You can't always know that it's a great year for new music while it's happening, but there was a sense from the very start of 2024 that we were in for a ride. A springtime gauntlet of weekly album drops by the industry's biggest stars was regularly interrupted by wildly inventive newcomers arriving out of nowhere, underground favorites reaching new heights and elders making vital statements. (For the record, just one of those reigning champions made our final list. Plenty of the challengers did.) Sometimes the sheer amount of great albums out each week could feel disorienting — June 7 was quite a day — but the abundance, looking back, is clearly a gift. We kept our ears open all year.
Here's the result of that listening: our picks for the best albums of 2024. Fifty albums to give you something to hold onto when things get overwhelming, or to keep your head spinning with new sounds and ideas. They're presented chronologically and unranked, though we've adorned NPR Music's picks for the best of the best — a baker's dozen, perfect for a year overflowing with great music — with a crown.
Kali Uchis
ORQUÍDEAS
Label: Geffen
Release Date: January 12
There is a seductive, disarming sweetness to the paisa accent of Colombian women. Perhaps that's why Kali Uchis, who was born in Virginia and grew up between the U.S. and her family's native country, fought with a former label to let her make music in Spanish. On her fourth LP and second Spanish-language project, ORQUÍDEAS — named after Colombia's national flower — Uchis' voice and vision is finally in full bloom.
She purrs her way from a fluttering falsetto on "¿Cómo Así?"" to the full-bodied, revenge-fueled wails of the bolero "Te Mata." Uchis has long made divine femininity a central motif of her work, complete with glittery pop melodies and whispered prayers. But in the second half of ORQUÍDEAS, silky synths and moonlit musings descend into a raunchier, grittier party. She ramps things up with JT and El Alfa on dembow standout "Muñekita," then slides into a sweaty, sapphic duet with Karol G before landing on her grand finale: an escalating merengue medley that immediately demands a dancing partner and a shot of guaro. —Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
▶️ Stream Orquídeas by Kali Uchis
Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey
Compassion
Label: ECM
Release Date: February 2
Turbulence and grace are coequal forces on Compassion, the second album by a powerfully perceptive all-star piano trio. Spearheaded by pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, it's recognizably stamped by his point of view, which favors brisk, slippery kineticism and a trust in the collective ideal. That trust is beautifully placed in two exceptionally astute partners: Linda May Han Oh, a bassist who imparts the sensation of a deep moving current; and Tyshawn Sorey, an ever-surprising drummer who released a stunning trio album of his own this year. The original compositions refer obliquely but sincerely to pandemic losses ("Panegyric," "Tempest") and personal heroes ("Arch," for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "Prelude: Orison," for Iyer's father). But these musicians put an equally distinctive spin on some material by shared touchstones: the experimental composer and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, the bridge-building pianist Geri Allen, the openhearted soul magus Stevie Wonder. —Nate Chinen, WRTI
▶️ Stream Compassion by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey
Mk.gee
Two Star & The Dream Police
Label: R&R
Release Date: February 9
Where the hell did Mk.gee come from? Before this year, the 28-year-old singer-songwriter and music school dropout from New Jersey was largely known for his songwriting and production collaborations with Dijon. But in the months since dropping his spellbinding debut rock album, Two Star & The Dream Police, Mk.gee has cemented himself as his generation's guitar god in an era devoid of them, steadily building an impassioned fanbase who seek to replicate his mysterious playing style and clamor to see him repeat songs in his sets (he once played a song 12 times) at his energetic sold-out shows. But it's not just unearned hype. On Two Star & The Dream Police, Mk.gee confidently melds the soft sounds and yearning styles of '80s rock, from U2 to The Blue Nile, with his distinctive guitar finger-picking to create a feverish, instantly replayable blur of an album. —Hazel Cills
▶️ Stream Two Star & The Dream Police by Mk.gee
Madi Diaz
Weird Faith
Label: ANTI-
Release Date: February 9
Madi Diaz has spent many years bouncing around as an industry lifer, moving from Nashville to L.A. and back, writing songs for pop and country stars (Kesha, Little Big Town), releasing her own rich and deeply perceptive records, and even touring with Harry Styles. With Weird Faith, she follows her stunning 2021 breakup record History of a Feeling with an equally gripping set of songs about uncertainty — navigating the pitfalls of new love, wrestling with existential questions and generally surveying the minefields that forever lie ahead.
Diaz keeps her arrangements spare, which lets the occasional swell of voices or orchestration hit that much harder. It also draws the listener's attention ever closer to her clear, plainspoken examinations of life's risks, questions, doubts and — maybe, if everything goes just right — triumphs. —Stephen Thompson
▶️ Stream Weird Faith by Madi Diaz
Hurray For The Riff Raff
The Past Is Still Alive
Label: Nonesuch
Release Date: February 23
Across Hurray for the Riff Raff's eighth studio album, Alynda Segarra tells several stories about America through their history as a hitchhiker and train hopper. "People who sleep outside [have] a form of expertise about what's going on in this country," Segarra told World Cafe. The Past Is Still Alive reclaims some aspects of patriotism to redistribute power to the people living on the margins of society. Their journey is storied with misadventures: eating from the garbage ("Hourglass"); finding community in a "barrel of freaks" ("Snake Plant"); ducking from gunfire at a gay bar ("Colossus of Roads"). "Say goodbye to America / I wanna see it dissolve / I can be your poster boy for the great American fall," they sing on the latter, making way for deeper understanding, desire, freedom and survival. —Elle Mannion
▶️ Stream The Past Is Still Alive by Hurray For The Riff Raff
ScHoolboy Q
Blue Lips
Label: Top Dawg Entertainment
Release Date: March 1
Rappers have been innovating on ways to say "I'm Bad" since L.L. started grabbing his crotch in his grandma's basement. But nobody in 2024 bested ScHoolboy Q, with a line buried like a gold nugget on an album full of uncut gems: "I ain't never met God but I bet he know me," became the ultimate flex as soon as "Yeern 101," Blue Lips' first official single, dropped in February. When the album came two weeks later, it was the first sign that hip-hop gon' be alright after a 50th-anniversary year in which the genre's biggest names collectively took an unpaid vacay from the Billboard charts. Meanwhile, Q had been quietly woodshedding for the last five years on a psychedelic gangsta-rap opus, full of obscure samples, beat switches and the ruminations of an ex-pill popping, hood politickin, dad rapper approaching middle age and loving it. Blue Lips is the sound of maturing gracefully, from an artist nearly 20 years in the game and still feeling himself. —Rodney Carmichael
▶️ Stream Blue Lips by ScHoolboy Q
Experiential Orchestra
American Counterpoints
Label: Bright Shiny Things
Release Date: March 1
After the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, steps (albeit small ones) have been taken to better represent the work of Black American composers, past and present. This important — arguably long overdue — album spotlights two versatile mid-20th century artists whose music fell into neglect. The once-celebrated Julia Perry died in 1979, leaving her arresting violin concerto in disarray. Recently reconstructed, it receives a committed performance by Curtis Stewart, keen to the score's chromatic nuances. Her Prelude is serene, unlike the experimental Symphony in One Movement, which probes dark harmonies with the urgency of a search party. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, an agile pianist-composer who collaborated with Max Roach and Marvin Gaye, channels Handel in his neoclassical Sinfonietta No. 1 and conjures gritty southern styles in Louisiana Blues Strut: A Cakewalk for Violin. These strong performances by the Experiential Orchestra will hopefully spark a resurgence in the music of these exceptional composers. —Tom Huizenga
▶️ Stream American Counterpoints by Experiential Orchestra
Kim Gordon
The Collective
Label: Matador
Release Date: March 8
"The song is breathing down my back, breathing down my neck," Kim Gordon sings half-way through her second solo album, The Collective. Every single song on this intimidating, arty, wildly cool album breathes down your neck. Over abrasive beats and heavy guitar reverb produced by collaborator Justin Raisen, Gordon lets her art school freak flag fly higher here than she ever did in Sonic Youth. Across 11 tracks, she spins up a collection of poetic, Dadaist songs, deadpanning in a whisper about everything from misogyny, the Los Angeles art scene, gift shop purchases, gun worship, influencer culture and what might be the most chilling (and somehow sexy) song ever written about bowling. It's fun, it's a nightmare, it's an album about the American dream that only Gordon could pull off. —Hazel Cills
▶️ Stream The Collective by Kim Gordon
Waxahatchee
Tigers Blood
Label: ANTI-
Release Date: March 22
Katie Crutchfield's melodies veer around like unchecked feelings, but on Tigers Blood this indie royal has never been more in control. Having claimed her friends and foes, turned a love match into a working partnership and faced up to the limits — and possibilities — of giving yourself to rock and roll, Crutchfield frees herself completely in these rambling yet tightly executed songs. "We can roll around in the disarray," she sings in "Evil Spawn," nailing every syllable to the snap of Spencer Tweedy's drums as she perfectly captures the earnest extravagance of making creativity the center of your world. Crutchfield's love songs acknowledge monogamy's challenges, her self-assessments have swagger and she redefines the very idea of "adult" music, saying it's possible to keep a little wildness at the core of a fully realized life. —Ann Powers
▶️ Stream Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee
Tyla
Tyla
Label: Epic
Release Date: March 22
"They ain't never had a pretty girl from Joburg, see me now and that's what they prefer." If 2023's "Water" was any indication of Tyla's star power, then her self-titled debut cements it. On this album, Tyla creates a formula that has global appeal while keeping true to herself: Anchored by the South African pulse of amapiano, Tyla brims with energy, ambition and a clear sense of identity. There are many standout moments — the Aaliyah-infused "On and On" and Tyla's mesmerizing vocals on "Butterflies" — but perhaps the most powerful is when she teams up with Nigerian R&B princess Tems for the confidence-boosting "No. 1." With this debut, she's not only positioned herself as thee African popstar, but also carving out space for a new generation of African artists on the global stage. —Ashley Pointer
Rosie Tucker
UTOPIA NOW!
Label: Sentimental
Release Date: March 22
"What you give to me no one can frack / What you give to me cannot owe bail / What you give to me no app can track," Los Angeles indie-rocker Rosie Tucker sings on UTOPIA NOW! The lyric demonstrates something at which Tucker is especially talented: moving deftly between big-picture societal critiques and dialed-in personal intimacies, often from one line to the next. The album, which Tucker wrote in the aftermath of being dropped from their label, chronicles (among many things; Tucker created a Wiki compiling all the references on the album) the perils of the music industry and the failures of technology. But Tucker's erudition doesn't come at the cost of the music's playfulness; it's a guitar record after all, and the production is experimental, with literal bells and whistles (and car horns and dog barks) layered throughout. And Tucker is truly funny as a lyricist, slipping one-liner zingers into songs that are existential and anti-capitalist, making listeners sit with our complicit consumerism. —Elle Mannion
▶️ Stream UTOPIA NOW! by Rosie Tucker
Amaia Miranda
Mientras vivas brillas
Label: Vida
Release Date: March 22
Let this be the official acknowledgment: My Alt.Latino co-host Anamaria Sayre turned me on to this Basque artist, and for that I am eternally grateful. Amaia Miranda is part of a cohort of musicians from northern Spain creating new musical expressions based on existing traditions, but with 2020s sensibilities. I was completely enchanted by the quiet beauty of her acoustic guitar meditations and wondered how I've lived so long without her music in my life. OK, turns out she's only been releasing music since 2017, but such is the hold her music has on me now that I know. —Felix Contreras
▶️ Stream Mientras vivas brillas by Amaia Miranda
Beyoncé
Cowboy Carter
Label: Columbia
Release Date: March 29
The origin story of Beyoncé's latest album — a rebuke to those who questioned her legitimacy after she performed at the 2016 CMA Awards — is well known. But to assume that Act II: Cowboy Carter is just an album of personal retribution is to miss her doctorate-level dissertation on the depths of country's Black roots and its all-American recuperation.
Cowboy Carter manages to expand a Black-birthed genre and meditate on what dismantling genre altogether can mean. The album's 27 tracks unfurl lifetimes of knowledge. Bey reminisces. She teaches. She raps. She writhes. She do-si-dos. She soothes her babies with lullabies and reloads the gun for her hangman on some "'03 Bonnie and Clyde" role revisal. She bows down to unsung trailblazer Linda Martell. She traces her family tree. She calls herself home.
While Toni Morrison taught us that the "function of racism is to distract," the function of appropriation is to abstract; to steal so specifically that over time, you can make someone forget what's theirs in the first place. Cowboy Carter reclaims what's been abstracted with a spiritual, silly, kaleidoscopic precision. On the resounding "AMEN," Bey holds a funeral for the "old ideas" that this music was never Black people's to enjoy and occupy. After one spin of this album, you won't be able to claim you didn't know ever again. —Sidney Madden
▶️ Stream Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé
Fabiana Palladino
Fabiana Palladino
Label: XL Recordings
Release Date: April 5
The vibes are immaculate on Fabiana Palladino's debut album. Her pedigree is, too: She's the daughter of Pino Palladino, an in-demand session bassist since the early 1980s (both of her parents, plus her brother and sister, contribute here, giving it the feel of an intimate coming-out party) and she was mentored by Jai Paul, a reclusive singer and producer whose limited output is balanced by the reverberations of his influence (check out the guitar sound on Mk.gee's Two Star & The Dream Police for more proof). It's crucial to mention this background, but just as important to discard it, because Fabiana Palladino belongs completely to its namesake, a writer and producer of immediate distinction.
Fans of sophisticated, richly textured pop (Solange, Jessie Ware) will find rewards for days here. Palladino's songs feel bound to the early 1980s moment when experimental synth production was at pop's vanguard. Tastefully-retro keyboard sounds, shuddering guitar parts and multi-tracked backing vocals all jump out of the mix, but everything remains in perfect balance. These 10 songs play out like a classic '80s LP, with big hooks on side A, but don't sleep on the back half, where Palladino's skills as an arranger reach swoon-inducing heights. —Jacob Ganz
▶️ Stream Fabiana Palladino by Fabiana Palladino
Maya Beiser
Maya Beiser x Terry Riley: In C
Label: Islandia Music
Release Date: April 5
Sixty years ago, Terry Riley's groundbreaking In C debuted in San Francisco, helping to usher in the minimalist movement in music. Over the years, his sparse, one-page score of 53 modular "riffs" has been performed by groups as diverse as a Chinese orchestra, musicians from Mali and a Japanese acid rock band. But none of these (nor many other renditions) offers the deep, trance-inducing grooves laid down by so few instruments — just Beiser's cello (with a looping machine) and a pair of percussionists. She unspools long, droning lines, like bolts of fabric in the wind, as the low C string of her cello caroms off the drummers' beat. There are moments of serene repose, also headbanging grunge, redolent of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." The project started as a whimsical surprise gift for Riley. It continued with his blessing, and pulses on for all to get lost in. —Tom Huizenga
Ekko Astral
pink balloons
Label: Topshelf
Release Date: April 17
So rare that a debut album announces a punk band so fully, loudly and, well — in a year that's celebrated highly chaotic energy — so damn brat. In the first 60 seconds of pink balloons, you get an immediate sense of Ekko Astral: throttling bass fuzz, bottom heavy drums, noisy guitar squall and the snotty snarl of Jael Holzman's voice. Each song is a confetti cannon stuffed with an unknown pink substance leaking out the sides, not only daring you to thrash, but dance. But even more than a cathartic set of punk anthems, Ekko Astral captures the feeling of falling apart together: How else can we cope with the anxiety and exhaustion of existence, religion and gender-based violence than in the company of comrades? pink balloons wants to hold space for empathy, but also, as Holzman cheekily offers, "Carly Rae Jepsen with a broadsword." —Lars Gotrich
▶️ Stream pink balloons by Ekko Astral
claire rousay
sentiment
Label: Thrill Jockey
Release Date: April 19
In claire rousey's music, hushed, seemingly insignificant beats of everyday life are often focused in on and magnified into moments of beauty. The experimental artist and composer is known for her prolific, disparate body of largely ambient music that makes great use of found sound (iPhone voice memos, field recordings) and her own Auto-Tuned vocals. But on sentiment, rousay pushes her uncategorizable work the closest it's ever been to something resembling singer-songwriter music, turning totally inward and pairing her introspective writing with emo guitar and strings. The result is a quietly powerful album that surfaces the artist's potent self-criticisms and ruminations on loneliness, and in its constantly mutating, delicate sound creates the devastating feeling of wanting for more. —Hazel Cills
▶️ Stream sentiment by claire rousay
Luiza Brina
Prece
Label: self-released
Release Date: April 30
The Brazilian singer-songwriter Luiza Brina calls these non-religious prayers calls for peace, salves for broken hearts, and announcements of arrivals and departures in life. She looks to Brazilian music masters for inspiration — the psychedelic symphonies of Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa come to mind, as well as Milton Nascimento's tender sambas — but through a concave lens. Her soft-yet-commanding voice, nimble nylon guitar picking and orchestral arrangements expand outward with bombastic synths and more subtle electronic textures, crafting a sound that's right now, with a host of collaborators from Brazil's past and present. (And, if you'll forgive a brief tangent, 2024 was an incredible year for albums from Brazilians: Amaro Freitas, Sítio Rosa, Rogê, Milton Nascimento with esperanza spalding, to name a few.) There's a restrained ambition to Prece — a promise of something bigger than the prayers contained. A quiet, yet colossal record. —Lars Gotrich
▶️ Stream Prece by Luiza Brina
Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch
Label: Mexican Summer
Release Date: May 3
Before you hear Jessica Pratt's unmistakable voice on Here in the Pitch, there are signs that the singer is working with an ambitious new palette. Drums thud and echo a familiar boom-pitter-pat as strings float in like rays of a long-awaited sunrise. And then, as if echoing down a smoke-filled hallway leading out of a dream, Pratt sings, her voice an uncanny mix of regret and resignation: "Life is … it's never what you think it's for." That lyrical head fake, two words into her fourth album (her first in five years and by a wide margin her best) gives a sense of what makes Here in the Pitch so special. It's an album of displacement — temporal and psychological — that manages to find its own plane of existence.
Naturally, references to the past are part of the album's fabric. Foremost, to rock and roll before it became "rock" — those early 1960s acts still tugged by widescreen country storytelling, smoky basement jazz crooning and studio strings — as well as the revivalists who have draped themselves in its image in each decade since. But Here in the Pitch avoids feeling overtly retro by being utterly enveloping (an attribute it shares with Cindy Lee's rapturously received Diamond Jubilee). "It's the age of what's to come," Pratt sings later in "Life Is." Here in the Pitch is a handbook for keeping your balance when life is turning upside down around you. —Jacob Ganz
▶️ Stream Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown
Label: Domino
Release Date: May 17
The two most established public truths about the singer Beth Gibbons — that she is the lead vocalist of the trailblazing trip-hop group Portishead and a notoriously off-the-record person — are complicated by her solo debut, Lives Outgrown. Ten years in the making, the album introduces a brand new sound world of hushed chamber folk, using its delicately layered, splendidly crafted arrangements and their faintly rhythmic thrust to reveal more of herself than ever before. Wraithlike and pensive, its penetrating music meditates on maturity as a process, with all of its aches and hard lessons. The album can feel haunted in similar ways to the striking Portishead classics, but it is a personal sanctum all to itself that seems possessed by its own myths and folklore. Death and loss loom large, but Gibbons' spindly voice remains steadfast. Clear-sighted through an encroaching gloom, an anxious artist seems determined to fortify herself through doubt. —Sheldon Pearce
▶️ Stream Lives Outgrown by Beth Gibbons
Angelica Garcia
Gemelo
Label: Partisan
Release Date: June 7
The brilliance of Angélica Garcia is in her malleability. The layers of intricately arranged emotion and cultural commentary come from excavating varieties of sound that feel spatially boundless. There's a neatness to the chaos on Gemelo. The album charts massive moments of transformation and rebirth as the Mexican-American singer carefully explores the duality of her core rhythm. She wrestles with twin identities, spirit and body, beauty and pain. There is a fixed, eternal conflict inherent to Mexican-ness, children of the colonizer and the colonized. Mexican philosopher Octavio Paz posits this as the explanation for our embracing of equal parts joy and sorrow. These two states of being are irreconcilable, so we bask in the glory of their messy collision. Amidst guttural cries and electro-cumbia rhythms, Garcia builds solace in extremity and acceptance. "To a certain extent, we have a choice of how we frame things," she explained regarding the record. "Pain can be another color, and the more colors I have — it just means that I lived." —Anamaria Sayre
▶️ Stream Gemelo by Angélica Garcia
Kaytranada
TIMELESS
Label: RCA
Release Date: June 7
Longtime listeners of Kaytranada know his sound instantly — that effortless bounce, its undeniable grooves and precision. Building off of the sonic diversity of 2016's 99.9% and the collaborative spirit of 2019's BUBBA, TIMELESS delivers all of these hallmarks across a whopping 21 tracks that offer surprises without straying too far away from his signature style. "Video" with Ravyn Lenae and "Feel a Way" featuring Don Toliver feel overdue in the best way, while powerhouse vocalist Durand Bernarr makes a triumphant return, adding to the album's mix of the fresh and the nostalgic. No matter whether you're entertaining friends or unwinding solo, TIMELESS has something for everyone — securing Kaytranada's place as a masterful producer who knows how to keep the party going, or just help you vibe out. —Ashley Pointer
▶️ Stream TIMELESS by Kaytranada
Charli xcx
brat
Label: Atlantic
Release Date: June 7
Sometimes when I survey the artists who've dominated our mainstream pop landscape for the last few years, I feel like I'm staring down a ballot to nominate America's homecoming queen and king. Everyone's so squeaky clean and inoffensive, so gracious and self-edited. But in 2024 we got Charli xcx, as if emerging from cutting class to smoke in the girls bathroom all these years, to release her irresistibly chaotic brat. For over a decade, the artist has been circling a commercial breakthrough, her records largely relegated to cult classics. But brat is her most thrilling release in years, a fast and furious electro-pop album that twists and turns between its bitchy, party girl persona and Charli's stark anxieties that flare underneath it. And even as it was memed into oblivion, garnering TikTok dances and a mention from Kamala Harris' campaign, brat's cool factor never waned, boosted months after its release by an equally incredible remix version. Now that's, like, so brat. —Hazel Cills
Tems
Born in the Wild
Label: RCA
Release Date: June 7
"This is for the girl in the dark / This is for the one tryna make it right / This is for the one waiting for the sunrise / This is for the one with a voice inside." The parting message on Tems' debut album commemorates her artistic awakening — one that's prompted a seismic shift in music. Since 2018, the Nigerian phenom knows full well that she's set the tone for African artists attracting global ears ("Yeah, I'm the one that got the scene bangin' " she blazons on "Wickedest") but throughout the LP, she reiterates that her confidence comes from the knowledge that she's covered by God during all her most daring moves. Born in the Wild weaves the soundwaves of her Lagos and London upbringing with a playful bravado delivered through her unforgettably rich alto. "It was night in my life, for so long, that I just thought it was never coming," she told me during Born in the Wild's release. But this classic album celebrates the divinity of trusting the light that burns within us all. —Sidney Madden
▶️ Stream Born in the Wild by Tems
Gabriela Ortiz
Revolución Diamantina
Label: Platoon
Release Date: June 7
This dazzling, multi-Grammy-nominated album starring celebrity conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic should give the hard-working 59-year-old Mexican composer the widespread recognition she deserves. In three disparate works, the album proves Ortiz as a distinctive master of color and rhythm. The 43-minute ballet Revolución Diamantina tackles her homeland's history of violence against women with whiplash Stravinskian beats, percussive commentary from a chorus and, oddly, a pinch of humor. The violin concerto Altar de cuerda sports modernist hues (think Messiaen and Ligeti) with a cinematic, diaphanous central movement inspired by Mexico's 16th-century open-air churches. A seven-minute show-stopper, Kauyumari is fueled by a perky folk melody that continually transforms and finally blossoms into a jubilant frenzy. It's intoxicating music that, in a just world, should be played by orchestras around the globe. —Tom Huizenga
▶️ Stream Revolución Diamantina by Gabriela Ortiz
Rema
HEIS
Label: Interscope
Release Date: July 10
As the wunderkind of Afrobeats, Rema has watched the growth of the continent's modern genre parallel his own coming of age. And coming off his 2022 crossover success with the catchy, PG-rated "Calm Down" remix featuring Selena Gomez, the 24-year-old singer could have easily coasted on some highly lucrative Afropop laurels. Instead, the Remy Boy grabbed the steering wheel and jerked attention back to his roots of Benin City, Nigeria, with HEIS.
During its all-too-brief 28 minutes, the album is bold, shadowy, roving and all-consuming. Adrenaline rush standouts "MARCH AM," "YAYO," "OZEBA," and "HEIS" drive home Rema's statement that no matter how popular it becomes, the ancestral sounds of African music can never be diluted. It's exactly what the genre called for at this moment and a project that will go down as a powerful turning point in his career. —Sidney Madden
Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer
Label: Dead Oceans
Release Date: July 12
Omakase berries are a strawberry varietal only found, in nature, in the foothills of the Japanese Alps. Today, though, they're grown in vertical greenhouses and sold at Eataly for five dollars a pop. In "Omakase," sophisti-pop auteur Cassandra Jenkins dreams that she feeds the rare berries to her lover (who is, she murmurs, her light and destroyer); turning into coyotes, they lick the seeds from each others' teeth. Such surreal magic abounds on this gorgeous collection of synth-kissed reveries: in "Petco," she locks eyes with a lizard and finds dubious communion; "Clams Casino" describes depression through images of stray hairs in hotel beds and mysterious encounters in hotel restaurants. The music that makes Jenkins' stories glow is uncanny, too: retrofuturistic and intimate, modestly psychedelic, punctuated by interludes that feature French murmurs and her mother, a science teacher, enthusing about the stars. Twenty-first century intimacy is strange — established virtually, regulated pharmaceutically, threatened by existential unease. My Light, My Destroyer captures its plastic, fragile heart. —Ann Powers
▶️ Stream My Light, My Destroyer by Cassandra Jenkins
Remi Wolf
Big Ideas
Label: Island
Release Date: July 12
She knows how to disco, but don't call her a revivalist: Though Remi Wolf's songs can feel like stepping through a magic wardrobe packed with shakers and ankle bells, there's no separating them from the anxieties of the here and now. Hence, Big Ideas, a step up in craft and a pivot out in theme from 2021's toy-chest charmer Juno, complicating her roller-jam confessions with the new twist of being a quasi-famous person, bound to the rules of the road. Desire moves differently here: Borrowed luxury is all around, tempting you to binge appetizers and small talk at the media party, before serving fierce emotional hangover when the lights come on. Situationships get physical in stolen moments, bodies lathered in fancy hotel soap, but beyond each euphoric peak is a valley of longing to darken your alone time. Spite is a hell of a drug, especially when leveled at that ex who's doing just a little too well without you. To catalog this many relatable, regrettable micro-feelings in one place would have been impressive enough; she didn't have to make the thing so damn danceable, too. —Daoud Tyler-Ameen
▶️ Stream Big Ideas by Remi Wolf
JPEGMAFIA
I Lay Down My Life For You
Label: AWAL
Release Date: August 1
No one online admits they were wrong, least of all the edgelords. It is more effective to simply double down, to build an entirely new identity around digging in. Few have been more committed to standing their ground than the rapper JPEGMAFIA. Across four albums of incendiary rap, he has emerged as hip-hop's troll in chief, belligerent, unshakable and trenchant. The gripping, knotty I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU carries many of those same instincts — taking on all comers for the rap equivalent of a Royal Rumble (if it were held on Twitter). But there is something lingering just under the surface that had previously eluded him: the pangs of conscience, which bleed into charged-up polemics turning defense into offense. Released in the wake of a controversial collaboration with Kanye West, a career provocateur does some self-reflection, coming out reinvigorated if not reformed. Though far closer to apologia than an apology, the music takes thoughtful, unexpected turns, and the album is gorgeous even when ugly, managing punk fury with an artisanal flair. As an idealogue's conviction takes the slightest of blows, he produces the most stunning work of his career. —Sheldon Pearce
▶️ Stream I Lay Down My Life For You by JPEGMAFIA
Meshell Ndegeocello
No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
Label: Blue Note
Release Date: August 2
When NPR's Ari Shapiro asked Meshell Ndegeocello why James Baldwin's work — in particular, his book The Fire Next Time — continues to inform her music, Ndegeocello responded with a question of her own: "Why aren't we going back to it more?" Like Baldwin, the bassist, singer-songwriter and producer examines systems of oppression through her music, making a conscious decision to opt out. No More Water also includes the words of Audre Lorde, a poet, activist and educator who during her life was dedicated to calling out injustice in all of its forms. These elements, set to music composed by Ndgeocello and her band, make for an uncompromising listening experience. —Nikki Birch
▶️ Stream No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello
Rae Khalil
CRYBABY
Label: Def Jam
Release Date: August 9
"I'm tryna become who I wanna be / Let me define by any means." This decisive declaration is paramount for a recording artist making a transition from independence to a major label. On CRYBABY, rapper and singer Rae Kahlil flows seamlessly between rhyming without artifice and singing with vulnerability. Boasting collabs with Freddie Gibbs, Benny Sings, Tiana Major9 and Anderson .Paak, Kahlil moves through pockets of R&B, including a Running Man-inspiring New Jack Swing via "COME HOME," the soulful "IS IT WORTH IT" and the sonic curveball "KNOW YOU." Whether wrestling with herself or a lover, she returns to that central intention to exist honestly within these spaces indefinitely, proclaiming, "F*** ya 15 minutes, I got so much more." —Mitra Arthur
▶️ Stream CRYBABY by Rae Khalil
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland
Label: Acony
Release Date: August 23
In "The Bells and the Birds," one of the most quietly resonant tracks on this deceptively modest return from Americana music's reigning partnership, Gillian Welch murmurs a question as David Rawlings' guitar overtones ring behind her: "Listen how the bells, they ring in the morning / What do they say to you, my love?" What they say is move along; change is both necessary and inevitable. But, the birds answer, there is joy in claiming its sweet moments. Woodland follows the currents of impermanence through many storylines, some personal, others mythic or historical. Friends die, power corrupts and destroys, dreams play themselves out or are unfulfilled. Through it all there is love, fraying like an old coat, but still the ultimate protection. As spare guitar-and-voice duets alternate with subtle electric folk arrangements, Welch and Rawlings offer a midlife testament that honors and mourns loss while sounding ageless. —Ann Powers
▶️ Stream Woodland by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Sabrina Carpenter
Short n' Sweet
Label: Island
Release Date: August 23
Sabrina Carpenter is hungry, and she wants you to know it. On her delightfully compact breakthrough album, this Disney grad-turned-pop auteur casts herself as a freedom fighter in the sheets, calling out the hot boys who've wronged her — often because they're too dumb to do otherwise — while saucily acknowledging that she's no saint, either. We've seen this character before; from Jean Harlow's Blonde Bombshell to Mikey Madison's Anora, she's the baddish girl whose insistence on transparency exposes all the holes in the romantic fantasies that keep thoughtless, entitled men on top. Short n' Sweet swathes its empowerment fantasies in Y2K-pfp pastels, her vocals light as a feather floating in a cloud of vintage synths as she whispers to a lover on the verge of wandering, I won't give a f*** about you. On the merry-go-round of heartbreak, she's putting her foot down. It won't stop the spin, but for this laughing vamp, it's one way toward sure footing. —Ann Powers
▶️ Stream Short n' Sweet by Sabrina Carpenter
Doechii
Alligator Bites Never Heal
Label: Top Dawg Entertainment
Release Date: August 30
When Doechii performed in Atlanta at the final stop of her Alligator Bites Never Heal tour, she took a moment between songs to relish in her four recently announced 2025 Grammy nominations. "They didn't see the Black b**** coming!" she shouted to a sold-out crowd, flaunting the explicit moniker she's used at least since her 2022 mixtape, she / her / black bitch. Of course, the phrase dates back much further in the annals of antebellum history. To be stuntin on 'em as a young, lyrically-gifted, dark-skinned, bisexual woman from the Deep and Dirty South in hip-hop today is a leather-gloved pimp slap across the face of an industry hard-coded with all the inbred racism, sexism and colorism that comes with commodifying Black bodies.
Doechii knows this. And by the time she unpacks her bags — from Tampa to L.A., dependency to sobriety, self-doubt to audacity — over the course of a 19-song mixtape that's never bound or confined by genre, formula or label pressure, you'll know she's the s***, too. —Rodney Carmichael
▶️ Stream Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii
Emily D'Angelo
Freezing
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Release Date: August 30
While the 30-year-old Canadian mezzo-soprano emerges into stardom (she opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall), she's yet to release a standard-issue "opera arias" album. And that may confound traditionalists. On Freezing, Emily D'Angelo opts for a smartly curated mix of folk and pop-ish songs. I admire her restless curiosity and, frankly, wouldn't mind if she sang a physics textbook. The voice is that beautiful — a burnished mahogany instrument with crisp (but not overly fussy) diction, tidy vibrato and elegant phrasing that sounds at home whether she's conjuring Jean Ritchie in the old Irish ballad "O Love is Teasing," diving deep into the melancholy of Purcell's "O Solitude" or probing the heartbreak of Randy Newman's "Wandering Boy." The arrangements are sparse but fresh — scorching electric guitar, droning synths and simple piano. D'Angelo is proving that her voice is one for all seasons. —Tom Huizenga
▶️ Stream Freezing by Emily D'Angelo
Patricia Brennan Septet
Breaking Stretch
Label: Pyroclastic
Release Date: September 6
Folkloric futurism is a trademark for Patricia Brennan, a brilliant vibraphonist and composer rattling along the volatile edge of contemporary chamber music (or if you prefer, the more compositional quadrant of avant-garde jazz). On Breaking Stretch, an album whose title pointedly evokes the idiom "stretched to the breaking point," she augments her percussive quartet with an elite three-man horn section — Adam O'Farrill on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on alto saxophone, Mark Shim on tenor saxophone — and deploys them with a fidgety emphasis on abrading tensions. Her compositions play with unstable accord and accumulative density, with a rhythmic brio that occasionally evokes her formative years in Veracruz, Mexico. But the core coordinates of this music are fixed someplace that hasn't yet been charted; Brennan and her expeditionary forces make us feel flush with its discovery. —Nate Chinen, WRTI
▶️ Stream Breaking Stretch by Patricia Brennan Septet
Nala Sinephro
Endlessness
Label: Warp
Release Date: September 6
The London-based harpist, keyboardist and composer Nala Sinephro designed her second album, Endlessness, as a musical Möbius strip. Comprising 10 tracks titled by number — "Continuum 1," "Continuum 2" and so on, continuity being the animating principle — it glides in a scroll of accumulative and recessive detail, with input from peers like saxophonist James Mollison (of Ezra Collective) and drummer Natcyet Wakili (formerly with Sons of Kemet). Sinephro's modular synthesizers burble and hum, as an arpeggiated line shimmers through the mist. Occasionally there's a tasteful slick of strings. As a totality, the result suggests an elegant convergence of ambient, electronic music and astral jazz, but genre terms can only offer an imprecise shorthand. Sinephro is pursuing a form of transcendence, at once cosmopolitan and almost elemental, relaxed yet hyperacute, rooted in an understanding that even infinity is a matter of one moment surrendering to the next. —Nate Chinen, WRTI
▶️ Stream Endlessness by Nala Sinephro
MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks
Label: ANTI-
Release Date: September 6
MJ Lenderman sings like a slightly out of tune guitar, like it kinda hurts him to do so, but he wouldn't want you to say anything about that. A poet of the half articulate, he's the guy at the backyard party who silently takes note of every sloppy kiss, dirty lie and borderline racist quip the alcohol inspires, recording them later in a secret notebook his kids will find in a closet in 50 years' time. Manning Fireworks claims Americana for the kids with revoked drivers licenses and the families with Christmas decorations in the yard in June; it claims rock for the unheroic and uncool, the purveyors of awkward pauses. A gentle feedback master, Lenderman knows heroic moves break bones; his band, a shaggy beast, extends the legacy of wrecked rock from Neil Young through Pavement and the Drive-By Truckers. "Please don't laugh, only half of what I say is a joke," he begs, bending the melody like it's a pipe cleaner in his nervous hands. After the party, there's a little sculpture on the kitchen table in the shape of a broken heart. —Ann Powers
▶️ Stream Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman
Nilüfer Yanya
My Method Actor
Label: Ninja Tune
Release Date: September 13
As Nilüfer Yanya began to make her third album, on the cusp of her 30s, she started thinking about the nature of performance, of being unable to separate herself from her songs and uncertain about giving her life to them. Previous albums established the Londoner as an electrifying young polymath, an indrawn songwriter and menacing guitarist with a majestic, sandpapery voice that could light a match. Where do you go from there? What stokes the desire to keep committing oneself to such an invasive process? The search for answers charges My Method Actor, a discerning record that interrogates the process itself and the identity put into it. Dynamic yet locked into an indefatigable groove, even as its grungy sound begins to dissolve into something more understated and unwound the longer it plays, the album is poised amid existential confusion. Yanya emerges from her crisis of conviction a virtuoso more in command of her artistry than ever, blazing her path forward by simply trusting her instincts. —Sheldon Pearce
▶️ Stream My Method Actor by Nilüfer Yanya
Mustafa
Dunya
Label: Jagjaguwar
Release Date: September 27
The music made by the poet and folk artist Mustafa can feel like it is operating across planes. The songs are remarkably present yet obscure somehow. His voice, which is translucent in its own way, hangs at a middle distance. He is in conversation with both the living and the dead, and he sings as if he is occupying a liminal space. Dunya, his second album of quietly awe-inspiring elegies and remembrances, stands at many intersections to consider the toll the messenger must bear in service of keeping memories alive. In his capacity as hood archivist, he comes to represent many things: his Regent Park neighborhood, a Toronto youth movement in crisis, the Black muslim diaspora, the gang as a means of community, a facilitator of violence and a refuge from it. Through the softspun sounds of his heartbreaking memoranda, written so carefully as to feel both intimate and unknowable, Mustafa reaches out across the threshold, continuing to try to make sense of the senseless, even as his spirit grows weary. —Sheldon Pearce
Yasmin Williams
Acadia
Label: Nonesuch
Release Date: October 4
Some fingerstyle guitarists need more than the six or 12 strings under their fingers. They are composers, after all, who dream and hear techniques and textures outside of our imagination — the guitar can extend the artistic expression toward something symphonic in size and scope. On her third album, Yasmin Williams' musicianship is impressive as always — her percussive-yet-melodic touch on the acoustic guitar is immediately distinctive — but here her musical storytelling finds brilliant vistas in the company of others. A string trio coaxes warming colors out of a busy "Sisters," underscoring a familial tension. Allison de Groot (banjo) and Tatiana Hargreaves (fiddle) brighten the corners of "Hummingbird," a brisk bluegrass tune that is among Williams' finest compositions. When she switches over to electric guitar, drummers give the emo-tinged "Dream Lake" and "Nectar" just enough juice to shred. With over 20 guest musicians, Williams quite literally traveled far and wide to make her vision a reality; on Acadia, she forges new ground. —Lars Gotrich
▶️ Stream Acadia by Yasmin Williams
Blood Incantation
Absolute Elsewhere
Label: Century Media
Release Date: October 4
Have you ever growled into the void and found the light of creation? Blood Incantation, a death metal band steeped in the brutality of the masters, has always looked beyond — to the death of self, to the spaceways, to the horror (and hope) of existence — to write the next chapters of metal. Absolute Elsewhere, the band's fourth full-length, collapses a catalog of sublime stargazing and varied influences into a metal masterpiece that we'll be picking apart for ages. Explosive riffs, planet-swallowing grooves, atmospheric synths, dubby production, proggy instrumentals, bongo breaks and psychedelic passages deftly weave through two side-long songs — deemed "tablets" by the band — that are as intricate as they are enticing. Are there sections that veer into Pink Floyd laser show territory? Yes! And I, for one, challenge planetariums absolutely everywhere to take on Absolute Elsewhere. —Lars Gotrich
▶️ Stream Absolute Elsewhere by Blood Incantation
Immanuel Wilkins
Blues Blood
Label: Blue Note
Release Date: October 11
With his stunning third album, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins deepens his scope as a conceptualist — creating a song cycle that explores familial bonds, ancestral bloodlines, and Black pain and persistence. (Its title refers to an utterance by Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six savagely beaten by police in 1964; the composer Steve Reich once created a sound collage with the same phrase.) The album creates space for four sensitive vocalists, whose contributions overlap and intertwine in ways that suggest a subterranean root system. Among them are the transfixing South Indian devotionalist Ganavya and the folkish singer-songwriter June McDoom, whose hauntingly emotive lyrics meld naturally with Wilkins' bittersweet melodic designs (and the intuitive grace of his excellent quartet). Working deftly with producer Meshell Ndegeocello, Wilkins balances bracing poignancy with affirming communality: his invocation of historical struggle is also a reminder that no one fights alone. —Nate Chinen, WRTI
▶️ Stream Blues Blood by Immanuel Wilkins
BigXthaPlug
Take Care
Label: UnitedMasters
Release Date: October 11
The same morning BigXthaPlug dropped his second studio album, I hit up my cousin in Texas: "Yo man, Dallas finally got a rapper bout to go big. No pun intended." Like BigX, my cousin hails from the Big D. I hadn't shot him a music recommendation in years, but couldn't resist while sitting at a red light bumping "Law & Order," the Take Care song named for the same TV-show theme song it samples. The canned guitar wails that made the '90s police procedural so cringe never sounded as twanged-out and redemptive as they do next to BigX's double-barrel baritone drawl. A swashbuckling outlaw with a heavy soul, the man personifies Texas. Producer Tony Coles keeps that same energy throughout, leading with big samples — Willie Hutch, War, Ronald Isley, Rick James — that make Take Care ride like a mixtape masquerading as an album. Clearly, this is what Pimp C meant when he christened Southern hip-hop as "country rap tunes." When the all-encompassing story of country music's 2024 resurgence is told, BigXthaPlug will require a sizable entry. —Rodney Carmichael
▶️ Stream Take Care by BigXthaPlug
GloRilla
GLORIOUS
Label: Interscope
Release Date: October 11
Without fail, GloRilla is going to deliver that gospel. Five years into a career of continued, authentic virality, Big Glo blesses fans with a debut album displaying all her sides. The former choir girl praises her Christian roots with "RAIN DOWN ON ME" and "GLO'S PRAYER," then mixes the ratchet with the righteous on "HOW I LOOK." She talks herself out of overthinking with "STOP PLAYING" and "LET HER COOK." Released during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, she stands on business with "DON'T DESERVE" and "I AIN'T GOING": "I ain't goin' for all that rough me up and grab me by the neck (no) / N**** put his hands on me, we gon' be smokin' on him next." Heavy on the energies of self-love, reliance and respect, GLORIOUS is a triumph of Southern lyricism that shows off the Memphis star in new multitudes. —Sidney Madden
▶️ Stream GLORIOUS by GloRilla
Roy Hargrove's Crisol
Grande-Terre
Label: Verve
Release Date: October 18
The glow of his first Grammy win — in the category of Best Latin Jazz Performance, for Habana — didn't even have time to fade before trumpet dynamo Roy Hargrove went back into the studio to record a sequel, in the spring of 1998. Why, then, was that album put in the vault rather than on a release schedule? It couldn't have been the quality of the music, because Grand-Terre is an ecstatic winner: an even more fluent and focused celebration of Afro-Cuban musical lineage, with Hargrove and his Crisol band both in exceptionally strong form. Maybe the album would have been taken for granted had it been released in the immediate wake of Habana; arriving as it does six years after Hargrove's untimely death, it's a heartening reminder of his uncommon gift for crisp lyricism, his abiding respect for Afro-Diasporic traditions, and his strutting ease in every sort of groove. —Nate Chinen, WRTI
▶️ Stream Grande-Terre by Roy Hargrove's Crisol
Latin Mafia
Todos los días todo el día
Label: Rimas
Release Date: October 24
Latin Mafia's genius hinges on mining glitter in the gray area. When the trio of brothers from Monterrey, Mexico, creates, nothing is off limits: a dancing piano, synthetic sparkle, palmas and, always, chillingly honest lyrics. "Que no te acabes nunca (May you never be finished) / Y si te acabas me esperas (And if you are finished may you wait for me)," they coo on "y como te digo que." Love always plays with death and joy with a bit of melancholy. Within the trio's sonic landscape, the most extreme and seemingly oppositional expressions of emotion find equal representation. Whether dropping bars of bitter self-condemnation ("nunca he sido honesto.") or sitting with messages from their grandma about how to carry on ("tengo mucho ruido."), authenticity is both Latin Mafia's power and connective tissue. —Anamaria Sayre
▶️ Stream Todos los días todo el día by Latin Mafia
Tyler, The Creator
CHROMAKOPIA
Label: Columbia
Release Date: October 28
You can split the career of Tyler, The Creator pretty neatly into two phases: the confrontational wildness of his attitude era, running from the early days of Odd Future to the explosively shifty Cherry Bomb; and the more thoughtful expressions of his post-Flower Boy awakening, bringing increasing degrees of experimentation and refinement. They are divided by an artistic puberty of sorts, whereby a once and future auteur began to grow into himself as both a performer and a personality. Now 33, the fully rehabilitated rabble-rouser makes another leap with CHROMAKOPIA, a colossal album of developmental epiphanies. In asserting himself as the premier rapper-producer of his generation, Tyler reckons with aging into a new personal reality, realizing the weight of adulthood bearing down on him. If this quarter-life crisis finds him off-guard, he chooses to meet it emphatically with platoon march aesthetics that embrace the flashing, prismatic energy of a carnival. Throughout the album, you get the sense that growing up shouldn't mean sacrificing the creativity of one's inner child. —Sheldon Pearce
▶️ Stream CHROMAKOPIA by Tyler, The Creator
The Cure
Songs of a Lost World
Label: Polydor
Release Date: November 1
"The Cure's first album in 16 years!" certainly qualifies as a news peg, but how often have fans' hopes been dashed by albums that follow absurdly lengthy hiatuses? No record could fully live up to the sum of that much anticipation, right?
And yet here we are, returning to The Cure at its most grandly and orchestrally forlorn, in its most sonically and thematically cohesive record since 1989's Disintegration. Robert Smith's voice — weary and mysterious, awash in regret and swimming in loss, yet still up for a bit of playful yearning every now and then — has lost nothing as the singer rolls on past retirement age. With Smith envisioning Songs of a Lost World as the first installment in a trilogy, bleakness and optimism have rarely coexisted so neatly. —Stephen Thompson
▶️ Stream Songs of a Lost World by The Cure
Kendrick Lamar
GNX
Label: pgLang/Interscope
Release Date: November 22
Pluto entered Aquarius the same week Kendrick Lamar's surprise album GNX descended upon us. The bigger surprise may be that no fan theories about this supernatural phenomenon exist. With all the bedevilment stirring between hip-hop's biggest stars, the answers we seek might lie somewhere in the stars. According to all the internet astrologists I follow, Pluto's newest transit is a big deal. It began Nov. 19, the Tuesday before GNX dropped, and will remain in Aquarius for the next 19 years. The last time the planet of transformation entered the sign of rebellion for that long, the American Revolution popped off. You might think that's too much weight to place on a rap album; Kendrick Lamar doesn't. His battle isn't against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. He's out to end wars — between rival gangs, conflicting hip-hop doctrines, God and Lucifer — even if waging war is the only means to do so. You've heard of a carpenter from Nazareth purportedly dying for our sins. But until you've heard a ninja from Compton black out "just to take our power back," you haven't seen the light. —Rodney Carmichael
▶️ Stream GNX by Kendrick Lamar
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