The New York Times: Jon Caramanica's Best Albums of 2019

“I have always wanted to release an album, but I never had the opportunity,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music of his long-awaited debut LP. “Now I feel completely free as an artist and as a person. I feel good about showing people something different.” It’s hard to imagine that in a little under three years, Benito Martínez Ocasio went from working in a grocery store to amassing a fervent worldwide following on the back of massive singles and high-profile guest features. On Noche Buena 2018, Bad Bunny finally delivered his much-anticipated full-length debut, *X 100PRE*—an engulfing breakup album that doesn’t merely justify the long wait, but also redefines música urbana. *X 100PRE* has everything you’d expect from the reigning king of Latin trap. The songs seamlessly flow into one another and cross genres freely, creating a narrative fueled by trap, reggaetón, dream-pop, pop-punk/emo, and Dominican dembow. The album opens with “NI BIEN NI MAL,” in which he promises that no matter how tempted he may be, he won’t cave in and call an ex (“Pase lo que pase no te voy a llamar”). His declaration that without his former lover, he’s neither happy nor sad, speaks to a place many have been after a pivotal relationship: stuck in the middle, waiting for closure. “Solo de Mí” goes from emo-perreo to trap-reggaetón heater, and in it Bad Bunny reaffirms his agency as an individual after accepting the dissolution of his relationship. It’s one of the strongest tracks on the album and was recorded just a couple of weeks before its release. “I was going into the studio in Miami to listen to all of the songs and see what was missing,” he says. “I went to take a shower and started singing, ‘No me vuelvas…’ I kept going: ‘No soy tuyo...solo de mí.’ I rushed out of the shower and didn’t even dry myself off. I just laid down some tones with my voice and said, ‘Give me a click track so I can record in time,’ and I recorded the chorus. Everything happened really fast.” The album is surprisingly light on guests, and those who are here highlight Bad Bunny’s own strengths. On “200 MPH,” Diplo offers a minimalist but effective trap number, while the Drake-featuring global smash “MIA” has the Canadian superstar singing in Spanish and Bad Bunny delivering one of his most clever lines to date: “Yo soy tu Romeo pero no Santo” (“I’m your Romeo but I’m no saint”), a reference to bachata star Romeo Santos. “La Romana,” named for the Dominican city where the song was recorded with El Alfa, kicks off with an infectious “trapchata” foundation, before changing gears and clobbering listeners with a full-force Dominican dembow banger. “Otra Noche en Miami” invokes M83-style dream-pop perfect for a night drive, and on “Tenemos Que Hablar,” Bad Bunny and longtime producer Tainy expertly interweave pop-punk with a trap foundation, making this heart-wrenching breakup song a contender for 2018’s emo anthem. The ease with which he navigates these disparate genres while telling a cohesive story shows that we’re in a new era of música urbana; even an anthem like “Estamos Bien,” which was released in June 2018 and has already amassed millions of streams, feels new within the context of the album—it’s about both Puerto Rico’s survival in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and Bad Bunny’s personal survival. For anyone who ever wondered why Bad Bunny took his time releasing a proper album, this is it. So sit back and join him in his hazy quest for answers.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s reputation as the voice of Baton Rouge is well-earned. Over the course of a career that effectively started with 2016’s *38 Baby*, he’s released music at a furious rate—uploading a great deal of it online, apart from streaming platforms. His *AI YoungBoy 2*, however, comes after something of a break, the MC’s last official project *Realer* arriving nearly a year prior. This is eons for YoungBoy, whose output couldn’t even be slowed by the jail sentences and periods of house arrest that have plagued his time in the spotlight so far. Fans will be delighted to learn that very little has changed from the perspective of the man born Kentrell Gaulden. Over beats from a veritable all-star team of producers, including Louie Bandz, Mike WiLL Made-It, Buddah Bless, and Jetsonmade, YoungBoy reminds us that he is every bit in love with the jewelry, guns, women, and drugs that have inspired some of the most vivid and impassioned Baton Rouge street rap since Boosie Badazz. He spent three good years amassing a fanbase that would push his name into the top ten trending topics of Twitter on the days leading up to *AI YoungBoy 2*’s release, and this album will only help to ensure it finds its way there again at some point in the future.

After months of drip-feeding her first full-length project to fans—devising her own release schedule and dropping a new song each week—German-born pop superstar Kim Petras presents the full, glittering package. *Clarity* is baked in ’80s bubblegum nostalgia—it’s neon, cartoonishly girly, and largely apolitical—but isn’t without layers. Underneath the raunch and sass of Madonna-inspired bops like “Broken” and “Do Me,” Petras offers glimpses at her own empowering journey through gender reassignment surgery and self-discovery. Sometimes, she tells that story through an outstretched hand: “From the bottom you come up/From haters to lovers/From nada to Prada/You know you’re the star that you are,” she belts on closing track “Shinin’,” which feels like an it-gets-better anthem for LGBTQ+ kids and outsiders. “If you’re lost/Don’t get down/Don’t give up now/You should know just what you are.”

With an April Fool\'s Day 2019 post on Instagram promising the immediate drop of a new single with his former bandmates in Aventura, Romeo Santos created a frenzy among his fans. Yet this tease proved an even more elaborate ruse for an entire album’s worth of surprise collaborations—not just with Aventura, but with an astounding assortment of Dominican bachata greats. A veritable love letter to the genre from one of its most celebrated practitioners, *Utopía* connects the superstar bachatero with those whose own music influenced him and paved the way for his tremendous success. On \"Payasos,\" bachata\'s self-appointed and enduring prince Frank Reyes holds court with its reigning king, while El Jefe Elvis Martínez adds his signature guitar flourishes on \"Millonario.\" Monchy & Alexandra, Raulin Rodriguez, and Luis Vargas, among others, also join Santos as part of an impassioned project that evokes and connects decades worth of Latin music history. He explains the ethos of the album to Apple Music. **You\'ve been doing singles with artists like Anuel AA and Ozuna. Some people may not have expected you to follow up these reggaetón tracks with a bachata album.** Those happened organically. All of the urban songs that I\'ve done in the last year are basically collaborations that have been brought to me. They\'re friends of mine, guys that I respect. I want these young urban listeners to understand that, hey, this guy can do more than just bachata. The new fans probably have heard of Aventura, but are more connected to these urban artists and this urban wave. **Were you already close or connected with these bachata artists prior to recording with them?** Most of them I did know already, some I\'ve even had good friendships with. There\'s a lot of respect, and when I reached out, one of the things I appreciated was that everyone accepted. I was a little skeptical and afraid that some might tell me, \"Well, I don\'t want to be part of the album because this guy is there.\" You know, there\'s always that competitive nature. They were all accepting to be part, and I thought that was really awesome. **How would you describe *Utopía*, to fans of the genre or otherwise?** It\'s almost like a lesson of the traditional bachata. I would risk saying there is absolutely no one that\'s relevant from the \'90s on that\'s not part of this project. If you\'re a fan of Luis Vargas, you\'re probably going to love his song. If you\'re a fan of Antony Santos, you\'re going to love that record. I tried to capture the essence of every bachata artist, to really get their true feel and their vibe. **What is it about bachata that you think connects so well and so strongly with listeners?** Bachata is just something that you feel. You want to basically dance the moment that you hear this. Any type of music that you\'re able to dance to, you already have a win-win situation. Bachata has a very sexual rhythm, and you don\'t necessarily need to be Latin or to be familiar with Latin music to just enjoy that. On 90% of the records, they\'re talking about love—the one thing that\'s never, ever going to go out of style.

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.

Kalie Shorr released a handful of tracks, mixtapes, and EPs before arriving at her confessional country-pop approach, distinctly influenced by emo and ’90s alt rock, which fits her well. She teased that direction on last year\'s *Awake* before going all in on *Open Book*, her full-length debut. True to the title, she’s said that the songs’ confrontational, diaristic details are her way of processing her own family tragedy and romantic betrayal, and she co-produced the album with Skip Black, merging spiky guitar sounds with energetic acoustic instrumentation. “Messy,” a piano ballad postmortem of the breakup, is bewildered and biting, but the pop-punk-leaning “F U Forever” is especially savage and clever: “Now I’m wearing your stupid ring on my pretty little middle finger,” she gloats, “so I can say F U forever.” “Escape” surveys varieties of self-medication, “Gatsby” pinpoints the dishonesty bound up in likability, and “Angry Butterfly” has the swagger and youthful intensity of someone who’s newly harnessed the power of her feelings.

Oakland rapper Guapdad 4000 is a scammer, a flimflammer, and in general the kind of guy you don’t want to leave your phone unlocked around. But like any good con, *Dior Deposits*—his first release after a breakthrough spot on the J. Cole label showcase *Revenge of the Dreamers III*—understands that the surest way to your wallet is to get you comfortable. So he jokes about his girl pinching his clothes (the Chance-featuring “Gucci Pajamas”), opens up about his past (“Can’t Stop Finessing”), and keeps tough talk to a minimum—seriously, the harshest insult here might be him calling his biters “nerds” (“Doing Too Much”). By the time he’s ready to level the hammer (the Maxo Kream and Denzel Curry featuring “Izayah”), you’ll be having so much fun you won’t know what hit you.

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.

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.

Let’s just state the obvious: BENNY THE BUTCHER can *rap*. He’s from Buffalo, not NYC, but *The Plugs I Met* boasts the kind of grimy, word-obsessed, kick-in-the-door New York gutter raps that old heads think went extinct in ’98. Well, not if Benny has anything to say about it. Over dusty Alchemist drums and menacing keys on “Dirty Harry,” the rapper crafts dense, writerly bars about all varieties of cinema-caliber gangster shit: “I wash the blood off the money that my daughters inherit/And kept the barrel so hot that it fog up the mirrors.” Name another current rapper who could invite Pusha T, Jadakiss, and Black Thought on their EP—and outpace all three.

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

The Vegas-born rapper is on the kind of hot streak that’ll make you wonder what you’ve been doing with your life: In the span of a couple years, the teenager collaborated with Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar (co-writing and co-producing “Nile” for Beyoncé‘s 2019 *The Lion King* tie-in album *The Gift*), nabbed writing and production credits on the *Black Panther* soundtrack, and had his own breakaway hit with the brash, minimalist “Orange Soda.” Keem’s low-key sing-raps aren’t exactly reinventing the form on *DIE FOR MY BITCH*, his second mixtape, but they’re weirdly catchy and occasionally hilarious. (“If they cancel me, then I retire,” he smirks on “TOP RAMEN.” Goals!) He even tries his hand at emo on the wonderfully salty “MY EX,” to surprisingly pleasant effect.

The cover of Polo G’s *Die a Legend* features pictures of dearly departed friends and relatives looking on from heaven, their legacies front and center as he embarks upon the next, largest step of his career. The album is a timestamp for the MC, who recently relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles to escape the tragic cycle of street violence he often sings about. He’s come a long way, refining the drill music sonics of his earliest work into the more melodic and playlist-friendly delivery of songs like “Finer Things,” released nearly a year before *Die a Legend*. The tow of his former life is ever-present, though, and celebrations of success are often inseparable from pain. “Couldn\'t leave my brother in them trenches, told him come and stay with me/We gon\' live like kings for all them nights ain\'t have no place to sleep/N\*ggas watched us starve and never offered us a plate to eat/Took off, now they mad, but I know that they won’t wait for me,” he raps on “Through da Storm.” His bars can come across as catharsis, but there are constant warnings that Polo is still very much of the environment he left. On “Lost Files” he talks about being anointed for success by God, and then, in the same verse, details a remorseless revenge killing. Songs like “A King’s Nightmare” serve as warnings to the generation behind him, while “Dyin Breed,” “Pop Out,” and “Last Strike” all paint him as someone not to be toyed with. On the whole, *Die a Legend* is a portrait of an artist trapped between the plight that informs a great deal of his work and what lies beyond the determination to escape that trauma. Fortunately for Polo G, he’s singing about the experiences he’s already had as opposed to the ones yet to come.