Among the masterminds of this fifth album by Jessie Ware (UK), we notice the presence of Stuart Price, the legendary producer of Madonna's Confessions On A Dance Floor. A detail which speaks volumes about the general hue of the That! Feels Good! album, with its impeccable artistry and disco-funk rhythms which are as scintillating as they are dramatic. With her powerful voice, this new LGBTQ+ icon perfectly fulfils her role as a Diva, with the theme of freedom featuring highly on the album – that is, freedom as a political statement. In That! Feels Good !, she asserts that "pleasure is a right", using a rhythm that Prince certainly would have been proud of.  The same is true for the Free Yourself track, with the added bonus of strong piano notes typical of 90’s handbag house. With a singular blend of sophistication and assurance, Jessie Ware sweeps away all inhibitions, including sexual ones: we may feel somewhat uncomfortable by the eroticism of These Lips, while Shake The Bottle seemingly reveals the recipe for a successful orgasm. Euphoric and hedonistic, this album is also an ambiguous self-portrait, as evidenced in the Pearls track, in which Ware defines herself as a “lover, freak, and mother.” With nods to the 70s and references to the 90s, That! Feels Good! mixes many festive musical genres from the end of the 20th century, and sometimes even flirts with the pastiche. It is therefore more an album attuned to the nightclub scene, but that doesn’t take away its mischievous or glamourous side. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

On his official debut effort, Jimin takes a wide step away from his usual role as the sensitive, angel-voiced member of BTS, delivering a surprisingly defiant and bold set of songs, Face. Ready to take his turn in the spotlight, he immediately unloads with "Face-off," lamenting, "Tonight I don't wanna be sober/Pour it up, it's all f*cking over," over a hypnotic loop that sounds like an artist descending into the depths of madness. On the escapist hedonism of "Like Crazy," a sensual opening dialogue gives way to shimmering synths that propel the track through a neon skyline. It's sexy, provocative, and a welcome change of pace. Later, on the raucous "Set Me Free Pt. 2," horns blare, beats pop, and Jimin shows off his rapping skills, shouting to the heavens about freedom and release. Balancing both his vulnerable and fiercely intense sides, he manages to reveal more of himself in 20 minutes than he has to date. Unlike the (mostly) expected solo directions of his BTS bandmates, Face is a revelation, setting aside the tender softness and purging his inner demons in thrilling fashion.© Neil Z. Yeung /TiVo

The Police never really broke up, they just stopped working together -- largely because they just couldn't stand playing together anymore and partially because Sting was itching to establish himself as a serious musician/songwriter on his own terms. Anxious to shed the mantle of pop star, he camped out at Eddy Grant's studio, picked up the guitar, and raided Wynton Marsalis' band for his new combo -- thereby instantly consigning his solo debut, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, to the critical shorthand of Sting's jazz record. Which is partially true (that's probably the best name for the meandering instrumental title track), but that gives the impression that this is really risky music, when he did, after all, rely on musicians who, at that stage, were revivalists just developing their own style, and then had them jam on mock-jazz grooves -- or, in the case of Branford Marsalis, layer soprano sax lines on top of pop songs. This, however, is just the beginning of the pretensions layered throughout The Dream of the Blue Turtles. Only twice does he delve into straightforward love songs -- the lovely measured "Consider Me Gone" and the mournful closer, "Fortress Around Your Heart" -- preferring to consider love in the abstract ("If You Love Somebody Set Them Free," one of his greatest solo singles, and the childish, faux-reggae singalong "Love Is the Seventh Wave"), write about children in war and in coal mines, revive a Police tune about heroin, ponder whether "Russians love their children too," and wander the streets of New Orleans as the vampire Lestat. This is a serious-minded album, but it's undercut by its very approach -- the glossy fusion that coats the entire album, the occasional grabs at worldbeat, and studious lyrics seem less pretentious largely because they're overshadowed by such bewilderingly showy moves as adapting Prokofiev for "Russians" and calling upon Anne Rice for inspiration. And that's the problem with the record: with every measure, every verse, Sting cries out for the respect of a composer, not a pop star, and it gets to be a little overwhelming when taken as a whole. As a handful of individual cuts -- "Fortress," "Consider Me Gone," "If You Love Somebody," "Children's Crusade" -- he proves that he's subtler and craftier than his peers, but only when he reins in his desire to show the class how much he's learned.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

It's hard to overestimate the importance of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter, one of considerable skill, imagination, and vision. At the time, folk had been quite popular on college campuses and bohemian circles, making headway onto the pop charts in diluted form, and while there certainly were a number of gifted songwriters, nobody had transcended the scene as Dylan did with this record. There are a couple (very good) covers, with "Corrina Corrina" and "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance," but they pale with the originals here. At the time, the social protests received the most attention, and deservedly so, since "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" weren't just specific in their targets; they were gracefully executed and even melodic. Although they've proven resilient throughout the years, if that's all Freewheelin' had to offer, it wouldn't have had its seismic impact, but this also revealed a songwriter who could turn out whimsy ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"), gorgeous love songs ("Girl From the North Country"), and cheerfully absurdist humor ("Bob Dylan's Blues," "Bob Dylan's Dream") with equal skill. This is rich, imaginative music, capturing the sound and spirit of America as much as that of Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, or Elvis Presley. Dylan, in many ways, recorded music that equaled this, but he never topped it.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Like everybody else, Lana Del Rey is playing hide-and-seek with quarantine. For her seventh album, the New Yorker based in Los Angeles has opted for hushed intimacy, bedroom melodies and confessional arrangements. With Chemtrails Over the Country Club, her pop is folkier than ever, although the echo and reverb in which her exquisite, sensual and hypnotic voice basks set her high above the clouds. This folk idiom fascinates her to the point that she closes out this record (with some help from Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood and Zella Day) with a magnificent cover of Joni Mitchell's For Free, taken from her album Ladies of the Canyon (1970). There are also those guitars with an air of the Laurel Canyon 70's scene about them on Not All Who Wander Are Lost, and the equally pure guitar sounds that open Yosemite. As usual, Lana Del Rey takes out her pen to decry the torments of celebrity and the star system, starting with White Dress which opens the album, regretting the good old days when she was a barmaid, unknown and listening to Sun Ra, Kings Of Leon and the White Stripes "when they were white hot". Further on, she offers up more references to the music history as on Breaking Up Slowly (a duet with Nikki Lane) where she addresses the marital storms between those two legends of country music, Tammy Wynette and George Jones. On song after song, this solitary amazon soldiers on, not battling for any particular cause, just doing what is right by her own lights ("Well, I don't care what they think. Drag racing my little red sports car. I'm not unhinged or unhappy, I'm just wild"). Chemtrails Over the Country Club shows above all that she excels in the art of storytelling, wielding her tweezers to fine-tune every detail of her lyrics. At 35, Lana Del Rey has arguably released her freest and most accomplished album. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

In 1992, British indie label Imaginary put together Brittle Days, a Nick Drake tribute album featuring a wonderfully diverse slate of acts ranging from Shelleyan Orphan and the High Llamas to Loop and Nikki Sudden. While this was a full eight years before an ad agency placed "Pink Moon" in a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial and made Drake one of the most well-known "undiscovered" artists around, it was right in the middle of a then-current craze for tribute albums that alternative acts used to make explicit their roster of influences. And among indie and alternative artists of that late '80s/early '90s era, Nick Drake was a widely shared touchstone, thanks to the 1986 Fruit Tree box set that packaged up the entirety of his recorded output at an affordable price. So it wasn't terribly surprising that Brittle Days was one of a few Drake tributes that would emerge over the next few years. As his legacy has become more required reading rather than sui generis discovery, it's been a while since another truly inspiring collection of Drake covers has been released. Endless Coloured Ways ends that drought in an exceptional manner. Spearheaded by the Drake estate, this sprawling collection features 23 of Drake's songs reimagined by a wildly broad selection of artists, from likely candidates such as David Gray, Skullcrusher, Ben Harper, and Feist to more surprising appearances from the likes of Craig Armstrong, Liz Phair, and Emeli Sandé. The lineup is even more rewarding than it would appear at first, kaleidoscopic sight: Instead of getting all these unique voices to bend their musical style in homage to Drake's sound, the approach is refreshingly catholic, resulting in two albums' worth of Nick Drake songs that sound nothing like Nick Drake. While the original spirit of the tunes is largely respected—no death metal "Parasite"—and the lyrics and melodies are intact, each artist delivers their own unique arrangements, sonic predilections, and particular weirdnesses to the proceedings. To be sure, there are a few artists who just kinda sound like a '70s singer-songwriter (looking at you Ben Harper), but for the most part, things are much more adventurous and unexpected, as this album unfolds across its "four seasons" of material. Whether it's Fontaines D.C.'s epic, ripping sonics on "Cello Song," the sensitive glitch-folk of Radiohead's Philip Selway doing "Fly," or Norwegian electropop artist Aurora turning "Pink Moon" into atmospheric synth futurism, the material here often veers far away from Drake's sonic approach. Instead, it manages to stay tightly connected to the original's aesthetic truth, a true hallmark of a successful tribute album. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

The fourth studio album by Long Island brother duo Brian and Michael D'Addario—aka The Lemon Twigs—finds them still digging through the crates of the '70s for inspiration. Having already played around with the histrionics and bombastics of Cheap Trick, ELO and Jim Steinman, the two have moved over to a different section. "When Winter Comes Around" is a perfect distillation of John Denver-style singer-songwriter sincerity and immediately uncovers one of the big new revelations this time around: fraternal harmonies. "On previous records, whoever wrote the song might do most, if not all, of the harmonies on their track, but not so much on this one. Our blend is a strength that we tried to exploit as much as possible," Brian D'Addario has said of the record. The melded vocals of "Every Day Is the Worst Day of My Life," mesmerize, while "Corner of My Eye" is so much like an Everly Brothers track it sounds lifted from some lost Felice Bryant archive. "Any Time of Day" nods to the toothy, wholesome balladry of family groups like the Carpenters or the Osmonds and gives Brian in particular a chance to hit a whole new array of high notes. "Sometimes you have to crawl/ To know that gravity is working/ 'Til you're one day walking tall/ And know that nothing is for certain/ And no one can close the curtain," he sings on the track, which the band has said came about over a business deal gone wrong after the were "hired to write material and act in an interactive TV show about an imaginary '70s brother band" for the now-dead streaming service Quibi. "Ghost Run Free," which comes the closest to tapping into the soaring upbeatness of 2020's Songs for the General Public, truly sounds like it should have been the theme to a That Girl-style sitcom. The D'Addarios apply melancholy horns on the ballad "I Don't Belong To Me," sweeping strings to the ambitious title track, and a waltz beat and carousel melody to "Born to Be Lonely." Starry-eyed "What Happens to a Heart," meanwhile, is pure chamber-pop pomp, complete with dreamy pin-up vocals. And when they revisit Badfinger-style power pop—on "What You Were Doing" and the chiming "In My Head"—here, it is whipped-cream-cloud perfection. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Has DJ Shadow managed to free himself from the weight of his acclaimed 1996 debut album, Endtroducing...? The six subsequent records provide a resounding "yes" to that question. Joshua Paul Davis continues his electronic exploration, moving away from hip-hop conventions and heavy sampling, and presents Action Adventure, a collection of 14 luminous tracks where the obsession with atmosphere takes precedence over mere demonstration.With stripped-back synthesizer melodies, ominous pad-driven beats, and unrestrained hi-hats, songs like "All My, Friend and Foe," and especially the excellent "Craig, Ingels & Wrightson" share a common sonic mold. DJ Shadow doesn't stop there however. He ventures into rock-inspired experimentation with distorted guitars on "The Prophecy," showcasing his technological prowess. He then takes an experimental turn with "Forever Changed" and delves into a retro-futuristic vibe on "Time and Space”. The urge to call on traditional jazz piano samples is never too far away – evident on the track "Fleeting Youth (An Audible Life)”. Even so, DJ Shadow resists the temptation of dwelling on the nostalgia of his past successes. And it works. © Brice Miclet/Qobuz

The strength-to-strength peaks of Joni Mitchell's run of albums in the early 1970s is one of the most remarkable stretches of musical excellence in the pop era. The folk-rock perfection of 1970's Ladies of the Canyon led to the stark emotional intensity of 1971's Blue, which then opened up into the kaleidoscopic sonic experimentalism of 1972's For the Roses. While this era yielded only one U.S. Top 40 hit (1972's "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio"), it nonetheless established Mitchell as a formidable artistic force who was not only far more musically interesting than many of her hippie-era peers, but also far more iconoclastic in her approach to her art and the music business.  So one would be forgiven for assuming that, after taking 1973 off, Mitchell would return with an album that either aimed straight for the charts or one that indulged her creative adventurousness. Court and Spark managed to do both. By far Mitchell's most commercially successful album—it's her only album to go double-platinum in the U.S. and also contained her only U.S. Top Ten hit, "Help Me"—the popularity of Court and Spark has managed to overshadow its weirdness. Following along from the jazzy inflections that made For the Roses so sonically interesting, Court fully blossomed into a funky, fusion-tinged affair, featuring members of the Crusaders and Tom Scott's L.A. Express providing highly complementary instrumentation to Mitchell's always-unusual guitar playing. In Mitchell's hands, "jazzy" becomes as much of a mindset as a sonic signature (a cover of Annie Ross's "Twisted" that closes the album is the closest that Court ever gets to anything resembling capital-J "jazz"), giving her freedom to dive deep into the unusual tunings and chord voicings she's always preferred, but also to open up the arrangements of the songs beyond simple verse-chorus-verse. Of course, her lyrics are as impressive as ever (the imagery in "Raised on Robbery" is as vivid as it is implicit), but even the largely wordless multi-tracked harmonies of "Trouble Child" and "People's Parties" can take the listener's breath away. Mitchell's use here of the "studio-as-an-instrument" is notable; while she is once again self-producing alongside the formidable engineering talents of Henry Lewy, her bold approach to Court's construction also helped make it the best-sounding album in her catalog to this point. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

According to Lady Gaga, Chromatica is an imaginary planet, a utopia that concretises her search for happiness. "I live on Chromatica, that is where I live. I went into my frame - I found Earth, I deleted it. Earth is cancelled", she said during the promotion for this sixth album, released less than two years after the global success of the soundtrack for A Star Is Born. Chromatica's sci-fi concept naturally steered the singer towards electronic music, tinged with concise and melodic pop. She not only surrounded herself with experienced producers (BloodPop, Burns, Madeon, Axwell...), but also with "extra-terrestrial" guest stars: Ariana Grande (Rain on Me), the K-pop band Blackpink (Sour Candy), and - with a large generational gap - Elton John (Sine From Above).On this flamboyant pink outfit-filled planet, Lady Gaga displays herself as a warrior fighting her own demons, as well as external threats, especially those that overwhelm her fellow-women (Plastic Doll, Free Woman). Her weapon of choice? The most "stupid" love there is, which she clamours for in a cathartic and liberating way (Stupid Love). As the queen of binary bass drums and boundless joy (Fun Tonight), she also has a calm side, especially in three lyrical and majestic instrumentals (Chromatica I, II and III). As the title suggests, Lady Gaga's planet presents an entire spectrum of colours, just like the singer's resolutely colourful soul. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz