We weren’t sure if Madonna could surprise us anymore. Until she did.
The specter of death and sting of betrayal have cast a somber mood onto many of the best albums of 2016.
The album, Donald Glover’s third release as Childish Gambino, finds the musician confusing his idols for muses.
The best singles of the year were attuned to a worldwide drift toward maintaining one’s own financial and psychological bottom line.
The album remodels an artistically marginal, genuinely interesting figure into a toothless celebrity version thereof.
The video employs sexuality—and homosexuality—purely for the purpose of the male gaze.
Bruno Mars’s album is a tidy, if derivative, antidote to today’s overthought, overwrought pop.
The album finds the Parisian duo capturing the rapture and agony that can accompany unrequited love.
Welcome to Sideways is a contoured album that hits a sweet spot between kinetic and laidback.
Alicia Keys seems at once more awake and relaxed than ever on her first album in four years.
Sleigh Bells charts a clear creative path forward on this album, one saturated in pop affect.
Eternally Even plants Jim James dead-center in the rubble of modern sociopolitical rot.
The album offers a peek inside the psyche of a smart, burgeoning young star.
The album is a wry reckoning of a lifetime’s worth of damaged relationships, upheld vows, and broken promises.
While she may have eschewed the outlandish costumes, Gaga has replaced them with a different kind of pretense.
The Deaner Album possesses the swagger of an artist in full command of his craft.
Ruminations is prolific singer-songwriter Conor Oberst’s rawest and most earnest album in years.
The album wields the Orb’s trademark synths, samples, and stray noises toward a more personal end.
The album’s production is as versatile as Brown’s voice, though it favors off-kilter intensity.
These Systems Are Failing too often obscures Moby’s message with abstractions and platitudes.
Revolution Radio manages to survey almost the entire bag of tricks Green Day has pulled from over the past 25 years.