Charles Lyons-Burt

After a pair of truncated albums, Kanye West again indulges his penchant for excess on his 10th album, Donda, which clocks in at an ambitious 108 minutes. Right down to the hand-written text on its cover, 2018’s Ye was a troubling status update on the rapper’s well-being, while its follow-up, 2019’s Jesus Is King, found West in worship mode. On Donda, he manages to dramatize his struggles with bipolar disorder and commitment to his faith with both more coherency and dynamism than ever before. Th

Vince Staples’s music is laser-focused on a single time and place: his adolescence and early adulthood in Long Beach, California. Across four albums, the 28-year-old West Coast rapper hasn’t been able to shake his past, haunted by the ghosts of “dead homies” and the survival tactics, both physical and emotional, that he developed from living in poverty. His eponymous fourth album continues in this vein, as Staples raps about “trying to drown the violence out” on “Take Me Home,” and provides turn

“No heavy hearts in my next year,” Josiah Wise promised on “A Comma,” a track from his 2020 EP Apparition. It was a bold claim from the Baltimore-bred, Los Angeles-based artist who, under the moniker serpentwithfeet, specializes in a grandiose fusion of R&B, gospel, and soul guided by powerful emotional outbursts and evocative metaphors. His second full-length album, Deacon, scales back the divine aspirations and melodramatic tendencies of his 2018 debut, Soil, for a more intimate approach.

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The lilting instrumental track near the midpoint of R.E.M.’s seminal Out of Time can be seen as a blueprint and exemplar for the project. “Endgame” unfolds at a slower pace than much of the band’s catalog up to that point, though their major label debut, 1988’s Green, struck a balance between ballads and galvanizing rockers. The song features folksy, circular acoustic guitar and an electric guitar riff that descends in emphatic single notes rather than chords, accompanied by a lush combination o

In 2020, few genres were more representative of a plethora of perspectives: from Bad Bunny’s thrilling reggaeton tributes to Burna Boy’s Nigerian dispatches to Lil Uzi Vert’s S.O.S. messages from the far reaches of the galaxy. Likely spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, we were graced by a surge of late-year surprises: 21 Savage & Metro Boomin and the Daveed Diggs-fronted trio Clipping took their October release dates to heart and embraced a horror influence, and preeminent sadboi Kid Cudi dropped

Pop music, it seems, has finally caught up with Arca, née Alejandra Ghersi. The Venezuelan artist has helped shape the sound of hip-hop, indie-pop, and R&B over the last decade, making sizable contributions to projects by Kanye West, Björk, and Kelela, while toiling away at her solo work in a separate, more challenging lane. After three albums of apocalyptic, ambient tone poems, Arca’s pop and avant-garde interests converge on Kick I. It’s an anti-pop pop album, a distillation of the producer-si

“Are things better or worse the second time around? Can we really do anything more than once?” intones actor Morgan Freeman early on in Savage Mode II. The album answers affirmatively, in the form of a robust and deeply enjoyable sequel to the 2016 collaboration between rapper 21 Savage and producer Metro Boomin. Freeman’s contributions, especially a delightful rejoinder on the midpoint interlude “Snitches & Rats,” are performed with a mock gravitas that 21 Savage and Metro Boomin frame with equ