The Atlantic's 10 Best Albums of 2021

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

Where *KICK ii* delves into the lurching, snapping grooves of reggaetón, *KicK iii* applies an even more forceful touch to experimental beats that zigzag between futuristic club rhythms and vintage IDM. The strutting “Bruja” fires merciless ballroom salvos over car-crash drums and apocalyptic synth squeal; “Incendio” twists Arca’s perpetually morphing vocals over drums that punch like Brazilian funk carioca or Portuguese batida; and “Morbo” dissolves into a gooey morass of slow-motion techno. From there, things just get more unpredictable: The shuddering beats of “Fiera” and “Ripples” feel like they’re coming apart at the seams, while the shimmering melody of “Skullqueen” channels mid-’90s Aphex Twin, long a latent influence on Arca’s fractured syncopations. But the storm clouds part for the closing “Joya”: Over soft, feathery chimes, she sings sweetly, “I want to tell you/You are a jewel among men/I feel so much love.” After so much violent turmoil, to let us down so gently feels like an act of kindness.

Allison Russell has long been a fixture of the roots scene, crafting melodic roots-pop as part of the duo Birds of Chicago and inventive, socially conscious folk with the acclaimed supergroup Our Native Daughters. The Nashville-based, Montreal-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist steps out on her own on her debut album, an expertly rendered and powerfully delivered collection that proves Russell to be just as adept a solo artist as she is a collaborator. (Though, in the spirit of collaboration, Russell invites friends and fellow musicians like Yola, Erin Rae, and the McCrary Sisters to join her.) Thematically, *Outside Child* navigates difficult terrain—such as abuse, neglect, and racism—though it does so with an undercurrent of healing, transformation, and compassion. In an album full of standout moments, it’s hard not to point to “4th Day Prayer,” a brutally frank recollection of Russell’s sexual abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, built atop a soulful, gospel-adjacent arrangement that suggests empowerment rather than victimhood. Russell is one of roots music’s finest musicians in any form, but with *Outside Child*, she stakes her claim as one of its finest visionaries too.

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

Lorde’s third album *Solar Power* was born out of an epiphany. “I was very much raised outdoors by the beach, in the ocean, outside,” the New Zealand pop titan tells Apple Music. “But it wasn\'t until I got my dog that I understood how precious the natural world is and how many gifts there are for someone like me to receive. I felt like all I was doing was paying attention and being rewarded tenfold with things that would not just lift my mood, but legitimately inspire me.” The death of her dog, Pearl, in 2019, slowed down the production of the album, but what Lorde learned from him—the joy of being outside, even if it’s just at your local park—flows through the finished product. Expressing all of that in the twisted, spring-tight pop of 2013’s *Pure Heroine* and its dizzying 2017 follow-up *Melodrama* was never going to work. So she turned instead to a (somewhat unlikely) palette crafted alongside returning producer Jack Antonoff—shuttling between LA and New Zealand in 2019 and 2020 and finishing it remotely during the pandemic—of ’70s Laurel Canyon and early-2000s pop. “I think, on paper, it doesn’t make any sense,” she says. “But I was like, ‘What’s something that’s captured the experience of being outside or feeling the sun and a certain kind of joy?’” *Solar Power* might well be seen as just that: an album to kick back with on a summer’s day. But there is, as Lorde puts it, “deep and shallow” to this record. There are meditations on celebrity culture (“California”) and the wellness industry (“Mood Ring”), alongside sorrow for the destruction of the natural world. This isn’t, however, a climate change album (“It definitely wasn\'t a goal of mine to make people care; I can\'t make that happen for you”). If it’s about anything, she says, it’s about “the passing of time and being OK with that. All my work is sort of about that. All these works are just me trying to ask a series of questions. And if that makes people ask their own questions of their world, then I’ve done a good job.” Read on as Ella Yelich-O’Connor guides us through *Solar Power*, one track at a time. **“The Path”** “This was the first one I wrote for the album, and I always knew it would open it. I wanted to bring people right up to speed: This is where I\'m at. This is the wave. As I get older, I feel the absurd nature of our modern life more every day, and some of the images in this song really play into that. I’ve also been thinking more about people in my position and the worship that comes towards someone like me. I thought about dismantling that and saying, ‘Let\'s leave that at the door for this one and make it about something else.’ It was really fun, golden and sassy to be like, ‘It\'s not going to be me. I\'m sorry. Let\'s redirect.’” **“Solar Power”** “This song was featherlight. It’s just a song about being happy in the sunshine, which is kind of a crazy move for me. But It\'s a bit dark and weird, with lots of cult and commune imagery. I knew that people would kind of be like, ‘What the fuck is she talking about?’ On the surface it’s light, but it’s got a lot to it.” **“California”** “California and LA are places I have a huge amount of affection for. I find it really alluring and mystical and kind of dreamy, but it also totally freaks me out. It isn\'t where I am supposed to be right now, so I\'ve tapped out. I\'ve been listening to a lot of The Mamas & The Papas, so that was a melodic reference. There’s kind of an eeriness to this song, and a lot of people have tried to get at that when capturing LA in movies and in music. I love the line about the kids in the line for ‘the new Supreme.’ It\'s a classic me thing to say something that is modern, but could sound classic.” **“Stoned at the Nail Salon”** “This was one of the first few we wrote. I think of it as coming right at the tail end of *Melodrama*. My life is very low-key and very domestic. It\'s like the life of a hippie housewife. It really struck me when the Grammys or VMAs were on and I was trying to get a stream on my computer and I couldn\'t. It felt so outside of that part of my life. I was starting to have these thoughts like, ‘Am I choosing the right path here by hanging up the phone, so to speak? And just hanging out with my dog and making lunch every day?’ The vocals that are on the song are the ones that we recorded the day we wrote it. So it kind of has this loose, organic quality that came to be a big part of *Solar Power*.” **“Fallen Fruit”** “I was going to LA to write with Jack and I started this on the plane. There’s always a slightly kind of unhinged or unfiltered quality to songs I write on planes, because I’m at altitude or something. I had been very careful before that point about not being preachy or like, ‘Hi, I’m a pop star and this is my climate change album!’ But I just had this moment where I was like, ‘This is the great loss of our lives and this will be what comes to define all of our lives and our world will be unrecognizable for my children.’ I loved trying to make it sound like this flower child’s lament and making it sound very Laurel Canyon, essentially. At the same time, there’s only one 808 on this record—and it’s in the breakdown of this song. It’s me describing an escape to somewhere safe that takes place in the future when our world has become uninhabitable. I liked snapping into a kind of modern thing for that.” **“Secrets From a Girl (Who\'s Seen It All)”** “This is me talking to my younger self trying to impart some of the things that I learned. It was a fun place to write from. To me it’s very Eurythmics meets Robyn. And then we got Robyn to do the incredible spoken part. She’s someone I have learned a huge amount from, through song. She really completed the experience.” **“The Man With the Axe”** “I wrote this track almost as a poem. I was very hung over and I think that fragile, vulnerable quality made it in here. It’s funny because it’s kind of melancholy, but I also think of it as very cozy. I’m expressing a huge amount of love and affection for someone. To me, it sounds very private—I sort of don’t even like thinking about people listening to it because it\'s just for me. \[US producer\] Malay did the coolest chords. I really didn’t change the poem, apart from maybe taking one line out. That was one of the biggest accomplishments of the album.” **“Dominoes”** “*Solar Power* is about utopias, and wellness is very much a utopia. It was also a big facet of the kind of ’60s, ’70s, New Age enlightenment, Age of Aquarius—seeking this thing that will give us the answers and make us feel whole. I feel like everyone kind of knows someone like this. It really cracked me up to say, ‘It’s strange to see you smoking marijuana, you used to do the most cocaine of anyone I’ve ever met.’ We all know that guy.” **“Big Star”** “The title of this song is a nod to Big Star the band, who I absolutely love. When I think about a song like ‘Thirteen’ by Big Star, there’s something so kind of childlike about it, and the song channels a similar thing. But I also loved the image of the people that we love being like celebrities to us. When I see a picture of a loved one, I feel like you get the same chemicals as if I was seeing a celebrity. They’re famous in my heart. But really, this is just a song about my dog. I wrote it when he was a puppy. I was just like, ‘Holy shit, I’ve never loved anything as much in my life.’” **“Leader of a New Regime”** “I wanted to have a little reprieve and go in that Crosby, Stills & Nash direction a little bit and be like, ‘Where’s it going to go from here?’ Whether it’s culturally, politically, environmentally, socially, spiritually. I felt that desire for doing something new.” **“Mood Ring”** “It’s full satire, inhabiting a person who’s feeling really lost and disconnected in the modern world and is trying to feel well, however she can. I felt like so many people would be able to relate to that. It was funny and gnarly to write. The melodies and the production were a great blend of that early-2000s sound and then that kind of Age of Aquarius energy. They both very much had to be present on this song.” **“Oceanic Feeling”** “I knew this would be the last track. I really wanted it to sound like when I get up in the morning at home and go outside and think about what the day’s going to hold. Am I going to go to the beach? Am I going to go fishing? What’s going to happen? I wanted to make something that people from New Zealand would hear and would feel like, ‘Oh, I’m this. That\'s where I’m from.’ But I was also ruminating on a lot. My little brother had been in a car accident and had had a concussion and was really lost and confused. And I wanted to say to him that it was going to be OK. I was thinking a lot about my parents and this deep connection we have to our land. I was thinking about my children. I really liked the end saying, ‘I’ll know when it’s time to take off my robes and step into the choir.’ It sort of connects that first sentiment of ‘If you\'re looking for a savior, that’s not me’ and ‘One day, maybe I won’t be doing this. Who knows?’ My music is so singular. I’m pretty much at the center of it. I thought that was a really powerful image to leave with: ‘One day, I too will depart.’”

Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, *SoulFly*. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can *actually* fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s *Hunger Games*, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”

Ninajirachi and Kota Banks’ True North (Deluxe) EP is a 10 track consolidation of their insatiable sonic chemistry. An exploration of multiple genres under a fantastically electronic lens, the project finds the pair shining a spotlight on exactly why they’re regarded as one of Australia’s most potent joint forces, with a view to taking over globally.

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.