Albumism's 100 Best Albums of 2020

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

It takes only 20 seconds of rhythmic rapture on “Samba” before a familiar melodic refrain emerges. Not long thereafter, Gloria Estefan’s distinct voice cuts through and reveals the self-referencing interpolation at play, a culture-blending revival of Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 smash “Conga.” Such boldness sets *BRAZIL305*, the 13th studio album of her decades-long career, off to a truly memorable start. With a titular portmanteau that perfectly encapsulates its contents, the project bridges São Paulo with Miami in riveting fashion. Fan favorites from her bilingual catalog like “Get on Your Feet” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” transform here with fresh instrumentation that maintains the pop majesty of the original versions. Estefan doesn’t limit the reinterpretations to her own work, providing inventive takes on tracks like Maria Rita’s “O Homem Falou” in both English and Spanish.

Coming out of the eclectic Cincinnati scene, Arlo McKinley has washed his songs in the blood of street soul, country, punk and gospel – and tattooed them onto the underground. Filled with an honest weight and gritty-hope from rustbelt city life, McKinley rolled downriver to Memphis’ Sun Studio where Grammy Award-winning producer Matt Ross-Spang gathered a working man’s all-star band to record his Oh Boy Records debut, “Die Midwestern.” McKinley’s 10 original songs bleed truth from a heart scarred by wild nights and redeemed by Sunday morning confessions. “She’s Always Around,” “Suicidal Saturday Night,” “Bag of Pills” and “Ghost” are all carved out in the key of life.

After five studio albums, Little Dragon has established a reputation for genre-blending experimentation, trance-inducing ’80s pop, and downtempo ’90s R&B. For five albums, the band remained faithful to their signature breathy, dreamy dance club sound, but in the three years since the Swedish quartet released *Season High*, the band has matured lyrically. The subject matter on *New Me, Same Us* ranges from commentary on the monotony of life to coping with loss of loved ones. “It definitely feels like a personal album for us,” lead singer Yukimi Nagano tells Apple Music during a track-by-track interview for the band’s latest record. **Hold On** “It started very much as a house track, actually. The demo version of it really reminded me of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ by Massive Attack, which is a band that has been a huge influence for us. The song has a deeper meaning about accepting change, which can go for a lot of the other tracks as well. That one in particular is about being able to let go of a former part of yourself and accept the new you in a way. And not being ready to let go of that part of you, the older part of you.” **Rush** “‘Rush’ is basically just a song about this feeling of our modern lives and everything moving as a whirlwind, really hectically, and not being able to really reflect on your inner self. In the midst of just being this arrow moving forwards in life, you\'re filled with feelings of fear and the separation anxiety and all these kinds of things that you maybe can\'t even deal with properly. It’s about that frenzy of modern-day life.” **Another Lover** “I had this beat from the guys and I really loved it. I had a melody that I was working on and I was just sort of a bit stuck. It was my birthday and I had a mushroom, a magic mushroom. I just had to lay down and close my eyes and embrace what was happening. I just felt this huge amount of pain and sorrow for a person that I had not been able to feel any empathy for. And as I felt all those things, I was like, ‘Okay, let me snap out of this. I really want to write this song.’ So in the midst of that, I sort of wrote the song. It just felt very genuine and like my heart was wide open. I sort of recorded the vocals straight after that with snot running out of my nose and tears flowing. I was just like, oh. My voice was so groggy and hoarse. So actually we recorded it the next day.” **Kids** “‘Kids’ is one of our tracks that was very playful and experimental. It\'s kind of dark and hopeful at the same time. It\'s definitely a reflection on just this time of individualism. Everyone sort of being the star of their own story and kids growing up into this madness. It has an angelic vibe to it with the synth, but it also has the darkness. It has a lot of mixed emotions, and it kind of was one of those tracks that we felt the album needed. It wasn\'t that single or anything, but it had that experimental vibe that we love and that we\'ve tried to keep in the band and that\'s important to us.” **Every Rain** “The fact that we\'re all from this earth, this planet, this universe together. In that sense, we\'re every rain, we\'re the clouds, we\'re the sky, we\'re everything here together, but we change form.” New Fiction “That started with Fred \[Källgren Wallin\] singing the chorus and messing with sort of the demo version. I recall him saying that he went out to a party and he kind of just felt like he was seeing it as a very shallow experience where everyone was trying to be something. Sometimes you just feel misplaced in that and you feel like everyone\'s almost playing roles and following some kind of an invisible curriculum in a way. We need new fantasies to live up to that are more epic than this. My favorite part of that song is the piano solo in the end, because we have a grand piano in the studio right now. We\'ve never had it on any song. Fred had a bit of anxiety because it\'s not a cheap instrument. It takes all this space and it has this aura around it that is just very serious. He got so excited about having the piano that once it arrived, it put on a big pressure. We were very happy to lighten that pressure by having him sort of let go on that track.” **Sadness** “Sadness is the space of transition; it can truly lead to something beautiful. So it\'s kind of a portal where you can heal yourself, where your tears are something that can be something beautiful and helpful. It\'s something that I\'ve always enjoyed, when the music has a certain emotion and the lyrics kind of contradict that.” **Are You Feeling Sad?** “We have a lot of songs that didn\'t end up on the album, but \'Are You Feeling Sad?\' was just a beat that felt infectious to us and fun. So I didn\'t have any deep thoughts about it. I didn\'t sit and explode my brain on what to write on that. It was just sort of freestyling, going into the booth and putting some vocals in. I kind of liked the idea of a dancing song kind of also being a soothing lullaby-ish kind of song, you know? Then with the Kali \[Uchis\] feature, we were really excited because I just really love her verse on it, so it added something definitely to the whole song. Lifted it up.” **Where You Belong** “It started just guitar and vocals. Not typical Little Dragon, just crazy beat from somebody\'s computer. The song is about the feeling of losing somebody and when you still have their number in your phone and you want to hear their voice or you want to talk to that person. There\'s that realization of them not being there, but they\'re always with you, you know? You close your eyes, you know that they\'re with you no matter what.” **Stay Right Here** “‘Stay Right Here’ is a love song. Every album is a sort of reflection of where we are in our lives at the moment. I met somebody in my life, someone now that means so much to me. It\'s kind of literal, even in the lyrics.” **Water** “‘Water’ is also a song that really changed from the demo. It started very electronic and kind of became in the end a song that sounded almost a little country. It\'s written in a shattered way—I usually just write different sentences that I feel at the moment. It\'s about time passing and sitting, becoming older and looking out. I wanted to get that sort of feeling of a journey of life, starting somewhere and then ending in another space. You start out in the desert and then you kind of end out in the water.”

Little Dragon—the pioneering Swedish four-piece fronted by enigmatic vocalist Yukimi Nagano, with multi-instrumentalists Håkan Wirenstarnd and Fredrik Wallin on keyboards and bass respectively and Erik Bodin on drums and percussion—return with their sixth studio album, “New Me, Same Us”. For a band who are proudly left-of-centre and fiercely protective of doing things on their own terms, they have achieved no shortage of mainstream recognition. Grammy nominated for 2014’s “Nabuma Rubberband”, Little Dragon have long been seen as one of the most sought-after groups to work with. Chalking up an enviable list of collaborators throughout the years, working with equally groundbreaking artists like BADBADNOTGOOD, Gorillaz, SBTRKT, Flying Lotus, Flume, Kaytranada, Big Boi (who was first put on to the band via fellow Outkast member André 3000), De La Soul, DJ Shadow, Tinashe, Mac Miller, Future, Raphael Saadiq, Faith Evans and more. Their hugely popular and highly regarded live performances have spawned a decade-spanning touring career which has seen them recently co-headline a show with Flying Lotus at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl and perform at some of the world’s most revered festivals such as Coachella, Glastonbury, Bestival, Lollapalooza, Melt, Dour, Sonar and Tyler, The Creator’s ‘Camp Flog Gnaw’. Having played together since their school days in Gothenburg—where they’d meet up after class to jam and listen to records by artists like A Tribe Called Quest and Alice Coltrane —“New Me, Same Us” is the sound of a band going back to basics and falling back in love with their instruments: drums, bass, keyboards, harp, guitar and voice, to produce some of their most focussed and inarguably best music to date. “This album has been the most collaborative for us yet.” they explain, “which might sound weird considering we’ve been making music together for all these years, but we worked hard at being honest, finding the courage to let go of our egos and be pieces of something bigger.” Entirely self-produced and recorded at their long-term home-built studio in Gothenburg, “New Me, Same Us” represents another chapter in the continuing evolution of Little Dragon, finding new direction in their unique style of unhurried, off-kilter r’n’b, pop and electronics, they sound as rejuvenated and energised as ever. The record also finds them in a reflective mood, Yukimi’s distinctive vocals musing on transitions, longing, and saying goodbye. “We are all on our own personal journeys,” they say, “full of change, yet still we stand united with stories we believe in, that make us who we are.” Lead single ‘Hold On’ is a message about breaking away and moving on, ‘Rush’ is about yearning for a love now lost, ‘Another Lover’ is described as a daydream of heartache, “I can’t understand what I'm doing / don't understand where we going” Yukimi laments in the opening lines. The aptly named ‘Sadness’ speaks to “how you might think you know someone but then time shows you a new face” say the band. ‘Where You Belong’ is a lullaby of fear of loss and death. There is room for optimism too, though. ‘New Fiction’ seeks that space in which to create new narratives and forge your own path and ‘Are You Feeling Sad’ is a reminder to take a step back and not worry too much: “you gonna be alright / don’t worry don’t worry / things gonna turn out fine”. Artwork is produced by award-winning Swedish director, producer, screenwriter and animator Johannes Nyholm (who’s shadow puppetry short film ‘Dreams from the Woods’ was used as the music video for Little Dragon’s ‘Twice’) and continues the band’s long history of working with boundary-pushing creatives across the worlds of art and design, including IB Kamara (i-D, Dazed, Vogue) and David Uzochukwu (Dior, FKA Twigs, Nike) on previous album “Season High”, Vicki King on their “Lover Chanting” EP and Lena Mačka on their recent “Tongue Kissing” single.

Honus Honus (aka Ryan Kattner) has devoted his career to exploring the uncertainty between life’s extremes: beauty and ugliness, order and chaos. The songs on Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, Man Man’s first album in over six years and his Sub Pop debut, are as intimate, soulful, and timeless as they are audaciously inventive and daring. The 17-track effort, featuring “Cloud Nein,” “Future Peg,” “On the Mend” “Sheela,” and “Animal Attraction,” was produced by Cyrus Ghahremani, mixed by S. Husky Höskulds (Norah Jones, Tom Waits, Mike Patton, Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette, Allen Toussaint), and mastered by Dave Cooley (Blood Orange, M83, DIIV, Paramore, Snail Mail, clipping). Dream Hunting...also includes guest vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski on “Future Peg” and “If Only,” and Rebecca Black (singer of the viral pop hit, “Friday”) on “On The Mend” and “Lonely Beuys.” The album follows the release of “Beached” and “Witch,“ Man Man’s contributions to Vol. 4 of the Sub Pop Singles Club in 2019. At the end of 2015, Man Man went on an unexpected and unforeseen hiatus, and thus began a period of creative reinvention for Honus. He worked in music supervision and on scores (The Exorcist, Superdeluxe, Do You Want to See a Dead Body?). He acted in the indie film Woe (“I played a park ranger, a nice guy in a sad movie.”), So It Goes, a short musical film with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and starred in the award-winning tour documentary Use Your Delusion. He also developed an animated series, wrote film scripts, a graphic novel, a neo-noir TV pilot, and briefly penned a music column for The Talkhouse all while continuing to work on new music, such as an unreleased kids’ record, another Mister Heavenly album, a self-released Honus Honus record, and a conceptual art/noise project Mega Naturals. He was sleeping 2.5 hours per day. In the midst of this Man Man sabbatical, Honus began piecing together what would become Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between. He recruited longtime-creative collaborator Ghahremani to help him produce. Written in a friend’s LA “guesthouse” (more shack than chic) that had “an old upright piano, a thrift store lamp, and nothing else,” it was an arduous, three-and-a-half-year process, “I had chord progression notes that looked like chicken scratch and lyrics on pieces of paper stuck all over the walls. It looked like I was about to break the big case, catch the killer,” he says, laughing. “One of the best things about this time, in these ‘lost in the wilderness/surreal exile from my own band’ years, was that I finally found players who believed in me, trusted my vision, respected my songwriting. It was rejuvenating.” Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between opens with “Dreamers,” an ethereal instrumental that soon takes a dark turn into the 20 seconds of cacophony that introduces “Cloud Nein.” An exercise in orchestral-pop storytelling tinted by wry cynicism, it features lyrics such as, “All your dreams crash and burn, and fall to the ground. When they’re made of sweet nothings ’cause nothing sticks around.” Says Honus: “I was writing a song about someone else, but also myself, in a sense. You have to keep changing, evolving in order to survive, appreciate what you have while you have it because there are no guarantees it’ll stick around forever. AKA, life.” He would find inspiration everywhere. “If Only,” featuring feather-light vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski, came to him in a dream. “I first heard ‘If Only’ sung in an R&B Jackie Wilson kind of way,” he says of the haunting piano lullaby. The glitched-out fever dream “Oyster Point'' opens with a recording of 8-year-old Honus singing to his newborn brother and named after the town where the frontman and his bandmates met someone who tried to sell them a broken bass clarinet. An ex, bitten by a goat and worried she’d contracted salmonella (true story!), inspired the off-kilter jazz narrative “Goat.” (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well!) In the opening seconds of “Goat” you can actually hear the first time Honus presented the song to his band —an iPhone recording of his drummer playfully teasing, in classic 80s movie tone, “Don’t fuck this up. This is a big gig,” before launching seamlessly into the studio version. “I was taking songs out under the guise of my solo band,” he explains, “so we could test the waters, see what worked live, what didn’t, and then I’d adjust accordingly. When it came time to finally record, we did everything at Cy’s studio but after a year or so of tracking, I didn’t like how ‘in the box’ and stiff everything felt so we booked out a short tour with the sole intention of rolling back and recutting everything together live in a larger studio space. In two frantic tracking days. It was crucial to me that this album feels like a band playing together in a room, communicating with each other, breathing, organic, slithery, alive.” This lust for life, gloriously unhinged at times, beats strongly throughout. The “Inner Iggy,” all staccato Pinocchio Pleasure Island vibes, pays obeisance to the punk singer as a one-man tsunami. Joseph Beuys, the conceptual artist famous for cohabitating with a coyote at a gallery, stands at the center of the full-throated “Lonely Beuys.” Meanwhile, “Sheela,” a pop-fuzz update on doo-wop, is a love song to the cult attaché at the center of Wild Wild Country. “I watched that documentary, and she terrified me,” he says. “But weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I loved how strong and powerful and determined a person she was.” The devil is in the details, which is why they affected coyote howls to honor the hell-raiser. “I started Man Man because I saw Holy Mountain when I was 22. It blew my mind. I had never been in a band or played music before, but I knew I needed to make songs that sounded like that movie felt,” he says. “When I was hunkering down to write, there was a lot of self-doubt, fighting the urge to throw in the towel. It was unavoidable but I had to dive headlong into these fears and twist them into something that wasn’t dominated by them. I’m not gonna lie, it fucking sucked, but it definitely forced the best album of my career out of me. Sometimes you have to tear it all down to build it back up the right way.” Kattner caught the killer. He is currently sleeping 3.5 hours per day. Hope reigns.

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

When the rapping concludes toward the end of the first song on *Ignatius*, “Pearly Gates,” Jadakiss begins speaking. “Icepick Jay forever!” he says. “We love you, we miss you, we gon’ keep this shit solid.” The album is a dedication to dearly departed friend, manager, and longtime Ruff Ryders A&R Ignatius “Icepick” Jackson. At 13 tracks, including two interludes, it’s a shorter set than we’re used to from the legendary Yonkers MC, but one chock-full of emotion, both in honor of and in several instances in direct tribute to its namesake. Whether in collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign, 2 Chainz, and Rick Ross (among others) or eulogizing his friend as he does on “I Know” and “Closure,” Kiss is wholly the wizened OG fans have watched him grow into over the course of a decades-long career. With regard to his friend’s impact on the project’s music, Kiss says that the Pusha T collaboration “Huntin Season” began as an Ignatius idea. Together, Jada and Push honor a curator in remaining their cleverest selves.

Some years you have to wonder how Public Enemy sustains such righteous indignation. Others—let’s say 2020, just for example—you wonder why everyone isn’t as angry as they are. That they have strong thoughts on the 45th president of the United States isn’t surprising (“State of the Union”), nor is their crusade to uphold old-school values about hip-hop and art in a frictionless digital world (“Public Enemy Number Won,” “Toxic,” the Ice-T-featuring “Smash the Crowd”). The surprise is how vital, engaged, and unflinchingly on message Chuck D and Flavor Flav sound this side of their 60th birthdays, and on their prodigal return to Def Jam. If you think YG’s line “Pull the trigger, kill a negro/He\'s a hero” on the revamp of “Fight the Power” sounds hyperbolic, remember George Zimmerman and welcome to Kyle Rittenhouse. Breonna Taylor is mentioned, but because systemic racism comes in many forms and flavors, so are Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. And if PE\'s politics seem preoccupying, listen to “R.I.P. Blackat”—their feelings about friends are just as strong. Yes, they’ve been confronting us with the same stark reality for more than three decades. But that’s not their fault, it’s the world’s. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.

Lauv is a pop star communicating love and life for Generation Mindful—and it’s a position held with much sincerity. “Artists get encouraged to find their ‘thing’ and I think that’s super unhealthy,” he tells Apple Music. In search of an antidote, Lauv introduced The One Man Boyband, an eccentric online video series that outlines the basis of his debut studio album *~how i\'m feeling~*. “We created these six different characters that represent different aspects of my personality,” he explains. “I wanted to find a way to visually represent that in a way that was simple, but also somewhat funny.” *~how i\'m feeling~* is the artist born Ari Staprans Leff distilled across 21 tracks, feeling Purple (“existential”), Blue (“hopeless romantic”), Red (“spicy”), Yellow (“positive”), Green (“goofy”), and sometimes Orange (“fuckboy”). Though the album’s theme runs deeply personal, Lauv connects with a wide-ranging cast of collaborators, each helping to lure a new dimension out of him. Over infectious flamenco licks, he’s joined by Sofía Reyes for the bilingual pop anthem “El Tejano,” and on the wintry ballad “Who,” he layers wondrous harmonies alongside K-pop sensations BTS. In a fun exploration of the many strands that make the man, Lauv talks us through the album, picking out some color-coded key tracks. **Drugs & The Internet** (Orange & Purple) “That was the first song I had written for the album. My project before was all love songs, heartbreak songs, hopeless romantic, blah, blah, blah. I think that was the beginning of me being like, ‘Okay, I\'m going to really open this door musically and stop trying to filter myself,’ which is also a big part of the concept, too. I felt like before I was filtering myself as an artist—only showing one side.” **fuck, i’m lonely (feat. Anne-Marie) \[from *13 Reasons Why* Season 3\]** (Blue) “I usually know when a song happens pretty fast that they\'re usually the best ones. I made the beat when I was on tour, in an airport. It was super quick, and then I came home and I was hanging with my best friend who I do a lot of my songwriting with. The chorus came from a conversation. The whole song was written pretty quickly; it just felt like one of those catchy songs that I could see people resonating with. I sent it to Anne-Marie—I think she was back home and I was in LA working on the album—and she absolutely smashed it.” **Sims** (Blue) “‘Sims’ for me was an important one, especially as we made a short film around that one. That was one of the ways we broke down the concept of the different characters in The One Man Boyband. Funny thing about the song—I actually don\'t even know that much about the game Sims, but the whole thing about the song is wondering how you can do a situation differently. Whether it\'s a romantic situation, you meet somebody at a party and choke up and you don\'t say the right thing, and then they leave and you\'re like, I wonder if they could have been my wife, or whatever, any situation.” **Billy** (Green) “My favorite is Green, just because he doesn\'t take shit seriously. He doesn\'t show up much because he\'s fucking weird. I have no idea how this song happened. I went through a really shitty time—I got really, really depressed and was diagnosed with OCD and depression, so I wrote some songs about that. I ended getting prescribed some antidepressants and I woke up one week, so unbelievably happy, every day, like crazy, crazy. Within a week span, I bought a house, I got my dog, I bought all this art. I went crazy, and all my friends were like, \'Yo, what the fuck is going on? You were just super depressed. This is not normal.\' Essentially, I was some version of manic. I was just super elevated. I would be in the middle of making one song, and then an entire other song would happen in 10 minutes. \'Billy\' was one the songs that just came out of nowhere while I was working on something else. My dog is named Billy, I think that\'s where the name came from. I had just gotten him, and to the song, it\'s somewhat fantasy, somewhat autobiographical.” **Feelings** (Blue) “I think this might be the only song on the album that I mixed myself. It was one of my babies, so I was very protective about how I wanted it to sound. One of my best friends, Jaime—she helps me a lot on the A&R side—she was like, ‘Oh, I know this amazing producer who can help you on the song.’ So I met him, and that same day, we were just vibin’. His girlfriend, another amazing songwriter named Andrea, she came in, and just by chance, we wrote ‘Feelings’ in an hour. I was just not expecting that. It’s about when you\'re on the edge with someone new and it\'s like, ‘Come on, let\'s just go for it.’” **Canada (feat. Alessia Cara)** (Yellow & Blue) “I was dating this girl and she sent me a screenshot of trending topics on Twitter, and the top topic that day was ‘Studies show if you\'re looking for the best quality of life, you should move to Canada.’ I wrote the song with Phoebe Bridgers—she\'s amazing—and then I sent it to Alessia, I thought she would do something amazing for that song. I\'ve been in LA for three and a half years now, I was in New York for four years before that, in school, and I feel like at this point, it would be so hard for me to not live in some type of city, just because I need stuff always happening. Don\'t get me wrong, I love beautiful nature and stuff, but I\'d just go crazy.” **For Now** (Blue) “What happens at my shows is the production\'s pretty big—there’s really huge moments, huge video wall, and a lot of content and stuff. But then I strip it down for that song, to just one single microphone and my acoustic guitar. I have to get the entire room to be silent for people to hear me. I was nervous that it wouldn\'t work, but it actually works—99.9% of the time. I was about to play and somebody said something, so someone else in the crowd turned and said, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ You can find the video on TikTok, actually—it was *so* funny. It\'s one of my favorite moments in the show because unpredictable stuff happens every time.” **Mean It** (Red) “I started \[writing the song\] in New York a while ago, with a couple of my best friends, Michael Pollack and Michael Matosic. I sat on it for a while. Then, me and Paul \[Klein\] from LANY had been talking, we hung out, and Twitter was always like, ‘LANY and Lauv, Lauv and LANY, they need to collab,’ so on and so forth. When I first came to LA, I found their stuff, and been listening since they were putting shit out on SoundCloud. Before I was Lauv, I had a DJ project that I was doing remixes under. I did this bootleg remix one night to ‘I Love You So Bad.’ I don\'t think they even know that, but I was definitely a longtime fan. My mom is obsessed with \'Mean It.\' After it came out, she was like, \'Paul\'s voice is so amazing.\' I think she low-key has a crush on Paul.” **Tell My Mama** (Orange) “I reference things, drugs and whatever. I think the way that I sing about it, I listen back and I\'m like, \'All right, it\'s a little fuckboy.\' Somebody might take it as if you\'re bragging about it or something like that.” **Who (feat. BTS)** (Purple) “When you get to that chorus and the stacked vocals, the back harmonies and stuff, I thought it\'d be really sick. I met them at Wembley. That was when they asked me to do the remix for ‘Make It Right.’ ‘Make It Right’ was my favorite song off of that project \[*MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA*\]. That song, just talk about brilliant, brilliant melodies, some of the best melodies in the world. Think Ed Sheeran\'s on that one—an absolute icon of a songwriter, obviously, and artist, and person. I was so lucky to go on tour with him. Every time I go to London and we hang, he tries to get me to get a beanie wrap from Nando\'s, and I got to be honest, I\'m not really a beanie wrap type of guy.” **El Tejano (feat. Sofía Reyes)** (Red) “It means ‘The Texan,’ I believe. You know when you move to a new city and quickly find your spots? We found this bar and restaurant \[in downtown LA\] called El Tejano, and I started going there three or four times a week. It\'s just the most chill place and they\'ve got a good fish taco. Me and my best friends are always joking about making a song about it, and one day we finally got the song right, I knew it had to be on the album. When I sent her the song, the way I knew it was perfect and meant to be is she was like, \'Yo, I actually love El Tejano. I go there all the time.’” **Tattoos Together** (Yellow) “I was seeing this girl—super, super, super quick into seeing her, I went to Portland and got a matching tattoo with her. I\'ve never done that before, and I\'m very much an overthinker for the most part. I don\'t just do stuff like that, and I just did it. I don\'t know for sure if she\'ll still keep it. It\'s not each other\'s names or anything, it\'s a really cute tattoo, and honestly even though the relationship didn\'t work out, it marks a time in my life that I was just so happy and so in love. I have a few really dumb tattoos, and you know what, at least I can say at that moment it was something that I felt strongly about.” **Changes** (Purple) “That song was very much a journey song for me. I started writing it before I was diagnosed. Not being dramatic here—I spent the entire month in my bed, just in a horrible place. The only way I could get myself to write a song, I put a little shitty keyboard in my bedroom, and that was the only place I was really able to work on a song. I\'m just super lucky that I do what I do and I wasn\'t working an office job or something, because I would\'ve just fallen apart. So, I started ‘Changes’ then, and then I finished it after I got to a much better place. I was like, ‘I love this song, maybe I can finish it.’ That\'s how I got the perspective to finish. It was once I had actually got happy again.” **Sad Forever** (Purple) “One of the best ways I would describe the difference between, for me, sadness and depression is I felt like there was this heavy blanket between me and the world. It wasn\'t just normal sadness. I felt like I couldn\'t really feel. I almost started to feel numb. I couldn\'t really feel joy or anything out of life anymore. I thought I wanted to quit music. I just felt super not me, and that\'s where ‘Sad Forever’ came about. One day I decided I wanted to record a little monologue on my iPhone. In one of my friends’ cars, I just stream-of-consciousness spoke about what happened in my life around ‘Sad Forever.’ Then, before I play it at every show, I walk off stage and the screen goes black and text appears, and you hear that iPhone voice memo. Then, I come and play.” **Modern Loneliness** (Purple) “I\'ve been playing it in rehearsals, and not to be melodramatic, but I literally cry. When it gets to that last chorus, I just lose it. I don\'t know why, it\'s just an emotional song for me. That one was the most important song to me. I love that song so, so, so, so, so much.”

The 11th Jayhawks studio album XOXO was released July 10, 2020 on Sham/Thirty Tigers. Recorded in late 2019 at Pachyderm and Flowers Studios in Minnesota, XOXO represents a bold step forward. For the first time, all four members contribute writing and lead vocal duties. XOXO is the most diverse and wide-ranging in the group’s storied history. Rather than marking a sonic departure, though, the collection signals a sharpening of focus for the band, an elevation in understanding of who they are and what they do best. In classic Jayhawks fashion, the songs here mix the influence of American roots music with British invasion and jangly power-pop, but there’s a newfound vitality at play, as well, an invigoration of confidence and energy that could only come with the injection of fresh blood. The result is an album that, much like the band’s lush harmonies, brings multiple distinctive voices together into a singular whole, a collection that, ironically enough, finds unity in individuality and identity in reinvention.

Even though it arrives two decades into her career, Norah Jones’ eighth album is her first born from poems. Her friend, the poet Emily Fiskio, inspired Jones to try poetry, and Jones inspired Fiskio to write songs. Eventually, the two combined forces, and several of their collaborations are included here. “It opened me up to a different avenue of writing,” Jones tells Apple Music. “Plus, when you read Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein to your kids every night, weird rhymes float around in your head.” Perhaps that’s why these songs, which trace a difficult period in Jones’ life, as well as the world, still feel somewhat hopeful. Or it could be the fact that they weren’t written to fit an album at all. Instead, Jones allowed herself to record spontaneously, uploading tracks to a playlist whenever they came together—another first. “I was collaborating with different people and just trying to make singles rather than forcing an album,” she says. “It was very freeing.” Here, she shares the inside story behind each song. **How I Weep** “This song began as a poem, and then I sat on it for a few months, unsure what was going to happen. I knew I eventually had to try to turn it into a song, because that\'s what I do, so one night, I waited until the house was quiet, and played and sang until it came together. I always had it first in my little side playlist. It was always the first song. So when I decided to turn those songs into an album, I knew this would be the introduction.” **Flame Twin** “This is another song that came from a poem. I brought it into the studio one day and was like, ‘Well, let\'s see if I could put some music to this real quick and record it.’ And it came together pretty quickly.” **Hurts to Be Alone** “I had a little piano melody and some lyric ideas in notes in my phone, but as usual, I didn’t really know what they were until I started working with them. For me, songs tend to come together in the studio. This one came to life during one of those whirlwind three-day studio sessions where we wound up with seven songs. There were no bad pancakes! Lyrically, you know, sometimes you don’t even realize you’re going through something until you write a song about it. It’s only later that you’re like, ‘Oh man, I was really feeling that.’ It\'s a good way of processing.” **Heartbroken, Day After** “This is one of my favorites. I love how it came out with the pedal steel. It\'s very mournful and heartfelt. And of course it references something specific, but I like that it\'s still open to your own interpretation. It\'s interpretable to the listener. So I\'m not going to tell.” **Say No More** “This is a song written by my friend Sarah Oda. She’s one of my oldest friends, and she’s also my manager, and she’s a really gifted songwriter. When she brought me this, it was basically done. All we had to do was change some of the chords. It\'s got a fun energy; we picked up on it immediately in the studio. For me, I thrive on spontaneity and recording with a live band. I don\'t love laboring over things. If we don\'t have a good take of a song in an hour, then we move on. It’s instinctive. Sometimes, when artists overthink songs, I think you can hear it in the music.” **This Life** “‘This Life’ has turned into one of my favorite songs on the album, and it started out as a real throwaway. It was a little backup idea, a voice memo I had that was just ‘This life as we know it is over.’ I brought that into the studio along with a couple other lines, and we wound up with a pretty good vibe. But it wasn\'t amazing. It was only later when we added in the part where the harmonies come that I really fell in love with it. It felt like something you’d hear in church, those big harmonies. That’s one of my favorite things.” **To Live** “I wrote this song for a session with Mavis Staples. I’d written two songs for our session, but she only wound up singing on one of them, ‘I’ll Be Gone,’ which we released as a single \[in October 2019\]. This was the song we didn’t wind up using, but I couldn’t really part with it. It was intended as a duet, but I liked my demo, and I thought, ‘Well, I\'ll just keep it.’” **I\'m Alive** “This was one of the songs I did with Jeff Tweedy in Chicago. I went out there a year and a half ago to mess around with him for three days and maybe release a single, and we ended up doing four songs. Two of them are on this album, this one and ‘Heaven Above,’ and I think this one has great energy. I\'ve known Jeff for a long time. I met him for the first time doing a TV show that we were both on in London, and ever since then we\'ve been friendly, and I\'ve always been a huge fan. He was one of the first people I thought to call when I wanted to start doing collaboration singles, because I thought it\'d be a great way to connect. They’re just a great way to connect with other musicians without being bound to an album. They’re low commitment and low pressure.” **Were You Watching?** “I wrote this song in March of 2018, and it was the very first session I did for anything that wound up on this album. I knew it needed harmonies and I liked the idea of adding vocals that weren’t me, so I called my friend Ruby Amanfu. She and her husband Sam Ashworth came to New York and did a bunch of harmonies on four or five songs. Then I had this great violinist, Mazz Swift, who I\'ve always wanted to work with, come in and add violin. She did a great job. She sounded like she was on the original live recording. It felt perfectly spontaneous.” **Stumble on My Way** “This song, like a lot of my songs, as you’re probably realizing, came from a spontaneous experiment. A voice note in my phone that blossomed. I always keep scraps of ideas and pick them up years later. I found one from 2015 the other day that’s currently stuck in my head. The ideas and emotions hold—the fear for the state of the world, the anxiety about being human. You think you\'re writing about something very ‘in the now,’ but the truth is that you’re writing about being a human on this planet that is falling apart.” **Heaven Above** “I had this song in my head before I went to Chicago, but I loved the way it came out after working with Jeff. There’s something meditative about it that works as the last song. It\'s a little bit like a benediction, if you go to church. A nice closing moment. You know, the album has a lot of sad stuff on it, so I wanted it to feel hopeful in the end. Because I am hopeful about things. I’m a realist, but I’m hopeful.”

Traditionally, the “king’s disease” refers to gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis commonly associated with excessive consumption of rich foods and alcohol. For Nas, an MC whose catalog would lead us to believe he\'s been eating and drinking well for decades, *King’s Disease* the album is a chance for him to relive that sort of voracious glory verse by verse, if not bar by bar. The follow-up to 2018’s seven-song Kanye West collaboration *NASIR*—again helmed by a single producer, Fontana, California’s own Hit-Boy—finds the MC wistfully recounting the days when he and his associates were the gold standard of ill, detailing the ways they’d receive preferential treatment at legendary NYC nightspot the Tunnel (“Blue Benz”), the specific and calculated ways he would hustle (“Car #85”), and the surplus of fly women who yearned to spend time with him (“All Bad”). Touchtones of the era will strike a chord with those who lived or even admired it—(“Since Guess was spotted on my denim pockets/And my wave grease would amaze geeks and freeze fly chicks”)—while a reunion of ’90s supergroup The Firm (minus beloved Queensbridge spitter Nature, who replaced a reportedly incarcerated Cormega at the time of *The Album*’s release in 1997) speaks directly to the school of thought that real MCing is truely timeless. To that very point, Nasty (as he was once known) allows newcomers like Don Toliver (“Replace Me”) and Fivio Foreign (“Spicy”), among others, to bask in the deftness of a voice their own parents likely idolized. He plays educator on songs like “Til the War Is Won” and “The Definition,” but ultimately leaves his legacy in the hands of the people—as any great king should—asking humbly on “10 Points”: “Is there love for a Queens dude in Supreme shoes?”

“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”

Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

As a kid in the late ’60s, Wayne Coyne lived in fear of losing his oldest brother to drugs. “A lot of times, when he left the house on his motorcycle, I just thought, ‘He’s going to crack,’” the Flaming Lips frontman tells Apple Music. “If he didn\'t come home ’til 4:00, I would literally be up in my bed, scared that he was dead somewhere. That’s a real thing.” The Lips’ 16th studio LP is a haunting exploration of how we see the world as children and adults, high and sober, innocent and experienced—and its cover is a photo of Coyne’s brother in 1968. Featuring guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, it’s also—by Flaming Lips standards—a song-oriented reimagining of American classic rock that’s inspired, in part, by a passage in the late Tom Petty’s biography about Petty and his band Mudcrutch stopping to record in Coyne’s native Oklahoma in 1974, as they traveled cross-country to make a go of it in LA. “There\'s never been anybody who’s ever uncovered it or ever noticed it or anything,” Coyne says of the Tulsa session. “But in that little gap, I wondered what that music would have been. So \[multi-instrumentalist\] Steven \[Drozd\] and I just took it further. Like, ‘What if Tom Petty and his band would have run into my older brother, if my brother went up there and they all got addicted to drugs and they got caught up in all this violence and they never became Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but they made this very sad, fucked-up, beautiful record in Tulsa?’ And then we said, ‘Let\'s make that record.’ Here, Coyne tells the story of every song therein. **Will You Return / When You Come Down** “A lot of music is trying to tell you, ‘Dude, go blow your mind.’ And ‘Being insane is great.’ Steven and I\'ve always been like, ‘Dude, I think I\'m insane anyway.’ And I think we\'re glad to finally be embarrassed enough or old enough or whatever it is to say, ‘Yeah, we\'re singing about drugs.’ Part of it is our friends that have died from crashing their car. Part of it is our friends that have died from drug overdoses. And a part of the song is survivor’s guilt, while part of me was glad that I wasn\'t the one who died. But now as you look at yourself later, you’re like, ‘I wish was there with you.’ I think when you\'re a teenager and your friends die in a car accident, part of you has this fantasy you\'ll see them in heaven. Or if we live a thousand lives, you’ll be something else and I\'ll meet you again. And all of these are just fantasies, so you really have to face the horrible truth that you\'re never going to see that person again. The song’s you singing to these ghosts and hoping that they understand how you feel about it.” **Watching the Lightbugs Glow** “We like to always leave room for instrumentals. We like that it just floats along. You don\'t have to listen to it so intensely. Once we convinced Kacey Musgraves to sing on one track \[‘God and the Policeman’\], I thought, ‘Well, while we\'re there, why don\'t we try to do two songs?’ So we came up with another song, and then we end up coming up with a third song \[‘Flowers of Neptune 6’\], and she ended up liking all the things that we presented. I asked her about the song \[2018’s\] ‘Mother.’ She talked about this idea of light bugs, and they were floating around in her yard and she got one with a leaf and she put it in the house and she played some music for it and they danced together. All of this was on a very pleasant acid trip, but she did say that not all of her acid trips were pleasant—she understood sometimes they go horribly bad. While we were coming with this thing, I thought, well, let\'s just have her do kind of a wordless melodic thing, and we would let it be about that story. We could relate to it and she could relate to it and it would be real. And it would be true. I think that\'s why we put it second. Like, ‘Let\'s just not be in such a hurry to say more stuff, just let it just float along with the mood.’ But I wouldn\'t have done it without her. We would have never done it as one of us singing. It was made for her.” **Flowers of Neptune 6** “‘Flowers of Neptune’ came from an insanely great demo that Steven made, but it was long enough that we could envision it being a bigger, more epic song. As we started to make it, we were like, ‘I don\'t think it\'s as good if it keeps going too long, because it\'s got such a crescendo of emotion. Let’s just make it two songs.’ One, ‘Lightbugs,’ could be a little bit more fun and kind of floaty and melancholy—but optimistic. The other, ‘Flowers of Neptune,’ could be more powerful and personal. There is some connection to that idea that our older brothers and their friends, they were these characters that we didn\'t relate to. They were crazy and they were going to go to jail. They were going to go off to war, they were going to get in a fight, they were going to get in a motorcycle accident and we weren’t. And then at some point we realized their life and ours is the same. I am me because of them. You can\'t really express it, but in a song you can, because it\'s big and it\'s crescendos and it\'s emotional and you find somehow you\'re able to express this thing that we would never, ever consider saying to our real brothers, in real life. You\'d just be too embarrassed. But music wants you to go all the way.” **Dinosaurs on the Mountain** “I remember being in the back of the station wagon with my family as we were traveling down a highway, in the middle of the night, on our way to Pittsburgh. And seeing these giant trees, pretending that they were dinosaurs, falling over and killing each other. And also remembering that this is like the last time that I felt that I could just see fantasy and not worry that we\'re driving down a highway, my father might be falling asleep, and we could crash the car and die—all these things you start to think about when you\'re becoming an adult. The times we went back after, I didn\'t see the dinosaurs in the trees. They were just trees. You can\'t get that back. It’s trying to make that into a song that an adult can relate to instead of being like a children\'s storybook or a Disney movie.” **At the Movies on Quaaludes** “I only did quaaludes once, and I have to say, I didn\'t feel anything. There\'s a line at the very beginning of the novel *The Outsiders*—which when you live in Oklahoma, you read in junior high and high school because it\'s set in Tulsa—about coming out of a movie theater. You were so immersed in the movie that you forgot, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life out here.’ My brothers and their friends, they would go to movies all the time in the middle of the day and they would just be so completely fucked up. There was hardly any moments that they weren\'t on some drugs. And I just remembered for myself sometimes, the shock of being in a movie theater, so immersed in that, and you walk outside and you\'re back in real life, whereas I think sometimes they never came back to real life. It\'s just one big, long movie. So there\'s something wonderful about that. It\'s like a dream that you know is never going to come true, but the better to dream it and know it isn\'t going to come true. Or is it worse to not dream it at all?” **Mother I’ve Taken LSD** “This one is devastating for me. It has to be 1968, 1969—there’s a lot of talk about LSD. It’s in the news every day, and when we would be at school, dudes in suits would come with a briefcase full of drugs and say, ‘Don\'t take drugs. And especially don\'t take LSD, because it\'ll make you think that you can fly, and you\'ll go to the top of a bridge and jump off and you\'ll die.’ So all this is in our minds and I\'m only seven or eight years old. It’s like, ‘Fuck. The Beatles think it\'s cool, but the police think it\'s horrible. What do I do here?’ So my brother and my mother are sitting on the porch and they’re having a conversation. I remember my brother saying, ‘Well, mother, I\'ve taken LSD.’ I just couldn\'t believe it. My own brother is doing the things that the police are coming to school to tell me about and he’s going to go insane. I\'m singing about it like it\'s sad for her, but really, it was just sad for me. It’s stayed with me my whole life because it was such a blow.” **Brother Eye** “Steven was like, ‘Why don\'t you just write down some words and I\'ll make up a song around your words?’ Which we never do. Usually, he\'s got a melody and I\'ll put lyrics to it, or I\'ll have lyrics and stuff and he\'ll help me with melodies. I think I wrote out, \'Mother, I don\'t want you to die.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, you have too many songs about mothers. Let\'s do one about brothers.’ His older brothers and his younger brother, all of them, his whole family is dead. When his oldest brother died, I know it devastated him, and we really don\'t sing about it. But in this way of me presenting words to him, I know that he put it in a way of saying we\'re just doing a song. But both of us knew somewhere in there, we\'re singing about this heavy thing. When it came time to be like, ‘Well, are you going to sing it or am I going to sing it?’ I just told him, ‘I think you’ve got to sing that.’ And he was just like, ‘Oh shit.’” **You n Me Sellin’ Weed** “When I was 16 and 17, I started selling pot because everybody around me was selling pot and some were making better money than they were working in a restaurant like I was. But I didn\'t want to do it for very long, because I did fear that I\'d get put in jail or something worse. The second verse is about that. It sounds pretty gentle, but it\'s really about a friend of ours who was involved in a murder. He owed the drug dealer a lot of money and the drug dealer was threatening to kill his little girl. So he went over to his house and he stabbed \[the dealer\] to death. He was put in jail for murder and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life there. And a year or two later, he committed suicide in jail. It\'s a blissful story about a state of mind for just a moment, before the violence and all these things rush in and kill you. I was very lucky that my experience stayed an adventure. That time could have been where everything went badly and our family destroyed itself. Because we saw it happen and because we knew them and they were just like us, I think it changed us to say, ‘Let\'s not let that happen.’” **Mother Please Don’t Be Sad** “When I was 17, there was a robbery happening in the restaurant that I was working in. The guys came in and I thought for sure that I was going to be killed. This song is what I was saying to myself while I laid on the floor, waiting to be shot in the head. I was going to stop at my mother\'s house after I got off work that night and leave my dirty work uniform there, and talk to her for a little bit. I\'m laying on the floor and I know that I\'m going to die. And I\'m thinking, ‘Mother is going to wonder where I\'m at because I\'m going to be late, and she\'s going to start to worry. Then the cops are going to show up like they do in all these horrible movies, and they\'re going to tell her that I died in the robbery.’ And that line, ‘Mother, please don\'t be sad’: I said that laying on the floor there because I just knew it was going to be horrible. It was me that was going to die, but I just thought I\'ll be dead in a second, and it\'s going to be horrible for her. I wanted her to know that I wasn\'t doing something dangerous, I wasn\'t doing something fucked up. I was just at work and this happened, so don\'t worry about it. This was just the chaos of the world. Sometimes there\'s nothing you can do. You\'re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” **When We Die When We’re High** “That beat that Steve plays—in the hands of a lot of drummers, it would be flashy and it would be pompous, but he\'s doing these things that are just so effortless that you don\'t realize what an insane beat it is. And man, that one note with that beat, that\'s got a good menacing joy about it. And then to put that title to it. A friend of ours was killed in a car accident, and everybody in the car was completely zonked out. The car hits a telephone pole and part of his head is just completely taken off and he\'s just dead right there at the scene. This is real stuff. And part of you, what you do to get around just how brutal and how horrible this is, is you do music. Well, he was so high when he died that he wouldn\'t know he was dead. He\'s going to wake up later in the afterlife, everything will be cool. We\'re saying, ‘If you\'re high when you die, do you really die?’ It\'s ridiculous, but it\'s fun to sing.” **Assassins of Youth** “I think in the beginning, it was intended to be on that Deap Lips collaboration that we did with the girls from Deap Vally, and it just never really went anywhere. Something about it reminded us of ABBA. And what I liked about ABBA is that they\'re singing about something that sounds rebellious and revolutionary, but it\'s very sweet-sounding at the same time. And because English too wasn\'t their first language, I always felt like they didn\'t quite know what they were talking about, which was better. So we took this ridiculously overused line, ‘assassins of youth,’ and we pretended that we were like ABBA—we’re not quite sure what it means in English, but we know what it means in Swedish or whatever. It\'s just great, triumphant classic-rock stuff. It presents itself like it\'s an important message. And then when you dissect it, you’re like, ‘I\'m not sure what you\'re saying.’ That, to me, is wonderful.” **God and the Policeman (feat. Kacey Musgraves)** “When Kacey heard it, she came back to me and was like, ‘Now, this is the one. This is the one I want to be on, for sure.’ I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run. On the run from what, I don’t know, but it tied into another drug story, a friend of ours who got caught up in a bad drug deal. It sounds like I\'ve told this one before, but another guy I know, a drug dealer was telling him, ‘Well, if you don\'t pay me, I\'m going to kill you.’ So he went over to \[the dealer’s house\], and the drug dealer, he thought that he was bringing him what he owed him and he just went over there and killed the guy. And he said, ‘See you later. I\'ll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer.’ I can\'t talk too much about it, but I feel like enough time has gone by, I really don\'t even know if he\'s alive anymore.” **My Religion Is You** “It still feels like a folk song or religious song or something, but nothing in our life—my life, anyway—was ever so heavy that I had to turn to God. I always had my mother, my father, and plenty of people around to explain the mysteries of pain and all that to me. I remember, when we initially went to school, our first and second grade, we went to a Catholic school. And there\'d be a lot of talk about Jesus sacrificing himself for us. I didn\'t really understand. I would ask my mother, like, ‘Well, what do they mean? Why is Jesus dying? I don\'t want him to die. Why does he have to die for me?’ And she\'d say, ‘Well, these aren\'t things that most people have to deal with. It\'s for people who don\'t really have families and brothers. People don\'t love them, so Jesus loves them. They don\'t have anybody that will listen to them. So they need God to listen to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, my religion is you.’ She\'s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

As The Killers began work on their sixth full-length, Brandon Flowers had a single visual in mind: the album’s eventual cover art, illustrator Thomas Blackshear’s *Dance of the Wind and Storm*. “We wanted to make sure that the songs fit underneath the banner of what that image was saying,” Flowers tells Apple Music of the drawing, which he hung on the wall of the studio. “Blackshear typically does Western landscapes, or he does spiritual art. But on this particular one he combined them, and that\'s exactly what I wanted to capture. Songs that didn\'t fit, they had to get cut. We’d never done anything like that, but it ended up being a real beacon for us.” As intended, *Imploding the Mirage* evokes the scale and natural majesty of the American West, like The E Street Band playing Monument Valley. And at its heart are a series of synth-lined, often Springsteenian tales of love and salvation, inspired by Flowers’ recent move from Las Vegas to Utah—and the effect it had on his wife’s mental health. (“Las Vegas is a tainted and haunted place,” he says. “Talk about a clean slate.”) It’s the band’s first LP without founding guitarist Dave Keuning, whose departure made space for a list of collaborators that includes k.d. lang, Weyes Blood, The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s also meant to be a companion to 2017’s unabashedly grand *Wonderful Wonderful*. “I\'m very interested in the optimistic side of things,” Flowers says. “I was brought up to have that kind of a perspective, and I think you hear it in the songs: It feels triumphant, like there are angels present.” Here, Flowers details a few of its key tracks. **My Own Soul’s Warning** “It\'s strange to write a song about repentance. It\'s not a typical subject in a pop or a rock song. And I felt like, to be able to go into that territory and write something that was meaningful to myself and that felt like it was going to transcend and resonate with a lot of people in a stadium or inside their headphones—that’s kind of the Holy Grail. It\'s just one of those songs for me.” **Blowback** “The producer of the record, Shawn Everett, he\'s producing the new War on Drugs, and he produced the last one. I think Adam \[Granduciel\] and I share a lot of the same musical landmarks and touchstones—we just follow along through our own experiences, usually Las Vegas. It just kind of happened pretty organically.” **Dying Breed** “Shawn, he’s a wizard in the studio, kind of a mad scientist. And he just will throw things at a song that you were just not envisioning at all. The song was already good, and then Shawn disappeared into a B room for about an hour and came back all excited, and played us that \[Can and Neu!\] loop over the song. And it was like, ‘Yeah.’ It\'s frustrating that it wasn\'t our loop in the beginning, but then we just embraced it and got permission. And when Ronnie \[Vannucci, drummer\] and the full band come in halfway through the song, it just goes to this other level. Now I love that song.” **Caution** “Sometimes they talk. That’s what you hear about, when you hear about great guitar solos—how they speak, how they’re singable. And, man, Lindsey just delivered in a big way, and I love that. I love that you can kind of memorize that solo and sing along.” **Imploding the Mirage** “In \[1977’s\] ‘Solsbury Hill,’ Peter Gabriel talks about walking out of the machinery—and I think he\'s talking about Genesis. It’s kind of like that. It\'s like getting out from underneath the weight of what it is to be in The Killers and what is expected of you, and just doing what you love. That\'s a huge part of it, for sure. I mean, I can\'t pretend like everything\'s just hunky-dory and that we\'re firing on all cylinders. It\'s just not. I\'m obviously using the imagery of Las Vegas—we implode things, we have a casino called The Mirage—and just the idea of this facade that we can put on and how stressful that can be. I think getting rid of it and replacing it with what\'s real can be such a relief and can be something that we could all strive to do.”

The times have finally caught up with The Chicks. With *Gaslighter*, their first album in 14 years, the country trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks seem to have met their moment in the current activist climate. It’s been 17 years since outspoken lead singer Natalie Maines, along with sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire, brazenly risked alienating a large chunk of their audience—and lost the support of the country music industry—when she railed against George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq (controversial opinions at the time, especially for their conservative fanbase). Their last LP, 2006’s *Taking the Long Way*, doubled down on the politics, winning them an armful of Grammys but little notice from Nashville. Now paired with pop producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and a who’s who of superstar songwriters (Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger), The Chicks are still not ready to make nice. The incendiary opening title track is a trademark Chicks kiss-off that could as easily be addressing a jealous ex as the current US president. “March March” was inspired by a political rally that all three Chicks attended with their families, but its timely video draws a natural parallel between the song’s broad self-empowerment message and this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. The rest of the album maintains the personal-is-political bent, with universal messages of hope and self-help addressed autobiographically to the band member’s children (“Young Man,” “Julianna Calm Down”), their ex-husbands (“Tights on My Boat,” “Hope It’s Something Good”), and even themselves (“For Her”). “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff,” Strayer tells Apple Music, “but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news stories, but they’ve always been here.” The Chicks spoke to Apple Music and reflected on the making of the album and the inspirations behind a few of the album\'s most memorable songs. **Gaslighter** Natalie Maines: “That was the first song we wrote with Jack Antonoff, who produced the majority of the record. I know I came in with the word ‘gaslighter’ and some lyrics in a notebook and wanted to write about gaslighting, but I\'m sure it was Jack that thought of coming out cold with the chorus.” Martie Maguire: “I remember him loving that word and you having to explain what it meant. I was definitely impressed with him right off the bat. He would start playing and singing that word, and then having us record it. When we went to record it, it took like five minutes.” NM: “And that became the title track just because most Americans didn\'t know what that meant a few years ago. I learned about that in therapy. We never thought of any other title for the album, because it really is a buzzword now because of President Trump. It just seemed like the perfect word and captured this time that we\'re in.” **Texas Man** NM: “Wasn\'t that when Julia Michaels came over here to my house and sat with just like a tape roll? She just has an interesting way of scoring melodies. We\'d just go through a tape, and just let her go. She\'ll go for like half an hour just vamping.” Emily Strayer: “Remember how we did vocals? It\'s literally the smallest closet.” NM: “My coat closet!” MM: “That song is about Natalie. We just wanted to get her groove back. It still hasn\'t happened yet, but maybe that song will bring that energy.” **For Her** ES: “The song is about speaking to your younger self and giving some wisdom. It was written with Ariel Rechtshaid and Sarah Aarons. We were with writers in this room, in this very dark, dingy studio, and I remember just feeling really drained. It was just so tired and gloomy. Wasn\'t it where Michael Jackson recorded *Thriller*? He had this booth built for Bubbles, with a little window. You could just imagine this chimp looking out the window. Sarah was hilarious, just so self-deprecating. She was just a joke a minute, she has such a personality, and her lyrics—it’s different to write with a woman, just to write those kind of female lyrics with another female.” NM: “She was a huge driving force behind those lyrics, for sure. And once she gets going, it\'s like a lyric train that you can\'t stop and you don\'t want to stop. By the time we left that session, we had loads of options, and we kept a lot of her lyrics but changed some as well, just so we could have a part in the song. Sarah Aarons did not need us.” MM: “And she was great writing for Natalie\'s voice, because she has such a strong voice and she can do these acrobatics. Not many people can keep up with Natalie\'s voice and have the same type of inflections.” NM: “But also—and I’m not saying this is what I am but—I loved her soul. She\'s a very soulful singer. It would be interesting to go back and listen to those original recordings, because she made a lot of soul in her voice and her phrasing and I definitely stole some of that.” **March March** NM: “We went to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., with our kids. It was so impactful for me. That\'s the first time I\'ve ever been in a march that large. And we weren\'t there as performers, we were just in the crowds, with my little girls on my shoulders. We took a lot from that, the energy of it. We didn\'t want it to be about one particular march, so on the verses we talk about different things that are important to us.” ES: “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff, but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I do think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news story, but they\'ve always been there.” NM: “You don\'t need a group around you if you\'re on the right side of history. We wanted to empower people who stand up for what they believe. Unless you believe in racism, then sit down. \[laughs\] Know what\'s right, act on it, speak out, be an army of one; you don\'t need to be a follower or go along with a group if you feel strongly about what\'s right.” **My Best Friend\'s Weddings** ES: “It\'s my wedding—weddings.” NM: “Yeah, everybody kept calling it ‘My Best Friend\'s Wedding,\' and I was like, \'No, *weddings*.\' That one\'s definitely got a lot of personal truths in it. There are three songs—\'My Best Friend\'s Weddings\' was one of them—that we consider the Hawaii songs, that we wrote in mostly Kauai. We spent three weeks in Hawaii all together making this record. We\'d go from the studio to my house, and it was a family vacation for everybody as well. It was a lot of fun, and there\'s songs with ukulele, and if you have headphones, you can hear birds chirping and waves, and a rooster.” **Julianna Calm Down** MM: “I\'ll just say that that was one that Julia wasn\'t sure that she wouldn\'t want for herself, but once we heard it, we pounced on it. Unbeknownst to her, Natalie went home and rewrote all the verses to make them about our closest family, our nieces and our cousins. Originally it was called ‘Julia Come Down’—it\'s her talking about breathing, taking a moment, everything\'s not going to be so bad. But Nat flipped it on its head to make it a song about advice to our girls and our nieces.” NM: “When Jack told her that we had written on it and asked if we could have that song, she was like, ‘Oh yeah, they can have the verses and the bridge. But I\'m going to keep the chorus and rework it.’ And I was just like, \'No, no, no!\' We kind of tricked her out of it.”

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

'Television’s Golden Age' is an LP of bright, intimate songs that reveal the soulful heart beating behind NYC’s chaotic, gritty exterior.

Since signing with Rhymesayers in 2015, Sa-Roc has continued to both invigorate and grow her fanbase with a string of singles, accompanied with powerful and visually enthralling music videos, including "Forever", which has over 4 million views on YouTube. In that time, she has continued to cultivate and sharpen her skill sets, and now she is set to release her first album for the label. Speaking on the meaning of the album’s title and inspiration, Sa-Roc shares, "The Sharecropper’s Daughter speaks to my father’s actual beginnings on a Virginia tobacco farm where his family sharecropped. The title is meant to signify that both my father’s and my upbringing, though so different, are linked by a shared history that informs the way I move through the world. Although his formative years were spent in the Jim Crow era of the south, where he suffered through poverty and racial oppression, and mine were shaped in the heart of DC, amidst the war on drugs and the effects of its fallout, the album finds points of connection in two very different yet tragically familiar stories of Blackness in America. It’s a sonic reflection of the things we inherit. About the emotional weight that we unknowingly bestow upon the next generation; the genetic transfer of both trauma and triumph that we, both donors and beneficiaries, are tasked with reshaping into a future of our own." The Sharecropper’s Daughter album is entirely produced by a veteran renaissance man from the Atlanta Hip Hop scene, Sol Messiah, with the exception of "Deliverance" produced by Evidence and co-produced by Al B Smoov. And, while Sa-Roc’s crafty wordplay, razor-sharp delivery and exceptional writing are the prominent highlight, this undeniable quality is only further enhanced by stellar guest performances from a small, but formidable, all-star cast of guests, including Saul Williams, Styles P, Ledisi, Chronixx, and Black Thought. This Fall, Sa-Roc seeks to demand her rightful place at the table amongst rhyme royalty with The Sharecropper’s Daughter, at a time when the world is clamoring for powerful voices of substance, along with a patient and attentive fanbase who have already been tuned in, waiting for this moment. The time is finally here.

“This is my quarter-life crisis album,” Sasha Sloan tells Apple Music about *Only Child*, which also happens to be her debut full-length. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter, who recently uprooted from Los Angeles to Nashville (“cheaper rent, nicer people,” she quips), had dreamed of recording her first LP in one of Music City’s legendary studios, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut all that down. “I wound up making the whole record in my house with my producer, who is also, conveniently, my boyfriend,” she says. “It was limiting, but also freeing. I got to be totally immersed in my own world.” Solitude, as it happened, was the ideal scenario for writing these contemplative songs, which introduce us to Sloan’s inquisitive personality, against-the-grain perspective, and storytelling flair. “It’s easy to lean into love songs and breakup songs, but there’s a lot more to me than who I date,” she says. “I wanted every song to tell a real story, whether it’s how I struggle with body image or the way I feel about sharing opinions online.” Below, she talks us through the album track by track. **Matter to You** “I took an edible one night and wound up on this website where you start at an atom and slowly zoom out. Suddenly it\'s a plant, and then it\'s a rock, until you make it all the way to Pluto. And I just felt very small after that. I\'m a glass-half-empty kind of person, so when I start to think about how big the world is, I feel really insignificant. It can be almost crushing. But I’ve realized, over time, that I find meaning through love. The song is a little bittersweet, like, ‘Hey, I feel like this really small person who has no purpose here, but you give me that in some way.’ But I thought it was a nice way to kick off the album.” **Only Child** “I had this title written down in my phone for ages, but I didn\'t know how to write it or what the angle would be. Then one day I was writing with King Henry and Shane McAnally, and Shane said, ‘Well, it gets lonely being an only child.’ The whole song just poured out from there. I remember laying in bed that night, listening to the demo over and over, and feeling like it just explained a lot about why I am the way I am. I\'m pretty cynical, I grew up really fast, and it was just my mom and I for a very long time. And only children often feel like outsiders, because we don’t learn how to fight with people, how to make up with people, how to grow. So it kind of summed me up as a person. It felt all-encompassing.” **House With No Mirrors** “My boyfriend and I were going into the studio and I was getting ready to leave the house. I remember putting on this pair of jeans and breaking into tears. They were a little tighter than they used to be, and I was having a really off day, and he said, ‘Man, we need to get you a house with no mirrors.’ We ended up bringing that title into the studio session, and the woman we were working with connected with it immediately. For me, the important thing was to make it as real as possible. A problem I have with a lot of body image songs is that they’re really empowering. It doesn’t feel real. Someone screaming on the radio that I\'m beautiful doesn\'t do it for me. So I started pulling from real examples in my life—I\'ve struggled with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia for a very long time—and getting specific about these vulnerabilities. It was scary putting it out. I posted it and lay on my couch having a panic attack for the next two hours.” **Lie** “I might actually be too empathetic. My mom\'s the same way. We take other people\'s pain and really feel it for them. When I wrote this, I had just gone through a breakup, and even though I was the one who broke up with him, I felt equally heartbroken, maybe even worse because of the guilt that came with it. Going back over everything in my head—how he felt, what he was thinking—is how ‘Lie’ was born. It was the first time I ever wrote from someone else\'s perspective. Of course, I\'ve been rejected plenty of times, so I know what it feels like. There’s a feeling of desperation and a struggle to accept that you\'re not right.” **Hypochondriac** “I used to be a huge piece of shit. Worse than I am now. Beyond the whole eating disorder thing, I really didn’t take care of myself. My nutrition was horrible; I smoked tons of weed and cigarettes. I had never heard of a vitamin. I basically grew up on fast food. And partly as a result of all of these things, I’m sure, I have bad anxiety. It changes depending on what life phase I’m in, and recently I’ve become the biggest hypochondriac. I literally went to the dentist yesterday because I thought I was dying of a tooth infection. There was nothing wrong with my tooth. This is the level of insanity we’re dealing with.” **Is It Just Me?** “I\'m completely obsessed with Reddit and I love the subreddit Unpopular Opinion. I knew I wanted to write a song about it. The idea was like, I\'m sure that my unpopular opinions are actually popular opinions, but people are too scared to say them out loud. We live in such a hypersensitive climate that I\'m scared to say anything, ever. And that isn’t right. We should be able to express ourselves. As scary as this was to put out, it was so much fun to write. It took forever because I wanted to make sure that all my examples were actually somewhat unpopular opinions, but without going too far. You need to be able to sing along.” **Santa\'s Real** “This was initially meant to be a jab at being cynical and jaded, and growing up to realize that shit\'s basically rigged. But then the pandemic happened, and the world caught fire, and it was the first time in my life that my problems felt truly insignificant because everything else seemed so bad. I was in first grade when 9/11 happened, and while I was aware that something tragic was going on, I was still playing with toys. I didn’t grasp it. So ‘Santa\'s Real’ ended up being about how I sometimes wish that I was still a child so I wouldn’t have to reckon with how grave things have become.” **Someone You Hate** “I got all emotional about my ex-boyfriend one day, thinking about how we used to be best friends but now I\'m someone he hates—how I put him through all this shit and it didn’t have to be that way. It’s the most literal I\'ve ever been about my ex in a song, and I think it\'s because enough time has passed that the wounds have begun to heal. I can revisit what went down without shielding myself from pieces of it. And that’s important because in music, there’s power in specificity. That’s what makes a song relatable.” **Until It Happens to You** “A very close friend of mine lost his cousin to leukemia, and it happened really fast. When someone you love experiences something like that, you want to give them everything and yet nothing feels like enough. I’ve never lost anyone, thankfully, and even at funerals I’ve always felt a bit removed. So maybe because of that, I never feel like I know what to say. I never feel like my words are sufficient. I haven’t been there. I tried to funnel that frustration into a song, and I wanted it to sound truly emotional, like an Explosions in the Sky effect that hits you like a wave. It was a way for me to express just how badly I wanted to be there for them.” **High School Me** “This started off as a joke song about hating old pictures of me from high school. Honestly, I think I default to humor when I’m feeling something uncomfortable. When I took the draft to Shane, he was like, ‘Oh my god, I can totally relate to this.’ We both feel the same crushing embarrassment about that period in our lives even though we’re both proud of who we’ve become. Even though I have some regressions, like on ‘House With No Mirrors,’ I like the fact that the album ends with the line ‘I wish I could go back/Tell her it\'s okay.’ It’s saying, even though things aren’t perfect and I don\'t fully love myself yet, I\'m still okay.”

Over the last 20 years, a Pearl Jam studio album has come to signal more of something else—more tour dates, more bootlegs, more live films and live albums, more reason for them to come together onstage, that place that’s come to define them most this millennium. But *Gigaton*—the Seattle rock outfit’s first LP since 2013’s *Lightning Bolt*, and a clear response to our current political moment—feels different: Self-recorded and self-produced in tandem with longtime band associate Josh Evans, their 11th full-length merges the sheer power and unpredictability of their live experience with an experimental streak they haven’t embraced so fully since the late ’90s. For every midtempo guitar workout (“Quick Escape” is especially heavy), there’s a sliver of Talking Heads-like post-punk (“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” in which bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard swap instruments). Where there’s a weathered acoustic ballad (“Comes Then Goes” finds Eddie Vedder at his Who-iest), there’s also a psychedelic lullaby (“Buckle Up,” whose lyrics and kazoo-like backup vocals come via Gossard). It’s an album whose anthemic moments (see: the six-minute epic “Seven O’Clock,” whose cloud-parting coda bears echoes of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”) are matched—if not enriched—by its subtleties, namely a welcome attention to texture and arrangement. And with every band member represented in various phases of the songwriting process, it’s arguably their most collaborative studio effort to date, as clear a document of the chemistry they’ve developed over three decades as anything they’ve recorded live. “In the end, when we listened to it, it\'s like we really achieved something,” Gossard tells Apple Music. “It’s really us.”

If I Break Horses’s third album holds you in its grip like a great film, it’s no coincidence. Faced with making the follow-up to 2014’s plush Chiaroscuro, Horses’s Maria Lindén decided to take the time to make something different, with an emphasis on instrumental, cinematic music. As she watched a collection of favourite films on her computer (sound muted) and made her own soundtrack sketches, these sonic workouts gradually evolved into something more: “It wasn’t until I felt an urge to add vocals and lyrics,” says Lindén, “that I realized I was making a new I Break Horses album.” That album is Warnings, an intimate and sublimely expansive return that, as its recording suggests, sets its own pace with the intuitive power of a much-loved movie. And, as its title suggests, its sumptuous sound worlds – dreamy mellotrons, haunting loops, analogue synths – and layered lyrics crackle with immersive dramatic tensions on many levels. “It’s not a political album,” says Lindén, “though it relates to the alarmist times we live in. Each song is a subtle warning of something not being quite right.” As Lindén notes, the process of making Warnings involved different kinds of dramas. “It has been some time in the making. About five years, involving several studios, collaborations that didn’t work out, a crashed hard drive with about two years of work, writing new material again instead of trying to repair it. New studio recordings, erasing everything, then recording most of the album myself at home…” Yet the pay-off for her long-haul immersion is clear from statement-of-intent album opener ‘Turn’, a waltzing kiss-off to an ex swathed in swirling synths over nine emotive minutes. On ‘Silence’, Lindén suggests deeper sorrows in the interplay of serene surface synths, hypnotic loops and elemental images: when she sings “I feel a shiver,” you feel it, too. Elsewhere, on three instrumental interludes, Lindén’s intent to experiment with sound and structure is clear. Meanwhile, there are art-pop songs here more lush than any she has made. ‘I’ll Be the Death of You’ occupies a middle ground between Screamedelica and early OMD, while ‘Neon Lights’ brings to mind Kraftwerk on Tron’s light grid. ‘I Live At Night’ slow-burns like a song made for night-time LA drives; ‘Baby You Have Travelled for Miles without Love in Your Eyes’ is an electronic lullaby spiked with troubling needle imagery. ‘Death Engine’’s dark-wave dream-pop provides an epic centrepiece, of sorts, before the vocoder hymnal of closer ‘Depression Tourist’ arrives like an epiphany, the clouds parting after a long, absorbing journey. For Lindén, Warnings is a remarkable re-routing of a journey begun when I Break Horses’s debut album, Hearts (2011), drew praise from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, The Independent and others for its luxurious grandeur and pulsing sense of art-pop life. With the electro-tangents of 2014’s Chiaroscuro, Lindén forged a new, more ambitious voice with total confidence. Along the way, I Break Horses toured with M83 and Sigur Rós; latterly, U2 played Hearts’ ecstatic ‘Winter Beats’ through the PA before their stage entrance on 2018’s ‘Experience + Innocence’ tour. Good choice. A new friend on Warnings is US producer/mixing engineer Chris Coady, whose graceful way with dense sound (credits include Beach House, TV on the Radio) was not the sole reason Lindén invited him to mix the album. “Before reaching out to Chris I read an interview where he said, ‘I like to slow things down. Almost every time I love the sound of something slowed down by half, but sometimes 500% you can get interesting shapes and textures.’ And I just knew he’d be the right person for this album.” If making Warnings was a slow process, so be it: that steady gestation was a price worth paying for its lavish accretions of detail and meaning, where secrets aplenty await listeners eager to immerse themselves. “Nowadays, the attention span equals nothing when it comes to how most people consume music,” Lindén says. “And it feels like songs are getting shorter, more ‘efficient’. I felt an urge to go against that and create an album journey from start to finish that takes time and patience to listen to. Like, slow the fuck down!” Happily, Warnings provides all the incentives required.

Even back when she was flanked by the comparatively opulent production of her ’90s Nashville albums and her nervy 1999 pop breakthrough *I Am Shelby Lynne*, the Alabama-bred Lynne had a way of exercising steadfast, knowing restraint in her performances. Eventually, she adopted a more simplified, self-sufficient recording approach—like the one showcased on her new, self-titled full-length—and still managed to suggest entire elusive worlds of desire with her deft, sensual gestures. Lynne laid down part of this 11-song set in the process of filming an unreleased movie about the artistic spirit, even utilizing lyrics from director/screenwriter Cynthia Mort, and called in some contributions from seasoned players including Benmont Tench. But the album feels like the work of a singer, songwriter, and producer who prefers more cloistered communication. “My Mind’s Riot” and “Revolving Broken Heart” are sketches of oppressive solitude and the pain and pleasure of pining. During the slinky R&B number “The Equation,” Lynne\'s murmurings of lust make it feel like a private preoccupation. Her soulful vamps during \"Weather\" savor appetites stoked by isolation. \"I can taste the weather,\" she pauses, sensitivity heightened, \"stirring me up, stirring me up, stirring me up.\"

Dinner Party was birthed from the idea that stylistic variety can breed a new singular style. The jazz supergroup began as a conversation between Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin, before Martin’s close affiliates Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder joined the fold. Unlike many supergroups, the quartet united less for novelty than to explore undiscovered avenues of modern music: The band plays with notions of rap and jazz, R&B and ’70s soul—indebted to each, but adhering to their own rules. “First Responders” is an interplay between 9th Wonder’s head-nodding rap production and a hollowed-out, knotty saxophone line from Washington. The Phoelix-featuring “Freeze Tag” finds Glasper ditching jazz piano chords in favor of uplifting pop structures, while Phoelix’s lyrics tap into the fear of being Black in America above lush production from Martin.

CD's available here: www.spitslamrecords.com Everybody is talking at the same time. How many actually listen? Too many pumping up the social noise volume without saying a thing. EnemyRadio is the MC/DJ soundsystem of Public Enemy, questioning the establishment and society in the 2020's. Back to the rap root are 10 freedom Hiphop songs written by its conspiratorappers Chuck D and Jahi with DJ Lord on the decks. Production by David "C-Doc" Snyder and featuring guest appearances by Flavor Flav, Professor Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, Sadat X of Brand Nubian and Boston's own Blak Madeen. Believe Half of What You Hear and None of What You See. These songs, like the mind altering single Food As A Machine Gun, Born Woke, STD (Slavery Transmitted Disease) and Same God, ramp up into the Public Enemy release Nothing Is Quick In The Desert this summer 2020... if there is an Earth remaining...