Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time [2020]

The band could have gone for a less direct title, but even then it would have been crystal clear: Funeral captures the agony and even ecstasy of surviving death all around you.

Gaga loves overheated cosmic statements for the same reason she loves dance pop and metal guitars – because she hears them as echoes of her twisted rock & roll heart. That's the achievement of Born This Way: The more excessive Gaga gets, the more honest she sounds.

The Nashville star's most ambitious LP, a range-y two-disc set ditching country's mainstream playbook for the sort of Great Album rock acts used to spit out regularly back in the day.

Start here for an action-packed entree to the genre's rougher pleasures.

For Emma, Forever Ago never turns into a pity party, because Vernon has a light touch, with zero interest in narrative or confessional lyrics.

She has said the album's conceit is a house party and its unfolding dramas; indeed, Pure Heroine's cool snark is now a hotter passion, in its millennial-skeptical way.

I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is less about O’Connor’s ambitions than the cost of those ambitions, and in almost every regard, it is an even better record than her first.