Hypebeast's Top 10 Albums of 2019

Over the decade-plus since he arrived seemingly fully formed as the platonic ideal of indie DIY made good, Justin Vernon has pushed back against the notion that he and Bon Iver are synonymous. He is quick to deflect credit to core longtime collaborators like Chris Messina and Brad Cook, while April Base, the studio and headquarters he built just outside his native Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has become a cultural hub playing host to a variety of experimental projects. The fourth Bon Iver full-length album shines a brighter light on Bon Iver as a unit with many moving parts: Renovations to April Base sent operations to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, for much of the production, but the spirit of improvisation and tinkering and revolving-door personnel that marked 2016’s out-there *22, A Million* remained intact. “This record in particular felt like a very outward record; Justin felt outward to me,” says Cook, who grew up with Vernon and has played with him through much of his career. “He felt like he was in a new place, and he was reaching out for new input in a different way. We\'re just more in the foreground inevitably because the process became just a little bit more transparent.” Vernon, Cook, and Messina talk through that process on each of *i,i*\'s 13 tracks. **“Yi”** Justin Vernon: “That was a phone recording of me and my friend Trevor screwing around in a barn, turning a radio on and off. We chopped it up for about five years, just a hundred times. There’s something in that ‘Are you recording? Are you recording?’ that felt like the spirit that flows into the next song.” **“iMi”** Brad Cook: “It was like an old friend that you didn\'t know what to do with for a long time. When we got to Texas, a lot of different people took a crack at trying to make something out of that song. And then Andrew Sarlo, who works with Big Thief and is just a badass young producer, he took the whack that broke through the wall. Once the band got their hands on it, Justin added some of the acoustic stuff to it, and it just totally blew it wide open.” **“We”** Vernon: “I was working on this idea one morning with this engineer, Josh Berg, who happened to be out with us. And this guy Bobby Raps from Minneapolis was also at my studio just kind of hanging around, and he brought this dude named Wheezy who does some Young Thug beats, some Future beats. So I had this little baritone-guitar bass loop thing, and Wheezy put his beat on there. All these songs had a life, or had a birth, before Texas, but Texas was like graduation for every single one. That\'s why we went for so long and allowed for so much perspective to sink into all the tunes. It\'s a fucking banger; I love that one.” **“Holyfields,”** Vernon: “The whole song is an improvised moment with barely any editing, and we just improv\'d moves. I sang some scratch vocals that day when we made it up, and they were weirdly close to what ended up being on the album. We didn\'t really chop away at that one—it kind of just was born with all its hair and everything.” **“Hey, Ma”** Vernon: “It just felt like a good strong song; we knew people would get it in their head. A couple of these tunes, and some of the tunes from the last album, I sort of peck around the studio with BJ Burton from time to time, and 90 percent of the stuff we make is death techno or something. So, there\'s another one that sort of just hung around with a stake in the ground, so to speak. And then our team—the three of us and the rest of everyone—just kept etching away at it, and it ended up becoming the song that felt emblematic of the record.” **\"U (Man Like)\"** Cook: “We had Bruce \[Hornsby\] come out to Justin\'s studio for a session for his *Absolute Zero* record. Bruce was playing a bunch of musical ideas that he had just sort of done at his house, and that piano figure in that song—I feel like we were tracking 15 seconds later. It was like, \'Wait, can we listen to this again?\'” Vernon: “I\'m not so good at coming up with full songs on the spot, but I can kind of map them out with my voice, or inflection. Then it takes a long time to chip away at them. Messina might have an idea for what that line should be, or Brad, or me. The melody that I sang that first day probably sounds remarkably like the melody that\'s on the album.” **“Naeem”** Vernon: “We did a collaboration with a dance group called TU Dance, and that was one of the songs. So we\'ve been performing \'Naeem\' as a part of this thing for a while. It\'s in a different state, but it\'s the finale of this big collaboration. And it just seemed very anthemic, and a very important part of whatever this record was going to be. It feels really nice to have a little bit more straightforward—not always bombastic, not always sonically trying to flip your lid or something.” **“Jelmore”** Vernon: “Basically an improvisation with me and this guy Buddy Ross. Again I probably didn\'t sing any final lyrics, but it\'s based on an improvisation, much like the song \'\_\_\_\_45\_\_\_\_\_\' from \[*22, A Million*\]. And when we were down outside El Paso, me and Chris were over on one part of this studio and Brad was with the band in a big studio across the property, and they sort of took \'Jelmore\' upon themselves and filled it in with all the lovely live-ness that\'s there. As the record goes on, it feels like there\'s a lot of these things that are sort of bare but have a lot of live energy to them.” **“Faith”** Vernon: “A basement improv that sat around for many years; maybe could have been on the last album, was for a while. I don\'t know, man—it\'s a song about having faith.” **“Marion”** Chris Messina: “I think that\'s one that Justin\'s been noodling around with for a while; for a few years, he would pick up that guitar and you would just kind of hear that riff. And we didn\'t really know what was going to happen to it. It\'s another one that exists in the TU Dance show. But what\'s cool about the version that\'s on the record is we did that as a live take with a six-piece ensemble that Rob Moose wrote for and conducted, and it was saxophone, trombone, trumpet, French horn, harmonica, and I think that\'s it that we did live. And then Justin was singing live and playing guitar live.” **“Salem”** Vernon: “OP-1 loop, weird Indigo Girls/Rickie Lee Jones vibes. I got really into acid and the Grateful Dead this year, so there\'s definitely some early psych vibes in there. The record really is supposed to be thought of as the fall record for this band, if you think of the other ones as seasons. Salem and burning leaves—these longings and these deaths, it\'s very much in there in that song, so it\'s a really autumn-y song.” **“Sh’Diah”** Vernon: “It stands for Shittiest Day in American History—the day after Trump got elected. It\'s another that sort of hung around as an improvised idea, and we finally got to figure out where we\'re going to land Mike Lewis, our favorite instrumentalist alive today in music. He gets to play over it, and the band got to do all this crazy layering over it. It\'s just one of my favorite moods on the album.” **“RABi”** Messina: “Justin\'s singing a cool thing on it, the guitar vibe is comforting and persistent, but we just weren\'t really sure where it needed to go. And then Brad and the rest of the dudes got their hands on it and it came back as just a dream sequence; it was so sick. We all kind of heard it and it was like, whoa, how can this not close out the record? This is definitely \'see you later.\'” Vernon: “Just some ‘life feels good now, don\'t it?\' There\'s a lot to be sad about, there\'s a lot to be confused about, there\'s a lot to be thankful for. And leaning on gratitude and appreciation of the people around you that make you who you are, make you feel safe, and provide that shelter so you can be who you want to be, there\'s still that impetus in life. We need that. It\'s a nice way to close the record, we all thought.”

If there is an overarching concept behind *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Danny Brown’s fifth full-length, it’s that it simply doesn’t have one. “Half the time, when black people say, ‘You know what I\'m sayin\',’ they’re never saying nothing,” Danny Brown tells Apple Music. “This is just songs. You don\'t have to listen to it backwards. You don\'t have to mix it a certain way. You like it, or you don’t.” Over the last decade, Brown has become one of rap’s most distinct voices—known as much for his hair and high register as for his taste for Adderall and idiosyncratic production. But with *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Brown wants the focus to lie solely on the quality of his music. For help, he reached out to Q-Tip—a personal hero and longtime supporter—to executive produce. “I used to hate it when people were like, ‘I love Danny Brown, but I can\'t understand what he\'s saying half the time,’” Brown says. “Do you know what I\'m saying now? I\'m talking to you. This isn\'t the Danny that parties and jumps around. No, this the one that\'s going to give you some game and teach you and train you. I\'ve been through it so you don\'t have to. I\'m Uncle Danny now.” Here, Uncle Danny tells you the story behind every song on the album. **Change Up** “‘Change Up’ was a song that I recorded while trying to learn how to record. I had just started to build the studio in my basement. I didn\'t know how to use Pro Tools or anything. It was really me just making a song to record. But I played it for Q-Tip and he lost his mind over it. Maybe he heard the potential in it, because now it\'s one of my favorite songs on the album as well. At first, I wasn\'t thinking too crazy about it, but to him, he was like, \'No, you have to jump the album off like this.\' It\'s hard not to trust him. He’s fuckin’ Q-Tip!” **Theme Song** “I made ‘Theme Song’ when I was touring for \[2016’s\] *Atrocity Exhibition*. My homeboy Curt, he’s a barber too, and I took him on tour with me to cut my hair, but he also makes beats. He brought his machine and he was just making beats on the bus. And then one day I just heard that beat and was like, ‘What you got going on?’ In our downtime, I was just writing lyrics to it. I played that for Q-Tip and he really liked that song, but he didn\'t like the hook, he didn\'t like the performance of the vocals. He couldn\'t really explain to me what he wanted. In the three years that we\'ve been working on this album, I think I recorded it over 300 times. I had A$AP Ferg on it from a time he was hanging out at my house when he was on tour. We did a song called \'Deadbeat\' but it wasn\'t too good. I just kept his ad libs and wrote a few lyrics, and then wrote a whole new song, actually.” **Dirty Laundry** “The original song was part of a Samiyam beat. He lives in LA, but every time he visits back home in Michigan he always stops over at my house and hangs out. And he was going through beats and he played me three seconds of that beat, and I guess it was the look on my face. He was like, \'You like that?\' and I was like, \'Yeah!\' I had to reform the way the song was written because the beats were so different from each other. Q-Tip guided me through the entire song: \'Say this line like this…\' or \'Pause right there...\' He pretty much just coached me through the whole thing. Couldn\'t ask for anybody better.” **3 Tearz (feat. Run the Jewels)** “I’m a huge fan of Peggy. We got each other\'s number and then we talked on the phone. I was like, \'Man, you should just come out to Detroit for like a week and let’s hang out and see what we do.\' He left a bunch of beats at my studio, and that was just one. I put a verse on, never even finished it. I was hanging out with EL-P and I was playing him stuff. I played that for him and he lost his mind. El got Mike on it and they laced it. Then Q-Tip heard it and he\'s like, \'Aww, man!\' He kind of resequenced the beat and added the organs. That was tight to see Tip back there jamming out to organs.” **Belly of the Beast (feat. Obongjayar)** “I probably had that beat since \[2011’s\] *XXX*. That actual rap I wrote for \[2013’s\] *Old*, but it was to a different beat. Maybe it was just one of those dry times. I set it to that beat kind of just playing around. Then Steven \[Umoh\] heard that—it was totally unfinished, but he was like, ‘Yo, just give it to me.’ He took it and then he went back to London and he got Obongjayar down there on it. The rest was history.” **Savage Nomad** “Actually, Q-Tip wanted the name of the album to be *Savage Nomad*. Sometimes you just make songs to try to keep your pen sharp, you know? I think I was just rapping for 50 bars straight on that beat, didn\'t have any direction. But Q-Tip resequenced it. I think Tip likes that type of stuff, when you\'re just barring out.” **Best Life** “That was when me and Q-Tip found our flip. We were making songs together, but nothing really stood out yet. I recorded the first verse but I didn\'t have anything else for it, and I sent Tip a video of me playing it and he called me back immediately like, \'What the fuck? You have to come out here this weekend.\' Once we got together, I would say he kind of helped me with writing a little bit, too. I ended up recording another version with him, but then he wanted to use the original version that I did. He said it sounded rawer to him.” **uknowhatimsayin¿ (feat. Obongjayar)** “A lot of time you put so much effort when you try too hard to say cool shit and to be extra lyrical. But that song just made itself one day. I really can\'t take no credit because I feel like it came from a higher power. Literally, I put the beat on and then next thing I know I probably had that song done at five minutes. I loved it so much I had to fight for it. I can\'t just be battle-rapping the entire album. You have to give the listeners a break, man.” **Negro Spiritual (feat. JPEGMAFIA)** “That was when Peggy was at my house in Detroit, that was one of the songs we had recorded together. I played it for Flying Lotus. He’s like, \'Man, you got to use this,\' and I was like, \'Hey, if you can get Q-Tip to like it, then I guess.\' At the end of the day, it\'s really not on me to say what I\'m going to use, what I\'m not going to use. I didn\'t even know it was going to be on the album. When we started mixing the album, and I looked, he had like a mood board with all the songs, and \'Negro Spiritual\' was up there. I was like, \'Are we using that?\'” **Shine (feat. Blood Orange)** “The most down-to-earth one. I made it and I didn\'t have the Blood Orange hook, though. Shout out to Steven again. He went and worked his magic. Again, I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to have to convince Q-Tip about this song.\' Because before Blood Orange was on it, I don\'t think he was messing with it too much. But then once Blood Orange got on it, he was like, \'All right, I see the vision.\'” **Combat** “Literally my favorite song on the album, almost like an extra lap around a track kind of thing. Q-Tip told me this story of when he was back in the late ’80s: They\'d play this Stetsasonic song in the Latin Quarter and people would just go crazy and get to fighting. He said one time somebody starts cutting this guy, cutting his goose coat with a razor, and \[Tip\] was like, \'You could just see the feathers flying all over the air, people still dancing.\' So we always had this thing like, we have to make some shit that\'s going to make some goose feathers go up in the air. That was the one right there. That was our whole goal for that, and once we made it, we really danced around to that song. We just hyped up to that song for like three days. You couldn\'t stop playing it.”

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

An eccentric like Madlib and a straightforward guy like Freddie Gibbs—how could it possibly work? If 2014’s *Piñata* proved that the pairing—offbeat producer, no-frills street rapper—sounded better and more natural than it looked on paper, *Bandana* proves *Piñata* wasn’t a fluke. The common ground is approachability: Even at their most cinematic (the noisy soul of “Flat Tummy Tea,” the horror-movie trap of “Half Manne Half Cocaine”), Madlib’s beats remain funny, strange, decidedly at human scale, while Gibbs prefers to keep things so real he barely uses metaphor. In other words, it’s remarkable music made by artists who never pretend to be anything other than ordinary. And even when the guest spots are good (Yasiin Bey and Black Thought on “Education” especially), the core of the album is the chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib: vivid, dreamy, serious, and just a little supernatural.

In 2017, Wu-Tang Clan\'s Raekwon took the mic during a Griselda Records showcase at New York’s Webster Hall, and hailed the Buffalo rap crew for “carrying the torch.” That historical moment marked an early hip-hop coronation for the Buffalo, New York, label/collective, who have since signed to Eminem\'s Shady Records. Following wave after wave of gritty independently released street-savvy mixtapes and coveted merch drops from BENNY THE BUTCHER and brothers Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn, the crew\'s core trio deliver on their promise with their Shady Records debut. Lest there be any concern that Shady’s major-label shine would somehow diminish Griselda\'s presence or dull their menace, *WWCD* revels in some of the darkest corners of the crew’s classic East Coast rap aesthetic, as evidenced by the murky atmospheres and ice-cold rhythms of “Chef Dreds” and “Moselle.” On the virtual cipher “Scotties,” they trade off relentlessly every few bars, with Benny launching memorable lines like \"I remember listening to the Wu in ’95/Got my first strap from Conway in ’99.\" Narrative moments like the bloody “Freddie HotSpot” tether Griselda to the lyrical crime-spree glories of the 1990s rap canon, while a guest verse by 50 Cent on “City on the Map” and an essential, full-circle intro from Raekwon himself only further establish their bona fides.

slowthai knew the title of his album long before he wrote a single bar of it. He knew he wanted the record to speak candidly about his upbringing on the council estates of Northampton, and for it to advocate for community in a country increasingly mired in fear and insularity. Three years since the phrase first appeared in his breakout track ‘Jiggle’, Tyron Frampton presents his incendiary debut ‘Nothing Great About Britain’. Harnessing the experiences of his challenging upbringing, slowthai doesn’t dwell in self-pity. From the album’s title track he sets about systematically dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism. “Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?” ‘Nothing Great About Britain’ serves up a succession of candid snapshots of modern day British life; drugs, disaffection, depression and the threat of violence all loom in slowthai’s visceral verses, but so too does hope, love and defiance. Standing alongside righteous anger and hard truths, it’s this willingness to appear vulnerable that makes slowthai such a compelling storyteller, and this debut a vital cultural document, testament to the healing power of music. As slowthai himself explains, “Music to me is the biggest connector of people. It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together.”

Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated *Over It*, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape *Last Day of Summer*—as well as the *CLEAR* EP—the singer recontextualizes some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games.” “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name,” Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. *Over It* is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilizes a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru,” which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of *Over It*, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight.” “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT.” Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. *Over It*, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.

“How people may emotionally connect with music I’ve been involved in is something that part of me is completely mystified by,” Thom Yorke tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Human beings are really different, so why would it be that what I do connects in that way? I discovered maybe around \[Radiohead\'s album\] *The Bends* that the bit I didn’t want to show, the vulnerable bit… that bit was the bit that mattered.” *ANIMA*, Yorke’s third solo album, further weaponizes that discovery. Obsessed by anxiety and dystopia, it might be the most disarmingly personal music of a career not short of anxiety and dystopia. “Dawn Chorus” feels like the centerpiece: It\'s stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful with a claustrophobic “stream of consciousness” lyric that feels something like a slowly descending panic attack. And, as Yorke describes, it was the record\'s biggest challenge. “There’s a hit I have to get out of it,” he says. “I was trying to develop how ‘Dawn Chorus’ was going to work, and find the right combinations on the synthesizers I was using. Couldn’t find it, tried it again and again and again. But I knew when I found it I would have my way into the song. Things like that matter to me—they are sort of obsessive, but there is an emotional connection. I was deliberately trying to find something as cold as possible to go with it, like I sing essentially one note all the way through.” Yorke and longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich (“I think most artists, if they\'re honest, are never solo artists,” Yorke says) continue to transfuse raw feeling into the album’s chilling electronica. “Traffic,” with its jagged beats and “I can’t breathe” refrain, feels like a partner track to another memorable Yorke album opener, “Everything in Its Right Place.” The extraordinary “Not the News,” meanwhile, slaloms through bleeps and baleful strings to reach a thunderous final destination. It’s the work of a modern icon still engaged with his unique gift. “My cliché thing I always say is, \'You know you\'re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music,\'” Yorke says. “Because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don\'t want to know anymore. They\'re turning themselves off.”

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

There aren’t many rappers who can claim to have the stylistic influence that Young Thug has had—a fact that may or may not have slowed the once prolific artist’s rate of output. Never lacking in feature work, the majority of Thug’s career saw him release multiple projects annually before dropping the Future collaboration *SUPER SLIMEY* and the YSL Records showcase *Slime Language* in 2017 and 2018, respectively. A little more than halfway through 2019, Thugger awards his fans’ patience with *So Much Fun*, an album that not only reminds us what we’d been missing, but one whose title seems to speak directly to the experience of creating it. Thug sounds elated to be making music across *So Much Fun*, unloading quirky stream-of-consciousness bars like rounds from one of the many guns he so often cites. “I put on my brothers, I put on my bitch/Had to wear the dress, ’cause I had a stick,” he raps on “Just How It Is.” He gets explicit on “Lil Baby,” telling us, “She put my cum in her cup like it was shake/I’ll never fuck this bitch again, it was a mistake,” but also proclaims via “Ecstasy,” “I don’t wanna talk about no hoes with my dad.” Fair. The production on *So Much Fun*, along with the way Thug processes it, is based in trap but equally indebted to video game scoring and some unplaceable fantasy world. Frequent collaborators like Wheezy and Southside, as well as friend and former tourmate J. Cole, have pushed themselves to their weirdest in attempts to keep up with Thug’s vocal experiments. Here, they include playing with British slang (“Sup Mate”), aping Louis Armstrong’s singing voice (“Cartier Gucci Scarf”), and punctuating bars with Michael Jackson-reminiscent ad-libs (“Light It Up”). The MC is very clearly in his bag on *So Much Fun*, something that we might attribute to the peace he may have found as one of rap’s most revered innovators. He alludes to this himself on “Jumped Out the Window,” rapping, “I been in the top room at Tootsie’s, they ain’t stunt me/They know I got money, and I don’t want nothing.”