This year's list features offerings from Billie Eilish, Adele and Lil Nas X. With vaccines and hope, live music began to return in 2021, and yet for a lot of us, studio recordings remained the only ...

We all enter 2021 facing many challenges, and in the scheme of things this one is pretty minor: Advance notice of album release dates is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The “surprise drop” that ...

Like every year, 2021 was an excellent year for rap music, with so many great albums coming from all across the board. From the poppiest pop-rap to the most experimental interpretations of hip hop, ...

As much as any other year (maybe more), music lovers needed something from the songs and albums of 2021 — to name what was going wrong and to begin sketching the possibilities for how we might ...

2021 proved to be a standout year in music, with established and up-and-coming artists achieving new career highs. As the year comes to a close, Showbiz Cheat Sheet is taking a look back at the great ...

Any best-of list is by definition incomplete: There’s always a great record that got overlooked, an abundance of riches that simply didn’t fit into the limited numbers of spaces available, a genre ...

The last 12 months have been great for the debut effort in rock and metal music. In fact, there's been a veritable army of significant first albums issued this year. After all, they say you never get ...

Our list of the best albums of 2021 features everything from a mid-career masterpiece that dropped in January to a modern-day classic that released in November. From Drake to Adele to Kanye West, 2021 ...

It’s been a whirlwind year, one that started as a continuation of 2020’s lockdown, and then saw the triumphant return of live music, and now is ending like it began, with a mass cancellation of live ...

Vince Staples delivered a refreshing dose of brevity and precision in a year in rap music otherwise defined by excess. While Kanye West’s “Donda” and Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” leaned on a wide ...

The COVID pandemic continued in 2021, making the presentation of live music difficult, and during a spike in infections, nearly impossible. Over the course of the year, fewer albums than usual were ...