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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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A Seat at the Table

Solange

93

Museum-worthy art that heals, homing in on the Black female experience—especially her own.

“Fall in your ways so you can wake up and rise,” Solange sings in the intro track of her third album. The line encapsulates the journey of the then 30-year-old artist—formerly known as Beyoncé Knowles’ little sister—emerging from an eight-year hiatus from music and recognised as a bona fide visionary in her own right.

“Look at the control that she has, the power in the nuance, in the quiet. That’s just as powerful as loud horns and belting.”

Lizzo

On cuts like “F.U.B.U.”, Solange centres Black empowerment; on “Don’t Wish Me Well”, she pores over personal growing pains and what is left behind. Eight interludes weave her stories together, featuring narration from her parents, Mathew and Tina Knowles, as well as Master P. Other collaborators include Lil Wayne, Sampha, The-Dream and Raphael Saadiq, who initially sent Solange the instrumental for what would become “Cranes in the Sky” and went on to produce eight of the album’s tracks. The 21-song set is museum-worthy art that heals, homing in on the Black female experience, inextricable from Solange’s own struggles and triumphs.

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Flower Boy

Tyler, The Creator

92

Embracing the art of emotional bloodletting—and setting rap in a bold new direction.

Even when he was the enfant terrible of underground hip-hop, Tyler, The Creator’s most provocative and irony-soaked albums still provided windows into his anxiety and self-loathing. But his fourth solo album, 2017’s Flower Boy, was the moment Tyler fully embraced his role as bloodletting diarist, stripping away the appeals for shock and fully embracing expressions of lovesickness and loneliness. He emerges as a pan-genre auteur, as likely to spit rhymes as croon in a Pharrell-ian falsetto, landing somewhere at the intersection of hip-hop, neo-soul and chilled jazz.
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In many ways, Flower Boy was prescient about where music was going as a whole, thanks to early appearances from future hitmakers like Steve Lacy and Kali Uchis. Though Tyler surrounds himself with a packed guest list of friends (Frank Ocean), heroes (Pharrell Williams) and rap superstars (A$AP Rocky, Lil Wayne, ScHoolboy Q), Flower Boy is still a deeply personal statement from a one-of-a-kind artist. It just happened to have set hip-hop in a bold new direction.

Flower Boy by Tyler, The Creator