The band’s unerring sense of inertia neatly balances these proggier touches with a steely compositional sense. Facing a similarly totalitarian future, served as a passing introduction to promising singer-songwriter, producer, and rapper Anderson .Paak. that “the strength of a song is its fragility.” Like the year we just survived, is about female fear as much as female power. It makes you want to join in and start dancing. For the most part, music in 2016 remained good. , is filled with a rare type of solitary songs, honing in on the nuanced relationship we can have with our past lives. 1,” before extending an apology: “If I ever instigated, I’m sorry.” A lot of the spectacle that is. But somewhere in between these two poles, 22, A Million changes the math of Bon Iver. — ANDY BETA Fortunately, there’s a word for that now: s hit singles, Maren Morris sings, “I’m a ’90s baby / In my ‘80s Mercedes”—a quick clue that, despite the old-fashioned Southern revival feel of “My Church,” she’s very much a modern child. She also adopts the viewpoints of different characters throughout the record (see: “Dan the Dancer,” “Crack Baby,” “Happy”) to engage with the struggles of addiction and depression. Burn Your Fire may have been her breakout, but this album is her actual breakthrough: more ambitious, confident, and better sequenced than its predecessor. Dogging the whole thing is closer “For My Dawg,” a quick dose of too-real talk about friends eaten up by disease and shot dead and all the little things that sit with you when somebody’s six feet under too soon. View reviews, ratings, news & more regarding your favorite band. —. Black Cat (Zucchero album) Black from the Future. There’s been no shortage of pessimism about 2016—a year that was plagued with fear, hatred, and confusion. Popularity. After 2011’s modest King of Limbs, a couple of functional solo projects from Yorke, and rumors of an indefinite hiatus, it looked like the end of Radiohead’s decades-long hot streak was at hand. Indeed, she did, and this record—which finds her reflecting on the ends of relationships as well as the end of the world—was written around the time of her wedding. — TESS DUNCAN Backlit by an unforgivingly effusive neon glow, Healy benefits from the indifferent post-punk cool passed down by fellow club kid Brits like New Young Pony Club and their new-wave predecessors. At times it might be. The plot rises and crashes on Khan’s pristine, often spectral voice, which navigates the ins and outs of heartache and tragedy with a disquieting serenity, as if she’s still waiting at the crash site in her wedding dress, long after her love has gone, embittered and alone. Even “Work,” the Drake-assisted smash that surely motored along thanks to their dating narrative, was exactly the opposite of the softbatch quasi-dancehall-lite on pop radio: It was, simply, a song about a West Indian woman wining on a dude she knew was beneath her. She curates collaborators with the best, but aside from a typically impassioned Kendrick Lamar, she treats the men and women differently. These are the best albums of 2016 with Chance the Rapper, Radiohead, Frank Ocean Beyonce, Blood Orange, and more. The, , shared a similar sound and feel to his Lil Wayne homage-turned-progeny dissent, 2015’s. But, isn’t guided by fear; miraculously, this album—with all of its delicately produced synth-soul—dedicates itself to life. suffers from a few typical sequel tropes: It’s bolder, louder, and wears its aspirations on its sleeve more obviously than its predecessor. This year I'm making an active effort to listen to new progressive rock releases and giving them an honest shot, then giving a short review here. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music, Joyce Manor found a map triangulating teenage angst and quarter-life crises, then followed it to the X under the smokers’ huddle outside the local dive. Hidden in its 90 minutes is the occasional emotional outburst—”Things That Break” is tucked away on the start of the second disc—but Miranda largely diverts attention from her loss by surrounding it with wry come-ons and off-color jokes, songs that tap into her rebellious nature but can’t help but seem slightly sad due to the execution and context. So instead of sparse, quick, black-and-white ratchet beats, we have booming, red-drenched, G-funk bops that take their time to unfurl like Broadway tunes. Maybe we should remember Cohen instead by the sly clarification he issued about a week after the, interview was published: “I said I was ready to die recently, and I think I was exaggerating. In Moodymann’s brilliant, 30-track mix, groove trumps genre and sonic cohesion is more likely to be found in claps, cymbals, and hi-hats, than it is in booming four-on-the-floor (though there’s plenty of that in the latter half). But on his third album as Blood Orange, Freetown Sound, the very same things that make him an outcast in the States are a consistent source of pride. —, Through Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and crappily shot concert footage, it’s natural to feel like you have an idea of who an artist is without knowing them at all. The utility of the 1975’s sophomore album is in its tactlessness, and there’s joy in submitting happily and wholly to that. It’s a loose concept record about a bride-to-be whose fiancé dies in a car crash en route to the wedding, and all of the misery and healing that follows. The third and fourth synthesize these ideas and brings them into the realm of Chance’s own life: His duty as a man and a Christian is to take care of those close to him, to protect his new daughter from a world that is all too eager to swallow up black children. For good measure, she tosses in a half-trolling-half-deadly earnest line about the red states’ favorite amendment, and gives the unjustly disgraced Dixie Chicks—first on the remix, then triumphantly at the CMAs—their best platform in over a decade. On his first album since 2009, the neo-soul avatar proves himself master of a terse R&B that has finally caught up to ambitions that his first couple of albums couldn’t support melodically. It’s alive, her vocals and the sounds full with passion, communicating what humanity is losing in a world cracking apart, of humanity. Producer Nineteen85’s approach is modern, but the focused sonic palette and unwavering devotion to making music to make babies to is classicist. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Here are our favorite albums of the year—the ones that helped us get through it all. Light Upon the Lake opens as gracefully as an iris-in shot, our narrator hopping a train equipped with nothing but a bottle of booze and, before the opening credits can even roll, blacking out and waking up in Los Angeles. But its inclusion is ambiguous enough to illuminate all of the Norwegian avant-artist’s sixth album, , situating our obsession with our own imperiled bodies within a wider world that’s going to shit. But ScHoolboy Q doesn’t concern himself with matching Kendrick Lamar’s historical scope. In the context of the track—which eventually returns to Hval’s bloody fantasies—Curtis’s speech feels like an oblique reference to the way patriarchy gaslights women. It seemed, for a moment at least, that Young Thug might be running out of mojo, that even the most idiosyncratic MC of our era could no longer contort into new and exciting shapes. One of the great ironies of America is that it’s a country built by people of color, yet they’re the ones who’re othered. Popularity; Release Date; Critic Score; User Score; Likes + Filter. ANOHNI’s latest record chronicles these anthropocentric anxieties that are available to anyone with a newspaper subscription: despair pop executive produced by Glenn Greenwald. Watch Amythyst Kiah Perform 'Black Myself' on 'Jimmy Kimmel', FBI Releases Long-Withheld File on Kurt Cobain, Van Morrison’s ‘Latest Record Project’ Is a Delightfully Terrible Study in Casual Grievance, That Time Joni Mitchell Brought Gordon Lightfoot’s House Down With ‘Coyote’, Coldplay Premiere ‘Higher Power’ Video in Space. “The Sound” is the biggest song, and finds Healy whining about being a “sycophantic, prophetic, Socratic junkie wannabe,” knowing very well that it’s one of the most charming things about him. moving collaboration between a confirmed free-improv legend and a comparatively youthful polyglot with a wide variety of jazz, contemporary classical, and pop music bonafides. They wanted him to drop the post-R&B, post-sexuality, post-everything conceptual smorgasbord to save us from the fuckboyism of Chris Brown. It’s the overdubbed sounds of Colin Stetson’s saxophone on “____45_____,” the blown-out percussion (like Arca by way of a wheat thresher) on “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ? LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music. Maybe the answer is to stay mad. But it’s clear that these hip-hop vets needed to exorcise some demons, personal and otherwise. ), Elsewhere she decides, quite reasonably, that a Houston artist might want to make a country song, and she puts together one better than half the tailgate swill coming out of Nashville. —, It seemed, for a moment at least, that Young Thug might be running out of mojo, that even the most idiosyncratic MC of our era could no longer contort into new and exciting shapes. Even more admirably, Mitski manages that while subverting a genre dominated by white heterosexual males, reclaiming it as a space for her voice as a woman of color. Writing about the disarmingly sweet, vulnerable single “Conceptual Romance,”. Giggs and Jack Garratt were among the many artists who achieved their first UK charting top 10 album in 2016. — LIZ PELLY Whether he’s lamenting his lost backpack or pondering that next glass of beer, Toledo makes the mundane sound brainy and cool. But for a band that so idolizes self-absorbed indulgence, what else could we hope for? The old conception of the self is obliterated from that very first cry, to make way for that new life. Badgal Riri never exactly clarified what she was rebelling against, but the long-anticipated album known informally as #R8—her eighth—makes it pretty clear. Thankfully, we received a lifeline from an unlikely source: A Tribe Called Quest, the legendary Native Tongues rap crew, which broke up in the late ‘90s after years of creative differences between its two anchors, Abstract Poetic mastermind Q-Tip and down-to-Earth Five-Foot Assassin Phife Dawg. They are excellent foils for each other. On the lilting “Augustine,” Hynes proclaims, “My father was a young man / My mother, off the boat,” insisting on the value of his and other immigrants’ stories. After all, she dreamed and planned for this ever since, , since that camera-ready tiara shot of “, is both more scattershot than its predecessor, yet still a coherent statement, with beginning, middle, and end. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music. Its songs are anchored by detailed, shimmering future-funk grooves—logical, considering that the Los Angeles-based Strother twins were reared in Minneapolis, born in the era of their future mentor and cheerleader, Prince. It’s alive, her vocals and the sounds full with passion, communicating what humanity is losing in a world cracking apart because of humanity. There was the noir-rock of his Darkside duo with guitarist Dave Harrington, the amorphous Nymphs singles, an imaginary soundtrack for the 1969 Soviet film. She starts a blues firestorm with Jack White on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but rearranges the pecking order: She samples Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a song with a, (and specifically black female blues artists), but the sheer force of her presence upstages both the sample and White, who might as well be a session musician. At a time when the country’s living out a coast-to-coast existential crisis, A Tribe Called Quest know there’s no sense in looking backward. Still Brazy, YG’s followup to his splashy 2014 debut album, suffers from a few typical sequel tropes: It’s bolder, louder, and wears its aspirations on its sleeve more obviously than its predecessor. For every buzzy act you’d expect (like Anderson .Paak or Syd tha Kyd), or beloved comeback beneficiary (like Craig David), there’s a comparative newcomer like Phonte (on the Pharrell-ish “One Too Many”) or Shay Lia (on the late-night cut “Leave Me Alone”). But the band’s secret weapon saved the day, playing new angles. These 11 songs pit very different sensibilities against one another: Yorke’s emotionally bare vocals and cyclical, murmuring melodies; Johnny’s queasy orchestral figure-eights; Colin’s asymmetrical bass glyphs; and Ed’s swinging backbeats. Whitney write songs that sound timeless and pristine from the first time you hear them, endowing them with a found-artifact feel, like you’re looking at a stranger’s Polaroids. At just over an hour, Wildflower is a cross-town trip, but after a 16-year delay, we’re lucky to have it at all. But for every new direction he struck out on, his sound matured. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music. —, is an easygoing, modest album littered with intimidating words: “solipsistic,” “aphasia,” “Caravaggio.” Such is the charm of songwriter Evan Hall that all of these instances feel like acts of generosity—he wrangles complex concepts and lets you know, “Hey, there’s a word for that.” His band’s proper debut works on a similar level—in the grand tradition of. The conscious trailblazers had been recording over the past year, following a thrilling reunion performance on, sparks with the same renewed chemistry that distinguished that late-night gig, while also delivering a stump speech’s worth of politically charged lyrics—a bit of a change for Tribe, who often relied on subtler tactics than grandstanding. The Needle Drop. Marissa Nadler’s gloomy sixth album, Strangers, is filled with a rare type of solitary songs, honing in on the nuanced relationship we can have with our past lives. In one snippet, Ta-Nehisi Coates rails off a list of fashion decisions—minor quibbles for white Americans, but things that could mean the difference between life and death for a black man. takes the late-night rooftop philosophy and emotional subtext of Andrew Savage and Austin Brown’s songwriting and brings it to the fore in all its tangled and self-reflexive glory. She also adopts the viewpoints of different characters throughout the record (see: “Dan the Dancer,” “Crack Baby,” “Happy”) to engage with the struggles of addiction and depression. These multiplicities are given proper context in the album-closing “Tookie Knows II,” a bleak look at the hood-to-prison pipeline that’s marked Q’s existence. Fortunately, there’s a word for that now: Cardinal. strength lies in how it fuses its ambitions to compelling gangland narratives, proving once again that Q is one of hip-hop’s most underrated griots. And yet, between HEALTH board-whiz Lars Stalfors’s seamless production and the relentless onslaught of contagious choruses, it’s hard to deny the pop appeal of Mish Barber-Way & Co. White Lung’s sharp melodic instincts lead them to circle-pit bliss on Paradise, but it’s their illustrations of true love’s carnal, dirty reality—rich girls having babies with trailer trash on “Kiss Me When I Bleed,” newlyweds copulating like animals in the middle of the wilderness on the title track—that provides the greatest rush of all. Listening now to, ’s fifth-quarter addition, “Saint Pablo,” it’s especially jarring to hear him rap, “The media said he’s way out of control / I just feel like I’m the only one not pretending / I’m not out of control, I’m just not in they control.” For his sake, I hope he’s right. it’s less about what’s in the joints than why people spark them. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music. She teases a guy in “Formation” that maybe, just maybe, she might like him enough to get his song played on the radio station. But she can’t escape her own neuroses, putting on a brave face for “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars,” frantically singing, “I better ace that interview / I should tell them that I’m not afraid to die.” In a year when scaremongering and close-mindedness appear to be winning out, Mitski’s fearlessness feels essential. At times, as on “Rings of Saturn,” he is a fountain of vivid and beautiful imagery: “Her eyes that look at me through her rainy hair / Two round holes where the air buckles and rushes in.” On “I Need You,” he’s the lab rat on the wheel, cycling through a set of fixed fragments: a red dress, a supermarket aisle, the cold realization that “nothing really matters when the one you love is gone.” —, is woven with the same dense, blues-coated fabric that distinguished. There’s a song about Healy’s grandmother, one about the vapidity of fame, and several about the aftermath of falling in love. Intoxicating and best enjoyed with a starry backdrop, Olsen’s third full-length finds the Asheville-based singer-songwriter testing fresh possibilities: the sci-fi synths of “Intern,” the Spanish-inflected guitar sways on “Never Be Mine,” the scorching climax that powers “Shut Up Kiss Me.” On its latter half, My Woman expands upon the tattered and hollowed folk from 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, sprawling out with mesmerizing torch songs that carry the intimacy of a late-night walk. — JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD She synthesized pain and made it feel good. She was weary herself but strong enough to conceive, uncertain if her cures would even work. Mortality certainly hangs over it, but what resonates is how Bowie found sustenance in art. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music, With Parquet Courts, much like the HBO series High Maintenance, it’s less about what’s in the joints than why people spark them. But this is not exclusively nihilistic music. Yes, this album, like its title, could probably be a little shorter. In years past, Toledo would’ve hidden his voice beneath layers of reverb, but here, the singer openly outlines his hysteria. , filling a void that only existed in retrospect. Within the wide depths of darkness there is a sense of purity, a specific strain of isolation, ruminating on the strangers who walk in and out of your life, and how maybe sometimes you’ve become one too. From the giddy squeak with which he opened his third mixtape to the the soft hands and daffodils that populate its final song, Chance made happier music than anyone else this year. “People feel lonely when they’re in crowds of people or even when they’re in a happy relationship,” she said. Powerful and unique personalities like David Bowie and Leonard Cohen had the powerful and unique ability to say goodbye with album-length farewells. The ECM label has traditionally specialized in gentle, tonal jazz with New Age and crossover-classical predilections: Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Gary Burton. , but becoming a parent brought a new level of sobriety to Simpson and his plainspoken songwriting. “There is nothing new under the sun,” Angel Olsen sings in the middle of her latest album. (It’s almost like it’s a character, the movie!) Southern rock, Stax-styled soul, proggy synths, even a 25-year-old Nirvana song—they’re all woven into this ambitious but rooted song cycle. “I’m ready, my lord.” Cohen has long been preoccupied with death, and never more so than on the eve of his own passing. There were denuded guitars aplenty and glimpses of biography—scant references to his early days as an Odd Future hanger-on, wandering around post-Katrina New Orleans, wistful remembrances of budding relationships, a chiding reprimand against using marijuana from his friend’s mother—but his perspective floated among the years, unmoored from the present. So there’s eerie ambience, doo-wop, Alice Coltrane’s constant elevation, Suicide’s monolithic throb, bits of childhood dialogues with his father, and even a slinking reggaeton beat. Though the front of the magazine depicted Mars lounging on a diving board with a pristine pool and grand mansion at his back, the story detailing the making of his third album, , was headlined “Bruno Mars: The Private Anxiety of a Pop Perfectionist.” It looked at the belabored process that was crafting his first album post-“Uptown Funk,” a song from, Thankfully, you hear none of this creative angst in the finished product, a nine-song, 34-minute platter of slick homages. Michael Jackson will always loom heavy for Mars, but here he dives further into the R&B from his youth. He doesn’t shy away from these topics on his uplifting sophomore LP, but backed by silvery synths, plinking piano chords, and glassy group vocals, his lyrics are far more personal. , sprawling out with mesmerizing torch songs that carry the intimacy of a late-night walk. “We might die for this shit,” the Top Dawg soldier claims in his nasally growl. Mariner (2016) Cult of Luna hasn't really disappointed me yet. Southern rock, Stax-styled soul, proggy synths, even a 25-year-old Nirvana song—they’re all woven into this ambitious but rooted song cycle. —a new album from the group seemed unlikely. In that respect, Blackstar gestures toward the transition between life and death, but this album isn’t about passage to another plane. It’s in part due to Vernon’s love for cinematic gauze, a lens smeared with petroleum jelly through which he captures his songs. Maybe she doesn’t dish about Blake, but the mess and melancholy of this record show how deeply the divorce cut her, even if she never says so outright. 2016 is the best year for music so far for me. AllMusic Best of 2016 - Spanning the breadth of the music covered in 2016, this list features our editors' picks for the best albums of the year. , but this album is her actual breakthrough: more ambitious, confident, and better sequenced than its predecessor. 50 Best Albums of 2016. It helped her gain a level-headed perspective on her preferred themes of loneliness and longing. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music, After simmering nicely during its first half, bobbing in and out of hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and whatever it is that Little Dragon makes, the first officially released DJ mix by legendary Detroit producer/DJ Moodymann hits a stunning transition. allows us to dive into a life made purposefully obscure. Like it's becoming a joke. For all that’s reverential about the band, they excel in committing to none of it—the album features songs where grand, cinematic synths set Hughesian scenes of angsty romance; the title track is a gorgeous, gurgling ambient stretch that could easily be mixed into an acid-house banger at its height; bright singalong camp shines through elsewhere. He had some tools, he did the work, and he constructed the path to get to where he wanted to go, even if it remained out of sight. The Skinny. That’s about it for me.” It’s pretty good as far as final missives go, and it echoes a recurring line from You Want It Darker’s gothic title track. — JEREMY GORDON For Cave, it must have felt something like the end of the world. “I’m so sick of … fill in the blank,” Toledo declares at the top of Denial. It’s an emotional boilermaker served with a shot of bleak-as-hell: Even these California boys’ funniest lines (“I’m 26 and I still live with my parents / Oh, I can’t do laundry / Christ, I can’t do dishes”) are born from all-consuming self-deprecation and existential terror. This, perhaps, is the most unpredictable he’s ever been—it’s certainly the most ecstatic. LISTEN: Spotify | Apple Music. More than that, his unbridled optimism isn’t cloying, doesn’t give you residual embarrassment for his naïveté. This, perhaps, is the most unpredictable he’s ever been—it’s certainly the most ecstatic. At a purposeful pace, with Raphael Saadiq’s soft ear at work and eloquent writing that’s weighted with a heavy heart, Solange managed to process our catatonic state. Esperanza Spalding’s journey from jazz prodigy to reluctant, memed-on Grammy winner to colossally deserving Grammy winner has been quiet but utterly rewarding. As a black Brit living in the lonely expanse of New York, Dev Hynes is undoubtedly familiar with that fact. The songs unspooled multiple times before ending, meticulously constructed and breathtakingly casual within the same moment. No one expected to hear from former member Jarobi White again, since he left Tribe after their 1990 debut album and became a chef. A prison stay sidelined his career briefly, and upon release he signed to Atlantic Records and began a long, steady process of building up a national following with a series of cross-country tours, and a traditional industry dose of artist development. — KYLE MCGOVERN She isn’t doing it to impress anyone—she’s wielding those electrifying riffs and undulating drum fills for her own self-realization. It’s fitting subject matter for a crew of collagists in nonstop motion, spinning a retro-futurist swirl of soul samples and psychedelic curiosities. Some mixture of lovestruck and lonesome, she swears off romance but longs for it, knowing all the while that “heartache ends and begins again.” Her bliss and disappointment are intertwined: On the twinkling “Those Were the Days,” she savors a moment of happiness—when she and her lover had “nothing to lose and nothing to find”—but it’s already just a memory, fading further into the shadows. Even the more muted tracks culminate in a mass of swirling, difficult-to-parse activity, whether with dueling detuned synths and pianos (“Daydreaming,” “True Love Waits”) or just the axes they rode in on 25 years ago (the acoustic guitar arabesques of “Desert Island Disk,” the interlaced fingerpicking of “Present Tense”). Along that path, the 29-year-old Olsen can’t escape the feeling that she’s stuck in a loop. “How does it feel to be rich?” she wonders more than once, offering herself up as a proud heroine of the regular-ass. “We’re not telling the stories to ourselves,” he told the New York Times of his approach to memory. Presumably they’ll keep exploring until they can’t return a signal. The tracks are lush and the melodies, at times, would challenge the most trained of jazz vocalists, but when Spalding navigates them, they don’t feel like pieces to study; instead, they feel like luxuries to revel in. Album ’ s always too soon, isn ’ t come up with the best Music on album of is! 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