Carnival of Soul

Jon Pareles

The best pop of 2019 didn’t try to reach everyone. It was the work of bedroom-studio conspirators, of songwriters confronting their traumas and aspirations, of old hands challenging themselves and newcomers determined to warp accepted boundaries: artists working to please themselves at a time when gatekeepers can easily be bypassed. If it turned out that those private outpourings resonated with a wide audience, all the better — but that wasn’t the only goal.

The weird outsider became a popular girl in 2019. The songs of Billie Eilish, 17, are death-haunted and depressive, by turns arrogant and anxious, mocking and desperate. Yet they became mass singalongs, aided by Eilish’s busily maintained, anti-fashion social media presence. Eilish’s sound understands how adolescence can feel like a horror movie: the constantly looming suspense, the way the ordinary is suddenly pierced by the ghastly or the absurd. Her music often whispers, but it’s hardly soothing. Quiet moments are shattered by creepy sound effects or loud intrusions, while her breathy vocals — hushed enough for A.S.M.R. — often carry bitter thoughts. The show-tune shapeliness of her melodies is often a sardonic frame for grim sentiments, to be faced with a ballooning bass line and a self-conscious smirk.

Instead of making a third album with Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard went solo on “Jaime,” creating a candid autobiography in funk. Her songs are decisively personal, detailing struggles with racism, faith, desire and her own self-sabotage, while the music is gleefully experimental, playing with sounds and structures and taking chances just because she can. With a voice that can go to the roadhouse, the church or deeply private places, she exorcises troubles with the music’s sheer pleasure.

Carlos Santana revved up his band with grooves adapted from Africa and the Caribbean, jamming live in the studio. He pushed his guitar tone to bite and claw, and — even better — he found a guest singer and lyricist who could ride atop that passionate ferocity: Buika, a singer from Spain with roots both in flamenco and in her parents’ birthplace, Equatorial Guinea. In multiple languages, Buika addresses hard times and the turmoil of love as Santana’s band ignites.

The debut album by the songwriter, singer, violinist and producer Sudan Archives (born Brittney Parks) carries the potential of her homemade EPs even further. Loops of her beats and her raw violin lines are still the core of her music, but collaborating producers add new possibilities: wilder counterpoint, psychedelic hazes, orchestral cushioning. As she sings about self-invention and self-discovery, she accomplishes exactly that in the music.

The Puerto Rican songwriter Ileana Mercedes Cabral Joglar, who records as iLe, gets combative on her second album, “Almadura,” which translates as “Hard Soul” and puns on “armadura,” Spanish for armor. She assails colonialism, machismo, hypocrisy and hate, and praises Pan-American solidarity and traditions, in songs that balance pugnacity, elegance and lithe rhythms. Vintage Caribbean styles like bolero and rumba get 21st-century twists.

Justin Vernon assembles Bon Iver’s songs ever so painstakingly, with a shifting array of collaborators, elaborate electronic manipulation and lyrics that often need decrypting. But what comes through all the convolutions is a paradoxically pastoral warmth: earnest, yearning melodies and music that rustles and burbles like a digitally enchanted forest.

Lana Del Rey distills her 21st-century California state of mind on an album that’s thoroughly high-concept behind its air of vulnerability. She presents herself as a latter-day Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, full of longing and devotion, supported by the naturalism of piano, guitars and string sections. But her lyrics also quote a litany of California musicians and song titles — constructing the state from its pop artifacts — and the longer a song extends, the more its sound wanders toward the surreal present. Del Rey suspends herself between emotion and well-wrought illusion.

The British singer and songwriter Michael Kiwanuka seeks private and communal healing, or at least the possibility of hope, on his expansive third album, “Kiwanuka.” He sees pressure, violence and heartache all around him, yet he envisions putting them behind him. His soundstage is as broad as his ambitions, with choirs, horns, strings and echoes of late-1960s soul and psychedelia, while the grain in his voice is equal parts weariness and persistence.

Pounding, gnashing, jabbing and sneering — but also swerving suddenly into passages of intricate interplay — the English rock group Black Midi pulls together all the virtuosic and noisy impulses of post-punk, math-rock, jazz-rock fusion and progressive rock. Each song is a labyrinth with hairpin-turn episodes and lyrics full of dourly corrosive observations. The music feels energized and pulled taut by every apprehension of 2019.

The manic electronic pop of 100 gecs — the duo of Laura Les and Dylan Brady — usually feels like it’s running way too fast. Voices are pitched up; arrangements skid through changes of beat, texture, direction and volume, with the speed and arbitrariness of digital editing run amok. 100 gecs are kindred spirits to the P.C. Music collective in England and to the Kanye West of “Yeezus,” but even more prankish than either one. And now and then — between the whiz-bang musical one-liners and non sequiturs — they linger just long enough over an earworm of a pop verse to prove they could slow down and write more standard songs if they weren’t having so much fun.

Jon Caramanica

Each year the album becomes a more fragile thing, and also less meaningful: Musicians are focused on their fame and their art minute to minute, not cycle to cycle. So it makes sense that the most impressive full-length projects of 2019 aren’t merely wide-eared grab bags of sounds, but extended meditations on a novel idea — albums that prove a point again and again and again.

The sound of internet splatter. The collapse of avant/gauche binaries. The use of machine textures to capture and amplify deeply human joy. “1000 gecs” is a snowblower of an album — completely rowdy but technically astute, full of references to pop-punk, dubstep, megaclub oontz-oontz-oontz jams and much more. After the last decade, why wouldn’t you put everything in a blender and start over?

Bad Bunny, the definitive global pop star of the last two years, is good at lots of things: low, moanlike singing, densely packed rapping, melodies that melt atop all kinds of production. So his debut album is erratic by design — one minute he’s inconsolably sad, another he’s flirting with verve, the next he’s a pop-punk scamp. And because of his versatility, he’s accelerating the conversations between reggaeton, Latin trap, hip-hop and pop.

The latest iteration of post-post-Drake sing-rapping comes in the melancholy lullabies of Polo G and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, both of whom made heartbreaking albums. “Die a Legend” is delivered with cold emotional clarity, and the howls of sadness and vitriol on “AI YoungBoy 2” are almost disorienting.

A high-gloss debut album from a rising pop star who has made something pure out of pastiche. “Clarity” is an impressive statement of purpose from Kim Petras, who’s clearly enamored of all of pop’s most saccharine subthreads and also its left-field auteurs. Her songs capture the thrill of slightly askew pop gems, then amplify them into something undeniable.

Romeo Santos has nothing left to prove in bachata: He brought the genre into the present day, made it huge and gleaming, and remained the most tender-voiced and, at times, one of the most boundary-pushing singers in Latin pop. “Utopia” is a clever victory lap — a series of duets with other bachata greats, many who preceded him, that serves as both a collection of microduels and a this-is-your-life of the genre.

Each song on “Norman _____ Rockwell!” lands like a stern kick. Lana Del Rey’s songwriting is at its most complex and also most economical, and she sings with the conviction of someone who’s been speaking truth so long she no longer cares if anyone believes her — but you better believe her.

“Open Book,” by the relative newcomer Kalie Shorr, is the sort of gut-wrenching album made by someone who understands how vital and detailed country music can be, and who is faithful to its heritage (including its lineage of resistance). Everyone in Nashville is likely hoping to sandpaper her into something just a little bit less confrontational; fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.

The new rap eccentrics cloak their peculiarities in au-courant-sounding packages. For Baby Keem, it’s storytelling candor — the directness of the sentiment on “Die for My Bitch” often leaps out. And for Guapdad 4000, it’s slickly whispered absurdist posturing that’s just this side of sketch comedy.

For everyone who heard Kanye West rap three years ago, “I miss the old Kanye, straight from the ’go Kanye/Chop up the soul Kanye, set on his goals Kanye/I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye/The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye/I miss the sweet Kanye, chop up the beats Kanye,” and agreed wholeheartedly — well, here he is.

“The Creator” is 22 minutes of puerile pleasure from the Dallas quasi-rapper 10k.Caash, who is single-handedly restoring early Beastie Boys mayhem to hip-hop. This album could pass for a sound-effects reel; it’s exuberant, wobbly, silly and consistently neck-breakingly fun.

Since the beginning of her career, Ariana Grande has been an excellent singer, precise and slyly emotional. And then in recent years, she became a pro at stirring up online conversation. “Thank U, Next” is when those threads came together. It’s her most thematically textured album, as well as her most musically adventurous. It marked her arrival as a pop superstar who could still turn on a dime.

Rarely does an album feel so frank, so cut-to-the-quick. Which isn’t to say vulnerable; it’s clear Summer Walker is protecting herself on “Over It.” But the frustration, the desperation, the lust, the disappointment, the dismissal — they ooze off Walker like summer sweat. The result is startlingly damp.

Stoicism can turn into a kind of flamboyance — hard-nosed commitment to form is rare and electric. So it is with Benny the Butcher, part of the Griselda Records crew, who is kiln-fired in the ethos of 1990s New York rap. This coldblooded EP features others in the tradition (Jadakiss, Pusha-T) and comes off like a gathering of Mafia elders, reflective but still scowling.

Behold what’s likely to be the final album of Taylor Swift’s Middle Period, the era in which she jettisoned her country-prodigy training wheels and became a fully formed, ideologically neutral pop star. Which she’s good at, too! “Lover” is a welcome return to emotional intimacy after the armor of “Reputation.” Moving forward, though, it’s likely Swift will stop wrestling for pop’s center; she didn’t get this far by emulating other people’s ideas of what a pop star should be.