“I changed by not changing at all,” Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder once solemnly intoned on 1993’s “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” That sentiment has become something of a guiding principle for a veteran rock band that, despite lacking Nirvana’s raw emotion and the Smashing Pumpkins’s sense of theatricality, has managed to outlast many of their alt-rock contemporaries. While Vedder has penned some indelible rock songs—“Yellow Ledbetter” is but one example—Pearl Jam has been locked in cruise control since the late ‘90s, and their latest, Gigaton, is largely more of the same.

The album’s opening track, “Who Ever Said,” comes out swinging with some growling, interlocking guitar riffs. Vedder’s voice is likewise in fine form (he’s beginning to sound a bit like Chris Cornell, who was always a better singer) and he delivers some clever wordplay: “‘It’s all in the delivery,’ said the messenger who is now dead.” The song’s hook—“Whoever said it’s all been said?”—seems to directly confront the notion that the band is out of ideas. And for a couple of minutes, Pearl Jam sounds determined to prove their naysayers wrong—until the song shifts into a meandering second movement and ultimately peters out. In that way, it serves as a microcosm of the album as a whole: a few good ideas and moments of experimentation alongside some baffling head-scratchers.

Most baffling is “Superblood Wolfmoon,” a frenetic song that features a two-step rhythm with skittering cymbal fills, giving it a nervous energy that’s matched by Vedder’s clipped delivery. But the kludgy guitars feel oddly out of sync with the song’s energy, and the lyrics read like an attempt to confront political catastrophe through the prism of personal loss and weird fiction. If that sounds like a lot, it is. Elsewhere, “Buckle Up” suffers from a lyrical fuzziness: “Firstly do no harm, then put your seatbelt on, buckle up!” Vedder seems to be trying to address the importance of self-care, but the song’s loping rhythm and his warbly delivery make the lyrics sound like a goofy P.S.A.

Occasionally, Vedder and company’s experimentation works. Despite its silly title, “Dance of the Clairvoyants” is a successful reworking of the band’s signature sound. The track’s elastic, funk-inspired rhythm section and unsettling synth riff are a good match for Vedder’s vocals, which sound alternately enraged and exhausted. “When the past is the present and the future’s no more/When every tomorrow’s no more,” he sings, sounding like a man who’s lived more lives than he can remember. In sharp contrast to that track’s maximalism, “Comes Then Goes” is a gentle, country-inflected ballad that showcases Vedder’s often under-appreciated vocal range. Reliability may be what’s made Pearl Jam such a powerful mainstay, but the more they move outside their comfort zone, and away from their longstanding identity (or lack thereof), the worthier they become of their apparent permanence.

Label: Republic Release Date: March 27, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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Lilly Hiatt’s songs are disarmingly personal and immensely endearing, even when she’s singing about fucking up—which is pretty often. There’s an almost parasocial element to Hiatt’s songwriting: Her voice is like that of an old friend who’s perpetually in various stages of getting her shit together. Her love life, in particular, always seems to be a mess, and she’s looking for a shoulder to lean on.

Hiatt’s fourth album, Walking Proof, forms something of a thematic trilogy with her last two: 2015’s Royal Blue, a portrait of a relationship in its death throes, and 2017’s harder, darker Trinity Lane, which depicted its immediate aftermath. Hiatt spent both albums seeking solace and guidance for her troubles everywhere she could, from family to her favorite records. On Walking Proof, she’s emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound.

Written for the singer’s sister, Georgia Rae Hiatt, the album’s opening track, “Rae,” offers a hint of Hiatt’s new, more positive outlook. It’s the kind of sweet, tender ode, built around a pretty tremolo rhythm guitar riff, that could have appeared on either of her previous two albums, but in the context of the songs that follow, the hook line sounds almost like an atonement: “I put so much on you, Rae.” She appears to have put some of her problems behind her, and that becomes clear on “P-Town,” ostensibly another Lilly Hiatt song about a failed relationship. This one, however, is electrifying and ebullient, sounding like a classic Loretta Lynn track amped up with huge, fuzzy guitars. “I don’t think I’m who we thought I was,” Hiatt suggests, perhaps taken aback by her newfound sense of defiance.

The rest of the album’s first half showcases Hiatt’s impressive musical range, shifting from the punk-tinged power-pop of “Little Believer” to the brittle guitar rock of “Some Kind of Drug” to the sweet balladry of “Candy Lunch.” Walking Proof hits an emotional apex at its midpoint with a pair of country songs. The title track is a gorgeous slice of electric guitar-infused mountain music that suits Hiatt’s high, keening voice perfectly, as if it’s wafting down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her ethereal presence underscores the authority and experience behind her words: “I could tell you that it’s easy, but that wouldn’t be the truth/If you ever need to call me, well you know there’s walking proof.” She could well be singing to her past self as much as anyone else. The same goes for “Drawl,” a call to embrace one’s idiosyncracies rather than conform: “I’ve hid behind my hair too/Told myself I’m nothing new.”

There are a couple of lingering references to Hiatt’s past relationship problems. But when, in the hauntingly stark closer “Scream,” she claims, “I swear to God I’m done with him,” it’s convincing this time. That’s because she sounds so invigorated by her new beginnings, romantic and otherwise. “I got a man…He makes me feel real good/Yeah he treats me right,” she declares on the country anthem “Never Play Guitar.” On “Brightest Star,” she assures the new guy: “So don’t worry ‘bout that other guy/You just got the right tattoos/The brightest star in my whole sky is you.” These aren’t exactly the most poetic or complicated of romantic pledges, but given Hiatt’s history, they’re rather profound in their simplicity.

Label: New West Release Date: March 27, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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Though Björk had enjoyed minor cult fame as the lead singer of the prog-punk band the Sugarcubes, it only took one solo album to solidify the Icelandic artist as a viable pop iconoclast. The plainly titled Debut and its accompanying music videos showcased the endlessly fascinating sides to Björk’s offbeat persona, from sweater-clad explorer (“Human Behaviour”) to trailer-hitch improvisational performance artist (“Big Time Sensuality”). Subsequent eras found the singer delving deeper into surrealism (“Army of Me”), technology (“Hyperballad”), and, occasionally, raw performance (“Pagan Poetry” and “Black Lake”). One of pop music’s most forward-thinking performers, Björk has always been at the forefront of the video medium, a true multimedia pioneer whose influence can be seen in the work of Arca, FKA twigs, and countless others who have followed her wake.

15. “Army of Me”

Directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, the video for “Army of Me,” the first single from 1995’s Post, is a surreal vision that complements the track’s call for self-sufficiency with a dreamlike, often nonsensical, narrative. On a mission to rescue a man from an art installation at a local museum, Björk drives a giant tank—a nod toward the film Tank Girl, in which the song is featured—through a cartoonish urban landscape, encountering a thieving gorilla-dentist who snatches a diamond from the singer’s mouth along the way. Sal Cinquemani

14. “Human Behaviour”

Björk’s very first music video as a solo artist was also the start of a fruitful professional relationship with frequent collaborator Michel Gondry. “Human Behaviour,” in which the singer is chased by a stuffed bear in a twisted nod to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, literally set the stage for both of the respective auteurs’ careers. Cinquemani

13. “Crystalline”

The eighth (and, to date, most recent) collaboration between Björk and Michel Gondry, 2011’s “Crystalline” boasts a charmingly and deceptively simple concept—Björk portrays a lunar goddess-cum-club-kid overseeing a meteor shower on the surface of the moon like a musical conductor—that nods to both A Trip to the Moon and early stop-motion animation. Cinquemani

12. “The Gate”

In the same sense that Stéphane Sednaoui’s interpretation of “Big Time Sensuality” stripped away everything extemporaneous to find more than enough in that essential Björkish energy, director Andrew Thomas Huang sees the spectrum of life itself within his muse and assigns it the only appropriate visual analogue. Dressed in a corrugated prism, Björk gets her groove back in a spasmic frenzy of pure, OLED fireworks. In “All Neon Like,” she promised to weave a “marvelous web of glow-in-the-dark threads,” and with “The Gate,” she’s delivered. Eric Henderson

11. “Mutual Core”

Eric Henderson calls this video “little tectonic plate of horrors.” The lyrics to “Mutual Core” sometimes feel like Björk is reading from a science textbook (“As fast as your fingernail grows/The Atlantic Ridge drifts”), but the video, a sort of sequel to the Gondry-directed 1997 clip for “Jóga,” brings the song to explosive life, with Björk, naturally, in the role of neglected Mother Nature. Cinquemani

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In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1980s, I noted that, while ‘80s pop culture is largely remembered for its frivolity, the social unrest that stirred beneath the decade’s brightly colored gloss and greed resulted in not just the guilt-driven good intentions of enterprises like the star-studded USA for Africa, but a generation of artists whose music genuinely reflected the state of the world. From political violence across the pond and the struggles and dreams of the American working class, to race relations, sexuality, and gender, no topic was left unexcavated by the pop, rock, and hip-hop artists of the Reagan era. As we enter the 2020s, an entire generation removed from the ‘80s, it seems as good a time as any to once again look back and reflect on the music that defined one of the most definable of decades. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This); Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Doppelganger; David Bowie, Let’s Dance; Malcolm McLaren, Duck Rock; The Pointer Sisters, Break Out; Minutemen, What Makes a Man Start Fires? ; Def Leppard, Pyromania; Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones; Cocteau Twins, Head Over Heels; Zazou/Bekaye/CY1, Noir et Blanc

10. The Police, Synchronicity

Their status as classic rock radio titans has made the Police seem like a much less weird band than they were. On paper, a fusion of jazz-reggae and world-punk with yowly, philosophically inflected lyrics might sound like abject torture. And yet, for a couple of years, they were pretty much the biggest band in the world. Like all Police albums, Synchronicity has a couple of clunkers—the Andy Summers-penned “Mother” is a howling nuisance, and the loping “Walking in Your Footsteps,” in which Sting asks dinosaurs for advice about nuclear disarmament, is less playful than it should be—but the heights are sublime. The band comes out with guns blazing on “Synchronicity I,” a head-spinning song that makes a forceful case for Stewart Copeland being the best drummer in rock history. “Synchronicity II” and “Miss Gradenko” are excellent Cold War-era time capsules into the growing disaffection with Western culture. At its heart, Synchronicity is a breakup album though. During recording, Sting was in the process of divorcing his first wife, and the band wouldn’t survive much longer. The triptych of “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger” depict all the messy ugliness, from obsession to miserable wallowing, that accompany the death of a failed relationship. After this album, Sting would dissolve the band so he could focus on making the type of music that fades into the background at a grocery store, but he’ll always be the king of pain. Seth Wilson

9. U2, War

The aptly titled War found U2 not only diving into the jagged terrain of British politics, but likewise, developing a harsher, needle-nosed sound. The album finds the band in attack mode, where on standout tracks like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” an instrument as refined as the violin takes turns playing electrical whip, wailing animal, and battle cry across the song’s marching protest beat. This is U2 at their angriest, each piece infused with a sense of dark urgency that reaches a frothy head on “New Year’s Day.” Bono’s resolution, “I will begin again,” is perhaps indicative of the spiritual introspection to come on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, but for War, the music is as immediate, violent, and striking as its subject matter. Kevin Liedel

8. Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues

If the title of the Talking Heads’ sixth album found them embracing their lyrical Dadaism with an almost religious zealotry, and if the title’s mission statement is more than fulfilled in the likes of “Moon Rocks” (“I ate a rock from the moon/Got shicked once, shocked twice”) and “Girlfriend Is Better” (where “Stop making sense” became a mantra), it’s also worth noting that the tunes were counterintuitively accessible like never before, no more so than “Burning Down the House,” which set fire to no wave and planted one of the many seeds for new wave. Eric Henderson

7. Eurythmics, Touch

If Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) proved that the Eurhythmics had mastered the new wave genre’s icy detachment and ironic distance better than just about anyone, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart’s follow-up, Touch, found them ready to move on to greater challenges. The album may not be as song-for-song consistent as Sweet Dreams, but it’s far more diverse in its style, leaning heavily on the soulfulness of Lennox’s performances to keep its synth-pop aesthetic grounded in palpably human emotions. To that end, standout cuts like “Who’s That Girl” and the defiant “Aqua” confirm Lennox’s status as one of pop music’s most gifted, singular vocalists. Jonathan Keefe

6. Madonna, Madonna

Few would deny that Madonna went on to pursue deeper goals than the simple pop perfection of Madonna. But any debut album that yields a “Holiday” and a “Lucky Star,” both released as singles in the span of two consecutive days (albeit an ocean apart), is still pretty untouchable. Wistful and eager to please, Madonna’s sparkling ditties aren’t so much “post-disco” as they are “disco ain’t going nowhere, so shut up and dance.” Like a heavenly body atop the surging underground currents of every synth-heavy dance subgenre that preceded her, Madonna’s cultural co-opting is nothing if not fervent. Henderson

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By the time the teen-pop bubble burst in 2001, Justin Timberlake had shrewdly positioned himself as the de-facto frontman of NSYNC, parlaying the short-lived boy band’s success into a lucrative career as a solo artist and producer, and even managing to convince the likes of David Fincher and Joel and Ethan Coen to cast him in their films. The singer’s foray into Hollywood resulted in years-long gaps between studio albums, but that hasn’t stopped him from racking up the hits. Last week saw the release of the soundtrack to Trolls World Tour, which was executive-produced by Timberlake and features the singles “The Other Side” and “Don’t Slack,” with SZA and Anderson Paak, respectively. To celebrate the release of his 25th single, we’ve ranked all of Timberlake’s hits—not including tracks on which he’s credited as a guest, like Timbaland’s “Give It to Me” and Madonna’s “4 Minutes”—from worst to best. Sal Cinquemani

25. “I’m Lovin’ It”

McDonald’s reportedly paid Timberlake $6 million to sing the jingle for what would become the fast-food chain’s longest running advertising campaign. The story behind the ad’s conception is long and twisty, but it began in Unterhaching, Germany, where an ad agency came up with the slogan “Ich Liebe Es,” which as a hook would have made the single’s existence only slightly more tolerable. Cinquemani

24. “Drink You Away”

A special edit of “Drink You Away” was serviced to country radio programmers in late 2015, setting the stage for Timberlake’s impending bearded woodsman persona. The Memphis soul-infused track is driven by strained, cliché metaphors. “Bottom of the bottle,” indeed. Cinquemani

23. “Supplies”

The second single from Timberlake’s Man of the Woods did little to assuage confusion over the discrepancy between the album’s musical content and the Americana imagery touted in the project’s promotional materials. The track, co-produced by the Neptunes, pairs a plodding trap beat with sitar flourishes, staccato interjections from Pharrell Williams, and lyrics that liken romantic commitment to surviving the apocalypse. Cinquemani

22. “TKO”

The one saving grace of this unsuccessful attempt to recreate the magnificent bad faith of “Cry Me a River” is, at least for those of us who are “Mirrors” skeptics, imagining it to be the inevitable outcome for the 2013 hit’s protagonist. Like Björk once sang, how extremely lazy to think she could replace the missing elements in him. Henderson

21. “Not a Bad Thing”

The least ambitious track on either installment of The 20/20 Experience, “Not a Bad Thing” isn’t a bad thing, per se, but its guitar-driven blue-eyed sorta-soul represents the watering down of the formula established by the previous year’s “Mirrors.” The track sounds more like an NSYNC castaway than a representative of Timberlake’s most challenging album to date. Cinquemani

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Katie Crutchfield’s songs are personal, openhearted, and earnest, displaying keen pop sensibilities that starkly contrast the lo-fi sound of her work as Waxahatchee. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield has at last formulated an approach that provides the ideal outlet for both her poetically confessional lyrics and her billowing, marbly voice. Adopting a free and easy Americana style marked by both twangy guitars and dreamy keys, the songs here are at once deeply intimate and broadly accessible, like selections from an alternative universe where modern mainstream country radio isn’t all pandering, homogenized slop.

Saint Cloud opens with the lilting, sublime “Oxbow.” On top of a silky combination of plaintive, bittersweet piano chords, bleeping electronics, and crackling drums, Crutchfield cycles through a small handful of unexpectedly swaggering melodic phrases that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Lorde song. The song’s only flaw is that it drifts away far too quickly. The delicately funky “Fire” likewise owes at least some of its DNA to the minimalist pop of Billie Eilish, while “Lilacs” is a pretty country-folk song with subtle psychedelic touches and a strutting, radio-ready chorus.

Even when sliding into conventional roots fare, though, Crutchfield and her band—currently featuring members of Detroit band Bonny Doon, along with in-demand indie-rock instrumentalist Josh Kaufman—work up an irresistibly comfortable groove that perfectly suits the singer’s buoyantly direct songs. “Can’t Do Much” is a classic honky-tonk love song, barreling ahead with a friendly twang as Crutchfield slides effortlessly in and out of her upper register. The freewheeling “War” is even more fun, sounding like something Steve Earle could have written in one of his more jovial moods.

Lyrically, Crutchfield covers typical singer-songwriter territory like relationship strife and the mistakes of the past—she reportedly wrote the album after getting sober—but rarely succumbs to cliché. On “Lilacs,” she sings, “And the lilacs drank the water/And the lilacs died,” which is some kind of zen poetry. The album is full of similarly aesthetic lines that feel almost subversive in the context of usually more plainspoken country and folk songs. “The Eye” is a rumination on the intersection of creativity and romance, featuring a string of unconventional metaphors like “A scientific cryptogram lit up behind a sunbeam.” But like great country songwriters do, Crutchfield grounds her songs in a definite sense of place—from famous city streets to rural creeks—that keeps their true-life origins in perspective.

Label: Merge Release Date: March 27, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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The strain of 1980s alternative music that straddles the line between post-punk and power pop used to be called college rock. Game Theory, whose very name signals their intellectual bona bides, made what could best be described as “grad-school rock.” The band took all the hallmarks of college rock—jangly guitars, vocal harmonies, dense, allusive lyrics—and cranked them up to peaks of brain-twisting intensity. Their music is like a sonic dissertation that aims to read rock classicism and punk/new wave through the lens of Jacques Derrida. In their songs, ideas will often emerge and percolate briefly before a hard tape cut sends things off in a totally different direction. And despite the sometimes challenging nature of their songs, Game Theory made some of the most beautiful, rewarding music of the ‘80s.

After Game Theory fizzled out at the end of the decade, principal singer-songwriter Scott Miller formed the Loud Family, a band that was somehow both more accessible and a little sharper around the edges. In the ensuing years, the Loud Family’s discography has remained fairly easy to find, while Game Theory became, for a while at least, one of the great lost bands of its era. None of their albums sold terribly well and original pressings went for hundreds of dollars on Amazon. Rights issues prevented the recordings from getting reissued, and the band never enjoyed the type of posthumous revival that, say, Big Star had. But after Miller suddenly passed away in 2013, Omnivore Recordings finally began a proper reissue campaign.

The latest release in that campaign, Across the Barrier of Sound: PostScript, isn’t a studio album, but it’s also not quite an odds-and-sods collection. The band’s lineup had always been a bit in flux, and before they broke up Miller recruited Michael Querico of the Three O’Clock and Jozef Becker, with whom he’d been in a previous band called Alternate Learning, to join him and longtime member Gil Ray. Instrumental duties were shuffled about and the group set out on a tour that would prove to be their swansong. Though this lineup never recorded a proper album, they worked on a batch of songs that are assembled here. And while many of these tracks were later re-worked for Loud Family’s Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, it’s interesting to hear them rendered by the final incarnation of Game Theory. The package is rounded out with some other home demos, live songs, a few covers, and some remixes. For Miller’s fans, it’s a heretofore unseen window into a transitional period in his career.

Despite the fact that most of his output mainly consisted of fractured art-pop song-smithery, Miller was always a massive Beatles fan, and PostScript opens with a home recording of the Fab Four’s “All My Loving.” There isn’t much to the recording on a technical level—just Miller’s warbly tenor and, eventually a gently strummed, fuzztone guitar—but it’s certainly big-hearted. In his hands, the song swaps out the wide-eyed teeny-bopper innocence of the original for a nervy energy that belies the peppy lyrics. Miller’s wavering voice doesn’t exactly make his narrator sound confident that the object of his affections is saving her love for him. Though its lyrics aren’t by Miller, the song crystallizes what makes his work so compelling.

Game Theory specialized in giving voice to and working through the emotions of people more comfortable with intellect than feeling. One of the central questions of Miller’s songs is why something that’s supposed to be pleasurable (usually love) so often results in a bewildering or crushing sadness. That paradox is exemplified by “Inverness,” the swooning chorus of which (“I bet you’ve never actually seen a person die of loneliness”) makes the track the closest thing to an anthem that Miller ever recorded. Two versions of “Inverness” are included here, a demo and a full-band rendition, and the Game Theory version features a bit less studio sheen than on the mix eventually released by Loud Family, showing that the final incarnation of Game Theory was apparently ready to flex a little more straightforward rock muscle.

For further proof of that, the album includes two songs that Miller co-wrote with Querico: The band blasts through “My Free Ride,” a power-pop rave-up that’s given the full production treatment, while a demo for “The Come On” is a psychedelic slice of acid pop that sounds a lot more like something by the Elephant 6 than any of the band’s other work. “Take Me Down (to Halloo),” an arch travelogue-cum-drug-song, is a little punchier than the version on Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, while the cleverly titled “Go Back to Sleep, Little Susie” is much sharper and cynical than the song it became, “Aerodelieria.” “Laurel Canyon (Reprise)” is little more than a song fragment, eventually winding up on the band’s final album, Supercalifragile, which was released in 2017 after Miller’s widow Kristine Chambers Miller and Ken Stringfellow assembled it out of demos and piecemeal tracks Miller left behind.

In addition to the songs recorded by the nascent Loud Family, the collection packages several more covers and rarities. There’s a cover of Brian Eno’s “Needle in the Camel’s Eye” and the Monkees’s “The Door Into Summer,” both of which attest to Miller’s eclecticism. The album also features the band’s take on the Big Star classic “Back of a Car” during a live set at the Stanford radio station when Big Star was still wildly, unfairly obscure. Perhaps the most welcome inclusions here are two songs—“Treat It Like My Own” and “Water”—from a fan club-only release tape, a mini-musical called “A Child’s Christmas Saving the Whales.”

PostScript is lovingly packaged with an excellent essay by critic Annie Zaleski, as well as reminiscences by Pat Sansone, Doug Gillard, and Dan Vallor, who worked with Miller on a number of these tracks and elsewhere. Ultimately, the collection’s only real flaw is that it has limited appeal to those unfamiliar with Miller and Game Theory. It’s also not as strong a primer on Miller’s songcraft as Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things and the Game Theory collection Tinker to Evers to Chance. For the initiated, though, PostScript is an invitation to burrow deeply into the work of one of the great, unexplored cult figures of indie rock. Listening to these songs alongside the first Loud Family album gives listeners a look at what Game Theory might have become, and what separates Miller’s second project from his first. If that sounds a bit like a literature seminar, that’s probably the way Miller would have liked it.

Label: Omnivore Release Date: March 20, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1980s, I noted that, while ‘80s pop culture is largely remembered for its frivolity, the social unrest that stirred beneath the decade’s brightly colored gloss and greed resulted in not just the guilt-driven good intentions of enterprises like the star-studded USA for Africa, but a generation of artists whose music genuinely reflected the state of the world. From political violence across the pond and the struggles and dreams of the American working class, to race relations, sexuality, and gender, no topic was left unexcavated by the pop, rock, and hip-hop artists of the Reagan era. As we enter the 2020s, an entire generation removed from the ‘80s, it seems as good a time as any to once again look back and reflect on the music that defined one of the most definable of decades. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights; Duran Duran, Rio; King Sunny Ade and His African Beats, Juju Music; Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, One from the Heart; Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, The Message; Donald Fagen, The Nightfly; Mission of Burna, Vs. ; Orange Juice, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever; Marvin Gaye, Midnight Love

10. George Clinton, Computer Games

George Clinton’s solo debut begins, almost oddly, with the former Parliament and Funkadelic frontman putting on his clothes. But the song’s message is a naked one: the promise of a throw down—to bring on the funk, the soul, and the psychedelic like no one’s business. What follows is an almost spotless blitzkrieg of jams that run the gamut from the rousing (“One Fun at a Time”), to the poignantly metaphoric (“Free Alternations”), to the playfully infantile (“Pot Sharing Tots”). “Loopzilla” is a master class in sampladelic overload, and the title tune suggests Kraftwerk put through a P-Funk filter, but it’s the synth-funk “Atomic Dog” that remains the album’s triumph, an unbelievably improvised totem to Clinton’s own stray cock strut, and one that makes a world without Adina Howard and Snoop Dogg seem impossible. Ed Gonzalez

9. The Clash, Combat Rock

“This is a public service announcement…with guitars!” The album’s famous first words, and a perfectly concise summation of the Clash’s uniquely exuberant and stylish craft, their provocative blending of political provocation with eclectic musicality. Their evolution was such that they became catchier as their convictions became more dense, which may explain Combat Rock’s somewhat ill repute; there would be hits, and as such it was conceived, wrongly, as a sell out. To me, the stream of consciousness of “Car Jamming” attests like few other Clash songs to Joe Strummer’s social consciousness, restless even when he was standing still. They saw rock, like fascist might, as a power, and so it is that their music feels as if it hits you with the force of a club or a boot to the face. Gonzalez

8. The Cure, Pornography

After two albums’ worth of uncharacteristically light-hearted pop, Disintegration might’ve sounded like something of a relapse for the Cure. It’s a dreamlike album that turns nightmarish in places as its icy, imperious pop epics channel Pornography‘s atmospheric despondency. Depression is often associated with the inability to feel, but Disintegration proves that sorrow is, as much as love, a many-splendored thing. For all his infamous melodrama, Robert Smith can be a plainspoken and relatable lyricist; this is an album with songs about hungry spider men and hopeless prayers, but its most memorable lines are simple and heartfelt. If not for Smith’s wardrobe, we wouldn’t call this goth. We’d call it sad, pretty pop music. Matthew Cole

7. Kate Bush, The Dreaming

As far as 1980s female-centric performance-art-cum-mutant-pop goes, Kate Bush is the explosive sensualist against Laurie Anderson’s cool, detached yogi. Years removed from the idyllic anticipation of “This Woman’s Work,” The Dreaming is a violently singular work that places its creator’s emotions in their most natural environment: inscrutable and volatile. Each song, from the pedagogically impatient “Sat in Your Lap” to the trap-door hysterics of “Get Out of My House,” is a Joyce-worthy confluence of footnotes-to-be, and the key keeps getting tantalizingly passed between tracks via Bush’s darting tongue. Eric Henderson

6. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Imperial Bedroom

Imperial Bedroom can be a challenging listen at times, but the hooks and melodies are so beguiling and infectious that it’s about as close to pop as Costello has ever gotten. There’s a myriad of sounds and styles coalescing wonderfully throughout, and the quirky songwriter punctuates each of his sonic detours with jaunty badinage and pert observations. The album boasts some absolutely astonishing wordplay, with even its most personal harangues arriving veiled in clever allegories and razor-sharp double entendres. Despite its lackluster commercial performance, then, Imperial Bedroom affirms Costello as a poet laureate for the counterculture and a restless musical genius all in the space of 50 topsy-turvy minutes. Huw Jones

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Last night Katy Perry unveiled the music video for her latest single, “Never Worn White,” a heartfelt ballad that pays tribute to fiancé Orlando Bloom. Directed by Parisian duo J.A.C.K., the clip features the pop singer donning an extravagant floral gown and headdress a la Florence Pugh’s May Queen in Art Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar. Perry’s career is, of course, largely defined by her outrageous video fashions, so we decided to take a look back at some of her wildest looks.

“California Gurls”

Prior to Perry’s 2010 smash “California Gurls,” the singer relied on her girl-next-door-cum-pinup good looks, but this Matthew Cullen-directed video (inspired by the work of artist Will Cotton) reset the bar for her visuals. Sporting a violet-hued wig and, famously, a whipped cream-spurting halter top, the singer frolics among the game pieces of a giant Candy Land in this trippy tribute to all things sticky and sweet.

“E.T.”

Perry plays an extra-terrestrial siren-turned-humanoid-turned-gazelle in this CG-heavy sci-fi fantasy co-starring Kanye West and model Shaun Ross.

“Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”

Part of Perry’s charm is that, unlike some of her contemporaries, she doesn’t take herself (or her work) too seriously. Exhibit X: “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a tongue-in-cheek tribute to ‘80s teen flicks featuring cameos by Darren Kriss, Kevin McHale, Kenny G, Corey Feldman, Debbie Gibson, and viral YouTube star Rebecca Black in which Perry plays a lovesick, metal-mouthed teen.

“The One That Got Away”

Directed by Floria Sigismondi and co-starring Diego Luna, 2011’s “The One That Got Away” finds Perry sporting Hollywood-style old-age makeup as she recounts a doomed love affair from her salad days.

“Dark Horse”

Prompting accusations of cultural appropriation, the video for Perry’s smash hit “Dark Horse” sees the singer portraying a magical Egyptian queen cheekily named Katy-Patra who presides over a parade of potential new lovers.

“Birthday”

Perry reportedly spent up to seven hours having prosthetic makeup applied for the various characters she depicts in the quirky video for the disco-inflected “Birthday”: a former burlesque dancer, a Jewish M.C. (cringe), and a creepy clown, among others.

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It’s been over a decade since Mandy Moore’s last album, Amanda Leigh, saw the singer turned actress pivoting from teen pop to a more mature musical palette. Her seventh album, Silver Landings, boasts a sharper point of view while evoking a broader range of sonic influences, including country and ‘70s pop-rock, for a probing examination of adult life.

The album opens with “I’d Rather Lose,” a sophisticated, Laurel Canyon-esque country-rock track that showcases Moore’s more seasoned voice. The song’s lyrics are shot through with a world-weariness shaped by the increasingly cynical nature of modern life, contrasted by the resilience of the soaring chorus: “If the only way to win is by breaking all the rules/I’d rather lose.” It’s one of several on the album that finds Moore directly and openly grappling with living in a world that will, at some point, force you to compromise your principles.

Throughout, the album’s production is sleek but never saccharine, with a smart focus on Moore’s voice and lyrics. The singer’s soaring vocal makes clear the depth of her love for her adopted hometown on “Trying My Best, Los Angeles,” while the album’s high-water mark is “Forgiveness,” an affecting meditation on what it means to forgive and to be forgiven. Moore reaches a moment of catharsis during the bridge, declaring, “Will I forgive you? You don’t get to know.” The song is a clear-eyed and moving ballad for the Me Too era, but its scope is more personal than political. Moore thinks through the complicated questions surrounding forgiveness and culpability in a gentle yet incisive way.

A few songs here lack the lyrical polish of those moments. The title track offers a clunky twist on the familiar cliché about finding a silver lining in the darkest of situations, while “Fifteen”—about Moore’s journey to stardom, breaking onto the pop star circuit before she was old enough to drive—is perhaps a little too specific to feel relatable: “Missed prom, missed graduation/No college in the fall/On the road with the boy bands/Singing for people in the mall,” she recounts in a muted tone. The similarly themed “Stories Reminding Myself of Me” is much more accessible, thanks at least in part to its guitar-driven, AM-radio energy. By drawing on the sounds of ‘70s singer-songwriters, Moore has successfully completed the transition from her teen-pop origins to adult troubadour.

Label: Verve Release Date: March 6, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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