Donald Glover’s exploded, genre-twisting album Bando Stone and the New World, released this summer, is reportedly his last. Willow opens, touring on her latest, empathogen—excitingly worlds away from her viral hit “Wait a Minute!”

Apollo’s star continues to rise with his second LP, God Said No. His pop R&B songs flow through a clever mix of influences. Robyn-esque disco anthems sit next to tracks with incantatory vocals bouncing over nylon strings in stereo and one full-fledged trap song, “Against Me.” It’s all in the hips, and it all somehow works together.  

Indie rock’s “sad dads” are in their Swiftie era. Guitarist Aaron Dessner produced several recent Taylor Swift albums, and the band traded features with her: they played on her 2020 single “coney island,” and she on their “The Alcott,” from 2023. Their latest, Laugh Track, is the band’s 10th LP. 

Clairo raised more than a few eyebrows by working with producer-to-the-stars Jack Antonoff on the follow-up to her critically adored lo-fi bedroom pop debut, Immunity. The results, 2021’s Sling, and their second project together, Charm, see Clairo embracing luxurious, vintage tones and live instrumentation over the garage band sound of her early stuff. Carole King gets mentioned in pretty much every review.

Last year, OutKast’s André 3000 released his first album in 17 years, New Blue Sun. The first track’s title, “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time,” goes far in setting the 98-minute ambient jazz record’s tone.  

“Seed of a Seed,” an acoustic strummer with strings bolstering Heynderickx’s warbling and tender singing, quietly popped up this summer. It’s the Portlander’s first new music since her 2018 debut album, I Need to Start a Garden. Though it hasn’t yet been attached to an album, this pair of hometown shows are on the backend of a national tour. 

Brat summer becomes Brat fall. The British pop singer’s sixth album sold the masses on her dancy brand of hyperpop, and turned Kamala Harris’s campaign green. This coheadlining tour, Sweat, pairs Charli with Australian singer Troye Sivan, who’s touring his latest album, Something to Give Each Other. 

Don’t Forget Me, Rogers’s third album, is her first that didn’t start as a school project. She made her first at NYU; and her second was part of her master’s thesis at Harvard Divinity School. Don’t Forget Me, which came out this spring, is also her most pared-back recording to date, letting her enchanting pop-rock songwriting shine. 

Those billion-with-a-B Spotify streams don’t lie. “Espresso,” from 25-year-old Carpenter’s sixth album, Short n’ Sweet, hit number three on the Billboard Hot 100 this summer, jumping the one-time Disney child actor into a new stratosphere of fame.

Though famously the first by an artist born in the new millennium to top the Billboard charts, the music Eilish and her brother, Finneas, make together has never felt adolescent. Their third LP, Hit Me Hard and Soft, puts Eilish’s ASMR-like sprechstimme and wavering portamento choruses on full display.