By Rolling Stone. Her vocal tone, the intuitive melismas and rhythmic accents of which were built from training in flamenco for more than a decade, possesses a crystalline nature that in turn awakens emotions deep in the hearts of listeners. With her breakthrough album, El Mal Querer , she started heavily incorporating Auto-Tune — not to mask her voice, but to instead emphasize the nuanced texture of her performance, which fluidly shifts from ferocity to playfulness to sorrow.
While his hardcore-punk contemporaries were ranting about alienation and social ills, the Misfits frontman was crooning about Astro Zombies , infanticide , and teenagers from Mars in a rich, defiantly melodic voice that harked back to his heroes Elvis Presley , Jim Morrison, and Roy Orbison one of the legends he would later write for , along with Johnny Cash.
Though she leaned into an ASMR-like deadpan for her spooky debut album, she played with the timeless sorrow of s jazz and contemporary pop on her sophomore effort, Happier Than Ever , which also saw her releasing a cathartic belt on its title track. A Nigerian cultural giant, Burna Boy is the ambassador of Afrobeats as a global movement that can feel equally at home climbing the European charts and maintaining a subtle emotional connection with past African genres like highlife.
The Replacements frontman had a barbaric yap to match any musclebound hardcore psycho — but his ability to bring wit, deprecation, irony, and intimacy into that chaos made him the greatest Midwestern rock singer of the s. A tiny, biracial dynamo who wore braces and delivered her brainy lyrics about consumerist self-delusion in a gleefully unholy screech, Styrene was perhaps the most instantly arresting vocalist of Seventies punk. When she went solo with the lost classic Translucence , she proved just as startling, and even more personable, while singing something closer to lullabies.
Since the mid-Nineties, Anohni has possessed a singular place in pop music, placing her soulful, smooth wail amid lush-yet-agitated avant-pop as the leader of Antony and the Johnsons and in collaborations with the likes of Yoko Ono and Bryce Dessner. Before Baez, the masters of folk and country sang their mournful ballads with craggy or imperfect voices.
