The songs rarely cohere into anything greater than the sum of their individual parts.
As a concept album about good and evil, Heroes & Villains mostly delivers.
The album is filled with accessible musings on urban life and epiphanies spurred by lovers and considerations of mental health.
The album suggests a lost ’70s Afrofuturist sci-fi movie score as composed by Alice Coltrane.
The album serves as a refinement of Young’s late-period output.
Among other things, the rapper’s sixth EP proves that sometimes less really is more.
Too often, Stormzy sounds crushed under the weight of his own unrelenting seriousness.
The album conjures a dark, enticing dynamism unparalleled even by the band’s own extraordinary output.
The album sounds more like the product of a therapy session than a collection of songs intended for the public.
The rapper’s 16th album often feels like a spartan exercise in pure technical ability.
The album is rooted in our current moment, though it occasionally paints with a broad brush.
The EP finds the band adding an ornate art-punk edge to their characteristically hostile sonic assault.
The album’s sonic palette is nearly identical to its predecessors, but this is the most introspective release of the trilogy.
The album is expertly crafted, but a rougher hewn approach would have better honored its source material.
The English producer’s first album in six years is another immersive slice of low-key electronica.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a Drake album that just happens to feature 21 Savage.
For the most part, the album delivers the kind of deceptively simple, fleet pop for which the band is best known.
The DJ and producer looks back on his own musical past, taking inspiration from the artists that shaped his youth.
Rihanna has released her first solo single in six years, but it’s not the return to form that fans have likely been waiting for.
The album traces a personal narrative about growing weary of casual sex and embracing love, all in the span of just half an hour.
The singer proves she’s unwilling to operate on anyone’s terms other than her own.