It’s brutal out there, and that’s why, more than ever, we needed the consoling and prodding pleasures of popular music to help everything make sense in here. [Stage direction: taps chest, knowingly.] ...

In a year saturated with excellent releases — luminous false starts idling in the shadow of this never-ending global tragedy — projects that maximized ferality won me over. Identifying and rejecting ...

The Best Music of 2021 So, 2021 wasn’t quite the “post-pandemic” return to normal we’d all hoped for. But once again, music carried us through, and not even ever-mutating variants could stop ...

We've spent the past couple of weeks sharing a whole bunch of incredible music that came out in 2021, including NPR Music's picks for the 50 Best Albums and 100 Best Songs. But despite our best ...

“Too much pain,” Young M.A. offers on her second LP, “could barely notice the beauty in things.” Not only did these albums provide comfort and commiseration, they also taught me new ways to listen, to ...

We ranked the year’s 50 best albums earlier this month, and now it’s time to dig into the 50 best songs. Putting a list like this together is never an easy task, but in a year like 2021, when so many ...