I only just heard Brandi Carlile's masterpiece By The Way, I Forgive You last year, but I think In These Silent Days might be even better. I love the big moments early in the album, like the way Carlile's voice works its way up to its full power on "Right On Time," and the way "Broken Horses" explodes out of the acoustic "This Time Tomorrow." But the whole thing is great. "Sinners, Saints And Fools" is a killer late album slow burner. Carlile's Highwomen bandmate Natalie Hemby also released an excellent album in October. Here's the 2021 albums Spotify playlist with all the records I've been listening to this year. 

I liked Good News, but it was definitely the kind of overly labored everything-to-everyone debut album that lots of rappers after making their name with better mixtapes and EPs. And I wasn't really expecting her to make any kind of back-to-basics stopgap project, but the surprise mixtape she released last Friday, Something For Thee Hotties, really just feels like the perfect thing from her on the heels of "Thot Shit," nothing but back-to-back bangers with no guests, lots of Juicy J and LilJuMadeDaBeat productions, just reaffirms that she's still one of the best rappers in the world right now. My favorites are definitely "Megan's Piano," "All Of It," "Freakend," and the Mass Production sample on "Kitty Kat," but she's snapping on the whole record.

Young Thug is also coming off of the success of a so-called 'debut album' that finally put him on the level he'd long deserved to be at, and though So Much Fun was a solid project, I'm glad that Punk isn't a retread of its winning formula. Punk also isn't the Travis Barker-assisted punk pop crossover that the album's title and the Tiny Desk Concert and "SNL" promo appearances seemed to indicate it would be -- there are a lot of guitars on the album, but they're often clean or acoustic, with little or no percussion on a lot of tracks. The opening stretch of the album is practically Young Thug Unplugged (which would be cool, come to think of it -- it even rhymes!), which kind of makes the clubbier songs later in the album hit harder. That more melodic approach only feels like a calculated crossover attempt once towards the end of the album, on "Love You More" with Nate Ruess, otherwise it just feels like Thug felt like writing a gentler set of songs and wound up with the album people sort of expected Beautiful Thugger Girls to be.

When one of PinkPantheress's singles caught my ear a few weeks ago, I didn't quite realize that she was rapidly accruing next-big-thing status in the UK. Most of her songs are TikTok-ready snippets that run less than 2-minutes, and I joked that her debut album/mixtape thing would be only 17 minutes without realizing that it is, in fact, 18 minutes long. Brevity suits her, though, and this thing almost breezes by too quickly to register any shortcomings that her simple, charming songs have, but I definitely dig the '90s jungle homages like "Passion," "Noticed I Cried" and "I Must Apologise" more than the more straightforward tinny bip bap beats. 

I don't know if I like this one as much as 2019's Brandon Banks, but it's solid, "They Say" is one of the best songs with a beat switch I've heard in recent memory, actually feels like the different pieces fit together and complement each other. 

I don't do a lot of handwringing about the waning commercial relevance of rock music, because whatever, it is what it is. But I do periodically find myself envious of England, where rock music is still pop music, when I see younger rock artists like Sam Fender and Wolf Alice and Royal Blood top the UK album charts with excellent records. Those albums have made relatively small splashes in America, where we instead settle for table scraps like Machine Gun Kelly picking up a guitar as a pathetic excuse for a "people still listen to rock music" angle. One of the singles from Sam Fender's debut caught my ear a couple years ago, and I'm really loving his second album, which has lots of sax and makes his Springsteen influences even more explicit. 

I've always been a big Meek Mill fan and thought he made great projects whether his career was thriving or not, but after he reached a new peak with Championships, it feels like he spent the last 3 years losing all his momentum from that project and chipping away at his popularity with a hundred mini-controversies, and Expensive Pain feels like the least urgent record he's ever made. And the lame title and cover art don't help. It's not bad, though, lot of bangers on here, particularly "Hot" with Moneybagg Yo and "Cold Hearted III." 

Limp Bizkit just released its new album on Halloween, presumably just because one of the songs on the album opens with the words "it's Halloween." I kinda wish they didn't release an album on a Sunday, though, because Limp Bizkit has enough factors working against them as it is, even though, as I wrote here 3 months ago, their performance at this year's Lollapalooza kind of put them back on everyone's mind and spurred another backlash to the backlash. An album titled Still Sucks has the defensive moments you'd expect like "Love The Hate," but for the most part it's fun, fast little 32-minute album with lots of 2-minute songs, I think my favorite is "Pill Popper," the record definitely plays to the band's strengths with some odd little detours. There's an acoustic cover of a song I love, INXS's "Don't Change," which I surprisingly don't hate, and a skit that references Nick Cave and Godspeed! You Black Emperor, just weird stuff all around.

Coldplay are, to my mind, as much a cartoonish vestige of the early 2000s as Limp Bizkit, but they've done a better job of doubling down on their brand and incorporating trendy pop sounds to stay relevant. Doing songs with the Chainsmokers and Rihanna and Big Sean and so on felt mercenary and maybe a little desperate, but an entire album produced by Max Martin weirdly feels a little more ambitious and in line with their Brian Eno-produced album. The tracks with BTS and Selena Gomez are about as awkward and embarrassing as expected, but the rest is the best Coldplay album in a while, with unexpected moments like the dreamy 10-minute epic "Coloratura" and "People of the Pride," which rocks pretty hard by Coldplay standards. 

A lot of time the 'worst album' in this spot is something I genuinely hate, but I just found this kind of dull. I'm not much of a Don Toliver fan but I checked it out on the assumption that after "Lemonade" his next album would be huge, but it doesn't even seem to have much of an impact even with the crowd that would usually be hyped about a record with multiple Travis Scott features. And I get it, it feels kind of low energy and underwhelming even by Toliver's standards. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »