The kid who used to sleep on friends’ couches is a jet-setter lounging on yachts in foreign seas now, a luxury-car driver and world traveler. CALL ME is a bookend to the hunger and struggle of 2009’s BASTARD. He is rapping hard again, and he punctuates this shift by hiring one of hip-hop’s great hype men: The new songs are narrated by veteran mixtape host DJ Drama, whose inimitably gruff tone graced the Lil Wayne tapes Tyler worshipped as a teenager.
As such, it’s easy to see this past spring’s CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST as a kind of sharp riposte to its predecessor. The first decade of his career was spent working through a lengthy list of gripes but also sharpening his craft on 2019’s IGOR, he pivoted hard into a different style, singing in most of the places you’d expect him to rap. Upon first introduction in the late aughts, Tyler, the Creator was an iconoclastic everything-phobe, a student of Eminem raps and Pharrell beats with a totalizing disdain for authority figures, be they politicians, music-industry execs, celebrities, or peers in hip-hop.
This sage recalibration of adult-contemporary aesthetics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is doing it better than Musgraves.
The album traces a marriage from its giddy early days through a rough ending, moving from the high hopes of “good wife” and the dizzying rush of infatuation of “cherry blossom” through the lonesome yearning of “camera roll,” the sizzling spite of “breadwinner,” and the gutting perseverance of “keep lookin’ up” and “there is a light.” star-crossed is a subtler mixing of pure pop sweetness and roots-rock acoustics than 2018’s Golden Hour, which won Album of the Year at the Grammys you think “breadwinner” and “cherry blossom” are going to pull big dance-pop moves like a Dua Lipa record, but they turn inward at the chorus, piling on guitars and synth sounds straight from the ’80s Fleetwood Mac playbook. Star-crossed, the fifth album from pop-country hybridizer Kacey Musgraves, is a concept record informed by divorce, soul-searching, therapeutic mushroom trips, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. What’s more, on songs like “Darling,” on which Buckingham sits in on guitar, it seems like they’re getting new ideas out of each other. The singer is perfectly capable of matching the producers’ tuneful darkness. Nails’ tart, synthetic grooves provide the perfect base for Halsey’s tense, personal writing and cathartic vocals.
Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power goes a step further, tracking down Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails to produce and securing appearances from Dave Grohl, TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and others to help the New Jersey singer with the goth-rock rebirth this album attempts. Pop stars disappeared into their record collections this year: Lorde paid respect to Natasha Bedingfield on Solar Power, Olivia Rodrigo served grunge-pop and pop-punk on SOUR, and Billie Eilish delivered a brand of moody singer-songwriter record more akin to 1996 than 2021 with Happier Than Ever.