Occasionally, Homme, Fertita, and Helders impress, but more often than not, Iggy’s sidemen are unremarkable, which only serves to highlight how commanding the rock n’ roll singer still is at age 68.
Harvey would suggest that passivity wreaks nothing but death and destruction. But, in this particular case, the result is something like a clarion call.
Bottomless Pit is possessed, and songs like ‘Eh’ and ‘Three Bedrooms In A Bad Neighbourhood’ are as vital as anything the group has yet released.
Marked by a reverence for the rich history of black American music, Malibu is a love letter to the giants on whose shoulders he stands.
Everything You’ve Come to Expect is stylish, self-satisfied, smug, sleazy, cocky and confident. It is completely over the top and that’s just where these boys want to be.
The overarching feeling here is confidence – the result of a band that threw themselves off a cliff and found a net hanging just below.
The Colour in Anything is a work of restless invention, standing as Blake’s most creative collection to date.
Puberty 2 captures the sense of frustration, resignation and self-awareness that can only come from years of grappling with emotional demons: now, she holds her vulnerability with confidence, in anthemic and improbably striking songs, for all to see.
If The Life of Pablo is about anything, it’s about the absurdity of being Kanye West.
Hopelessness is a response to the raging debate around diversity; it’s a shot across the bow to steadfast conservatives and ambivalent progressives alike. Anohni doesn’t just seek visibility – she demands it.
As much a house record as it is a hip-hop record, 99.9% often defies classification, but never abandons its skew-whiff take on contemporary dance music.
Miraculously, Wildflower still sounds like The Avalanches, a collection of ideas and moments, loosely compartmentalised as songs. It’s 2016, and they’ve kept that bastard, time, at bay.
There are tiny blips in momentum, but for the most part Adore Life is a pummelling statement.
Although Coloring Book isn’t a disappointment necessarily, but there are no giant leaps forward here, nothing to fully justify the wait. Chance has crystallised his aesthetic, but one hopes that on his next release he adds another chapter to the volume, rather than revising the text again.
The candidness on My Woman captures what makes Olsen such a compelling artist, making for an album that will stand as a critical release in her illustrious career.
On his fourth album, Atrocity Exhibition, Brown reigns things in: there are less straight up bangers on this album than on XXX or Old, but it’s altogether dirtier and darker than either of those. Danny Brown’s coke dreams are turning into nightmares.
untitled’s 34 minutes are so crammed with ideas that they almost need to be read like poetry, with annotations, to be fully appreciated.
Utopia Defeated is a dark and meticulously constructed debut, the violent fantasies presented within always clever, confronting and beautiful.
We got it from Here…Thank You 4 Your Service sees A Tribe Called Quest revive what they do best, and beyond – bridging the gap between carefree and critical, classic and contemporary, timeless and topical, return and departure.