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Lizzo , Cuz I Love You
★★★★☆
No one could accuse Lizzo of holding back. Not when it comes to her voice – which is raw and rowdy, so laden with personality even the vulnerable moments are a joy to listen to – and certainly not when it comes to her message of unabashed self-love. That’s the predominant theme of the singer / rapper / flautist-extraordinaire’s hugely likeable third album, Cuz I Love You .
“I’m like chardonnay, get better over time,” she sings on the funk-pop banger “Juice”. “Heard you say I’m not the baddest, bitch, you lie.” “Woke up feeling like I just might run for president,” she announces on “Like a Girl”, “even if there ain’t no precedent.” Later on that song, whose chanty chorus is not quite as brilliant as its friskily rapped verses, she declares: “Only exes that I care about are in my f**king chromosomes.”
This is a polished, playful album, though it has a DIY edge to it: “S**t, f**k, I didn’t know it was ending right there,” she chuckles in the final few moments of “Like a Girl”. “Girl, run this s**t back,” she says after a vivacious flute solo on “Tempo” – a song featuring a guest verse from Missy Elliott, the person who, Lizzo said on Twitter, “made this chubby, weird, black girl believe that ANYTHING was possible”.
When Lizzo played Coachella earlier this week, her set was plagued by technical problems. “When I’m headlining next time,” she announced, “I’m gonna need my motherf**king ears to work.” Judging by the strength of her third album, that might not be such an implausible assumption. Alexandra Pollard
The best albums of 2019 (so far)Show all 67 1 /67The best albums of 2019 (so far) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Rina Mushonga – In a Galaxy It’s not uncommon for an artist to be influenced by the place they grew up in. Yet few are likely to have as much inspiration to draw on as India-born, Zimbabwe-raised and now Peckham-based artist Rina Mushonga. The singer-songwriter’s nomadic personality is reflected in the vast scale of reference points on her new record, In a Galaxy. It’s technically a follow-up to 2014’s The Wild, the Wilderness, but the newfound boldness on this new work is startling. Since that first record, Mushonga has begun to incorporate themes of empowerment into her work. On “AtalantA”, she showcases her muscular vocals, which are capable of switching between an airy lilt to a deep, emotional moan, as she sings lyrics inspired by the Greek hunter goddess who refused to marry. In a Galaxy is a record that takes you far beyond the borders of the world you’re familiar with, and into something altogether more colourful. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Deerhunter – Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? On Deerhunter’s eighth album, frontman Bradford Cox takes on the role of war poet, documenting the things he observes with a cool matter-of-factness, and heart-wrenching detail. Death is everywhere on Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, as much as others may refuse to see it. Already Disappeared is not an easy album. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation. This is a new side of Deerhunter that gives the listener much to contemplate. (Roisin O’Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow After a period of tumult, Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is a reinvention. But beneath its hazy synths and electronics are songs of endurance and inner peace, of settling after a flurry of activity. On Remind Me Tomorrow, written during her recent pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Van Etten dims her spotlight on toxicity and instead casts a warm glow behind the record’s psychic overview. The anxiety and pride of impending parenthood converge on “Seventeen”, a paean to the invincibility and melancholy of adolescence. Addressing a younger version of herself, the 37-year-old sings of the carefree young and their mistrust of those defeated by time. After years making peace with drift and uncertainty, she’s never sounded more sure of anything. (Jazz Monroe)
Ryan Pfluger
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Bring Me the Horizon – Amo BMTH frontman Oli Sykes wants to assert the fragility of the boundary between love and hate. Amo is a way of exploring that, even down to the title itself. Closer “I Don’t Know What to Say” is cinematic in its symphonic drama – perhaps inspired by their 2016 shows at the Royal Albert Hall that featured a full orchestra and choir – and becomes the album’s most moving song. Over urgent, darting violin notes and soft strumming on an acoustic guitar, Sykes sings about the loss of a close friend, building to a hair-raising climax where he screams out the song’s title one last time. Amo won’t satisfy all of BMTH’s fans, but it’s certainly accomplished, catchy and eclectic enough to bring in some new ones. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Nina Nesbitt – The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change Nesbitt is back with her second LP, switching to a brand of soul and R&B-fused pop that feels bang on time, and suits her far better. The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change has slick, polished production from Fraser T Smith (Adele), Lostboy (Anne-Marie), Jordan Riley (Zara Larsson), and Nesbitt herself. Several tracks tap into a Nineties R&B sound that UK women, from Mabel to Ella Mai, are excelling at right now. Assertive tracks “Loyal to Me” and “Love Letter” nod to TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”, but there is vulnerability, too, in the acoustic guitar-led neo-soul of “Somebody Special”, and the tender heartbreak on ”Is it Really Me You’re Missing”. (Roisin O'Connor)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Better Oblivion Community Center This self-titled record, a loose but beautifully crafted collection of folk-rock songs, explores the kinds of anxieties intrinsic to the modern age – the longing to be at once noticed and invisible; the paralysing effects of limitless information, and the desire to do good versus the desire to be seen doing good. As if to hammer home their parity, they even largely sing in unison – which might have had a plodding effect if the pair’s voices weren’t so distinct: Bridgers sings with a hazy assurance, Oberst with an emotive tremor. And when Bridgers’ melody does sporadically glide above Oberst’s, it is all the more potent for it. (Alexandra Pollard)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Ariana Grande – Thank U, Next The album is packed with personal confessions for the fans – “Arianators” – to pick over. It lacks a centrepiece to match the arresting depth and space of Sweetener’s “God Is A Woman”, but Grande handles its shifting moods and cast of producers (including pop machines Max Martin and Tommy Brown) with engaging class and momentum. One minute you’re skanking along to the party brass of “Bloodline”; the next floating into the semi-detached, heartbreak of “Ghostin’”, which appears to address Grande’s guilt at being with Davidson while pining for Miller. She sings of the late rapper as a “wingless angel” with featherlight high notes that will drop the sternest jaw. (Helen Brown)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) James Blake – Assume Form The perma-brilliant James Blake has flooded his fourth album – Assume Form – with euphoric sepia soul and loved-up doo-wop. His trademark intelligence, honesty and pin-drop production remain intact. But the detached chorister vocals of a decade in which he battled depression have thawed to reveal a millennial Sam Cooke crooning: “Can’t believe the way we flow, way we flow, way we flow...” The warm splashes of piano that washed over that song break through the anxious rattle of dance beats on the album’s eponymous opener, the singer so regularly reviewed as “vaporous” promises to “leave the ether, assume form” and “be touchable, be reachable”. His own sharpest critic, he winks at the journalists who’ve called him glacial as he drops from remote, icy falsetto into a richly grained, deeper tone to ask: “Doesn’t it seem much warmer?” (Helen Brown)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) AJ Tracey – AJ Tracey While he recognises his roots and includes plenty of nods to grime, AJ Tracey's magpie’s eye for a good melody or hook extends far beyond that. With the help of stellar producers like Cadenza (Kiko Bun), Swifta Beater (Kano, Giggs), and Nyge (Section Boyz, Yxng Bane), Tracey incorporates electronic music, rock, garage and even country on his most cohesive work to date. The variety and scale of ambition on this album is breathtaking. Fans will be surprised to discover Tracey sings almost as much as he raps, in pleasingly gruff tones. Each track is a standout, none more so than “Ladbroke Grove”, a hat-tip to classic garage in which Tracey switches up his flow to emulate a Nineties MC. It’s a thrilling work. (Roisin O’Connor)
Ashley Verse
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sleaford Mods – Eton Alive The album title of the year gives us an image of Brexit Britain trashed by Old Etonians David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the fifth studio work from the punk duo has more than social commentary to offer. There’s some of that, as vocalist Jason Williamson skewers documentary-makers who take advantage of the poor in “Kebab Spider” – “the skint get used in loo roll shoes” – but elsewhere this is a record that expands the idea of what Sleaford Mods could be. Andrew Fearn’s beats are no longer just the backdrop, they’re threatening to take over this album. Surprising influences creep in, from Eighties R&B to the Human League, and on “When You Come Up To Me”, Williamson not only sings but there’s a melancholy tone breaking through the anger. “I don’t want to flip the page/ Of my negative script,” he intones on the final track, but there’s just a hint that he does. (Chris Harvey)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Julia Jacklin – Crushing “Do you still have that photograph?/ Would you use it to hurt me?” asks Australian indie rocker Julia Jacklin, against the menacing throb of “Body”. The tension is stormy: imagine a mid-period Fleetwood Mac song, covered by Cat Power. It’s a masterclass in narrative songwriting. Those who fell for Jacklin’s 2016 excellent debut, Don’t Let the Kids Win, will find a continuity of alternative attitude and vintage influences. But there’s a deeper sense of personal connection to anchor Jacklin’s lyrical and melodic smarts. That snare drum keeps a relentless, nerve-snapping pulse throughout, with Jacklin sounding more confident in her contradictions: at once yearning to comfort a lover she’s dumped and then, on “Head Alone”, declaring: “I don’t wanna be touched all the time/ I raised my body up to be mine.” Ah. Shucks. Grunge-rinsed, feminist-flipped, upcycled Fifties guitar an’ all: Crushing is a triumph. (Helen Brown)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Little Simz – GREY Area With praise from Kendrick Lamar, five EPs released by the time she was 21, tours with Lauryn Hill, collaborations with Gorillaz and two critically praised albums – including 2017’s excellent concept album Stillness in Wonderland – fans and critics alike wondered what else Little Simz could do to find the kind of mainstream success enjoyed by so many of her male peers. Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a moment over the past few years where Simz has commented on this issue herself. Instead, she’s been busy honing her craft for Grey Area, which sees her land on a new, bolder sound assisted by her childhood friend – the producer Inflo [Michael Kiwanuka’s Love & Hate] – for a record that incorporates her dextrous flow and superb wordplay with an eclectic range of influences. The album takes in everything from jazz, funk and soul to punk and heavy rock, plus three carefully chosen features. (Roisin O'Connor)
Jen Ewbank
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Solange – When I Get Home Solange Knowles has never been coy about the intent behind her music. Beautiful arrangements and seamless production notwithstanding, you get the sense, each time she drop a project, that it serves a distinct, zeitgeist-shifting purpose. This time, with When I Get Home, Solange has effectively given us permission to rest. Echoing similar movements seen in recent years, such as Fannie Sosa and niv Acosta’s “Black Power Naps” exhibition – which speaks to and hopes to remedy the socio-economic problem of higher rates of sleep deprivation among black people – the album has a calming, blissed-out quality, with its layers of sound and enveloping harmonies. And where better to dream than from the comfort of your own digs? Whether it’s in the physical structure of a property that’s shaped you over the years, or in the familiar sounds of the music and culture that your people have crafted, there seems to be a call to return to what is familiar. (Kuba Shand-Baptiste)
Max Hirschberger
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Foals – Everything Not Saved Will be Lost (Part 1) FoalsMerging their asymmetrical early math pop with the deep space atmospherics of Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, plus added innovations – ambient rainforest throbs on “Moonlight”, deadpan EDM on “In Degrees”, Afro-glitch Radiohead on “Café D’Athens” – they’ve created an inspired album of scorched earth new music that, in all likelihood, will only really be challenged for album of the year by Part 2. (Mark Beaumont)
Alex Knowles
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Dave – Psychodrama Tracks are at once astute and deeply personal in how they capture vignettes of everyday life and spin them into important lessons. “Black”, the most recent single from the record, considers what that word means to different people around the world, as well as to Dave. “Voices” has him singing over an old-school garage beat, fighting off personal demons. “I could be the rapper with a message like you’re hoping, but what’s the point in me being the best if no one knows it?” he challenges on “Psycho”, which flips scattershot between beats and moods as though the track itself is schizophrenic. Dave spends Psychodrama addressing issues caused by the generations who came before him. By the end of the album, he sounds like a figurehead for the hopeful future.
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sigrid – Sucker Punch At her best, Sigrid throws out precision-tooled high notes like icicle javelins into vast, blue Scandi-produced skies. Then she growls like an Icelandic volcano preparing to disrupt western civilisation until we sort ourselves out. l enjoyed the muted, Afro-tinged authenticity of “Level Up” and the conscious, pasty-girl reggae of “Business Dinners” (on which she refuses to be an industry angel) and I loved the Robyn-esque rush of “Basic” (which sees her yearning to shed love’s complications). Sigrid has a raw energy and emotional briskness that can make you feel like you’re doing aerobics in neon leg warmers atop a pristine mountain. (Helen Brown)
Francesca Allen
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Karen O and Danger Mouse – Lux Prima Lux Prima was born just over a decade ago from a drunken phone call from Karen O to Danger Mouse – real name Brian Joseph Burton – during which the pair vowed they would work on something together. It wasn’t until after O had given birth to her son, though, that recording finally began, and there is a beatific sense of contentment on songs like “Drown”, with its Kamasi Washington-like choirs and stately horns. Danger Mouse is known for genre-hopping collaborations with artists such as Beck, the Black Keys and CeeLo Green, and he applies that approach here, too: the album is an impressive mix of blissed-out synths, psych-rock guitars and trippy hip-hop beats. Lux Prima is an accomplished record – proof that two wildly different minds can work seamlessly together. Maybe drunk-dialling isn’t always such a bad idea. (Roisin O'Connor)
Eliot Lee Hazel
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Cinematic Orchestra – To Believe This is an ambitious creation, meticulously crafted and assembled. For a start, the range of guest performers is a cornucopia of contemporary soul and hip-hop collaborators: vocalists Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend and Tawiah; strings player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and keyboardist Dennis Hamm – both of whom have worked with Flying Lotus and Thundercat. Ma Fleur was emotive and piano-led, its themes of mortality and the passage of life captured so evocatively in the Patrick Watson collaboration “To Build a Home” – which went on to soundtrack every TV show from Grey’s Anatomy to Orange is the New Black. To Believe, however, feels more expansive in reach. (Elisa Bray)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Lucy Rose – No Words Left Rose – who found fame in the UK’s indie-folk scene as an unofficial member of Bombay Bicycle Club in 2010, only to walk away amid the band’s growing hype – is darkly compelling on No Words Left. Assisted by producer Tim Bidwell, who worked on Rose’s last record Something’s Changing, she sounds braver than she ever has before. There are moments that recall her Communion labelmate Ben Howard, on his latest album, Noonday Dream, and others that nod to the quiet stoicism of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. (Roisin O'Connor)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Nilufer Yanya – Miss Universe The record is loosely conceptual insomuch as it’s punctuated with mock adverts for “WWAY HEALTH, our 24/7 care programme”. But don’t be put off: Miss Universe is a brilliant collection of songs, an expansive melange of indie, jazz, pop and trip-hop that flits between a lo-fi sparseness and something The Strokes would play. Yanya – who is of Turkish-Irish-Bajan heritage – grew up in London on a mix of Pixies, Nina Simone, The Libertines and Amy Winehouse, and this unlikely combination is certainly reflected in the sound. (Patrick Smith)
Molly Daniel
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Jenny Lewis – On the Line Here, Lewis does what she does best: adds the glossy sparkle of Hollywood and a sunny Californian sheen to melancholy and nostalgia, with her most luxuriantly orchestrated album yet. Even when she’s singing, “I’ve wasted my youth”, it’s in that sweet voice, with carefree “doo doo doo doo doo doos”, and at a pace that’s so upbeat that it masks the sentiment. It’s a bittersweet mourning of her past. (Elisa Bray)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Ty Segall – Deforming Lobes Comprising songs from Segall’s eclectic (that’s putting it lightly) catalogue and performed by him and the Freedom Band (Mikal Cronin, Charles Moothart, Emmett Kelly, and Ben Boye), the album is delightfully short and sweet. It is certainly a drastic switch-up from Freedom’s Goblin (2018), which had 19 tracks and ran for 75 minutes. Opener “Warm Hands”, from Segall’s self-titled 2017 LP, is essentially an epic jam; he grinds out fuzzy distortion and squalling riffs for a solid nine and a half minutes with a gleeful lawlessness. “Love Fuzz”, which serves as the opposing bookend at the album’s close, is even wilder. This isn’t a “best of” selection – the band simply chose the tracks out of which they got the biggest kick. Deforming Lobes is unpredictable and invigorating – the best representation of Segall’s restless creativity to date, not to mention the most fun to listen to. (Roisin O’Connor)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising If you want to know how hard it is to categorise Titanic Rising – the enthralling fourth album from Weyes Blood – look no further than the American musician’s own attempt to do so. It is, she says, “The Kinks meet the Second World War, or Bob Seger meets Enya.” Neither of those is a particularly accurate description, but they do at least fit the album’s refusal to loiter in any one genre. Slide guitars give way to violas, which usher in eerie synths. Organs crop up throughout, evoking both Renaissance music and a fairground attraction. The fragmented strings in “Movies”, a song about the falsities of Hollywood romance, recall the chaotic minimalism of Arthur Russell. And then there’s that voice – at once warm and haunting, controlled and untethered. It’s no wonder she’s lent it to the likes of Perfume Genius, Drugdealer and Ariel Pink: it adds a touch of profundity to everything it meets. Titanic Rising isn’t Bob Seger meets Enya. It’s better. Alexandra Pollard
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Chemical Brothers – No Geography Tension aside, there’s a great sense of fun here. The title track is pure euphoria, as restless synths of a Utah Saints or Orbital rave break into swelling bass and melody. And they create the full club experience with “Got to Keep On”, on which the four-to-the-floor beat, funky rhythm guitar, sweet backing vocals and chiming bells make way for the simple sounds of happy party-goers; just as the anticipation builds, so does the instrumentation into a hypnotic crescendo. It’s masterful production. (Elisa Bray)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Anderson .Paak – Ventura Six months after the release of Oxnard, Anderson .Paak returns with another Dr Dre-produced record, Ventura. Where the former was overflowing with choppy, experimental sounds, guest appearances and clumsy attempts at Gil Scott Heron-esque revolutionary lyrics, the sequel – recorded around the same time – streamlines .Paak’s sound, making for a tightly packaged, melodic and danceable album. Rather than being an album of Oxnard offshoots, Ventura instead borrows heavily from .Paak’s consistently brilliant 2016 record Malibu, itself a fresh slice of soulful funk. The singer croons over disco-infused, Quincy Jones-inspired trumpets on “Reachin’ 2 Much”, masterfully interplays vocals from Smokey Robinson with violin flourishes on “Making it Better”, and playfully raps about global warming on “Yada Yada”. As .Paak sings on “Winners Circle”, “They just don’t make them like this anymore”. Considering how few artists have such command of their craft as .Paak, he’s not wrong. (Jack Shepherd)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Loyle Carner – Not Waving, But Drowning Two years after the release of his Mercury Prize-nominated debut Yesterday’s Gone, the south London hip-hop artist unveils its follow-up, Not Waving, But Drowning. And if any two records could portray how quickly someone can grow from a boy to a man, it’s these. Familiar faces and themes serve as his trademarks. Fellow Mercury Prize nominee Jorja Smith and winner Sampha sound like old friends in their guest spots – they fit comfortably into Carner’s landscape, built from classic hip-hop beats and warm piano loops. Over all of it, he raps with an easy flow in gruff yet honeyed tones. Above all, he is conscious of what family means to him, and so bookends the album with a poem from him to his mother Jean, and one from his mother to him. Not Waving, But Drowning has an emotional intelligence that shows just how strong Carner is when he’s at his most vulnerable. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Lizzo – Cuz I Love You No one could accuse Lizzo of holding back. Not when it comes to her voice – which is raw and rowdy, so laden with personality even the vulnerable moments are a joy to listen to – and certainly not when it comes to her message of unabashed self-love. That’s the predominant theme of the singer / rapper / flautist-extraordinaire’s hugely likeable third album, Cuz I Love You. When Lizzo played Coachella earlier this week, her set was plagued by technical problems. “When I’m headlining next time,” she announced, “I’m gonna need my motherf**king ears to work.” Judging by the strength of her third album, that might not be such an implausible assumption. (Alexandra Pollard)
Luke Gilford
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Fat White Family – Serfs Up! It seems as likely as Old Man Steptoe dining with the Rees-Mogg, but this new tactic of burying their confrontational gruesomeness beneath a veneer of alt-rock respectability for album three works well for Fat White Family. Drenched in chamber strings and celestial harmonies, the plush yet sinister “Oh Sebastian” could be Pet Sounds selling its soul to the devil. “Fringe Runner” is so sleek and funksome it could be a New Romantic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)”; “Kim’s Sunsets” is a piece of refined cosmic reggae resembling a blissed-out “Bankrobber”. Tarantino bossa novas and Velvets drones are all imbued with a luminous, cultured seediness, like the entire Cannes Film Festival owning up to its social diseases. Wonderfully unsettling. (Mark Beaumont)
Morbid Books
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Cage the Elephant – Social Cues On Cage the Elephant’s fifth album, Social Cues, frontman Matt Shultz reacts to the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of three close friends. He undergoes a kind of Jekyll and Hyde transition through the 13 tracks, the result of which is the band’s best work to date. Assisted by producer John Hill, whose previous credits include co-writing Portugal. The Man’s mega-hit “Feel it Still”, the Kentucky-formed, Nashville-based Cage the Elephant remain faithful to their neo-soul influenced brand of garage rock but move to something darker and far more visceral. Single “Ready to let Go” is by far the most explicit – a moody swamp-rock jam where Shultz comes to terms with his impending divorce. “House of Glass” is a sequence of frenzied mutterings with a buzzsaw guitar cutting through his attempts to convince himself of love’s existence. Social Cues is an album where Shultz bares his soul, and apparently shakes off a few demons in the process. (Roisin O’Connor)
Neil Krug
The best albums of 2019 (so far) SOAK – Grim Town SOAK reaches to outsiders once again on her new album. Musically, she’s developed her arrangements and become bolder, too. The tempo-shifting country-folk song “Get Set Go Kid” layers guitar, keys and subtle, harmonising backing vocals, unexpectedly building towards a cacophony of syncopated piano and saxophone. “Crying Your Eyes Out” appears to be a sombre piano ballad until it ramps up the angst with plaintive vocals, conjuring up a storm with swirling rhythms. On the melancholy, gently strummed guitar and piano-led “Fall Asleep, Backseat”, Monds-Watson reflects on pretending to sleep as her parents make the painful decision to divorce. In a way, Grim Town portrays the journey from adolescence into young adulthood – with all the introspection, resignation and wide-eyed forays into love that entails. (Elisa Bray)
Charlie Forgham Bailey
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Cranberries – In the End There’s a cruel irony that the release of The Cranberries’ final album should come just a week after journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by the New IRA during a riot in Londonderry. “Zombie” was a protest song written by the band’s late frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan after two children were killed by IRA bombs – was released. She was deeply affected by the deaths, and would no doubt have been devastated by recent events in Northern Ireland as well. “Wake Me When it’s Over”, the third track on In the End, could be “Zombie”’s twin. On it, O’Riordan, who recorded demos for the album’s 11 tracks before her death in January last year, sings: “Fighting’s not the answer/ Fighting’s not the cure/ It’s eating you like cancer/ It’s killing you for sure.” The band have spoken about how O’Riordan was singing about leaving many of the negative things in her life behind. It sounds like The Cranberries found some kind of closure in this last record. Hopefully fans will, too. (Roisin O’Connor)
(Photo credit should read GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Aldous Harding – Designer On her third record, Aldous Harding combines the gothic folk of her self-titled 2014 debut with the dramatically intimate tones of her follow-up album Party. The New Zealand artist seems to derive a particular glee from unsettling her audience. Her Medusa’s stare – witnessed at her live shows as well as in her music videos – has become the stuff of legend. She switches her vocal style song to song, moving from a lilting croon on “The Barrel” to the quirky elocution of the title track. She joins forces once again with PJ Harvey collaborator John Harvey, and also enlists Welsh musicians Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) and Huw Evans (H Hawkline) plus Clare Mactaggart on violin, giving Designer a generously textured feel. It’s layered with whimsical flutes, intricate guitar picking and sombre bass lines that meander with casual abandon. At an age where the pressure is on to have everything worked out, Harding sounds delightfully free. (Roisin O’Connor)
Claire Shilland
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Big Thief - UFOF Big Thief’s frontwoman Adrianne Lenker has an uncanny ability to make you feel like you’re in on a secret. Her whispering, spectral delivery and deeply personal lyrics are the key to this. Even on the band’s third album UFOF, with an audience that has grown exponentially in the past few years, the songs are still immensely intimate affairs. Often, Lenker offers the same kind of symbolic fatalism as the poetry of Christina Rosetti: “We both know/ Let me rest, let me go/ See my death become a trail/ And the trail leads to a flower/ I will blossom in your sail,” she sings on “Terminal Paradise”. This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it. (RO)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Collard - Unholy On his debut album, the 24-year-old Collard mixes sultry jams that recall the electronic funk of MGMT with nods to the greats: Prince, James Brown, Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. Throughout, Collard exhibits his extraordinary voice, which swoops to a devilishly low murmur or soars to an ecstatic falsetto. Guest rapper Kojey Radical takes on the role of preacher for “Ground Control”. There’s a sax on “Sacrament” that’s loaded with longing, while the grunge-gospel stylings of “Merciless” offer ominous guitars and Collard’s reverent croons. On the lustful “Hell Song” he sings “less is more… but more is good”. You’re inclined to agree with him. (RO)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Carly Rae Jepsen - Dedicated Dedicated covers the full, but generic, spectrum of relationships: dizzying love, lust, and break-ups. But whether she’s pining for the return of a former love in the funky disco banger “Julien”, or singing about masturbating post-break-up in lead single “Party For One” (“I’ll be the one/ If you don’t care about me/ Making love to myself/ Back on my beat”), the vibe remains positively jubilant. The euphoric, Eighties synth-laden “Want You in My Room” is most distinctive, both vocally and melodically, and was co-written and produced by Jack Antonoff, indie tunesmith for fun. and Bleachers. But “Party For One” remains the album’s highlight, harnessing the bouncy energy of Jepsen’s breakout hit. It is the perfect upbeat end to an album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs. (Elisa Bray)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Tyler, the Creator - IGOR “I don’t know where I’m going,” Tyler, the Creator begins on the song “I THINK”. “But I know what I’m showing.” The US artist’s words ring true throughout his fifth studio album, IGOR, where he adopts the dark and twisted mutterings of the Frankenstein character from which the record gets its name. The production here is superb. Tyler has never been one for traditional song structure, but on IGOR he’s like the Minotaur luring you through a maze that twists and turns around seemingly impossible corners, drawing you into the thrilling unknown. (RO)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Flying Lotus - Flamagra It’s been a long wait for Flying Lotus’s new album. In fact, the LA producer has been masterminding Flamagra for the past five years – snatching moments between collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly, directing and writing the comic horror movie Kuso, producing much of Thundercat’s Drunk and growing his Brainfeeder label. But it was worth the wait. Flamagra – a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius – is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases. A 27-track masterpiece, the album features the likes of Anderson .Paak, Little Dragon, David Lynch, and Solange, and serves up a hot, textural mix of hip-hop, psychedelia, funk, soul, jazz and electro. (Ellie Harrison)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Amazons - Future Dust A heftier sound is never at the cost of melody, which shines through in Thomson’s vocals, the rest of the band’s backing falsetto, and the searing blues grooves stamped all over Future Dust. Those qualities are captured nowhere more satisfyingly than on “25”. “All Over Town” is their singalong anthem, neatly positioned in the middle to ease the pace. If there’s a twist here, it’s final song “Georgia”, which takes its classic-rock licks straight out of the Eagles’ songwriting book. But this is an album that shows a band who’ve grown stronger and unafraid to flex their muscle. (Elisa Bray)
Alex Lake
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Skepta - Ignorance is Bliss In keeping with the relatively restrained guest spots, it’s heartening just how much Skepta has rejected overloading Ignorance is Bliss with high-profile producers, preferring instead to burrow into his own aesthetic. There’s no attempt to chase someone else’s wave here; no token drill, afroswing or trap beats to satisfy playlist algorithms. Instead, his cold grime sonics are rendered down to their no-frills essentials – brutalist blocks of sad angular melodies and hard, spacious drums. The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative. “We used to do young and stupid,” Skepta concludes on “Gangsta”. “Now we do grown.” (Ian McQuaid)
Boy Better Know
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars Bruce Springsteen seems to have told almost every tale in the grand old storybook of American mythologies, except perhaps one: a wide-eyed Californian dreamer finds the Golden State turns sour and flees back east, to some romantic speck of a town, to pine and rehabilitate. It’s the classic pop plotline of Bacharach and David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”, and it’s a tale Springsteen taps repeatedly here, on his sumptuous, cinematic 19th album, which is nothing short of a late-period masterpiece. Springsteen’s sublime portraiture of the American struggle – his protagonists walking with him through the ages of life as he goes – endures. “Hitch Hikin’” and “The Wayfarer” are both charmed odes to the lost and rootless. Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart. (Mark Beaumont)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Mark Ronson - Late Night Feelings A revolving door of female vocalists (A-listers, indie darlings like Angel Olsen and unsung songwriters) deliver heartbroken lines over big, shiny beats and synths. The emotional cohesion the record loses in its shifting cast of singers/songwriters/genres it makes up in DJ-savvy textural variety. You’ll already have heard “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”, on which Miley Cyrus channels the quavering, fearless bluegrass spirit of her godmother Dolly Parton over a briskly plucked guitar. Ronson’s production is so sharp that you all but see the steel strings rise like a hi-definition hologram from your speakers. It's a style that makes fans of vintage engineering wince, but snags the ear like a fishhook. And those quicksilver hooks just keep coming. (Helen Brown)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Raconteurs - Help Us Stranger Help Us Stranger reaches all corners of guitar rock: funky Detroit garage (“What’s Yours Is Mine”); country soul (“Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying)”); psych (a cover of Donovan’s “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)”); blues and bluegrass (“Thoughts and Prayers”). A cornucopia of instrumentation is woven into its brisk 42-minute yarn. From frenetic opener “Bored and Razed”, you can sense the compelling chemistry between Benson and White playing out on stage as the duo harmonise or sing in unison, and White strikes frenzied riffs alongside Benson’s melodic guitar chops. The energy here is thrilling, the strong rhythm section provided by former Detroit garage band The Greenhornes’ bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler. The bass and riff-driven “Now That You’re Gone” feels stripped back by comparison; it’s perfectly crafted. Help Us Stranger has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. (Elisa Bray)
David James Swanson
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Hot Chip - A Bath Full of Ecstasy When Hot Chip achieved chart success with their second album, 2006’s The Warning, it seemed more like a happy coincidence than a sign they were conforming to current pop trends. Since then, they've released a string of consistently great albums, from 2008’s Made in the Dark (featuring their only Top 10 single to date, “Ready for the Floor”) to this, their seventh and best record, A Bath Full of Ecstasy. Philippe Zdar – one half of the French duo Cassius and producer for the likes of MC Solaar and Phoenix – helps the band reconcile their house and hip-hop influences. The late musician had a free-spirited approach that suits Hot Chip on the psychedelic “Clear Blue Skies”, and there are nods to early Nineties French house via the glitchy funk and vocoder effects of “Spell” (an album highlight).. For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul. (Roisin O'Connor)
Ronald Dick
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Banks – III The record frequently switches in tone: Banks can be both formidable and vulnerable, accusatory or filled with regret. “Gimme” demands sex and refuses to be shamed for it; “Contaminated” mourns a toxic relationship that can’t be saved; and “Stroke” is a bitter riposte to a man emulating the Greek figure Narcissus – laid over a funk guitar riff. III is Banks’s most cohesive album to date because she’s no longer restricting herself to exploring one feeling at a time. The way she has structured this record takes the listener through the complicated yet nuanced emotions of a woman who has recently learnt to accept everything she feels. She embraces her pain, and as a consequence is able to let it go. (Roisin O"Connor)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Mini Mansions – Guy Walks into a Bar Mikey Shuman shares vocal duties with Tyler Parkford; his voice falls somewhere between the sleazy drawl of his QOTSA bandmate Josh Homme and Alex Turner’s more adenoidal tone on opener “We Should Be Dancing”. With tracks that frequently dart from sprawling, psychedelic pop to scuzzy post-punk and rock references, the record has a superb dynamic that holds the listener’s attention, while the band navigate through a single, tumultuous relationship. By the end of all that, you feel like they deserve a pint. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Marika Hackman – Any Human Friend Hackman’s debut album, 2015’s We Slept At Last, was a gentle, unprovocative affair – though if you listened closely, the dark, sexual energy that convulses through her current sound was already there. Her second, I’m Not Your Man, was scuzzier and more explicitly queer – a road she continues down with Any Human Friend, a blunt, bold album on which Hackman’s beatific voice sits atop methodically messy instrumentals. Written in the aftermath of Hackman’s split from fellow musician Amber Bain – aka The Japanese House, who released her own reflection on their break-up on her debut album Good at Falling – Any Human Friend is a satisfyingly dismal affair that is certainly not suitable for the four-year-old who inspired it. (Alexandra Pollard)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Slipknot – We Are Not Your Kind Frontman Corey Taylor, who had just emerged from a toxic relationship when recording this album, addresses feelings of belittlement and inadequacy with unflinching honesty and some of his best vocal work in years. Over the Celtic influences of “Solway Firth” (at one point, he seems to attempt some Cockney screamo) he issues a blistering riposte to the people he holds responsible for his negative mindset. Critics may question how relevant Slipknot are in 2019. The pummelling force of We Are Not Your Kind should be enough to silence them – this may be one of the band’s most personal records, but the rage they capture is universally felt. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sleater-Kinney – The Center Won't Hold There’s an increased anxiety, both corporeal and emotional, running through The Center Won’t Hold, a pent-up desire to break free from something – though they never seem quite sure what. “Disconnect me from my bones, so I can float, so I can roam,” sings Brownstein – her singular voice all yelps and creaks – on “Hurry On Home”. On “Reach Out”, Tucker begs, her voice a little sleeker than Brownstein’s but no less commanding, “Reach out and see me, I’m losing my head.” Quietly discordant piano ballad “Broken” pays tribute to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault: “Me, me too, my body cried out when she spoke those lines.” The Center Won’t Hold is a reference, it seems, to the 1920 WB Yeats poem “Second Coming”: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” If this is Sleater-Kinney falling apart, then what a beautiful collapse it is. (Alexandra Pollard)
Nikko LaMere
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Rapsody – Eve The overarching sound, production and instrumentation on Eve are outstanding. Produced by Rapsody’s long-time collaborator and mentor 9th Wonder, the record samples cuts from Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” (“Whoopi”) and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” (“Cleo”), offers a smooth R&B joint with “Aaliyah” featuring the late singer’s ghostly backing vocals, and includes an interlude that is “an ode to the black woman’s body”. As on Laila’s Wisdom, Eve conveys Rapsody’s natural feel for funk – “Michelle” (Obama) bounces in on a jaunty piano riff – but other tracks, such as closer “Afeni”, are pure soul. Nina Simone said an artist’s duty, “as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times”. This is precisely what Rapsody has done – in the most resonant way possible.
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Taylor Swift – Lover Swift has a habit of putting her worst foot forward. The album’s lead single, “Me!”, is peppy and poppy in all the wrong ways, a rictus grin of a song that rings hollow. Thank goodness that the rest of the album is nothing like that. Perky opening track “Forgot That You Existed” is a syncopated snigger, on which Swift shrugs off old grudges and breathes a sigh of relief in doing so. “Something magical happened one night,” she sings. “I forgot that you existed. And I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t.” The title track, meanwhile, is poignant and unfussy, a reminder of Swift’s ability to distil infatuation into something specific and universal. (Alexandra Pollard)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sheryl Crow – Threads One could argue that there’s too much eclecticism here – that if this really is Crow’s final LP, she perhaps could have gone for something with a more singular sound. But then it wouldn’t be a Sheryl Crow album. She sings about the fear of the unknown on “Flying Blind” – her steely determination on this record has you believing that she’ll take the leap regardless. (Roisin O'Connor)
Dove Shore
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Common – Let Love There’s more of a soul influence here – “HER Love”, the counterpoint to his 1994 track “I Used to Love HER”, benefits from the gospel-like vocals of Daniel Caesar and Dwele, while “Memories of Home” skitters over a muffled bass and Common’s recollections of his past – including an incident where he was molested by a family member. Where Black America Again was notable for its sharp, observational urgency, Let Love feels far more personal, and softer in tone. Common’s optimistic nature gives it an uplifting vibe, and while closer “God is Love” is gently critical of people who use their religion to persecute others, the message is one of learning from our mistakes. It couldn’t be more timely. (Roisin O'Connor)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell! This is Del Rey at her most assertive – personally, if not politically. Those hoping for a barbed protest record in keeping with Del Rey’s newfound public activism (last year she called President Trump a “narcissist” who “believes it’s OK to grab a woman by the pussy just because he’s famous”) will be disappointed. But it is gratifying to hear her take control. Aside from “Happiness Is a Butterfly”, that is. “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” she asks. Crikey. “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record,” sings Del Rey on “Next Best American Record”. This isn’t it, but it’s pretty great all the same. (Alexandra Pollard)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Ezra Furman – Twelve Nudes Assisted by veteran producer John Congleton (St Vincent, John Grant), he channels the spirit of David Bowie and Iggy Pop. He screeches over distorted “ooh oohs” via The Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Devil” on opener “Calm Down aka I Should Not Be Alone”. “Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere” is sung in a Ziggy Stardust croon, while “Rated R Crusaders” shows Furman exploring his Jewish identity in the era of the Israel/Palestine conflict. His sardonic yet sensitive approach to gender and sexuality on “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” is a reminder, if one was needed, why he was so well-suited to scoring the soundtrack for Netflix’s Sex Education. Each song feels personal yet relatable – the deep-rooted despair felt on “Trauma” at the sight of wealthy bullies rising to power is a universal one, as is the sense of liberation in just letting go on “What Can You Do But Rock n Roll”. Twelve Nudes is Furman’s most urgent and cathartic record to date. (Roisin O'Connor)
Jessica Lehrman
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Black Keys – Let's Rock! If Brothers, their brawny album from 2010, turned the pair into serious rock contenders, then 2011’s El Camino cemented their reputation. Yet neither can claim to be as fiendishly catchy as Let’s Rock, a record that can scarcely sit still. On opener “Shine a Light”, the riffs are big, the momentum irresistible, with frontman/guitarist Dan Auerbach layering scabrous licks over AC/DC-like chords. Backing singers Leisa Hans and Ashley Wilcoxson add texture to the grooving “Lo/Hi”, while the languid “Sit Around and Miss You” is Stealers Wheels by way of the Deep South. Listen to the melodic harmonies in “Tell Me Lies” and it’s not just the lyrics that’ll remind you of Fleetwood Mac. Indeed, so heavily do The Black Keys wear their influences that the record – their ninth – risks coming across like Stars in Their Eyes: The Rock Edition. But if this is genre pastiche, it’s genre pastiche done with skill and savvy. (Patrick Smith)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Thom Yorke – ANIMA The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. You can hear his paranoia in the stuttering techno opener “Traffic”, which channels the heady grooves and pulses of electronic artist Floating Points (who, with his neuroscience background, seems like an entirely fitting reference point). Yorke often tends to make his most explicit political comments outside of music: in a recent interview, for example, he complained about how discourse has regressed, referring to British and American politics as “a Punch and Judy show”. But there are moments here where you feel his rage: “Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?/ One day I’m gonna take an axe to you,” he growls on “The Axe”. (Roisin O'Connor)
Greg Williams
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Nas – The Lost Tapes II There are plenty of surprises, like Swizz Beats singing on “Who Are You” against elegant violins that recall a Kamasi Washington composition. “Adult Film” features a gorgeous piano riff; the Pete Rock-produced “The Art of It” has a delicious funk vibe; “It Never Ends” comes full circle via a bright piano loop. Where a full album produced by Kanye West (2018’s Nasir) didn’t pan out – perhaps because West’s perfectionism was a bad fit for Nas’s penchant for procrastination – “You Mean the World to Me” sounds like it would have been a standout on that record had it not been abandoned on the cutting-room floor. Now it’s a standout on this album. Maybe Nas never really lost it, but The Lost Tapes II sounds like an artist rediscovering his love for hip hop in the most joyous and satisfying way. It’s hard not to consider his timing for this release, just three months since the 25th anniversary of Illmatic. It feels a lot like a third coming. (Roisin O'Connor)
Rex
The best albums of 2019 (so far) The Flaming Lips – King's Mouth For all the album’s eccentricities, the vibe is earnest fairytale rather than tongue-in-cheek – save for the sound of a strangled feline mirroring the lyrics “when you stepped on your cat” on “How Many Times”. Epic highlight “Electric Fire” and celestial album-closer “How Can a Head” capture Coyne at his most wistful. The latter is a wide-eyed, strings-laden gem, its childlike, questing lyrics poignant whatever your age. Just as the preceding art installation invited viewers to enter its vast head of LED lights and wonder, this album does the same. (Elisa Bray)
Warner Bros Records
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Bat for Lashes – Lost Girls Given our current preoccupation with the Eighties, you could argue that Lost Girls is hardly breaking new ground – and yes, nostalgia is a fairly generic formula. But listened to as a whole, the album positively thrums with sonic invention, managing to feel both fresh and full of intrigue. Khan once again demonstrates a knack for uncanny storytelling. Three of her past albums have been nominated for Mercurys; expect this to make it four. (Patrick Smith)
Jen Ewbank
The best albums of 2019 (so far) MUNA – Saves the World MUNA might not be a household name yet, but their influence runs through the charts like a stick of rock these days. Listen to Katy Perry’s summer smash “Never Really Over”, or Taylor Swift’s feminist clap back “The Man”, and you’ll hear the same dense, sticky synths and brawny beats that the emo-pop trio have been honing for the past three years. Their debut album, 2017’s About U, was raw, poignant and just the ride side of melodramatic, queering the mainstream, one sad-pop anthem at a time. If there’s any justice, its follow-up, Saves the World, should see MUNA joining the ranks of those who have brazenly borrowed their sound. Lead single “Number One Fan” banishes intrusive thoughts – “Nobody likes me and I’m gonna die” – just in time for a lavish, self-celebratory chorus, one part earnest, one part tongue-in-cheek.(Alexandra Pollard)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Pixies – Beneath the Eyrie Tales of witchy curses (“On Graveyard Hill”) and spirit reincarnation (“Daniel Boone”) feel like they’ve been dug up from ancient folklore, and capture classic-Pixies menace and ghoulish spirit. Over the album’s 12 tracks, ghostly organs and minor-key guitar-picked sequences help to conjure this dark, Gothic vibe. Yet for all its darkness, Beneath the Eyrie is brimming with the kind of melody that we expect from these indie-rock giants from the late Eighties. “Ready for Love” is a melancholy ballad with harmonising vocals from bassist Paz Lenchantin (Kim Deal’s now-permanent replacement), while lead single “Catfish Kate” – a tale of a woman battling a catfish in a river told by Black Jack Hooligan – is a rock hit in waiting. (Elisa Bray)
BMG
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Jenny Hval – The Practice of Love This endlessly fascinating artist’s seventh, full-length, album The Practice of Love is just as considered as 2016's Blood Bitch, examining one’s role in humankind and on Earth, and probing that favourite of pop-song themes: love. But where the 2017 Nordic Music Prize-winning Blood Bitch was packed with visceral imagery and disarming sonics, the themes of The Practice of Love are encased in a warm cocoon of poetry, blissed-out circling synths and trance-like Nineties beats. (Elisa Bray) There’s an interior dialogue throughout, which is sometimes more intriguing than musically engrossing. Take the title track, whose spoken-word monologue morphs into a recorded conversation in which a woman discusses how childlessness in her late thirties affects her place in society, over the sparsest electronica.
Tore Setre
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Metronomy – Metronomy Forever This is Metronomy at their most ambitious and pleasurably weird. As with the dreamy “Upset My Girlfriend”, which speaks of a man about to propose to his partner despite the fight they’re in, it’s an album stranded somewhere between pure joy and unexplainable sadness; like slapping on a false smile despite feeling miserable, and recognising how much it helps in the moment. (Adam White)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Charli XCX – Charli Listening on headphones, I was reminded of the late French designer Janet Laverriere. Born in 1909, she was still a powerful, playful force when I interviewed her for this paper in her eighties. She banged a cast iron radiator with a spoon to celebrate the echoes and curves of essential pipework: “I put all the hard plumbing on the outside. In kitchens, in bathrooms, I am feminist, evidemment!” I felt that spirit through almost every the clink, clunk, crash and molten flare of this album. It ends with another Sivan collaboration: “2099”. “I’m Pluto, Neptune, pull up, roll up, f**k up, future, future...” they intone. Charli’s always so much cooler when she swaps the people-pleasing nostalgic for the free-wheeling futuristic. (Helen Brown)
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The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sam Fender – Hypersonic Missiles Fender drew plenty of early comparisons to Bruce Springsteen – on Hypersonic Missiles they’re entirely warranted, as much for the instrumentation as the lyricism and his vignettes of working-class struggle. There are sax solos (more than one), and pounding rhythms that make you want to jump in a car and drive down a highway at sunset, and blistering electric guitars next to classic troubadour acoustics. He has Springsteen’s rousing holler, and the early indications of someone who could be the voice of a generation – not because he wants to be, but because he sees things and understands. (Roisin O'Connor)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Liam Gallagher – Why Me? Why Not. Why Me? Why Not. is enjoyably defiant, Gallagher embodying a settled and contented aura. “Gotta live for something besides yesterdays,” Gallagher snarls on “Be Still”. The downbeat “Once” forgoes easy Noel-bashing for a mournful glance at the years when the pair were still speaking (“I remember how you used to shine back then... but you only get to do it once”). And “Now That I’ve Found You” is even somewhat sickly-sweet in tone, a cheery tribute to his daughter Molly, whom he met for the first time when she was 21. “I know it’s late for lullabies, but the future is yours and mine,” he sings, alongside upbeat whoops and Radio 2-friendly guitars. (Adam White)
The best albums of 2019 (so far) Brittany Howard – Jaime The album takes a deep, contemplative breath on “Short and Sweet”, which is exactly what it promises, a Grace Jones-like ballad on which Howard’s voice takes precedent over inconspicuous guitar, and the background hisses like an old vinyl. On “He Loves Me”, she grapples with maintaining a relationship with God when she’s long since stopped going to church. There’s no track on Jaime that is likely to make waves – not in the same way as some of the better-known Alabama Shakes tracks, such as “Hold On” or “This Feeling” (the latter of which was recently used to remarkable effect in the final scene of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag). But what lovely ripples it makes. (Alex Pollard)
Brantley Gutierrez
Fat White Family , Serfs Up!
★★★★☆
Pygmalion. The Elephant Man. Chris Eubank. And now, to this classic roll call of gutter-to-grandeur stories, we must add the Fat White Family. Once they were south London drug scoundrels renowned for smothering audiences with offal and openly fondling themselves while singing about Nazis, grotty sex, paedophilia and Disneyland terror attacks. Now, over the course of three albums, they’ve shifted their grosser tendencies over to their numerous side-projects – notably fictional band The Moonlandingz, often to be found wrapped in cling film and smothered in swastikas and expletives – and suddenly developed an air of culture and sophistication.
It seems as likely as Old Man Steptoe dining with the Rees-Mogg, but this new tactic of burying their confrontational gruesomeness beneath a veneer of alt-rock respectability for album three works well for them. Drenched in chamber strings and celestial harmonies, the plush yet sinister “Oh Sebastian” could be Pet Sounds selling its soul to the devil. “Fringe Runner” is so sleek and funksome it could be a New Romantic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)”; “Kim’s Sunsets” is a piece of refined cosmic reggae resembling a blissed-out “Bankrobber”.
Inevitably, at times, their feral nature peeks through. “Tastes Good With the Money” might be a glorious anthem of corroded glam rock, but it comes with a spoken-word interlude about the apocalypse from Baxter Dury and a video of an upper-class garden party descending into an ultraviolent bloodbath. For all the suave disco noir of “Feet”, the song includes phrases better suited to a BNP rally chant. There’s a narcotic space funk tune about dating sex workers (“Bobby’s Boyfriend”), and a Tame Impala-like dream-pop homage to Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” called “Vagina Dentata”, which means exactly what you think it does. Tarantino bossa novas and Velvets drones are all imbued with a luminous, cultured seediness, like the entire Cannes Film Festival owning up to its social diseases. Wonderfully unsettling. Mark Beaumont
The 40 best albums to listen to before you dieShow all 40 1 /40The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground It was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewed together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album. It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Side one track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a love song. European Son is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. Chris Harvey
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he "took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself". The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T 50 years before the #MeToo movement. Helen Brown
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Master of Puppets (1986), Metallica Despite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. This album is about storytelling – the medieval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. Although that was really the only medieval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. Roisin O’Connor
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Remain in Light (1980), Talking Heads “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. Same as it ever was. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Catch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the Earth and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. Marley sang of life “where the living is hardest” in “Concrete Jungle” and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – “No chains around my feet but I’m not free”. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as “High Tide and Low Tide”, and rhythmic dance tracks like “Kinky Reggae”. Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Revolver (1966), The Beatles An unprecedented 220 hours of studio experimentation saw George Martin and The Beatles looping, speeding, slowing and spooling tapes backwards to create a terrifically trippy new sound. The mournful enigma of McCartney’s “For No One” and the psychedelia of Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “She Said, She Said” can still leave you standing hypnotised over the spinning vinyl, wondering if the music is coming out or being sucked back in. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna It may be the most “serious” album she’s ever made, yet Like a Prayer is still Madonna at her most accessible – pulling no punches in topics from religion to the dissolution of her marriage. In 1989, Madonna’s personal life was tabloid fodder: a tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn finally ended in divorce, and she was causing controversy with the “Like a Prayer” video and its burning crosses. On the gospel abandon of the title track, she takes the listener’s breath away with her sheer ambition. Where her past records had been reflections of the modern music that influenced her – Like a Prayer saw her pay homage to bands like Sly & the Family Stone, and Simon & Garfunkel. The album was also about an artist taking control over her own narrative, after releasing records that asked the audience – and the press – to like her. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Led Zeppelin Millennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Jimmy Page’s juggernaut riffs and Robert Plant’s hedonistic wails set the bench mark for all subsequent heavy, hedonistic rock. But it’s worth playing the whole thing to experience the full mystic, monolithic ritual of the thing. Stairway? Undeniable. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Best of the Shangri-Las (1996), The Shangri-Las Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no, no one ever did teen heartbreak quite like the Shangri-Las. Long before the Spice Girls packaged attitude for popular consumption, songwriter Ellie Greenwich was having trouble with a group of teenagers who had grown up in a tough part of Queen’s – “with their gestures, and language, and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their legs”. But the Shangri-Las sang with an ardour that was so streetwise, passionate and raw that it still reaches across more than half a century without losing any of its power. "Leader of the Pack" (co-written by Greenwich) may be their best-known song, but they were never a novelty act. This compilation captures them at their early Sixties peak. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David Bowie Flamboyance, excess, eccentricity – this is the breakthrough album that asserted Bowie as glam rock’s new icon, surpassing T Rex. He may have come to rue his Ziggy Stardust character, but with it, Bowie transcended artists seeking authenticity via more mundane means. It was his most ambitious album – musically and thematically – that, like Prince, saw him unite his greatest strengths from previous works and pull off one of the great rock and roll albums without losing his sense of humour, or the wish to continue entertaining his fans. “I’m out to bloody entertain, not just get up onstage and knock out a few songs,” he declared. “I’m the last person to pretend I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division In their brief career, ended by the suicide of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division created two candidates for the best album by anyone ever. Closer may be a final flowering, but Unknown Pleasures is more tonally consistent, utterly unlike anything before or since. The mood is an all-pervading ink-black darkness, but there is a spiritual force coming out of the grooves that is so far beyond pop or rock, it feels almost Dostoevskyan. There are classic songs – "Disorder", "She’s Lost Control" and "New Dawn Fades" – and for those who’d swap every note Eric Clapton ever played for one of Peter Hook’s basslines, the sequence at 4:20 on "I Remember Nothing" is perhaps the single most thrilling moment in the entire Joy Division catalogue. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hejira (1976), Joni Mitchell Though her 1971 album, Blue, is usually chosen for these kinds of lists, Mitchell surpassed its silvery, heartbroken folk five years later with a record that found her confidently questioning its culturally conditioned expectations of womanhood. Against an ambiguous, jazzy landscape, her deepening, difficult voice weighs romance and domesticity against the adventure of “strange pillows” and solitude. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Body Talk (2010), Robyn The answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. It includes different versions of some tracks, such as the non-acoustic version of “Hang With Me” (and we can argue all night about that one), but leaves well alone when it comes to the single greatest electronic dance track since “I Feel Love”, “Dancing On My Own”. Body Talk is simply jammed with great songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Off The Wall (1979), Michael Jackson “I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it,” wrote Jackson as he turned 21 and shook off his cute, controlled child-star imagery to release his jubilant, fourth solo album. Produced by Quincy Jones, the sophisticated disco funk nails the balance between tight, tendon-twanging grooves and liberated euphoria. Glitter ball magic. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Illmatic (1994), Nas How good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music – not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Nas used the sounds of the densely-populated New York streets he grew up on. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track “Live at the BBQ”: ‘When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Trans-Europe Express (1977), Kraftwerk This is the album that changes everything. The synthesised sounds coming out of Kraftwerk’s Kling-Klang studios had already become pure and beautiful on 1975’s Radio-Activity, but on Trans-Europe Express, their sophistication subtly shifts all future possibilities. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. Released four months before Giorgio Moroder’s "I Feel Love", Trans-Europe Express influenced everything from hip-hop to techno. All electronic dance music starts here. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Kind of Blue (1959), Miles Davis With the sketches of melody only written down hours before recording, the world’s best-selling jazz record still feels spontaneous and unpredictable. Davis’s friend George Russell once explained that the secret of its tonal jazz was to use every note in a scale “without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord”. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Astral Weeks (1968), Van Morrison “If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…” To enter this musical cathedral, where folk, jazz and blue-eyed soul meet is always to feel a sense of awe. Recorded in just two eight-hour sessions, in which Morrison first played the songs to the assembled musicians then told them to do their own thing, Astral Weeks still feels as if it was made yesterday. Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics within the richness of the acoustic setting – double bass, classical guitar and flute – make this as emotionally affecting an album as any in rock and pop. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die West Side Story Soundtrack (1961) “Life is all right in America / If you're all white in America” yelp the immigrants in this passionate and political musical relocating of Romeo and Juliet to Fifites New York. Leonard Bernstein’s sophisticated score is a melting pot of pop, classical and Latin music; Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics sharp as a flick knife. An unanswered prayer for a united and forgiving USA. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Sign o' the Times (1987), Prince Sign o’ the Times is Prince’s magnum opus from a catalogue of masterworks – a double album spanning funk, rock, R&B and most essentially, soul. It is the greatest articulation of his alchemic experiments with musical fusion – the sum of several projects Prince was working on during his most creatively fruitful year. On Sign o’ the Times, the bass is king – Prince cemented his guitar god status on Purple Rain. There are tracks that drip with sex, and love songs like “Adore”, which remains one of the greatest of all time. Stitched together with the utmost care, as if he were writing a play with a beginning, a middle and an end, the album is a landmark in both pop and in art. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Pet Sounds (1966), The Beach Boys Caught in the psychological undertow of family trauma and all those commercial surf songs, 23-year-old Brian Wilson had a panic attack and retreated to the studio to write this dreamlike series of songs whose structural tides washed them way beyond the preppy formulas of drugstore jukeboxes. Notes pinged from vibraphones and coke cans gleam in the strange, sad waves of bittersweet melody. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Ys (2006), Joanna Newsom Weave a circle round her thrice… Joanna Newsom is dismissed by some as kookily faux-naif, but her second album, before she trained out the childlike quality from her voice, may be the most enchanted record ever made. At times, she sounds other-worldly, sitting at her harp, singing to herself of sassafras and Sisyphus, but then a phrase will carry you off suddenly to the heart’s depths – “Still, my dear, I’d have walked you to the edge of the water”. Ys’s pleasures are not simple or immediate. Newsom’s unusual song structures, with their fragmented melodies, and strange and beautiful orchestral arrangements by 63-year-old Van Dyke Parks, take time to work their magic. But once you’re bewitched, Ys’s spell never wears off. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Public Enemy Public Enemy’s second album is hip-hop’s game-changing moment, where a new musical form that arrived fully born after years of development away from meddling outsiders found its radical voice. It Takes a Nation of Millions… is still one of the most powerful, provocative albums ever made, “Here is a land that never gave a damn / About a brother like me,” raps Chuck D on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Producer Hank Shocklee creates a hard-edged sound from samples that pay homage to soul greats such as James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and Flavor Flav gives it an unmistakeable zest. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Pink Floyd It’s easy to knock these white, male, middle-class proggers, with their spaceship full of technology and their monolithic ambitions. But the walloping drums, operatic howls and “quiet desperation” of this concept album about the various forms of madness still resonates with the unbalanced, overwhelmed and alienated parts of us all. Play loud, alone and after dark. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill Lauryn Hill raised the game for an entire genre with this immense and groundbreaking work. Flipping between two tones – sharp and cold, and sensual and smoky – the former Fugees member stepped out from rap’s misogynist status quo and drew an audience outside of hip hop thanks to her melding of soul, reggae and R&B, and the recruitment of the likes of Mary J Blige and D’Angelo. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies. But Hill’s reggae influences are what drive the album’s spirit: preaching love and peace but also speaking out against unrighteous oppression. Even today, it’s one of the most uplifting and inspiring records around. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), Serge Gainsbourg The great French singer-songwriter provocateur probably wouldn’t get too many takers today for a concept album about a tender love between his middle-aged self and a teenage girl he knocks off her bicycle in his Rolls-Royce. But, musically, this cult album is sublime, an extraordinary collision of funk bass, spoken-word lyrics and Jean-Claude Vannier’s heavenly string arrangements. “Ballade de Melody Nelson”, sung by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, is one of his most sublimely gorgeous songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In My Own Time (1971), Karen Dalton There’s nothing contrived about Karen Dalton’s ability to flip out the guts of familiar songs and give them a dry, cracked folk-blues twist. Expanding the emotional and narrative boundaries of songs like Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman is just what she did. Why has it taken the world so long to appreciate her? HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Let England Shake (2011), PJ Harvey “Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England.” PJ Harvey may have sounded like she was channelling Boris and Nige when she made this striking album in 2015, but few Brexiteers would want to take this journey with her. Let England Shake digs deep into the soil of the land, where buried plowshares lie waiting to be beaten into swords. Death is everywhere, sometimes in its most visceral form: “I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,” she sings on “The Words That Maketh Murder”, “Arms and legs are in the trees.” Musically, though, it’s ravishing: Harvey employs autoharp, zither, rhodes piano, xylophone and trombone to create a futuristic folk sound that’s strikingly original yet could almost be from an earlier century. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Boy in da Corner (2003), Dizzee Rascal It’s staggering to listen back to this album and remember Dizzee was just 18-years-old when he released it. Rising through the UK garage scene as a member of east London’s Roll Deep crew, the MC born Dylan Mills allegedly honed his skills in production after being excluded from every one of his classes, apart from music. If you want any sense of how ahead of the game Dizzee was, just listen to the opening track “Sittin’ Here”. While 2018 has suffered a spate of half-hearted singles playing on the listener’s sense of nostalgia for simpler times, 15 years ago Dizzee longed for the innocence of childhood because of what he was seeing in the present day: teenage pregnancies, police brutality, his friends murdered on the streets or lost to a lifestyle of crime and cash. Boy in da Corner goes heavy on cold, uncomfortably disjointed beats, synths that emulate arcade games and police sirens, and Dizzee himself delivering bars in his trademark, high-pitched squawk. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hounds of Love (1985), Kate Bush Proof that a woman could satisfy her unique artistic vision and top the charts without kowtowing to industry expectations, Kate Bush’s self-produced masterpiece explored the extreme range of her oceanic emotions from the seclusion of a cutting-edge studio built in the garden of her 17th-century farmhouse. The human vulnerability of her voice and traditional instruments are given an electrical charge by her pioneering use of synthesisers. Thrilling and immersive. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Blue Lines (1991), Massive Attack A uniquely British take on hip hop and soul that continues to influence booming modern genres like grime and dubstep, the Bristol collective’s debut gave a cool new pulse to the nation’s grit and grey. You can smell ashtrays on greasy spoon tables in Tricky’s whisper and feel the rain on your face in Shara Nelson’s exhilarating improvisations. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Surfer Rosa (1987), Pixies It only takes 20 seconds of opening track Bone Machine to realise Pixies and producer Steve Albini have stripped down the sound of rock ’n’ roll and rebuilt it piece by piece. The angry smack of Led Zep drums, ripe bass, and sheet metal guitar straight off the Stooges’ Detroit production line are separated and recombined. Pixies’ sound is already complete before Black Francis embarks on one of his elusive pop cult narratives (“your bone’s got a little machine”). The tension between the savagery of his vocals and Kim Deal’s softer melodic tone won’t reach its perfect balance until their next album but their debut, Surfer Rosa is gigantic, and deserving of big, big love. Its “loud, quiet, loud” tectonics would prove so influential that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would later say he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies”. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Talking Timbuktu (1994), Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder If you ever doubt the possibility of relaxed and respectful conversation across the world’s cultural divisions, then give yourself an hour with this astonishing collaboration between Mali’s Ali Farka Toure (who wrote all but one of the tracks) and California’s Ry Cooder (whose slide guitar travels through them like a pilgrim). Desert meets Delta Blues. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Great Gospel Men (1993), Various artists Compared to the blues, the incalculable influence of gospel music on pop, soul and rock ’n’ roll has been underplayed. It can be found in every song on this brilliant 27-track compilation. If you can’t hear James Brown in the foot-stomping opener “Move on Up a Little Higher” by Brother Joe May, you’re not listening hard enough. The road to Motown from “Lord, Lord, Lord” by Professor Alex Bradford is narrow indeed, but you could still take a side-turning and follow his ecstatic whoops straight to Little Richard, who borrowed them, and on to the Beatles who copied them from him. The swooping chord changes in James Cleveland’s “My Soul Looks Back” are magnificent. All the irreplaceable soul voices, from Aretha Franklin to Bobby Womack, were steeped in gospel. This is a great place to hear where they came from. Companion album The Great Gospel Women is a marvel, too. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hopelessness (2016), Anonhi “A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club,” said this angel-voiced, transgender artist in 2012. Four years later, the seismic drums and radical ecofeminist agenda of Hopelessness shook that club’s crumbling foundations to dust. The horrors of drone warfare, paedophilia and global warming are held up to the bright lights in disconcertingly beautiful rage. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In Utero (1993), Nirvana Kurt Cobain had one goal with In Utero: to pull Nirvana away from what he dubbed the “candy-ass” sound on Nevermind – the album that had turned them into one of the biggest rock bands on the planet – and take them back to punk-rock. He asked Pixies’ producer Steve Albini to oversee production. It didn’t exactly eschew commercial success upon release (it went on to sell 15m copies worldwide), but the heaviness the band felt as they recorded it bears down on the listener from the opening track. Disheartened by the media obsession with his personal life and the fans clamouring for the same old shit, In Utero is pure, undiluted rage. “GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYY” he screams on “Scentless Apprentice”, capturing the essence of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer and using it as a metaphor for his disgust at the music industry, and the press. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Curtis (1971), Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mayfield had been spinning golden soul music from doo-wop roots with The Impressions for more than a decade before releasing his first solo album, which contains some of his greatest songs. While some point to the 1972 Blaxploitation soundtrack Superfly as the definitive Mayfield album, Curtis is deeper and more joyous, its complex arrangements masterly. Mayfield’s sweet falsetto sings of Nixon’s bland reassurances over the fuzz-bass of “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”; doleful horns give the politically conscious “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” a profound emotional undertow; “Move On Up” is simply one of the most exhilarating songs in pop. To spend time with Curtis is to be in the presence of a beautiful soul. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Rumours (1977), Fleetwood Mac Before they went their own way, Fleetwood Mac decided to tell a story that would be the quintessential marker for American rock culture in the Seventies. As Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks tossed the charred remains of their relationship at one another on “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way”, the rest of the band conjured up the warm West Coast harmonies, the laid back California vibes of the rhythm section and the clear highs on “Gold Dust Woman”, in such a way that Rumours would become the definitive sound of the era. At the time of its release, it was the fastest-selling LP of all time; its success turned Fleetwood Mac into a cultural phenomenon. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Are You Experienced? (1967), Jimi Hendrix A virtual unknown to rock fans just a year before – Hendrix used Are You Experienced? to assert himself as a guitar genius who could combine pop, blues, rock, R&B, funk and psychedelia in a way no other artist had before. That’s even without the essential contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who handed Are You Experienced? the rhythmic bridge between jazz and rock. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Few tracks are as gratifying, as sexy, as the strut on “Foxy Lady”. And few songs come close to the existential bliss caused by “The Wind Cries Mary”. Hendrix’s attack on the guitar contrasted against the more polished virtuosos in rock at the time – yet it is his raw ferocity that we find ourselves coming back to. Few debuts have changed the course of rock music as Hendrix did with his. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die We Are Family (1979), Sister Sledge Disco’s crowning glory is this album that Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards made with Kathy Sledge and her sisters Debbie, Joni and Kim. Nile and ’Nard were at the peak of their powers, classic songs were pouring out of them – We Are Family was released in the same year as the epochal “Good Times” by Chic – and this album has four of them, “Lost in Music”, “He’s the Greatest Dancer”, “Thinking of You” and the title track itself. Sister Sledge gave Rodgers a chance to work with warmer, gutsier vocals than the cool voices he used to give Chic records such laid-back style and the result is a floor-filling dance party, punctuated by mellow ballads. CH
Cage the Elephant , Social Cues
★★★★☆
On Cage the Elephant’s fifth album, Social Cues , frontman Matt Shultz reacts to the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of three close friends. He undergoes a kind of Jekyll and Hyde transition through the 13 tracks, the result of which is the band’s best work to date.
Assisted by producer John Hill, whose previous credits include co-writing Portugal. The Man’s mega-hit “Feel it Still”, the Kentucky-formed, Nashville-based Cage the Elephant remain faithful to their neo-soul influenced brand of garage rock but move to something darker and far more visceral.
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Sign up Social Cues opens with the bouncy punk of “Broken Boy”, where the raw, driving energy and distorted vocal delivery recall The Damned ’s seminal 1977 track “Neat Neat Neat”. From there, it twists and turns through Shultz’s tormented mind, asking the listener to question certain social traits we adopt as a means to conform.
Single “Ready to let Go” is by far the most explicit – a moody swamp-rock jam where Shultz comes to terms with his impending divorce. “House of Glass” is a sequence of frenzied mutterings with a buzzsaw guitar cutting through his attempts to convince himself of love’s existence. The symphonic arrangements on “Love’s the Only Way” and “What I’m Becoming” harks back to 2017’s live album, Unpeeled .
By the time the album reaches its closing track you’re well prepared for a blistering climax, which makes the stripped-back, sombre piano notes and Shultz’s low murmurs on “Goodbye” all the more disarming. It’s a song steeped in regret for things that weren’t said, or done, tempered with a bittersweet tone of acceptance.
Social Cues is an album where Shultz bares his soul, and apparently shakes off a few demons in the process. Roisin O’Connor
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