Rolling Stone's 20 Best Pop Albums of 2018

Anchored by the bittersweet-but-bumping smash \"Havana,\" the solo debut from Camila Cabello is a surprisingly candid affair, often disguising her soul-baring confessionals as irresistible slow jams. The former Fifth Harmony diva exults in the dangerous euphoria of love with aching electro-pop opener \"Never Be the Same\" and closes with a plea for emotional intimacy on the moody R&B anthem \"Into It.\" But while the album\'s peaks also include a pair of anguished piano ballads, *Camila* isn\'t just about romantic turmoil: \"Inside Out” is a playful, tropical-tinged pledge of devotion.

It’s no coincidence that the cover photo for Ariana Grande’s fourth album is her first not in black and white. She told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden that *Sweetener* is different because, “It’s the first time I feel more present than ever, and I see colors more.” Her new outlook comes just over a year since the devastating attack at her 2017 Manchester concert that killed 22 people and injured over 500, leaving Grande “permanently affected.” She responded with *Sweetener*, a gorgeous, pastel album about love, happiness, strength, and womanhood. She’s deeply in love, evidenced on the tropical “blazed,” and “R.E.M,” with harmonies described as “rainbow clouds” by Pharrell, who produced over half the album. She exits a toxic relationship in “better off”; “God is a woman” is a feminine, sex-positive anthem that she told Darden is her “favourite thing I’ll probably ever do”. The album closer “get well soon” is a self-care message she wrote immediately following a panic attack. “It\'s about being there for each other and helping each other through scary times and anxiety,” she told Darden. “I wanted to give people a hug, musically.” Sonically, *Sweetener* brings some surprises—sparse rhythms and what she calls “dreamier” harmonies replace many of the huge beats and choruses she’s famous for. She said the album is “more like me as a person. And what I’ve been craving to do.”

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

It makes so much sense, it’s a wonder this took so long. An album of ABBA covers by camp queen Cher is a match made in pop-music heaven. The ostensible inspiration for the set was her cameo in *Mamma Mia 2*, where she delivered a faithful rendition of the timeless ballad “Fernando.” But who needs a reason to justify 10 new takes on ABBA’s biggest hits? From the piano vamp of “Dancing Queen” that opens the album, it’s clear nobody is trying to reinvent the wheel here. These tracks, FM radio staples for 40-plus years already, are given a spit shine and updated production values, but they’re otherwise straightforward takes that make clear the producers’ (and the performer’s) reverence for the source material. Only at the end does the formula change: “One of Us,” a heartbreaking standout from the Swedish group’s final album, *The Visitors*, is stripped down to strings and piano, leaving only Cher’s voice to channel all of the emotion from the devastating lyrics.

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

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

It only took Shawn Mendes three years to realize his pop dreams. After catching a wave of fame on Vine, he steered it into solo stardom with two chart-topping albums, a world tour, and a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Then, the Toronto-area native got right to work on his third album, an adventurous voyage of texture and tempo, with songwriting support from pop heavyweights like Ed Sheeran, Julia Michaels, and John Mayer. Lyrically, he’s still the same Shawn—brooding, broken, heart on his sleeve—but age and experience have emboldened him; heartbreak is no longer a curb on his powers, but his creative fuel. With a skillful balance of poise and risk-taking, he explores slick funk (“Particular Taste”), soulful piano ballads (“Perfectly Wrong”), and Kings of Leon-inspired pop-rock (“In My Blood”), showing us just how much he’s capable of.

King Princess’ first single, “1950,” is one of those wonderful, rare tracks filled with enough melody and meaning that hearing it thousands of times after it goes viral doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. The pristine electro-pop tune about unrequited queer love at a time when queerness wasn’t socially accepted quickly set a high bar for the Brooklyn singer—who became the first artist signed to producer Mark Ronson’s own Zelig Records. It\'s included here on her hype-exceeding debut EP, amid other songs about love\'s sensual beginnings (“Holy”) and difficult endings (“Talia,” “Upper West Side”).

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

For many pop stars facing down their second album, “maturity” means dour confessionals, but Charlie Puth flips the script, bringing grown-up emotion to these easy-to-love grooves. On first listen to the nakedly romantic lyrics and bump-and-grind beats of *Voicenotes*, it may be hard to imagine that this is the same guy behind the peppy acoustic ballads and big-budget pop that filled his 2016 debut, *Nine Track Mind*. “Attention” is the steamy, bass-up-front strut designed to flip Puth’s public persona from grinning nice guy to wounded R&B player, and “Done for Me” seals the deal with its electro-funk duet with Kehlani. But it’s the album’s deeper cuts that really reveal Puth’s uncanny feel for classic soul music, including the harmony-rich Boyz II Men collab “If You Leave Me Now” and the throwback-disco rush of the Hall and Oates cowrite “Slow It Down.”

Three years after *Know-It-All* introduced her as pop’s rebellious newcomer—an introvert with power pipes who was skeptical about fame—Alessia Cara returns with a fresh perspective. Rather than run away from her problems, the 22-year-old Toronto-area singer opts, instead, to run toward them. Her autobiographical sophomore album tells her journey of heartbreak, growth, and self-acceptance with cautious optimism. “I guess the bad can get better/Gotta be wrong before it’s right,” she sings on “Growing Pains,” an introspective, chin-up ballad about the trials of adolescence and stardom. Cara, who often talks openly about therapy, works through a wide range of emotions here—vulnerability (“I Don’t Want To”), disappointment (“All We Know”), and determination (“Wherever I Live”)—and each song feels like an outstretched hand. On “Not Today,” she simply lets herself feel low, offering the gentle reminder that healing takes time. “One day I won’t need a PhD to sit me down/And tell me what it all means,” she sings. “Maybe one day it’ll be a breeze/But surely not today.”

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

Anne-Marie Nicholson’s adolescent karate success (three world championship golds, thanks very much) hopefully taught the importance of patience. The Essex singer/songwriter spent her early 20s as a voice for hire, carefully, patiently building to a celebratory debut album that smartly trades off its author’s USP: personality. Anne-Marie decorates each track with easy charm and bracing openness (“You know I get depressed/Are you impressed with my honesty?” she retorts on “Perfect”) while the music keeps its end of the bargain. Buoyant dancehall bangers (“Ciao Adios”, “Can I Get Your Number”) grind up effortlessly against the softer moments (“Machine”, “Some People”) on an album that finally, firmly introduces a true star.

When they go low, Barbra Streisand goes to her songwriting room. The political climate fostered by the 45th President of the United States inspired seven of the 11 songs here, Streisand\'s first set of originals since 2005. The triumphant call-to-arms “The Rain Will Fall” takes on the spin cycle fueled by the White House (“Facts are fake/And friends are foes/And how the story ends, nobody knows”). “What’s On My Mind” and “Walls” find Barbra lost in worry, searching for answers in that singular bloodied-but-unbowed voice. Despite her state of mind, she sounds peerless and ageless, elegant and delicate as fine silk. Go ahead and tack “Take Care of This House” onto her all-time great vocal performances, while “Don’t Lie to Me” beats with an EDM spine, ripping the clothes off the back of a \"fictional\" emperor: “You can build towers of bronze and gold/You can paint castles in the sky/You can use smoke and mirrors, old clichés/Not today, not today.” She also resurrects classic protest anthems on *Walls*. The Burt Bacharach/Hal David chestnut “What the World Needs Now” gets a “hip” replacement with guests Michael McDonald and Babyface. John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” are combined into a joyous medley (the coda “Just...*imagine*” could be interpreted as either pained or hopeful, depending on your mood). The album’s last song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” reprises her first commercial single, from 1962, when she performed it ironically as a millionaire who lost it all.

“I’m making pop records,” The 1975 frontman Matty Healy told Beats 1 host Matt Wilkinson. “When I say we’re a pop band, what I’m really saying is we’re not a rock band. Please stop calling us a rock band—’cause I think that’s the only music we *don’t* make.” It’s a fair comment: Thanks to their eclecticism and adventure, attempting to label The 1975 has been as easy as serving tea in a sieve. On their third album, the Cheshire four-piece are, once again, many things, including jazz crooners, 2-step experimentalists and yearning balladeers. What’s most impressive is their ability to wrangle all these ideas into coherent music—their outsize ambition never makes the songs feel cluttered. “I hate prog, I hate double albums, I hate indulgence,” said Healy. “I hate it when the world goes, ‘Hey, you’ve got our attention!’ and someone goes, ‘Right, well, if I’ve got your attention, how many guitar solos…’” Crucially, Healy’s lyrics add extra substance to—and bind together—the kaleidoscope of styles. On the neo-jazz of “Sincerity Is Scary,” he rails against a modern aversion to emotional expression. Broadly an album about love in the digital age, *A Brief Inquiry…* offers compelling insights into Healy’s own life. “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)” provides an unvarnished account of his heroin addiction, while “Surrounded By Heads and Bodies” draws on his experiences in rehab and “Be My Mistake” examines guilt and compulsion. “Honestly, you can look at your work and be like, ‘What did I do there that someone likes?’” he said. “Me, when I’m, like, really personal or really inward, really honest, that’s when I get the best reaction.” Introspection needn’t breed a somber mood though. From the tropical pop of “Tootimetootimetootime” to the spry electro-indie of “Give Yourself a Try,” this is an album full of uplifting, melodic rushes. “My favorite records are about life,” said Healy. “It may be a bit of a big thing to say, but I like the all-encompassing aspect of life: You can have these bits, the sad bits, but don’t leave the dancing out, you know what I mean?”