Her songs are decisively personal, detailing struggles with racism, faith, desire and her own self-sabotage, while the music is gleefully experimental, playing with sounds and structures and taking chances just because she can. Voices are pitched up; arrangements skid through changes of beat, texture, direction and volume, with the speed and arbitrariness of digital editing run amok.

Everyone in Nashville is likely hoping to sandpaper her into something just a little bit less confrontational; fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.

Frontwoman for the band Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard struck out on her own for the first time in 2019 with her solo debut, Jaime, titled after her late sister. The 50 Best Albums of 2019. By. Loops of her beats and her raw violin lines are still the core of her music, but collaborating producers add new possibilities: wilder counterpoint, psychedelic hazes, orchestral cushioning.

Here are the highest-scoring "disqualified" albums of the year: Thousands of albums are released each year, and most of those don't even make their way to reviewers; as a result, the vast majority of the awful albums recorded each year do not show up on Metacritic.

Note that live albums, reissues, EPs, box sets, multi-artist soundtracks, and other compilations are excluded from this chart, though they are listed separately a bit further down this page. Predict the 2020 Emmy Award Winners. And then in recent years, she became a pro at stirring up online conversation. Critics had nothing but tremendous praise for Cave's haunting album upon its release in October. By Pitchfor k. December 10, 2019… Charm City Kings, a Sundance standout, is coming to HBO Max on Thursday, October 8.

LEGACY!

Clockwise from left: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Chad Batka for The New York Times; Jingyu Lin for The New York Times, Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times, See the critics’ lists of the best songs of 2019, Billie Eilish, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, songwriter, singer, violinist and producer Sudan Archives, British singer and songwriter Michael Kiwanuka, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, ‘AI YoungBoy 2’. Del Rey suspends herself between emotion and well-wrought illusion. And because of his versatility, he’s accelerating the conversations between reggaeton, Latin trap, hip-hop and pop. But Ghosteen is currently only in fourth place in our combined list of critic year-end top 10 lists, suggesting that it may not actually be reviewers' favorite album of 2019. We want to hear from you! Mering co-produced the album (titled, presumably, after the fake Titanic sequel from Homecoming) with Jonathan Rado of Foxygen.

Her songs capture the thrill of slightly askew pop gems, then amplify them into something undeniable.

"Highly eccentric and blisteringly beautiful--a record destined to worm its way deep under the skin.".

So it makes sense that the most impressive full-length projects of 2019 aren’t merely wide-eared grab bags of sounds, but extended meditations on a novel idea — albums that prove a point again and again and again. It was the work of bedroom-studio conspirators, of songwriters confronting their traumas and aspirations, of old hands challenging themselves and newcomers determined to warp accepted boundaries: artists working to please themselves at a time when gatekeepers can easily be bypassed. What Our Users Are Talking About. See Billboard's rankings of this year's most popular songs, albums, and artists. (In other words, consider them the year's best under-the-radar releases.) Vintage Caribbean styles like bolero and rumba get 21st-century twists. Pounding, gnashing, jabbing and sneering — but also swerving suddenly into passages of intricate interplay — the English rock group Black Midi pulls together all the virtuosic and noisy impulses of post-punk, math-rock, jazz-rock fusion and progressive rock.

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. is one of the albums of the year.

Our critics chose the best albums of the year — a format that is in an increasingly fragile state in pop music.

The Metascore is a weighted average of scores from top professional critics, on a scale from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). Stoicism can turn into a kind of flamboyance — hard-nosed commitment to form is rare and electric.