FLOOD

Surrounded by an all-star team of collaborators, the soul artist imbues these 15 familiar pop duets with a newfound sense of weightiness, grit, and—crucially—queerness.

With its well-curated influences and almost uncomfortably human lyrics, the London jangle-punk quartet’s third LP finds charm and combustible energy in its intersection of bleakness and pep.

The band’s seventh color-coded self-titled release presents their signature nerdish power-pop at its most brutal—all schlocky riffs, thundering beats, and scuzzy guitar tones.

The title of the Brooklyn-based songwriter’s fourth album suggests an artist who contains multitudes, something to which these songs readily attest.

Clearly written in the pressure cooker of Trump’s America, the artist’s community-oriented third album battles the darkness with an at-times overwhelming sense of optimism.

The Stones come as close as they ever will to reckoning with their twilight years on a surprisingly effective 25th LP that finds them bringing a fresh spark to their signature sound.

Awash in twang and thick pedal steel, the country star’s seventh album explores the solitary no man’s land that exists between the ending of one relationship and the beginning of another.

Three albums into her tenure as a pure-pleasure purveyor, Ware leans into the featherweight grooves of the ABBA era for a smooth yet occasionally frictionless epilogue to the trilogy.

While the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist’s collaboration-heavy foray into jazz occasionally errs on the side of pensive, it’s never anything less than heartfelt.

Fully embracing the trashy SoundCloud-era internet aesthetic as she raps, sings, and shreds over industrial clatter, this is the sound of an artist who’s still inspired by the cutting edge at 72.

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s guest-packed ninth album is a different kind of Gorillaz record—frequently interior, occasionally existential, surprisingly heartfelt.

Once again demonstrating her command of genre and lineage, the bluegrass songwriter’s turn toward pop is less a rejection of her roots than an expansion of her worldview.

The blues-rock duo sifts through wreckage in search of meaning and growth on their 13th album only to come up with answers that are every bit as pat and saccharine as the title suggests.

The Tennessean country-soul songwriter’s latest finds her sounding comfortable in her own skin, offering what may be the purest distillation yet of her strange charm and dogged positivity.

Explicitly pitched as a response to the unrest of early 2025, the former Hüsker Dü leader’s first album in five years continues to confidently summon instant-earworm hooks and visceral thrills.

This 75-minute opus pays tribute to Baldwin’s righteous witness, applying his moral and spiritual rigor to Black experience in contemporary America with big ideas and vivid emotions.

The prodigious jazz band leader shifts from kinetic energy to meditative tranquility as he puts down the sax on a solo release that’s somehow both calming and jarring.

The celebrated Philadelphia rapper’s debut full-length is made up of masterpieces in miniature—two- to three-minute songs intimate in their scope and spare in their production.

Exposure is the dominant mode on the Chicago-based songwriter’s latest, in which her language feels more carefully chiseled, more focused and impactful than ever before.

Beyond being wiser than her debut, this sophomore LP is also sharper, meaner, funnier, more assured, more pleasurable, and more persuasive that Rodrigo is operating on a plane of her own.