LS Read the full review. Allison Moorer - Blood. Hey, it's been a helluva year (so far!) Introduction. Big Thief, U.F.O.F. BBT Read the full review. But it summoned to mind that strain of 80s pop when older musicians would reach the top end of the charts with sophisticated, modern records that used production techniques from records for teenagers, and applied them to songs unmistakably written about adult life. Uncut’s 50 best new albums of 2019. Slowthai wryly evokes the forgotten parts of the country through snapshots of working-class life: tea and biscuits, hiding drugs, fallouts with a stepfather, EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell. - 0:00 Well, what a year it’s been. LS Read the full review. LS Read the full review. Like Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond and so many others this year, Amber Bain uses super-synthetic electropop and soft rock to say much rougher, grittier truths. The chief grotbags of the British indie scene return, retaining a genuinely reptilian edge to their lounge lizard music. By NME. The 50 Best Albums of 2019 So Far Including Lizzo, Vampire Weekend, Billie Eilish, Tyler the Creator and more. Listen to our Best Pop Albums of 2019 playlist on Spotify right here. The Highest Rated Albums of 2019 1. The powerful music on Almadura will long outlast the injustices iLe and the rest of the island are fighting against. But the sheer zest for life in these bombastic, ultra-quotable self-empowerment tracks – as well as the pure-pop hooks – gives them intensity even on record. Clockwise from left, Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny and Brittany Howard. A future cult classic ... (Sandy) Alex G. Modern classics ... Durand Jones and the Indications. Alexis Petridis Read the full review. Until this year, rapper Dave was a singles artist – he managed 11 before his debut album was released – but Black marked a sea change: serious, reflective and grown-up. Diatom Ribbons, by Kris Davis (center) was selected as the No. Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox! All that inscrutability could be off-putting, but Designer is the kind of art that rewards questioning. Their ranting live shows gathered hype like a crowd round a bullhorn, and this debut album delivers – and then some. Dec 19, 2019 by Genius @Genius. But it’s a disarming invitation to Hval’s most intimate work yet, one where she and her collaborators contemplate the purpose of existence and art in imagery that’s no less evocative for its surrealism. Big Thief Drawing from personal history — including the death of his older brother, the album's namesake, from a heroin overdose — Saadiq delivers an anguished suite of songs about black struggle and surrender, incarceration and redemption. American Love Call is full of modern classics, from the falsetto raptures of How Can I Be Sure to the perfect country soul of Long Way Home. Without resembling anything so cliched as a “getting it together in the country” record, her fifth solo album runs on that solitary, spartan existence: sad and lovely piano-led songwriting unfolds in its own unruffled time, but then a post-punk scribble like Mother’s Mother’s Magazines upsets Le Bon’s calm, like a momentary wigout at her dislocation from society. LS Read the full review. A transformative year for music brings bold new voices and a breaking of genre boundaries. The orchestra's 100 or so musicians and a chorus of singers weave a beatless, beatific drone that draws inspiration from the deceptive monotony of our planet's deserts, where time only appears to stand still. Copied to clipboard. Bleeding' Burna Boy, 'African Giant' Rico Nasty and Kenny Beats, 'Anger Management' The Black Keys, 'Let's Rock' Todd Snider, Salinger and Charles Dickens), but he himself knocks at their door with an ability to wrap nostalgic imagery within a crucial moment that never leaves your psyche: "Dollar movie theater, dingy foyer, little kid, not a penny to my name / F*****' with the joystick, pretendin' I was really playin'." —Suraya Mohamed, ■ MORE: Watch Burna Boy perform at NPR's Tiny Desk, New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah is one of the most compelling voices working in music today — and his latest "stretch music" album is possibly his most ambitious work to date. 01 January 2020 The Official Top 40 biggest albums of 2019 Albums by Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande and Tom Walker are among 2019's big-hitters. Elegiac and rickety, it’s a lasting testament to his mordant and philosophical poetry, but also to his pain: “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting,” he sings on That’s Just the Way That I Feel. Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheAJayII What a year, huh. You can find the rest of our picks for the best music of 2019 here. Note: You can listen to a Spotify playlist of songs from these albums below. BBT Read the full review. The data is compiled by Nielsen SoundScan based on each album's weekly physical and digital sales, as well as on-demand streaming and digital sales of … All scores on this page are from December 19, 2019. Consider, then, a side-by-side accounting for a certain pop star who came into full flower over the course of the decade: In 2011, Lana Del Rey's mere presence was viewed by some as an affront to the ideal of authenticity; in 2019, few albums achieved the critical consensus that greeted Norman F****** Rockwell! It's a compelling, echoing acoustic introduction to a primarily synth-driven album, which at times resolves into chaotic crescendos. LS Read the full review. It’s a body of work that’s comforting and heartening in the way a journey towards enlightenment should be, but it’s also challenging, full of ambivalence and irresolvable confusion. To see each voter’s ballot, skip ahead to page 6 of this feature. The Best Albums of 2019. Good: Check out our picks for the Best Movies of 2019 and the Best TV Shows of 2019. 3. By Pitchfor k. The 100 Best Songs of 2019. It flew over some folks' heads, but only because it so thoroughly resists the white gaze. The latter is an album-length self-excavation that crawls through moldy memories in a brutal poetry that is at times darkly funny but mostly wrestles with personal and societal truths that'll leave you touched, shook. Albums and box sets released between Nov. 10, 2018 and Nov. 9, 2019 were eligible. From the return of Sunn O))) to Blood Incantation’s death-metal space odysseys to anarcha-feminists Ragana, these are the metal records we loved this year. The artists who ruled the year, starring FKA twigs, Bon Iver, Kim Gordon, DaBaby, and more. Until this year, rapper Dave was a singles artist – he managed 11 before his debut album was released – but Black... 3. How do we make sense of our relationships with our bodies or the planet — and how do those relationships impact each other? LS Read the full review. Case in point: "Te Rumba" comes across as a hypnotic love song that stands as a personal statement of desire, but like the best protest music, the power of the message is in the storytelling. Lankum - The Livelong Day. BBT Read the full review. Kathryn Bromwich Read the full review. Legacy! —Jewly Hight, ■ MORE: Jewly Hight reviews Songs Of Our Native Daughters, Ari Lennox declared her intentions for her debut album right from the title. NME's 50 Best Albums of 2019. They tainted the water. One album can’t really contain the pop-cultural moment that is Lizzo – she is at her most enjoyable live, feeding back with a crowd that are delighted to see a star who looks like them, or, rather, not like everyone else in pop. 7th June 2019. It's a beautiful world, but we are not okay. While artists like Billie Eilish and Polachek have pushed pop into the future this year, King Princess joins Lana Del Rey in showing that there’s potential in classicism yet. By Pitchfor k. The 20 Best Music Videos of 2019. Written By SPIN Staff December 17 2019, 1:21 PM ET. But nobody perfected the approach like Ariana Grande, whose second album in six months (following 2018’s Sweetener) vibrates with immediacy. Even before you get to Aldous Harding’s magnetic, bug-eyed live shows, the New Zealander’s third album operates on its own unique logic: inscrutable lyrics and tender folk settings that are deeply eerie yet obviously benign, like the traditional music of some beatific lost civilisation. Illustration by Drew Litowitz. Generally speaking, breaks-up are trash. Editor's note: All albums were chosen from Canadian releases between Jan. 1 and Nov. 22, 2019. —Bob Boilen, ■ MORE: Lankum's All Songs Considered interview, Those who might consider the string quartet little more than a fusty, forgotten genre haven't heard Orange. The other Dublin post-punk success story of 2019 alongside Fontaines DC, The Murder Capital have a bit more monochrome hauteur – but there’s still a touch of lairiness. Things I Imagined She pulls you under with her. Saves the World is an unsparing emotional confrontation that drags you right into the bedroom bathed in pink light, the dorm room with the blunt scissors, not to mention singer Katie Gavin’s torrid self-examinations. BBT Read the full review. Singing of her deep ambivalence about love and identity, Tamko ultimately settled on the only album title that could sum up the full measure of her sleek, soulful shape-shifting: Vagabon. Death-metal, hardcore, grindcore, goth and industrial insurgents stakes their claim to the respective thrones. Alabama Shakes hardly cleaved to one genre, but frontwoman Brittany Howard shows just how astonishingly broad and instinctive her talent is here. With every twist, Simz is already on top of the beat. Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell! Listen to our Best Punk Albums of 2019 playlist on Spotify right here . Del Rey’s stately sixth album is completely out of step with contemporary... 2. Those sounds are more than just another layer of Americana cosplay: her obsession with American archetypes, once dismissed as superficial, has matured into an acute understanding of how they are created and frustration at what they conceal. Jimmy Lee, Saadiq's first studio release in eight years,has all of those musical trademarks in place. There’s a musicality to his delivery that suggests a man considering one side of the argument, then the other – but ultimately there is little equivocation as he condemns institutional racism, needless violence, and the difficulty of social mobility: “We’re Kunta Kintes in some Cuban links / The Balenciagas didn’t blend us in.” BBT Read the full review. Shaw gene splices strands of Mozart and Ravel into rigorously assembled pieces such as Plan & Elevation, proving that while some tricks of string quartet architecture remain, her buildings emerge with fresh authority. The 100 Best Albums of 2019 It was a great year for throwback hip hop, sex-positive R&B, ice-cold dance music, ambitious metal, and downright weird pop. 8. Instead, as the title promises, the album depicts intimacy as a process: a series of trials and metaphors that draw us closer to each other. 2 Jem Aswad’s 10 Best Albums. Lewis fully leans in to her best west coast troubadour mode on her fourth solo album, spinning endlessly captivating yarns of estranged lovers and lost hopes. Dec 10, 2019 Getty. Listen to our Best Punk Albums of 2019 playlist on Spotify right here . woods found an inspired partner in Segal, whose beats are built like the condemned house falling apart on the album's cover. 20. hide caption, This stunningly beautiful, trance-inducing album record draws heavily on traditional Irish folk music, but with a deep dark Dublin twist. As her discography has grown, her imagery has evolved: less shorthand, more self-reference. Whether it's conceit or confidence, Burna Boy deserves to brag. 1. Fontaines D.C. - Dogrel. They colored a universe. The freestyle flows. Pang details a rebirth – the end of a marriage, a new start, a new creative partnership with producer Danny L Harle – and its avant-garde mix of airy synthesis and human tactility glistens with wonder. The point is that the best music you’ve ever heard can come from anywhere, and this year, it came from just about everywhere. With his sixth album, the east Londoner cements his status as one of the UK’s greatest ever MCs. Nevertheless, human decency still feels close at hand – not least from the man singing. But what if you're not even allowed to call it a break-up? “They’re waiting and hoping I’m not enough,” she sings on Cellophane in the album’s final moments, contemplating the fallout from the end of her relationship. Trending Now. Solange, When I Get Home Dense layers of fluttering gauze ... Amber Bain. BBT Read the full review. It’s a moment of fragility, but one that’s undercut by what has come before it – FKA twigs has proved that she is more than enough, someone who can sing, write, produce and pole-dance, all of it brilliantly. — that matter, magnified magnificently. (With her flexible but utterly distinctive voice, she sometimes reminds me of Cat Stevens, if you never had a single clue what Cat Stevens' songs were about.) This is sound that refuses stasis, insisting on endless renewal from one moment to the next. —Tom Huizenga, ■ MORE: All Things Considered's review of Orange, Remind Me Tomorrow opens with six seconds of silence. By. It's lovely, but how do you explain it? Since 2015, the album chart has been based on both sales and streaming. The Brooklyn band’s second album of the year is earthier than UFOF, the glowing collection that arrived in spring. Norman F****** Rockwell! BBT Read the full review. DIIV: Deceiver. Kitty Empire Read the full review. The 25 Best K-pop Songs of 2019: Critics' Picks This year, Billboard critics picked the best K-pop albums with these narratives -- as well as accomplished musicianship -- in mind. LS Read the full review. LS Read the full review. To realize her songs' deceptively plainspoken complexity, Howard and producer Shawn Everett brought together jazz disruptors Nate Smith on drums and Robert Glasper on keys, alongside her old bandmate and musical anchor, bassist Zac Cockrell. The same, Moten says, is true of black music – a broken circle, rooted and free, it demands a new way of listening. These are notable albums, defined as having received significant coverage from reliable sources independent of … Across 40 minutes, IGOR draws, erases and redraws emotional lines in the sand, smudging up Tyler's self-esteem with each new boundary crossed. I … It makes Legacy! Ten albums that take listeners to unexpected places while providing a timeless reminder that the boldest creative expression sounds like freedom. It practically became a genre unto itself, with DJs taking up the mantle, younger artists adopting the sound and producers incorporating his slurred, stutter-step technique. Months later, he released his fourth album with the same title. Southern Sky, Bad Man, SugarHouse and plenty more make this a future cult classic. In these brawny, meandering folk songs, a butcher spouts anti-immigrant bile, an anxious jogger hears of racial violence, and workers in a warehouse flog themselves half to death; at a more intimate level, there are infidelities and loneliness. By Craig Jenkins @CraigSJ. U.F.O.F. Performing concerts in support of the album while dressed in a Warhol wig, shades and dazzling neon suits, Tyler cavorted all over the stage celebrating an even greater breadth to his music. The best albums of 2019 (so far!) BBT Read the full review. Scroll down for 20 of our favorite punk albums from 2019, as voted on by the Paste staff. Congleton told me that after they first made a solo acoustic version of the album (a version you may get a chance to hear in 2020), they worked to expand its scope, aiming for "early period Scott Walker" as an inspiration, "where it's fantastic songs, with really cool arrangements and you're hearing something totally new." These one-time music students create a perfect simulacrum of 60s and 70s soul, but lit with the lamps of a jazz club rather than the sterile striplighting of a lab. Ariana Grande, Thank U, Next 2. When drummer Janet Weiss quit Sleater-Kinney prior to the release of their ninth studio album, it cast an unfair pallor on a record mired in suspicion, every new dazzling synth or poppy refrain regarded as the possible straw that broke the camel’s back. A list of the top albums of the year from NME. —Bobby Carter, ■ MORE: Watch Ari Lennox perform at NPR's Tiny Desk. Billie Eilish, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? By NME. There are spectral strings and synths, bells, electronics, a smattering of piano notes. By Matt Miller and Madison Vain. An absentee father, a sibling in prison (his brother Christopher is serving a life sentence for his involvement in the killing of Sofyen Belamouadden), a burgeoning, pressurised music career – it all gets mixed into an urban opera that plays out intensely, and internally. New ground … Carrie Brownstein, left, and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. IGOR, the fifth studio album from Tyler, The Creator, mourns a love that was never granted permission to flourish in the first place. —Ruth Saxelby, ■ MORE: All Songs Considered interviews Holly Herndon, Burna Boy has been a superstar of Nigerian music for years. Below, CBC Music has ranked the best francophone albums of 2019. This video is a look at the best this year had to offer. The first solo album by Alabama Shakes front woman Brittany Howard inspires such heady thoughts. By Pitchfor k. The Chorus of #MeToo, and the Women Who Turned Trauma Into Songs. BEST ALBUM SEKAI NO OWARI 2010-2019 2021.2.10[WED] Release. Listen to our Best Indie Rock Albums of 2019 playlist on Spotify right here. 23rd December 2019. Top 20 Jazz Albums of 2019 Mike Flynn Thursday, November 21, 2019 The ultimate guide to the year's best new jazz albums as voted for by Jazzwise's peerless panel of reviewers – including the complete original Jazzwise reviews. Long may it last. Wistful, resigned and cutting, it's a fitting swan song for the decade. But Morgan Simpson’s astonishingly tight drumming keeps them painting within the lines, even when they’re making the most abstract daubs. This album, Olsen's fourth, runs screaming from her quiet side, with songs propelled by string arrangements that, along with her dramatic vocal performance, enhance the lyricism of some of Olsen's most energetic songs. The top-performing albums and EPs in the United States are ranked on the Billboard 200 chart, which is published by Billboard magazine. Because Sharon Van Etten has no time for superficiality. This is an album of deep inner struggles thrust onto a bigger stage, with words — "What about my dreams? Yet the darkness of their first three albums is never far from the door, antisemitism and apocalypse snapping a little harder at the heels of a new father and husband who’s realised how much more he has to lose. Like Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile, each track on poet/activist/songwriter Jamila Woods’s second album is named for a pivotal artist of colour, whose legacies she explores as models of how to live life to the fullest. The Best Rock Albums of 2019. Much as Kacey Musgraves broke open country songwriting in 2018 with the love-bombing body high of Golden Hour, Sturgill Simpson casts himself as the genre’s outlier in 2019. I'm not sure why. The 50 best albums of 2019: the full list 1. Though it used sounds and textures familiar from the 80s, Remind Me Tomorrow didn’t sound like an 80s record. The working title for Laetitia Tamko's second album as Vagabon was All the Women in Me — a versatile phrase to sum up everything from the roles women play in society to the singer's own complex identity as a Cameroonian who relocated to New York at 13. These are Complex’s picks for the 50 best albums of 2019. Unburdened by modish musical trends – no guests, no genre crossovers – it was a feat of immersive beauty, the kind of record you might put on an old-fashioned stereo, dim the lights and sit through in one indulgent sitting, the better to appreciate its three-dimensional production washing over your skin like a gong bath. The starkness of those first chords of "I Told You Everything" offer a reprieve; a chance to gather yourself, to take one last breath before dunking deep beneath the surface. The band’s picture of Dublin is as vivid and impetuous as the Joycean visions they clearly admire, all rough beauty and “ready-steady violence”; the pint-chucking songs have the blithe, amused swagger of someone who enjoys a fight, but the ballads (Roy’s Tune, Television Screens) are equally good, with a bleating, pub-piano sadness to them. 0:00 Note: You can listen to a Spotify playlist of songs from these albums below. It’s adventurous, beautifully crafted, devoid of filler, packed not just with hooks but finely wrought sonic details. Facebook. Remind Me Tomorrow was a grown-up record that didn’t sound jaded. The pining of "EARFQUAKE," the short-lived euphoria of "I THINK," the feeble negotiation of "NEW MAGIC WAND," the obvious lie of "I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE," the diluted compromise of "ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?" —Nate Chinen, WBGO, ■ MORE: Watch Raphael Saadiq perform at NPR's Tiny Desk, "I didn't know that the record was going to sound this way at all. If A Seat At The Table was all about her giving the world a piece of her mind, When I Get Home is Solange returning to her interior world for some peace of mind.