Genre-ingesting prog rock virtuosos Polyphia recorded their fourth album, Remember That You Will Die, with contributions from producers like Rodney Jerkins (Destiny's Child, Black Eyed Peas), Johan Lenox (Big Sean, Machine Gun Kelly), and Y2K (Doja Cat, Remi Wolf), although bandmembers Tim Henson and Scott LePage helmed its production. It marked the group's debuts on both the Rise Records label and the Billboard 200 chart, the latter thanks at least in part to the star power of such guests as Grammy winners Steve Vai and Brasstracks, Deftones' Chino Moreno, and charting rapper $not, among others from just as wide-ranging corners of the music world. Highlights include the playful "ABC," featuring R&B-pop singer Sophia Black, and "Chimera," a relatively brooding entry featuring raps by Lil West. The album closes on the Vai showcase "Ego Death," a multi-act instrumental sure to delight fans of Polyphia's scorching funk-rock.© Marcy Donelson /TiVo

Ezra Collective won well-deserved critical and commercial acclaim for 2019's You Can't Steal My Joy, a raucous debut long-player laced with elements of Afrobeat, jazz, hip-hop, and grime. However, before they could take it on tour globally, the COVID-19 pandemic set in. They introduce the same musical chemistry on Where I'm Meant to Be and still employ massive doses of jazz-funk layered inside swinging Afrobeat, salsa, grime, and soul.On "Life Goes On" (featuring Sampa the Great), party sounds meet James Mollison's honking tenor sax, Femi Koleoso's funky beats, and Sampa's rapid-fire delivery as T.J. Koleoso's insistent bassline and Ife Ogunjobi's trumpet solo above Joe Armon-Jones' organ and piano vamps before massive funk arrives with a trumpet solo to carry it out. "Victory Dance" commences as a triple-timed drum and percussion orgy atop shouted human voices. Afro-Cuban-styled horns and hand percussion bump and burn before the horns usher in an Afro-Cuban theme. Armon-Jones enters, then takes off with rapid montunos as the tune moves to intense salsa with soaring trumpet. They don't let up when Kojey Radical fronts the band on the single "No Confusion." Anchored by T.J.'s circular funk bassline, the horns pulse in driving Afrobeat style above Femi's breaking snares and hi-hat while Armon-Jones lays down sinister chord voicings, adding to the rhythm section's heft as Radical syncopates his incendiary delivery. "Welcome to My World" is all groove and grit as post-bop and Afrobeat horns meet dubwise rhythms in a strutting frenzy. "Ego Killah" is strictly dubwise steaminess with double-time bass and piano vamps; interlocking drums and percussion rub against and buoy one another. That track is followed by the R&B-centric "Smile" led by Armon-Jones' crystalline jazz piano harmonies supported by a rhythm section playing smooth, gentle, neo-'80s soul. "Live Strong" inserts grooving '70s-styled funk into shimmering contemporary jazz piano and swinging horns. Emeli Sande assists on the livelier sounding "Siesta," offering her heavenly yet assertive soprano atop Rhodes piano, congas, bongos, and bass. "Belonging" arrives as interstellar space jazz with glorious soloing from Mollison and martial snare from Koleoso. Armon-Jones opens a harmonic door in the bridge as the tune begins to assert itself, wedding spacious spiritual jazz to driving neo-electro and funk. His knotty acoustic piano solos with both Koleosos in trio. The set closes with a reading of Sun Ra's "Love in Outer Space" as a finger-popping, smooth, jazzy, neo-soul jam with Nao (Neo Jessica Jones) emoting in her wispy, reedy soprano as T.J. Koleoso guides her with a slippery, resonant bassline framed by ascendant horns and spectral keys. While Where I'm Meant to Be is a logical follow-up to Ezra Collective's debut, it's a soulful, musically advanced, rhythmically infectious one, too.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

In most cases, bands put out these odds and sods collections for die-hard fans, to fulfill a record deal, or to stall while they're taking seven years to record a follow-up. Steal This Album!, on the other hand, definitely doesnot fit any of those ideals. First, it's almost impossible to think of this as an "outtakes" record. System of a Down has managed to make tracks from a seven-year period sound cohesive without having to embellish or sacrifice. Some might argue that maybe they're just treading water. Not true. If System proved anything with 2001's Toxicity, it's that they're one of the few breaths of fresh air out there in mainstream metal land. This collection is no different, and with its amazing pacing, it's hard to not be moved by what this band can do. Secondly, Steal This Album! has everything that a "normal" album release would have; it's heavy without being a burden, political without being condescending, and in some cases, downright beautiful. It's been mentioned that this is the link to what they've done and what they're moving towards. If that turns out to be true, the next one should be a monster.© Chris True /TiVo

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Featuring the singles "Cut the Line," "Swerve," "Kill the Noise," "Dying to Believe," and "Stand Up," Ego Trip is the 11th full-length effort from the multi-platinum-selling California hard rockers. The LP sees Papa Roach unleash their most wide-ranging effort to date, delivering a dizzying 14-song set of anthemic, mainstream rock peppered with flourishes of hip-hop, heavy metal, and glitchy electronics.© TiVo

Human is the debut full-length release from British singer/songwriter and neo-soul/hip-hop artist Rag 'n' Bone Man. Composed of arresting and powerful vocal work anchored in gospel, pulsating hip-hop beats, and sweeping strings, the record features production work from Two-Inch Punch (Jessie Ware, Sam Smith), Mark Crew (the Wombats, Bastille), and Jonny Coffer (Beyoncé, Emeli Sandé). The album's title track leads as its main single.© Rob Wacey /TiVo

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The Slim Shady LP announced not only Eminem's arrival, but it established that his producer Dr. Dre was anything but passé, thereby raising expectations for 2001, the long-anticipated sequel to The Chronic. It suggested that 2001 wouldn't simply be recycled Chronic, and, musically speaking, that's more or less true. He's pushed himself hard, finding new variations in the formula by adding ominous strings, soulful vocals, and reggae, resulting in fairly interesting recontextualizations. Padded out to 22 tracks, 2001 isn't as consistent or striking as Slim Shady, but the music is always brimming with character. If only the same could be said about the rappers! Why does a producer as original as Dre work with such pedestrian rappers? Perhaps it's to ensure his control over the project, or to mask his own shortcomings as an MC, but the album suffers considerably as a result. Out of all the other rappers on 2001, only Snoop and Eminem -- Dre's two great protégés -- have character and while Eminem's jokiness still is unpredictable, Snoop sounds nearly as tired as the second-rate rappers. The only difference is, there's pleasure in hearing Snoop's style, while the rest sound staid. That's the major problem with 2001: lyrically and thematically, it's nothing but gangsta clichés. Scratch that, it's über-gangsta, blown up so large that it feels like a parody. Song after song, there's a never-ending litany of violence, drugs, pussy, bitches, dope, guns, and gangsters. After a full decade of this, it takes real effort to get outraged at this stuff, so chances are, you'll shut out the words and groove along since, sonically, this is first-rate, straight-up gangsta. Still, no matter how much fun you may have, it's hard not to shake the feeling that this is cheap, not lasting, fun.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The trio hit their stride with second album Solid State Survivor, a brisk and confident set of synth-disco-pop that continues along the line drawn five years before by Kraftwerk. Fun-loving and breezy where Kraftwerk had been ponderous and statuesque, the album sets out YMO's template for electronic pop with less minimalism and a more varying use of synthesizer lines. The English lyrics, written by Chris Mosdell but sung by YMO themselves, make for hilarious listening especially on a cover of the Beatles' "Day Tripper."© John Bush /TiVo

If you take De La Soul's first three albums collaborating with Prince Paul behind the boards as a sort of trilogy arc, 1993's Buhloone Mindstate represents a maturing epiphany after the youthful revolution of 3 Feet High and Rising and the defensive autonomy of De La Soul Is Dead. For one thing, it's a lot less comedic: Paul's role as beatmaker/advisor also played out like a mentor helping his friends figure the rest out for themselves, so at this point the characteristic skits and oddball sample juxtapositions recede in favor of something a bit more deliberately esoteric and reflective. The production benefits from a tighter focus on soul-jazz soundscapes and cratedigger funk—complete with live appearances by The J.B.'s legends Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis on "Patti Dooke" and "I Am I Be." (Parker's solo on the latter track's instrumental counterpart "I Be Blowin'" might be the single most transcendent moment of golden era hip-hop paying dues to its funk forebears.)  But it's also a bit trippier and knottier than a lot of their peers were willing to go, with the deeply layered and sometimes borderline disorienting beats of tracks like old-school-mutating "Area" and the precipice-teetering slow-burn gallop "En Focus" using head-nodding drums to spin those heads 360 degrees; even the track that samples Michael Jackson ("Breakadawn") has a little bit of psilocybin glow to its mellow fusion.Pos and Dave's unconventional flows and sleight-of-tongue lyrics provide some of the most intricately abstract verses to ever express sarcastic monomania (the rap boast deconstruction "Ego Trippin', Part Two"), existential reckonings (the soul-baring, intermittently emotionally wounded "I Am I Be"), and Afrocentric defiance (due-credit demand "Patti Dooke," featuring hooks and mic-trading verses from Gang Starr's Guru). The album's titular mindstate—"it might blow up, but it won't go pop"—seemed to anticipate a reception at odds with what mainstream rap was looking for at the time, and it didn't move the kind of units Tommy Boy was hoping for (or get the label push that De La were hoping for). But many of the fans who put their trust in De La Soul have grown over time to consider this arguably the group's finest album—a group sounding thoroughly liberated by the idea that, after two albums spent defining themselves to skeptics, they had nothing left to prove and everything to show for it. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz

In 2022, FLETCHER landed in the Billboard 200 Top 20 with the self-examining, self-affirming, and lovestruck Girl of My Dreams. On the follow-up, she struggles to pick up the pieces on the explosive turn into sadness and rejection that constitutes In Search of the Antidote. Some of its characteristic sentiments include lines like, "The thought of you is torture" ("Lead Me On") and "I'm burning down my world again" (opener "Maybe I Am"). Recorded with a slate of producers, including returning main producer/co-songwriter Jennifer Decilveo as well as FLETCHER first-timers such as Pete Nappi (Maroon 5, the Score), the Monsters & Strangerz (Jonas Brothers, Katy Perry), and singer/songwriter Jon Bellion, it revisits familiar electro-pop territory while upping the anguish and explicit content. Essentially a set of danceable power ballads about people who get past the bouncer at the club ("You'll never f*ck somebody hotter"), it may have some cringy, bratty lyrics at first listen (catch also "Joyride"'s anthemically delivered "You were in my dreams/Now I’m in your bed"), but, supported by performances, the raw vulnerability is the point. Ultimately, In Search of the Antidote followed Girl of My Dreams into the Top 40.© Marcy Donelson /TiVo