Dean's List: 2025

The 61 best albums of the past year (or so)

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1. Margaret Glaspy: The Golden Heart Protector (ATO): Maybe if I was a singer-songwriter guy—a folkie, to resurrect the somewhat condescending old term—I'd recognize all her collaborators on these seven cover versions, which include Creedence and Jackson Browne: Madison Cunningham, Julian Lage, Andrew Bird, Alam Khan, and James Bay. But as it stands I'm pretty sure that between Berklee-trained Glaspy's crystalline soprano and her deft guitar and piano, these are almost certainly the renditions I'd rather hear. "Beautiful" is seldom a praiseword I'm comfortable resorting to. But for nearly half an hour it applies. A−
2. CMAT: Euro-Country (AWAL): Her third album phenomenally musical and phenomenally odd, and not for the first time, this very Irish, even more female singer-songwriter once again bounces from man to guy or guy to man as if she can't get enough and enough is too much too soon. Eschewing the usual guitaristics, the arrangements are original enough and the tunes addictive enough to serve such themes as squandered kisses, expensive jeans, dating a guy with kids, dating a guy so you can write a song about him, a boyfriend on the make who messages you as a diversion, waxing your legs when you're only nine, and unreliable boyfriends being more fun than daytime television although admittedly that's a low bar. But as I assume is clear after all that, enduring love is not on the agenda and may never be. A−
3. Bruce Springsteen: Land of Hope & Dreams (Columbia): Not much new musically on this live, six-track, four-song, born-in-the-U.K. EP. For one thing, many Springsteen fans already own live versions of "Land of Hope and Dreams," "Long Walk Home," "My City of Ruins," and the Dylan hymn "Chimes of Freedom." What is new—newer than you'd figure, given how long and hard Springsteen has preached his democratic leftism—is that a third of the record is devoted to the unabashed speechifying that peeved our plump, trusseted prexy so much he devised the witticism "dried-out prune" to pin on Springsteen, thus, said prexy is stupid enough to "think," putting the quietus on Springsteen's half-century career. Instead what happens is that the speechifying vitalizes what even nonobsessives like me and you might otherwise file away as extraneous remakes of honorable but not necessarily classic protest songs that work in tandem with the speechifying to drive home their stubborn determination to "make America great again" before it's too late. And with all respect to Rachel Maddow, for instance, the way Springsteen's spoken words beef up the already political songs is even more vital and heartening. [Inspirational Stage Patter: Now, there's some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world's poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country they're taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers. They're rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society. They're abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They're defunding American universities that won't bow down to their ideological demands. They're removing residents off American streets and without due process of law are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now. A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American. The America that I've sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we'll survive this moment. Now, I have hope because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, "In this world there isn't as much humanity as one would like. But there's enough." Let's pray.] A
4. Body Type: Expired Candy (Poison City '23): The only discernible reason that this sexed-up Australian band—three frontwomen and a female drummer now together for nearly a decade—is often compared to the estimable though somewhat less predictably preoccupied Courtney Barnett is that, well, Barnett is a woman and indeed a lesbian. What she isn't is anywhere near as raucous; the aesthetic on the band's catchiest album reminds me a lot more of Nirvana except that it's (guess what) sexed-up. Which in itself renders it quite the engaging take on pleasure and hooks and rock and roll. A−
5. S.G. Goodman: Planting by the Signs (Slough Gates/Thirty Tigers): On her third album, 37-year-old Kentucky farmgirl Goodman continues to sing so melodically yet so unassumingly she has few if any peers. Although she never misses a note, she doesn't make a thing of it, achieving a calm, fetching beauty that may well be homegrown but verges on the exotic where I come from. Among other things it includes the only song I can recall that's about saving a turtle, and from local ruffians at that. But I'm pleased to report not just that in addition to "small towns where my mind gets stuck," it also reaches Los Angeles, and that there is indeed a love object, only one I think: "I call your name in sweet surrender/Marry me in inclement weather." Give her an imaginary hug. I have, and it felt good. A−
6. Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night (ATO): The title brushes up against a big problem with love songs, especially the married kind: taking them on the road, a paradox adduced by the Old 97s headman's killer line: "Tonight I will be lonely in the arms of someone else." But this is nonetheless a remarkably warm and rich love album, complex and contradictory yet calm and thoughtful enough to convince the so inclined that however endangered the love match it analyzes and celebrates may be, it will endure. Credo: "Well now what a fool to figure that forever you'd be mine/Well I wrote a little rhyme to make it right." Quite a trick—quite a triumph, in fact. A
7. The Mekons: Horror (Fire): Although Jon Langford sings the lead single on this unannotated CD, which is basically an acerbically associative capsule history of British imperialism and its dire aftermaths (some of them, anyway), it comes off as the brainchild of the glummer and more ideological Tom Greenhalgh, which in this horrendous Trump moment-we-hope seems all too apt even if you still believe that the American constitution has its uses. But though the mood is bitter, it's not desperate—the songs aren't what you'd call lively much less cheerful, but they are relaxed enough to make you not just believe but feel that the end is by no means in sight. Yet. A−
8. Lily Allen: West End Girl (BMG): Some sixteen ago I wrote a full-length Barnes & Noble Review essay praising this then-23-year-old British ingenue-in-disguise. Then I pretty much forgot about her as she became a renowned minor U.K. star. Sonically, this album is, like Allen's voice, lightweight albeit tuneful, but after all this time she seemed worth checking out and proved surprisingly complex. I believe the album reflects a major lacuna in marital mores between the UK, where the concept of the "open marriage" is often all but taken for granted, and the USA, where such notions are less casual and explicit. "I know you've made me your madonna," Allen reminds her theoretical lifemate before informing listeners that "my marriage has been open since my husband went astray." In fact, she concludes, her estranged husband is a "sex addict," so maybe it's in the spirit of competition that she adds "I wanna be your whore." And it gets more detailed and complicated than that, you bet. A
9. Haim: I Quit (Columbia): On the most songful of an album catalogue that's never lacked melody, the three L.A. sisters savor sex even more than they do tune while wishing that guys—with special emphasis on the sexy ones—were more patient, more reliable, just better. True enough, "I'm getting you hard/In the back of the car/But baby you know that I'll still be leaving tomorrow." But then again, "Something about it made you seem like/You could fill the seat next to me without complications." By a large margin I find them not just catchy but theoretically attractive enough to truly hope so even if it means not taking the album title literally. A
10. Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow (Southeastern): Formally, if this isn't a folk record then it's an unaccompanied singer-songwriter record—in the old days the two were synonymous. But given his deep connection to the Drive-By Truckers, Isbell's picking has a way of making you anticipate a rousing chorus that never comes to pass, an observation I see I'm making on the very day he's scheduled to join his own 400 Unit band in hard-rocking Saskatchewan. My preference for this voice-plus-acoustic iteration no doubt reflects my enthusiasm for the kind of thoughtful love songs many guys never come up with one of and all of these tracks qualify as. I mean, he wrote the eternal "Outfit" and put his back into the pro-Dem Georgia Blue, so give him credit for not just respecting but welcoming the impressive array of female charm, substance, and erotic allure these songs address. From "Last time I tried this sober I was 17" to "I wasn't even fishing when I caught you," I respect him enough to believe his heart's in the right place and like him enough to hope the rest of him settles down there. A−
11. Jeff Evans Porkestra: When Pigs Dance (self-released): "Sixty-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket" documents an EP's worth of a world where "old people ain't as old as they used to be," lost dogs leave a trail of puppies where they bury their bone, the sun sinks whenever Evans leaves the girl who holds out on the loving until she gets her Sunday beer, and if it's green lights all the way to her house it's also green lights all the way home. A−
12. Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD): I worried at first about the disappearance of their trademark delicacy, but a few listens in I'd not only cheered up but fallen in love—they were going for shameless beauty and getting there track after track, most strikingly on one called "All Night All Day," which begins with a transported Adrianne Lenker stanza I can't resist quoting: "All night, all day/I could go down on you/Hear you sing your pleasure/God is good/Or whatever made the mouth/To drink the treasure." But the hero is drummer James Krivchenia, who I'd given so little thought that I had to keep looking back to make sure I got the spelling right and whose own idea of transport if not pleasure itself is mating clatter with momentum verse after verse. A
13. Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (Loma Vista): Not every perky bad-ass would have the brains much less gall to defend Jimmy Kimmel by going after—yes, she used the word—"fascism." So take her seriously at this grim moment even if or because she's also drawn to "I don't give damn who you think you am," "All the cocaine in existence couldn't keep your nose out of my business," and "Take your tongue out of my mouth I'm kissing you goodbye." But I say be glad for her sake that there's also a "Throw me into the back seat and love me like you used to do." A
14. Buck 65: Keep Moving (Handsmade): Now 53 and supposedly so fat his memory foam forgot he existed, the Nova Scotia rapper turned CBC host rolls out what I count as his 20th album without showing his age much less giving up the musical ghost. After all, as he explains and illustrates simultaneously: "It's the equivalent of abstract expressionism, perfectionism when I'm rockin' on the mechanism." Rhymes that have never occurred to any other rapper include caribou-parachute, liver-quiver, phase six-basics, and to the best of my knowledge encore-John Ford. So not only could he go on if so inclined, he can't stop and he won't stop. When there's yet more, as there will be, we'll be glad there is. A
15. Robert Forster: Strawberries (Tapete): Eight new ones, all of which postdate 2023's The Candle and the Flame with its definitive chemo song "It's Only Poison," not a dirge because the stuff saved his wife's life. Nothing that strong here because damn few songs are, although for all that the first four come close enough, with my favorite not the title number where the former Go-Between eats all of them himself, but the troth-plighting eight-minute "Breakfast on the Train," which ends with him and his wife-to-be making a racket when they finally find a suitable hotel. And somehow then there's the "alone and in need of love" "Foolish I Know," with its "I knew it at the age of 10, it wouldn't be women, it would be men." A−
16. Public Enemy: Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 (Enemy): At least one online source I consulted had the label (insofar as that term retains meaningful materiality in a digital world) for the first PE album in five years listed as "Flavor Flav," and I wish it were, not because it would signal that after 35 years the most loudly political hip-hop group has been if not taken over by then somehow passed on to its resident clown but because it implicitly acknowledges they've evolved into old companeros proud to clock dollars as a legendary politically conscious collectivity. "I let 'em talk, I let 'em gossip," renowned and proud of it O.G. Flav scoffs dismissively and while he leaves most of the big ideas to Chuck, it's clear that he enjoys his newfound respectability. Chuck, meanwhile gets a kick out of namechecking both Brian Eno and Kamala Harris in the course of opining that ageism, as he chooses to call it, is "worse then racism" and leaving little doubt that he and his sidekick turned partner are "black millionaires" with both their politics and their careers in the right place. As a proud "sexagenarian," a term Chuck leaves no doubt has zero to do with sex, he's proud to bring "O.G. hip hop to your town" and preach racial awareness as opposed to superiority in the bargain. A−
17. James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (New West): Extry extry, or do I mean uh-oh: gifted, respected, well-bred never-much-of-a-star singer-songwriter essays a concept album (see uh-oh) on a theme close to both his heart and a world he knows all too well: that of the gifted, well-respected, never-quite-a-star singer-songwriter. Really, there's a built-in market there: the motley and by no means truly impoverished subculture of second-level "creatives," as they're called these days. A talky but engaging singer whose verbal acuity belongs in the same basket long ago filled by his Pulitzer-winning novelist father Larry, the son's themes include the World Trade Center, Bush meets Enron, Pinocchio grows up, meds that don't work, the salt of the earth in search of a savior, the paperwork of a Texas Ranger, and having a blessed day. A−
18. The Kasambwe Brothers: The Kasambwe Brothers (MASS MoCA): Just three siblings from small, landlocked, mostly agricultural Malawi in southeast Africa singing and playing guitar, drums, and a basslike indigenous instrument called the babatone. Recorded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, there are no translations I can locate for nine tracks mostly in the five-minute range. But the publicist's one-sheet reports that themes are dominated by varying accounts of courtship and that eventually women participate as well as men. All of which sounds perfectly nice, I hope. In fact, however, the overall effect is considerably more ebullient than that—irresistible verging on joyful in what turns out to be the most inspirational Afropop surprise I've heard all year. A
19. Dingonek Street Band: Primal Economics (Accurate '18): Led by well-schooled trumpeter Bobby Spellman, who released it in 2018 to acclaim if not renown, this no-vocals avant-second-line album is still available from Amazon and let's hope less Trumpy vendors. I've enjoyed it every time it distinguished itself from other uncommercial ventures I don't have the heart to add to what I laughably call the sell pile. There's plenty of wise-ass in a second line where three different saxophonists say "Me? Arty? Sure I have chops but not so's they stop me from fooling around." Special thanks to Josiah Reibstein for playing bass on his tuba. A−
20. Todd Snider: High, Lonesome and Then Some (Thirty Tigers/Aimless): "Granted is what you've been taking me for," the perpetually unreliable, regularly lovelorn Rahm Emanuel fave and substance connoisseur is on this evidence spiritually undiminished. But that's not to suggest he sounds hale or anything like that, especially since he was recently hospitalized in the wake of an alleged physical attack outside his Salt Lake City hotel at the start of the tour he has now cancelled. For nine tracks that clock in at 42:31 he sings his songs of emotional displacement and comic woe, which here follow one called "The Human Condition" with one called "Unforgivable," which is not actually the "worst story ever told" as its subtitle claims, well before things get to "All she wanted me to be was a halfway decent person/But I had always been afraid of change." "It's Hard to Be Happy" speaks for itself. "Stoner Yodel #2" allows as how jealousy keeps him alive. "Older Women" wishes his girlfriend would do the introductions before the title song comes along to reprise the bleak descriptive "totally estranged." But before you throw up your hands and go thataway, let me note that on this album Snider's unvirtuosic but irrepressible guitar should be enough to keep you listening. A−
21. Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out (City Slang): As girlpunk and/or grrrlpunk goes, this two-woman U.K. band that was once a mixed-gender and/or all-female four-piece is remarkable not just for its specialty in disruptive noise but for its fluctuating sexuality. By that I mean not so much gender identity, although they're happy to tease that one out for you if you pay attention, but such subjects addressed and left in smithereens as police brutality, broken body cameras, filthy-rich nepo babies, workplace harassment, glass ceilings, crossed fingers, the wrong love to die on, and how could I leave out the climactic "cuntology"—which, if you'll permit me to beg your pardon, is their term, not mine. A
22. Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend (Island): In which the showgirl-glamorous, romantic-erotic blonde tries and apparently fails to forge one or more deep and indeed pleasurable bonds with an evolving collection of male hunks with brains and maybe even heart. She gives head to the kind of guy who touched her aforementioned heart after a few rounds of naked twister and not only that—tears run down her thighs for guys who both do the dishes and know how to assemble an Ikea chair. But as someone all too aware that "thinkin' of" rhymes with "drinkin' enough," it's her artistic and psychological duty to report that a girl who knows her liquor is quite often a girl who's been dumped. A−
23. Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta: Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes): The delicate textures of this polyrhythmic collab between arty-cum-experimental Peruvian electronica gal Hop and peripatetic-cum-adventurous Congolese soukousish guitar guy Bakorta has what for me is almost an MJQ vibe, which is to worry that it's short on texture not to say body not to say blood and guts. But for just that reason it's also audacious and delightful. There's considerable sprezzatura here, light-hearted in the face of a future even grimmer than the one that's right now sticking its tongue out at you and me. A−
24. Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (Reconstruction): "Singer-songwriter whose father wrote the Eagles/Baez warhorse "Seven Bridges Road" ventures into more personal and occasionally wacky territory in which his grandmother fetishizes a Portuguese punchbowl even though it's missing three glasses, "Dumb Luck" rhymes with a one dubbed "IDGAF," and "Lost in Hollywood" presages a closer called "Welcome to Nashville, Asshole." Without having put time into the research, it's my guess that his dad was nowhere near as funny. A−
25. Jax: Dear Joe, (Atlantic '24): Just 28, she not only sounds girlish and cynical at the same time but makes as clear as her commitment to maintaining an unprecedented balance of mean jokes, lovelorn plaints, and next-level feminism that coexists with a comic, catchy, credible autobiography for art's sake. The girlish part is embodied by a soprano so pure you'll be surprised how worldly-wise it turns out to be and even more surprised that its wisdom comes with yucks that provide both an edge to and a respite from her cynicism. Which damn right is earned. It can be brittle and/or thin, I admit. But it's also utterly original. And it closes with one called "Victoria's Secret," which is that "She's an old man in Ohio/Making money off of girls like me." A
26. Danny Brown: Stardust (Warp): From "the lesson is the essence that snatch you out of adolescence" to "apocalypse"/"pot to piss," the ever-articulate, fast-rapping, high-pitched 44-year-old super-rhymer has lost barely a consonant as he showcases his hard-won sobriety over a panoply of speedy, digicore-friendly beats that are more likely to make your knee bounce and soon enough your head dance than your booty shake. Frantic he's not—finally he has his shit under his control. But excited you may well become, which after all is why you're listening at all. A
27. Marshall Allen: New Dawn (Mexican Summer): Kentucky-born World War II Buffalo Soldier, 17th Division Special Service Band member, and postwar Paris Conservatory student Allen joined Sun Ra's band and collective on saxophone in 1958 while also occasionally backing pioneer Afropopularizer Babatunde Olatunje on a kora he built himself. A few years after Sun Ra died at 79 in 1993, Allen took over the band while residing in the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Philadelphia. And eventually, on May 25, 2024, he just flat-out turned 100, whereupon Cologne-based arts acivist Jan Lankisch thought it only proper for him to celebrate by making an album that was hardly his first. Cute, right? Who could cavil about that? Only this isn't just a birthday present. It's a lively, varied, congenial big band experiment of the first order, the kind of avant-entertainment Sun Ra aimed for in principle but too often failed to finish off in practice. In notes you'll have to read with a magnifying glass, Knoell Scott resorts more than once to the words "cosmic" and "celestial." But to me this music embodies how wonderful as opposed to wondrous unmitigated mortality can be. A
28. Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (Hickman Holler/RCA): "For the birds," this young Kentuckian "worked with words," and that was just the beginning, so that circa 2017 he found himself "road-doggin' in a stripped-out van" with a lot more to come—seven albums in, he finds himself getting to the bottom of an "angst hard-fought to learn" in such locales as first Australia and then India as he essays the first country album ever to enlist the words "pheromone" or, uh-oh, "chlamydia." "Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills," he's warned by his coalminer dad, who you get the feeling had more luck with the grindstone than the pills himself. When Childers emerged from nowhere circa 2017 he had the lineaments of a regional phenom—in one of my favorite strokes, he courted a Catholic girl. Wowing the other side of the world as he ponders the Bhagavad Gita, however, he clearly intends to wow you too. A
29. Amanda Shires: Nobody's Girl (ATO): It's the rare female country star who's more ingenue than belter—Kacey Musgraves and Megan Moroney come to mind but not many others. And it's the rarer country singer of any gender who can reel off lyrics of this quality. Her tempos moderate, her pitch elevated, her enunciation crystalline, Jason Isbell's ex is an exception so impressive you can only hope they didn't split up because she can write rings around him that don't wind up on his finger. "The streetlights and stars/They bring up old scars/In the backseat of a car/Wondering how you are/Under the streetlights and stars." "Starship hovered and love left my third eye strained." "You can't hold your breath for the rest of your life." "I stopped feeling anything/No guilt, no remorse, no shame/Didn't breathe any easier with the feelings out of the way." "You think it's tough now to swallow/Wait till it scrapes against your throat." "I hope you finally find/Your missing piece of mind." "How'm I doing? I don't know/Just sitting here listening to Billy Joel." Convinced yet? A
30. Wednesday: Bleeds (Dead Oceans): Karly Hartzman specializes in bleak tales from the scrubby subsistence bohemia of greater Asheville, North Carolina. Stoking bonfires with leaf blowers seems like fun, and why shouldn't your champagne taste like elderberry wine? But weeds ruin the local trampoline, one guy needs a new set of choppers after a local thug mistakes him for the S.O.B. who fucked his wife, and eating grocery-store sushi while you chop up your ketamine with your room key isn't most people's idea of a good time. In the mountains this music may well have its own life. Pastoral as that term is generally understood it isn't. A−
31. Craig Finn: Always Been (Tamarac): The verbal textures, narrative details, and credible characterizations the 53-year-old Hold Steady frontman's sixth solo album meld into its 11 songs achieve a literary pitch that could win this alt-rock lifer a short story prize. His protagonists are all full-fledged adults like him although usually a little younger, many of them onetime clergymen who are still figuring out how and why they'd ended up so, well, unfulfilled. Just because they've passed 30, their tales have gone through enough stages to accrue more incident than Willy Vlautin's, which as a result are starker and cleaner. Feels to me like a lot of these guys and gals were big Hold Steady fans a decade or two ago—which makes me hope at least a few of that cohort had happier endings. So tell me, Craig—is this how things always work out? Or is it just easier to write about than the happy endings I'm betting still sometimes materialize? A
32. Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (4AD): As unassuming as she is prolific, Catskills queen Lenker is too delicate and enigmatic for some. But an entranced, occasionally befuddled admirer like me will hear these two putatively off-the-cuff hours of quiet music she recorded to adoring admirers out in Oregon, her sheer charm splits what difference there may be between captivating and compelling. Instrumentation is sparse and some would say undetectable, sidepeople tried-and-true fans more than collaborators, and not all 43 tracks are songs—a few are recitations, even chats. But the changeable, somewhat ramshackle music articulates a personality not just persona only a grump would turn up her or his nose at. There's a sweetness, a modesty, a self-effacing humor to almost every moment of music she performs—and yes, she is performing here, not just expressing herself. Only a grump or a cynic would dismiss her as anything like insubstantial. A
33. Ms. Ezra Furman: Goodbye Small Head (Bella Union): Flaunt though she may the gender-affirming "Ms." of the billing and the penis reference of the title, the long left-identified and now also trans-identified Furman is here to insist not that her love life is a mess, if indeed it is, but that the world is a mess, which nobody can deny. "Stop the car now! Time to jump out," she warns. "The human mind is a maze in the hedges/On the lawn of a distant king," she goes on. But if you need one to home in on first, try "Submission": "We'll see no victory day/Let's see how much I can take/Keep going a little more/I can take a little more/I'll take it take it take it." Words to live by? Maybe not. To stay alive for? Let's hope so. A−
34. Girl Scout: Headache (Human Garbage '24): Five more songs from Sweden-spawned, musically trained, female-centric, EP-prone foursome, every one sprightly yet calm, decent yet reserved, well-meaning yet emotionally a little flat. The overarching theme is explicit as can be: "I could never love you the way you deserve/And I'm so sorry." I look forward to the next installment of these not quite romantic reflections less than altogether convinced there'll be one. A−
35. Common/Pete Rock: The Auditorium Vol. 1 (Loma Vista '24): For well over three decades, the rapper christened Lonnie Rashid Lynn whose rap name evolved from the simultaneously humble and dull Common Sense to the simultaneously simple and grandiose Common has lived up to both claims, and although crediting producer Pete Rock in the slug line would seem a nice show of humility it's also a by now a commonplace—as Common has said himself on Instagram: "A Dream to let the world know I've been here. A dream to be part of Hip Hop. A Dream to MC at a level where De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS One and Ice Cube knew who I was." Musically, he doesn't get there, because that's just not who he is flow-wise. Instead he nails a hip-hop of the everyday, a rare thing just because it sounds so ordinary. Daydreamin' of Gladys nights, he's proud to "use the microphone for a rhyme and a staff," to celebrate "the birth of the Nation of Islam," and at 52 still wants to know why "my endless love always comes to an end." Because he never actually brags on this attempted masterwork, he personifies the common sense he started off by claiming. Just for that you have to respect the guy. A−
36. Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon (Def Jam): Even with Chuck taking almost every lead, this isn't oratorical or hortatory enough to qualify as a true Public Enemy "comeback," as they say, and not just because the production is several shades more reflective and relaxed than PE's power beats were designed for. As why shouldn't it be, especially given that the man born Carlton Ridenhour turns 65 on August 1, and though of course he's still Black with a capital B, his philosophical tone is conversational rather than polished, associative rather than rational, paternal rather than authoritarian, humanistic rather than race-proud. "If we can't be allies then let's just be enemies." "Born out of tragedy scorned by survival." "Save the rap world like a lyrical vaccine/With thousands of lit candles, rhetorical ramble." "My body is a temple, so no you can't feel it/I build nations, civilize mankind." "I've been your age/You ain't been mine yet/And don't forget New Gens I love y'all, have a ball." A−
37. Amadou & Mariam: La Vie Est Belle (Because '24): Not counting none other than Youssou N'Dour, the now 70- and 65-year old "blind couple of Mali" gathered more international plaudits than any Afropop act of their generation. Their most prestigious honor was nabbing Welcome to Mali's 2010 Contemporary World Music Grammy nomination, when they were somehow outpaced by, oy, Bela Fleck. But to say that I own five of their earlier albums isn't to claim I play them much—their rhythms are more reliable than uplifting. Yet when this two-LP compilation that includes many songs I already own showed up in the mail, multiple replays came easily enough, which isn't to assume an all-new album can't be in their future. Upful, varied, and well-practiced, with a big tone and a fondness for decorative distortion, their vie remains sufficiently belle to argue convincingly that they needn't slow to a stop quite yet. A−
38. FACS: Wish Defense (Trouble in Mind): Their all-caps name adapted from the U.K. Factory label's numbering system, their renowned producer the late Steve Albini of Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and his own Big Black fame, this spare, loud, foursquare Chicago trio makes New Order sound like the Beatles and hence also makes them sound relatively conventional. Of course, a lot of the music we love fits that description. But their sixth album's irresistibly propulsive yet verging-on-abstract purity could make anybody who ever loved New Order consider putting it on repeat, reading along with the lyrics, or both. So I did the latter—once. Not that they're offensive the way Albini liked to be—there are even hints of empathy and conscience. But the next time I play it, and I expect to, it will be to lift myself from a mild existential funk—anything bigger much less warmer would appear to be beyond them. And they're docked a notch for their back-cover snapshot of an apparently male human being's legs straining tippy-toe on a wooden chair toward a ceiling from which hangs, one can only assume, a noose. A−
39. Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya Come Back (Umsakazo): It's been a quarter century since Lion of Soweto cum mbaqanga king Simon Mahlathini Nkabinde roared on this earth, so it would be going too far to claim that the superb live-in-U.K. 1988-89 Music Inferno is nevertheless not nearly as definitive as 1980's incomparable multi-artist Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The genre is just too male. Nonetheless, I have a hunch that at some future moment when I'm in the mood for an Indestructible Beat alternative this ebullient, newly recorded female sampler-cum-best-of will return to my CD player, fully annotated by Hilda Tloubatla, who joined up 60 years ago at 22 and is still at it. A
40. Helene Cronin: Maybe New Mexico (self-released): A well-put-together middle-aged woman who's won some local festival prizes, Cronin is so unassuming in her electric-folk way that you may not notice the lyrical acuteness of an album where the second song goes: "Oh the one who's more in love/Is at the mercy of/The one who doesn't feel it as strong/And that's how the power lines are drawn." Or how about "I want to leave this place better than I found it/Take a breaks my heart and wrap my arms around it/I wanna put a little good out into the world/Shine a little light in the dark/I want to leave my maker's mark"? You may think those sentiments are corny, but in part that's because they're true, and seldom have said truisms been put so acutely or originally. So if you're still unimpressed maybe that's because you're an asshole. A−
41. Patterson Hood: Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams (ATO): I found the head Drive By Trucker's quasi-autobiographical songwriting here so varied and indeed interesting that I dipped back two decades to reaccess his 2004 solo debut Killers and Stars, which I assayed in 120 B plus/A minus words for Blender but never gave it its own review in the Consumer Guide. Not bad, right, only the new one's even better. From Hurricane Helene wrecking North Carolina in the opener to the plane-crash funeral at the close, quite a few of these retrospectives tend dark. But the truly serious part is how much detail suffuses Hood's tales of eros gone wrong and pool-house suicide and Oldsmobiles that get ten miles a gallon and classy Christmas parties over an eight-year-old's head. Extra thanks to Wednesday for chipping in when appropriate. A
42. The Delines: Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom (El Cortez): In this extraordinary partnership, the endlessly subtle and succinct Willy Vlautin concocts or in a few cases mayhap relates 13 down-and-out Americana tales that the endlessly calm and unassuminglygraceful Amy Boone brings to life without dramatizing much less overdramatizing them. All but a few are mini-tragedies in which a limited but plausibly functional sexual partnership, initially sometimes a youngish one, is propped up by a workable job or hustle until the deal falls apart for one reason or another, health setbacks included. There are many different ways such a pattern can assert itself, all of them both different and painful. The execution is so flawless that its aesthetic achievement is actively pleasurable. But that doesn't mean you'll ever put it on for the fun of it. A
43. Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (self-released): Love fan that I am—the concept or feeling, I mean, both obviously much bigger deals than the band—I find this attorney-turned-singer-songwriter's latest album no less poignant for his tendency to croak some when he sings. On the contrary, it's a quirk that intensifies the amorous vulnerability he can't stop emoting or writing about. "She borrowed my heart and brought it back broken, and this day's no fair." "And I can see her in his arms and my heart stops, beaten, struck, and crashes to the ground." "Walking hand-in-hand with you my love. Can't seem to grasp what I was thinking of. I said I didn't want to say goodbye. But you were etching it in stone in my mind." "Desire runs in a race with Time, sayin' 'Who's the bigger fool between you and I. Or did we tie?'" A
44. Manu Chao: Viva Tu (Because '24): The French-Spanish Chao never goes out of style around our house, where his gentle 2007 Radiolina proved such a multicultural easy-listening standard that 2008's Baionarena escaped my notice and his first album in the subsequent 16 years got stuck in the not-quite-enough-of-the-same-thing slot. Only then I bore down and realized that Chao had switched gears sonically. Where before his gentle gestalt was so soft-edged it could make critical praisewords out of adjectives like hazy and muzzy, here the lyrics sound alert and enunciated insofar as an English speaker can tell—"Viva Tu," that must mean keep living or thereabouts, and it's followed by one whose title comes in the aforementioned English: "Heaven's Bad Day," as in "There is no devil to visit my heavens today." Tempos are somewhat speedier, too, and if that makes it more rock and roll let's hope not. We've got plenty of that and not too much Manu Chao at all. Just the thing to blot the noise out of your mind for a spell. A−
45. Billy Woods: Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz): The most literate as well as the most Marxist frontman/mastermind ever to go over the heads of alt-rap cognoscenti types, Woods has never fully mastered the distinction between rhyming and flow. Even when he's linking (and rhyming!) "armed robberies," "carbon copies," and "autopsies" he's kind of prosaic, more a self-made speechifier than a born poet. But he's so well-informed you stick with him—the relative plainness of his delivery makes you want to hear (I said hear) more about "bad hamburger meat," "pre Xmas eviction," "I spent all summer diggin' out a grave/Can't run with the wolves when you're a stray," "if you never came back from the dead you can't tell me shit," "the king's dead and your uncle's not my friend," "staggerin' postcolonial African zombi state," "I rock a clean pair of socks every day just in case," and last but not least "West 86th three beautiful kids and they wake up and make their own beds." A−
46. Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling (Geffen): Come on—for Dacus, forever isn't just a feeling but a goal. Song after unfashionably sweet, unfailingly melodic, undeniably sincere song, she falls in something like love with partners and/or objects of desire who if they aren't all different people (and it's conceivable they're all just one) inspire different apercus and/or call up different memories. "You are doing the Lord's work every time you smile at me." "Clasping your necklace, zipping your dress/Hands on your waist, kissing your neck." "You may not be an angel, but you are my girl/You are my pack a day/You are my favorite place/You were my best friend before you were my . . . " "I'm thinking about breaking your heart and if I do I'll break mine too." "Now I'm knocking down your door 'cause I'm trying to make up for lost time." "This is bliss/This is hell." A−
47. Kadef: Kadef (RR Gems '23): K is for karma, A is for agape, D is for discernment, E is for enactment, and F is for freedom on this wordily annotated double-LP of Arab-inflected trance music that, for the record, sounds decisively richer and more present on the vinyl they've put up for sale than on the Spotify stream. When I say wordy I'm not kidding except insofar as I'm referring to written language as opposed to blabber—a total of eight LP-jacket-sized pages bearing three smallish-print columns of type, thousands of words all-told. The four pages I got through and the other four I skimmed bear not a single reference to the music they supposedly reference in the course of an unrelenting if less than politically practical attack on economic injustice. Which in an attempt co compensate by pinning down the music proper inspired me to jot down such descriptives as "vivid," "lovely," "detailed," "changeable," "intense," and by no means let me forget "ululating." A−
48. Willi Carlisle: Winged Victory (Signature Sounds): Kansas-born, Arkansas-based Carlisle is the most idiosyncratic folkie protest singer to noodge my recall memory in years. "We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years" he begins before citing the bad TV, frozen food, and conservative neighbors besetting "a house we can't afford" and moving on to the unheard-of stuff best summed up by a lissome mid-LP waltz disconcertingly titled "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears," which at the very least prepares us for "Big Butt Billy," which in turn I betcha is the first folk song if perhaps not talking blues ever to use the word "nonbinary." So right, sexuality is on the table here—almost as much as poverty is. A−
49. Corook: Committed to a Bit (Atlantic): In which the musical artist also known as Corinne Savage plights their pronoun on the pointedly upper-cased "THEY!" and their troth pretty much throughout. "I came out of the womb with my heart on my sleeve," they report in their lucid soprano. "You taught me to love me/Like it was hard to love me/You were so focused on the flaws you saw/You didn't even see me," Corook tells their father (never mind "dad"). For the anxiety their daughter feels, their mother prescribes her favorite cure-all, Pepto-Bismol: "a bandaid for a broken arm/Drink it all until it's gone/Drink so we don't have to talk." Yet in the evocatively titled "Death" "a woman whose husband died suddenly" so that she "can't listen to Kenny Rogers anymore" "looked us in the eyes/Said cherish all our time/And I felt you grab my hand a little tighter." Which is why, if you turn it upside down and think about it briefly, the last words of that song are "I want to love you to death." A
50. Grace Potter: Medicine (Hollywood): Produced back in 2008 by none other than T-Bone Burnett for Potter, then and for a while after the lead singer of the proudly Vermont-based Nocturnals, this song collection went unreleased, near as I can tell because the band found its slick professionalism untrue to its homespun ideals. And heard now, it does seem a little dated in its smooth and catchy way. But give it three spins, as I did out of professional courtesy and you might for the hell of it, and notice how happy you are to hear half these songs again—for me, "That Phone" and "Money" at three and four, the propitiatory "Medicine" at seven, the take-that "Make You Cry" at eight, and just to get away from home the highly unpastoral "Paris (Ooh La La)," which makes an admirably enjoyable five out of 10 by me. A−
51. Peter Stampfel, Friends & Daughters: Song Shards (Jalopy): Comprising 46 often foreshortened "soul jingles, stoic jingles, vintage jingles, prayers, and rounds" that break down into 20 obscure hymns and apothegms and 26 long-lost radio ads in just 43 minutes, and what can I say? At first I thought those 72 . . . ditties (???) seemed pretty thin as pieces of vocal music and 2021's Peter Stampfel's 20th Century in 100 Songs it ain't. But Stampfel is so unpredictable and so generous of spirit that I found myself playing it over again after reading the downloadable 23 pages of notes Stampfel wrote to contextualize these compositions. These include his thoughts on the religious ramifications of the project, which though an atheist I found worthy of reading, rereading, and revisiting musically. How well they and for that matter it will endure there's no knowing at this point. But let me call attention to my favorite tunelet here, which goes: "When the values go up up up/And the prices go down down down/Robert Hall this season/Will show you the reason/Low overhead, low overhead." True, the clothing chain of that name went bankrupt in 1977. But take it from me—the songlets hang in there. Carola likes it too. A
52. Funkrust Brass Band: Make a Little Spark (self-released '24): Having never seen one of the live shows this Brooklyn-based brass band's fanbase kvells about, I assume their hyperactive, densely populated, quite findable "Terminus" video is a suitable introduction to their all-white, sexually integrated, determinedly eccentric Balkan-New Orleans hybrid with a fictional post-apocalypse backstory. Their latest and richest recording, while well-executed and then some, is goofier and more playful than "Terminus," although half a dozen viewings in I can't claim to have caught myself humming it on the way to the grocery store. Still, this album establishes them as a worthy, ambitious, and imaginative project. I'd go see them play in a minute if it wasn't too far away on the subway. A−
53. Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist (4AD): Her tempos both delicate and deliberate, her sonics spare whether acoustic or electronic, her soprano simultaneously somber and fluting, this Norwegian journalist-novelist turned singer-songwriter is only 44, a little young you could say to be obsessed with mortality. Post-Covid, however, all such cavils are null and void, especially given the song that tracks the fatal illness of her mother or someone like her. The music is quiet and slow. But because it's philosophical without shame, it definitely doesn't aim for the background. And it firmly suggests that you stop smoking. A−
54. Jeffrey Lewis: The EVEN MORE Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis (Vintage Voltage): What I count as the 14th long player by an East Village lifer set to turn 50 in November is also the best or damn close to it, its themes familiar but its details particular. The one about the girlfriend who always falls asleep on his shoulder before the movie passes the half-hour mark is counterbalanced by the bereft breakup song "Tylenol PM," just as the disgruntled opener "Do What Comes Natural" is sweetened by the pre-closer "100 Good Things." But aptly for someone approaching the half century mark, a closer called "The Endless Unknown" leaves the door open for a follow-up album that lands on or tries to encompass existential vastness itself. A−
55. Sudan Archives: The BPM (Stones Throw): Sticking to what sure looks like an every-third-year schedule, virtuoso violinist-vocalist Brittney Parks muses more fetchingly and strikingly than ever about the usual even though usual she's obviously not. She's gifted with talent, savoir-faire, and a vocal style she has every reason to believe both conveys and simulates pure pleasure—a pleasure so convincing that it seems almost utopian in its offhand sexuality and confident aura. The main reason you won't fall in love with her is that you know damn well she's out of your league. A−
56. Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: Talkin to the Trees (Reprise): Young loves cars so much that way back in 2009 he came up with Fork in the Road, a "domestic green fuel" preachment that like so much of his vast oeuvre was melodic as opposed to catchy. The songs seldom set you humming along in the manner of Tonight's the Night or Rust Never Sleeps, but for a while there many of his albums stuck with you and roused your blood a little. Lately that kind of vitality has dimmed notably, as why shouldn't it—he turns 80 in November. But here he climbs back on the green-car soapbox with some relatively hooky numbers as well as spreading the news that China of all places was taking the lead in the little matter of cars that "won't kill our kids." Inspirational Side Comment: "If you're a fascist then get a Tesla/If it's electric it doesn't matter." Although actually it kind of does, I'd say. A−
57. Wet Leg: Moisturizer (Domino): "You wanna fuck me, I know, most people do," brags and/or murmurs LBGTQ bandleader/ingenue Rhian Teasdale to a present/prospective inamorata on a love album where affection is unmistakable, passion explicit, and pleasure guaranteed. That's how eros is supposed to work, right? To reduce half-an-hour of it to soft, lyrical pop-rock is an aesthetic triumph all the more impressive because it never sounds like it's trying too hard. A−
58. GloRilla: Glorious (CMG/Interscope '24): From "These niggas tryin' to get me pregnant/I need to tie my tubes" to "I ain't goin' for all that rough me up and grab me by the neck," this sex object signifies as a subject. She sees herself as a conscious combatant in the war of the genders who's in it for both pleasure and autonomy and is committed enough to her own goodness to enlist the Reverend Kirk Franklin in her life quest and hint that "Stop playing with that girl" is more likely out of concern for said female than desire for the male she sees is on the make. Limited though the world she inhabits may seem, she gets quite a few distinct songs out of it. A−
59. PinkPantheress: Fancy That (Warner): As any boxing fan understands better than I do, there's lightweight and then there's featherweight. But as of her third not very long longplayer, this mere rock fan feels entitled to declare the former Victoria Beverly Walker a musical featherweight. Do I enjoy just about every airy track said longplayer accommodates? Yes. Am I aware PinkPantheress has become a well-regarded-of-sorts songwriter-of-sorts? Yes. Can I therefore tell one irresistibly inconsequential track from the other? Not as far as I recall although the track breaks are discernible. Ur-Prosaic Verse: "You were recommended to me by some people." A−
60. Smerz: Big City Life (Escho): Of course post-ingenues Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt's quietly doleful, quietly atmospheric reports on Oslo's club life are delivered in English—they're Norwegian, after all. Of course they prefer we think their heels are higher than their IQs—for them, as long as they can sing about it, that's the main thing clubs are there for. Which is hardly to say they've given up on love as quickly as they have every right to. Perfectly aware that they're no longer ingenues, they remain determined to stay in the game because they still believe they've got it in them to win it, which they just may. A−
61. Skrillex: F*ck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 (Atlantic/Owsla): After a nice 2011-2013 run as "the most hated man in dubstep" (only he wasn't dubstep really), the beaty L.A. noisemaker originally known as Sonny John Moore kind of returned to form with two 2023 albums, even winning a 2024 Grammy for the "collaborative single" "Rumble." But this comeback hoot-and-a-half is a who-knew? jamboree as continuously engaging and hilariously silly as its title. If there's a single expression of human feeling in the random verbiage that emerges here, I was too busy chuckling to notice, although "we make your eardrums bleed," while claiming too much by half-and-a-half, has its truth value if you happen to be sentimental about human voices and what many still call musical instruments. A

And It Don't Stop, May 7, 2026

2024

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