NPR Music's 25 Best Albums of 2019

JAIME I wrote this record as a process of healing. Every song, I confront something within me or beyond me. Things that are hard or impossible to change, words and music to describe what I’m not good at conveying to those I love, or a name that hurts to be said: Jaime. I dedicated the title of this record to my sister who passed away as a teenager. She was a musician too. I did this so her name would no longer bring me memories of sadness and as a way to thank her for passing on to me everything she loved: music, art, creativity. But, the record is not about her. It’s about me. It’s not as veiled as work I have done before. I’m pretty candid about myself and who I am and what I believe. Which, is why I needed to do it on my own. I wrote and arranged a lot of these songs on my laptop using Logic. Shawn Everett helped me make them worthy of listening to and players like Nate Smith, Robert Glasper, Zac Cockrell, Lloyd Buchanan, Lavinia Meijer, Paul Horton, Rob Moose and Larry Goldings provided the musicianship that was needed to share them with you. Some songs on this record are years old that were just sitting on my laptop, forgotten, waiting to come to life. Some of them I wrote in a tiny green house in Topanga, CA during a heatwave. I was inspired by traveling across the United States. I saw many beautiful things and many heartbreaking things: poverty, loneliness, discouraged people, empty and poor towns. And of course the great swathes of natural, untouched lands. Huge pink mountains, seemingly endless lakes, soaring redwoods and yellow plains that stretch for thousands of acres. There were these long moments of silence in the car when I could sit and reflect. I wondered what it was I wanted for myself next. I suppose all I want is to help others feel a bit better about being. All I can offer are my own stories in hopes of not only being seen and understood, but also to learn to love my own self as if it were an act of resistance. Resisting that annoying voice that exists in all of our heads that says we aren’t good enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, rich enough or successful enough. The voice that amplifies when we turn on our TVs or scroll on our phones. It’s empowering to me to see someone be unapologetically themselves when they don’t fit within those images. That’s what I want for myself next and that’s why I share with you, “Jaime”. Brittany Howard

Producer, bassist, and Tony! Toni! Toné! cofounder Raphael Saadiq steps away from classic soul (2008’s *The Way I See It* and 2011’s *Stone Rollin’*) to tell a tragic personal story. *Jimmy Lee* refers to his older brother, who was addicted to heroin and died of an overdose in the ’90s. Saadiq draws on the struggles he witnessed and experienced to create the most personal album of his career. “It’s about my brother, it’s about me growing up to be a man versus a boy, and the vulnerabilities and frailties we have in life,” he tells Apple Music’s Ebro. Given the fragile subject matter, the songs on *Jimmy Lee* are dark, leaning on supple soul and gospel as both vessel and confessional. Perspectives move from an addict’s (“Sinners Prayer,” “So Ready,” “Kings Fall”) to those caught in the addict’s crossfire (“This World Is Drunk”). A burst of clarity emerges on “I’m Feeling Love” (“You are my rehab/The only needle that I have/Injections every day/Vein to vein, I’m here to stay”) before returning back to fatal urges. The aftermath begins with “Belongs to God,” a church spiritual that mysteriously ends and opens into the ominous self-examination “Glory to the Veins.” “Rikers Island” is split in two parts: one a gospel-delic protest against the physical and psychological incarceration of African Americans, the second a pleading spoken-word piece voiced by actor Daniel J. Watts. Then an uncredited Kendrick Lamar steps up for the chorus on the album closer, “Rearview” (“How can I lead the world when I’m scared to try/Why should I need the world, we all gon’ die,” he posits). *Jimmy Lee* is a chilling lamentation. Like Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye, Saadiq uses soul music as a transformative tool, embracing darkness in order to shed light.

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.

In some ways, Aldous Harding’s third album, *Designer*, feels lighter than her first two—particularly 2017’s stunning, stripped-back, despairing *Party*. “I felt freed up,” Harding (whose real name is Hannah) tells Apple Music. “I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes. There was a joyful loosening in an unapologetic way. I didn’t try to fight that.” Where *Party* kept the New Zealand singer-songwriter\'s voice almost constantly exposed and bare, here there’s more going on: a greater variety of instruments (especially percussion), bigger rhythms, additional vocals that add harmonies and echoes to her chameleonic voice, which flips between breathy baritone and wispy falsetto. “I wanted to show that there are lots of ways to work with space, lots of ways you can be serious,” she says. “You don’t have to be serious to be serious. I’m not a role model, that’s just how I felt. It’s a light, unapologetic approach based on what I have and what I know and what I think I know.” Harding attributes this broader musical palette to the many places and settings in which the album was written, including on tour. “It’s an incredibly diverse record, but it somehow feels part of the same brand,” she says. “They were all written at very different times and in very different surroundings, but maybe that’s what makes it feel complete.” The bare, devastating “Heaven Is Empty” came together on a long train ride and “The Barrel” on a bike ride, while intimate album closer “Pilot” took all of ten minutes to compose. “It was stream of consciousness, and I don’t usually write like that,” she says. “Once I’d written it all down, I think I made one or two changes to the last verse, but other than that, I did not edit that stream of consciousness at all.” The piano line that anchors “Damn” is rudimentary, for good reason: “I’m terrible at piano,” she says. “But it was an experiment, too. I’m aware that it’s simple and long, and when you stretch out simple it can be boring. It may be one of the songs people skip over, but that’s what I wanted to do.” The track is, as she says, a “very honest self-portrait about the woman who, I expect, can be quite difficult to love at times. But there’s a lot of humor in it—to me, anyway.”

Aldous Harding’s third album, Designer is released on 26th April and finds the New Zealander hitting her creative stride. After the sleeper success of Party (internationally lauded and crowned Rough Trade Shop’s Album of 2017), Harding came off a 200-date tour last summer and went straight into the studio with a collection of songs written on the road. Reuniting with John Parish, producer of Party, Harding spent 15 days recording and 10 days mixing at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth and Bristol’s J&J Studio and Playpen. From the bold strokes of opening track ‘Fixture Picture’, there is an overriding sense of an artist confident in their work, with contributions from Huw Evans (H. Hawkline), Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), drummer Gwion Llewelyn and violinist Clare Mactaggart broadening and complimenting Harding’s rich and timeless songwriting.

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

In *Orange*, Caroline Shaw’s music furtively glances back while striding forward with scintillating inventiveness. Its beauty emerges as much from its fragments of Mozart, Ravel, and Bartók as from the iridescent shards of light that punctuate this playful, unexpected album. “Punctum” is a good place to start, its explosive Beethovenian opening and modal introduction giving way to a breathtaking pass by Bach’s Passion chorale. “Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a” moves distractedly from the 17th century to the here and now; the five-movement *Plan & Elevation* is engaging, thoughtful, and exciting. Shaw was partly inspired to write “Valencia” by the wondrous construction and architecture of a Valencia orange, and many of her most radiant ideas, indeed, blossom from simple roots.

On an exquisite, portentous set that challenges folk’s past and present, Lankum found fresh confidence. “We mean what we say and we mean what we’re doing,” Daragh Lynch tells Apple Music. “On the first two albums, we would have the songs pretty much fully arranged before we went into the studio. This time, we were confident enough that we could go in and experiment. It’s a lot of work we put in, and at times we worried it wasn’t worth it. But now it all feels worthwhile.” That work is evident in the results: The Dublin four-piece has reimagined traditional standards as sinister, winding epics, and the band’s own compositions thrum with instrumentational invention. Here, Lynch and Cormac MacDiarmada take you through *The Livelong Day* track by track. **The Wild Rover** Daragh Lynch: “We decided to tackle the song after hearing a version by Dónal Maguire, a folk singer from Drogheda in Ireland. Of course, we’d heard hundreds of versions over the years—from The Dubliners to The Pogues—as it’s such a popular Irish drinking song. But we wanted our version to make it really obvious that we’re singing about someone who is destroying their life for alcohol. Ian \[Lynch, Daragh’s brother and bandmate\] did a lot of research into the song and discovered its origins: It started life as an English anti-drinking song but somehow ended up almost the polar opposite. We spent a long time chipping away at it until it made sense sonically. We’ve been trying to push that traditional Irish drone sound since the first album, but working with John ‘Spud’ Murphy \[the album’s producer\] allowed us to push it to the extent we would like to.” **The Young People** DL: “The chorus popped into my head as I was waking up one morning. I was in a semi-dream state, still in the middle of waking up. It felt like it should have about a hundred people singing, with a Scottish feel to it. Similar to those old songs with a lot of people singing, ‘Go, lassie, go.’ Thematically, the verses are very dark but the chorus also gives it that lift. We then sat down, the four of us, and came up with the instrumental section in the middle. The final crescendo where we just repeat the chords and build instruments on top was a lot of fun in the studio. I remember Spud bringing in some hand bells which Radie \[Peat, bandmate\] had a great time playing.” **Ode to Lullaby** Cormac MacDiarmada: “It started off with Radie just playing some chords on the harmonium that really reminded us of a track off the first album that Daragh came up with, ‘Lullaby.’ We started building little pieces from there. We would throw around a lot of atmospherics at it, and then Spud would make sense of it.” DL: “This is definitely one of the ones where we experimented most on the album. We threw the kitchen sink at it and then built it up in the mixing stage. That shimmery, ghostly sound you hear is Cormac playing the vibraphone with a cello bow.” **Bear Creek** CM: “I’d heard this off Ron Kane, an American fiddler who spends a good bit of time in Ireland, and we came up with our arrangement.” DL: “We did a lot of rehearsing in Liberty Hall. It’s a legendary Dublin building through its attachment to the Easter Rising in 1916 and the workers’ rights movement. The most difficult part was trying to figure out how to slow from the first old-time American tune into the next and give it a really nice build for when the second tune hits.” CM: “It’s such a hypnotic style of music. It’s literally condensing the hypnosis into a few bars, repeatedly.” **Katie Cruel** DL:” This was originally arranged in around 2015 for a TV pilot about a post-apocalyptic Ireland. We were asked to arrange a lot of music with a really amazing DJ and producer duo from Limerick called Deviant & Naive Ted. Sadly, the show never got made, but this was one of the pieces we had, which is why it really does sound apocalyptic. There’s a barren wasteland kind of sound to it. And Radie’s vocals are just brilliant here. She’s not a very tall woman, but she has one of the loudest voices I’ve heard in my life. Spud would put three or four microphones in front of her mouth just to get as big and wide a sound out of it as possible.” **The Dark Eyed Gypsy** DL: “This is one of a couple of tunes we have where I at least try and play the guitar as gently as possible so that when Radie comes in with the bayan—which is a Russian accordion—you nearly get a cello sound from the blending of the reed and the strings.” **The Pride of Petravore** DL: “It totally started life as a joke where Ian taped two tin whistles together so he was getting this drone sound out of them.” CM: “I basically retuned my viola to where the bottom string became a grumble. All tone was gone, so all you’re getting is texting and rattle. I started just doing a rhythm and eventually Ian began playing over it. It felt like a palate cleanser after the ridiculous amount of recordings of the old-time tunes that we had laid down. It was just instant: We were really excited and started throwing stuff at it. But it definitely did start life as a total joke.” DL: “We were just really taking the piss out of a standard traditional tune that you hear everywhere. Radie was playing this out-of-tune, wonky honky-tonk piano in the control room, then we’d add accordion on it, then some trombones sounding like elephants. It’s still a bit sinister, though.” CM: “We always imagined it marching orcs out to war.” **Hunting the Wren** DL: “A few years ago Ian was asked to play at a concert at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin by a woman called Lisa O’Neill \[Irish folk musician\]. One of the stipulations was that he had to play a couple of original pieces of music—but it was only three weeks away. They turned it into a challenge where they set each other topics to write a song around. Ian told Lisa to write about Violet Gibson, who was an Irish woman who went to Italy to assassinate Mussolini \[the result, ‘Violet Gibson,’ appears on her 2018 album, *Heard a Long Gone Song*\]. Lisa challenged Ian to write about these women who lived communally in makeshift huts and shelters on the Curragh of Kildare over a century ago. They were accused of being prostitutes and alcoholics and were apparently despised by the local community and treated horrifically. But they all looked after each other’s kids as if they were their own. There was a lot of help from Spud to completely deconstruct the arrangement, and we put in all this mad percussion. We were shaking buckets of rocks, we were banging gas canisters with hammers, brushing off some giant cheese-grater-looking thing.”

Hiding Places is a collaborative album from Brooklyn-based rapper billy woods and Los Angeles beat scene veteran Kenny Segal, set for release by Backwoodz Studioz on March 29, 2019. On its face, it seems an unlikely pairing; woods—who moonlights as ½ of dissonant rap duo Armand Hammer—is a chaotic force, the warped relic of an NY indie-rap wave that never happened. Meanwhile, Segal has been in L.A. for twenty years; from paying dues with Project Blowed to pushing the culture forward with Busdriver and Milo. All the while, his soulful, dreamlike production precariously tethered to earth by the right drums or rumbling bass. But look closer and it makes more sense. After all, Segal lent his production to a couple of songs on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s critically-acclaimed opus, and the two veterans have more than a few shared collaborators: Open Mike Eagle, ELUCID, and Hemlock Ernst amongst them. Hiding Places finds both artists deep in the labyrinth. Segal’s lush soundscapes have a new edge, woods’ writing is, paradoxically, at its most direct. Hiding Places is a child’s game: funny and cruel, as brutal as a fairy tale. The album features contributions from both artists’ well of collaborators with ELUCID, Self-Jupiter, and MOTHERMARY making appearances.

After the billowing, nearly gothic pop of 2016’s *Blood Bitch*—which included a song constructed entirely from feral panting—Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval makes the unlikely pivot into brightly colored synth-pop on *The Practice of Love*. Rarely has music so experimental been quite this graceful, so deeply invested in the kinds of immediate pleasure at which pop music excels. Conceptually and sometimes formally, the album can be as challenging as Hval’s thorniest work. The title track layers together a spoken-word soliloquy by Vivian Wang, the album’s chief vocalist, with an unrelated conversation between Hval and the Australian musician Laura Jean, so that resonant details—about hatred of love, the fragility of the ego, the decision not to have children—drift free of their original contexts and intertwine over a bed of ambient synths. But the bulk of the record is built atop a shimmering foundation of buoyant synths and sleek dance beats, with memories of ’90s trance and dream pop seeping into cryptic lyrics about vampires, thumbsuckers, and nuclear families. In “Six Red Cannas,” Hval makes a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch in New Mexico, citing Joni Mitchell and Amelia Earhart as she meditates on the endless skies above. Her invocation of such feminist pioneers is fitting. Refusing to take even the most well-worn categories as a given, Hval reinvents the very nature of pop music.

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.” Prompted by an urge to find a different kind of language to express what she was feeling, the songs on Love unfurl like an interior dialogue involving several voices. Friends and collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Felicia Atkinson surface on various tracks, via contributed vocals or through bits of recorded conversation, which further posits the record itself as a kind of ongoing discourse. “The last thing I wrote, which was my new book (forthcoming), had quite an angry voice,” says Hval, “The voice of an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies. Perhaps this album rediscovers that same voice 20 years later. Not so angry anymore, but still feeling apart from the mainstream, trying to find their place and their community. With that voice, I wanted to push my writing practice further, writing something that was multilayered, a community of voices, stories about both myself and others simultaneously, or about someone’s place in the world and within art history at the same time. I wanted to develop this new multi-tracked writing voice and take it to a positive, beautiful pop song place... A place which also sounds like a huge pile of earth that I’m about to bury my coffin in.” Opening track “Lions” sets the tone for the record, both thematically and aesthetically, offering both a directive and a question: “Look at these trees / Look at this grass / Look at those clouds / Look at them now / Study this and ask yourself: Where is God?” The idea of placing ourselves in context to the earth and to others bubbles up throughout the record. On “Accident” two friends video chat on the topic of childlessness, considering their own ambivalence about motherhood and the curiosity of having been born at all. “She is an accident,” Hval sings, “She is made for other things / Born for cubist yearnings / Born to Write. Born to Burn / She is an accident / Flesh in dissent.” What does it mean to be in the world? What does it mean to participate in the culture of what it means to be human? To parent (or not)? To live and die? To practice love and care? What must we do to feel validated as living beings? Such questions are baked into the DNA of Love, wrapped up in layers of gauzy synthesizers and syncopated beats. Even when circling issues of mortality, there is a kind of humane delight at play. “Put two fingers in the earth,” Hval intones on “Ashes to Ashes”— “I am digging my own grave / in the honeypot / ashes to ashes / dust to dust.” Balanced against these ruminations on love, care and being, Hval employs sounds that are both sentimental and more than a little nostalgic. “I kept coming back to trashy, mainstream trance music from the ’90s,” she says, “It’s a sound that was kind of hiding in the back of my mind for a long time. I don’t mean trashy in a bad sense, but in a beautiful one. The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and too scared to attend, they were the sounds I associated with the people who were always driving around the two streets in the town where I grew up, the guys with the big stereo in the car that was always just pumping away. I liked the idea of playing with trance music in the true transcendental sense, those washy synths have lightness and clarity to them. I think I’m always looking for what sounds can bring me to write, and these synths made me write very open, honest lyrics.” Though The Practice of Love was, in some sense, inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name, for Hval the concept of love as a practice—as an ongoing, sustained, multivalent activity—provided a way to broaden and expand her own writing practice. Lyrically, the 8 tracks present here, particularly the title track, hew more closely to poetic forms than anything Hval has made before. (As evidenced by the record’s liner notes, which assume the form of a poetry chapbook.) Rather than shrink from the subject or try to overly obfuscate in some way, Love considers the notion of intimacy from all sides, whether it be positing the notion of art in conversation with other artists (“Six Red Cannas”) or playing with clichés around what it means to be a woman who makes art (“High Alice”), Hval’s songs attempt to make sense of what love and care actually mean—love as a practice, a vocation that one must continually work at. “This sounds like something that should be stitched on a pillow, but intimacy really is a lifelong journey,” she explains, “And I am someone who is interested in what ideas or practices of love and intimacy can be. These practices have for me been deeply tied to the practice of otherness, of expressing myself differently from what I’ve seen as the norm. Maybe that's why I've mostly avoided love as a topic of my work. The theme of love in art has been the domain of the mainstream for me. Love is one of those major subjects, like death and the ocean, and I’m a minor character. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at otherness, this fragile performance, to explore how it expresses love, intimacy, and kindness. I've wanted to explore how otherness deals with the big, broad themes. I've wanted to ask big questions, like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”  It’s a crazy ambition, perhaps, to think that something as simple as a pop song can manage, over the course of two or three minutes, to chisel away at some extant human truth. Still, it’s hard to listen to the songs on The Practice of Love and not feel as if you are listening in on a private conversation, an examination that is, for lack of a better word, truly intimate. Tucked between the beats and washy synths, the record spills over with slippery truths about what it is to be a human being trying to move through the world and the ways—both expected and unexpected—we relate to each other. “Outside again, the chaos / and I wonder what is lost,” Hval sings on “Ordinary,” the album’s closing track, “We don’t always get to choose / when we are close / and when we are not.”

When asked what gets under her skin, Brooklyn-based singer Laetitia Tamko has an answer: “The categories that people have for who deserves to be treated with humanity,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “and who doesn’t.” It’s just one of the recurring topics that the singer—who goes by Vagabon—has examined since her 2014 debut EP *Persian Garden* and its 2017 follow-up LP, *Infinite Worlds*. “Naturally, it comes up in my music,” she adds. “To have the lines be less rigid about who deserves to be treated what way, and who deserves the space to feel safe in one room versus another.” With her second full-length, *Vagabon*, the singer’s mission is clear: to document her triumph over self-doubt, and to create an empowering space for others. Originally from Cameroon, Tamko honors the hard work of all the women who paved the way for her while simultaneously offering a hand to the next generation on “Every Women” with the line “All the women I meet are tired/They just kick up their feet prior/To my sittin’ down.” This theme of fellowship also connects to “Wits About You,” with Tamko rejecting any offer of success that doesn’t include her community. Amidst the calls for togetherness, the singer recalls some of the arduous experiences that helped her realize her self-worth, like the toll relationships have taken on her (“Water Me Down”) and ruminating on what could have been (“In a Bind”). The album opens and closes with “Full Moon in Gemini,” but on the reprise, the Montreal band Monako regenerates Tamko’s reflective anecdotes into an eager declaration about the singer’s future.

“Break the rules you think you are bound by.” That’s the recurring sentiment Lætitia Tamko carried with her through the writing and recording of her second album under the Vagabon moniker. Her first, 2017’s Infinite Worlds, was an indie breakthrough that put her on the map, prompting Tamko to tour around the world and quit her job in electrical/computer engineering to pursue a career in music full-time. Tamko’s self-titled Nonesuch Records debut finds her in a state of creative expansion, leaning fully into some of the experimental instincts she flirted with on the previous album. This time around, she’s throwing genre to the wind. Vagabon is a vibrant culmination of influences, emotional landscapes, and moods; a colorful and masterful statement by an artist and producer stepping into her own.

Ari Lennox is Dreamville’s resident singer-songwriter, rounding out the label\'s hip-hop-heavy lineup with rich, midtempo soul birthed from basslines, melody, wind instruments, and supreme heartbreak. “I never thought I\'d make money off of soul music,” the Washington, DC-based singer told Beats 1’s Ebro. “I always thought I\'d have to be this pop artist or make this super hit, but no.” Lennox was discovered after putting her music up online, signing with Dreamville in 2015. She\'s contributed “Shea Butter Baby” to the *Creed II* soundtrack and released the 2016 EP *Pho*. The positive response to tracks like “Backseat” showed that her retro R&B fits well in contemporary times. “There\'s so many opportunities that come to me,” she said. “And I\'m just like, ‘You guys like soul and R&B that much? That\'s awesome.’ I didn\'t know it could ever happen again, because I knew it was really booming in the ’90s and the early 2000s, and then it felt like people stopped caring.” On her debut full-length, her voice is strengthened and emboldened by both breakup and “u up?” texts. She celebrates independence (“New Apartment”) and processes pain (“Speak to Me,” “I Been,” “Pop”) with equal parts frankness and freedom. Cameos by JID (“Broke”) and J. Cole (“Shea Butter Baby”) and a classy Galt MacDermot “Space” sample on “BMO” give the album its pronounced bump. “It’s soul,” she told Ebro. “There’s no gimmicks. It’s feeling.”

The late 2010s have been a boom time for women forming supergroups in the name of mutual admiration, solidarity, or common mission. Some enjoy greater visibility than others, but none has greater historic significance than Our Native Daughters, made up of four women of color—Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah—who all perform roots music on banjo and found each other in the folk scene. Invited by Giddens to the remote bayou studio of her co-producer Dirk Powell to write and record together, the four members reclaimed and reimagined old tunes, styles, and stories, many dating back to the enslavement of African people, recentering them on the perspectives and multifaceted survival strategies of black women. Each of the contributors brings a different sound, spirit, and texture into the circle—from dignified satire (“Barbados”) to sinewy defiance (“Black Myself”), spryly syncopated revelry (“Music and Joy”) to supple reverence (“Quasheba, Quesheba”)—for a collective work as loose, lively, and welcoming as it is tenacious.

'Songs of Our Native Daughters' gathers together kindred musicians Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell in song and sisterhood to communicate with their forebears. Drawing on and reclaiming early minstrelsy and banjo music, these musicians reclaim, recast, and spotlight the often unheard and untold history of their ancestors, whose stories remain vital and alive today. The material on 'Songs of Our Native Daughters' -- written and sung in various combinations -- is inspired by New World slave narratives, discrimination and how it has shaped our American experience, as well as musicians such as Haitian troubadour Althiery Dorval and Mississippi Hill Country string player Sid Hemphill, and more.

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.

The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”

*** Grammy Nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album “All forms of expression in sound are valid, as all people are… this is the mantra of Ancestral Recall.” Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah sets the tone for his new project - Ancestral Recall - with this powerful statement. In his mission to unify cultural voices and tear down the sonic and social constructs that separate based on race, class, and culture, Adjuah asserts music has historically been disseminated to people with harmony and melody prioritized over rhythm. The value distinction leads to harmful hierarchal sentiments and perpetuates the view that cultures who prioritize harmony and melody are more nuanced and sophisticated than those who prioritize rhythm. It is an inaccurate portrayal. Ancestral Recall looks to excavate and update hidden histories in sound by displaying a sonic tapestry that illuminates the har-melodic movements found within rhythm, rendering previous contexts baseless, Adjuah explains: "In its inception, Ancestral Recall was built as a map to de-colonialize sound; to challenge previously held misconceptions about some cultures of music; to codify a new folkloric tradition and begin the work of creating a national set of rhythms; rhythms rooted in the synergy between West African, First Nation, African Diaspora/Caribbean rhythms and their marriage to rhythmic templates found in trap music, alt-rock, and other modern forms. It is time we created a sound that dispels singular narratives of entire peoples and looks to finally represent the wealth of narratives found throughout the American experience. One that shows that all forms of expression in sound are valid, as all people are." The goal is to connect people in one understanding rather than dividing them by definition. The music of Ancestral Recall focuses the mind. As the ear adjusts to the shifting tapestries of rhythm, Adjuah stands firm in the mix, heralding the histories of rhythm and song. Walking hand-in-hand with listeners through his and their musical histories, clearing the way for a new reading of what all musical futures can become. Ancestral Recall is an album that might easily be misunderstood in its own time, but will certainly be seen as a moment in history that marked a momentous shift in musical and perhaps social understanding.

It takes a village to raise a child; Holly Herndon’s third proper studio LP, *PROTO*, holds that the same is true for an artificial intelligence, or AI. The Berlin-based electronic musician’s 2015 album *Platform* explored the intersection of community and technological utopia, and so does its follow-up—only this time, one of her collaborators is a programmed entity, a virtual being named Spawn. Arguing that technology should be embraced, not feared, Herndon and her human collaborators, including a choral ensemble and hundreds of volunteer vocal coaches, set about “teaching” their AI via call-and-response singing sessions inspired by Herndon’s religious upbringing in East Tennessee. The results harness *Platform*’s richly synthetic palette and jagged percussive force and join them with choral music of almost overwhelming beauty. The massed voices of “Frontier” suggest a combination of Appalachian revival meetings and Bulgarian folk that’s been cut up over Hollywood-blockbuster drums; in “Godmother,” a collaboration with the experimental footwork producer Jlin, Spawn “sings” a dense, hyperkinetic fugue based on Jlin’s polyrhythmic signature. The crux of the whole album might be “Extreme Love,” in which a narrator recounts the story of a future post-human generation: “We are not a collection of individuals but a macro-organism living as an ecosystem. We are completely outside ourselves and the world is completely inside us.” A loosely synchronized choir chirps in the background as she asks, in a voice full of childlike wonder, “Is this how it feels to become the mother of the next species—to love them more than we love ourselves?” It’s a moving encapsulation of the album’s radical optimism.

Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria. Holly’s third full-length album 'PROTO' isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn. For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion. 'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards? You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee. “There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty.” Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Just as Holly’s previous album 'Platform' forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, 'PROTO' is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.

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.

Drop into the anonymous project Sault’s 2019 debut and you might mistake it for a compilation of ’70s soul/funk obscurities, the kind of tracks that don’t hit a commercial sweet spot but marshal their influences with such style that the particulars get subsumed into the big, intoxicating whole. Like post-punk? “Don’t Waste My Time.” The Chi-Lites vis-à-vis Erykah Badu? “Masterpiece.” Flower-crown funk? “We Are the Sun.” And so on. Vintage as the sound is, the sentiments—“Why Why Why Why Why,” “Foot on Necks”—are unnervingly current, a nod to the reality that while sounds change, state-sanctioned violence has long been ingrained in the American consciousness.

As if being two of the biggest and busiest artists working today wasn’t enough to make an album-length team-up between J Balvin and Bad Bunny a tricky project to pull off, there’s also the difference in the stars’ lifestyles. “I wake up at five in the morning,” Balvin tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “and he goes to sleep at five in the morning. I’m ready to go to the gym and he’s ready to go to bed.” They are the odd couple of urban Latin music: Balvin, an experienced Colombian reggaetón singer who spent the last decade honoring and advancing the genre’s legacy; and Bunny, the flamboyant punk upstart who quickly made his name as one of the more unique acts in the trap en español scene. First teased on Ebro Darden’s Beats 1 show in 2018, the surprise joint album builds on the breakthrough moment of their contributions to Cardi B’s megahit “I Like It,” pushed along by a healthy dose of mutual admiration. “It was like, ‘We have to do something,’” Bad Bunny says of the urgency in the wake of the chart-topping bilingual smash. “A project hasn’t been done in the Latin market from two huge artists with two different styles.” Their parallel lives in the tight-knit urbano scene initially brought them together, and while some of this material dates back to before they blew up, most of the album was completed before they both performed at Coachella in April 2019. As Balvin and Bunny originate from some of the most vibrant locales for Spanish-language music today—and with both representing their homelands proudly in their work—their union here on *OASIS* shines a brighter and deserving light on the flourishing urban Latin sound. The natural chemistry the pair shared on “I Like It” and 2017’s one-off single “Si Tu Novio Te Deja Sola” proves even more potent over the course of these eight new tracks. On “QUE PRETENDES,” Balvin slinks around the taut reggaetón groove as Bunny’s sung bars, by contrast, bounce against its structure. For the retro-nodding “MOJAITA,” their divergent flirty techniques merge into a gratifying mix that highlights the individuality of their personal and popular appeals. Emotions run high across the pointed verses traded on “ODIO,” buoyed by a breezy beat. “YO LE LLEGO” presents trap dosed with a piquant salsa tincture, while the booze-soaked “LA CANCIÓN” mingles jazzy touches around a muted dembow. Deviating from genre conventions has been crucial to both artists\' come-ups, and that approach extends to *OASIS*. Veteran Argentinian heroes Los Enanitos Verdes add rock flair to “UN PESO,” while the Mr Eazi collaboration “COMO UN BEBÉ” bridges urbano with Afrobeats. As far as Bad Bunny is concerned, the project is about more than merely blending musical styles. “There’s a message here that goes beyond,” Bunny says. “It’s not like me and someone else from Puerto Rico. It’s something bigger.” Adds Balvin, “We just wanted to elevate our culture, you know? If I win, they win. If we win, we all win.”

Acclaimed as a free improviser and challenging composer in many settings from octet to solo piano, Westchester, New York-based Kris Davis accesses a whole other sound palette on *Diatom Ribbons*. She foregrounds the complex groove sensibility of drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and turntablist Val Jeanty while bringing disparate modernist piano influences to bear, from Cecil Taylor (that’s his speaking voice on the opening title track) to Olivier Messiaen (that’s him speaking on “Corn Crake”). The renowned Esperanza Spalding appears as well, her voice insinuating and highly effective on the snaky Michaël Attias piece “The Very Thing” and the spoken-word beat abstraction of “Certain Cells” (the poem is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To Prisoners”). Trevor Dunn anchors it all on acoustic and electric bass, while guitarists Nels Cline and Marc Ribot and tenor saxophonists Tony Malaby and JD Allen enter and exit the fray. Ches Smith’s vibraphone lends a rich timbre and color to “Stone’s Throw,” while “Reflections,” by Julius Hemphill, serves as an extended-length finale—a showcase, like the opener, for the fiery tenor saxes.

Tanya Tucker was already singing in a voice that conveyed grit and experience when she scored her first hit at age 13. In the half-century since, the veteran country star has released roughly two dozen albums. But *While I’m Livin’*, arriving on the heels of an extended quiet spell, is the first full-length she’s recorded that reflects—or, more accurately, magnifies—her life experiences and brassy persona. Shooter Jennings and Brandi Carlile, who both grew up with Tucker’s music, made it their crusade to produce an album that would present Tucker as an artist whose undiminished edge and seasoned wit qualify her as a legend. They selected songs, several of them written by Carlile and her frequent collaborators Tim and Phil Hanseroth, that dramatize Tucker\'s headstrong, hard-living ways and the pride she took in weathering hardship. She makes loping outlaw epics like \"High Ridin\' Heroes,\" \"Hard Luck,\" and \"Mustang Ridge\" her own, and sounds more unvarnished than ever delivering soft, sentimental tunes like \"The House That Built Me,\" \"The Day My Heart Goes Still,\" and \"Bring My Flowers Now.\"

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.