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30 (Technically 36) Albums We Loved That Happened To Come Out in 2021

We must have listened to 500 albums this year–what else was there to do when not (finally!) going to live shows again–so it proved to be an immense task narrowing down records to highlight to a mere 36. Like we did in 2020, we chose not to rank the list, revealing our choices in alphabetical order. LPs, EPs, reissues, and even rerecords were eligible and are all represented. As we continue to navigate uncertain waters when it comes to music and the industry, from vinyl shortage-induced release delays to shows being canceled because of COVID, recorded music never lets us down.

Adia Victoria - A Southern Gothic (Canvasback)

A Southern Gothic arrives with a haunting presence, a lone guitar picking before the steady beat of a drum and Adia Victoria's vocals slink in. "I followed you into the blue and north into the cold/You led me off my land, you led me far from home," she starts on opener "Magnolia Tree" before declaring, "I'm going back South/Down to Carolina/I'm gonna plant myself/Under a magnolia."

Adia Victoria is a blueswoman and a storyteller of the South. On her latest album, she crafts songs that reclaim the region, painting a vibrant portrait that goes beyond the all-too-familiar monolithic view of it. Each track radiates, from Victoria's crackling vocals in "Far From Dixie" and the self-preservation embedded in the lyrics of in "Deep Water Blues". You can feel the collaborative spirit of "You Was Born to Die", featuring Kyshona Armstrong, Margo Price, and Jason Isbell. Victoria's pinned tweet from the release of the album says it all: "to the south – my land and my people. this record is yours. from one of your daughters." - Lauren Lederman

adult mom - Driver (Epitaph)

There's always discussion around the perfect autumnal record, a search for a soundtrack as we move from the heat of summer to the cold of winter. But what about the springtime album? Like the fall record, it's something you want to get cozy with, one that's reflective, that hinges on the promise of a changing season. If it has a sense of yearning, that helps, too. For me, Driver was that spring album, released in March. Stevie Knipe's poignant lyrics capture that sense of reflection and revisiting memory so vividly, often setting the crucial moments in the interior of their car, giving the album its central image and through-line. Each song's story unfolds in vivid detail, though my favorite lyrical moment is the perspective shift in the album's opening track, "Passenger", the subtle rearranging of words to shift their meaning so drastically. - LL

Arlo Parks - Collapsed in Sunbeams (Transgressive)

"At its core, Arlo Parks' remarkably assured debut Collapsed in Sunbeams is about finding solidarity in each other's darkness. Thought much of the record was inspired by or takes from Parks' life, from transformational periods of time to brief moments, she converses with the listener at a time when most of us can't meet in person. 'We're all learning to trust our bodies,' she says on the opening title track, a short passage of spoken word over lilting Spanish guitars and synths, 'making peace with our own distortions.' At a time when spending time by ourselves allows us to confront past traumas or deep-seated anxieties, or perhaps succumb to them, Parks proposes that we simply declare them."

Read the rest of our review of Collapsed in Sunbeams.

Cassandra Jenkins - An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing!)

"An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is not so much a record about Berman's death as it is one about processing things that are out of your control. Yes, he's mentioned by name, and Jenkins' self-described 'diaristic' details refer to her story, like on "Ambiguous Norway", where her Purple Mountains tour outfit comes in the mail and she looks at it wondering what could have been. But the album's a document of a period in Jenkins' life rife with general change and her responses to it."

Read "What I'm Dealing With", our interview with Jenkins about An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, here.

Dijon - Absolutely (R&R/Warner)

Dijon's Absolutely snuck up on me. After seeing other musicians and writers I admire sing the praises of the album, I finally hit play and took a listen for myself. Each song that comprises the 31 minute runtime feels purposeful, whether Dijon's moving from soul, crooning R&B, or lonely cowboy campfire songs. There's a warmth to the songs on Absolutely, a lived-in raspiness to the vocals where Dijon sounds worldly but not weary as he explores the intimacies of the people who inhabit its songs: The way rollicking single "Many Times" eventually dances out and seamlessly melts into "Annie", which folds into the twangy "Noah's Highlight Reel" only to slide into the wistful slow jam of "The Dress". Absolutely has a little of everything, and Dijon has the skill and confidence to pull it all off. - LL

Emma Ruth Rundle - Engine of Hell (Sargent House)

Fresh off multiple collaborations with Thou (and following 2018′s noisy, swirling, crashing On Dark Horses), Emma Ruth Rundle demonstrated a more minimalistic approach on Engine of Hell, with few overdubs, acoustic instrumentation, and no additional musicians. Rundle's still using music to process trauma, and listening to her is an intense emotional experience that feels like you're being let into her head. But if past albums hid any truth in their expressiveness, Engine of Hell lays bare. The way her words and breath escape from her mouth on songs like opener "Return", over solemn, lilting piano, encapsulates the sheer rawness of the album. She sings conversationally about addiction, scraping her wiry guitar on "Blooms of Oblivion". On "Body", about a childhood memory of seeing a deceased family member being wheeled away, she alternates between matter-of-fact steps ( "We're moving the body now") to spiritual hymns of comfort ("You know my arms are always around you"). That she manages to perfectly capture the complexity of grief without the peppering of details, biographical or otherwise, is universally astounding. - JM

Griff - One Foot In Front Of The Other (Warner)

"She was just awarded the Rising Star Award at the Brits, but pop singer-songwriter Griff is certainly already here with her debut mixtape One Foot In Front Of The Other. Written during lockdown and almost entirely self-produced, the 7-song release, which barely exceeds 20 minutes, shows an artist already confident in her pop chops, whether downtempo tunes about self-doubt or upbeat love songs. Until now, Griff's released an EP and a smattering of singles that have only hinted at the versatility she shows on One Foot. Take even its first single and opening track 'Black Hole', a bouncy bit of admitted melodrama that's a nonetheless affecting portrait of a broken heart. 'There's a big black hole where my heart used to be / And I tried my best to fill it up with things I don't need,' she sings, a concise, simple illustration of desperate, lovesick behavior that so many songwriters try to achieve in many more words. It's already been released in an acoustic version and with various club-boosted remixes, its sentiments appropriate for both tender balladry and propulsive solidarity anthems. Such is Griff."

Read the rest of our review of One Foot In Front Of The Other.

Illuminati hotties - Let Me Do One More (Hopeless)

"The interplay between Tudzin's words and singing style highlights her simultaneous artistic mania and human vulnerability. Immediate highlight 'Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism', a fitting bedfellow to Free I.H.'s 'will i get cancelled if i write a song called, 'if you were a man you'd be so cancelled'', sees two people in a relationship competing over progressive ideas, 'practicing our death threats / hold-your-breath contest.' Early single 'MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA' sports a similar tone, Tudzin's absurd musings on turmoil internal and external mirroring the song's zany math rock-pop-punk hybridization. 'Love me, fight me, choke me, bite me/The DNC is playing dirty/Text me, touch me, call me daddy/I'm so sad I can't do laundry!' she shouts, her voice jumping across different vocal registers like she's in a one-woman play."

Read the rest of our review of Let Me Do One More.

Irreversible Entanglements - Open the Gates (Don Giovanni/International Anthem)

While Irreversible Entanglements' music is anything but formulaic, up until now, they've succeeded by giving vocalist Camae Ayewa's urgent words a dynamic freneticism to match. On Open the Gates, while the brief title track welcomes you back into the band's familiar world, by the time "Keys to Creation" rolls around, you can hear the free jazz collective expanding their horizons. Using synthesizers and electric bass guitar for the first time, they veer into the fried Afrofuturism that Ayewa had only sung about as a member of Irreversible Entanglements. Combining a funk strut and expressive horns with uneasy synth washes, it sounds like entering a new dimension. Of course, Ayewa's poetry still propels Irreversible Entanglements, and she's the captain of the band's journey through time on "Lágrimas del Mar", a Latin jazz tune with eerie, humanistic histories of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. But each band member is a vital part of the act of opening the gates, not only to new genres but new ways of being, something necessary in a world whose leaders would prefer status quo. - JM

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee (Dead Oceans)

2021 was Michelle Zauner's year: the publication of her gorgeously heartbreaking memoir Crying in H Mart, finally reaching the fame level of "Jimmy Fallon Big!", and the sparkling triumph of Japanese Breakfast's third album Jubilee. Zauner has always been an architect of tiny universes, which listeners should be excited to explore, from the 80s synth-pop of "Be Sweet" to the eerie liminal space of "Posing on Bondage" and the billionaire's bunker of "Savage Good Boy". Jubilee gives the band more room to roam while exploring joy. But joy doesn't mean the absence of fear, selfishness, or regret. These things often go hand-in-hand, which is rendered beautifully on the album. "How's it feel to stand at the height of your powers / To captivate every heart?" she asks on album opener "Paprika". Enter her creative world and find out for yourself. - LL

Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales (RCA)

"Heaux Tales isn't interested in colorful metaphors for sex. Really, Sullivan presents situations you might not want to find yourself in. 'Gotta stop gettin' fucked up / What did I have in my cup? / I don't know where I woke up / I keep on pressin' my luck,' she coos on opener 'Bodies (Intro)' over zooming synths and a finger-snapped beat, hooking up with strangers and taking risks, on her own terms. Her situation never unravels, or at least she never reveals that happening; either way, she doesn't care what you think."

Read the rest of our review of Heaux Tales.

Julien Baker - Little Oblivions (Matador)

It's easy to think of Julien Baker in hushed tones. The first time I saw her perform, the crowd was near silent. The singer stood in a single ray of white light on an empty stage, just the power of her voice and guitar reverberating off the venue's walls to fill the space. Baker excels at that, the almost reverent feeling of exploring even the darkest parts of our psyches. It's finally on Little Oblivions that the controlled flame of those emotions and Baker's louder arrangements combine together into something bigger, something towering. Her third album is a broader soundscape that complements her lyrics, like a flint and pile of tinder ready to ignite. - LL

Katy Kirby - Cool Dry Place (Keeled Scales)

"With an unassuming coo and wiry guitar playing, Kirby certainly covers a range of topics, from privilege to motherhood to toxic masculinity, but her songs about relationships hit the hardest. 'Tap Twice', released almost a year ago before Cool Dry Place was even announced, is a standout, detailing a person's increasingly desperate attempts to reach out to someone else, as the low-key venerable band's instrumentation also builds up to unhinged clatter. The title track uses similarly autobiographical imagery–that of an orange–as a metaphor for a dissolving relationship. 'Ten segments in an orange–only so many ways that you can pull apart someone,' Kirby sings on the penultimate track, the emotional climax before the stunning closer 'Fireman'. That one's about an always distant relationship, Kirby's sophisticated writing again playing with the album's established iconography while introducing new metaphors: 'We're a slow burn kind of love / but now the whole house smells like smoke,' she sings. Intentional or happy accident, for a first record, it's connections like this that have already positioned Kirby as one of the best new songwriters in recent memory."

Read our interview with Kirby in advance of her livestream back in March here.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - L.W./Butterfly 3000 (KGLW)

Few bands combine Western pop with Eastern experimentalism as well as King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. That they do it so consistently and often and nonetheless use a unique process every time is stupefying. L.W., their third microtonal album and considered a sister album to last year's K.G., soundtracks words about existential issues with global sounds. Opener "If Not Now, Then When?" tackles deforestation, capitalism, and climate change with a psychedelic funk bounce, Stu Mackenzie's falsetto tagging along with the band's synth lines; nestled below are everything from sitar to harmonica. "Pleura" and "K.G.L.W." toe the line between sludge metal and desert blues riffing, the former chiding the selfishness of world leaders in the face of COVID. King Gizzard created an environmentalist punk funk classic.

Butterfly 3000, on the other hand, is totally built around modular synth loops, recorded during COVID and taken from instrumental interludes made as a part of the band's 2020 live album Chunky Shrapnel. They play more here with textures and layers of instrumentation and melody. While "Dreams"' main refrain of "I only wanna wake up in my dream," crisscrossing with synth arpeggios, could sound right at home in the summer of 2009, such sentiments find new meaning in a world of pandemic isolation-induced time bending. Similarly, the songs tend to have less peaks and valleys, instead embracing hypnotic motorik styles, like on "Interior People".Butterfly 3000 is also far more joyful than L.W. even if more musically subdued, the band paying tribute to nature in the moment rather than lamenting its eventual demise, like the trippy "Blue Morpho", named after a species of South American butterfly. In past years, King Gizzard has released more albums than they did in 2021, but I think these two might just be their finest yet–and they couldn't be more different. - JM

Laura Stevenson - Laura Stevenson (Don Giovanni)

It's impossible to talk about Laura Stevenson's self-titled album without starting at the first track. Written around the terror of a loved one almost dying, "State" begins with foreboding guitar, a threatening calm before the storm crashes in. It's the most full of rage we've heard Stevenson, but she constructs a brilliant expression of anger in three minutes. It rolls in waves, but even the quiet moments don't mean the anger's subsided. The rest of the album touches on that sense of simmering rage, or the need to protect a loved one, wrapped in softer tunes with still-vivid lyrics. Stevenson is a master at exploring layered emotions, able to wrap complexity up in tenderness. "Continental Divide" asks, "But what could I do right to keep you safe while you're in flight?" The gorgeous "Sky Blue, Bad News" reckons with what to do with that rage: "Shana says to take the year/Shutter up…Don't let it strip you bare". - LL

Neil Young - Way Down in the Rust Bucket (Live)(Reprise)/ Young Shakespeare (Reprise)/Carnegie Hall 1970 (Live)(Shaky Pictures)

Every year, Neil Young drops a bevy of goodies from his archive, and three of his live albums released this year were especially notable. Way Down in the Rust Bucket captures Young and Crazy Horse just before they would go on to tour 1990′s Ragged Glory, ripping versions of "Country Home", "Fuckin' Up", and "Farmer John" dominating rather than the usual "Cinnamon Girl" or even "Cortez the Killer". Young Shakespeare was taken from a set in Connecticut, a mere three days after Live at Massey Hall 1971, giving you the opportunity to put yourself in the heads of audience members likely hearing Harvest songs like "Old Man", "The Needle and the Damage Done", and "Heart of Gold" for the first time. And on Carnegie Hall 1970, Young performs solo and acoustic, adapting scuzzed out epics like "Cowgirl in the Sand" to versions more concise and quiet but no less affecting. Taken as a whole, these three releases are all the more evidence you could pretty much randomly select any given Neil Young show and turn it into a stellar live album that bears repeat listening. - JM

Pauline Anna Strom - Angel Tears in Sunlight (RVNG Intl.)

Last November, the promise of a new Pauline Anna Strom album–the first of new compositions in over 30 years–was enough on its own to get me excited for 2021 even if we had to stay inside for another year. Strom would unexpectedly pass away the next month, and though Angel Tears in Sunlight, released this February, is a gorgeous record, it may just end up being best known as a fitting encapsulation of a remarkable career and life. Recorded in the same San Francisco home as her earlier work, it's far more spritely than any music she ever released. The panning, vocal-emulating synth slabs of "Marking Time" is an early highlight, wonderfully discombobulating after the blissful arpeggios of opener "Tropical Convergence". The cascading zooms of "Temple Gardens at Midnight" are what I imagine flying through space in a UFO, alone and peaceful, sounds like. The pattering, yet layered percussion of "The Pulsation" and "Equatorial Sunrise" is like minimalist tropicalia. But it's the emotional centerpiece, "I Still Hope", that hits the heaviest. Its glassy drones aren't a wholly positive sound, but one that recalls cautious optimism, the feeling of knowing that anything in life can lurk around the corner, so take the time to appreciate the beauty in front of you. - JM

portrayal of guilt - We Are Always Alone (Closed Casket Activities)/CHRISTFUCKER (Run For Cover)

Released in the depths of winter at the beginning of the year, We Are Always Alonewas Portrayal of Guilt's headfirst dive into miserable nihilism, albeit one whose instrumental prowess suggested otherwise. Indeed, among all the negativity, there were hints of feeling and a sort of playfulness. That side of the band manifested on their second album of the year, CHRISTFUCKER. If there was a horror movie quality to We Are Always Alone, moments of unsettling, squeaky noise leading up to harsh jump scares in the form of blast beats and cacophony, CHRISTFUCKER is more wholly cinematic. Teaming up with Uniform's Ben Greenberg, who produced the album, Portrayal of Guilt are more explicit in their suffering on CHRISTFUCKER: Take the brutal "Sadist" with piercing guest vocals from Anatomy's Jenna Rose, or the tempo-changing "Fall From Grace" that juxtaposes Matt King's guttural burbling and bassist Alex Stanfield's uncomfortable sinews with Touche Amore's Jeremy Bolm's hardcore chants of despair. The Austin band proved to be the most exciting heavy act that broke out in 2021. - JM

Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi - They're Calling Me Home (Nonesuch)

"'I miss my friends of yesterday,' sings Rhiannon Giddens on 'Calling Me Home', the pseudo title track of her second album with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. In covering a song by legendary bluegrass singer Alice Gerrard, Giddens centers us in the context of how They're Calling Me Home came to be: recorded over 6 days in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic, Giddens away from her native North Carolina, Turrisi his native Italy, feeling homesick but also embracing their newfound home outside of Dublin. As per tradition for the two of them, they mix and match musical and cultural influences from all three worlds, and more."

Read the rest of our review of They're Calling Me Home.

Sault - NINE (Forever Living Originals)

It's annoying how good Sault still are at remaining mysterious, even as one of its members contributed to one of the year's biggest albums. The R&B collective, whose confirmed versus rumored members seemingly changes depending on who you ask, released their latest gem, NINE, in June, and made it available to purchase or stream online for only 99 days thereafter. (Seriously, try to look it up on Spotify.) Eschewing a music industry where everything is available at the click of a button, Sault call back to eras of "you had to be there" with their strategy even more so than with their music these days. Of course, the issues about which they sing are unfortunately timeless–just hear how they incorporate the "Auld Lang Syne" melody on "Vitamin C"-meets-"Block Rockin Beats" mournful jam "London Gangs"–but their aesthetic is proving increasingly adventurous and post-modern. From the industrial hip hop styles of "Fear" to the whispered spoken word of "Mike's Story", Sault find new, rewarding ways to channel anger over structural racism and police brutality, all in the grand tradition of moving your body to claim your space. - JM

Shannon Lay - Geist (Sub Pop)

"For many artists, songs that are born out of the desire to leave their comfort zone tend to be their most abrasive-sounding. Geist is instead Lay's most beautiful and gentle record, played with a nylon-string acoustic guitar, her vocals and guitar recorded before she sent the tunes out to other musicians to add their own layers. That it was recorded this way yields a record that's warm and oscillates gently on songs like 'Sure' and 'Time's Arrow'. None of the songs even reach what sounds like a full-band choogle–the closest it comes is the end of 'Rare to Wake' and 'Untitled', which has the only audible percussion on the record–but the record is rich in its assured calm. At the center of it all is Lay's smoky voice, layered a capella on 'Awaken and Allow' and traveling with her guitar on the album's title track."

Read "A Still Spirit", our interview with Lay about Geist, here.

Sons of Kemet - Black to the Future (Impulse!)

"Black to the Future is more wide-ranging than a concept. The fourth album from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet cements itself as exemplary of and in tribute to Black music the world over. If 2018′s excellent Your Queen Is A Reptile specifically tackled the racism of the British monarchy and bolstered Black women throughout history, Black to the Future does it all. Its song titles, read in order, combine to make a mission statement. It's big, both in ideas and features, and deep, both thematically and literally, as Shabaka Hutchings added layers upon layers of woodwinds during lockdown to round out the band's otherwise raw combination of sax-tuba-drums-drums. 'I do not want your equality / It was never yours to give me,' declares spoken word artist Joshua Idehen on opener 'Field Negus', over fluttering horns and clattering drums, words he initially recited during a Black Lives Matter protest last summer. More urgent as the song goes on, it's clear that Idehen and Sons of Kemet are going for greatness. 'Born from the mud with the hustle inside me,' goes Kojey Radical's refrain on 'Hustle', a similar anthem of Black achievement."

Read the rest of our review of Black to the Future.

Sun June - Somewhere (Run For Cover/Keeled Scales)

Longing and lushness are what comes to mind every time I put on Sun June's Somewhere. Self-described as "regret pop" on their Bandcamp page, Somewhere's songs are filled with wanting what you know you can't have, or that sense that past memories must be sunnier than what you're left with. "Everything I had, I want it back" goes the chorus on "Everything I had". It's a straightforward declaration, but one that resonates deeply, maybe even more so this year. Sun June wraps their wistful lyrics in a beautiful package of Laura Colwell's dreamy vocals, steady percussion, and the gentle strumming of warm guitar. It pulls you into its warmth and lets you stay there a while, giving you a moment to breathe. - LL

Sydney Sprague - maybe i will see you at the end of the world (Rude)

Like Sydney Sprague, I'm thinking of the end of the world these days. Not necessarily in a doom-and-gloom kind of way, but more like the slow chipping away of what we know, or the smaller scale personal apocalypses we all experience: the struggles of love, the beginnings and endings of relationships. But Sprague's tenacity throughout the album, from its lyrics to guitar-driven rock, sticks with you. Album opener "refuse to die" starts things off with a defiant spark, asserts strength in the face of the unknown and resiliency when things aren't looking great: "I've come too far to just get stuck/So I refuse to die." It surfaces again on the hooky dark humor of "Objective Permanence" and plaintive album centerpiece "Quitter". May we all approach the end of the world with the same wit and vulnerability. - LL

Taylor Swift - Red (Taylor's Version)/Fearless (Taylor's Version) (Republic)

2021 was the year one of the world's biggest pop stars went punk rock, not in sound but in middle fingers raised. As a counter to Scooter Braun's ownership of her masters, Taylor Swift began releasing rerecords of her first six studio albums. Ever the enterprising businesswoman and social media influencer, Swift isn't doing it how you might expect, either, taking the opportunity to release the rerecords out of chronological order and along with previously unreleased "from the Vault" nuggets. Best, neither of the Taylor's Versions released this year, Fearless and Red, are just for fans. They give casual listeners the opportunity to consider Swift anew, whether from a vocal, instrumental, or contextual standpoint. "Forever Winter" and the 10-minute "All Too Well" lift platonic and romantic relationship weight off her shoulders, while the Maren Morris-featuring "You All Over Me" reminds you of Swift's dormant country pop chops, pulsating synths finding a home behind fiddles, acoustic guitars, and harmonica. For as much as shitty people claim that Swift's entire life is there for all the world to see, she clearly has both tricks up her sleeve and the willingness to turn the sexist music industry upside-down. - JM

The Bug - Fire (Ninja Tune)/Kevin Richard Martin - Return to Solaris (Phantom Limb)

The ease with which an artist as prolific as Kevin Richard Martin jumps from alias to alias, persona to persona seems impossible. Treating us to the first solo full-length as The Bug in seven years, he continued right where the beloved London Zoo and Angels & Devils left off, exploring existential environmental and political threats over burbles and swamps of grime and dancehall. As much as The Bug was born as a project out of the desire to shake things up and come at listeners with full force, Fire is by no means a maximal album. Just listen to the restraint in IRAH's vocals on top of the arpeggiated beats of "Demon", especially when compared with Moor Mother's trilling growls on the trap-inspired "Vexed". If the album's title and cover art represent the harsh, inevitable aftermath of unfettered capitalism, Martin nonetheless treats his subjects with empathy. Roger Robinson's spoken word on album closer "The Missing" is a eulogy of sorts for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, its moving synthscapes ascending to heaven, too, bruised but still determined.

Of course, the sheer timbre of Martin's music is cinematic, so it's fitting that his other major release this year was a casually released score to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. Return to Solaris succeeds on its own as a piece of music for its ability to find beauty in noisy, distorted sound design. Invited by the Vooruit arts centre in Gent to compose a score for the film of his choice, Martin chose Solaris almost out of ambition, wanting to give new context and meaning to a film (and score) already classically influential. That he managed in his rescore to create one of the more lush, yet foggy and unsettling drone albums in recent memory speaks to his richness as a composer. - JM

The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore (Atlantic)

This year has been an odd mixture of much of the same as last year and change. Even in a pandemic, the world spins on. For me, I Don't Live Here Anymore seemed to capture that feeling perfectly. A War on Drugs album is a familiar space, a band who continues to both perfect their sound and expand. When I dig into this War on Drugs album, I can't help but feel a sense of forward movement, a feeling that things are possible. The expansiveness of their sound is like a journey with no specific destination, and there's freedom in that. It surfaces throughout the album in the lyrics too, particularly on the title track: "I'm gonna walk through every doorway, I can't stop/I need some time, I need control." It feels fitting for this year, and paired with top-notch production, it's a welcome journey to take. - LL

The Weather Station - Ignorance (Fat Possum)

"Ignorance as an album never does go wild, nor is it obsessed with the calm before the storm. It's instead focused on that limbo where something might be okay or even beautiful at the moment, but you know something's wrong, and you feel helpless. 'My god, I thought, what a sunset / blood red floods the Atlantic,' Lindeman sings on 'Atlantic', shrugging, 'I should get all this dying off my mind, I should really know better than to read the headlines,' but then proposing, 'Does it matter if I know?' Though she may doubt, she does have to know that awareness is certainly better than nihilism, but it doesn't make the pain of inevitability any less severe. On piano-led disco jam 'Parking Lot', she solemnly contrasts herself–a performer who has to sing to make a living no matter what catastrophe is happening that day–to a bird who sings out of instinct, who doesn't know the difference between inside and outside. On the affecting, fluttering 'Loss', she repeats, 'Loss is loss is loss,' trying to convince herself that loss, or even just the lack of something, is not all-consuming."

Read our preview of The Weather Station's livestream back in February here.

Turnstile - GLOW ON (Roadrunner)

"Since their existence, Baltimore punk band Turnstile has expanded the limits of hardcore punk. What separates GLOW ON, their third album (and second for Roadrunner), from not only previous efforts like Time & Space but other exploratory bands is their ability to divert their aesthetic within a single song. From the onset of opener 'MYSTERY', which begins with glistening synth arpeggios, Turnstile toy with your expectations. You know the distorted guitars and Brendan Yates' all-encompassing vocals will come, but Turnstile's smarter than that. They also throw some electronic elements back in, calling back to how the song started. 'Is all the mystery gone?' wonders Yates. Quite the contrary."

Read the rest of our review of GLOW ON.

VIjay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey - Uneasy (ECM)

For Vijay Iyer's second trio album on ECM, he convened a first time group in double bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Together, they embark on the journey of creating beautiful sounds inspired by years of heightened social unrest responding to government crimes. Such weighty aspirations are nothing new for Iyer, who has long been one of the most politically charged jazz players of our time, but in decrying the death of Eric Garner and the Flint water crisis, it's the democratic balance between all three band members that allows Uneasy to thrive. They revisit a previous Iyer composition as well as songs by Cole Porter and Geri Allen, giving old standards renewed life and ever-present relevance. - JM

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