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The 28-year-old singer-songwriter-producer takes his arty R&B into strange and thrilling places on this double-album opus. His majestic falsetto stretches out across songs that are sprawling yet beautifully constructed, playing in the space between soul, jazz, and avant-garde rock, as he meditates on ideas of race, desire, discovery, and identity. The creative splurge that ensues […]

During the past two years, Bad Bunny has left no box unchecked en route to attaining global crossover superstardom. On his sophomore solo release, he’s trying something even more ambitious: asking us to cross over to him. An artist of his merit might try to further stretch his clout by recruiting even more maximalist pop […]

Before he died of an accidental drug overdose in September 2018, at age 26, Miller put out the two most complete albums of his career: The Divine Feminine, an ornate jazz-rap record, and Swimming, a profoundly bittersweet portrayal of his attempts to come to terms with depression and heartbreak. Circles doesn’t build on Swimming so much as riff off […]

Detroit producer Moodymann excels at making house music with unshakeable links to a treasure trove of R&B from the the late Sixties and Seventies; his catalog, which reaches back more than 25 years, includes indelible tracks indebted to Marvin Gaye, Chic, and Syl Johnson, among others. Moodymann’s latest album, Taken Away, is no different — […]

On her latest album, Saint Cloud, 31-year old songwriter Katie Crutchfield trades in the indie-rock neurosis of her previous work for a mellower, twangy sound that nods toward her roots in Birmingham, Alabama. But her piercing observations have only grown sharper with time. The sun-kissed compositions match her words perfectly. Produced with Brad Cook, they […]

Future Nostalgia is a breathtakingly fun, cohesive, and ambitious attempt to find a place for disco in 2020. Incredibly, Dua Lipa is successful: The upbeat album that she decided to release a week earlier than planned is the perfect balm for a stressful time. “Future Nostalgia” is like a neon “Welcome” sign. Its camp, Daft Punk-ian […]

Given how publicly and privately painful Selena Gomez’s last few years have been — worsening struggles with lupus, a kidney transplant, stays in mental-health treatment centers, high-profile breakups — Rare is shockingly, and beautifully, upbeat. Gomez told us she would learn to take better care of herself on 2015’s Revival. On Rare, she puts that promise into […]

For longtime fans who are expectantly, perhaps giddily, steeling themselves for another brutal LP from Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she’s still more than capable of telling off partners, detractors, and others who […]

Eternal Atake is Lil Uzi Vert’s best album yet, with a cohesiveness, slick concept, and performance that justifies every ounce of hype. He’s still melodically minded — note the almost melismatic flourish of “Got a model/With vitiligo” on “Prices” — but Eternal Atake sometimes feels like a return to 2013, when he was a nobody in […]

Manic is Halsey’s raw autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young mess, craving her share of love and tenderness in a hostile world. Yet Halsey’s Ashley Frangipane is a mess who’s a hungrily ambitious artist seeing herself as a mirror for her entire generation. As she told Rolling Stone last summer, Manic is “hip-hop, rock, country, fucking everything.” Who […]

The Slow Rush is Tame Impala’s first album since their 2015 breakout, Currents. Kevin Parker still sings like a Bee Gee with the soul of Bowie’s Major Tom, floating above his thick disco, funk, and trip-hop beats, beautifully manicured synth textures, and easeful yacht-soul melodies. Even when songs wander off into diffuse eddies, or when he crams […]

Twelve years have passed since Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I–IV, their brooding suite of instrumental bric-a-brac, and it’s interesting just how different their new Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts sound compared to the predecessor. Of the two LPs, Locusts is the darkest and the most engrossing. “Around Every Corner” is atonal jazz with the type of dusky trumpet […]

By the fourth installment, most pop-culture franchises can start to seem pretty tired. Not El-P and Killer Mike: On RTJ4, the duo deliver their agit-rap gospel with the spry fire of a band making its debut. RTJ4, which the band rush-released a few days ahead of schedule, is laser-focused, as if Mike and El-P are trying to outrun […]

Seasons change: Every Hot Girl Summer must turn into a Mad as Hell Winter. So Megan Thee Stallion chose the right moment to break free. Her nine-song EP Suga drops just as the Houston rap goddess goes to war with her label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. Suga is just a 24-minute taste of Megan’s new sound — […]

Chromatica is a return to form, and a return to the dance floor for Lady Gaga. The singles “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” have the pop sensibilities of her early hits, and the music throws back to house, disco, and even New Wave, but it still feels like a progression as Gaga sings about rising […]

High Off Life is the first Future album since January 2019 — an eternity by his standards. It’s been a rare breather for the hardest-working rapper in the solar system, the Atlanta trap legend with a voice full of the Auto-Tune blues and a head full of astronaut status. High Off Life is Future at […]

The Chicago band’s full-length debut will be an immediate boon to fans of heart-on-sleeve indie groups like That Dog, Waxahatchee, Charli Bliss, and the Beths. They cover a lot of ground in the album’s nine songs — from the pop punk of “Promises” and “Cuffing” to the cuddle-core ballad “April” to the Paramore-like push-pull explosiveness […]

Map of the Soul: 7 is BTS’ most smashing album yet, showing off their mastery of different pop styles from rap bangers to slow-dance ballads to post-Swedish electro-disco to prog-style philosophizing. The seven members have been together seven years, and it’s inspired them to sum up where they’ve been even as they look ahead to their […]

The punk-rock icons sound refreshingly unburdened by legacy or accrued status on their latest LP. The glam-slam stomper “Oh Yeah!” summons Joan Jett’s version of “Do You Wanna Touch Me.” The speed-freak Merseybeat cheese of “Stab You in the Heart” is phony Beatlemania at its finest, right down to its screaming-girl crowd noise. A couple songs […]

The fourth album from Alabama sibling duo the Secret Sisters is the stunning country-soul opus their talent has always promised. In 2017, the pair enlisted singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile to co-produce their third LP, You Don’t Own Me Anymore, helping them up their game in a set of songs about piloting life’s hardships, delivered with tender intimacy. Carlile […]

The first Strokes album in seven years picks up pretty much where the last one, 2013’s Comedown Machine, left off — another study in what LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy once called “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties.” Most encouragingly, the New Order-indebted “Bad Decisions” fondly transports us back to the concise neo-New Wave charge of the […]

Sam Hunt has taken more than a few knocks for his progressive approach to country music. So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear Hunt begin his long-awaited follow-up, Southside, with an acoustic guitar and the line “I put the whiskey back in the bottle/Put the smoke back in the joint.” Classic gestures are all over Southside, though […]

After months of buzz and colorful, evocative singles unspooling diasporic disillusionment and the burdens of womanhood, Polaris Prize-winning artist Lido Pimienta has finally unleashed her long-awaited third full-length, Miss Colombia. Lead singles “No Pude” and “Eso Que Tu Haces” explore this thesis further as breakup songs, wherein Pimienta laments a relationship turned toxic — aiming feelings of heartbreak and disappointment toward […]

Sophie Allison is just two years into her twenties, but she sounds as if she’s been navigating early adulthood for decades, wading through the waters of depression and sadness while fighting a few demons along the way. Some of her sophomore album’s tracks share the same titles as songs from the Nineties and early aughts (“Night Swimming,” […]

The Japan-born, U.K.-raised singer-model’s debut album, Sawayama, is a thrilling musical adventure, expertly referencing the chaos of Top 40 at the turn of the century without getting too hung up on the nostalgia of it all. Combining crunchy nu-metal guitar riffs with a penchant for early-aughts R&B-pop production in the vein of Aaliyah and ‘NSync, Sawayama sounds […]

On the first record Pearl Jam has mustered during the Trump administration, the group has blended the miasmic angst of “Jeremy” and “Alive” with a sense of tenderness and even flashes of hope. Although Trump is not the sole focus of the record, Eddie Vedder gives the president (“a tragedy of errors,” in EdVed’s words) plenty […]

On High Road, Kesha wants to have it both ways — she sings about her therapist and tarot readings and her aura, but she’s also back to clubbing with a vengeance. She recently said, “To quote one of my favorite songs of all time, I’ve decided to ‘fight for my right to party!’” “Tonight” begins as […]

Born to a Dominican immigrant mom, Shake grew up on Lauryn Hill and My Chemical Romance. The flows come hard and soft, in English and Spanish, with verses suggesting a fierce, strong, proud, brave, spiritual being who’s also hungry, searching, scared, self-loathing, and self-destructive — just like plenty of humans, especially in their early twenties. […]

Released in three parts over the course of this spring, Petals for Armor can be viewed as a trilogy of five songs each, where Hayley Williams explores her changing coping mechanisms in the midst of hardship. Her path leads through seething rage, spontaneous revelation, and, eventually, new romance. Sonically, there are hints of the disco-funk […]

After spending the better part of the past decade gravitating toward a state of pop auteurism, Claire Boucher’s climate-change-themed album finds her returning to primordial, nu-metal ooze. Poisoned smog seeps through the air on tracks like the stunning six-minute opener, “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.” While Boucher’s vocals soar above the stratosphere, a handful […]

Ed O’Brien has been an underappreciated but crucial part of Radiohead ever since the band formed in 1985. It’s taken some time, but O’Brien has finally stepped out from the shadows with the release of his exceptional solo debut, under the moniker EOB. He’s noted in interviews that he felt he had to release the record, that part of him […]

In 2018, Arkansas native Ashley McBryde released one of the most striking country LPs in recent memory with Girl Going Nowhere; her music honored Townes Van Zandt and John Mellencamp, and she sang with plainspoken vulnerability about everyday stuff, like her platonic roommate, or the folks back home who told her she’d never make a living […]

On their excellent 2018 debut LP, Hope Downs, these Australian guitar romantics proved themselves to be must-hear masters of Eighties college-rock scholarship. They’ve upped their game even further on Sideways to New Italy, and the result is a perfect summertime indie-rock record. With three guitarists who all write songs, Rolling Blackouts’ music could feel cluttered or disconnected, […]

The Pittsburgh hardcore band give their melodic bark more bite in the glitchy horror thrash of Underneath. It’s an all-out assault on the panopticon that is the internet: Augmented with creeping electro-tremors by Eric “Shade” Balderose, “Swallowing the Rabbit Hole” sees drummer-vocalist Jami Morgan step to the fore, slamming naysayers emboldened by the shelter of […]

It Is What It Is is daring in its musical reach — and in its pairing of goofy and gutting. The record finds bass-player-singer-songwriter-producer Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner continuing to parse the existential crises of everyday life, especially the void left by the death of his friend Mac Miller. With Thundercat once again working with psychedelic-minded […]

Over the years, Lucinda Williams’ drawl has thickened, making every vowel its own sumptuously rolling river to cross and lending her songs a heavier tug of sensual hunger, which is saying something for someone whose been writing almost impossibly intense tracks of love (and other afflictions) for decades. On Good Souls Better Angels, that couples […]

A big part of frontman Will Toledo’s charm is his ability to craft sweeping epics that explore unified themes, sometimes across whole albums. He’s described Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy as a bildungsroman and a romance, respectively. MADLO wasn’t built with any such narrative arc. It’s still concerned with the Big Stuff — “anger with society, sickness, loneliness, love,” Toledo wrote […]

The adventurous pop singer’s latest was conceived and written during quarantine. “I’m so bored/Wake up late, eat some cereal/Try my best to be physical/Lose myself in a TV show/Staring out to oblivion/All my friends are invisible,” she sings. It’s definitely a sentiment for our times. But while songs like “Detonate” channel our fearful and confused […]

As the lead singer of Philly’s Hop Along, Frances Quinlan has a peerless way of stopping you in your tracks with just a few choice words. On her own here, without the band’s clean classic-rock crunch to buoy her, she’s quieter but no less arresting. Some songs dance with Postal Service synths (“Rare Thing”), others […]

Now in their twenties, the R&B sister duo move into decidedly adultish lyrical territory on their second LP. Mostly, though, the signs of maturity come through in their music. Chloe’s layered beat on “Baby Girl” is submerged but insistent, perfect for lyrics about going out into a worrying new world of adventure and independence. There’s […]

It’s taken 45 years since Neil Young was originally going to release Homegrown, an album he shelved because he felt it was too personal, but he’s finally ready to let us hear it. Of the album’s 12 songs, seven have never been released, making this the most revelatory of Young’s recent run of Archives releases. […]

Another apocalypse, another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy […]

From a narrative standpoint, Earle’s latest record, Ghosts of West Virginia, is likely the most tightly focused and thematically driven collection of the songwriter’s career. Its inspiration was the horrific 2010 West Virginia mining explosion that killed 29 miners, and the album took shape as Earle signed on to provide music for a theater production called Coal […]

After the festival-ready R&B-house peaks of 2014’s Our Love, Dan Snaith steers back toward the weird and woolly, packing a triple album’s worth of twisted disco, sample-drunk collage, and psychedelic warmth into one 45-minute thrill ride. The highs (“Home,” “You and I,” “Never Come Back”) are as euphoric as any he’s hit in his two-decade […]

A pop savant whose vision keeps getting more all-encompassing as he keeps making records, Mike Hadreas (a.k.a. Perfume Genius) has delivered his most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. Hadreas’ sound mixes a loving sense of pop history and a blithe disregard for stylistic boundaries, causally traversing goth, glam, synth-pop, soul, and indie-rock, collapsing decades […]

There’s a reason Jason Isbell chose to open Reunions, his seventh album, with the image of someone up late alone, plagued and comforted by the past. In addition to being his most crisply produced, sleek recording yet, Isbell’s latest is also his most haunted and ruminative (the word “ghost’ appears no less than five times). […]

Inspired by David Bowie’s Blackstar, Savages frontwoman Jehnny Beth set out to make her own defining statement with To Love Is to Live with open-diary lyrics and extraterrestrial electronic soundscapes that seem to blend together. The music transforms from sweet and cinematic to harsh and claustrophobic, and Beth’s voice similarly vacillates between acidic and lush, […]

The iconic Los Angeles punk band’s eighth album overall and first with virtuoso rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom since 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand!, is a rare animal among comeback records — it both feels like a continuance of the band’s classic Eighties sound and is actually good. They’re still obsessed with the same themes vocalists John Doe and Exene […]

South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and Nigerian drummer Tony Allen — the man who gave Afrobeat its inimitable pulse — first met through Fela Kuti in the Seventies, but they didn’t record together until 2010. Following Masekela’s death in 2018, Allen and producer Nick Gold went back to the tapes, adding a few extra touches. […]

Stephen Malkmus has been on quite a creative roll as of late. In 2018, he released Sparkle Hard, one of his best albums to date with his backing band, the Jicks, and last year, he took a detour into synth-pop with Groove Denied. His latest solo LP is all-acoustic set, with Malkmus on 12-string guitar, playing […]