Five years since the release of his critically acclaimed Pulitzer-winning album DAMN., rapper and storyteller Kendrick Lamar returns with the highly anticipated Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. The project is a stunning, intimate look at Lamar’s personal journey and confrontations with toxic masculinity, the cycle of sexual abuse, trans rights, mental health, and generational trauma. The first track, “United In Grief,” a heady and confessional banger, is the perfect lead-in to the revelations, or “truths,” Lamar works to unpack, all beginning with the rapper seeing a therapist. The fruits of his emotional labor continue in “Father Time,” with the rapper processing his wants and needs for paternal affirmation from his childhood and the resulting lessons he’s learned as a father of two: “I love my father for tellin’ me to take off the gloves / Cause everything he didn’t want was everything I was / And to my partners that figured it out without a father / I salute you, may your blessings be neutral to your toddlers.” And “We Cry Together” is not for the faint of heart, disguised as six minutes of a couple’s dispute, with an emotional performance from actress Taylour Paige, who shares her feelings on gender inequality, among other topics, in the entertainment industry and the larger surrounding world. Other standouts: “Auntie Diaries,” a provocative look into Lamar’s struggling acceptance of the trans community, and “Mother I Sober,” a profoundly introspective reflection on sexual trauma as seen through the experiences of his mother, his fiancée, abusers, and generations of the Black community.

Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known by her persona and stage name Ethel Cain, grew up in Perry, Fla., in a religious household, where Christianity grabbed ahold of her life the second she stepped into it. She came out to her family at age 12, and by her 20th birthday, had come out as trans. Thus, her relationship with religion is complicated, and this debut album explores the death and tragedy of Ethel Cain, her persona in an alternative, and the darkest, timeline of her life. The project is her magnum opus following three EPs, and is what Anhedönia hopes will be the “next great American record.” The album succeeds, and is an epic that takes on Southern Baptism and saccharine American sentiments, breaking it all down into all-too-American generational trauma. One of few pop-esque records on the otherwise broody gothic album, “American Teenager” critiques the realities of the American Dream and ties in Anhedönia’s own lived experiences with Christian sensibilities: “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American Dream.” Through Ethel, Anhedönia tackles a traumatic past of abuse, and in a Pitchfork interview, explains her negativity about the Christian religion in her music: “Everything I do through my art is a way to get my thumb on top of what’s happened to me in the past, because now I’m in control and I can’t be hurt by it again.”

The Smile is a supergroup of superstars. Members are rock veterans Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and jazz group Sons of Kemet’s drummer Tom Skinner, and from behind the scenes, Radiohead’s trusty producer, Nigel Godrich. The collective has thus been accurately dubbed a Radiohead side project, and at six years since Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, The Smile’s debut project comes with a side of hefty expectations right off the bat. The first track, “The Same,” leads listeners into an unsettling and fragmented ambience, and into themes that continue throughout the project. Yorke’s desperate and exasperated verses in “The Same” (“We are all the same”) plead with a crazy world to abandon their differences and join together. The other tracks warn of a world that continues on the same stubborn path: “You Will Never Work In Television Again” is the band’s scathing critique of corruption, referencing the crimes of the former mega film producer Harvey Weinstein, “The Smoke” paints a picture of a world ravaged by climate change and Yorke’s unease and restlessness with the state of a society seemingly unbothered by it all.

Florence Welch, lead vocalist of the band Florence + The Machine, is upended by her desire to pursue motherhood and a world that’s not kind to women or mothers. In the project’s first single and track “King,” she struggles over how children could fit into her lifestyle, how she could juggle her music and kids. A staunch critic of the burdens society has placed on her kind, Florence continues her campaign against patriarchy in the satirical “Dream Girl Evil” and “Girls Against God,” which ties in her frustrations during COVID-19 lockdowns. Among other standout tracks: “The Bomb,” where we see Florence, notorious for her tendency to fall back on feelings of loneliness, and in Mitski-esque fashion, consider taking a break from her music career.

Six years after forming One Direction, the biggest boyband in the world, on the British talent show The X Factor, each member left in 2016 to chase a solo career. The cheeky, charismatic Harry Styles, in particular, hasn’t looked back. The megastar’s third, and latest, studio album introduces refreshing yet easily assimilable plays into the radio stratosphere. With an undying and loyal fanbase that’s followed him through his teens to his now-late-20s, the status of Harry’s House on the charts was a little iffy in the days leading up to release. But now the full force of the Briton’s domination can be felt simply by turning to any station, sure to be blasting a track off the quirky and danceable project. Standouts: the infectious and jazzy “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” the sincere and therapeutic “Matilda,” and the wildly popular “As It Was.”