No club-hopping or bottles popping – it’s the after-hours balladry of a 23-year-old star wondering why he spends so much time in lonely hotel rooms staring at his phone. He avoids the celebrity-guest debutante ball he could have thrown himself – instead, he goes for a intimately emotional Seventies soft-rock vibe. We Say: n his superb solo debut, the One Direction heartthrob claims his turf as a true rock & roll prince, a sunshine superman, a cosmic dancer in touch with his introspective acoustic side as well as his glam flash. The song grows into a stomping electro-acoustic thrill ride, its swarming, processed vocal chant “I want it!” recalling another precocious, hyperliterate, synth-loving auteur singer-songwriter – Kate Bush, who insisted “I want it all!” back in 1982 on “Suspended in Gaffa.” Give Lorde credit for wanting it all too – the massive vistas of electronic music alongside the human-scaled and handmade. ![]() They open the single “Green Light,” a barbed message to an ex who the singer can’t quite shake. We Say: Now 20, Lorde signals a new order straightaway, with lonely piano chords where Pure Heroine’s pure electronic palette was. grime (“No Long Talk”) to Caribbean dancehall (“Blem”) to South African house (“Get It Together”) to Earth, Wind & Fire (“Glow”). When you get right down to it, Aubrey Graham is a playlist – a true pop visionary who’s always a fan at heart, an omnivore with a raging appetite for his next favorite sound. More Life is his finest longform collection in years, cheerfully indulgent at 22 tracks and 82 minutes, a masterful tour of all the grooves in his head, from U.K. ![]() We Say: Drake calls his superb new More Life a “playlist,” not an album or even a mixtape, yet that might be why it sounds so expressive, so emotional, so quintessentially Drakean. In an era where “bars” seems almost old-fashioned in the age of Drake’s polyglot tunesmithery, Young Thug’s Silly-Putty syllable stretching and Future’s expressionist robo-croak, Lamar builds a bridge to the past. The rhymes on songs like “DNA,” “Element,” “Feel,” “Humble” and “XXX” come fast, furious and almost purist in nature. But here he explores what we traditionally know as a “rapper” more than on any of his albums to date. Kendrick has many talents – pop star, avant-garde poet, lyrical gymnast, storyteller. ![]() If To Pimp a Butterfly was the best rap album in 2015, Damn.is the platonic ideal of the best rap album of 1995, a dazzling display of showy rhyme skills, consciousness-raising political screeds, self-examination and bass-crazy-kicking. seemingly takes a classicist route to rap music. We Say: Seemingly exhausted with the burden of constantly pushing hip-hop forward into concept operas, electric Miles explosions and Flying Lotus electronic burbles, Damn.
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