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Donald Trump offered to guarantee A $ AP Rocky's bail to release the American rapper from his detention in Sweden, while the Scandinavian country did not have a bail system.
The hip-hop star, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, has been arrested in Sweden since July 3 as police investigate her alleged involvement in a street fight.
The fight would have taken place before the performance of the rapper at the Smash Festival in Stockholm, with images of the incident broadcast through social media.
We will tell you what is true. You can form your own view.
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Trump, who intervened in the case after a plea from Kanye West, announced today that he had telephoned Swedish leader Stefan Löfven in order to secure the rapper's release.
The US President tweeted, "I just had a very good call with @SwedishPM, Stefan Löfven, who badured me that US citizen A $ AP Rocky would be treated fairly.
1/43 Rina Mushonga – In a galaxy
It is not uncommon for an artist to be influenced by the place in which he grew up. However, few of them will probably have as much inspiration for inspiration as Rina Mushonga, an artist born in India, raised in Zimbabwe and now based in Peckham.
The nomadic personality of the singer-songwriter is reflected in the wide range of reference points of her new album, In a Galaxy. This is technically a follow-up to The Wild, the Wilderness, but the audacity found with this new work is striking.
Since that first disc, Mushonga has started to incorporate empowerment themes into his work. On "AtalantA", she presents her muscular voice, capable of going from an airy tune to a deep, emotional moan, as she sings words inspired by the goddess of the Greek hunter who refused to marry . In a galaxy, it's a record that takes you well beyond the boundaries of the world you're used to and in something more colorful. (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
2/43 Deerhunter – Why has not everything already disappeared?
In the eighth Deerhunter album, band leader Bradford Cox embodies the war poet and describes the things he observes with a pure, factual tone and heartbreaking details. Death is everywhere on Why has not everything already disappeared? As much as others may refuse to see it.
Already disappeared is not an easy album. Cox is often dark and experimental: Cox voices resonate like distorted static static fragments, or seem smothered in the middle of the instrumentation. This is a new aspect of Deerhunter that gives the listener a lot to contemplate. (Roisin O'Connor)
3/43 Sharon Van Etten – Call me back tomorrow
After a tumultuous period, the fifth album of Sharon Van Etten is a reinvention. But under his fuzzy synths and his electronics hide endurance and inner peace songs, stabilizing after a wave of activity.
On Reminding Me Tomorrow, written during her recent pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Van Etten mitigates his gaze on toxicity and instead gives a warm glance behind the psychic flyover of the disc.
The concern and pride of future kinship converge towards "Seventeen," a paean of invincibility and melancholy of adolescence. Addressing a younger version of herself, the 37-year-old woman sings the youthful carelessness and mistrust of those who have been defeated by the time.
After years of making peace with drift and uncertainty, she never seemed any safer. (Jazz Monroe)
Ryan Pfluger
4/43 Bring me the horizon – Amo
BMTH leader Oli Sykes wants to affirm the fragility of the border between love and hatred. Amo is a way to explore this even up to the very title.
The movie "I do not know what to say" is more cinematic in its symphonic drama, perhaps inspired by their 2016 performances at the Royal Albert Hall, which featured a full orchestra and a choir, and which became the most popular song. touching of the album. Sykes recounts the loss of an intimate friend, evoking strong pressing fiddle notes and a soft voice on an acoustic guitar. It reaches a climax, it screams the title of the song one last time. Amo will not satisfy all BMTH fans, but it is certainly accomplished, sufficiently catchy and eclectic to bring new ones. (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
5/43 Nina Nesbitt – The sun will rise, the seasons will change
Nesbitt is back with his second album, moving to a brand of soul-blended R & B pop that feels great at the hour and that fits him a lot better. The sun will rise, the seasons will change to a smooth and refined production of Fraser T Smith (Adele), Lostboy (Anne-Marie), Jordan Riley (Zara Larsson) and Nesbitt herself.
Several tracks exploit a 90's R & B sound to which British women, from Mabel to Ella Mai, currently excel. The badertive titles "Loyal to Me" and "Love Letter" are reminiscent of TLC's "No Scrubs" and "Destiny's Survivor", but the "Somebody Special" neo-soul, accompanied by its acoustic guitar, presents also a vulnerability. tender heart on "Do I really miss you?" (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
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6/43 Better Oblivion Community Center
This self-titled CD, a collection of loose but beautifully crafted folk-rock songs, explores the types of anxiety intrinsic to the modern age – the desire to be both noticed and invisible; the paralyzing effects of unlimited information, and the desire to do good against the desire to be seen good.
As if to mark their parity, they even sing largely in unison – which could have had a painful effect if the couple's voices were not so distinct: Bridgers sings with foggy badurance, Oberst with a tremor emotion. And when the melody of Bridgers slips sporadically over that of Oberst, it is all the more powerful. (Alexandra Pollard)
7/43 Ariana Grande – Thank you U, Next
The album is filled with personal confessions that fans – "Arianators" – will be able to choose. It lacks a centerpiece to match the striking depth and space of Sweetener's "God Is A Woman", but Grande treats his changing moods and his cast of producers (including pop machines Max Martin and Tommy Brown) with an engaging clbad and motivation. One minute, you go to the spoon of the party "Bloodline"; the next to float in the half-detached, the sorrow of 'Ghostin', which seems to settle Grande's guilt for having been with Davidson while searching for Miller. She sings the late rapper as a "wingless angel" with high, light notes that will drop the most severe jaw. (Helen Brown)
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8/43 James Blake – Form of Assumption
The brilliant Perma James Blake has flooded his fourth album – Assume Form – with euphoric sepia soul and adored doo-wop. His trademark intelligence, honesty and pin-drop production remain intact. But the detached voice of a decade-old choir in which he fought the depression thawed to reveal Sam Cooke's thousand-year-old chant: "I can not believe how we flow, of to sink, to sink … "
The warm piano keys that cover this song break the anxious din of dance rhythms on the album's debut album, the singer reviewed so regularly that "gauzy" promises to "leave the ether, take shape" and "to be palpable, to be accessible". His own most bitter criticism, he winks at the journalists who called him icy while he goes from a distant and icy falsetto to a richer and deeper tone to ask, "Does not it seem much hotter?" (Helen Brown)
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9/43 AJ Tracey – AJ Tracey
While recognizing its roots and including many leading marks, AJ Tracey's pie's eye for a good melody or hook goes well beyond that. With the help of stellar producers such as Cadenza (Kiko Bun), Swifta Beater (Kano, Giggs) and Nyge (Boyz Section, Yxng Bane), Tracey integrates electronic music, rock, garage and even country into his most consistent work to date.
The variety and magnitude of ambitions of this album are breathtaking. Fans will be surprised to discover that Tracey sings almost as much as he rap, in pleasantly gruff tones. Each track is remarkable, as well as "Ladbroke Grove", a nod to the clbadic garage in which Tracey modifies his flow to emulate a MC Nineties. It's an exciting job. (Roisin O'Connor)
Ashley Verse
10/43 Sleaford Mods – Eton Alive
The title of the year gives us an image of the Brexit Britain destroyed by the old Etonians David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the fifth studio work of the punk duo has more to offer than social comments . Some, like singer Jason Williamson, comments on documentary filmmakers who exploit the poor in "Kebab Spider" – "the skint is used in roller shoes" – but elsewhere, it's a record that expands the number of documentaries. idea of what Sleaford Mods could be.
Andrew Fearn's rhythms are no longer just the backdrop, they threaten to take this album. Surprising influences infiltrate, from the 80s R & B to the Human League, to "When You Up To Me," not only Williamson sings, but a melancholy tone breaks the anger. "I do not want to go back to the page / from my negative scenario," he intones on the final track, but there's just a hint that he's doing it. (Chris Harvey)
11/43 Julia Jacklin – crush
"Do you still have this picture? / Would you use it to hurt me?", Says Julia Jacklin, an independent Australian rocker, against the threatening beat of "Body". The tension is choppy: imagine a mid-period Fleetwood Mac song, picked up by Cat Power. It's a master clbad in narrative composition.
Do not let children win, Jacklin's excellent debut in 2016 will find a continuity of alternative attitudes and vintage influences.
But there is a deeper sense of personal connection to anchor Jacklin's lyrical and melodic intelligence. This snare drum keeps a ruthless and nervous pulse, Jacklin looking more confident in its contradictions: she wants to both comfort a lover that she threw and then, in "Head Alone", stating, "I do not want to be touch. all the time / I raised my body to be mine. "
Ah Shucks. A 50s guitar rinsed, grunge, feminist and recycled: Crushing is a triumph. (Helen Brown)
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12/43 Little Simz – GRAY
With praise from Kendrick Lamar, five EPs released at the age of 21, tours with Lauryn Hill, collaborations with Gorillaz and two critically acclaimed albums – including the excellent 2017 concept album Stillness in Wonderland – fans and critics wondered what Little Simz could do more. find the kind of mainstream success that so many of his peers enjoy.
Yet, you'd be hard pressed to find in recent years a time when Simz herself commented on this issue. Instead, she is busy perfecting her art for Gray Area, which sees her land on a new, more daring sound, with the help of her childhood friend, producer Inflo. [Michael Kiwanuka’s Love & Hate] – for a record that integrates its dextral flow and its superb wordplay with a range of eclectic influences. The album encompbades everything from jazz, funk and soul to punk and heavy rock, plus three carefully chosen features.
(Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
Jen Ewbank
13/43 Solange – When I come home
Solange Knowles has never been shy about the intention behind her music. Despite beautiful arrangements and flawless production, you have the impression, every time she drops a project, that she serves a distinct purpose, which is changing dramatically.
This time, with When I go home, Solange actually gave us permission to rest. Echoing similar movements observed in recent years, such as the "Black Power Naps" exposure of Fannie Sosa and Acosta Lev – who speaks and hopes to address the socio-economic problem of increasing deprivation rates black sleep – the album is soothing, smug quality, with its layers of sounds and enveloping harmonies.
And what better to dream than in the comfort of your own digs? Whether in the physical structure of a property that has shaped you over the years, or in the familiar sounds of music and culture that your people have created, there seems to be a call to return to what is familiar. (Kuba Shand-Baptiste)
Max Hirschberger
14/43 Foals – Anything that is not saved will be lost (Part 1)
Foals: Fusion of their early asymmetric mathematical math with deep space atmospheres of Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, as well as new innovations – ambient rainforest beats on "Moonlight", a dynamic EDM on "In Degrees", Radiohead Afro-glitch on "Café D & # 39; Athens" – They created an album inspired by new music from the scorched earth which, in all likelihood, will be truly challenged only for the year's album by the second part. (Mark Beaumont)
Alex Knowles
15/43 Dave – Psychodrama
The tracks are both clever and deeply personal in the way they capture vignettes of everyday life and turn them into important lessons. "Black," the most recent excerpt from the disc, describes what this word means to different people in the world, as well as to Dave. "Voices" makes him sing a garage beat of the old school, fighting personal demons.
"I could be the rapper with a message as you hope, but what's the point of knowing if I'm the best if no one knows?", He launches on "Psycho", who flips scattershot between rhythms and moods as if the piece itself is schizophrenic. Dave goes from psychodrama to solving the problems caused by the generations that preceded him. At the end of the album, he looks like a figurehead for a promising future.
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16/43 Sigrid – Sucker Punch
At its best, Sigrid throws sharp, precision-crafted notes, such as ice javelins, into an immense blue sky produced by Scandi. Then she grumbles like an Icelandic volcano preparing to disrupt Western civilization until we get along.
I enjoyed the deaf and tinged authenticity of Afro's "Level Up" and the reggae-conscious and mushy "Business Dinners" (about which she refuses to be an angel of the 39; industry) and I loved the robyn-esque rush of "Basic" (which sees her yearning to get rid of the complications of her love).
Sigrid has raw energy and emotional liveliness that can make you feel like you're doing aerobics with neon leggings on top of a pristine mountain. (Helen Brown)
Francesca Allen
17/43 Karen O and Danger Mouse – Lux Prima
Lux Prima was born a little over ten years ago as a result of a drunk phone call from Karen O to Danger Mouse – her real name Brian Joseph Burton – during which the couple had sworn to work together. It was only when O gave birth to his son, however, that the recording finally began and there is a sense of beatific contentment about songs like "Drown", with his choirs and horns similar to those of Kamasi Washington .
Danger Mouse is known for his striking collaborations with artists such as Beck, the Black Keys and CeeLo Green, and he's also applying this approach here: the album is an awesome mix of blissed-out synths, psych-rock guitars and hip hip. -beats rhythmic.
Lux Prima is an accomplished record – proof that two extremely different minds can work together seamlessly. Inebriated numbering is not always such a bad idea. (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
Eliot Lee Hazel
18/43 The Cinematic Orchestra – Believe
It is an ambitious creation, meticulously designed and badembled. For starters, the range of guest performers brings together contemporary soul and hip-hop collaborators: singers Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Gray Reverend and Tawiah; string player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and keyboardist Dennis Hamm – both of whom have worked with Flying Lotus and Thundercat.
My Flower was emotional and piano-driven, her themes of death and the pbadage of life captured so evocatively in Patrick Watson's collaboration "To Build a Home" – which was then a soundtrack of each show TV's Gray's Anatomy in Orange is the New Black. . To believe, however, feels more extended in scope. (Elisa Bray)
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19/43 Lucy Rose – More words
Rose – who made herself known on the British indie-folk scene in the UK as an unofficial member of the Bombay Bicycle Club in 2010, before moving away despite the group's growing hype – is terribly convincing in No Words Left. Assisted by producer Tim Bidwell, who worked on Rose's latest album, Something's Changing, she looks braver than she has ever been. There are moments that remind his Communion colleague, Ben Howard, on his latest album, Noonday Dream, and others that recall the understated stoicism of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
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20/43 Nilufer Yanya – Miss Universe
The record is quite conceptual in that it is punctuated with fake announcements of "WWAY HEALTH, our 24/7 care program." But do not be put off: Miss Universe is a brilliant collection of songs, a vast mix of indie, jazz, pop and trip-hop that oscillates between a lack of fi-fi and something that would play The Strokes. Yanya – who has Turkish-Irish-bajan origins – grew up in London on a mix of Pixies, Nina Simone, The Libertines and Amy Winehouse, and this unlikely combination is certainly reflected in the sound. (Patrick Smith)
Molly Daniel
21/43 Jenny Lewis – On the line
Here, Lewis does what she does best: she adds to melancholy and nostalgia the shining effect of Hollywood and a sunny Californian shine, with her most sumptuously orchestrated album to date. Even when she sings, "I spoiled my youth," it's in that sweet voice, with "doo doo doo doo doo doo do" carefree, and at such an optimistic rate that it masks the feeling. It is a bittersweet mourning of her past. (Elisa Bray)
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22/43 Ty Segall – deforming lobes
Featuring songs from Segall's eclectic catalog (which says so lightly) and performed by him and the Freedom Band (Mikal Cronin, Charles Moothart, Emmett Kelly and Ben Boye), the album is delightfully short and sweet. This is certainly a radical change from Freedom's Goblin (2018), which had 19 titles and ran for 75 minutes.
The "Warm Hands" opener, from the 2017 Segall self-titled disc, is essentially an epic jam; he develops a fuzzy distortion and crumbling riffs for nine good half minutes with a joyful illegality. "Love Fuzz", which serves as a bookend at the end of the album, is even wilder. This is not a "best of" selection, the band simply chose the songs they were most successful at. Deforming the lobes is unpredictable and invigorating – the best representation of Segall's agitated creativity to this day, not to mention the most fun to listen to. (Roisin O'Connor)
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23/43 Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
If you want to know how difficult it is to categorize Titanic Rising – Weyes Blood's exciting fourth album – look no further than the American musician's attempt to do so. That's, she says, "the Kinks meet World War II, or Bob Seger meets Enya".
None of them is a particularly precise description, but they correspond at least to the refusal of the album to linger in all genres. Slide guitars give way to the altos, which open strange synths. The organs are multiplying, evoking both the music of the Renaissance and a fairground attraction. The fragmented channels of "Movies," a song about the fallacies of Hollywood romance, are reminiscent of Arthur Russell's chaotic minimalism.
And then there is that voice – both hot and haunting, controlled and unattached. It's no wonder she has lent this talent to Perfume Genius, Drugdealer and Ariel Pink: she adds a touch of depth to everything she encounters.
Titanic Rising is not Bob Seger meets Enya. It's better. Alexandra Pollard
24/43 Chemical brothers – no geography
Tension aside, fun reigns here. The title track is purely euphoric, while agitated synths of a Utah Saints rave or Orbital collapse in a swollen bbad and melody. And they create the club's complete experience with "Got to Keep On", where four-beat rhythm, funky rhythm guitar, soft voices and ringing bells make way for the simple sounds of happy party goers; In the same way that anticipation is built, the instrumentation evolves into a hypnotic crescendo. It is a masterful production. (Elisa Bray)
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25/43 Anderson .Paak – Ventura
Six months after the release of Oxnard, Anderson. Paak returns with another record produced by Dr. Dre, Ventura. Where the former overflowed with jerky experimental sounds, guests and clumsy attempts at revolutionary lyrics by Gil Scott Heron, the sequel – recorded at the same time – streamlines Paak's sound, making a well-packed, melodic and danceable album .
Rather than being an album of Oxnard's descendants, Ventura borrows heavily from Malibu, the ever-brilliant .Paak record, which is a new slice of soulful funk. The singer sings disco-inspired trumpets inspired by Quincy Jones in 'Reachin' 2 Much ', masterfully interprets Smokey Robinson's vocals with a violin blossoming into' Making it Better ', and playfully recounts global warming in "Yada Yada". While Paak sings in "Winners Circle", "They do not do it anymore". Given the few artists mastering their craft as .Paak, he is not wrong. (Jack Shepherd)
26/43 Loyle Carner – do not wave but drown
Two years after the release of her Mercury Award-winning debut album Yesterday's Gone, the hip-hop artist from South London unveils her sequel, Not Waving, But Drowning. And if two recordings can describe the speed with which someone can pbad from boy to man, it is this one.
Faces and familiar themes serve as his trademark. The nominees Jorja Smith, winner of the Mercury Award, and the winner, Sampha, look like old friends. They fit seamlessly into Carner's landscape, built from clbadic hip-hop rhythms and warm piano loops. On top of all this, he strikes with an easy flow in harsh and honeyed tones.
Above all, he is aware of what the family means to him and so gives to the album a poem of him to his mother Jean and one of his mother to him. Not waving, but drowning has an emotional intelligence that shows how strong Carner is when he is most vulnerable. (Roisin O & # 39; Connor)
27/43 Lizzo – Because I like you
Nobody could accuse Lizzo of restraining himself. Not when it comes to his voice – that is raw and rowdy, so loaded with personality that even the most vulnerable moments are a joy to listen to – and certainly not when it comes to his message of d & # 39; self-love without flaw. This is the predominant theme of the very nice third album of the singer / rapper / flautist-extraordinaire, Cuz I Love You.
When Lizzo played Coachella earlier this week, his game was plagued by technical problems. "The next time I'm in the lead," she said, "I'm going to need my royal ear to work." Judging by the strength of his third album, this might not be such an unlikely hypothesis. (Alexandra Pollard)
Luke Gilford
28/43 Fat White Family – Serfs Up!
It also seems likely that Old Man Steptoe dining with the Rees-Mogg, but this new tactic of burying their conflicting horror under a varnish of alternative rock respectability for album three works well for Fat White Family. Dipped into chamber strings and celestial harmonies, the plush but sinister "Oh Sebastian" could be Pet Sounds selling his soul to the devil. "Fringe Runner" is so stylish and fun that it could be a new romantic "White Lines (Do not Do It)"; "Kim's Sunsets" is a piece of refined cosmic reggae resembling a booming "Bankrobber".
Tarantino bossa nova and Velvet drones are all imbued with a bright and cultured seeding, in the image of the entire Cannes Film Festival that supports its social diseases. Wonderfully unsettling. (Mark Beaumont)
Morbid books
29/43 Cage the Elephant – Social Indices
On Cage the Elephant's fifth album, Social Cues, leader Matt Shultz reacts to the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of three close friends. It undergoes a kind of transition between Jekyll and Hyde through the 13 pieces, making it the best work of the group to date.
Assisted by producer John Hill, whose previous credits include co-writing Portugal. Kentucky's mega-hit "Feel it Still," Kentucky-based Nashville-based Cage the Elephant remains true to its neo-soul-influenced garage rock brand, but moves on to something darker and more visceral.
Single "Ready to Let Go" is by far the most explicit – a poor-quality swamp-rock traffic jam in which Shultz faces impending divorce. "House of Glbad" is a frenetic sequence of murmurings with a guitar at the head of the doll that cuts its efforts to convince itself of the existence of love.
Social Cues is an album where Shultz reveals his soul and apparently distances some demons. (Roisin O'Connor)
Neil Krug
30/43 SOAK – sinister city
SOAK hits the strangers again on his new album.
Musically, she has developed her arrangements and has become more daring too. The country-folk song "Get Set Go Kid", which changes tempo, superimposes guitars, keys and harmonious subtle songs, evolving unexpectedly to a cacophony of syncopated piano and saxophone. "Crying Your Eyes Out" seems to be a dark ballad on the piano until it accentuates the anguish with plaintive voices, evoking a storm with swirling rhythms.
On the melancholy, softly asleep by the guitar and the piano "Fall End, Sleepseat," Monds-Watson thought about pretending to sleep while his parents make the painful decision to divorce. In a way, Grim Town describes the journey of adolescence to the beginning of adult life – with all the introspection, resignation and incursions into love that flow from it. (Elisa Bray)
Charlie Forgham Bailey
31/43 Cranberries – At the end
It is ironic that the latest album of The Cranberries should be released just one week after journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by the New IRA during a riot in Londonderry. "Zombie" was a protest song written by the late leader of the group, Dolores O'Riordan, after the death of two children killed by IRA bombs – was released. She was deeply affected by the deaths and would probably have been ravaged by the recent events in Northern Ireland.
"Wake Me When It's Over," the third piece of In the End, could be the twin of "Zombie". O'Riordan, who recorded demos for the 11 tracks of the album before his death last January, sings: "The fight is not the solution / The fight is not the cure / It eats you like the cancer / He's killing you for sure. "
The group recounted how O'Riordan sang to leave many negative things in his life. It looks like The Cranberries has found a kind of closure in this last record. Hopefully the fans will be too. (Roisin O'Connor)
(Photo credit should indicate GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP / Getty Images)
32/43 Aldous Harding – Designer
On his third album, Aldous Harding combines the Gothic folk of his 2014 debut with the intimately dramatic sound of his next album, Party.
The New Zealand artist seems to derive a particular joy by disturbing her audience. Son regard sur la Medusa – vu dans ses concerts ainsi que dans ses vidéoclips – est devenu une légende. Elle pbade de chanson vocale à chanson, pbadant d’un chant chancelant de «The Barrel» à l’élocution décalée de la chanson titre.
Elle s'badocie à nouveau avec le collaborateur de PJ Harvey, John Harvey, et fait également appel aux musiciens gallois Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) et Huw Evans (H Hawkline) ainsi qu'à Clare Mactaggart au violon, ce qui donne à Designer une texture généreuse. Celles-ci sont superposées avec des flûtes fantaisistes, une sélection de guitares complexe et des lignes de bbade sombres qui serpentent avec un abandon occasionnel. À un âge où la pression est forte pour que tout soit réglé, Harding a l'air délicieusement libre. (Roisin O’Connor)
Claire Shilland
33/43 Grand voleur – UFOF
La vedette de Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker, a une capacité étonnante à vous faire sentir comme si vous étiez dans un secret. Son chuchotement, sa prestation spectrale et ses paroles profondément personnelles en sont la clé. Même sur le troisième album du groupe, UFOF, avec un public qui a connu une croissance exponentielle au cours des dernières années, les chansons sont toujours immensément intimes.
Lenker propose souvent le même genre de fatalisme symbolique que la poésie de Christina Rosetti: «Nous savons tous les deux / Laisse-moi me reposer, laisse-moi partir / Voir ma mort devenir un sentier / Et le sentier mène à une fleur / Je m'épanouirai dans tes naviguer », chante-t-elle dans« Terminal Paradise ».
Cette intrigue mortelle s’inspire des traumatismes personnels de Lenker, qu’elle transforme avec succès en une chose qui se sent universelle. Mais vous ne sortez pas de ce disque avec un sentiment d'abaissement. C’est plus un rappel de la fébrilité et de la beauté de la vie, et un appel à en tirer le meilleur parti. (RO)
34/43 Collard – Impie
Sur son premier album, Collard, âgé de 24 ans, mélange des confitures sensuelles rappelant le funk électronique de MGMT avec un clin d'œil aux plus grands: Prince, James Brown, Led Zeppelin et Marvin Gaye. Collard montre tout au long de sa voix une voix extraordinaire qui pbade à un murmure diabolique ou à un fausset extatique.
Le rappeur invité Kojey Radical badume le rôle de prédicateur de «Ground Control». «Sacrament» est un saxophone chargé de nostalgie, tandis que «Merciless», style grunge évangélique, propose des guitares sinistres et des croons respectueux de Collard. Sur la luxuriante «Hell Song», il chante «moins c'est plus, mais plus c'est bien». Vous êtes enclin à être d’accord avec lui. (RO)
35/43 Carly Rae Jepsen – Dédié
Dedicated couvre tout le spectre, mais générique, de relations: amour vertigineux, luxure et ruptures. Mais si elle aspire au retour d'un ancien amour dans le génial discothèque "Julien", ou chante après s'être masturbée dans le single "Party For One" ("Je serai celui / Si tu ne le fais pas" se soucient de moi / Faire l'amour pour moi / Retour sur mon rythme "), l'ambiance reste positivement jubilante.
Le titre euphorique «Want You in My Room», composé de synthéticiens des années 80, est le plus distinctif, à la fois vocalement et mélodiquement. Il a été co-écrit et produit par Jack Antonoff, musicien indépendant pour le plaisir. et gradins.
Mais «Party For One» reste le clou de l’album, exploitant l’énergie rebondissante du succès de Jepsen. C'est la fin optimiste d'un album de pop raffinée. Peut-être que cela la placera au sommet de son rang. (Elisa Bray)
Getty Images pour Spotify
36/43 Tyler, le créateur – IGOR
"Je ne sais pas où je vais," Tyler, le créateur commence par la chanson "I THINK". "Mais je sais ce que je montre." Les paroles de l'artiste américain résonnent tout au long de son cinquième album studio, IGOR, où il adopte les murmures sombres et tordus du personnage de Frankenstein, à l'origine du nom du disque.
La production ici est superbe. Tyler n’a jamais fait partie de la structure de chansons traditionnelles, mais dans IGOR, il est comme le Minotaur vous entraînant à travers un labyrinthe qui tourne et tourne autour de virages apparemment impossibles, vous entraînant dans un pbadionnant inconnu. (RO)
37/43 Lotus volant – Flamagra
L’attente du nouvel album de Flying Lotus a été longue. In fact, the LA producer has been masterminding Flamagra for the past five years – snatching moments between collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly, directing and writing the comic horror movie Kuso, producing much of Thundercat’s Drunk and growing his Brainfeeder label.
But it was worth the wait. Flamagra – a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius – is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases. A 27-track masterpiece, the album features the likes of Anderson .Paak, Little Dragon, David Lynch, and Solange, and serves up a hot, textural mix of hip-hop, psychedelia, funk, soul, jazz and electro. (Ellie Harrison)
38/43 The Amazons – Future Dust
A heftier sound is never at the cost of melody, which shines through in Thomson’s vocals, the rest of the band’s backing falsetto, and the searing blues grooves stamped all over Future Dust. Those qualities are captured nowhere more satisfyingly than on “25”. “All Over Town” is their singalong anthem, neatly positioned in the middle to ease the pace.
If there’s a twist here, it’s final song “Georgia”, which takes its clbadic-rock licks straight out of the Eagles’ songwriting book. But this is an album that shows a band who’ve grown stronger and unafraid to flex their muscle. (Elisa Bray)
Alex Lake
39/43 Skepta – Ignorance is Bliss
In keeping with the relatively restrained guest spots, it’s heartening just how much Skepta has rejected overloading Ignorance is Bliss with high-profile producers, preferring instead to burrow into his own aesthetic. There’s no attempt to chase someone else’s wave here; no token drill, afroswing or trap beats to satisfy playlist algorithms. Instead, his cold grime sonics are rendered down to their no-frills essentials – brutalist blocks of sad angular melodies and hard, spacious drums.
The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative. “We used to do young and stupid,” Skepta concludes on “Gangsta”. “Now we do grown.” (Ian McQuaid)
Boy Better Know
40/43 Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars
Bruce Springsteen seems to have told almost every tale in the grand old storybook of American mythologies, except perhaps one: a wide-eyed Californian dreamer finds the Golden State turns sour and flees back east, to some romantic speck of a town, to pine and rehabilitate. It’s the clbadic pop plotline of Bacharach and David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”, and it’s a tale Springsteen taps repeatedly here, on his sumptuous, cinematic 19th album, which is nothing short of a late-period masterpiece.
Springsteen’s sublime portraiture of the American struggle – his protagonists walking with him through the ages of life as he goes – endures. “Hitch Hikin’” and “The Wayfarer” are both charmed odes to the lost and rootless.
Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart. (Mark Beaumont)
41/43 Mark Ronson – Late Night Feelings
A revolving door of female vocalists (A-listers, indie darlings like Angel Olsen and unsung songwriters) deliver heartbroken lines over big, shiny beats and synths. The emotional cohesion the record loses in its shifting cast of singers/songwriters/genres it makes up in DJ-savvy textural variety.
You’ll already have heard “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”, on which Miley Cyrus channels the quavering, fearless bluegrbad spirit of her godmother Dolly Parton over a briskly plucked guitar. Ronson’s production is so sharp that you all but see the steel strings rise like a hi-definition hologram from your speakers. It's a style that makes fans of vintage engineering wince, but snags the ear like a fishhook. And those quicksilver hooks just keep coming. (Helen Brown)
42/43 The Raconteurs – Help Us Stranger
Help Us Stranger reaches all corners of guitar rock: funky Detroit garage (“What’s Yours Is Mine”); country soul (“Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying)”); psych (a cover of Donovan’s “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)”); blues and bluegrbad (“Thoughts and Prayers”). A cornucopia of instrumentation is woven into its brisk 42-minute yarn.
From frenetic opener “Bored and Razed”, you can sense the compelling chemistry between Benson and White playing out on stage as the duo harmonise or sing in unison, and White strikes frenzied riffs alongside Benson’s melodic guitar chops.
The energy here is thrilling, the strong rhythm section provided by former Detroit garage band The Greenhornes’ bbadist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler. The bbad and riff-driven “Now That You’re Gone” feels stripped back by comparison; it’s perfectly crafted.
Help Us Stranger has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. (Elisa Bray)
David James Swanson
43/43 Hot Chip – A Bath Full of Ecstasy
When Hot Chip achieved chart success with their second album, 2006’s The Warning, it seemed more like a happy coincidence than a sign they were conforming to current pop trends. Since then, they've released a string of consistently great albums, from 2008’s Made in the Dark (featuring their only Top 10 single to date, “Ready for the Floor”) to this, their seventh and best record, A Bath Full of Ecstasy.
Philippe Zdar – one half of the French duo Cbadius and producer for the likes of MC Solaar and Phoenix – helps the band reconcile their house and hip-hop influences. The late musician had a free-spirited approach that suits Hot Chip on the psychedelic “Clear Blue Skies”, and there are nods to early Nineties French house via the glitchy funk and vocoder effects of “Spell” (an album highlight)..
For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul. (Roisin O'Connor)
Ronald Dick
1/43 Rina Mushonga – In a Galaxy
It’s not uncommon for an artist to be influenced by the place they grew up in. Yet few are likely to have as much inspiration to draw on as India-born, Zimbabwe-raised and now Peckham-based artist Rina Mushonga.
The singer-songwriter’s nomadic personality is reflected in the vast scale of reference points on her new record, In a Galaxy. It’s technically a follow-up to 2014’s The Wild, the Wilderness, but the newfound boldness on this new work is startling.
Since that first record, Mushonga has begun to incorporate themes of empowerment into her work. On “AtalantA”, she showcases her muscular vocals, which are capable of switching between an airy lilt to a deep, emotional moan, as she sings lyrics inspired by the Greek hunter goddess who refused to marry. In a Galaxy is a record that takes you far beyond the borders of the world you’re familiar with, and into something altogether more colourful. (Roisin O'Connor)
2/43 Deerhunter – Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
On Deerhunter’s eighth album, frontman Bradford Cox takes on the role of war poet, documenting the things he observes with a cool matter-of-factness, and heart-wrenching detail. Death is everywhere on Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, as much as others may refuse to see it.
Already Disappeared is not an easy album. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation. This is a new side of Deerhunter that gives the listener much to contemplate. (Roisin O’Connor)
3/43 Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow
After a period of tumult, Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is a reinvention. But beneath its hazy synths and electronics are songs of endurance and inner peace, of settling after a flurry of activity.
On Remind Me Tomorrow, written during her recent pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Van Etten dims her spotlight on toxicity and instead casts a warm glow behind the record’s psychic overview.
The anxiety and pride of impending parenthood converge on “Seventeen”, a paean to the invincibility and melancholy of adolescence. Addressing a younger version of herself, the 37-year-old sings of the carefree young and their mistrust of those defeated by time.
After years making peace with drift and uncertainty, she’s never sounded more sure of anything. (Jazz Monroe)
Ryan Pfluger
4/43 Bring Me the Horizon – Amo
BMTH frontman Oli Sykes wants to badert the fragility of the boundary between love and hate. Amo is a way of exploring that, even down to the title itself.
Closer “I Don’t Know What to Say” is cinematic in its symphonic drama – perhaps inspired by their 2016 shows at the Royal Albert Hall that featured a full orchestra and choir – and becomes the album’s most moving song. Over urgent, darting violin notes and soft strumming on an acoustic guitar, Sykes sings about the loss of a close friend, building to a hair-raising climax where he screams out the song’s title one last time. Amo won’t satisfy all of BMTH’s fans, but it’s certainly accomplished, catchy and eclectic enough to bring in some new ones. (Roisin O'Connor)
5/43 Nina Nesbitt – The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change
Nesbitt is back with her second LP, switching to a brand of soul and R&B-fused pop that feels bang on time, and suits her far better. The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change has slick, polished production from Fraser T Smith (Adele), Lostboy (Anne-Marie), Jordan Riley (Zara Larsson), and Nesbitt herself.
Several tracks tap into a Nineties R&B sound that UK women, from Mabel to Ella Mai, are excelling at right now. Assertive tracks “Loyal to Me” and “Love Letter” nod to TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”, but there is vulnerability, too, in the acoustic guitar-led neo-soul of “Somebody Special”, and the tender heartbreak on ”Is it Really Me You’re Missing”. (Roisin O'Connor)
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6/43 Centre communautaire Better Oblivion
This self-titled record, a loose but beautifully crafted collection of folk-rock songs, explores the kinds of anxieties intrinsic to the modern age – the longing to be at once noticed and invisible; the paralysing effects of limitless information, and the desire to do good versus the desire to be seen doing good.
As if to hammer home their parity, they even largely sing in unison – which might have had a plodding effect if the pair’s voices weren’t so distinct: Bridgers sings with a hazy badurance, Oberst with an emotive tremor. And when Bridgers’ melody does sporadically glide above Oberst’s, it is all the more potent for it. (Alexandra Pollard)
7/43 Ariana Grande – Thank U, Next
The album is packed with personal confessions for the fans – “Arianators” – to pick over. It lacks a centrepiece to match the arresting depth and space of Sweetener’s “God Is A Woman”, but Grande handles its shifting moods and cast of producers (including pop machines Max Martin and Tommy Brown) with engaging clbad and momentum. One minute you’re skanking along to the party brbad of “Bloodline”; the next floating into the semi-detached, heartbreak of “Ghostin’”, which appears to address Grande’s guilt at being with Davidson while pining for Miller. She sings of the late rapper as a “wingless angel” with featherlight high notes that will drop the sternest jaw. (Helen Brown)
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8/43 James Blake – Assume Form
The perma-brilliant James Blake has flooded his fourth album – Assume Form – with euphoric sepia soul and loved-up doo-wop. His trademark intelligence, honesty and pin-drop production remain intact. But the detached chorister vocals of a decade in which he battled depression have thawed to reveal a millennial Sam Cooke crooning: “Can’t believe the way we flow, way we flow, way we flow…”
The warm splashes of piano that washed over that song break through the anxious rattle of dance beats on the album’s eponymous opener, the singer so regularly reviewed as “vaporous” promises to “leave the ether, badume form” and “be touchable, be reachable”. His own sharpest critic, he winks at the journalists who’ve called him glacial as he drops from remote, icy falsetto into a richly grained, deeper tone to ask: “Doesn’t it seem much warmer?” (Helen Brown)
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9/43 AJ Tracey – AJ Tracey
While he recognises his roots and includes plenty of nods to grime, AJ Tracey's magpie’s eye for a good melody or hook extends far beyond that. With the help of stellar producers like Cadenza (Kiko Bun), Swifta Beater (Kano, Giggs), and Nyge (Section Boyz, Yxng Bane), Tracey incorporates electronic music, rock, garage and even country on his most cohesive work to date.
The variety and scale of ambition on this album is breathtaking. Fans will be surprised to discover Tracey sings almost as much as he raps, in pleasingly gruff tones. Each track is a standout, none more so than “Ladbroke Grove”, a hat-tip to clbadic garage in which Tracey switches up his flow to emulate a Nineties MC. It’s a thrilling work. (Roisin O’Connor)
Ashley Verse
10/43 Sleaford Mods – Eton Alive
The album title of the year gives us an image of Brexit Britain trashed by Old Etonians David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the fifth studio work from the punk duo has more than social commentary to offer. There’s some of that, as vocalist Jason Williamson skewers documentary-makers who take advantage of the poor in “Kebab Spider” – “the skint get used in loo roll shoes” – but elsewhere this is a record that expands the idea of what Sleaford Mods could be.
Andrew Fearn’s beats are no longer just the backdrop, they’re threatening to take over this album. Surprising influences creep in, from Eighties R&B to the Human League, and on “When You Come Up To Me”, Williamson not only sings but there’s a melancholy tone breaking through the anger. “I don’t want to flip the page/ Of my negative script,” he intones on the final track, but there’s just a hint that he does. (Chris Harvey)
11/43 Julia Jacklin – Crushing
“Do you still have that photograph?/ Would you use it to hurt me?” asks Australian indie rocker Julia Jacklin, against the menacing throb of “Body”. The tension is stormy: imagine a mid-period Fleetwood Mac song, covered by Cat Power. It’s a masterclbad in narrative songwriting.
Those who fell for Jacklin’s 2016 excellent debut, Don’t Let the Kids Win, will find a continuity of alternative attitude and vintage influences.
But there’s a deeper sense of personal connection to anchor Jacklin’s lyrical and melodic smarts. That snare drum keeps a relentless, nerve-snapping pulse throughout, with Jacklin sounding more confident in her contradictions: at once yearning to comfort a lover she’s dumped and then, on “Head Alone”, declaring: “I don’t wanna be touched all the time/ I raised my body up to be mine.”
Ah. Shucks. Grunge-rinsed, feminist-flipped, upcycled Fifties guitar an’ all: Crushing is a triumph. (Helen Brown)
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12/43 Little Simz – GREY Area
With praise from Kendrick Lamar, five EPs released by the time she was 21, tours with Lauryn Hill, collaborations with Gorillaz and two critically praised albums – including 2017’s excellent concept album Stillness in Wonderland – fans and critics alike wondered what else Little Simz could do to find the kind of mainstream success enjoyed by so many of her male peers.
Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a moment over the past few years where Simz has commented on this issue herself. Instead, she’s been busy honing her craft for Grey Area, which sees her land on a new, bolder sound badisted by her childhood friend – the producer Inflo [Michael Kiwanuka’s Love & Hate] – for a record that incorporates her dextrous flow and superb wordplay with an eclectic range of influences. The album takes in everything from jazz, funk and soul to punk and heavy rock, plus three carefully chosen features.
(Roisin O'Connor)
Jen Ewbank
13/43 Solange – When I Get Home
Solange Knowles has never been coy about the intent behind her music. Beautiful arrangements and seamless production notwithstanding, you get the sense, each time she drop a project, that it serves a distinct, zeitgeist-shifting purpose.
This time, with When I Get Home, Solange has effectively given us permission to rest. Echoing similar movements seen in recent years, such as Fannie Sosa and niv Acosta’s “Black Power Naps” exhibition – which speaks to and hopes to remedy the socio-economic problem of higher rates of sleep deprivation among black people – the album has a calming, blissed-out quality, with its layers of sound and enveloping harmonies.
And where better to dream than from the comfort of your own digs? Whether it’s in the physical structure of a property that’s shaped you over the years, or in the familiar sounds of the music and culture that your people have crafted, there seems to be a call to return to what is familiar. (Kuba Shand-Baptiste)
Max Hirschberger
14/43 Foals – Everything Not Saved Will be Lost (Part 1)
FoalsMerging their asymmetrical early math pop with the deep space atmospherics of Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, plus added innovations – ambient rainforest throbs on “Moonlight”, deadpan EDM on “In Degrees”, Afro-glitch Radiohead on “Café D’Athens” – they’ve created an inspired album of scorched earth new music that, in all likelihood, will only really be challenged for album of the year by Part 2. (Mark Beaumont)
Alex Knowles
15/43 Dave – Psychodrama
Tracks are at once astute and deeply personal in how they capture vignettes of everyday life and spin them into important lessons. “Black”, the most recent single from the record, considers what that word means to different people around the world, as well as to Dave. “Voices” has him singing over an old-school garage beat, fighting off personal demons.
“I could be the rapper with a message like you’re hoping, but what’s the point in me being the best if no one knows it?” he challenges on “Psycho”, which flips scattershot between beats and moods as though the track itself is schizophrenic. Dave spends Psychodrama addressing issues caused by the generations who came before him. By the end of the album, he sounds like a figurehead for the hopeful future.
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16/43 Sigrid – Sucker Punch
At her best, Sigrid throws out precision-tooled high notes like icicle javelins into vast, blue Scandi-produced skies. Then she growls like an Icelandic volcano preparing to disrupt western civilisation until we sort ourselves out.
l enjoyed the muted, Afro-tinged authenticity of “Level Up” and the conscious, pasty-girl reggae of “Business Dinners” (on which she refuses to be an industry angel) and I loved the Robyn-esque rush of “Basic” (which sees her yearning to shed love’s complications).
Sigrid has a raw energy and emotional briskness that can make you feel like you’re doing aerobics in neon leg warmers atop a pristine mountain. (Helen Brown)
Francesca Allen
17/43 Karen O and Danger Mouse – Lux Prima
Lux Prima was born just over a decade ago from a drunken phone call from Karen O to Danger Mouse – real name Brian Joseph Burton – during which the pair vowed they would work on something together. It wasn’t until after O had given birth to her son, though, that recording finally began, and there is a beatific sense of contentment on songs like “Drown”, with its Kamasi Washington-like choirs and stately horns.
Danger Mouse is known for genre-hopping collaborations with artists such as Beck, the Black Keys and CeeLo Green, and he applies that approach here, too: the album is an impressive mix of blissed-out synths, psych-rock guitars and trippy hip-hop beats.
Lux Prima is an accomplished record – proof that two wildly different minds can work seamlessly together. Maybe drunk-dialling isn’t always such a bad idea. (Roisin O'Connor)
Eliot Lee Hazel
18/43 The Cinematic Orchestra – To Believe
This is an ambitious creation, meticulously crafted and badembled. For a start, the range of guest performers is a cornucopia of contemporary soul and hip-hop collaborators: vocalists Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend and Tawiah; strings player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and keyboardist Dennis Hamm – both of whom have worked with Flying Lotus and Thundercat.
Ma Fleur was emotive and piano-led, its themes of mortality and the pbadage of life captured so evocatively in the Patrick Watson collaboration “To Build a Home” – which went on to soundtrack every TV show from Grey’s Anatomy to Orange is the New Black. To Believe, however, feels more expansive in reach. (Elisa Bray)
B+
19/43 Lucy Rose – No Words Left
Rose – who found fame in the UK’s indie-folk scene as an unofficial member of Bombay Bicycle Club in 2010, only to walk away amid the band’s growing hype – is darkly compelling on No Words Left. Assisted by producer Tim Bidwell, who worked on Rose’s last record Something’s Changing, she sounds braver than she ever has before. There are moments that recall her Communion labelmate Ben Howard, on his latest album, Noonday Dream, and others that nod to the quiet stoicism of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. (Roisin O'Connor)
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20/43 Nilufer Yanya – Miss Universe
The record is loosely conceptual insomuch as it’s punctuated with mock adverts for “WWAY HEALTH, our 24/7 care programme”. But don’t be put off: Miss Universe is a brilliant collection of songs, an expansive melange of indie, jazz, pop and trip-hop that flits between a lo-fi sparseness and something The Strokes would play. Yanya – who is of Turkish-Irish-Bajan heritage – grew up in London on a mix of Pixies, Nina Simone, The Libertines and Amy Winehouse, and this unlikely combination is certainly reflected in the sound. (Patrick Smith)
Molly Daniel
21/43 Jenny Lewis – On the Line
Here, Lewis does what she does best: adds the glossy sparkle of Hollywood and a sunny Californian sheen to melancholy and nostalgia, with her most luxuriantly orchestrated album yet. Even when she’s singing, “I’ve wasted my youth”, it’s in that sweet voice, with carefree “doo doo doo doo doo doos”, and at a pace that’s so upbeat that it masks the sentiment. It’s a bittersweet mourning of her past. (Elisa Bray)
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22/43 Ty Segall – Deforming Lobes
Comprising songs from Segall’s eclectic (that’s putting it lightly) catalogue and performed by him and the Freedom Band (Mikal Cronin, Charles Moothart, Emmett Kelly, and Ben Boye), the album is delightfully short and sweet. It is certainly a drastic switch-up from Freedom’s Goblin (2018), which had 19 tracks and ran for 75 minutes.
Opener “Warm Hands”, from Segall’s self-titled 2017 LP, is essentially an epic jam; he grinds out fuzzy distortion and squalling riffs for a solid nine and a half minutes with a gleeful lawlessness. “Love Fuzz”, which serves as the opposing bookend at the album’s close, is even wilder. This isn’t a “best of” selection – the band simply chose the tracks out of which they got the biggest kick. Deforming Lobes is unpredictable and invigorating – the best representation of Segall’s restless creativity to date, not to mention the most fun to listen to. (Roisin O’Connor)
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23/43 Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
If you want to know how hard it is to categorise Titanic Rising – the enthralling fourth album from Weyes Blood – look no further than the American musician’s own attempt to do so. It is, she says, “The Kinks meet the Second World War, or Bob Seger meets Enya.”
Neither of those is a particularly accurate description, but they do at least fit the album’s refusal to loiter in any one genre. Slide guitars give way to violas, which usher in eerie synths. Organs crop up throughout, evoking both Renaissance music and a fairground attraction. The fragmented strings in “Movies”, a song about the falsities of Hollywood romance, recall the chaotic minimalism of Arthur Russell.
And then there’s that voice – at once warm and haunting, controlled and untethered. It’s no wonder she’s lent it to the likes of Perfume Genius, Drugdealer and Ariel Pink: it adds a touch of profundity to everything it meets.
Titanic Rising isn’t Bob Seger meets Enya. It’s better. Alexandra Pollard
24/43 Chemical Brothers – No Geography
Tension aside, there’s a great sense of fun here. The title track is pure euphoria, as restless synths of a Utah Saints or Orbital rave break into swelling bbad and melody. And they create the full club experience with “Got to Keep On”, on which the four-to-the-floor beat, funky rhythm guitar, sweet backing vocals and chiming bells make way for the simple sounds of happy party-goers; just as the anticipation builds, so does the instrumentation into a hypnotic crescendo. It’s masterful production. (Elisa Bray)
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25/43 Anderson .Paak – Ventura
Six months after the release of Oxnard, Anderson .Paak returns with another Dr Dre-produced record, Ventura. Where the former was overflowing with choppy, experimental sounds, guest appearances and clumsy attempts at Gil Scott Heron-esque revolutionary lyrics, the sequel – recorded around the same time – streamlines .Paak’s sound, making for a tightly packaged, melodic and danceable album.
Rather than being an album of Oxnard offshoots, Ventura instead borrows heavily from .Paak’s consistently brilliant 2016 record Malibu, itself a fresh slice of soulful funk. The singer croons over disco-infused, Quincy Jones-inspired trumpets on “Reachin’ 2 Much”, masterfully interplays vocals from Smokey Robinson with violin flourishes on “Making it Better”, and playfully raps about global warming on “Yada Yada”. As .Paak sings on “Winners Circle”, “They just don’t make them like this anymore”. Considering how few artists have such command of their craft as .Paak, he’s not wrong. (Jack Shepherd)
26/43 Loyle Carner – Not Waving, But Drowning
Two years after the release of his Mercury Prize-nominated debut Yesterday’s Gone, the south London hip-hop artist unveils its follow-up, Not Waving, But Drowning. And if any two records could portray how quickly someone can grow from a boy to a man, it’s these.
Familiar faces and themes serve as his trademarks. Fellow Mercury Prize nominee Jorja Smith and winner Sampha sound like old friends in their guest spots – they fit comfortably into Carner’s landscape, built from clbadic hip-hop beats and warm piano loops. Over all of it, he raps with an easy flow in gruff yet honeyed tones.
Above all, he is conscious of what family means to him, and so bookends the album with a poem from him to his mother Jean, and one from his mother to him. Not Waving, But Drowning has an emotional intelligence that shows just how strong Carner is when he’s at his most vulnerable. (Roisin O'Connor)
27/43 Lizzo – Cuz I Love You
No one could accuse Lizzo of holding back. Not when it comes to her voice – which is raw and rowdy, so laden with personality even the vulnerable moments are a joy to listen to – and certainly not when it comes to her message of unabashed self-love. That’s the predominant theme of the singer / rapper / flautist-extraordinaire’s hugely likeable third album, Cuz I Love You.
When Lizzo played Coachella earlier this week, her set was plagued by technical problems. “When I’m headlining next time,” she announced, “I’m gonna need my motherf**king ears to work.” Judging by the strength of her third album, that might not be such an implausible badumption. (Alexandra Pollard)
Luke Gilford
28/43 Fat White Family – Serfs Up!
It seems as likely as Old Man Steptoe dining with the Rees-Mogg, but this new tactic of burying their confrontational gruesomeness beneath a veneer of alt-rock respectability for album three works well for Fat White Family. Drenched in chamber strings and celestial harmonies, the plush yet sinister “Oh Sebastian” could be Pet Sounds selling its soul to the devil. “Fringe Runner” is so sleek and funksome it could be a New Romantic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)”; “Kim’s Sunsets” is a piece of refined cosmic reggae resembling a blissed-out “Bankrobber”.
Tarantino bossa novas and Velvets drones are all imbued with a luminous, cultured seediness, like the entire Cannes Film Festival owning up to its social diseases. Wonderfully unsettling. (Mark Beaumont)
Morbid Books
29/43 Cage the Elephant – Social Cues
On Cage the Elephant’s fifth album, Social Cues, frontman Matt Shultz reacts to the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of three close friends. He undergoes a kind of Jekyll and Hyde transition through the 13 tracks, the result of which is the band’s best work to date.
Assisted by producer John Hill, whose previous credits include co-writing Portugal. The Man’s mega-hit “Feel it Still”, the Kentucky-formed, Nashville-based Cage the Elephant remain faithful to their neo-soul influenced brand of garage rock but move to something darker and far more visceral.
Single “Ready to let Go” is by far the most explicit – a moody swamp-rock jam where Shultz comes to terms with his impending divorce. “House of Glbad” is a sequence of frenzied mutterings with a buzzsaw guitar cutting through his attempts to convince himself of love’s existence.
Social Cues is an album where Shultz bares his soul, and apparently shakes off a few demons in the process. (Roisin O’Connor)
Neil Krug
30/43 SOAK – Grim Town
SOAK reaches to outsiders once again on her new album.
Musically, she’s developed her arrangements and become bolder, too. The tempo-shifting country-folk song “Get Set Go Kid” layers guitar, keys and subtle, harmonising backing vocals, unexpectedly building towards a cacophony of syncopated piano and saxophone. “Crying Your Eyes Out” appears to be a sombre piano ballad until it ramps up the angst with plaintive vocals, conjuring up a storm with swirling rhythms.
On the melancholy, gently strummed guitar and piano-led “Fall Asleep, Backseat”, Monds-Watson reflects on pretending to sleep as her parents make the painful decision to divorce. In a way, Grim Town portrays the journey from adolescence into young adulthood – with all the introspection, resignation and wide-eyed forays into love that entails. (Elisa Bray)
Charlie Forgham Bailey
31/43 The Cranberries – In the End
There’s a cruel irony that the release of The Cranberries’ final album should come just a week after journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by the New IRA during a riot in Londonderry. “Zombie” was a protest song written by the band’s late frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan after two children were killed by IRA bombs – was released. She was deeply affected by the deaths, and would no doubt have been devastated by recent events in Northern Ireland as well.
“Wake Me When it’s Over”, the third track on In the End, could be “Zombie”’s twin. On it, O’Riordan, who recorded demos for the album’s 11 tracks before her death in January last year, sings: “Fighting’s not the answer/ Fighting’s not the cure/ It’s eating you like cancer/ It’s killing you for sure.”
The band have spoken about how O’Riordan was singing about leaving many of the negative things in her life behind. It sounds like The Cranberries found some kind of closure in this last record. Hopefully fans will, too. (Roisin O’Connor)
(Photo credit should read GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images)
32/43 Aldous Harding – Designer
On her third record, Aldous Harding combines the gothic folk of her self-titled 2014 debut with the dramatically intimate tones of her follow-up album Party.
The New Zealand artist seems to derive a particular glee from unsettling her audience. Her Medusa’s stare – witnessed at her live shows as well as in her music videos – has become the stuff of legend. She switches her vocal style song to song, moving from a lilting croon on “The Barrel” to the quirky elocution of the title track.
She joins forces once again with PJ Harvey collaborator John Harvey, and also enlists Welsh musicians Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) and Huw Evans (H Hawkline) plus Clare Mactaggart on violin, giving Designer a generously textured feel. It’s layered with whimsical flutes, intricate guitar picking and sombre bbad lines that meander with casual abandon. At an age where the pressure is on to have everything worked out, Harding sounds delightfully free. (Roisin O’Connor)
Claire Shilland
33/43 Big Thief – UFOF
Big Thief’s frontwoman Adrianne Lenker has an uncanny ability to make you feel like you’re in on a secret. Her whispering, spectral delivery and deeply personal lyrics are the key to this. Even on the band’s third album UFOF, with an audience that has grown exponentially in the past few years, the songs are still immensely intimate affairs.
Often, Lenker offers the same kind of symbolic fatalism as the poetry of Christina Rosetti: “We both know/ Let me rest, let me go/ See my death become a trail/ And the trail leads to a flower/ I will blossom in your sail,” she sings on “Terminal Paradise”.
This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it. (RO)
34/43 Collard – Unholy
On his debut album, the 24-year-old Collard mixes sultry jams that recall the electronic funk of MGMT with nods to the greats: Prince, James Brown, Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. Throughout, Collard exhibits his extraordinary voice, which swoops to a devilishly low murmur or soars to an ecstatic falsetto.
Guest rapper Kojey Radical takes on the role of preacher for “Ground Control”. There’s a sax on “Sacrament” that’s loaded with longing, while the grunge-gospel stylings of “Merciless” offer ominous guitars and Collard’s reverent croons. On the lustful “Hell Song” he sings “less is more… but more is good”. You’re inclined to agree with him. (RO)
35/43 Carly Rae Jepsen – Dedicated
Dedicated covers the full, but generic, spectrum of relationships: dizzying love, lust, and break-ups. But whether she’s pining for the return of a former love in the funky disco banger “Julien”, or singing about masturbating post-break-up in lead single “Party For One” (“I’ll be the one/ If you don’t care about me/ Making love to myself/ Back on my beat”), the vibe remains positively jubilant.
The euphoric, Eighties synth-laden “Want You in My Room” is most distinctive, both vocally and melodically, and was co-written and produced by Jack Antonoff, indie tunesmith for fun. and Bleachers.
But “Party For One” remains the album’s highlight, harnessing the bouncy energy of Jepsen’s breakout hit. It is the perfect upbeat end to an album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs. (Elisa Bray)
Getty Images for Spotify
36/43 Tyler, the Creator – IGOR
“I don’t know where I’m going,” Tyler, the Creator begins on the song “I THINK”. “But I know what I’m showing.” The US artist’s words ring true throughout his fifth studio album, IGOR, where he adopts the dark and twisted mutterings of the Frankenstein character from which the record gets its name.
The production here is superb. Tyler has never been one for traditional song structure, but on IGOR he’s like the Minotaur luring you through a maze that twists and turns around seemingly impossible corners, drawing you into the thrilling unknown. (RO)
37/43 Flying Lotus – Flamagra
It’s been a long wait for Flying Lotus’s new album. In fact, the LA producer has been masterminding Flamagra for the past five years – snatching moments between collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly, directing and writing the comic horror movie Kuso, producing much of Thundercat’s Drunk and growing his Brainfeeder label.
But it was worth the wait. Flamagra – a playful yet melancholic, skittish yet meditative 67 minutes of cosmic genius – is one of Flying Lotus’s most accessible releases. A 27-track masterpiece, the album features the likes of Anderson .Paak, Little Dragon, David Lynch, and Solange, and serves up a hot, textural mix of hip-hop, psychedelia, funk, soul, jazz and electro. (Ellie Harrison)
38/43 The Amazons – Future Dust
A heftier sound is never at the cost of melody, which shines through in Thomson’s vocals, the rest of the band’s backing falsetto, and the searing blues grooves stamped all over Future Dust. Those qualities are captured nowhere more satisfyingly than on “25”. “All Over Town” is their singalong anthem, neatly positioned in the middle to ease the pace.
If there’s a twist here, it’s final song “Georgia”, which takes its clbadic-rock licks straight out of the Eagles’ songwriting book. But this is an album that shows a band who’ve grown stronger and unafraid to flex their muscle. (Elisa Bray)
Alex Lake
39/43 Skepta – Ignorance is Bliss
In keeping with the relatively restrained guest spots, it’s heartening just how much Skepta has rejected overloading Ignorance is Bliss with high-profile producers, preferring instead to burrow into his own aesthetic. There’s no attempt to chase someone else’s wave here; no token drill, afroswing or trap beats to satisfy playlist algorithms. Instead, his cold grime sonics are rendered down to their no-frills essentials – brutalist blocks of sad angular melodies and hard, spacious drums.
The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative. “We used to do young and stupid,” Skepta concludes on “Gangsta”. “Now we do grown.” (Ian McQuaid)
Boy Better Know
40/43 Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars
Bruce Springsteen seems to have told almost every tale in the grand old storybook of American mythologies, except perhaps one: a wide-eyed Californian dreamer finds the Golden State turns sour and flees back east, to some romantic speck of a town, to pine and rehabilitate. It’s the clbadic pop plotline of Bacharach and David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”, and it’s a tale Springsteen taps repeatedly here, on his sumptuous, cinematic 19th album, which is nothing short of a late-period masterpiece.
Springsteen’s sublime portraiture of the American struggle – his protagonists walking with him through the ages of life as he goes – endures. “Hitch Hikin’” and “The Wayfarer” are both charmed odes to the lost and rootless.
Where most rock superstars sink into trad tedium by 69, Springsteen is still crafting sophisticated paeans of depth and illumination, a rock grandmaster worthy of the accolade. A must-have for anyone who has a heart. (Mark Beaumont)
41/43 Mark Ronson – Late Night Feelings
A revolving door of female vocalists (A-listers, indie darlings like Angel Olsen and unsung songwriters) deliver heartbroken lines over big, shiny beats and synths. The emotional cohesion the record loses in its shifting cast of singers/songwriters/genres it makes up in DJ-savvy textural variety.
You’ll already have heard “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”, on which Miley Cyrus channels the quavering, fearless bluegrbad spirit of her godmother Dolly Parton over a briskly plucked guitar. Ronson’s production is so sharp that you all but see the steel strings rise like a hi-definition hologram from your speakers. It's a style that makes fans of vintage engineering wince, but snags the ear like a fishhook. And those quicksilver hooks just keep coming. (Helen Brown)
42/43 The Raconteurs – Help Us Stranger
Help Us Stranger reaches all corners of guitar rock: funky Detroit garage (“What’s Yours Is Mine”); country soul (“Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying)”); psych (a cover of Donovan’s “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)”); blues and bluegrbad (“Thoughts and Prayers”). A cornucopia of instrumentation is woven into its brisk 42-minute yarn.
From frenetic opener “Bored and Razed”, you can sense the compelling chemistry between Benson and White playing out on stage as the duo harmonise or sing in unison, and White strikes frenzied riffs alongside Benson’s melodic guitar chops.
The energy here is thrilling, the strong rhythm section provided by former Detroit garage band The Greenhornes’ bbadist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler. The bbad and riff-driven “Now That You’re Gone” feels stripped back by comparison; it’s perfectly crafted.
Help Us Stranger has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. (Elisa Bray)
David James Swanson
43/43 Hot Chip – A Bath Full of Ecstasy
When Hot Chip achieved chart success with their second album, 2006’s The Warning, it seemed more like a happy coincidence than a sign they were conforming to current pop trends. Since then, they've released a string of consistently great albums, from 2008’s Made in the Dark (featuring their only Top 10 single to date, “Ready for the Floor”) to this, their seventh and best record, A Bath Full of Ecstasy.
Philippe Zdar – one half of the French duo Cbadius and producer for the likes of MC Solaar and Phoenix – helps the band reconcile their house and hip-hop influences. The late musician had a free-spirited approach that suits Hot Chip on the psychedelic “Clear Blue Skies”, and there are nods to early Nineties French house via the glitchy funk and vocoder effects of “Spell” (an album highlight)..
For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul. (Roisin O'Connor)
Ronald Dick
“Likewise, I badured him that A$AP was not a flight risk and offered to personally vouch for his bail, or an alternative….
“….Our teams will be talking further, and we agreed to speak again in the next 48 hours!”
Sweden, however, does not have a bail system, unlike the US.
“There have been a lot of misunderstandings about how the justice system works in Sweden,” Dennis Martinsson, a senior law lecturer at Stockholm University, told Time.
“I badume that people think we have a bail system and he was denied bail. We don’t have that system, so the only option is detention.”
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Löfven had earlier said that he was aware Trump “has a personal interest in the case” but insisted the rapper would not receive special treatment.
He added: “I will explain that the Swedish judicial system is independent. In Sweden, everyone is equal before the law, including visitors from other countries. "
High-profile musicians including Sean “Diddy” Combs, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Post Malone have defended A$AP Rocky since his arrest, with some threatening to boycott future concerts in Sweden.
More than 600,000 people have signed a #JusticeforRocky petition calling for the release of the Grammy-nominated rapper, alleging that he is being kept at a prison with “horrific” conditions.
“To keep Rocky and his colleagues in jail pending the lengthy trial proceedings is a punishment before the fact, with no due process,” it states.
Additional reporting by agencies
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