Albumism's 100 Best Albums of 2020

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

“I don’t know where it went, really,” Lianne La Havas tells Apple Music of the time between the release of her stunning second album *Blood*, in 2015, and her self-titled third record, delivered in 2020. “Lots was happening—and nothing.” In 2016 she toured with Coldplay (“Something I couldn’t not do”) and Leon Bridges (“extremely fun”), after which La Havas thought she’d settle down to write album number three. Two years later, she was still drawing a blank. “I was trying really hard, but I realized I couldn’t force it,” she says. “I just had to live my life a bit.” The inspiration came, at last, in 2019, in the form of a series of “big life changes—stuff in my personal life, family, relationships.” *Lianne La Havas* was finished before the year’s end. “Once I made those changes, it was the catalyst for the clarity of what I needed to write and how I needed to do it. Once I knew what to do, the process was quick.” The result is a record that harnesses the power of the bold, bass-imbued sounds of *Blood*—and then takes it up a level. The beats are heavier and the influences wider-ranging, from R&B (“my musical upbringing”) to Brazilian music (La Havas has been an avid fan for the last decade) and Radiohead, whose song “Weird Fishes” the singer gives her powerful take on midway through the album. “I feel like this is the first time my influences are more defined,” says La Havas. “But the album still sounds like me. It’s maybe the most me I’ve ever sounded, which is what I want.” *Lianne La Havas* is, too, a moving exploration of those seismic shifts that prompted the record’s inception and, in particular, the life cycle of a relationship. There’s the heady infatuation of those early days (“Read My Mind”), the devastating moment cracks begin to show (“Paper Thin”), and, finally, the slow, precarious process of putting yourself back together after a painful end (see “Sour Flower,” the album’s gorgeous, sprawling, jazz-imbibed outro). “This is my first album that is actually a full story where you can hear a beginning, middle, and an end,” says La Havas. She adds, as reassurance, “I’m all right now. Get to the last song on this album and you will know that I am totally fine!” More than that, this is the most self-assured the singer has ever sounded. “I’d lost a bit of confidence and got insecure about everything,” she says. “As I completed each piece of the story on this album, it made me a bit stronger. With each song, I realized that I could do it—that I could finish something I was proud of.” Let La Havas guide you through her triumphant album, track by track. **Bittersweet** “I started this song a long time ago and it was actually one of the contenders for my second album. This album is plotting a timeline, and lyrically this song is an overview of what’s to come. And the entire album is bittersweet—if it wasn’t self-titled, it would be called *Bittersweet*. Sonically, it’s also quite a statement. There’s nothing else really like it on the album, and it felt appropriate to start with this. As for the repetition of lyrics in this song: I really like poetry, and I was influenced by some of the poetry I was reading at the time and the idea of repeating a word to give it this whole different meaning.” **Read My Mind** “When I made this song, it made me feel slightly intoxicated. I wanted it to be reminiscent of that—like a night out where you meet someone and there\'s this hazy, wondrous, excited feeling that you can\'t quite describe. I worked with \[British songwriter and producer\] Bruno Major on this. He\'s just the most amazing guitarist, and when I heard the music, it just made me feel like I was on a date. So it had to be about what it\'s about. It’s got humor and lightness, but I wanted to be very literal in the right way about the overwhelming urge to give yourself away.” **Green Papaya** “A love letter, basically. You’ve got one another now and you want to make it a thing—to solidify the commitment in some way. It’s not really about physical love—it’s about making a home and doing all those things that come after the flirtatious infatuation. It\'s like, ‘Actually this could be a really great thing. And I want you to know that I believe it could be that.’ The whole track is very vulnerable—it’s hard to say those things for real at the best of times. That’s why sonically it felt best not to have any drums. I gave all the types of production that you can do a fair shot, but it just wasn’t the same.” **Can’t Fight** “There’s a little bit more humor here. It’s like when your conscience is talking to you. And because of the sound of the lilting guitar, it always felt like a cartoon conscience to me. It feels very animated, but with some quite serious themes at the center of it. I just wasn’t done being happy yet in this song. I was still very optimistic and everything is still pretty good. The music makes you bound a bit. I like how the ending came together—I don’t really do a lot of strings, and I’ve never been a string person. But with this one, because it’s so light-sounding with that quite serious content in the lyrics, I thought the strings brought that serious element to it. I think it ended up being the perfect balance.” **Paper Thin** “The very first song written for this album, but one of the last to be finished. I was falling asleep four years ago and I just heard that guitar part. It was like, ‘Should I get up? Should I record this? Should I just sleep on it?’ But I got up and thought about the lyric ‘paper thin.’ I heard all the chords for each section of the song, and I had the first line. It stayed that way for a long time. Anytime I would get a moment alone—say on a plane or something—the lyrics would start to make themselves apparent for the song. I think this one is maybe the most intimate and most vulnerable that I get, because the person is talking really candidly with the other person in the song. The pain is starting to show about how hard it can be when the person you\'re trying to love is maybe not in the same space as you, or maybe hasn\'t dealt with some things that they might need to deal with. I\'m not saying I\'m perfect. I\'m not saying the narrator is perfect. But it\'s recognizing the pain of somebody you really care about and wanting to help them, but not knowing how. Again, I thought sonically it would be appropriate to just have barely anything on it. And it\'s really all about the lyrics and the groove.” **Out of Your Mind (Interlude)** “This is the descent. When you go, ‘You know what? This isn’t for me.’ It doesn’t really have any words, it’s just sounds, but they’re murmurings of trying to work it out and then something sort of clicks. It’s the moment you flip. I wanted there to be a definite line under the first section of the album. When I first made an album, I had no idea how you would pick the order. How do you put your first album together? How do you know what to say first and last? And a piece of advice that I was given was, just think of it like it\'s a vinyl. Side A and side B. So every album now, I\'ve always just thought of side A and side B. And this one is the first one that is actually a full story that you can have a beginning, middle, and end. And for me, that is the middle, the absolute middle.” **Weird Fishes** “I sat and the looked at the lyrics to this song—which I love—and they felt really appropriate to what was happening in my life. Even the final lyric—‘I’ll hit the bottom and escape’—felt totally where I was at. The first time I played this song was at Glastonbury back in 2013 with my band. Somebody put it on YouTube, and I just loved this version. I was so happy with our arrangement. We’re not the same anymore, but we’re all still mates, so it was a lovely memento of that time we had together. I recorded this with a new band, and from that day I was like, ‘This is obviously how I’ve got to do the rest of the album: with my band, all in a room.’ We all get on, they\'re all sick musicians. So that\'s how it happened really. It just sort of all clicked in my head and everything felt right lyrically and with the personnel.” **Please Don’t Make Me Cry** “This is a loop and it\'s nice, because I got to explore that hip-hop way of writing, that R&B, which I just love. I grew up on all of that stuff. I love how it makes me sing too. I did it with a dear friend of mine, \[US musician\] Nick Hakim. He’s an incredible, humble guy with an incredible voice, and he’s maybe one of the best songwriters out there. I could spend days with him. I was getting frustrated with my lack of output and thought, ‘F\*\*k it. I’m going to New York and I’m going to see Nick.’ I was there for three weeks or so and did a bunch of songs. This one felt special and just said everything it needed to. He has amazing instruments available, amazing textures. And he\'s just such a brilliant producer. I just love every single choice of sound he had. I was just like, yeah, that\'s great. So this song has ended up quite thick in texture, but I love that, because it\'s quite contrasting with the rest of it and I really love that style. I was able to just chuck loads of stuff at it, and it never felt crowded.” **Seven Times** “My Blu Cantrell moment. Again, it’s that R&B which was a really big part of my musical upbringing. I was on a bit of a journey, I think, at this point, and I was finding my confidence and finding my own voice again. I was having an okay time. I was feeling very free and feeling like I’d come home to something or from somewhere and then just dancing in my house to all the music I listened to when I was 12. And then at the same time, again, I was listening to loads of Brazilian music. For me, this song is all my favorite R&B and all my favorite Brazilian music merged. And then I also got to give a piece of my mind in the lyrics. Once the demo was made, my band did their thing on it. I just love the groove, I love the chords, I love the melody. I love the lyrics. I love everything about it. I love the flute solo. I wanted to say that even though this thing has happened, it doesn’t mean that I’m completely out of the woods. It’s an ongoing process of self-care and getting yourself back on your feet after a bad thing.” **Courage** “Milton Nascimento, one of my favorite Brazilian artists, has an album called *Courage*. And during one of my darker times over the last few years, a friend of mine recommended that album to me. And then I wrote this song, and it wasn\'t going to be called that for a while. But then that word is just such a good word. I guess the song takes you to the most vulnerable point of just admitting that you\'re lonely and it\'s really hard and it feels like the pain is never going to end—even if it might\'ve been your decision. It was a particularly confusing type of pain. The music was written with a friend of mine, Joe Harrison, who played bass on ‘Paper Thin’ too. He\'s just an amazing guitarist and songwriter. During those five years where everything and nothing was happening, I was doing a writing camp—I think, basically, my label panicked and wanted to give me the tools to try and make music. I ended up in the studio with lots of incredible musicians, but not much of it was right. One day, I remember I was feeling particularly alone in this process and I called Joe. I was like, ‘Hey, are you in LA right now? Please will you come to the studio?’ And I made everyone get out of the room so that me and Joe could just be in the studio together. And we just wrote that thing in about 10 minutes. That was my piece of beautiful treasure from that weird time creatively that I was having.” **Sour Flower** “‘Sour flower’ is a phrase my great-grandmother used to say. Meaning ‘That\'s your sour flower, that\'s your problem, you deal with it.’ She was Jamaican and would say stuff like that, and I’d be like, ‘What does that mean?’ Later on, I was talking to Matt Hales, who I write a lot with, about her old phrases. We always wanted to get one of them onto a song. And that one just seemed appropriate. It\'s your journey, it\'s your issue, your cross to bear. For me, this song is all about the self-love and the self-care to restore yourself after whatever monumental derailment. I think it\'s ultimately a positive ending. But also, I wanted to have that long outro as well, to represent the ongoing work that the person is doing on themselves to improve things. The song is fully live—we all were playing together in the room, and it just feels like I should have done that earlier in my career. Of course there were some changes and then I was like, ‘No, we have to have that very first version, please.’ I\'m glad that it ended up as it was on the day that we did it.”

Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.

Proceeds will be going to charitable funds

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

“A disco ball allows you to see light in the darkness,” Kylie Minogue tells Apple Music, neatly encapsulating why her 15th album *DISCO* is a welcome bright spot in a distinctly dingy year. “I’ve turned off the dirt road and onto the supersonic highway—straight to the galactic disco.” Indeed, *DISCO* is a marked departure from 2018\'s country-tinged *Golden*, transporting its listeners straight to the kind of packed dance floor they could only dream of amid 2020’s global lockdown. And yet *DISCO* was recorded during isolation in a makeshift home studio made up of clothes rails, curtains, and blankets—all of which earned Minogue her first engineering credit (“I went to recording kindergarten and had to learn to use GarageBand,” she says). Minogue, of course, isn’t the only artist turning to disco as a radical form of escapism in 2020, a year that’s also seen Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Róisín Murphy experiment with the genre. “At its inception, disco was a way of allowing people to dance through their struggle and pain,” says Minogue of why rolling back the years has proven such a tonic. “Some of the best disco songs are mission statements of strength. Even though I started recording before the dramas of 2020, there is a correlation.” Read on as a music legend takes us inside the thrilling *DISCO*, one track at a time. **Magic** “‘Magic’ is a kind of hors d’oeuvre for the album. The main course will be coming in a while—and leave space because there is going to be tiramisu. It feels classic, grown-up, and polished, but there\'s still an element of surprise with the falsetto notes.” **Miss a Thing** “I first heard the demo for this in February and loved it. It fitted the brief: There was enough disco in there, but it also felt like a fresh interpretation. I was due to fly to LA in March and work on it with one of the key writers, \[Finnish songwriter\] Teemu Brunila. Then of course lockdown happened so we ended up working remotely. I had a meltdown one day with him. I was trying to do this vocal and I was so exhausted, and stressed, I couldn’t. I felt like I was failing him and me. I didn’t go to the full cry, but I came close. All this, and yet we’ve never met. I can\'t wait to give him a hug when we finally can.” **Real Groove** “Because I was recording my own vocals at home, I found myself doing a lot more takes than I usually would, to the point where I literally had to back away from my laptop. ‘Real Groove’ was one of the songs where I did the most takes. I wanted to take the melody down half a tone. We experimented with doing it lower, but ultimately the higher notes were the sweet spot. You don’t know what’s coming, and then the song ends up really pumping. It was worth the effort.” **Monday Blues** “I almost gave up on this track. It initially had a different chorus, so it took some juggling. We had to dig deep and nail it with a proper chorus. I became quite insular in lockdown and didn’t really go out much, but I listened to a version of this during a rare walk and it started to make sense. It was so uplifting and cool. It’s so different listening to music away from the environment in which you’re making it. Hearing it on a sunny day, taking a stroll, I really felt: ‘This is going on the album.’” **Supernova** “There’s a vocoder voice at the start of the song. In my mind, it’s the voice of a little space creature who’s my friend in the song. I’m always drawn to celestial words and imagery, so this was a fun chance to play with all of those elements. I think making it slightly spacey was a way to do disco without being trapped in the 1970s. \[Songwriter\] Skylar Adams, who also co-wrote and produced on this, has a baby boy called Jupiter, so we wanted to work his name into the lyrics too. If you weren’t awake before ‘Supernova,’ you’re awake by the time it starts.” **Say Something** “You need a rest after ‘Supernova,’ and ‘Say Something’ is a chance to calm down and reflect a little. It’s one of those songs that just dropped from the sky. I recorded it in my first session, before I even had a timeline or an album planned. I was working with \[writer and producer\] Biff Stannard and \[British songwriter\] Ash Howes, who I’ve worked with a lot, and \[producer\] Jon Green, who I worked with on *Golden*. I knew that the three of us would do something different, but I didn\'t know it would be this. It started as a beat, and we were all just singing into a microphone to capture everything. The ‘love is love’ part is almost like a different song, but somehow it lives with the rest of it. The song literally spilled out of us that day.” **Last Chance** “‘Last Chance’ is very inspired by ABBA and the Bee Gees. I was obsessed with ABBA as an eight- or nine-year-old. They’re pure perfection. I can\'t compare with these all-time epic, amazing songs. So what I tried to do was absorb them, try to understand them and then just stay on my own path. This was one of the last songs that came about, just as the doors were about to shut. It just goes to show you\'ve really got to keep going until it’s closing time.” **I Love It** “This was another one that I started working on with Biff, a day or two before lockdown. Again, it had a slightly different chorus, which just wasn’t hitting it. We didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so when I was making changes at home I chipped away at it and added the line ‘So come on, let the music play, we’re gonna take it all the way,’ which was inspired by Lionel Richie. That little restructure lifted it to where it needed to go, and it found its place on the album.” **Where Does the DJ Go?** “I wrote this with songwriters Skylar Adams and Daniel Shah, and Kiris Houston, who’s a wonderful instrumentalist and very hands-on. It was in the period just before lockdown, so we were acutely aware that something was happening. The lyric ‘The world’s trying to break me, I need you to save me’ echoes how we were feeling, and the ‘Singing I will survive’ line was inspired by the Gloria Gaynor song. It was our way of saying, ‘Please pull me out of this situation!’” **Dance Floor Darling** “There are songs on the album that have another meaning to them, or a slight melancholy. ‘Dance Floor Darling’ doesn’t have any real depth to it, but I think it feels like a hug. It feels like a wedding reception where everyone’s eaten sufficiently, had a few drinks, all the official stuff’s out of the way, and—especially once the track speeds up in the middle eight—Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves. We wanted escapism, and we committed to it.” **Unstoppable** “Earlier I was describing ‘Magic’ as an hors d’oeuvre. Well, ‘Unstoppable’ is a refreshing sorbet, a palate cleanser. I worked on it with \[songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist\] Troy Miller, who is another writer I only know from the waist up on Zoom. The vocals are quite different, and I wasn’t sure if he was pleased with what I was doing when we were recording because he really didn’t say much. But it turned out he just wanted to go with the vibe and let me go for it!” **Celebrate You** “I’ve never written a song in the third person before. The character of Mary was born out of mumble-singing melodies. Mary is anyone and everyone who needs reassurance that we are enough and we\'re loved. The last part of the album has a pretty high BPM, so ‘Celebrate You’ is the wind-down. It’s last orders at the pub—all of the family’s there, and Auntie Mary’s had a few too many. I’ve introduced you to this stellar landscape, we’ve gone to supernova, but we’ve come back down to Earth. This is about heart and connection.”

The 14th album of adventurous dance pop from Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. The album is the third instalment in the series of PSB albums produced by Stuart Price, following “Electric” in 2013 and “Super” in 2016. Yesterday the duo also revealed the video for their latest single “Monkey business”, directed by Vaughan Arnell.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

They began by just playing the hits. In 2017, nearly eight years after Doves had last picked up their instruments together, drummer Andy Williams and his twin brother, guitarist Jez, gave bassist/singer Jimi Goodwin a call. Come over to Andy’s studio, they said, and let’s see if we can remember how to play “Black and White Town” and “There Goes the Fear”—just for fun. “It came back really quickly,” Andy tells Apple Music. “We were all laughing and having fun. As a drummer, hearing that bass—*his* bass—instantly felt very familiar, in a good sense. Pretty soon, there was a real enthusiasm and hunger from us to work together.” When they went on hiatus after 2009’s excellent *Kingdom of Rust* album, Doves were fatigued. They’d been together for a quarter of a century, serving up four albums as one of Britain’s best and more adventurous indie-rock trios—plus one before that as house specialists Sub Sub. They were never meant to disappear for a decade, but when you’ve got families and side projects (the Williams brothers as Black Rivers, Goodwin with his 2014 solo album *Odludek*), life gets in the way. “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think there’s a chemistry between us three that you don’t run into every day,” Andy says. “That time away from each other has helped us appreciate that.” Fizzing with that chemistry, *The Universal Want* sounds like a Doves album precisely because it doesn’t sound like any other Doves album. The exquisitely measured mix of euphoria and sorrow is familiar, but by experimenting with Afrobeat, dub, and keyboards foraged from behind the Iron Curtain, the trio continues to expand their horizons on every song. “We didn’t attempt to resurrect another ‘The Cedar Room’ or ‘There Goes the Fear,’ because it’s a recipe for disaster when you chase your own tail,” says Andy. “It’s really important for us three to be excited and feel like we’re moving forward.” Let him guide you through that evolution, track by track. **Carousels** “Originally, it started life as Black Rivers and we couldn’t get it to work. We put it down for a while, then Jez had a look at it again. He’d bought a Tony Allen breakbeat album and just sampled some breaks. It just clicked—the song came alive. We felt it was a bit of a progression for us, so it felt like a good song to introduce ourselves back to people again. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a nostalgia thing. We all used to go out to funfairs as kids up here in the North West, and every summer we’d go to a place called Harlech in North Wales and there’d be a funfair near there. It’s a nostalgic look back at that era when you used to hear music for the first time, loud, on loudspeakers, and that excitement at the fair—trying to recapture that feeling. The music’s trying to push it forward, but lyrically, it’s looking back, so there’s that juxtaposition.” **I Will Not Hide** “Really fun memories of making this. Jimi loves his sampling, so when he played it to us, it was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on there?’ I couldn’t really fathom out the lyrics. I mean, I put a couple of lines in there myself, but I still don’t fully understand what it’s about. I don’t think Jimi does. But we quite like that place sometimes, where it’s almost a train of thought. Jimi’s demo stopped, I think, at chorus two. We just looked at the chords, me and Jez, and tacked the guitar section onto the end. That’s the nice thing about Doves—when people present ideas to the band, it goes through the filter of all three of us and it can change. That’s when it’s working well between us three, when someone has an initial idea and then the other two run with it.” **Broken Eyes** “Early doors, we found an old hard drive with loads of material on, stuff we hadn’t actually ever managed to finish, and this was one \[from the *Kingdom of Rust* sessions\]. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s got real heart and soul. Let’s tackle that again.’ Last time, we were maybe overcomplicating it, so we stripped it away and kept it simple. It always had a different lyric, right up until the 11th hour, actually. It had a very different vibe. Jimi sounds brilliant on this. When he did the vocal, it was hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. That’s when you know you’re on the right path. You just hit a brick wall sometimes with songs. I read a Leonard Cohen book and I think he was talking about ‘Tower of Song,’ that it took him 20 years to finish. Started it, put it down, picked it up again, kept going back to it. If a song’s got strength in it, it will keep knocking on your door. We’ve got other songs which I’m hoping we can look at again at some point. There’s a couple of things where I’ve gone, ‘Do you remember this one?’ And it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t.’ Because we’d absolutely hammered it at the time and not made it work, and no one’s ready to go back to that place.” **For Tomorrow** “Again, we had those chords for the chorus kicking round for a while but we never really had a song. The high string in the verses, we were like, ‘Oh god, look, it’s got that kind of Isaac Hayes classic soul thing we were going for.’ I know it didn’t necessarily end up that way, but that’s what we were going for in our heads. We did it live in the room, and I remember going back in the control room and going, ‘Ah, it’s just coming together.’ I’ve got really fond memories, a couple of moments of like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s a really fun one to play on the drums.” **Cathedrals of the Mind** “Initially it was from a Black Rivers session—another song that, down the line, Jimi heard and really loved and worked on with us. We were booked to go to Anglesey, me and Jez, in 2016. We were due to set off at nine in the morning, but at six o’clock, my wife wakes me up and says, ‘Bowie’s passed.’ I couldn’t take it in—like the whole world, I guess. I remember driving to Anglesey with 6 Music on, they cleared their schedule and were just talking about Bowie. We got to Anglesey and it was like, ‘Fucking hell.’ I’m not saying we wrote this song for him, but I think it was an unconscious thing. Jez had some chords and I tried a couple of different grooves. It didn’t work, and I tried that sort of dub groove, and that was the start of the song. The lyrics, as well—‘In the back room/In the ballroom/I hear them calling your name…/Everywhere I see those eyes.’ I think we were referencing the passing of such a musical icon. He was such a towering figure, cultural figure. Him passing felt like your own mortality, essentially.” **Prisoners** “It’s the love affair with northern soul that we’ve had for years. Very English lyrics. The Jam was one reference when we were doing the lyrics, ‘Town Called Malice.’ It was written way before the situation we’re in \[2020’s lockdown\], but it’s got some sort of resonance. We’ve all been stuck in our houses and we’re only just starting to come out. But it’s also got a sense of hope. The chorus is ‘We’re just prisoners of these times/Although it won’t be for long.’ So there is a sense of hope with that. We let everybody know our struggles, I guess, but it’s good to have a sense of hope in there.” **Cycle of Hurt** “Jez came with that \[robotic voice\] sample and those chords. They’re probably the most direct lyrics \[on the album\]. It’s referencing a relationship really, and just trying to get out of a cycle of hurt—a cycle of thought that you’re trapped in. They’re quite collaborative, these lyrics. A lot of them that are \[about being\] just locked in a cycle of your own thought, really, and trying to break free from that. There’s definite references to trying to keep your own mental health on track. Looking back on it, that’s a subject we’ve definitely returned to on this record. We felt this \[track\] was really good for the album because there weren’t really deep strings on the rest of the record, and it just brings a new sound for your ears to keep your interest up.” **Mother Silverlake** “The end result doesn’t bear any relation to an Afrobeat song, but that’s what we had in our heads—something that felt new to us, we’ve never really attempted that. Jez and Jimi combined \[on the\] vocal—that was really nice to hear those two singing together in the studio, the mix of their two voices. Martin Rebelski’s pianos really uplift the chorus. It’s a feel-good track, but the lyrics are slightly melancholic, almost referencing our mum, who’s still around, thank god. We always try and make music as uplifting as possible, or as joyous as possible. It might be offset with more melancholic lyrics, but overall we always want it to be an uplifting experience.” **Universal Want** “I started it in my studio as a ballad. I never intended it to be like a house workout at the end. I was thinking of just a two-and-a-half-minute song about the universal want—this question of always chasing something, be it consumerism or some aspect of your life where you think you’re going to be happy. But Jez took it away and he obviously saw something else for the end section and thought of welding this house section onto the end. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, it was just so unpredictable, and I hope that unpredictability carries through to the listener. I guess it’s kind of a reference to our past, our Sub Sub days—a cheeky doff of the cap to that era. It was a very formative era for all of us.” **Forest House** “Again, this had been knocking around for a while and we were never able to master it, didn’t ever find the key to unlock it. It just felt like it was a really intimate way to finish the record—a small way to wind the album down. A simple song, but with Jez’s Russian keyboard in there—this old Russian ’60s monster of an analog keyboard. It’s almost got a dystopian sound. Once that got brought into the song, it was like, ‘Yeah.’”

Brandy\'s voice has aged like fine wine. Eight years since her last album and 26 removed from her debut, the singer—affectionately nicknamed “The Vocal Bible”—still sounds at once fresh and refined on *B7*. Lyrically, the album traces the map of love from its passionate expressions (“Rather Be”) to gray-area affections (“I Am More”) as well as more interior (“Lucid Dreams”) and exterior (“Baby Mama”) spaces. Vocally, though, it\'s a master class in riffs and runs, harmony and control. On “Borderline,” her signature wispy tone layers almost as if to form its own kind of element while her voice shifts from shadowy and set back to front and center; “No Tomorrow,” which immediately follows, features a stripped production that allows Brandy to carry the momentum, and carry it she does. When she sings lines like “Can you tell me why you still love me?/And why I feel so deep like back at the altar?/Oh, you\'re just feeling your way through me/I just wanna touch you so,” it\'s a brief example of just how she uses her voice as an instrument unto itself. *B7* is also about the details: The transition between “Unconditional Oceans” and “Rather Be” is seamless in both sound and mood, while “Say Something” plays with cadence to imbue the track with a certain intensity that sets it apart from the others. “Love Again,” a collaboration with Daniel Caesar, answers for the dearth of old-school-style duets in contemporary R&B with the two engaging in a tender interplay throughout. By the time “Bye Bipolar” arrives to usher the album to a close, it\'s hard to imagine what\'s left for the singer to do, and yet she stuns all over again. The ballad is a wrenching kiss-off filtered through a metaphor for how romantic dysfunction can mirror (and cause) mental dysfunction, but it\'s sung like the gospel, a true benediction.

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

“Everything that I was feeling is in the songs,” Alanis Morissette tells Apple Music of *Such Pretty Forks in the Road*, her ninth LP. It’s a simple idea, but in the eight years since 2012’s *Havoc and Bright Lights*, Morissette has felt and experienced a lot, from multiple miscarriages to the birth of her second and third children, the depths of postpartum depression to the realization that her business manager had been stealing millions from her over the course of nearly a decade. All of that has made for some of her most powerful work since 1995’s *Jagged Little Pill*—a set of deeply candid and largely piano-driven ballads she recorded in Malibu and her new home in the Bay Area whose title is based on a lyric from “Smiling,” a song first heard in the 2018 musical that *Jagged Little Pill* inspired. “Anytime something is that life-changing and hard, I want to chronicle it,” she says. “Some of the more challenging turning points in my life have yielded the greatest evolution in my own consciousness.” Here, she takes us inside every song on the album. **Smiling** “I wrote this for the record, and then it wound up being really appropriate for MJ, the lead character in the musical. She’s grappling with wanting to serve and present well, not fail her family and not fail her community. Writing ‘Smiling,’ I was just losing it. I was losing my relationship with Los Angeles, grieving a home that I\'d had for 20-some-odd years. There were the fires in Malibu, my dog died—everything was happening all at once. Countless therapists have given me feedback that, ‘Alanis, you\'re saying something really, really challenging and hard to hear, and yet you\'re smiling. Tell me about that.’ It’s the idea of presenting one way, and then internally falling apart. And that\'s not an uncommon thing with certain types of people who want to help. I\'ve seen my mom cry maybe three times in my life, and one of them was when I played her this song. There was something that really spoke to her, and after she left, I just scoured the lyrics, really wanted to get to know my mom, thinking, ‘Okay, so this one really got to her. What the heck did I write about?’ It\'s a good way to know your parents: See how they feel about your songs.” **Ablaze** “This one makes me cry if I listen to the lyrics, so I have to think about baseball, baseball, baseball. Heaven forbid, if I were to pass away, this is what I want to make sure that I shared with my children. I have all these journals and books that I\'m like, ‘These are here for you.’ I\'m an attachment mom, and I\'m obsessed with addressing the developmental tasks of attachment and exploration—forming a sense of identity and a sense of competence. But I didn\'t want to write a whole song about those, so I just started talking about dualism, and how being here on Earth there\'s always two. There\'s hot, cold, tall, short. The song was a little longer, actually, and I had to cut one of the verses.” **Reasons I Drink** “My big three are work addiction, love addiction, and food addiction. And then, all my secondaries are all the other lovely ones. I think for a long time the general notion of addiction was so stigma-filled and shaming, like, ‘Shame on you for being an addict. Shame on you for needing to go to rehab. Shame on you for a lack of quote-unquote discipline.’ Which is such bullshit, because you\'re not going to meet more disciplined people oftentimes than addicts. It\'s actually seeing those of us who are addiction-riddled as us seeking relief. It’s trying to assuage a culture that is basically chronically stressed out. It’s cutting myself and cutting other people slack, and also giving a little insight. This isn\'t just someone gratuitously trying to cause chaos. This is someone who needs support and help, and to sit across from a nonjudgmental person in order to heal. Byron Katie once said, ‘Drugs and alcohol, they\'re just doing their job.’” **Diagnosis** “I think as a celebrity, someone in the public eye, I don\'t get a lot of loving, gentle feedback from people. I will either get positive or negative projections, or egregious misperception or misunderstanding of where I was coming from. I\'ve been perceived as wildly sane. I\'ve been perceived as unstable and unpredictable and wild. My dad told me when I was really young that people are going to love what I do, people are going to hate what I do, and some people won\'t give a shit about what I do. And that that won\'t change no matter what I\'m doing, so just keep going. ‘Diagnosis’ is me going, ‘Look, I don\'t care. I don\'t even know how I\'m perceived at this point. But this is what\'s happening. I have postpartum depression; I can\'t think straight.’ My whole life has been relying upon my cognitive function in order to show up. But when I wasn\'t able to rely on that as much, with the postpartum activity, it became, ‘What am I going to rely on? And how am I being perceived?’ In the middle of writing it, there were moments where I just wanted to walk into the ocean and not come back. But then I just thought about my kids, and I\'m like, ‘That\'s not going to happen.’” **Missing the Miracle** “Marriage for me is both people wanting to participate actively in the healing of each other\'s wounds, in theory. But when so much is going on, I just feel like we\'re missing the point and the beauty of it all, and that\'s not uncommon to be just overwhelmed by the day-to-day and triggering each other\'s PTSD. It\'s just a playground of missing the beauty, until it isn\'t. Spending at least ten minutes alone, I can get back into how beautiful it is, and how it is a miracle that any relationship can be sustained with how different we are, and how we\'re such complicated, beautiful human beings. We all have different perspectives—how the frick does any relationship stay together? We\'re animals. But I think the more consciousness I bring to my marriage, the more I can really see, even when it\'s hard, that it\'s this incredible experience. It’s a reminder for me to just pull my head out of the sand sometimes and look around, and just be that gratitude thing.” **Losing the Plot** “Los Angeles was always such an incredible city to be in when I was working. But when I wasn\'t working, and being a mom, it just felt like I wasn\'t in the right city. The line \'I am lying down my cape\' comes from this idea of thinking that I can be the superhero for everybody. Whether it\'s the house, or the dog, or the food, or the travel, or the logistics, or, in our case, education—we’ve been homeschooling for nine years. It’s superwoman-ing and just surrendering, going, ‘I can\'t keep doing the same thing and thinking it\'s going to yield different results.’ I\'m supposed to be making all these wise decisions, but I didn\'t have access to my intuition to the degree that I typically do. Postpartum depression is a ghost that sneaks in and takes a lot of things away. But I\'ve been through it twice now, so I know that there\'s another side, and my guess is it\'ll be shortly after I stop breastfeeding. I’ll report back.” **Reckoning** “I\'ve been writing songs about having been sexually abused for a long time, and songs like \[2002’s\] \'Hands Clean\' just came and went. A lot of times trauma is just stored in our bodies, and we\'ve disassociated. Fight, flight, freeze. Later on, we can melt and come through, when it might feel like a safer choice to make. It\'s quite traumatic to not only relive it, but then to be in the public eye and have it questioned? When I listen to ‘Reckoning,’ there\'s some lyrics—that second verse, ‘Where is everybody? Where are all these protectors around me?’—I can’t not cry when I\'m listening to them. When I\'m asked what would I say to my 19-year-old self, my 46-year-old self would just be like, ‘We’ve got to check and check the people in your immediate vicinity.’ Because a lot of people were not the safest people to be around and didn\'t have my best interests at heart. I love this song because it empathizes with this small little girl in there, as opposed to the grown woman looking back.” **Sandbox Love** “It begs a big question, post-sexual-abuse: What does healthy sex even look like? And what prize should I keep my eye on? There’s this culture—porn culture, acting-out culture, having-a-sidepiece culture. There\'s so much repair that’s needed to be experienced in a relationship, for those of us who\'ve had sexual abuse in our past. ‘Sandbox Love’ is my imagining of what healthy sex would be, what that terrain looks like.” **Her** “Her as me, her as the Divine Feminine, her as feminism. I’ve had so many mentors who were women, who have really represented the maternal. Especially postpartum, there\'s this whole thought of, like, ‘Who\'s going to mother the mother?’ My husband and I are always joking that he gets such a mama energy from me, and I\'m like, ‘Where the fuck is my mama energy? I need a bosom too.’ For me, this song is really about the reaching out for mom, the reaching out for the maternal, for the empathic, the skin-on-skin tenderness. Also, in spirituality, I love attempting to spot the threads of continuity between all these religions—it\'s all pretty patriarchal. I think this is me going, ‘Sorry, but I\'m not going to be praying to the old man in the throne in the sky, as lovely as that fantasy is, but to this femininity that I yearn for so much.’” **Nemesis** “So the theory is that 20% of animals and humans are highly sensitive temperamentally, to the point where they take in 500 pieces of information when they walk into a room and the other 80% of people take in maybe 50 pieces of information. I\'m a sucker for the subtleties, and I think that\'s due to the kind of temperament I have. I think everyone is realizing how adaptable they are right now, but change is hard. I’ve never been good with it, I’m always horrified. Later on, I can see what a great idea it was to make that change, but while I\'m in it, there\'s some profound suffering. It doesn\'t mean I\'m not making changes every day, because in order to evolve our consciousness we have to be willing to say goodbye to the old. That certainly has to do with becoming a mom—it\'s just a complete head-spinner to go from not being a parent to being a parent. But it\'s everything: It\'s leaving Canada; it’s going on tour and saying goodbye to my friends; it\'s coming home and saying goodbye to everyone on the road. I think that\'s the nature of what life is: Life is change. It’s constant. But that doesn\'t mean I won\'t fight it, and resist like a professional resister.” **Pedestal** “I remember I was dating someone and we did some show in front of 40,000 people, and I came backstage all sweaty and glittery and spent, and I turned to the person I was dating and I said, ‘What do you think of the show?’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about? You just heard 40,000 people cheering for you. What’s your problem?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I don\'t know those people.’ It’s growing up in the public eye. It’s writing songs at 16, and then wanting to evolve that into writing songs as a 19-year-old, and people dissuading me from that and not really seeing me as this human being who\'s just evolving and expressing. It’s looking back on all of these relationships, whether it was people that I was dating, or my family when I was younger, or different producers, or so-called guardians who were meant to be taking care of me when I was younger who were being sexually inappropriate. There\'s been a lot of relationships that maybe started off on a note of my thinking that it potentially could be safe or super intimate. And then I found out that there was a lot of opportunism involved, or some blindside, or some betrayal—or some embezzlement, as happens. This song really just takes it down to the lowest common denominator: At the end of the day, I\'m still a human being who has a lot of needs, and is vulnerable, and scared and shaking like a poodle in the corner, like anybody else.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of \[2018 album *A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. Fucking hell. What are we going to do?’” The way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest. “Go back to when we were wearing Spider-Man T-shirts,” says Healy, “and the reason I wanted Ross \[MacDonald\] to play bass was not because we could eventually be in some culturally informative, cool thing but because that noise sounded cool with this noise.” On an album that begins with an address by Greta Thunberg and winds down with a song written by Healy’s dad, Tim, the noises that sound cool together include folk, UK garage, Max Martin-inspired pop, and hazy, discolored indie. Over that questing backdrop, Healy digs further into his inner self. “It has a lot of heart, this record,” he says. “A lot of the ideas have evolved. There was stuff like \[2015 single\] ‘Love Me,’ earlier work, which was about ego; those ideas are still there, but it’s now more about self-love in the truest sense—that people only change when it’s too hard not to. You’ve got to look out for yourself, accept that you’re not a Superman. There’s a lot of self-reflection. It’s the most me record. It’s the truest.” Here, he talks us through that truth track by track. **The 1975** “We were talking about how we were going to do *that* statement—the same statement that we always make musically—and we wanted it to be us at our most modern. That first track always has to be us checking in. That got us into the conversation of what is the most modern statement, or who has the most modern statement, and Greta was the decision. I think it sounds like how a lot of us feel. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it’s quite a somber piece of music. It’s very 1975 in the way that it’s quite beautiful superficially but also quite sad, quite pretty but also quite ominous. Greta has a lot of reach, but I really wanted to see her exist formally in pop culture, not just as an anecdote of somebody.” **People** “This song is right back to where we came from—almost what we were like in our first incarnation of the band. Very inspired by bands like Refused and Converge and stuff like that. It was around the time of the Alabama abortion bill and we’d just played a show in Alabama. It was the feeling of oppressive, conservative religion. It happened up on the tour bus. It was kind of like our ‘Youth Against Fascism’—\[UK journalist\] Dorian Lynskey said that. I was definitely thinking about that Sonic Youth song. I think that it’s about fear and apathy and referencing how annoying responsibility can feel. I wanted there to be like a slapstick madness to its urgency.” **The End (Music for Cars)** “The actual reason that it\'s called ‘(Music for Cars)’ is because...I wasn\'t going to tell anybody, but there was a song called ‘Hnscc,’ which was an ambient piece of music about death, the death of one of my family members, that was on the \[2013\] EP *Music for Cars*. And ‘The End’ is a reinvention of that, basically an orchestral version. And yeah, ‘Music for Cars’ has kind of become the umbrella title for this whole era.” **Frail State of Mind** “\[During our early teens\], we were super into hardcore and making noise and, like most people in the UK, super into dance music. I think Burial is quite an obvious one that you can hear on this, and even people like MJ Cole. That darker side of garage is something that I’ve always really loved. It’s very dreamy and sounds like driving down the M25 at night with the passing of lights and the smoking of stuff. Mike Skinner spoke about how garage clubs and the actual garage scene was always a bit intimidating to him as a late teen, so he would experience these things at his mates’ houses or in cars with his mates smoking weed. That’s what my experience was—with so much time spent in my car listening to music and then going home and making music with George \[Daniel, drummer and co-producer\] and then going out in my car and listening to it for context. That was one of the happiest times of my life.” **Streaming** “Sonically, it’s a tribute to our formative years and what we were into–Cult of Luna and Godspeed \[You! Black Emperor\] and Sigur Rós, all of these big ambient artists. And UK garage music. This record is like a bit of that with a bit of Midwest emo thrown in. What we love in ambient music, we call it Pinocchio-ing: It’s stuff that’s trying to sound like a real boy. Sigur Rós sounds like it’s striving to sound like a river or a landscape. All of the kind of visuals that you get with that kind of music. It really takes you back to one’s relationship with nature and texture and temperature. To be honest with you, we took quite a lot of that off. A lot of that made way for more actual songs.” **The Birthday Party** “It was the first thing that I wrote for this album that I knew was great. And it was the first thing that we got excited about. Inherently, excitement equals projection, \[so it was originally going to be the first single\]. And then we went off on tour and I wrote ‘People.’ And we were like, ‘Right, well. If we don’t start with this, where are we going to put it?’” **Yeah I Know** “I fucking love ‘Yeah I Know.’ I don\'t know what it reminds me of. It\'s kind of like Hyperdub. I remember super, super minimal ravehead music when I was growing up. It was just a synth and a drum kit. We’re also big Thom Yorke fans, outside of Radiohead, so I think there\'s probably a bit of that.” **Then Because She Goes** “It doesn\'t have a bridge or anything. It’s just this little moment. But this is how I feel about life. There’s so many fleeting moments of beauty on the record, which was really important because most of my favorite records always have them. Especially if we’re talking about shoegaze records. I think a lot of that comes from the slacker mid-’90s thing of Pavement or Liz Phair. There’s a lot of Life Without Buildings and stuff like that, especially in this song. And it’s like faded splendor, as I always call it. I love pop songs that sound like they’re drowning. Like My Bloody Valentine. Like a Polaroid that’s gasping for air. That really sunny but sun-flared feeling is quite across the record because—for the time and for the kind of person that I am, and my political views—it’s inherently quite a warm record.” **Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America** “This song happened quite early in the record. It reminded me of America so much in its ambience. It even goes back to \[*A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\]—I think I wrote it around that time. There’s quite a bit of folk music on the record. I’ve never really collaborated with anybody before, and it was so easy making music with \[guest vocalist\] Phoebe \[Bridgers\] that every time I had an idea or I wanted a slightly different texture to the vocals, I just got her to do it. Phoebe does all the backup vocals on ‘Roadkill’ and then ‘Playing on My Mind.’” **Roadkill** “‘Roadkill’ is about touring America, it’s about getting burnt out and searching for things. Anecdotal things that happen on the road—pissing myself on a Texan intersection, all those kind of things. I don\'t know what it sounds like—maybe like Pinegrove, or there’s a band called Limbeck that I used to love.” **Me & You Together Song** “We’ve gone full circle–this album is very like the early EPs: dreamy, hazy, and quite broken and deconstructed. A lot of our hardcore fans emotionally relate to our EPs and see them as our first albums, so it’s nice that we’ve ended up back there. Our favorite music is music that’s kind of inherently beautiful. It’s not pretty but kind of fractured or a bit jangly or overly distorted. I think the whole record is like that, and this is a stark example of that idea.” **I Think There\'s Something You Should Know** “It’s explicitly about impostor syndrome, depression, that kind of a sense of isolation. I think there’s a lot of that in this record. I think it’s also about the lack of desire to communicate about those things as well—like, if I’m talking to someone close to me who’s not aware of what’s going on. And I think the reason for that is normally because it’s exhausting to take it out of your head and put it on the table.” **Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied** “It’s quite a lo-fi hip-hop track. It came from George jamming on the piano, and I was putting a really low-resolution breakbeat over the top of it. Stuff like that is really fun for us sometimes. If it’s really simple and you’ve got a loop to work with, you can kind of just go into producer mode. And—like any producer normally is—we’re huge J Dilla fans and all that kind of stuff. Lyrically, it’s just more self-reflection. I think it’s about also doing your bit as an artist—if you give people nothing to work with, if you say nothing, then you leave room for people to project anything. I find that a lot of people who are out there doing their thing musically, who aren’t challenging any ideas, are only made interesting through association or projection. I don’t feel like a lot of people stand by stuff.” **Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)** “This is the anomaly on the record for me. I don\'t know where it came from. That was me fucking around when the record was feeling really, really relaxed. It reminds me of all the kind of proper pop music that I grew up listening to, like Backstreet Boys. And it’s like an ode to early Max Martin, late-\'90s pop. I don\'t think we ever do anything retro. We never do anything pastiche-y. But there’s definitely a reflection on a certain time of our musical upbringing. And that was very much part of that. And it’s got a great Temptations sample at the beginning, and kind of reminds me of Kanye or something.” **Shiny Collarbone** “Cutty Ranks did all those vocals for us. It started out as a sample, but then we spoke to him to clear it and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it again.’ That’s Manchester, that tune, to me, man. That just sounds like going to town—that kind of dreamy, deep, dreamy, slow deep house music. Again, it’s like a fractured shard. There’s so many shards on this record. A lot of that is George. George always talks about how I’m quite expressive, how I have the ability, or even the desire, to express myself outside of music. And that can be in lyrics or in conversation. Whereas, because he’s not like that, he takes a really big responsibility on himself to express himself through sonics. That’s a really good way of explaining why a lot of our records are almost OCD in their detail. It’s because that’s George’s language.” **If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)** “If your vibe is instilled in people’s brain from what your earlier work is like, then probably \[it is the most 1975 song on the record\]. When I hear bands that are sounding—or are trying to sound—like The 1975, it’s normally *that* 1975 that they’re trying to sound like—that reference to post-punk pop, ’80s pop. And that does come out quite naturally in \[the album\] sometimes, because that’s very much in our blood. This song is very on-the-nose for this album. But I like that, because it’s another completely different tone to the album and it kind of comes out of nowhere.” **Playing on My Mind** “This takes us back into that American, James Taylor-y, Jackson Browne-y kind of sound. Again, Phoebe is just great to have there. As soon as I write something, if I get her to put a harmony on it or to just do something over the top of it, it completely changes. And that was really easy and really natural. I think this is my funniest record; there’s some lines in there that still make me smile when I listen to it. \[With\] ‘Playing on My Mind,’ there’s one line I really like: ’I won’t get clothes online ’cause I get worried about the fit/That rule don’t apply concerning my relationships.’ I thought that summed up me really, really well.” **Having No Head** “This is George, man. All George. It’s the only thing that George titled as well; he\'s very much into his Eastern philosophy. You can ask him what it\'s about. I don\'t fucking know. That\'s just George meditating. That\'s what that sounds like to me. That is how George gets it out, this big, sprawling ambience, his artwork, like tapestries.” **What Should I Say** “Bane of my fucking life. Honestly, for two years. This was going to be on *A Brief Inquiry*. It was just this piece of house music that we never really quite got right. I think it\'s about social media. It was kind of like Manchester again; we always thought about New Order when we were making this, for some reason. I’ve seen New Order, I’ve been a couple of times during the making of this record. I mean, we even met Brian Eno recently. The reality that we get to fuck with these people now: Whether it gives you a confidence...it gives you a *something*.” **Bagsy Not in Net** “We finished \[the album\] and after we’d done all of our deliberations, the record came down to 21 tracks. Now, we were looking at it and thinking, ‘But hold on: It *was* 22 tracks.’ It’s not that we didn\'t want to lose the preorders, it’s just that it didn\'t really make sense to me. But we weren’t just going to make up an interlude or something for the sake of it and put it on what we want to be our best album. We’d been with Mike Skinner recently, and I was talking to him about this tune, which is basically using that string sample. The conversation just turned to that, and then George started doing it, making the beat, and it was so fucking exciting. So we set the mic up and recorded the whole thing in, like, a day. It’s about wanting to die with your partner. Don\'t want to lose someone that I love. If somebody wanted to know what the album sounded like in a clip, I would play them this. We knew exactly what \[the album\] was just at the very end, whereas during the creation of it, we just didn’t.” **Don’t Worry** “‘Don’t Worry’ is the first song that I ever heard, I think. In 1989, 1990, our dad was in a band, just a fuck-around band, and he had this song that he wrote for my mum about her postnatal depression. It’s a song that I remember because my dad would play it on the piano. Looking back, in the way that \[this album\] is about me and my family and my life, it just felt right \[to do a version of the song\]. It was written 30 years ago, and it’s me and my dad singing—that was just a really special moment. He’s a good songwriter, my dad. It’s a very 1975 interpretation of his work. And he loves that. He’s very, very proud to be on the record.” **Guys** “There\'s not many love songs about some of the most beautiful, powerful relationships in your life. Especially straight guys or whatever in rock music, \[they\] tend not to write about how much they love their mates, or how this would be impossible and frivolous and completely pointless if we weren\'t all doing it together. One of the things we say to each other all the time is ‘Imagine being a solo artist. Imagine being here, now, on your fourth day in Brisbane, waiting to go…’ It’s hard out here if you’re just constantly traveling. And we’ve been a band since we were 13, and they’re my best friends. And we\'ve never fallen out. It’s a really true song. They’re the thing that gives me purpose.”

Yeah, yeah, “A Thousand Miles”—that was nearly two decades ago. (And it still bangs.) And if you haven’t been paying attention since, you might be surprised by the elegant and often idiosyncratic folk-pop that Carlton’s been putting out over the years. Produced by Dave Fridmann, who’s worked with bands from Sleater-Kinney to MGMT, the songwriter’s sixth album is full of strange little twists and turns—more Dirty Projectors than Top 40 radio. Take the cavernous title track, backed by gentle synth arpeggios and sampled rainfall, or the psychedelic fuzz of “I Can’t Stay the Same,” an ode to evolution.

In the third installment of Black Thought\'s *Streams of Thought* series, the Roots\' frontman links with producer Sean C for a fiery display of the sharp lyricism that consistently keeps the rapper in conversations about the greats. He\'s joined by a star-studded cast that includes Killer Mike and Pusha T (the charged “Good Morning”) and ScHoolboy Q (the sinister “Steak Um”) and pleasantly surprising cameos from indie rockers Portugal. The Man alongside Portland rapper and singer The Last Artful, Dodgr. *Streams of Thought, Vol. 3* strikes a balance between disparate sounds and modes with ease—whether in political screeds or in personal confessions, soul, hip-hop, and tinges of rock congeal for a collection that feels at once immediate and requiring repeated listening. Black Thought takes aim at systems and institutions as well as mentalities that keep those who look like him in a perpetual state of war and survival, and true to the reputation he\'s earned, no one gets out unscathed.

In the early 2010s, the members of Yumi Zouma spent time together on a New Zealand street that gave its name to their first single, “The Brae.” After the 2011 Christchurch earthquake destroyed that street and much of the city, its members took off for other parts of the globe and soon began writing their first songs over email. As a result, the band was born, and distance became a recurring theme in Yumi Zouma’s work. This makes sense given the far-flung cities the group of musicians currently call home: New York City for Burgess, London for Ryder, Wellington for Campion, and Simpson remaining in their native Christchurch. Of course, distance can also manifest metaphorically, and it’s in these figurative chasms that Truth or Consequences, Yumi Zouma’s third album and first for Polyvinyl, finds its narrative: romantic and platonic heartbreak, real and imagined emotional distance, disillusionment, and being out of reach. There are no answers, there’s very seldom closure, but there is an undeniable release that comes from saying the truth, if only to oneself. “In the age we’re living in, there’s an emphasis on making things clear cut” says Burgess about the album’s title. “But in life and in art, nothing is ever that definitive. The truth is usually in the gray zones, and I think that’s so much of what we were trying to explore and understand on this album.” Whilst exploring these realms, Yumi Zouma deliberately pursued a deeper sense of collaboration in order to craft a record that reflects the bond between them. Produced by the band and mixed by engineer Jake Aron (Solange, Grizzly Bear, Snail Mail), Truth or Consequences stems from sessions in Los Angeles, London, and Christchurch, where the band actively took a collegial approach, often working note-by-note, to ensure the foundations of the album reflected a sense of togetherness. “We wanted to make the songwriting process as egalitarian as possible. Completely sharing the process helped us feel like we were capturing a purer sense of atmosphere,” says Ryder. Much like how the first moments of a new year can usher in a wave of emotions, the first notes of Truth or Consequences wash over the listener with the contemplative yet rapturous opener “Lonely After,” in which Simpson softly sings "I was embarrassed when I knew who I was, so wild and zealous and overly down for the cause." As Burgess recalls, it’s about “that pit in your stomach when you start to question your own identity,” who wrote the first lines of the song one lonely New Year’s Eve, during the nebulous beginnings of a budding relationship. Lead single “Right Track / Wrong Man” exhibits a Balearic tempo and bass-heavy energy that belies its underlying tension. Simpson reveals, “At the time I was living with a boyfriend who was quite lovely, but there wasn’t that passion or excitement that you imagine for yourself when you’re young. That song is about accepting that something’s not working, and deciding to just be on your own for a while.” Album centerpiece “Cool For A Second” coalesces the motif of isolation and its ensuing fallout into a letter to a past connection: Whilst on “Truer Than Ever,” the band draws inspiration from the classics to radiate a brazen spirit of perseverance. “I love the duality in a lot of disco songs, where they’re incredibly upbeat, but there’s real frustration in the lyrics – sort of like, ‘Nothing’s going the way I want, but I’ve got to deal with it any way I can,’” Simpson says. Throughout, Simpson’s voice gives weight to whispers of impressionistic poetry, shielding hard truths with soft tones, while Burgess’ vocals reveal a rarified dimension of raw and lucid romanticism. With this being the first Yumi Zouma album to feature live drums, courtesy of Campion, Truth or Consequences is a testament to the success of the band’s approach – a unified body of melody that mines the spaces in between.

Fun City is a love letter to the LGBTQ+ community, celebrating its history and present. The album looks at how LGBTQ+ stay strong, focused and creative through times of social and political hardships, and is inspired by the legacy of artists from Sylvester, Erasure, Scissor Sisters and Hercules And Love Affair who have been bold, visible and pioneering through the years to give LGBTQ+ people shining beacons of hope. It features some of my favourite artists in the LGBTQ+ community across the world.

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

Newness and Strangeness This album was made from January 2015 to December 2019, starting as a collection of vague ideas that eventually turned into songs. I wanted to make something that was different from my previous records, and I struggled to figure out how to do that. I realized that because the way I listened to music had changed, I had to change the way I wrote music, as well. I was listening less and less to albums and more and more to individual songs, songs from all over the place, every few days finding a new one that seemed to have a special energy. I thought that if I could make an album full of songs that had a special energy, each one unique and different in its vision, then that would be a good thing. Andrew, Ethan, Seth and I started going into the studio to record songs that had more finished structures and jam on ideas that didn’t. Then I would mess with the recordings until I could see my way to a song. Most of the time on this album was spent shuttling between my house and Andrew’s, who did a lot of the mixing on this. He comes from an EDM school of mixing, so we built up sample-heavy beat-driven songs that could work to both of our strengths. Each track is the result of an intense battle to bring out its natural colors and transform it into a complete work. The songs contain elements of EDM, hip hop, futurism, doo-wop, soul, and of course rock and roll. But underneath all these things I think these may be folk songs, because they can be played and sung in many different ways, and they’re about things that are important to a lot of people: anger with society, sickness, loneliness, love...the way this album plays out is just our own interpretation of the tracks, with Andrew, Ethan and I forming a sort of choir of contrasting natures. I think my main hope for the world of music is that it will continue to grow by taking from the past, with a consciousness of what still works now. Exciting moments in music always form at a crossroads - a new genre emerges from the pieces of existing ones, an artist strips down a forgotten structure and makes something alien and novel. If there is a new genre emergent in our times, it has not yet been named and identified, but its threads come from new ways of listening to all types of music, of new methods of creating music at an unprecedented level of affordability and personal freedom, of new audiences rising up through the internet to embrace works that would otherwise be lost, and above all from the people whose love of music drives them to create it in the best form they possibly can. Hopefully it will remain nameless for some time, so it can be experienced with that same newness and strangeness that accompanies any and all meaningful encounters with music. "Yea but what's with the mask?" Bob Dylan said, “if someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth...if he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” He never actually wore a mask onstage so I don’t know why he said that. But I decided to start wearing a mask for a couple of reasons. One, I still get nervous being onstage with everybody looking at me. If everyone is looking at the mask instead, then it feels like we’re all looking at the same thing, and that is more honest to me. Two, music should be about enjoying yourself, especially live music, and I think of this costume as a way to remind myself and everyone else to have some fun with it. I don’t think it changes anything else about the songs or how you feel about them to be able to drop it for a second and have fun with it. If you can’t do that then you’re in a bad place... The character comes from another project Andrew and I have been working on called 1 TRAIT DANGER. This is something Andrew started doing on tour¬—recording ideas for his own songs as they came to him, and forcibly enlisting everyone else to participate. It appealed to me because it was nothing like Car Seat Headrest, and the ideas cracked me up. Before we knew it we had two albums released, a video game that was almost impossible to beat, and a growing number of people who seemed to be enjoying it all. It’s been a great outlet for weird and untenable musical experiments, and the live performances have been a blast. I play a character called TRAIT, and we’ve been working out the backstory as we go. I think he spent a lot of time in classified government facilities before getting into the music business. This is the kind of stuff that kept us going while we were working on MADLO. We were in our own little world and free to try any idea we wanted. A lot of the ideas for 1 Trait bled over to the Car Seat tracks, and vice versa. You just can’t make music without first creating your own environment around it...sound’s always gotta travel through something. This time it was a mask. —trait

The original *Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front* album, released in 1998, is possibly the most revered Busta Rhymes album in a catalog that includes many greats. *E.L.E.* 1 made good on the increasingly bombastic delivery and cutting-edge aesthetic Bus delivered with *When Disaster Strikes*, pushing the MC’s star further into the pop stratosphere while supplying canonical entries like “Gimme Some More” and “What’s It Gonna Be?!” To deliver its sequel, then—some 22 years later and also after a near decade-long album hiatus—would mean that Busta holds this latest work in the very highest esteem, believing that over the course of a now three-decade-long career, his music-making ability hasn’t wavered a bit. Luckily for us, nobody knows Busta better than he does. In 2020, an album like *Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God* could only have come from its creator. Busta’s sonic palate spans the many eras he’s been active, and the album’s production includes touchstones from nearly all of them. From “E.L.E. 2 Intro,” we get an Ahmad Jamal Trio piano line familiar to most hip-hop heads as a part of Nas’ “The World Is Yours.” “Outta My Mind” boasts a sample of Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” chopped so well that we have no choice but to forgive Busta for dismantling one of the most beloved new jack swing songs of all time. The sprightly Mariah Carey collaboration “Where I Belong” is basically a continuation of their “I Know What You Want,” a high point of both of their careers. Collaboration, in fact, is a cornerstone of *Extinction Level Event 2*. The list of featured artists reads like a guest list for a Busta Rhymes birthday party: Rakim, Pete Rock, M.O.P., Q-Tip, Rick Ross, Anderson .Paak, Vybz Kartel, Mariah Carey, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, Mary J. Blige. There’s even a previously unheard Ol’ Dirty Bastard verse and a sample of young Michael Jackson. Busta’s role here, of course, is elite-level MCing in the East Coast tradition, and he gives as much as he gets from his guests, trotting out a plethora of flows over the project’s 22 tracks. Busta superfan Chris Rock appears throughout the album but uses the intro to “Czar” to speak to who he feels Busta Rhymes is to hip-hop at large: “There ain’t no place in the world where Busta Rhymes ain’t the baddest motherfucker!” Rock shouts. “Do you understand who this man is? Do you understand how hard he brings it?”

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

Country Westerns is a three-piece rock band from Nashville that sounds nothing like its name. Drummer Brian Kotzur (Trash Humpers, Silver Jews) and singer-songwriter-guitarist Joseph Plunket (The Weight, Gentleman Jesse) began working on songs together in 2016, after bonding over the shared desire to be in a band in a town full of solo artists and guns-for-hire. Following a couple of years writing and playing shows with varying lineups, Sabrina Rush (State Champion) joined the band as bassist. The now complete Country Westerns recorded their debut album in New York and Nashville, encouraged by friend and producer Matt Sweeney. Plunket’s raspy bravado and subtle twang, his insistent 12-string guitar riffs, Kotzur’s dynamic and metronomic drumming, and Rush’s harmonic bass playing create hyper catchy rock songs, with lyrics that bend towards poetry and punk rock sneer in equal measure. This album was released June 26, 2020.

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Luke James, also known as Grammy-nominated songwriter Luke Boyd, has the formula for writing infectious pop hits for artists like Justin Bieber, Chris Brown, and Britney Spears. However, on his second album and first independent release, the New Orleans native moves past that for an intimate and vulnerable sound not unlike the music he grew up with. The provocative lyrics and awe-inspiring vocal gymnastics of tracks like “All of Your Love,” “Colours,” and “Blow” demonstrate James’ deep reverence of his R&B roots.

“My attitude to writing this album was that I needed to be honest about situations and honest with myself,” Holly Lapsley Fletcher tells Apple Music. “I write and produce songs within about two days, so it’s quite instant. I\'ll go into the studio and write about whatever happens that week and then leave it. It’s very therapeutic.” Four years on from a debut album that won her fans including Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, the Liverpudlian singer-songwriter, producer, and self-proclaimed “music nerd” relates the pain of a breakup and weaves the beauty of nature into the lyrics on an intoxicating second album. The production is also bigger and bolder here, inspired by ’80s indie, electronica—and on the luminous standout “Womxn,” even disco. “After *Long Way Home*, I took a year off,” she says. “I needed to work on my mental health and take time off from touring. I wasn\'t able to write at that point, and then as soon as I felt like I was finding myself again, I felt way more in control. I came straight into the industry at 17 and then was expected to write a debut album—whereas this time, it\'s me discovering who I am.” Below, Låpsley guides us through that discovery track by track. **Through Water** “I met with my dad the week that I wrote this song. He’s one of the world leaders in sustainable development, and works in climate change and water. I went upstairs to the bathroom in XL \[Recordings, her record label\], which is by the studio, and just left the tap running and pressed voice note and I read out a speech my dad has given. Then I created this track, so the album opens with my dad’s words. I think he\'s my biggest fan.” **My Love Was Like the Rain** “That came together super quickly. I never really write at such a fast tempo, and I just remember shoving loads of like Robyn tracks on, and thinking, ‘I want to make a song that has this kind of energy!’ but then I gravitated towards darker chords.” **First** “I love Drake and I love lots of Afrobeats, so I guess there\'s an influence here. I wanted to create a song that, production-wise, sat more in that space. The song\'s basically about being obsessed with someone and putting them on a pedestal even if they don\'t feel the same way back—almost like worship.” **Ligne 3** “I lived in Montpellier for two months, which is where my ex-boyfriend lives. Ligne 3 was the tram line between where we lived and where his work was. That was at the start of a year that I took off, so I wasn\'t really doing anything, and I wasn\'t well, so I\'d just go out and wander around the city for two months. It just sums up the end of that relationship and that place. It was pretty lonely.” **Our Love Is a Garden** “My favorite track on the album. I was obsessed by the ’80s, with \[record label\] 4AD acts, bands like Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, so I wanted to have something that referenced that point in the decade. It’s about trying to make a relationship work, and there\'s a sadness, but obviously beautiful references to gardens too.” **Leeds Liverpool Canal** “The canal has always been a place that\'s very close to our family, whether that\'s the men in our family walking down on their own, working out mental health problems or fishing with my dad. Now my dad works in water, so there\'s just this massive link to that place, so this instrumental is about home.” **Sadness Is a Shade of Blue** “I wanted to write a pop song about depression and how I feel like we\'re all responsible for our own health and trying to improve things in our own lives. I was getting frustrated that I was doing stuff to help my mental health and my ex wasn\'t doing anything to help his—and I wanted to write a pop song that was real.” **Womxn** “This was the first track that I wrote for the record when I was in a pretty bad place. I took the demo in with Pete O’Grady \[aka UK producer Joy Orbison\], and the additional production just took it to the next level. By releasing it as a single, I wanted to show people how much I\'ve changed and how that comes from a place of acceptance.” **Bonfire** “This song is about being with someone with a really short temper. Like, this person finds it very difficult to change and I feel like I\'m the one who has to change the way that I speak around him to accommodate him, so it\'s about that.” **Speaking of the End** “I worked with \[Adele and Florence + the Machine collaborator\] Eg White on this. I just went into his studio and was like, ‘Oh you\'ve got a piano!’ It\'s very rare that someone actually has a piano in the studio, so then the intention was to write a song and make it full-sounding. That is the original vocal first take, and the lyrics are about the end of one relationship and the start of another, and also the end of childhood and the start of adulthood. It\'s kind of dark and light at the same time.”

The first verse we hear on Jay Electronica’s *A Written Testimony* comes from JAY-Z. The God MC opens “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” the second track on the album, which follows an intro comprising mostly remarks from Minister Louis Farrakhan—adding an extra four minutes to the decade-plus many fans have waited to hear Jay Electronica rap on his debut album. Having Jigga bat leadoff registers as much less of a stunt in the context of the full project, and only helps build the anticipation. JAY-Z appears on nearly every song on *A Written Testimony*, assuming a partner-in-rhyme role not unlike the one Ghostface Killah played on Raekwon’s seminal *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx*. The Jays sound likewise inspired by each other, yielding the mic for continuous intervals of elite-level MCing, delivering bars both forthright and poetic, and also steeped in phrasings uncommon outside of the written word. “If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master/I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter,” Electronica raps on “The Neverending Story.” Electronica is credited with the bulk of production on the album, with additional contributions from No I.D. and The Alchemist, along with the all-star team (Swizz Beatz, Araabmuzik, Hit-Boy, G. Ry) responsible for “The Blinding.” The MC raps in Spanish on “Fruits of the Spirit,” and though he shouts out Vince Staples, Marvel villain Thanos, and cosmetic butt injections, there are very few references on *A Written Testimony* that could date the album long-term. The goal here was very clearly to make a timeless project, one we should appreciate considering there’s no telling if or when we will get another.

“I get really emotional when I talk about it,” Melanie C tells Apple music of her self-titled eighth album. “I\'ve had well-documented issues \[with eating disorders and depression\], but this record finds me in a more self-accepting place.” In order to get there, she had to go right back to the beginning, joining her former bandmates for a sold-out stadium tour in summer 2019. “Like a lot of people, I\'ve spent time feeling not good enough. But when I was onstage with the Spice Girls, I had this moment of realization about the impact we had on a generation of young people, and it blew me away. It felt like it was time to acknowledge that I\'m part of something really incredible.” Embracing her past—Sporty Spice and all—inspired a return to pop following experimentations in rock and electronica. “I knew I wanted to dance, but it can be hard to write uptempo tracks with lyrical depth,” she says. “So I was listening to artists like Robyn and Mark Ronson, who are amazing at sad disco.” Sure enough, the featherlight pop of single “In and Out of Love” jostles alongside ruminations on toxic relationships (the tropical-tinged “Overload”) and panic attacks (the Billie Eilish-indebted “Nowhere to Run”). Key to that evolution was working with a fresh raft of co-writers, including Jonny Lattimer (Ellie Goulding, Rag’n’Bone Man), Future Cut (Little Mix, Lily Allen), Tom Neville (Dua Lipa, Calvin Harris), Nadia Rose, and Shura. “I loved getting back in the studio with youthful, talented people who had influences that were quite different to mine,” says Melanie. “They encouraged me to experiment more, and I feel reinvigorated. This is a new chapter.” Read on as Melanie talks us through her revelatory eighth record, track by track. **Who I Am** “I wrote this with Biff Stannard, who I\'ve written with since my Spice Girls days, and Bryn Christopher, who I hadn\'t worked with before. So it was a really nice combination of having that history and the security to be vulnerable, and then having someone new and fresh in the mix. It\'s about how I\'ve spent a lot of time not speaking up for myself, and now that I do, it confuses people who are used to me going with the flow. Instead of feeling embarrassed or ashamed of those things, it\'s time for me to own them, and be proud that I overcame them. The whole album is a massive healing process.” **Blame It on Me** “I was bitching and moaning with Niamh Murphy, one of the co-writers, about friends who had let us down, and the lyrics came out of that. It\'s about having someone who you rely on, and then something happening which rocks your world and makes you think, ‘That was the dynamic of our friendship and I never even saw it.’ I\'m not confrontational, I don\'t really fall out with people, so being able to express those feelings in songs is a great way of getting my emotions out. It\'s one of the tracks where I\'ve used my voice quite differently—it\'s a lower tone and a bit more aggressive on the mic than I\'d normally be.” **Good Enough** “I wrote this with Future Cut and Shura, who is an artist that I adore. She\'s another Northern lass with very similar musical influences to me. It was the first time that the three of us had worked together, so it was a bit like an awkward first date. Again, I was bitching and moaning—I do a lot of that in the studio—about someone who was driving me to distraction, finding fault in everything, nitpicking and saying nothing is ever good enough. Sometimes I feel nervous to do things I deem youthful, because I don\'t want to be trying to be something I\'m not. But working with younger artists has been a great way to push me out of my comfort zone.” **Escape** “I came into the studio and was having one of those days when I was feeling overwhelmed and didn\'t know what I wanted. I was feeling like life is such a treadmill, and we\'re all on it working so hard to achieve certain things. But what if it\'s all bollocks? What if we just did something completely different? That\'s where the idea for ‘Escape’ came from. It\'s weird because since we wrote it, COVID has happened, and we\'ve all had the opportunity to stop, or at least slow down. Now I\'m getting back to work, I can identify with the sentiment again.” **Overload** “I like to have references to my other songs—song titles or lyrics—in my work. And on ‘Overload,’ the lyric ‘I don\'t want to be your acceptable version of me’ harks back to my last album, *Version of Me*. It\'s about feeling under a lot of pressure, and people driving you mad. There\'s a big theme of people driving me mad on this album (funnily enough, I was writing it during Spice Girls tour rehearsals!). This was written in one of the first sessions, with Jonny Lattimer. I loved his work with Ellie Goulding, so it was brilliant to get in the studio, just the two of us. I\'ve worked in a more modern way on this album, with bigger teams, so it was nice to go back to something a bit more intimate.” **Fearless (feat. Nadia Rose)** “I\'d seen Nadia Rose being interviewed on Kathy Burke\'s *All Woman* documentary and kind of fell in love with her. Then I watched her video for ‘Skwod’ and thought she had such a great, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, as well as being a brilliant rapper. About two weeks later I was DJing at a Fashion Week party, and as I was heading for the exit, someone came running after me—and it was her. I took it as a sign that we should collaborate, which she was super excited to do. We set up a session with Paul O\'Duffy and drove up to his place in Hertfordshire together, chatting in the car. We were talking about being a woman in music, and how, in order to pursue your dreams, you have to do petrifying things—whether that\'s going onstage in front of thousands of people or turning up at a stranger’s house for a session. Out of that came the idea of encouraging people to be fearless and go for their dreams, like we both have. I love how lush and expensive this one sounds.” **Here I Am** “This is a really important song for me. I was in the studio with Tom Neville and Poppy Bascombe to re-vocal something, and when we\'d finished we thought, ‘Shall we have a crack at another song?’ I\'d had a mad dream the night before where I was tumbling down in water. I could see my boyfriend, but he was obscured and I didn\'t know if he could see me or knew that I needed help. I\'m always reading stuff into dreams, and I thought it would make a good starting point for a song. For me, the dream was about how so often you feel like you can\'t keep your head above water, but at some point you have to help yourself.” **Nowhere to Run** “I was listening to and getting quite obsessed with Billie Eilish, so I was inspired to look at doing some darker production. I wrote it with Biff, who also loves to write songs that are very \'up\' and dancy, and which then go really dark. Something that I\'d never explored in a writing capacity, but which felt comfortable to do with him, was the experience of having panic attacks. We\'d written the first verse and chorus, but I didn\'t have any words for the second verse. I hadn\'t had a panic attack for months, and then I went out to a restaurant and had one in public for the first time ever, which was terrifying. But as soon as it passed I thought, ‘That’s brilliant, I\'ve got a great idea for the second verse now.’ Weirdly, one of the lyrics that we\'d already written was ‘I see exit signs, but there\'s no way out.’ Then, when I was having the panic attack, I could see the exit, but would\'ve had to cross through the restaurant to leave. So there really was no way out. Life was imitating art.” **In and Out of Love** “I wanted to do something really fun and disco. It\'s about being on the pull, inspired by the days when I had no responsibilities and would go on a night out and find romance on the dance floor. It\'s super frivolous, which I think is a welcome change of pace after \'Nowhere to Run.’ My daughter is 11 and she\'s in control of the dial when we\'re in the car, so I\'d been listening to a lot of her pop playlists, a lot of Dua Lipa.” **End of Everything** “This was written in an early session with Sacha Skarbek, who comes from a much more traditional songwriting background. Lyrically, it\'s about all the changes that I\'ve been through, including leaving my manager of 18 years and changing most of my team, and all of the emotions that come with that. I wanted to explore the feeling of something ending in your life and being left void of any emotion. It\'s an interesting space to inhabit. This song was always earmarked to close the album.”

“It was just a big experiment, the process of making this album,” Tom Misch tells Apple Music. “There wasn\'t too much thought process behind it.” On this freewheeling passion project born of breakneck jam sessions, songwriter and producer Misch unites with virtuoso jazz drummer Yussef Dayes for a sound that fluidly combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, and electronica. Freddie Gibbs—the album\'s sole vocal feature—adds menace on “Nightrider,” “The Real” riffs on Dilla-era soul chops, and “Sensational” throws a nod to the swirling solos of percussive greats. This wickedly unrestrained vision has landed the Southeast London pair a maiden release on the pioneering jazz imprint Blue Note Records. “It\'s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be associated,” says Dayes, reeling off Blue Note luminaries including Coltrane, Hancock, and Blakey. “It makes you want to work harder, because those guys, they were on another level.” The process also prompted a bout of déjà vu for Misch. “I have this memory of seeing this guy on drums, like, 15 years ago in a talent show in this school, and thinking, ‘This guy\'s insane.’ When we were working on the album, I was like, \'Shit. Are you that dude who...\' So it was kind of a weird one,” he says. “I was always performing at school,” Dayes admits. “It\'s a way for me to express what I\'m feeling. A chance for me to connect with the people that are into the music and give them some energy and vice versa. But with us two collaborating, coming from two different fields, we have to meet in the middle. It\'s give and take from both of us.” Here, the pair run through the album track by track. **What Kinda Music** Tom Misch: “This was one of the first tracks we did. I had a session with Loyle Carner in summer 2018. We were recording and I called up Yussef to try some drums on this track I was producing. He came down and recorded the drums for what is now ‘Angel,’ on Loyle\'s \[*Not Waving, But Drowning*\] album. So, he left the studio, and then Yussef and I were there for the rest of the day. The origins of \'What Kinda Music,\' \'The Real,\' and \'Storm Before the Calm\' came from that day. It was just a crazy day.” Yussef Dayes: “From there, we realized it wasn\'t a one-track collaboration. We felt like it could be a tape or something. Sometimes you collaborate and it doesn’t quite click, but if from the get-go it\'s clicking and it\'s sounding good, you know there\'s something there. It\'s a unique sound this track; I felt like that was a fresh sound that neither me or Tom had explored completely, so I wanted to see us start with the off-kilter thing.” **Festival** TM: “This was a day with me, Yussef, and a bassist, Tom Dressler. We recorded a bunch of stuff over the three days. And the basis for this song was something we recorded there. I knew I liked the vibe, but I wanted to sing on it, and it took a while to execute the vocals. It\'s about when you\'re younger, you have this natural presence as in you\'re in the *now*, generally, when you\'re young. And then you kind of lose that as you grow older. It\'s saying how you still have that, that you\'re still able to be present. Yussef was like, ‘I want to call it \"Festival Tune.\"’ So I was like, \'Fair enough.\'” YD: “This is a big tune. It sounds like it could score a David Attenborough documentary, you know? On something about the planet, for the real earth people. It\'s just emphatic. I can imagine this being performed at Glastonbury; I can hear people singing along.” **Nightrider (feat. Freddie Gibbs)** TM: “The vibe of the instrumental felt kind of woozy, a bit hazy. And I remember going on the *Knight Rider* trailer on YouTube, playing it with the music, and it was just a perfect combination. We knew we wanted to get a rapper on the record, and I wrote down a list of people that we like. I\'m just going through the list and Yussef said, \'Let\'s do Freddie Gibbs.\' I\'m really chuffed about getting him because I\'m a big fan of Freddie. It really adds a different vibe to the record.” YD: “We recorded this with a good friend of mine, \[producer and engineer\] Miles James. We were just were rocking. We recorded the drums and bass down in Eastbourne and then we came back and produced it up. It\'s the same thing again. My job is...my drumbeat should be able to give everybody the music that they hear on top of it. I just was like, \'Yeah, we\'ve got to get Freddie on this, man.\' I\'d been in contact with him already, just sending him beats, and I just thought this needed that extra, that little touch, man.” **Tidal Wave** TM: “You can just hear the rawness of it, the moments where we\'re just shouting and stuff. Really low in the mix you can hear me shout out, \'All right, now it\'s like a chorus, so play drumming.\' Because at that point, even though we were just jamming, I knew it had potential to be a song.” YD: “This was me, Tom, and Rocco Palladino on bass. We set up, pressed record, and just jammed some ideas. We did that twice on this record, and this was the second time, just three hours worth of music. It was just one of those days, man, just light up the incense and catch a vibe, man. Not even thinking. I was just trying to do some different stuff on the drums, different cymbals that I hadn\'t used before, some wood blocks and stuff, and try to switch up a bit.” **Sensational** TM: “This represents a bit of the rawness on the record. It’s just a little cut from a day of jamming, a little insight, and I hit up Tobie Tripp, he’s an amazing strings player. I got him to lay some violin on it and double up the guitar part.” YD: “I wanted to make sure there\'s skits and interludes and off-cuts on the records, because all my favorite albums, when I listen to the Fugees or D\'Angelo, those albums play with skits in between that tie it together. I think \'Sensational\' is one of those things—it\'s like some country-western shit, sort of, like some Django shit. This is, I suppose, my bag, man. This kinda shit. I\'d love to get a rapper on this for a remix maybe.” **The Real** TM: “For me, this was kind of like me going back to being a beatmaker. The drums are from that day I was in the studio with Loyle, and then I went home and I started chopping some Aretha Franklin. That\'s what I like about this one. It\'s kind of me going back to what I used to do.” YD: “This is definitely one of my favorites. It\'s from the same day as \'Angel.\' This is one of the beats from that day, and I recorded the drums and then I forgot about this. Tom went away, he put the Aretha sample to it, processed the drums a bit, and came back later. I was like, \'Wow, what\'s this? I don\'t even remember this.\' I love that kind of stuff. I love gospel music. That\'s a big influence to me, man. That\'s a dream of mine, to record with a live choir at some point, and obviously Aretha Franklin, that\'s legendary.” **Lift Off (feat. Rocco Palladino)** TM: “I linked up with Rocco through Yussef. They have a proper sort of musical bromance. And it\'s cool to play with them, because they\'re very much in sync. It\'s been interesting finding my voice within that trio. It\'s brought out something different in me.” YD: “I\'ve known Rocco for about 10 years now. I think we\'ve started performing together the last three years now. He\'s crazy, man. You always can tell, because bass players—they\'re very specific, man. He\'s definitely the best at what he does, and obviously he comes from... \[Welsh musician and producer Pino Palladino\], his dad\'s an amazing bass player, too. He knows what he\'s doing, man. Let\'s put it that way.” **I Did It for You** TM: “We just clicked record and we were jamming for a whole day. And this is one of the joints that came up in the evening. We jammed something, then we\'d go up to the control room, we listen. I remember thinking, \'Shit, that sounded really nice.\' I knew I wanted to sing on that one. I was like, \'Yeah, this is a vibe.\'” YD: “We recorded this nearly two years ago, it was one of the first tracks. I\'d been to Brazil a few years back, years ago, and I remember Tom wanting to go. I think he did in the end, so that track was kind of inspired by some of those rhythms and that kind of energy. It\'s closer to Tom\'s sound, I think.” **Last 100** TM: “I was playing some piano, messing around, Yussef was up on the drum kit. It was after a session. We\'re just messing around before we go home, and then I start playing those chords. And I recorded it on my iPhone. I was like, \'This is nice.\' We came back to it the next day and recorded the bassist. This is kind of like the love tune on the record. It\'s a summery, feel-good one.” YD: “You have the initial session and then obviously some of the tracks you need to produce up, so you spend a couple of weeks on them. Tom would write his vocals or add little synths to it, to get those sections there, but the drums are obviously the main thing you want to record and get that first. Then after that, it’s just adding the structure around it. ‘Last 100’ is definitely one of those ones we produced up and got the arrangement and added different instrumentation and backing vocals.” **Kyiv** TM: “So this one was actually recorded in London, but the live video was recorded in Kiev. That was a very, very cold day. It was about minus five degrees. And we were recording the live video for ‘Lift Off’ in this ex-community center in Kiev. It\'s an amazing old building. It looks like a Call of Duty zombie level. It was pretty cool. It was interesting to be in that part of Europe, the fashion and the architecture, ex-Soviet kind of architecture. And everyone in fur jackets and stuff. I want to go back.” YD: “It was in a mad building. It was like a freezer in there. They said we had one reel left, and we’d already wrapped up ‘Lift Off,’ then Rocco started playing these chords and we just recorded real quickly. It just came. What I like to do is still like to make it like it was a song. You play your part. The music is still the most important thing, even though you want to freestyle and you want to solo and all this stuff. You want to make a beat. You want to make something people will listen to as well. It’s just that know-how, how to, even if you are freestyling, just make it into the thing straight away, man.” **Julie Mangos** YD: “That’s our dads speaking on this one. It\'s a medley of little skits and stuff that we\'ve recorded. My dad’s talking about Deptford Market, where he used to sell Caribbean and West Indian food. He\'s describing what it was like in the market. About 20 years ago, he had a stall down there, and we used to have fruit imported and pick it up from the docks. This is just me and Tom trying to give a bit of context to where we\'re coming from. To get our dads on the record, and family involved—it\'s a touch, man.” TM: “Both our dads have been quite involved in coming down throughout making this record. Just coming and listening, giving their opinions on stuff. I called my dad, another day. Clicked record without him knowing, and I asked him what he thought of the record. So we put those on. I think my dad knew that this is something that I really wanted to do, making this record. Because I\'d tell him how excited I was about working with Yussef, and the way the tracks were sounding initially. There\'s a lot of excitement making this record. I think he sensed that.” **Storm Before the Calm (feat. Kaidi Akinnibi)** TM: “Kaidi is an amazing saxophone player. I met him when I was about 12 and he was seven or something. We met at a jazz youth club called Tomorrow’s Warriors. He was just insane at the sax at that time. Then fast-forward 10 years, I hit him up and we start jamming, and he featured on one of my tracks from \[2017 EP\] *5 Day Mischon*. And then we hit him up again, and he\'s been playing in my band, he\'s been touring with me. Thought we\'d try him on this track, and he just destroyed it.” YD: “He\'s 20 years old, and he\'s killing it already. It\'s one of the first ones we recorded as well. It\'s *that* same day, man. The same day, the \'Angel\' day, we recorded this one as well. This one’s got these dark synths, it\'s like a storm. It was always going to be the outro or the intro, but I think it just closes off with a different vibe before you check out. We were just trying to experiment with synths and the OP-1, which is this mad little synth I’ve got, and just span different sounds.”

Two years after her breakthrough album *Loner*—a witty, woozy, and very personal New Wave odyssey—Rose returns with an appropriately glossy concept album about fame and misfortune. Over the course of *Superstar*’s 11 tracks, she follows a fictitious striver who dreams of big-screen stardom, for all the wrong reasons. “I’m moving to LA/A weekend in Paris/I’m gonna bask in fame/Fiji in a banana hammock,” Rose sings on “Got to Go My Own Way,” one of the album’s several bright-eyed vision-board boasts. They’re part of a doomed Hollywood journey Rose narrates through both gorgeously slow-burning anthems (“Nothing’s Impossible”) and synth-afflicted dance-floor jams (“Feel the Way I Want”). *Superstar* may not have the happiest of endings, but it’s alluring enough to make you hold out hope for a sequel.