10 Best Albums of 2021

Though Kendrick hasn’t released a solo album since 2017’s astounding, Pulitzer-winning DAMN., the writing on the wall indicates that he has something big brewing. Before the pandemic hit last year, he was scheduled to headline Glastonbury Festival, a strong indicator he was planning a new release. Since then, TDE bosses have hinted at new Lamar music on the way. He’s also been reportedly seen filming music videos in LA.

After a four year break between her smash hit 2013 debut Pure Heroin and her astounding 2017 follow-up Melodrama, the time has come for a new Lorde album. In May of 2020, Lorde sharde in a message to fans that she’d been in the studio since December working on new music with Jack Antonoff. “The work is so fucking good, my friend,” she wrote. “I am truly jazzed for you to hear it … It flowed. A thing started to take shape. And then, of course, the world shut down. We’re still working away—Jack and I FaceTimed for over an hour this morning going over everything. But it’ll take a while longer.”

Though he was secretly planning on releasing Certified Lover Boy in January, Drake decided to push his sixth studio album so he could recover from knee surgery. “I was planning to release my album this month but between surgery and rehab my energy has been dedicated to recovery,” he wrote on Instagram. “I’m blessed to be back on my feet and feeling great and focused on the album, but CLB won’t be dropping in January.” For now, we can likely anticipate the album sometime in the first half of 2021.

After dominating pop and hip-hop for the last few years, Cardi B confirmed multiple times throughout 2020 that the follow-up to Invasion of Privacy is on the way. Last summer, Cardi tweeted to fans about her new music: “It’s comin .Its going to hit too!!!”

With one debut album written with her brother in their childhood home, Billie Eilish became one of the most successful breakout artists in decades. Her follow-up to that is certainly one of the most anticipated sophomore albums in a long time. And in a December interview with Vanity Fair, Eilish confirmed that she and her brother had 16 songs for the new album. “We’ve been working and I love all of them,” Eilish said.

The world needs more Adele right now. Hell, the world has needed more Adele since at least November 21, 2015, the day after she released her transcendent 25. We know she has new music ready to go—in fact it was expected in 2020, but the pandemic might have thrown off her release plans. Let’s hope 2021 is her year.

I know, every year we pray that there will be a new Frank Ocean album. But, with a few singles in 2020, Frank Ocean seemed to be gearing up for some sort of release. Who can say if this will be the year. Certainly he’s overdue for a full-length now nearly five years after Endless and Blonde.

At this point it really does feel like Rihanna is teasing us with R9. While she’s been focusing on her fashion line recently, we also know she’s been working on new music. In 2018 she promised a new album the following year, but that was pushed to 2020, then pushed again with hopes that it’ll be out this year. Please? We need it.

Thankfully there’s one thing we can count on this year. In December of 2020, St. Vincent tweeted that she has a new album “locked and loaded,” and that she “can’t wait for you to hear it.” In an interview that month with Mojo she said this new music would mark “a tectonic shift.” “I felt I had gone as far as I could possibly go with angularity. I was interested in going back to the music I’ve listened to more than any other — Stevie Wonder records from the early ’70s, Sly And The Family Stone. I studied at the feet of those masters.”