TIME's Best Albums of 2021 So Far

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

Like many of the best things in life, the genesis of London producer Fred again..’s debut album lies in a chance meeting on a night out. “I met a guy called Carlos in a bar in Atlanta,” the London producer born Fred Gibson tells Apple Music. “And he just had the most joyous spirit. I had some videos on my phone from the night, and when I got back to the hotel, I dragged them into Logic and began to make a song out of them.” Soon, this became a key element of his working process, and one he dubbed “Actual Life.” “Why write a song about an experience when you can just make the song out of the experience?” he says. He began trawling old videos on his phone and recording phone conversations and ended up releasing tracks featuring snippets of friends. After working on tracks by artists including FKA twigs, Romy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy, collaborating with Headie One on the *GANG* project, and being named Producer of the Year at The BRITs in February 2020, he spent much of the rest of the year focused on turning his Actual Life concept into his first full-length album. “It’s called *Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020)* because I want every album I make to be a kind of diary entry of the time it was made,” he says. “I like to try and shine a light on the things that otherwise seem unglamorous.” With Gibson citing a friend falling seriously ill and the upheaval of lockdown as two key influences on the record, *Actual Life* demonstrates his knack for creating an unshakable hook and is at times heart-wrenching and melancholic but always imbued with a healthy sense of optimism and the joy of life. “I went through some tough things this last year, but I often think the most optimistic people are those doing it in the face of adversity,” he says. “Hopefully that comes across in the music.” Here, he talks us through some key tracks on the album. **“Kyle (I Found You)”** “This was the first tune I made for the project, and the vocal is from Kyle Tran Myhre, a poet I found on Instagram who goes by the name of Guante. The sample is him reading at an open-mic night, and he has such a beautifully nervous but lovable spirit. Musically, it’s quite influenced by a few nights I spent in \[Berlin techno club\] Berghain at the start of \[2020\]. You wouldn’t think it from the chords and vocal of the track, but the drums underneath have that very reverb-heavy sound you’d get on a techno record.” **“Julia (Deep Diving)”** “I found Julia \[Michaels\] on Instagram too, and she’s a singer-songwriter. She has the most infectiously joyful tone to her voice and there’s a real innocence to her speaking tone. She’s got a beautiful singing voice too, but her speaking voice is just so special to me. I think this track really captures the joy of falling in love with someone.” **“Big Hen (Steal My Joy)”** “I made this track at 5 am on a beautiful summer’s day in August \[2020\]. I decided to get up really early to work on music and this just came together so quickly. The drums obviously have a garage influence. It’s a really hopeful and joyful song.” **“Angie (I’ve Been Lost)”** “The interlude just before this track is a reprise of a lot of the memories and samples on the record, and then the track kind of concludes the record. It’s funny because it feels like it ends on a positive note, but really it’s me trying to say I don’t know what’s going on and how I’m feeling. The sample is from Angie McMahon, an amazing singer I saw play to, like, 20 people in a basement a while back. When she says, ‘I’ve been lost, I’ve been lost, but I’m really trying,’ I think you can take that sentence in a few different ways.” **“Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing)”** “So this features Marea Stamper, aka The Blessed Madonna. I met Marea initially in Palestine at a trip for songwriters organized by \[creative group\] Block9 and Banksy. She’s such an open book and a real bastion of the human spirit, and we’ve been good friends since. This sample came from a conversation we were having on Zoom about what’s happened to our industry this year and hopefully what will come next. She’s such a natural orator and a great example of someone who’s optimistic in the face of adversity. This song’s almost like a bonus track, as it looks ahead to what’s coming next.”

Marfa, Texas, has played host to countless artists over the years, musical and otherwise. The storied West Texas town is known as much for its vast collection of fine arts as its famed Marfa lights, making it a popular destination for anyone in need of a bit of cosmic inspiration. For Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall, Marfa offered the perfect setting for songwriting retreats, so much so that the trio returned for repeat visits over the last few years. “Jon had been preaching Marfa to us for a long time and telling us how magical it was,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “We\'re all from Texas, but that\'s like a whole other state in itself over there in that area. That was the first time we\'d ever written as a trio even though we had been friends forever. It was instant chemistry, for sure.” *The Marfa Tapes* captures the magic the trio found across 15 tracks, recorded in just five days using one acoustic guitar and two microphones. Accordingly, the desert itself plays a prominent sonic role in the project, with the occasional breeze or crackle of firewood adding the kind of intimacy that can’t be created in a recording studio. In addition to a number of new and unreleased songs, the collection includes an emotional, stripped-down version of Lambert’s beloved *The Weight of These Wings* song “Tin Man” as well as an acoustic take on *Wildcard*’s “Tequila Does.” Below, the trio offers insight into two of the highlights on *The Marfa Tapes*. **“Ghost”** **Lambert:** “That was one of those moments where I was actually venting. I was telling them two things I had done recently to make myself feel better. Some of that involves burning some clothes that weren\'t mine. That\'s how the ball started rolling.” **Randall:** “We were stuck. We were sitting around a fire, and we were playing the song over and over. It never had that thing, whether it\'s a hook or just someone to make it real. That\'s when she goes, ‘And heaven knows I ain\'t afraid of ghosts.’ I started freaking out. \[Jack\] got up and danced around.” **“Amazing Grace (West Texas)”** **Lambert:** “That was all Jon Randall.” **Ingram:** “Around the mountains, you can see for a hundred miles. We saw this cloud and the storm coming in. You could see it raining and how it just looks gray all the way to the ground. It rolled into the ranch where we stayed, the bunk house. It was just beautiful. That song was just like a soundtrack to what we were seeing and the landscape, just the people and the towns and the cows. It\'s like a soundtrack to our trip.” **Randall:** “I can remember how it felt to be at that table outside writing the song. You become part of your own picture.”

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.

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.