Leonard Cohen - Thanks for the Dance

The Guardian 100

(Columbia)
This posthumous album finds the poet and singer on reflective, insightful, deadpan form, ‘settling accounts of the soul’

After finishing You Want It Darker, which was released just 19 days before his death in 2016, aged 82, Leonard Cohen still wanted to add to his tower of song. Thus, he kept on writing and recording as life ebbed away, and the result is this beautiful posthumous collection. His songwriter son Adam has assembled a stellar cast of musicians, such as Daniel Lanois, Jennifer Warnes and Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, to do justice to the unfinished home recordings. However, the sparse, sublime instrumentation never takes the focus away from Cohen’s inimitable voice, which is lush, deadpan, warm and poetic, with a hint of frailty adding to the sense of a final statement.

Pitchfork 69

After the grand farewell of 2016's You Want It Darker, Cohen's son gathers his father's scraps and unfinished ideas and lovingly fleshes them out with help from collaborators like Beck, The National's Bryce Dessner and Feist.