The people who advised us to survive ’til ’25 need to come outside and provide an update. The nuts and bolts have loosened on the roller-coaster ride of civil society and shared reality. Everyone strapped in it is wondering how their car will handle the forthcoming turbulence. Where does your mind travel to abate the worry of cruising off rails into the unknown and uncharted? For some of the best albums of the new(est) year, that tether, that shelter, is home. It’s geography, history, family, and tradition. Others conceptualize a gilded escapism, or a stabilizing coming to terms with never being able to guess what’s around the corner.
Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is a wonder of threading art and advocacy, a collection of catchy tracks stuffed with multifaceted Puerto Rican pride from its lyrics to its genre selection to its employment of local artists and studio space. A surface listen will yield an appreciation of its blending of aggressively produced and pastoral sounds, but more steadfast attention unearths a treasure trove of homages. Love is shown to everyone from rapper Héctor el Father to educator/philosopher Eugenio María de Hostos. In true Spotify final boss fashion, you don’t necessarily need to grok the entire context this music fits into — the succession of salseros and reggaetoneros it takes to get to a song like the winding “Baile Inolvidable” — for a hook to catch you. But DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS rewards every dip with more unforeseen spoils.
➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.
Darkside, Nothing
Darkside — an on-again, off-again collaboration between singer-songwriter and electronic producer Nicolás Jaar and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington — expanded into a trio in the 2020s. Listeners noticed the gains on 2023’s Live at Spiral House, a rehearsal space recording bringing drummer/programmer Tlacael Esparza into the fold. February’s Nothing, their third studio album, filters the bubbly, groove-oriented psychedelia of earlier works through more conventional songwriting structures. The result is summery repose interspersed by alluring surprises: The pulsating, oceanic “Are You Tired? (Keep on Singing)” drifts toward an unexpected cosmic-rock interlude you’d sooner expect to encounter deep in a Grateful Dead tape. The soulful, bipartite centerpiece “Hell Suite” plays by the book everywhere except Jaar’s vocal, equal parts lounge lizard and absurdist Dusty in Memphis reimagining.
FKA Twigs, Eusexua
FKA Twigs’s Eusexua recalls another time neither distinctly past nor future. The sexual politics are very now but the sonic predilections spread out over key points in dance music’s past. All the while, the artist’s overarching dream of a utopian bond between the techno- and organic ponders philosophical tenets that will bind the rest of the century. Eusexua balances Boiler Room banger material and heady atmospherics. Production is conversant in the sleek, metallic otherworldliness couching manicured hooks in Eurodance classics. But unlike those points of reference, lyrics here don’t merely gesture toward sensuality. They hash out boundaries and dismantle hangups. Eusexua offers a soundtrack for bedrooms and basements fit for balling and bawling sessions.
➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of Eusexua.
Mac Miller, Balloonerism
Mac Miller’s unreleased work explains and presages the stylistic shifts his successive studio albums yielded, revealing a never-ending question of what kind of artist he could or should be. Proving his mettle by easing into the burgeoning indie and mainstream Cali rap movements in the early 2010s, he went back and forth between delivering a tight commercial argument for radio airplay and a more totalizing dive into his bursting gifts as a multi-instrumentalist. Balloonerism, recorded in 2014 seemingly in the overflow of the darkly impressive Faces, catches Miller working through the prior mixtape’s still-pervasive darkness with a widening creative palette. It took a back seat to the emotionally and musically slippery GOOD:AM, a winning (and called) shot at a big-league push. But the bad feelings tucked away in jarringly candid cuts like “Rick’s Piano” are just as potent as singles of the era. You wish the late rapper, singer, and studio Swiss army knife didn’t second-guess his work but see why an artist having brushes with public scrutiny and disapproval might think again about sharing too many thoughts about drugs and death at one time.
➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s review of Balloonerism.
MIKE, Showbiz!
The first thing you notice pressing play on Showbiz!, the latest full length in a nonstop stream pouring out of Bronx rapper-producer MIKE, is the bass. It’s a commanding, center-stage presence, the ruddy root the ideas sprout from. Even the high end feels woozy and drowned, like foliage piercing a melting frost. Hefty low end hugs tastily pitched-down loops the artist uses to wax exhausted. “You gotta be, I mean, probably above me,” the boisterous “Artist of the Century” begins. “Proud of me, working against the odds and the ugly.” You don’t expect the bustling flute-funk jam to float in on a note of familial grief and questioned faith delivered via hazy internal rhyme, but entwining joy and grief is a constant in MIKE’s catalog. The song and album aren’t always as piercing as the couplet, but brevity allows Showbiz! to hit a listener with alternating sweets and hots, its shifting moods anchored by the subterranean frequencies in the beat.