The singer has yet to discover a sound or sensibility that truly distinguishes her.
Parquet Courts’s Sympathy for Life proves the band is still capable of writing songs that shine in the same no-frills style as their idols.
Kelly Clarkson’s When Christmas Comes Around… juxtaposes the yuletide blues with jubilant holiday standards.
Adele’s “Easy on Me” is a melancholic piano ballad in the mold of 2010’s “Someone Like You” and 2015’s “Hello.”
The album’s simple, one-word song titles and ramshackle arrangements suggest a blunted capacity for more elaborate creativity.
From The Fame to Love for Sale, we’ve ranked every Lady Gaga album from worst to best.
From Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” to Billie Eilish’s “No Time to Die,” we’ve ranked all 24 Bond themes from best to worst.
All Day Gentle Hold is Porches’s punchiest and most concise album to date.
The World Is a Beautiful Place’s Illusory Walls feels like the awakening that the band has been building toward all along.
Diamonds and Pearls was an important sign that Prince was willing to embrace contemporary sounds to stay visible.
Illuminati Hotties’s Let Me Do One More is full of swift and dramatic shifts in tone, from acerbic and brash to soft and despondent.
Thirty years later, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory remains a stellar execution of hip-hop methodology.
Mickey Guyton’s Remember Her Name satisfies pop-country standards even as it defies the genre’s institutional roadblocks.
The time has come to at long last grant Trompe le Monde its rightful title as the Pixies’s best album.
“If You Say the Word” is quintessential Radiohead, a comment on the ennui of late-capitalist society.
The boundaries between earnestness and camp are blurred, but the album retains the rapper’s sensitive, playful personality.
Thirty years later, we take a look back at Mariah Carey’s underrated sophomore effort, Emotions.
Drake’s Certified Lover Boy is a distended confessional wherein the rapper attempts to reaffirm his image as a sweet-talking power player.
Low’s Hey What finds the duo fully embracing sonic expressionism while further honing their impeccable songcraft.
If Lady Gaga’s Chromatica favored pop hooks over musical invention, many of the versions on Dawn of Chromatica are just plain tuneless.
If Musgraves is going to be a pop star, Star-Crossed proves she’s doing it on her own terms.