury.
Jamila Woods, the Chicago-based teacher, activist, and R&B poet, takes an audacious leap forward on LEGACY! LEGACY!, her sophomore album. Each song is named after a creative titan of color (Betty Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, etc.), drawing on the subject’s specific history as a spiritual guide for locating her own truth. LEGACY! LEGACY!
Brittany Howard named her debut solo album after her older sister, who died when Brittany was eight years old. While there’s no song explicitly about her on Jaime, there is urgent advice about how to live with the time we’re given: by refusing hatred and spreading love in fractious times; by dismissing inattentive partners and acting on desire. That immediacy pervades the sound of Howard’s solo debut, which is less wedded to genre than her work with Alabama Shakes and Thunderbitch.
By the time Big Thief released U.F.O.F. this past May, you might’ve thought they deserved some time off: It was their third album in four years. But not five months later came Two Hands, which is as much an exorcism as its predecessor. Violence ripples through these songs like a vein of quartz—“Rock and Sing” might be a children’s lullaby about lost souls, “The Toy” an intimation of great evil.
No one does maximalism like Beyoncé. Homecoming: The Live Album—the musical companion to her retina-popping Coachella live film—boasts a whopping 40 tracks that fuse soul, hip-hop, gospel, and go-go with live skits and confessional interludes, as brassy marching bands and black drumlines give dap to the cultural traditions of HBCUs.
Plenty of people come to Bill Callahan’s music just to hear him string sentences together as he explores an absurd, beautiful world one song at a time. While Callahan’s double album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest contains plenty of his signature wisdom—songs about love and death, paternal advice and domestic romance, smirking one-liners and piercing, plainspoken verse—its magic is in the way his words wear his music like a beloved pair of old jeans.
In form and function, Bon Iver’s fourth album is an act of protest. You can see its vision of egalitarianism across the LP’s inner gatefold, which shows obscured portraits of the 52 people who helped create the record. You can hear its selflessness in the myriad tones, instruments, voices, and happy accidents that come and go, subverting ego while sidestepping excess. Even the title i,i nods to the Rastafarian idea of “I and I,” of oneness.
Since first emerging as a prodigious one-man songwriting machine earlier this decade, Alex Giannascoli has remained tapped into an ever-flowing stream of idiosyncratic excellence. House of Sugar is his most ambitious and immersive album yet. Moving beyond the haunted Americana of 2017’s Rocket, these 13 songs offer meticulous portraits of addiction, greed, and obsession.
The solitary piano chords that launch Clairo’s debut album sum up the emotional tone of everything to come. Opener “Alewife” finds 21-year-old singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill revisiting suicidal thoughts that she had in eighth grade, and over the next 10 tracks, we are with her through so many growing pains and regrets. Even on the twinkling “Impossible,” where she evokes how weird and cool it is to be a young person with a messy, meaningful life ahead, she never hides.
Jessica Pratt’s folk songs usually press right up against the speaker, making you feel inches away from her delicately voiced guitar, lonesome words, and peculiar execution of vowels—a language unto itself. Her third album, Quiet Signs, sounds a little further away—perhaps through an open stained-glass window as Pratt, alone in a church, hums as if she’s just going through soundcheck.
As the planet becomes more crowded, studies suggest the most surefire way to limit your impact on a world buckling beneath our self-made weight is to have fewer children, or even none at all. Norwegian art-pop philosopher Jenny Hval floats between these logical dots throughout The Practice of Love, an album of festering generational unease set to the twilit synths and entrancing pulses of ’90s raves.
Every generation gets the teen-angst avatar it deserves. For kids raised under the threat of mass extinction, of course a dead-eyed 17-year-old whispering about night terrors, benzos, suicide, and the climate crisis over a post-genre stew of trap beats, dubstep drops, and twee-ish bedroom pop would be hailed as a savior. (Throw in ASMR sonics, samples from The Office, a dental drill, and the sound of the singer ripping out her own Invisalign, and you’ve got Gen Z musique concrète.
While writing the songs that would become her fifth album, Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon spent a year studying furniture-building at an English architecture school, living alone in a cabin in England’s rural Lake District. On Reward, Le Bon proves herself to be a canny architect of another kind: one gifted at making dense sonic arrangements feel somehow weightless.
Tyler, the Creator’s IGOR is an album about heartbreak, but the bright chords and harmonies suggest hope, not self-pity. His 2017 album Flower Boy was a disarming journey into self-discovery, but Igor is even more revealing, as Tyler wrestles with the fact that maybe he doesn’t have everything figured out.
After rewriting rock’s rulebook with Sonic Youth, establishing herself as a star in the art world, and writing a memoir, Kim Gordon finally got around to making her first solo album. For No Home Record, she worked with producer Justin Raisen, whose credits include the Kim-indebted brooder Sky Ferreira and experimental shapeshifter Yves Tumor, and the pair conjure a dissonant, avalanche-sized sound.
Vampire Weekend ambled away from the spotlight for a half-decade or so, but even as the delays mounted for the follow-up to their 2013 masterpiece Modern Vampires of the City—and even as Rostam Batmanglij, long thought to be their behind-the-scenes mastermind, left to pursue other projects—they returned on Father of the Bride as if they’d just stepped out of the country club for a breath of sea air.
Nigeria’s Burna Boy titled his fourth album African Giant to reflect his own outsized stature in his home country and, more broadly, the continent’s eons-long cultural footprint. On it, he perfects styles from the worldwide African diaspora and situates them in universal conversation, while his sharp ear for collaborators—including Future and YG, Lagos rapper Zlatan, Kingston crooner Serani, and Beninise icon Angélique Kidjo—underpins his thesis and shows off his range.
Emily Alone is the kind of delicate album that doesn’t compete for your attention so much as it waits patiently for you to return to it. Credited to singer-songwriter Emily Sprague’s band but very much a solitary project, the record comes on the heels of a few years in which she underwent three of the biggest changes a person can undergo: the dissolution of a relationship, the death of a parent, and a major shift in location, from upstate New York to California.
You become a parent with the wish that your kids outlive you. But what happens when that hope is suddenly dashed? Nick Cave confronts this reality on Ghosteen, the first album he wrote and recorded in full after the tragic accidental death of his teen son, Arthur. It’s a record unlike anything else he’s made with the Bad Seeds across the last 35 years.
Ariana Grande released thank u, next in the aftermath of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller’s death and her broken engagement to Pete Davidson, but she refuses to bend to the tropes of traumatized women throughout the album. She flaunts her vulnerability. She molds her desires into flexes. She is silly and silky and occasionally swaggering, not in spite of her tumultuous recent past but because of it.
“I got two souls fighting for the same spotlight,” Long Island emo hero Jade Lilitri sings on the opening track of his third album as Oso Oso, Basking in the Glow. One soul seems devoted to self-pity and the other to splendor, and throughout the album, this internal battle plays out via guitar rock that’s marked by a dappled radiance. “Priority Change” swaggers with shy pride in its chord changes, while Lilitri complains of “being trapped in binary code.
Most rap songs are composed of two main elements: the rapping and the beat. Sometimes those two things complement each other nicely; sometimes they don’t. But rarely do they melt into each other in the way they do on MIKE’s Tears of Joy. The young New York City artist’s delivery is somewhere between talking and rapping, and the album’s production, composed of short loops of various dirgelike sounds, matches that intermediary state.
After the lonesome folk of her 2009 debut, Sharon Van Etten’s subsequent albums mostly offered modest tweaks to a familiar strain of heartland-flavored indie. But Remind Me Tomorrow cracks her style open like a geode: The roadhouse soul of “You Shadow” is halfway between Motown and Massive Attack; “Seventeen” arrives decades too late for the John Hughes closing credits it deserves; “Jupiter 4,” titled after a vintage Roland synthesizer, sounds like a gothic take on slowcore.
When Chicago drill first hit mainstream rap like a sonic icepick seven years ago, it was due to the distinctive, abrasive sounds of Chief Keef, Young Chop, and King Louie. But drill has always had a melodic side, and that undergirding pop sensibility has allowed the subgenre to survive in an industry always on the lookout for the next regional trend. Chicago’s latest star is Polo G, whose debut album Die a Legend contains some of the best hip-hop ballads in recent memory.
Brexit broke Britain, fast-rewinding the country to the ’70s, when it first joined Europe and last seemed this close to collapse. Perhaps that’s why slowthai, a grime MC from the nowheresville dead-center of England, often feels so punk. His publicity stunts—like brandishing Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decapitated head at an awards ceremony—can’t help but recall the Sex Pistols (and Sid Vicious got a namecheck in one of his songs).
For their first album with legendary pop-punk label Epitaph Records, the Philadelphia quartet Mannequin Pussy swap fuzz-heavy thrashers for melodic, grand anthems of heartache and regret. On “Drunk II,” a raging post-breakup lament, frontwoman Marisa Dabice drowns her hurt in alcohol and wry jokes, but there’s no mistaking the depth of her emptiness. The pop-forward “Who You Are” finds Dabice tackling self-loathing, settling on a kind of acceptance that sounds simple but is anything but.
Nearly a decade after releasing his first tape, Carol City, Florida’s most promising native son, Denzel Curry, delivered his opus this year. ZUU is an homage to the rapper’s hometown, alight with the anarchic spirit of an art-school thesis. Curry freestyled nearly every song on the album—an extraordinary feat for any rapper, made all the more dazzling by the vividness of his storytelling and the complexity of his internal rhymes.
Nilüfer Yanya plays her guitar the way some people pick at their nails—as if she wouldn't know what to do with her hands if she stopped. Along with her rich voice, Yanya’s fidgety guitar is one of the few binding threads tying together her virtuosic, post-genre smear of a debut.
Do you think Lifetones are far and away better than This Heat? Do you feel like Gang Gang Dance were never the same after Tim DeWitt left the band? Do you stand in solidarity with DJ Sprinkles in her anti-streaming stance? If you have a burning hot desire to answer these questions, then you’re probably already obsessed with the RAP album.
Aldous Harding is frequently inscrutable. The music world didn’t know how to respond to the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s unpredictable 2017 album Party; its follow-up, Designer, is even more opaque. At a time when many of our biggest stars visit Genius HQ to offer blow-by-blow accounts of their lyrics, Harding gives us cryptic lines like “show the ferret to the egg” and dares us not to overthink them.
Was 2019 the year Thom Yorke finally got funky? Sure, Radiohead’s “Idioteque” kind of banged, and the singer has been known to flail around to syncopated rhythms from time to time. But until ANIMA, there was something a little stiff about Yorke’s beats, both solo and with his band, a studiousness that suggested a lifetime of nervously eyeing the dancefloor. ANIMA saw him jump right in: Songs like “Impossible Knots,” “Traffic,” and “Not the News” genuinely swing.
In one sense, Blood Incantation are traditionalists. The warped, intricate death metal of the Colorado quartet’s sophomore album takes influence from legendary bands like Death and Morbid Angel, while its all-analog recording and illustrated sci-fi cover art feel further rooted in the past.
The thrill of 1000 gecs isn’t just the post-internet omnivorousness with which it connects its various reference points, but how profoundly dumb it is. These are the kinds of songs you might make up in the shower, or to your pet—half-phrased absurdities too embarrassing to let out of your own head, let alone broadcast to an audience.
Following their mosh-worthy 2018 collaboration “Smack a Bitch,” Maryland rapper Rico Nasty and producer Kenny Beats doubled down on their reckless chemistry with Anger Management. Offering nine tracks in 18 minutes, the project burns quick and bright: Mostly, Rico jumps in, commands a raucous beat, and dips before the three-minute mark. But midway through, her signature voice-cracking threats shift in tone. She’s still calling out irritating shit, but with a cool-headed poise.
PROTO plays like a document of the creation of Spawn, the neural network that experimentalist Holly Herndon trained to sing using her voice alongside the voices of some 300 collaborators. But Spawn isn’t a computer simulation made to appear human, like other recent CGI novelties. According to Herndon, who recently earned her PhD in artificial intelligence in music, Spawn learns on “her” own, and Herndon uses the technology to create an album that thrills even beyond its futuristic context.
On his major label debut, North Carolina rapper DaBaby is tireless behind the mic, weaving words with a boxer’s nimble intensity. Utterly smashed 808s and snappy drums undergird his flows as he injects fierce energy into hits like “Suge” and “Baby Sitter.” He has range beyond the singles, too: “Carpet Burn” finds him twirling around hedonistic reflections on his success, while “Deal Wit It” and “Backend” flash his melodic finesse.
PUNK, the second album from Nagoya, Japan’s Chai, is as anthemic and glossy as it is insurgent. Throughout the record, the quartet subtly distort their sugar-pie group vocals, whisking them into frenzied disco-grrl guitars, hectic brass bleats, and fluorescent electro blips. They pierce the conformist pressures of contemporary Asian femininity without clichès or sloganeering: “Too much makeup/Just lips and eyebrows all set,” chirps frontwoman Mana in Japanese.
Sam Barker is wary of taking the easy route in getting people to move their bodies. A resident DJ at Berlin’s hallowed techno haven Berghain, he has voiced his skepticism of kick drums and drops—the utilitarian elements that so often trigger lizard-brain reactions on a dancefloor. For his debut album, Utility, Barker dug into his archives to see which of his old sketches sounded good when he stripped them back to the studs. The result is mysterious, weightless.
Danny Brown’s fifth full-length offers heartening proof that the 38-year-old has settled snugly into a demographic of middle-class rappers who can sustain livelihoods without the pressure of storming charts or selling out stadiums. The album is a wonderful scenario for an artist a decade into their career: a rewarding balance of consistency and growth, with subtle experimentation instead of the common midcareer misstep of transparently grabbing for radio play.
On Atlanta Millionaires Club, 22-year-old singer-songwriter Faye Webster taps into a wide variety of her Southern hometown’s natural reserves, powering her homebody daydreams with drowsy folk-country, bold R&B, and filigreed soul.
British electronic producer Sam Shepherd has always exerted remarkable control over his meticulous musical output as Floating Points: With his favored instrument, the Buchla modular synthesizer, he can contour sound waves and alter circuitry to suit his needs. But Shepherd, like the rest of us, has comparatively little control over his input, and the chaos of the past three years—Brexit, Trump—shook something loose inside him.
