NPR Music

This week's mix of essential new songs includes a surprising collaboration between Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, Dan Deacon without the vocal effects, M. Ward and more.

A posthumous release from Mac Miller, Halsey's Manic and Little Big Town's Nightfall top our shortlist for the best new albums out this week.

Featured Releases:
1. Bombay Bicycle Club — Everything Else Has Gone Wrong
Featured Song: "Is It Real?"
2. The Innocence Mission — See You Tomorrow
Featured Song: "The Brothers Williams Said"
3. Halsey — Manic
Featured Song: "You Should Be Sad"
4. Little Big Town — Nightfall
Featured Song: "Sugar Coat"
5. Mac Miller — Circles
Featured Songs: "Blue World" and "That's On Me"
6. Mura Masa — R.Y.C.
Featured Song: "Teenage Headache Dream"
7. 070 Shake — Modus Vivendi
Featured Song: "Divorce"
8. Alice Boman — Dream On
Featured Song: "Who Knows?"
9. Bill Fay — Countless Branches
Featured Song: "Filled With Wonder Again"

Other notable albums out on Jan. 17: A Girl Called Eddy — Been Around; Algiers — There Is No Year; And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead — X: The Godless Void and Other Stories; David Dondero — The Filter Bubble Blues; Della Mae — Headlight; Holy F*** — Deleter; The Marcus King Band — El Dorado; Of Montreal — UR FUN; Pinegrove — Marigold; Theophilus London — Bebey; Whyte Horses — Hard Times

The annual festival in New York gathers a dozen bands from around the world to shake up your listening habits.

On this edition of All Songs Considered you'll hear extraordinary music from South Korea's Ak Dan Gwang Chil, the sweet voice of Senegalese Cheikh Lō, the husky sounds of Algerian rai music from Sofiane Saidi & Mazalda, wild distorted Kurdish wedding music from the Tufan Derince Trio, powerful vocals from France and the band San Salvador, and La Chica's swooning, arty electronica via France and Venezuela.

Taking us on this musical journey to give context and insight is NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas, Afropop Worldwide's Banning Eyre and WFMU's Rob Weisburg, host of "Transpacific Sound Paradise." Together, we share our favorite discoveries from globalFEST 2019.

Our sprint through the week's best new albums returns with music from the genre-bending artist known as Poppy, Irish singer-songwriter David Keenan, Echosmith, Field Music and more.

Featured Albums:
1. Poppy - I Disagree
Featured Song: "Fill the Crown"
2. Alexandra Savior - The Archer
Featured Song: "Saving Grace"
3. David Keenan - A Beginner's Guide to Bravery
Featured Song: "Unholy Ghost"
4. Georgia - Seeking Thrills
Featured Song: "24 Hours"
5. Echosmith - Lonely Generation
Featured Song: "Lonely Generation"
6. Craven Faults - Erratics and Unconformities
Featured Song: "Slack Sley & Temple"
7. Field Music - Making A New World
Featured Song: "Money is A Memory"

Other notable releases for Jan. 10: Apocalyptica — CELL-O; Beach Slang — The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City; Hawktail — Formations; Josephine — Music is Easy; Mick Jenkins — The Circus; Selena Gomez — Rare

Hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton look back at the first year of the program, which turns 20 years old this month.

On January 3, 2000, All Songs Considered became National Public Radio's first online-only program. The show's origins came from the interest of those little music snippets played between news stories. As director of All Things Considered at the time, choosing those music "buttons" was Bob Boilen's job. The amount of mail that came his way inquiring about those buttons was astonishing. It just seemed our audience was starved for new and exciting music, and so began our journey.

On this episode of All Songs Considered, we listen back to some of the early music we played on the program. We'll paint a picture of what it was like to connect to the internet in the year 2000, how we choked people's bandwidth by producing a multimedia show filled with not only music but photographs and text. We'll also look at what it meant for NPR to take a chance on doing "a music show for your computer" in the days before iPods, iTunes and YouTube. At the time, when it came to music, the internet was mostly used to download songs illegally so you could burn a CD.

NPR Music's Lars Gotrich recounts 2019 with psychedelic noise-rock from Brazil, icy minimalism from Sweden, bonkers punk from Boston and anthemic heavy metal from Fresno.

Taylor Swift, Jenny Lewis, Tarriona "Tank" Ball, Lucy Dacus and more special guests join hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton for their annual holiday party. What could possibly go wrong?

All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton count down the top 20 albums of the year as selected by NPR listeners in our annual poll. The clear message in 2019? Love rules.

Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X dominated the headlines this year, but 2019 was much more than that. We look back at the music we'll remember most and the marks it left on our cultural landscape.

As we listened back to the past year in music we heard a lot of the cultural and political angst you'd expect in a turbulent (and relentless) news cycle. But the albums that seemed to resonate the most in 2019 were more personal and inward looking, overflowing with love and defiant optimism. Sharon Van Etten reflected on motherhood, Amanda Palmer shared stories of survival and David Bazan, back as Pedro the Lion for the first time in 15 years, returned to his childhood, making the personal universal. Brittany Howard wrote songs of healing on an album she named after and dedicated to her sister who died at the age of 13, while the members of the Rwandan group The Good Ones sang songs of forgiveness in the wake of unspeakable genocide.

For other artists, 2019 was a year of renewal. Angel Olsen, Michael Kiwanuka, Sleater-Kinney, Raphael Saadiq and more all reinvented their sound, pushing themselves in dramatic new directions as a testament to the resilience and restlessness of the creative spirit.

The soul musician behind one of the year's best albums, the heartwrenching Jimmy Lee, spoke with NPR music critic Rodney Carmichael as part of NPR's Tiny Desk Fest, a special four-night series of Tiny Desk concerts at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Saadiq shared stories about his brothers' battle with addiction, the origins of D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," and what it's like to play two Tiny Desk concerts 10 years apart.