While his 2010 solo debut Mshini Wam (translated as Bring Me My Machine Gun) was promising in a guided-by-M.I.A. kind of way, Father Creeper is downright epic.

Open Your Heart improves the band's focus even as it widens its range, ditching the harrowing, hacking-death-cough stuff and reaching for something more.

Where she once had a compelling songwriting portfolio, here she has a compelling mood. That mood’s best described as “content.” ... It’s not a belting voice, but it’s a remarkable instrument, capable of imbuing with winsome empathy songs.

The album, as intended to be heard, deftly captures the whiplash mood swings of a volatile relationship, showing how giddy exuberance and bitter despair can intertwine.

Boldly, My Krazy Life is in the vein of Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city, with a developed, knotty and, ultimately, deeply moral narrative.

It’s as good a model of modern folk music as has come along in some time.

Though Drake’s globetrotting is seeping into American pop (hi, Katy) More Life still stands apart. Its closest recent antecedent is probably Drake’s own Take Care, itself a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that pulled horizontally and vertically from across music.

Like Joni Mitchell’s spare 1976 masterpiece Hejira, Not Even Happiness is a lonesome travel album par excellence: a document of transience and half-formed inspiration, reveling in riddles and paradox rather than firm conclusions.

It’s a bold step forward for the now 20-year-old Rodrigo—an incisive unraveling of the chaos and disappointment of young adulthood, dating and fame with a side of sizzling with zingers and rage. It’s her Melodrama.

McMahon’s most transcendent statement yet. ... Freedom rings as both immediate and timeless, intensely personal and easily understood. ... Freedom exalts in subtlety. It offers powerfully economical songwriting.

Over ten songs detailing a young man's despair and self-doubt, he delivers a performance that's both deeply confident and convincingly vulnerable, replete with stark, piano-based meditations and fuzz-pedal-abetted fury.

It’s a seamless, flawless mix that in Moodymann’s hands becomes a timeless capsule spinning across the galaxy to rally any generation that finds it.

New Bermuda both expands their range and sees them coming further into their own.... Bermuda is ace metal.

A swaggering, electric, and passion-fueled statement that lives up to the towering persona being put forth at its outset. ... African Giant is easily Burna Boy’s most cohesive and strongest project, with even the diverse list of guest stars—from Damien Marley to Nigerian rapper Zlatan to Jeremih and Future—being used expertly without overkill. Burna Boy is the true star at the center.

They continue to blur the lines between art, psychedelia, alt metal, and prog rock with undiminished curiosity and skill. ... As with previous work, on Fear Inoculum, the band’s songwriting can at times seem like a riddle, daring listeners to lean in and figure out exactly what is going on.

On her excellent second album, she brings us the whole block.

The wealth of talent on A Seat at the Table is well-showcased--it’s among the most exquisite productions of the year, each track silken-smooth and replete with quietly virtuosic instrumental flourishes—and in service of a story of pain and healing.

This inspired, two-disc, 29-track set is one part musical grandstand like Prince's Sign O' the Times, one part marital saga like Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. [5/2001, p.139]

The result is an eclectic mix of tempos and moods that maintain Kozalla’s sense of whimsy without sacrificing earnestness.

The band recorded in a real New York City studio, with a real producer, Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House). And the songs are even better.

Aided by producers Organized Noize and Mr. DJ, Sir Lucious Left Foot is a monster of an album.

The result is artistic click bait, and its genius and connective power is that it doesn’t treat music fans as factions. This one is for everyone, all at once.

Roni Size and Reprazent come back so fast and furious on In the Mode that their record sounds less like a jungle reinvention than a call to arms. [Nov. 2000, p.207]

It’s an album of expertly crafted dark-pop confessions with flecks of glitter and aspiration — a purposefully fitful project mimicking her racing thoughts. The high-gloss pop production marks Midnights as a sullen sister to Lover, her honey-dipped 2019 effort, rather than a successor to 2020’s heartstrung Folklore and Evermore.

Over and over, these songs reveal how a wisecracking record geek can still achieve rapture. [Mar 2007, p.98]

M.I.A.'s border-crossing dance pop is a revolutionary manifesto set to the victory-party vibe of the future. [Sep 2007, p.127]

There’s a good balance here: classicist in the Lee Ann Womack neo-countrypolitan sense, yet neither stodgy, frail, nor nostalgic, but rather as thoroughly in tune with modern millennial existence as Taylor Swift.

Accept its odd phrasings and vast negative spaces and Lorde’s sophomore effort reveals itself dark and glorious. ... The smoky, slightly hoarse warmth of her maturing voice immediately sets the new material apart from rivals, and from her 2013 debut Pure Heroine.