There’s no pain exactly like losing a musician you love. Partaking in good art can’t help but feel like a communion between oneself and the work’s author, so even if we never get the chance to meet our favorite creators in real life, the loss of one feels deeply personal. Not to mention the collected weight of all those songs that will never be written, and concerts never performed. Add to this the complicated nature of mourning a public figure — whose private life and struggles are often known only to their family and friends — and, well, it’s just brutal.That’s why posthumous songs, while so often a source of strife between labels and artists’ estates, can be so soothing to us fans. They give us a chance to remember the musicians as they were (consider Sublime’s “What I Got”) or as they might be right now (Avicii’s “Heaven”). They let us feel grateful for what we had (Bob Marley’s “Give Thanks & Praises”) or pissed off over what we lost (Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”). Sometimes they play like a final missive from beyond (John Lennon’s “Woman”). Often they’re prophetic (Tupac’s “To Live and Die in L.A.”). And occasionally they’re just big, beatific shrugs (Mac Miller on “That’s Life”).Some of these songs were released within days of the artist’s passing, and most came within a year. But all of them feel imbued with some extra meaning, from the sad irony of the opener, Hank Williams’ “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but Time,” to the hard-fought optimism of the closer, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Music heals, so grab a tissue box and hit play.

In the dawning weeks of 2019, Spotify declared that “emo-rap” was the previous year’s fastest-rising genre. While the term had, by then, come to be associated with a fresh crop of post-genre, pro-feelings artists like XXXtentacion, Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, and Juice WRLD, back in the early ’00s it had a different association. Inspired by the artsy, socially conscious likes of Project Blowed out west and Native Tongues back east, a small but creatively mighty wave of experimentally minded MCs and beatmakers had emerged in the ’90s from the underground tape-trading scene. By the decade’s end, they had congealed into a handful of seminal record label/collectives, each with its own regional flavor but all often derisively referred to by hip-hop purists as “emo-rap.”

The brashest camp was anticon., whose members had relocated from various points across the U.S. to Oakland, where wordsmiths like Sole, Doseone, and WHY? basked in the Bay Area’s scrappy boho-hippie vibe and kitchen-sink approach to art. The coolest by far was New York’s Definitive Jux, headed by El-P (who’d later become half of Run the Jewels) and heralded by Cannibal Ox, a duo so captivatingly cutting-edge that Elvis Costello was known to name-drop them in interviews. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Rhymesayers Entertainment held it down for the blue-collar, lovelorn, bad-childhood types—a lane that Atmosphere carved out brilliantly before finding broader success on (in hindsight rather fittingly) the Warped Tour circuit.

There were posse projects and crossovers (cLOUDDEAD, Deep Puddle Dynamics), rivalries and outliers (Nova Scotia’s Buck 65, Los Angeles’ Busdriver). But whether it’s Sage Francis tracing his sister’s self-inflicted wounds on “Inherited Scars,” Alias converting depression into revelation on “Watching Water,” or Aesop Rock bundling a life’s worth of observation into one glorious tumble of words, this is, was, and forever will be the original emo-rap.

Over time, Anderson .Paak grew to become the kind of artist who can stack his albums with cameos from the likes of Smokey Robinson, Brandy, and a posthumous Nate Dogg — actually, that’s all on his 2019 LP Ventura, and we didn’t even mention the André 3000 verse that tears up the set’s astral-funk opener, “Come Home.” The kid from Oxnard, California, earned his clout. Becoming Dr. Dre’s pet prodigy surely helped, but .Paak paid it forward as a hugely prolific and effective guest MC and hook slinger for years.This playlist culls the man’s best features from a list that stretches into the 70s. .Paak is a shape-shifter, sliding between melodic rhymes and swaggerful singing with the same ease that allows him to coast through an alt-R&B dreamscape (“Realla”) one minute and lead a rip-roaring Afrobeat band the next (“Black Hole”). Even after becoming a star, .Paak popped up on others’ cuts, and always with the mood to match. There he is, playing a starry-eyed philosopher over FlyLo’s far-out electronica. With Freddie Gibbs, he’s a soulful-but-cold gangsta documentarian. For T.I. in grown-ass-man mode, .Paak’s a world-weary lover.That versatility doesn’t mean these songs don’t stick together. .Paak’s unmistakable voice is a powerful binding agent, of course — he tends to steal the show — but so is his penchant for appearing on tracks that feel outré and in-the-pocket, old school yet future-leaning, easy to get on the first listen but packed with enough style and substance that repeat plays are a must. .Paak knows how to pick a good collaborator, but considering the broad range of folks he’s worked with, we’d like to think that in addition to bringing his own magic to the studio, he’s pulling something special out of damn near everyone he meets.Photo credit: Israel Ramos

In 1999, Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun bewitched a surprisingly broad swath of music lovers with its heavily textural, exceedingly patient approach to orchestral art rock. But hidden within the gossamer folds of that gorgeous album was something even more novel: lyrics sung in the band’s very own made-up language, Hopelandic. Though indistinguishable for most fans from the group’s native Icelandic, this idioglossia became an attractive part of the Sigur Rós mythos—elaborate world-building is, after all, catnip to pop-culture obsessives (shout out to the MCU).As it turns out, Jónsi and co. were neither the first nor the last to experiment with bespoke jargon. Not all have taken it as far, but some have gone farther: ’70s French prog-rockers Magma record exclusively in Kobaïan, a language from a fictional planet that was apparently also visited by Japan’s ’80s-founded Ruins, who howl in a Kobaïan derivative. New ager Enya adopted her Gaelic-inspired “Loxian” after singing in Elvish for The Lord of the Rings. Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard sometimes slips into a vocabulary she says she shares exclusively with God.On the chiller end of the spectrum, you’ll find Elton John and Talking Heads employing fake speech in Dadaist thought experiments. And off-kilter interpretations, like Tom Waits grunting in German-esque on “Kommienezuspadt,” or Italy’s Adriano Celentano aping American English on 1972’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” There’s a lot of quasi-Latin chant out there, but there’s only so much meditation music one playlist can handle, so we skipped some of those songs to make room for a little novelty: Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping in Huttese, and a certain gang of yellow fellows covering the Village People.

On October 11, Lightning Bolt return with their seventh album, Sonic Citadel, reminding us of the aural brutality—and, you know, creative vibrancy—that a couple of weirdos from Rhode Island can wreak with just a drum kit, a bass guitar, a mic, and a mask. Like a lot of power duos, the band found fame amid the 2000s indie-rock boom. Also like a lot of them, Lightning Bolt are still going—stomping and screeching like a two-headed dinosaur ripping its way through a modern era in which even bedroom records can feel overproduced. This set pulls together 25 songs from as many duos. Most pairs hail from the 2000s, bookended (chronologically) by the grinding ’90s grunge of Local H and the 2019 post-everything electro-whatever of Twenty One Pilots.

It’s an eclectic lineup. There are bluesy bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys, party destroyers like Death From Above 1979 and Japanther, folk-inspired acts like Wye Oak and Two Gallants, metalheads Early Man and Jucifer, psych-poppers The Holydrug Couple, dream-poppers Giant Drag, and even capital-P pop-poppers like Matt and Kim. What’s consistent among them, though, is that each outfit sounds greater than the sum of its parts (typically drums and either guitar or bass), and most play loud and hard. Maybe their leanness makes them extra mean. Maybe they’ve just got something to prove. Either way, the virtues of the power duo aren’t celebrated enough. Hit play here to make amends.

‍Photo Credit: Scott Alario