Whether singing in Spanish or in English, Kali Uchis continually proves herself to be a versatile performer. Following 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)* and its hit single “telepatía,” the Colombian American singer eventually boasted that she had two more albums, one in each language, more or less at the ready, the first being 2023’s soulful *Red Moon in Venus* and the next being *ORQUÍDEAS*. With lyrics primarily (though not exclusively) in Spanish, she delivers an exquisite pop-wise R&B set here, one replete with clubby highs and balladic depth. The dance floor is well served with cuts like “Me Pongo Loca” and “Pensamientos Intrusivos,” her ethereal vocals elevating them further. The collaborations reflect her journey as well as her status, as she links with superstar KAROL G on the polished perreo throwback “Labios Mordidos” and música mexicana sensation Peso Pluma for the romantic duet “Igual Que Un Ángel.” On “Muñekita,” she bridges her two worlds with the aid of Dominican dynamo El Alfa and City Girls rapper JT, who combine to produce an irresistible dembow moment.
With a career spanning four decades, Kim Deal holds the distinction of being part of two indie-rock giants—Pixies and The Breeders—counting among her fans the likes of Kurt Cobain and Olivia Rodrigo, two era-defining talents who invited her on tour three decades apart. But somehow, Deal had never set out to write a proper solo album outside of a 10-song 7-inch vinyl series in 2013. Hunkering down in the Florida Keys during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic ignited that initial spark, but the island naturally seeped into her creative psyche for years, having routinely retreated there with her parents before they were too old to travel. As a result, the intersection of memory and family comes across vividly throughout *Nobody Loves You More*. On “Summerland,” written as a loving tribute to the Keys, she reflects on their tradition with a soothing ukulele giving way to grand, whimsical orchestral swells worthy of Harry Nilsson. While on the tender title track, a vintage slow dance leads over majestic horns as she sings with open-hearted grace. It pairs elegantly with the gentle lullaby “Are You Mine?”, a touching ode to her mother, who battled dementia. These songs may sound like timeless tunes of the golden oldies era, but Deal also amps up the guitars, grounding them in reality with her usual humor and insouciance. “A Good Time Pushed,” the closest thing here to a Breeders ripper, suggests the end of a relationship before it’s even started: “We’re having a good time/I’ll see you around.” With songs dating back to the early 2000s, *Nobody Loves You More* varies stylistically, with Deal connecting to her own truth through personal loss, triumph, and failure. The fiercely paced “Disobedience” mirrors her enduring defiance, where she promises to stick around on her own terms: “I know what I want/Till I’m thrown off.”
Singers often try mixing musical genres in their programs, but few manage it with the aplomb of Lea Desandre in *Idylle*, the French mezzo-soprano’s second solo recital. It starts in the 17th century, with a sensual rendition of Honoré d’Ambruys’ song “Le doux silence de nos bois,” complete with dazzlingly fluid note-runs indicating Desandre’s experience in Baroque repertoire. By song three, however, Desandre has flipped forward 300 years, to an effortlessly idiomatic take on Françoise Hardy’s “Le temps de l’amour,” from the French chanteuse’s 1962 debut album. Elsewhere, Debussy happily rubs shoulders with 1960s star Barbara’s “Dis, quand reviendras-tu?” and there’s a delicious slice of Offenbach (“Amours divins!”) as an encore. Thomas Dunford accompanies on lute, seamlessly complementing the pure vocal class and often disarming insight of Desandre’s interpretations.
As important as it is to foreground the Tuareg/Nigerien heritage of Mdou Moctar’s scorching psychedelic rock, it’s just as important to note its connection to the American underground. After all, *Funeral for Justice* isn’t “folk music” in any touristic or anthropological sense, and it’s probably as (if not more) likely to appeal to fans of strictly American weirdos like Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees as anything out of West Africa. Still, anyone unfamiliar with the stutter-step rhythm of Tuareg music should visit “Imajighen” and the lullaby-like hush of “Modern Slaves” immediately, and it pleases the heart to imagine a borderless future in which moody teenage guitarists might study stuff like “Sousoume Tamacheq” the way Moctar himself studied Eddie Van Halen. As with 2021’s breakthrough *Afrique Victime*, the intensity is astonishing, the sustain hypnotic, and the combination of the two an experience most listeners probably haven’t had before.
At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.
“It’s quite a strange album,” Nia Archives tells Apple Music about her debut, *Silence Is Loud*. The award-winning artist, producer, and DJ—credited with spearheading a mainstream revival of jungle music—is the first to acknowledge that the sonic landscape of the album is an eclectic departure from her early sound. While elements of the production will be familiar to fans of Archives—including jungle pioneer Goldie and global superstar Beyoncé—*Silence Is Loud* rings with Britpop, Motown, and alternative rock influences, resulting in a wholly original listening experience that exposes the unconventional edge to her artistry. Co-produced with rising talent Ethan P. Flynn, whose credits include FKA twigs and slowthai, the record is beholden to the late-’90s/early-2000s era of organic, experimental pop dominated by William Orbit—albeit charged with the frenetic energy of drum patterns still firmly rooted in jungle. While tracks like “Cards on the Table,” “Crowded Roomz,” and “F.A.M.I.L.Y” see Archives explore recurring themes of loneliness, self-acceptance, parental estrangement, and love—both unconditional and unrequited—with her characteristic lyrical candor, *Silence Is Loud* leaves fewer places for the intensity of her words to hide behind. This reality is most clearly evidenced on the reprise of the title track, which strips away her typical percussive camouflage. “Jungle is so chaotic and intense that nobody really pays attention to the lyrics that much,” says Archives. “The drums take up a lot of space in the music—they’re like the heart, and when you take that away, it’s like the brain. Which is a bit much sometimes.” For all the risk Archives has taken in releasing a body of work that resists the urge to chase trends in favor of presenting a true reflection of her own journey, *Silence Is Loud* succeeds in alchemizing its disparate parts into audio gold. “I played in a pub in London the other day and the people were singing along so loudly it made me think this isn’t just a viral-TikTok-moment album. It’s an album that people have to listen to, and then listen to again to take it in…\[because\] it’s something weird and new,” she says. “But I think I’ve got good taste in music, so that gives me a little bit of confidence in myself.” Read on to find out more about each track in Archives’ own words. **“Silence Is Loud”** “I wrote this song about my little brother, who is my little baby. He’s getting older and our relationship has changed so much. He’s changed so much, I’ve changed so much. I wanted to write about how I love him no matter what, and that is what unconditional love is to me. There’s no ifs or buts, it’s just pure love. I wrote it in bed and then I took it to Ethan. It’s the first song we made together. One of my favorite albums is *Aha Shake Heartbreak* by Kings of Leon, I’m so inspired by the lo-fi \[sound\] in their music. I really wanted a Kings of Leon-meets-Radiohead moment because *In Rainbows* is also one of my favorite albums.” **“Cards on the Table”** “I wanted to make a really hardcore Britpop jungle tune. It’s quite stripped-back breaks. I was hugely inspired by Blur, Pulp, Oasis, all that kind of vibe. I love Damon Albarn. If there’s anyone I would love to listen to the album, it would probably be him. Again, I wrote this in bed—I had a bit of a situationship with an Irish boy I met after a show in Dublin last year, so it’s a real story and my first time writing a song like this. I don’t really write love songs, but I was trying to have a bit of a Natasha Bedingfield moment. I’ve really tried to think of all the best songwriters to come out of the UK and focused on studying a lot of people. This was the first time I wrote a song and I felt like it was a ‘proper’ song.” **“Unfinished Business”** “This is the only song I’m worried about having to sing live because I’d just come back from a festival and I’d lost my voice, which is why it sounds so hoarse and rock ’n’ roll—I don’t know if I can re-sing it like that. I wrote it about realizing that everybody else has their own life before they’ve met you. Before you even say hello, they’ve already had so many experiences that have shaped them as a person. That’s actually quite positive. The production is quite four-four because I’ve been making loads of four-four music recently. And I also really wanted to make a Foo Fighters-inspired jungle tune because I loved the Foo Fighters when I was 14.” **“Crowded Roomz”** “We made this in the studio and it was a bit overwhelming. I was talking about loneliness—chronic loneliness. I feel like a lot of people my age experience loneliness. For me, with what I do—where it’s really high or low—it’s so heightened and you experience that a little bit more. And it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is actually a bit much, I can’t listen,’ because we listen to the same song on loop for four hours and it’s an intense one to listen to over and over again. The next day, we were like, ‘Oh, this is actually really good.’ I’ve been playing this one out and everyone screams the words, so I’m hoping that will be the vibe across the album. More of my sets have turned from hardcore jungle to a pop concert, which is cool.” **“Forbidden Feelingz”** “I feel like there’ll be a lot of people discovering me \[through this new sound\] and I really want them to hear where I’ve come from and how I got to this point. This is a nice moment for a switch-up, to be like, ‘I do this as well and, if you want, you can go back and discover all that stuff.’ I can never recreate this song, it’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made, so I didn’t want it to not be a part of an album that will hopefully shape the next few years of my life.” **“Blind Devotion”** “This is the longest project I’ve made in my life. I’m usually a 20-minute person, max. Towards the end I was like, ‘Oh my god, for an album to be an album it has to be 35 minutes, I need three \[more\] minutes to complete this thing, let’s make one more song.’ It’s one of the only new songs with the ‘old me’ sound, where it’s really clubby. We were going for that Massive Attack kind of vibe. We made this one at my studio and mine’s not got a lot of equipment. I try not to spend money on too much stuff. I’ve got 10 plug-ins, which is really weird as a producer, but I’d rather be the master of what I’ve got than have everything and not know how to use any of it. As a creative, you want a challenge and to feel like, ‘I’ve only got this, how do I make it sound interesting?’” **“Tell Me What It’s Like?”** “I said to Ethan that I wanted to make a song a bit like The Cranberries. The middle section, which is so happy, comes from another beat—the only song that didn’t make it on to the album. The rest of the song is quite dark and it was Ethan’s idea to put the two together. It’s about unrequited love, but not necessarily in a relationship sense, more related to my own life, but I guess people will take it however they want to take it. When I wrote it, I was inspired by Natalie Imbruglia’s kind of vibe. I sampled this voice note that Goldie sent me, because he sends me voice notes every week. He’s been a great listening ear and a real supporter. He’s someone I’m so inspired by and look up to—not just as a musician but as a person. He was quite gassed about it when I sent it to him.” **“Nightmares”** “I had my heart broken in Tokyo, which is hilarious and random. It’s like something out of a film. I came back from Asia and I was really sad, and the only way I can process my emotions is by making music. I wrote this song at home and then Ethan’s label let us use their spare studio, and he brought his guitar. I’d been listening to loads of Fleetwood Mac to get over my upset and I wanted to make something with that vibe. I thought ‘Nightmares don’t just happen when you’re sleeping’ was quite a funny play on words because what was happening felt like a real-life nightmare, which is so dramatic. This is the only song I kind of regret. I’ve never been really mean on a song in my life and the person I wrote about hasn’t heard it. I hope they don’t hate me because we’re kind of friends again now. But it’s a good song, so what can you do?” **“F.A.M.I.L.Y”** “I wrote this about my personal experience and my relationship with my family. This song is the end of that era, for me. I’m 25 this year, I feel like there’s only so many times you can be so caught up in things that cause you stress or upset you, so I really just wanted to say my piece and that’s it. There’s a little bit of acceptance within the song, understanding this is just the way things are and that’s OK, I guess. It was quite therapeutic. We recorded it in Ethan’s flat with me screaming and Ethan’s friend Felix \[Stephens\] playing the viola. My main inspiration was Estelle, ‘1980.’ There’s just a feeling I get when I listen to that song…I don’t know how to explain it. Even the video, where she’s sat on the stairs. It’s just a whole vibe I really wanted to capture with this song. It’s quite theatrical and I feel like the production reflects the drama.” **“Out of Options”** “I’d just been to the Motown Museum in Detroit for the first time and it was amazing. I love Motown. All the productions they made, just with what they had in those times, is actually crazy. It was such a booming Black industry that I’ve always been so inspired by. And I love The Ronettes, one of my favorite girl groups of all time. So I was really intensely listening to that kind of music and wanted to explore that sound. It was the only song I wrote on the spot and didn’t really have much that I wanted to say, but it was really fun recording how they would have recorded—standing in different spots in the room to create that big sound.” **“Silence Is Loud (Reprise)”** “Ethan suggested we do a reprise and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Feels a little bit weird.’ But I trusted his gut. This was the only song we didn’t make in the UK. I was in L.A. on tour, and I hate making music in L.A., but we were at Sound Factory and we had all kinds of equipment and he was really having fun with the sound design. Throughout this album, I wanted to have loads of voice notes and anecdotes from people who mean something to me. So the voice talking at the start is my brother. In the middle, it’s loads of different voice notes from my friends, my friends’ parents who have become a really big part of my life, and my manager Tom, who’s my best friend. At the end is a sample of a video of all my friends from my birthday dinner. It’s quite emotional actually.” **“Killjoy !”** “I had a really nasty interaction with somebody who was quite close to me and this was me expressing that. It was the first time I was trying to think about how to make the words interesting and I love the way I wrote it. I made it at home and took it to Ethan, and what he brought to it was so cool—Massive Attack vibes with a bit of old-school IDM and jungle.” **“So Tell Me…”** “Another moment from a previous project. If I didn’t make \[2023 EP\] *Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall*, this song would have been on the album anyway—it felt like a good end.”
It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn\'t really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they\'re very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.” In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s *Ghosteen*, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be. Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, *Wild God* finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marveling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don\'t matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. *Wild God* is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.” It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake,” a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it\'s just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band\'s influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We\'re not taking it too seriously in a way, although it\'s a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.” There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy,” the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn\'t necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it\'s these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record\'s full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.” While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, *Wild God* shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there\'s one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that \[wife\] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that\'s why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it\'s just full of life and it\'s full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.” Read on as Cave takes us inside a few highlights from the album: **“Wild God”** “I was actually going to call the record *Joy*, but chose *Wild God* in the end because I thought the word ‘joy’ may be misunderstood in a way. ‘Wild God’ is just two pieces of music chopped together—an edit. That song didn\'t really work quite right. So we thought, ‘Well, let\'s get someone else to mix it.’ And me and Warren thought about that for a while. I personally really loved the sound of \[producer Dave Fridmann’s work with\] MGMT, and The Flaming Lips, stuff—it had this immediacy about it that I really liked. So we went to Buffalo with the recordings and Dave did a song each day, disappeared into the control room and mixed it without inviting us in. It was the strangest thing. And then he emerges from the studio and says, ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’ When we came in it sounded so different. We were shocked. And then after we played it again, we heard that he traded in all the intricacies and stateliness of The Bad Seeds for just pure unambiguous emotion.” **“Frogs”** “Improvising and ad-libbing is still very much the way we go about making music. ‘Frogs’ is essentially a song that I had some words to, but I just walked in and started singing over the top of this piece of music that we\'d constructed without any real understanding of the song itself. There\'s no formal construction—it just keeps going, very randomly. There\'s a sort of freedom and mystery to that stuff that I find really compelling. I sang it as a guide, but listening to it back was like, ‘Wow, I don\'t know how to go and repeat that in any way, but it feels like it\'s talking about something way beyond what the song initially had to offer.’” **“Joy”** “‘Joy’ is a wholly improvised one-take without me having any real understanding of what Warren is doing musically. It’s written in that same questing way of first takes. I\'m just singing stuff over a kind of chord pattern that he\'s got. I sort of intuit it in some way that it’s a blues form to it, so I’m attempting to sing a blues vocal over the top, rhyming in a blues tradition.” **“Final Rescue Attempt”** “That was a song that we weren\'t putting on the record. It was a late addition, just hanging around. And I think Dave Fridmann actually said, ‘Look, I\'ve mixed this song. It doesn\'t seem to be on the record. What the fuck?’ It feels a little different in a way to me. But it\'s a very beautiful song, very beautiful. And I guess it was just so simple in its way, or at least the first verse literally describes the situation that I think is actually in the book, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*, where Susie decided to come back to me after eight months or so, and rode back to my house where I was living, on a bicycle. It’s a depiction of that scene, so maybe I shied away from it for that reason. I don\'t know. But I\'m really glad.” **“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”** “That song is an attempt to encapsulate what Anita Lane was like, and we all loved her very much and were all shocked to the core by her death. In her early days when we were together, she was this bright, shiny, happy, laughing, flaming thing, and we were the dark, drug-addicted men that circled around her. And I wanted to just write a song that had that. She was a laughing creature, and I wanted to work out a way of expressing that. It\'s such a beautifully innocent song in a way.”
For their 14th album, Swedish prog wizards Opeth created a concept record around the reading of a will. Partly inspired by a talk-show segment and partly by the massively popular TV show *Succession*, Opeth guitarist/vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt decided to write about an inheritance with a twist. “I stumbled upon the idea of putting the whole story as it would’ve been written in a legal document, like a proper old piece of paper with paragraphs like, ‘My daughter will get the country house,’ and things like that,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s more like a confession of sorts, where the patriarch reveals secrets about himself, his paranoia, and his regrets. And some of these secrets will immediately affect his children in an existential kind of way.” *The Last Will and Testament* also marks Åkerfeldt’s return to the death-metal vocal style of Opeth’s early days. “I wanted to bring back the screaming vocal, but at first, I felt a bit like a fraud because I wasn’t listening to brutal music,” he explains. “I’m listening to Dexter Gordon and David Crosby. But after I finished two songs with that kind of vocal, I thought it was fucking awesome.” Add guest appearances from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson (on flute and narration) and Europe vocalist Joey Tempest, and you’ve got another fascinating installment in Opeth’s catalog. Below, Åkerfeldt comments on each track. **“§1”** “This was the first song written for the album. It’s when I dipped my toe in the water, so to speak, to see where I was on a musical level. At the time, I didn’t really have the lyrics ready, but I wanted to try out that screaming vocal. So, this song is kind of the guinea pig for that. And usually, when I start writing for a record, I come out all guns blazing. So, it’s kind of heavy, evil, fast, and a bit insane. Lyrically, the kids are being summoned to attend the reading of their late father’s last will and testament. There’s also a couple of solicitors in place. The reading starts, and he’s explaining that there’s going to be prizes. But they might not be what you wanted.” **“§2”** “I can hear that I was quite comfortable with whatever I was doing musically here. And that kind of stands out because it has two guests on there. On ‘Paragraph One’ you have a voice-over thing by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and he’s heavily featured in ‘Paragraph Two’ as well. And so is Joey Tempest, from Europe. For some reason, he loves Opeth, which is awesome for me because I grew up with Europe. The song itself is pretty adventurous, I think. It’s probably one of the songs that will take a long time to sink in with the listener. There’s also a calm section that I kind of nicked from Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years.’” **“§3”** “This is more of a classic heavy metal song, I would say. The opening was inspired by a theme you often hear in jazz music, like Django Reinhardt, but also some classical music and fusion-rock bands. And the musical *Chess*, believe it or not, which was written by Benny and Björn from ABBA. From there, it kind of becomes a normal heavy metal song, but with more emotions than your basic Iron Maiden song. I’m not saying Iron Maiden doesn’t have emotions, but this is kind of a sad song—to me at least. Lyrically, there’s some explanation about infidelity that happened and what that led to.” **“§4”** “This is an interesting tune because it’s almost like a couple of different songs in one, which is not so uncommon for Opeth. I started off trying to write something called 12-note music, which is an experimental classical thing where you have 12 notes in an octave, and you can’t play the same note twice—meaning it’s going to be fucked up. So, the beginning of the song is hard to sing along to. It’s a bit Zappa-esque. That leads into kind of a metal-y call-and-response with death metal vocals and clean vocals, and then it stops and goes into a harp section. I actually found the harp player from an article in a Swedish newspaper, which is weird. That leads to the next section, which is Ian Anderson playing the flute. Then it builds into the most vicious, evil-sounding music on the record.” **“§5”** “This is maybe the last song I wrote for the record, or one of the last. You can tell that I’m comfortable in my songwriting here because it’s quite experimental. There’s not a lot of acoustic guitars on this record, but this song is built around an acoustic lick and clean vocals, and all of it gradually becomes heavier. In some parts, maybe the heaviest sections on the record. And really good death-metal vocals on that track, if I do say so myself. There’s also a Middle Eastern-sounding midsection, which I never dared to do before. If you just hear the song once, you probably won’t know what the fuck is happening. You need some time with it.” **“§6”** “During the recording, everybody feared this song because it’s so difficult. It doesn’t sound difficult, but for some reason, it’s really, *really* difficult. I’m not really a good guitar player or a good musician, but for some reason I have a knack for writing really complex music. And this song, it’s almost like it spirals out of control in a way, like you’re losing control of the horse and it just stampedes. I’ve never done cocaine in my life, but it sounds like what I imagine a cocaine rush is. I think that’s got something to do with me not tampering with the tempo of the song, which resulted in us almost not being able to play the fucking thing.” **“§7”** “This always felt like the ending song of a record, even if there’s one after. But it’s still the end of the testament, as it were. It’s more of a groovy song. I don’t really like that word, but sometimes it’s the only word that applies. It’s slower than the other songs, and less crazy. It’s also the first song in our history where every band member sings. There’s a multipart harmony vocal that happens a couple of times, and everyone is on it. I can tell you there were people who had never been in front of a microphone before, which was quite fun.” **“A Story Never Told”** “At this point, the testament is done. But everything that’s been said in the testament doesn’t really apply because here comes the twist to the story. The inheritance has been settled, a few years have passed, and a letter arrives, revealing a secret. The song itself is a ballad, and I’m a sucker for ballads. I wanted to write a beautiful ballad, not just because I love ballads, but because the seven songs prior to ‘A Story Never Told’ are so intense that there’s no room for breath, really. And this song feels like a good ending, with a beautiful Gilmour/Blackmore-esque solo by \[Opeth guitarist\] Fredrik \[Åkesson\] at the finish.”
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.’”
Samara Joy’s 2022 breakthrough album, *Linger Awhile*, established her as a new voice in jazz and helped revitalize the genre within the modern music landscape. She became a household name, armed with accolades and devoted new fans. A lot rides on her shoulders, but on *Portrait*, she refuses to cave into the pressure. Like its title suggests, the album is a collection of thoughtfully reimagined standards and classics. Each track works as a stand-alone statement of Joy’s talent, but also as part of a greater whole that honors the jazz tradition. On opener “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” best-known from the 1941 film *Ziegfeld Girl*, Joy steals the show with her scale-hopping vocal performance, showcasing her deepest registers and heavens-reaching falsetto alike. It’s a stunning display, but throughout *Portrait*, Samara Joy is more interested in honoring these compositions with thoughtful, inventive arrangements than showing off her voice—which speaks for itself.
A Top Dawg Entertainment fixture since the early 2010s, ScHoolboy Q played no small role in elevating the label to hip-hop’s upper echelon. With his Black Hippy cohorts Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock, the tremendously talented Los Angeles native made a compelling case for continuing the West Coast’s rap legacy well beyond the G-funk era or the days of Death Row dominance. Even still, his relative absence from the game after *CrasH Talk* dropped in 2019 has been hard to ignore, particularly as the most prominent member of his group departed TDE while SZA became the roster’s most undeniable hitmaker. Indeed, it’s been nearly five years since he gave us more than a loosie, which makes the arrival of his sixth full-length *BLUE LIPS* all the more auspicious. His concerns as a lyricist draw upon the micro as well as the macro level, as a parent decrying mass school shootings on “Cooties” or as a rap star operating on his own terms on “Nunu.” Elevating the drama, the *Saw* soundtrack cue nods of “THank god 4 me” accent his emboldened bars targeting snitches, haters, and fakes. Q’s guest selection reflects a more curatorial ear at work than the gratifying star-power flexes found on *CrasH Talk*. Rico Nasty righteously snarls through her portion of the menacing “Pop,” while Freddie Gibbs glides across the slow funk groove of “oHio” with scene-stealing punchlines. A producer behind TDE records by Isaiah Rashad and REASON, Devin Malik steps out from behind the boards to touch the mic on a handful of cuts, namely “Love Birds” and the booming paean “Back n Love.”
“It feels really good to be in the driver’s seat,” singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on the eve of releasing *Shawn*, his first album in four years and most personal record to date. A teenage social-media sensation who became one of pop’s biggest stars in the late 2010s, Mendes pulled back after the release of 2020’s *Wonder*, canceling a 2022 tour and setting out on a journey to find himself, a decision he calls “terrifying” but one that was ultimately liberating. “It was the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself,” he says. “I gave myself a life. The best part about that is, it taught me that the next time I’m standing at the crossroads between choosing something in my truth or doing what would make everyone else happy, I have this reference point.” “Everything’s hard to explain out loud,” Mendes sings on the hushed opener “Who I Am,” a sketched overview of where Mendes has been and what’s to come over the next half-hour. It strips down Mendes’ music to its essence—vocals and strummed guitar framing lyrics that detail the way his thoughts raced as his life got too big around him. *Shawn* feels loose and confident even as it’s economical, putting Mendes’ reflections and smoke-plume voice front and center on the campfire sing-along “Why Why Why” and his tender, album-closing cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The swaying “Heart of Gold” is a Laurel Canyon-inspired cut where Mendes laments the way a longtime friend slipped out of his circle before passing away, its weeping slide guitar providing a counterpoint to the bittersweet reminiscing about the days when he and his friend “shot for the stars.” “That’ll Be the Day” is fatefully lovelorn, its arrangement as delicate as lace, as Mendes muses on the idea of eternal love. On “The Mountain,” Mendes takes aim at the many rumors that have swirled around him and his intimates over the last two years in gently devastating fashion, rebuking anyone who might put him in a box while acoustic guitars roil beneath him. “Call it what you want,” Mendes sings on its refrain, and that phrase became an almost-defiant mantra for him as he was working on his fifth album. The song references a spiritual experience he had in Kauai. “Without going into the exact details of it, leaving that mountain that day gave me something I’ve always wanted, which was a sense of security that no success could ever provide me, no relationship could ever provide me,” he says. “It was security with myself. A lot changed after that, because when you’re not chasing something, you let go. And then it almost feels like things are starting to appear.” As he tells Lowe, whatever label people might want to place on him “really doesn’t matter, because I feel this.” *Shawn*, as a whole, is a statement of purpose from a musician who’s a veteran of the game in his mid-twenties—and it shows what he’s capable of when there’s nothing holding him back.
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.”
Schubert’s last string quartet, the G Major, D887 (1826), predates his deeply poignant final chamber work, the String Quintet, yet rivals it both in terms of scale and ambition. Its jagged motifs and often unstable harmonies have led several writers to compare the work to Beethoven’s innovative late quartets. Yet, the expressive melodies—particularly the one played by the lead violin and then cello early in the first movement—are highly characteristic of Schubert. More unusual is his widespread use of a technique more typical of orchestral string playing: a rapid shivering or “scrubbing” of the bow over a succession of notes, known as *tremolo*. The Takács vary these tremolos, creating quite different atmospheres. Sometimes it’s a barely perceptible background—sometimes smoky, sometimes a shimmering haze—to a poignant theme; but in the initially decorous “Andante un poco moto” second movement, it becomes a baleful, threatening cloud of sound, raw anger breaking through a conventional expression of grief. The Takács are likewise sensitive to the sharp accents which punctuate the lightly dancing “Scherzo,” and the unpredictable harmonic progressions of the final “Allegro assai.” The teenage Schubert’s B flat Major, D112 also has moments of darkness, but also a great deal of charm as in the Haydn-style “Menuetto,” which the Takács as veteran performers of that composer’s work play with fluency and wit.
“We weren’t really expecting it at such a rate,” The Last Dinner Party’s guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland tells Apple Music of the band’s rise, the story of which is well known by now. After forming in London in 2021, the five-piece’s effervescent live shows garnered an if-you-know-you-know kind of buzz, which went into overdrive when they released their stomping, euphoric debut single “Nothing Matters” in April 2023. All of which might have put a remarkable amount of pressure on them while making their debut record (not least given the band ended 2024 by winning the BRITs Rising Star Award then topped the BBC’s new-talent poll, Sound of 2024, in January). But The Last Dinner Party had written, recorded and finished *Prelude to Ecstasy* three months before anyone had even heard “Nothing Matters.” It meant, says lead singer Abigail Morris, that they “just had a really nice time” making it. “It is a painful record in some ways and it explores dark themes,” she adds, “but making it was just really fun, rewarding, and wholesome.” Produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Jessie Ware), who Morris calls “the dream producer,” *Prelude to Ecstasy* is rooted in those hype-inducing live shows, its tracklist a reflection of the band’s frequent set list and its songs shaped and grown by playing them on stage. “We wanted to capture the live feels in the songs,” notes Morris. “That’s the whole point.” Featuring towering vocals, thrilling guitar solos, orchestral instrumentation, and a daring, do-it-all spirit, the album sounds like five band members having an intense amount of fun as they explore an intense set of emotions and experiences with unbridled expression and feeling. These songs—which expand and then shrink and then soar—navigate sexuality (“Sinner,” “My Lady of Mercy”), what it must be like to move through the world as a man (“Caesar on a TV Screen,” the standout, celestial “Beautiful Boy”), and craving the gaze of an audience (“Mirror”), as well as loss channeled into art, withering love, and the mother-daughter relationship. And every single one of them feels like a release. “It’s a cathartic, communal kind of freedom,” says Morris. “‘Cathartic’ is definitely the main word that we throw about when we talk about playing live and playing an album.” Read on as Morris and Mayland walk us through their band’s exquisite debut, one song at a time. **“Prelude to Ecstacy”** Abigail Morris: “I was thinking about it like an overture in a musical. Aurora \[Nishevci, keys player and vocalist\] composed it—she’s a fantastic composer, and it has themes from all the songs on the record. I don’t believe in shuffle except for playlists and I always liked the idea of \[an album\] having a start, middle, and end, and there is in this record. It sets the scene.” **“Burn Alive”** AM: “This was the first song that existed in the band—we’ve been opening the set with it the entire time. Lyrically, it always felt like a mission statement. I wrote it just after my father passed away, and it was the idea of, ‘Let me make my grief a commodity’—this kind of slightly sarcastic ‘I’m going to put my heart on the line and all my pain and everything for a buck.’ The idea of being ecstatic by being burned alive—by your pain and by your art and by your inspiration—in a kind of holy-fire way. What we’re here to do is be fully alive and committed to exorcising any demons, pain or joy.” **“Caesar on a TV Screen”** AM: “I wrote the beginning of this song over lockdown. I’d stayed over with my boyfriend at the time and then, to go back home, he lent me a suit. When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to *be* him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way. Getting to have his suit, I was like, ‘Now I am a man in a band.’ It’s this very specific sensuality and power you feel when you’re dressing as a man. I sat at the piano and had this character in my head—a Mick Jagger or a Caligula. I thought it would be fun to write a song from the perspective of feeling like a king, but you are only like that because you’re so vulnerable and so desperate to be loved and quite weak and afraid and childlike.” Lizzie Mayland: “There was an ending on the original version that faded away into this lone guitar, which was really beautiful, but we got used to playing it live with it coming back up again. So we put that back in. The song is very live, the way we recorded it.” **“The Feminine Urge”** AM: “The beginning of this song was based on an unreleased Lana Del Rey song called ‘Driving in Cars With Boys’—it slaps. I wanted to write about my mother and the mother wound. It’s about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how those go back over generations, and the shared traumas that come down. I think you get to a certain age as a woman where your mother suddenly becomes another woman, rather than being your mum. You turn 23 and you’re having lunch and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just two women who are living life together,’ and it’s very beautiful and very sweet and also very confronting. It’s the sudden realization of the mortality and fallibility of your mother that you don’t get when you’re a child. It’s also wondering, ‘If I have a daughter, what kind of mother would I be? Is it ethical to bring a child into a world like this? And what wound would I maybe pass on to her or not?’” **“On Your Side”** LM: “We put this and ‘Beautiful Boy’—the two slow ones—together. Again, that comes from playing live. Taking a slow moment in the set—people are already primed to pay attention rather than dancing.” AM: “The song is about a relationship breaking down and it’s nice to have that represented musically. It’s a very traditional structure, song-verse-chorus, and it’s not challenging or weird. It’s nice that the ending feels like this very beautiful decay. It’s sort of rotting, but it sounds very beautiful, but it is this death and gasping. I really like how that illustrates what the song’s about.” **“Beautiful Boy”** AM: “I come back to this as one that I’m most proud of. I wanted to say something really specific with the lyrics. It’s about a friend of mine, who’s very pretty. He’s a very beautiful boy. He went hitchhiking through Spain on his own and lost his phone and was just relying on the kindness of strangers, going on this beautiful Hemingway-esque trip. I remember being so jealous of him because I was like, ‘Well, I could never do that—as a woman I’d probably get murdered or something horrible.’ He made me think about the very specific doors that open when you are a beautiful man. You have certain privileges that women don’t get. And if you’re a beautiful woman, you have certain privileges that other people don’t get. I don’t resent him—he’s a very dear friend. Also, I think it’s important and interesting to write, as a woman, about your male relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual.” LM: “The flute was a turning point in this track. It’s such a lonely instrument, so vulnerable and so expressive. To me, this song is kind of a daydream. Like, ‘I wish life was like that, but it’s not.’ It feels like there’s a deeper sense of acceptance. It’s sweetly sad.” **“Gjuha”** AM: “We wanted to do an aria as an interlude. At first, we just started writing this thing on piano and guitar and Aurora had a saxophone. At some point, Aurora said it reminded her of an Albanian folk song. We’d been talking about her singing a song in Albanian for the album. She went away and came back with this beautiful, heart-wrenching piece. It’s about her feeling this pain and guilt of coming from a country, and a family who speak Albanian and are from Kosovo, but being raised in London and not speaking that language. She speaks about it so well.” **“Sinner”** LM: “It’s such a fun live moment because it’s kind of a turning point in the set: ‘OK, it’s party time.’ I was quite freaked out about the idea of being like, ‘This is a song about being queer.’ And I thought, ‘Are people going to get that?’ Because it’s not the most metaphorical or difficult lyrics, but it’s also not just like, ‘I like all gendered people.’ But people get it, which has been quite reassuring. It’s about belonging and about finding a safe space in yourself and your own sense of self. And marrying an older version of yourself with a current version of yourself. Playing it live and people singing it back is such a comforting feeling. I know Emily \[Roberts, lead guitarist, who also plays mandolin and flute\] was very inspired by St. Vincent and also LCD Soundsystem.” **“My Lady of Mercy”** AM: “For me, it’s the most overtly sexy song—the most obviously-about-sex song and about sexuality. I feel like it’s a nice companion to ‘Sinner’ because I think they’re about similar things—about queerness in tension with religion and with family and with guilt. I went to Catholic school, which is very informative for a young woman. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but the imagery is always so pertinent and meaningful to me. I just thought it was really interesting to use religious imagery to talk about liking women and feeling free in your sexuality and reclaiming the guilt. I feel like Nine Inch Nails was a really big inspiration musically. This is testament to how much we trust James \[Ford\] and feel comfortable with him. We did loads of takes of me just moaning into the mic through a distortion. I could sit there and make fake orgasm sounds next to him.” LM: “I remember you saying you wanted to write a song for people to mosh to. Especially the breakdown that was always meant to be played live to a load of people throwing themselves around. It definitely had to be that big.” **“Portrait of a Dead Girl”** AM: “This song took a long time—it went through a lot of different phases. It was one we really evolved with as a band. The ending was inspired by Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ And Bowie’s a really big influence in general on us, but I think especially on this one. It feels very ’70s and like the Ziggy Stardust album. The portrait was actually a picture I found on Pinterest, as many songs start. It was an older portrait of a woman in a red dress sitting on a bed and then next to her is a massive wolf. At first, I thought that was the original painting, but then I looked at it again and the wolf has been put in. But I really loved that idea of comparing \[it to\] a relationship, a toxic one—feeling like you have this big wolf who’s dangerous but it’s going to protect you, and feeling safe. But you can’t be friends with a wolf. It’s going to turn around and bite you the second it gets a chance.” **”Nothing Matters”** AM: “This wasn’t going to be the first single—we always said it would be ‘Burn Alive.’ We had no idea that it was going to do what it did. We were like, ‘OK, let’s introduce ourselves,’ and then where it went is kind of beyond comprehension.” LM: “I was really freaked out—I spent the first couple of days just in my bed—but also so grateful for all the joy it’s been received with. When we played our first show after it came out, I literally had the phrase, ‘This is the best feeling in the world.’ I’ll never forget that.” AM: “It was originally just a piano-and-voice song that I wrote in my room, and then it evolved as everyone else added their parts. Songs evolve by us playing them on stage and working things out. That’s definitely what happened with this song—especially Emily’s guitar solo. It’s a very honest love song that we wanted to tell cinematically and unbridled, that expression of love without embarrassment or shame or fear, told through a lens of a very visual language—which is the most honest way that I could have written.” **“Mirror”** AM: “Alongside ‘Beautiful Boy,’ this is one of the most precious ones to me. When I first moved to London before the band, I was just playing on my own, dragging my piano around to shitty venues and begging people to listen. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18, and it’s the only one I’ve kept from that time. It’s changed meanings so many times. At first, one of them was an imagined relationship, I hadn’t really been in relationships until then and it was the idea of codependency and the feeling of not existing without this relationship. And losing your identity and having it defined by relationship in a sort of unhealthy way. Then—and I’ve never talked about this—but the ‘she’ in the verses I’m referring to is actually an old friend of mine. After my father died, she became obsessed with me and with him, and she’d do very strange, scary things like go to his grave and call me. Very frightening and stalker-y. I wrote the song being like, ‘I’m dealing with the dissolution of this friendship and this kind of horrible psychosis that she seems to be going through.’ Now this song has become similar to ‘Burn Alive.’ It’s my relationship with an audience and the feeling of always being a performer and needing someone looking at you, needing a crowd, needing someone to hear you. I will never forget the day that Emily first did that guitar solo. Then Aurora’s orchestral bit was so important to have on that record. We wanted it to have light motifs from the album. That ending always makes me really emotional. I think it’s a really touching bit of music and it feels so right for the end of this album. It feels cathartic.”
The hip-hop polymath built a reputation on witty freestyles that befitted her Philadelphia roots, then broke through in 2017 with “MUMBO JUMBO,” a purposefully unintelligible trap ditty that brought new resonance to the term “mumble rap” with a Grammy-nominated video that should come with a warning for those with dentophobia. Her debut album, 2018’s *Whack World*, crammed an LP’s worth of ideas into the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee: 15 sharp, surrealist minute-long tracks that veered from slapstick vocal hijinks to straight-ahead spitting, each accompanied by its own micro music video. The world Whack built was carnival-esque, all funhouse mirrors and sensory overload, with a darkness lingering at the edges. Aside from a trio of three-song EPs (the tentatively titled *Rap?*, *Pop?*, and *R&B?*) released in 2021, Whack kept a puzzlingly low profile in the years that followed. The colorful critical darling who’d had so much to say in so little time had more or less gone quiet. Then, six years after *Whack World*, she announced *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, billed as the rapper’s real full-length debut. Early videos continued the high-concept ideas and cartoonish costumes, but listen awhile and you heard something new: naked vulnerability, almost shocking in its rawness. “I can show you how it feels when you lose what you love,” Whack sing-songs on the twinkling “27 CLUB,” looking like a cross between Pierrot the clown and Bootsy Collins. The hook was one word, drawn out into a wistful melody: “Suiciiiiide…” In other words, there’s more to Whack’s world than you might expect. (“Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me,” she reminds you on the minute-and-change “MOOD SWING.”) Over the 15 songs of *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, the rapper grapples with real life, where echoes of abandonment and instances of suicidal ideation coexist with bursts of cockiness, uncertainty, lust, loneliness. The constant is her voice, thoughtful and brimming with ideas as ever. “BURNING BRAINS” is an expression of depressive thinking filtered through Whack’s imagistic lens: “Soup too hot, ice too cold, grass too green, sky too blue.” And there’s a great deal of whimsy, too, as on “SHOWER SONG,” a space-funk bop on the joys of singing in the bathroom.
“I\'ve always wanted to be a pop star, but beyond that, I wanted to be an African pop star,” Tyla tells Apple Music. “The roots of my sound are in amapiano music, in South African and African music.” Though the megaviral 2023 single “Water” may have put the South African singer-songwriter on the proverbial map—first as a social media sensation, then as the highest-charting African female soloist ever on Billboard’s Hot 100, earning her the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance—she’s been carefully plotting her path to the top for years. “Since I started experimenting with amapiano, I just feel like it\'s really helped me get to this point where I created something that is fresh and new, but still familiar and comes from home,” she says. “It\'s a sound of Africa, and it\'s something that I couldn\'t be more proud about.” She weaves through a blend of pop, R&B, amapiano, and Afrobeats (“pop-piano sounds cute,” she admits) across *TYLA*, a coming-of-age chronicle through love, heartbreak, and self-discovery. “I’m speaking about the things that I\'ve gone through while creating the album—basically three years in the making,” she explains. “I was becoming a woman. So it was a lot of growing that happened, and me realizing my worth, and realizing how I want to be treated—and how basically, I\'m that girl, and people need to know I\'m that girl.” While the project was brought to life with the help of global producers including Sammy Soso, Mocha, Believve, Rayo, and Sir Nolan, Tyla made sure they all had a taste of her homeland. “\[It was important\] to bring some to South Africa,” she explains, “so when we get in the studio, they have context. Some people that try amapiano sound so watered down, it\'s cringey. So even though I am mixing it with pop and R&B, I didn\'t want it to sound watered down. Music is our everything in Africa. The way we speak, the way we dance, literally, our dance moves—they come so naturally. It\'s just in us. It’s our essence.” Below, Tyla talks us through her debut album. **“Intro” (Tyla & Kelvin Momo)** “I wanted to start off my album with something that was truly South African, something that showed people the root of where I started, before ‘Water,’ before all of these mixtures. I secretly recorded a voice note when I was in a session with Kelvin Momo. I loved hearing the people in the session, speaking, hearing the language, the accents. It was so raw and real. Kelvin Momo is my favorite amapiano producer—his music and his sound is my heart.” **“Safer”** “The message of the song is something that I feel like a lot of people could relate to. And the energy of the song I feel like is a strong intro to open an album.” **“Water”** “‘Water’ surpassed all expectations. I could\'ve never expected all of these accolades—a Grammy, the Billboard Hot 100, people all over the world dancing and pouring water down their back. From the time I finished recording the song, it was all that I was listening to. It was also like a step away from what I was used to, because I \[had been\] *very* PG. And with this one, I was more grown up and I was experimenting more. And even though I don\'t enjoy vulgar music, I feel like we were able to make the song speak about what it speaks about, but in a way that\'s friendly.” **“Truth or Dare”** “This was the song where I was playing more house-y with it. It’s me calling out people, being like, ‘Hey, *now* you care.’ I\'m not that type of person, but these are feelings that I felt around the time where I\'m like, ‘Where did this person come from? Out of nowhere, you want to now talk to me?’ and I literally hate it. I\'m sure a lot of people have felt that.” **“No.1” (feat. Tems)** “Tems and I had been wanting to make a song for long now. We ended up making it work, and Tems\' voice alone is so amazing, so unique. The song is for everyone, but when I had it in mind, it was really for the girls—me and Tems, girl power, African girls—and we were just really pushing that message of ‘I\'m leaving. I don\'t need anybody. If this is not serving me anymore, I’m gone, and I\'m going to be okay.’ Always put yourself before anything.” **“Breathe Me”** “It\'s a song that\'s so emotional and so real. It\'s just about love, of how strong love is, and how you don\'t even need anything else. I don\'t need anything else. You don\'t need anything else—just me, and you; just breathe me and we\'ll be fine.” **“Butterflies”** “With ‘Butterflies,’ I was in a session with \[producer and songwriter Ari PenSmith\] and he was playing me some stuff that he\'s worked on, and I was like, \'Cool, cool, cool.\' And then he played this, and I fell in love with it. It sat so perfectly with my voice. I connected with the song instantly, and it was too specific to what I was going through to not do anything with it.” **“On and On”** “This was \[an initial\] version of my sound, before ‘Water’ and everything. I made this with Corey Marlon Lindsay-Keay in South Africa. We were supposed to go out, and we didn\'t end up going out, so I was dressed up in a whole outfit in the studio session, and he was producing. I love the song so much because it\'s so nostalgic but new. I love that it feels like old-school R&B. I love that it has hints of Aaliyah\'s influence, but it\'s new, and fresh, and African—all things that are Tyla. The messaging is not so serious—it’s literally about not wanting a party to end.” **“Jump” (Tyla, Gunna & Skillibeng)** “‘Jump’ is a very different vibe. I really just wanted to tell people who I am, and I had to show my confidence through the song. And the opening line, with Skilli being like, \'Original girl, you want a replica? No.\' There\'s no replica. That intro was already perfect, and it segues to that line of me saying, \'They\'ve never had a pretty girl from Joburg/They see me now and that\'s what they prefer.\' That line is just—it’s too iconic for me, and I\'m just so excited to hear all the girls sing it, all the Joburg girls sing it, all the girls from home. And having Gunna on it, I really feel like it took me into that world further, making it even more raw and cool.” **“ART”** “When I\'m with someone that treats me so good, treats me well, treats me like art, treats me like a princess, I will be there for them. I will be their art piece. We also played with that wording where it can be ‘art piece,’ but also your peace and your comfort. As a woman, that\'s how I want to be treated, and that\'s how I would treat you if you treat me that way. It’s about being treasured.” **“On My Body” (Tyla & Becky G)** “This was such a fun one because it’s in my world, but also I played a bit with the Latin vibes. The feature came so organically—I was in studio, and she was in a session next door. She loved it, and she recorded a verse, and I absolutely died. I died. I just love her touch, and how it just broadened the audience, because now it\'s just bringing everybody into this experience. It\'s a melting pot with all these genres, and I love that I was able to expand it even further.” **“Priorities”** “This song was probably the most difficult to share, because it\'s really letting people into my heart and mind, and how I feel I\'ve been with myself. I feel like people would resonate with it, and it speaks about what a lot of people feel and may not express. \[The idea of having spread yourself too thin\] is something that\'s so raw and real, that not even just women, men, everybody feels.” **“To Last”** “I love this song with all my heart. I was in the Vaal with LuuDadeejay, and I literally finished this song in five minutes. It was based off an experience that my friend was going through at the time. About a year prior, I wrote the lines ‘You never gave us a chance, it\'s like you never wanted to last.’ And that note just came to mind, and the song just flowed out of me. I ended up going through something that made me feel that way. It was like I told the future, which is not good—but I fell in love with the song again. It’s so South African: It’s amapiano, it\'s house-y, it\'s our sound.” **“Water (Remix)” (Tyla & Travis Scott)** “Travis reached out—he loved ‘Water,’ and around the time, I was like, \'I don\'t want a remix, I\'m cool.\' But Travis Scott was so unexpected that I wanted to do it so bad, and he absolutely killed it. He added some South African shout-outs in his verse, and I just knew that people from home were going to love it—he acknowledged us, and he mentioned \[the South African telephone country code\] +27 and all those things. And I also love that he brought a different energy to the song. Everyone knows ‘Water’ to be that summer banger, and now Travis made it still the summer banger, but also more gritty. Putting him on an African-sounding song was just the perfect collab.”
There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.
There was a point early in the creation of the swaggering second record by Yard Act when the Leeds quartet realized they were holding themselves back and needed to let go. “We were putting some drones and synths on the track ‘Fizzy Fish,’ which was the first one we wrote for the record, and someone raised the point that we weren’t going to be able to do it live,” vocalist James Smith tells Apple Music. “But we quickly agreed we’d worry about that later. Once we cut our losses with the idea of how we could do it, there was no real discussion on the areas the album went to.” That sense of daring is at the heart of *Where’s My Utopia?*. The four-piece has emerged with a kaleidoscopic pop record that dramatically builds upon the playful post-punk of their 2022 debut *The Overload*, its expansive sound taking in Gorillaz-meets-Ian Dury future funk, art-rock wigouts, orchestral epics, careening disco punk, and explosive indie sing-alongs. *The Overload* earned them a Mercury nomination and the chance to rerecord 2022 single “100% Endurance” with star fan Elton John, and its follow-up finds Smith searching for meaning in the wake of all his dreams coming true. “The record is about me realizing that the thing I’d wanted since being a teenager wasn’t going to magically solve all the problems that I live with,” Smith explains, “and the idea that everyone just has problems regardless of what position they’re in. I’m starting to wonder now if we just create them for ourselves because it shouldn’t be this hard.” It’s a narrative arc delivered with Smith’s trademark humor but always laced with poignancy, their anthemic hooks even sharper than those that fired their debut to success. *Where’s My Utopia?* is a bold, brilliant second album from one of the decade’s most imaginative bands. Smith guides us through it, track by track. **“An Illusion”** “This song definitely sets the score for ‘This isn’t a minimalist guitar post-punk album this time.’ The chorus lyric really sets up the whole premise of the situation I ended up in—that I’m in love with an illusion—and the idea that being in a successful band would solve my problems. Then, whilst my head was so buried in this world that I couldn’t get out of because of how much energy and time it was sucking out of me, all my other principles fell by the wayside. This song’s probably harder on myself than most are. The verses are about me being pissed, which I was for 18 months, and basically being just a bit useless, which I’ve got out of now. I stopped drinking off the back of the touring, I learned that I had to.” **“We Make Hits”** “This was one of the last songs written. We wrote it in Ryan \[Needham, bassist\]’s spare bedroom in a break from touring. I think Ryan had been going for that kind of French disco, Daft Punk, Justice vibes and everything fell out of me quite fast. I started by writing the story of me and Ryan and how we started the band. With this song, we were acknowledging that we’d always had ambition and we’d always wanted to do something bigger with music. Even though, at our core, all we wanted to do was make music, we always knew we would quite like to see what it was like on the other side and achieve something.” **“Down by the Stream”** “This was written in Turin. Everyone else had gone out for a meal and I decided to stay in the hotel room and wrote it using Jay \[Russell, drummer\]’s laptop. I’ve been looking back on my childhood a little bit more since my son was born and projecting him into scenarios I was in, even though historical truth and accuracy is a vague thing in terms of songwriting. It’s not literal, but it draws on my childhood. I was framing myself as this struggling person who was having a bit of a rough time, doing the woe-is-me thing about being in a successful band. I realized that if I was going to ask that empathy of the listener, then I should make sure that there was some corruption within me as well and highlight that I’m not some innocent person. It’s me dragging myself through the mud to let people know that I’m capable of being a dickhead just like everyone else.” **“The Undertow”** “‘Down by the Stream’ starts by the stream and then the stream leads to the sea, and that’s where the sharks start circling. We’ve ended up at sea on ‘The Undertow.’ The stream is the journey into adulthood and the sea is the murky open waters of adulthood and being out on your own in the big, bad world, then getting caught by the undertow of the industry. This is a thank-you note to my wife, really, who’s supported me through this entire caper that I’ve ended up on and been solid as a rock through it. There’s a part of me that’ll never be able to understand why I was selfish enough to do this for a living and leave my family behind to do it, so I’ll always live with that.” **“Dream Job”** “I caught myself writing the chorus in an interview when we were in Europe. Someone asked how it felt to have done a song with Elton John and have a Mercury nomination and all these things and I wasn’t really in the room and I just went, ‘Yeah, it’s ace, it’s wicked.’ I just started listing all these positive words without actually taking stock of what they were saying. It’s funny because I don’t really know how those things have affected me. I definitely wanted them and I’m glad I got them but they just happen and you move on. You get asked about them a lot, and the truth is that you don’t really think of them. I feel like the second you start wearing your achievements with pride, you’re dead in the water. I think the whole album is trying to strike that balance between being cynical and maybe a bit arsey, but also going, at the same time, ‘Things are great!’ It can be both, and it is both for us, and that’s life, even if it’s your life or my life in this band I’m in.” **“Fizzy Fish”** “The lyrics changed a lot on this one—I was literally writing about Fizzy Fish sweets for about three verses originally. With those seeds, you don’t really know where you’re going with them a lot of the time, but you let your mind chase after it and see where it goes. The Fizzy Fish, it was nostalgia, it was going back to the playground and that’s me having a conversation with another version of me from my childhood or a parallel universe. Again, it’s set in a lake, going with the water theme, because that’s a stagnant body of water that’s separate from the sea. It stands alone from the rest of the album. It’s set in my subconscious. ‘The Undertow’ through to ‘Grifter’s Grief’ is one narrative arc that follows me going into this successful Yard Act. ‘Fizzy Fish’ is me learning to cope with this newfound spotlight and who I am, whether I’ve changed from who I was, whether that’s positive or negative and the fact you have to create new masks to deal with a public-facing job because you don’t want to give too much of yourself away but, ultimately, to connect with people is the entire reason you’re making music.” **“Petroleum”** “This is based on an incident that happened at a gig at Bognor Regis at the start of 2023, the point within the story where I hit the bottom. I bottled the gig. Not anything drastic, we got through a set, but I was really disappointed in myself and my performance that night. I told the audience I was bored and I didn’t want to be there. We’d bitten off more than we could chew and I hadn’t had a break in 18 months, and I had a bad gig. This looks at the idea of what is expected of musicians when they perform live and this consumerist demand that they deliver. I realized that people don’t actually want honesty, they want the version of honesty they’ve paid to see. It’s learning to deal with these extra masks that we develop. I was trying to get to the core of ‘How can I channel a true version of how I’m feeling into an enjoyable performance that people deserve to see?’ This whole song reignited my passion for playing live and I’ve since learned how to process my emotions and funnel them into a performance that creates something that I’m proud of.” **“When the Laughter Stops” (feat. Katy J Pearson)** “It’s maybe a reaction to a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, Yard Act is the fun band, the jokers, and they don’t take it too seriously,’ and we don’t—because you can’t—but it’s that whole sad-clown complex. We’re not base level: We feel things just the same as everyone else! A lot of this album is rooted in that paranoia of not being able to maintain this—because it felt like I couldn’t do it if what it took to make a living from this job was those first 18 months over and over again. Fortunately, it’s changed, it’s fine but it has to stay at this level for it to be OK. If it drops back below, it’s hard work being in a band.” **“Grifter’s Grief”** “This is to do with the fact that my entire job now is based around sucking electricity out of giant venues and getting on aeroplanes and constantly burning up road miles and air miles and sea miles just to selfishly make a living whilst the planet burns. I spoke to my dad about it and he was kicking off about something and I was like, ‘Yeah but, Dad, I do that, I get on planes all the time.’ He went, ‘Yeah, but you need to do it to work.’ And I was like, ‘But I don’t. I could get a job that doesn’t involve that.’ It’s that everyone’s selfish inherently, I think.” **“Blackpool Illuminations”** “This is probably the most important song on the album. When we do the zany and comical stuff, we’re always trying to do it so you can pull the rug from under people with a song like this and prove what we’re capable of if we really put our minds to it. We supported Foals in Blackpool in May 2022. I had such nostalgic memories of Blackpool from going as a kid. My wife and son came and joined us for those two nights with Foals, and we had a couple of days and weekend in Blackpool because I wanted to show my baby where I had holidays as a child. Seeing him walking along the promenade, I saw myself in him and realized that he was just following the exact same footsteps that I did when I was a kid. \[The song\] follows my journey through childhood to that moment, really—these footprints of the past that we leave and then the future treads over them in a very similar way.” **“A Vineyard for the North”** “This is the note of hope that comes at the end. Climate change punctuates the album but I didn’t want to write too heavily about it. I read an article that French vineyard owners are starting to buy land in the south of England—because of the rising temperature, the south of England is now \[in\] prime condition for growing grapes for champagne. I was thinking how, as it gets hotter, it works its way up the country. It’s clutching at straws in a sense but it’s more to do with human nature and our ability to adapt and problem solve. I don’t think the answer is that everyone in the north starts buying vineyards and growing grapes. But, in essence, it is that things will change and we’ll have to adapt, and there’s hope and there are avenues we can always take.”
