Rob Sheffield
On 'Guts' she avoids all the second-album pitfalls with her most ambitious, intimate, and messy songs yet.
Rapper's excellent third album mixes jazzy grooves and revolutionary politics.
One Direction's Irish bard is full of feelings as he approaches thirty.
Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn are back with one of the year's most welcome comebacks.
The power of boygenius is how something weird, unpredictable, and slightly dangerous happens when these three musical minds meld. All over The Record, they prove they’re a band that can do it all, hitting peaks together that can’t be reached any other way.
The latest album from the Canadian pop goddess delivers high-gloss pop with serious emotional punch
Her long-awaited Hold The Girl is a personal journal — a Saturn-return statement about moving out of her twenties and facing up to her past.
The UK duo revel in a Pavement-style guitar slack that goes perfectly with the rollercoaster emotional tension in their songs.
She’s never sounded more ferocious than she does on 30—more alive to her own feelings, more virtuosic at shaping them into songs in the key of her own damn life.
This new version of Taylor Swift’s greatest album is 30 tracks–the original 16-song ‘Red’ tricked out with B-sides and vault outtakes, all redone with more boom and detail in the production.
Instead of chasing trends, they stick to the classic sound they perfected years ago, the sound that has kept influencing modern pop ever since. As they once sang, the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.
Her sophomore album documents her fears and traumas and still manages to sound astonishingly self-assured.
Her eighth album is a radical detour into the deepest collection of songs she’s ever come up with.
On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before—yet he just keeps pushing on into the future.
High Off Life is Future at his most optimistic, as the man from Pluto decides to send out a positive message.
On Suga she sounds warm and vulnerable, unsure how to carry on without her mama to guide her, but determined to do her proud.
Manic is about the here-and-now real world and her fight for a place in it as a young woman.
The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger.
It’s shaped into discrete songs that stand on their own, yet the scenery is always in flux.
This is one of the year’s best pop albums so far, even in a 2019 that’s already turning out to be a great one for new music.
It could have been worse. But who thought that would ever be a standard Kanye West would settle for?
She's playing for bigger emotional stakes – this is an album full of one-on-one adult love songs.
Halsey shows off all her wild musical ambitions on Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, a bold second album that consolidates all the strengths of her 2015 debut Badlands.
More Life is his finest longform collection in years, cheerfully indulgent at 22 tracks and 82 minutes, a masterful tour of all the grooves in his head.