FLOOD

These songs take on a kind of confessional immediacy that you don’t hear much on proper Prince albums, and there’s stark emotion in abundance.

For a band that’s so steady and sure-footed, Low are uniquely gifted at conveying a sense of unraveling.

Mitski is deepening her craft and heightening her emotional availability, but never dulling her edge.

Cowboy Junkies have never reckoned with the times as vividly or as pointedly as they do here.

More than ever, Welch trusts her magnetic personality and her unerring gift for skyscraping pop hooks to do the emotional lifting.

Everything’s writ large; it is music that contains multitudes, and it’s teeming with joy and power. 

Friedberger has crafted an album of contoured melodies and steely precision.

Every generation needs its own soundtrack for kicking against the pricks, and Monáe delivers one here.

Willie’s addressing his twilight years with a light touch and an amiable chuckle.

They may be the only band around who can make the New Wave sound old-timey.

What the indie rock veterans offer is an album’s worth of palate-cleansers—songs of pastoral purity and laid-back reflection.

“Loner” could rightly be called a feminist album or simply a human one, weaponizing empathy in an age of despair.

SHIRT comes across as a battle rapper; he blazes through “Pure Beauty” in a blur of shit-talking and chest-puffing.

“Vessel of Love” feels modest and small-scale—the work of a self-possessed singer who’s inspired by tradition but never beholden to it.

Merrill Garbus’s latest LP doubles down on hooks and polished mainstream sheen without actually jettisoning any of her quirks or peculiarities.

Nico Segal’s Chicago quartet is exploring what jazz music can and should be in 2017.

At fifty-seven, Bono remains weirdly obsessed with charting a song on the radio, and hopelessly committed to the idea that rock and roll can still change the world.

Mavis Staples isn’t one to brandish a song like a weapon—not when she’s so good at disarmament—and here she aims to melt swords into plowshares through the cosmic force of neighborly love, wild empathy, and intentional optimism.

“Take Me Apart”‘s tension between sleek, modern sound and beating-heart humanity reveals what’s always been great about R&B: that it wears its emotions on its sleeve and provides a conduit for deep feeling.

The songs of Barnett and Vile are deliberately gnarled and unkempt, and never sound nearly as fussed-over as they probably are.