I’m excited to present my installment of RIFF’s year-end staff lists of the best albums of 2018. This year was one of transition and experimentation for artists, and I’ve used fairly simple criteria to narrow down my top 10 albums. These are the ones I found myself loading up…

The road wasn’t easy for  Pennsylvania Grammy-winning hard rockers Halestorm as they entered the studio to begin writing and recording their fourth studio album. Unhappy with the initial direction of the material, frontwoman Lzzy Hale and co. scrapped everything, regrouped, refocused and returned with a different mindset. The result…