Skyzoo is incapable of making a bad album, and All The Brilliant Things may be his best work to date.

In my 18 years of life, I've been around to see mainstream pop music change three different times that I can recall. In 2009, Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster, a nearly 90-minute reissue/deluxe edition of her 2008 debut The Fame, revived the sound of electropop in mainstream music after Y2K-era pop artists faded into the background as nothing more than a memory for most. In 2013, the elusive Lorde released Pure Heroine and the even more elusive Sky Ferreira released Night Time, My Time. Both albums ... read more

IDK is like Kanye without the things that separate him from his peers. His flow is a carbon copy on the majority of this album, his bars are like Kanye's appearance on "Stay Up" dialed up to 13, and he's preachy to the point where it gets unbearable (that one isn't a Kanye issue, that's strictly an IDK issue). Between that, production that refuses to differ at any point, and a string of mediocre at best features, this album is a chore to get through.

Also, "Red" is one of ... read more

*i wrote this some time ago for a different thing, but my opinions are largely the same.*

I’ve been loosely following Olivia Rodrigo’s career since she was on Bizaardvark (the Disney show that did the world a disservice by giving Jake Paul a large platform and allowed him to parlay his time on the channel into one of the most lucrative social media runs we’ll ever see). She was pretty easily the best thing about a show that had no real redeeming qualities about it. Since ... read more

Their second album of 2008, Pretty Dark Things is the weakest of the 2000s CYNE catalogue, but it's a good album in its own right. It's not particularly adventurous, just standard CYNE. Water For Mars, released 14 months later, is phenomenal. Starship Utopia, released only a few months before this, is also a great album. So Pretty Dark Things is disappointing in that regard, but it's not a bad album at all. This is also probably the most Akin Yai on a single CYNE album, but he's consistently ... read more

Tyler, The Creator's roots are in hip-hop but he's never been a rapper rapper in the same way his peers are. CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST is the definitive Tyler rap album, a re-affirmation of his status as one of the best artists of his generation, and in a lot of ways, has a legitimate argument to be his best release to date.

The DJ Drama appearances are polarizing, but for someone who grew up in an era when Lil Wayne mixtape cuts had consistent placements on New York radio and Drama's ... read more

Water For Mars is a product of its time, but listening to it in that context makes it a great experience still. Cise and Akin do their thing, Speck & Enoch's production is great, and those forces combine to create an album that's not quite as good as their best, but still great. I guess you could begin to see the cracks forming regarding the group, as there are more solo tracks and a lot more Cise Starr than previous releases. It's not surprising that Akin would go solo in the years between ... read more

I'm going through and revising some of my old reviews. Honestly, this album is better than the 6.8/10 I gave it initially, but it's still the weakest CYNE album. I miss the chemistry Cise Starr and Akin Yai had, and since the Akin Yai solo run hasn't gone the way he would've liked so far, I hope they can reunite down the line.

Planet Her is the closest we've gotten to seeing Doja Cat meet her potential so far, and while this is a good, occasionally great album, it still feels like it's missing something.

I'm going to keep this short. Doja Cat herself is not an issue. Doja is a more than capable artist. She's a good songwriter, a good vocalist, and a good rapper. She's a triple threat with room to grow. The issues with Planet Her stem almost entirely from its production. An artist as unique as Doja Cat should not be ... read more

At its core, Camp isn't a great album. It's barely even a good album a lot of the time. However, its great songs still hold up, and the production is still really enjoyable if dated at times.

I missed Camp when it first dropped. I was a fan of Childish Gambino but not a "look for his album" fan. I thought Freaks and Geeks (from the EP) and Bonfire were amazing songs, and I still believe that to be the case. I probably took three or four years to actually get around to listening to ... read more

Rina Sawayama is one of the most impressive musical talents I've heard in the last couple of years, if not the most impressive. Her songwriting isn't complex, but it's poignant, powerful, playful, and at times, downright aggressive. She plays with styles ranging from nu-metal to J-pop, and pretty much everything she touches turns to gold on this record. I guess my only nitpick would be that "Chosen Family" doesn't match the quality of everything else before it and the closer that ... read more

When I first listened to Manger on McNichols, I put it on my speaker as background noise while I was working on a school assignment. In that first background listen, I could tell there was something here, but I wasn't in the right headspace to process it. Once I was able to listen to it with my headphones and without other things getting in the way, I realized this was a masterpiece.

Boldy James is an MC that fascinates me. He's obviously skilled, but there are moments in his catalogue where ... read more

I'm not going to give this a score because I don't think an album like this can be reduced to a number. Carrie and Lowell is the culmination of eleven years of excellent releases. In many ways, it's the ending of the first arc of Sufjan Stevens' career. We saw his rise from obscure indie-folk artist to the commercially successful, (then-)soon to be Oscar-nominated performer he would grow into. In other ways, it's a work as bleak and uncompromising as Phil Elverum's A Crow Looked At Me. The ... read more

K.A.A.N. is one of the most underrated albums in the space right now. His latest work, produced mainly by FloFliz (with additional credits to Damu the Fudgemunk) has been the best he's sounded in a couple of years. There's also a killer Blu feature. K.A.A.N. is great, not much else for me to say.

Simply put, Skyzoo doesn't miss.

This is a largely inoffensive collection of B-sides and leaks. The highlights are some of the best songs he's released in years, while the lows aren't outright bad, just bland. His album should be good.

Of all the singles he's released during what appears to be an album rollout, this is by far the best.

The man changed the sound of R&B.

This is The Weeknd's best studio album, and arguably his best since his breakout debut House of Balloons.

Jay Electronica's debut album is a mostly good, sometimes great collection of songs, but it unfortunately left me wanting a new Jay-Z album instead of wanting to hear more from the man whose debut this is meant to be. Jay Elec will never quite reach the heights of Act 1 or Exhibit C (which is still an all-time great rap song), but he remains a solid, if now unspectacular, lyricist.