National Post (National Edition)
Soccer Mommy’s ferocious debut highlights a year of upheaval in pop music.
Genre lines continued to blur and the definition of album shifted further in another year of upheaval in pop music
1 Soccer Mommy, Clean
From indie-rock singer-songwriter Sophie Allison, who records as Soccer Mommy, comes a ferocious howl of an album that captures the tension just as the fear of internal collapse gives way to newfound strength. These songs are damp with derision, regret and desire, but never uncertainty.
2 Charlie Puth, Voice notes
The year’s most promising pure pop album is from a painstakingly detail-oriented, emotionally wrenched, melodically ambitious soul and funk savant who’s just now, a couple of years into his run in the limelight, learning how to squeeze the most arresting of sentiments from the rawest of arrangements.
3 Juice WRLD, Goodbye & Good Riddance
The pop-punk of 2018 is hiphop, and Juice WRLD is its best brat. On this album, he’s a lost soul — a victim of others and also himself — who’s never at a loss for melody.
4 Drake, Scorpion
A double album that captures all the essential Drake modes: indignation, flirtation, celebration and more indignation. No one is better at internal narrative continuity than Drake, which is why he has the ability to make an album that’s utterly current while effortlessly blending with the Drake of yesterday.
5 Gunna, Drip Season 3; Lil Baby, Harder Than Ever; Lil Baby and Gunna, Drip Harder
The children of Young Thug are alive and thriving — beautiful, abstract singer rappers peddling streetcorner psychedelia. Lil Baby is wiry and rough-edged, while the elegant Gunna verges on new age.
6 Ashley Mcbryde, Girl Going Nowhere
Lean, sinewy, blues-inflected country music from a singer with a voice that’s thick but nimble. The still beauty in her singing is impressive, but her easeful storytelling feels practically radical.
7 Kanye West, Ye and Kids See Ghosts, Kids See Ghosts
Broken records for a broken year. For more than a decade, Kanye West has released albums that shifted and reframed pop culture, making bold propositions about hiphop’s dissolving boundaries. These albums are smaller than that — plangent ruminations that demonstrated that even amid all the tumult, not all of his instincts abandoned him.
8 Cardi B, Invasion of Privacy
Cardi B, who arrived at rapping after stints of Instagram and reality-tv fame, isn’t much beholden to tradition, or to one particular version of herself. So what’s thrilling about this album is its variety — you hear her working through who she might become in real time, a quick study already leapfrogging to the front of the class.
9 The Weeknd, My Dear Melancholy
As the Weeknd has reached for the pop stratosphere in recent years, he’s shed some of the scar tissue that made his earliest music so transfixingly unsettling. This betweenalbums EP demonstrates that he hasn’t lost those abrasions.
10 Kane Brown, Experiment
Sturdy songs about love. Sturdy songs about lust. Sturdy songs about faithfulness. Sturdy songs about growing up country. And one sturdy song about how political hypocrisy and its repercussions can drown out all of those things.
11 Pusha T, Daytona
Listening to Pusha T rap is like watching a skyscraper get built one steel girder at a time: Every step is carefully programmed, every angle is crisp, and the sum total effect is overpowering.
12 The Blaze, Dancehall
Club music reframed as Earth art.
13 Turnstile, Time & Space
Hardcore that pummels locally and reaches across the aisle.
14 Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love
Shards of glimmering industrial anarcho-soul.
15 Lil Peep, Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2
The ghost of the 2018 year in pop that never was.