Albumism's 50 Best Albums of 2024

Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”

Since her breakthrough with 2006’s critically acclaimed *Fur and Gold*, Natasha Khan has embodied 21st-century witchy mysticism, seeming to pull her synthy, sensuous chamber pop from the great beyond. Where past records were springboards for high-concept world-building (2016’s *The Bride* hinged around a grieving woman whose fiancé died en route to their wedding, and 2019’s *Lost Girls* followed an all-girl biker gang through the dystopian streets of LA), her sixth record as Bat for Lashes brings her storytelling back home. On *The Dream of Delphi*, she mythologizes her early motherhood (she gave birth to her first child in 2020) with songs that ripple with strings, elegant piano, and gentle synth arpeggios. Khan sings her wispy, haiku-esque lyrics directly to her newborn: “Your life an echo, my darling, of all before/Your life an echo, my darling, of all to come,” she coos on “Letter to My Daughter.” The outlier is the soaring “Home” (on whose credits appear club gods Hudson Mohawke and Baauer), which escapes from the nursery and makes its way to the dance floor.

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”

Having previously partnered with some of hip-hop’s most iconic producers, not the least of whom being J Dilla, Common built a career on securing superb beats to suit his agile rhymes. While many rappers of his generation hopped from trend to trend, repeat and reliable collaboration proved core to his discography, with several of the same studio figures from his early albums now fixtures in his circle decades later. It’s the native Chicagoan’s characteristic consistency, perhaps, that makes *The Auditorium, Vol. 1* such a momentous album event. A hip-hop artist indisputably worthy of the word “legend,” Pete Rock comes to this joint effort with the rare distinction of both defining and embodying Golden Era greatness. Though relatively selective about who he deems dope enough to form a duo with since the C.L. Smooth days, the Bronx-born producer generated goodwill and critical respect for his 2010s efforts opposite his city’s Skyzoo and Smoke DZA. As such, he makes a formidable complement for Common, evident from the jump on the exquisite intro “Dreamin’.” His timeless instrumentals conjure certain nostalgic tendencies from the MC, his verses on “We’re on Our Way” and “This Man” laden with old-school references and lyrical memorabilia. From the jazzy swing of “Everything’s So Grand” to the enlightened gospel groove of “A GOD (There Is),” the pair deliver on the promise of their premise, delivering theatrical thrills befitting their skills. And not that an album of this caliber requires special rapper guests, but Posdnuos of De La Soul is a naturally welcome addition to “When the Sun Shines Again.” Furthermore, Rock lays down some refreshing bars of his own on “All Kind of Ideas,” thus providing Common with a worthy foil on the mic as well as off and increasing anticipation for a presumed second volume.

When it comes to manifesting, Dua Lipa is, well, radically optimistic about its power. And with good reason. “I know this is going to sound mad, but when I was writing my first album, I was having thoughts about my third album,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I thought by the third album, I would maybe be deserving of working with Tame Impala. *Currents* \[Tame Impala’s career-defining 2015 album\] was the record that completely shook me.” With *Radical Optimism*—the follow-up to 2020’s impeccable, superstar-confirming *Future Nostalgia*, and the next note after her 2023 *Barbie* smash “Dance the Night”—Lipa got her wish. The 11 tracks here were made with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, as well as Tobias Jesso Jr. (the singer-songwriter Adele has labeled her “secret weapon”), OG PC Music artist Danny L Harle (PinkPantheress, Caroline Polachek), and Lipa’s long-term collaborator Caroline Ailin, co-writer of “New Rules.” It’s not the *most* obvious team for a chart-dominating name like Lipa to recruit, but maybe there was radical optimism in that, too. Plus, the proof came in the first song they wrote together: A moodier sister to *Future Nostalgia* standout “Hallucinate,” “Illusion” is an indisputable banger that feels tailor-made for Lipa’s 2024 Glastonbury headline set (something else she manifested for her third album). “It was like, ‘OK, how are we all going to connect together in the room? How is it all going to work?’” says Lipa. “\[‘Illusion’\] really kicked us off. When we wrote that song, it just gave us confidence as a group.” Like *Future Nostalgia*, *Radical Optimism* pulls from the past, so you can expect shimmering synths, groove-laden basslines, nods to psychedelia, and plenty of ’80s production (Lipa has also cited the adventurousness of both Britpop and Massive Attack among the album’s spiritual influences). But the singer-songwriter wanted to “experiment and do something different” as well, and in place of *Future Nostalgia*’s polished nu-disco, *Radical Optimism* often embraces an organic, golden-pop feeling with bright acoustic guitars, pianos, roomy drums, handclaps, and the occasional panpipe, plus some skyscraping vocals that should stop anyone describing Lipa’s vocal style as “nonchalant” again (see: “Falling Forever”). All of which is set against Lipa’s most personal writing to date, fueled by reflections on heartbreak, singledom, the arresting experience of meeting someone you might just give your heart to, and realizing the person you once loved has moved on. “With this album, I feel like I’ve managed to put so much more honesty out there and be really open in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever had the chance to,” she says. “It was a beautiful experience to not be afraid.” That was helped, again, by the team around her. “You come into the room, you’re hanging out with your friends, and you’re just having a tell-all,” she says. “There was absolutely no holds barred. They knew everything that was happening. There was no judgment. The fact that everyone felt free to just be themselves is what, I think, created such a beautiful energy in the room.” The singer-songwriter *gets* heartbreak pop; after all, she’s made a whole career out of crafting sharp, post-breakup empowerment anthems (and you’ll hear her trademark up-front lyricism here, such as on “Training Season,” in which she declares, “Are you somebody who can go there?/’Cause I don’t wanna have to show ya”). But here, Lipa also favors acceptance and a heartening sense of hope. Perhaps the album’s most powerful moment comes at its end, when Lipa realizes her ex has moved on and experiences an unfamiliar feeling: just happiness that they’re happy. “It feels like a full 180,” she says of closing track “Happy for You,” a song she admits she couldn’t have written until this point in her career. “Maturing, seeing almost my ghost on the other side and being like, ‘Wow, you’ve grown so much from an experience to be able to see things from that perspective. You have to be in the act of forgiveness and growing and learning and being OK with the past in order to move on. For me, ‘Happy for You’ is a beautiful, happy song because it’s so reflective of my journey.” You might say the same about “Maria,” in which Lipa salutes a new partner’s ex for making them who they are today. “I’m better, too, from the ones that I’ve lost/Now he is everything I’d ever want,” she sings. “I wanna thank you for all that you’ve done.” Working through these stories has been “a form of therapy” for Lipa, but she always kept two things in mind: what her songs mean to other people and how they might land at Glastonbury, which the singer-songwriter calls “the pinnacle.” “I think about emotions and feelings and thoughts. How does this make me feel? How will this make someone else feel when they hear it? What is the energy and the emotion and the thing that I’m trying to convey at this point in my life?” For Lipa, the answer seems to be in this album’s title. “What \[this album\] was really about was the theme, which was ‘radical optimism,’” she says. “It’s this idea of rolling with the punches, of not letting anything get you down for too long. I’ve always seen the positive side of things, of being able to grow and move forward and change your perspective regardless of what’s happening in your life—whether it’s heartbreak, whether it’s a friendship, whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s just growing and seeing things differently. I think it’s a big part of maturing.” When *Future Nostalgia* came out in 2020, just as the global pandemic set in, the album met the moment in a way Lipa could never have foreseen. It became a vehicle for escapism—another kind of radical optimism in a locked-down world. It seems that, for Lipa, *Radical Optimism* was about meeting *her* moment—the point she began working with the collaborators she’d always dreamed of, on songs made to perform on the most important stage she can think of. And now, she can draw a line under everything she needed this album to help heal. “Now, I’m done. This chapter is done,” she says. “I did so much growing. I feel like that is my exorcism.”

Gracie Abrams may be fresh off her teenage years, but she’s old enough to know risk and reward belong together. Since she began releasing music in 2019, the singer-songwriter has homed in on emotional leaps of faith, her tremulous vocals expertly evoking the tear-splattered diary scribbles a great young love inspires. On her stripped-down new record *The Secret of Us*, Abrams takes stock of every crush and contradiction that led her to this chapter, reflecting the glow of formative past romances through soft prisms of pop, folk, and indie rock. Anyone who missed her coveted stint as an opener on the Eras Tour will welcome Taylor Swift’s feature on “us.,” a soaring centerpiece addressed to an older partner Abrams can’t be sure ever took her seriously. She isn’t afraid to face the anxiety around her own legitimacy, or face it alone—Swift is the only feature across these 13 tracks. But between the cathartic power chords of “Tough Love,” the twinkling balladry of “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” and the delicate simplicity of “Free Now,” the real secret to Abrams’ success shines through in her craftsmanship: She’s as serious as it gets.

The White Stripes were nothing if not a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of self-imposed limitation—in instrumentation, in color scheme, in verifiable biographical information. Since the duo’s dissolution in 2011, Jack White has continued playing with form (and color schemes), from the just-one-of-the-boys-in-the-band vibes of The Raconteurs to 2022’s sonically experimental *Fear of the Dawn* and its more restrained companion *Entering Heaven Alive*. Despite—or perhaps *to* spite—those who longed for a simpler, noisier, more monochromatic time, White tinkered away. The rollout for *No Name*, White’s sixth solo album, was characteristically mischievous: It first appeared as a white-label LP given away at Third Man Records before being posted online without song titles, sparking an excitement that felt fresh, largely because the sound did not. Meg White is not walking through that door anytime soon, but the 13 tracks here channel the unadorned, wild-eyed ferocity of the band that made him famous more efficiently and consistently than anything he’s done since. There’s plenty of swagger from top to bottom, but most of all there’s *hooks*: big, fat, noisy guitars played in the catchiest combinations possible. “That’s How I’m Feeling” may not relieve “Seven Nation Army” of its ubiquity anytime soon, but it is a ready-made capital-A anthem with a euphoric jump-scare chorus that sticks on first listen and doesn’t get unstuck. “Bless Yourself,” “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago),” and “Number One With a Bullet” are just as infectious, while “Bombing Out” may be the fastest, heaviest thing White has ever put out in any of his many guises. The casualness of it all is a flex—as meticulous and exacting as White can be, *No Name*’s modest arrival is a reminder of how easily he could have kept churning out earworm White Stripes songs. Good for him that he didn’t want to; good for us that he does now.

Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”

When KAYTRANADA left the 2021 Grammys with two awards (Best Dance/Electronic Album for 2019’s *BUBBA* and Best Dance Recording for “10%”), he made history as the first Black and first openly gay artist to win the former category. The industry recognition was long overdue for the producer, who had been building a devout following for nearly a decade. “In my mind I was finally a true artist,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. After relocating to Los Angeles, he channeled that confidence into making his third solo album, *TIMELESS*: “It felt more serious—more legit. I was still having fun making *TIMELESS*, but making *BUBBA* was another type of fun where I didn’t really take it seriously.” Like its predecessor, *TIMELESS* is a collection of club grooves for catching a vibe. It’s packed with guests who effortlessly acclimate to KAYTRANADA’s singular sound while imprinting their own touch. PinkPantheress’ saccharine voice is richer on the squiggly house beat of “Snap My Finger,” Ravyn Lenae offers breathy seductions on the hard-edged R&B of “Video,” and Thundercat delivers comical disses in soothing falsetto on the jazzy hip-hop of “Wasted Words.” Back-to-back tracks “Do 2 Me” (featuring Anderson .Paak and SiR) and “Witchy” (featuring Childish Gambino) hit an energy peak, their tales of late-night infatuation framed by sultry, body-enveloping production. If *BUBBA* was about finding KAYTRANADA’s sound, *TIMELESS* expands it. The producer is in what he calls his “experimental bag,” and Channel Tres joins him in it on the incendiary “Drip Sweat.” Channel’s trademark baritone drifts in and out of disembodied Auto-Tune, dropping bars over punchy drums and breaks sampled from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” “We were just making the funkiest thing, like how it would sound if we did new jack swing today,” KAYTRANADA says. “What is that Bobby Brown energy? We were trying to give it that.” He tries out AI sampling on the breezy instrumental “Seemingly.” He also sings on a track for the first time on the Weeknd-inspired “Stepped On,” creating his version of ’80s New Wave with strobing synths and a dark disposition. With a new skill unlocked, *TIMELESS* makes room for another KAYTRANADA evolution.

If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.

It’s not hard to see why Kylie Minogue wanted to keep the *Tension* era going. The Princess of Pop’s 2023 record—her 16th—met the moment and set the mood, captured best by “Padam Padam,” the unexpectedly viral hit that ruled over summer ’23 in what will always be known as the “Padamic.” Released just over a year on from that record, this sequel is a celebration of that career high—and a collection that feels primed to get the party started again ahead of 2025’s global *Tension* tour. *Tension II* lives in the same world as its predecessor, but here, things feel darker, clubbier, later-night. And as for all the original’s sexual tension? It *still* hasn’t been broken. Across these tracks, Kylie’s overpowered by “electric energy” (on the disco-laced, ABBA-recalling “Taboo”) and “raw emotion” (“Kiss Bang Bang”); by 4am, she’s even standing outside someone’s door on the rushing “Hello,” unable to stay away. If on *Tension* Kylie felt ultra-confident, here she feels liberated, throwing off an ex on the dance floor (“Who would think that losing you would be so much fun?” she muses on “Good as Gone”) and declaring her desires outright. “Do you have someone for me?/To be the one/To turn me on/That’s what I need,” she demands on “Someone for Me,” a moment so evocative you can almost see her hiding in a dark club corner, waiting for that wish to be fulfilled. At last, nine tracks in, she finally dials things down, with the end-of-the-night almost-ballad “Shoulda Left Ya,” on which she realizes things have become a little less no-strings-attached with someone she’s met on the dance floor. Still, she’s not hanging around. Next, she brings new partners into the *Tension* world: the artists—including The Blessed Madonna, Orville Peck, and Sia—who she worked with on a series of genre-hopping collabs in 2024. Their inclusion serves as a reminder of Kylie’s continuing pop power in an era that confirms that, 37 years into her music career, there’s still nothing this pop princess can’t do.

Throughout his nearly four-decade career, Lenny Kravitz has kept with the theme of positivity in his music. Six years after releasing 2018\'s *Raise Vibration*, which saw him advocating for peace and unity with more political bite, the multiple-award-winning rock icon shows his more lighthearted side on *Blue Electric Light*. The conditions had to be perfect, and with a clearer mind, Kravitz returned to his home on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas to record the album (reportedly one of four albums\' worth of material) with his longtime songwriting partner, guitarist Craig Ross. That feeling of escapism also flows through the album\'s genre-hopping style, which switches from swaggering P-funk (“It\'s Just Another Fine Day \[In This Universe of Love\]”) and robotic synth-pop (“Let It Ride”) to anthemic gospel (“Love Is My Religion”). Elsewhere, he continues to take influence from Prince on “TK421,” leaning hard into an upbeat funk jam featuring an extended outro begging for a party remix. But when the mood is more subdued, Kravitz adds plenty of sultry touches to soulful ballads (“Honey”) and slinky slow jams (“Stuck in the Middle”), another similarity he shares with the Purple One. He may encourage you to bob and dance throughout *Blue Electric Light* with wild abandon, but Kravitz can still crank out groovy hard rock. In fact, he can still flex his virtuoso guitar chops with gusto. Take the stomping, hypnotic “Paralyzed,” where Kravitz revisits the ’70s classic-rock sound of 1993\'s commercial breakthrough *Are You Gonna Go My Way*. Taken together, all of these playful experiments add up to a remarkably consistent statement of purpose tied together to one unifying message: Love conquers all. But when he\'s not spreading positivity to others, Kravitz does some thoughtful self-reflection, like on “Human,” feeling grateful to be alive and live his truth: “My heart is yearning for transformation/What is this life for? I\'m gonna win.”

Some two years after the sublime *Candydrip*, Lucky Daye ensures that his third studio album is required listening for R&B fans and lovers everywhere. Despite the seeming coldness of its title, *Algorithm* allures with its series of sensual come-ons and pillow-talk confessions. The carnal delights depicted on “Top” feel downright palpable thanks to the singer’s earnest and eager delivery, a move that proves equally efficient on relatively more abstract cuts like the title track. A standout swirling with circular rhythms and squelchy bass, “Think Different” makes an assertive plea for cuffing in order to break an unfulfilling cycle of one-night stands. You can hear how much he’s enjoying himself on the blues-inflected novelty “Mary,” a steamy entry in the canon of lothario lore. At the same time, he’s also coming to understand the existential terror of being alone, particularly via “That’s You.” On the guest front, Teddy Swims adds his countrified soul-pop seasoning to the vulnerable duet “Blame,” while RAYE nudges Daye closer to commitment on the tender “Paralyzed.”

“There\'s something about this record that feels like I\'m coming home,” Maggie Rogers tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe about her third full-length *Don\'t Forget Me*, which is the Maryland-born singer-songwriter\'s first project since completing her master\'s degree in religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. Being away from the music business, she says, allowed her time to think about her life as an artist while also diversifying her mind. “I was trying to put so much in music,” she says. “Now my life is a lot more balanced and a lot more full—and I\'m not saying by any means I have it figured out.” *Don\'t Forget Me* finds Rogers still on a path toward “figuring it out,” marrying the kineticism that made her breakthrough single “Alaska” such a sensation eight years prior with bigger sonic structures and wiser lyrics. Opener “It Was Coming All Along” thrums with plush synths and strings, as well as a sampled phone call that brings Rogers\' lyrics about “trying to be brave these days” to life. “The Kill” possesses a grandness that recalls a sunny drive on an open road, which makes its story of a doomed relationship hit even harder. That energy, together with a wiser perspective, enabled her to her explore stories from beyond her personal realm. Take “So Sick of Dreaming,” a sauntering, Nashville-tinged cut about the travails of twentysomething life punctuated by a frustrated monologue about being stood up for Knicks tickets. (“And by the way, the Knicks lost,” she dryly notes.) It\'s based on “a story that a friend had told to me the night before about another friend of hers that was going through this thing,” she says. “I never would\'ve thought it was material; I had only written songs about things that were so personal to me.” Broadening her songwriting is another way Rogers lets loose on *Don\'t Forget Me*—and it\'s apparent across the album\'s 10 songs, which are confident even when they\'re grappling with regret and frustration. “I\'m so focused and clear about the things that I want, and I\'ve had different goals for every record or things that I really want to accomplish,” Rogers says. “The goal on this album cycle is, I\'m trying to have fun. And if I don\'t think it\'s going to be fun, you probably won\'t find me there.”

Mary J. Blige’s 15th studio album arrived at a moment when the R&B diva was embracing her legacy as a new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Thirty years after she released her 1994 masterpiece *My Life*—when it felt as if she were singing for her life—she had survived all the drama and made it to her place in the sunshine as a certified legend with nothing left to prove. And Blige is in a state of appreciation on *Gratitude*, which feels like a much-deserved victory lap. The celebratory vibe is set on “Breathing,” on which she’s inhaling “fresh air, good news.” It’s a throwback bop featuring Fabolous, part of a guest-rapper roster including Jadakiss (“Need You More”), Fat Joe (“God’s Child”), and A$AP Ferg (“I Got Plans”). While the nostalgic feels are real, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul isn’t resting on her crown. At 53, Mary is still here to rock the party—and keep it raw about relationships (see “Don’t Fuck Up”)—in her thigh-high boots.

There’s a moment on Michael Kiwanuka’s *Small Changes* that sums up the languid brilliance at the heart of the London singer-songwriter’s fourth album. It comes at the beginning of “Lowdown (part i),” its easygoing guitar strums and fluid bass groove stretching into life over what sounds like a spaghetti junction of distant conversations, as if Kiwanuka and his band have set up in the corner of the room and started playing, unprompted. As his warm croon wanders in, the background noise halts and the track gently glides into its soulful sway. It’s a neat summation of *Small Changes*’ unhurried elegance; this is a record that’s not designed to grab you by the collar but stops you in your tracks nonetheless. Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize for 2019’s self-titled third album, yet nothing about *Small Changes* suggests he felt any pressure to repeat the success. Instead, he sounds like an artist free to follow his muse wherever it takes him. Working again with long-running collaborators Inflo (Little Simz, Sault) and Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton (Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz, The Black Keys) in studios in London, LA, and Connecticut, he strips away from *KIWANUKA*’s fully-formed psychedelic soul expanse and emerges with another masterpiece. Early in his career, Kiwanuka followed the traditional singer-songwriter route of writing songs at home and taking them into the studio to get down on tape. There’s something looser and more free-spirited at work here—the trio starting from nothing and letting ideas blossom in the sessions. It has resulted in a record that inhabits its own sonic world, its mix of airy ’70s soul, orchestral folk, and minimalist ballads gently luring you in to its mesmerizing flow, everything elevated by Kiwanuka’s lightness of touch and melodic ease. There’s a spellbinding restraint to the way “One and Only” guides you to its string-laden outro, or how the mournful piano patterns of “Rebel Soul” lurk on the edge of the song, never stepping into the spotlight. Then there’s the way “Follow Your Dreams” lets its jubilant chorus drift blissfully by. At times, such as the moment when “Lowdown (part ii)” takes flight and unfurls into a Pink Floyd-esque epic with shimmering guitar flourishes, it sounds utterly timeless. It’s a record that sees Kiwanuka glancing back to his youth, reflecting on doubt-filled teenage years and considering the advice he could give to his young self. But this is also an album that strides hopefully into the future, the sound of an artist in full control of who he wants to be.

Expansive, cinematic, adventurous: These are the intentions saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia decided to channel when it came to creating *Odyssey*. “I wanted to make a record that felt bigger, something that delivers unexpected emotions,” she tells Apple Music. Bursting onto the London jazz scene in 2017 with the release of her debut EP, *Nubya’s 5ive*, Garcia became a key proponent of a new group of young improvisers who were drawing on jazz traditions as much as their diaspora heritages in their music. Following 2020’s full-length debut *SOURCE*, Garcia now develops her Afrobeat- and dub-influenced sound further to encompass everything from the sweeping string arrangements of “Clarity” to the weighty soundsystem basslines of “Triumphance” and the ’90s R&B references of “Set It Free.” Largely written during extended trips to Brazil, away from her typically hectic touring schedule, *Odyssey* is Garcia soaking up new atmospheres to create an instinctual and intricately articulate music. “This is me growing through joy and practice,” she says. “It’s the fullest, freest vision of myself.” Read on for her in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dawn” (feat. Esperanza Spalding)** “I wrote this track when I was in Brazil for six weeks at the end of 2022. I was staying right by the ocean and would wake up for the sunrise every day. It was such a beautiful, poignant way to start the day and this melody just came to me in that environment. I’ve always loved Esperanza’s work and she felt like the perfect addition to the song—I was so happy when she agreed to it. I only gave her the title and let her run free otherwise with these beautiful lyrics drawing on the Icarus myth.” **“Odyssey”** “‘Odyssey’ is the epic adventure of the record. I didn’t know the album would center on this composition but I had a feeling that it was going to be cinematic and journeying. Every section of this tune keeps building and turning in unexpected ways, from the keys to the string section producing a huge range of light to darkness. The melody wanders and feels like a beautiful marriage between my love of modal jazz and my love of classical textures. It all flowed really quickly since I had so many ideas for it, all sparking on from one another.” **“Solstice”** “This is one of the oldest tracks on the album. I wanted it to have a busy, erratic beat with a slower melody sauntering and winding over it. It’s about the fast and slow being in conversation. It’s called ‘Solstice’ because the first time I played it with the band was on the summer solstice in 2023. We’d all been away and not done a gig for a while but it just felt right and went down really well.” **“Set It Free” (feat. Richie)** “As soon as I began trying out ideas for this track, I knew I wanted it to have a chill but energetic backbeat, one you could walk down the street to. Richie’s vocals add a stunning sound and lyricism and establish the theme of the song being about promoting confidence in women who are so often raised in society to continually apologize for themselves. It also features a cheeky nine-bar loop, rather than the usual eight, which always surprises me when it comes around!” **“The Seer”** “‘The Seer’ is about wishing you could catch a glimpse of yourself in the future to know you’re on the right track and be confident about your choices. Sonically, it’s a nod to modal jazz with classic voicings and then shifts into my love of broken beats and energetic drums. That switch feels a bit like the ’90s R&B interludes where you hear a snippet of another section or song coming in.” **“Odyssey (Outerlude)”** “I wanted outerludes on the album to give the listener a reprieve and remind them of what they have just listened to before, as well as melting into a different energy for the rest of the record. This switches it from a very high-energy beginning to something much softer and quieter for the halfway point. I love it because it has an eerie vibe full of shimmering strings.” **“We Walk in Gold” (feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow)** “The melody for this composition feels like a lament but the intentions of the tune are joyous. It’s full of energies of hope, purpose, and direction, all informed by the color gold, which represents a light that releases darkness for me. I’ve always loved Georgia Anne Muldrow’s work and was elated when she agreed to feature on this track with me—she fully embodied the track’s uplifting intentions.” **“Water’s Path”** “This was the only tune on the album written in one go with no edits, which is something I haven’t done before. It’s one of my favorites because I’ve never written for strings before this album and I’m really proud of how this song embodies both happiness and sadness, as well as the qualities of water always finding its way through, which is reflected in the ostinato that just keeps ticking along. It’s super melodic and romantic.” **“Clarity”** “The vision for this song became clearer—no pun intended—as I wrote it and it became really enjoyable seeing it morph into the final version where the harmony is upward-reaching and always building. The intention behind the song is about the importance of clarity and transparency in relationships and how freeing that can be when we have it.” **“In Other Words, Living”** “Like ‘Clarity,’ this song always feels like it’s reaching upwards, pushing for peace and excitement in life. It’s a song about being intentionally present and living the balancing act between happiness and sadness that so often constitutes our existence as humans. That’s living as I know it, anyway.” **“Clarity (Outerlude)”** “I wanted one more reprise before we end, something to shift the listeners’ energy back to what’s been before and to show how far we’ve come over the course of the record. It’s a small offering to the journey we’ve traveled on together.” **“Triumphance”** “We’ve been playing this track for a few years to close the live shows and it always leaves people with such joy, since they can’t help but move when it drops. I wasn’t going to record it for the album but it ultimately felt like the only way we could end. I wanted a speech over the dub while the band cooked, something to sum up the triumphant themes of the record and to leave people feeling self-confident as they go out into the world. Except, the person I wanted to do the speech couldn’t and we were running out of time, so I ended up recording it myself, which was a first! I guess I had to find my own self-confidence here to say my piece.”

After nearly two decades in the game, Rapsody’s left no room for doubt when it comes to her formidable pen. But it wasn’t until 2020, when she began piecing together her fourth studio album, *Please Don’t Cry*, that Marlanna Evans realized that she’d shared very little of herself beyond her mic skills. “People had to put up a mirror for me,” she admitted to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, recalling a pivotal conversation with the producer No ID. “He was like, ‘Everybody knows you can rap, but I can’t tell you five things that I know about you.’” Thus began the North Carolina native’s journey inward: Before she could reintroduce herself to her fans, she’d have to know herself first. The result of that journey, *Please Don’t Cry*, is Rapsody’s deepest and boldest work yet. “Who are you in your rawest state?” asks the gentle voice of the album’s narrator, Phylicia Rashad. Making the record, Rapsody found her mind wandering towards *The Matrix*, in particular the relationship between Neo and the Oracle. “He’s trying to find his way, trying to find himself…and she’s kind of his guiding voice,” she tells Darden. “I was like, ‘That’s kind of what this journey has been for me, but who would be my Oracle?’” Rashad was the first name that came to mind. Through interludes, the Tony Award winner nudges Rapsody further down the path of vulnerability: “Who are you when you’re joyful? What makes you sad? Why do you cry?” Rapsody doesn’t hold back her answers on tracks like “Diary of a Mad Bitch,” a cathartic shit-talking session, or the bittersweet “Loose Rocks,” where she grapples with a loved one’s dementia diagnosis with backup vocals from Alex Isley (yes, that Isley). Intense emotions are countered with airy, meditative beats on the gorgeous “3:AM,” a late-night love song with a hook from Erykah Badu, and the balmy reggae jam “Never Enough.” By the closing track “Forget Me Not,” her fear of vulnerability feels like a distant memory as she raps: “I want to know everything/I want to feel, I want to be alive/It’s too good.”

Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.” It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album *Short n’ Sweet*. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.” With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.” Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”

In the video for Sleater-Kinney’s “Untidy Creature,” freediver Amber Bourke spends two and a half minutes on her back, eyes closed, holding her breath under the water of a full bathtub. That peaceful-seeming setup, juxtaposed with Bourke\'s re-oxygenating gasps, is an apt metaphor for the tension, anxiety, vulnerability, and catharsis that characterize the Portland, Oregon, band’s 11th LP (and second as a duo following the departure of longtime drummer Janet Weiss), *Little Rope*. “The album is playing with ideas and feelings and sentiments that could be either or both,” guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein, one half of the duo alongside vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker, tells Apple Music. “So a little rope could signify the darkest moment for someone, a desire to end it all, but it could also conversely be the thing that someone throws to you to rescue you, to pull you from the muck and the mud.” Over the last couple of years, Sleater-Kinney has experienced a lot more than just muck and mud. In late 2022, just as the band had started writing the album, Brownstein\'s mother and stepfather died in a car accident while traveling overseas. “There was a sense of fragility and also disorientation,” Brownstein says of that time. “So the act of playing guitar, I understood that ritual. I knew what to do with my hands. So Corin brought me songs instead of baking cakes or bringing me food. Part of it was just tending to this world that we have spent nearly three decades building—and songs were something that were still very much alive. And because the stakes felt higher, I just wanted every song to be perfect.” Here Brownstein and Tucker explain how they made that happen. **“Hell”** Corin Tucker: “This song really came about organically when I was in a record store listening to music in LA. It was one of those moments where the lyrics just started coming to me and the emotion of feeling like I was having this revelation about what we normalize in our society, the way that we normalize violence, the way that we have accommodated it. It\'s supposed to be a moment of shock of waking up to that and realizing it in that moment.” **“Needlessly Wild”** Carrie Brownstein: “I\'ve always been a scrappy, irascible person, and I think this song reckons with outsize emotions that no longer feel sanctioned and that feeling of continual clumsiness, or confusion, or almost being feral. I kept wanting to change the lyrics from the demo version, which said \'needlessly wild\' over and over again. But Corin and John Congleton, our producer, liked it better when it was more lyrically austere. And I finally realized that the repetition was the song—that the whole point was that there wasn\'t an escape route, and that we\'re not going to find a different end to this repetitive line, just like we can\'t write alternative endings for things that we don\'t want or like the outcomes to.” **“Say It Like You Mean It”** CT: “This song is about when you realize that your time with the people you care about the most, it will come to an end, and you may not know exactly when that\'s going to be or how it\'s going to take shape, but you definitely will be saying goodbye. And it\'s about the wide range of emotions that come with that: acceptance, the tender feelings, and also a feeling of frustration and even anger in the imperfection of the intimacy that we have together during the time that we have.” **“Hunt You Down”** CB: “I was listening to a podcast that featured an interview with a poet, an undertaker named Thomas Lynch. And he was talking about a meeting he had with a father as they were planning the burial of this man\'s child, and the father said to Thomas Lynch, \'The thing you fear the most will hunt you down.\' It was such a striking and devastating line, and it had such an axiomatic quality to it. It is just the truth. This sounds very depressing, but the music of the song—the rhythm, the vocal melody—it\'s catchy. The more you sing something—even if there\'s pain or sadness in the lyrics—when you put that over something that actually buoys you, it can change the meaning of what that is until there\'s freedom in letting go of that great fear.” **“Small Finds”** CT: “When we started playing this song, it was just kind of like a jam on guitar. It’s a weird song. It definitely comes from our love of discordant guitar—bands like Television and Sonic Youth—and music that has some real grit to it. And then the fun of it is making a puzzle that works as a song. With the lyrics and the vocals, I wanted to do something that gave it a bit of swing into a catchier song, so that it had a story to it that wasn\'t just bits and pieces. So the character in it is a dog, and it\'s about taking away all of that cerebral angst that we live with every day, and we worry about things and getting into our bodies and thinking about, ‘Well, what is meaningful in the everyday life? What is some joy I can seek out?’” **“Don\'t Feel Right”** CB: “This is that duality between dark and light. To me, when I was writing it, we needed a fast song. I like songs that feel like songs you drive around to. It\'s such a classic way of listening to music. And I wanted a song that you could sit inside and go on a journey with, musically. It has that repeating riff and this just constant drive to it. When we sing the chorus, it really conjures Tom Petty to me, who I think is very good at taking heartbreak and heartache and turning it into something melodious.” **“Six Mistakes”** CT: “I think it was something that we were messing around with sonically to have it be like a New Wave or Devo song. But as we got into the studio with the rest of the songs and the emotion and the rawness of everything, it took it to this very heightened level, where it\'s a song about feeling outside of being loved, and outside of being seen. So it\'s almost a character of a woman who can\'t understand why people can\'t see her. That\'s something that I think comes up on this record a lot: aging and feeling like a woman—your identity really changes over time, and taking back your power with that and playing with it.” **“Crusader”** CB: “There\'s a handful of methodologies with which we work, and one is just Corin and I still sitting in a room together playing guitar, and you can hear that on this song or \'Small Finds,\' just that very fundamental, central Sleater-Kinney quality of intertwining, angular guitar lines. Thematically this song zooms out a little bit, surveys the landscape, grappling with this harsh reality that\'s sometimes unimaginable and that\'s grown dire. And just the idea that someone\'s very existence is a threat to someone else, and the trespasses on bodily autonomy. I think the song imagines that instead of shrinking, you grow to possess something grander and brighter. It\'s a little bit of a hype song in the middle of a broader narrative—of this album that is about resistance and grappling with smallness and self-effacement.” **“Dress Yourself”** CB: “This song speaks to the modern-day predicament of somehow getting out of bed and getting ourselves prepared for the day, despite all of the existential threats. It\'s almost shocking what great pretenders we all are, and the normalcy and steadiness that we can project out into the world. It\'s a rallying cry for those of us who can\'t believe we\'re upright every day.” **“Untidy Creature”** CT: “This one’s meant to be a very personal story about feeling trapped in a relationship, but it\'s also meant to look out as a window on what women are going through in this country in the past couple of years, losing our bodily autonomy, losing our sense of being able to control our own destiny. And so it\'s meant to mirror the personal and the broader world at the same time.”

Few artists have done more for carrying the banner of guitar rock proudly into the 21st century than St. Vincent. A notorious shredder, she cut her teeth as a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band before releasing her debut album *Marry Me* in 2007. Since then, her reputation as a six-string samurai has been cemented in the wake of a run of critically acclaimed albums and collaborations (she co-wrote Taylor Swift’s No 1. single “Cruel Summer”). A shape-shifter of the highest order, St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, has always put visual language on equal footing with her sonic output. Most recently, she released 2021’s *Daddy’s Home*, a conceptual period piece that pulled inspiration from ’70s soul and glam set in New York City. That project marked the end of an era visually—gone are the bleach-blonde wigs and oversized Times Square-ready trench coats—as well as creatively. With *All Born Screaming*, she bids adieu to frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced *Daddy’s Home*, and instead steps behind the boards for the first time to produce the project herself. “For me, this record was spending a lot of time alone in my studio, trying to find a new language for myself,” Clark tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “I co-produced all my other records, but this one was very much my fingerprints on every single thing. And a lot of the impetus of the record was like, ‘Okay: I\'m in the studio and everything has to start with chaos.’” For Clark, harnessing that chaos began by distilling the elemental components of what makes her sound like, well, her. Guitar players, in many respects, are some of the last musicians defined by the analog. Pedal boards, guitar strings, and pass-throughs are all manipulated to create a specific tone. It’s tactile, specialized, and at times, yes, chaotic. “What I mean by chaos,” Clark says, “is electricity actually moving through circuitry. Whether it\'s modular synths or drum machines, just playing with sound in a way that was harnessing chaos. I\'ve got six seconds of this three-hour jam, but that six seconds is lightning in a bottle and so exciting, and truly something that could only have happened once and only happened in a very tactile way. And then I wrote entire songs around that.” Those songs cover the spectrum from sludgy, teeth-vibrating offerings like “Flea” all the way to the lush album cut (and ode to late electronic producer SOPHIE) “Sweetest Fruit.” Clark relished in balancing these light and dark sounds and sentiments—and she didn’t do so alone. “I got to explore and play and paint,” she says. “And I also luckily had just great friends who came in to play on the record and brought their amazing energy to it.” *All Born Screaming* features appearances from Dave Grohl, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, among others. Le Bon pulled double duty on the album by performing on the title track as well as offering clarity for some of the murkier production moments. “I was finding myself a little bit in the weeds, as everyone who self-produces does,” Clark says. “And so I just called Cate and was like, ‘I need you to just come hold my hand for a second.’ She came in and was a very stabilizing force, I think, at a time in the making of the record when I needed someone to sort of hold my hand and pat my head and give me a beer, like, ‘It\'s going to be okay.’” With *All Born Screaming*, Clark manages to capture the bloody nature of the human experience—including the uncertainty and every lightning-in-a-bottle moment—but still manages to make it hum along like a Saturday morning cartoon. “The album, to me, is a bit of a season in hell,” she says. “You are a little bit walking on your knees through some broken glass—but in a fun way, kids. We end with this sort of, ‘Yes, life is difficult, but it\'s so worth living and we\'ve got to live it. Can\'t go over it, can\'t go under it, might as well go through it.’ It\'s black and white and the colors of a fire. That, to me, is sonically what the record is.”

In the 18 months after Taylor Swift released *Midnights*, it often felt as though the universe had fully opened up to her. The Eras Tour was breaking records and blowing past the billion-dollar mark; its attendant concert film became the highest-grossing of all time. She generated interest and commerce and headlines everywhere she stepped foot, from tour stops to the tunnels of NFL stadiums. In 2023, she was named both *TIME* magazine’s Person of the Year and—just as iconic, tbh—Apple Music’s Artist of the Year. But do songs about that level of success speak to you? As the news broke that her highly private six-year relationship to Joe Alwyn had ended, Swifties started Swiftie-ing, quickly recirculating a clip on social media of Swift a few weeks earlier, onstage during an early Eras show, in tears as she sang “champagne problems”—a song she and Alwyn had written together. It was a reminder that, despite the superhero-like aura she now radiates, Swift, at her peak, still hurts like the rest of us. What sets her apart is her ability to sublimate that pain into pop. When she announced her 11th studio album in early 2024—while accepting another Grammy, as one does—we probably shouldn’t have been surprised. “I needed to make it,” she’d say of *THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT* a few weeks later, to a crowd of—\[rubs eyes\]—96,000 in Melbourne, Australia. “I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on *TORTURED POETS*.” Working again with trusted collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she returns to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of *Midnights*. But the stakes feel noticeably higher here: This isn’t so much a breakup album as it is a deep-sea exploration of everything Swift has been feeling, a plunge through emotional debris. On “But Daddy I Love Him”—over strings and guitar that faintly recall her country roots—she lashes out at the crush of scrutiny and expectation she’s been subject to from the start. Naturally, catharsis comes after the chorus: “I’ll tell you something right now,” she sings. “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” On “Florida!!!” she and Florence + the Machine team up for a pulpy escape fantasy wherein they Thelma and Louise their way down to the Sunshine State in hopes of starting over with new lives and identities: “Love left me like this,” they sing. “And I don’t want to exist.” At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, *TTPD* is a study in extremes, Swift leaning into heightened emotions with heightened, hyperbolic, ALL-CAPS language and imagery—how we think when we’re drunk on love or flattened by its sudden disappearance. Note the dark humor she weaves through the Post Malone-enriched opener “Fortnight” (“Your wife waters flowers/I wanna kill her”). Or the thrilling self-deprecation of “Down Bad,” a foray into science fiction wherein Swift likens the warmth of a relationship to being abducted by love-bombing extraterrestrials—only to be left “naked and alone, in a field in my same old town.” But this remains her most candid and unsparing work to date: As a listener, you frequently get the feeling that you’ve stumbled across emails she’d written but never sent, or into conversations you were never meant to hear. There’s a density and a specificity and a ferocity to her lyrical work here that makes 2012’s “All Too Well” feel sorta light by comparison. If you’re the kind of Swiftie who likes to live in the details, well, this one might be your Super Bowl. “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?” she asks on the devastating “So Long, London,” a high point. “I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” Alone at a piano on the haunting “loml,” she flips the script on someone who’d told her she was the love of their life, by telling them that they were the loss of hers: “I’ll still see it until I die.” The story, as you likely know, doesn’t end there. We get a glimpse of new beginnings in “The Alchemy” (“This happens once every few lifetimes/These chemicals hit me like white wine”) and something like triumph in the montage-ready synths of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” when Swift, shattered on the floor, “as the crowd was chanting, ‘More!’,” still finds the strength to deliver: “’Cause I’m a real tough kid and I can handle my shit.” But we also get a sense of acceptance, of newfound perspective. On “Clara Bow”—named after a 1920s movie star who was able to survive the jump from silent film to sound—Swift reflects on the journey of a small-town girl made good, sung from the vantage of an industry obsessed with the next big thing. She zooms out and out and out until, in the album’s closing seconds, she’s singing about herself in the third person, in past tense, acknowledging that nothing is forever. “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it,” she sings. “You’ve got edge she never did/The future’s bright, dazzling.”

“We made this record in two and a half weeks,” Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “People always go, ‘Whoa, you must\'ve been really nervous, you haven\'t made a Black Crowes record in a hundred years.’ We\'re in here to get it. We\'ve done everything that we\'ve done because it feels good.” The Black Crowes never slunk from excess, from the kind of glorious hyperbole that fortified the popular arrival of their anachronistic Southern rock strut at the exact moment grunge dominated the mainstream. There was, of course, the famous and relentless feud between Chris and Rich Robinson, respectively flamboyant and pensive brothers who evoked opposite sides of the same acid sheet. All of that jibed with records of extravagant indulgence—hour-long major-label escapades that declared freaks and priests belonged in the same congregation whether it was Saturday night or Sunday morning. The Black Crowes didn’t just want to sound rock ’n’ roll; they wanted to live its dichotomies, vainglories, and sagas, too. But after a 15-year stalemate that included an eight-year break without speaking, the Robinsons reconciled and have returned with an efficient and charged 37-minute album, *Happiness Bastards*, that posits the two have moved beyond mere rapprochement. These 10 songs alternately ferry the pomp, grit, sneer, and swagger that made The Black Crowes interesting nearly 35 years ago, without the theatrics that always suggested they were actually trying twice as hard. Opener “Bedside Manners” finds Chris strutting around Rich’s sharp little riff like some lost ’70s rock god, dismissing a wanton lover one last time. With the help of stylistic descendant Lainey Wilson, they glide across and through the acoustic beauty of “Wilted Rose” like The Doobie Brothers dosed on both gospel and doom. And “Flesh Wound”—one of the sharpest and most surprising songs in their entire catalog, somewhere between Tom Petty sparkle and J. Geils Band verve—is the sort of song you want playing as you hit the road, leaving a love affair that only ever let you down. In the context of The Black Crowes’ contentious past, it’s tempting to hear that and the other kiss-offs on *Happiness Bastards* as potential relics of a more fraught moment in the Family Robinson. Or when Chris sings “Tomorrow owes nothing to the past” early in the swaying closer “Kindred Friend,” a mea culpa for lost time, it’s easy to hear a fraternal apology. The Black Crowes, though, resonated the first time around not just because they supplied unabashed retro chic in spades but because they implied that classic rock done well had something timeless to offer. Arguably the least fussy and most focused record this long-wayward band has ever made, *Happiness Bastards* reinforces that idea and The Black Crowes’ place within it.

The Smile, a trio featuring Radiohead prime movers Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with ex-Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, sounds more like a proper band than a side project on their second album. Sure, they’re a proper band that unavoidably sounds a *lot* like Radiohead, but with some notable distinctions—much leaner arrangements, bass parts by Greenwood and Yorke with a very different character from what Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood might have laid down, and a formal fixation on conveying tension in their melodies and rhythms. Their debut, *A Light for Attracting Attention*, was full of tight, wrenching grooves and guitar parts that sounded as though the strings were coiling into knots. This time around they head in the opposite direction, loosening up to the point that the music often feels extremely light and airy. The guitar in the first half of “Bending Hectic” is so delicate and minimal that it sounds like it could get blown away with a slight breeze, while the warm and lightly jazzy “Friend of a Friend” feels like it’s helplessly pushed and pulled along by strong, unpredictable winds. The loping rhythm and twitchy riffs in “Read the Room” are surrounded by so much negative space that it sounds eerily hollow, like Yorke is singing through the skeletal remains of a ’70s metal song. There are some surprises along the way, too. A few songs veer into floaty lullaby sections, and more than half include orchestral tangents that recall Greenwood’s film score work for Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion. The most unexpected moment comes at the climax of “Bending Hectic,” which bursts into heavy grunge guitar, stomping percussion, and soaring vocals. Most anyone would have assumed Yorke and Greenwood had abandoned this type of catharsis sometime during the Clinton administration, but as it turns out they were just waiting for the right time to deploy it.

Vince Staples knows his songs aren’t soundtracking too many wild Friday night parties; they sound way better on the long, contemplative walk home. “I’ve always been aware of where I fit within the ecosystem of this whole thing, and that allows me to create freely,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “No one’s coming to me from a fan standpoint looking for a single, or looking for a party record. But I do know the people who listen to my music are probably looking for thoughtfulness or creativity.” Since breaking through a decade ago with his debut EP *Hell Can Wait*, the Long Beach rapper has been the go-to guy for heady West Coast rap: songs that may not make you dance, but always make you think. Still, his sixth studio album (and the last one on his Def Jam contract) isn’t quite the downer that the title suggests. Where its predecessor, 2022’s *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART*, looked back at his bittersweet youth, *Dark Times* is a snapshot of Staples right now: on top of the world on paper, but the reality is trickier. (“I think I’m losing it,” he raps on the bass-heavy “Black&Blue.” “Hope you’re along for the ride.”) On “Government Cheese” he grapples with survivor’s guilt, mourning his brother and lying that all’s well to his friend in prison who saw him on TV. Still, light enters through the cracks with breezy, soulful beats from frequent collaborators Michael Uzowuru and LeKen Taylor, not to mention Staples’ trademark dry wit: “Don’t be no crab in the bucket, be a Crip at the Ritz,” he quips on “Freeman.” There’s even a few tracks you could bump at the function: “Étouffée,” a love letter to New Orleans rap, and “Little Homies,” a lo-fi house jam on whose hook Staples crows, “Life hard, but I go harder.” And no matter how heavy things get, Staples is realistic about what his work means in the grand scheme of things. “They\'re just songs, man,” he says. “It doesn\'t need to go past that point. I know everybody values things differently—but for me at least, put it out, people listen to it, they like it or they don\'t. And then if you get to do it the next time, that\'s the gift that you get is the ability to do it the next time, because most people don\'t get that.”

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

In the 313 days after Zach Bryan released his self-titled fourth album, he scored his first No. 1 single alongside Kacey Musgraves and headlined no fewer than 58 arenas, stadiums, and festivals, further cementing his legend as a self-made megastar whose ascendance looks, at least from the outside, like it’s skipped all the hard parts. And then, on the 314th day, he released *The Great American Bar Scene*, a 19-track follow-up that dispenses with any questions about his ability to remain almost laughably prolific as he’s learning how to adjust to it all in real time. Like its immediate predecessor, *The Great American Bar Scene* opens with a spoken-word soliloquy about good fortune and good morals that burnishes the Oklahoman’s earnest, everybro cred, serving as a mission statement of sorts for the 18 songs that follow—and, really, for Bryan’s whole deal. At only 28, he is a master of nostalgia, bathing the libertine spirit of past generations and 2021 in the same sepia light. Bryan’s grappling with his recent past isn’t just subtext; it’s in the songs. In “Northern Thunder,” a wistful slow-burn ballad characteristic of the album’s overall vibe, he’s still processing a mix of homesickness and shock: “And please don’t ask me how these last years went/Mama, I made a million dollars on accident/I was supposed to die a military man/Chest out too far with a drink in my hand/But I’ve got folks who like hearing me rhyme/I think of thunder under metal roofs all the time.” “Like Ida” reaffirms his aversion to the Music City machine, even if the feeling isn’t mutual: “When you make it to Nashville you can tell from one hat tilt/That shit just ain’t my scene/I like out-of-tune guitars and taking jokes too far/And my bartenders extra damn mean.” *This* is Bryan’s great American bar scene: less shout-along rave-ups exhorting you to go out and get drunk than evocative meditations on your inalienable right, and frequent need, to go out and get drunk. The title track is a barroom serenade that name-checks Springsteen’s spare, pitch-black *Nebraska* track “State Trooper”; “Sandpaper” pays off the reference with an appearance by Springsteen himself that plays like a heartland-rock *Looper*—a weathered elder meeting a younger version of himself who already has seen so much. (It also sounds more than a little like “I’m On Fire.”) And for all of Bryan’s humility, he’s self-aware enough to lean into the romance of his origin story and underdog status, numbers be damned—he is nothing if not an elite storyteller.