Idolator's 25 Best Albums of 2018

On her 15th studio album, and first in four years, Mariah Carey’s graceful R&B is punctuated by crisp hip-hop production, this time via Timbaland, DJ Mustard, and Drake’s frequent producer Nineteen85. Along with them are some of the most memorable hip-hop features in R&B: Ty Dolla $ign for the chant-led “The Distance” and Gunna on the upbeat, trap-influenced “Stay Long Love You.” When she’s on her own, she uses her spotlight to give a little female-empowerment sass on “GTFO” and “A No No.” But the real standout of the set may be the slinky, six-minute “Giving Me Life,” featuring Slick Rick and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes. Mariah Carey largely set the template for the current era of hybrid hip-hop/R&B-pop, and *Caution* proves she’s still pushing the musical conversation forward.

“I wanted to write an album that could give justice to being someone complex in the pop world,” the surging French star sometimes known as Héloïse Letissier tells Apple Music. “Pop music is so much recently about trying to simplify narratives, and I was trying to complexify mine. Christine is really me taking your shirt and talking to you really up close. I just want to make sure you actually meet me.” If you have not yet made his acquaintance, you are about to: his second album under the name Christine and the Queens takes his alter ego a step further with a bolder iteration named Chris. “The first album was born out of the frustration of being an aberration in society, because I was a young queer woman,” says the singer (who announced in August 2022 that he was gendering himself in the masculine). “The second was really born out of the aberration I was becoming, which was a powerful woman—being lustful and horny and sometimes angry, and craving for this will to just own everything a bit more and apologize a bit less.” While the new album, also named *Chris*, undoubtedly works as an exploration of identity and sexuality and power—and as self-aware performance art worthy of touchstones like David Bowie and Laurie Anderson—it is also a supremely danceable collection of synth-pop confections that never gets overwhelmed by its messages. “Doesn’t matter” makes something as heavy as questioning the existence of God feel weightless; “Girlfriend,” featuring LA producer/DJ Dâm-Funk, likewise aims for both the hips and the head. “I don’t feel like a girlfriend, but I’ll be your lover,” he says. “The song is basically me trying to steal a bit from the patriarchy. It’s purely empowering out of defiance and wittiness.” That flair for the dramatic comes naturally to this artist. “I wanted to be a stage director before I became a pop performer, and writing a record is kind of like staging a huge play in my head,” he says. “This is a mysterious job I have.”

*“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.

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.”

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

Karen Marie Ørsted’s pop ascendance happened so fast, she could hardly catch her breath. A year after releasing her debut album, the Danish singer struck gold with a feature on Major Lazer\'s “Lean On,” a global hit that broke streaming records and earned MØ collaborations with Justin Bieber, Snakehips, and Charli XCX. Despite pressure to release a follow-up, she wouldn’t be rushed. Instead, she left for Los Angeles to fulfill a lifelong dream of living in California. Her experience was bittersweet. On *Forever Neverland*—a nod to Hollywood’s obsession with youth—she serves up big, euphoric pop songs that are both soul-wrenching and sunny, and that wrestle to reconcile the city’s natural beauty (“Sun in Our Eyes,” featuring Diplo) with its superficiality (“California, you’re aware that everybody wants ya,” she sings on \"Purple Like the Summer Rain”). The album’s lone interlude will resonate with anyone who’s spent time on Sunset Blvd.: “Right now all I want to do is call up my mom/And get my ass out of West Hollywood.”

“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.

For years, Australian songwriter Amy Shark struggled to get her music heard. But that changed when her 2016 single \"Adore\" went quadruple platinum in her own country, paving the way for a debut album featuring collaborations with Jack Antonoff and one of her heroes, blink-182’s Mark Hoppus. As she found the confidence to present soul-baring material, that openness formed a sound—and story—that is definitively her own, but relatable to anyone. “Psycho,” her Mark Hoppus collaboration, is an honest, driving pop-punk admission to feeling paranoid and insecure at the start of a new relationship. The theme continues on “Leave Us Alone,” a dark reflection on self-destruction: “I don’t know who I am/I’m not fun anymore,” she sings. The Up Next alumnus tells Apple Music about trusting herself, working with big names, and opening up on her stunning, ARIA Album of the Year-winning debut. **What was the biggest lesson you learned while making this album?** To not let anything slide. I worked on “All Loved Up” with Jack Antonoff. He’s such a big producer and it’s hard to give notes to someone like that. The biggest lesson was to be confident, be strong, and voice your opinion. At the end of the day, this is gonna be on my album forever. **What motivated you to keep going during all the difficult moments?** Just the pure addiction to songwriting. I would’ve loved for radio to be playing me, but that wasn’t the main thing on my mind. Can I write a good song? That makes my day—I’m a bit of a weirdo like that. I don’t even really care if anyone hears it. I’m just like, “Oh, my god, that sounds great.” **What was it like to work with Jack Antonoff?** I’ve heard artists say, “Oh, we were so excited, jumping around the room,” and I’m like, “Man, that must be lovely, but I’m such a loner when I write.” But we were putting together “All Loved Up” and once we reached the chorus, we just sat there and were like, “This is a f\*\*kin’ song, man. This is really cool.” **You can hear that in “Psycho” too.** I’ve got a real soft spot for that song. I wasn’t even gonna put it on the album. And when the opportunity came for me to do something with Mark \[Hoppus\], I thought, *Maybe that could be its moment.* I sent it to him and he said, “Amy, this is sick. I really wanna be a part of it.” I convinced him to sing on it and it all came together. It’s such a special, special song—such a moment for me as a songwriter. **Was it hard to put those personal thoughts and stories out there, especially on your debut?** It’s never a challenge for me to write the songs—it has to be about something I care about. The challenge is the part where I’m like, *Am I okay with talking about this?”* For so long, I didn’t really have to talk about music, because I didn’t have anyone listening, so I was just using it for therapy. Or I might play it at a party in front of 12 people. Now, people are obsessing over why I’ve written it. But I don’t wanna hold back and start editing my songs because of that. And I think that’s why people like it—they need it.

If Robyn has found peace or happiness, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to her first album in eight years. Opener “Missing U” sets the mood, with wistful lines about stopped clocks and empty spaces left behind. Yet it’s somehow one of *Honey*’s more upbeat tracks, with an insistent rhythm and glittery arpeggios that recall the brightest moments of 2010’s *Body Talk*. At its best, Robyn’s music has always straddled the line between club-ready dance and melancholy pop, and her strongest singles to date, “Dancing On My Own” and “Be Mine!,” strike this balance perfectly. But never before have we heard the kind of emotional intensity that possesses *Honey*; in the years leading up to it, Robyn suffered through the 2014 death of longtime collaborator Christian Falk and a breakup with her partner Max Vitali (though they’ve since reunited). A few one-off projects aside, she mostly withdrew from music and public life, so *Honey* is a comeback in more ways than one. Produced with a handful of collaborators, like Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, the album mostly abandons the disco of \"Missing U,\" opting to pair Robyn’s darker lyrics with more understated, house-influenced textures. She gives in to nostalgia on “Because It’s in the Music” (“They wrote a song about us...Even though it kills me, I still play it anyway”) and gets existential on “Human Being” (“Don’t shut me out, you know we’re the same kind, a dying race”). But for all the urgent and relatable rawness, *Honey* is not all doom and gloom: By the time closer “Ever Again” rolls around, she’s on the upswing, and there’s a glimmer of a possible happy ending. “I swear I’m never gonna be brokenhearted ever again,” she sings, as if to convince herself. “I’m only gonna sing about love ever again.”

“This is my first album,” MNEK tells Apple Music, “and in the same way that you learn a language, it takes time to figure out how to go about it. It’s something to absorb — literally the first step amongst many.” Already an accomplished songwriting hired gun, with credits on Beyoncé’s “Hold Up,” Madonna’s “Hold Tight,” and Dua Lipa’s “IDGAF,” Uzoechi Emenike uses his own terrain to play with pop templates. From the intimate embrace on the cover to his lyrics’ openhearted honesty, he makes good on his desire to, as he says, “help the fight in normalizing black homosexuality in pop music.” Punchy anthem “Girlfriend” is a classic tale of falling for a taken man, with a crucial twist. “If you sing it as a girl, it’s not a big deal,” he explains. “But when I sing it as a boy?” He takes a dramatic gasp and laughs. But it’s the five-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, “Honeymoon Phaze,” that might be MNEK’s proudest moment. “It’s a song that I really had to fight to be on the album,” he says. “Everyone’s view was that it was indulgent and long and not poppy, but I liked that it wasn’t that. It’s the one song where I’m singing and just going off.”

If Christina Aguilera\'s 2002 album, *Stripped*, was her definitive statement on sexuality and identity, *Liberation*, her first album in six years, is her declaration of independence. As executive producer, she takes full creative control here, choosing her collaborators and dipping her toes in new stylistic streams. Her versatility is on full display on “Right Moves,” a simmer-down reggae joint, and “Sick of Sittin’,” an acid-rock throwback on which she taps her inner Tina Turner. And the Kanye West-produced “Accelerate,” with Ty Dolla $ign and 2 Chainz, deepens her relationship with hip-hop. But even more central than these playful experiments are the empowering vibes that the mom of two unleashes throughout: “Dreamers” opens with a chorus of girls\' voices stating their ambitions, and “Fall in Line” is a #MeToo anthem with Demi Lovato.

“My natural go-to is sad songs”, Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. But the South African-born, Australian-raised, LA-residing pop star found himself with a problem when he started work on his second album. “I’d go into the studio and think, ‘What am I sad about?’ And it just wasn’t there. So I started writing these lighter, happier songs.” That has manifested as *Bloom*, a warm, upbeat record about love, sex, relationships, and self-discovery. “My My My!,” “Bloom,” and “Dance to This (feat. Ariana Grande)” are ecstatic, innuendo-laden dance-pop hits that glow with the brightness of flourishing love. Even the more solemn songs about difficult moments and breaking up are wise and wistful, rather than melancholy. On “The Good Side,” he gently sings to his ex-boyfriend over an acoustic guitar: “I sympathize, and I recognize/And baby, I apologize/That I got the good side of things.” *Bloom* is, above all else, an ode to the joys of nascent maturity. “I’m out of the teen angst now,” he says. “I’m 23 and I feel a little bit more that I know who I am. I’m super in love. I wanted to immortalize that, as much for myself as anyone else.” Beyond the album’s more dynamic sound—which he says he designed for “hopping around the stage”—what really makes *Bloom* so special is the intimacy behind it all. “Music has always been extremely personal and extremely cathartic and therapeutic,” says Sivan, citing Amy Winehouse as an example of using specificity to make songs more relatable. “That’s the most powerful way to speak to an audience: to just be real with them.”

Rita Ora is resilient. The seven years between her debut album and this powerful follow-up were, by all accounts, tough, with record label legal entanglements, high-profile relationship drama, and unseemly rumors. “I was like, ‘I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m frustrated, I’m alone, I’m single, I’m sexless,’” she told curator Arjan Timmermans on Beats 1’s *The A-List Pop*. “Not anymore.” Armed with renewed self-confidence and a good-vibes-only outlook, she started fresh. *Phoenix*, of course, is a nod to rebirth. The album is adventurous, triumphant, and unflinchingly honest. “My fans deserve to know exactly how I feel, exactly what I went through, and exactly why they had to wait so bloody long for a Rita Ora album,” she said. Here are the stories behind a few of the album’s standout songs. **Falling to Pieces** “‘Falling to Pieces’ was the first time \[many of the album’s writers\] had come to London. They asked me, ‘What is this city about?’ And I said, ‘Let’s start off with that, because this is where I’m from.’ It became incredibly emotional. London was rainy and dark that day, which is what we had mood-wise, but the song has this sense of empowerment to it. It feels like London—incredible people of all different personalities, cultures, races. It’s one of my favorites on the album.” **Keep Talking** “Julia Michaels and I were in the studio, both pissed off about something, and I was like, ‘Don’t you just hate it when people just keep talking about you, and they don’t know you, and you just want to scream from the rooftops and be like, \'You’re all wrong!\' And she said, ‘They can just keep talking.’ And the song started. I wanted it to feel like two girls talking about something they had in common. Chris Martin, who is an absolute legend, helped take this song to another level. He put that Chris Martin dust on it.” **Soul Survivor** “‘Soul Survivor’ is, for me, the most honest I’ve ever been with myself, let alone my fans. I’m good at pretending things haven’t happened, at compartmentalizing things. This was the moment I said, \'I want to talk about being a survivor.\' Because I don’t think anybody went through what I went through, with such powerful individuals in the industry, sacrificing maybe being blacklisted forever because of the moves I had to make to survive. I felt like that was an inspiring story. ‘It’s been seven long years/Fighting for your attention/Manipulated by fear and misdirection.’ That’s just the opening line. It isn’t about anyone in specific, but the demons I had to face to get here. Without this song, I probably would never have believed in myself.”

He’s been labeled a hip–hop artist, but as the song says, Post Malone is a rockstar too. His second album regales fans with tales of the hedonism and excess that 2016’s astoundingly popular *Stoney* afforded him. The *beerbongs & bentleys* universe is one of partying, girls, money, and Saint Laurent clothes, but he makes no secret of the downsides to success. Money is everything—except true happiness, and this tenderness adds a dark depth to his addictive songs. This album, like his previous releases, proves that Post holds the recipe for the perfect chart-topper: a wild lifestyle, exceptionally catchy melodies, and the ability to fit Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and heartfelt acoustic ballads alongside fiery features from Nicki Minaj, YG, and 21 Savage.

Vance\'s romantic love songs feel like poetry poured into pop-music castings, overflowing with intimacy and tuneful tenderness. The Melbourne singer/songwriter is plenty talented on his own, but to tip the scales for album two, he hired seasoned songwriters Dave Bassett and Dan Wilson to cowrite many of the songs here. As a result, *Nation of Two* feels brighter and bigger, a rich plate of layered harmonies (“Lay It On Me”), buoyant rhythms (“We’re Going Home”), and flourishes of banjo and ukulele (“Saturday Sun”). They’re strung together by his quivering croon, which shines on acoustic ballads like “I’m with You,” a fairy-tale serenade so sweet it belongs in a Hallmark card.

In 2013, Emma Louise recorded a few songs with vocals pitched down. It was a far cry from her usual high, angelic voice, and she named that deepened register Joseph. You won’t hear Emma Louise on her third LP, *Lilac Everything*—just Joseph. The unique album, which only features those altered vocals, came about in Mexico, where Louise flew to escape a creative slump while in Melbourne. There, she worked with Tobias Jesso Jr., who took it on for his first project as a producer. While tracks such as the lush piano ballad “Wish You Well” and “Gentleman” might sound like familiar musical terrain for the singer, the deep, smoky baritone of her voice casts these songs—and Louise herself—in an entirely new light.