What lifts God's Favorite Customer beyond homage is Tillman's slicing, free-associative candor as he examines the cost in sanity and constancy of his craft and touring life.
It’s an album full of fire and passion from an artist who doesn’t have anything left to prove.
McBryde’s got a big, vibrato-tinged alto, biker-chick style, and she wrote or co-wrote everything here, including “Dahlonega,” with a sharp eye for piercing detail. She has a serious gift.
The rising Americana singer-songwriter flips the script on her ambitious seventh LP, with help from husband Jason Isbell.
Wide Awake! is the sort of reality-reckoning many of us have been having on a daily basis lately. In place of the usual Parquet Courts concerns – oblique self-analysis, post-graduate existential ennui, meta-rock references, girl problems – are big-picture anxieties and flabbergasted outrage.
It's not quite as good as his Beck-produced 2011 album Mirror Traffic but it's a more immediate than his last LP, 2014's Wig Out at Jagbags.
Costello’s his first new album in five years finds him squaring his restless artistic impulses with his storied past.
Tell Me How You Really Feel is noisy and way more pissed off than her 2015 debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, unsheathing sharp new earnestness alongside her trademark sabers of sarcasm and penetrating observation.
When it does, rhythms and racket ratcheting up accordingly, American Utopia ... boasts some of the most exciting music Byrne has made in years.
Rosalía’s new album, El Mal Querer, is less rigorous than its predecessor, though even easier to like.
Katie Bennett writes quiet little tunes stocked with great one-liners, deep emotions and vivid imagery on the band’s excellent fourth LP.
With Snail Mail's Lush, indie rock has officially entered its "Black Crowes era," where young artists refigure music from the decade they were born. But that's not a bad thing here.
Where recent marathons like Migos' gratuitous Culture II felt more about streaming algorithms than art, Sr3mm rarely wears out its welcome.
For all its keen lyricism, Historian ultimately floats on a sea of fuzz, rich with small melodic details and the sort of glorious guitar heroics that indie rock is often much too modest for.
Vibras, Balvin's fifth studio LP, happens to be a pan-Latin masterstroke of its own, a set of primo Spanish-language pop with vibe deep enough to make it universal.
In its own way, its as artful, ambitious, determined, joyous and inspiring, as Lemonade or To Pimp a Butterfly. It's a sexy MF-ing masterpiece.
His first LP in five years is structured like a ride on the cosmic train, complete with silly sex songs and a plea for peace. The result is classic Paul.
There isn’t an incompetent song to be found here – it’s more consistent than the genre-hopping More Life – and every last one has its moments. This is a masterclass in pop-focused execution and an exercise in inoffensive ambition swirling into itself.
Vile’s latest LP has his tastiest playing and his deepest writing. It follows his fantastic 2017 collaboration with singer-songwriter wiz Courtney Barnett, Lotta Sea Lice, and suggests he’s in the midst of a real artistic roll.
Its most powerful moments are among the best of Gaga’s career.
In many ways, Daytona replicates Jay-Z and No I.D.'s 2017 rap highlight 4:44: two older men who simply practice their craft, their legacies already secure.
In the sixth year of his career, Astroworld marks the first time that his music has actually matched the aspirations of his art-crunk bluster, rock-star stage dives and aisle-crossing fashions.
Finding light is often much harder than drowning in darkness, but on Sweetener Grande makes moving forward from pain feel easy and, most importantly, possible. That light Grande promised has helped lead her down the path toward her best album yet, and one of 2018’s strongest pop releases to date.
The 14 songs on Interstate Gospel tell a tightly-woven story about adult restlessness, bittersweet farewells and hard-won independence. Several albums into their own individual and collective career, the Pistol Annies are less interested in singing about burning down their ex-husbands’ houses than in burning up their own dull lives in order to start anew.
Though Golden Hour might take time to relax into, the set is a fine lava-lamp soundtrack, and if "country" suggests engaging American musical traditions with respect and pioneer spirit, then this album is as country as it comes.
Invasion of Privacy flaunts so many different aspects of Cardi's game, it comes on like a greatest hits album, as undeniable as the excellent New Wave suit she rocks in the cover art. It's already tough to remember what it was like not having Cardi B around. Invasion proves she's here to stay.