11 Albums We’re Looking Forward To |

2016 is a historically significant year for music. We are losing and being gifted icons, and huge albums are slated for release (often surprise-release) at any given moment. Here is a non-comprehensive list of a few records the Stanford Arts Review is looking forward to.

Tinashe: Joyride – date TBA by Anthony Milki

Tinashe’s major label debut, Aquarius, and a gift of a mixtape she gave us impressively soon after, Amethyst, prefaced the reign we’re waiting for her to impose over this broad, broad new wave of R&B. She’s banged out club smashes, soul-search music, and just well-constructed songs alike, and has a scary team of producers and potential features backing her up for this next record. Tinashe wants Joyride to be amazing, and she’s teasing it as such. We’ve heard several singles so far, none nearly as good as the underrated, shockingly underplayed first single, “Party Favors,” but let’s hold our breath and trust that the flashes of brilliance will find a stable home on Joyride.

Haim: TBA – date TBA by Benina Stern

I don’t have any siblings, so to compensate for that, I frequently daydream about being the missing Haim sister (they’re from Los Angeles, I’m from Los Angeles. They’re Jewish, I’m Jewish; I promise the daydreams make sense). Their sisterhood on top of their insane talents as multi-instrumentalists make them a pop-rock band with depth, feeling, and never boring (especially live in concert. They are goofs on stage, with their banter, and consistent switching of instruments). So far, they’ve released one previous album, 2013’s “Days Are Gone,” which, at almost three years old, I have still yet to get sick of. It’s hard for me to guess what their upcoming album will be, but I hope it carries over some of their quintessentials: their poppy synths, inventive vocal runs, and, of course, sisterly camaraderie.

Arca: Reverie – date TBA by Alex Muscat

It feels like nonsense to say that electronic music has suddenly become about the body. From the 4/4 thump of house and techno to EBM (electronic body music) to the lung compressing wub of dubstep, you’d think that this ever-expanding genre was always more about blood than brain.

But not until Arca had I heard music that sounds like living in a body. It’s no accident that the first track off his emotive, ugly, brilliant last album was called “Alive.” His music shudders and writhes – clearly synthesized but more organic than any unplugged acoustic album.

Even if you’ve never heard of Arca, you’ve probably been gripped by one of his off-kilter productions. He’s teamed up with Kanye to concoct the industrial wheeze of Yeezus, Bjork for her heart-wrenching latest Vulnicura, and, last but not least, the goddess that is FKA Twigs. Arca is on the vanguard of ultra-talented queer artists of color making some of the most cutting-edge electronic music around.

While his cryptic 15 second Instagram video doesn’t give much to go off of, Reverie is sure to be another wild, fluid anatomy lesson courtesy of this Venezuelan visionary.

Anohni: Hopelessness – May 6th by Ned Hardy

Is it okay to be excited about something that’s going to be really, really depressing? I ask this because there’s no way in hell that Hopelessness, the debut record of ANOHNI (formerly Antony) performing as herself, isn’t gonna be a dark fucking trip. And yet: I’m looking forward to it. Executive produced by festival-circuit mainstay Hudson Mohawke and experimental wunderkind Oneohtrix Point Never, Hopelessness promises to be equal parts magnificent and overwhelming. And if the two singles released by the legendary singer reveal anything about the general direction of her new album, we can expect enormous drums and precipitous drops (“4 Degrees”) as well as synthy breakdowns and strikingly pop-indebted hooks (“Drone Bomb Me”).

As usual, ANOHNI’s voice is front and center on both tracks, her brilliant falsetto cutting through the acid of each song. From a lyrical perspective, she seems more political than ever before. Gone are the days of subtle protest, as on Antony & the Johnson’s I Am A Bird Now standout, “Hope There’s Someone,” a debilitatingly powerful ode to AIDS victims forced to die alone, or that same album’s quietly confident, “My Lady Story.” There’s certainly nothing wrong with subtlety, but there’s also something to be said for asserting yourself a bit more loudly than usual. Here, ANOHNI doesn’t seem to be afraid of yelling to get her point across – whether she’s decrying the toxicity of human beings to our planet’s well-being on the throbbing “4 Degrees” or writing a song like “Drone Bomb Me,” in which a little girl begs for death-by-drone after witnessing the drone-bombed murder of her family. “Drone Bomb Me” is simply stunning, as sonically gorgeous as it is horrendously relevant. It’s a song that I can see myself returning to for decades to come.Six years after her last full-length, it sounds like ANOHNI is fed up. I mean, there’s a song on the tracklist called “Obama.” Hopelessness could be the catharsis we’ve all been waiting for.

Drake: Views From The 6 – April 29th by Anthony Milki

It’s been over two years since Drake’s last full-length and (hopefully surpassable) current opus. He’s since caught the Future bug and produced, produced, produced some quality mixtape material. The impression he and his camp have left us with for the last year or so has been that Views is going to be his best album, that through the collabs and effortless top-to-bottom flow reconstruction he’s graced hip-hop with, he’s been hard at work with Noah “40” Shebib, the silent Sam to his Frodo, and rap’s most loyal secret weapon. We have a few singles that may or may not actually make the album (but the release date looms, so it’s likely they’ll find themselves in the final tracklist), and they fail to do justice the skyscraper expectations Drizzy stans have been riding. They’re good tracks – “Summer Sixteen” would make a sick mixtape cut, “Pop Style” uses Jay Z in the only possible remaining way you can use Jay Z (by not giving him a verse), and “One Dance” will be a summer anthem – but these aren’t singles from an album that’s supposed to be our generation’s biggest rapper’s career-best work. A lot can happen between now and April 29th – so let’s pray to the 6 god.

Radiohead: TBA – date TBA by Katie Nesser

Radiohead are a coy bunch. Without explicitly announcing their ninth LP, they’ve signalled its coming, acting like the prophets so many fans see them as. First came the festival dates, then the handful of announced shows. When they began registering new corporations, as they are for whatever reason wont to do before releasing a record, LP9 finally became a reality in my mind, and I got just a hint of the fangirlish excitement I felt for the band during their last album cycle, when I saw them live, cried a million tears, and on an unrelated, somewhat bizarre note, met Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips. But the full-on Radiohead hysteria began when news leaked that the band has filmed a music video with my favorite director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Each detail that Radiohead grants us just adds to my anticipation for an album about which I know nothing, musically. I’m just along for whatever ride Thom Yorke & Co. want to take us on.

Kanye West: Turbografx 16 – date TBA by Anthony Milki

It’s very possible this album doesn’t actually exist. The Life of Pablo had just dropped, it was slaying streaming records right off the bat, and Kanye probably hadn’t slept in a month – all we have to rely on is a tweet, one from a guy who’s been tweeting some things lately that we really shouldn’t be believing. On the other hand, considering that Kanye probably brought most of Pablo together during a superhuman stroke of inspired brilliance during the weeks right before the way-too-ambitious February 11th release date he promised (and, miraculously, Yeezy came through), and that he’s been working hard with his best puppet Kid Cudi and a few others, maybe he’s still in his own little world that only a select few are invited to create in, and maybe, just maybe, that’ll translate to another incredible album, and maybe Kanye’s about to go 8 for 8.

LCD Soundsystem: TBA – date TBA by Benina Stern

I am proud to admit that I spent my Friday night indoors watching the livestream of LCD Soundsystem’s Coachella set. I was floored by it. For a band I didn’t start loving until a few months after they broke up, I was reconciled with never seeing them live or do anything new again. And here they were, (relatively) live before me, jamming as if nothing has changed. And in a way, they haven’t. Their hypnotic, repetitive beats have a certain timelessness to them, that sound like they could have been created weeks ago, instead of over a decade ago.

We don’t necessarily have any details about the exact nature of LCD Soundsystem’s new stuff, except that it is a “record sometime this year,” and they didn’t play any new songs at Coachella. On Christmas Eve 2015, they released “Christmas Will Break Your Heart,” which carries a similar toned back, non-dancey, weary-then-crescendoing mood that their “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” has. Accompanying that single, James Murphy released a blog post a few weeks later detailing that he has so many songs that he wants to record, and him and two other members of LCD (Pat and Nancy) agreed to make another record. The creative impetus and surplus seems to have willed LCD Soundsystem back together, and I’m bubbling with excitement to see what five years has done to their musical processes.

James Blake: Radio Silence – date TBA by Alejandra Salazar

You’re killing me here, James, absolutely killing me. See, the thing about Radio Silence is that the LP is actually already finished. James Blake himself, as deadpan and nonchalant as ever, announced the news on his latest BBC1 residency: “It turned out great–quite long, but I’m really happy with it. It’s 18 tracks long. Yeah, one of the tracks is 20 minutes long, as well.”

Let that just sink in a bit. The fact that eighteen moody, soul-infused masterpieces of minimalist dubstep electronica are out there, probably just sitting on this man’s laptop, saved in a “Radio Silence” file folder tagged something like, “idk release date when i feel like it or whatever” — just let that really sink in. Add to that the fleeting, teasing rumors that big names like Kanye and Justin Vernon reportedly played a role in its production? My god, it’s infuriating.

But it’s also a mad genius move on Blake’s part that, knowing everything we know about his notoriously private persona and the drawn-out nature of his final cuts, actually seems very apropos. You can tell from his work; the guy’s all about the long game, all about deliberately organized chaos, all about making you wait and wait so when that drop hits or that synth buzzes or that vocal crescendos, it sounds all the better for it. Like his music, this album is all about the build-up. And like his music, I’m confident that London’s resident electro-crooner will deliver (take a listen to ‘Timeless’, his most recent single, and just try to tell me you don’t want to leave that playing on some kind of eternal, hypnotic loop). So, you know, I get it, James: patience is a virtue. Just don’t keep me waiting too long.

Chance the Rapper: TBA – date TBA by Anthony Milki

I’m a little bit peeved at Chance, but now that I think about it it’s almost entirely due to a potentially irrational interpretation of his “Mixtape 3 down the chimney” quip he added onto his “Sunday Candy” verse over at SNL a few weeks before Christmas. I texted friends, I spammed group messages, and I dropped my insider info during pickup games (between you and I, a Redditor was the secret source of my speculation); everyone had to get ready, because Chance’s mixtape was dropping on Christmas. It’s April, and we haven’t gotten it yet; but that’s okay, because the most notorious perfectionist and shameless delayer is none other than Chano from 79’s creative daddy, Kanye West.

“Angels” and “Somewhere In Paradise,” the only two songs we can assume have made mixtape 3, are some of the year’s best hip-hop tracks. There’s no question Chance is working, and there’s no question he’s cooking up something brilliant, everyone’s just dying for that legal and free download to show up on ChanceRaps.com, and to make matters agonizingly worse, he posted a blurry picture with at this point the unethically elusive Frank Ocean (wearing a Napster shirt in 2016; so retro). The mixtape might come this month, it’ll probably be Chance’s best work yet, and it’ll probably be especially stacked on the features (we’ve already got Jeremih, R. Kelly, and Saba through two singles). Maybe Chance will inherit and recycle best bud and mentor Kanye’s scrapped Good Ass Job album title (on “Ultralight Beam,” he raps “Let’s do a good ass job on Chance 3” and also tweeted this) and would officially anoint himself the king of rap’s rightful Chicago heir.

Frank Ocean: TBA (Boys Don’t Cry) – date TBA by Ned Hardy

It’s been almost four years since Frank Ocean came down to Earth to bless us with his major label debut, the undeniable Channel Orange. Four years is a long time. So what’s he been up to since 2012? Well, he made a song with Beyoncé, he did a few well-placed Kanye features, and he recorded a bizarreass song for a sneaker company with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and, uh, Diplo.

Ocean also deleted all of his social media accounts except for his Tumblr, where he’s posted his only solo performances of his absence: two characteristically cryptic tracks. “Memrise” is a lofi sketch of a song, its gently hummed intro (reminiscent of the Channel Orange bonus track “Golden Girl”) leading into a staccato spoken-word segment: “I memorized your / body / exposed / I could / fuck you / all night / long / from a / memory / alone.” Even in its presumably-unfinished state, “Memrise” is as breathtakingly intimate as any of Ocean’s best songs.

The other track — “(At Your Best) You Are Love” — is a cover of the Isley Brothers’ original, later made doubly famous by the late Aaliyah. Ocean’s version is stunning, his aching falsetto reaching its greatest heights yet before falling gently over a bed of softly lit keys. But don’t be fooled by the straightforward veneer. Sure, Ocean sticks to the OG lyrics, but with 20 seconds left, his vocals suddenly drop out and we’re left with a funk band coda that sounds a lot like a higher-BPM version of the Isley Brothers’ original backing track. It goes without saying that Frank Ocean is nothing if not fundamentally enigmatic.

Whether or not either of these beauties will make it onto Ocean’s forthcoming sophomore record, allegedly titled Boys Don’t Cry, is anyone’s guess. (Also, that title… I’m really hoping that’s a Cure reference. Maybe we’re getting a Robert Plant feature?) Either way, expect this one soon. I won’t be shocked if Frankie comes through to soundtrack another hazy, glowing summer.

Image from here.