The album has never seemed stronger. Artists have never had more ways to express themselves, from one-off Soundcloud singles to social media posts to live streams of video. Yet in this world of plenty, they’ve continued to keep the album in an exalted place, one where they make a bid for serious amounts of their audience’s fractured time. From Radiohead to Frank Ocean to both Knowles sisters to Leonard Cohen, 2016 was an embarrassment of riches from major artists. Highly personal and flowing concept records like A Seat at the Table landed alongside tightly sequenced song-cycles like Singing Saw, genre-hopping experiments like Emily’s D+Evolution, and drifting slabs of ambient music like For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). These are the best albums of 2016.
Metro Boomin / 21 Savage: Savage Mode
Rapper 21 Savage and producer Metro Boomin’s Savage Mode is a heavy, dark collaboration between these two young Atlanta stars. Though many artists draw their verses from lived experience, there is something uniquely dour in Savage’s storytelling. His narratives are accented by the production’s rhythmic twitches; low, round bass buoys his flat, vocal fry monotone. Flutes, xylophones, and old video game effects contrast with the harsh whisper of Savage alongside Future on “X.” “Feel It,” a love song, seems hopeless, but Savage’s near-percussive repetition of “I can feel it in the air” is intoxicating. This record presents a slow burn and a singular mood: grim music for grim times. –Erin Macleod
Listen: 21 Savage/Metro Boomin: “No Heart”
Porches: Pool
Since Aaron Maine began releasing music as Porches, his style has evolved from down-home alt-country to synth-streaked, lo-fi pop. Pool, Porches’ second album and first on the indie mainstay Domino Records, was another shift, diving headlong into the lacquered keys and prickly guitars of quintessential ’80s pop in a way that recalls circa-2009 chillwave. With mixing by ace Chris Coady, the bid for professionalism paid off in a set of elegantly restrained, melancholic synth-pop tunes that showcase Maine’s aching falsetto. The laconic yet vivid lyrics, with references to weed, water, and other music, belie Maine’s background in painting. There's even a heartstopping saxophone solo. What saves Pool from getting lost in its own glossy vibes is an underlying sense of intimacy, helped no doubt by its being recorded mainly in Maine’s Manhattan apartment, and by some warmly enigmatic backing vocals from Greta Kline, better known as Frankie Cosmos. A follow-up EP of Pool demos, Water, further attests to the sturdiness of Maine’s craft. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Porches: “Underwater”
Frankie Cosmos: Next Thing
Greta Kline is the girl on the F train scanning the subway car’s bounty for inspiration, scribbling her thoughts in a notebook. As Frankie Cosmos, her muses include New York City, animals, the touring life, memories, friends, growing up—big topics that she distills with a few carefully chosen words and notes and sounds. Near the end of her brief, brilliant album Next Thing, backed by a simple backbeat and ringing guitars—think the Strokes minus any and all machismo—the 22-year-old breaks down nothing less than the paradox of life in two tidy lines: “When you’re young, you’re too young/When you’re old, you’re too old.” The record’s 15 songs all clock in around the two-minute mark, a brevity born of wisdom rather than laziness. Kline is a keen editor of feelings and fragments. She knows exactly when to end a song, which can be just as important as knowing when to start one. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Frankie Cosmos: “Outside with the Cuties”
Kamaiyah: A Good Night in the Ghetto
On A Good Night in the Ghetto, the young Oakland MC Kamaiyah captures lightning in a bottle. Confident and nuanced, it’s a self-contained piece of Bay Area hip-hop with clear lyrical nods to Too $hort, as the funkified, fleshy beats recall DJ Quik. Kamaiyah chronicles her young life via a series of drunken and stoned nights (“Out the Bottle”) and a supply of sexual conquests (“Niggas,” “Break You Down”) that are notable in how bold and plainspoken she is about them. Kamaiyah’s style descends from fellow West Coast rappers like Suga Free, but it’s also very much her own, blending equal loves of Cali hip-hop and ’90s vocal groups like TLC. Bay Area producers such as P-Lo, 1-O.A.K., and Trackademicks blend new jack swing and radio R&B samples for this young, agile rapper. The YG-featuring “Fuck It Up” and life-affirming hit single “How Does It Feel?” leap out of the speakers and onto many DJ sets, but it’s the overall triumphant vibe of A Good Night in the Ghetto that merits repeat listens. –Matthew Ramirez
Listen: Kamaiyah: “How Does It Feel”
Pinegrove: Cardinal
The Montclair, N.J. group Pinegrove have two logos: one, a small box intersected with an identical box, is favored among their legions of young and tattooed fans, as evidenced in an endless stream of RTs on the band’s page. The other is an ampersand. This summer, when Pitchfork interviewed the band’s frontman, Evan Stephens Hall—a 27-year-old of highly enthusiastic, bookish charisma—he said he’d thought about publishing a pamphlet on Pinegrove iconography. Both symbols, he said, are intended to reflect an ethos of multiplicity, of many simultaneous realities, and thus of radical empathy.
On Cardinal, Hall’s plainspoken lyrics belie this epistemological headiness, but you can feel the compassion in their raw alt-country arrangements, in phrases that reach and erupt. Pinegrove songs are appealingly episodic. “Aphasia,” the best one, is about moments when language falters. The narrative leading “Size of the Moon”—moving furniture to dance, the liminality in love—is basically Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods.” When people call Cardinal “emo,” what they mean is there’s bracing lucidity to lyrics such as “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago/Saw some old friends at her funeral,” or “Maybe I should have got out a bit more when you guys were still in town/I got too caught up in my own shit/That’s how every outcome’s such a comedown.” Life, as ever, demands such clear-headedness. It demands we learn how to talk with one another. Cardinal contains that power and hope. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Pinegrove: “Old Friends”
William Tyler: Modern Country
In a post-truth age, who needs words, anyway? Certainly not William Tyler, whose guitar talks the talk on Modern Country, his fourth album. A former member of Lambchop, Kurt Wagner’s long-running Nashville-based country-soul collective, Tyler’s ambitions always pointed further out than just being a solo guitarist. When he released his debut in 2008 (under the name the Paper Hats), Tyler’s instrumentals mixed in drones, and subsequent releases have featured clattering avant jams (2014’s Blue Ash Montgomery cassette) and pedal steel-laced krautrock covers soaring towards the Western horizon (2014’s Lost Colony EP). But like the genre it takes its name from, Modern Country is extremely accessible. Welcoming of every experimental deviance, the album firmly establishes Tyler as a link in the chain of experimental American guitarists who know that sometimes, lyrics just spoil the fun. –Jesse Jarnow
Listen: William Tyler: “Gone Clear”
Kevin Gates: Islah
At the time of this writing, Kevin Gates’ major label debut, Islah, is one of only two rap albums released this year to be awarded platinum certification by the RIAA (the other being Drake’s massive, guest-star-laden VIEWS). It’s a remarkable accomplishment for an album with no featured guests, apart from the Ty Dolla $ign/Trey Songz/Jamie Foxx trifecta on the bonus track “Jam.” It’s all Gates, a summation of his career that pushes him into new but logical directions. At once too-much-coffee intense, disarmingly gentle, and unfashionably sincere—often all at the same time—Islah is a lot to take in, but having zero chill is one of Gates’ greatest strengths. On “Ain’t Too Hard” he raps, “Sometimes emotions get the best of me clearly/And I ain’t never try to straddle no fences.” May he never aim for the middle ground. –Renato Pagnani
Listen: Kevin Gates: “2 Phones”
Weyes Blood: Front Row Seat to Earth
Though Natalie Mering wears her ’70s rock influences proudly on her sleeve, Weyes Blood is careful not to rehash the past. Gorgeous synth strings, blocky piano chords, and vast harmony stacks lift her powerful, baroque voice. She often sings about modern topics; on “Generation Why,” she amusedly recounts her fractious relationship with technology. “Goin’ to see end of days/I’ve been hanging on my phone all day/And the fear goes away,” she lilts as phantom background vocalists rise alongside a rumbling organ and acoustic guitar plucks resound, seemingly from a dream. Front Row Seat to Earth has many of these moments, where Mering’s vocals and arrangements coalesce into a melancholy, beautiful cry to the heavens—not a plea to a higher power, but a declaration of worthiness in the present day. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Weyes Blood: “Generation Why”
Vince Staples: Prima Donna
Vince Staples cites “Kurt Cobain dreams,” but the suicidal Nirvana frontman serves as a stand-in for anyone who ever felt the walls close in. If rock/rap star alienation is its own genre, Staples rehabilitates it on this barely 20-minute EP—part F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” part psychedelic gangsta rap industrial rave brawl soundtracked by James Blake, DJ Dahi, and No I.D. Unlike his more self-pitying peers, Staples lucidly dissects his psychological disintegration. We see the pitfalls and contradictions of celebrity—the pressures that mount when you need to escape poverty and violence but can’t turn your back on the place that raised you. Prima Donna is existentially trapped music—when you’re too wealthy to complain but branded a consumer product, forced to answer condescending questions, and smile for inane selfies. When Staples sings in that wounded croak, “this little light of mine,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else so artfully distilling the darkness. –Jeff Weiss
Listen: Vince Staples: “Prima Donna”
Huerco S.: For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
Huerco S.’s ambient album For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), was this year’s great salve. It evoked that liminal state between awake and asleep, when your whirring brain slows down enough to let your body rest. The burbling, drunken loop of “Lifeblood” is in constant danger of being overtaken by a lush drone, while “Marked for Life” drags warmth from what sounds like the flickering glow of a million computer screens. But the real feat of this record is the sequencing, beginning with the pillowy ambient of “A Sea of Love” and ending with a look to the stars via “The Sacred Dance.” In between, the album lurches and drifts through underwater atmospherics, subtle sonar pings, and blunted nostalgia trips via the sound of ’70s science films. At the right volume, it can muffle the outside world entirely.
Much has been made of how these tracks cut off abruptly, like the producer didn’t know how to end them. It’s consistently jarring, but it also makes sense. Endings require answers—or at least some gesture toward certainty. But when that certainty is impossible, For Those… acts as an antidote. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen: Huerco S.: “Promises of Fertility”
Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke
The core of the album by the pianist Vijay Iyer and his mentor, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, is its title suite, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a tribute to the late Indian artist and photographer Nasreen Mohamedi. The suite ranges in mood from the quieter “Uncut Emeralds” to the rumbling intensity of “A Cold Fire”—all titles stemming from Mohamedi’s diary entries—and coheres into a minimal yet layered partnership that connects two generations and two approaches, as well as echoes the thoughtful minimalism of the visual artist. Iyer and Smith worked together previously in Smith’s Golden Quartet, but this is the truest expression yet of their relationship: Here, they are united in palpable fondness and awe. –Erin Macleod
Listen: Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: “Passage”
Moodymann: DJ-Kicks
For Moodymann’s entry in the DJ-Kicks series he creates a hazy world, feeling free to invent a space where singer Cody ChestnuTT’s blunted “Serve This Royalty” is mashed up against Detroit rapper Dopehead like they were always meant to play next to each other. It’s not about making a huge statement, it’s about making a series of small ones. Years and genres are disregarded as Moodymann pieces together a mix linked by disconnect. Each of these tracks is just slightly off—marred by a drum stutter, a muffled throb of bass, or a piece of fuzzy sound. By the time he gets around to revitalizing Jai Paul’s modern classic “BTSTU”—which sounds like a revelation here—it’s clear that there’s another subliminal theme at play: Each song is an epiphany, a bedroom artist pushing his or her idiosyncratic tendencies into the world at large. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen: Dopehead: “Guttah Guttah”
Schoolboy Q: Blank Face LP
Like Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle or Clipse’s Lord Willin’, Blank Face LP is gloriously, unrepentantly street, an album disinterested in crossover or concession. Shadowy and ochre and starkly soulful, it dips low and knocks hard. Miguel, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Jadakiss, Vince Staples, and others drop in and out, but almost as soon as they’ve surfaced, dense plumes of figurative Cali weed smoke swallow them whole and you forget they were even there. The scenery-chewing Schoolboy Q won’t be faded or upstaged as he spits clipped, curving darts straight into your consciousness. Redemption isn’t necessarily foremost on the South Central L.A.’s rapper’s mind here: For every “Let’s put the guns down and blaze a spliff,” there are eight or nine equivalents of “I was out here sellin’ dope at 14, what it do?/I was out here fuckin’ hoes at 14, what it do?” Blank Face’s triumph lies in how it weaves these extremes into a realized, lived-in world, each vignette bleeding naturally into the next, and in Q’s lyrical and tonal commitment to a version of his youth that past releases only touched on. –Raymond Cummings
Listen: Schoolboy Q: “THat Part” [ft. Kanye West]
KING: We Are KING
KING’s first album is rendered in just the right number of brushstrokes; songs like “Carry On” rely heavily on negative space, free of clutter and pretense. Their competence and earnestness is also reflected in three tracks that reappear from the trio’s 2011 EP, presented here in “extended mixes” that display a half-decade of shrewd tweaks and revisions. All these fragments coalesce into one synth-led, R&B-heavy, deeply soulful whole. KING work best as impressionists; “Red Eye” sounds like a bout of sleep deprivation mixed with a little desperation and a good bit of sex. The signature song is “The Greatest,” a delightfully off-kilter ode to Muhammad Ali: It’s no wonder Prince spoke so highly of these new Los Angeles royals. –Paul A. Thompson
Listen: KING: “The Greatest”
Jamila Woods: HEAVN
On the first Tuesday in July, police killed Alton Sterling. On Wednesday, they took Philando Castile. The following Monday, Jamila Woods showed us HEAVN and reminded us that despite everything, there is still hope.
In her glowing solo debut, Woods seeks and creates her own refuge, proclaiming graceful pride in her blackness and her hometown of Chicago. On “LSD,” an ode to the city (via Lake Shore Drive) featuring Chance the Rapper, she sings, “A body of water inside me/Reminds me of oceans, though I’ve never known one/I’m born by a cold one”—in one fell swoop, linking Lake Michigan to the Atlantic, and herself to her ancestors. On “VRY BLK,” Woods flips the children’s clapping game Miss Mary Mack into a quietly devastating commentary on police brutality. She also stitches anecdotes from other Black women into her songs, telling of a place where Black girls with “braids filled with bubbles” chant Assata Shakur, where the CD man still walks up and down 79th, where young love blooms on Emerald Street. Throughout HEAVN, members of Chicago’s young musical vanguard lend themselves to Woods' warm vision: Noname delivers poetic raps, Nico Segal offers jazzy trumpet lines, oddCouple makes cushy beats. Chicago is her heaven, which, she comes to realize, was also inside her all along. –Minna Zhou
Listen: Jamila Woods: “HEAVN”
Rostam / Hamilton Leithauser: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
Hamilton Leithauser, late of the Walkmen, and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, took a nod from David Byrne and Brian Eno when deciding how to bill their album together, and that was telling: Like those pioneers’ two classic collaborations, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine keeps both of its creators’ identities intact. In combining two of the recent indie-rock realm’s more distinctive artistic sensibilities, though, this first full-length from Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam transports both someplace altogether wonderful and different. What would the disheveled-yet-debonair voice of the Walkmen sound like over finger-picked classical guitar? ...with saxophone? ...alongside the dulcet Angel Deradoorian on a Disney-esque symphonic reverie?
Now we know. Between dry shooby-doo-wops and barstool howls, with a slide guitar here and a smattering of synths there, I Had a Dream updates mid-20th-century pop tropes—and tweaks its makers’ musical trademarks—for a thoroughly engrossing, richly enjoyable album rooted in nostalgia and loss. “I use the same voice I always had,” Leithauser roars early on, and it’s true of both parties here. Although Leithauser is touring the material without Batmanglij, who’s increasingly busy as a pop producer, let’s hope that, unlike Byrne and Eno, it doesn’t take them 27 years to reunite. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Hamilton Leithauser/Rostam: “A 1000 Times”
Kevin Morby: Singing Saw
By most accounts, classic rock had a good year in 2016. Beyoncé sampled Led Zeppelin. Frank Ocean sampled the Beatles. The Oldchella Festival found the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young uniting for a block of music that previously existed only on classic rock radio. And then, on a more modest scale, there was Kevin Morby’s Singing Saw: an album steeped in this tradition with ideas so ingrained in our collective conscious as to feel idiomatic. But the most striking thing about Morby’s music is less his set of influences and more his ability to locate the internal geography that has informed them all.
The album, tellingly named after an instrument whose eerie warble sounds like wind howling against a window, finds wisdom in the natural world. Morby lets his songs unfold with an organic sense of inevitability. When he asks for trumpets in “Destroyer,” they appear. In the title track, he wanders behind the house as percussion chirps around him like crickets. And in “I Have Been to the Mountain,” the album’s most momentous anthem—one that eulogizes Eric Garner, giving Singing Saw its deepest sense of urgency—Morby gazes heavenward to find he’s become a part of his surroundings, and that they are as attuned to him as he is to them. “A sky that mirrors,” he muses. “A sky that stares as I sing.” —Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Kevin Morby: “I Have Been to the Mountain”
Maxwell: blackSUMMERS’night
Though blackSUMMERS’night was Maxwell’s first album in seven years, the final product doesn’t sound overwrought or overworked—in fact, parts of it seem half-erased or smudged. In that sense, it recalls There’s a Riot Goin’ On, where the number of overdubs melt and obscure the original tracks until the voice at the center seems to be singing against a production of ghosts. The horns that were central to Maxwell’s previous album are now almost parenthetical, swelling out of the corners of songs like “Fingers Crossed” and then sinking back into silence. This makes for an album the pleasures of which, beyond Maxwell’s newly grainy voice, can be as abstract as they are immediate: The disco pulse of “All the Ways That Love Can Feel” exists between two margins, a stereo space in which guitar and organ sounds merge like inkblots. “The Fall”’s drums give the song a jazzy digression that resembles the shiver of autumn leaves. Beneath their generous detail, though, the songs on blackSUMMERS’night are still Maxwell songs; it’s music as furniture—not in the Erik Satie ambient sense, but music you can sink into and feel something resembling an embrace. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Maxwell: “1990x”
Elza Soares: A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World)
Elza Soares’ story ought to be a tragedy: The 79-year-old Brazilian singer has survived political exile, enduring racism, and marital abuse by a national icon. But since emerging from the Rio favelas in the 1950s, she has channeled that horrific biography into an display of perseverance in the face of adversity—both her own and her country’s. “While there are still black people taking a beating, we will have music to make,” she has said.
Soares recorded her last studio LP, 2004’s Vivo Feliz, with her 26-year-old rapper husband. Its follow-up, again made with artists decades her junior, is a work of staggering, coruscated beauty. Musicians assembled from São Paolo’s samba sujo (“dirty samba”) scene abrade and mutilate Afro-Brazilian rhythms, with staccato guitars that splice eerie post-punk with primal post-hardcore. Soares’ what-is-this-shit rasp thrashes through the noise. In the chorus of “Pra Fuder,” or “To Fuck,” she pelts out the titular refrain like a dancer on hot coals; on “Maria da Vila Matilde,” she offers her domestic abuser a faceful of scalding water, then calmly refills the kettle to welcome the cops.
She is always in character, but often that character is Elza Soares, the Brazilian myth. On the title track, written in her honor by Rômulo Fróes, Soares attends an apocalyptic carnival, seeming to hover overhead. She wanders through the “confetti rain,” past “angel wings…scattered on the ground.” “There, in the parade,” she growls, as the chorus explodes like so many streamers, “I left my black skin, my voice...My home, my solitude...Woman at the end of the world, I am.” In A Mulher do Fim do Mundo, she has made the album of her life, in every sense. “I go on singing,” she croaks finally, “Till the end.” –Jazz Monroe
Listen: Elza Soares: “Mulher do film do mundo”
Whitney: Light Upon the Lake
Emerging from the ashes of Smith Westerns, guitarist Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich created a sound tinged with late-’60s, harmony-soaked nostalgia. Ehrlich’s lyrics are winsome, celebrating an America of yawning skies and infinite possibilities, and the arrangements are big, fitting for Whitney’s large touring presence. “No Woman” uses strings and horns as perfect punctuation, while the “na-na-nas” of “Golden Days” call for arms-around-the-shoulders-style camaraderie. Light Upon the Lake isn’t about grand statements or shifting paradigms but is instead a place of escape and comfort, a perfectly rendered example of guitar-pop at its best. –Nathan Reese
Listen: Whitney: “No Matter Where We Go”
Esperanza Spalding: Emily’s D+Evolution
Before Emily’s D+Evolution, Esperanza Spalding was a certain kind of artist—the kind who performs at the White House, who wins Grammys as reliably as you and I file taxes. Somewhere along the line, she must have squinted at all this and decided it was boring, because on Emily’s D+Evolution—a runaway buggy of jazz fusion, folk rock, and prog—she exploded it. Sinewy, lean, and containing some three-dozen hairpin turns across its 12 tracks, the album feels pitched somewhere between master’s thesis and decathlon. It is a heroic feat that would feel fatiguing if Spalding weren’t nearly cackling with glee through it all. Even when the music conjures Joni Mitchell fronting Yes, Spalding sings and plays with mortal urgency, exploring questions about gender roles, about the existence of evil and temptation, about humanity’s ability to self-destruct, and about the need for love and courage in the face of it all. “We could change the whole story of love,” she pleads on the open-hearted ballad “Unconditional Love.” By the ferocity of her conviction, you are almost swayed into believing it. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Esperanza Spalding: “Earth to Heaven”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: EARS
Exploring the Buchla synthesizer, says composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, has led her to think differently about her surroundings: “When I hear any sound in the entire world, I end up thinking, ‘How would I have made that?’” This appears to be the challenge she presented herself while creating her masterwork EARS. An uncanny valley of burbling aquatic sounds and the chatter of birds, insects, and amphibians mark “Wetlands,” while “Rare Things Grow” is full of sloshing, dripping movement. Smith has discussed the patience required to understand a modular synthesizer, and that manifests in this slow-building music, which blurs the line between organic and synthetic. Vocals are processed beyond comprehension; woodwinds tangle with Smith’s electronics. The album’s artwork is a painting full of flora and fauna, some recognizable while others are seemingly fictional. Similarly, EARS teems with life both knowable and incomprehensible. She’s built a world of her own. It’s a good place. —Evan Minsker
Listen: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: “Existence in the Unfurling”
NxWorries: Yes Lawd!
Months after breaking through with his vibrant, heartfelt album Malibu, Anderson .Paak continued to drape himself in his most garish threads—literally and metaphorically. On Yes Lawd!, his collaborative project with bohemian beatmaker Knxwledge, you can picture the satin-smooth soul man peacocking in a blaxploitation joint, draped in a gaudy-as-hell coat with matching fedora. Knxwledge, meanwhile, chops up the samples into quick-fire sonic sketches; this is a beat tape of lean soul, grubby basslines and hard drum loops. .Paak delivers his low-level hustler anecdotes with a broad grin etched across his face. This is old-school gold, as vintage as .Paak’s plaid jackets. For best results, try bumping it on a convertible’s tape deck. –Dean Van Nguyen
Listen: NxWorries: “Lyk Dis”
Noname: Telefone
Aside from their name, an emerging rapper’s hometown is one of the most important details to know about her. On Telefone, Noname’s stunning debut, her native Chicago is a central character; even though her chosen moniker hints at a guarded public persona, any reservedness disappears as she takes us through the Windy City. Sometimes she evokes the nostalgia of childhood summers, eating ice cream on her front porch as she watches her friends hit the “Diddy Bop.” Then, abruptly, she describes her peers as being “Casket Pretty,” because any one of them could be buried looking just as beautiful as they are in the instant before their life is taken.
Similarly dark prospects are juxtaposed with happy beats throughout Telefone: warm church organs, snapping fingers and major-key vocals from friends and collaborators like Cam O’bi and Eryn Allen Kane. The record would be completely devastating if it weren’t so charming. Any city, even one whose narrative is frequently reduced to one of danger and unrest, is inhabited by people who want the best for themselves and their loved ones. On Telefone, Noname invites the listener to see this through her eyes by opening up about her joys, her loves, and her losses closest to home. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo
Listen: Noname: “Diddy Bop” [ft. Raury and Cam O’bi”]
Parquet Courts: Human Performance
The Brooklyn band Parquet Courts have the misfortune of seeming smart, which they are. But under the art-punk jigsaw puzzles and copious amounts of thinking, there are feelings, too: ordinary ones like I miss you (“Berlin Got Blurry”), nobody understands me (“Paraphrased”), and I feel kinda lonely (“One Man No City”). They are clearly felt if not always clearly stated. Romantics at heart, Parquet Courts keep their wits up; sensitive, they yell as often as possible. Even richer and more layered than Austin Brown and Andrew Savage’s lyrics is the band’s music, which sounds both working-class and sophisticated (“Human Performance”), country (“Outside,” “Pathos Prairie”), and city (“Captive of the Sun,” “Two Dead Cops”). It is as psychedelic and gristly as Manhattan traffic at dusk. In other words, Parquet Courts continue to rock, with and without quotation marks. –Mike Powell
Listen: Parquet Courts: “Outside”
Kaytranada: 99.9%
Many talk about it, but this year, a handful of guys—DJ Paypal, Sporting Life, and this crazy kid from Quebec—actually stomped on the line connecting archival black music tropes to the ever-branching threads of electronic music. 99.9% got everything right by “Track Uno” (among the best song titles of the year): the junk-bin funk sample lands like a transmission from the early-’80s radio sets that birthed Detroit techno, even leaning back into scratchy A.M. static before the drums plunge. Kay’s drums are like his glasses: at once nondescript and trademark, their Dilla-ish wonkiness frame the many different voices he invites to play throughout the record. From legitimizing Craig David’s comeback to prodding Syd tha Kyd out front, Kaytranada might’ve made R&B great again by dancing around it like an election pun. Still, turn up your bass and blast “Lite Spots,” and it becomes quickly apparent how futile it is to overthink his style. For every R&B remix that inspires a thousand Soundcloud jockeys, he drops an inimitable freak-out like this Portuguese chop job—hard evidence that a featured guest or obtuse sample can’t distract from his strong hand when he chooses to show it. –Matthew Trammell
Listen: Kaytranada: “Glowed Up” [ft. Anderson .Paak]
Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial
This is how bands are made in 2016: Not in the garage or in the basement, but in the backseat of your mother’s car. Graduating from a period during which he released approximately 11 albums of smart but scrupulously ambition-free indie rock through Bandcamp, songwriter Will Toledo stabilized his lineup, expanded his sound, and resigned himself to his talent.
A feel-good album about people chemically incapable of feeling good, Teens of Denial reckons mental illness, alienation, and a blooper reel’s worth of false epiphanies without angst or coddling, the only real redemption being a chance to fuck up again. And if you don’t have the time for lyrical exegesis, you can pump your fist instead—the music certainly warrants it. How Toledo manages to keep such close company with depression and still find the will to rock is a mystery. That he does it with humor is a miracle. Pray that he never takes happiness seriously. –Mike Powell
Listen: Car Seat Headrest: “Fill in the Blank”
Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch
Midway through pop avant-gardist Jenny Hval’s sixth album, Blood Bitch, her frequent collaborators Annie Bielski contemplate the record’s concept. “It’s about vampires…. It’s about blood,” Bielski concludes. True, as Hval has said, Blood Bitch is indeed a look into “the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood,” but it is also about desire, capitalism, and self-discovery. As she considers these ideas, Hval's voice floats skyward, tethered to her worldly concerns only by pulsing beats that conjure the throb of menstruation. Rarely does an album focus so fully on the dignity and beauty of female fluids. This year saw the female body and her rights attacked relentlessly, as if the capacity to reproduce automatically prohibits autonomy. Blood Bitch gives power to the rejected body with a simple encouragement: “Don’t be afraid, it’s only blood.” –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance”
YG: Still Brazy
The pivotal moment on YG’s set-throwing sophomore album, Still Brazy, is “Who Shot Me?” a song that attempts to uncover who exactly tried to kill the rapper last June. It’s like opening a film with a flash-forward to the violent, climactic ending, narrated by the victim, who’s reflective and conscience-stricken. In his 11th hour, isolated and angry, YG scrolls back through his memory bank seeking to identify the shooter from the long list of enemies he’s made as a rich gangsta. What spirals out is a polished gangland parable, brimming with paranoia and panic. YG assesses the short history of his wrongdoings, and subtly examines the cycle of bloodshed incited by sporting colors. His resulting value realignment brings about a turn toward social consciousness, producing snapshots of black American ghettos, addressing race relations and police brutality, and offering up the most succinct and righteous denunciation of Donald Trump on record—the useful chant of “Fuck Donald Trump,” devoid of any substantial politics, filled with literal vitriol. As it smoothly stitches together swatches of g-funk and P-Funk, Still Brazy coolly stares down the barrel. –Sheldon Pearce
Listen: YG: “FDT” [ft. Nipsey Hussle]
Young Thug: JEFFERY
Before hearing JEFFERY, you could be forgiven for not buying into the hype around Young Thug. Maybe you thought he was sub-verbal, not post-verbal, and the only talent Jeffery Lamar Williams had was a knack for getting attention; even wearing a dress on the album’s cover seemed like a stunt.
But JEFFERY’s opener, “Wyclef Jean,” laid down the gauntlet in bar one: “Ok my money way longer than [a] NASCAR race.” The magic is partially in the words and the silliness, but also in Thug’s melodicism and attitude—that slurry, undeniable voice, urging you to imitate him. Then the song unfolds into one of the most unpredictable pop jams of the year, with a mid-song rappity-rap showcase unfurling into JEFFERY’s crowning achievement. If you don’t get hype to “Future Swag” or “Floyd Mayweather,” or aren’t prepared to respect the fury of “Harambe,” you are the one left in the cold. On “Kanye West,” when you hear Wyclef Jean’s voice bringing things full circle, Young Thug demands to be celebrated. And so we do. –Jonah Bromwich
Listen: Young Thug: “Kanye West”
Nicolas Jaar: Sirens
Patience has always been a part of the Nicolas Jaar experience. His melodies and references reveal themselves slowly. Though he’s been consistently active as an artist and label owner since his debut LP, Space Is Only Noise, a formal follow-up was slow to materialize. When Sirens arrived, its cover was obscured by scratch-off foil; the first track is an amorphous, 11-minute sound collage.
Sirens is more assured and aggressive than Space; “No,” the album’s centerpiece, is a lightly stepping pop song, sung in Spanish. Jaar has spoken eloquently about how Sirens straddles the political and the personal but in the music itself, the contradictions feel smaller and more ethereal. The first half of the album ends with “Leaves,” another collage, wordless until he shares a snippet of himself, as a child, having a discussion with his father. This is peak Jaar: equal parts intimacy and obscurity.
“Space Is Only Noise had all these little tunnels in it, and I’ve tried to go into every single one of those tunnels ever since,” said Jaar earlier this year. The tracks on Sirens feel like those explorations: They take unexpected turns, double back, break for a sandwich. Jaar is investigating these tunnels on Sirens; we wait, patiently. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: Nicolas Jaar: “No”
Rihanna: ANTI
After seven LPs, Rihanna finally made a great album, rather than a collection of zeitgeist-dominating bangers surrounded by filler. What makes ANTI work (work work work work) is the presence of Rih’s no-fucks-given (but secretly a few fucks given) attitude in every crack and corner. Her stoner queen comes out in “James Joint,” an all-too-brief gem of Stevie Wonder warmth. The savage boss she perfected in “Bitch Better Have My Money” (and across social media) comes full force on “Needed Me,” the quintessential “Oh, you caught feels?” anthem. It’s only as ANTI continues that Ms. Fenty realizes maybe no woman is an island, no matter how many platinum records she racks up, diamond ball gowns she wears, or skull-sized blunts she smokes. By the time we get to old-school piano ballad “Higher,” Rihanna raspily belts out what is essentially a drunk voicemail to a man she has to admit she still thinks about. Whoever he is, he doesn’t deserve her. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake]
Mitski: Puberty 2
Mitski Miyawaki’s Puberty 2 is a case study of the modern condition, a record for this era crippled with worry. The Brooklyn musician told Pitchfork in June that one of her goals as an artist is “to always make clear that I am a real person,” and on her fourth album, that realness is a bittersweet proposition. Puberty 2 is vividly, excitingly, and sometimes crushingly human, containing all the ups and downs of maintaining emotional sanity as told through her guitar’s indie fuzz. To convey a range of tenuous emotion, Mitski uses uncomfortable metaphors, nuanced lyrics about instability and unpaid rent. On “Happy,” for instance, contentment is a one-night stand that leaves just as quickly as it came. The song “Fireworks” may or may not be about pushing back distressing tears, but when its chorus explodes into a starry crescendo, it feels like a liberating cry shared amongst friends who need it most. Even with its nerves, there’s something incredibly comforting—hopeful, even—about Puberty 2’s half-hour minutes of catharsis. –Alex Frank
Listen: Mitski: “Your Best American Girl”
Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker
You Want It Darker will always be linked with Leonard Cohen’s death. Singing while seated in his living room medical chair, he calls himself “broken and lame.” He looks back on his past, with regrets, and says goodbye on “Traveling Light” and “I’m Leaving the Table.” Several times, he notes that he’s out of the game. He’s joined by the choir from his childhood Montreal synagogue and sings the same prayer that was offered at his funeral: “Magnified, sanctified be Thy holy name.” You Want It Darker is one of the world’s greatest poets putting his house in order.
Through the darkness and mortality, there’s levity. Backed by gospel organ and a bluesy guitar solo on “If I Didn’t Have Your Love,” he sings about the revitalizing powers of love. At one point, a subtle dick joke even finds a place in the mournful fray. As usual, Cohen oscillates between heft and humor, love and death. It closes with a string reprise of “Treaty”—a gorgeous requiem followed by just a few more words from Cohen. “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine,” he sings. And with that beautiful notion of surrender, he’s gone. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Leonard Cohen: “You Want It Darker”
Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered.
Even Kendrick Lamar’s afterthoughts are fiercely thought-provoking. Last year, his To Pimp a Butterfly—an 80-minute opus of plush jazz-funk grooves, intricate rhymes, and ruthlessly self-interrogating philosophical excursions—was close to a consensus album of the year. This March, Lamar followed with untitled unmastered., a work that’s as different from TPAB in presentation as it is sonically and thematically similar. Its cover is an unadorned green box, and untitled is a 34-minute set of eight numbered and dated tracks. It further cements Lamar’s singular position in both hip-hop and popular culture while deftly sidestepping the non-musical noise that generally accompanies such lofty status. At its best, untitled is just as potent as TPAB. Where TPAB breathed the sound of jazz back into rap, untitled more closely embodied the jazz spirit: living in the moment, embracing mistakes, and foregrounding the music with the quiet confidence of a virtuoso bandleader. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Kendrick Lamar: “Untitled 02”
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Skeleton Tree
Nick Cave’s songs have always been the scrim between the visceral dark of this world and the promised light of another; the Australian songwriter, our high priest of goth, is the docent moving freely between them. He has for years offered this sweaty and bloody vision of life: at times bawdy and carnivalesque, other times fueled by ample heroin, libido, and hair gel. Though Skeleton Tree was released following the tragic death of his son Arthur, it is still another excavation of humanity, this time deeper and more austere, taking place in a zero-gravity cathedral of grief. Here, Cave steps into the hereafter to look beyond the simple rituals of mourning and into the state of the soul. Where goes love when it is interred?
Instead of succumbing to the weight of death, these songs have a certain airiness. Above the music of Warren Ellis and his fellow Bad Seeds’ latter-day tranquility, Cave’s words float unbound. Always one to avoid mawkishness, Cave reveals the ugliness within himself with gruff self-examinations like, “You believe in God but you get no special dispensation for this belief now” (“Jesus Alone”). These articulate moments are surrounded by more surreal imagery—rabbit’s blood, mermaids, stars splashed across a ceiling. But the faith that hums in Cave’s sacrament is not vengeful or supernatural; it’s vulnerable and uncertain. Through his art, Cave has tried to wrest some good from so much evil. One cannot exist without the other, and so this, his most painful and human album, is filled with love and the divine. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “I Need You”
Blood Orange: Freetown Sound
It seemed overnight that Dev Hynes, a London ex-pat who’d arranged himself as defiantly individualist, was seized by the cause for representation, sparking dialogue in stylish circles that had largely avoided such messy threads. This was Freetown Sound’s primary concern: enlivening genres and eras past, people in margins, and cultures in shadows. Hynes’ patented style of nimble, vintage quirk funk carries excellently on “Best to You”—Empress Of remains an effortless duet partner—and is pushed to its conceptual peak on “E.V.P.,” a Downtown ’81 pose made even sharper with help from Debbie Harry. The format blossoms out by the second half, with vaporous meditations like “Hadron Collider” and “Thank You” bearing Hynes’ most palatable writing and production work yet. On the latter, he sums up his shrewd sheepishness through vocals from Ava Raiin, one of 11 female guests: “Thank you for all your praise,” she sings, “even if you promise me a way out of your gaze.” Freetown Sound stirs up the hymnal punk of Coastal Grooves and runway soul of Cupid Deluxe, combining all of Hynes’ most fascinating angles to earn the ogling it got. –Matthew Trammell
Listen: Blood Orange: “Best to You” [ft. Empress Of]
Anderson .Paak: Malibu
There are better songs than “The Waters” on Anderson .Paak’s star-making 2016 release, Malibu, but none lay out his musical history with the precision of its opening lines: “Tried to tell nggas/In 2012, ngga/Working hand to hand and no avail/Volume one was too heavy for you frail n*ggas/So I got leaned like codeine and pills.” So he’s been hustling, making soulful music for a minute. But he couldn’t find an audience until the machete-sharp verses he contributed to Dr. Dre’s Compton made him a name to watch. All of a sudden, an audience was there. A couple lines later, .Paak says, “I can do anything but move backwards.”
By 2016, the Oxnard native understood what the most precocious people take the longest to learn: Try to do everything and you won’t be the best at any one thing. On Malibu, .Paak’s focus is primarily on his voice and his flow. He learned to trust his collaborators, and got a slew of amazing beats in return. That’s how you make dreamers like “The Bird” and “Your Prime,” inventive combos like “The Season/Carry Me” and funk bangers including “Am I Wrong” and “Come Down.” And while for .Paak, success must have seemed like it was a long time coming, for the vast majority of his fans, Malibu was only the beginning. –Jonah Bromwich
Listen: Anderson .Paak: “Come Down”
Bon Iver: 22, A Million
Bon Iver’s first two albums trafficked in distinct emotional impressions. They evoked three-dimensional spaces: whether or not one knew the real-life backstory, For Emma, Forever Ago conjured the den of a small backwoods cabin, while Bon Iver, Bon Iver rang out from a mountaintop. But 22, A Million takes place solely within its own stereo image: It’s an electroacoustic obstacle course that constantly destroys and rebuilds itself, smudging out prospective mise-en-scènes before they can fully form. When the ol’-reliable, fingerpicking Justin Vernon rears his head at the beginning of “29 #Strafford APTS,” he quickly falls victim to a series of elaborate pranks: Tracks speed and slow abruptly and non-sequitur horn fanfares, seemingly borrowed from a lost Moondog record, bleed into the mix. Versions of himself sing different lyrics on top of each other, rendering his emotional pleas inscrutable.
Why did Vernon force that lovely Lyle Lovett-as-choirboy voice of his into dubious battle with those vocal shadows, plus a chipmunked Mahalia Jackson? To test whether his voice was strong enough to shine through it all? If so, he passed the exam: His stylistic signatures remain intact even in the record’s most deformed moments, especially his rare ability to transfer the natural rhythms of breath and speech into vivid melody. The incongruities of 22, A Million hammer it home: This is a record about the perpetually dissatisfying search for the divine, or really anything to hang one’s hat on, within an overwhelming, constantly regenerating digital present. –Winston Cook-Wilson
Listen: Bon Iver: “29 #Strafford APTS”
Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition
Danny Brown is great on social media and an engaging interviewee and he puts on a good show, but solitude is the essence of his art. His music always circles back to one man in a room, struggling with his demons. In Atrocity Exhibition, the scene is set from the first verse, with Brown sweating like he’s at a rave though he hasn’t left his room in three days—he’s forever the guy who gets all the teeth-grinding anxiety of the drug experience but none of the communal joy or release. But then, “mind expansion” has never been the point of Danny Brown’s experiences with chemicals; he smokes blunt after blunt because he’s trying to poison the thoughts that plague him, fill them with so much dope that they drown in the bathtub and leave him at peace. And the fact that he finds a way to share those thoughts, bouncing horror against dark humor, makes his listeners, at the very least, feel less alone. If XXX was a room-clearing explosion and Old found him picking up the broken pieces to see how they fit together, Atrocity Exhibition is where Brown slows down and sinks deeper, exploring how wisdom might possibly emerge from pain. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Danny Brown: “Really Doe” [ft. Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt]
Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool
For a band that has cultivated a roughly 25-year bond with their fans through alienation and obfuscation, the plucking of heart strings on “Burn the Witch” signifies a new mode of operation: less clever, more giving, more human. For once in Radiohead’s career, there are other people on their album: the beds of violins, violas, and cellos are played by members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, then arranged by Jonny Greenwood in a newfound romanticism. Songs are archly composed, as finely detailed as ever—and at times, like on “Daydreaming,” monumental. Whereas The King of Limbs was anemically written using proprietary computer software, A Moon Shaped Pool was recorded to tape on 8- and 16-track recorders, capturing the early, genius impulses of the group.
The other person who orbits around this album: Thom Yorke’s former partner of 23 years. Impressions of loss ring out; in his heartbreaking turn of phrase, he is “trapped in your full stop.” There’s something elliptical about this album, best represented by the long-awaited studio version of a fan-favorite track from the 1990s, “True Love Waits.” By the end of the album, we are inches away from these sustained piano notes, so much so that we can hear the felt of the keys rubbing up against each other. Yorke’s pure tenor is recast as the voice of a man who just woke up, exhausted and phlegmatic. After eight albums of labyrinths and paranoia and rabbit holes, Radiohead finally let us in. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Radiohead: “Burn the Witch”
Angel Olsen: My Woman
By all accounts, Angel Olsen didn’t set out to make a pop record with My Woman, and while it remains funny to call any album with a nearly eight-minute centerpiece a “pop record,” her fourth LP is concentrated and undeniable—more confident and less dissonant than her previous work. Olsen, whose voice is resolute but still soft in places, sounds like a person who has figured out much of what she needs and what she’s willing to endure to get it. “I want to follow my heart down that wild road,” she sings on “Sister,” the album’s long, anchoring jam. Her vocals have taken on a wizened texture, the warmth of knowing, of having lived and discovered. “You learn to take it as it comes, you fall together, fall apart.” –Amanda Petrusich
Listen: Angel Olsen: “Intern”
ANOHNI: Hopelessness
If war is politics made physical, and politics is war made verbal, then ANOHNI howls from the sliver of sanity between the two. On “Drone Bomb Me,” she whimpers, taking the voice of a young Afghan girl, asking that a random strike “Blow my head off/Explode my crystal guts.” Of global warming, her lips curl into a sneer: “I wanna hear the dogs crying for water/I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea.” She lobs similar vitriol at Barack Obama, NSA surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, and any other matter of CNN carnage. This would founder as a dire sermon from other musicians, but ANOHNI’s voice is as lucidly beautiful as her prophecies are grotesque. Her range is wide, from low soprano to racking falsetto, and her tone quavers with tearful, light vibrato that dances over Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke’s stuttering production. Even a simple line like “I don’t love you anymore” is a shot through the heart; when she turns that acuity towards her more topical subjects, it is debilitating. On HOPELESSNESS, ANOHNI’s songs reflect horror at every turn; eyes wide, she wails upward as the weapons rain down. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me”
A Tribe Called Quest: We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service
Even in their heyday, A Tribe Called Quest were often mistaken for soothsayers. It was an easy error to make if you weren’t listening very closely—if you focused on the lilt of their voices, say, or their spacious, inviting beats. But Tribe were always revolutionaries. And on their first new album in 18 years, a miracle that the year 2016 barely deserved, they are returning to fight. “The Space Program,” for one, is a song-length metaphor for gentrification, dedicated to “Tyson types and Che figures.” These are the radical spirits Tribe are calling for, the energies they wish to summon. The rounded stand-up bass plunks genially along in the background, but Q-Tip uses his time to salute Bree Newsome, the woman who scaled the South Carolina statehouse flagpole to remove the Confederate Flag nine days after the hate-fueled 2015 Charleston killings.
The vibe is welcoming, as ever: You can come in and wipe your feet on the rhythm rug, but after that, it is time to confront some sobering realities. On “We the People...,” Q-Tip addresses state-sanctioned figures and paranoiac actors who find themselves in a “killing-off-good-young-n*gga-mood,” and on “Whateva Will Be,” he envisions an uprising, signing off with, “in some universe, this verse will be true.” He sounds older; they all do. The mixing seems purposefully ragged, with echo trails left on many of Phife’s vocals, Jarobi’s mutters buried. Q-Tip’s production leaves some wrinkles in as well, with unusually sharp drums that hit like peeling soup can lids. Maybe this is an honest way of acknowledging their age while showing their character. It was a final ride into the sunset for the most beloved rap group in history—its outcome assured, its standoff graceful. –Jayson Greene
Listen: A Tribe Called Quest: “We the People...”
Chance the Rapper: Coloring Book
On Coloring Book’s “Same Drugs,” Chance the Rapper sings, “Don’t forget the happy thoughts/All you need is happy thoughts.” On the Chicagoan’s third mixtape, he believes in the power of positive thinking. But the closer you listen, the more complicated the record becomes. While light in tone and sound, Coloring Book also touches on sin, veering track-to-track from “God song” to “flawed human song.” Chance parties “All Night”; he deserves a “Smoke Break”; he’s got “No Problem” threatening major labels. On “Blessings,” he bestows his most praise on God, simultaneously accepting goodness and admitting helplessness. “Blessings keep falling in my lap,” Chance sings, because it is out of his control; they could just as easily fall to the person next to him. Coloring Book glides across the surface, full of wonder, but it remains a truly special record because of the existential concerns that simmer just below. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Chance the Rapper: “Blessings”
Kanye West: The Life of Pablo
Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo may be a masterpiece, but it’s a lumpy one. It’s got tracks that play too long, songs that barely feature Kanye, perfect moments scattered deep, deep into the tracklist. So while not flawless in a traditional sense, TLOP’s hyperactive bent is what makes it great. Consider its most memorable moments, all unhinged and/or collaged: West praying for Paris, Kelly Price belting it, Future’s Young Metro warning, Madlib’s boom bap, André 3000 harmonizing with Arthur Russell, Max B calling from prison, approximately seven seconds of Young Thug. Remember the blown release dates, the title changes (R.I.P. Swish), the schadenfreude of catching Taylor Swift in a lie. The pleasures of Pablo are varied and tactile, sometimes extramusical, sometimes illicit, sometimes religious, always scarily committed. It’s a record for the greedy made by a glutton willing to share.
The man’s overzealousness can lead to some strange places: Recently, a sleep-deprived Kanye declared his allegiance to Donald Trump, which was an odd moment from the guy who scared the shit out of Mike Myers by saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on live TV when no one else would. Soon after the recent outburst, he was hospitalized. Whatever he genuinely believes about the people running this country, it seems clear that he is a musical genius who appears to have some serious problems. His baser instincts may reveal him as a stressed-out perfectionist, which, while not a lifestyle to ascribe to, makes his artistic output pretty much unparalleled. In his search to create Pablo is a messy marriage of his previous two albums, Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; its production is not as tight as the former, nor are its wild moments as blissful as the latter. But the album can be as compelling as those anointed classics, its highs arguably higher, its lows a lot weirder. Listening to Pablo is a chaotic experience, so seems about right it was made by someone with a unique perspective on reality. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Kanye West: “Ultralight Beam” [ft. Chance the Rapper, The-Dream, Kelly Price, and Kirk Franklin]
David Bowie: Blackstar
It’s hard to escape the gravity of an album that offers up an artist’s farewell. That task is even more difficult when the record includes a song entitled “Lazarus,” or a promotional video laden with sickbed imagery. But when listening to David Bowie’s final studio set, it’s important to avoid letting the singer’s death dominate your thoughts entirely—if only because Blackstar is so creatively alive.
Before fans knew Bowie was ailing, before his collaborators confirmed that they knew he was suffering, what we had, on release day, was one of the artist’s best records. The singles demonstrated that Bowie had outdone a prior experimentation with jazz textures (on 1995’s Outside). Here, his decision to collaborate with saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s band paid off handsomely. The ensemble is capable of moving between hurtling rock and the more abstract atmospherics heard during the title track’s transitional sections. By the time the last song “I Can’t Give Everything Away” hits, there’s an exuberance that’s miles away from the mood of the grim opener. Bowie’s brief harmonica tones communicate some weariness, but also joy. McCaslin reaches for exultant high notes while soloing behind the singer. Ben Monder’s guitar spirals through lines of bluesy invention. Though it has the limitations of life in view—right down to its title—the track also makes good on a death-defying boast offered by Bowie, several songs earlier: “I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen.” –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: David Bowie: “Blackstar”
Beyoncé: Lemonade
This year led to a lot of re-imaginings, including a colossal re-think of what we mean when we talk about protest music; suddenly, the old definitions don’t make sense. Lemonade, Beyoncé’s sixth solo album, isn’t expressly political in the grand, didactic tradition of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But these songs (and the album's accompanying film, a densely layered portrait of what it means to be a black woman in America in 2016) still feel like a call to arms—a mandate to reassess everything, whether it’s relationships with those we hold dear or the methods by which we fight for what we believe. The institution Lemonade critiques most explicitly is marriage: On its surface, the record is a recounting of infidelity and betrayal (or, possibly, a sneaky meta-commentary on celebrity coupledom, a way of actualizing and profiting off the rumors that have dogged Beyoncé and Jay Z for years). But it doubles as a how-to guide for anyone keen on self-reclamation. Here, Beyoncé suggests, is how you get yourself back: by transforming anguish into art. That lesson—and others, about conviction and forgiveness, and how those things can co-exist—feels more essential than ever before. –Amanda Petrusich
Listen: Beyoncé: “Formation”
Frank Ocean: Blonde
The oddest image Frank Ocean’s Blonde conjures is one of his former arch-nemesis. In 2006, Chris Brown accepted the trophy for Best New Artist at the BET Awards, and, reading from notes scribbled on his hotel card envelope, he thanked, “My manager Tina Davis, who I brought up here, who been with me from day one, pushing me, telling me to sing—I ain’t no rapper. Smile.”
Frank Ocean ain’t no rapper. He doesn’t sing all that forcefully either. And he certainly hardly smiles. His hook has always been his glowing pen, which he used to complicate the image of a male R&B artist through his awe-drawing lyrics on nostalgia, ULTRA and channel ORANGE. So, throughout Blonde, it’s fun to hear him indulge the inner-rapper we’ve occasionally seen him flash, in content if not form: the groupies on “Nikes,” the Jagger-swagger on “Solo,” the interlude on “Good Guy,” the “I been out here head first/Always liked the head first” on “Nights.” After creating as much room around himself as contracts and silence would allow, he filled the moat with dense verses, only iced with melody. “Self Control” even opens with a pitched-up bar or two, before melting into the album’s highpoint: “Keep a place for me,” a helium voice sings, “I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s nothing.” Ocean’s gift, toyed with on Endless and crystallized on Blonde, is his ability to find space where there shouldn’t be any. It’s no coincidence he came up with rappers, and a blessing that he didn’t end up one. –Matthew Trammell
Listen: Frank Ocean: “Nikes”
Solange: A Seat at the Table
“And do you belong? I do.”
The assertion sits atop an essay that Solange Knowles wrote in the waning weeks of summer. In the text that followed, she recounted a painful, much-publicized recent incident: A group of women had pelted her, with words and then trash, as she stood to dance at a Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans. She recalled her resolve to stay positive for the sake of her young son and his friend, also in attendance, and remembered assuming that she must have been imagining their violation: “Certainly a stranger would not have the audacity.” But that charity proved misplaced, and disappointingly familiar: As a woman of color, she had been dismissed, scrutinized, and harassed by strangers in predominantly white spaces before. She knew well the emotional labor of turning the other cheek.
When A Seat at the Table dropped three weeks later, it became clear that the essay’s title pulled from the lyrics of “Weary.” It’s a wistful ballad that explores how, when you’re constantly fighting for the base amount of respect, graciousness can be downright exhausting: “Be leery ’bout your place in the world/You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world/You’re leaving not a trace in the world/But you’re facing the world.” A Seat at the Table is full of similar admissions, delivered with a rare and beautiful empathy. In it, Solange often speaks to the universal experiences of youth (new love, confusion, heartbreak), but does not shy away from her own journey; the specificities of black life are proudly inextricable from her accounts. On “Mad,” she offers a poised reply to a damaging stereotype commonly affixed to black women, flipping accusations that they’re always angry into an uplifting rebuttal: “You got the light, count it all joy!” Floating over Raphael Saadiq’s lush soul arrangements, she travels “70 states” to escape such pressures, turning to sex, alcohol, isolation, and material pursuits on the haunting ballad “Cranes in the Sky”—but the journey leads her back to where she began, looking inward for strength.
A Seat at the Table has a gorgeous sense of flow; ideas of identity commingle easily with social commentary as lithe R&B melts into spoken interludes. The latter happens with a cinematic ease; the interludes sew the album together like plot points of a larger narrative. Solange’s mother, Tina Lawson, makes an impassioned appearance, saying: “It’s such beauty in black people, and it really saddens me when we’re not allowed to express that pride in being black, and that if you do, then it's considered anti-white. No! You’re just pro-black. And that’s okay.” This segues beautifully into the standout track “Don’t Touch My Hair,” a measured stance against the misguided act of reaching for a black person’s crown. Much like the know-how required to care for this hair, which is often passed down by a maternal figure, Lawson’s words offer a glimpse of the love for her heritage that she instilled in her daughter. Other monologues feature Solange’s father recalling the trauma of school integration (“We lived in the threat of death every day”) and an introspective Master P, who crystallizes one of the album’s salient themes: “If you don’t understand my record, you don’t understand me—so this is not for you.”
On her third album, Solange has reclaimed every part of her narrative and has done something undeniably inspiring. In 2016, when it still seems like a radical act to release a record that catalogues the nuances of black womanhood, she has done so with stunning candor. A Seat at the Table is a contemporary take on the protest records of yesteryear, steeped in the tradition of vanguard singers who critiqued society’s ills from the female perspective. It is an offer of solace for anyone working towards their own glory, and for those whose right to dignity is long overdue. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo
Listen: Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”
