The Triumph of the Weird

1. Billie Eilish, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’

The weird outsider became a popular girl in 2019. The songs of Billie Eilish, 17, are death-haunted and depressive, by turns arrogant and anxious, mocking and desperate. Yet they became mass singalongs, aided by Eilish’s busily maintained, anti-fashion social media presence. Eilish’s sound understands how adolescence can feel like a horror movie: the constantly looming suspense, the way the ordinary is suddenly pierced by the ghastly or the absurd. Her music often whispers, but it’s hardly soothing. Quiet moments are shattered by creepy sound effects or loud intrusions, while her breathy vocals — hushed enough for ASMR — often carry bitter thoughts. The show-tune shapeliness of her melodies is often a sardonic frame for grim sentiments, to be faced with a ballooning bass line and a self-conscious smirk.

2. Brittany Howard, ‘Jaime’

Instead of making a third album with Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard went solo on “Jaime,” creating a candid autobiography in funk. Her songs are decisively personal, detailing struggles with racism, faith, desire and her own self-sabotage, while the music is gleefully experimental, playing with sounds and structures and taking chances just because she can. With a voice that can go to the roadhouse, the church or deeply private places, she exorcises troubles with the music’s sheer pleasure.

3. Santana featuring Buika, ‘Africa Speaks’

Carlos Santana revved up his band with grooves adapted from Africa and the Caribbean, jamming live in the studio. He pushed his guitar tone to bite and claw, and — even better — he found a guest singer and lyricist who could ride atop that passionate ferocity: Buika, a singer from Spain with roots both in flamenco and in her parents’ birthplace, Equatorial Guinea. In multiple languages, Buika addresses hard times and the turmoil of love as Santana’s band ignites.

4. Sudan Archives, ‘Athena’

The debut album by the songwriter, singer, violinist and producer Sudan Archives (born Brittney Parks) carries the potential of her homemade EPs even further. Loops of her beats and her raw violin lines are still the core of her music, but collaborating producers add new possibilities: wilder counterpoint, psychedelic hazes, orchestral cushioning. As she sings about self-invention and self-discovery, she accomplishes exactly that in the music.

5. iLe, ‘Almadura’

The Puerto Rican songwriter Ileana Mercedes Cabral Joglar, who records as iLe, gets combative on her second album, “Almadura,” which translates as “Hard Soul” and puns on “armadura,” Spanish for armor. She assails colonialism, machismo, hypocrisy and hate, and praises Pan-American solidarity and traditions, in songs that balance pugnacity, elegance and lithe rhythms. Vintage Caribbean styles like bolero and rumba get 21st-century twists.

6. Bon Iver, ‘i,i’

Justin Vernon assembles Bon Iver’s songs ever so painstakingly, with a shifting array of collaborators, elaborate electronic manipulation and lyrics that often need decrypting. But what comes through all the convolutions is a paradoxically pastoral warmth: earnest, yearning melodies and music that rustles and burbles like a digitally enchanted forest.

7. Lana Del Rey, ‘Norman ____ Rockwell!’

Lana Del Rey distills her 21st-century California state of mind on an album that’s thoroughly high-concept behind its air of vulnerability. She presents herself as a latter-day Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, full of longing and devotion, supported by the naturalism of piano, guitars and string sections. But her lyrics also quote a litany of California musicians and song titles — constructing the state from its pop artifacts — and the longer a song extends, the more its sound wanders toward the surreal present. Del Rey suspends herself between emotion and well-wrought illusion.

8. Michael Kiwanuka, ‘Kiwanuka’

The British singer and songwriter Michael Kiwanuka seeks private and communal healing, or at least the possibility of hope, on his expansive third album, “Kiwanuka.” He sees pressure, violence and heartache all around him, yet he envisions putting them behind him. His soundstage is as broad as his ambitions, with choirs, horns, strings and echoes of late-1960s soul and psychedelia, while the grain in his voice is equal parts weariness and persistence.

9. Black Midi, ‘Schlagenheim’

Pounding, gnashing, jabbing and sneering — but also swerving suddenly into passages of intricate interplay — the English rock group Black Midi pulls together all the virtuosic and noisy impulses of post-punk, math-rock, jazz-rock fusion and progressive rock. Each song is a labyrinth with hairpin-turn episodes and lyrics full of dourly corrosive observations. The music feels energized and pulled taut by every apprehension of 2019.

10. 100 gecs, ‘1000 gecs’

The manic electronic pop of 100 gecs — the duo of Laura Les and Dylan Brady — usually feels like it’s running way too fast. Voices are pitched up; arrangements skid through changes of beat, texture, direction and volume, with the speed and arbitrariness of digital editing run amok. 100 gecs are kindred spirits to the PC Music collective in England and to the Kanye West of “Yeezus,” but even more prankish than either one. And now and then — between the whiz-bang musical one-liners and non sequiturs — they linger just long enough over an earworm of a pop verse to prove they could slow down and write more standard songs if they weren’t having so much fun.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .