The four-man Bay Area rap crew delivers a breathless, irresistible, and highly defined record that hits your gut and your shoulders at the same time.
As a listening experience, Heaven and Earth contains the most transcendent moments of his output thus far, as well as some of the gnarliest.
This record’s emotional valence—between collapse and grace, unity and emptiness—will resonate with anyone who's ever caught an unexpected sunrise in a concrete room. Yet his depth and clarity of vision resists formula. Making music “to get lost in” is overrated—Compro takes you somewhere new.
On her first album in six years, Chan Marshall roams the many moods of her songwriting with a careful, soft-spoken power.
The essential trick of The Sciences—and the reason it feels like more than an overdue cash-in—is these 40something dudes have managed to grow up without growing old. Their minds are still focused on weed and the escape that it offers, but that’s just the gag; these riffs, rhythms, and the mantra-like singing of Al Cisneros are a drug unto themselves, evidence of a band that’s improved upon their animating idea.
The latest album from the Big Thief singer evokes a singular, solitary chill. With a great imagination for melody, Lenker conjures a world of mingled trauma and love.
Beyondless sparkles like a champagne bottle smashed in slow motion.
Isolation is a star turn from an artist who has proven she’s ready for it.
The ferocious 21-year-old shapeshifter comes through with one of the hardest rap records of the year.
Amid our tumultuous news cycles, the unevenness of Broken Politics is the best she can do, and it’s enough.
MUDBOY delivers mosh raps with a cold, steely New York edge ... It’s its own coming-of-age album and the rare project from an über-hyped rap prospect that actually delivers on its promise.
For anyone still struggling to tell any woman with a guitar apart, the deft collaboration and complex collective songwriting on the boygenius EP is a great place to learn.
Five years removed from their landmark Sunbather, Deafheaven have never seemed less interested in being fashionable—as a result, they sound newly content.
Still trading in piercing vulnerability, Clean is Allison’s excellent studio debut: a compact album of clear melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and the impossibly tangled logic of infatuation.
The Atlanta rapper’s official debut is an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. It is a perversely infectious sugar high, rap that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers.
If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning.
Daytona is Pusha’s best work as a solo artist, a tightly wound record that doesn’t recapture the highs of peak Clipse, but finally makes ideal use of the now middle-aged rapper’s considerable skills.
Tirzah Mastin’s debut album Devotion is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical.
After years of searching, Ariana Grande has found her true voice. Sweetener is an exemplary pop album, radiating with low-key joy and newfound love.
With Lush, Jordan earns her place as a leader in the next generation of indie rock, the ones who are keeping the genre’s honorable ideals alight while continuing to expand its purview beyond straight white dudes.
Robyn presents her first solo album in eight years subtly, with slight builds and light hands. But her masterful command of emotions on the dancefloor slowly reveals itself across another enthralling record.
If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one.
The mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling.