Frank Ocean has approximated the mess of human memory on the staggering Blond(e), an album that represents a rebellion against record labels and against spelling but more than anything against musical convention. To nail the beauty and ache and confusion of combing through one’s own past, he liquified genre barriers, recorded his voice with a variety of distorting techniques, treated the entire concept of rhythm as optional, and ditched the pop directive to simplify life experiences into relatable, salable units. The results are intuitively moving and intellectually confounding: You’re mesmerized, then annoyed, then mesmerized, then crying, then crying, then hyped up, then crying, and so on.

It’s the kind of album that teaches you how to listen to it, and the ultimate lesson is simply about the person who made it. Ocean is vulnerable, perceptive, and arrogant at once. He’s trying to live up to certain ideals of purity, but cars and drugs and flesh still have their allure. And he’s left behind a lot of constraints—the most famous of them heteronormativity—but hasn’t solved the problem of human connection: “Wish we’d grown up on the same advice,” he says to some lover on “Self Control,” maybe the most heartbreaking line on a generally heartbreaking album. Entirely bridging the gulf between one person’s mind and another’s remains impossible, but it’s still the job of art’s great innovators to propose new ways to approach the task. That’s what Ocean has done.

2. Beyoncé, Lemonade

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The Lemonade era saw Beyoncé cement her credibility as social critic, political symbol, film director, businesswoman, publicity master, and possessor of Serena Williams’s phone number, but every achievement has been built on the unshakeable foundation of her brilliance as an entertainer. Her knack for locating the sound, the statement, and the aesthetic swerve that will be most fascinating for any given moment—and will remain fascinating on the strength of execution—has only grown stronger over the course of her career.

Which explains why Lemonade, even when considered separately from the many conversations it has inspired, is a thrill from front to back. These songs open up mysteries and slowly solve them, revel in cliffhangers and twists, and betray the same eye for stylistic juxtaposition that a veteran fashion-magazine editor might have. When Beyoncé tackles a new sound—rock on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” country on “Daddy Lessons,” spiritually drained dance-floor assassin on “Sorry”—she commits entirely. And if haters want to level accusations of self-seriousness, the pop idol most associated with professionalism and control answers with moments of giddy, rude humanity: “Suck on my balls, pause!”

Then there’s the content itself, so layered with relevance as to keep her omnipresent in the cultural conversation, from the Super Bowl “Formation” debut till now. A near-mythic story cycle gives new vibrancy to the theme of infidelity, further supercharged with intrigue by Beyoncé appearing to air out her very-public marriage. The accompanying film deftly connects that personal struggle to a social one, honoring black female resilience in the face of generations of disrespect. The message came at the right time: Solange, Jamila Woods, and others have since released strong albums carrying on not only Lemonade’s themes but also Lemonade’s insight that to change lives with music, you need music that people want to live with.