Music
Megan Thee Stallion, a Hardcore Master of Rap
What makes this music hardcore, a term that has meant many things to many genres, is technical mastery.
Lucas Fagen
Music
Chance the Rapper Ties the Knot, and You’re Invited
Chance the Rapper’s new release, The Big Day, is celebratory and playful, but also wheedling — he wants to convince you that marriage is a good decision.
Music
Jamila Woods and Her Ancestral Spirits
Woods’s new album Legacy! Legacy! is framed by the presence of a larger community — the enacted community of choir singing and an imagined community of Black artists.
Music
Surface Buzz with Lizzo, Ariana Grande, Twice, and GFriend
The new albums by these artists all adapt R&B tropes to their own uses.
Music
The Art Songs of Carly Rae Jepsen
If you’d told radio listeners in 2012 that the singer responsible for “Call Me Maybe” would in seven years be hailed as an eccentric avant-pop totem, nobody would have believed you, but here she is.
Music
The Maximalist Dance Music of Valgur, Ibibio Sound Machine, Hama, and Steve Lacy
These new releases burn with creepy surprises, rubbery jitters, musical knots, and basslines that run into your arms.
Music
Rock Without the Posturing
New albums from Mdou Moctar, Control Top, L7, and Gary Clark Jr., guitar heroes all.
Music
Vampire Weekend Self-Consciously Grows Up
Growing up and finding love are conflated as a general spiritual awakening on the band's new album.
Music
The Singer-Songwriter Complex
New word-heavy releases from Jenny Lewis, Sir Babygirl, Nilufer Yanya, and Sharon Van Etten.
Music
Billie Eilish's Creepy, Crawly Pop
Eilish’s debut album is an exercise in comic horror.
Music
Solange, Captured Mid-Dream
Conceived as a musical map of Houston, Solange's hometown, When I Get Home wanders from mood to mood, arrangement to arrangement, a soundscape as cityscape, where songs correspond to locations and melodies merge with memory.
Music
James Blake Grows Up
Assume Form is Blake’s first album to acknowledge his status as a pop presence, but it also feels like an attempt to broaden his range, to correct the way he became associated with generic melancholy.