Albumism's 100 Best Albums of 2022

Mandy Moore signed her first record deal when she was 14, set up to become a teen pop superstar with seamlessly engineered bubblegum hits like 1999’s “Candy.” In the more than two decades since, her albums have grown more and more introspective, and, as a result, more and more unfettered: 2007’s *Wild Hope* was optimistic country pop; 2020’s *Silver Landings* was a love letter to Southern California, the sound of a woman learning to make peace with her past. On 2022’s *In Real Life*, she has evolved into a mother (as heard on the title track), an empath (“Little Dreams”), and a wife (“Four Moons,” with its romantic organ and tender lyrics like “I wanna hold your hand a little too much/Step on your toes, pull you in close/Never really close enough”).

“Our philosophy as a band is to do things properly—to take the time to make what we want, exactly how we want it,” Kokoroko guitarist Tobi Adenaike tells Apple Music. “We never rush.” It is an ethos that has served the eight-piece jazz-fusion group well. The 2018 single “Abusey Junction”—featured on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label’s scene-defining UK club-jazz compilation *We Out Here*—was an online hit thanks to its slow-shuffling, soothing encapsulation of harmonic warmth, and helped build the London collective a strong following. Since then, there was a self-titled 2019 EP, high-profile shows, and an awful lot of expectation. The long-awaited *Could We Be More* is a sprawling set of 15 tracks spanning jazz swing, uplifting highlife melodies, and kinetic Afrobeats that reflects the collaborative nature of the ensemble. “This album is all eight of us exploring our own life experiences to create a record of who we are,” drummer Ayo Salawu says. “There is no agenda, just the inspiration of joy.” Read on for Salawu and Adenaike’s thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Tojo”** Tobi Adenaike: “We recorded the album at a live-in studio in Eastbourne, over the course of a month at the end of 2020. During that time, we picked apart the material we already had to create something new together. This track came from an initial idea from our keys player, Yohan Kebede, which we ended up reworking. It’s a throwback to a 1970s psychedelic sound with a heavy Afrobeat and jazz influence. The mishmash of atmospheres on this song feels like a perfect, grand opening.” **“Blue Robe (Pt.I)”** Ayo Salawu: “I grew up in Nigeria until I was 10 years old, and the rhythm on this interlude is an ode to the traditional West African rhythm I would always hear in church, or just on the street. It has a 6/8 signature over a 4/4 feel, which makes it instantly recognizable. The ‘Blue Robe’ of the title is to signify the regal vibe the rhythm has, and it’s a great segue to the next track, which works on the same rhythm but at a faster tempo.” **“Ewà Inú”** AS: “This song was based on an Afrobeat and highlife rhythm, which was one of the first drumbeats I ever played. When I work on this rhythm, it releases pure joy and reminds me of my childhood. The title means ‘inner beauty’ in Yoruba, since the song represents the experience of encountering beauty to us all.” **“Age of Ascent”** TA: “People have been waiting and asking for this song to be released for some time. We’ve been playing it ever since our trombone player, Richie Seivwright, came up with the initial idea a few years ago. The ethos of the song is all in its title: It’s about rising into a spiritual awakening through the music. This album feels like the right way to finally release the track, and it sits as a meditative, peaceful moment alongside the other songs.” **“Dide O”** TA: “The roots of this song come from jamming in sound check with Ayo during the tour we completed—just before the pandemic hit. I recorded a rough version of the tune on a voice memo and then brought it to the studio to be worked on. ‘Dide\' means ‘get up’ in Yoruba, since the song is based on the journey I would make every weekend as a child visiting family in North London. I’d fall asleep in the car and wake up at home to my mum and dad saying ‘dide.’ It’s a memory of that peaceful time.” **“Soul Searching”** AS: “Our producer, Miles James, worked quite heavily on this one, workshopping it with the rest of the band to add certain sections and remove others from the initial idea our saxophone player, Cassie Kinoshi, came up with. The title says it all: Musically, the song inspires an awakening and a sense of longing to find yourself and your place of belonging in those who surround us.” **“We Give Thanks”** AS: “We had a lot of midtempo songs at this point in the recording process, and we needed something upbeat to add into the mix. \[Bandmate\] Sheila \[Maurice-Grey\] came up with the idea of ‘We Give Thanks’ as joyous and congregational, and it fit perfectly with what we were looking for. This was one of the beats I’d play in church at seven or eight years old, and when I was recording it, the song really reconnected me to those roots. We recorded the whole thing in one take, since we tried to recreate the good energy of the song itself in the studio.” **“Those Good Times”** TA: “Before this album, none of the male members of the band used to sing, but one of the main goals with this project was to push us out of our comfort zones, so this song meant every member of the group getting behind the mic to vocalize the call-and-response sections. It was a really exciting experience, and it’s one we’re much more comfortable with now, especially during the live shows.” **“Reprise”** TA: “We use interludes in the record to help tie the album together, and this one is a reverse synth part of the track ‘Something’s Going On,’ with the vocal refrain added in. It’s an ode to the ’70s psychedelic era, creating something trippy to prelude to the full number, which comes later in the album.” **“War Dance”** TA: “‘War Dance’ is exactly what it sounds like: It’s aggressive and unrelenting, and the solos aren’t playing games, since it’s an anthem for getting yourself energized for going to war. The horn lines are reminiscent of Sierra Leonean people and their music. The seeds of the song come from a tune Sheila brought in that we would jam in sound check during our last tour. It has a huge sound that feels like 10 horns, while the melody is like a chant.” **“Interlude”** AS: “This track opens with a voice note taken from a video that references the Lekki shooting, which happened in 2020 when the Nigerian army opened fire on a group of protesters. We were reflecting on the horrors of that tragedy and made a piece asking for more from our fellow humans, so something similar would never happen again.” **“Home”** TA: “This track is from the same references as ‘Dide O,’ since it is an ode to the experience of home as a comforting environment and the feeling of looking forward to being back home when you are on tour. It plays like a stripped-back version of ‘Dide O’ also, soothing us towards our end point.” **“Something’s Going On”** AS: “Our bassist, Duane Atherley, is a soulful old soul, and he has an old-school approach, even down to the way he improvises around chord changes. He brought this one to the band, and it adds to the overall blend of the record, since we are eight people influenced by West African sounds, ’70s funk, and soul. An album allows us to delve further into our soundworlds and different influences.” **“Outro”** TA: “We were in the studio on our last day of recording, and this track came out as an organic moment that we managed to keep. We were all singing on ‘Something’s Going On’ and just kept improvising after the tune ended to capture the natural joy in the room as we celebrated reaching the end of the album.” **“Blue Robe (Pt.II)”** AS: “It felt necessary to call back to these foundational West African rhythms on the last track of the album. ‘Blue Robe II’ sounds, to me, like a journey into whatever we end up creating next. It is an end but also a beginning, taking the listener to a different destination from where we have just come throughout the album.”

Today sees the phenomenal, London based 8-piece band Kokoroko anounce their long-awaited debut album Could We Be More via Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings. Could We Be More is an expansive and ambitious album that speaks to the force of Kokoroko. Each song possesses the energy which so naturally underpins the heartbeat of Kokoroko’s identity - deftly moving through afrobeat, highlife, soul, and funk across the album’s 15 tracks and taking inspiration from a plethora of other influences from within the West-African and Caribbean communities that the band grew up listening to - the album gifts the listener feelings of homecoming and joy. Speaking on the origins of Could We Be More, band members Sheila Maurice-Grey and Onome Edgeworth explain: “I think home has hugely informed the way we write and play our music. Everyone comes from different backgrounds but the thing that unites us in Kokoroko is that we all have a similar love and appreciation for afrobeat and highlife, whether that’s Ebo Taylor or Pat Thomas,” Sheila says. “It’s that feeling when you’re younger and you hear something and you feel some ownership over it. For me, Nigerian music and soul was played in the house a lot so I felt I had ownership over it so when I heard it elsewhere, there was a certain pride and energy filled with it. Recreating a piece of music that fills you with pride, ‘this is a piece of me and this is what I came from,’” Onome adds. Kokoroko have come to represent all that is blissfully sweet about London’s improvised music scene - an echo of the past that has taken on new forms while still sounding new and entirely original. The band are a vibrant example of the shape of things to come for British music: having released just 7 tracks (1x EP and 3x singles) in their short career, they have quickly developed a huge cult following with 60Million+ Spotify streams to their name and a classic record already under their belt in 2018's intimate viral masterpiece ‘Abusey Junction’. As they release their similarly immersive debut album, Kokoroko’s return feels particularly poignant. The collective are already winners of ‘Best Group’ at the Urban Music Awards 2020 and the Parliamentary Jazz Awards 2021, have been lauded in the NPR Austin 100 list, been crowned One To Watch by The Guardian, played across the globe at the likes of Glastonbury, Meltdown Festival, Elbjazz, Jazz a la Villette, We Out Here, SIM São Paulo and BBC6 Music Festival (to name a few), performed a raucous session for Boiler room and made their BBC Proms debut in the Royal Albert Hall; all up front of their debut record, which is as, progressive and musically versatile as you would expect from the eight different personalities within Kokoroko. With equal support across BBC Radio 1, BBC 6Music, Jazz FM, CLASH, Crack, The Observer, Evening Standard, Mixmag, Trench, gal-dem, Loud & Quiet, Rolling Stone, NATAAL + many more - what Kokoroko have achieved in the past four years is nothing short of remarkable.

Over the course of 30 years, Eddie Vedder has evolved from wild-eyed spokesperson for a generation to spotlight-allergic grouch to, slowly but surely, one of rock’s elder statesmen—a guy who can comfortably share a stage with Bono, The Boss, and JAY-Z. And though his second solo outing (2011’s aptly titled *Ukulele Songs*) showcased his gentler side, its follow-up is more diverse: a panoramic sprint through blistering punk (“Power of Right”), classic pop (the Elton John-enriched “Picture”), road-ready anthems (“The Dark”), and the sort of tender ballads he’s penned for Pearl Jam this side of the ’90s (“The Haves”). Most of all, Vedder—long seen as self-serious by some—sounds like a kid in a garage here, calling out to ground control from the cockpit on “Invincible” or shooting himself out of a cannon on “Try.” It sounds like he’s having *fun*.

The new 80s-inspired synth-pop album by Minute Taker, featuring the singles 'The Darkest Summer', 'Lead You Home' and 'After The Rain (feat. Bright Light Bright Light) as heard on BBC Radio 2. CDs, Vinyl and Merch available at minutetakershop.com

I'm excited and proud to announce that my 5th solo record A Legacy Of Rentals will be released on May 20, 2022 via Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers. A Legacy of Rentals was largely written during 2020, in the shadow of the pandemic and the George Floyd murder that occurred in my hometown of Minneapolis. It was recorded in 2021 with producer Josh Kaufman, engineer D. James Goodwin, and a number of other friends and collaborators. These songs deal a lot with memory: how we remember people that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. It's about how memories become the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s about the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. It’s about finding joy in the mundane and engaging in hope in our everyday. You can watch a video trailer for the record here: youtu.be/3YqMngcaZSg I really appreciate you being a part of this. This record is very special to me, and I think a bit different than anything I’ve done before. I’m honored to be here to share A Legacy Of Rentals with you. This is what it looks like. cf Pre-order physical formats of A Legacy of Rentals: orcd.co/alegacyofrentals

Candid stories and warm folk-pop tunes propel a much-awaited LP.

Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.

A few months before releasing his third solo album, Liam Gallagher told Apple Music to expect a little of the unexpected. “Some of it’s odd,” he said. “I’d say 80 percent of the record is peculiar but still good, and 20 percent of it is classic. If you’re gonna do something a bit different, do it in these times, and if people don’t dig it, blame it on COVID.” On *C’MON YOU KNOW*, “odd” doesn’t quite mean a journey into the outer rims of acid trance or vaporwave, but, chiefly guided by trusted producer/songwriter Andrew Wyatt, Gallagher is noticeably freer of spirit. After two albums of bedding himself into a solo career with gently psychedelic rock that didn’t range too far from Oasis or Beady Eye, Liam is now deftly toggling between polemic punk and weightless dub on “I’m Free.” He told Apple Music that he’d bought a tepee to help cope with the claustrophobia of lockdown and, by building from a children’s choir to a grand, strobing finale, opener “More Power” suggests he spent those outdoor nights picking up signals from Spiritualized’s richly orchestrated cosmos. Other more intrepid moments include deeply psychedelic pop (“Better Days”), elegantly psychedelic soul (“The Joker”), and limber funk rock (“Diamond in the Dark”). While the music peers in new directions, the voice remains unmistakable—and in decent health. There’s a familiar snarl and swagger to “I’m Free” and the trippy, indie groove of “Don’t Go Halfway,” but Gallagher’s sometimes-overlooked warmth and reassurance are also regularly in play. He never likes slapping definitive meaning on the words he sings, preferring that listeners take what they want from the songs, and in a post-pandemic age there’s plenty to draw from the piano-driven heart-tugger “Too Good for Giving Up”: “Look how far you’ve come/Stronger than the damage done/Step out of the darkness unafraid.” During “Don’t Go Halfway,” he sings, “You were all thumbs/Through the dark days/When your time comes/Don’t go halfway.” On a record released a few months before his 50th birthday, Gallagher is heeding his own advice and emerging as a man whose horizons stretch further than ever.

“One more time, for whatever reason, the universe saw fit to inject this band with another giant shot of plasma,” Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis tells Apple Music. “Left to our own devices, we probably would\'ve withered on the vine somewhere along the line, as we all do at some point. But it wasn\'t quite time for us to do that yet.” The shot of “plasma” that Kiedis is referring to is, in large part, the (second) return of guitarist John Frusciante, after roughly a decade away. You can immediately hear the difference—in the aqueous funk of “Poster Child,” the stadium-ready swings of “These Are the Ways,” or the acoustic phrasing of “Tangelo,” the album’s delicate closer. “It\'s so clear when he writes and when he plays,” Kiedis says of his bandmate, whose guitar work proved galvanizing on career highlights like 1991’s *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* and 1999’s *Californication*. “It\'s really fun to listen to because it’s sound and emotion and color. He\'s not trying to play the right notes—he\'s just trying to play the notes that are truly him.” Also back in the fold: producer and honorary fifth Chili Pepper Rick Rubin, who—absent on 2016’s *The Getaway*—accompanied Kiedis to Kauai for a songwriting retreat that was unexpectedly extended by lockdown. “Nobody could come, nobody could leave,” Kiedis says. “It was six months of being in the land that time forgot.” For the five of them, the aim was simple: Be together, play together, and, in Kiedis’ words, “write and write and write and write. Maybe we\'ll keep all of it, maybe we\'ll keep some of it. The process that it had to go through to become this record was very democratic in the sense that we all voted, including Rick.” The result is 17 songs that pay tribute to the veteran outfit’s chemistry and affection for one another, a magnetic coming-together that’s apparent anytime they play. “We\'re older and different, and enter *Unlimited Love*, a really fun and wild experience,” Kiedis says. “We accept each other and we love each other and there is an endless friendship going on there—which is not to say that we want to hang out every day. It\'s nice to go away from it and come back to it, go away from it and come back. But it never dies.” Here, Kiedis takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Not the One”** “This idea came out from ‘I think I know who you are, but maybe I don\'t. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don\'t.’ Especially in intimate relationships, we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start? Like, not trying to impress each other, or just ‘I’m kind of a fuck-up and here\'s my weak suit and my flaws.’ And then we would never have to discover that down the line and go, ‘What?’” **“Poster Child”** “I didn\'t think that the music from ‘Poster Child’ was going to survive, because Flea brought in two painfully funky basslines on the same day, and they weren\'t similar, but the way I was hearing it was like, ‘I have to choose. My plate\'s too full.’ And so I chose the other one, which ended up becoming a song called ‘Peace and Love’ that didn\'t make the record. The one that I thought was the superior funk was not the superior funk, and then it just took me a long time of living with this music before I found my place. I can\'t say that any of them were really a struggle or a battle, but it’s the one that I was surprised came to life.” **“These Are the Ways”** “That\'s a song that John brought—the arrangement and a version of that melody. I’m never able to recreate his melodies perfectly—he\'s just on a different melodic level—so I usually put it through a simplification machine. I didn\'t overthink it. It was the first idea that came to my mind when I heard that arrangement, which is very bombastic and almost like a huge classical orchestra, exploding and then going way back. It was a reflection on life in America, but not a good or a bad reflection—just, this is it. We might be bloated, we might be overloaded with more than we can handle, and let\'s just take a step back and rethink it just a little bit. But it’s not ‘this is wrong and that\'s right.’ It\'s just ‘this is who we\'ve become.’”

Unlimited Love is Red Hot Chili Peppers' twelfth studio album, released on April 1, 2022 and coming six years after their previous full-length effort, The Getaway. The record also marks the return of two key figures in the band’s history: guitarist John Frusciante, who re-joined RHCP in 2019 and scores his first contributions since the band’s 2006 LP Stadium Arcadium, and long-time producer Rick Rubin, who returned to work with the group after a whopping eleven years (since I’m With You came out in 2011). RHCP started recording and working on the album in 2021, at Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu: a initial selection of around 100 tracks was trimmed down to slightly less than 50 recorded songs, 17 of which would eventually make the cut for the album’s final tracklist, while “Nerve Flip” would be the bonus track added to the Japanese Import of the album.

When Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton were making their third album, *Two Ribbons*, someone from their record label told them, “You know you don’t have to put yourselves through this, don’t you?” The album is a visceral exploration of the love, loss, grief, and devastation they’ve experienced in recent years. And for the electronic-pop duo from Norwich, England, best friends since childhood, this was the only way through. “I was like, ‘We’re going through it anyway,’” Hollingworth tells Apple Music. “It was hard making the record, but that’s because it was a hard time in general. Even though it was extremely challenging, it gives you a place to put the amount of emotion you have. It was a way of trying to forge meaning out of stuff, especially when it all feels a bit meaningless.” Here, their intricately woven synth-pop brings out a lightness in the darkest of subjects. This is an album about the duo’s personal ordeals, as Hollingworth tries to make sense of the tragic passing of her boyfriend, the singer Billy Clayton, who died at just 22 from a rare form of bone cancer, with both reflecting on cracks in their friendship. “It was the first time that we’ve written that honestly about our lives, and that felt really important,” says Walton. “It’s just very down the line and quite brutally honest. That was important for both of us.” All of which has resulted in a profound and poignant artistic statement—and an album that sees Walton and Hollingworth’s songcraft reaching new peaks. Here, they talk us through *Two Ribbons*, track by track. **“Happy New Year”** Rosa Walton: “I actually started writing this with the intention of it being for the Cyberpunk 2077 game but, in the end, the brief for that was so specific, and I wrote a different track instead. I had the main hook chords for this and then I just sung the words ‘best friend’ and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I know what this should be about.’ I had loads of things that felt really pressing to write about mine and Jenny’s relationship and looking back on that in a nostalgic way and also looking forward to a new chapter. It made sense to use the metaphor of New Year because it’s often a time when you do that.” **“Levitation”** RW: “This was written about the surreal mental state of feeling detached from reality, in a way that you almost feel high, and there’s positives about it, but then also it can be really scary and alienating. I wanted to write about two sides of that. It’s one that we both sing, and Jenny brought lyrics to it later in the process.” **“Watching You Go”** Jenny Hollingworth: “I wanted to make something that reflected the pent-up emotion of grief and the kind of tension that you feel when you’re in a lot of confusion and distress. The way that the song’s built, there aren’t really clear chords through most of it; it’s very bass-led and kind of churning and then, at the end, there’s this big guitar release. It represents, to me, just how difficult I found it at the time to express myself. There’s a lot of nature imagery on the record because a lot of the record was written spending a huge amount of time outside. This one looks at the images of beauty but also the horror of nature at the same time.” **“Hall of Mirrors”** RW: “This was very production-led in that the shiny, bright metallic sounds came before any of the lyrics or the story. They almost informed the lyrics, in a way. The idea of writing about the hall of mirrors came from the image of the shiny, delayed synth sounds that were like reflections in a mirror, and then from there I realized that I wanted to write a song about my sexuality, which I hadn’t written about before. That was something that I felt like, at that point, I was ready to talk about in a song and the many different emotions in relation to that. I knew that I wanted it to be an uplifting and positive song, but then, in the same way, there’s a lot of secrecy and guilt mixed in there as well. I knew that I wanted to keep it a dance-pop song at the core.” **“Insect Loop”** RW: “This one is very painful and a raw, emotional song. I see it in sections, and all of the sections represent different facets of how you feel about a person. There’s anger, there’s guilt, there’s tenderness in the middle section, and then a release at the end, and we used the production to build that. The end section I imagine as being set on a beach: The big, reverb-y, distorted guitars are like the crashing waves. Both of us are really influenced by our environment and influenced by the Norfolk coastline and the Norfolk countryside.” **“Half Light”** RW: “This was written as a segue between ‘Insect Loop’ and ‘Sunday’ because they’re both very heavy, emotionally intense songs, and we felt like we needed to put in a breather there.” **“Sunday”** RW: “I started writing this one at the beginning of lockdown. I was about to break up with my boyfriend at the time and it was written ahead of that, as a kind of way to prepare myself for the break-up. I really wanted to write something very warm-sounding, which is interesting with it being about a break-up. The warmness was like a longing for how I wanted to feel and how I once felt in the relationship. I think there’s something extra sad about that. A lot of the sounds are very delicate and fragile, and also just really pretty. Again, there’s something really sad about using those sounds in a way which is about something which is ending.” **“In the Cemetery”** RW: “This was a track that Jenny had started, and then I wrote a bit of instrumental around it and then put in some shitty recordings of birds off the internet, and then Jenny went to the cemetery and recorded actual birds. Again, we just felt like we needed to have something in there that just created a bit of space and a break from the high volumes of lyrics.” **“Strange Conversations”** JH: “It’s complicated to talk about this because I feel like a lot of the lyrics are mysterious, even to me. I think when Billy passed away, it made me think a lot about spirituality, not in the literal sense of religion, but just in terms of meaning and what happens when we die, and you are quite confronted with that aspect of life in a way that you’re not previously. It not only represents a conversation with either some sort of higher power or a god, but also the questions that you have for the person that you love who’s passed away, and the way that your relationship continues even when they’ve passed away. I guess the strangeness of it is the fact that it’s obviously one-sided and that you can’t actually get the answers that you’re looking for.” **“Two Ribbons”** JH: “It wasn’t immediately obvious to me as a closer, but it made sense as the record came together because it just felt like it had a mood that was difficult to bounce back from. It also ended up creating a kind of circular, because ‘Happy New Year’ is almost like a response to ‘Two Ribbons.’ Ending on ‘Two Ribbons’ and then starting again with ‘Happy New Year,’ it’s almost like you hear the songs differently the second time you listen on loop because of the context of this song.”

The band's new album, 'Two Ribbons', tells the story of the last three years from both Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton's points of view. As a body of work, it is astonishing: a dazzling, heart-breaking, life-affirming and mortality-facing record that reveals their growing artistry and ability to parse intense feeling into lyrics so memorable you'd scribble them on your backpack.

After 30 years and an incalculable number of rhymes about blunts, joints, and hits from the bong, Cypress Hill return with *Back in Black*, the 10th entry in their brilliant, steadily paced catalog. Wise and seasoned veterans, the Los Angeles rap legends from South Gate spit rhymes that are as sharp and incisive as ever, reminding fans of their legacy alongside more nuanced perspectives on blazing and owning entire grow houses. They’ve also traded the booming, psychedelic, and often dark beats of longtime producer DJ Muggs for some gritty, slamming boom-bap from revered Detroit beatsmith Black Milk. The result is a record that sonically pivots without forsaking the group’s roots. Between nostalgic glances at their formative years (“Takeover”) and avowals of hometown pride (“The Original”), B-Real and Sen Dog pen righteous screeds on the pitfalls of marijuana legalization (“Open Ya Mind”) and deservedly beat their chests in celebration of outlasting their peers (“Champion Sound”).

In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”

"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."

The years 2017, 2019, and 2021 brought Fantastic Negrito three Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues Album. If 2022 doesn’t provide a fourth for the Oakland-hailing singer and composer, it is only because his *White Jesus Black Problems* isn’t actually a blues album. The project is a concept LP exploring the relationship between Negrito’s seventh-generation white Scottish grandmother, an indentured servant, and his seventh-generation African American grandfather, a slave, in Colonial Virginia. Buried in some wily and operatic amalgamation of funk, rock, blues, gospel, Motown, and country are Negrito’s impressions of the era and the unknowable pressures of carrying on an interracial relationship during that time. For his part, Negrito is able to narrate an impossible sort of existence (“You Don’t Belong Here,” “You Better Have a Gun,” “Register of Free Negroes”) with near-academic resolve, bolstered by grooves too expansive and lively to be reduced to just “the blues.”

The bright, kaleidoscopic vignettes that defined Melody’s Echo Chamber’s first decade have softened into misty pastel watercolors on the French singer/songwriter Mélody Prochet’s third album, *Emotional Eternal*. Following 2018’s *Bon Voyage*—a dense, disorienting psych-pop set whose release was overshadowed by an accident that left Prochet hospitalized for several months—the artist moved from Paris to the Alps, became a mother, and fused all those experiences into a lighter, more lithe album that seeks peace somewhere between reverie and reality. Slipping between English and French, Prochet is a bewitching pied piper, her breathy incantations guiding a playful procession of sitar (“Pyramids in the Clouds”), horns (“A Slow Dawning of Peace”), and strings (“Personal Message”) through weightless, winding melodies that are held down by a persistent, propulsive bass. It all leads to “Alma\_the Voyage,” a swooning, swirling orchestral ode to the artist’s daughter that balances all the headiness with pure heart as Prochet gushes, “I’m so lucky to have you, and so proud to hold you.”

Lissie's Carving Canyons finds the acclaimed singer-songwriter digging deep to carry on through life's many uncertainties. The singer-songwriter's fifth album is her most personal expression yet, with twelve songs that chart the ripples caused by heartbreak and loneliness as well as what happens when the soul perseveres amidst pain. Carving Canyons is as deeply felt as Lissie's music has ever been, with sumptuous production and indelible melodies that will surely stand the test of time.

“I want to love unconditionally now.” Read on as Steve Lacy opens up about how he made his sophomore album in this exclusive artist statement. “Someone asked me if I felt pressure to make something that people might like. I felt a disconnect, my eyes squinted as I looked up. As I thought about the question, I realized that we always force a separation between the artist (me) and audience (people). But I am not separate. I am people, I just happen to be an artist. Once I understood this, the album felt very easy and fun to make. *Gemini Rights* is me getting closer to what makes me a part of all things, and that is: feelings. Feelings seem like the only real things sometimes. “I write about my anger, sadness, longing, confusion, happiness, horniness, anger, happiness, confusion, fear, etc., all out of love and all laughable, too. The biggest lesson I learned at the end of this album process was how small we make love. I want to love unconditionally now. I will make love bigger, not smaller. To me, *Gemini Rights* is a step in the right direction. I’m excited for you to have this album as your own as it is no longer mine. Peace.” —Steve Lacy

When Bonnie Raitt was dreaming up *Just Like That...*, her first album in six years, she had a very specific mission in mind: Record the songs she’s always wanted to, and especially the most soulful, funky ones she could find. “I always got my ear cocked for either old soul chestnuts or some obscure album cut off of an artist that I haven\'t listened to for a while,” she told Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I\'m just always hunting.” Some of the songs are covers or tributes inspired by other artists: She fell in love with The Bros. Landreth’s “Made Up Mind,” the album’s lead-off track, when the band opened for her on tour in 2014, while Al Anderson of NRBQ’s “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart” has been stuck in her head for three decades. Others, like the album’s title track, are new compositions inspired by the legendary singer-songwriter’s own favorite songs and songwriters. “I knew that this time when I wrote, I wanted to write from a third-person point of view,” Bonnie Raitt said. “Either a short story or something that moved me out in the world from somebody else\'s life story, because I\'d really mined a lot of my own personal life. I\'d pretty much covered all the members of my family, my relationships, and I just loved story songs, and I hadn\'t done one except for a song called \'All at Once\' that I did years ago. I love John Prine\'s \'Angel From Montgomery\' and \'Donald and Lydia,\' and I love the music of early Dylan, the first few albums where it\'s just him fingerpicking in a voice unadorned. I wanted a song to tell as a very simple story.” “Just Like That” is both simple and not, in that it touches on deep love, painful truth, and devastating loss—all things that Raitt felt acutely as she worked on the album over the course of the trauma and furious change she witnessed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “It\'s hard to separate the last couple of years\' COVID experience from the nightmare of the election cycle, and the polarity, hostility, and viciousness that\'s become what our country\'s climate is,” she says. “I just wasn\'t expecting that in this lifetime. It gave me a purpose. I knew that we eventually were going to either get back on the road or I was going to get in the studio, so it felt healing to have something to focus on and pull those songs together and know that people are hurting out there. And I can\'t wait to get on the road—not just to support my band and crew and the groups that I support, but to have some fun again and bring some light.”

Yumi Zouma’s Josh Burgess likens the band’s songwriting process to gardening, “Someone brings in a seed and through collaboration, it grows into a song that is vastly different from its original form.” Like any garden, this one requires dedicated tending, a practice that seems rather inconvenient if not straight-up difficult, considering the fact that the four members live in disparate parts of the world – calling New York, London, and New Zealand home – but long-distance has always been a feature of their songwriting process, not a bug. Their new album, Present Tense, is the product of those efforts, a work Christie Simpson describes as “a gallery wall displaying these different moments in each of our lives. A process of curation, revisiting the past and making it relevant to the present.” You might assume that while some artists have struggled to rethink their processes during a pandemic, Yumi Zouma would be perfectly suited to lockdown, but the opposite proved to be true. Without looming tour dates driving them to release new music, the prolific band found themselves at a standstill. On the day that the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the band released their third LP, Truth or Consequences, via Polyvinyl, and had sold out their first American tour. After Yumi Zouma’s first show in Washington DC, the tour was canceled and the four members went their separate ways, an experience memorialized on Present Tense opener “Give It Hell.” “It was disorientating,” Charlie Ryder admits. “We generally work at a quick clip and average about a record a year, but with no foreseeable plans, we lost our momentum.” So they set a date. By September 1st, 2021, the album needed to be finished, regardless of whether they’d be able to tour it or even meet to record together. Before the September deadline goaded the band into action, they had what felt like endless amounts of time to record the album. What began in fits and starts became a committed practice again as Yumi Zouma dug through demos from as early as 2018 to collaborate on and make relevant to the peculiar moment in time the band, and world, was experiencing. “The lyrics on these songs feel like premonitions, in some regards,” Simpson reflects. “So much has changed for us, both personally and as a band, that things I wrote because the words sounded good together now speak to me in ways I didn’t anticipate.” Remote and in-person sessions in studios in Wellington, Florence, New York, Los Angeles, and London all played a role, and Yumi Zouma brought in new collaborators from different disciplines to broaden their sound. Studio recordings of drummer Olivia Campion were incorporated into every song, while pedal steel, pianos, saxophones, woodwinds, and strings were played by friends around the globe who were able to lend their talents and support. The band enlisted multiple mixers in Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy), Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood, Julia Holter), and Jake Aron (Grizzly Bear, Chairlift), and recruited the mastering expertise of Antoine Chabert (Daft Punk, Charlotte Gainsbourg) for the first time. “This is our fourth album, so we wanted to pivot slightly, create more extreme versions of songs,” Ryder says. “Working with other artists helped with that, and took us far outside of our normal comfort zone.” You can hear the impulse on “In The Eyes Of Our Love,” a song that’s seemingly twice as fast as any prior release, and closer to the classic rock of Dire Straits than the dream pop aesthetics that the band has built their career on so far. Campion’s drums crash in hard from the outset, sending the accompanying band into a revelry that only breaks upon arriving at the first bridge, when Simpson sings: “But we won’t lose sight of what we said/ I'll sing from the dirt instead.” There’s a defiance heard throughout Present Tense, a refusal to bend to what might seem fated, communicated not only through lyrics but in the boldness of these arrangements, metamorphosing between tracks without ever losing momentum. The triumphant chorus of “Where The Light Used To Lay” belies any of the pain beneath its surface, a technique Simpson likens to the work of folk-adjacent rock acts like Bruce Springsteen and Phoebe Bridgers. “We wanted quiet moments to give into a big, brash chorus, something that approaches cliché,” Simpson says. “The chorus feels like a dramatic encapsulation of who we want to be as a band,” Ryder adds. Two years away from the road gave Yumi Zouma a new appreciation for the friendship they’ve sustained and the opportunity an abundance of time off-cycle offered. “We used to run on adrenaline, and if a song wasn’t working we’d just nip it in the bud and move on. This process gave us the opportunity to really sit with songs and rethink them until they felt like they belonged in the collection,” Burgess says. Album closer “Astral Projection” is one such song, originally conceived by Burgess, who felt as if he’d been handed a sliver of brilliance after the song had been rewritten and abandoned by Ryder and Simpson. “It was as if I’d been given this rescue cat who had the potential to be great,” he says, laughing. Between them, the song developed into a bass-driven slowburner, moody and oddly prescient,“A hint of panic can do wonders for distance,” Simpson sings, her voice mirrored by Burgess’s. The outro twinkles like a summer skyline at dusk, violets and grays intermingling with the bright glow of a thousand open windows. “I daydream about playing that one live,” Burgess says. “In bed, I’ll close my eyes before sleep and imagine the drumbeat kicking in.” It’s a craving the members of Yumi Zouma all share, one they hope will be satiated someday soon. Dedicated to an embattled past, Present Tense is the band’s offering to a tenuous future.“To 2020, and the memory of all that was lost,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Kia Kaha.”

When Ari Lennox dropped her debut album *Shea Butter Baby* in 2019, the D.C. native was a young woman exploring love and heartbreak while trying to understand her self-worth beyond sex. Now, with her sophomore outing, Lennox ditches the romantic uncertainty and frustrations about not receiving the love she deserves for a sultrier, sexier, more self-assured collection of songs. “I just was being my regular hopeless romantic self and crushing on just completely terrible individuals that for whatever reason in that state I completely romanticized, and I’m recognizing I love the idea of love,” Lennox tells Apple Music radio’s Nadeska. “Sometimes it can feel like something that’s really unavoidable or unhealthy or avoidant. So it’s just really me just trying to maneuver through this dating life, which can be so exhausting.” Described by Lennox as a “transitional space before my current ‘eat, pray, love’ journey,” *age/sex/location* is a play on online dating and AOL chat rooms, where Lennox’s adventures in dating began. The opening track, “POF,” named after the dating site Plenty of Fish, introduces Lennox’s frustrations with the lack of good men in her life. However, despite experiencing not-so-good outcomes with these lackluster relationships, she still desires companionship. Over a bluesy bassline and gentle percussion, Lennox yearns for love but asserts her power in understanding what she doesn’t want. “Young Black woman approachin’ 30 with no lover in my bed/Cannot settle, I got standards,” she sings. Not every song on the 12-track project is about setting boundaries and lovelorn texts; the best moments are when Lennox pivots into the salacious details of her sensual pleasures. On the seductive and hypnotic “Hoodie,” Lennox lustfully crushes on a potential lover while trying to get underneath his clothes. She continues to express her passion and desires on tracks like “Pressure,” “Stop By,” and the Chlöe Bailey-assisted “Leak It.” Other guests on the album include Summer Walker, who lends her buttery vocals on the Erykah Badu-esque closer “Queen Space,” and Lucky Daye, who does his best to woo Lennox on the flirtatious duet-skit “Boy Bye.” The song plays like a game of cat and mouse with Daye’s slick talk and player-like lines, and Lennox, who’s dismissive but secretly is kind of into him too, offers up her cheeky one-liners in response, singing, “Those lines belong in 1995/Just like them funky Nikes.” “I love people who play,” Lennox says of the song. “Or not play with my feelings, but we’re playing around. We’re goofing around as long as your actions or your energy can show that you’re a secure, nice person. Me and Lucky, it was just really innate and natural. And we’re just lovers of soul. I feel like lovers of love.” *age/sex/location* showcases Lennox’s storytelling as the album starts with her search for authenticity in her suitors and ends with removing negative influences (“Blocking You”) and setting boundaries while emphasizing her self-worth (“Queen Space”). The evolution is evident in comparison to her *Shea Butter Baby* debut: Where she was hoping for reciprocation from her lover, now she demands it with a promise of cutting the relationship off without it.

The latest release from Nashville-based Caitlin Rose, CAZIMI captures a voice which is equal parts honeyed and world-weary, and sees her singing self-aware songs of self-destruction, documenting proclivity and impulse control, bad habits in life and in romantic pursuits. She skips across genres, combining new wave influences with pop stylings and the melancholy folk songwriting that made her such a staple of the Nashville rock scene.

“Through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, I found my way back to the world around me – a way to reach nature and the people I love and care about. This record is a sensory exploration that allowed for a connection to a consciousness that I was searching for. Through the resonance of sound and a beaten up old piano I bought in Camden Market while living in a city I had no intention of staying in, I found acceptance and a way of healing.” - Beth Orton Many musicians turn inward when the world around them seems chaotic and unreliable. Reframing one’s perception of self can often reveal new personal truths both uncomfortable and profound, and for Beth Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force even when her own life felt more tumultuous than ever. Indeed, the foundations of the songs on Orton’s stunning new album, Weather Alive, are nothing more than her voice and a “cheap, crappy” upright piano installed in a shed in her garden, conjuring a deeply meditative atmosphere that remains long after the final note has evaporated. “I am known as a collaborator and I’m very good at it. I’m very open to it. Sometimes, I’ve been obscured by it,” says Orton, who rose to prominence through ‘90s-era collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers before striking out on her own with a series of acclaimed, award-winning solo releases. “I think what’s happened with this record is that through being cornered by life, I got to reveal myself to myself and to collaborate with myself, actually.” Weather Alive - Beth Orton's first album in six years - is out 23rd September on Partisan Records"

Picture the most Phoenix place imaginable to record an album. Now make that place a little *more* Phoenix and you’re probably in the right ballpark. “As a teenager, I thought one day we’d be there,” Thomas Mars tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson of the Louvre Palace in Paris—where his band’s seventh album would be born. “They wanted to have an artist residency for the first time, so they built a studio for us and we’d work from 10 am to 7 pm every day.” The band was able to keep “bank hours” in such an extraordinary location thanks to the extraordinary times in which the album was harvested. “This was the pandemic,” Mars says. “So we could enter the building by one entrance and choose which floor to work on. It was so enjoyable but also sad. We knew it wouldn’t last forever, but with the pandemic we stayed about two years. I roller skated on the perfect marble one day.” That freewheeling vibe is calcified across *Alpha Zulu*’s 10 songs—the majority written within 10 days of setting up at the Louvre. “We felt lucky,” guitarist/keyboardist Laurent Brancowitz says. “Thomas was stuck in the US for a long time, so when we were back together in between lockdowns, those little moments of work were really joyful. You can hear the joyfulness, I hope.” The band describes the album as possessing the same “weird Frankenstein” spirit as their debut LP, 2000’s *United*, and its vivacity is irresistible. The title track is a reminder that few bands conjure more fun from unshowy pop-rock ingredients; Ezra Koenig collab “Tonight” is the best kind of fan servicing; and “The Only One” and “Season 2” are the type of gorgeous, velvety mid-pacers Phoenix excels in. But, as ever, this isn’t just stylish, calorie-free indie. The French band has always managed to smuggle introspection and darkness into even their most melodic work, and here the influence of Philippe Zdar—the Cassius musician who produced multiple Phoenix records and died in 2019—casts an imposing shadow. The band’s 2020 single “Identical” is the album’s emotional centerpiece and a taut, disarming love letter to Zdar. “He didn’t hear any of this record,” Mars says. “‘Identical’ was recorded three days after his funeral. We got back into the studio and instead of talking to each other, we made music. He was just so instrumental and so charismatic that every song we would think with his language. We still do.” “Philippe and the Louvre,” Brancowitz says. “That’s a good combo. For sure.”

Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

Nashville singer-songwriter Kelsey Waldon is one of a handful of young artists keeping traditional country music alive and well. Signed by the late, great John Prine to his Oh Boy Records label, Waldon is revered for her nuanced, image-rich songwriting as well as her agile voice. *No Regular Dog*, which she recorded alongside producer Shooter Jennings (Brandi Carlile, Yelawolf), follows 2019’s *White Noise / White Lines* and builds upon the narrative writing and clear-eyed insight of its predecessor. Highlights include the atmospheric, fiddle-heavy “Sweet Little Girl” and the sweet, tender “Simple as Love.” But “Season’s Ending,” Waldon’s tribute to Prine, is the album’s beating heart.

I am so excited to announce that my new record “No Regular Dog”, produced by Shooter Jennings, will be out on Oh Boy Records and into the world on August 12, 2022. This record feels like a lifetime in the making after all we’ve been through the past couple years, and I am so proud of the stories and songs and what we created. The first single “Sweet Little Girl”, is in part about me, but perhaps it’s also about you. It’s about the rage and unrest inside during a process to find healing. It’s simply just about a gal who is trying to find her way back “home”. I hope y’all enjoy the journey with this album. There is so much more to come and I can’t wait to share it all with you in the months ahead.

Have you ever been in the kind of relationship that makes you want to sing? By the sounds of *Digital Roses Don’t Die*, revered Mississippi MC and producer Big K.R.I.T. has. And if he’s not in that relationship at the moment, he’s done his best to immortalize it across a 17-track follow-up to 2019’s *K.R.I.T. IZ HERE*. Save for maybe “It’s Over Now,” the whole of the project is about how special K.R.I.T. thinks a particular someone is. Love is the message, and he’s pushed his voice to the outer reaches of funky R&B crooning to deliver it. We don’t actually get a name for the object of his affection, but he details the phases of his infatuation, including crushing (“Just 4 You,” “Cum Out to Play”), courtship (“Southside of the Moon,” “Show U Right”), and full-blown lovesickness (“So Cool,” “Boring,” “More Than Roses”). Moments of actual rapping are few and far between here, but bars reveal themselves in the interludes, each of which contain spoken-word poetry.

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

On Jillian Banks’ fourth album, the avant-pop performer has reinvented herself: Her alt-R&B sonic signatures remain, sure, but she’s leaned into the darkness. “Someone write my new name down,” she sings in the intro of lead single “The Devil.” “I’m the devil/Did they tell you I’m the devil?” The wickedness sounds good on her: “Misunderstood” is goth church, “F\*\*k Love” is glitchy trap production, “Burn” is a ballad from the great beyond, closer “I Still Love You” is a relationship dirge. Despite—or perhaps due to—Banks’ sophisticated approach to pop music, this is a deep album with unique pleasures: soulful harmonies, dance-driven bass, contorted synths, club-ready love songs. This is a new Banks, the result of a victorious battle with depression and anxiety attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clearly, she’s emerged stronger than ever.

A great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song can make you feel like you’re on top of the world and have no idea what you’re doing at the same time. The difference here—on their first album since 2013’s *Mosquito*—is a sense of maturity: Instead of tearing up the club, they’re reminiscing about it (“Fleez”), having traded their endless nights for mornings as bright and open as a flower (“Different Today”). And after spending 20 years seesawing between their aggressive side and their sophisticated, synth-pop side, they’ve found a sound that genuinely splits the difference (“Burning”). Listening to Karen O’s poem about watching the sunset with her young son (“Mars”), two thoughts come to mind. One is that they’ve always been kids, this band. The other is that the secret to staying young is growing up.

It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like “Maps” or “Zero” or the latest addition to their canon, “Spitting off the Edge of the World featuring Perfume Genius” — an epic shot-to-the-heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on Cool It Down, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalog, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely.

Before becoming a progenitor in the microgenre chillwave—defined by a 2000s indie rock culture obsessed with 1980s electro-synth sounds and nostalgic, dreamy bedroom pop—Toro y Moi (Chazwick Bradley “Chaz Bear” Bundick) was known for his experimental production, leading to a long run of widely lauded albums. *MAHAL* is his seventh, its title taken from the Tagalog word for “expensive.” It\'s also a good time in 13 songs, from the Parliament funk of “Postman” and the psychedelic percussion of “Clarity” to the garage-psych of “The Medium” featuring New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and the smoky “Mississippi.” If chillwave was a flash-in-the-pan moment, Toro Y Moi has long since survived it.

The 13-track project marks the seventh studio album from Bear under the Toro y Moi moniker. To celebrate the announcement, Toro y Moi shares two singles from the forthcoming record "Postman" b/w "Magazine." Each of the new singles arrives with accompanying visuals. "Postman," directed by Kid. Studio, sees Toro and friends riding around the colorful San Francisco landscape in his Filipino jeepney, seen on the cover of MAHAL. "Magazine," directed by Arlington Lowell, sees Toro and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who supplies vocals on the track, dressed vibrantly in a photo studio spliced with various colorful graphics and playful edits. MAHAL's announcement and singles arrive on the heels of Toro's highly celebrated 2019 album Outer Peace, which Pitchfork described as "one of his best albums in years" along with his Grammy-nominated 2020 collaboration with Flume, "The Difference," which was also featured in a global campaign for Apple's Airpods. Today's releases mark the first from Toro y Moi since signing to Secretly Group label Dead Oceans. Dead Oceans is an independent record label established in 2007 featuring luminaries like Japanese Breakfast, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Mitski, Slowdive and more. Toro y Moi is the 12+ year project of South Carolina-reared, Bay Area-based Chaz Bear. In the wake 2008’s global economic collapse, Toro y Moi emerged as a figurehead of the beloved sub-genre widely known as chillwave, the sparkling fumes of which still heavily influence musicians all over today. Over the subsequent decade, his music and graphic design has far, far surpassed that particular designation. Across 9 albums (6 studio as Toro y Moi along with a live album, compilation and mixtape) with the great Carpark label, he has explored psych-rock, deep house, UK hip-hop; R&B and well-beyond without losing that rather iconic, bright and shimmering Toro y Moi fingerprint. As a graphic designer, Bear has collaborated with brands like Nike, Dublab and Van’s. And as a songwriter and producer, he’s collaborated with other artists like Tyler, The Creator, Flume, Travis Scott, HAIM, and Caroline Polachek.

Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.

“Wanna know why I retired?” Logic asks on “BLACKWHITEBOY.” “’Cause I was uninspired.” Fair enough. But if it was inspiration that brought the Gaithersburg MC back to the booth after a nearly year-long pause to record his seventh and self-proclaimed “final” studio album for Def Jam, it likely came from some outside help. *Vinyl Days* features guest verses from Action Bronson, Curren$y, Russ, Wiz Khalifa, Royce da 5’9, RZA, AZ, and The Game (among others), along with voice notes from Aaron Judge, JJ Abrams, Michael Rapaport, Tony Revolori, NEMS, Earl Sweatshirt, Rainn Wilson, and Lena Waithe. The bars are here—it is a Logic album, after all—along with heaps of gratitude (“Decades”), stories about his life pre-fame (“Bleed It”), a deep exploration of his relationship with music critic Anthony Fantano (“LaDonda”), showcases for lesser-known MCs (“Kickstyle,” “Introducing Nezi”), and even a heartfelt plea for Madlib to return to rapping (“Quasi”). But the biggest takeaway from *Vinyl Days* is that Logic is friends with a lot of talented people. And it was important to have them all by his side when he came back to rap.

In the winter of 2019, Belle and Sebastian had an album’s worth of material ready to record and were preparing to decamp from Scotland to California to make their ninth studio album. You know what happens next. “Once the lockdown started, everything else got forgotten, and then we very much went inside,” lead singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch tells Apple Music. They kept busy, of course, collaborating with fans online for the pandemic-specific “Protecting the Hive” project and assembling the live compilation *What to Look for in Summer*. “But I don\'t think any of us were really interested in making an album remotely from each other,” says singer/violinist Sarah Martin. Once they were able to convene in person nearly a year later, the band decided to transform their Glasgow rehearsal space into a studio and make their first LP in their hometown since 2000. Murdoch still had his reservations, but they turned out to be moot. “A vocal booth could be in San Francisco, it could be in Cape Town, it doesn\'t matter,” he says. “It becomes like a womb for you to imagine new songs.” And that’s very much what happened—they scrapped most of the songs from the original batch and let *A Bit of Previous* take shape organically. “The record was entirely different to the one that would\'ve been made if we had gone to Los Angeles,” Murdoch says. “We could write in the studio. We could start songs in any direction we wanted to. We could start the song with just a drum beat and build it up from there. Or we could bring everybody in and have everybody perform. It was a very flexible, very creative time.” That result is 12 songs that, like the LP\'s title playfully suggests, represent the band in classic form, reflecting on the present and occasionally looking to the past, with a mix of wit and tenderness. Here, Murdoch, Martin, and keyboardist Chris Geddes speak through each of the album\'s songs. **“Young and Stupid”** Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s a very happy song for me. Although the lyrics might feel like, ‘I was yelling in my sleep/Crying, feeling weak,’ when you write a song where you appear to be moaning about your life, it\'s a sort of a therapy in a way. I wrote this song very quickly, on the way into the studio. And immediately with myself and Brian \[McNeill\], the engineer, we just set up a drum machine, and we put down very basic chords so that we could map it out. And we wrote the song almost. To capture something so quickly—even though in the present time the feeling seems to be down—that\'s part of the beauty and the nature of music and writing songs is that you can capture a feeling and still come out the other end feeling happier.” **“If They\'re Shooting at You”** Murdoch: “I had the music idea for this a couple of years ago. It was around about the same time that Bob \[Kildea, bassist\] brought a song, his own musical idea. This was during the \[*How to Solve Our Human Problems*\] EPs. It became mostly Bob\'s song, and I wrote the words for it, and it became \[2018 single\] \'Poor Boy.’ So I took a little bit of my tune and slotted it in because I felt that the vibe was the same. The thing is, though, afterwards, the original feel kept going around in my head. And I thought, \'I want to extend this and make this a song.\' And so that\'s what we did with this one.” **“Talk to Me, Talk to Me”** Sarah Martin: “I kept going to Sainsbury\'s \[supermarket\] on Friday nights, inexplicably, where they play great records. And there was one time they were playing like a series of Style Council songs while I was in trying to find pasta. When I was driving home, that tune kind of popped into my head, so I made a rough demo of it. It just kept niggling me that I thought Stuart would sing it better than I would.” Murdoch: “As soon as I heard the tune, I was gone. I loved this right away. I could see the possibilities for it. I was thinking about somebody who was corresponding with me, somebody who wasn\'t in fact very well. And so I kind of deliberately tried to slip into their mind and tell the story from their perspective.” **“Reclaim the Night”** Martin: “It\'s about having to kind of carry on bumping into people who are problematic because they\'re friends of friends. And you just want to kind of go through life without having to engage with them, but you can\'t make your friends stop being friends with people who are assholes.” **“Do It for Your Country”** Murdoch: “I do imagine trying to impart wisdom. And sometimes it\'s to an imaginary person, sometimes it\'s to a person from quite deep in the past where it\'s almost unfair in a sense when you think, ‘Okay, well, I know this stuff now. This is what I want to say to you back then.’ But it\'s quite a simple song. It\'s a loving kind of speech, or something. They have that phrase, \'l\'esprit d\'escalier\'—the things you thought about on the stairs, things you thought about afterwards that you wish you\'d said to somebody. And so that is an aspect of songwriting—my songwriting, anyway.” **“Prophets on Hold”** Murdoch: “This was another one, like \'Young and Stupid,\' that would never have existed if we\'d gone to LA. It was a walk-in song. I had the original chorus just as I came in, and played it on the piano. I thought it was going to be the greatest song I ever wrote. I really did. Sometimes you think that. And whereas \'Young and Stupid\' was simple but came out great, this one I thought was going to be great and came out okay. I mean, I think everyone did a good job. But I thought it was going to be a like a soft disco, soulful classic.” **“Unnecessary Drama”** Murdoch: “I took a similar stance that I did with \'Talk to Me\' and decided to write about a correspondence. This correspondence actually spanned time, and the person had sort of changed during the life of the correspondence. And I told the person that I was going to try and write the song. She thought it was funny. The thing I love about this track is that the guitar riff and the melody, which were both provided by Bob, seemed to dance with each other, but they lock in at the same time. And that to me makes a thing interesting.” **“Come On Home”** Chris Geddes: “I never really write complete songs. I\'ll just have the sketch of something, bring it in, teach it to a couple of people, and try and have a groove going. And then hope that one of the singers walks in and says, \'Oh, that sounds quite good.’ But in this instance, the verse that Sarah sings and the whole kind of feel of the track popped in my head when I was on my way to or from a football match. Because of laziness and trying to avoid writing lyrics, I only had those couple of lines, which I gave to Sarah. And then we were playing it as the band, Stuart kind of just took the groove and wrote his verses over it.” **“A World Without You”** Martin: “It\'s nostalgic for kind of times when you connect with somebody. It\'s kind of based on the last episode of *Fleabag*. It\'s based on Fleabag and the priest. Just like when you have a connection with somebody that neither of you is really reachable, but just kind of a memorable moment with people.” **“Deathbed of My Dreams”** Geddes: “I think Stevie \[Jackson\] wanted us to try and do something that sounded like a Frank Sinatra record.” Stuart Murdoch: “It\'s one that just really took off for me with the arrangement. Chris did a pseudo sort of string part, but it sounded rich. And it was a really nice setting for Stevie\'s voice.” **“Sea of Sorrow”** Murdoch: “Most of the songs are very current. They were all written pretty much for the record and written about that time. \'Sea of Sorrow,\' the tune for that was a few years older. And I had it under the pseudonym ‘Nice Waltz Number One.’ We don\'t write too many waltzes, I don\'t think. So that tune was in my head, and then suddenly I had a notion to write some words.” **“Working Boy in New York City”** Murdoch: “‘Working Boy in New York City’ is more about a San Francisco thing, but maybe San Francisco didn\'t scan. It\'s about a friend of mine that I became friends with when I came to America for the first time in the early \'90s. But it\'s best not to be too literal, and so I placed it in New York. And there\'s other elements that come in that go just beyond his story. But there\'s a line from his favorite song, which was ‘Downtown\' by Petula Clark. And I specifically remember him one day describing what that song meant to him.”

Tove Lo’s fifth studio album is also her first as an independent artist. Full of surprising collaborations, intimate confessions, and sexy, sparkly, ’80s-inspired synths, it marks a new era of creativity and experimentation for the Swedish singer-songwriter who is known as club pop’s rebellious and raunchy cool girl. Lo spent three years writing these songs in Los Angeles and Torekov, Sweden—a small fishing village where she spent summers growing up. That extended timeline gave her space to explore new soundscapes and musical ideas. “I had time to push myself and go to new places,” she tells Apple Music. “I had time for the details. I had time to be myself.” The album reflects a time of transition for the singer—she and her husband eloped to Vegas during the pandemic. Around the same time, she invited a few of her friends to move into her new home in LA, forming what she described as a collective. “It’s been wild, *fun*,” she says. “But there have been moments where I’m like, ‘Where is this going? Who am I? What are we doing?’” *Dirt Femme* explores these questions with sincerity (“Grapefruit,” “No One Dies From Love”), but makes it clear that Lo has no plans to hang up her party-girl crown anytime soon (“Pineapple Slice,” “Attention Whore”). She wrote each song with a certain character in mind: a “horny huntress,” scorned girlfriend, or intense, intimidating Scorpio (see: the album art). “The point is that we all contain multitudes,” she says, “and each of these women is me.” **“No One Dies From Love”** “When lockdown hit, I was already worn out from an intense, emotionally draining year. My go-to collaborator, Ludvig, was, too. We were both in the middle of little existential crises and spent a few weeks in Malibu trying to write some songs. ‘No One Dies From Love’ was the only thing that came out of those sessions. We mostly cried and drank and walked on the beach, talking about those all-consuming relationships where you feel like your whole existence revolves around a single person, and like there won\'t be anything left of you if they leave. Obviously, it’s not true. Time heals most wounds. But it doesn’t feel like that at the time.” **“Suburbia”** “My husband and I both had fairly traditional childhoods, and I’ve always \[sensed\] a certain amount of confusion around my lifestyle—friends and family wondering when we’ll stop partying and settle down. In 2020, we eloped in Las Vegas, and the reaction was pretty uniform, like, ‘Oh, thank god, you did something normal! So when are you having kids?’ People seem to have this idea about how our life is supposed to look, and if that idea doesn’t appeal to you, it makes your head spin. You’re like, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ We made a beat that sounded sad and upbeat at the same time, and it reminded me of the Stepford Wives—that eerie feeling you get in suburbia that everyone is hiding something.” **“2 Die 4”** “My friend Oscar Görres and I were talking about the reemergence of Y2K trends—in music, films, photography, fashion—and it makes us feel old. But sometimes it’s interesting to look at things from a new angle—trance music, for example. When I was a kid, I hated it. I was like, ‘There\'s no vocals, I don’t get this.’ Now I\'m like, ‘How did I ever miss out on all this sick synthy shit?’ So this song kind of channels that era. It’s a slower tempo, but it’s nostalgic to me.” **“True Romance”** “I haven\'t ever really released a ballad before. My songs always have a beat or full production. In opera, they tell the story all the way through and it just builds and builds and builds. So I went into this song with that essence. I wanted it to be about a destructive relationship. The movie *True Romance* popped into my head, and I decided to watch it and then write a storyline into the lyrics. It took me three days to write the lyrics, but I recorded the vocals in one take. We kept it because it just felt raw and powerful.” **“Grapefruit”** “Up until now, I’ve never really been up front about the fact that I had a severe eating disorder when I was a teenager. I did a movie in Sweden, and had to lose some weight for it—nothing extreme, maybe four or five kilos, but I had to lose it in two weeks. I went on a diet for the first time in 10 years and it triggered so many memories—the obsession, the anxiety, being hungry all the time. All these memories flooded back and I was like, ‘Can I do this without falling back into old patterns?’ In the end, I did it and it was fine. To me, it felt like validation that I’d healed. So I started writing about that. When I played this song for my friends, they were like, ‘I never would\'ve known. You\'re so much about body positivity.’ And my response is: ‘Yes, because I went through that.’” **“Cute & Cruel”** “This is my sunset song. It\'s about accepting what love does to you as a human being. I wrote this with Elvira, who is one of my favorite producers in Sweden. She and I really click. There\'s an emotional sweetness to it, a tenderness. This folksy, cinematic sound was new for me, so I wanted to bring in one more voice, preferably someone from that scene. First Aid Kit really elevated the song because they’re so at home in this world. It’s a really unexpected, powerful one.” **“Call On Me”** “I made this song with SG Lewis, who is a close friend. He\'s an emotional party person just like me. He actually wrote this song and then sent it to me, which isn’t something I do very often; it’s hard for me to find a way to make it mine. But I loved this song, so we agreed that I’d play with the lyrics. Initially, I rewrote them to make them more deep and complex, but it actually felt like that took away from the energy of the song. We decided to just let it be what it is, which is a big, fun dance anthem that all my gays are going to love.” **“Attention Whore”** “I wrote this track at four in the morning after having a silly drunk argument with my husband. I don’t even remember what it was about. He was probably just being his great self, but sometimes when I\'m drunk I just decide to get mad like an idiot. You know when you’re just feeling jealous and sassy and maybe a little bitchy? That’s the essence of this song. I\'d just seen Channel Tres live at a festival and was floored by his performance—it was sexy and cool and full of attitude. I knew he’d be perfect for this track.” **“Pineapple Slice”** “SG Lewis and I wrote this song together from scratch, and he kept pushing me to make the lyrics dirtier. Finally I was like, ‘Okay, fine, let me show you what I can do.’ I just went for it. In pop, you\'re supposed to insinuate. You\'re never supposed to say things outright. So it was fun to break the rules and really *go* there.” **“I’m to Blame”** “I wrote this song with Ali Payami, who told me he wanted to make something ‘Oasis-inspired with hip-hop drums.’ I was like, ‘That sounds out of my lane, but let\'s do it.’ Growing up, I listened to a ton of rock and indie rock, and those days came right back to me when we got in the studio. With the help of his guitar and instrumentals, I found a lyrical and melodic place that I hadn\'t gone to yet for this album. It\'s more poetic and nuanced, whereas I’m usually pretty blunt. And the vocals sound less perfect, more alive. It\'s really special to me.” **“Kick in the Head”** “This was one of the first songs I wrote when I was feeling inspired again. I’m singing about being unmotivated, not knowing what to say, how I need someone to shake me, feelings creative people experience when everything feels...flat. But things turned around when Tim, my roommate and one of my producers, brought me this beat. It had a funky bassline that reminded me of Fatboy Slim, and I thought it was so cool and interesting. Even a little experimental. It stands out in the best way and I love having it on this album because I think it helps show my range as an artist.” **“How Long”** “This was definitely written with *Euphoria* in mind. The ominous beat, the darkness, the slow, hypnotic energy...even when we hadn’t written lyrics yet, there was just so much anger in the track. It felt like revenge. I was working on the lyrics for a few days with a songwriter, and had a dream about my husband cheating on me. I\'m the kind of person who will wake up and be mad about something like that. I’ll pretend I\'m not, but I am. I\'m playing out the scenario in my head like, ‘If he did this, what would I do? How would I handle it?’ I’d go through every worst-case scenario. So I wrote about that. He knows I’m like this and will get nervous, like, ‘Babe, you know I didn’t actually cheat on you, right?’ And I just sit there like, ‘I know. I think.’”