Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. It seems to be working. On songs like “THE DINER” and “CHIHIRO,” Eilish seeps back into her creative happy place, dusting off those haunting, gothic, dark sensibilities that became her trademark and making them feel bigger and new. Elsewhere, she uses those core soundscapes as a launching pad to veer off into surprising new directions: “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” morphs from a staccato jazz ballad into a joyride of trance and Auto-Tune, and “BITTERSUITE” begins as a low-key bossa nova song before cascading into a wall of giant cinematic synths. As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself.

Cage the Elephant’s *Neon Pill* arrives five years after their 2019 Grammy-winning global breakthrough *Social Cues*. Brothers and bandleaders Matt and Brad Shultz lost their father in the interim, the group mourned the death of friends, and Matt spent time in the hospital with severe depression. This tragedy, fight, spirit, and resolve is messily and triumphantly wrapped into *Neon Pill*, an album that finds the band forging their own sound devoid of outside influence, channeling their rollicking live show into a meditation on life, death, and music’s healing power. Take the psych-folk-leaning title track, which tells the story of Matt’s battle with mental illness, looking for answers but only finding more questions. As the band so often does, they mask dark and searching lyrics with melodic candy, making these philosophical queries go down more easily. On the track, Matt sings: “It\'s a hit and run, oh no/Double-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love/I lost control of the wheel/Double-crossed by a neon pill.” Just like the story of the band over the past five years, the track includes a phoenix-like resurgence: “Knocked down, not out, let\'s roll.”

“Say goodbye to the past/Leave it all with a laugh,” ZAYN reflects on his single “Alienated” from his fourth solo LP *ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS*. The British Pakistani singer is learning now how time heals wounds. It was nearly a decade ago that he left One Direction and forged on alone, releasing three albums while bearing the public scrutiny of fame, high-profile relationships, breakups, and in recent years becoming a father. Decamping to a farm in rural Pennsylvania provided a sanctuary from the noise, where, through nurturing his daughter, as well as animals and a garden, he learned his own ways of self-care. *ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS* refers to the space where ZAYN recorded the album: an actual shoe cupboard in his home. From familiar surroundings, he steps into largely unexplored territory, submerging himself in the stripped-back, country-inspired sounds he’d touched upon at the tail end of his third album *Nobody Is Listening* in 2021. Assisted by renowned Nashville producer Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile), ZAYN’s voice and lyrical vulnerability here are as raw and resonant as the acoustic instrumentation, with a weary soulfulness fit for the questions—about life, love, growth, and parenthood—that emerge in the stillness of solitude. “I’ve been needing something else/I’ll know what it is when I see it,” he sings on album opener “Dreamin.” On the bittersweet \"What I Am,” he sets boundaries and asks for acceptance, while reverberating guitars, cinematic strings, and background croons create a vast soundscape for live-and-learn revelations on “Grateful.” Healing isn’t always linear, as the twinkling, wide-eyed love of “Stardust” whiplashes into “Gates of Hell,” which seethes with loathing. But it’s “The Time,” a song about the joy his daughter brings to his life, that shows ZAYN’s hard-won maturity.

After nearly two decades in the game, Rapsody’s left no room for doubt when it comes to her formidable pen. But it wasn’t until 2020, when she began piecing together her fourth studio album, *Please Don’t Cry*, that Marlanna Evans realized that she’d shared very little of herself beyond her mic skills. “People had to put up a mirror for me,” she admitted to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, recalling a pivotal conversation with the producer No ID. “He was like, ‘Everybody knows you can rap, but I can’t tell you five things that I know about you.’” Thus began the North Carolina native’s journey inward: Before she could reintroduce herself to her fans, she’d have to know herself first. The result of that journey, *Please Don’t Cry*, is Rapsody’s deepest and boldest work yet. “Who are you in your rawest state?” asks the gentle voice of the album’s narrator, Phylicia Rashad. Making the record, Rapsody found her mind wandering towards *The Matrix*, in particular the relationship between Neo and the Oracle. “He’s trying to find his way, trying to find himself…and she’s kind of his guiding voice,” she tells Darden. “I was like, ‘That’s kind of what this journey has been for me, but who would be my Oracle?’” Rashad was the first name that came to mind. Through interludes, the Tony Award winner nudges Rapsody further down the path of vulnerability: “Who are you when you’re joyful? What makes you sad? Why do you cry?” Rapsody doesn’t hold back her answers on tracks like “Diary of a Mad Bitch,” a cathartic shit-talking session, or the bittersweet “Loose Rocks,” where she grapples with a loved one’s dementia diagnosis with backup vocals from Alex Isley (yes, that Isley). Intense emotions are countered with airy, meditative beats on the gorgeous “3:AM,” a late-night love song with a hook from Erykah Badu, and the balmy reggae jam “Never Enough.” By the closing track “Forget Me Not,” her fear of vulnerability feels like a distant memory as she raps: “I want to know everything/I want to feel, I want to be alive/It’s too good.”

Álvaro Díaz’s artistic evolution has been nothing short of remarkable. The Puerto Rican rapper heard on 2020’s hip-hop-centered *Diaz Antes* sounded little like the 2.0 version on his innovative and inventive 2021 follow-up *Felicilandia*. His now-established penchant for pop-wise productions and futuristic forms carries on with *SAYONARA*, an album that finds him on the cutting edge of reggaetón, among other styles. At a time when the pervasive dembow thump in Latin music can feel a bit too formulaic, he brings a freshness to the format on cuts like “KAWA” and the Quevedo team-up “QUIZÁS SI QUIZÁS NO.” He has obvious reverence for his pioneering predecessors, evident on the homage-heavy Feid collab “GATITAS SANDUNGUERAS VOL.1,” but he’s not beholden to genre norms: The beat switches on “EN PR NO HACE FRÍO” and “SIN PODERES” feel surprisingly natural, a testament to his ability to navigate shifting sonic environs. Further departures such as “QUIÉN TE QUIERE COMO EL NENE” and the balladic “YOKO” only add to his growing mystique.

It’s been two years since A Boogie wit da Hoodie’s *Me vs. Myself*, and his 2024 effort *Better Off Alone* charts just how much his life has changed since. Due to both his love life and his success as a rapper, the MC from the Bronx spins tales of heartbreak and deceit. On the title track, which kicks off the album, he outlines how romantic flings continue to betray him and opps remain relentless in their pursuit. Over mournful piano bars and bouncy 808s, Boogie croons: “Guess I\'m better off alone right now, I\'m ducked off in the Bahamas/Got so much shit on my shoulders, think my back broke.” Later, he adds: “Only feelin\' safe around my bros, I gotta bulletproof the bus/They won\'t catch me lackin\' on the road.” Boogie uses features from Young Thug, Future, Cash Cobain, Lil Durk, and more to infuse the album with positive vibes, like on the Thugger-assisted “Let’s Go Away,” which is a dose of pure joy after A Boogie’s laundry list of friends turned enemies and lovers turned rivals.

Twenty-five years or so after they picked up their banjos and decided to turn off their amps (at least for a little while), The Avett Brothers make the album you kinda always figured they would. Having graduated from the lowercase charm of their early music but likewise from the more stadium-sized sentiments of albums like 2019’s *Closer Than Together*, they ruminate on the simple pleasures that (of course) turn out to be not so simple after all (“Cheap Coffee”). They also indulge in folksy wisdom while taking enough shots at themselves to make that wisdom feel real (“Country Kid”). And no matter how earnest they get, they always remember to exercise the good, old-fashioned American humility that got them here in the first place (“2020 Regret”).