The Associated Press's Top Albums of 2019

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.”

Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated *Over It*, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape *Last Day of Summer*—as well as the *CLEAR* EP—the singer recontextualizes some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games.” “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name,” Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. *Over It* is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilizes a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru,” which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of *Over It*, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight.” “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT.” Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. *Over It*, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.

Where do you go after you’re nominated for a Grammy for what is only your second proper album? If you’re celebrated North Carolina MC Rapsody, you go only wherever your heart desires—for her, that was down a path forged by historic black women before her. “When I think of why I am who I am, it\'s because I\'m inspired by so many dope women,” Rapsody tells Apple Music. “Dope men, too, but mostly dope women.” The MC’s third album *Eve* (named for that biblical mother of humanity) is a series of dedications to these women—some literal, others figurative, and still others simply named for individuals who embody ideals the artist felt compelled to extol. “It was easy once I had a concept,” she says. “All these women have different energies and they represent different things to me. And the bars just connected on their own, to be honest. Once you have the idea, the basis of what you want to write, everything else is just freedom and truth.” Lead single “Ibtihaj” (as in Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics) features a sample of GZA’s “Liquid Swords” along with guest spots from D’Angelo and The Genius himself. Elsewhere, the voices of rising New York MC Leikeli47, Los Angeles singer K. Roosevelt, and the legendary Queen Latifah ring out to help Rapsody tell the tales of “Oprah,” “Maya,” and “Hatshepsut,” respectively. *Eve* also features fellow generational talent and early Rapsody supporter J. Cole, who, during the sessions for “Sojourner,” helped distill his and Rapsody’s shared purpose as educators. “That whole song came from a two-, three-hour conversation that myself, J. Cole, and Ninth Wonder had in the studio,” Rapsody explains. “We were talking about Ninth’s generation versus me and Cole\'s. Everything is on the internet; they don\'t have to go and talk to each other face to face. In school they don\'t learn about all our black heroes. Some of them don\'t even want to know who Malcolm X is, who Betty Shabazz is. So that turned into: What is our responsibility as artists? We teach through our music. We should have fun, we should vibe out, but we have a responsibility to be reporting and talk about what\'s going on.” What that means for *Eve* is that the MC gets to honor some of her biggest inspirations as she earns a place among them.

Yola’s sound conjures a moment in the late \'60s when country, R&B, gospel, pop, rock, and the lighter side of psychedelia mixed together so freely—and so seamlessly—one remembered they all came from the same distinctly American well. Produced by The Black Keys\' Dan Auerbach, *Walk Through Fire* is expectedly long on style: “Faraway Look” is Dusty Springfield refracted through Phil Spector; “Walk Through Fire” is a slow folk thump so studiously offhand that Auerbach keeps the count-off in the mix; “Lonely the Night” captures the pop-lite poise of Petula Clark, and “Love All Night (Work All Day)” the catharsis of Rod Stewart. Really, though, it’s a testament to Yola’s writing and voice—smoky and deep but never smothering—that the album manages to cohere as the sound of a single artist.

What do you do when things fall apart? If you’re Ariana Grande, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and head for the studio. Her hopeful fourth album, *Sweetener*—written after the deadly attack at her concert in Manchester, England—encouraged fans to stay strong and open to love (at the time, the singer was newly engaged to Pete Davidson). Shortly after the album’s release in August 2018, things fell apart again: Grande’s ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, died from an overdose in September, and she broke off her engagement a few weeks later. Again, Grande took solace from the intense, and intensely public, melodrama in songwriting, but this time things were different. *thank u, next*, mostly recorded over those tumultuous months, sees her turning inward in an effort to cope, grieve, heal, and let go. “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head,” she confesses on “ghostin,” a gutting synth-and-strings ballad that hovers in your throat. “He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then.” Like many of the songs here, it was produced by Max Martin, who has a supernatural way of making pain and suffering sound like beams of light. The album doesn\'t arrive a minute too soon. As Grande wrestles with what she wants—distance (“NASA”) and affection (“needy”), anonymity (“fake smile\") and star power (“7 rings”), and sex without strings attached (“bloodline,” “make up”)—we learn more and more about the woman she’s becoming: complex, independent, tenacious, flawed. Surely embracing all of that is its own form of self-empowerment. But Grande also isn\'t in a rush to grow up. A week before the album’s release, she swapped out a particularly sentimental song called “Remember” with the provocative, NSYNC-sampling “break up with your girlfriend, i\'m bored.” As expected, it sent her fans into a frenzy. “I know it ain’t right/But I don’t care,” she sings. Maybe the ride is just starting.

“I wrote *American Teen* at 17 years old,” Khalid told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “Now I get to release this at 20-21, so it\'s a completely different mind frame.” His much-anticipated second album, the 17-track *Free Spirit*—and its companion film of the same name, created by Khalid along with director Emil Nava—is a soulful, sober meditation on what he\'s learned in those intervening years and about what happens when you long for personal freedom but aren\'t yet totally sure what to do with it. Khalid talked through the stories and inspiration behind each song with Zane, so read along as you take it all in. **“Intro”** “I wanted people to find their own name for this song and what it means to them. It was made to be the intro: I\'m naming it \'Intro.\' No other name popped up in my head. It\'s so cinematic and it washes over you, and I\'m like, \'People have to hear this first.\'” **“Bad Luck”** “*American Teen* started a little bit more up, a little bit more happy. For *Free Spirit*, overall, the vibe\'s completely different—the melancholy tone, the melodies. \'Bad Luck\' was so fitting to the intro it had to go right after. That intensity—it\'s literally like it\'s punching you in the face.” **“My Bad”** “It\'s so crazy because that song floated out of me. I wrote that in less than 10 minutes flat. So I was obviously in my bag for real.” **“Better”** “I was in LA, I was at the studio. I was surrounded by my friends. Good energy. I was just in the pocket. I think I was fresh off of tour and I was like, I gotta create, I gotta. I held all of that energy that I had on tour and it was just like, boom boom boom boom. All the songs just flew out of me, and \'Better\' was definitely one.” **“Talk”** “I love Disclosure so much, and they were on my wish list of people I wanted to collaborate with since I started music. It\'s like a gift to myself. It was a little naive of me to go into the session expecting to walk out with a house record. This beat was my second pick—until I sang on it and was like, \'Oh OK, this makes so much sense.\' This song is so huge, it\'s just one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever done. And there is definitely another Disclosure song floating out there somewhere in the world.” **“Right Back”** “I love working with \[producers\] Stargate because every time I work with them, the melodies just flow right out of me. It gives me this level of nostalgia from one of my favorite areas of music, the \'90s. The way that it sounds, the way that I see my friends dance to it, and the fact that my mom really, really loves it—that was the tipping point. If my mom doesn\'t like a song, it\'s not making the album.” **“Don\'t Pretend” (feat. SAFE)** “I think I did this song with SAFE in like 2016, 2017. I love his tone, I love his melody. And this was actually one of the last songs I recorded for the album. It got brought back to my attention and I was like, \'I love this song so much, it has to find a way out.\'” **“Paradise”** “I feel like having enough songs for people to see different sides of me as an artist. I could\'ve gone forever—there were like 30 more songs. Although there were some that didn\'t make the album, that doesn\'t mean those won\'t have a life. I could hit up some of my favorite artists and be like, \'Yo, do you want to turn this into a collab and you want to hop on it?\'” **“Hundred”** “\'Hundred\' is the soundtrack of my life. When I\'m in the mix of everything, I\'m on autopilot and I can\'t stop. I swear I could get into car crash after car crash, I\'m making my way through wherever I got to go and I\'m getting the job done. I hate canceling anything. I performed shows sick. If I gotta walk onstage with a broken foot, I\'m going to do it. Keep it a hundred. I got a hundred things I got to do.” **“Outta My Head”** “I think \'Outta My Head\' is definitely my favorite because of just how timing came into play. It was ridiculous—I\'m walking out of the studio and I run into John Mayer. And then I\'m like, \'Yo, you want to hear my project?\' Third song in and then he hopped on it and it was great. It\'s such a moment.” **“Free Spirit”** “This is the pivotal point, sonically, of the album. It starts off a little dark and gets a little bit more lighthearted. I feel like \'Free Spirit\' is the start of where everything gets intense and more cinematic.” **“Twenty One”** “I love that my friends and I have such a complete understanding of each other emotionally. I get to talk to them and I get to make time for them, they get to make time for me. Just to hang out and just to live and tell stories. You can\'t write a song if you don\'t have anything to write about. My friends give me something to write about every single day.” **“Bluffin\'”** “This is so heavy and soulful. It\'s almost like that make-up-after-breakup song. If you\'ve gotten into an argument with your bae or whatever you got going on, you play that song. It sets the tone completely. If it didn\'t make the album, if they made another *Fifty Shades*, maybe that song would fit there.” **“Self”** “I had to get ready to be comfortable with allowing myself to literally talk about loss, and talk about losing, and talk about how even though I\'m at this high to the world, mentally I feel like I\'m at a low at that moment when I wrote that song. I wanted to leave my fans with something where they felt connected to me on a different level and they realized, \'Wow, he\'s just like me and he goes through what I go through, and he has his time where he stares in front of a mirror and picks himself apart and then builds himself back together.\'” **“Alive”** “This is the second chapter of everything—chapter two, act two. I felt like ending it giving people a song they can listen to whenever they\'re feeling down, whenever they\'re going through something. Though these songs feel very sad, I feel like they have a brighter message.” **“Heaven”** “Father John Misty wrote \'Heaven.\' That\'s a song he loved a lot and he felt like it was so fitting for me. I feel like my voice is not too far off from his because that\'s a voice I grew up with, and sat with, and lived with. How many people do you know out there who can say they sang a song Father John Misty wrote? The fact that he looks to me like, \'You\'re going to do this song justice, and you\'re going to sing this song the way that it should be sung.\' Amazing.” **“Saturday Nights”** “I don\'t think I really wanted to end the album on such a dark and tense note. It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. The fact that it gets a new life because there\'s going to be a lot of people who listen to *Free Spirit* that didn\'t listen to \[2018 EP\] *Suncity*, and the fact that it plays a big part of the film as well—it was perfect. It had to go last.”

After releasing 2016’s *The Colour in Anything*, James Blake moved from London to Los Angeles, where he found himself busier than ever. “I’ve been doing a lot of production work, a lot of writing for other people and projects,” he tells Apple Music. “I think the constant process of having a mirror held up to your music in the form of other people’s music, and other people, helped me cross something. A shiny new thing.” That thing—his fourth album, *Assume Form*—is his least abstract and most grounded, revealing and romantic album to date. Here, Blake pulls back the curtain and explains the themes, stories and collaborations behind each track. **“Assume Form”** “I\'m saying, ‘The plan is to become reachable, to assume material form, to leave my head and join the world.’ It seems like quite a modern, Western idea that you just get lost. These slight feelings of repression lead to this feeling of *I’m not in my body, I’m not really experiencing life through first-person. It’s like I’m looking at it from above*. Which is a phenomenon a lot of people describe when they talk about depression.” **“Mile High” (feat. Metro Boomin & Travis Scott)** “Travis is just exceptionally talented at melodies; the ones he wrote on that track are brilliant. And it was made possible by Metro—the beat is a huge part of why that track feels the way it does.” **“Tell Them” (feat. Metro Boomin & Moses Sumney)** “Moses came on tour with me a couple years ago. I watched him get a standing ovation every night, and that was when he was a support act. For me, it’s a monologue on a one-night stand: There’s fear, there’s not wanting to be too close to anybody. Just sort of a self-analysis, really.” **“Into the Red”** “‘Into the Red’ is about a woman in my life who was very giving—someone who put me before themselves, and spent the last of their money on something for me. It was just a really beautiful sentiment—especially the antithesis of the idea that the man pays. I just liked that idea of equal footing.” **“Barefoot in the Park” (feat. ROSALÍA)** “My manager played me \[ROSALÍA’s 2017 debut\] *Los Ángeles*, and I honestly hadn’t heard anything so vulnerable and raw and devastating in quite a while. She came to the studio, and within a day we’d made two or three things. I loved the sound of our voices together.” **“Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”** “It’s a pure love song, really. It’s just about the ease of coexisting that I feel with my girlfriend. It’s fairly simple in its message and in its delivery, hopefully. Romance is a very commercialized subject, but sometimes it can just be a peaceful moment of ease and something even mundane—just the flow between days and somebody making it feel like the days are just going by, and that’s a great thing.” **“Are You in Love?”** “I like the idea of that moment where neither of you know whether you’re in love yet, but there’s this need for someone to just say they are: ‘Give me assurance that this is good and that we’re good, and that you’re in love with me. I’m in love with you.’ The words might mean more in that moment, but that’s not necessarily gonna make it okay.” **“Where’s the Catch?” (feat. André 3000)** “I was, and remain, inspired by Outkast. Catching him now is maybe even *more* special to me, because the way he writes is just so good! I love the way he balances slight abstraction with this feeling of paranoia. The line ‘Like I know I’m eight, and I know I ain’t’—anxiety bringing you back to being a child, but knowing that you’re supposed to feel strong and stable because you’re an adult now. That’s just so beautifully put.” **“I’ll Come Too”** “It’s a real story: When you fall in love, the practical things go out the window, a little bit. And you just want to go to wherever they are.” **“Power On”** “It’s about being in a relationship, and being someone who gets something wrong. If you can swallow your ego a little bit and accept that you aren’t always to know everything, that this person can actually teach you a lot, the better it is for everyone. Once I’ve taken accountability, it’s time to power on—that’s the only way I can be worthy of somebody’s love and affection and time.” **“Don’t Miss It”** “Coming at the end of the album was a choice. I think it kind of sums up the mission statement in some ways: Yes, there are millions of things that I could fixate on, and I have lost years and years and years to anxiety. There are big chunks of my life I can’t remember—moments I didn’t enjoy when I should have. Loves I wasn’t a part of. Heroes I met that I can’t really remember the feeling of meeting. Because I was so wrapped up in myself. And I think that’s what this is—the inner monologue of an egomaniac.” **“Lullaby for My Insomniac”** “I literally wrote it to help someone sleep. This is just me trying to calm the waters so you can just drift off. It does what it says on the tin.”