Summer school: Albums to catch up on from the first half of the year

Country music has been going through a notable revolution in the past few years. While "country pop" had always had a bad rep, the "pop" side has been leaning more and more towards actual pop music: drum machines, synth pads and catchy choruses. Yet it's still considered country, amazingly. Fittingly, it's about time we had Carly Rae Jepsen-level pop music, and it's arrived in the form of Kacey Musgraves' "Golden Hour." Sweet and earnest when it needs to be ("Rainbow"), propulsive in a Ryan Adams-kind of way when it feels like it (see: opener "Slow Burn"), and full-bore disco 'cos why not ("High Horse"), this doesn't only feel like Musgraves' magnum opus, it's also an album that can be loved by country hardcores and pop passersby alike. Glorious.

Electronic artist George FitzGerald has found a real sweet spot for his emotional, dancefloor-ready grooves. Never once skipping with the backbeat but wisely eschewing modern EDM conventions, FitzGerald's second album, "All That Must Be," is a blissed-out, propulsive set that's even better than his first, with collaborations with the likes of Bonobo and Tracey Thorne just being icing on the cake. The year's not even over and it may already be 2018's best dance release.

While the New Zealand-bred indie rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra have always had a way of marrying a love of noisy guitars to immaculate pop hooks, "Sex & Food" is something different. Expanding on their last album "Multi-Love" in a phenomenal way, the group here gets a little funky, adding a touch of Grateful Dead-styled jam band liquid grooves to their disco-ready creations, resulting in an album that sounds like a dorm room, a disco, and a sexy space odyssey all at once. The band has grown over the years, but this is already their most concise and consistent album.

Coming from the same Chicago stomping grounds that have yielded talents like Chance the Rapper and Noname, Saba first fell into the national spotlight when he was featured on a pair of Chance songs: 2013's "Everybody's Something" and 2015's "Angels." Yet Saba has always been more self-reflective and serious on his solo works, and on "CARE FOR ME," he has production to match his sometimes stoic observations of his life. Although Chance does show up for a guest verse, the star of the show is assuredly Saba, and from the sounds of it, he's just getting started.

There's a good chance you haven't heard of 24-year-old Alice Ivy, but this Melbourne DJ and producer has learned well from her sample-based dance heroes like The Avalanches, Daft Punk, and Skylar Spence. Spoken word vocals get mixed with dynamic beats, inventive arrangements, and a spirit of four-on-the-floor joy. At times accidentally (and wonderfully) recalling the likes of U.K. quirk-dance maestros Saint Etienne, "I'm Dreaming" is an album that came out in February but sounds like the perfect soundtrack for just about anyone's summer.

Say what you will about Keith Urban, but the man is committed to following his muse wherever it may go. While still being one of the biggest country stars in the universe, his embrace of electronic and dance elements on his 2016 record "Discord" alienated a few fans (while also winning new ones), so for "Graffiti U," Urban decided to double down on his new direction and give us rave-ready jams with a country bent. It's all still traditional pop stuff, but opening number "Coming Home" has a beat that would sound great if given to a hip-hop artist... but it's Keith Urban turning it into a country stomp. He's a man of contradictions, and love it or hate it, those contradictions at least make his music interesting.

You can love him or hate him (both options are completely acceptable in our eyes), but you can't deny him. Already armed with the biggest sales debut of the year, the almost-rap sounds of this almost-rapper have genuinely struck a nerve. You may not like his looks, but his way of crafting relatable, emotional tales have found an audience well beyond his megaton radio smashes, parsing together clues of who the songs might be about and how they connect to earlier releases. His fans find him inspirational, and something tells us he's not going away anytime soon.

The best part about following Boston's Lake Street Dive over the years has been hearing how much more confident they get with every new release. While they're best known for their Southern-indebted brand of blue-eyed soul, "Free Yourself Up" finds the group going straight for the full-on rock numbers that we've always known they've had inside them. The incredible "Dude" — about being with a guy who treats his girlfriend more like his mommy — has great lines about how they used to "kick it like Joe and Obama" while letting singer Bridget Kearney's wail take front and center. It's liberating, fresh, funny, and unafraid to get emotional when it needs to. Stellar stuff.

While Jeff Rosenstock has made quite the name for himself as a solo artist following the dissolution of his incredibly literate punk rock group Bomb the Music Industry!, those pining for BTMI's old sound need to look no further than the sophomore album of Spanish Love Songs, which features singer Dylan Slocum's incredibly pointed lyrics about the banality of life and the pointlessness of love. There's optimism and humor here — often to offset the cascading waves of thundering rock guitars the band brings in — but Slocum's emotive, plain-screaming voice brings his words to life and makes them believable. If this all sounds heavy, don't worry, Slocum knows, as he says in the opening lyric to the song "The Boy Considers His Haircut": "My dad says that I'd probably have more fans / If I could learn to sing about some happier s---."

Virtually no one knows who Shawn Lee is, but in some ways, he's probably OK with that. When not putting out countless albums under his own name or with his famous Ping Pong Orchestra, he's bringing his multi-instrumentalist talents to productions for the likes of Amy Winehouse, Lana del Rey, Alicia Keys, and many others. For his second collaboration with Mama's Gun singer Andy Platts under the guise of Young Gun Silver Fox, Lee and Platts continue their quest to make the best Hall & Oates album that never existed, carrying the groovy vibes of 2016's "West End Coast" to its next step: full-bore disco and pop-soul. If you like escapism in your pop music, look no further than this breezy little number.

The singers are called Janet Planet and Sugar Bones. The album was recorded (over the course of several years) at a place called The Puzzle Basement. It may sound odd, but that's just the way this Australian quartet likes it, mixing quick drums, group vocals, and sugary basslines to create a sassy, flashy, party-ready album. The incredible single "Boyfriend (Repeat)" is about being bored in a relationship where the other guy just takes everything so seriously, and goodness is that groove the logical extension of both the Talking Heads and Deee-Lite. The whole album is full of bubblegum pop like this and feels like the year's best guilty pleasure LP.

While everyone knows The B-52's for their party-pop brand of songs, a lot of people forget that their early albums had gritty, dry New Wave guitars that helped ground their oddball anthems. Few bands are able to capture the group's early charm (although many have tried), but Washington, D.C.'s Flasher have come closer than anyone else, taking their unique brand of post-Dismemberment Plan guitar rock and making it something more emotional, relatable, and fun. Their debut album is remarkably fun, but those chord changes, those incredible guitar lines — these feel like they've been plucked out of another era, which might explain why all of their songs clock in at under four minutes. Couldn't ask for anything better.

What can't Janelle Monáe do? Discovered by OutKast's Big Boi, signed by Puff Daddy, and a friend and disciple of Prince, Monáe could've done anything she wanted to with music, but ended up taking a break to star in two Oscar-nominated films ("Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures"). After years away from the mic, she's back, proudly pansexual, and liberated in an album that's flush with clever winks and homages to her influences. "Take a Byte" curbs the guitars from David Bowie's "Let's Dance" while her stellar single "Make Me Feel" is the best rewrite of Prince's "Kiss" anyone has ever attempted. Welcome back, Janelle — can't wait to hear this "Dirty Computer" power-up in a live setting.

Although she's been putting out music since 2012, the Colombian-born Kali Uchis has been making a lot of waves recently, finding her place under the weird wings of Tyler, The Creator, who had her guest on his pop single "See You Again." Yet her debut album, "Isolation," is a remarkable amalgam of funk, pop, and bossa nova, wholly unique but smart and sly in its presentation. Her voice is lovely and unassuming, but her personality on out-there Casio creations like "In My Dreams" help ground what may be the best R&B record of the year. Don't sleep on Kali.

While Simian Mobile Disco have had a nice sustained career in the indie-dance realm, few could've predicted they'd make a left turn as drastic as they would on "Murmurations," wherein the group collaborates with the female Deep Throat Choir over the chorus of an entire album, taking their knowledge of beats and loops and structures and marrying it to songs that feature the Choir front and center, making for a heady, lucid, dreamlike experience that is unlike anything they've ever attempted before. It's fascinating stuff, and a quick listen to "Caught in a Wave" is enough to silence any doubters.

Alexandre Kassin has been Brazil's producer du jour for some time, putting his name behind countless artists and styles, showing great genre flexibility while still keeping everything fundamentally Brazillian in focus. For his latest solo effort "Relax," Kassin just goes all-in, throwing horns, boom-clap beats, jazz licks and whatever else he can think of at the wall — and amazingly, it all sticks. Sometimes it's disco, sometimes it has elements of samba to it, but at all times, it is one of the most compelling world-pop releases to have come out this year.

While Kendrick Lamar is only tagged on a handful of numbers, King Kendrick's fingerprints are all over this remarkable soundtrack to the year's biggest standalone superhero movie. Black Panther is a distinct character, so it makes sense that the soundtrack is just as compelling. It's not a full-bore new Kendrick album, but his voice jumps in and out of many tracks, introducing and ad-libbing songs as he sees fit. The singles are smashes, but our favorite track might be the down-and-dirty chase number that is Vince Staples' "Opps [ft. Yugen Blakrok]."

What made Cardi B — and by extension, her triumph of a first single, "Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)" — so remarkable is her personality. No one doubted her talents as a rapper, but she endeared herself by presenting her true, honest self — not a fake, put-on personality. Her braggadocio was grounded, which is why her first full-length album proper, "Invasion of Privacy," was so surprising: she revealed complex layers, telling stories of her past and how she used to strip at a club located across from the school she once attended. Dripping with guest verses and fun beats, this "Invasion" works because of the beating heart underneath all the bluster.

Will Toledo had been cranking out lo-fi, hand-crafted indie rock albums for years, and finally broke into critical circles with 2016's longing "Teens of Denial.`" Yet, now that he's toured, has a band, and has access to studios, he felt it was time to right a past wrong, and take his cult-classic 2011 effort "Twin Fantasy" and re-record it from scratch. With a fresh coat of paint but all the emotional urgency of the original, "Twin Fantasy" has proven to be a striking, vital, and cathartic rock suite about two teen boys falling in love. Some of the songs stretch to over 10 minutes, but as he builds up the stakes and the band takes center-stage, you won't want to miss out on a second of it.

Austin's Charlie Martin and Will Taylor have been hinting at a second Hovvdy album for some time, so to finally see it come into fruition is nothing short of extraordinary. Reminiscent of the hushed pop of early Death Cab for Cutie/Barsuk Records releases, the fellas' plaintive voices and recorded-in-a-basement production create an emotional world all its own, one where only a few light guitar strums is all it takes to break your heart, make you fall in love, and go through a rambling group of emotions all at once.

When's a good time for a new Superchunk album? Oh, just about any time. Recorded in a rush following the anger the group felt after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Merge Records founders decided to make this album quickly, simply, and directly, showing no signs of tamping down their hard rock urges after decades of being in the business. Guests like Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, and Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt help add to this musical middle finger to the current administration, and even as the band's members hit the ripe old age of 50, they've never sounded as youthful or defiant as they do here.