The Greatest New music of 2021: Moving on From Hardship

Two important releases have been explicitly framed as “divorce albums,” and had been produced against a backdrop of turmoil. Foremost is

Adele’s

“30” (Columbia), the English singer’s first total-size LP in 6 years, which arrived with a great deal fanfare in November. She’s regarded earlier mentioned all for the room-shaking electrical power of her voice, but Adele’s new collection primarily seems built for smaller spaces. Even though a number of tracks explicitly mention her separation from her longtime husband or wife and the affect of the break up not only on the singer but also on their youthful son, she peppers her songs with observations and asides that trace at the universality of her struggles.

Kacey Musgraves,

an additional singer putting her daily life back again jointly right after the collapse of her relationship, took a pretty different technique to therapeutic on “Star-Crossed” (MCA Nashville/Interscope), locating peace and hope in hazy psychedelia and other genres outside the house her region-pop comfort and ease zone.

Adele and Ms. Musgraves are two thriving Grammy winners who also occur to be 30-something white girls with functioning-class roots who now attractiveness to the suburban masses. Four other albums concerned with exploring a shifting perception of self and seeking to develop on foundational truths whilst accommodating new realities come from lesser-recognised but similarly talented artists of very diverse backgrounds.

R&B singer

Dawn Richard,

who was as soon as intently discovered with audio mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs right after showing up on his fact display “Making the Band” and on his data, hasn’t rather broken by way of into the mainstream with her solo function even even though she’s making the strongest music of her vocation. “Second Line” (Merge), a stunning tour by way of an array of kinds earlier and current, pays tribute to the complex musical gumbo of her New Orleans upbringing.

Michelle Zauner,

who records thoughtful indie rock as Japanese Breakfast and wrote the highly regarded memoir “Crying in H Mart”—about the dying of her Korea-born mother and how cooking connected them—released the wide-ranging “Jubilee” (Lifeless Oceans), her finest outing yet. She just lately obtained Grammy nominations for Finest New Artist and Greatest Substitute Music Album. Onetime Vampire Weekend member

Rostam Batmanglij,

who has collaborated with singers like

Solange

and Frank Ocean, information solo less than his very first title, and his album “Changephobia” (Matsor) was a sonically brilliant showcase of his producing and manufacturing prowess, imbuing folks-rock and indie pop with touches of dance audio and calypso on songs about romantic longing. And

Tirzah

Mastin, who also documents less than her presented identify, labored with producer Mica Levi to craft “Colourgrade” (Domino), a delightfully odd album of spare R&B music that just take on both carnal desire and motherhood.

Two transcendent rock albums were rooted in a incredibly unique previous but match flawlessly in the existing many thanks to the unique and relatable songwriting voices of their creators. The War on Medications, the prolonged-operating band fronted by

Adam Granduciel,

issued “I Really don’t Are living In this article Anymore” (Atlantic), an album that channeled the glittering synth-significant rock of the mid-1980s. He’s in appreciate with the new music of

Bruce Springsteen

and

Tom Petty,

but Mr. Granduciel’s tunes of longing, decline and redemption, filled with illustrations or photos of very long streets and fading reminiscences, mark him as a master of mythology, the

Joseph Campbell

of heartland rock. Snail Mail’s

Lindsey Jordan

is enamored of the indie rock that came a decade later—think

Liz Phair

or the Breeders—but her composing on the LP “Valentine” (Matador), which is unusually articulate about interior states, applies that audio to a instant-by-second stream of consciousness.

Hip-hop had an strange yr in which two of the most hyped and streamed albums—

Kanye West’s

“Donda” and Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy”—were forgettable. But there have been really a several gems from artists who aren’t on that business level. Tyler, the Creator’s “Call Me if You Get Lost” (Columbia) had a collage-like composition inspired by mixtapes from the early 2000s, and it was also a work of deep emotional resonance, with tracks about rejection and trauma fitting simply future to get together tracks about conspicuous usage. Veteran beatmaker Madlib, a lifelong inspiration of Tyler’s, partnered with producer

Kieran Hebden,

aka Four Tet, on “Sound Ancestors” (Madlib Invazion), a wealthy assortment of sample-pushed instrumentals that collapsed previous and foreseeable future.

A different intriguing collision of resources and sensibilities came when Floating Points, the project of British digital new music producer

Sam Shepherd,

satisfied up with octogenarian spiritual jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the album “Promises” (Luaka Bop). It is a affected person and generally quiet document filled with stress and refined beauty, and with Mr. Shepherd’s composition and production, Mr. Sanders’s horn, and accompaniment from the London Symphony Orchestra, if resists genre classification.

Guitarist

Yasmin Williams

also painted outside the strains on her fantastic album “Urban Driftwood” (Spinster). The report is steeped in the solo finger-style kind popularized by

John Fahey,

but Ms. Williams adds numerous intriguing wrinkles—cello, kalimba, West African percussion from

Amadou Kouyate

—to build a audio all her individual. It’s a single of a amount of information here that twist acquainted styles from the earlier into bold new styles, building space for an idiosyncratic, individual and finally personal expression throughout a yr when we spent so a lot time wondering about physical closeness and the risk of isolation.

—Mr. Richardson is the Journal’s rock and pop songs critic. Comply with him on Twitter @MarkRichardson.