This is an album that forces us to question the boxes we've placed Rihanna in all along.

It's not every goth-punk fiend who can celebrate his fiftieth birthday with an album as loud, filthy and brilliant as Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

For all of his vigor for partnership, is a solitary classicist, a singer-songwriter wrestling with the dynamics of desire and emotional commitment. Hyperspace is grounded in that realism.

A concept album about an all-night bender, Last Night solidifies Moby's link in the chain that binds DJ pioneers like Todd Terry to slinky futurists like Justice.

Earthy, impressively diverse. [28 Oct 2004, p.101]

It’s a band whose great talent has always been its aspirational one-world melodies, now sounding much more like the world.

Taylor has grown immensely as a melodicist and arranger (he self-produced this album) in the ensuing decade, and the LP, which features contributions from longtime companions like Josh Kaufman and Scott Hirsch, is full of the collaborative warmth of recent Hiss landmarks like Heart Like a Levee.

[A] superbly rugged new solo album.

All that said, this is an exercise for die-hards and audiophiles: To PJ's credit, the original didn't leave much room for improvement.

Hearing it reimagined 50 years later, the album’s themes — transcendence, renewal, breaking free of materialism — resonate even more than they did all those years ago.

A near-perfect balance of gutter grime and high-art aspiration, the Rick Rubin-produced By the Way continues the Peppers' slow-motion makeover.

The ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove.

He’s paid just enough attention to pop’s new ideas to come out with an album that looks forward while remaining true to what's made him one of R&B's most reliable stars.

With Work of Art, he solidifies his status as a street-pop superstar.

Punisher is more sure of itself than its predecessor, thanks to Bridgers’ sharpened and studied songwriting. Her couplets, even more biting this time around, are either brutally self-directed (“I’m a bad liar/With a savior complex”) or just quietly dazzling.

The 15 songs range from entertaining throwaways to top-shelf Prince, making this basically a very good golden-era Prince album, with material recorded entirely between 1981-85 but for the ’91 version of “Love… Thy Will Be Done,” a hit that year for Martika.

Wagner and Foo have gone back to the rougher basics--distortion, echo and monastery-choir vocals--of their debut EP, 2002's Whip It On. But the simplicity is deceptive.

It’s empowering to see Trifilio own the full spectrum of her emotions, and it’s what cements Beach Bunny’s latest record as a masterclass in confessional rock and roll.

His new disc offers a typically appealing mix: prom ballads, gospel-tinged weepers, odes to fatherhood and plentiful yuks. But the heart of it is a double shot of widescreen optimism.

With Dark Matter, the band has rarely sounded more essential.

On Collapse Into Now, they sound like they'd rather be a band than a legend, which must be why they keep pushing on.

Pretty in Black is virtually fuzz-free, highlighting the exquisite detail in the Raveonettes' gift for pastiche.

At its worst, the music on Everyone’s Crushed sounds like etudes – studies in experimentalism, finger exercises for tyros in the avant-garde. But when Water From Your Eyes find transcendence – especially on the record’s final two tracks, “14” and the extra winky “Buy My Product” – it can be quite stunning.

Le Noise is also the most intimate and natural-sounding album Young has made in a long time: just a songwriter making his way through a vividly rendered chaos of memoir, affection and fear.

Knowing he was crafting his farewell, Vega leaves as he arrived, raging over Suicide-style industrial grinds.

If anyone expected a drift into sentimentality, her writing’s just gotten bolder, with arrangements that stretch the definition of “Americana” to the point of meaninglessness (Shires won the “Best Emerging Artist” trophy at last years Americana Music Awards).

The best solo record of her career... Vespertine is the closest any pop-vocal album has come to the luxuriant Zen of the new minimalist techno, even beating Radiohead's nervy Kid A. Where Kid A sounded like a record of risk, the work of a band on unfamiliar ground, Bjork sings here as if she owns and knows every inch of space and shadow in these songs.

It's a moment that feels like an emotional explosion – and it sums up everything great about Wild Flag.

Her take on “Standing in the Doorway,” a moody standout from Dylan’s 1997 comeback Time Out of Mind, retains the ethereal, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” throwback vibe of Dylan’s recording but on her own terms.

Their riotous manifesto remains the same, but their musical dialect has expanded to include blues, soul and even traces of pristine Led Zeppelin-era metal.

The pulse of the quieter cuts draws you into dreamy little songs that play out like strolls through an art gallery. Beautiful, if not always transfixing.

A wonderful little record that never lets up, piling on unassumingly buzzy fun until you start realizing you might be in the presence of a true power-pop monument.

R.E.M. were already college-radio heroes by the time they made Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. They could've kept making mumbly, jangly tunes for their core audience, but they went bigger and bolder, stepping toward radio-friendliness while retaining their iconoclastic spirit.

Life Under the Gun may frequently taste like candy, but, in the end, it’s a lollipop whittled into a shiv.

Clapton is both impulses in one record, for the first time: a serenely masterful engagement with roots--the guitarist co-wrote just one original--that is all over the place in repertoire yet devoutly grounded in its roaming.

Part of why Blue Lips is compelling is that it seduces the listener enough to accept Schoolboy Q on his own terms.

Burnside and Co. play with a perfect recklessness, as though no one was listening.

Vile’s latest LP has his tastiest playing and his deepest writing.

woods fulfills the literary expectations he’s often saddled with. Each work is a different chapter in an impressively consistent collection, and Maps finds him in repose, taking stock of the world of him.

The eclectic elements combine for dark, muted balladry a la Syd Barrett or the Beatles' White Album, with a touch of dub.

With their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the pair rejoin the rock conversation as if they'd never left.

S.O.S., SZA’s long-awaited sophomore album, is even more enjoyable than her 2017 debut, CTRL. The songs are looser and more confident. And the worthy themes—retribution, nostalgia, ego—amount to the most intimate and juicy self-revelations since the Real World confessional booth.

If the alternate versions aren't all that different from the originals, they're no less dazzling, dense with harmonies and hooks whose perfectly turned imperfections make their aches leap out of the speakers.

Playboi Carti—Gen Z’s answer to Nosferatu—performs emotions, toggles between them, and disguises them with a disquieting ease. He has never been more enigmatic.

She refashions material from other artists and makes it seem like it's been hers all along.

First Kiss presents few surprises, mostly because Kid Rock's journey from abrasive rap metal to unreconstructed heartland rock has landed him in a sweet spot: big guitars, big drums, big choruses and gravelly vocals.

Words & Music improves the sound on Reed’s original tape (available to hear, with many others, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, home to the Reed Archives), and evidently takes some liberty with song order.

There's plenty of storminess on her excellent second solo album, whose songs mix muscular guitar rock ('The Next Messiah') with soul balladeering ('Sing a Song for Them') and chamber pop ('Black Sand').

This timely set from four style-hungry producers recalls Elliott's turn-of-the-century heyday, with post-national street beats and an army of fresh MCs and singers. It feels like a genuine next-generation moment.

The chemistry between Mosshart and Hince must be more intense than ever, because their fourth album is also their finest.

Burke is the rare singer who makes songwriters sound wise beyond their words -- he finds ache lying dormant in unlikely places and manages to pinpoint, with GPS accuracy, the murky emotional terrain within the lyrics.

It’s a total departure, her kaleidoscopic mix of decades’ worth of R&B, hip-hop, blues, and gospel, steeped in trippy laptop sonics and deeply personal political urgency. ... “I just want Georgia to notice me,” she sings, confronting oppression with faint hope. It’s a strikingly bold moment on a record that’s full of them.

Like Akomfrah’s Data Thief, Madlib sees the connections between the past and future. On Sound Ancestors, he manages to give us a sense of what those connections feel like.

One of the best albums Beck has ever made.

[Chris Martin's] hinted that this could be Coldplay's last album; if so, they're going out on a sustained note of grace.

Paak’s output is keeping pace with his ambition. But good as his records have been, this set included, you still get a sense that the best work still lay ahead.

It seems the isolation of lockdown made her bolder about looking inside herself. The most exciting thing about Hold the Girl is that you can’t even guess where Sawayama might go next.

Along with the new reissue of 1965's Freedom Highway, it's a worthy tribute to a gentle giant of American music.

With her third record, Miranda Lambert remains country's most refreshing act, and not just because she makes firearms seem like a matter-of-fact female accessory.

What makes Born This Way so disarmingly great is how warm and humane Gaga sounds. There isn't a subtle moment on the album, but even at its nuttiest, the music is full of wide-awake emotional details.

The best Superchunk album in recent memory.

[Orbital is] leaving on a high note. [28 Oct 2004, p.100]

Her debut is antsy and ambivalently sexy.

Extends the murky, revelatory folk of [Bonnie Light Horseman] with wistful reflections on the passing of time and free-falling in love. [Jan 2022, p.71]

Dacus and her band sound emboldened, confident, like kids who are thrilled they still have something to prove.

Taken as a whole, the album's first five songs stand among Beck's strongest work.

His most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. ... These are age-old ideas, but they don’t feel that way when he’s singing them. It’s par for the course for an artist who specializes in embodying pop archetypes, and making them new again.

Shaw tries to sing here and there (notably on “Driver’s Story”) but Dry Cleaning’s words and music seem to work best together when they’re working independently of each other. The band’s peers in the sing-speak/post-punk group Wet Leg do a better job overall of conjuring joy from the marriage of poetry and music but what Dry Cleaning do feels unique.

As great as their Nineties high points, a hazy, globalist British rock that's loose and optimistically eclectic. [Mar 2020, p.87]

Japanese Breakfast’s latest LP Jubilee is the project’s most ecstatic-sounding album to date, although one glance at the lyrics will tell you that Zauner isn’t done excavating the thornier aspects of dependency, devotion, and longing.

The National are letting light and air into their shadows.

Trespassing delivers, with a mix of tinsel disco-club sleaze and leather-boy love ballads.

Building on their prior LP, Sheer Mag broaden their scope just a little more on A Distant Call while retaining the DIY grit and edgy concision that made them so arresting in the first place. This might technically be a concept album, but at 35 minutes, it’s still a punk rager at heart.

This time, they go lighter on the samples and heavier on post-trip hop soundscapes and contemporary singers, making for recombinant pop that feels joyfully seamless and organic.

It's what Drake does best, collapsing many moods--arrogance, sadness, tenderness and self-pity--into one vast, squish-souled emotion.

Where Reed once ham-acted the part of cuckolded savage Jim on the original, he sings here with both detachment and fatherly compassion.

In the 1977-79 half of Name, nearly every song beats the studio version. But the 1980-81 disc is the prize, as the Heads take their lofty concepts to the stage with a ten-piece band. [2 Sep 2004, p.147]

Thunder, Lightning, Strike was hailed as a pop masterpiece when it came out in the U.K. late last year, but clearing all the samples held up its U.S. release until now. Wait no longer.

Unlike past efforts, where their narratives relied on a heavy dose of dark humor, the songs on Interstate Gospel convey a much more intimate personal urgency. The result, from the housewife harmony blues on “Best Years of My Life” to Lambert’s haunting post-divorce balladry on “Masterpiece,” is a sharply-rendered sketch of bruised hearts and shaken souls that amounts to the group’s most moving work to date.

Young charges forward here, playing half of the imminent Neil Young in pristine, tremulous-vocal form and reclaiming six of his Buffalo Springfield songs.

With Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths — Stokes, Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck — prove that despite a global pandemic, it’s still possible to have a good time. They might not be excited, but we sure are.

It's a startlingly vivid picture of the artist as a young man.

They are aggressively modern in the long reach of Young Modern.

It’s a scorching art-pop statement.

Always an underrated vocalist, he delivered lyrics with two-pack-a-day gravitas, gruff aggression and flashes of fraying soulfulness. Musically, he doubled down on vintage earthiness and living history. ... The deluxe edition includes six bonus tracks that show just how much fun these guys were having at the time.

Tyla’s debut, sure to be on repeat at better houseparties this year, shows she’s up to the challenge; amapiano probably couldn’t ask for a more effective ambassador.

Zwan are more straightforward (and much less histrionic) than the Smashing Pumpkins, so a few of the songs in the middle are pretty but not very dramatic.

But as challenging as this avant-garde music is, it's also warm, absorbing and gorgeous.

The Whole Love seems like a celebration of that freedom, with songs that roam happily all over the place.

Revival is an audacious name for a 23-year-old singer's second album, but from start to finish, Gomez earns it. This is the sound of a newly empowered pop artist growing into her strengths like never before.

This collection (or any compilation for that matter) can’t come close to defining who Cornell truly was. He was multi-talented and a cipher; in some ways, he was impossible to know. But most of his truth appears to be in the music. The challenge is putting the puzzle pieces together.

What makes this more than glib is a golden-era songwriting craft evidently shaped by Tillman's tenure with Fleet Foxes, and his unsparing self-examination.

A series of punk songs that balance throat-shredding, brain-rattling intensity with an undercurrent of sadness and vulnerability.

He's playing his best character: the demon spawn of Trailer Hell, America, hitting middle age with his middle finger up his nose while he cleans off the Kool-Aid his kids spilled on the couch.

Color Theory could have been a true indie-rock stunner if more of its songs hit with the same individually distinct charge as the ones on her debut. Still, Allison’s nostalgic sadness suggests a bright musical future.

The Nashville star's most ambitious LP, a range-y two-disc set ditching country's mainstream playbook for the sort of Great Album rock acts used to spit out regularly back in the day.

When Jacklin isn’t waxing philosophical on mind-body duality, she’s simply showing the special way she processes the world around her. The result is a profound statement that stands as an early candidate for this year’s strongest singer-songwriter breakthrough.

Pouring out harmonies on originals ("Tennessee Me"), spunky covers (the kitsch classic "Something Stupid") and sublime traditional ballads ("Do You Love an Apple"), they make you believe, for three minutes or so, the lie that music was purer and better way back when.