WIRED's 7 Best Albums of 2019

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

Singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Cuco, aka Omar Banos, built his name in 2017 on a woozy, heart-on-sleeve indie-pop slow jam called \"Lo Que Siento.” Despite the fact that its title translates to “What I Feel,” the song’s lyrics—“This is for you, baby, listen/It’s your song”—are clearly directed at someone else. However, as the title of his full-length debut suggests, *Para Mi* is ultra-personal and made for an audience of one discerning listener. \"This one is for me,\" he tells Apple Music. \"Nobody else.” With songs that examine lovesickness through the lens of a bad drug trip (“Ego Death in Thailand”), heartbreak after a harrowing accident (“Hydrocodone,” which he completed following his hospitalization after a tour van crash in 2018), and being alone in one’s room while toggling between LSD and psilocybin (“Keeping Tabs”), it’s definitely not intended to cast him into the spotlight. And so far, his style of confessional, vulnerable songwriting (and the ease with which he jumps between psych rock, lo-fi hip-hop, \'70s synth-funk, \'80s quiet storm, shoegaze, and jazz-inflected pop) has made him a bit of a reluctant star, particularly among Latino kids who don’t often see themselves reflected onstage, especially in the American indie-pop world. \"It\'s kind of scary,” he says of performing to audiences who sing every word along with him. \"People look at me like a teacher or some shit. But other than that, it\'s fun. I like seeing people that look like me in the crowd.” Growing up in Hawthorne, California, the 21-year-old only child of Mexican immigrants didn’t really have a model for his career. \"I just made the music,” he says of his teenage tinkering, using whatever tools he had around—a laptop with GarageBand or Ableton Live, his trumpet, a pair of headphones as a mic—doing mix-downs through the auxiliary port of his car stereo. \"I didn\'t relate to a lot of people. \'Keeping Tabs’ is just like me being in school, kind of being a lowlife. The whole vibe of it—it\'s like the song sounds really happy and shit, but the lyrics are pretty dark.” It was during those formative years that he discovered flutists like Bobbi Humphrey and Hubert Laws and trumpeter Clifford Brown (all of whose influence you can hear in the jazz-funk of “Feelings”) and Brazilian greats like Antônio Carlos Jobim and Seu Jorge (whose impact makes itself heard on “Bossa No Sé” and “Best Friend”). Somewhere down the line, though—after enough SoundCloud uploads caught fire, after the video for the blissful “Summertime Hightime” blew up—what used to be his became everyone else\'s. Cut to Cuco in the middle of headlining a pretty grueling world tour. He\'s exhausted and homesick—the kind of situation that, for better or worse, inspires one of *Para Mi*’s most poignant tracks. \"Far Away From Home” is, as you can guess, an opulent ballad about “missing someone on tour when you can\'t see them,” he says. \"You\'re tired and you come to a city, enjoy it for like an hour, perform. Then you fucking dip out the next day.” Don’t get him wrong—he appreciates the love, but he longs for the simple pleasures of just being Omar, back in LA with his friends, kicking it: \"I’m just a regular-ass dude.”

An eccentric like Madlib and a straightforward guy like Freddie Gibbs—how could it possibly work? If 2014’s *Piñata* proved that the pairing—offbeat producer, no-frills street rapper—sounded better and more natural than it looked on paper, *Bandana* proves *Piñata* wasn’t a fluke. The common ground is approachability: Even at their most cinematic (the noisy soul of “Flat Tummy Tea,” the horror-movie trap of “Half Manne Half Cocaine”), Madlib’s beats remain funny, strange, decidedly at human scale, while Gibbs prefers to keep things so real he barely uses metaphor. In other words, it’s remarkable music made by artists who never pretend to be anything other than ordinary. And even when the guest spots are good (Yasiin Bey and Black Thought on “Education” especially), the core of the album is the chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib: vivid, dreamy, serious, and just a little supernatural.

If some of literature’s greatest works—*The Sun Also Rises*, \"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows*—can start with an epigraph, why can’t an album? “It sort of sets the scene in a way,” Kindness tells Apple Music of their choice to introduce their third LP with an a cappella from Detroit techno group Galaxy 2 Galaxy’s “Transition.\" \"It shows that the author\'s read someone other than themselves.” Kindness is definitely one of those authors. The singer-songwriter-producer born Adam Bainbridge makes plush downtempo pop tunes that not only wear their diverse influences on their sleeve (avant-garde disco, classic house music, ’90s hip-hop, Balearic beat) but emblazon them across their chest in huge block letters (boldly sampling \'80s R&B singers Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal, DC go-go royalty Trouble Funk, and UK synth-pop experimenters Art of Noise). So the salvo that opens “Sibambaneni” is particularly fitting: “There will be people who will say, ‘You don’t mix *this* with *that*.’ And you will say, \'Watch me.’” From there, *Something Like a War*’s all-inclusive utopia takes shape, as Kindness and their score of collaborators (including the late Cassius producer Philippe Zdar, who helped make Kindness’ debut album and to whom this one is dedicated) weave personal reflections and soulful, atmospheric excursions with a stylistic vision that\'s matched only by peers like Solange and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes. The geographically unbound Kindness explains how each of the album’s songs came together. **“Sibambaneni”** \"This was inspired by the best parts of a visit to Johannesburg. My mother\'s family are Indians who immigrated to South Africa, and who experienced some really horrible things under apartheid. I didn\'t really want to go back, but I went in 2016 and had both good and bad experiences. And the good of the experience was often finding a mutual understanding with other queer and non-white communities there. That was very cathartic and positive, and the idea of standing in solidarity and attempting to uplift each other was what we tried to put into the song.\" **\"Raise Up”** “This is the more positive continuation of \'Sibambaneni.’ You can’t really have light without dark. The piano comes in and the beat comes in, and it’s just trying to get closer to that communal euphoria—the joy of these voices singing together. These first two songs have string contributions from Rob Moose and vocals from my friends Bryndon Cook and Amanda Khiri.” **\"Lost Without\" (feat. Seinabo Sey)** “What I hope is the first of many songs with Seinabo. The song was originally written by myself and Kelela. We did a demo that was quite far removed from this, around the time of my last album. I always think it’s nice to have these little foundational pieces that carry on from one project to the next. The incredible bass was recorded in Johannesburg, the lead vocals in Stockholm, and the rest of the instrumentation in New York, where 99 percent of this record was made.” **\"Softness as a Weapon”** \"Mixing is a key part of making records for me. But I’m absolutely not a mixer; it’s too technical, too many decisions. This was the first track that Philippe mixed, and working with him was like coming home. So absolutely natural yet also insanely exciting. I remember him pushing the volume of new vocal effects he recorded and taking the song to a really extreme place which no one else could have done. This whole album is a testament to our friendship and collaboration.\" **\"Hard to Believe\" (feat. Jazmine Sullivan)** \"Jazmine Sullivan posted an Instagram story about her song \'Bust Your Windows,\' saying how she’d want strings on everything if she could have them. I was in the middle of writing a song which I knew would have some, so I went out on a limb and sent it to her management. We followed up maybe a thousand times, but the persistence was worth it. It’s kinda nice to have Jazmine and Bahamadia on the same record, too. This is definitely my East Coast album.\" **\"Who You Give Your Heart To\" (feat. Alexandria)** \"I’ve been a fan of Alexandria since 2014’s *Rebirth*. This is inspired by house projects like Nuyorican Soul—by vocal house and where those arrangements can take you.\" **\"Samthing’s Interlude\" (feat. Samthing Soweto)** \"I always love LPs where someone takes an interlude and resets the energy for a moment. It was amazing to come across Samthing’s music online and then meet him in Joburg. If you have a chance, listen to the song which introduced me to him: ‘Kwamampela.\'\" **\"Dreams Fall\"** \"I moderated Robyn’s lecture for Red Bull Music Academy in 2018, and perhaps this was a little window of fate. I had been chipping away at a few songs—this one, ‘Cry Everything,\' and ‘Softness as a Weapon’—but really needed a second pair of ears. She came into the studio and instinctively knew what the right move was for each. I’m indebted to her, both for our collaborations and songs like these where I get to pick her songwriter’s brain. That said, she is quite audibly singing a very country-esque background *oooh* in the breakdown of the track.\" **\"The Warning\" (feat. Robyn)** “I remember playing ‘Who Do You Love?’ from \[2014’s\] *Otherness* to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Robyn and I were working with them at the time on songs I truly hope we’ll one day finish. Terry was horrified by \'Who Do You Love?’—all loping rhythm, asymmetry, and fidgety arrangement. I can understand his point. But a few weeks later, we played them this and his reaction was a smile, and one of relief. I think it’s wonderful to have finally made something approaching a straightforward ballad with Robyn, as her voice is heartbreaking when most unadorned. This is also the first song she and I wrote together.\" **\"Cry Everything”** \"There are a lot less samples on this LP than on previous ones. I think samples should really sound like samples—enormous-sounding, otherworldly, too much to be the product of any one individual. That’s what’s amazing about using samples sometimes: It’s a hybrid song which couldn’t exist in the scale of ambition it has if it weren’t for the original composition. I’m grateful to have been able to use Todd Rundgren’s voice in this song. The original, \'Pretending to Care,\' was just already such a beautiful and profound piece of music that it was interesting to try and do something respectful, but also make it sound huge.” **\"No New Lies\" (feat. Cosima)** \"These last three songs are kind of the moody ending to an otherwise uptempo record. \'No New Lies\' was such a fantastic title from Cosima, and we built the track around her energy. This song also manages to do something I’ve always wanted to do and builds into another completely separate track. I had charts on my walls for years of keys and tempos, always on the lookout for when a song idea might end up blending into another.” **\"Something Like a War\" (feat. Bahamadia)** \"With the last LP, I felt like there was something incongruous working with American MCs when I was based in London, but this record really brought me close to all of the incredible musicianship close to home in NYC and the surrounding cities. It took a little time to make contact, but it was so worth it. Bahamadia has long been a hero. Her work on *Kollage* and Roni Size’s *New Forms* LP are super formative for me. Everything she touches is golden. This song was part of a longer thematic discussion. She wanted to see the rest of the lyrics for the record and hear as much as she could, and then extrapolate from there.” **\"Call It Down\" (feat. Cosima and Nadia Nair)** \"This is sort of in keeping with the traditions of vinyl sequencing—you put your soft and drumless tracks at the end of a side of vinyl, where there’s less loudness and dynamic range. As a listener who enjoys records released in the vinyl era, there are a lot of peaceful last songs in my collection. This was inadvertently one of those, and brings together so many of the team who worked on this LP: Philippe on the mix, Daniel Aged on bass, Rob Moose on strings, Hanna Benn on choral vocals, and Cosima and Nadia Nair singing lead with me. It’s bonkers to me that we get to make records. I can’t tell you how honored I feel to have made this one with so many incredible people.”

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

Steve Lacy snapped on this one. The guitarist/bassist of The Internet (and acclaimed producer for Solange and J. Cole, as well as featured collaborator on Vampire Weekend\'s *Father of the Bride*) presents a kaleidoscopic tour of funk and R&B styles on his debut solo album *Apollo XXI*. The sound and drive heard on the album are deeply indebted to the freaky early days of Prince Rogers Nelson, from the way Lacy stylizes song titles (“Love 2 Fast,” “N Side,” “4ever”) to his voice, which ranges from growly lows to pleading, teasing falsetto. “Guide” has *Dirty Mind* on its mind, while “Playground” jumps on the one with funk guitar and slap bass. The nine-minute shape-shifter “Like Me” sparkles with psychedelic touches, as if he’s hitched a ride on the P-Funk mothership. On “Lay Me Down,” Lacy masters the art of patient seduction, taking his time to do it right, while “Basement Jack” and “Hate CD” feel like something Frank Ocean would ride to. Sprinkled among these gems are spontaneous bursts of creativity like “Amandla’s Interlude” and “Outro Freestyle/4ever,” which show Lacy exploring the outer limits of expression and spirituality.

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.