arts year in review 2021

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    12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

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      Our Favorite Arts Photos of 2021

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      After 15 months of darkness, live music returned. In New York, Foo Fighters reopened Madison Square Garden.Photograph by Tim Barber for The New York TimesOur Favorite Arts Photos of 2021These are the pictures that defined an unpredictable year across the worlds of art, music, dance and performance.Laura O’Neill More

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      The Best TV Episodes of 2021

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      Among the thousands of hours of television that came out this year, episodes of “Call My Agent,” “For All Mankind,” “Mythic Quest,” “Pose” and “WandaVision,” among others, stood out.From left, “Dave,” PEN15” and “Genius: Aretha” put out some of TV’s best episodes of the year.From left: Byron Cohen/FX; Hulu; Richard DuCree/National GeographicTelevision today comes in big portions, as anyone who spent seven-plus hours with the Beatles over Thanksgiving weekend can attest. But just as a marathon jam session can yield a few tight singles, the most memorable TV is still often the well-crafted individual episode. As Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I end another year’s binge as TV critics for The New York Times, here are a few of the installments from 2021 that topped our personal hit parades. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)‘Sigourney’More than 30 European actors — including stars like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno — have graciously and often mercilessly lampooned themselves in this French dramedy, playing clients or prospective clients or angry former clients of the fictional talent agency ASK. In this Season 4 episode, an American stepped in, and Sigourney Weaver, speaking more than passable French and playing herself as an utterly charming manipulator, was flawless. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘City of Ghosts’‘Bob & Nancy’Plenty of children’s shows are cute but “City of Ghosts” is also beautiful, and its poetic wistfulness about Los Angeles would be at home on a premium cable drama. Instead it’s in this plucky, naturalistic cartoon about ghost-hunting kids who have a podcast. I loved every episode of this show. But I picked “Bob & Nancy” because it’s about a marionette theater, and thus it toys with ideas of animating the inanimate — rich ground for a show in touch with the spirit realm. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSHarley Quinn Smith in the finale of “Cruel Summer,” which offered both a happy ending and a surprising twist.Freeform/Bill Matlock‘Cruel Summer’‘Hostile Witness’This teen kidnapping mystery took all the hallmarks of prestige-y crime shows — split timelines, dark lighting, tangential secrets — and repackaged them with a kicky ’90s YA flare. It was one of the juicy highlights of the summer. But shows like this are only as good as their finales, and “Cruel Summer” managed the trick of both a happy ending and a thrilling, dark twist. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Dave’ (FXX)‘Somebody Date Me’Texting can be a crutch for TV shows, a way to use pop-up bubbles to give characters phone-enabled telepathy. Not so in this playful, smart half-hour, in which Dave Burd’s up-and-coming rapper made (and lost) a date with Doja Cat. As the two musicians courted with their thumbs, “Somebody Date Me” showed how context and time can change the meaning and reading of the smallest online (mis)communication. Thumbs-up emoji! (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKThe Season 2 finale of “For All Mankind,” with Krys Marshall, revolved around multiple white-knuckle missions.Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)‘The Grey’Each season of this space-race alternative history is a multistage booster rocket. The slow-moving early episodes expend a lot of fuel, building energy and narrative force until the show reaches escape velocity. (My aerospace engineer readers, I beg you not to fact-check my metaphors.) The white-knuckle Season 2 finale moved with the deftness of a docking maneuver, as a U.S.-Soviet conflict on the moon and a threatened war on Earth required risk and sacrifice on two celestial bodies and points in between. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Genius: Aretha’ (National Geographic)‘Amazing Grace’‘Pose’ (FX)‘Take Me to Church’The music and community of the Black church co-starred in two praiseworthy hours of TV. The Aretha Franklin bio-series peaked as it focused on the recording of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” live album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, fusing the artist’s past and present in a crucible of soul. In “Pose,” a grim diagnosis led Pray Tell (Billy Porter) back to his hometown and church community, both to confront the homophobia that drove him from it and give voice to the music that sustained him. (Stream “Genius: Aretha” on Hulu; buy “Pose” on Amazon.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKPerry Mattfeld, left, and David Webster, in the “Somewhere Over the Border” episode of “In the Dark.” CW‘In the Dark’ (CW)‘Somewhere Over the Border’This CW drama about a blind woman and her buddies, who run a rescue-dog agency and get involved in drug dealing and murder, is no more than a serviceable thriller. But the rapport among its central characters, Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), Jess (Brooke Markham) and Felix (Morgan Krantz), has developed into one of the more believable and moving portrayals of friendship on TV. When Murphy found herself stranded in a strange country, the strength of those ties was the foundation of a taut and agonizing hour. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘Line of Duty’ (BritBox)Season 6, Episode 5Tension and deception pump through the veins of this breakneck procedural about a British internal-affairs unit, and no show does cliffhangers better. You could point to just about any episode; this one, with one of the heroes following a possibly dirty cop into an abandoned industrial park because that’s what the job called for, was off the charts. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE‘Love, Death & Robots’‘The Drowned Giant’In just 13 minutes, this elegant short about a giant’s corpse that washes up on a beach one day captures, in a perfect snapshot, humanity’s tendency to desecrate marvels, to behold a world-changing event and decide simply to carry on. Based on a short story by J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” is rendered here in mostly realistic animation, with the giant’s clean-shaven cheeks, tidy fingernails and muscular chest shown in aching detail. In an era when so many shows just blend together, this episode stands out for its light touch and sad imagination. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSIn a memorable episode of “Making It,” contestants like Jessie Lamworth, (right, with the host Amy Poehler) made Halloween costumes.Evans Vestal Ward/NBC‘Making It’‘All the Holidays at Once’Post “Great British Baking Show,” lots of reality competition series have gone away from the cutthroat in favor of the warm and fuzzy, and perhaps no show is warmer and fuzzier than the craft competition “Making It.” Each episode has its charms but “All the Holidays at Once” was especially thrilling, because unlike some of the show’s grander projects, crafting your own Halloween costume is pretty standard fare, even for layfolk. The contestants’ giddy joy in presenting their creations to the judges was matched only by my own giddy joy at seeing their silly and spectacular costumes. Jess won with her superb alien-abduction costume but when everything is this fun, don’t we all win? As a bonus, this episode also included Melañio telling a story about a bat in a toilet, a tale that will haunt me for the rest of my days. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)‘Backstory!’Having come up with one of the best pandemic-inspired episodes of 2020, this video game-industry comedy is gunning for TV’s high score in stand-alones. This installment gave the back story-obsessed game writer C.W. Longbottom (a wonderfully blustery F. Murray Abraham) his own flashback as a struggling sci-fi author in the 1970s — a funny and poignant tale of irony, professional jealousy and success at a cost. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Nuclear Family’ (HBO)Episode 3Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights, threatening to pull apart her family, built to a powerful and eloquent conclusion. It both affirmed the importance of the battle her mothers fought and questioned the assumptions of everyone involved. (Streaming on HBO Max.) MIKE HALEIn a March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle discussed their separation from the royal family.Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese‘Oprah with Meghan and Harry’One so rarely gets to receive or send a “turn on your TV right now” text, especially in my line of work. So for that dual thrill alone this interview earned a place in my heart. It was the kind of programming that barely exists anymore: a tell-all network special in which celebrities share genuine new information with Oprah, the patron saint of soul-baring. There were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, aglow in the California sun, decrying racism and candidly discussing mental health crises. Which would have been enough, but they also reset the royal narrative, gave Oprah eggs, fought back tears and gazed lovingly at one another — all while sitting in chairs sold by Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch.” Television, baby! I love you! MARGARET LYONS‘PEN15’ (Hulu)‘Yuki’Mutsuko Erskine had never acted before her daughter, Maya, cast her to play Maya’s mother in Hulu’s brutally funny teen comedy. Sometimes daughter knows best. This showpiece episode, in which a chance meeting with an ex-husband led Yuki to look down a road not taken, was a rich vignette of an immigrant’s experience and a subtle performance to cap off the role, literally, of a lifetime. (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)‘The Dad-Feelings Limited’Who would have thought that the origin story of Comic Book Guy, done partly as an affectionate sendup of a Wes Anderson film, would be so lovely? (Streaming on Disney+.) MIKE HALE‘Snowfall’ (FX)‘All the Way Down’This brutal and only-as-sentimental-as-it-needs-to-be drama about a rogue C.I.A. agent and a young Black entrepreneur, partners in the crack wars in early 1980s Los Angeles, still does not get enough attention. That’s especially true of the stories written by the novelist Walter Mosley, like this chilling, tightly packed episode about rage, revenge, gentrification and wanting to go straight. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALEIn “WandaVision,” Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen channeled multiple eras of TV including, in the premiere, 1950s sitcoms.Marvel Studios‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)‘Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience’Several installments of this superhero psychodrama, set in a bizarro-world version of classic sitcom formats, could have made this list. But might as well start at the beginning, in which Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) played house on a 1950s stage set whose made-for-TV perfection turned horrifyingly (and ingeniously) wrong. (Streaming on Disney+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘What We Do in the Shadows’‘Casino’“Shadows” is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and “Casino,” where the gang heads to Atlantic City, was my favorite episode this season. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes entranced by a “Big Bang Theory” slot machine — “‘bazinga’ is the war cry of Sheldon,” he explains — and in perfect, cascading horror, this leads to the total dissolution of his understanding of the universe. “Shadows” is its best when the vampires’ grandiosity clashes with their vulnerabilities, especially their excitability, and I’ll never see another in-house ad on a hotel TV without thinking that it’s Colin Robinson’s favorite show. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS More

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      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2021

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      In a year that offered glimmers of hope across the world of arts, these performers and creators rose to the occasion.Olivia Rodrigo, members of the cast of “Reservation Dogs” and a scene from “Sanctuary City.”Clockwise from left: Mat Hayward/Getty Images; jeremy Dennis for The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe cultural world began to sputter back to life this year, and in turn, so did many of us — slipping out of our sweats and into movie theaters, clubs and Broadway shows. Even for those who were less confident rubbing (or bumping) elbows in public, artists brought us plenty of joy in the safety of our home. It may not have been the beforetimes, but in 2021, these artists and creators from across the arts gave us a fresh outlook.Pop MusicOlivia RodrigoFor those of us over 30, Olivia Rodrigo seemed to come out of nowhere with her colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” a heartbreak ballad that dropped in January and stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks. But for a younger audience, Rodrigo, 18, was familiar from her time as a Disney child star. Despite that pedigree, she didn’t drag along a squeaky clean image.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times, called “Sour,” her debut album from May, “nuanced and often exceptional,” deploying “sweet pop and tart punk equally well.” He called Rodrigo, a California-raised Filipino American, “an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities.”As Rodrigo told GQ magazine in June, “Something that I learned very early on is the importance of separating person versus persona. When people who don’t know me are criticizing me, they’re criticizing my persona, not my person.”Olivia Rodrigo’s colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” stayed at the top of the charts.Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IheartmediaTelevisionLee Jung-jaeBlood-drenched, brutally violent entertainment is rarely synonymous with nuanced, complex performances. But in Netflix’s “Squid Game,” a dystopian thriller from South Korea that became a global streaming sensation, Lee Jung-jae, 49, pulled off just that. As the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a gambling addict who is deeply in debt, he gives a wrenching and surprisingly subtle performance as he battles his way through unspeakable horrors.But Lee, a model-turned-actor who has starred in several hit Korean films like last year’s gangster drama “Deliver Us From Evil,” doesn’t play Gi-hun as a hero or a villain, a bumbling fool or a savvy con man. “Gi-hun’s emotions are very complicated,” Lee told The Times in October.“Squid Game,” he went on, “is not really a show about survival games. It’s about people.”TheaterThe Authors of ‘Six’In October, “Six” became the first musical to have its opening night on Broadway since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. An exuberant and cheeky pop musical about the wives of Henry VIII, it brought much-needed fun and noise to the stage — thanks to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who wrote the book, music and lyrics. (Moss also directed the show with Jamie Armitage.)The hit show is “a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past” that “turns Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives into spunky modern-day pop stars,” as Jesse Green, the theater critic at The Times, and Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large, put it. Think Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, whom the leading divas were in some ways modeled after.Marlow came up with the idea for “Six” while daydreaming during a poetry class at Cambridge University, where he and Moss, now both 27, became fast friends. “This,” Moss told The Times in 2019, “is obviously the craziest thing that’s ever happened to us.”MoviesAunjanue EllisIn 1995, The Times called Aunjanue Ellis an up-and-comer for her role in the Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tempest” in Central Park. Ellis “projects nearly as much force offstage as she does in character as Ariel,” the article read. That fire hasn’t wavered in the years since, whether on film —“Ray,” “The Help,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” — or on TV in “When They See Us” and “Lovecraft Country,” both of which earned her Emmy nominations.Now, in the movie “King Richard,” Ellis delivers a megawatt performance as Oracene, the mother of Venus and Serena Williams (opposite Will Smith as Richard) — turning a supporting role into a talker and generating Oscar buzz.In an interview this fall, Ellis, now 52, talked about what makes her say yes to a role: “Can I do it and not be embarrassed and stand by the fact that I’ve done it?” she says she asks herself. “Is it fun to play and am I doing a service to Black women?”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Classical MusicEun Sun Kim“An artist is never satisfied,” said Eun Sun Kim after the San Francisco Opera’s production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” on Oct. 14 — despite an extended ovation and shouts of “Bravo!” from the audience.After all, Kim — the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States and the first Asian to take on such a role, a monumental appointment that became official in August — has a lot on her plate. Not only is she grappling with the company’s financial fallout from the pandemic, she inherited the opera’s previous problems, like declining attendance.“It’s a hard job, it’s a big job, whether you’re a woman or a man,” she told The Times in October. “I want to be seen just as a conductor.”Kim, 41, whose conducting debut in the states was in 2017 with the Houston Grand Opera production of “La Traviata,” is aiming to broaden the art form’s appeal in the digital age. The company hopes her appointment will do the same; there were advertisements featuring her image with the words “A new era begins” around the city.“Opera is not boring or old,” she said in October. “It’s the same human beings, the same stories, whether it was 200 years ago or nowadays.”Eun Sun Kim, the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States, at the San Francisco Opera in October.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesArtJennifer PackerLast year, Jennifer Packer, 37, a painter who depicts contemporary Black life through atmospheric portraits and still lifes, told The Times that she’s driven by thoughts of “emotional and moral buoyancy in the face of various kinds of impoverishment and de facto captivity.”Now, that perspective is on display in her biggest solo exhibition, “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show includes about 30 of her works from the past decade, including the painting “A Lesson in Longing,” which was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial — as well as works that speak to Black lives lost to police brutality. Her largest painting, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” referring to Breonna Taylor, was created during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.In reviewing Packer’s Whitney exhibition for The Times, Aruna D’Souza wrote that no other artist right now is doing as much as Packer “to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible.”MoviesCooper HoffmanIn “Licorice Pizza,” the new comedy-drama-romance from Paul Thomas Anderson, Cooper Hoffman plays an unlikely teenage hero. Cooper, 18, is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s muse before the actor’s death in 2014. Before this movie, Hoffman had never really acted, except with Anderson in something akin to home movies, he said during a press event in November. “It was on a very lower scale, with an iPhone and his kid,” Hoffman joked, referring to Anderson’s child. “I would always play the bad guy, and his kid would beat me up, and it was good fun.”In her review of the film, Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critic at The Times, said that Anderson’s love for Cooper’s character, Gary, is special — “as lavish as that of an indulgent parent.” His affection for Gary, she continued, “is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into ‘Licorice Pizza.’”Cooper plays opposite Alana Haim, who also had no acting experience before “Licorice Pizza.” The pair had met briefly through Anderson several years ago, she told The Times, never thinking their paths would cross again. As soon as they read together, though, Haim recalled, “It was like, oh, we’re a team. We can take on the world together.”Cooper Hoffman, foreground, stars in “Licorice Pizza,” which was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.Melinda Sue Gordon/MGMDanceLaTasha BarnesLaTasha Barnes — a leader in the dance forms of house, hip-hop and the Lindy Hop — bridged worlds this year. Barnes is “a connector, or a rather a re-connector,” Brian Seibert wrote in the Times. In particular, she works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers (like herself) to their jazz heritage. To watch her dance, Seibert said, “is to watch historical distance collapse.”Barnes, 41, has been admired in dance for years, but it was her showing in “The Jazz Continuum” (the show she presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum in May and later at Jacob’s Pillow) and her appearance in “Sw!ng Out” (the contemporary swing-dance show that debuted at the Joyce Theater in October) that caught the attention of many. In November, she won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer.Discouraged by dance teachers at a young age because of her body type, Barnes pivoted to gymnastics and track and field; at 18, she enlisted in the Army. She later weathered athletic injuries, as well as a broken hip, back and wrist after being hit by a car. Despite it all, her zeal for dance continued.“I was always looking at myself as the perpetual outsider,” she told The Times, “without realizing that it was actually the reverse.”The dancer LaTasha Barnes works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers to their jazz heritage.Cherylynn Tsushima, via The BessiesTelevisionThe Cast of Reservation Dogs“Reservation Dogs,” a dark comedy about four teenagers living on a Native reservation in Oklahoma, is a game-changer. That’s how one of its stars, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, described it, and he wouldn’t be alone. The series, from FX on Hulu, is the first on TV with an entirely Indigenous writer’s room and roster of directors. That backbone allows the undeniable synergy among its core cast members — Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Lane Factor and Paulina Alexis — to flourish.On previous sets, Jacobs said she was “literally the only Native person for miles.” The industry “should feel embarrassed that 2021 is a year for firsts for Indigenous representation,” she went on.For Alexis, her acting dreams once felt so impossible, she felt embarrassed to tell anyone about them, she told The Times. “There was no representation on TV. I didn’t think I would make it.” Now she has a role in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and will star in a second season of “Reservation Dogs,” which was renewed in September.The stars of “Reservation Dogs,” a groundbreaking show from FX on Hulu: from left, Paulina Alexis, Lane Factor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Devery Jacobs.Jeremy Dennis for The New York TimesPop MusicMickey GuytonAfter Mickey Guyton was nominated for three Grammys in November, she told The New York Times, “I was right.” She was referring to her instinct for the direction of “Remember Her Name,” her debut full-length release. “This whole album came from me and what I thought I should release,” she said, “and that’s something I’ve never done.”In January, alongside major players like Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, she will have three chances to win: for best country album, best country song and best country solo performance (for the title track). Last Grammys, she became the first Black woman to be nominated for a solo country performance award for the track “Black Like Me.”Guyton, 38, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville, with song titles like “Different” and “Love My Hair.”“What’s being played on country radio has been played on country radio for the last 10 years — I can’t do that,” she told Jon Caramanica of The Times in September. “I can’t do it spiritually. I can’t write songs that don’t mean something.”The country singer Mickey Guyton, performing in New York in December, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesTheaterSharlene CruzIn September, amid theater’s reopening, “Sanctuary City,” a play from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, resumed Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Like much of Majok’s work, it takes on the “plight of undocumented immigrants, with a glowering side-eye cast on the rest of us,” as Jesse Green of The Times put it in his rave of the play.Sharlene Cruz brings to life the smart, impulsive G — performing opposite Jasai Chase-Owens as B, both playing undocumented teenagers. Cruz, who is in her 20s, renders her character smartly, impulsively and with a lot of subtext. “Impulsiveness can just seem stagy — youth, a caricature,” Green told this reporter, but Cruz gets the rhythm right and is disciplined enough to put that quality in service of the character’s goals.As those goals change — G ages a few years in the play — Cruz convincingly shows how that impulsiveness hardened into hotheadedness, and youth into something that’s not quite maturity.Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens play undocumented teenagers in “Sanctuary City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArtPrecious OkoyomonPrecious Okoyomon, 28, a multidisciplinary artist and poet who has only been exhibiting for a few years, creates massive site-specific installations using organic materials. “I make worlds,” Okoyomon, who won the Artist Award at Frieze New York this year, told The New York Times Style Magazine. “Everything, every portal I make, is its own ecosystem.”Okoyomon, who lived in Lagos, Nigeria, as a child before moving to Texas and then Ohio, added: “I attach myself to materials such as earth, rocks, water and fire because these are things I can’t control on my own.”As part of the Frieze win, Okoyomon conceived and presented a performance-based installation at the Shed titled “This God Is A Slow Recovery,” which focused on communication or the lack thereof. “It’s about destroying our language, building it up, crashing the words into each other,” Okoyomon said. “How do we create the language to get to the new world?”This month, Okoyomon won a Chanel Next Prize, a new award from the French fashion brand established to nurture emerging talent, nominated by a group of cultural figures and selected by the jurors Tilda Swinton, David Adjaye and Cao Fei.DanceKayla FarrishIn September, the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish — teaming up with the jazz, soul, and experimental musician Melanie Charles — transported Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn to a vivid scene of grace and power.The performance — as part of the platform four/four presents, which commissions collaborations among artists — was “sweeping and robust work braiding music and spoken word with choreography” that encompassed the best of technical dance and athletic drills, said Gia Kourlas, the dance critic at The Times.The result turned its five dancers — Farrish, 30, was joined by Mikaila Ware, Kerime Konur, Gabrielle Loren and Anya Clarke-Verdery — into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power,” Kourlas wrote. 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      10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

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      Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More

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      Best Movies of 2021

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      Even when a film wasn’t great, filmgoing was. But there were some truly wonderful releases, ranging from music docs and musicals to westerns and the just plain weird.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” left, Kristen Stewart in “Spencer” and Ariana DeBose in “West Side Story.”From left: Kirsty Griffin/Netflix; Pablo Larrain/Neon; Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosA.O. Scott | Manohla Dargisa.o. scottThe 10 Best Arguments for the Importance of MoviesThis year, it felt to me as if every good movie was also an argument for why movies matter. There is a lot of anxiety, pandemic-related and otherwise, about what the future of the art form might look like. Will everything be streaming except a handful of I.P.-driven spectacles? Will streaming platforms (and their subscribers) be receptive to daring, difficult, obnoxious or esoteric work? Anyone who claims to know the answers is a fool. What I can tell you for sure is that these 10 movies, and the 11 that almost made the list, do what they can to resist the dishonesty, complacency and meanness currently rampant around the world. They reward your attention, engage your feelings and respect your intelligence. Every little bit helps.1. ‘Summer of Soul’ (Questlove)This documentary about a series of open-air concerts in Harlem in 1969, interweaving stunning performance footage with interviews with musicians and audience members, is a shot of pure joy. The lineup is a pantheon of Black genius, including Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, the Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson and many more. But the film is more than a time capsule: It’s a history lesson and an argument for why art matters — and what it can do — in times of conflict and anxiety. (Streaming on Hulu.)Mavis Staples, left, and Mahalia Jackson in a scene from “Summer of Soul.”Searchlight Pictures2. ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ (Radu Jude)From its hard-core opening to its riotous conclusion, this category-defying Romanian film captures the desperate, angry, exhausted mood of the present almost too well. A Bucharest schoolteacher (the brilliant, fearless Katia Pascariu) finds her job endangered after a sex tape she made with her husband goes semiviral. Meanwhile, the Covid pandemic and simmering culture-war hostilities turn everyday life into a theater of grievance and anxiety. Holding everything together — barely — is the abrasive intellectualism of Jude’s direction and the earnest rage that fuels his mockery. (In theaters.)3. ‘The Power of the Dog’ (Jane Campion)There are a lot of talented, competent, interesting filmmakers working today. Then there is Jane Campion, who practices cinema on a whole different level. The craft in evidence in this grand, big-sky western — the images, the music, the counterpointed performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee — evoke the best traditions of old-style Hollywood storytelling. But there is nothing staid or conventional in the way Campion tackles Thomas Savage’s novel of jealousy, power and sexual intrigue. (Streaming on Netflix.)4. ‘Petite Maman’ (Céline Sciamma)The death of a grandmother, the grief of a parent, the acquisition of a new friend — these ordinary experiences, occurring over a few weeks in the life of an 8-year-old girl, provide the basic narrative structure of this spare, perfect film. Whether it’s best described as a modern-dress fairy tale, a psychological ghost story or a low-tech time travel fantasy is up to you. What’s certain is that the performances of Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, real-life twins playing possibly imaginary friends, have a clarity and purity that Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) deploys for maximum emotional impact. (Coming to theaters.)Joséphine, left, and Gabrielle Sanz are possibly imaginary friends in “Petite Maman.”Lilies Films5. ‘Bring Your Own Brigade’ (Lucy Walker)This harrowing documentary about California wildfires is also, almost by accident, an exploration of the country’s polarized, chaotic, self-defeating response to the Covid pandemic. The picture Walker paints is complicated, partly because that’s the way people are: stupid, generous, reckless and brave. The movie is hardly optimistic, but its open-mindedness, compassion and intellectual rigor provide a buffer against despair. (Paramount+)6. ‘Bergman Island’ (Mia Hansen-Love)In a year when rumors of the death of moviegoing spread along with all the other bad news, it was delightful to encounter this warm, wry, emotionally savvy exploration of movie love, moviemaking and movie-centered tourism. Two filmmakers travel to Faro, a Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked, and discover either that movies are life, or that there’s more to life than movies. (For rent on most major platforms.)Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie in “Bergman Island.”IFC Films7. ‘Drive My Car’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)A theater artist (Hidetoshi Nishijima), recently widowed, travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” A young woman (Toko Miura), also stricken by loss, is hired as his driver. Out of this scenario — and out of Haruki Murakami’s novella — Hamaguchi builds an understated, multilayered meditation on the complexities of human connection. The spirit of Chekhov hovers in the background and is honored by the film’s unsentimental, compassionate regard for its characters. (In theaters.).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}8. ‘Memoria’ (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)Weerasethakul’s movies defy summary or easy categorization. To describe them as dreamlike is incomplete, since you never know who is doing the dreaming. In this case, it might be Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a Scottish expatriate living in Colombia. Or it might be alien visitors, the filmmaker, the Earth or time itself. What is certain is that this film sharpens the senses and activates emotions that are no less powerful for being impossible to name. (Coming to theaters.)9. ‘West Side Story’ (Steven Spielberg)Somehow, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner — and an energetic young cast of Jets and Sharks — pulled off a surprising cinematic coup. Respecting the artistry and good intentions of the original stage musical, they turned it into something urgent, modern and exciting. There’s a lot to unpack in the movie’s gestures of reverence and revisionism, but mostly there are big emotions, memorable songs and an unabashed faith that sincerity will always be stronger than cynicism. (Coming to theaters.)Ariana DeBose, center, as Anita in “West Side Story.”Niko Tavernise/20th Century Studios10. ‘The Velvet Underground’ (Todd Haynes)Like “Summer of Soul,” this documentary revisits the music of the 1960s in a spirit that is more historical than nostalgic. Rather than assemble present-day musicians to pay tribute to their forebears, Haynes concentrates on the Velvets in their moment and on the artistic scene that spawned them. In particular, he focuses on their connections to the experimental cinema that flourished in New York, work that inspires his own visceral, cerebral, visually dense style of storytelling. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)Also …“Annette” (Leos Carax), “The Disciple” (Chaitanya Tamhane), “Flee” (Jonas Poher Rasmussen), “The Green Knight” (David Lowery), “The Hand of God” (Paolo Sorrentino), “King Richard” (Reinaldo Marcus Green), “Mogul Mowgli” (Bassam Tariq), “Parallel Mothers” (Pedro Almodóvar), “Passing” (Rebecca Hall), “El Planeta” (Amalia Ulman), “The Souvenir Part II” (Joanna Hogg), “Spencer” (Pablo Larraín), “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (Joel Coen).MANOHLA DARGISThe Best Film Was One in a TheaterIn July, I watched one of the most mediocre movies that I’ve seen this year — and it was glorious. After more than 16 months of streaming at home, I went to a theater to watch Matt Damon sing the white-guy blues in “Stillwater.” The movie was poky and trite and irritating, and I reviewed it accordingly. And while I regretted it wasn’t better, I was still grateful because it sent me back to theaters, big screens and other moviegoers.Those other people admittedly did give me pause. They were masked, well, most were, kind of, but could I be safe and feel at ease with these people for two or so hours? I was vaxed and masked but also still navigating being back in the world. But the room was great, the screen huge, and I decided that I could — though first I had to tell a guy near me that, yes, he did need to wear the mask he’d parked on his chin. He put it on. I settled in, back in the place that makes me supremely happy: I was at the movies.Since then, I have watched many more new releases in person, including at two festivals where I gorged like a famished person (so many thanks to both the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival). I had spent the first part of the year on book leave, and while I’d streamed plenty of new and old films then (hello, Marie Dressler!), I missed going out (anywhere). I missed really, really big bright images and I missed the rituals, including the quick search for the most perfect seat and the anticipatory wait for the movie to begin, for someone to hit the lights and start the show.Movie critics tend to write about movies as discrete entities. Even when writing about franchise copies of franchise copies, we often stick to the object. Although we sometimes share how a movie makes us feel (happy, sad), we rarely write about the true depth of our experiences as we watched these movies — how it felt as the images flowed off the screen and into our bodies and memories — and how this too affected us. There are a lot of reasons for this, including reviewing conventions, which tend to measure movies by certain, traditionally prescribed, often literary and commercial values: Was it a good story, did it say something, is it worth leaving the house for, worth spending money on?It’s a given that money is always part of the equation, as much of the discussion around the future of moviegoing underscores. Most of the chatter about moviegoing these days often devolves into journalists and industry types parroting the logic of capitalism, i.e., whatever industry power dictates. Netflix and other big streamers have had a huge impact, no question, and we can chat about what it all means in a few years. But whatever the rationalization, the reasons there’s so much intense focus on Netflix and Disney is their monopolistic grip not simply on the entertainment industry but also on the hive mind of the mainstream media. But there are other considerations, as well.Benedict Cumberbatch as a malignant presence in “The Power of the Dog.”NetflixSo, yes, more people will likely watch “The Power of the Dog,” the latest from Jane Campion, than any other film in her decades-long career because it’s on Netflix. But what matters is the movie. And you should watch it whether at home or, if you can, in a theater. It looks beautiful no matter the size of the screen. But I’m grateful that I’ve seen it several times projected in theaters. For starters, I could focus on it rather than the distractions of my home, but mostly I could more fully experience the monumentality of its images, could feel on a profound, visceral level both the claustrophobia of its shadowy interiors and the liberating, heart-clutching boundlessness of its open landscapes.Like all the movies I love, “The Power of the Dog” got under my skin. I watched it, fell into it, felt it. And like all the movies I care most about, it is far more than the sum of its finely shaped story parts. I admire its narrative ebb and flow, but the movie’s meaning extends beyond its chapter breaks and dialogue. In Campion’s aerial shots of an arid, lonely land and in the anguished close-ups — in backlighted bristles of horsehair and in the rhythmic rocking of a strand of braided leather on a man’s body — she sets loose a cascade of associations. You see Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays its tormented villain, and in his strut you also see John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. You see the sweep of the western genre, the men and women you know, the world you live in.1. ‘Drive My Car’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)A masterpiece about life and death and art from one of the most exhilarating directors to hit the international film scene in a long while, “Drive My Car” draws from theater and literature — a splash of “Waiting for Godot” but mostly “Uncle Vanya” and the Murakami short story that gives the movie its title — to create a work of pure cinema. (In theaters.)Hidetoshi Nishijima plays an actor and theater director in “Drive My Car.”Sideshow/Janus Films2. ‘The Power of the Dog’ (Jane Campion)Much has rightly been made of Benedict Cumberbatch’s powerful performance as a malignant force named Phil in Campion’s latest. Much more should be said about how delicately and beautifully Kirsten Dunst, as Rose, holds the movie’s moral center with a gutting performance that shows you how brutally optimism can both die and be reborn. (Streaming on Netflix.)3. ‘The Velvet Underground’ (Todd Haynes)Everything comes together in Todd Haynes’s superb testament to a lost world that helped make our own: the music and art, the drugs and ideas, Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, the beauty and ugliness, the affordable New York housing and the artistic freedom that cheap rents allowed, the droning and strobing and darkening shadows that swallowed people whole. It’s all here. Watch it — play it — loud. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)4. ‘Summer of Soul’ (Questlove)There’s much to love in Questlove’s documentary about a New York concert that took place in the summer of 1969, most obviously the music that takes you higher. But consider too the formal design and rigor, and how the movie contracts and expands in time with the onstage call and response, how Questlove narrows in on a moment of beauty — a soaring note, a sliding foot, a beaming face — only to gracefully expand your horizons as he dialogues with the past, the present and the possible future. (Streaming on Hulu.)5. ‘Passing’ (Rebecca Hall)Set in the 1920s, Hall’s exquisite heart-wrencher centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white. One (Tessa Thompson’s Irene) will pass for convenience, as when she enters a racially restricted hotel, while the other (Ruth Negga’s Clare) lives as white. Separately and together, with yearning and dueling looks, they negotiate the color line, which W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of the 20th century” and that still stubbornly defines and divides this country. (Streaming on Netflix.)Tessa Thompson with André Holland in the drama “Passing.”Netflix6. ‘Azor’ (Andreas Fontana)With chilled detachment and meticulous control, this shocking drama tracks a Swiss banker and his wife on a seemingly routine business trip through Argentina in 1980. As they travel about, the juxtaposition between the bourgeois homes they visit and the ever-present military creates an increasingly unnerving tension, culminating in a shattering finale. Here, every polite smile and bland pleasantry is in service to a world of evil. (Streaming on Mubi.)7. ‘The Card Counter’ (Paul Schrader)For decades, Schrader has been telling his favorite story — that of a man alone in a room, alone in his head — to greater and lesser if always interesting effect. Now, with Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Willem Dafoe, Schrader tells that tale again, getting into your head with feeling, some scattershot politics, horrific violence and auteurist confidence. (Available on most major platforms)8. ‘The Disciple’ (Chaitanya Tamhane)Every so often, the title character, a Hindustani classical singer (Aditya Modak), rides through the dark night, the voice of a musical guru filling the air and stirring your soul. Our young singer yearns for greatness, but as the years pass and practice never quite makes perfect, the divide between aspiration and reality grows impossibly wider. In a year of wonderful soundtracks, this is the one that soars highest. (Streaming on Netflix.)9. ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)This movie, the other of Hamaguchi’s to receive an American release this year, is split into three intricate stories that turn on chance and were, he has said, inspired by Eric Rohmer. Not all of the parts work equally well, but all have moments of beauty and grace along with amazing, complex rivers of words. By the time a character rests a hand on her heart in a rush of feeling, you may find yourself doing the same. (In theaters)10. ‘Spencer’ (Pablo Larraín)Larraín’s atmospherically perfect (and creepy) drama is at once a blistering takedown of the British monarchy, a blazing psychological portrait and a queasily funny Gothic horror freak-out. If you’re still chuckling and sometimes weeping over that soap opera called “The Crown,” this may wipe off your smile — or just make you roar with laughter. (Available on most major platforms.)Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in “Spencer.”NeonAlso!“Bring Your Own Brigade” (a smart, cleareyed, solution-oriented documentary about the climate crisis that won’t leave you curled up in a ball sobbing); “Dune” (yeah, I know, but I dug this immersive big-screen spectacle, the sort Hollywood rarely produces today); “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” (part of this year’s Benedict Cumberbatch wave and a must-see for animal lovers or, really, anyone with a beating heart); “Faya Dayi” (a gorgeous dream to slip into); “The First Wave” (a moving, intelligent, deeply human documentary on the pandemic); “In the Same Breath” (a tough, compassionate look at the pandemic via China); “Licorice Pizza” (especially the truck sequence — I could watch two hours of that amazingly directed, staged and choreographed camera-and-wheel work); “Prayers for the Stolen” (stirring and upsetting); “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time” (a gorgeous labyrinth); “Stillwater” (eh, it isn’t good but it brought me back into theaters); “The Truffle Hunters” (a touching lament for rapidly disappearing communities and traditions); “The Woman Who Ran” (elegant, wry, touching cinematic serialism). 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      Best Albums of 2021

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      Less isolation didn’t mean a return to normalcy. Albums with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Olivia Rodrigo, Moneybagg Yo and Allison Russell stood out in 2021.From left: Grant Spanier; Noam Galai/Getty Images; Bethany Mollenkof for the New York TimesJon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesSongs of Trauma, Fear and TriumphThe past year was awash in recorded music — not only the stuck-at-home recordings that musicians occupied themselves with when touring evaporated during the pandemic, but also many albums that had been made before the lockdowns but had been shelved in hopes of some return to normalcy. The albums that resonated most with me during 2021 were songs of reflection and revelation, often dealing with traumas and crises, transfigured through music.1. Bomba Estéreo, ‘Deja’The Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs tied to the ancient elements: water, air, fire, earth. Each new one broadened an album that entwines folklore and electronics, personal yearning and planetary concerns. With Liliana Saumet’s tartly endearing singing and rapping and Simón Mejía’s meticulously kinetic productions, the songs dance through their fears. (Read our interview with Bomba Estéreo.)Simón Mejía and Liliana Saumet of Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs.Valerie Amor C2. Allison Russell, ‘Outside Child’Allison Russell, the longtime frontwoman of Birds of Chicago, transforms a horrific childhood — she was abused by her stepfather — into songs of joyful survival. “I’m still rising, stronger for my pain and suffering,” she sings. Drawing on soul, country, folk and deep blues, she connects her own story to myth and metaphor, remembering the trauma yet decisively rising above it. (Read our interview with Allison Russell.)3. Mon Laferte, ‘Seis’Sometimes visitors can see what residents take for granted. Mon Laferte is from Chile, but she has been living for more than a decade in Mexico and has immersed herself in its music. On “Seis,” she wrote songs that draw deeply on regional Mexican traditions — mariachi, banda, ranchera, corrido, norteño — to sing, in a voice that can be teasing or furiously incendiary, about deep passions and equally deep betrayals. (Read our interview with Mon Laferte.)Mon Laferte drew on Mexican traditions for one of two albums she released this year, “Seis.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times4. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’Tamara Lindeman, who writes songs and records as the Weather Station, surrounded herself with a jazzy, intuitive backup group for “Ignorance,” clearly aware of Joni Mitchell’s folk-jazz precedent. The rhythms are brisk and precise; winds, keyboards and guitars ricochet respectfully off her breathy vocal lines. She sings about impending disasters, romantic and environmental, and the widespread disregard for what’s clearly about to happen. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)5. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitarist born in Niger. Like Tinariwen, his band plugs North African rhythms and modal vamps into rock amplifiers and drums. But “Afrique Victime” further expands the sonic possibilities for Tuareg rock, from ambient meditation to psychedelic onslaught. Six-beat rhythms and skeins of guitar lines carry Moctar’s voice in songs that can be modest and introspective or unstoppably frenetic.6. Julien Baker, ‘Little Oblivions’“Beat myself until I’m bloody/And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” Julien Baker sings in one of the brave, ruthlessly self-indicting songs that fill “Little Oblivions,” an album about the toll of one person’s addictions on everyone around her. She played all the instruments herself, scaling her sound up to arena size and chiming like U2, even as she refuses herself any excuses or forgiveness. (Read our review of “Little Oblivions.”)7. Black Midi, ‘Cavalcade’The virtuosic British band Black Midi bristles in every direction: with jagged, skewed funk riffs; with pointed dissonances; with passages of Minimalistic, ominous suspense; with lyrics full of bitter disillusion. And then, just to keep things unsettled, come passages filled with tenderness and wonderment, only to plunge back into the fray. (Read our interview with Black Midi.)8. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Olivia Rodrigo, now 18, fixates on a breakup with an adolescent’s obsessiveness on “Sour,” building on the audience she found as a cast member in Disney’s “High School Musical.” With Taylor Swift as a role model for craftsmanship, her songs are as neatly detailed as they are wounded, and the production whipsaws through styles — calm piano ballad, ethereal choir harmonies, fierce distorted guitars — to match every mood swing. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)Olivia Rodrigo’s songs are neatly detailed.Erica Hernandez9. Esperanza Spalding, ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’“Songwrights Apothecary Lab” was the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding’s pandemic project; she consulted neuroscientists, music therapists and ethnomusicologists to devise music for healing, and an online user’s guide prescribes the purpose of each song. But the songs are equally effective off-label; they encompass meditations, serpentine jazz compositions, calm or turbulent improvisations, open-ended questions and sly bits of advice, the work of a graceful, perpetually questing mind. (Read our interview with Esperanza Spalding.)10. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’A life of luxury can’t mollify Tyler, the Creator. He’s no longer the trolling provocateur he was a decade ago when he emerged with Odd Future, but he’s still intransigent and high-concept. After singing through most of his 2019 album, “Igor,” he’s back to rapping, now simulating a mixtape with DJ Drama as hypeman. In his deep voice, he raps about all he owns and all he can’t control — mostly romance — over his own dense, detailed productions, at once lush and abrasive. The album peaks with an eight-minute love-triangle saga, “Wichita”: a raw confession, cannily orchestrated. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)Tyler, the Creator swings back to mostly rapping on his 2021 album.Luis “Panch” PerezAnd here are another 15 deserving albums, alphabetically:Adele, “30”Arooj Aftab, “Vulture Prince”Khaira Arby, “New York Live”Billie Eilish, “Happier Than Ever”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, “Promises”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Rhiannon Giddens with Franceso Turrisi, “They’re Calling Me Home”Idles, “Crawler”Ka, “A Martyr’s Reward”Valerie June, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers”L’Rain, “Fatigue”Arlo Parks, “Collapsed in Sunbeams”Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, “Raise the Roof”Omar Sosa, “An East African Journey”Jazmine Sullivan, “Heaux Tales”Jon CaramanicaProcessing Pain, Blurring BoundariesIn the second year of global quasi-paralysis, what made the most sense were, once again, albums that felt like wombs and albums that felt like eruptions. When there was nowhere to go, literally or metaphorically, there were still places to retreat — to the gut, to history, to memory, to forgetting.1. Mustafa, ‘When Smoke Rises’Did you mourn this year? Were you broken in some way that was beyond words? Mustafa’s debut album was there with you, a startling, primal chronicle of relentless loss and the relentless grace required to navigate it. In moments when the ground buckled, this album was a cradle. (Read our interview with Mustafa.)Mustafa’s debut album is a profound meditation on loss.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times2. EST Gee, ‘Bigger Than Life or Death’The latest in a string of excellent releases from the Louisville, Ky., rapper EST Gee, whose verses are refreshingly burly and brusque, and who tells stories sprinkled with surprisingly vivid left-field details. A bold back-to-basics statement, utterly free of filigree.3. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’The most important new pop star of the year delivered a debut album of poppy punk and punky pop that’s sometimes musically blistering and always emotionally blistered. A reminder that a failed relationship might leave you icy or bruised or drained, but in truth, it frees you to be emboldened. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)4. Moneybagg Yo, ‘A Gangsta’s Pain’Moneybagg Yo is a casually sassy rapper — a don of tsk-tsking, fluent in arched eyebrows, dispositionally blunt. This is his fourth major-label album, and it’s punchy and robustly musical. À la peak 2 Chainz, Moneybagg Yo boasts so long and so intently that he sounds fatigued, and in turn, uproarious.5. PinkPantheress, ‘To Hell With It’This is music about listening to music, about the secret places we burrow into in order to make sure our favorite songs can wash over us unimpeded. The singing is sweet and melancholic, and the production flirts with memory and time — stories of right now and back then, all told as one. (Read our review of “To Hell With It.”)6. Summer Walker, ‘Still Over It’The most emotionally direct vocalist working in R&B today, Summer Walker is a bracing listen. And this album, her third full-length release, is rawly vindictive and unconcerned with polish, the equivalent of a public-facing Instagram account that feels like a finsta. (Read our notebook on Summer Walker.)Summer Walker’s third album is appealingly unpolished and intimate.Theo Wargo/Getty Images7. Lana Del Rey, ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’Lana Del Rey albums have become pop music’s most compelling ongoing saga about American loneliness and sadness. This, the better of her two albums this year, is alluringly arid and dreamlike. (Read our review of “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.”)8. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’In which the rapper who introduced himself a decade ago as the genre’s great anarchist reveals something that was long clear to close observers: He reveres tradition. Brick-hard rhyme structures. Ostentatious taunts. Mixtape grit. All of it. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)9. Playboi Carti, ‘Whole Lotta Red’Just an unyieldingly odd record. Notionally a cousin of mid-2010s SoundCloud rap, it also has echoes of 1980s industrial rock and also the glitchcore of the 2000s. It’s buoyant and psychedelic and totally destabilizing.10. Kanye West, ‘Donda (Deluxe)’“Donda” lives at the intersection of Kanye’s “Yeezus” era and his Jesus era. On the one hand, there’s scabrous, churning production that sets a chaotic mood. On the other, there are moments of intense searching, gasps for air amid the unrest. (Read our notebook on “Donda.”)11. Rauw Alejandro, ‘Vice Versa’Rauw Alejandro, the most imaginative meta-reggaeton Latin pop star, dabbles in drum ’n’ bass and baile funk on his second major-label album. But the star is his hypertreated voice, which is synthetically sweet and appealingly lush, almost to the point of delightful suffocation. (Read our review of “Vice Versa.”)Rauw Alejandro’s latest album puts a spotlight on his vocals.Thais Llorca/EPA, via Shutterstock12. Doja Cat, ‘Planet Her’Outlandish, eccentric, lustrous, mercenarily maximalist pop from the sing-rapper with the richest and keenest pop ear not named Drake.13. Chloe Moriondo, ‘Blood Bunny’Openhearted and effortlessly catchy indie punk-pop about lovelorn confusion and beginning to figure out you’re too cool for that. (Read our notebook on Chloe Moriondo.)14. Kidd G, ‘Down Home Boy’Why yes, those are Juice WRLD cadences in the singing on the year’s best country debut album. (Read our interview with Kidd G.)15. The Armed, ‘Ultrapop’Shrieking sheets of nervy noise — a battering ram.16. Carly Pearce, ’29: Written in Stone’A brief marriage, a messy divorce, a helluva album.17. Yeat, ‘4L’If “Whole Lotta Red” is too coherent for you, try Yeat.18. Conway the Machine, ‘La Maquina’A cold, cold, cold growl of a classic-minded hip-hop album.19. Farruko, ‘La 167’“Pepas” is here, along with a confidently expansive range of reggaeton styles.Farruko’s “La 167” is a showcase for reggaeton styles.Rich Polk/Getty Images20. Mickey Guyton, ‘Remember Her Name’A pop-country winner that feels both universal and singular. (Read our interview with Mickey Guyton.)… and 20 more albums for a more well-rounded year.42 Dugg, “Free Dem Boyz”Gracie Abrams, “This Is What It Feels Like”Aespa, “Savage”Jay Bahd, “Return of Okomfo Anokye”Benny the Butcher and Harry Fraud, “The Plugs I Met 2”Ivan Cornejo, “Alma Vacía”Jhay Cortez, “Timelezz”Dave, “We’re All Alone in This Together”Drake, “Certified Lover Boy”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Cody Johnson, “Human the Double Album”NCT 127, “Sticker”RXK Nephew, “Crack Dreams”serpentwithfeet, “Deacon”Spirit of the Beehive, “Entertainment, Death”Don Toliver, “Life of a Don”Rod Wave, “SoulFly”Tion Wayne, “Green With Envy”Wiki, “Half God”Young Thug, “Punk”Lindsay ZoladzOpening Up Hearts and MindsIn an emotionally hung over year when so many people were trying to process loss — of loved ones, of charred or flooded homes, of the world as we once knew it — some of the best music offered an opportunity to slow down and reconnect with feelings we may have rushed right by before truly acknowledging. Sometimes we just needed a voice to capture and echo the absurdity all around us, but other times records gave us a way of experiencing nothing less than mass catharsis.1. Adele, ‘30’It takes a certain kind of record to make me want to quote Rumi, but Adele really killed this, so let me say: “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”Adele has been our mass-cultural bard of heartbreak for the past decade, but in her music — save for the handful of instant-classic ballads scattered across her discography — I did not really get the sense that she was truly open in all the terror and glory that implies. Then she turned 30. “I’m so afraid but I’m open wide,” she sings on the divine “To Be Loved,” her imperial voice trembling but assured. Most breakup albums are full of anger, scorn, and blame, but this one is remarkably self-directed, a grown woman making a deeply considered choice to leap into the void and break her own heart wide apart. “I took some bad turns that I am owning,” she sings, audibly italicizing that last phrase, as if the preceding 10 tracks in all their startling honesty hadn’t already made that clear.On “19,” “21,” and “25,” Adele acted wise beyond her years: “We both know we ain’t kids no more,” she chided an ex on an album about being in her mid-20s, which also included a world-wearied number called “When We Were Young.” “30” refreshingly winds back the clock and finds her admitting that all along she was “just a child, didn’t get the chance to feel the world around” her. But now she sings like a mature woman who knows there’s still plenty of time to get wine-drunk on the everyday wonders of her own freedom, to break her heart open again and again in her newly omnivorous and sonically eclectic songs. This, at last, is Adele living up to her promise, pop majesty at the highest count. (Read our review of “30.”)Adele breaks her own heart open on “30.”Cliff Lipson/CBS2. Tyler, The Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’He’s still on the boat! Tyler has never sounded this breezy yet in control, but for all the luxurious braggadocio, there’s a darker undercurrent at work, too. “I remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions,” he raps at the beginning of the album; by the stunning penultimate track, the heart-tugging epic “Wilshire,” he’ll have to admit that’s impossible. Full of playful reflections on his past (“I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers”) and auspicious blessings for his future, “Call Me” finds Tyler dropping a stone into that murky blue and discovering unexplored new depths. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)3. Snail Mail, ‘Valentine’Lindsey Jordan begs, bargains and finally accepts the pain of heartache in this searing song cycle that further establishes her as one of indie rock’s brightest young stars. There’s a raw immediacy to these 10 songs that make them almost feel hot to the touch — the thrashing title track, the keening acoustic ballad “Light Blue,” even the slinky, synth-driven vamp “Ben Franklin.” Her nimble guitar work highlights a sharp ear for off-kilter melody, but at the core of “Valentine” is Jordan’s passionately hoarse voice, lungs filled to the brim with sound and fury. (Read our review of “Valentine.”)4. Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Heaux Tales’The chatty, candid interstitials woven through this wonderful album play out like an adult reunion of those young girls in the classroom from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” — now grown women swapping secrets, recollections and hard-earned wisdom. “Heaux Tales” is a prismatic, multiperspective snapshot of female desire in the 21st century, enlivened by the testimonies of friends like Ari Lennox and H.E.R. but made cohesive by the soulfully versatile voice of Jazmine Sullivan. She breathes life into a spectrum of emotions, from the sassy assertion of “Pick Up Your Feelings” to the naked yearning of “The Other Side,” proving that it would be too limiting to choose between being a hard rock or a gem. Aren’t we all a little bit of both? (Read our review of “Heaux Tales.”)Jazmine Sullivan explores the multiple dimensions of female desire in the 21st century on “Heaux Tales.”NAACP, via Reuters5. Illuminati Hotties, ‘Let Me Do One More’The indie producer turned surprisingly ebullient frontperson Sarah Tudzin is a personable and occasionally hilarious guide through the surreal ruins of late capitalism. “You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed start-up?” she seethes in a punky, cartoonish voice, but a few songs later she’s exhausted enough to sound resigned to inevitable compromise: “The corner store is selling spit, bottled up for profit,” she sighs, “can’t believe I’m buying it.” Still, Tudzin’s songs glow with the possibility of human intimacy amid all the rubble, and they show off her mastery of so many different genres that by the end of the record, it seems like there’s no ceiling to her talent as both a producer and a finger-on-the-pulse songwriter. (Read our interview with Illuminati Hotties.)6. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Hell hath no fury like a young woman out to prove she’s no one-hit wonder. From the opening guitar-crunch of the Zoomer primal scream that is “Brutal,” Olivia Rodrigo proves there’s so much more to her than could be expressed even in a song as exquisitely expressive as her seismic smash “Drivers License.” Rodrigo fashions teen-girl sarcasm into a lethal weapon on the dream-pop “Deja Vu,” rails against the Instagram industrial complex on the barbed social critique “Jealousy, Jealousy” and transforms a sample of one of her idol Taylor Swift’s sweetest love songs into a tear-streaked heartbreaker on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back.” If it feels comparatively weak on the back end, that’s only because the first half of this album is probably the most impressive six-song run anybody put together this year. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)7. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’How do you make music about climate change without it sounding too didactic and abstract? Tamara Lindeman, the Canadian musician who records as the Weather Station, came up with a winning solution on her stirring album “Ignorance,” which finds her singing elegiac love songs to a dying planet. The graceful melancholy of “Tried to Tell You” surveys the natural beauty we’ve been too numb to mourn, while the sparse, jazzy “Robber” is a kind of musical tone-poem about large-scale corporate destruction. With her nimble voice — sometimes high and fluttery, other times earthy and low — and evocative lyricism, the songs of “Ignorance” animate, as one of her bandmates puts it, “the emotional side of climate change,” employing music’s depth of feeling to ignite political consciousness. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station finds artful ways to sing about the climate crisis.Angela Lewis for The New York Times8. Low, ‘Hey What’If only every band could sound this adventurous 30 years into existence. As their eerily heartfelt harmonies cut through with rhythmic blurts of electronic noise, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk sound, quite literally, like ghosts in the machine, imbuing vast, steely soundscapes with a disarming beauty. Following the sonic reinvention of the stunning 2018 album “Double Negative,” the Duluth band have continued to frame human yearning amid a churning and apocalyptic backdrop, with career-best songs like “Disappearing” and “Days Like These” capturing both the difficulty and the necessity of finding light in a dark age.9. Lucy Dacus, ‘Home Video’Lucy Dacus’s wrenching third studio album is as much an achievement of memoir as it is of songwriting, a vividly conjured coming-of-age story so personal that she used her own teenage diaries for research. “In the summer of ’07, I was sure I’d go to heaven,” she sings on “VBS” (as in, Vacation Bible School), before a gradual and all-consuming doubt begins to creep in. By the final song, when a friend tells her she’s afraid that their desires have rendered them “cursed,” Dacus responds, “So what?” As thoughtfully crafted as a collection of short stories, “Home Video” achingly chronicles the tale of a young person who loses her religion but in the process gains autonomy, a sense of identity and the glorious strength to tell her own truths in song. (Read T magazine’s interview with Lucy Dacus.)10. Dry Cleaning, ‘New Long Leg’“Are there some kind of reverse platform shoes that make you go into the ground more?” the ever-droll Florence Shaw asks, one of many absurdist yet somehow relatable philosophical questions she poses on the English post-punk band Dry Cleaning’s singular debut album. The instrumentation around Shaw swells like a sudden squall, but her deadpan, spoken-word musings — a mixture of found text, overheard chitchat and offbeat poetry — are the eye of the storm, remaining steady and strangely unperturbed in all kinds of weather.11. Billie Eilish, ‘Happier Than Ever’No record grew on me more this year than Billie Eilish’s patient and personal sophomore effort, which shuns repeat-the-formula predictability and unfolds at its own unhurried pace. It’s somehow even quieter than her sumptuously ASMR-triggering debut, until those sudden moments when it isn’t — as on the corrosive conclusion to the Nine-Inch-Nails-like “NDA,” or the fireworks display of pent-up frustration that rips open the title track. Exquisitely sequenced, this is a rare pop album that doesn’t show all its cards right away, but instead saves its strongest material for the end, building toward a satisfying finale and a hint at the potential versatility of her future. (Read our review of “Happier Than Ever.”)Billie Eilish’s second album, “Happier Than Ever,” reveals itself at its own pace.Rich Fury/Getty Images12. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’The fluid and incandescent playing of the Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar transcends borders, seamlessly fusing Western psychedelia with North African desert blues. “Afrique Victime,” his strongest and most focused record to date, showcases not only his quicksilver fingerwork but his innate gift for melody and songcraft, proving in every one of these nine blazing tracks that shredding is a universal language.13. Bitchin Bajas, ‘Switched on Ra’This shouldn’t work, or at least not nearly as well as it does: A drone synth outfit tackling the otherworldly compositions and complex harmonies of cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra? But Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas approach the task with equal parts reverence and playfulness, assembling an Arkestra of 19 different analog synths and in the process creating a prolonged musical meditation on time, space and the meaning of retrofuturism. The vibes are exquisite, and the whole thing sounds like the Muzak that would play in an intergalactic portal’s waiting room.14. Remi Wolf, ‘Juno’Here’s to anyone who takes a technically skilled voice and chooses to do something delectably weird with it. The Palo Alto native Remi Wolf’s pipes are strong enough to have propelled her to Hollywood on the 2014 season of “American Idol,” but she’s since carved out a much less conventional path, making bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas, melodies and truly wild wordplay (“I love my family intrinsically, like Anthony Kiedis,” she sings, which — sure!). On “Juno,” one of the most promising debut albums of the year, Wolf throws everything she’s got at the wall — and a surprisingly high percentage of it actually sticks. (Read our interview with Remi Wolf.)Remi Wolf makes bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesSome runners-up worth mentioning:L’Rain, “Fatigue”Rostam, “Changephobia”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Lana Del Rey, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”/“Blue Banisters”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Palberta, “Palberta 5000”/Lily Konigsberg, “Lily We Need to Talk Now” More