Erykah Badu's discography was damn near flawless before that weird 2015 mixtape with multiple features from a Drake impersonator. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Before the Wind Blows is awesome, but I guess I'd kinda given up on hearing another great record from her when her last proper album was 16 years ago. People have become really weird about The Alchemist in his super-prolific second (third? fourth?) wind, on the other hand, so maybe I also underestimated that he'd know know how to get on Badu's wavelength, but he really understood the assignment. This often reminds me of New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), which is a big personal favorite, a headphone record where it feels like Badu is singing in your ear over these gently psychedelic beats. I think my favorite track right now is "What the People Say (Apostle 1)." 

I already added There Near to my recent ranking of Dinosaur Jr. albums, and ended up putting it dead in the middle, which is high praise for one of the more consistent discographies of the last 40-something years. I think right now "Take Me With You" is my favorite song and "Clam Along" has my favorite guitar solo, I love when J just hits the ground shredding right at the beginning of a song. I also highly recommend Grayson Haver Currin's recent Pitchfork piece, easily the best and most insightful profile in the history of Dinosaur Jr. 

The second single Rapsody released from God Gotta Afro & Gold Hoops, and the first one I heard, was "Apple Juice," and she sings that entire song without any rapping, so I went into this album wondering if it was gonna be the melodic experiment that so many rappers do now. But that song's pretty much a one-off, she's still rapping rapping and this is probably my favorite thing she's released in the 9 years since the classic Laila's Wisdom, "Free Yo' Mind" and "Never Break" and "Black Love" with Malice are great. 

I wish Sara Bareilles had an entire album that sounded like Good Grief's "Heartland," just her voice and piano. But I'm pretty happy with the relatively stripped-down sound of both this Aaron Dessner-album and 2019's Amidst the Chaos (turns out there's not really a whole lot of functional difference between T Bone Burnett production and Aaron Dessner production). Sara Bareilles is one of the few singer/songwriters who can actually make me cry, so I imagine the mortality-themed Good Grief may destroy me emotionally the next time I lose someone in my life. And "Salt Then Sour Then Sweet" totally lives up to the potential of a Bareilles/Brandi Carlile duet, their voices sound sublime together. 

I interviewed the Maryland-born and Nashville-based singer Maggie Rose two years ago, just before she got her first Grammy nomination for No One Gets Out Alive and was starting to write the follow-up. Her producer and co-writer for Half Moon is Daniel Tashian, who's done most of the Kacey Musgraves albums from Golden Hour onwards, and she's continuing to mine an earthy '70s sound that suits her voice really well. The first track "Used To It" hooks me right away, I love the way it just very quickly ramps up and gets pretty loud and intense. 

I don't know if you could call any of J Dilla's work underrated at this point, but I don't think his work with Busta Rhymes gets enough credit, the last 9 tracks of my Busta deep cuts playlist are all Dilla productions and they're all killer. Apparently Dilla gave Busta 300 unreleased beats before he died, and I guess he used some of them on the 2007 mixtape Dillagence but the tracks he used for the new sequel are largely unheard. So this album is a treasure trove just for the beats, but this is probably Busta's best work as an MC in decades, he really did a great job of curating a good variety of tracks and using his entire arsenal flows of voices. I especially the way he uses two beats to make one song on "Spazzz," the first part is crazy, and it's fun to hear Lil Wayne on a Dilla beat on "Talk Ya Shit." 

Each Carly Pearce album has charted lower than the previous one, with her fifth album Honest Woman being her first to miss the Billboard 200. It's frustrating to see one of my favorite artists lose her footing in mainstream country, especially because I think they've underestimated the potential for "Daisy" or "You Can Have Him" to be radio singles. I don't like "Church Girl" because the chorus is structured so similarly to her 2020 hit "Next Girl," but there's a lot of great songs on here and Cary Pearce just has this visceral ache in her voice, sad songs aren't as important to country music as they used to be but she's one the best at them right now.  

E-40 has slowed down his output over the years, Turning My Money Over is his second full-length solo project of the 2020s, but he loves to drop huge amounts of music at once. "Quadruple album" is a little deceptive since it runs less than 2 hours, he's actually released more music in one day a few times (including three albums totaling three and a half hours in 2012), but this is still just a bounty of great tracks in the classic late period post-hyphy E-40 tradition. If I had to pick a favorite of the four discs, I'd go with disc 2, "Blessed" and "Trunk Is Alive" go crazy. 

Pat McAfee became a sportscasting personality after retiring from the NFL almost a decade ago, and at this point he might be the only person that's on ESPN more than Stephen A Smith, but even Stephen A. never submitted us to a musical side quest. I was almost disappointed about how ordinary McAfee's wildly mocked debut album is, like a Jelly Roll record by someone with even less talent than Jelly Roll, but it becomes properly awful around that mid-album stretch of "Oops" ("I used to not have shit, now I got a bidet") and "Smokin" ("I be smokin', silence what they say/ I got a clear mind, yinz call it a haze").