Albumism's 100 Best Albums of 2022

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

Harry Styles’ third solo album, *Harry’s House*, is the product of a chain reaction. Had the pandemic not thrown his world into a tailspin in early 2020, he would’ve continued to tour behind *Fine Line*, his critically adored sophomore album, and played its songs hundreds of times for sold-out crowds around the world. A return to the studio was planned, of course, but when COVID-19 canceled those plans too, Styles faced an empty calendar for the first time in a decade. The singer opted to use this free time carefully, taking a solo road trip through Italy and visiting with family and friends for rare long, drawn-out stretches. It was an important moment of reevaluation. “You miss so many birthdays,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And eventually it\'s just assumed you\'re unable to be at stuff. Finally I was like, ‘I want to balance my life out a bit. Working isn’t who I am, it\'s something I do. I want to be able to put that down.’” His upbeat, lightly electronic third LP riffs on the concept of home, viewing it less as a geographical location and more as a state of mind—his mind. “Imagine it’s a day in my house, a day in my mind,” he said. “What do I go through? I’m playing fun music. I’m playing sad music. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff.” Because of the pandemic, Styles recorded the songs with a small handful of longtime friends and close collaborators who gathered in a single room to drink wine, write, and play. That intimacy is reflected in the songs, which are conversational and casually confessional, as if he’s thinking out loud. Blending vintage folk rock with flickers of disco and a generally more relaxed sensibility, they illustrate a turning point in Styles’ career as he transitions even further towards career singer-songwriter. “For a while it was, how do I play that game of remaining exciting?” he says. “But I finally had a moment where I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m not the young thing, so I would like to really think about who I want to be as a musician.’” Read on for the inside story behind a handful of standout selections from *Harry’s House*. **“Music for a Sushi Restaurant”** “After *Fine Line*, I had an idea of how I thought the next album would open. But there\'s something about ‘Sushi’ that felt like, ‘Nah, *that\'s* how I want to start.’ It becomes really obvious what the first song should be based on what you play for people when they’re like, ‘Oh, can I hear a bit of the music?’ It\'s like, how do you want to set the tone?” **“Daylight”** “We were like, ‘We have to find a way to stay awake and finish this, because if we all go to bed, then this won’t turn out the way it would if we finished tonight.’ So we powered through, finished it, and went down to the beach as the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘Okay. Yeah.’ It felt correct that we\'d finished it in that place. Life, and songs in particular, are so much about moments. In surfing, for example, sometimes you don\'t get the wave and sometimes the wave comes and you haven\'t practiced. But every now and again, the wave comes and you’re ready, you\'ve practiced enough that you can ride it. Sometimes when the songs write themselves like that, it feels like, ‘Okay, there\'s a reason why sometimes I sit out there, falling off the board a bunch. It\'s for this moment.” **“As It Was”** “‘As It Was,’ to me, is bittersweet. It’s devastating. It\'s a death march. It’s about metamorphosis and a perspective change, which are not necessarily things you have time with. People aren’t like, ‘Oh, we\'ll give you a couple more days with this moment and let you say goodbye to your former self,’ or whatever. No. Everyone is changing, and by the time you realize what’s happened, \[the moment\] is already gone. During the pandemic, I think we all at some point realized that it would never be the same as it was before. It was so obvious that it wouldn’t. You can\'t go backwards—we can’t as a society and I can’t in my personal life. But you learn so much in those moments because you’re forced to face things head-on, whether they’re your least favorite things about the world or your least favorite things about yourself, or all of it.” **“Matilda”** “I had an experience with someone where, in getting to know them better, they revealed some stuff to me that was very much like, ‘Oh, that\'s not normal, like I think you should maybe get some help or something.’ This song was inspired by that experience and person, who I kind of disguised as Matilda from the Roald Dahl book. I played it to a couple of friends and all of them cried. So I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something to pay attention to.’ It\'s a weird one, because with something like this, it\'s like, ‘I want to give you something, I want to support you in some way, but it\'s not necessarily my place to make it about me because it\'s not my experience.’ Sometimes it\'s just about listening. I hope that\'s what I did here. If nothing else, it just says, ‘I was listening to you.’” **“Boyfriends”** “‘Boyfriends’ was written right at the end of *Fine Line*. I\'d finished the album and there was an extra week where I wrote ‘Adore You,’ ‘Lights Up,’ and ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ At the end of the session for ‘Lights Up,’ we started writing ‘Boyfriends,’ and it felt like, ‘Okay, there\'s a version of this story where we get this song ready for this album.’ But something about it just felt like, no, it’ll have its time, let\'s not rush it. We did so many versions of it. Vocal. Acoustic. Electric guitar. Harmonies on everything, and then we took them out for chunks and put them back in for chunks. You try not to get ahead of yourself when you write a song, but there was something about this one where I felt like, ‘Okay, when I\'m 50, if I\'m playing a show, maybe there\'s someone who heard me for the first time when they were 15 and this is probably the song they came to see.’ Because I\'m learning so much by singing it. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m hearing you.’ It’s both acknowledging my own behavior and looking at behavior I\'ve witnessed. I grew up with a sister, so I watched her date people, and I watched friends date people, and people don\'t treat each other very nicely sometimes.” **“Cinema”** “I think I just wanted to make something that felt really fun, honestly. I was on a treadmill going, ‘Do-do-do-do-do-do.’ I tend to do so much writing in the studio, but with this one, I did a little bit here and then I went home and added a little bit there, and then kind of left it, and then went into the studio to put it all together. That was a theme across the whole album, actually: We used to book a studio and be like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got it for two months, grind it out.’ But some days you just don\'t want to be there, and eventually you\'ve been in the studio so long, the only thing you can write about is nothing because you haven\'t done anything. So with this album, we’d work for a couple of weeks and then everyone would go off and live their lives.” **“Love of My Life”** “‘Love of My Life’ was the most terrifying song because it\'s so bare. It\'s so sparse. It’s also very much in the spirit of what *Harry\'s House* is about: I wanted to make an acoustic EP, all in my house, and make it really intimate. It’s named after \[the Japanese pop pioneer Haruomi\] Hosono, who had an album in the \'70s called *Hosono House*. I immediately started thinking about what *Harry’s House* might look like. It took time for me to realize that the house wasn\'t a geographical location, it was an internal thing. When I applied that concept to the songs we were making here, everything took on new meaning. Imagine it\'s a day in my house or a day in my mind. What do I go through? I\'m playing fun music. I\'m playing sad music. I\'m playing this, I\'m playing that. I have doubts. I’m feeling stuff. And it’s all mine. This is my favorite album at the moment. I love it so much. And because of the circumstances, it was made very intimately; everything was played by a small number of people and made in a room. To me, it\'s everything. It\'s everything I\'ve wanted to make.”

On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”

“I had a responsibility to give people what they were asking for, especially during the pandemic,” Robert Glasper tells Apple Music. “They wanted another *Black Radio*, so I had to deliver.” The pianist, composer, songwriter, and producer has spent the past decade pushing the boundaries of what constitutes jazz music, combining its acoustic instrumentation with hip-hop swagger, R&B melodies, and an ear attuned to improvisation. Ten years after the first *Black Radio* album, he returns to the genre-hopping, collaborative format, producing 13 tracks that seamlessly transition from the power of Amir Sulaiman’s poetry on opener “In Tune” to an elegantly downbeat version of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” to the funk of “Why We Speak” with Q-Tip and Esperanza Spalding. Here, Glasper talks through all the collaborations, track by track. **“In Tune” (feat. Amir Sulaiman)** “I was scoring a Dave Chappelle documentary, and in the film, Amir performs a poem that floored me. I’ve never had a poem reach me that way. I was in tears. I immediately asked Dave to connect us, and we had a short conversation about what I was looking for. Two days later, he came back with this incredible poem that opens the record. A lot has happened in the 10 years since the first *Black Radio*, and a whole lot has happened for Black people in America in the last two years. I felt like I had to address the elephant in the room with this track and with ‘Black Superhero.’” **“Black Superhero” (feat. Killer Mike, BJ The Chicago Kid & Big K.R.I.T.)** “BJ is my bro, but this is the first time we’ve done something together on wax. He came to the studio, and I was just playing around and testing the keyboard and he said, ‘That sounds like some superhero shit,’ so I kept playing and the concept started from there. After that, I wanted to pick rappers that teach us. I wanted them to say something that spoke to this moment. I knew K.R.I.T. and Killer Mike would do it justice.” **“Shine” (feat. Robert Glasper, D Smoke & Tiffany Gouche)** “‘Shine’ came out of a jam session. I was playing drums and my drummer was playing keys and we came up with this riff that I then looped. I refined it on keys and added bass and then sent it to D Smoke to see what he thought. He sent me back a draft the next day. The song is all about self-love and knowing that you’re enough. That’s something I feel like a lot of hip-hop songs don’t talk about, and especially during the pandemic, people needed to hear that.” **“Why We Speak” (feat. Q-Tip & Esperanza Spalding)** “A lot of my music starts off with jam sessions. I have my guys come over and we throw down some vibes and see what sticks. We came up with this joint and, immediately, I thought of Esperanza. I sent it to her and a few days later, she sent it back, and I thought something was wrong with the mic. She never told me she was writing it in French! I thought it was so dope, though, and I realized it sounded like something that would fit Q-Tip too. I used to play in his band, but I’ve never had him rock on an album, so it was perfect.” **“Over” (feat. Yebba)** “Yebba was part of the *Fuck Yo Feelings* sessions. She’s become like a little sister to me since, and I knew I had to have her on the record. While we were at Electric Lady Studios, listening to her latest album, we jammed and came up with this pattern and the skeleton of the song. That was in early 2021, and a few months later, we got back to LA and finished up here at my studio. Her voice is so beautiful, and I’m so happy we got to make this one together.” **“Better Than I Imagined” (feat. H.E.R. + Meshell Ndegeocello)** “I scored a film called *The Photograph*, which came out in February 2020. H.E.R. sang the ending song for the movie, and at the premiere, she told me she was so inspired by my score that she wanted to write something together. We literally went from the movie theater to the studio and wrote ‘Better Than I Imagined.’ It wasn’t planned for any project, but it did so well when I put it out, it planted the seed for the rest of *Black Radio III*.” **“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (feat. Lalah Hathaway & Common)** “I have this thing with Lalah. On the first *Black Radio*, she did a cover of ‘Cherish the Day’ and killed it. The next time, I was like, ‘Let’s do Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America.”’ She recorded it in one take, and it won a Grammy. So why not keep it going? I’ve always loved ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’—I don’t think I would trust a person who doesn’t like that song—but I don’t know anyone who has made a version of it. I redid it in my own vibe, and Common loved it so much, he invited himself on it too!” **“Everybody Love” (feat. Musiq Soulchild & Posdnous)** “My DJ, Jahi Sundance, and I wanted to make a house EP together, and this was the first song we wrote for it. I sent it to Musiq Soulchild, who I have known for a long time, and he came up with his joint in three days. I’ve never done a house song and neither has he, so it was new for both of us. It has a party vibe, and when it comes to party rappers, I always think of De La Soul and Posdnuos. I knew he would kill it, and he delivered.” **“It Don’t Matter” (feat. Gregory Porter & Ledisi)** “I have wanted to produce an R&B album with Gregory for a while now, and when his tour with Ledisi got canceled, I called them both up. I was luckily able to get them in the studio because the COVID restrictions had eased at that point, and they wrote it to fit their voices. They’re both so powerful and definitely have their own sound, so this felt like a match made in heaven.” **“Heaven’s Here” (feat. Ant Clemons)** “I went to Snoop Dogg’s birthday party and on my way out, Ant Clemons stopped me and introduced himself. Terrace Martin told me that he’s high-level and that we should work together. Fast-forward to the next week and we started writing songs. We wrote four or five tracks since he was working with Justin Timberlake on his new album and Usher too. This was one we were going to give to Usher, but it didn’t work out with the timing. I love it so much, I had to put it on *Black Radio*.” **“Out of My Hands” (feat. Jennifer Hudson)** “Jennifer came to one of my shows with my homegirl Kelly Rowland, who I know from Houston. They both sat in with me onstage, and I knew I had to get Jennifer on something. When I wrote this song, I heard her voice on it. It took us a little while to get together, but she performed it perfectly.” **“Forever” (feat. PJ Morton & India.Arie)** “PJ worked with me on *Black Radio 2* back in 2013, and he wrote the song ‘Worries,’ which Dwele sang. I love matching people up who’ve never recorded together, since it makes the song become more special. I knew PJ and India would sound perfect together, and we luckily managed to make this more of a back-and-forth process to make it feel like a duet where we were in the studio at the same time.” **“Bright Lights” (feat. Ty Dolla $ign)”** “I’ve jammed with Ty before. He is a legend who changed the game up, and I wanted to do something with a modern, pop-R&B vibe because that’s where Ty thrives. It’s different from any of the other *Black Radio* tracks that I’ve made, and so I wanted to end the album with this one because it has such a unique feel.”

The centerpiece and title track of Mary J. Blige’s 14th album is an emotional display of self-love—the kind of song that, after three decades of heartbreak anthems, feels like the soft landing spot she’s been searching for this entire time. “All the times that I hated myself, all the times that I wanted to be someone else, all the times that I should’ve been gentle with me,” she sings in the second verse. “I wake up every morning and tell myself, ‘Good morning gorgeous.’” Across the album, her voice sounds just as convincing as it has all these years, contoured in soul and grit. Her lyrics, though, beautifully reflect her life experiences, evolved and brimming with wisdom. There are no histrionics to be found here; she knows what she wants and will put up with nothing less. On songs like “Love Without the Heartbreak” (“I’m so got’damn sick of the pain,” she cries on the hook) and “Enough” (“You can’t see what you got at home, you dead wrong not to fight for it,” goes that chorus), she sounds genuinely fed up, far from the wounded defeat of those beloved earlier releases. It’s no small feat to have a career and catalog as long and storied as Mary J.’s, and here she reveals some of the secret. Her brand of R&B is uniquely hers, ebbing and flowing with the waves of her own life; here, her take on love feels honest and lived-in without the pretense of autobiography. *Good Morning Gorgeous* stands up as not just a possible blueprint for artistic longevity, but also a model for how to love yourself even when others have failed to.

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

*Read a personal, detailed guide to Björk’s 10th LP—written by Björk herself.* *Fossora* is an album I recorded in Iceland. I was unusually here for a long time during the pandemic and really enjoyed it, probably the longest I’d been here since I was 16. I really enjoyed shooting down roots and really getting closer with friends and family and loved ones, forming some close connections with my closest network of people. I guess it was in some ways a reaction to the album before, *Utopia*, which I called a “sci-fi island in the clouds” album—basically because it was sort of out of air with all the flutes and sort of fantasy-themed subject matters. It was very much also about the ideal and what you would like your world to be, whereas *Fossora* is sort of what it is, so it’s more like landing into reality, the day-to-day, and therefore a lot of grounding and earth connection. And that’s why I ended up calling *Fossora* “the mushroom album.” It is in a way a visual shortcut to that, it’s all six bass clarinets and a lot of deep sort of murky, bottom-end sound world, and this is the shortcut I used with my engineers, mixing engineers and musicians to describe that—not sitting in the clouds but it’s a nest on the ground. “Fossora” is a word that I made up from Latin, the female of *fossor*, which basically means the digger, the one who digs into the ground. The word fossil comes from this, and it’s kind of again, you know, just to exaggerate this feeling of digging oneself into the ground, both in the cozy way with friends and loved ones, but also saying goodbye to ancestors and funerals and that kind of sort of digging. It is both happy digging and also the sort of morbid, severe digging that unfortunately all of us have to do to say goodbye to parents in our lifetimes. **“Atopos” (feat. Kasimyn)** “Atopos” is the first single because it is almost like the passport or the ID card (of the album), it has six bass clarinets and a very fast gabba beat. I spent a lot of time on the clarinet arrangements, and I really wanted this kind of feeling of being inside the soil—very busy, happy, a lot of mushrooms growing really fast like a mycelium orchestra. **“Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress” (feat. Sindri Eldon)** Two songs about my mother. “Sorrowful Soil” was written just before she passed away, it\'s probably capturing more the sadness when you discover that maybe the last chapter of someone\'s life has started. I wanted to capture this emotion with what I think is the best choir in Iceland, The Hamrahlid Choir. I arranged for nine voices, which is a lot—usually choirs are four voices like soprano, alto, or bass. It took them like a whole summer to rehearse this, so I\'m really proud of this achievement to capture this beautiful recording. “Ancestress” deals with after my mother passing away, and it\'s more about the celebration of her life or like a funeral song. It is in chronological order, the verses sort of start with my childhood and sort of follow through her life until the end of it, and it\'s kind of me learning how to say goodbye to her. **“Fungal City” (feat. serpentwithfeet)** When I was arranging for the six bass clarinets I wanted to capture on the album all different flavors. “Atopos” is the most kind of aggressive fast, “Victimhood” is where it’s most melancholic and sort of Nordic jazz, I guess. And then “Fungal City” is maybe where it\'s most sort of happy and celebrational. I even decided to also record a string orchestra to back up with this kind of happy celebration and feeling and then ended up asking serpentwithfeet to sing with me the vocals on this song. It is sort of about the capacity to love and this, again, meditation on our capacity to love. **“Mycelia”** “Mycelia” is a good example of how I started writing music for this album. I would sample my own voice making several sounds, several octaves. I really wanted to break out of the normal sort of chord structures that I get stuck in, and this was like the first song, like a celebration, to break out of that. I was sitting in the beautiful mountain area in Iceland overlooking a lake in the summer. It was a beautiful day and I think it captured this kind of high energy, high optimism you get in Iceland’s highlands. **“Ovule”** “Ovule” is almost like the feminine twin to “Atopos.” Lyrically it\'s sort of about being ready for love and removing all luggage and becoming really fresh—almost like a philosophical anthem to collect all your brain cells and heart cells and soul cells in one point and really like a meditation about love. It imagines three glass eggs, one with ideal love, one with the shadows of love, and one with day-to-day mundane love, and this song is sort of about these three worlds finding equilibrium between these three glass eggs, getting them to coexist.

“When I make records, I make them with the idea that no one else will hear them,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “When you get to the realization that this private dialogue is going to be completely public, it’s like I’ve tricked myself again.” On her band’s fifth album *Dance Fever*, such private dialogues include rejecting real love (“Girls Against God”), dance as the greatest form of release (the anxious synth-folk of “Free”), embracing less healthy coping mechanisms in her past (“Morning Elvis”), and the push-pull between a creative career and the possible desire to start a family. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king,” Welch declares in baritone on “King,” in which she ponders one of *Dance Fever*’s most prominent themes: her complicated relationship with her own artistry. “A lot of it is questioning what it gives to me as well, and being like, ‘Why do I need this so much, sometimes at the cost of more sustainable forms of intimacy or more stable relationships?’” she says. “I think this record is questioning, ‘How committed am I to my own loneliness? How committed am I to my sense of a tragic figure?’” Work on the album had begun alongside producer Jack Antonoff in New York in early 2020 before the pandemic forced Welch back to London, where her creativity was stifled for six long months. *Dance Fever*, then, also covers writer’s block (the cathartic “My Love,” a track intended to help shake off Welch’s blues, and our own) and her despair of what was lost in a locked-down world. Her lyrics occasionally poke fun at the image she has created of herself (“I think there\'s a humor also in self-knowledge that runs through this record that I\'ve actually found really liberating,” says Welch), but they are often as strikingly vulnerable as on 2018’s *High as Hope*. And even if the singer admits on “King” that she is “never satisfied,” her band’s fifth album has brought her rare peace. “I feel like I managed to take everything that I learned in the last 15 years and consolidate it into this record, into this art, into the videos,” she says. “I felt like, if I had to prove something to myself, somehow I did it on this record.” Read on as Welch talks us through a selection of tracks on *Dance Fever*. **“King”** “Sometimes songs just arrive fully formed, and it\'s always when you think you\'ll never write a song again. I felt like my creative abilities were finally at the peak of how I understood myself as an artist and what I wanted to do. But if I wanted to have a family, there was this sense that suddenly I was being irresponsible with my time by choosing this thing that I\'ve known my whole life, which is performance, which is making songs, which is striving to be the best performer that I can be. Somehow, it would be your fault if you miss the boat. I think that scream at the end of ‘King,’ it\'s just one of frustration, and confusion as well. I was thinking about Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. I was thinking about how they can commit their body entirely to the stage. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I\'m not going to be able to do that. I\'m going to have to make choices.’ It\'s a statement of confidence, but also of humor that the album has, of ‘If I\'m going to sacrifice these other things in my life, I have to be the best.’ I was like, ‘Why not me? Why can\'t I be king?’” **“Free”** “I think out of all the Florence + the Machine songs, it\'s sort of the purest sentiment of why I do it, distilled into why music is so important to me, why I need it, why performance is so important to me. Sometimes you just know a song is working: When we started playing it before it had even come out, just this ripple started in the audience of people catching onto the chorus and starting to move. And it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a special one. This is really hitting something in people.’ And that\'s so magical for me. That\'s when the celebration starts.” **“Daffodil”** “I thought I\'d lost my mind, because I remember coming home and being like, ‘Okay, I wrote a song today. It might be the most Florence + the Machine thing I\'ve ever done. We\'re a year into the pandemic, I think maybe I\'m losing it. The chorus is just “daffodil” over and over again.’ I was like, ‘Can you do that? That\'s a crazy thing to do.’ There were so many moments where I had nearly gave up on this record. There were so many moments where I nearly went, ‘It just feels like the way that the world is, this is just too hard to finish.’” **“The Bomb”** “There\'s a lot of nods, I think, to the previous records. All three of them are in this album, which is nice. Because I feel like somehow I\'m bridging the gaps between all of them on this record, like all the things I\'ve been interested in. This song is nodding to what I was thinking about, in terms of unavailability in people, in *High as Hope* in songs like ‘Big God,’ with like the obsession of someone who\'ll never text you back. Why is the person who creates the most space and gives you nothing the most appealing person? And really that\'s because if you\'re a songwriter, they give you the most enormous space for fantasy and you can write anything you want because they don\'t really exist. Every time I think in my life I\'ve been in a stable place, something or someone will come up and be like, ‘How do you feel about blowing all this up?’ It\'s also a fear of growing up and a fear of getting older, because if you regenerate yourself constantly through other people by blowing up, changing everything, you never have to face aging or death.” **“Morning Elvis”** “I\'m obsessed with Nick Cave as a performer, but the performer he\'s obsessed with is Elvis. So that\'s how it feeds back to me. I was at home and stuck and there was an Elvis documentary. It made me remember us, when we were on tour in New Orleans, it would have maybe been on the second record. The wheels were really coming off for me, in terms of drinking and partying. I just got very in the spirit of New Orleans and was at a party and just went, \'You all leave without me, I\'m staying at this party.\' I ended up with my dress completely shredded, because I\'m always wearing these vintage things that basically just disintegrate: If you’re on a rager, you will come back with nothing. You would\'ve thought things were going so well for me. What was it about me that had such a death wish? I had such little care for myself. It didn\'t matter what I had done the night before, or the week before, or what chaos I had created, I knew if I got to the stage, something there would save me and that I would be absolved. And that song is about that feeling, but also a testament to all the performers I\'ve seen turn pain into something so beautiful.”

Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.

Grammy and Americana-award-winning singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires has pushed the reset button with 'Take It Like A Man', releasing a record that is so unlike anything she has ever recorded that you would be tempted to think it’s her debut album instead of her seventh. Shires, who also plays in The Highwomen, worked with producer Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Kim Gordon) to make a fearless confessional, showing the world what turning 40 looks like in 10 emotionally raw tracks.

Anyone encountering the gorgeous, ’70s-style orchestral pop of *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* might be surprised to learn that Natalie Mering started her journey as an experimental-noise musician. Listen closer, though, and you’ll hear an album whose beauty isn’t just tempered by visions of almost apocalyptic despair, but one that also turns beauty itself into a kind of weapon against the deadness and cynicism of modern life. After all, what could be more rebellious in 2022 than being as relentlessly and unapologetically beautiful as possible? Stylistically, the album draws influence from the gold-toned sounds of California artists like Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, and even the Carpenters. Its mood evokes the strange mix of cheerfulness and violent intimations that makes late-’60s Los Angeles so captivating to the cultural imagination. And like, say, The Beach Boys circa *Pet Sounds* or *Smiley Smile*, the sophistication of Mering’s arrangements—the mix of strings, synthesizer touches, soft-focus ambience, and bone-dry intimacy—is more evocative of childhood innocence than adult mastery. Where her 2019 breakthrough, *Titanic Rising*, emphasized doom, *Hearts Aglow*—the second installment of a stated trilogy—emphasizes hope. She writes about alienation in a way that feels both compassionate and angst-free (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”), and of romance so total, it could make you as sick as a faceful of roses (“Hearts Aglow,” “Grapevine”). And when the hard times come, she prays not for thicker armor, but to be made so soft that the next touch might crush her completely (“God Turn Me Into a Flower”). All told, *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* is the feather that knocks you over.

August 25th, 2022 Los Angeles, CA Hello Listener, Well, here we are! Still making it all happen in our very own, fully functional shit show. My heart, like a glow stick that’s been cracked, lights up my chest in a little explosion of earnestness. And when your heart's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes. Titanic Rising was the first album of three in a special trilogy. It was an observation of things to come, the feelings of impending doom. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about entering the next phase, the one in which we all find ourselves today — we are literally in the thick of it. Feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change. Looking for embers where fire used to be. Seeking freedom from algorithms and a destiny of repetitive loops. Information is abundant, and yet so abstract in its use and ability to provoke tangible actions. Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats. Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity. I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs, and hyper isolation kept coming up for me. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” is a Buddhist anthem, ensconced in the interconnectivity of all beings, and the fraying of our social fabric. Our culture relies less and less on people. This breeds a new, unprecedented level of isolation. The promise we can buy our way out of that emptiness offers little comfort in the face of fear we all now live with – the fear of becoming obsolete. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal. Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. Being in love doesn’t necessarily mean being together. Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection? Could it be narcissism? We encourage each other to aspire – to reach for the external to quell our desires, thinking goals of wellness and bliss will alleviate the baseline anxiety of living in a time like ours. We think the answer is outside ourselves, through technology, imaginary frontiers that will magically absolve us of all our problems. We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve. In “God Turn Me into a Flower,” I relay the myth of Narcissus, whose obsession with a reflection in a pool leads him to starve and lose all perception outside his infatuation. In a state of great hubris, he doesn’t recognize that the thing he so passionately desired was ultimately just himself. God turns him into a pliable flower who sways with the universe. The pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel on towards an uncertain fate. I see the heart as a guide, with an emanation of hope, shining through in this dark age. Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot on who we are. Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment. And maybe that’s the beginning of the nuanced journey towards understanding the natural cycles of life and death, all over again. Thoughts and Prayers, Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood)

Listeners expecting the stylish soul-funk of Sault’s 2020 albums *Untitled (Rise)* and *Untitled (Black Is)* might be momentarily thrown by the cosmic choral-and-orchestral suite of *Air*, but thematically, it fits: Like all their music, *Air* is, at heart, a study of Black artistic traditions, in this case early-’70s Alice Coltrane (“Solar”), the soulful ambience of Stevie Wonder’s *Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants* (“Heart”), even a little of the modern-classical side of artists like Anthony Braxton. And as sci-fi as the sound can seem, the core feeling is one of uplifting Earth—a message confirmed as equally by the skyward arc of the strings as by the prayer-like recitation on “Time Is Precious.” Or, as producer Inflo tells Apple Music, not fantasy, but “art in reality”—air.

*Humble Quest*, Maren Morris’ third major-label album, is a window into her mind during two of the most unpredictable, cathartic, and life-changing years she’s experienced to date: She gave birth to her first child with her husband and “Chasing After You” collaborator Ryan Hurd; mourned the loss of busbee, one of her dear friends and closest colleagues; and weathered the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic without knowing when, or how, she and her band would return to the road. “We were stuck in the house for two years—not just from COVID, but our baby was born at the beginning of 2020,” she shared with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in a conversation about *Humble Quest* and the process that shaped it. “Both being songwriters, after a few months of learning to be new parents, it was like, ‘Should we start being creative again? I don\'t know, what are we doing this for? There\'s no touring.’ It was sort of this free fall of not being able to tour or write towards a direction, and I feel like that freed us up to write about whatever we wanted.” The path between her 2019 album, *GIRL*, and *Humble Quest* was one of extreme highs and soul-crushing lows, and it was important to her that the full emotional spectrum was represented in each of its songs. Deafening rock anthems (“Nervous”) and fun, flirtatious jams (“Tall Guys”) follow up sage ballads (“Background Music”), determined motivational anthems (“Humble Quest”), and tear-jerking tributes to gone-too-soon friends (“What Would This World Do?”). In spite of the sadness and grief that inspired some of these tracks, Morris finds peace and contentment in where her *Humble Quest* leads. “It\'s two sides of a coin, and darkness is there to make us see light a little bit better,” she said. “When I was listening to all of these songs, I just felt happy. I felt like \[the album\] was healing me in whatever I was drowning in. Ultimately, you can scream in an echo chamber as long as you want, but eventually the songs have to be heard by somebody besides you. I guess my hope is when people hear this, it will feel therapeutic and light.”

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

On the cover of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*, the singer-songwriter gazes into the mid-distance, the sky behind her red-hot from wildfires. The home she stands before is her own in LA, where she witnessed blazing fires up close in 2020 and sheltered with her family during the global pandemic. It is also where *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* was crafted, the album becoming Van Etten’s attempt to make sense of the pandemic years, our unequal world, and the shaky future she’s raising her son into. “Up the whole night/Undefined/Can’t stop thinking ’bout peace and war,” she sings on “Anything,” a soaring ballad on which she also explores the numbness induced by the monotony of the pandemic. But *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* isn’t just about the collective experience of recent events. Here, Van Etten is also a mother assuaging guilt that her career keeps her away from home (“I need my job/Please don’t hold that against me,” she sings to her son on “Home to Me”), a partner trying to keep intimacy alive (“Come Back,” a track reminiscent of Van Etten’s “Like I Used To” collaborator and indie peer Angel Olsen), and a citizen of the world who’ll do what she can to make it a better place: “Let’s go march/I’ll go downtown,” she sings on the shimmering, anthemic “I’ll Try.” There’s much of what you might expect from a Van Etten record: acoustic guitars, lonesome minor-chord vocals, driving drums, and the jagged electro-pop of 2019’s *Remind Me Tomorrow* (see the hooky “Headspace” or the self-forgiveness anthem “Mistakes”). But despite it being constructed in a shrunken world, this is also an album on which one of America’s foremost singer-songwriters pushes her sound—and voice—to astonishing new heights. That perhaps reaches a peak on “Born,” which begins as a slow-marching piano moment before exploding into a stop-you-in-your-tracks album centerpiece on which Van Etten’s vocals sound not unlike a celestial choir amid swirling synths and cascading, cathartic drums. Like many of this record’s tracks, “Born” is gargantuan and rich, but elsewhere things are more simple. On the raw, delicate “Darkish,” for example, Van Etten includes the birdsong she (and so many of us) heard during lockdown, a poignant reminder of the quietest days of the pandemic. *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong* might have been shaped by moments of crisis, but it isn’t colored with despair. Just as something like a smile hovers across her expression on *We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong*’s cover, optimism breaks through across this record. “Better stay light/I’m looking for a way,” she sings on opener “Darkness Fades,” before offering her ultimate worldview on “Darkish”: “It’s not dark/It’s only darkish.” We’ve been going about this all wrong, Van Etten seems to be saying, but there’s still time for that to change.

Sharon Van Etten has always been the kind of artist who helps people make sense of the world around them, and her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, concerns itself with how we feel, mourn, and reclaim our agency when we think the world - or at least, our world - might be falling apart. How do we protect the things most precious to us from destructive forces beyond our control? How do we salvage something worthwhile when it seems all is lost? And if we can’t, or we don’t, have we loved as well as we could in the meantime? Did we try hard enough? In considering these questions and her own vulnerability in the face of them, Van Etten creates a stunning meditation on how life’s changes can be both terrifying and transformative. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong articulates the beauty and power that can be rescued from our wreckages. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is as much a reflection on how we manage the ending of metaphorical worlds as we do the ending of actual ones: the twin flames of terror and unrelenting love that light up with motherhood; navigating the demands of partnership when your responsibilities have changed; the loss of center and safety that can come with leaving home; how the ghosts of our past can appear without warning in our present; feeling helpless with the violence and racism in the world; and yes, what it means when a global viral outbreak forces us to relinquish control of the things that have always made us feel so human, and seek new forms of connection to replace them. Since the release of Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten has collaborated with artists ranging from Courtney Barnett and Joshua Homme to Norah Jones and Angel Olsen. Earlier releases were covered by artists like Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine and Idles, celebrating Sharon as a legendary songwriter from the very beginning. When the time came to return to her solo work, Van Etten reclaimed the reins, writing and producing the album in her new recording studio, custom built in her family’s Californian home. The more she faced – whether in new dangers emerging or old traumas resurfacing – the more tightly she held onto these songs and recordings, determined to work through grief by reasserting her power and staying squarely at the wheel of her next album. In fact, that interplay of loss and growth became a blueprint for what would become We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. The artwork reflects that, too, inspired as much by Van Etten’s old life as her new one. “I wanted to convey that in an image with me walking away from it all” says Van Etten, “not necessarily brave, not necessarily sad, not necessarily happy…” We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is intensely personal, exploring themes like motherhood, love, fear, what we can and can’t control, and what it means to be human in a world that is wracked by so much trauma. The track “Home To Me,” written about Van Etten’s son, uses the trademark “dark drums” of her previous work to invoke the sonic impression of a heartbeat. Synths grow in intensity, evoking the passing of time and the terror of what it means to have your child move inevitably toward independence, wanting to hold on to them tightly enough to protect them forever. In contrast, “Come Back” reflects on the desire to reconnect with a partner. Recalling all the optimism of love felt in its infancy, Van Etten begins with the plain beauty of just her voice and a guitar, building the arrangement alongside the call to “come back” to anyone who has lost their way, be it from another person or from themselves. Hovering between darkness and light, “Born” is an exploration of the self that exists when all other labels - mother, partner, friend - are stripped back. Throughout, and as always, we are at the mercy of Van Etten’s voice: the way it loops and arcs, the startling and emotive warmth of it. What started as a certain magic in Van Etten’s early recordings has grown into confidence, clarity and wisdom, even as she sings with the vulnerable beauty that has become her trademark. Nowhere is that truer than on “Mistakes,” where Van Etten creates a defiant anthem to the mistakes we make, and to everything we gain from them. Unlike Van Etten’s previous albums, there will be no songs off the album released prior to the record coming out. The ten tracks on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong are designed to be listened to in order, all at once, so that a much larger story of hope, loss, longing and resilience can be told. This is, in itself, a subtle act of control, but in sharing these songs it remains an optimistic and generous one. There is darkness here but there is light too, and all of it is held together by Van Etten’s uncanny ability to both pierce the hearts of her listeners and make them whole again. Things are not dark, she reminds us, only darkish.

Like most people on this embattled earth, Maggie Rogers spent the better part of 2020 in isolation—in her case, in Maine, where *Surrender* took shape. “I started this record there,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was really drawn to big drums and distorted guitar, because I missed music that made me feel something physically. I missed the physicality of being at a festival”: a big feeling, she says—a little overwhelming, a little cold, a little drunk. The noise was a symbol of chaos, but also of liberation. “Like, in all the craziness in the world, being able to play with something like that,” she says, “it was as if it could make my body let go of the tension I was feeling.” So think of the album’s title as a possibility, or even a goal: that even at her most commanding—the electro-pop of “Shatter,” the country swagger of “Begging for Rain” and barroom folk of “I’ve Got a Friend”—Rogers can explore what it means to relinquish control without sacrificing the polish and muscle that makes her music pop. “When we’re cheek to cheek, I feel it in my teeth,” she sings on “Want Want”: an arthouse on paper, a blockbuster in sound. When Rogers started the album, she was so burned out from touring she could barely talk. “I hadn’t been to a grocery store in four years,” she says. “I was ready to bite. And this record is the bite. But when I listen back, there’s so much joy. I think that’s the thing that surprised me more than anything—that *that* was the place I escaped to, and it was the thing that became the way I survived it, or the way I worked through it. This idea of joy as a form of rebellion, as something that can be radical and contagious and connective and angry.” “Are you ready to start?” she sings on “Anywhere With You.” And then she repeats herself, a little louder each time.

Loyle Carner has always made music out of the things he’s been through in life. Sometimes, the South London rapper and songwriter wishes he could weave some fictional tales so he could save something for himself, but that’s not how it works for him. “It’s the only thing that inspires me to write,” he tells Apple Music. He was feeling uninspired after the release of his second album, *Not Waving, But Drowning*, in 2019, but the news that his girlfriend was pregnant opened the creative floodgates. What has emerged is *hugo*, a remarkable record that not only sees Carner reflect on life as a new father but also prompted him to iron out the troubled relationship he has with his own dad. “It was really useful to have the space to be able to write about it and reflect on it in real time to help me make sense of my thoughts,” he says. “But other times it was quite exhausting. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was tough.” It makes for a cathartic listen. Let him guide you through it, track by track. **“Hate”** “We made it really quickly, a stream of consciousness. It’s not a big, smash-hit single, but it was the one that summed up where I was at the beginning of the process and it couldn’t go anywhere else. It had to be the first thing that people heard from the album. When you pick up the album, I want you to come on a journey with me, because I started in a bad place and I ended in a good place. I want people to go on that with me.” **“Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)”** “This was probably the first song I wrote for the album. It was before lockdown, even before I found out my girlfriend was pregnant. I had already been thinking about a lot of the subjects on the album, and this was one of the first times where I tapped into something and was like, ‘OK, this is the start of a new project. I can see that I have an idea here.’ I tried to put the songs that I made at the beginning of the process at the beginning of the album. It’s quite autobiographical and you need it to run in a linear fashion, it needs to be chapters of a story.” **“Georgetown” (feat. John Agard)** “This was produced by Madlib. I was saving it for a project with him. I’ve got loads of music that we’ve made together, and we wanted to do a MadLoyle tape, which is a dream come true for me. But I played this to my friend Mike, who was working as an A&R and a collaborator on this project, and he was like, ‘You have to put this on the album. It’s too good to be held back just in case you drop it later.’ I think it really tapped into the same story as the rest of the album. It was really close to ‘Nobody Knows’ but one of them is self-depreciative and the other one is self-fulfilling, really lifted and full of self-belief. They work nicely together.” **“Speed of Plight”** “I was in the studio with Rebel Kleff, who’s a longtime collaborator of mine, and Jordan Rakei and Nick Mills, who’s my engineer and good friend. It came together quite quickly, as did a lot of the stuff for this album. It was such a relief to be really letting fly, not being afraid to be a bit more aggressive, a bit more frustrated, to have a place to vent. That’s what this song really was.” **“Homerton”** “Homerton \[in East London\] was where my son was born. All these songs are little pieces of a journey between me and my father and where I was at. I used to see my father as flawed, and in the first few tracks on the album, he’s very flawed to me. ‘Homerton’ is really that middle point where I start to look at my son and then I’m able to finally, as a father, see myself as flawed as well. Then I’m able to begin the journey of understanding where my father was at and how difficult it is to be a parent and how nobody is a bad person. People make bad decisions and some people have no tools to deal with some of the things that get thrown at them.” **“Blood on My Nikes”** “After ‘Homerton,’ my mind then went to, ‘OK, but what happens when my son grows up in the area that we live in?’ A young boy’s life was taken over a pair of shoes near where my girlfriend teaches around the time that I was writing this song, and I was so moved by it. I was really quite surprised at how numb I had become to hearing these stories and seeing this loss in the communities that I had grown up in. It was important to reflect on this story that’s told by many artists, but through my lens and through my words. I enlisted \[activist and writer\] Athian Akec to help me be able to speak to a younger generation with his voice, to reflect on what it is to see how many young people’s lives we’re losing and how the music is not the problem.” **“Plastic”** “At the end of ‘Blood on My Nikes,’ Athian is eloquently disrespecting the government and saying that where we’re at politically, socially is not good enough, that we’re putting emphasis on the wrong things. ‘Plastic’ is my version of his speech where I also attack these big companies that are making mistakes and hold them accountable, but also hold society accountable, hold myself accountable for putting emphasis on the wrong thing, wanting nice flashy trainers and a new iPhone instead of other bits. But I love my iPhone, so I can’t say anything about it. It’s just trying to find the balance between soul and commerce. Yes, everyone has to make money and live, but we also need to just take a step back, walk into nature and relax, and not put so much pressure on material things.” **“A Lasting Place”** “I was reading a book by Philippa Perry recently called *The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)*. There’s a large part about rupture and repair and this idea that you’re having a bad day and you shout at your kid. That’s going to happen, because people get angry. But the repair is the important part, going to your son or daughter and being, ‘Hey, Dad’s having a rubbish day and I took it out on you and that’s not right. It must have made you feel like X, Y, and Z, and I apologize.’ That’s what this song is about, making mistakes and being like, ‘It’s OK.’” **“Polyfilla”** “Towards the end of ‘A Lasting Place,’ it starts to feel like, ‘OK, I’ve got it made, I’m a dad, I’m brilliant, I’m repairing my ruptures. Yeah, I’ve got this in the bag.’ And I think ‘Polyfilla’ is that crashing back down to earth with another mistake or losing my temper or getting frustrated or being late to pick up my son or whatever it is. Battling with that thing of, ‘Man, maybe I’m not cut out for this.’ That worry of impostor syndrome: ‘Maybe I’m not a good parent. Maybe I’m not a good person.’” **“HGU”** “This is about forgiving my dad, and forgiveness in general. It’s not even forgiving for him, it’s about forgiveness for myself: ‘If I hold on to this, carry around this albatross my whole life, it’s weighing me down.’ I’ve taken so much from hip-hop and I wanted to give something back. Within rap, everyone else is like, ‘If your dad left and he’s rubbish, you don’t need to forgive him, just let that anger be your motivation.’ I think that’s cool to an extent, but it can cripple you if you let it go further than an initial youthful rebellion. It’s a nice little reveal at the end that we’re in the car. The album is called *hugo* because my dad’s car was called Hugo and he taught me to drive over lockdown. It’s a small story, but with some big topics.”

When COVID-19 lockdowns prohibited Welsh Dadaist Cate Le Bon to fly back to the United States from Iceland, she found herself returning to her homeland to create a sixth studio album, *Pompeii*, a collection of avant-garde art pop far removed from the 2000s jangly guitar indie she once hung her hat on. In Cardiff, recording in a house “on a street full of seagulls,” as she tells Apple Music, “I instinctively knew where all the light switches were and I knew all these sounds that the house makes when it breathes in the night.” Created with co-producer Samur Khouja, the album obscures linear nostalgia to confront uncertainty and modern reality, with stacked horns, saxophones, and synths. “For a while I was flitting between despair and optimism,” she says. “I realized that those are two things that don\'t really have or prompt action. So I tried to lean into hope and curiosity instead of that. Then I kept thinking about the idea that we are all forever connected to everything. That’s probably the theme that ties together the record.” Below, Cate Le Bon breaks down *Pompeii*, track by track. **“Dirt on the Bed”** “This song is very set in the house. It\'s being haunted by yourself in a way—this idea of time travel and storing things inside of you that maybe don\'t serve you but you still have these memories inside of you that you\'re unconscious of. It was the first song that we started working on when Samur arrived in Wales. It’s pretty linear, but it blossoms in a way that becomes more frantic, which was in tune with the lockdown in a literal and metaphorical sense.” **“Moderation”** “I was reading an essay by an architect called Lina Bo Bardi. She wrote an essay in 1958 called ‘The Moon’ and it\'s about the demise of mankind, this chasm that\'s opened up between technical and scientific progress and the human capacity to think. All these incremental decisions that man has made that have led to climate disaster and people trying to get to the moon, but completely disregarding that we\'ve got a housing crisis, and all these things that don\'t really make sense. We\'ve lost the ability to account for what matters, and it will ultimately be the demise of man. We know all this, and yet we still crave the things that are feeding into this.” **“French Boys”** “This song definitely started on the bass guitar, of wanting this late-night, smoky, neon escapism. It’s a song about lusting after something that turns into a cliché. It’s this idea of trying to search for something to identify yourself \[with\] and becoming encumbered with something. I really love the saxophone on this one in the instrumental. It is a really beautiful moment between the guitars and the saxophones.” **“Pompeii”** “This is about putting your pain somewhere else, finding a vessel for your pain, removing yourself from the horrors of something, and using it more as a vessel for your own purposes. It’s about sending your pain to Pompeii and putting your pain in a stone.” **“Harbour”** “I made a demo with \[Warpaint’s\] Stella Mozgawa, who plays drums on the record. We spent a month together at her place in Joshua Tree, just jamming out some demos I had, and this was one of them that became a lot more realized. The effortless groove that woman puts behind everything, it\'s just insane to me. She was encouraging me to put down a bassline. That playfulness of the bass is probably a direct product of her infectiousness, but the song is really about \'What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there\'s no point running?\'” **“Running Away”** “‘Running Away’ was another song that I worked on with Stella in Joshua Tree. It\'s about disaffection, I suppose, and trying to figure out whether it\'s a product of aging, where you know how to stop yourself from getting hurt by switching something off, and whether that\'s a useful tool or not. It’s an exploration of knowing where the pitfalls of hurt are, because you have a bit more experience. Is it a useful thing to avoid them or not?” **“Cry Me Old Trouble”** “Searching for your touch songs of faith, when you tap into this idea that you\'re forever connected to anything, there\'s a danger—the guilt that is imposed on people through religion, this idea of being born a sinner. Of separating those two things of feeling like you are forever connected to everything without that self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s about being connected to old trouble and leaning into that, and this connection to everything that has come before us. We are all just inheriting the trouble from generations before.” **“Remembering Me”** “It’s really about haunting yourself. When the future\'s dark and you don\'t really know what\'s going to happen, people start thinking about their legacy and their identity, and all those things that become very challenged when everything is taken away from you and all the familiar things that make you feel like yourself are completely removed. \[During the pandemic\] a lot of people had the internet to express themselves and forge an identity, to make them feel validated.” **“Wheel”** “In one sense, it is very much about the time trials of loving someone, and how that can feel like the same loop over and over, but I think the language is a little bit different. It\'s a little more direct than the rest of the record. I was struggling to call people over the pandemic. What do you say? So, I would write to people in a diary, not with any idea that I would send it to them, but just to try and keep this sense of contact in my head. A lot of this was pulled from letters that I would write my friend. Instead of \'Dear Diary\' it was \'Dear Bradford,\' just because I missed him, but couldn\'t pick up the phone.”

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence. The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

Learning to channel her intensity in lockdown was where Amber Mark began to fuse together ideas for her much-anticipated debut album, *Three Dimensions Deep*. “It was like putting pieces of a puzzle together,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “I had these songs. I didn’t have a concept or know exactly where I wanted to go with it all. So, on a paper to-go bag, from some food I had got delivered, I began to section it out into three clear parts.” For her deeply ruminative record, Mark soars through a galaxy of stirring anthems, helmed primarily by producer Julian Bunetta (a key part of One Direction’s hitmaking machine). “He’s my sensei,” she says, “and one of the only producers that I work with. My anxiety means I tend to make music by myself, but I left my comfort zone for this album. I used to be very against the idea of writing camps, but trusted Julian, and agreed to do one, which was so amazing.” On her endearing quest for healing, Mark embraces stages of grief (“One”), loss (“Healing Hurts”), and deep insecurity (“On & On”), advancing her sound and herself under the sharp light of futurist-feel R&B. “There’s been so much growth involved whilst making this album,” she says. “Just through the different points in my life—losing my mother, moving around. But since 2020, I’ve just been seeing the world differently.” Read on for her insights on each track from her debut album. **“One”** “I started really questioning myself at the start of 2019. You go into business with others, and you won’t always agree on things. So, this song initially came from a state of anger; I was angry, and I wanted to get it out. I’ve been attracted to the idea of rap-singing more, and lyrically, this is the perfect song to dip my toe in with and experiment.” **“What It Is”** “I’m a sucker for big, very in-your-face harmonies. I had just seen the Bee Gees film \[*The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart*\] and was so inspired by their journey. I remember writing this in one day. It’s a very bold song for me, and it started with writing out what this album means, conceptually.” **“Most Men”** “I wanted to express on the conversations you have with friends, trying to console them after a breakup, after something fucked up went down. And it’s always advice that I give to myself: ‘You need to be able to find happiness on your own—find the joy of being alone in these moments.’” **“Healing Hurts”** “I had just gone through a breakup, and I’m kind of processing on this song. After my mom passed away, that period showed me that time is the ultimate healer. And, as I know that, I know I’ll move on from this and get over the heartbreak. But right now, I’m in my bed, and I’m emotional!” **“Bubbles”** “This is also quite specific to the breakup—the aftermath. ‘Push those feelings aside, go out, and have fun.’ We wrote this at the \[writing\] retreat—where we all became close really quickly. We had dinners and got to know each other. It was like taking a vacation with great friends, except they would all be doing tequila shots. I used to, in my late teens, early twenties, but the idea doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I’m *always* down for a glass of bubbles, though, and somehow that became the joke of the trip.” **“Softly”** “When I was younger, living in Nepal, I had a very, very intense Craig David obsession. The beauty stores sold bootleg CDs there, and I bought his first two albums. I heard \[2001 single\] ‘Rendezvous’ quite recently on a summer day in New York and fell in love with it again. That synthesized harp is such a big staple of the early-’00s sound. I was like, ‘I need to sample this shit! We have to bring this back.’” **“FOMO”** “I was starting to have a little bit of cabin fever whilst \[writing\], a little frustrated at not getting anywhere. Looking at my friend’s \[Instagram\] Stories—they’re out, having fun, doing shit, and I’m missing all these amazing opportunities to be with them. So, I ended up getting inspiration from that—staying home and wrote this song about it.” **“Turnin’ Pages”** “This is where we really start to address my inner turmoil. This is the next chapter.” **“Foreign Things”** “Because the feeling of running away and leaving life behind is something that’s *so* tempting—this is about being faced with those problems, head-on, when you can longer hide or escape from them.” **“On & On”** “This song is a long-standing favorite of mine on the album. This touches on a lot of old insecurities and the ways I was dealing with them, which was not working. So, in need of a sign, this is where my mom comes into play: She would always say, ‘You have to surrender to the issues that you’re dealing with.’” **“Out of This World”** “This is the introduction to section three, essentially. Another ‘mom’ song, but here, things start getting a little spacey, sonically. The song is from her perspective, and it’s her talking to me, trying to console me.” **“Cosmic”** “I love playing with the idea of higher dimensions, associating them with the afterlife or the soul, because so many scientists have theories that prove they exist. They have the math for it but can’t portray it. So, I’m tapping more into the spirituality of science here.” **“Darkside”** “OK, I am *obsessed* with super-cheesy ’80s sounds, especially the really wet snares. And I was inspired by a really beautiful song I Shazamed in my yoga class. I went home, sampled it, and that was the start of this track. In my head, the approach was, ‘How can I make this sound like a really weird Prince, Phil Collins, and Michael Jackson love child?’” **“Worth It”** “I wrote this after releasing \[2020 single\] ‘Generous.’ People loved it, but I also received comments like, ‘Ah, it’s a different sound!’ ‘It’s not the same Amber Mark. I miss \[2017 EP\] *3:33am* Amber.’ So, I made a beat, thinking, ‘Oh, y’all want old Amber Mark? Fuck y’all. I’m going to make a beat that sounds exactly like her.’ I was giving them what they wanted…in an angry way.” **“Competition”** “This is another from a writing camp. On one of the nights, we decided to separate into teams and play a game. We had to write a song in 30 minutes, and I was also the judge, which was weird, as I was playing. But this song we ended up choosing as the best. It’s all about how it’s not actually competition. Wouldn’t it be better if we all work together?” **“Bliss”** “This is the comedown from the out-of-body experience, sonically. It’s about that euphoric state that you never even imagined possible. I was really falling in love at the time we wrote this. I’d never experienced anything like it. I wanted to talk about it. I mean, I didn’t even know this stage even existed.” **“Event Horizon”** “We were in mixing mode \[on the album\] when I wrote this. A really close friend of mine, Lincoln Bliss, sent me some stuff he had worked on to a BPM; I ask all my really talented musician friends to just send me shit I can try to make a beat from. He wrote this beautiful guitar riff that sounded like a lullaby. Normally, I sing gibberish for a few hours before I start writing. I tried to come up with the melody, but I wanted it to feel like a dream state. So, I’m also musing on some key questions I have about the universe. And finally, I ask, ‘What is the end when there is no time?’”

The irony of Sophie Allison calling her second Soccer Mommy album *color theory* is that the title would be a better fit for her third, *Sometimes, Forever*. Not only is this record more stylistically varied on a track-to-track level—the flinty, classic indie rock of “Bones” and “Following Eyes,” the industrial tilt of “Darkness Forever,” the country vibe of “Feel It All the Time”—but it amplifies the internal mixings that make Allison’s songs vivid: beauty and dissonance (“Unholy Affliction”), romance and violence (“I cut a piece out of my thigh/And felt my heart go skydiving” on “Still”), bitter wisdom and wide-eyed innocence (“Feel It All the Time”). She’s a devoted student of the ’90s, to be sure—but one who’s rapidly outgrowing her influences, too.

Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

Heading into Band of Horses’ sixth album, frontman Ben Bridwell wanted to do things differently. He’d been hanging out with some younger musicians in his adopted home of Charleston, South Carolina, and liked their style. “They were making really beautiful sounding records in, like, a storage shack, basically,” he tells Apple Music. One in particular, Wolfgang Zimmerman, had sparked Bridwell’s imagination to the point that Bridwell found himself sneaking out to make demos with Zimmerman on the sly, away from the rest of the band. “It wasn’t a plot to overthrow the record,” Bridwell says. “But in the end, it did feel a bit like a mutiny.” The result is music that feels less like a departure from the band’s core sound than a reaffirmation of it: the anthemic choruses, the windswept grit, the mix of joy and melancholy.

True to its title, Carly Rae Jepsen’s sixth album is an examination of solitude through catchy, chatty pop cuts like the spiky, synthy \"Talking to Yourself\" and the sweetly wary \"So Nice,\" as well as quite a few tracks that feel very *of* Jepsen\'s catalog. Take its title track, a thumping yet wistful duet with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright that, thanks to its disco strings and Jepsen\'s spoken-word interlude, squarely falls under the \"sad banger\" category. \"This song is very much about that fantasy of going over to your ex\'s in the middle of the night and pouring rain to rekindle what was not finished,\" Jepsen tells Apple Music. \"It\'s just a terrible idea in real life, but it\'s really fun to sing about.\" But the Canadian singer also spreads her wings with the poison-pen online-dating chronicle \"Beach House\" showing off her sardonic side and the California chronicle \"Western Wind\" possessing dream-pop vibes. \"Go Find Yourself or Whatever,\" which Jepsen co-wrote with frequent collaborator Rostam Batmanglij, is the starkest sonic departure—a downcast ode to a restless lover, with a country vibe. \"I definitely have been in love with the traveler before,\" she says. \"Looking back on the song when I perform it live now, there are elements of this song that just speak to me, too, as the traveler: \'You feel safe in sorrow/You feel safe on an open road/Go find yourself or whatever.\'\" Jepsen recalls that Batmanglij reminding her of \"Go Find Yourself\" helped her blow open the idea of her sound: \"Rostam sent me an email, being like, \'Remember this?\' I listened, and I was like, \'Huh. Am I allowed to do songs like that?\' Challenging that question and answering with an absolute \'yeah, there are no rules\' is really what this album\'s about. That rebellion led me to fit songs like \'Beach House\' and \'Go Find Yourself or Whatever\' on the same album. It\'s an old idea that a pop artist has to be one thing. We contain multitudes. Why can\'t this album allow that exploration a little bit?\"

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have been through a lot together in their 40-plus years as collaborators. They’ve toured the world countless times in Tears for Fears, the New Wave group they founded in 1981; bounced back from a breakup in the ’90s; and released their sixth album, *Everybody Loves a Happy Ending*, as well as a smattering of singles, in the 2000s. Their 1982 breakout single “Mad World,” “Head Over Heels,” “Shout,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” remain timeless favorites for generations of listeners, and several chart-topping artists, from The Weeknd to Kanye West and Drake, have sampled their hits to elevate their own. With *The Tipping Point*, their seventh studio album and first LP in 18 years, they’re immensely satisfied with what they’ve written together—partly because they took their time to write their way back to each other, and largely because they did so on their own terms. “We spent a lot of time doing all these writing sessions over a bunch of years with a lot of what are considered more modern songwriters, and it didn\'t really work out for us because we felt it was slightly dishonest,” Smith tells Apple Music. “We were left with a lot of things that seemed like attempts at making a modern hit single, and I don\'t think that\'s what we do. We\'re really an album band. We made *The Hurting* before \'Mad World\' was released. We made *Songs From the Big Chair* before \'Everybody\' and \'Shout\' were released. We sat down, just the two of us, with two acoustic guitars, and tried to forge a path forward. It felt more honest, and the material at the end of it was far better, probably because it was more honest.” “No Small Thing,” *The Tipping Point*\'s first track, is a folk-tinged ballad that builds into a sweeping epic, and it\'s one Smith points to as an example of what they hoped to achieve when they reconnected and started writing: “This song is definitely a journey, and albums for us should be a journey.”

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

During the disorienting first few months of the pandemic, Simon Green hit a creative block. The British electronic musician, better known as Bonobo, felt trapped and isolated working out of his home in east Los Angeles, starved for live music and human interaction. “I desperately needed to get into a different headspace,” he tells Apple Music. “Really, I needed to get out of the house.” Green began taking solo camping trips into the area’s remote mountains and deserts in an effort to get his creative juices flowing. “Exploring California was a great way of breaking the monotony of being indoors all day,” he says. “During this time of zero stimulation, I felt like I had to make it for myself.” *Fragments*, his moody seventh album, born from these adventures, is a tribute to the West Coast’s wide-open spaces. A laidback mix of mesmerizing techno, orchestral instrumentation, and hushed R&B balladry, the project is as sprawling, peaceful, and varied as the landscape itself. Here, he takes us inside the making of each track. **“Polyghost” (feat. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson)** “This began as a long, drawn-out, seven-minute techno track that didn’t make the final cut. But it was built on top of two important thematic elements: harp, which is played by Lara Somogyi, who I recorded and then sampled, and strings, which are played by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. In the end, I decided to keep just those two parts because they weave throughout the rest of the record and drew everything together. The minute I did that, it became the obvious opener.” **“Shadows” (feat. Jordan Rakei)** “Back in 2019, before I even started assembling this album, I was working on a track that felt like a reference to guys like Theo Parrish and Moodymann—that swingy, old-school Detroit sound. I had been listening to that Andrew Ashong song ‘Flowers’ and felt like, with a vocalist, this could be in that same area. I reached out to Jordan, who helped me work out the structure—a bit of tension and release—and it wound up being one of the first tracks I had in place for this project. I’ve been sitting on it for almost three years.” **“Rosewood”** “A good ways into making this album, I started to feel like I had the record but I didn’t have a proper single. So I went through my iPhone notes and voice memos and found a little piano loop that jumped out at me. I pulled it into Ableton and put a little kick drum under it and immediately felt like it could be the seeds of something. For the hook, I found this R&B a cappella on YouTube that had this little lyric of ‘I won\'t leave you.’ And I knew that was it.” **“Otomo” (feat. O’Flynn)** “This features an archived folk recording of a Bulgarian bagpipe choir that, to me, feels like a huge sample. It’s this big, droning, ethereal, cathedral-y thing, and I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I felt like it deserved to have some big *moments* around it, so I reached out to my friend O\'Flynn, who does that so well—switching between tuneful melodies and percussive muscle. He wound up building an entire section for it, without even me prompting him, and it was perfect. It’s definitely the track that’s going to get played out in the club.” **“Tides” (feat. Jamila Woods)** “I’d been talking to Jamila and a few other vocalists about doing some collaborations, but nobody was feeling particularly motivated—it was too early into the pandemic. But then, in 2021, people came to life. Jamila texted me that she was going into the studio to record something, and it wound up being a demo that’s on the record. Hearing it really kick-started my creative energy. I remember when she first sent it to me, I was heading out for the night and was like, ‘I\'m going to wait to listen to this until I get home, when I can really give it my full attention.\' When I got back, I\'d had a couple glasses of wine, so I was in the perfect state. I hit play, and I was just...overcome. I almost cried. It was like suddenly there was an emotional centerpiece to the record. It changed everything.” **“Elysian”** “This one is named after Elysian Park, which is very close to where I live in LA. Because it was the pandemic and most things were closed, I spent a lot of time in the park, going for walks, cycling up to Angels Point, and so on. As this song came together, I listened to it while walking around in Elysian, so the tribute felt appropriate. It’s the midway point of the record, and felt like a good place to have a nice acoustic interlude. A moment of pause.” **“Closer”** “I was digging around in my archives and stumbled upon an old session recording with Andreya Triana, a singer-songwriter who I’d worked with back in 2009. I produced her debut album, *Lost Where I Belong*, in my apartment in London. I pulled some vocals from this one track ‘Far Closer,’ and it worked really well. I hit her up and was like, ‘Hey! Remember this vocal? I\'ve started sampling it again on this other thing.’ She got a kick out of it.” **“Age of Phase”** “Throughout this whole process, I was playing a lot with modular synths. It was a way of keeping the process exciting, to learn how to use different technology. ‘Age of Phase’ is basically exclusively modular synths, apart from the vocals, and that was a new thing for me. I wanted to create all these interweaving melodies and vocals and have everything reach this chaotic peak, before diving down into something really lush. I\'m going to try to deconstruct it for the live show and see how far I can push that idea.” **“From You” (feat. Joji)** “This one seems like it’s a bit of a curveball for some people. Maybe myself as well. But I was trying to do something that sounded a bit more like contemporary hip-hop and R&B. I was listening to Kehlani, SZA, slowthai, even some James Blake, and was really inspired by that blended sound. I\'d always wanted to work with Joji, because I think he\'s a really interesting musician, and when the parts all came together I was like, ‘Wow, okay, this is kind of a pop song. And I\'m kind of into that.’” **“Counterpart”** “This song came together early on and was exactly the mix of sounds I was looking for—a little bit techno, but quite melodic, with lots of modular synths. It was so fun to make that I was sad when I finished it, so now I’m working on a live version as well. I think it’s going to have multiple lives.” **“Sapien”** “This is my throwback to early-\'90s rave—artists like Mike Paradinas, Rephlex, and Future Sound of London, that era of melodic, ravey breakbeats. I sent the piano part into a modular so I could get all those choppy synth parts that are actually from a Rhodes piano, and then I went apeshit on drum programming at the end as a way to hearken back to that era of frenetic drum breaks. It’s one of the more abrasive moments on the record, which I really like.” **“Day by Day” (feat. Kadhja Bonet)** “This is a straight R&B jam, really. I had spoken to Kadhja for ages and we\'d sent demos back and forth. And the thing I like about this one is that it references earlier stuff of mine. It feels like it could be from the *Black Sands* era, which makes me feel like I’ve come full circle. I also like that it has a sense of optimism as the album closer, serving as a reminder that everything’s going to be all right.”

Bonobo has announced Fragments, a new album that will be released January 14, 2022 (Ninja Tune), along with a 2022 world tour. Along with the announcement, Bonobo has also shared the lead single “Rosewood.” Fragments is the most emotionally intense record that he - aka Simon Green - has ever had to make. It’s no surprise that it’s also his masterpiece. The album features Jamila Woods, Joji, Kadhja Bonet, Jordan Rakei, O’Flynn and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Born first out of fragments of ideas and experimentation, the album ultimately was fused together in a burst of creativity fuelled by both collaboration and Green’s escape into the wild. ​​The artwork for ‘Fragments" is by Neil Krug who returns after creating the art for 2017’s 'Migration’. Krug has also made a visualiser for ’Rosewood”. One of the biggest names in dance music, Green’s career includes 3 Grammy nominations and 2 million tickets sold for the tour supporting his 2017 album Migration. Migration was a top ten album in multiple countries, top five at home in the UK and a Billboard dance album number one in the US. He’s also a favourite mainstage performer at the world’s greatest music festivals. As part of the tour announced today Bonobo will play three dates at the legendary Royal Albert Hall in London in addition to dates in Brighton, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Nottingham. Fragments is a series of 12 sonic affirmations, featuring some of the hardest and most hip-shaking grooves that Green has ever created. The ballads are perfectly placed throughout; they capture a world in flux and glow with hope. Coaxing the ideas out initially took some hard work. The constantly-touring Green creates best while on the move; the global shutdown forced him to stand still. Musical themes began to arise through Green’s exploration of modular synthesis, recordings he had made of harpist Lara Somogyi, his work with arranger and string player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, his own playing of the Fender Rhodes and more, as the album was created, recorded and mixed by Green over the past two years. The album also came into focus as he sought refuge on solo adventures into nature, away from the shutdowns and wild fires and into the blazing California desert. “Tides,” featuring Chicagoan singer and poet Jamila Woods, acted as a catalyst, and the album began to click into place around it. “I knew I had a centrepiece, I knew how it was all going to sound,” he says. Working with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, musical themes began to emerge. Recording orchestral musicians in actual studios helped bring the songs “out of the box” even more. A rhythmic framework started to come together too: the structures of UK bass music and rave began to seep into beats that would become tracks like “Otomo” (eventually co-produced by O’Flynn and featuring a sample of the Bulgarian choir 100 Kaba-Gaidi), and “Sapien.” The ”old school, Detroity, Moodymann and Theo Parrish inspired” “Shadows” was recorded with friend Jordan Rakei. “Rosewood,” “Closer” and “Counterpoint” each start with an ecstatic snap to them, but snake down surprisingly different paths. Somogyi's harp and Atwood-Ferguson's strings mingle together on the beatless “Elysian.” Two ballads flesh out the second half of the record: “Day by Day” featuring Kadhja Bonet and “From You” featuring Joji. It's about the dancefloor in many ways, about how “I remembered all over again how much I loved crowds and movement and people connecting with each other,” Green reflects. But the positivity isn’t just in the uptempo rhythms: even the most introspective and melancholic pieces have joy in them. “FRAGMENTS” LIVE TOUR DATES - 2022 North America 18-Feb: Wildhorse Saloon, Nashville, TN 19-Feb: PromoWest Pavilion at Ovation, Newport, KY 20-Feb: EXPESS LIVE!, Columbus, OH 21-Feb: Stage AE, Pittsburgh, PA 25-Feb: Great Hall, Brooklyn, NY 27-Feb: Royale, Boston, MA 28-Feb: Echostage, Washington, DC 02-Mar: Franklin Music Hall, Philadelphia, PA 05-Mar: Higher Ground, Burlington, VT 06-Mar: Mtelus, Montreal, QC 09-Mar: History, Toronto, ON 10-Mar: Royal Oak Music Hall, Royal Oak, MI 11-Mar: Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom, Chicago, IL 12-Mar: The Sylvee, Madison, WI 13-Mar: Turner Hall, Milwaukee, WI 15-Mar: The Palace, Minneapolis, MN 17-Mar: Mission Ballroom, Denver, CO 18-Mar: The Complex, Salt Lake City, UT 19-Mar: Knitting Factory, Boise, ID 21-Mar: PNE Forum, Vancouver, BC 22-Mar: Showbox SoDo, Seattle, WA 24-Mar: Roseland Theater, Portland, OR Europe 20-Apr: AFAS Live, Amsterdam, NL 21-Apr: edel-optics.de Arena, Hamburg, DE 23- Apr: UFO im Velodrom, Berlin, De 24-Apr: Palladium, Cologne, De 25-Apr: TonHalle, Munich, De 26-Apr: Xtra, Zurich, CH 28-Apr: Le Centquatre, Paris, FR UK 03-May: The Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK 04-May: O2 Academy, Birmingham, UK 06-May: Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, UK 07-May: O2 Academy, Leeds, UK 08-May: Rock City, Nottingham, UK 16-May: Royal Albert Hall, London, UK 17-May: Royal Albert Hall, London, UK 18-May: Royal Albert Hall, London, UK

Miranda Lambert hits the road on *Palomino*, her eighth solo album and the follow-up to her 2019 Grammy-winning LP *Wildcard*. Across 15 tracks, Lambert treks all over the United States, spinning colorful yarns of a rambling life out on the road. “We go to 36 different locations in this record and meet all kinds of characters that we made up,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “Or it might have been characters we have all met in our travels, put into these songs. I\'ve never written with that much purpose.” Lambert sets the freewheeling tone with opener “Actin’ Up,” a swampy ode to bad behavior. Tracks like “Scenes” and “Tourist” are some of Lambert’s most image-rich material yet, while “Music City Queen”—a collaboration with pioneering New Wavers The B-52’s—is easily one of her most fun. Some songs, like standout “Geraldene,” previously appeared in demo form on Lambert’s critically acclaimed *The Marfa Tapes*, a 2021 collaborative LP with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, and take on new life thanks to thoughtful production from Lambert, Randall, and frequent collaborator Luke Dick. Below, Lambert shares insight into a handful of tracks on *Palomino*. **“Geraldene”** “She\'s everyone. I feel like we\'ve all known one or been one at one point or the other. I just had that title because I was watching *Heartworn Highways* like a million times, and in that movie, Townes’ dog is named Geraldine. And Geraldine\'s this German shepherd, and I was like, ‘That\'s a cool name.’” **“Country Money”** “Aaron Raitiere pulls me in on a write one day. He\'s like, ‘Hey, come write with me and Mikey Reaves.’ I had never written with him before, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, that\'d be different,’ and we wrote ‘Country Money.’ It fit right into the vibe of this road trip we were taking. So it all just happened easily, which makes me a little nervous because I\'m like, ‘Okay, when\'s the other shoe going to drop?’” **“Carousel”** “That is a real feeling. We joined the circus in one way or another, and we\'re so lucky to be part of it. I mean, I\'m like, ‘If I ever lived before, I think I was either best friends with Calamity Jane or riding an elephant somewhere.’ Truly, that\'s what I was doing, because this is as close as I could get to those two things, what I do for a living. I miss so many weddings and funerals and baby showers and important moments of people that are important to me, and of my own, just because I\'m rolling. But I think ‘Carousel’ puts this romantic spin on it where it\'s like, ‘It\'s okay. There\'s this whole other life that can happen, too.’”

Welcome to 'STR4TASFEAR’, Gilles Peterson and Jean Paul “Bluey” Maunick’s sophomore STR4TA album. A collection of songs, melodies, grooves and sounds that sit perfectly in the brand new music world it’s part of. Gilles and Bluey are both men who emerged into the Brit-funk world. They were both part of this truly thrilling chapter in the story of homegrown music; which manifests itself here in a sumptuous mixture of twanging basslines, spacey synth melodies, clicking beats and wispy, ethereal voices. 'STR4TASFEAR’ is available on digital, CD & 12" vinyl LP formats with a special edition white 12" LP on 11th November 2022 released via Brownswood Recordings. For this new set, they’ve got a few like-minded souls along to join the party, connecting legacy with a new generation of innovators on the music scene. As a core concept of the album, nostalgic reflection meets a pivotal desire to celebrate the present moment, expressed through key features on the record. Namely, multi-talented neo soul Godfather Omar, who in a shock plot twist, was enlisted to lay down his intricate wonky synth lines on ‘Why Must You Fly’. The legacy family collaborations ensue with celebrated vocalist, Valerie Etienne, on ‘Find Your Bounce’ co-written by Rob Gallagher (Galliano, Talkin’ Loud) emulating Brit-funk’s first wave. Extending the family, catapulting STR4TA to a cosmic contemporary plane, is free-spirited musical polymath, Emma-Jean Thackray laying down her refreshing, breathy vocals and production acumen on ‘Lazy Days’. Also welcomed into the fold and garnering the admiration of Gilles and Bluey over his illustrious career, is Floridian trumpeter/vocalist Theo Croker, who breezed into the jam-style studio session encapsulating the innovation of future jazz with the soulfulness of a bygone era on ‘Soothsayer’ and ‘To Be As One’. Representing the dynamic US influences from the birth of Brit-funk and the current surge of multifaceted, jazz-trained artists exploring unchartered soundscapes. Plus Brighton duo Anushka, jump on ‘Bad Weather’, whose melting electronica sound gleefully displays its roots from that aforementioned era. The epicentre of 'STR4TASFEAR’ still remains the ‘meeting of minds’ and treasured friendship between the band’s founders, a solid production duo whose clearly defined roles compliment and inspire each other. Gilles Peterson as executive producer, sonically enriching the production process with his extensive and encyclopaedic knowledge from Brit-funk and Electro-soul of the late 70s/ early 80s to ushering in a new wave of musicians over his esteemed career as a DJ, label owner and broadcaster. Feeding the creative flow of highly acclaimed musician and producer Jean Paul “Bluey” Maunick who in record-time, single-handedly produced ‘Night Flight’ following one of their inspirational sessions characterised by the TR808 drum machine. With the invaluable contribution of Mo Hausler, an instrumental figure in completing the soundscape of the album. The vision was finessed by the magic touch of legendary keys/piano player Peter Hinds (Atmosfear, Light of The World, Incognito), appearing throughout the record, and is at the pinnacle of paying homage to the incredible pioneering work of bands such as SunPalace & Freeez, paving the way of UK electro-soul for artists like Total Contrast & Stephen Dante (produced by Bluey in the mid-80s). This sound is now being revived by contemporary producers like Dâm-Funk, Zopelar & Space Ghost to name a few. STR4TA is the new wave jazz funk project pioneered by Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick. Long-time friends and collaborators, STR4TA sees them mine new musical possibilities inspired by a shared formative era. Their debut album ‘Aspects’ was released in March 2021 to a rapturous reception, in the first material that Maunick and Peterson have released together in over a decade. With standout tracks ‘We Like It’ achieving over 1 million streams on Spotify, ‘Rhythm In Your Mind’ exceeding 12 weeks on Jazz FM’s playlist, and a remix EP featuring Melé, Dave Lee, Greg Wilson, Dave Aju & more released at the end of 2021. Heavily supported by BBC 6Music, The Guardian, Wax Poetics, The Vinyl Factory, CLASH, Télérama (FR), Radio Nova (FR), KCRW (US), Rolling Stones Italy & Japan. STR4TA have performed electrifying live shows at We Out Here (UK), Primavera Sound (Spain) and headline show at The Jazz Cafe, London. STR4TA’s second studio album ‘STR4TASFEAR’ is released on digital, CD & 12" LP formats with a special edition white 12" LP on 11th November 2022 via Brownswood Recordings.

The Loyal Seas is a new collaboration between Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses, Breeders, Belly) and Brian Sullivan (Dylan in the Movies). Their debut full-length features 10 glorious originals. Mastered by Sean Glonek at SRG studios (Juliana Hatfield, Waxahatchee, Julien Baker) with original artwork by Nicole Anguish at Daykamp Creative (Nada Surf, Superchunk, Letters to Cleo).

“Every time I go in, I\'m trying to do something I haven\'t done before,” Jack White tells Apple Music. “And it\'s not like something that *other* people have never done before. It’s whatever it is to get me to a different zone so I\'m not repeating myself.” On *Fear of the Dawn*—the first of two solo LPs White is releasing in 2022, and the first in over four years—that zone is the world of digital studio effects, new territory for an artist who’s long been an avatar and champion for all matters analog. Here, working in lockdown and playing most of the instruments himself as a result, White’s challenged himself to make a rock record that’s every bit as immediate and textured as what he’s made before. The guitars are scrambled and fried, blown out and buffed to an often blinding shine (see: the crispy title track; “The White Raven”). Keys squiggle and giggle (“Morning, Noon and Night”), drums stutter and skitter and hiccup (“That Was Then, This is Now,” “What’s the Trick?”). It’s a real studio record, saturated and collage-like—White flexing his muscles as a producer. “I don\'t know how many, but there\'s dozens and dozens of tracks,” he says of the recording process. “I never used to do that. I made mistakes—I would play drums last, which you\'re not supposed to do. But then I started to feed off of that. I liked that it was wrong. It\'s nice that time goes on and you get better at certain things in the studio.” And having been so dogmatic from the start—famously dedicated to tape, vinyl, and primary colors—White sounds free to experiment on *Fear of the Dawn*, whether he’s dusting off a Cab Calloway sample and joining forces with Q-Tip for “Hi-De-Ho” or pasting together shards of radioactive guitar and mutating vocals on “Into the Twilight.” But that doesn’t mean he’s any less disciplined. “It\'s delicate—when you have eight tracks only, there\'s not much you can do,” he says. “If someone says you can have as many tracks as you want, now you got to be your own boss. You got to be hard on yourself. All the years of the razor blade editing gets you to a point where I don\'t want to waste my energy on that when I could put that energy to this now.”

Alabaster Deplume’s skronky mix of spiritual jazz, freaky folk, and experimental music has the power to make you feel everything at once—and it’s often a thrilling, if unsettling, experience. On *Gold*, a sprawling double album cut from 17 hours of improv-heavy recording sessions with over 20 musicians (including guest vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke), the Mancunian multi-instrumentalist and spoken-word poet deconstructs his own ego in bursts of spontaneity and sincerity. On “F\*\*\*\*\*g Let Them,” he sets forth a passionate manifesto, declaring “I go forward in the courage of my love” before leaning into a breathless, brassy groove. As piercing as his words, his uninhibited sax riffs rustle through rustic acoustic folk on “I’m Gonna Say Seven” and quiver to near-oblivion on slow-burning dirges like “Now (Stars Are Lit).” Throughout, mesmerizing choral chants swirl around, threatening to detach the experience from reality, until Deplume\'s calming voice slides in with poignant reminders. “I remember my ex’s email address/but I forget that I’m precious,” he incants. “Don’t do it/don’t forget you’re precious.”

Ever since an early Obongjayar demo first surfaced on SoundCloud in 2016, it’s been clear that Steven Umoh, the man behind the moniker, possesses a completely unique talent. Known to his friends simply as ‘OB’, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician pens stirring and spiritual lyrics, while commanding a distinctive voice that flits between rap, song and spoken word. With afrobeats, soul and hip-hop influences, he has created a bold, genre-defiant musicality. Despite rich successes over the last few years; OB has never felt ready to release an album, until now, and his debut full-length, Some Nights I Dream of Doors represents a real levelling up for Obongjayar. Across twelve tracks, he deftly moves through diverse sounds and subcultures while navigating a wealth of personal and political topics. OB recently featured on the latest Little Simz album and the most recent Pa Salieu project.

Even as they become elder statesmen of alt-rock, there remains a youthful ebullience to Placebo’s songs. Perhaps that’s because singer and guitarist Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal make music rooted in the heady rush of the here and now, where the emotions are raw, the spirit unfiltered. That’s how it goes on this gripping eighth album, which tackles themes of climate change, mortality, and technology while journeying through a broad soundscape that takes in expansive goth rock, orchestral pop, and synth-tinged grooves. Their defiant anthems seem melancholic and hopeful at the same time, the sound of a band savoring life in the present.