Eighteen tracks from an album about therapy, generational trauma and the impossibility of being anybody's saviour. This is not an easy record and it was not meant to be. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, 2022 Kendrick Lamar had not released an album in five years when this arrived in May 2022, and it is the most difficult thing he has made. Where To Pimp a Butterfly was a public reckoning with race and fame, Mr. Morale turns almost entirely inward: infidelity, therapy, his father, his mother's trauma, his own inherited damage, and an explicit refusal of the role his audience had assigned him. The framing device is a therapy session, and Whitney Alford — his partner — and the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle both appear as voices. It is structured as a double album, and it is genuinely uncomfortable in places, on purpose. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Album and divided his audience more than anything he has done. What to listen for "United In Grie...

Twenty-five tracks from a singer, pianist, arranger and multi-instrumentalist who was, at his peak, the most musically accomplished man in R&B. Brian McKnight Brian McKnight is from Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist household singing in church — his older brother Claude McKnight founded the a cappella group Take 6 , which tells you a great deal about the harmonic standards in that family. What separates him from his peers is musicianship. McKnight writes, arranges, produces and plays multiple instruments, and his records are built on genuinely sophisticated harmony — the chord movement in his ballads owes more to jazz than to anything on R&B radio. He has sixteen Grammy nominations and no wins, which is its own kind of career. What to listen for "Back At One" is the signature record and a small marvel of construction — a counting song that never feels like a gimmick, with a bridge that lifts exactly where it...