Superstar releases, or at least great superstar releases, were in short supply in the first six months of 2021, maybe because a lot of our most reliable earners were waiting for the pandemic to crawl ...

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 ...

I’m sure I listened to more than 1,000 albums in 2021 — nothing unusual there. But that still left probably 10 times that number of releases that I passed over. So I don’t suggest that this year’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

No one knew of the impact one Minnesota native could singlehandedly have on the melancholic R&B world when he released his amateur mixtapes to SoundCloud in 2013. Most chalked down the triumph of his ...

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 ...

We love list season. We really love making lists, and we also really love reading lists made by other music publications, individual critics, and musicians. In the long term, these lists help preserve ...

2021 has been a trying year as the pandemic continues to affect the lives of human beings across the planet. It could be said that the saving grace of this year has been the incredible releases of ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Hugh McIntyre covers music, with a focus on the global charts. This article is more than 4 years old. LOS ANGELES, CA - FEBRUARY ...

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 ...

The pandemic has put the brakes on a lot of things over the last two years, but one thing it wasn’t able to stop was the abundance of amazing new music flowing from Connecticut in 2021. It was another ...