Anupa Mistry
Grimes’ first project as a bona fide pop star is more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Her genuineness shines through the album’s convoluted narrative, and the songs are among her finest.
6y
Solange’s fourth album is unhurried, ambient, and exploratory. Using everything from spiritual jazz to Gucci Mane, Solange conjures her hometown with exceptional songcraft and production.
7y
Her new EP, Hallucinogen, uses the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures in music.
10y
Unbreakable is a synthesis of ideas Jackson’s collected and tested throughout her career.
10y
A glassy-voiced singer refracting melody through diffuse electronic beats, twigs takes the familiar R&B star as her avatar, but her presentation is more complex: her ideas mar beauty and mine power, and exalt sex without exotifying.
10y
On Wildheart, Miguel makes good on all of his cross-genre dabbling of the past five years, but unlike the track-based experiments that dotted his two prior LPs and five mixtapes, he extrapolates the heavy funk across an entire album.
10y
On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.
11y
Heterocetera might not be a happy recording, but that’s what makes the five-track collection so ambitious.
11y
Much of A.K.A. is still mawkish, midtempo melodrama that does too much to accentuate J. Lo’s tunelessness.
11y
Where We Come From chooses its own pace, takes a softer approach to dembow and borrows strategically from the boudoir synths of current rap&b.
11y
This is her best album, more textured than its predecessors in both sound and content.
12y
Maybe this is just an honest reflection of where the young twentysomething finds himself, creatively and personally. Kiss Land plays like a more considered, better-mastered continuation of Echoes of Silence, not anything dramatically different.
12y
Wolf is where he should’ve reasserted himself within this new context. Instead, he seems bent on making a career out of his adolescent emotional turmoil, resulting in a thematically stagnant, myopic and ultimately immature record.
10y
Crutchfield is as keen an observer as she is a songwriter, and her minor catastrophes are often resolved by getting drunk and making out. Just like real life.
10y
He remains magnanimous but brash, never conceding to collaborators or the beat, rapping hard - channelling multiple voices - as if hip-hop depended on it.
10y
The Haunted Man is yearning, elegant pop music in line with the past year's best.
10y
Her debut is a sonic amalgam of dusky 80s R&B and pristine 90s Brit soul. It's lush, sophisticated pastiche.
10y
The production has been updated for a new, not so distant future, but retains its mechanical crunch and metallic din.
6y
Killer Mike is the Jäger shot of rap: efficient, acrid and totally devastating.
8y
Essentially, Evidence harkens back to 00s rap nostalgia without resorting to preachy tirades or regressive concepts, a respite during a time of sing-rap and hyper-aggressive flows.
2y
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