i am > i was shatters the notion of 21 Savage as a specialist with a narrow purview and audience, and recasts him as a star in waiting, all without forcing him into unflattering contortions. It also cements him as a far more original stylist than other hopefuls from Atlanta.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes doesn’t just broaden Metro’s sound, it’s a showcase for artists relieved to be working with Metro again, because that’s when they are at their most creative. ... Metro stumbles a bit when he deviates from that Atlanta sound.

Stranger Fruit is an uneven record. But by mixing genres and squaring them against ancient issues that remain tragically current, these songs grapple with past, present, and the possibility of the future by asking two necessary questions: How can art let us understand the problems we’ve overlooked or misunderstood? And how can we begin to fix them?

Icarus Falls, as a high-concept pop album, is fine. It shows off Zayn’s reluctant charisma and love-song-ready voice amid R&B ideas that are fully immersed in the present, for the most part for the better.

It’s not so much that Senyawa are unlike anything you’ve ever heard but the way they unify disparate genres under a single umbrella that makes the band’s approach so striking.

Much of Goldblum’s banter has a you-had-to-be-there quality, like squinting at a friend’s blurry photos from a party you weren’t invited to. That makes The Capitol Studios Sessions feel more like a document of an experience than the main attraction. Goldblum's most devoted obsessives won't need much persuading to visit his club.

The debut Big Joanie LP, Sistahs, is an impressively woven tapestry of affirmational lyrics, girl-group chants, and deep, slashing guitars that would have sounded very at home on Kill Rock Stars in the 2000s.

An album with more than two dozen credited producers really ought to have more surprises than this.

Grapetooth’s low-effort operation is part and parcel of their overall charm, but effortlessness doesn’t have to mean insincerity. During these 10 tracks, those feelings often seem inseparable.

Most of the songs on A Million and One burrow between ecstasy and threat, Nova’s voice playing at the edges of those feelings.

When you view the tracklist for Springsteen on Broadway and evaluate it from the perspective of one night’s performance, it’s an impressive list of songs. But when you look at it as representative of a body of work spanning four decades--which this production decidedly cannot escape representing--it is a more than suitable tribute to what Springsteen himself refers to as both his service and his “long and noisy prayer.”

The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry.

The result is his best album to date--his most mystical and earthbound, all at once.

Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.”

Her third album in five years, İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir crackles with a live energy that stems from the 18 months of touring following its predecessor, 2016’s Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu. Producing the album with longtime guitarist Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Su Akyol is in firm command of her powers, adding a few more electronic textures to push to new heights.

Each of her songs has a steely core built from lyrics that examine heartache and vulnerability.

His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop.

The band works much better when the material allows it to lean into its sleazy, session-pro sound.

She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun.

Whack World morphs into a clever exercise in economy and using only what you need. It’s a visual album prepackaged for optimum social media consumption; every tiny piece stands on its own without losing sight of the larger picture. At its core, though, Whack’s sense of humor--her captivating depiction of a black woman’s imagination--is an opportunity to celebrate an aspect of art that often goes uncelebrated, an opportunity for Whack to celebrate herself.

Songs for Judy now feels like a concept album whose concept is just as far out as prog rock, if less flashy and more soothing. It’s a high fantasy of meadows and moons and canyons, of shows that start after midnight, of possessing or creating enough space to let Neil Young play some quiet songs for you.

Protomartyr has commented, too, on how Deal’s sense of melody added “femininity” to their music of Consolation; her voice certainly adds life and levity. If Protomartyr learned anything from Odyshape, it might be the audacity to explore, to locate new methods of release—and they found a bracing clarity.

Ens tables the queries, at least temporarily, for a strictly personal statement. However you approach its aesthetic beauty, that is a much less satisfying response.

While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here--from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants--they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain.

In creating space for such a rich spectrum of expression, Self and his many families of collaborators have created a timely and timeless document of the kinship possibilities that await when ears and hearts stay open.

After the maze-like worlds conjured by Age Of and Garden of Delete, Love in the Time of Lexapro plays it disappointingly straight.

Mostly the record commits to what he does best: substantial rap with clear stakes and an uncommon sense of purpose. After a career marked too often by botched opportunities and wasted potential, Meek Mill has finally risen to the moment.

One night in January 1979, Bauhaus ventured into the bat cave and came out with a unicorn.

Mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks.

Even as pop culture continues to diverge sharply from Spencer’s definition of cool, he remains too spirited and unhinged as a performer to harden into cranky-old-man bitterness.

Alive and inspired, WARM is a different type of reinvention--as daring as Wilco’s early landmarks but more subtle and sustainable. He’s not trying to break your heart. He just is.

The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy.

The project is distinctly rough around the edges, to great effect; there’s the sound of dust popping off vinyl and cassette hiss throughout. ... His uncle and father are gone, but Earl is still here, carrying on their artistic legacy--and, with the help of his collaborators, building his own.

The Dream My Bones Dream grapples with memories that aren’t one’s own and tries to find some kernel of wisdom within them. It’s a multilayered, foggy work and one of Ishibashi’s fullest collections to date, showing us how the past can propel us forward.

Ouch is utterly, unapologetically about Krgovich’s own [breakup], an album of unvarnished particulars and graphic details. That doesn’t make “Ouch” less relatable. It has the opposite effect. Its specificity is what makes it ring true.

The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts.

The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix of what Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, and producer Alchemist do best. It is also an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.

This is ambient folk, shot through with ambient anxiety.

Walker’s idiosyncratic take is his way of reconnecting the celebrated, cerebral art-folkie he’s become with a past spent dodging beanbags and sucking down Natty Lights in an East Troy parking lot. If you hear a little bit of your own journey in there, hey, all the better.

She’ll employ of-the-moment producers to add current touches to her tracks, but the way she uses them on Caution results in her fine-tuning her aesthetic, not bending to current playlist-friendly trends.

On Art Brut’s last two albums, Argos’ act soured a bit, as he lashed out at a world that was buying less and less of what he was selling. Wham! Bang! is good-hearted in a way those records weren’t, and the newfound humility flatters him.

That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge.

An album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.

An EP is often a great place for a band to experiment and test out new ideas between albums, to make mistakes and start again, especially when their trademark sound seems tired. But Little Dragon show none of those desires.

Faithfull channels her body and mind’s ache into an album that’s her best and most honest work since Broken English. With Negative Capability, she reinforces our links by exposing her own broken places.

They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

With its often effortless synthesis of funk and rap, Oxnard is a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape--it’s just a little out of focus.

Offering more than mere updates of classics, Songs of Love and Horror also showcases the depth of Oldham’s catalog through obscure tracks like the slow, haunted “Most People” and the previously unreleased “Party With Marty (Abstract Blues).”

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.

It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.

This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. ... If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

As frightful and bewildering as a Dion McGregor nightmare, Thought Gang reveals Lynch and Badalamenti’s shared drive to disrupt any through line or logical outcome, the sounds and words as baffling as dream logic.

Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.

On Queen of Golden Dogs, he slashes the ropes and soars into the stratosphere, pulling off an extraordinary fusion of chamber music, choral quintets, poetry, surrealism, mysticism, and, not least, rubble-making electronic epics.

This turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke.

You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades--closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman”--remains.

She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life.

On Elastic Days, he’s somehow as accessible but elusive as ever.

Come Over Pt. 2 lacks a single, a glittering pop-punk exclamation point like “Awful Things” or “The Brightside” to break up the album’s long drift. But that’s OK, really. The album is a valentine offered to Peep and to his fans, and it is built for immersion, not for persuasion.

Daughters’ accessibility is directly proportional to their uncompromising compositional choices—hypnotic dissonance, martial drums cranked to incapacitating volumes, scathing vocal repetition, all rendered through impossibly vivid production. This is not music interesting in growing on you: it consumes and dominates.

The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.

It is a tease, an intriguing suggestion of possible next steps in the motion of one of this year’s most promising new singer-songwriters.

The content is memorable, but the melodies aren’t. Still, stronger and more diverse than their debut.

Ultimately, No Tourists is the sound of a once-inflammatory band happily lodged in its comfort zone, where virtuoso water treading meets industrial-strength customer satisfaction.

On Overload, the pop song structures, coupled with the economic, purposeful instrumentation, yields her most concise and moving set to date. A dozen restless years into her recording careers and Muldrow is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future.

Lyrically, the album is about insecurities and the burden of carrying a loved one’s feelings (see “Ugly/Bored” or “Borrowed Body”), but the straightforward way Medford sings about those subjects spotlights an increasing self-assurance that bolsters her words.

Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound.

Where Bloodroot bristled with bright, dissonant clusters, Ultraviolet is consonant and warm, with steady rhythms and reassuring harmonies. It is a spring rain rather than a freak hailstorm.

Like a lot of great country music, the songs here are staked not on novelty but on convention, on familiar stereotypes captured in unfamiliar depth. ... As always, the premium remains on real talk, which the band dispenses with the unsparing resolve of someone who’s been listening the whole time but has not been paid attention to until now.

Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls.

Vince is at ease here, intertwining his personality into his somber celebration of Long Beach like never before. He’s rapping his ass off, and hooks are mostly an afterthought. He dips in and out of inventive flows.

Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.

Though a versatile vocalist, Jenkins isn’t actually a Tier 1 rapper. His rasp can struggle when forced to take on too much, especially amid the prominent percussion and tough orchestration of something like “Ghost.” But this is a minor gripe within a major scheme. ... A gripping portrait of one human among Chicago’s 2.7 million.

Recorded far from home, these tracks document a band made restless by history, the blur caught in a distant mirror. ... The breadth of R.E.M. at the BBC does become a little absurd; as much as I love “Losing My Religion,” I’ve never wanted to compare six slightly different versions.

Time and time again, Premonitions delivers on that promise as Folick shares her inspiring vision of an ennobled world.

For all the complexity of Stadium, its true genius lies in understatement and how a thousand small sounds build into a larger vision.

For anyone still struggling to tell any woman with a guitar apart, the deft collaboration and complex collective songwriting on the boygenius EP is a great place to learn.

Between Nao’s lush voice and the album’s glossy production, it’s easy to get lost in Saturn. A worthy successor to For All We Know, it homes in on a specific, if occasionally ham-fisted, conceit while expanding on her sound in clear, vibrant ways.

Carpenter is working in service to his own nostalgia, and he understands intuitively what his score is here to do. It is not meant to be frightening. It is meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy things about John Carpenter, about the first time you saw the original Halloween.

The purpose of Sun City doesn’t seem to be a cohesive project but a vehicle to throw seven different sounds into the world and see what sticks. Khalid comes out of the project, mostly the same, still the least controversial pop star we have right now.

The stylistic left-turns taken on Darker Days are more hit-or-miss than the songs that explicitly recall the band’s native origins. ... But it’s also surprising, and indicative of the fact that even Darker Days’ most glaring missteps go a long way towards renewing interest in what Peter Bjorn and John are up to these days.

The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.

The Drought’s glacial intensity and dead-eyed focus force you to approach it on its own terms, but one senses that Hoffmeier is just getting started.

While not necessarily essential to the UMO catalog, Hanoi finds the band reveling in its psychedelic roots and exploring a primeval darkness that their songs often only hint at.

In its minimalist opacity and Vantablack depths, it’s the polar opposite of Goblin’s playfully neon-hued approach, and it’s in going to that extreme that Yorke has made Suspiria his own.

The album is invigorating and repetitive in the way that walking is invigorating and repetitive.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is.

Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.

Many of these dozen imagistic self-avowals have a discouraging sameness. So fluent is their collaboration that their weaknesses become complementary. ... Yet when Broken Politics’ material matches the record’s title, it triggers a sense of unease, a tentative awareness of danger, like smelling something burning in the kitchen.

The Anteroom is full of skittery electronics with hints of ambient and house textures that work as both as a marker for how outside of the margins Krell operates and how narrowly he deviates from his own previous innovations in the underground.

[“Everything Good, Everything Right” is] a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.

Because its overt politics now feel so inadequate, Warzone works best as a melancholy gesture, a long look back at a time when dreaming of a better world felt invigorating rather than exhausting.

What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.

A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music--and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help.