Tyler, the Creator
Call Me If You Get Lost
Tyler, the Creator “just keeps getting better,” said Eric Skelton in Complex .com. Two years after winning a Grammy for Igor, an album on which he moved decidedly away from rap toward an idiosyncratic blend of pop and R&B, the 30-year-old rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer returned with a rap release that’s “the most technically impressive album he’s ever made,” featuring some of the best beats of his career and “easily his best rapping.” Beyond its opening boasts about jet-setting success, this record is really about guilt, said Charles Holmes in TheRinger.com. Tyler made his name as “hip-hop’s nihilist incarnate,” an angry 20-year-old willing to spout ugly thoughts to grab attention. But while his latest album often sounds like an ode to the mixtapes of his youth, its true heart is revealed by “Wilshire,” a late track in which he remorsefully describes a tryst with a friend’s partner. What a discovery: “All it took to make the best rap album of the year was for the music industry’s resident goblin to feel something.”
Jazmine Sullivan
Heaux Tales
Many R&B divas before Jazmine Sullivan have insisted on the right of every woman to freely pursue wealth and sexual satisfaction, said Spencer Kornhaber in TheAtlantic.com. But Sullivan’s album-long contribution to that tradition “has the analytical heft of a dissertation, albeit a hilarious, moving, and virtuosically executed one.” In a bare 32 minutes, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter turns eight songs and interwoven testimonials from women she knows into “an exposé of the way that money and sexism shape the romantic battlefield.” Sullivan “has been one of R&B’s most compelling truth tellers since she broke through in the ’00s,” said Maura Johnston in Entertainment Weekly. With Heaux Tales, she “flaunts her contralto and her inner strength,” favoring a throwback sound as she “continues to distill deeply felt emotions into profane yet nuanced tracks that feel as immediate as a late-night catchup session with an old friend.”
Japanese Breakfast
Jubilee
“Michelle Zauner owned 2021,” said Hayden
Merrick in PopMatters.com. Not only did she have an acclaimed best-seller with her memoir, Crying in H Mart. As the leader of Japanese Breakfast, she also delivered “the finest indie-pop record of the year,” a gorgeous collection of songs that ride strings, horns, and Zauner’s “beautifully melancholic” voice to a place where it’s possible to acknowledge sorrows while celebrating life. Zauner’s brand of indie “draws from a wide array of influences,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. There are touches of dance music, shoegaze, and bygone U.K. synth bands, until, on “Posing for Cars,” the “glorious” closer, she sings her last line and unleashes a cathartic solo. “Her guitar sounds like someone breaking free.”
Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders
Promises
“When afforded the patience it demands, Promises is the kind of album that can rearrange the molecules in a room,” said Zach Schonfeld in PasteMagazine.com. “As remarkably potent as it is improbable,” this collaboration between 80-year-old jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the British electronic artist Sam Shepherd “could hail from 30 years in the past or 30 years in the future.” Shepherd, who records as Floating Points, composed the ambient 47-minute piece, which unfolds as a suite of nine movements built around a recurring seven-note arpeggio and Sanders’ searching tenor sax. When the London Symphony Orchestra finally enters, said Nate Chinen in NPR.org, the music it adds is “as subtle as a slow-moving weather front.” From start to finish, “this is a work of art that feels more like an experience in the natural world: irreducible, no matter how many times you bask in its light.”
Olivia Rodrigo
Sour
Olivia Rodrigo, at 18, is “already a killer songwriter,” said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. Five months after her breakup ballad “Drivers License” became the first smash hit of 2021, the Disney-trained phenom “dropped a greatesthits album on her first try, the kind of flawless mega-pop monster that just thrives in heavy rotation.” Soon, her “terrifyingly perfect” debut single was joined on radio and Spotify playlists by the “mall-punk rage” of “Good 4 U” and the winningly bitter “Deja Vu.” Though written by a teenager in a bad mood, Sour was also “wise beyond its years,” said Katie Atkinson in Billboard .com. Most heartbroken high schoolers would pour their emotions into a diary. Not Rodrigo. “She expertly rolled them into an 11-song pop master class.”
The 29 sources used to establish our rankings include Consequence.net, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, Stereogum.com, USA Today, and Variety.