#7. Arriving at the tail end of 2020 — Christmas Day, to be exact — to the bewilderment of fans and skeptics alike, Playboi Carti’s Whole…
#8. As easy as it is to recognize the old spirit that Lana Del Rey has always been, it’s just as easy to see how…
#10. Though prolific and trendy, Bladee remains a figure seemingly detached, his career thus far skirting up against, and indebted to, the western pop music…
#11. Most everyone who writes about Low’s HEY WHAT describes its desolate, fractured noise-scapes as an accurate portrayal of current times. The reality is that life…
#14. Duo Magdalena Bay make pop music that is in love with being pop music. Although their songs burst with playfulness and a desire to…
#16. 2021 saw Club Harlecore open its doors to the Internet, a 24-hour web-based rave spot featuring a quartet of mystical DJs brought into our reality…
#18. Rare is the artist in popular music with a sound that’s entirely their own; one-time Fleetwood Mac mastermind Lindsey Buckingham is for sure one of…
#19. Her approach to the blues has always bucked tradition, but Adia Victoria fully develops an inimitable aesthetic on A Southern Gothic, on which she embraces…
#22. Offhand, it’s tough to recall another “event” album release that seemed to confound the mainstream music press in the ways that Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR did.…
#23. At more than 100 minutes long, Skee Mask’s Pool has the immersive depth and feel of an entire ocean. His previous full-lengths already had…
#24. 333 is the second studio album Tinashe has released since becoming an independent artist, and you can hear it in the music. Maybe even…
Honorable Mention: Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert opens with one of the most striking singles of the year, a six-minute long rap epic…
Honorable Mention: In spite of a raging pandemic that has put many bands in the worst financial positions in their careers, Turnstile has managed to…
Honorable Mention: In a year where most mainstream rap albums not named Donda disappointed — looking at you Tyler, Jeffrey, Aubrey — and the genre…
Honorable Mention: As is the case with many of today’s most exciting new artists, Sematary is an Internet cult favorite, a mysterious bandcamp auteur who…
Honorable Mention: Licorice Pizza is, like almost every other Paul Thomas Anderson movie, about America. More specifically it is about America as embodied in the…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time collaborator…
Honorable Mention: A quick glimpse at the one-sheet for Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon doesn’t inspire much hope. A black-and-white flick with both auto- and metafictional…
Honorable Mention: It’s Christmas, the time of miracles, and there’s been no greater cinematic miracle this holiday/award season than the fact that Paul Verhoeven was…
Honorable Mention: Leave it to Sean Baker to direct poverty porn. After the much-celebrated The Florida Project, a fantastical if somewhat aestheticised survey of America’s…
#21. Hong Sang-soo’s films generally fall somewhere between melodrama and farce, but to classify them as such is to no doubt essentialize them as what…