The album sounds beamed in from an earlier decade, but it runs deeper than nostalgia.
On Prey//IV, the former Crystal Castles singer continues to pursue healing through cathartic fantasies of violence.
Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones.
Calling Erykah Badu’s Baduizm a better blueprint than it is an album isn’t meant to diminish its impact.
Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is more diverse and fully realized than the band’s past albums.
Mitski’s adoption of the decade’s tropes comes across as muddled and at times mismatched to her songwriting.
Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs is the work of a band who are leaning into the nostalgic observations that come with age.
Ultimately, MØ’s Motordrome has a way of getting your attention and failing to keep it.
Sick! hops between sounds and moods while still sounding like an Earl Sweatshirt album.
At its best, Elvis Costello’s The Boy Named If rivals the fractious energy and melodic verve of the singer’s classic period.
The Weeknd’s Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.
The album helped reshape the pop landscape and the reverberations can still be felt today.
The best music videos of 2021 tackle the themes and concerns of the day with imagination, humor, and skill.
The 10 albums on this list provide a dynamic sense of movement and grooves.
In 2021, hip-hop continued to be as plentiful as it was multifarious.
To celebrate the release of Alicia Keys’s Keys, we’ve ranked all eight of the singer’s studio albums.
Alicia Keys exudes an effortlessness throughout her ambitious eighth album, Keys.
The best songs of 2021 prove that old distinctions are continuing to evaporate at a rapid and liberating pace.
The best albums of 2021 prove that, despite all the chaos in the world, music’s pulse is stronger than ever.
We look back at some of the music that galvanized a generation into action.
Dangerous upped the stakes while cunningly inverting Michael Jackson’s playbook.