Views // Drake

Drake: Views (2016)

Know yourself, the theory goes, and you will know all. The world will open up to you. Existence will be made plain. You will be one with the matrix. Yadda yadda yadda. From arenas to memes, Drake has always had a skill for turning his innermost thoughts, feelings, and anxieties into breakthrough group therapy sessions—he articulates what we know to be true and then lets us rap or sing those truths en masse, exalting in common bonds that are as vulnerable as they are revealing. When he confides his fears, we become a little more fearless. When he turns his woes into anthems, we all get lifted. But there is a razor-sharp line between self-awareness and self-absorption: Whereas self-awareness can expand wisdom by reflecting it outward, self-absorption often festers, drawing things in only to let them rot. For the past seven years, Drake has expertly glided along that line. But on his fourth proper album, he edges closer than ever to a mirrored abyss, a suffocating echo chamber of self.

The record is called VIEWS but its perspective is decidedly singular. “This album, I’m very proud to say, is just—I feel like I told everybody how I’m actually feeling,” Drake told Zane Lowe in a toothless recent interview, differentiating VIEWS from his previous work. This might seem like a ridiculous distinction—there’s never any question that Drake is the star of his own show—but it’s apt, and it hints at why this album feels like more of a claustrophobic mindfuck than a collective catharsis. VIEWS is what happens when venting turns into whining. Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.

Revival // Selena Gomez

Selena Gomez: Revival (2015)

Selena Gomez wills a new era of her career into existence within the first two minutes of her second solo album. "It’s my time to butterfly," she sings on the self-care anthem "Revival." The Gomez of this relaxed, confident pop collection butterflies with such ease that it feels like she’s revealing her true personality for the first time. Where some former child stars tack toward aggressive maturity when they reach their twenties, Gomez finds ways to transcend that cliche. Her brand of sexiness has a coy, subtle quality that never tries too hard, from the fun, flirty "Hands to Myself" to the blissed-out "Survivors" to the intoxicating "Me & the Rhythm" — a riff on the classic theme of losing yourself on the dance floor ("Everybody wants to be touched/Everybody wants to get some") that nonetheless finds her sounding completely in control of her own euphoria.

Soaring past the harsh-though-catchy EDM beats of 2013’s Stars Dance and the shallow angst of her previous work with the pop-rock project the Scene, the former Disney star finds a new comfort zone in this album’s warm, tropical beach-pop sound. "Body Heat" brings Latin fusion into Gomez’s mix like never before and proves that she doesn’t need Zedd (the German producer behind her recent dance chart-topper "I Want You to Know") to make a genuine club banger.

Joanne // Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga: Joanne (2016)

At the start of the decade, Lady Gaga worked hard to reposition pop as a high art or vice-versa—both absorbing and extending a lineage that included oddball visionaries like Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Prince, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Elton John, Madonna, and Missy Elliott. Most of her avant-garde gestures were extra-musical, a string of cheeky, absurdist visions realized entirely outside of the studio and only tangentially in conversation with her bloodless dance jams (Gaga herself has referred to that early work as “soulless electronic pop”). It’s not hard, now, to recall these stunts from memory: she was sewn into a dress fashioned from slabs of flank steak for the VMAs. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. She hired a self-described “vomit artist” to puke a steady stream of syrupy green liquid onto her bosom during an SXSW performance. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was (and remains) plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and re-establish a hierarchy. Only Gaga could turn “monster” into a term of endearment.

And regardless of whether you find those moves electrifying or tedious, it's hard to overstate the value of that work as a public service—every generation’s freaks elect a champion, and Gaga was tireless, proud, and wholly devoted to the job. Her commercial success also meant that her chart peers were, for better or worse, free to get stranger, artier, and less predictable; Gaga helped usher in an era of pop in which hardly anything is too far-out (or pretentious) to play. Visual provocations of one sort or another are expected now: Sia performed “Chandelier” at the Grammys with her back to the audience, wearing a bobbed, platinum wig, while Kristen Wiig and the then-twelve-year-old dancer Maddie Ziegler frolicked around her in nude bodysuits. Miley Cyrus gyrates among furries as a matter of routine.

Major Key // DJ Khaled

DJ Khaled: Major Key (2016)

No one could have predicted the trajectory of DJ Khaled except for pt Khaled himself. Well before he ascended to Snapchat stardom in his soy milk-and-cocoa-butter'd glory, he was a local Miami radio DJ pushing brand-worthy catchphrases (“Listennn…”; “We the best!”) and promoting unity and self-belief with a persistence that was as endearing as it was annoying. His bombastic statements seemed to be a nod to his reggae soundclash bonafides, but it was actually a ‘hood-oriented manifestation gospel. Khaled wasn’t just beating his chest, he was willing his success to existence—comparing himself to his apparent betters such as Quincy Jones and Russell Simmons; later he placed himself alongside icons like Jay Z and Kanye West in a way that suggested good-natured delusions of grandeur. It started as cute and laughable, but it quickly became clear that Khaled was justifying his place in the big leagues with a succession of  hits—to the point that, when he claimed that “All I Do Is Win,” it was hard to disagree with him.

Khaled’s ascent is one of the most remarkable in the past decade of hip-hop history: He started as a bit player in Fat Joe’s Terror Squad, but has outlived (and maintained) that association to become a living meme, motivational figure, and controller of culture nonpareil. He may not have the cachet of the people he regularly rubs shoulders with, but he often transcends them with the depth of his connections and the breadth of his reach. He helped reestablish Miami as a creative export factory and has been instrumental in the rise of just about every notable commercially successful hip-hop movement that has popped up since 2006. It’s hard to imagine the prominence of Rick Ross’ MMG, Drake’s OVO, and Baby and Lil Wayne’s Cash Money and YMCMB without Khaled serving as the glue between those factions, even as they splintered and openly warred with one another. It’s been a running joke that Khaled—who has sporadic production credits, some under the alias Beat Novacane—doesn’t do more on his records than shout, but that ignores that fact that many DJs have tried their hands at compilation albums, and none have been as consistently successful at it as DJ Khaled. (For a quick comparison, one can listen to DJ Drama’s recent Quality Street Music 2; while Drama has had the golden touch with his Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, his official albums haven’t left the same footprint as Khaled’s efforts.)

Anti // Rihanna

Rihanna: Anti (2016)

For much of 2015, repeated delays and a lack of solid information started to make Rihanna's Anti feel like pop's mythical creature. Now that we know it's real, we can hear the singer's eighth LP for what it is: a sprawling masterpiece of psychedelic soul that's far more straightforward than its tangled rollout. The three full years since 2012's Unapologetic – the longest break between releases in Rihanna's career – turned out to be exactly what she needed to make a rich full-length statement. After more than a decade as a superstar of the singles chart, Rihanna has become an album artist.
Anti is first and foremost an experience built on vibes. Where previous LPs were built around clear peaks, here the songs fit together into a fluid landscape of seamless transitions – check the flow on the excellent mid-album run of after-hours joints from "Desperado" to "Woo" to "Needed Me." Every song sounds like our collective fantasy of Rihanna: a carefree island girl lounging in a cloud of smoke, asserting a brand of independence that's wholly her own. On "James Joint," she assures us that she'd "rather be/Smoking weed/Whenever we breathe/Every time you kiss me" in her most dulcet tones. "You been rollin' around/Shit, I'm rollin' up," she asserts on the biting kiss-off track "Needed Me." Clearly, the stoned party goddess we've seen on Instagram and Snapchat is pretty close to the real Rihanna.

Anti's beats are more muted than the flashier productions of her past work, which leaves room for the album's biggest revelation: Rihanna's show-stopping vocal performances. One year ago, on one-off single "FourFiveSeconds," she belted in a raw, raspy tone that expressed levels of soul the previous decade of her career had only hinted at. Here, she follows through on that promise, singing powerfully and with a deeper emotional density than she's revealed before. On the bluesy late-album highlight "Higher," when she sings "This whiskey got me feelin' pretty" over a dusty strings sample from producer No ID, she could be crooning in a smoky post-war jazz club.

Illuminate // Shawn Mendes

Shawn Mendes: Illuminate (2016)

Shawn Mendes – 18 and releasing his second album – rose to fame three years ago singing six-second cover snippets on Vine, mastering the micro hooks that define current popcraft from the inside. His own songs often start with his guitar (his debut album was titled Handwritten), at once as disarmingly intimate as a singer-songwriter confession and as layered with melodic and rhythmic bait as a Major Lazer single. As a growing audience has demanded something more personal from their hits than self-empowerment slogans (thank Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, and include Tove Lo and Justin Bieber's guitar-centric "Love Yourself"), he's been poised to take center stage.

Illuminate mixes professions of romantic agony like "Mercy" (where a quietly hummed hook explodes into crashing drums), with nice-boy valentines like "Treat You Better" and bedroom come-ons like "Lights On." Two-thirds of the album is produced by Sheeran collaborator Jake Gosling and deploys Sheeran's mix of familiar pop vestments (electric guitar solos that float with John Mayer weightlessness, gently worried vocals that owe as much to Justin Timberlake as to gospel or R&B). If you think that seems third hand, you might be right. But you're definitely too cynical for music that mixes this much sincerity and cunning, a trick Mendes first learned six seconds at a time. "I'm not trying to come off too strong," he says after telling one young lady how good she looks with her clothes on. "But you know I can't help it." Exactly.

A Seat At The Table // Solange

Solange: A Seat At The Table (2016)

Solange Knowles turned 30 in June, and it seems clear that her Saturn Returns manifested in an artistic surge. A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones. Even though it’s been out less than a week, it already seems like a document of historical significance, not just for its formidable musical achievements but for the way it encapsulates black cultural and social history with such richness, generosity, and truth.

To this point, Solange has been trying on styles and stretching out into her own skills as a songwriter. Having spent her early teen years singing backup and writing songs, she debuted as a solo artist at just 16, with Solo Star. Very 2003, it was a gleaming, hip-hop-informed album that slinked over beats from the likes of Timbaland and the Neptunes; even with plenty of great tracks, the production outweighed her presence. After a five-year break as a solo artist—during which she got married, had son Julez, moved to Idaho, got divorced, starred in Bring It On: All or Nothing, among other films, and wrote songs for her sister Beyoncé (whew!)—she returned in 2008 with Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. That album was clearly immersed in a deep love of ’60s funk and soul and its attendant politics, and she rebelled against expectations (see: “Fuck the Industry”), eager to fully express her individuality. She fused her musical impulses in the easy, ebullient grooves of 2012’s True EP, which eased a glossier vision of pop into the soul-funk groove she had ingrained.

Lemonade // Beyonce

Beyonce: Lemonade (2016)

If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let’s assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that. With its slate of accompanying videos, Lemonade is billed as Beyonce’s second "visual album." But here that voyeuristic feeling manifests while listening rather than viewing, given the high visibility of Bey and Jay. The songwriting is littered with scenes that seem positively cinematic, so it helps that you can imagine these characters living them: Beyoncé smelling another woman’s scent on Jay Z, her pacing their penthouse in the middle of the night before leaving a note and disappearing with Blue. Lemonade is a film as well, yet the album itself feels like a movie.

This Is Acting // Sia

Sia: This Is Acting (2016)

At the age of 40, Sia Furler has been through more career phases than her most of her contemporaries combined. By the time "Chandelier," one of the best Top 40 pop ballads of the decade, made her a global superstar, she had already been frontwoman of Australian '90s jazz-fusion band, Crisp; vocalist for crossover lounge act Zero 7; and  a modestly popular solo artist, whose 2006 song "Breathe Me" was featured in the finale of the HBO drama "Six Feet Under." That's a lot, so when "Chandelier" took off, there was an excitement to seeing this relative underdog succeed so wildly in a traditionally sexist and ageist industry, all without bowing to cookie-cutter concepts of what pop stars should be.

This Is Acting, the follow-up to this surprise attack on the Billboard charts, can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 Forms of Fear's sleeper hit. As the much-hyped backstory makes clear, almost every song on the album was written by Sia but rejected by another artist, from Adele to Rihanna to Beyoncé. Most songwriters would perhaps choose not to draw attention to the fact that they've had an album's worth of material passed over by some of the pop's biggest names, but to Sia's immense credit, This Is Acting doesn't necessarily sound like a slapdash collection of demos or B-sides. It's a complete piece of work and one that serves as a commentary on the intersectionality of art and fame by someone who has recently acquired a new level of notoriety. But the sacrifice here is the personal flair that gave her previous album a spark of creativity and set it apart from the songs she had already been writing for other pop stars. In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream, and in light of that transformation, you'd expect more than a play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights.

Sit Still Look Pretty // Daya

Daya: Sit Still Look Pretty (2016)

Daya is trying to be the new Lorde.

The 17-year-old pop artist sounds just as dream-like as the “Royals” singer, and Daya’s debut studio album “Sit Still, Look Pretty” appeals to the same group of wannabe edgy mainstream listeners. Both her titular song and April 2015 hit “Hide Away” promise an album of original, ethereal beats, but the new record’s shallow and dated lyrics of a millennial ultimately disappoint.

“Sit Still, Look Pretty,” the highlight of the album, rose to popularity when it was first released in March 2016 with messages about not changing for a boy and being more than a pretty face. Daya’s crisp sound production is the pretty face covering up other tracks’ superficial lyrics.

The epitome of her try-hard-yet-effort-lacking songwriting is the lyricism of “I.C.Y.M.I,” “Talk” and “Thirsty,” all of which do little more than use viral wording, such as pop culture references and internet language, to try to fit in with today’s hip youth

Cashmere Noose // Blackbear

Blackbear: Cashmere Noose

L.A. artist blackbear has had a busy few days.  Since this last Friday, he has released his third project of the year:  the deluxe edition of his newest EP entitled “Cashmere Noose”, trended #1 worldwide on Twitter, and leaked his cell number in order to send free downloads of the EP to his “broke college fans”.  The juxtaposition found on the EP of dark, moody lyrics with synth-heavy, beat-focused r&b creates a sound which the artist has experimented with consistently throughout his career and is learning to perfect with a layered production incomparable to his previous releases.

 

Blackbear begins the EP with the track “Sniffing Vicodin in Paris” and the lyrics “Time is running out. For everybody, especially me right now”.  After listening to the EP, I can’t imagine an end in sight for the artist- it’s that good; but, if he insists his time is running out, I figure it’s the listener’s duty to figure out why.  The track instantly grabs the listener’s attention with a groovy dance beat complimented by smooth vocals.  The production is flawless and the mood euphoric.  The lyrics: reminiscent and nostalgic- maybe the reason behind the belief that time is running out.  Blackbear seems to reveal a lot about his mindset in the second verse when he sings about not wanting to go to Kylie Jenner’s party because he’s “sick of LA bullshit, man I gotta go”.  The lyric reveals a focus less on the lifestyle of a star and more on the quality of the music.  The rest of the EP proves this.

 

“Rly real” is the follow-up track and honestly probably my least favorite on the EP.  It’s enjoyable but it’s not memorable.  With that being said, the follow-up track “Sometimes I Want To Die” seems to make up for that more than enough.  The confessional track features an instrumental to get lost in and the vocals to match.  The lyrics tell a narrative of the artists' previous habits, always ending with the fact that he’s “off that now”.  The song ends with the repetition to “let it burn”.  Once again, the theme of time running out returns and it seems to be centered around the idea that the artist is completely exhausted with the superficiality he used to lose himself in.

Mind of Mine // Zayn

Zayn: Mind of Mine (2016)

In One Direction, Zayn contributed a distinct, introspective personality, the pleasing and elastic geometry of his hair, a capable falsetto, and an emotional reserve which contrasted tastefully with the adolescent exuberance of his bandmates. On his own, uninterrupted by four other voices, his vocal can sound shapeless, with his vowels collapsing into mumbled piles of feeling. His highly anticipated solo album is state-of-the-art amorphous R&B, Frank Ocean and Miguel-indebted stuff that swerves in and out of focus like headlights through a fog. But his voice doesn't stand out in it, and on fussy, textured songs like "tRuTh" and "BoRdErSz," he's just an additional cloud in a misty atmosphere.

In sparer, more reduced arrangements you can hear him strain; "fOoL fOr YoU" is a Beatles pastiche, just piano and drums and Zayn, and his voice sounds pinched and exposed. He sounds lovely on "sHe" and "dRuNk," incidentally the most assured songs on the record. There’s a dexterity to "sHe" that seems vacuumed out of the rest of the album, his vocal moving nimbly among blurred pulses of guitar and inverted piano clusters. When he unleashes his falsetto, it pierces the track, a crystal tower rising through the surface of the earth. It’s the only instant on Mind of Mine that seems to hint at his actual capacity for pop artistry. There’s also something gorgeous and spectral to his voice on the intermission, "fLoWeR," which is sung entirely in Urdu; he snaps with ease into the perpendicular arrangement of notes.

The Life of Pablo // Kanye West

Kanye West: The Life of Pablo (2016)

Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo's namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of "which one?" set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye's Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history.

The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It's probably his first full-length that won't activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He's changed the genre's DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. "See, I invented Kanye, it wasn't any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there are so many Kanyes," he raps wryly on "I Love Kanye." The message seems clear: He's through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He's content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.

Kanye's second child Saint was born in early December, and there's something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. "Ultralight Beam" opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: "This is a God dream," goes the refrain. But everything about the album's presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.

Suicide Squad: The Album // Various Artists

Suicide Squad: The Album (2016)

John Ostrander began publishing the modern Suicide Squad series in May 1987, two months after Ronald Reagan broadcast his fatherly confusion about all that money sent to Nicaragua’s Contras. Gathering second-rate supervillains for a covert-ops team was both a reaction to the cynical politics of the era and an editorial necessity—you can show Captain Boomerang committing atrocities Batman never could. Movie soundtracks often feel similarly calculated: Some antiheroes get coerced into serving their government, and others form an unlikely partnership for the Spawn OST. You have an excuse to bury your worst material, or an opportunity to reconsider it. Following in the tradition of Judgment Night and Blade II, the Suicide Squad album tries to bring musical strangers to happy disagreement.

The affection holds, for a moment. If Skrillex had a secret origin, it would probably involve rock, techno, and rap pooling in mutant coils at some point during the late ’90s, so pairing him up with Rick Ross for “Purple Lamborghini” is almost intuitive. And Ross sounds more energetic than he has in a while, the bass clawing down to his lowest frequencies. “Sucker for Pain” is credited to “Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa & Imagine Dragons w/Logic & Ty Dolla $ign ft. X Ambassadors,” a gloriously generic pileup of royalty negotiations featuring Dragon man Dan Reynolds moaning: “I wanna chain you up, I wanna tie you down/I’m a slave to your game.” That’s just called being a switch.

The best contributions here go to approximate extremes. The R&B singer Kehlani delivers lyrics as measured intimacies, and on “Gangsta” her voice slows to a mantra: “You got me hanging from the ceiling,” her high notes sounding both captivated and frustrated. With its whispered taunts, its guitars testing the constant drum machine like a blade, “Medieval Warfare” is Grimes’ most direct attempt to salvage the aesthetic of nu-metal. Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie has the voice to bring off “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that also encourages their cover’s reference (for a moment I wondered whether the backing vocals were sampled from the original). The pleasure of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is its indifference to anybody else’s notions of taste, brandishing worthy historical references as preposterous camp, giving the metalheads pseudo-opera. Meticulously recreating that feels somewhat misguided, like annotating a joke.

According to anonymous-but-entertaining reports, Warner executives panicked after the first Suicide Squad teaser blew up online—instead of that hyper-saturated splatter, the actual film consisted of interchangeable paramilitary types looking drab in the rain. They hired back the trailer company to help with a different parallel cut, using familiar music cues to staple the final hybrid together. Listening to the Suicide Squad soundtrack resembles that experience, minus most of the hits. What you find is portentous covers, gun effects borrowed from a Joker toy, and Twenty One Pilots, a band whose singer addresses the microphone like his loyal pet rat. They don’t even rise from irritating to villainous unless you have the misfortune of programming a modern-rock radio station.

The presence of Eminem’s “Without Me” is telling: Once a wrecker of civilization, now the bully who couldn’t even go after ‘NSync collectively. Suicide Squad wants to show you around its twisted mind so badly you would think the mortgage just defaulted. The earlier Batman films reckoned with far more vivid forms of ugliness, whether the brutalist pandemonium that Tim Burton and Anton Furst devised or Joel Schumacher’s daubs of neon, but then they also had reference points beyond existing nerd media. (And Batman Forever had “Kiss From a Rose.”) The new superhero universe is a cosmos of templates, endlessly elaborating on itself—which makes a soundtrack like Suicide Squad like the background music in a PowerPoint.

us // gnash

gnash: us (2016)

Well, after u and me, it's time to review the last piece of the gnash puzzle - his newest album us.

After having the chance to "be part" of gnash's music/personal journey and seeing how some patterns re-occur (like that magical 7 tracks number), it's really nice to experience the gradual change of sound from u to us. Another thing which I realized was the fact that he never does a collaboration with someone twice. The first release is predominantly gnash-created, while I am quite the opposite. That being said, all of the artists' names appearing in us are new. Maybe that's a silly observation, but it felt somehow note-worthy.

This record is way more acoustic-driven, kicking off with an amazing cover of Bright Eyes' "first day of my life", which automatically (at least for me) makes it even more personal. That and gnash's distinctive voice almost make me feel part of the whole artist experience.

The Divine Feminine // Mac Miller

Mac Miller: The Divine Feminine (2016) 

The Divine Feminine is the fourth studio album by American rapper Mac Miller. It was released on September 16, 2016, by Warner Bros. Records and REMember Music. The album features guest appearances from Kendrick Lamar, Anderson Paak, Ty Dolla Sign and Ariana Grande, among others.

Mac Miller has put in hard work establishing himself as a Serious Rapper since the release of his emotionally and sonically flat debut Blue Slide Park, putting on his fair share of wordplay showcases and aligning himself with the right people since his sprawling breakout Watching Movies With the Sound Off in 2013, but much of that work came off as pandering or, worse still, overly earnest. He’s gotten more comfortable in his own skin with each release, but that threatened to be an issue here, given the title. Yet, The Divine Feminine is by far the most settled he's ever been. There aren’t any plays to satisfy or ingratiate a specific subgroup of listeners. There aren’t any lyrical exercises or overthought exhibitions of verse structure and execution, no plays to prove himself a rapper’s rapper—frankly, there’s almost more singing than rapping. But this is his most nuanced release, a record that forgoes personal narrative and somehow reveals his individuality in the process. He does it all with just a little help from his friends.

Last Year Was Complicated // Nick Jonas

Nick Jonas: Last Year Was Complicated (2016)

Last Year Was Complicated is the third solo album by American singer Nick Jonas. It was released on June 10, 2016, by Island and Safehouse Records. The album features collaborations with Tove Lo, Ty Dolla $ign, Big Sean and Daniella Mason. The album's lead single, "Close", was released on March 25, 2016.

Nick Jonas is talking up his third full-length as a look back at his two-year relationship with former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo, which fizzled out last June. As on any breakup album, regret and frustration predominate, and there are even flashes of bitterness, but the rhythms here are too brisk to give Jonas a chance to sulk. Sticking with what works, Jonas reunites with the producers behind his biggest singles. Jason Evigan, responsible for Nick's moody hit "Chains," handles five tracks here, including "Voodoo," which skitters like a tribute to classic Timbaland, and the clubby yet moody "Champagne Problems."

Of the four songs assembled by Sir Nolan, who helmed the pugnacious banger "Jealous," the new single "Chainsaw" stands out strongest, with its modulated ghostly vocal echoes suggesting the memories of lost love that haunt Jonas. As a singer, Jonas never exactly overwhelms a listener with charisma or technique, but he's personable and versatile, equally at home confessing a fear of intimacy over simulated steel drums and a tick-tock rhythm on the Tove Lo duet "Close" as he is teaming with Ty Dolla $ign to celebrate the single life on "Bacon." And his supple falsetto, sounding wounded or seductive as required, allows him to stake out his own patch of territory on the border between pop and R&B. The album overall is amazing and tells a beautiful, yet sometimes humorous story.

7/27 // Fifth Harmony

Fifth Harmony: 7/27 (2016)

To be quite honest, I was excited when I first found out girl group Fifth Harmony was releasing a new studio album. Upon arrival, I wasn't very pleased with it. The album is good, not great. I was expecting a new feel of music from the girls, not so much "bubblegum pop" as they usually are. Although there are songs from the album I do enjoy including "Work From Home" and "Flex". The girls ha()e had many great alubms in the past--and I'm sure there will be more added to the list. I just don't think that reflection will be one of them. Sorry!

Nine Track Mind // Charlie Puth

Charlie Puth: Nine Track Mind

This album is absolutely incredible. Charlie's voice is unique and full of passion. I love eery single song on the album. He obviously put much time and effort into making it great. It doesn't surprise me that critics aren't in favor of Nine Track Mind because it is not a traditional pop album, definitely, money well spent and I can't wait to see what Charlie has to come. My favorite songs would have to be Dangerously and Suffer.

Dangerous Woman // Ariana Grande

Ariana Grande: Dangerous Woman (2016)

Ariana Grande's 3rd album finds the 23-year-old pop star embracing a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the help of Future, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Macy Gray, and others.

Dangerous Woman by Ariana Grande leaves fans shocked and wanting more. On May 20, 2016, Ariana Grande released her third album which she spent a total of 5+ months working on. The album was originally supposed to be titled "Moonlight" and the song "Focus was supposed to be the lead single from the album. Instead, Ariana decided to change the name of the album to Dangerous Woman and Focus was completely removed from the album. It was listed as one of Rolling Stones top 20 best pop albums of 2016 and Fuse's top 20 albums of 2016 and sold 175,000 copies in the first week alone. 

My Opinion: This album by far has to be one of the best albums of 2016! I am a huge fan of Ariana so when this album came out, I made sure I was one of the first to get my hands on a copy. Ariana is really changing up her music style as you can tell from the evolution of her first album "Yours Truly". The singer/songwriter has added a more mature feel to her music and this is her first album to have a parental advisory on it. But again, the album is by far amazing. I love her, and all her music. If you ever get the opportunity to listen to it, go for it! I promise you will not be disappointed.