“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 ...

Well, we made it through another year. Even if it's only thanks to a technicality — a barely-there, hanging-by-a-thread type of completion — we made it. In 2021, we were more isolated than ever, ...

The sound of pop music shifted quickly and unpredictably this year: In 2021, ’90s club music made a euphoric return, an Afrobeats song cracked the Billboard Top 10, and hyperpop consolidated while a ...

As 2021 comes to a close, music giants like Billboard, Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartRadio and more are releasing their lists for the most-listened and best-selling songs and albums of the year, and ...

YouTube Music has officially launched its Year-in-Review-like 2021 Recap feature. As its branding suggests, that’s designed to bring all of the stats anybody could want for their listening history.

It's hard to argue there was a more important — and surprising — musician in 2021 than Olivia Rodrigo. She went from relative unknown to complete superstar, and she did it using, in part, the revived ...

We’re at the end of the year, which means a swarm of personalized “year in review” lists from the apps and platforms you use the most. One of the first up is the Apple Music streaming service. But ...

Olivia called it right and exact this year: God, it’s brutal out here. But tough times call for tough tunes, and these tunes delivered, in an absurdly abundant year for music. These are my 25 favorite ...

Not so sour! Olivia Rodrigo took home the trophy for New Artist of the Year at the 2021 American Music Awards on Sunday, November 21, earning her the record for most wins in one year by a first-time ...

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 ...