Cosmopolitan's 10 Best Albums of 2017

Four years after Lorde illuminated suburban teendom with *Pure Heroine*, she captures the dizzying agony of adolescence on *Melodrama*. “Everyone has that first proper year of adulthood,” she told Beats 1. “I think I had that year.” She chronicles her experiences in these insightful odes to self-discovery that find her battling loneliness (“Sober”), conquering heartbreak (“Writer in the Dark”), embracing complexity (“Hard Feelings/Loveless”), and letting herself lose control. “Every night I live and die,” she sings on “Perfect Places,” an emotionally charged song about escaping reality. “I’m 19 and I\'m on fire.\"

Until a late flurry of percussion arrives, doleful guitar and bass are Solána Rowe’s only accompaniment on opener “Supermodel,” a stinging kiss-off to an adulterous ex. It doesn’t prepare you for the inventively abstract production that follows—disembodied voices haunting the airy trap-soul of “Broken Clocks,” “Anything”’s stuttering video-game sonics—but it instantly establishes the emotive power of her rasping, percussive vocal. Whether she’s feeling empowered by her physicality on the Kendrick Lamar-assisted “Doves in the Wind” or wrestling with insecurity on “Drew Barrymore,” SZA’s songs impact quickly and deeply.

Outgrowing the wild-hearted club anthems that defined her ascent, Kesha sounds reborn on her third album, commanding a set of sonically broad, heartfelt pop. Here, she punctuates the assertive funk of “Woman” with The Dap-Kings’ horn section and sings country-touched harmonies with Dolly Parton. But *Rainbow* is held together by Kesha’s elastic, giggle-to-roar vocal, which sounds best on blasting, jittery confections like “Boogie Feet” and “Learn to Let Go.\"

R&B singer Kelela’s deeply personal debut LP does just what it says on the label. Over beats from Jam City, Bok Bok, Kingdom, and Arca—which swerve from warped and aqueous to warm and lush to icy and danceable—Kelela turns her emotions inside out with a sultriness and self-assuredness that few underground artists can muster. She’s tough and forthright, tender and subdued on songs about breakups (“Frontline”), makeups (“Waitin”), and pickups (“LMK”)—and the way she spins from one mode to the next is dizzying in the best way possible.

Songwriter Margo Price spent nearly a decade struggling around Nashville only to have her debut, *Midwest Farmer’s Daughter*, hit the country Top 10. Spirited, sharp-witted (“Do Right By Me”), class-conscious (“Learning to Lose”), and deeply bittersweet, *All American Made* cements Price’s place alongside artists like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell—keepers of the flame but never slaves to tradition. “At the end of the day, if the rain it don’t rain,” she sings on the fingerpicked folk of “Heart of America,” “We just do what we can.” It’s a tale of blue-collar hardship drawn from her own life.

For over a decade, Nika Roza Danilova has been recording music as Zola Jesus. She’s been on Sacred Bones Records for most of that time, and Okovi marks her reunion with the label. Fittingly, the 11 electronics-driven songs on Okovi share musical DNA with her early work on Sacred Bones. The music was written in pure catharsis, and as a result, the sonics are heavy, dark, and exploratory. In addition to the contributions of Danilova’s longtime live bandmate Alex DeGroot, producer/musician WIFE, cellist/noise-maker Shannon Kennedy from Pedestrian Deposit, and percussionist Ted Byrnes all helped build Okovi’s textural universe. With Okovi, Zola Jesus has crafted a profound meditation on loss and reconciliation that stands tall alongside the major works of its genre. The album speaks of tragedy with great wisdom and clarity. Its songs plumb dark depths, but they reflect light as well. ARTIST STATEMENT: Last year, I moved back to the woods in Wisconsin where I was raised. I built a little house just steps away from where my dilapidated childhood tree fort is slowly recombining into earth.  Okovi was fed by this return to roots and several very personal traumas. While writing Okovi, I endured people very close to me trying to die, and others trying desperately not to. Meanwhile, I was fighting through a haze so thick I wasn’t sure I’d find my way to the other side. Death, in all of its masks, has been encircling everyone I love, and with it the questions of legacy, worth, and will. Okovi is a Slavic word for shackles. We’re all shackled to something—to life, to death, to bodies, to minds, to illness, to people, to birthright, to duty. Each of us born with a unique debt, and we have until we die to pay it back.  Without this cost, what gives us the right to live? And moreover, what gives us the right to die? Are we really even free to choose? This album is a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of nature. To bring it to life, I decided to enlist the help of Alex DeGroot, who has been the only constant in my live band and helped mix the Stridulum EP back in 2010. It will be released on Sacred Bones, the closest group of people I’ll ever have to blood-bound family.

Pushing past the GRAMMY®-winning art rock of 2014’s *St. Vincent*, *Masseduction* finds Annie Clark teaming up with Jack Antonoff (as well as Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sounwave) for a pop masterpiece that radiates and revels in paradox—vibrant yet melancholy, cunning yet honest, friendly yet confrontational, deeply personal yet strangely inscrutable. She moves from synthetic highs to towering power-ballad comedowns (“Pills”), from the East Coast (the unforgettable “New York”) to “Los Ageless,” where, amid a bramble of strings and woozy electronics, she admits, “I try to write you a love song/But it comes out a lament.”

For the most part, Lana Del Rey’s fifth album is quintessentially her: gloomy, glamorous, and smitten with California. But a newfound lightness might surprise longtime fans. Each song on *Lust* feels like a postcard from a dream: She fantasizes about 1969 (“Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind”), outruns paparazzi on the Pacific Coast Highway (“13 Beaches”), and dances on the H of the Hollywood sign (“Lust for Life” feat. The Weeknd). She even duets with Stevie Nicks, the queen of bittersweet rock. On “Get Free,” she makes a vow to shift her mindset: \"Now I do, I want to move/Out of the black, into the blue.”