Panic! At The Disco Pray For The Wicked

Brendon Urie is the star of his own ongoing, over the top, show-stopping broadway production. At least, that's essentially been the overarching conceptual tone of his band Panic! At the Disco since at least 2011's Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! -- and that tone definitely informs his sixth studio album, 2018's Pray for the Wicked. It's a conceptual notion that also made 2016's surprisingly affecting Frank Sinatra-goes-emo-crooner masterpiece Death of a Bachelor such an unexpected joy. In many ways, Pray for the Wicked feels like a companion album to its predecessor, informed as much by '90s R&B and hip-hop as it is Urie's love of driving, hooky pop/rock. Produced once again by Jake Sinclair, it's a bombastically overstuffed production, full of pounding marching-band beats, tidal-wave synths, horns that punch at bright angles, and a DJ's penchant for twisting and reconfiguring arrangements with Thanos-like disregard for human physics. Throughout it all, Urie paints himself with