albums

Mitski, Yo La Tengo, Sufjan Stevens, and more It was a great year for charming guitar bands, confessional singer-songwriters, post-punk revivalists, power poppers, and roots rockers. Artists and bands we’ve been loving for a while made big leaps forward (in fact, our top album is by a band that made such a big leap they ended up releasing their long-awaited debut on a major-label). Beloved stars made capstone classics, and a ton of great new voices made themselves heard.…

This album begins with a sizzle reel of what Caroline Polachek can do with her voice. Floating serenely on a high thermal of coos, it dips down in pitch and speeds towards the earth, cracking as Polachek pushes it into the red. She pulls up with a Celtic folk ululation and heads back into the sky again, higher than ever, reaching the whistle register of Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande. After a final soulful flourish, the drums kick in and she begins merely talking: “Welcome to my island.”It is exhilarating to be hoisted in…

Almost two-and-a-half years ago, we walked around Chicago rapper Noname’s new LA neighborhood with her — at the time she was working to make her next,  highly-anticipated album a revolutionary text with the warmth and intimacy she was already beloved for; radically political, but personal and fun. She’d long named it Factory Baby. Instead, Sundial came as she freed herself from her own constraints. It’s bold and rich but lands naturally at the powerful intersection of her offbeat wordplay, tasteful…

Jessie Ware deliberately wanted the opening track of That! Feels Good! to sound like a group of people at an orgy. Featuring the likes of Kylie Minogue, actor Jamie Demetriou, Radio 1 host Clara Amfo, producer Benny Blanco and Ware’s mother (and co-host of the hit podcast Table Manners) Lennie all whispering the album’s title, it has the same brain-scratching satisfaction as an ASMR video, albeit one tempting you into the velveted opulence of Ware’s exceptional fifth album. It’s a record that delights in its author’s…

The lead single of Mitski’s previous album, 2022’s Laurel Hell, took a bleak view of her future in music. “I used to think I’d be done by 20,” she sang on Working for the Knife. “Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same / Though maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.” It was the Japanese American songwriter’s latest treatise on her conflicted relationship to her niche but intense fame. After several of her songs unexpectedly went viral, Mitski saw her mordant, nuanced introspection reduced to “sad girl” pop and came to…

Just like book covers, album covers have quite a job to do. They have to instantaneously capture the audience’s attention and intrigue them enough for the person to take some sort of action, whether it’s picking it off the shelf or listening to a song or two.Album covers also need to reflect what kind of music is in the album, which can be quite a tough task. After all, music is a completely auditory experience and coming up with a visual representation of a sound that also tells a story is complicated to say the least.…

Gut-churning doom, hip-hop-influenced industrial metal, avant-garde black metal, thrash for the ages, and so much more This list goes to 11 … and that Spinal Tap joke is about as far as headbanging traditionalism goes with this list of 2023’s best metal albums. The past year has seen beloved metal titans like Metallica and Godflesh expand their signature heavy riffage in unexpected ways, and it has given a platform for daring bands like Khanate and Agriculture to explore the…

Intoxicating love, triumphant self-destruction, abject abandonment, simmering-to-roiling melancholia: this is the tonal palette Lana Del Rey has spent the past 12 years fashioning into a heady sonic calling card. Pop is still thrilled by reinvention, but for the musician born Elizabeth Grant consistency is crucial: her inner darkness is always rendered in languid, sumptuously beautiful ballads littered with strange, specific detail and steeped in the musty beauty of golden age Hollywood, as well as the gritty romance of…

Pop-country, stomp n' clap folk country, Red Dirt, stoner country, and even grunge country helped give the genre one of its most impactful years in decades You know those people who say they listen to everything but country music? Even they were streaming and spinning many of these albums this year. Country had an undeniable moment in 2023, one informed by an influx of exciting new artists like Megan Moroney and Stephen Wilson Jr., a growing mainstream appeal for subgenres like…

Tainy, Diego Raposo, and Valgur turned out bold, outspoken experiments, and artists like Karol G, J Noa, and Grupo Frontera gave listeners honesty and intimacy All year, so much of the conversation around Latin music revolved around commercial growth: Yes, it’s true that the revenue for these genres exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 2022, and Latin music has continued outpacing other parts of the industry. And while that kind of success speaks to the popularity of music…