But in assembling the list of my favorite albums from 2025, what initially surfaced was a roundup of nine recordings by women artists. Robert Plant’s psychedelic folk gem “Saving Grace” was the only ...

Ironic, then, that such a shift seems to have been ushered in by a death — not of R&B proper, mind you, but of one of its greatest modern pacesetters: The Weeknd. Since 2011, the persona inhabited by ...