In a hyperspeed world, it is increasingly meaningful to sit with the vision of one artist for an extended period of time. It’s an experience that can offer shelter from the noise—or it can offer better noise, if that’s what you’re looking for. From drowsy hip-hop to pitch-perfect pop, albums of all genres felt more profound than ever. Synthesizing devastating breakups and calling for revolution in every style of sound, these albums went all-in on what matters.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Floating Points: Crush
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. Out came Crush, a record that vibrates with sadness and anger, buoyed by squelching melodies that flutter and pop. It’s the sound of a super-rational person realizing the limits of reason and letting loose with 44 minutes of pure feeling. –Jonah Bromwich
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Faye Webster: Atlanta Millionaires Club
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. These solitary songs about unrequited love are full of intimate moments and gestures: hanging on the dead air between her and the silent recipient of a love letter; sleeping in an ex’s shirt to keep the memories fresh; begging an old flame to come back into town and renew their spark. Her eagle-eyed observations about her hapless relationships can be as funny as they are heartbreaking, like on the swooning “Jonny,” where she laments how her dog is her best friend even though, she sings, “He doesn't even know what my name is.” –Sheldon Pearce
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Danny Brown: uknowhatimsayin¿
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. Brown knows what works and honors it here.
Notably, uknowhatimsayin¿ is executive produced by Q-Tip, whose penchant for air and texture encourages Brown into a mellower, more sober headspace. Fuzzy guitar, looped strings, and expansive guest spots from fellow vets Blood Orange and Run the Jewels underscore a new phase of Brown’s work without blotting out the high-pitched urgency that made him a compelling figure in the first place. That he’s still rapping his ass off makes uknowhatimsayin¿ as satisfying to hear as you can imagine it was for Brown to make. –Rawiya Kameir
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Barker: Utility
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. These tracks still throb: “Hedonic Treadmill” and “Utility” are trance-like bangers made propulsive entirely via cycling synth melodies, and even the more ambient songs swell and build like club music. As a whole, Utility is an expression of what techno can be when the most obvious percussive elements go away. –Evan Minsker
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Chai: PUNK
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. “Glossy yellow skin/Have nothing more than this.” Looking like what society demands of you isn’t weakness, they seem to say—it just means you can start your fire within its walls. –Stacey Anderson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
DaBaby: Baby on Baby
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. At the start of this year, DaBaby made his ambitions clear, saying, “I want to get where Drake and them are at.” With Baby on Baby, as well as its follow-up, KIRK, which hit No. 1 in October, he put in the work to make his big talk a reality. –Noah Yoo
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Holly Herndon: PROTO
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. The thundering “Frontier” builds a battle anthem for the climate emergency against anxious AI wails, while “Godmother” interpolates the fragmented rhythms of Herndon’s friend Jlin, chopping and scattering Spawn’s voice as if it were being fed through fan blades. At times, listening to PROTO can feel like being immersed in a language you’re only just beginning to understand, where obvious phrases seem to stick out of inappropriate contexts and the familiar is not quite so. –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Rico Nasty / Kenny Beats: Anger Management
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. The bright “Sell Out” contemplates her growth as an artist, the things she’s lost to get there, and the strength she found in turning her “emotions to something y’all could sing to.” Anger Management bursts open with the fury of a hardcore record, but it also shows there’s much more to Rico than her temper. –Braudie Blais-Billie
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
100 gecs: 1000 gecs
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. For as fragmented as this carousel of mall punk, trap-pop, video-game soundtracks, and melodramatic Euro-trance can feel, the lingering mood is one of intimacy, of inner children mashing the pleasure button without boundaries or shame. That Dylan Brady and Laura Les recorded most of it through remote collaboration makes sense: 1000 gecs taps into a kind of communication predicated on separateness, mining the difference between what you can say aloud in your imperfect human body and what you can express in a boundless cyberspace. –Mike Powell
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Blood Incantation: Hidden History of the Human Race
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. Even the side-long closing track, “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul),” seems like a nod to the ’70s prog acts whose dark visions helped inspire countless subgenres of heavy music. Yet the real brilliance of this music lies in how free it sounds from what’s come before. On these four songs—ranging from gnarled chaos in “The Giza Power Plant” to the psychedelic slow burn of “Inner Paths (to Outer Space)”—Blood Incantation find their own corner in a storied cosmos, where even the most familiar textures can feel thrilling and extreme. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Thom Yorke: ANIMA
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. The album also boasts some of his dreamiest tracks, from the storm-tossed swoon of “Twist” to the angelic venom on “I Am a Very Rude Person.” And Yorke finally got around to nailing the legendarily elusive “Dawn Chorus,” which shows up here as a sunset synthesizer buzz. With ANIMA, the 51-year-old embraced meaty production while maintaining his taste for digital glitches and melodic sprawl, coming away with his finest solo album yet. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Aldous Harding: Designer
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.
Designer is a fitting headphone companion for wandering the city in a melancholy fog, but it never fades into the background. Odd lines and textures linger: an incongruous maraca, a chorus that falls away to leave Harding eerily silhouetted against sparse piano, a world map with a pin in Dubai. Then there’s Harding’s voice itself, an androgynous instrument that glides from deep-chested husk to nasal yowl, often within the same song. On the title track, she declares, “Shapes live forever,” and they do here: Harding’s songs create jagged, impressionistic outlines that allow listeners to climb inside, yet they are unmistakably her own. –Aimee Cliff
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
RAP: EXPORT
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. If, instead, parsing any of the proper nouns above makes you want to throw the whole of experimental music into the ocean, bear with me, and please give a listen to EXPORT. Yes, the album fits comfortably within the avant-garde’s long tail, but the British duo’s sound is primed for a much larger audience. Blending skittering percussion with stoned-out synths and charmingly monotone vocals, EXPORT is warm and playful, a genreless exploration of rhythm. It’s the type of record that seems destined to be rediscovered long after its release and heralded as ahead of its time. But it doesn’t have to be. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe
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. With the poise of Sade’s Love Deluxe and the zapped attention span of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, Miss Universe triple-axels between silky soul, smoldering jazz, and ripping alt-rock—and then adds hybrids like “Tears,” a song that seems to imagine what Timbaland might have sounded like if he made ’80s new wave records. It’s an album that never stops openly wondering how cool it might be if it tried to be something completely different. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Denzel Curry: ZUU
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. It is a privilege to spend a half hour in the singular slice of South Florida that Curry paints in his forthright verses. He’s frank about the violence plaguing his beloved home; frank about the murder of his brother, Treon Johnson, who was Tasered to death by police in 2014. But he also wants his listeners to know about all the goodness that South Florida has to offer, all the day-one friends he’s made on its sun-soaked streets. With ZUU, Curry kicks at the darkness surrounding him until it bleeds daylight. –Peyton Thomas
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Mannequin Pussy: Patience
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. And she sings of a fledgling romance on the closing “In Love Again,” which wraps around her like a pair of arms while guitar riffs shoot off fireworks—a surprise happy ending to an album that turns anguish into high drama. –Madison Bloom
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain
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). On the Bajan-British MC’s debut album, Nothing Great About Britain, he even tosses in a sample from an ancient doc about glue-sniffing—that proud, crusty pastime. Elsewhere, the evocations are early-millennial: The loping, strings-propelled beat on “Drug Dealer” nods to the Streets, and he shouts out Dizzee Rascal.
These echoes might all add up to déjà vu if it weren’t for slowthai’s outsize personality and sharp eye for detail, from “Northampton’s Child,” the touching, Tupac-like tribute to his single mom, to the teen miscreant memoir “North Nights.” Still, it’s the waywardness of his delivery that really sets him apart: Sounding like a cross between a grimacing gargoyle and an impish urchin, he lurches side-to-side over his grooves like a drunk and agitated man approaching you on the pavement; you flinch, but you also lean in to hear what he’s ranting about. Even more than calling Her Majesty the C-word, slowthai’s mangling of the Queen’s English is his true feat of treason. –Simon Reynolds
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Polo G: Die a Legend
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. Polo approaches his verses with the dedication of a singer-songwriter, and his bleeding-heart sadness is more akin to country than emo-rap. Even when he’s snatching chains and staging robberies, like on the chorus of his breakout hit “Pop Out,” Polo G is apologetic and regretful, unable to ignore the ghosts. –Nadine Smith
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow
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. It all makes for a fitting soundtrack for starting over. Among all the record’s big themes—the brush with death recounted on the album’s opener, the closing letter to her child—it’s the little details that stick out, like a line of dialogue that gives “Comeback Kid” the feel of a finely turned short story. Like a freshly polished lens, the album’s eclectic production only pulls Van Etten’s songwriting into sharper focus. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
MIKE: Tears of Joy
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. The whole thing is recorded grittily—a garage band’s lo-fi aesthetic applied to hip-hop. You can duck in and out of deep listening: Binge Tears of Joy’s 20 short songs as one complete thought or rewind when a particular detail pricks your ears, like the stuttered beat of “Planet” or the vividly abstract bildungsroman of “Memorial.” The album closes with another type of lo-fi recording: a voicemail MIKE’s mother left him before she died. “My son, I love you so much,” she says. “You are such a golden child. My blessed boy. You shall be blessed forever. Ever.” –Matthew Schnipper
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Oso Oso: Basking in the Glow
“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.” “Dig” gets the balance just about right, with a gloriously smeared chorus in which he’s “still reeling from the mess I made.” Gems like “Impossible Game” find drama in the effort to invest meaning in well-worn metaphors of open roads and unknowable partners. It’s self-conscious stuff, to be sure, with highlight “Wake Up Next to God” reveling in the G-force of self-torment. But Lilitri shows why that spotlight—that glow to bask in—is worth fighting for. –Jesse Dorris
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Ariana Grande: thank u, next
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. Her swooping voice stitches the disparate moods together, gliding from gorgeous high notes into husky psuedo-raps, demanding to be followed as she pulls you from the dancefloor to the bedroom, from praying to partying. There are powerhouse, splashy pop numbers here—“NASA,” “bad idea,” “7 rings”—but the quieter tracks, especially the title song, showcase a stunning maturity. –Dani Blum
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen
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.
On "Hollywood," the double LP's 14-minute closing track, Cave viscerally summarizes his broken heart. "The kid drops his bucket and spade/And climbs into the sun," he murmurs before the track’s steady bassline suddenly glitches, as if the needle of a turntable has hit a bad groove, and Cave begins to keen in falsetto. Ghosteen abounds with stark moments like this that reveal the raw heart of grief. To sit with it can be almost unbearable, and yet Cave—with the same talent he’s loaned to many other dark topics—takes the harshness of life and uses it to cleave his way to the truth of being human. Singing his sorrow so nakedly, with so little reserve, Cave asks the world to bear witness to the love he’s shared and his cavernous, neverending loss. –Sasha Geffen
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Florist: Emily Alone
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. Not that the trauma surfaces in the music. If anything, Emily Alone embodies the hard-earned truth that behind every moment, however dramatic, lies another, quieter moment, transpiring without expectation or pressure.
Like the water Sprague often sings about, and by which she is so evidently moved, the music here is rippling and continuous, bedroom folk rendered with the meditative heart of new age. (That she also makes beautiful, droning synthesizer music isn’t surprising.) The album’s underlying note is a kind of supreme confidence, the sound of an artist seeking truth with open eyes, a gentle heart, and a practiced commitment to the possibility that under the politics and advertising lies a beautiful experience of the world. And so she puts her faith in trees, the ocean, her friends, and, finally, herself. Emily Alone dares you to tell her she’s wrong. –Mike Powell
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Burna Boy: African Giant
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.
The record is a sublime peak for the interchange between pared-down Afrobeats and sax-infused dancehall, and Burna Boy’s supple, occasionally craggy vocals—in English, Igbo, Pidgin, Yoruba—deliver intimacy, romance, and politically biting messages about colonialism. African Giant places him in the lineage of his Nigerian countryman Fela Kuti, a national treasure whose supreme musicality was inextricable from the rebellious surroundings in which it was made. More than his ability to smoothly navigate and naturally fuse genres through his voice, Burna Boy’s opus reflects a rare magnanimity of vision that is also simply irrefutable on a dancefloor. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride
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. Nothing, it seems—neither time, nor age, nor a shifting cultural landscape—can chip away at their self-delighted gleam, their garish sophistication, their heartbroken contentment.
Seasoned experts at locating the expanding borders of “cool” and then working just outside them, here Vampire Weekend decide that they are a jam band, with all of the fretless bass and weightless Jerry Garcia guitar solos this implies. Of course, they sound goofy at first. And of course, when the surface dressings fall away, Ezra Koenig is writing as searchingly as ever about lasting happiness, low-grade fear, and the certainty that if bad times are here, worse times are on the way. No matter how long they go away, Vampire Weekend will always return perfectly out of time. –Jayson Greene
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Kim Gordon: No Home Record
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. “Murdered Out” is three-and-a-half minutes of a patient bass loop being continuously, relentlessly sandblasted by one thing after another: distorted guitar, encroaching noise, and Gordon’s roar, the strongest blast of all. “Get Yr Life Back” sits uneasily atop tensely arranged found-sound; “Sketch Artist” seems to be tearing itself apart; “Paprika Pony” rides a minimal toy-piano rap beat that sounds like it was created by the world’s most sinister toddler. No Home Record shows that the 66-year-old Kim is still hellbent on chasing new musical ideas, wherever they may lead. –Katherine St. Asaph
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Tyler, the Creator: IGOR
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. Each track feels like a selection on a mixtape, chosen for a specific emotion: “RUNNING OUT OF TIME” is a slow-groove journey into his subconscious, reminding you how singular Tyler’s vision can be behind the boards; “EARFQUAKE” is one of Tyler’s most ambitious songs, a catchy symphony that features Playboi Carti in the squeakiest and strangest version of his baby voice. Years ago, the idea of Tyler making music this intimate and reflective seemed like a stretch, but on IGOR, he gives in to the grown-up uncertainty that eventually comes for us all. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Cate Le Bon: Reward
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. These songs are intimate and personal, with Le Bon carefully leveraging a broader, deeper palette of instrumentation than on past work. Elastic, off-kilter guitar lines carry the prickly “Mother’s Mother’s Magazines,” while “Sad Nudes” floats along slack percussion and metallic adornments. Her layers of guitars, synths, saxes, and more make Reward feel lavish but never overstuffed. With everything in its just-right place, Le Bon's precise touches on Reward are prizes in their own right. –Allison Hussey
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
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.) But you don’t have to be below the drinking age to appreciate Billie Eilish’s peculiar magic: Her music serves as a thrilling reminder of the vertiginous highs and lows of adolescence, from the giddy insouciance of “bad guy” to the boiling rage of “you should see me in a crown” to the black-hole devastation of “when the party’s over.” It’s going to be fascinating to watch how Eilish’s career unfolds: In 10 years, she will still be well under 30. Let’s hope the planet survives that long. –Amy Phillips
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love
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. The music is a wryly nostalgic nod to the moment in history just before we as a species fully understood how quickly life on Earth as we know it might collapse.
Surveying a wounded forest, Hval finds spirits stronger than God: herself, her friends, the continuums of art and ecology. She reckons with being child-free in a society that constantly reminds her how she’s running out of biological time. And, finally, she finds liberation in feeling equivalent to an annual plant, blooming once briefly and then fading into the forest. The Practice of Love asks more questions than it answers: Are we more responsible to ourselves or to our species? What value is conforming in a world where norms have ruined us? And what does one’s legacy look like when the future isn’t guaranteed? These are what Hval calls her “loops of the mind,” scattered here among voices that search for communion in an atmosphere of crisis. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Jessica Pratt: Quiet Signs
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. Only a few lyrics pop out from her baroque melodies, like, “This time around, has it gone so grey that my faith can't hold out?” Her nylon-string guitar recalls sunny ’70s Brazilian pop, but her voice is all fog and rain. Are you hearing these songs, or spying on them? –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Clairo: Immunity
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. Cottrill, who went viral in 2017 with the charmingly homemade track “Pretty Girl,” has said that Immunity is partly about the process of coming out as bisexual, and songs like “Bags” and “White Flag” feel undeniably about the beginnings of things. Meanwhile, the closing “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” about Cottrill’s struggle with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, is born directly from fresh pain: A choir of children lifts the song up, and you’re reminded how, in early adulthood, you wonder if you’re ever going to figure life out. With compassion and understanding, Immunity helps you access your unfinished self, the one you paved over just to make it through. –Alex Frank
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(Sandy) Alex G: House of Sugar
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. Inescapable spirals of desire—whether for control, companionship, or instant gratification—are manifested as voids desperate to be filled.
Giannascoli’s tendency to enshroud his vulnerabilities in warped guitars and pitch-shifted vocals makes the straightforward candor of album standout “Hope” all the more devastating. As he laments the overdose and subsequent death of a good friend, he reaches a humble conclusion: “Why write about it now?/Gotta honor him somehow.” This quiet tribute to the darkest of realities crystalizes what makes Giannascoli’s songwriting so poignant: a resounding humanity. –Quinn Moreland
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Bon Iver: i,i
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. Of course, Justin Vernon’s elastic howl will always be the catalyst that transforms Bon Iver from just another experimental indie rock project to a quasi-religious cult of emotion, but on i,i, he sounds like he’s simply flowing through a slipstream, his load lightened.
The songs follow an elusive—and affecting—dream logic. With its queasy synths, snatches of stray trumpet, and gas mask imagery, “Jelmore” conjures a landscape from a not-too-distant future that’s been left desolate by climate change. “Sh’diah”—which Vernon began writing the morning after the 2016 election, with a title that stands for “shittiest day in American history”—fights the ugliness of modern politics with an understated call for rationality. “U (Man Like)” is a piano ballad that urges men to do better. “Power has come to me,” Vernon said earlier this year, “but it’s not fun to wield by yourself.” i,i is the solution, a collective effort as endless as it is empathetic. –Ryan Dombal
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Bill Callahan: Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest
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. His simple arrangements for guitar, strings, and percussion are filled with purpose: Every new note and lyric is in service of communicating a pure thought.
Take “Writing,” which rises slow and heavy like the sun in late summer. “It feels good to be writing again,” Callahan sighs, stepping through a field of thickly plucked notes; in the six years since his last album, he married and fathered a son, milestones that, for a while, dulled the need to be creative. He sings about clear water flowing from his pen, and a second riff emerges, lighter and more delicate, a cool stream burbling just out of sight. Eventually he leaves words behind entirely, sinking into cascading acoustic guitars and the soft tinkle of chimes. It’s a moment representative of this warm, humble, and remarkably graceful album: a celebration of the act of creation that reaches its peak when there’s nothing left to say. –Jamieson Cox
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Beyoncé: Homecoming: The Live Album
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. In Beyoncé’s musical Cuisinart, James Weldon Johnson’s uplifting 1905 Negro National Anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” sidles up next to her bootyshaking 2016 club jam “Formation.” The dizzying result of all Beyoncé’s kitchen-sink pop mastery: one of the most confident concert albums ever made, an audacious raising of the bar for stadium R&B in the footsteps of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Janet. In a cultural moment when black women’s labor and contributions are still underrecognized and diminished, Homecoming is the distillation of 21st century black female fabulosity. –Jason King
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Big Thief: Two Hands
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. Warmed by humming amps and the presence of four bodies pressed in close, the album unspools as effortlessly as a campfire session—stray counterpoints, offhand vocal harmonies, tiny details dancing like shadows on the treeline. At a time when it feels like no patch of ground is immune from either flood or fire, Two Hands draws a circle and creates a refuge there. –Philip Sherburne
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Brittany Howard: Jaime
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. When the spirit calls for sparkling old soul, it’s there, as on the perennially festive “Stay High”; when Howard addresses a racist attack on her mixed-race parents, she doesn’t smooth over the stumbling piano refrain, nor her stunned delivery. The magnetic scrappiness doubles as a bracing alert. –Laura Snapes
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Jamila Woods: LEGACY! LEGACY!
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! is a more unified work than Woods’ 2016 debut, HEAVN, which marked her as a graceful champion of self-love, black feminism, and her Windy City hometown. On this album, even Woods’ more straightforward declarations—she’s “not your typical girl,” she’s “all out of fucks”—are set within richly imaginative and deeply allusive contexts, rooted in her artistic forebears. The music exists on an expanded scale, too, with producer Slot-A helping guide the proceedings from cosmic soul to garage-rock grit and on through to Chicago house. “So many women in me,” Woods sings, and she is every one. –Marc Hogan
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Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains
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. A number of lines and song titles—“The dead know what they are doing when they leave this world behind,” from “Nights That Won’t Happen,” or “No way to last out here like this for long” from “All My Happiness Is Gone”—seem to point at what was to come, and to hear them in a certain mood is to be emotionally overwhelmed.
But it’s important to remember what Berman’s friends at Drag City said following his death: His music didn’t predict his death; it was written despite his depression. The best way to hear these songs now is to listen to them in that spirit—to assume Berman was fighting fire with fire. He searched for the perfectly turned phrase to articulate pain because it helped him feel less of it; he added jokes because the absurdity of life is funny. His parting gift turned out to be one of his very best records. –Mark Richardson
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Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising
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. But even going the comfortable route, she is constantly disrupting her own ’70s soft rock pastiche with sounds that represent the future—space-age synths, satellites trying to connect. This simultaneous backwards-forwards vantage point leaves Mering well-positioned to consider our current moment—even if she sounds almost nothing like it. –Jillian Mapes
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Fennesz: Agora
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. The album’s four tracks are all over 10 minutes in length and unabashedly sweeping, as processed guitar tones and dense computer manipulations generate droning, nearly-orchestral waves. But each mountainous track is also filled with small details, be it a high-pitched squall, a grainy click, or a distant rumble. Like all of Fennesz’s best work, Agora evokes memories and the way they linger and change. But the album never feels faded or nostalgic; all of its enveloping sound is immensely present, pulsing with life. –Marc Masters
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Helado Negro: This Is How You Smile
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. Amid all this wonder, what stays with you most is Roberto Carlos Lange’s comforting voice: It’s resonant and entrancing in both Spanish and English as he narrates meditations on resilience and the Latinx experience. Fresh hells rear their ugly heads every day, and Helado Negro reminds us that we can care for our communities as we seek to improve a world determined to beat us down. This Is How You Smile effortlessly illustrates the kind of quiet rage that has come to feel increasingly common in our current reality; for that reason, it might be the finest political record of the year. –Noah Yoo
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Bad Bunny: X 100PRE
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. Expertly sequenced and absent of fluff, the album deploys only a choice few guest appearances designed for maximum impact: a rare Spanish verse from Drake, dirty bass programming by Diplo, and a romantic harmony courtesy of Ricky Martin. The focus instead is on flaunting Bad Bunny’s wide stylistic range; he channels salsa king Héctor Lavoe and flamboyant Mexican pop star Juan Gabriel as fluently as he might modern reggaetoneros like J Balvin and Ozuna. His versatility is most evident on the standout track “La Romana,” in which bachata guitar weaves cleverly into a trap beat before swerving into a full-on dembow banger. For the past few years, Bad Bunny has remained a true original in an urbano scene littered with talented copycats, and X 100PRE is his hard-to-catch victory lap. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
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Solange: When I Get Home
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. With its loose, almost jazz-like form, When I Get Home elevates Solange’s artistry to another plane: The grace and wisdom that flowed through 2016’s A Seat at the Table is chopped and screwed, complicated not just spiritually but musically as well. The album’s more abstracted tendencies also come to the forefront in its surreal visual companion piece, set in various real and imagined locations around the city. But in Solange’s generous hands, heady ideas don’t feel out of reach. We’re all given a place to rest in her Houston of the soul. –Eric Torres
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Angel Olsen: All Mirrors
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. Over the album’s inky expanse, Olsen tries out an entirely new, gothic corner of her record collection: The Cure’s Disintegration, Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Even at its gauziest, however, Olsen’s music still thrums with anxiety; her version of dream-pop is unsettled by existential terror, which prickles to the surface of “Too Easy” and “What It Is” like fever sweat. –Jayson Greene
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Big Thief: U.F.O.F.
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. On bulked-up folky rock songs like “Jenni” and “Betsy,” Lenker’s winding voice twists through a dense weave of vine-like guitars and brittle drums, acting as a sonic anchor while the rhythm swirls around her. The lyrics are elliptical yet striking, so successful at filling you with what feels like an ancient longing that it sometimes feels like you’re discovering a new language entirely. –Vrinda Jagota
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FKA twigs: MAGDALENE
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.
For all the clever syntheses in MAGDALENE’s production—polyphonic vocals wisping over bass shudders; operatic trills distorted into grisly yelps—twigs is desperately clear in her words. Over the alluring trap beat of “holy terrain,” she asks coyly for fidelity, nervous and brave in her open-heartedness. Part the waves of distortion on “home with you,” and she is wailing, gorgeously, at the injustice of emotional abandonment. And on the exquisite centerpiece “cellophane,” she is as exposed, fallen, and overwhelmed as the album’s namesake. But unlike Mary Magdalene, twigs can reclaim her narrative, in this act of graceful assertion that makes the agony of her love heroic. –Stacey Anderson
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Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell!
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. (As if the Bowies and Madonnas of the world didn’t spend decades proving that an artist’s greatest triumphs can come from reinvention.) But she ignored the haters and plowed forward, steadily carving out her own dark corner of the pop landscape. Norman Fucking Rockwell! takes that journey one step further: It cements Del Rey as a newly emergent Great American Songwriter.
The elements of the Lana Del Rey Cinematic Universe, as established in the Born to Die era, have remained consistent throughout her discography: Lynchian dreamscapes of haunted prom queens and suburban ennui, meditations on the death of the American Dream, Old Hollywood glamour, the agony and ecstasy of bad men, references to classic rock and Comp Lit 101. On Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting at last goes toe-to-toe with the grandeur of her ideas. Her lyrics are dense poems destined for academic scrutiny, anchored by the kind of dry wit that could come as easily from the pen of Dorothy Parker as from a really good Instagram caption. Del Rey’s attitude towards destructive relationships take a refreshing turn, giving her more agency than ever before: “You’re fun and you’re wild/But you don’t know the half of the shit that you put me through/Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she sings wearily on the title track. “’Cause you’re just a man/It’s just what you do.” (Because the reality of loving a fast-living, leather jacket-clad Romeo on a motorcycle is that you also have to deal with his bullshit.) Later, on “Venice Bitch,” she’s “fresh out of fucks forever,” like so many of us aspire to be. On “The Greatest,” she takes a widescreen look at our planet, sighing into the void as climate change brings about a hellish endless summer.
Del Rey’s melodies also find their ideal setting in producer Jack Antonoff’s airy Laurel Canyon psych-folk, where she follows in the lineage of Joni Mitchell and Carole King. Untethered from the electronic pop and hip-hop trappings of many of her previous songs, her vocals breathe deep and her melodies luxuriate. Nothing here aims anywhere near the top 40; to paraphrase Del Rey’s buddy Kacey Musgraves, she’s classic in the right way.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an album that arrived feeling like a greatest hits collection. Future generations will marvel that one album contained “Venice Bitch” and “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it.” And they will scoff in disbelief that Lana Del Rey was once treated as anything but the poet laureate of a world on fire. –Amy Phillips
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