Los Angeles Times' Best Albums of 2019

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

Jon Pardi\'s 2016 sophomore album *California Sunrise* was a commercial and critical success, cementing the California-born country artist as one of the most exciting young acolytes of neo-traditional country music. Now, Pardi has returned with *Heartache Medication*, a lively, fun-loving LP that infuses his throwback sensibilities with modern flourishes. The album also finds Pardi turning up the volume (and the distortion) and showing off his rock \'n\' roll chops (\"Tied One On,\" \"Me and Jack\"), while throwing in the occasional soulful moment (\"Don\'t Blame It on Whiskey\") and sweeping ballad (\"Ain\'t Always the Cowboy\") for good measure. Below, Pardi gives Apple Music the inside scoop on how he brought his influences together on *Heartache Medication*. **Old Hat** \"I heard \'Old Hat\' on Jeff Hyde\'s record \[2018\'s *Norman Rockwell World*\]. It was cool-sounding, and it talked about old-school things, like opening the door for a lady. It\'s a very sweet song about being a gentleman. One of the main reasons that song is on the record is Summer, my girlfriend, loves it. She said it reminds her of how many shitty dates she\'s been on. The ladies love a gentleman.\" **Heartache Medication** \"I wrote that song two years ago. I had the title. I thought the title was really cool-sounding—you kind of knew what you were talking about without having to say it. It\'s about a guy having a good time, dealing with heartache but having fun. A little bit of drinking, a little bit of dancing, a little bit of everything to make you feel good.\" **Nobody Leaves a Girl Like That** \"\'Nobody Leaves a Girl Like That\' was written by Bart Butler, Marv Green, and Jimmy Yeary. I hadn\'t heard anything like it. Originally it was super, super, super country, believe it or not. I always wanted a Brooks & Dunn-sounding song—you could hear Ronnie \[Dunn\] singing it. I always say that would be me if I left my girlfriend, Summer. As an artist you have to put yourself in that situation to feel that emotion.\" **Ain\'t Always the Cowboy** \"That\'s the \'lighter in the air\' song right there. What an idea. It\'s something that\'s always been there, with the cowboy riding away, but it hasn\'t been sung like this. It\'s a big power ballad of a song. I like power ballads. It\'s very \'80s. I love that girl power, like, \'Go do your own thing. I\'m here toughing it out regardless of what you\'re going to do.\' I knew girls would love it, and guys love it too. It was a no-brainer when we heard that song.\" **Me and Jack** \"\'Me and Jack\' is based on a true story. I wrote that song in LA on a writer\'s retreat. I had that idea in my phone, as many of our songwriters do with our notes in our iPhones now. I put \'me and Jack and Johnny Cash\'—I wanted it to sound like Johnny Cash, with a train kind of beat. I always thought Johnny Cash had the best story-songs. At the top of the song, when it says, \'Hey Jon, it\'s nice to meet you. My name is Jack,\' that was my secret homage to Johnny Cash. In the van days, we\'d put Jack Daniel\'s on the rider for our dressing room, but they\'d always give us the gigantic bottle. Crazy stuff would happen. We took it off the rider, and that\'s where I got the idea.\" **Don\'t Blame It on Whiskey (feat. Lauren Alaina)** “You notice how we put that right after \'Me and Jack\'? I heard Eric Church\'s version in 2010 and I thought it was a great song. Then my A&R person played it for me the day before we went in to cut, and I was like, \'I\'ll cut it if you get me the permission.\' He texted Miranda \[Lambert\] and Eric and they said they were excited. I love that Lauren Alaina is on it—she sounds great. It\'s about that point in a relationship where you\'re either done or you\'re gonna try to fix it but you can\'t blame it on other things. I\'ve been there for sure. I love songs that can hit an emotion.\" **Tied One On** \"We got a lot of drinking songs. \'I cut her loose and tied one on.\' That was another one that Bart Butler brought me at the last minute, the day before we went in to record the album. The demo sounded a lot different than when I recorded it. It\'s another one I really related to, because before my girlfriend Summer, I was just over relationships. So that really resonated with me and it made me want to go dance and go party. I feel like if a song can make you feel like that, you need to record it, or write it. It\'s rock \'n\' roll; it\'s Dwight Yoakam; it has country all over it. What can I say? It\'s an awesome song. And I didn\'t write it, so I can say that.\" **Oughta Know That** \"That\'s the jam. When I first wrote that, Bart Butler had the title. We wrote it in two hours. It\'s just a stomper, a punch-somebody-in-the-face kind of song. It has rowdy all over it. Even nowadays, I shouldn\'t have stayed out too late, I shouldn\'t have drank too much, I shouldn\'t have gone to that one spot with my buddies, because I have to get up and go to work. I oughta know that by now. We can all relate to it.\" **Tequila Little Time** \"I can feel a spicy margarita in my future. I love spicy margaritas. We wrote that on a Northern California retreat at the little studio I have at my mom\'s house. Rhett Akins was on the couch, just laying down. He couldn\'t come up with nothing all day. He blurped out, \'Tequila little time with you,\' and we finished it in about an hour and a half. It\'s the old-school picking up a girl when she\'s down, but slyly. Not trying to be too creepy. When we wrote it we were like, \'We can\'t make it creepy.\'\" **Buy That Man a Beer** \"Clint Daniels wrote that song. It reminded me a lot of the guys I grew up with, like my dad\'s friends, like veterans, or people playing music downtown, just out there working hard. It\'s a song for hard workers, like, \'Here\'s a beer, bud. Keep doing what you\'re doing.\' The song took me to a different place. You have to pay respect to people, and why not do it by buying them a beer?\" **Call Me Country** \"\'Call Me Country\' was written about my \'70s heroes. It\'s a time in country music where you\'re not really gonna hear songs like those on the radio anymore. You\'ve got Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard. For me, those guys are the older generation I got into as an older listener. When I was young, I was all about some Alan Jackson and George Strait. But when you dig in to those older guys, it\'s a different sound. Waylon Jennings was Waylon Jennings, you know.\" **Just Like Old Times** \"\'Just Like Old Times\' was supposed to be on *California Sunrise*. I was like, \'Man, I\'m not going to shelve this song again. It has to be on the record.\' I didn\'t have to sing it. I just put it on the record. It was ready to go. It\'s one of my favorites. When I hear that song, it makes me want to dance with somebody. I love the story—you can see it in your head.\" **Love Her Like She\'s Leaving** \"That\'s Dean Dillon and Bart Butler and Jessie Jo Dillon. I was talking to Dean—he was wanting to get on the record—and I was like, \'Man, I love that \'80s George Strait stuff. We\'ve been digging into that.\' He came up with the song and we really produced it so it was \'80s, early-\'90s kind of style, with the gut-string guitar. I love the message—every guy\'s been there. It\'s one of my favorites on the record.\" **Starlight** \"I wrote \'Starlight\' in 2014. It was mainly inspired by my grandmother, who got me into music when I was young. She died when I was 14. I wish she could see me, but I know she\'s around me and here in spirit. I wanted to make that feeling universal to everyone. I didn\'t want to write a song about my grandma, I wanted it to be meaningful to anybody who has lost somebody they love and they feel like they\'re there around them, like when you get chills on your arm. My buddy passed away last year. Back in the day, he was the guy who thought I would never lose. I couldn\'t make the damn funeral because I was on the road, so I made this video and talked to his family—he left two daughters—and I wanted to give them something. I sent them \'Starlight\' and the video for his celebration of life. Everybody talked about the song and everybody was crying, and it showed me how powerful that song could be. And that\'s why I wanted to end the record like that, to end with a remembrance.\"

With the DIY video for her 2017 track “Pretty Girl,” Clairo became the premier case study for how the internet can instantly blow up homespun artists. But with her full-length debut album, the Massachusetts indie-pop phenom betrays a bold artistic vision that can no longer be contained by her bedroom walls. Co-produced by the artist with ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, *Immunity* achieves just the right balance of focus and fuzz, expanding Clairo’s sonic vocabulary with neo-soul vibes, jazzy piano lines, and boom-bapped drum breaks while framing her most brutally honest tracks—like the breakup lament “Bags” and same-sex-love anthem “Sofia”—with gritty intensity and blown-out distortion. Throughout the album, Clairo tries to reconcile her desire for independence with her need for intimacy, an emotional tug-of-war that reaches its zenith on the momentous closer “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” a stark, defiant piano ballad that cedes to the warm embrace of its ecstatic chillwave outro.

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

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.

When David Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009, the world stood to lose one of the best writers in indie rock, a guy who catalogued the magic and misery of everyday life with wit, heart, and the ragged glory of the occupationally down-and-out. After a 10-year break professedly spent reading books and arguing with people on Reddit, Berman enlisted members of the Brooklyn band Woods to back him on *Purple Mountains*. Berman’s pain had never been laid quite so bare, nor had it ever sounded quite so urgent. “I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion,” he sings on the swaggering “That’s Just the Way I Feel.” “Day to day, I’m neck and neck with giving in.” And “Margaritas at the Mall” turns an ordinary happy hour into a jeremiad about the cold comforts of capitalism in a godless world. That the music—country-tinged indie rock—was as polished and competent as it was only highlighted Berman’s intensity: less a rock singer than a street preacher, someone who needed to avail himself of his visions stat. But even at his most desperate, he remained achingly funny, turning statements of existential loneliness into the kind of bumper sticker Zen that made him seem like an ordinary guy no matter how highfalutin he could get. “Well, if no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he sings on the album-closing “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” sounding not all that far off from the George Strait one-twos he reportedly loved. Above all, though, his writing is beautiful, attuned to detail in ways that make ordinary scenarios shimmer with quiet magic. Just listen to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” which turns a quiet night in a big city into an allegory of finding solace in the weather of what comes to us. Shortly after the release of *Purple Mountains*, Berman died, at the age of 52, a tragic end to what felt like a triumphant return. “The dead know what they\'re doing when they leave this world behind,” he sings on “Nights That Won’t Happen.” “When the here and the hereafter momentarily align.”

David Berman comes in from the cold after ten long years. His new musical expression is a meltdown unparalleled in modern memory. He warns us that his findings might be candid, but as long as his punishment comes in such bite-sized delights of all-American jukebox fare, we'll hike the Purple Mountains with pleasure forever.

There’s a reason Taylor Swift sounds so confident and cool on *Lover*, her seventh album and the most free-spirited yet. She’s in *love*—pure, steady, starry-eyed, shout-it-from-the-rooftops love. Arriving 13 years after her eponymous debut album—and following a string of songs that sometimes felt like battle scars from public breakups and celebrity feuds—this project comes off clear-eyed, thick-skinned, and grown-up. It may be a sign that the 29-year-old has entered a new phase of her life: She’s now impressively private (she and her long-term boyfriend are rarely seen together in public), politically fired up (this album finds her fighting for queer and women’s rights), and eager to see the big picture (fans have speculated that the gut-wrenching “Soon You’ll Get Better” is about her mother’s battles with cancer). As a result, she’s never sounded stronger or more in control. She calls out dark-age bigots on the Pride anthem “You Need to Calm Down,” sends up the patriarchy on “The Man,” perfects flippant indifference on “I Forgot That You Existed,” and dares to sing her own praises on “ME!,” a duet with Brendon Urie of Panic! At the Disco. Tonally, these songs couldn’t be more different than 2017’s vengeful and self-conscious *Reputation*. Most of the album is baked in the atmospheric synths and ’80s drums favored by collaborator Jack Antonoff (“The Archer,” “Lover”). And yet some of the best moments are also the most surprising. “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” is daydreamy and delicate, illuminated with laidback strumming, twinkling trumpet, and high-pitched *ooh-ooh*s. And the percussive, playful “I Think He Knows” is a rollercoaster of a song, spiking and dipping from chatty whispers to breathy shout-singing in a matter of seconds.