Vintage soul-folk instrumentation with an indie edge and vibey, languid hip-hop beats buoy the 20-year-old singer-songwriter-poet’s ruminations on everything from the moment she knew a relationship wouldn’t last to the queer pain of pining for a straight friend. Like a sun-warmed sweater you slip into on a lazy Sunday, Arlo Parks’ Collapsed In Sunbeams is a reassuring hug of an album.
The result is less meta than it sounds: in between winks toward the Best New Music-obsessed, New Music and Big Pop charms with grand harmonies, folk-inflected song arrangements and singer-songwriter Michael Doherty’s delicate voice, which spins upward into a falsetto in a way that will make a listener’s heart hurt. If the phrase “New Music and Big Pop” sounds more like the name of a Spotify playlist than the title of a gentle indie-rock album, that’s because Philly trio Another Michael spend much of their lovely debut LP ruminating about popular art, music analysis and their own ambitions as performers. On their latest album, released independently, the songs span from breezy, windows-down shout-alongs (“Break Yourself,” “Listen) to more contemplative, California-rooted rock gems (“Slow Dancing,” “Personal Cathedrals”), resulting in a well-balanced album that tells a beautiful story of hopeful reemergence - and manages to pack a decade-plus of wide-ranging emotion into 12 tracks. Pop-rock sister duo Aly & AJ combat that by dancing right through any such anxieties - and creating the perfect soundtrack for fans to do the same. Releasing an album after 14 years, and on the heels of a pandemic, introduces just a bit of pressure. Here are the Billboard staff’s 50 favorite albums of 2021 so far, presented alphabetically, with our favorite songs to follow tomorrow.Īly & AJ, A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun But in their continued absence, a number of new stars have emerged, while some less-hyped veteran artists have also made welcome returns - and a couple of the biggest names have indeed made their presences felt.
Many of the artists dormant in 2020 have stayed as such through the first half of 2021, or have just begun to peek their heads out, leading to a pretty slow start to the year for major releases. With the music world springing back to life, you’d probably expect that a lot of the bigger artists who’d largely written off last year as a wash would arrange to make their triumphant comebacks this year.
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