Baker, Julien (1995- )

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    Listening to boygenius, Together and Apart

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    Hear nine standout songs by members of the Grammy-winning trio: Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus.The trio boygenius, from left: Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,It’s been a big week for boygenius, the singer-songwriter supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. On Sunday, the band won its first three Grammys: best rock song and best rock performance for the single “Not Strong Enough,” and best alternative album for its full-length debut, “The Record.” But last Friday, during a Los Angeles concert, boygenius also announced that the group was going on hiatus. “This is our last show,” Dacus told the crowd, “and we’re feeling it.”Is it weird to say I wasn’t mad about this news? No disrespect to boygenius, but I’m also a fan of the solo music made by all three artists, and I’d been wondering when, say, we’d be getting a follow-up to Bridgers’s 2020 breakout album, “Punisher,” which is nearing its fourth birthday. “The Record” itself had been an unexpected bonus, since boygenius initially seemed like a one-off project that wouldn’t last longer than a six-song EP and a subsequent tour. But the runaway success of “The Record” also means that some people are more familiar with boygenius than with the three accomplished solo artists who make up the group.Today’s Amplifier hopes to change that. It’s a celebration of both the individual work of Baker, Bridgers and Dacus (which sounds like a law firm that I would definitely hire) and also the magic that happens when they put their Captain Planet powers together and become boygenius.Although all three artists share a subgenre (lyrically vivid, passionately sung indie-rock), each also has a distinct personality and sonic sensibility that comes through in their solo music. Bridgers has a darkly comic perspective and a dreamy, mirror-fogging delivery most effectively employed on tracks like boygenius’s bittersweet “Me & My Dog” or on “Garden Song,” a droll reverie from “Punisher.” Dacus has a honeyed deadpan and has a short-story writer’s eye for humanizing detail, as heard on “Night Shift,” her 2018 chronicle of a breakup. And Baker is an artist who’s not afraid to plumb her darkest depths (as she does on the arresting “Appointments”) or belt to the rafters (see her anthemic 2021 song “Ringside”).I hope the members of boygenius once again join forces someday in the not too distant future — and I’m confident that they will. But I’m also excited for people to get more acquainted with their solo work, and hopefully get more of it soon.Somebody roll the windows down,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      boygenius Is Having All the Fun

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      There’s a scene in the movie “Help!” where the Beatles roll up to a row of terraced houses and approach their adjacent front doors — four separate entrances, one for each Beatle. Then the camera cuts inside, and we see that all four doors lead into one immense mid-1960s playhouse, where the Beatles live together. This was and is the fantasy of a rock band: boys, together, reveling in a world of their own making. Beastie Boys. Beach Boys. Backstreet Boys. They are cute. They are straight. They are inseparable and nearly indistinguishable, like sitcom characters. They seem to travel with their own center of gravity. All for one and one for all. “The boys” is how the three members of the band boygenius refer to themselves. Over the past year, they have emerged as a fresh incarnation of that classic fantasy: the right band with the right synergy at exactly the right moment, with the most exhilarating record and the most emotional shows and the most exultant fans. Each boy even inhabits a classic boy-band archetype. Lucy Dacus, 28, is the thoughtful dreamy poet boy; Julien Baker, 28, the tattooed rocker heartthrob boy; and Phoebe Bridgers, 29, the wry, preternaturally charismatic boy. The music press often calls them a supergroup — which is technically correct, because all three are successful indie solo artists with fan bases of their own. But “supergroup” conjures images of ego-mad 1970s dudes in their cocaine phase, capturing a little magic on record before discovering that they hate one another. And this particular supergroup is made up of women who actually like one another, and who get off on reimagining what a rock band looks like and what it feels like to be in one. “There’s a very specific framework of the history of dudes and rock,” Dacus says. “People just know it, so it’s easy to play with.” I first met the boys at the conclusion of a stuff-of-dreams tour, the day before a final Halloween concert at the Hollywood Bowl. They had spent nearly a year crisscrossing the United States and Europe, selling out Madison Square Garden, headlining festivals, racking up critical acclaim. It had just been announced that in less than two weeks boygenius would be the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live,” with Timothée Chalamet hosting; they would be in New York, trying on clothes for the show, when they learned that their debut LP, “The Record,” had been nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year. Over oak-milk lattes and breakfast tacos in Studio City, Baker joked that the end-of-tour energy felt like “the Macy’s one-day sale” — an event that, despite its name, seems to exist in perpetuity.The boys were discussing Bridgers’s Halloween party, which went down over the weekend. Baker dressed as the pop star Ariana Grande, based on a much-memed paparazzi photo from when Grande was dating Pete Davidson: Disney-princess ponytail, a thigh-skimming sweatshirt worn as a dress, winged eyeliner, signature lollipop. Dacus, who is tall and ethereally elegant, went as Davidson, in a giant flannel hoodie. Just that morning, she had posted pictures on Instagram — she and Baker in their costumes, side by side with the original — driving fans crazy with even a mock suggestion that these two might be dating. (The boys’ potential romantic involvement is something they seem to enjoy neither confirming nor denying.) “This has completely obliterated an entire dimension of my mind,” one comment read.The band’s fans, a passionate and highly amped population, love it when the boys do stuff together: play guitar, make out onstage, dress up. Then the fans do those things, too. There’s “a lot of gay kissing” at boygenius shows, Dacus noted happily. The band identifies, individually and collectively, as queer, and they’re proud of the freedom fans feel to use boygenius as an avenue for exploring gender and sexual identity. “Safety and sexuality can inhabit the same space,” Bridgers said. “It’s tight that it’s both — it’s tight that there are friends just hooking up for fun and also people who actually [expletive] each other.” She paused and smiled. “It is hot and also safe.” The others laughed. “The hottest safest band of all time!” Dacus joked.Even when it’s not Halloween, fans like to come to boygenius shows dressed as highly specific iterations of the boys. The three of them in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone (itself a nod to Nirvana in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1994) or Bridgers, in boxers, standing in the middle of a monster-truck arena, in the Kristen Stewart-directed music video for the dreamy, twisted “Emily I’m Sorry.” “When I see the crowd dressing up like boygenius, I think it is so wonderful that these kids have people in rock music to dress ‘like’ instead of people to dress ‘for,’” says Haley Dahl, frontwoman of the avant-pop band Sloppy Jane and a friend of Bridgers’s from high school. One fan recently dressed as a teenage Baker in 1990s skater regalia, based on a photo of the guitarist as a pouty Tennessee high schooler. “The ‘Rocky Horror’ element of it was never — like, we can’t make that happen,” Bridgers said. “Yeah, I didn’t anticipate that,” Baker added. “I thought kids would just come in their normal clothes.”This year’s boygenius shows have felt like art-school prom: sincere, theatrical, joyfully subversive. As decidedly rock as the group’s sound is — full of loud-quiet-loud guitar jams — it’s also welcoming and interior, the songs little pockets of sometimes-soft, sometimes-hard beauty that offer fans a place to land in an often bereft-feeling world. The intimacy boygenius projects tempts fans to imitate them, to try to replicate the aspects of their friendship that seem rare and magical. It’s a sensation the band members can relate to, because they feel the magic, too. As Bridgers once put it, “I like myself better around them.”This is what sits at the core of what the boys sometimes call the “project” that is boygenius: creating a container for self-expression and exploration, a permission structure for identity, and then watching in wonder as that very private process winds up introducing you to your best friends, as well as to yourself. “In this band I get a license to live into parts of myself I’m curious about,” Baker said, as Dacus and Bridgers nodded in agreement. “We choose our most ideal versions of ourselves. And then the kids are dressing up as the persona that we’ve constructed — because they recognize something of their own in that.”The band performing at the Hollywood Bowl on Halloween.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIf the boygenius boys come across like old friends who know deep secrets about one another, that’s because they are. Dacus and Baker first met in 2016, when both were 22. Baker was doing a small club tour in support of her debut album, “Sprained Ankle.” Dacus was an opening act. “I met Lucy in the greenroom of a venue called DC9,” Baker says. “Lucy was reading ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ maybe? Henry James.” Both were very green, very young musicians raised in religious homes in small Southern towns — Dacus outside Richmond, Va., in a neighborhood she proudly describes as “across from a cornfield and next to a goat farm,” and Baker in Bartlett, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. They bonded.Bridgers was another opener on Baker’s tour. They met before a show at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Because Bridgers was from the area, and because the songs she had put out at that point struck Baker as “less amateur” and “more developed” than Baker’s own, Baker was expecting someone sophisticated, someone “more cultured.” But Bridgers “was a little bit of a hesher — in a leather jacket and a NASCAR T-shirt.” Bridgers was savvy and urbane, yes, but what mostly came across was her “sweetness,” Baker says. “I was just like, Do you want to go get some pizza and doughnuts? And so we went and got late-night pizza and doughnuts and stayed up talking about bands. It was very pure.”There are friends you meet in your early 20s — a fragile, formative stage — who become foundational. They are the people who know you on the edge of adulthood but before you’ve decided on a grown-up persona. They are the people who know who you are before anyone else cares who you are, an especially precious perspective if you later become famous. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best, cutthroat at worst and full of shady, dubious people. “Especially at that time, when everything feels like it’s happening really quickly around you, to have somebody that just had time for you,” Baker says — somebody who gives you her number and says she wants to hang out the next time you’re in the same city, and she means it — that, Baker says, was kind of everything. “I was just like, OK, I really trust these guys.” Before boygenius officially became a band, they were a text group, talking often about what they were reading, inaugurating what still feels like one long book-club meeting from which they occasionally break to play music. (Current selection: Leslie Jamison’s addiction memoir, “The Recovering.”) In the two years after they first met, all three of their careers took off. Bridgers released her debut solo album, “Stranger in the Alps,” while Baker and Dacus each released their second (“Turn Out the Lights” and “Historian”). All three were touring like crazy, while keeping in touch throughout. In the fall of 2018, the boys found themselves booked on a short tour together and decided that they might as well record some music to promote it. Four days after they began, they had recorded the six songs that became the “boygenius” EP. On tour together, they would do a mix of solo songs and songs they’d written together. They had their share of fans, but nothing like the level of interest or personal fascination that boygenius inspires now.The arrival of that personal fascination has been predictably disorienting. Over coffee in Studio City, for instance, there was a moment when a scowl washed over Bridgers’s face. “Were we just being filmed?” Dacus asked, following her bandmate’s gaze to a young woman who was sitting stiffly, staring intensely into her coffee, her phone face up on the table. “Don’t like it, don’t like it,” Bridgers fumed. Dacus was recently followed while shopping at Target. Baker discovered someone filming her through a display of Halloween candy at a CVS. “It was like a comedy,” she said, chuckling, “because they were filming through a gap in the candy and then it all fell down and they went like, [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive].” Bridgers smiled tightly but did not laugh. She leaned into the recorder: “And I just want to say to that person: ‘Die. Die!’” Bridgers is particularly sensitive to being watched because she, more than the other boys, has experienced the grosser side of notoriety. In the years between the “boygenius” EP and “The Record,” Bridgers got pretty famous. There were many reasons for this, including her relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, her association with Taylor Swift — she was one of the Eras Tour’s opening acts and a guest on Swift’s single “Nothing New” — and her general ubiquity as an in-demand collaborator for artists including the National, Lorde and Paul McCartney. But mostly it’s because Bridgers made an astonishing second record, “Punisher,” that came out early in 2020, when people were stuck home feeling anxious and dislocated and thus perfectly primed to receive Bridgers’s distinctive mix of austere beauty and rage. She played “S.N.L.” solo in 2021 and was criticized for smashing her guitar onstage. (David Crosby called the move “pathetic” on Twitter; Bridgers tartly replied, “little bitch.”) When the boys walk the Grammy red carpet in February, Bridgers will have been there before; “Punisher” earned her four nominations. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best and cutthroat at worst.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York TimesSo it’s notable that it was Bridgers who sent the text that got the boys back into the studio in 2020, and that she sent that text the same week “Punisher” came out. “Can we be a band again?” she wrote.As in so many great romances, everybody involved wanted to return to one another, but each was afraid the others might not feel the same way. What Bridgers understood was the difference between carrying success on your own and getting by with a little help from your friends. “The boys are really good at community,” she says. “I’m more insular. I mean, I have community for sure. But the boys have had, like, more roommates in their lives. So I learned a lot from them. Like how to come into the front lounge of the bus and be like, ‘[expletive], I got this really stressful text last night!’ And just talk it out. It’s the best.” The boys see a band therapist. They have only ever had, as Bridgers puts it, one “for-no-reason bitchy” day on the road. It was in England, while they were touring the Brontës’ house; perhaps, she says, it had to do with the repressed “ghost of Charlotte and Emily Brontë within us, the shared trauma.” Now, whenever the boys are spinning out, they call it Brontitis. Dacus declared, “We could never make music again, and boygenius is just the title of this friendship that we had.”The thing about catching lightning in a bottle is that the glow lasts only so long. Before the Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl, the boys were backstage, getting ready to play in front of nearly 18,000 people. The energy in the dressing rooms had the frenzied excitement of an extremely well-funded high school theater production, but also an underlying anticipatory mournfulness: This was the big end-of-year performance before everyone graduates and is sucked into the what-do-we-do-now abyss. “I’m OK — sad!” Dacus said outside the makeup room when her manager asked how she was doing. “Every song is going to be like, Oh, that’s the last time.”The band had been secretive about what they would wear for this final show of the tour. What could boygenius dress up as that would satisfy their and their fans’ taste for cheeky visual statements? Three rolling racks of clothes, neatly labeled with handmade signs, made plain the plan: They would be the Holy Trinity — Father (Dacus), Son (Baker) and Holy Ghost (Bridgers). A friend asked Baker, who was raised in a deeply Christian family, how her mother was going to feel about her dressing up as Jesus for Halloween. “I told her,” Baker said, amused — though Baker did wonder, “What if I get to heaven and they’re like, ‘We were cool with you being gay and all the lying, but why did you have to come for me so hard at the Hollywood Bowl?’”‘To sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us.’Baker’s costume was simple, just a white robe, sandals and a crown of thorns, so she was able to dress quickly and wander the hallways, marveling at the comfort of Jesus’ footwear (“You’ve got to walk far in the desert!”) while her bandmates were still doing makeup (Dacus, in an Elvisesque bejeweled white suit) and hair (Bridgers, whose spectral halo and veil had to be carefully secured in her ice-blond mane). Then there was the matter of Dave Grohl’s neckwear. “Can you string up this cross?” Lindsey Hartman, the band’s costumer, asked her assistant. Grohl was the night’s special guest. “I’m putting the drummer of Nirvana in a priest costume,” Hartman said, grinning and shaking her head. “This is it.”Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus backstage before the band performed at the Halloween show where they dressed up as the Holy Trinity.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesPhoebe Bridgers backstage before the same performance at the Hollywood Bowl.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesThe 2017 “Wonder Woman” movie regularly brought female audience members to tears with scenes familiar from dozens of other action films — except that everyone onscreen was a woman. The tableau at the Hollywood Bowl stirred similar emotions in me. Boygenius has an all-female backing band (they were dressed as angels, in white Dickies jumpsuits and halos), and there were a lot of women around. It felt as if there were almost no men. When Bridgers’s boyfriend, the comedian and musician Bo Burnham, showed up with his plus-one — the actor Andrew Garfield, in a Cobra Kai karate uniform he sweetly described as “comfy” — you could feel the energy shift. “You do your thing, don’t worry about me,” Burnham said to Bridgers, ducking out just as Grohl appeared with two of his daughters. “I’ll text you when Mom gets here,” he told them, disappearing into his dressing room to change.A few minutes later, the band took the stage, to their standard walk-on music: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Like everyone else, Grohl was there to serve the boygenius experience. He wanted to play drums on the propulsive “Satanist,” which meant coming on just a few songs into the show. The group sounded insane with Grohl behind them: big and bold, like a band that understood its power and was relaxed enough to fully enjoy it — but then it sounds that way without him too. “OK,” Bridgers said, shaking her body out and grinning. “I feel like the show is happening now. I feel like I just came online.” For the rest of the nearly two-hour performance, there was a sense of easy pleasure in the air, both onstage and in the crowd. Kristen Stewart could be seen in her box with her fiancée, Dylan Meyer, and a pack of fellow willowy motorcycle-jacket-clad Angelenos drinking Modelo with their feet up, singing along. “I’ve seen them twice now, and I tell myself every time to be cool, but I lose it,” Stewart says. “I don’t know why it’s so emotional. I think what it is, they are a real [expletive] band. There is something in the way they don’t negotiate. It’s embedded in a bond that feels like if you ‘get it,’ you’re allowed in. And allowed.” A few seats away, a lesbian couple in schoolgirl outfits smiled goofily amid bouts of making out. In between songs, Bridgers brought out Maxine, her famous-to-fans pug, dressed as a tiny sheep, and intoned, “Behold the lamb of God!” Just before the final encore, Dacus grabbed her microphone. “I have found it hard to figure out what to say to you this whole night,” she said, her voice full. “But to sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us. This is an absurd dream. Thank you.”Backstage after the show, Grohl and Billie Eilish and other assorted band insiders mingled in the greenroom. Elsewhere on the grounds, at the official after-party, Bridgers’s mother was milling around, beaming: “We have some friends from high school we need to check on, to make sure they’re not freaking out because they can’t get a drink.” (There’s no alcohol backstage on boygenius tours.) Bridgers eventually appeared with Burnham, a black hoodie pulled tight over her head, on guard once again.The night was still young, with lots of goodbyes to say, and then “S.N.L.” two weeks later, and then the Grammys early in 2024. What would come after that, however, was an open question. It’s unclear whether boygenius will make new music together anytime soon.The first thing the boys told me, on the first day we met, was that they were looking forward to their own obsolescence — a day, sometime in the future, when people would still be listening to their music, but without knowing or really caring about its makers.The boys said they were looking forward to their own obsolescence, when people would be listening to their music but not caring about its makers.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York Times“People will be like, Oh, yeah, I liked this song — a couple of years ago,” Baker imagined. “We talk about this all the time, because. …” Here she turned and asked Dacus: “Didn’t Louise Glück just die?”Dacus nodded, affirming the recent death of the Nobel-laureate poet.“OK,” Baker said, “but when she died, weren’t we like, Wasn’t she already dead?”Dacus smiled and nodded again.“That’s the dream,” Baker said.“That is my goal,” Dacus concurred. “I want, basically, for everyone to be so satisfied with what I could offer that they already think I’m dead.”Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of music in New York City from 2001-2011. Hobbes Ginsberg is a lesbian photographer based in Madrid, making vulnerable, hyper-saturated work exploring queer domesticity and the evolution of self. More

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      boygenius on Its First Grammy Nominations and Keeping Rock Fun

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      Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus earned six nods for their debut LP, “The Record.” Texts from fellow nominees Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish followed.For boygenius, the indie-rock supergroup with a penchant for neckties and introspective songs, this fall has held the kind of firsts that prove a rock band has turned into a phenomenon: its first arena show at a Madison Square Garden packed with fans chanting every lyric, its first performance at the Hollywood Bowl, and soon, its first feature on “Saturday Night Live.”On Friday, there was another first — and second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth — with boygenius’s debut Grammy nominations as a band, a haul that included nods for two of the biggest contests: record of the year (for the ethereal and anthemic “Not Strong Enough”) and album of the year (for “The Record”).The recognition has capped off a whirlwind period for Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, successful indie performers in their own right who turned an idea for a one-off collaboration in 2018 into a group that has captured the hearts of Gen Z fans and beyond, establishing a reputation for free-spirited onstage antics and the kind of wholesome bond not usually associated with touring rock stars.On a Friday afternoon video call, the trio discussed their nominations, songwriting and the future of their music from the basement of a New York City hotel where they were preparing for “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, a rack full of possible costume choices lined up behind them. It was in that hotel basement that they heard the good news, then, as Baker put it, “did a little screaming, hugging, jumping up and down,” before the texts started flowing — including notes from Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who also received six nominations each.“It’s like when kids cry on Christmas morning because I do feel so overwhelmed that I could just go to sleep,” Baker said.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.This has been a remarkable year of firsts for you. Has it changed your relationship to the album, playing in these large arenas?BAKER Not in a corny way you guys, but that’s the metric I return to. My relationship to it has stayed static, by making something that we preserved.BRIDGERS And it’s grown — I think of “True Blue” now as a kind of communal experience because that’s kind of the first moment in the set where the audience acts the same way every night. Lucy and I have pretty low voices and when people sing “True Blue,” they sing the octave up which is really funny.DACUS If I was doing “True Blue” for karaoke I would do the same thing.What about your relationships with each other? You’ve been around the world together at this point, in high-pressure situations — what’s different about your friendship?BAKER I’m proud of us. I think our communication has gotten better. We set out with a clear list of priorities in mind, and our excitement about the music and our genuine relationship with each other was at the top. That has stayed intact because we kept it as a priority. It’s being spoken into the project every day.BRIDGERS When you guys hit me up to have dinner the other night before we actually had to go into work, seeing you not at work first, I was like, this is so nice. We just got to talk about people and hang out.DACUS I’m not sick of you guys.Why do you think “Not Strong Enough” rose to the surface for the Grammys? You’ve talked about how it’s about mental illness, about self-hatred — is it the darkness that connected with audiences?DACUS I think the four-on-the-floor kick pattern connected with audiences. For me writing above everything is important, but you could switch out the lyrics of the song and I think it would be just as much fun.BRIDGERS I was like, we need a song that could be played on the radio, can we make one that’s like, really fun? And you guys understood the assignment.DACUS But “Not Strong Enough” is not a typical radio song, so it both fails the assignment but weirdly succeeded because it’s on the radio. Finneas said this too, it’s like you trying to copy your idols and failing is who you are. Something like that.BAKER And also “fun” is deep. Like you could retroactively dissertation explain what is just implicitly communicated by us having fun and writing lyrics in the way that we do. We put a breakdown in “Not Strong Enough” because it rocks; I want to have a good time!Has this past year made you want to dig deeper into boygenius or are you feeling like it’s time to return to your independent careers?DACUS We decided before it all started what the limits were, and that has allowed us to dig the deepest that we were willing to up until this point. We’ve put all of our energy into this knowing that there’s kind of a cap on this era of boygenius. We’re all going to make our own solo records after this — that’s fair to say, probably.BRIDGERS Or try.So you have six nominations as a band, but Phoebe has one extra (for a collaboration with SZA, “Ghost in the Machine”). Are you lording it over the other two?BRIDGERS All day. No, but it was the first one announced and Lucy was like, it would be so funny if we were all watching and it was only that. But I’m so proud of SZA.DACUS [whispers Bridgers’s section of “Ghost in the Machine”] I’ve had it stuck in my head all day.This year’s nominees are led by women — did that stick out at you at all watching it?BRIDGERS I noticed a lot of music I love.DACUS We’re excited for more pals to be getting recognized and the fact that we’re women isn’t the cool part — the music is the cool part.Have you been batting around any ideas yet for a Grammys performance? Nirvana suits?DACUS I haven’t thought about this at all because I did not think it was going to happen, so now it just opens up a whole world of having to think about things. More

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      SZA, ‘Barbie’ Songs and Young Women Lead 2024 Grammy Nominees

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      The indie-rock group boygenius, Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Victoria Monét are among the most nominated artists for the 66th annual awards in February.SZA, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, the indie supergroup boygenius and the eclectic bandleader Jon Batiste are among the top nominees for the 66th annual Grammy Awards, leading a class of contenders dominated by young women.SZA, the R&B singer and songwriter born Solána Rowe, has nine nods — more than any other artist this year — for her album “SOS,” which led the Billboard chart for 10 weeks and spawned an in-demand arena tour. “Kill Bill,” its standout hit, is up for both record and song of the year at the next ceremony, set for Feb. 4 in Los Angeles.Swift and Rodrigo will face off against SZA in all three top categories, with Swift’s “Midnights” — the studio LP she released last year, in between a slew of rerecordings — and Rodrigo’s “Guts” up for best album, and Swift’s “Anti-Hero” and Rodrigo’s “Vampire” each competing for both record and song.The awards were announced in an online stream Friday morning by the Recording Academy, the nonprofit organization behind the Grammys.Miley Cyrus and Batiste are also contenders in each of the most prestigious categories. Cyrus’s mellow, disco-inflected hit “Flowers” is up for record and song of the year, and “Endless Summer Vacation” for album. Batiste, the surprise album of the year victor in 2022 for “We Are” — a rootsy, uplifting collection that had barely made a dent on the charts — earned a string of nominations, including best album for “World Music Radio,” a high-concept amalgam of global pop that was also far from a hit. Its track “Worship” is up for record, and “Butterfly” for song. (Record of the year recognizes a single recording; song of the year is a songwriter’s award.)Boygenius, the project of three of indie-rock’s leading young women — Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, all in their late 20s — will compete for record of the year with “Not Strong Enough,” and best album with “The Record.”Swift, Rodrigo, Cyrus, boygenius, Batiste and the Americana singer-songwriter Brandy Clark have six nods apiece, as does Billie Eilish, another Grammy favorite; Victoria Monét, an R&B singer and songwriter, has seven. Bridgers, of boygenius, also nabbed a seventh, through a collaboration with SZA.The “Barbie” soundtrack, curated by the producer Mark Ronson and filled with female artists — Eilish, Dua Lipa and Nicki Minaj among them — has a total of 11 nominations in seven categories. In best song written for visual media, for example, “Barbie” tracks occupy four of the five slots.The contenders for best new artist include Monét; the banjo-playing pop-folkie Noah Kahan; Jelly Roll, who started as a rapper before finding fame in Nashville; the British dance producer known as Fred again..; the R&B singer and actress Coco Jones; the husband-and-wife soul duo the War and Treaty; and two artists who have gotten a boost from their associations with Swift — the singer Gracie Abrams and the drill-meets-pop Bronx rapper Ice Spice.In past years, the Grammys have been criticized for failing to adequately reward female artists, and this year’s woman-heavy nominations will likely be welcomed in the industry as a sign of progress. Still, the key will be who ultimately wins.As always, the nominations included some surprises in the top tier, particularly when it came to country artists.Luke Combs, who had a cross-generational smash with a reverently faithful version of Tracy Chapman’s 1988 song “Fast Car,” got a nod for country solo performance, but not record of the year, which many in the industry had expected. (“Fast Car” was not, however, eligible for song of the year, since it had already been nominated for that award in the ’80s.)Zach Bryan, an admired songwriter who found chart success this year with a self-titled album, was recognized only in country categories, for that LP and for “I Remember Everything,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves. And Morgan Wallen, a streaming titan whose album “One Thing at a Time” was a blockbuster this year, is absent completely — a sign, perhaps, that the coastal industry mainstream has not forgiven Wallen for his use of a racial slur two years ago, as establishment Nashville seemingly has. (Wallen’s hit “Last Night” is up for best country song, though Wallen was not among its four writers.)Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said in an interview that the nominations simply reflect the musical judgment of the academy’s 11,000 or so voting members.“There’s really no other explanation or calculus here,” Mason said. “The voters come in, they listen to the music, and the stuff they like the best, and feel is the most excellent, they vote for.”The nominations arrive two days after Neil Portnow, a former academy chief, was sued in a New York court by an anonymous female musician who accused him of drugging and raping her five years ago. The suit also accused the academy of negligence.Portnow has denied the accusation, and the academy on Wednesday called the woman’s claims “without merit.” Mason declined to comment about the case.The major Grammy nominations this year largely hew to popular hits, and they notably over-index with female artists, though country and hip-hop are scarce in the top categories.In addition to LPs by SZA, Swift, Rodrigo, Cyrus, boygenius and Batiste, the album of the year slate includes Lana Del Rey’s “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” and Janelle Monáe’s “The Age of Pleasure.”Record of the year also includes Monét’s “On My Mama” and Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” from “Barbie.” Del Rey’s “A&W,” “What Was I Made For?” and another “Barbie” number, Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” round out song of the year.The number of slots on the ballot for the four top Grammy categories has been a moving target for years. This year, the academy set it to eight, after two years at 10. It was the third such change in five years.Among other rule changes this year, the academy moved the producer and songwriter of the year categories to the general field, which allows all voting members to vote on those awards.Nominees for producer of the year, nonclassical, include Jack Antonoff, known for his work with Swift and Del Rey; Daniel Nigro (Rodrigo); Hit-Boy (Nas, Don Toliver); Dernst Emile II, known as D’Mile (Monét); and Metro Boomin (Travis Scott; Drake & 21 Savage). Songwriter of the year, meant to recognize writers who largely work behind the scenes, has nods for Edgar Barrera, Jessie Jo Dillon, Shane McAnally, Theron Thomas and Justin Tranter.For best pop vocal album, Swift’s “Midnights,” Rodrigo’s “Guts” and Cyrus’s “Endless Summer Vacation” are up against Kelly Clarkson’s “Chemistry” and Ed Sheeran’s “-” (called “Subtract”).In the rap album category, Drake & 21 Savage’s collaboration “Her Loss” and Travis Scott’s “Utopia” will contend with Killer Mike’s “Michael,” Nas’s “King’s Disease III” and Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains.”For country album, Bryan’s LP is up along with Kelsea Ballerini’s “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” Lainey Wilson’s “Bell Bottom Country,” Tyler Childers’s “Rustin’ in the Rain” and the self-titled album by Brothers Osborne.The contenders for best rock album are Foo Fighters’ “But Here We Are,” Greta Van Fleet’s “Starcatcher,” Metallica’s “72 Seasons,” Paramore’s “This Is Why” and “In Times New Roman …” by Queens of the Stone Age.For best African music performance, a new category, the nominees are Asake & Olamide’s “Amapiano,” Burna Boy’s “City Boys,” Ayra Starr’s “Rush,” Tyla’s “Water,” and Davido’s “Unavailable,” which features Musa Keys.In the audiobook category, Michelle Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders will compete with Meryl Streep, William Shatner and the music producer Rick Rubin.At the ceremony in February, the academy will give out prizes in 94 categories — the most in 13 years. The organization slashed many awards in 2011, but since then the number has gradually crept back upThe 66th Grammys will recognize recordings released from Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 15, 2023 — an unusual eligibility window of 11 and a half months. This year, nearly 16,000 entries were submitted for consideration, down slightly from last year. More

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      The Friendship Harmonies of boygenius

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn 2018, the rising indie rock singers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus teamed up to form boygenius, a collaborative side project that quickly took on outsized importance. For fans, it reinforced the characteristics that made each singer so appealing individually, and also created a new layer of lore.The debut boygenius EP was released in 2018, but it wasn’t until last week that the group released its first full-length project, “The Record.” It continues the group’s familiar combination of emotionally acute songwriting, rich harmonies and inside-joke banter.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the music of boygenius overlaps with the solo work of its three members, the ways in which friendship can be rendered in musical terms and how even the most beloved artists can be subject to a backlash cycle.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticCat Zhang, an associate editor at PitchforkConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Indie-Rock Supergroup boygenius Returns, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kim Petras, Yaeji, Arlo Parks and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.boygenius, ‘$20’The indie-rock supergroup boygenius — featuring Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — never promised to be anything more than a one-off side project when it released an excellent six-song EP in 2018. But this week, the group returned with the promise of a full album and three new songs that prove that EP wasn’t a fluke. The poignant, Bridgers-led “Emily I’m Sorry” is a compassionate folk-rock portrait of a relationship on the brink of collapse, while Dacus steers the ship on the heartening “True Blue,” a vivid snapshot of a love that’s going stronger than ever. (“It feels good to be known so well,” Dacus sings. “I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself.”) The revelation, though, is “$20,” a chugging rocker that finds the band kicking into a whole new gear, and allows Baker to inhabit a swaggering persona. “It’s a bad idea and I’m all about it,” she sings, sketching a scene full of indelible images (“It’s an all night drive from your house to Reno, to the T-Bird graveyard where we play with fire”). Halfway through, “$20” takes a thrilling turn when all three members of the band start singing different refrains in a round: Their voices converge and collide before the song erupts in a conflagration of primal screams — playing with fire, indeed.Fenne Lily, ‘Lights Light Up’On “Lights Light Up,” from the forthcoming album “Big Picture,” the English singer-songwriter Fenne Lily’s smooth, arpeggiated guitar playing has the fluidity of a babbling brook, and her murmured vocals flow with a similar kind of serenity. An undercurrent of melancholy and loss emerges from her lyrics, though, which chronicle a gradual acceptance of loss: “You didn’t listen when I told you I’m no dancer,” she sings, “now I dance alone all the time.”Yaeji, ‘For Granted’The New York-based musician and producer Yaeji has released two acclaimed house-inspired EPs and an impressionistic 2020 mixtape, but on April 7 she’ll finally put out her first full-length album, “With a Hammer.” The debut single, the shape-shifting “For Granted,” is certainly promising — a playful, sing-songy synth-pop track that, halfway through, explodes into skittish euphoria. “When I think about it, I don’t even know,” she croons dreamily, before letting her concerns go: “So I stop the thinking, let it rest and I’ll flow.”Arlo Parks, ‘Weightless’Arlo Parks works through indecision on the driving “Weightless,” the first single from her second album “My Soft Machine.” “I don’t wanna wait for you,” the young British artist sings on the chorus, “but I need you so I won’t go.” With its persistent beat and whooshes of melodrama, “Weightless” is a departure from the more muted sound she explored on her debut, “Collapsed in Sunbeams,” but the vivid lyrics still showcase her signature poeticism: “Cardamom and jade as your eyes screamed,” she sings, “on the night you showed your volcanic side.”Kim Petras, ‘Brrr’Kim Petras plays ice queen on the bold, commanding “Brrr,” a synth-pop track as industrial and echoey as a walk-in freezer. “Why don’t you take it out on me, if you think you’re so cold?” she asks a prospective paramour, delivering the line like a seductive dare.Ice Spice and Lil Tjay, ‘Gangsta Boo’Ice Spice cuts right to the chase on “Gangsta Boo” — “A baddie got’ get what she like/So what’s your sign, ’cause I like you?” — one of three new songs released today on her debut EP “Like..?” Her trusted producer RIOTUSA speeds up and adds some percussive crunch to a sample of P. Diddy’s “I Need a Girl Part 2,” while fellow Bronx rapper Lil Tjay drops in for an exuberant guest verse. “Gangsta Boo” doesn’t have the venomous attitude that made Ice Spice’s breakout single “Munch (Feelin’ U)” pop, but her effortless charisma sells the track just the same. More

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      Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake’s Team-Up, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Shygirl, Ava Max, Horse Lords and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake, ‘Sin Fin’Ever the canny collaborator, Justin Timberlake joins Romeo Santos — formerly of the Dominican-rooted boy band Aventura, now a stadium act on his own — to pump up a typically imploring bachata. Both of them are sleek high tenors who can always sound like they’re eager for romance; both also know what it’s like to sing answered by ecstatic screams. “Sin Fin” (“Endless”) is a bilingual pop promise with a stalking undercurrent. Timberlake sings, “Can’t escape my love ’cause it’s yours/Even if you walk out the door it’ll chase you down.” It opens with cathedral-choir harmonies, then buttresses the bongos and syncopated guitar of bachata with pop’s synthesizers and hip-hop’s hype-man cheers. Melding bachata and power ballad, it still begs for love with high drama. JON PARELESAva Max, ‘Million Dollar Baby’Ava Max is partying like it’s 2000 and 2004 on the thumping “Million Dollar Baby,” a sleek, calisthenic pop song that name-checks Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner and interpolates “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” LeAnn Rimes’ once-inescapable “Coyote Ugly” theme song. (Who said Y2K nostalgia was dead!) While Max still hasn’t quite carved out a distinct persona in the pop sphere, she’s proven herself to be a satisfying practitioner of aughts-pop pastiche — there’s even a stuttering echo of “Bad Romance” on the bridge. “She broke out of her chains,” Max sings of her titular, diamond-encrusted heroine, “Turned the fire into rain.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Congratulations’On the booming power-pop track “Congratulations,” the Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey attempts to process the news that an ex is getting married: “Congratulations,” she sings, dripping with sarcasm, “so happy for your perfect life.” There’s pathos in her voice during the verses — “If I don’t care then why do I still think about you all the time?” — but the chorus is volcanic and cathartic, as Lahey’s colossal guitar tones swell like a sudden surge of inner strength. ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Nike’“Peri-peri, too hot to handle,” the London-based Shygirl boasts with cool confidence on “Nike,” the latest single from her forthcoming debut album, “Nymph.” While the previous songs she’s released from the record have been glitchy and ethereal — think hyperpop crossed with “Visions”-era Grimes — “Nike” is all woozy low-end and spotlit swagger. “He tell me, ‘Nike, just do it,” Shygirl intones on the track (which was produced by the British electronic artist Mura Masa), her delivery full of winking, sensual charisma. ZOLADZHorse Lords, ‘Mess Mend’The instrumental “Mess Mend,” by the Baltimore band Horse Lords, starts out skewed — with chords from a slightly detuned piano hitting unevenly on offbeats — and gets nuttier from there, with a tricky 7/4 meter, a guitar melody that suggests a non-Euclidean hoedown and a gradual devolution into a funky electronic drone, not to mention a final twist. It’s a brainy lark. PARELESVDA, ‘Môgô Kélé’VDA — short for Voix des Anges — is a vocal duo from Ivory Coast that has become a consistent hitmaker in the Ivorian pop style called zouglou, which floats suavely sustained vocals over brisk polyrhythms and glossy synthesizers: airborne tracks that often hold sociopolitical messages. Above the speedy six-beat rhythms of “Môgô Kélé” — a hyperactive mesh of drums, marimbas, flutes and call-and-response vocals — VOA sings about easing tensions that have risen lately between Mali and Ivory Coast, citing their longstanding historical ties. The video shows jailed soldiers; it also gives the VDA a backdrop of both countries’ flags and words like “la paix,” “fraternité” and “union,” while the music sparkles and bounds ahead. PARELESDanielle Ponder, ‘Only the Lonely’“Love is lost and I must walk away,” Danielle Ponder sings, with mournful resolution, in “Only the Lonely,” a ballad that fights back any regrets with the certainty that “You don’t love me, you just lonely.” As the track rises from hollow keyboard tones to grand orchestral melancholy, Ponder’s voice opens up to reveal its bluesy power, with ghosts of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By the end she finds herself, once again, nearly alone. PARELESCarm featuring Edie Brickell, ‘More and More’CJ Camerieri, who records as Carm, plays brass instruments in yMusic, a contemporary chamber ensemble he co-founded; he has also backed Bon Iver and Paul Simon. In his own music, he often multitracks his trumpet and French horn into a supportive brass choir, as he does in “More and More,” a collaboration with Edie Brickell as a topliner. She sings about love, almost diffidently, amid sustained swells of brasses and strings. an electronic drumbeat and some echoing trumpet calls raise tensions, only to dissolve them in the undulating warmth of Carm’s orchestrations. PARELESWild Pink featuring Julien Baker, ‘Hold My Hand’John Ross, who leads Wild Pink, went through extensive cancer treatment between the band’s 2021 debut album and its coming one, “ILYSM.” He has explained that “Hold My Hand” came from a moment of “lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under.” As he whisper-sings to ask, “Will you be there when I come around,” joined by Julien Baker sounding delicate and fond, the band rolls through four rising chords again and again, promising nothing but reassurance. PARELESDawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, ‘Vantablack’The ever-evolving, impossible-to-pigeonhole Dawn Richard once again introduces a new side of herself on the first movement of “Pigments,” an upcoming collaborative album she made with the experimentalist Spencer Zahn. Each track on the album is named for a specific hue: “Coral,” “Sandstone,” “Indigo,” and “Vantablack” make up “Movement 1,” which the pair released in full this week. The culmination “Vantablack” is a tranquil, abstract, and utterly gorgeous contemporary classical soundscape populated by lilting clarinet, Zahn’s airy bass playing, and above it all Richard’s fluttering vocals, which profess a deep and radical comfort in her own skin. ZOLADZSteve Lehman and Sélébéyone, ‘Poesie I’In the hip-hop-jazz-avant-electroacoustic group Sélébéyone — which means “intersection” in the West African language Wolof — the saxophonist, composer and producer Steve Lehman collaborates with rappers from New York City (HPrizm from the Antipop Consortium) and Dakar (Gaston Bandimic), a saxophonist from Paris (Maciek Lasserre) and a drummer based in Brooklyn (Damion Reid). The group’s second album, “Xaybu: the Unseen,” pushes its previous ambitions further. “Poesie I” knocks its rhythms around with piano clusters, drumming that keeps moving the downbeat, hopscotching saxophone lines and a rap from HPrizm that keeps switching up its flow: “These words don’t fit so I’m forcing ‘em in/smashing the edges,” he declares. PARELES More

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      The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks from Alvvays, Tyshawn Sorey, Killer Mike and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.The 1975, ‘Part of the Band’Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine.” He also queries, “Am I ironically woke?” The production wanders from chugging string ensemble to fingerpicked folk-rock to saxophone choir, with all of them mingling near the end. It’s pandemic confusion, self-questioning and ennui, with melodies to spare. JON PARELESAlvvays, ‘Pharmacist’A plain-spoken, everyday admission — “I know you’re back, I saw your sister at the pharmacy” — kick-starts the latest single from the Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays; as soon as the vocalist Molly Rankin sings that line, the song suddenly transforms into a fantasia of melancholic melody and squalling guitars. Hints of My Bloody Valentine and Japanese Breakfast hang in the hazy atmosphere, but Rankin’s bittersweet delivery gives “Pharmacist,” the opening track from the upcoming album “Blue Rev,” a distinct emotional undertow, like a stirring dream that ends a little too soon. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulien Baker, ‘Guthrie’“Guthrie” is a quietly harrowing postscript to Julien Baker’s 2021 album “Little Oblivions” from a collection, “B-Sides,” being released later this month. Like “Little Oblivions,” the song confronts what it’s like to be an addict: “Whatever I get, I always need a little more,” she sings. But while Baker overdubbed herself into a rock band on “Little Oblivions,” in “Guthrie” she’s solo, picking a soothing waltz on her guitar as she tears into her own failings. The song is a crisis of conscience and of faith, with a voice humbled by self-knowledge. “Wanted so bad to be good,” she offers, “but there’s no such thing.” PARELESKing Princess, ‘Change the Locks’“A year without no separation just might have broke us, baby,” King Princess sings in “Change the Locks,” a song about how pandemic proximity — and friction — could destroy a relationship. It’s three-chord folk-rock that explodes into hard rock when King Princess (the Brooklyn songwriter Mikaela Strauss) realizes how bad things have gotten. She wants to hold on; she knows she can’t. PARELESFlo, ‘Immature’English R&B lags American innovations by years or sometimes decades. The vocal trio Flo is catching up with what American acts like Destiny’s Child accomplished in the 1990s: calling out male assumptions while mastering recording techniques and harnessing voices, instruments and machines to sharpen their message of self-determination. The way Flo juggles individual voices and two or three-part harmonies, flirtation and fury, harks back to Destiny’s Child, but unerringly: “Why you gotta be so immature,” they sing, adding “Tell me how can I relate/If you don’t communicate?” Even before a crying-baby sample slips into the mix, it’s easy to know who’s in the wrong. PARELESGhetto Kumbé, ‘Pila Pila (Trooko Remix)’Ghetto Kumbé is a group from Bogotá that fortifies Afro-Colombian drumming and socially conscious lyrics with electronics; it released a potent self-titled debut album in 2020 and has opened for Radiohead. The group handed over tracks from its album to various producers for “Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes,” an album due in November. “Pila Pila,” a brawny tribute to the power of drums, got reworked by the Grammy-winning Honduran producer Trooko (who worked on “Residente” and “The Hamilton Mixtape”). He revved it up even further, switching the meter from 6/4 to 4/4, moving its incantatory lead vocal to the start of the song and bringing in a hopping salsa bass line, electronic hoots, jazzy piano and twitchy drum machines, constantly hurtling ahead. PARELESKiller Mike featuring Young Thug, ‘Run’A verse from a still-jailed Young Thug only adds to the urgency of “Run,” Killer Mike’s first new track as a solo artist since his vital 2012 album “R.A.P. Music.” Across four fruitful albums with Run the Jewels, it’s become commonplace to hear Mike rapping over El-P’s kinetic, collagelike beats, but it’s refreshing here to hear him link up once again with the veteran No I.D., whose understated production allows Killer Mike to tap into a smoother flow. “The race to freedom ain’t won,” he raps on the chorus, providing some welcome counterprogramming to your standard Independence Day jingoism. ZOLADZDomi & JD Beck (featuring Anderson .Paak), ‘Take a Chance’Jazz might be one of the only spaces left where the term “internet star” still means anything. Domi & JD Beck are Exhibit A, a duo of virtuosic post-jazz Zoomers who seem to have leaped out of a cartoon, and whose wow factor is suited to the small screen: A blond keyboardist rips solos while a diminutive drummer taps out hyper-contained, hyperactive beats. References to jazz history are funneled into the aesthetics of a sped-up TV jingle. Domi and Beck have found a champion in Anderson .Paak, and their debut album, “Not Tight,” is being jointly released by his new label and Blue Note Records. Redolent of lounge, ’70s fusion, trip-hop and breakbeat, this LP offers the nonstop dopamine drip of a doom-scroll, and it’s heavy on star features: Thundercat, Snoop Dogg and Mac DeMarco all pull up. “Take a Chance” is their moment with Paak, and if his earnest, rapped pledges of devotion don’t exactly square with the song’s feel-good vibes and the geometrically sound pop hook that Domi and Beck sing, you’re hard-pressed to hold it against them. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘Enchantment’A multi-instrumentalist, composer, University of Pennsylvania professor and MacArthur “genius” grantee, Tyshawn Sorey is likely to be found writing suite-length experimental works, or serving as composer in residence with an opera company, or conjuring up new systems for group improvisation. It’s been a long time since anyone really thought of him as “just” a jazz drummer. So, for Sorey, recording an album of standards with a piano trio qualifies as a curve ball. Of course, he has a big fondness for throwing curves. Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon. Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” is usually played as a tautly rhythmic samba, but the trio retrofits it, with Diehl putting the lush precision of his harmonies to work over a loose-limbed, shuffling beat from Sorey. RUSSONELLO More

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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