At Cry Baby’s core, the singer unfurls a series of saccharine nursery rhymes that are truly, deeply unsettling. It rattles you with a painted smile.
Even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.
Someday soon Years & Years could be worthy of the “Worship” that all of Communion religious allusions cheekily point toward. That’s what communion is for. Try again. Perfect yourself. Take and eat.
Her confidently unsteady voice has a refreshing energy, serving as a cohesive, quivering throughline for her intentionally nomadic debut, The Fool.
The Desired Effect succeeds more often than not, goosed by the possibility that its gleaming, Ariel Rechtshaid-produced surfaces might attract radio programmers besotted with Avicii.
By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
At its high points, Revival is marked by this lush, sphinx-like readiness: as if, after a decade and a half of being nonstop front and center, Gomez has finally figured out what it means to center herself.
With the release of third LP, Delirium, a self-confessed “big pop album,” Ellie’s coming into the proverbial net, low on ballads and armed with 16 bangers to pelt at fans and peers alike.
Reflection often sounds like a Frankenstein’s monster of borrowed samples, phrases, themes, and sounds, but the stitches never show.
Fourth-grade, retrograde, retro-pop even, pining quietly for the simpler time when pop albums were variety packs aimed at both Keith Urban and Stevie Wonder fans, Jason Derulo doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not.
It’s a triumph of Grimes as gloriously and unapologetically DIY producer, a pop singer politically and emotionally invested in your knowing that she made this all on her own — as if anything workshopped with a team of songwriters could sound so bracing and unpredictable.
E•MO•TION is 2015’s Pop Album for Non-Pop People ... It’s definitely a bid for the middle while Jepsen’s chartmates Beyoncé and Lady Gaga bleed the edges.
To say that PRODUCT leaves you wanting more is an understatement, beginning and ending with EDM you can’t dance to, building and toppling all kinds of aural Legos in between.
Many of the 14 tracks meander like scenes in a Sophia Coppola film, all variations on depression and scenic pans of sparkling cities and desert expanses.