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.
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.
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.
A set that's seamlessly transporting, front to back.
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.
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.
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.
Low Cut Connie are defiantly old-school in their roots and values. But Dirty Pictures (Part 2), like its predecessor, is a stand-alone triumph of missionary zeal.
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.
The Future and the Past has a glossy, nostalgic sheen, but that only makes Prass' messages about getting past the world's current ills land harder.
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.
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.
Where recent marathons like Migos' gratuitous Culture II felt more about streaming algorithms than art, Sr3mm rarely wears out its welcome.
Mendes' strength is in romance, and more than ever before, this teenager seems like he not only believes the words he is singing, but he's actually lived through the emotions behind them.
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.
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.
In her excellent new solo album, with the droll title Record, the Everything But the Girl chanteuse tells tales of mid-life angst with the same wry wit she's had in her voice since she was a sullen Brit-punk kid.