ABC News' 50 Best Albums of 2018

The Beths occupy a warm, energetic sonic space between joyful hooks, sun-soaked harmonies, and acerbic lyrics. Their debut album "Future Me Hates Me," forthcoming on Carpark Records, delivers an astonishment of roadtrip-ready pleasures, each song hitting your ears with an exhilarating endorphin rush like the first time you heard Slanted and Enchanted or “Cannonball.” Front and center on these ten infectious tracks is lead singer and primary songwriter Elizabeth Stokes. Stokes has previously worked in other genres within Auckland’s rich and varied music scene, recently playing in a folk outfit, but it was in exploring the angst-ridden sounds of her youth that she found her place. “Fronting this kind of band was a new experience for me,” says Stokes. “I never thought I had the right voice for it.” From the irresistible title track to future singles “Happy Unhappy” and “You Wouldn’t Like Me,” Stokes commands a vocal range that spans from the brash confidence of Joan Jett to the disarming vulnerability of Jenny Lewis. Further honeying "Future Me Hates Me"’s dark lyrics that explore complex topics like being newly alone and the self-defeating anticipation of impending regret, ecstatic vocal harmonies bubble up like in the greatest pop and R+B of the ‘60s, while inverting the trope of the “sad dude singer accompanied by a homogenous girl-sound.” All four members of The Beths studied jazz at university, resulting in a toolkit of deft instrumental chops and tricked-out arrangements that operate on a level rarely found in guitar-pop. Beths guitarist and studio guru Jonathan Pearce (whose other acts as producer include recent Captured Tracks signing Wax Chattels) brings it all home with an approach that’s equal parts seasoned perfectionist and D.I.Y. “There’s a lot of sad sincerity in the lyrics,” she continues, “that relies on the music having a light heart and sense of humor to keep it from being too earnest.” Channeling their stew of personal-canon heroes while drawing inspiration from contemporaries like Alvvays and Courtney Barnett, The Beths serve up deeply emotional lyrics packaged within heavenly sounds that delight in probing the limits of the pop form. “That’s another New Zealand thing,” Stokes concludes with a laugh. “We’re putting our hearts on our sleeves—and then apologizing for it.” The result is nothing less than one of the standout records of 2018.

In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Iggy Pop called Mitski “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know”—a rave that briefly tempted the Japan-born, New York-based singer to call it a career. “I thought maybe it would be best to quit music now that I’d gotten to the whole point of it, which is to be known by your personal saints,” Mitski tells Apple Music. “Very unfortunately, I can’t seem to quit music.” But even with a widening chorus of cosigns—and a recent stint opening for Lorde in stadiums and arenas—Mitski revels in solitude on her fifth album. The 14 tracks feature precise thoughts on loneliness and self-discovery, encased in ambient textures (“Blue Light,” “Come into the Water,” “A Horse Named Cold Air”) and tempos that range from dance music (“Nobody”) to pensive balladry (“Two Slow Dancers”). On the latter—one of her favorites on the album—she put old anxieties to rest. “For once, I didn’t let my deep-seated fear of losing someone’s attention interfere with doing what I felt was best for a song,” Mitski explains, “which was to make it slow, long, and minimal.” “Washing Machine Heart” uses the metaphor of laundering a partner’s soiled kicks for sonic and lyrical inspiration. “I imagined that’s the sound of someone’s heart going wild,” she explains, “and I thought about what would create that painful sort of exhilaration.” From the dejected sigh that opens “Me and My Husband,” an unflinching peek into relationship doldrums and suburban ennui, to the alone-on-Christmas levels of “Nobody” that Morrissey himself would eat a bacon sandwich to reach, Mitski knows her album is a mood: “I guess I\'m just incredibly tapped into that specific human condition.”

Mitski Miyawaki has always been wary of being turned a symbol, knowing we’re quick to put women on pedestals and even quicker to knock them down. Nonetheless, after the breakout success of 2016’s 'Puberty 2', she was hailed as the new vanguard of indie rock, the one who would save the genre from the white dudes who’ve historically dominated it. Her carefully crafted songs have often been portrayed as emotionally raw, overflowing confessionals from a fevered chosen girl, but in her fifth album, 'Be The Cowboy', Mitski introduces a persona who has been teased but never so fully present until now—a woman in control. “It’s not like it just pours out,” she says about her songwriting, “it’s not like I’m a vessel. For this new record, I experimented in narrative and fiction.” Though she hesitates to go so far as to say she created full-on characters, she reveals she had in mind “a very controlled icy repressed woman who is starting to unravel. Because women have so little power and showing emotion is seen as weakness, this ‘character’ clings to any amount of control she can get. Still, there is something very primordial in her that is trying to find a way to get out.” Since 'Puberty 2' was released to widespread acclaim, ultimately being named one of the best albums of 2016 by Rolling Stone, TIME, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, NPR, and SPIN, Mitski has been touring nonstop. She’s circled the globe as the headliner, as well as opening for The Pixies, and most recently, Lorde. The less glamorous, often overlooked aspect of being a rising star is the sheer amount of work that goes into it. “I had been on the road for a long time, which is so isolating, and had to run my own business at the same time,” Mitski explains, “a lot of this record was me not having any feelings, being completely spent but then trying to rally myself and wake up and get back to Mitski. I was feeling really nihilistic and trying to make pop songs.” We want our artists to be strong but we also expect them to be vulnerable. Rather than avoiding this dilemma, Mitski addresses directly the power that comes from appearing impenetrable and loneliness that follows. In 'Be The Cowboy', Mitski delves into the loneliness of being a symbol and the loneliness of being someone, and how it can feel so much like being no one. The opening song, “Geyser,” introduces us to a woman who can no longer hold it in. She’s about to burst, unleashing a torrent of desire and passion that has been building up inside. While recording the album with her long-time producer Patrick Hyland - “little by little in multiple studios between tours” - the pair kept returning to “the image of someone alone on a stage, singing solo with a single spotlight trained on them in an otherwise dark room. For most of the tracks, we didn’t layer the vocals with doubles or harmonies, to achieve that campy ‘person singing alone on stage’ atmosphere. We also made the music swell louder than the main vocals and left in vocal errors like when my voice breaks in “Nobody,” right when the band goes quiet, all for a similar effect.” Not a departure so much as an evolution forward from previous albums, Mitski was careful this time to not include much distorted guitar because “that became something people recognized me for, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat myself or unintentionally create a signature sound.” The title of the album “is a kind of joke,” Mitski says. “There was this artist I really loved who used to have such a cowboy swagger. They were so electric live. With a lot of the romantic infatuations I’ve had, when I look back, I wonder, Did I want them or did I want to be them? Did I love them or did I want to absorb whatever power they had? I decided I could just be my own cowboy.” There is plenty of buoyant swagger to the album, but just as much interrogation into self-mythology. The music swerves from the cheerful to the plaintive. Mournful piano ballads lead into deceptively up-tempo songs like “Nobody” where our cowboy admits, “I know no one will save me/ I just need someone to kiss”. The self-abasement of desire is strewn across these 14 songs as our heroine seeks out old lovers for secret trysts that end in disappointment, and cannot help but indulge in the masochistic pleasure of blowing up the stability of long-term partnership. In “A Pearl” Mitski sings of how intoxicating it is to hold onto pain. “I wrote so many songs about being in love and being hurt by love. You think your life is horrible when you’re heartbroken, but when you no longer have love or heartbreak in your life, you think, wasn’t it nice when things still hurt? There’s a nostalgia for blind love, a wonderful heady kind of love.” Infused with a pink glow and mysterious blue light, the performer in Be The Cowboy makes a pact with her audience that the show must go on, but as we draw nearer to the end, a charming ditty recedes into ghostly, faded melancholia, as an angelic voice breaks through to make direct communication. “Two Slow Dancers” closes out the album in a school gymnasium, though we’re no longer in the territory of adolescence. Instead, we’re projected into the future where a pair of old lovers reunite. “They used have something together that is no longer there and they’re trying to relive it in a dance, knowing that they’ll have to go home and go back to their lives.” It’s funny how only the very old and the very young are permitted to indulge openly in dreams, encouraged to reflect and dwell in poetry. In making an record that is about growing old while Mitski herself is still young, a soft truth emerges: sometimes we feel oldest when we are still young and sometimes who we were when we were young never goes away, leaving behind a glowing pearl that we roll around endlessly in the dark. --Jenny Zhang

The Breeders’ music is a ball of little contrasts: beautiful but rough, off-hand but confident, spacey but tactile, lived-in—an unfamiliar object knit from yarn. The group\'s first album with a fully reunited lineup from their breakthrough LP, *Last Splash*, finds them back on their private path, balancing rave-ups (“Nervous Mary,” “Wait in the Car”) with heavy-lidded ballads (“All Nerve,” “Dawn: Making an Effort”) and blasts of noise with girlish harmonies, gently pushing the familiar garage-band template in new directions. As always, their ace remains an ability to elevate naiveté to mysterious, almost supernatural levels—just listen to “Walking With the Killer.”

*“Excited for you to sit back and experience *Golden Hour* in a whole new, sonically revolutionized way,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “You’re going to hear how I wanted you to hear it in my head. Every layer. Every nuance. Surrounding you.”* Since emerging in 2013 as a slyly progressive lyricist, Kacey Musgraves has slipped radical ideas into traditional arrangements palatable enough for Nashville\'s old guard and prudently changed country music\'s narrative. On *Golden Hour*, she continues to broaden the genre\'s horizons by deftly incorporating unfamiliar sounds—Bee Gees-inspired disco flourish (“High Horse”), pulsating drums, and synth-pop shimmer (“Velvet Elvis”)—into songs that could still shine on country radio. Those details are taken to a whole new level in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Most endearing, perhaps, is “Oh, What a World,” her free-spirited ode to the magic of humankind that was written in the glow of an acid trip. It’s all so graceful and low-key that even the toughest country purists will find themselves swaying along.

It would be difficult to think of a recording artist currently working who has less to prove than Paul McCartney. Yet in the past decade alone, the former Wings frontman has released, between stops on a seemingly endless stadium tour, one classical album, one electronic album as The Fireman, and now two contemporary pop albums—all of which have managed to burnish what was already rock’s most unburnishable résumé. His 17th solo effort is casually ambitious power pop, delivered with the ease and confidence of someone who invented it. At 76, McCartney finds hooks in relatable topics such as ditching weed for domestic bliss (“Happy With You”) and weathering petty criticism (“Who Cares”), while “Despite Repeated Warnings” and closer “Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link” each clock in at over six minutes, juggling their moving parts in ways that feel complex but never complicated. Producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters) navigates the middle ground between low-hanging nostalgia and trend-chasing modernity, but the biggest curveball comes courtesy of the Ryan Tedder-helmed “Fuh You”—the Macca song you’ll least want to play around little kids since “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

This long-buried studio session, found among John Coltrane’s holdings by the family of his first wife, Naima, offers a bounty of unheard material by the saxophonist’s classic quartet at a creative peak in 1963. His quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones was cranking out records for Impulse! at the time, some with an attempted commercial bent (this session was recorded just one day before the vocal classic *John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman*). Though *Both Directions at Once* somehow didn’t make the grade, it provides a new glimpse of the group at its most explosive and forward-thinking. “All these musicians are reaching some of the heights of their musical powers,” Coltrane\'s son, Ravi, who helped prepare the album, told the *New York Times*. “On this record, you do get a sense of John with one foot in the past and one foot headed toward his future.”

Clean presents Sophie Allison as a singular artist, wise beyond her years, with an emotional authenticity all her own. “It feels like my first real record,” says Allison. “It’s my first real statement.” It’s an emotional album, heavy on themes of growth, isolation, and change, but balanced by a lightness of touch, and with hooks to spare. Clean is a true step forward, a mature, powerful album from an artist just coming into her power.

Common Blah is the debut full-length by Portland, Maine’s Weakened Friends. Founded by songwriter Sonia Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman, and drummer Cam Jones in 2015, the trio is a low pressure outlet for emotionally volatile music. Engineered and produced by Hoffman and perfected over the last year, the record broadcasts heavy feelings amid screech and feedback with little more than a distortion pedal to clog up the signal chain. For Sturino, writing in Weakened Friends is more of a physical process than a mental one. “I have to feel the vibration or sound coming out of my body. I need the physicality to do it, to enjoy singing it,” she says. “People probably hear the vocals and think, ‘she just puts on that weird voice,’ but it’s really just what comes out. It’s my body making that sound.” Many of the songs reckon with deep mid-20s malaise — with the feeling of being young, stuck, and settling for less. “Sometimes, things look good on the outside, but they’re not working. That’s how it used to be for me. I’d hear, ‘You have a really cool job. You live in a cool city. Your band is cool.’ It was ‘Common Blah’ though because I was miserable. I didn’t care. Now, I’m at the other end of the spectrum. People do something that they think they’re supposed to do when it’s not what they should be doing and it doesn’t make them happy. In a lot of ways, this is the first time I’ve found happiness. I wrote the lyrics about the time before that happiness.” On Common Blah, Weakened Friends use volume — instrumental and emotional — to reassert a sense of control in a time when daily life has slid out of tune. The album also features guest shredding by peer and kindred spirit J Mascis on the song “Hate Mail.” Common Blah will be out on CD, LP, and digital download via Don Giovanni Records on October 19th. The band will tour the US and Europe throughout the fall, including stops at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris and The Fest in Gainesville.

The Weeknd\'s 2016 album, *Starboy*, was the musical equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster: action-packed, star-studded, with a little something for everyone. Here, he returns to his unfiltered, art-house roots with a release so intimate and tortured, you’ll feel like a fly on his bedroom wall. Stuttering snares, gauzy production, and R-rated lyrics about sex and drugs (“I got two red pills to take the blues away,” he coos through a vocoder on “Privilege”) paint a vivid picture of a brooding Lothario—one that strongly resembles the dark artist we initially met on *House of Balloons*. This time around, he’s tapped gothic electro king Gesaffelstein to bring a sheen to the shadows with neon synths and fuzzy echoes that lift his signature anguish into new emotional heights.

It’s no coincidence that the cover photo for Ariana Grande’s fourth album is her first not in black and white. She told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden that *Sweetener* is different because, “It’s the first time I feel more present than ever, and I see colors more.” Her new outlook comes just over a year since the devastating attack at her 2017 Manchester concert that killed 22 people and injured over 500, leaving Grande “permanently affected.” She responded with *Sweetener*, a gorgeous, pastel album about love, happiness, strength, and womanhood. She’s deeply in love, evidenced on the tropical “blazed,” and “R.E.M,” with harmonies described as “rainbow clouds” by Pharrell, who produced over half the album. She exits a toxic relationship in “better off”; “God is a woman” is a feminine, sex-positive anthem that she told Darden is her “favourite thing I’ll probably ever do”. The album closer “get well soon” is a self-care message she wrote immediately following a panic attack. “It\'s about being there for each other and helping each other through scary times and anxiety,” she told Darden. “I wanted to give people a hug, musically.” Sonically, *Sweetener* brings some surprises—sparse rhythms and what she calls “dreamier” harmonies replace many of the huge beats and choruses she’s famous for. She said the album is “more like me as a person. And what I’ve been craving to do.”

“I had a broken spirit,” Elle King tells Apple Music. “This is my journey of finding self-love.” On her triumphant sophomore album, recorded during the fallout of a short-lived marriage, the “Ex’s & Oh’s” breakout star recounts her struggles with fame, drugs, depression, and heartbreak. “My life just completely fell apart,” she says. “I struggled pretty badly with PTSD and music was the only thing that made me feel safe.” King cowrote much of the album with her band, The Brethren, producer Tim Pagnotta, and industry heavyweight Greg Kurstin (Sia, Adele), the latter of whom agreed to come and write at King’s house when she wasn’t up to leaving. King says Kurstin was particularly instrumental on “Runaway,” a dreamy, romantic ballad that twists her howl into a croon. “If I were to write a Roy Orbison song, that would be it,” she says. Elsewhere, she carries us through soul-wrenching heartache (“Good Thing Gone”), angst (“Ram Jam”), and pure, sweet catharsis (“Little Bit of Lovin’,” an invigorating electric number about not giving up). The latter song, King’s favorite, was written early on in the process and served as a guiding light for the album. “It was this weird marker of ‘I can get there, I can do this,’” she says. “It opened my eyes to what I was capable of.”

"Sundays" is the debut full length from Oakland-based Tanukichan, aka multi-instrumentalist Hannah van Loon. At surface level, the album sounds just how the title describes: hazy, dreamy, reflective, just like a lazy Sunday afternoon. Upon second and third listens, the dreamy music unveils a deeper world: an ever present sense of longing, an endless state of summer and a period of instability that plagues us all at one point or another in our lives. Raised in San Francisco, van Loon started out making classical, bluegrass and jazz music as well as playing in numerous bands in the area before deciding to make something more personal. What started with a few unfocused demos, with van Loon playing all the instruments herself in her house, became a studio experience and viable collection of music after her friend Anthony Ferraro of Astronauts, Etc. introduced her to Company Records founder Chaz Bear (Toro Y Moi, Les Sins). After collaborating on her 2016 EP "Radiolove," van Loon and Bear set out to make a much more sonically cohesive release, with both the producer and artist playing all the instruments on the record. The result is a slice of dream pop that could only come from the combination of the laid back atmosphere of California and the nostalgic and often difficult memories that are generally associated with coming of age. To van Loon, the tracks of "Sundays" are a form of contemplation and approaching life’s issues from a different and less complicated perspective. “Sometimes for me, it feels easier to write songs about things than to talk. A lot of things in life are layered and paradoxical, but with songs it always seems simpler.” Opening track “Lazy Love” sets the stage, sonically and lyrically, for the rest of the album, combining vulnerable lyrics with gorgeous, fuzzy tones. Above pummeling synths and guitar tones, van Loon sings “you know I'd do anything/don't you know I try my best/if I could wake up when the sun is rising” showing the album’s constant theme of balancing always wanting to be the best person you can be, while also feeling a low level joy at letting life play out as it wants to. “Natural” is a track that feels perfect for a road trip, a track that hums away with a driving beat, culminating in the sheer excitement of finally having a night alone with someone you’ve loved for a while, among many highs and lows: “a window too bright/it's natural sunlight/grey fades to white lie/kiss you tonight/it's natural delight/help me feel right.” The tracks collectively address a deep rooted sense of yearning for someone, something new, while also feeling content with your life; a realization that maybe the places you’ve always belonged aren’t where you should be anymore, that suddenly you might be looking for something completely different. “I settled on the name 'Sundays' as the title of the record because it encapsulated how the record felt to me,“ van Loon says. “I was thinking about the laziness, and dreamy clarity that you can feel after a late night, waking up having to face the world with a new perspective.” "Sundays" encapsulates this feeling, a nostalgic way of looking at the world, waking up feeling like a slightly different person than before, looking back on life, not sure if you can tackle what’s next, but doing your best, day in and day out.

Lily Allen has always been one of pop’s most absorbingly forthright stars. But the singer herself now criticizes her third album, 2014’s *Sheezus*, for lacking that honesty, telling Vulture.com that she was “writing music for people’s expectations rather than for me.” Follow-up *No Shame* redresses the balance by reflecting on her recently revealed divorce, parenthood, and the celebrity lifestyle with startling candour. Cloaked in dancehall-mottled pop and emotive balladry, her lyrics remain pin-sharp, evoking the scrutiny and isolation of fame: “If you go on record, saying that you know me/Then why am I so lonely?/’Cause nobody f\*cking phones me” (“Come On Then”). Lily’s clearly experienced difficult times, but they’ve helped inspire her most revealing album yet—and she still finds galvanizing energy in new love (“Pushing Up Daisies”) and the fight against the patriarchy (“Cake”).

“Before, I thought I ran on a chaos engine,” Florence Welch told the *Guardian* in June 2018, shortly ahead of the release of *High as Hope*. “But the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work. I can address things I wasn’t capable of doing before.” This newfound openness gives her band’s fourth LP an unvarnished vulnerability. “Hunger” will sit proudly among her most personal and beautiful songs, while “South London Forever” and “Grace” both make peace with the excesses that decorated her rise to fame. Such lyrical heft affords the Londoners a chance to explore a more delicate, restrained sound, but there’s still space for Welch to blow the roof off. A fiery confessional that majestically takes to the skies and forms the album’s centerpiece, “100 Years” uncorks some vintage Florence. No one, we’re reminded, chronicles sadness quite so exquisitely, or explosively.

Neko Case’s ‘Hell-On,’ an indelible collection of colorful, enigmatic storytelling that features some of her most daring, through-composed arrangements to date, is available now. Produced by Neko Case, ‘Hell-On’ is simultaneously her most accessible and most challenging album, in a rich and varied career that’s offered plenty of both. ‘Hell-On’ is rife with withering self-critique, muted reflection, anthemic affirmation and Neko’s unique poetic sensibility. Neko enlisted Bjorn Yttling of (Peter Bjorn & John) to co-produce 6 tracks with her in Stockholm, Sweden where she mixed the 12 track album with Lasse Martin. ‘Hell-On’ features performances by Beth Ditto, Mark Lanegan, k.d. Lang, AC Newman, Eric Bachmann, Kelly Hogan, Doug Gillard, Laura Veirs, Joey Burns and many more.

Following the release of her first earth-quaking single in 4 years at the beginning of August, counter-culture pop icon Neneh Cherry announces her fifth solo album Broken Politics, produced in its entirety by Four Tet. Continuing her blurring and conflation of the personal and the political, the second single Shot Gun Shack tackles the link between violence and deprivation using poetic logic. The track deals with the ever-present and always-global issue of gun violence in society. The track's name was the result of inspiration that sprung from a half-remembered conversation Cherry had at the funeral of late jazz great Ornette Coleman. Broken Politics pointedly asks the question; how do we conduct ourselves in extraordinary times? In an era where the signal-to-noise ratio is more uneven than ever, what are the measures we must take to retain and remember our own personhood? It searches for answers, patiently and with great care, and with a fearlessness to acknowledge that sometimes the answers don't even exist. It’s a record that’s equal parts angry, thoughtful, melancholy, and emboldening, as Cherry and her collaborators continue to expand her ever-widening sonic palette to craft truly singular and potent music.

Though the deceptively complex pop of Quit the Curse marks the debut of Anna Burch, it’s anything but the green first steps of a fledgling new artist. The Detroit singer/songwriter has been visible for the better part of her years-long career singing in Frontier Ruckus, or more recently co-fronting Failed Flowers, but somewhere along the way a vibrant collection of solo material slowly began taking form. Growing up in Michigan, Burch’s fixation with music transitioned from a childhood of Disney and Carole King sing-alongs to more typically angsty teenage years spent covering Bright Eyes and Fiona Apple at open mic nights. By 18 she was deep into the lifestyle of the touring musician, juggling all the regular trials and changes of young life while on a schedule that would have her gone for months on end. After a few whirlwind years of this, exhausted and feeling a little lost, she stepped away from music completely to attend grad school in Chicago. This respite lasted until 2014 when she moved to Detroit and found herself starting work in earnest on solo songs she’d been making casual demos of for a year or so. Friends had been encouraging her to dive into solo music, and one particularly enthusiastic friend, Chicago musician Paul Cherry, went so far as to assemble a band around scrappy phone demos to push for a fully realized album. “Writing songs that I actually liked for the first time gave me a feeling of accomplishment," Burch said, "Like, I can do this too! But working with other musicians and hearing the songs go from sad singer/songwriter tunes to arranged pop songs gave me this giddy confidence that I'd never felt before.” The process was drawn out and various drafts and recordings came and went as the months passed. By now Burch was playing low key shows and d.i.y. tours solo and had released some early versions of a few songs on a split with fellow Detroit musician Stef Chura. Even at a slow, meticulous pace, with every step the album took closer to completion, it felt more serious and more real. After a more than a year of piecemeal recording sessions, Burch was introduced to engineer Collin Dupuis (Lana Del Rey, Angel Olsen) who helped push things energetically home, mixing the already bright songs into a state of brilliant clarity. The nine songs that comprise Quit the Curse come on sugary and upbeat, but their darker lyrical themes and serpentine song structures are tucked neatly into what seem at first just like uncommonly catchy tunes. Burch’s crystal clear vocal harmonies and gracefully crafted songs feel so warm and friendly that it’s easy to miss the lyrics about destructive relationships, daddy issues and substance abuse that cling like spiderwebs to the hooky melodies. The maddeningly absent lover being sung to in “2 Cool 2 Care”, the crowded exhaustion of “With You Every Day” or even the grim, paranoid tale of scoring drugs in “Asking 4 A Friend” sometimes feel overshadowed by the shimmering sonics that envelop them. “To me this album marks the end of an era of uncertainty. Writing songs about my emotional struggles helped me to work through some negative patterns in my personal life, while giving me the sense of creative agency I'd been searching for.” Emerging from years spent as a supporting player, Quit the Curse stands as a liberation from feeling like Burch’s own songwriting voice was just out of reach -- an opportunity, finally, for the world at large to hear what’s been on her mind for quite a while.

Lucy Dacus is done thinking small. After her 2016 debut "No Burden" won her unanimous acclaim as one of rock’s most promising new voices, Dacus returns with Historian, a remarkably assured 10-track statement of intent. It finds her unafraid to take on the big questions — the life-or-death reckonings, and the ones that just feel that way. It’s a record full of bracing realizations, tearful declarations and moments of hard-won peace, expressed in lyrics that feel destined for countless yearbook quotes and first tattoos. Dacus and her band recorded the album in Nashville last March, re-teaming with No Burden producer Collin Pastore, and mixed it a few months later with A-list studio wizard John Congleton. The sound they created, with substantial input from multi-instrumentalist and live guitarist Jacob Blizard, is far richer and fuller than the debut — an outward flowering of dynamic, living, breathing rock and roll. Dacus’ remarkable sense of melody and composition are the driving force throughout, giving Historian the immersive feel of an album made by an artist in full command of her powers. The year leading up to "Historian," with its electoral disasters and other assorted heartbreaks, has been a rough one for many of us, Dacus included. She found solace in crafting a thoughtful narrative arc, writing a concept album about cautious optimism in the face of adversity, with thematic links between songs that reveal themselves on repeat listens. “It starts out dark and ends hopeful, but it gets darker in between; it goes to the deepest, darkest, place and then breaks,” she explains. “What I’m trying to say throughout the album is that hope survives, even in the face of the worst stuff.”

Whether featuring for Drake (“Get It Together” from *More Life*) or the Marvel cinematic universe (“I Am” from the Kendrick Lamar-curated *Black Panther* soundtrack), Jorja Smith brings refreshing vulnerability to hip-hop and R&B. The singer/songwriter frames fragile thoughts in a durable voice on *Lost & Found*, a reference to frequent travels between her hometown of industrial Walsall and swinging London. She turns heartbreak into beauty on “Goodbyes” and “Tomorrow.” Then she cools it off with loose hip-hop excursions: “Blue Lights” shows her grime IQ with a tasteful Dizzee Rascal interpolation, and on “Lifeboats (Freestyle),” Jorja drops Lauryn Hill-like bars and belts out her own hooks. Fans of Lorde or FKA twigs should check out “Teenage Fantasy” and “The One,” both of which pack bumping, luscious arrangements.

On “Hurt Feelings,” the second song from his fifth studio album, *Swimming*, Mac Miller raps, “I paid the cost to see apostrophes, that means it’s mine/Keep to myself, taking my time.” The Pittsburgh-born MC has always been clever; on *Swimming*, he\'s also direct—particularly about the distance he’s kept from the public eye following a high-profile breakup and other troubles. But this isn\'t a breakup album; Miller says *Swimming* is a more complete picture of his life. “I\'m just talking about things that I\'m proud of myself for, things I\'m afraid of, or things that are just thoughts and emotions,” he told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “And I\'m like, \'Why is this interesting?\'” That same curiosity is freeing for Miller, who leans further into the singing he displayed on *The Divine Feminine*. Production-wise, he’s riding ultra-funky basslines courtesy of Thundercat and an altogether jazzy and danceable set overseen by producer Jon Brion (Kanye West, Fiona Apple).

Try, if only for a moment, to envision a scenario in which you could still be completely *surprised* by a rock band. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s increasingly rare.  A couple of years ago, A Place to Bury Strangers were in search of a new drummer. Lia Simone Braswell, an L.A. native, had recently moved to New York, and was playing drums in shows around Brooklyn “just to keep her chops up.” As it turned out, APTBS bassist Dion Lunadon caught one of those shows and, after seeing her play, was moved to ask her if she’d want to come to a band practice sometime. “I told some of my friends about it before I met up with them,” Braswell says, of the rehearsal that would soon lead to her joining the band. “They told me, ‘You’re just gonna have to keep up as much as you possibly can.’” “To be fair, she had also never seen us live,” Lunadon adds. “She didn’t necessarily know what she was getting into.”  What she was getting into: For well over a decade now, A Place to Bury Strangers—Lunadon, founding guitarist/singer Oliver Ackermann, and, officially, Braswell—have become well known for their unwavering commitment to unpredictable, often bewildering live shows, and total, some might say dangerous volume. They don’t write setlists. They frequently write new songs mid-set. They deliberately provoke and sabotage sound people in a variety of cruel yet innovative ways. They can and will always surprise you. “When something goes wrong on-stage, a lot of bands will crumble under the pressure,” says Ackermann. “We like the idea of embracing the moment when things go wrong and turning it into the best thing about the show.”  This April marks the release of Pinned, their fifth full-length and an album that finds them converting difficult moments into some of their most urgent work to date. It’s their first since the 2016 election, and their first since the 2014 closing of Death By Audio, the beloved Brooklyn DIY space where Ackerman lived, worked, and created with complete freedom. “After DBA closed, I moved to an apartment in Clinton Hill,” he says. “I couldn’t make too much noise, couldn’t disturb my neighbors. I would just sit there and write with a drum machine. It had to be about writing a good song and not about being super, sonically loud.”  There are searing meditations on truth and government-led conspiracies (“Execution”), as well as haunting, harmonized responses to the tensions of our current political climate (“There’s Only One of Us”). It all opens with “Never Coming Back,” a frightening crescendo of group vocals, vertiginous guitar work, and Lunadon’s unrelenting bass. “That song is a big concept,” Ackermann says. “You make these decisions in your life…you’re contemplating whether or not this will be the end. You think of your mortality, those moments you could die and what that means. You’re thinking about that edge of the end, deciding whether or not it’s over. When you’re close to that edge, you could teeter over.”  It’s a clear and honest statement of intent, not just for everything that follows, but for this band as a whole. “As things go on, you don’t want them to be stagnant,” Ackermann says. “Being a band for ten years, it’s hard to keep things moving forward. I see so many bands that have been around and they’re a weaker version of what they used to be. This band is anti-that. We try to push ourselves constantly, with the live shows and the recordings. We always want to get better. You’ve got to dig deep and take chances, and sometimes, I questioned that. It took really breaking through to make it work. I think we did that.” They definitely did. 

After two concept albums and a string of roles in Hollywood blockbusters, one of music’s fiercest visionaries sheds her alter egos and steps out as herself. Buckle up: Human Monáe wields twice the power of any sci-fi character. In this confessional, far-reaching triumph, she dreams of a world in which love wins (“Pynk\") and women of color have agency (“Django Jane”). Featuring guest appearances from Brian Wilson, Grimes, and Pharrell—and bearing the clear influence of Prince, Monae’s late mentor—*Dirty Computer* is as uncompromising and mighty as it is graceful and fun. “I’m the venom and the antidote,” she wails in “I Like That,” a song about embracing these very contradictions. “Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”

Travis Scott sent a message to Apple Music about his third album, playfully attributed to Stormi, his infant daughter: “Just BUCKLE UP.” Stormi can’t speak yet, presumably, but the sentiment still rings true for a record named after a closed amusement park in his native Houston. *ASTROWORLD* delivers its twists and turns via some of Scott’s most personal lyrics yet, unexpected musical arrangements, and a diverse guest list. “SICKO MODE” features multiple beat changes and Drake halted midverse, playing like some kind of funhouse trip. Other sideshows include Stevie Wonder playing harmonica, James Blake crooning, The Weeknd emoting, and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker shredding — but the main attraction is still Scott\'s life. On album closer “COFFEE BEAN,” Scott tells an unnamed lover, \"Your family told you I\'m a bad move...plus I\'m already a black dude.\" At 17 tracks, *ASTROWORLD* is like any great theme park: There’s just so much to see.