Les Inrocks' 50 Best Albums of 2016

In the four years between Frank Ocean’s debut album, *channel ORANGE*, and his second, *Blonde*, he had revealed some of his private life—he published a Tumblr post about having been in love with a man—but still remained as mysterious and skeptical towards fame as ever, teasing new music sporadically and then disappearing like a wisp on the wind. Behind great innovation, however, is a massive amount of work, and so when *Blonde* was released one day after a 24-hour, streaming performance art piece (*Endless*) and alongside a limited-edition magazine entitled *Boys Don’t Cry*, one could forgive him for being slippery. *Endless* was a visual album that featured the mundane beauty of Ocean woodworking in a studio, soundtracked by abstract and meandering ambient music. *Blonde* built on those ideas and imbued them with a little more form, taking a left-field, often minimalist approach to his breezy harmonies and ever-present narrative lyricism. His confidence was crucial to the risk of creating a big multimedia project for a sophomore album, but it also extended to his songwriting—his voice surer of itself (“Solo”), his willingness to excavate his weird impulses more prominent (“Good Guy,” “Pretty Sweet,” among others). Though *Blonde* packs 17 tracks into one quick hour, it’s a sprawling palette of ideas, a testament to the intelligence of flying one’s own artistic freak flag and trusting that audiences will meet you where you’re at. In this case, fans were enthusiastic enough for *Blonde* to rack up No. 1s on charts around the world.

Michael and Brian D’Addario welcome you into the ecstatic and wonderfully odd world of The Lemon Twigs. Their debut album is a joyous treasure trove of musical curios, from the baroque surf-pop of opener “I Wanna Prove to You” to “Hi+Lo”’s kaleidoscopic rock opera. “These Words,” meanwhile, is a barmy alt-anthem so fabulous it indulges itself a mid-song xylophone solo. Which almost perfectly sums up this endlessly exciting record.

*You Want It Darker* joins *Old Ideas* and *Popular Problems* in a trio of gorgeous, ruminative albums that find Cohen settling his affairs, spiritual (“Leaving the Table”), romantic (“If I Didn’t Have Your Love”), and otherwise. At 35, he sounded like an old man—at 82, he sounds eternal.

On the cover of his fourth studio album *Views*, Drake looks down from atop Toronto’s CN Tower, paying homage to the city’s notoriously frigid winter temperatures in a heavyweight shearling coat and high-cut boots. He looks less like the superhero he’d made himself into over the course of a roughly six-year rise as singer-songwriter extraordinaire and more like a troubled monarch. *Views*, which followed two wildly successful projects in 2015 that he’d branded as mixtapes—*If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late* and the Future collab *What a Time to Be Alive*—would confirm him as both, his penchant for immaculate songwriting still fully intact and the pressures of existing as the most popular voice in rap, as well as his hometown’s most successful export, weighing heavy on his mind. “I made a decision last night that I would die for it,” Drake raps on “9.” “Just to show the city what it takes to be alive for it.” Drake’s presence eclipsed Toronto just about as soon as *So Far Gone* dropped, but the city—and what it thinks of him—was never far from his mind. There are references here to specific people (“Redemption”), places (“Weston Road Flows”), and experiences (“Views”), along with nods to the influence of the city’s Caribbean population on “With You,” “Controlla,” and “Too Good” (which just happens to feature Rihanna). He isn’t too much for the world, though, ruminating on his position as one of music’s biggest names—and those who’d rather he wasn’t—on songs like “Still Here,” “Hype,” and “Grammys.” Maybe the the most affecting acknowledgment to this end is the fact that “Hotline Bling,” a strong contender for 2015 song of the summer, was such an afterthought by the time *Views* was released that it appears here as a bonus track. For all intents and purposes, the Drake of *Views* is the same one we got on *If You’re Reading This* and *What a Time*, but if his previous proper album (*Nothing Was the Same*) foretold anything, it’s that the man peering down from CN Tower sees things differently than the rest of us.

Bathed in noir shades, Cameron makes eerie synth tracks perfect for a David Lynch movie.

My name is Alex Cameron and I won't waste your time.  When you're talking about me and my business partner, Roy Molloy, you're talking about the online cowboys in the wild-west days of the World Wide Web.  And if you want to know what we're really about just look at all the things you wish you'd done differently.  All the things you stopped yourself from doing on account of the fear of failure, or rejection.  Weigh that up against your ambitions.  Think about your work ethic.  We're reclaiming failure as an act of progress.  An act of learning.  Something to celebrate. A word's meaning can change depending on who utters the thing; and so we present characters - shapes are morphed and stories are delivered.  This is a collection of 4-minute tales written to provide you with insight into the inner workings of failed ambitions and self-destruction. Unedited, uncensored, and without inhibition.  I've learned to reveal what I want to unlearn.  I cast a light on the darkness and in doing so understand love and compassion.  Fear is to be confronted, and to learn strictly requires failure - over and over.  Celebrate failure with 'Jumping the Shark'.

The songwriter transfigures personal tragedy into growling, elemental elegies. On his latest collaboration with the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave pulls us through the gorgeous, groaning terrors of “Anthrocene” and “Jesus Alone” only to deliver us, scarred but safe, to “I Need You” and “Skeleton Tree,” a pair of tender, mournful folk ballads.

Bon Iver’s third LP is as bold as it is beautiful. Made during a five-year period when Justin Vernon contemplated ditching the project altogether, *22, A Million* perfects the sound alloyed on 2011’s *Bon Iver*: ethereal but direct, layered but stripped-back, as processed as EDM yet naked as a fallen branch. The songs here run together as though being uncovered in real time, with highlights—“29 #Strafford APTS,” “8 (circle)”—flashing in the haze.

'22, A Million' is part love letter, part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion. And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. The album’s 10 poly-fi recordings are a collection of sacred moments, love’s torment and salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or disregard as coincidence. If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces, then '22, A Million' is the letting go of that attachment to a place.

Brooklyn art-rockers Parquet Courts have sometimes obscured their warmth under a cover of discord, challenging song structures and sardonic detachment. Their fifth album simplifies and purifies their sound to thrilling effect though. Whether they’re dovetailing or duelling, Andrew Savage and Austin Brown’s punchy riffs sublimate into the band’s poppiest hooks yet. There’s emotional engagement too, with Savage opening up his heartache and isolation on the bittersweet “Human Performance” and “Berlin Got Blurry”’s collision of thrumming post-punk and surf guitar licks.

Recorded over the course of a year against a backdrop of personal instability, "Human Performance" massively expands the idea of what a Parquet Courts record can be. They've been one of the most critically acclaimed bands of the last 5 years; this is the record that backs all those words up. “Every day it starts, anxiety,” began the first song on 2014’s "Content Nausea." Those were essentially the song’s only lyrics, but "Human Performance" picks up where that thought left off, picking apart the anxieties of modern life: “The unavoidable noise of NYC that can be maddening, the kind of the impossible struggle against clutter, whether it's physical or mental or social,” says singer, guitarist and "Human Performance" producer/mixer Austin Brown. There has always been the emotional side of Parquet Courts, which has always had an important balance with the more discussed cerebral side, but Savage sees "Human Performance" as a redistribution of weight in that balance. "I began to question my humanity, and if it was always as sincere as I thought, or if it was a performance,” says Savage. “I felt like a sort of malfunctioning apparatus,” he says. “Like a machine programmed to be human showing signs of defect.” The sonic diversity, time, and existential effort that went into its creation makes "Human Performance" Parquet Courts' most ambitious record to date. It's a work of incredible creative vision born of seemingly insurmountable adversity. It is also their most accessible record yet.

After the lonesome folk and skeletal roadhouse soul of her debut album, 2012’s *Half Way Home*, Angel Olsen turned up the intensity on *Burn Your Fire for No Witness*, and she does it again on *MY WOMAN*. The title’s in all caps for a reason: The St. Louis, Missouri, native’s third album is bigger in both the acrobatic feats of her always-agile voice and the widescreen, hi-fi sound that Olsen and co-producer Justin Raisen bring to the table. With the very first song, “Intern,” it’s clear that Olsen has taken us somewhere new. A slow dance in a dive bar at last call, it might be familiar turf were it not for the synthesizers that cast an eerie glow across the song’s red-velvet backdrop. “Never Be Mine” harnesses the anguish of ’60s girl groups in jangling guitar and crisp backbeats; “Shut Up Kiss Me” couches desire in terms so heated the mic practically melts beneath Olsen’s yelp. Mindful of its ancestry but never expressly retro, the album is a triumph of rock ’n’ roll pathos, an exquisite dissertation on the poetry of twang and tremolo. And even if “There is nothing new/Under the sun,” as Olsen sings on the fateful “Heart Shaped Face,” she is forever finding ways to file down everyday truths to a finer point, drawing blood with every new prick. As she sighs over watery piano and fathomless reverb on the heartbreaking closer, “Pops,” “It hurts to start dreaming/Dreaming again.” But that pain is precisely what makes *MY WOMAN* so unforgettable, and so true.

Anyone reckless enough to have typecast Angel Olsen according to 2013’s ‘Burn Your Fire For No Witness’ is in for a sizable surprise with her third album, ‘MY WOMAN’. The crunchier, blown-out production of the former is gone, but that fire is now burning wilder. Her disarming, timeless voice is even more front-and-centre than before, and the overall production is lighter. Yet the strange, raw power and slowly unspooling incantations of her previous efforts remain, so anyone who might attempt to pigeonhole Olsen as either an elliptical outsider or a pop personality is going to be wrong whichever way they choose - Olsen continues to reign over the land between the two with a haunting obliqueness and sophisticated grace. Given its title, and track names like ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’, it would be easy to read a gender-specific message into ‘MY WOMAN’, but Olsen has never played her lyrical content straight. She explains: “I’m definitely using scenes that I’ve replayed in my head, in the same way that I might write a script and manipulate a memory to get it to fit. But I think it’s important that people can interpret things the way that they want to.” That said, Olsen concedes that if she could locate any theme, whether in the funny, synth-laden ‘Intern’ or the sadder songs which are collected on the record’s latter half, “then it’s maybe the complicated mess of being a woman and wanting to stand up for yourself, while also knowing that there are things you are expected to ignore, almost, for the sake of loving a man. I’m not trying to make a feminist statement with every single record, just because I’m a woman. But I do feel like there are some themes that relate to that, without it being the complete picture.” Over her two previous albums, she’s given us reverb-shrouded poetic swoons, shadowy folk, grunge-pop band workouts and haunting, finger-picked epics. ‘MY WOMAN’ is an exhilarating complement to her past work, and one for which Olsen recalibrated her writing/recording approach and methods to enter a new music-making phase. She wrote some songs on the piano she’d bought at the end of the previous album tour, but she later switched it out for synth and/or Mellotron on a few of them, such as the aforementioned ‘Intern’. ‘MY WOMAN’ is lovingly put together as a proper A-side and a B-side, featuring the punchier, more pop/rock-oriented songs up front, and the longer, more reflective tracks towards the end. The rollicking ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’, for example, appears early on - its nervy grunge quality belying a subtle desperation, as befits any song about the exhaustion point of an impassioned argument. Another crowning moment comes in the form of the melancholic and Velvets-esque ‘Heart-shaped Face’, while the compelling ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’ are the only songs not sung live. They also both run well over the seven-minute mark: the first being a triumph of reverb-splashed, ’70s country rock, cast along Fleetwood Mac lines with a Neil Young caged-tiger guitar solo to cap it off. The latter is a wonderful essay in vintage electronic pop and languid, psychedelic soul. Because her new songs demanded a plurality of voices, Olsen sings in a much broader range of styles on the album, and she brought in guest guitarist Seth Kauffman to augment her regular band of bass player Emily Elhaj, drummer Joshua Jaeger and guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. As for a producer, Olsen took to Justin Raisen, who’s known for his work with Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira and Santigold, as well as opting to record live to tape at LA’s historic Vox Studios. As the record evolves, you get the sense that the “My Woman” of the title is Olsen herself - absolutely in command, but also willing to bend with the influence of collaborators and circumstances. If ever there was any pressure in the recording process, it’s totally undetectable in the result. An intuitively smart, warmly communicative and fearlessly generous record, ‘MY WOMAN’ speaks to everyone. That it might confound expectation is just another of its strengths.

Michael Kiwanuka’s stunning second LP proves he’s an artist with something to say. *Love & Hate* is a timely and timeless set of slow-burning soul that recalls Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, and Curtis Mayfield. Produced by Danger Mouse, it sounds of the past and present all at once—as it does in the string-embossed swing of “Black Man in a White World.”

A year after the release of his GRAMMY®-winning breakthrough—2015’s *Beauty Behind the Madness*—The Weeknd returns with *Starboy*, a double album of interstellar soul and feverish R&B that orbits around an ambitious title character. Bookended by two titanic but very different Daft Punk collaborations, it’s a listening experience that, from start to finish, speaks to the Toronto native’s mastery of both melody and mood. “It’s good to have darkness,” he told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “Because when the light comes, it feels that much better.”

The new Weyes Blood record, Front Row Seat To Earth, is the folk music of the near future. Natalie Mering, the being behind Weyes Blood, embeds her sublime song in a harmonic gauze of arpeggiated piano, acoustic guitar, druggy horns, and outer space electronics. Propulsive, spare drums carry us across the album’s course. There is a faded California beauty to Front Row. A gentle honesty that recalls the finest folk music made on the West Coast of the ‘70s. The hue hangs in the sweet-spooky harmonies, the pulsing sway of the vibrato, and the ecstatic chord resolves. It is the joyful release of energy as the song delicately unfolds from intro to extrospection. But this beauty is scratched with shadow; with dark foreboding, alienation, and acceptance of change. Love and loss balance together in suspended alchemy, as the earthiness of the singer-songwriter tradition wears digital sounds like feathers in its hair. Mering, together with co-producer Chris Cohen and some special guests, contrasts live band intimacy with the post-modern electric sheen of A.M. radio atmospherics. The experimental flourishes sparkle amid the succinct, thoughtful arrangements. The closeness of this record - how personal, alone, and frank it feels - conceals its aspirations to the outside, to the "Earth" of its title. Weyes Blood harbors devastating weight while also universalizing the strange ways of identity and relationships. These are not typical love songs or protest songs -- they are painful, poignant riddles that celebrate the ambiguity of love and affirm the conflict of harmonious life within a disharmonic world.

Solemn, wrenching and totally stunning; *Freetown Sound* proves Dev Hynes has become one of pop’s great alchemists. Named after Sierra Leone’s capital (his father’s hometown), it’s an album, says Hynes, “for the under-appreciated.” Its dominant themes—exquisite heartbreak and displacement—check that description out. The music—scintillating, poised, and sticky synth-soul—make it a record for the under-appreciated to hold very close. Highlights are bountiful, but the ecstatic “Best To You” receives a glorious Real Thing assist and “Hadron Collider”, a mercurial Nelly Furtado ballad, will long stay with you.

Freetown Sound is the third album from Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange. Written and produced by Hynes, Freetown Sound is a tour de force, a pastiche of Hynes’ past, present, and future that melds his influences with his own established musical voice. For well over a decade, Devonté Hynes has proven himself a virtuoso of versatility, experimenting with almost every conceivable musical genre under a variety of monikers. After moving to New York City in the mid-2000s, Hynes became Blood Orange, plumming the oeuvres of the city’s musical legends to create a singular style of urgent, delicate pop music. Freetown Sound, which follows 2011’s Coastal Grooves and 2013’s breakthrough Cupid Deluxe, builds upon everything Hynes has done as an artist, resulting in the most expansive artistic statement of his career. Drawing from a deep well of techniques and references, the album unspools like a piece of theater, evoking unexpected communions of moods, voices, and eras. Freetown Sound derives its name from the birthplace of Hynes’ father, the capital of Sierra Leone. Thematically, it is profoundly personal and unapologetically political, touching on issues of race, religion, sex, and sexism over 17 shimmering songs.

Benjamin Biolay finds inspiration in unlikely places on his moody seventh album—somewhere between Paris and Argentina, to be precise. A cross between Leonard Cohen and Arthur H, the Frenchman\'s intimate rasp is in fine form, recounting sleepless adventures on the James Bond-esque title track. He explores love and abandon on the slinky \"La débandade,” which showcases the croonerly corners of his range. And a Latin breeze drifts through the groovy \"Palermo Soho,\" with Biolay dropping languorous come-ons in Spanish. Even when lamenting his broken heart, as on the nostalgic \"Pas sommeil,\" he never breaks a sweat.

Thugga’s agility and anguish come together in a high-impact performance for the ages. He’s always been lithe, but witness the rapper’s snakelike vocals slide through “Wyclef Jean” and “Swizz Beats,” both built on the subliminal rumbles of dub and dancehall. While he digs into “Future Swag” with wolfish gusto, his fractured croon finds home in the sore-hearted hedonism of “Riri.”

ANOHNI has collaborated with Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke on the artist's latest work, HOPELESSNESS. Late last year, ANOHNI, the lead singer from Antony and the Johnsons, released “4 DEGREES", a bombastic dance track celebrating global boiling and collapsing biodiversity.  Rather than taking refuge in good intentions, ANOHNI gives voice to the attitude sublimated within her behavior as she continues to consume in a fossil fuel-based economy. ANOHNI released “4 DEGREES,” the first single from her upcoming album HOPELESSNESS, to support the Paris climate conference this past December. The song emerged earlier last year in live performances. As discussed by ANOHNI: "I have grown tired of grieving for humanity, and I also thought I was not being entirely honest by pretending that I am not a part of the problem," she said. “’4 DEGREES' is kind of a brutal attempt to hold myself accountable, not just valorize my intentions, but also reflect on the true impact of my behaviors.” The album, HOPELESSNESS, to be released world wide on May 6th 2016, is a dance record with soulful vocals and lyrics addressing surveillance, drone warfare, and ecocide.  A radical departure from the singer’s symphonic collaborations, the album seeks to disrupt assumptions about popular music through the collision of electronic sound and highly politicized lyrics.  ANOHNI will present select concerts in Europe, Australia and the US in support of HOPELESSNESS this Summer.

Primitives, Sellers’ debut as Bayonne, is a rich, complex work, the kind with no clear rock parallel. In its winding, maze-like structures are hints of both Steve Reich and Owen Pallett, each instrument working a single melodic pattern over and over and over, as Sellers threads his soft, reedy voice between them. On songs like “Appeals,” the effect is hypnotic: notes from a piano crash down like spilled marbles from a bucket, as Sellers’ ringing-bell vocals swing back and forth between them. The end result is spellbinding music, meticulously-crafted songs where each tiny piece locks into another, and hundreds of them joined together create a breathtaking whole — like dots in a Seurat, or tiny bones in a dinosaur skeleton.

The dynamic, award-winning composer Jóhann Jóhansson takes up the tragic Greek tale of Orpheus in his first album for Deutsche Grammophon. *Orphée* features a kaleidoscopic array of instrumentations, from string quartet to electronics and choir, drawing from the Icelandic composer’s minimal, serene style to produce a focused, postmodern foray into atmosphere and myth.

After a five-year break, Justice return with *Woman*, a feel-good frenzy of rock-funk-disco that demands to be turned up. It\'s in line with the French pair’s signature sound—an aggressive brand of dance-pop sometimes called the New French Touch—but feels more well-rounded than earlier projects. “Chorus” and “Close Call” are unexpected moments of seriousness, and “Randy” is electrifying yet soft. But the whole album is high on drama, which is the way Justice like it. They told Zane Lowe: “If every song could sound like the opening of a boxing championship when the guy enters the stadium... well, it would be great.”

Radiohead’s ninth album is a haunting collection of shapeshifting rock, dystopian lullabies, and vast spectral beauty. Though you’ll hear echoes of their previous work—the remote churn of “Daydreaming,” the feverish ascent and spidery guitar of “Ful Stop,” Jonny Greenwood’s terrifying string flourishes—*A Moon Shaped Pool* is both familiar and wonderfully elusive, much like its unforgettable closer. A live favorite since the mid-‘90s, “True Love Waits” has been re-imagined in the studio as a weightless, piano-driven meditation that grows more exquisite as it gently floats away.

On *New Misery*, Cullen Omori creates dazzling, glam-infused indie rock with sparkling, expansive instrumentation. Inspired by the Top 40 pop played at his medical-supply company day job, Omori drenches these songs in blurry reverb, as heard in the title track’s swaying ’60s haze or in the echoing drums, spacey harmonies, and dreamy melancholia of “No Big Deal.” The slow-burning “And Yet the World Still Turns” distills everything that makes this album great: blissful, enveloping ambience fused with pure pop wizardry.

A confessional autobiography and meditation on being black in America, this album finds Solange searching for answers within a set of achingly lovely funk tunes. She finds intensity behind the patient grooves of “Weary,” expresses rage through restraint in “Mad,” and draws strength from the naked vulnerability of “Where Do We Go.” The spirit of Prince hovers throughout, especially over “Junie,” a glimmer of merriment in an exquisite portrait of sadness.

Over the past four years, North-East siblings Peter and David Brewis have threaded their way through one extra-curricular project after another but were inevitably drawn back to working together on their own songs. "As much fun as we might have had on our own or collaborating, we missed just spending time in the studio, the two of us, trying things out and playing together." explains David. The space that Field Music vacated in those four years still appears to be empty. No one else really does what Field Music do: the interweaving vocals, the rhythmic gear changes, the slightly off-chords, but with the sensibility that keeps them within touching distance of pop music. But with Commontime, Field Music show off their unashamed love of choruses in a way they’ve only hinted at before. Written and recorded in spontaneous bursts over six months in their Wearside studio, Commontime is built around the brothers playing and singing together again, but also features a wider array of players, including original Field Music keyboardist Andrew Moore, Peter's wife Jennie Brewis and new member of the live band Liz Corney on vocals, plus a panoply of other players. “We wanted to embrace being a duo and, perversely, that made us feel more comfortable about all of those conspicuous cameos” reveals David. Over the fourteen songs of Commontime, real life conversations are replayed, acquaintances come and go, hard won friendships are left to drift and diffuse snap shots of the everyday are pulled together into what must rank amongst Field Music’s best works to date.

On the gritty, star-studded *Blank Face LP*, ScHoolboy Q is at his very best. Through 17 tracks of heavy-lidded gangsta rap, the incisive L.A. native joins forces with guests both legendary (E-40, Jadakiss, Tha Dogg Pound) and soon-to-be (Vince Staples, Anderson. Paak). “Robbin’ your kids too,” he says on “Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane,” a haunting double feature. “My heart a igloo.”

After giving the world a decade of nonstop hits, the big question for Rihanna was “What’s next?” Well, she was going to wait a little longer than expected to reveal the answer. Four years separated *Unapologetic* and her eighth album. But she didn’t completely escape from the spotlight during the mini hiatus. Rather, she experimented in real time by dropping one-off singles like the acoustic folk “FourFiveSeconds” collaboration with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, the patriotic ballad “American Oxygen,” and the feisty “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The sonic direction she was going to land on for *ANTI* was still murky, but those songs were subtle hints nonetheless. When she officially unleashed *ANTI* to the world, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the Rihanna we’d come to know from years past. In an unexpected twist, the singer tossed her own hit factory formula (which she polished to perfection since her 2005 debut) out the window. No, this was a freshly independent Rihanna who intentionally took time to dig deep. As the world was holding its breath awaiting the new album, she found a previously untapped part of her artistry. *ANTI* says it all in the title: The album is the complete antithesis of Pop Star Rihanna. From the abstract cover art (which features a poem written in braille) to newfound autonomy after leaving her longtime record label, Def Jam, to form her own, *ANTI* shattered all expectations of what a structured pop album should sound like—not only for her own standards, but also for fellow artists who wanted to demolish industry rules. And the risk worked in her favor: it became the singer’s second No. 1 LP. “I got to do things my own way, darling/Will you ever let me?/Will you ever respect me?” Rihanna mockingly asks on the opening track, “Consideration.” In response, the rest of the album dives headfirst into fearlessness where she doesn’t hesitate to get sensual, vulnerable, and just a little weird. *ANTI*’s overarching theme is centered on relationships. Echoing Janet Jackson’s *The Velvet Rope*, Rihanna details the intricacies of love from all stages. Lead single “Work” is yet another flirtatious reunion with frequent collaborator Drake as they tease each other atop a steamy dancehall bassline. She spits vitriolic acid on the Travis Scott-produced “Woo,” taunting an ex-flame who walked away from her: “I bet she could never make you cry/’Cause the scars on your heart are still mine.” What’s most notable throughout *ANTI* is Rihanna’s vocal expansion, from her whiskey-coated wails on the late-night voicemail that is “Higher” to breathing smoke on her rerecorded version of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” Yet the signature Rihanna DNA remained on the album. The singer proudly celebrated her Caribbean heritage on the aforementioned “Work,” presented women with yet another kiss-off anthem with “Needed Me,” and flaunted her erotic side on deluxe track “Sex With Me.” Ever the sonic explorer, she also continued to uncover new genres by going full ’50s doo-wop on “Love on the Brain” and channeling Prince for the velvety ’80s power-pop ballad “Kiss It Better.” *ANTI* is not only Rihanna’s brilliant magnum opus, but it’s also a sincere declaration of freedom as she embraces her fully realized womanhood.

The playfully titled *Introducing* recasts alt-folkie Karl Blau as a bejeweled country crooner. A gorgeous exercise covering left-field classics by artists like Townes Van Zandt (“If I Needed You”) and Tom T. Hall (“That’s How I Got To Memphis”), the album presents a vision of country more in tune with indie Americana than Nashville, leaning on plush, mellow arrangements and Blau’s beery baritone, which delivers the songs’ lovelorn lyrics with the slightest of winks.

The first sound on Nicolas Jaar’s new record Sirens is a flag whipping in a gale. It’s the sort of sound you don’t realize you know until you hear it. But it’s unmistakable. And pregnant with meaning: nation, memory, conquest—but also frailty, a delicate thing buffeted by mercurial winds. The second sound is breaking glass. Nicholas Jaar has been busy. Since 2015, he’s released Nymphs, a series of four EPs, and Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. If Nymphs and Pomegranates represent two sides of the coin of Jaar’s work—club and experimental ambient respectively—Sirens, he says, is“the coin itself”: the terrain, the constraints, the material conditions from which the others emerge. Sirens is animated by an ambivalence at the heart of American music: that, in some fundamental sense, the history of American popular culture is a history of theft. The six lush tracks move seamlessly from rock to reggaetón to doo-wop, each exhibiting Jaar’s signature sensitivity to restraint and exuberance, disjuncture and groove, comfort and disquiet. Foregrounded throughout is the question of what these forms—artifacts of empire and its resistance both—can do for us today. Jaar, whose parents lived under dictatorship in Chile and whose grandparents are Palestinian, ascribes to Víctor Jara’s philosophy that you’re making political music whether you want to or not. The injustices of the past weigh heavily on the living, structuring the possibilities of the present. As Jaar sings, “we’re all waiting for the old thoughts to die.” For now, they’re our thoughts too. Jaar composed and recorded all the music on Sirens himself, with one exception: a sample of the Andean folk song “Lagrimas”—tears—which appears, almost unadorned, in the middle of “No,” the fourth track on Siren. “No” recalls the Chilean national plebiscite of 1988, when artists and activists organized millions of Chileans to vote “no”to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The song is a meditation on the seeming futility of protest against systems that structure our very reality. Over a loping reggaetón beat, Jaar laments, “ya dijimos no, pero el Si está en todo.”We already said no, but the Yes is everywhere. The songs on Sirens are fiercely critical, but they are generous too, even loving. “I made these songs to play for my friends, for people going to see music,” Jaar says. The place he wants to be is liminal: between the precious sense of freedom that only music can provide, and the reality that there’s no escape; between “knowing that we’re trying to get away and knowing that we can’t. That maybe,” he says, “we shouldn’t.” After the glass shatters, a rush of sound, fluttering pianos and synth mingle with the shards. The shimmering music billows and quiets. There is calm. Then the glass shatters again.

The border-crossing pop visionary returns with her most positive and self-assured album yet. Like her past triumphs, *AIM* is both thoughtful and provocative. Between the bhangra and boom-bap is the lived-in confidence of an artist who no longer has to shout to be heard, evidenced on the Delhi dancehall of “Visa” and the album-closing “Survivor,” her most unabashedly pretty song yet.

Shimmering, immersive, and buoyed by a light sense of melancholy throughout, *Is the Is Are* is filled with stunning purpose, distilling the jangly shoegaze outfit’s early sound into something atmospheric but focused—despite its palatial, 17-track length. Highlights (including “Dopamine,” “Is the Is Are,” and the aching “Mire (Grant’s Song)”) don’t break the mood so much as surface like moments of clarity in the middle of a dream.

Is the Is Are, the highly-anticipated sophomore release from Brooklyn-based DIIV, is an album years and many personal struggles in the making for it's architect, Zachary Cole Smith. Recorded and mixed in various locations in Brooklyn, it showcases everything you know and love about DIIV, and many things you did not, all with an added nuance and depth. It is a 17-song, double-album statement intended to resonate with its audience in much the same way that Bad Moon Rising or Tago Mago has for Smith himself. An extension and deepening of the musical ideas first expressed on 2012's critically-lauded Oshin, Is the Is Are yields a multiplicity of textures, lyrical themes, and moods. It is a more diverse world than Oshin, with different parameters and ideals. Dark and honest to a fault, the new songs are dynamic, loud, quiet, sad; they are songs that hiss and snarl; songs that, as Smith wrote recently, represent "the real me." Smith’s vocals, too, are much closer to the foreground, layered legibly on top of tidal waves of shimmering guitar and melodic bass weaving in and out, leaving a distinct and indelible imprint.

NOTE: Not Available For Purchase In Brazil Céu Drives Home the Rhythm with Tropix Brazilian singer returns with strong beats and gorgeous melodies One of the persistent challenges facing artists is keeping things fresh. Brazilian singer Céu seems to have no problem with this, however. From her self-titled gem of a debut to the dub influenced Vagarosa, to the road trip-themed Caravana Sereia Bloom, as well as last year’s gorgeous live recording, she goes beat heavy on Tropix (Six Degrees Records). In her quest for a more upbeat, rhythm-driven album, she employed the production help of French native Hervé Salters, aka General Elektriks, who cut his teeth playing keyboards for Femi Kuti and playing with Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, and Pupillo, drummer of one of a longstanding Brazilian feature, Naçao Zumbi, as well as his country’s most in-demand producer. Working with them was a dream come true, says Céu. They were able to translate her vision into reality with Tropix, which she says is a combination of ‘tropical’ and ‘pixel.’ “Somehow the pixel became a inspiration,” she says. “A pixel is a small part of a big thing—defragmentation as a concept. That’s also why the album has a lot of arpeggiator keyboard, to capture that sound.”