AllMusic's Best Albums of 2023

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

Following up previous tribute volumes focused on Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, Jean Carne, Brian Jackson, and other heavily sampled artists, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s Jazz Is Dead label offers this deliciously funky item featuring the late Afrobeat percussion master Tony Allen. Allen was the rhythmic engine behind Fela Kuti’s legendary Africa 70, which a JID press release calls (not unreasonably) “the sound of post-colonial Africa.” Hear Allen’s distinct beat placement and busy snare drum, and you’ll know it’s a sound that seeped into hip-hop as well. Thankfully, Younge had a chance to work with Allen directly on this project before the latter’s passing in 2020—at one point before “No Beginning,” you’ll hear him say, “Try to give me something that you think is really hard for me to follow.” Allen responds with a clipped, polyrhythmic snare pattern that reveals just how supple and variable the Afrobeat pulse can be. Fat basslines, scratchy rhythm guitars, and Farfisa organ complete the picture on a concise set that does justice to Allen’s storied legacy.

“The world got shook” So Algiers formed a crew. The band—who have built one of the most exciting catalogs and cult followings of recent years, with 2020’s There Is No Year described as "electrifying and unpredictable" (The Observer) and "precise, thoughtful and powerful" (NME) —gathered a posse of like-minded artists to create their fourth album,  SHOOK, out February 24th on Matador. Stacked with guests spanning icons through to future stars,  SHOOK  is a lightning rod for an elusive yet universal energy and feeling. A plurality of voices; a spiritual and geographical homecoming; a strategy of communion in a burning world; the story of an end of a relationship; an Atlanta front porch summer party. Ultimately, it's a 17-track set of the most mind-expanding and thrilling music that you are likely to hear anytime soon. Algiers have always been unflinching, but SHOOK is at the same time notably joyous and celebratory. It was born when Fisher and Mahan found themselves back in their native Atlanta for several months, reeling from growing pressures and burnout as touring musicians. This triggered an intense period of beatmaking, reconnecting as friends over hours immersed in episodes of Rhythm Roulette and Against the Clock and descending deep into alt-rap YouTube rabbit holes. A revisit of DJ Grand Wizard Theodore’s 1970s punk-infused New York City rap masterpiece ‘Subway Theme’ served as a spiritual moodboard for the album’s cross-pollination of urban and counter-culture styles. Across the seamlessly flowing set, including spoken vignettes and ambient instrumental segues, the band pay respect to a sprawling lineage of rap and punk iconoclasts from DJ Premier, DJ Screw and Dead Boys to Lukah, Griselda and Dïat – chopping and screwing beats on a dusty SP-404 and a Sequential Circuits Tempest, building imagined sample libraries from scratch. While community and collaboration has always been integral to Algiers’ ethos, SHOOK brings this to its fullest manifestation. The liner notes read like a who’s who of ground-breaking and contemporary underground music, featuring Zack de la Rocha, Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), billy woods, Samuel T. Herring (Future Islands), Jae Matthews (Boy Harsher), LaToya Kent (Mourning [A] BLKstar), Backxwash, Nadah El Shazly, DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music), Patrick Shiroishi, Lee Bains III, and Mark Cisneros (Hammered Hulls, The Make-Up, Kid Congo Powers). Their contributions throughout deftly reshape and recontextualize the notion of being Shook from a variety of perspectives, occupying shifting roles as oracles and narrators. “It very much deepens and broadens the world of Algiers”, says drummer Matt Tong. Atlanta, where the genesis of this record took place, is ultimately at its heart. It opens with a robotic train announcement from Hartsfield Airport—iconic to many Atlanta natives—that used to frighten Fisher when he was a child. Field recordings and original samples created by the band emphasize throughout a sense of place, collectivity, imagined community and home, all building a world that evokes the elusive sensory experience of growing up in the urban South. “We were working in an environment that we were used to”, says guitarist Lee Tesche. “It feels like the most Algiers record that we've ever made.” The accomplishment of this record is made all the more impressive by the fact it was made by a band who were falling apart and on the verge of breaking up. But instead they have produced an extraordinary, transformative record born from a shared sense of place and experience. “I think this record is us finding home,” says Mahan, with Fisher adding: “It was a whole new positive experience— having a renewed relationship with the city we're from and having a pride in that. I like the idea that this record has taken you on a voyage but it begins and ends in Atlanta.”

“Portals to environments few could have ever envisaged.” -- The Quietus Their 5th album in as many years Aşk (deeper feeling of love), marks an exuberant return to the 70s Anatolian folk-rock sound that characterised Altın Gün’s first two albums. It is a record that radiates the infectious energy found in the Amsterdam-based sextet’s celebrated live performances and next levels the group’s ground breaking sonic palette of Turkish psychedelic groove pop, sci-fi disco and dreamy acid folk. ------------------ The first thing that grabs you about Altın Gün’s new album is the energy. With Aşk, the Amsterdam-based sextet turn away from the electronic, synth-drenched sound of their 2021 albums, Âlem and Yol. While those two, created at home during the pandemic, paid homage to the electronic pop of the 80s and early 90s, Aşk, marks an exuberant return to the 70s Anatolian folk-rock sound that characterised Altın Gün’s first two albums, On (2018) and Gece (2019). But there’s development here too. Aşk is the closest the band have come so far to capturing the infectious energy of their live performances. “It’s definitely connecting more with a live sound – almost like a live album,” says bassist Jasper Verhulst. “We, as a band, just going into a rehearsal space together and creating music together instead of demoing at home.” “We didn’t record it like we did the last album,” agrees vocalist Merve Daşdemir. “We basically produced that one at home because of the pandemic. Now we’ve gone back to recording live on tape.” “We took a very traditional approach to recording a rock album, like in the 70s,” Verhulst adds. In this instance, that doesn’t just mean getting six musicians together in a room with a few microphones. “It’s also about the gear that we are using,” says Verhulst, “the tape and everything.” It’s this attention to detail in using vintage equipment and recording techniques that gives the album such a warm and welcoming sound. But, above all, this is the sound of friends and collaborators joyfully reconvening to make music together again in real time and space. There’s also a deliberate return to the source in the material they’ve chosen for this album. All ten tracks are new readings of traditional Turkish folk tunes, revealing how these ancient songs remain eternally resonant and ripe for reinterpretation. “These songs have been covered so many times, always,” says Daşdemir “But not really in psychedelic pop versions,” Verhulst adds. The album begins with “Badi Sabah Olmadan,” which also featured on Âlem as a burbling electronic excursion. But this is a different trip entirely. The opening snare roll cracks tight like a starting pistol, signalling a headlong flight into driving space rock, with Erdinç Ecevit supplying dolorous vocals and gnarled electric saz, and Thijs Elzinga’s razored slide guitar suggesting an Anatolian cousin to Pink Floyd’s psychedelic barn-stormer “One of These Days.” The saz and slide guitar are all over “Su Sızıyor” too, a reggae-funk groove with Verhulst and drummer Daniel Smienk in-the-pocket like Sly and Robbie, providing a tight backdrop for Daşdemir’s pleading, teasing vocals. On “Dere Geliyor,” Ecevit adds ethereal keyboards, rolling into a deeply-dosed synth solo with Chris Bruinings’ clattering hand drums and stumbling time signatures summoning an epic prog-folk feel. “Çit Çit Cedene” is the only track on the album that has previously had a 70s psych-folk makeover, by none other than Anadolu-psych legend Barış Manço. Here, Altın Gün add extra punch to his sultry funk vibe, with Ecevit unfurling another mind-blowing synth solo. The spirit of Barış Manço can also be detected in “Kalk Gidelim,” which bears distinct traces of Manço’s seductive classic “Lambaya Puf De.” How many more worlds do Altın Gün visit in this joyful expedition? “Rakiya Su Katamam” is glowering space rock as though Gong had taken a stopover on the Bosphorus. “Canim Oy” is a psychedelic freak-beat stomper from a world where Istanbul’s Kadiköy district was the Carnaby Street of the east. “Güzelliğin On Para Etmez” is a dreamy acid-folk anthem. And the finale, “Doktor Civanim,” is an irresistible slice of sci-fi disco camp with lava-lamp synth squiggles that wouldn’t sound out of place next to Barış Manço’s “Ben Bilirim.” Fresh yet timeless. Rooted in antiquity yet yearning for heavenly futures. Aşk wants to take you places. All you have to do is strap yourself in.

“Almost everyone that I love has been abused, and I am included,” declares Arlo Parks with arresting honesty in the first lines of her second album *My Soft Machine*. Then, almost in the same breath, she adds, “The person I love is patient with me/She’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy.” It’s an apt introduction to an album that both basks in the light—as Parks celebrates the affirming joy of falling deeply in love—and delves into darkness. “The core concept of the project is that this is reality and memory through my eyes, experienced within this body,” Parks tells Apple Music. “From the loss of innocence to the reliving of trauma to the endless nights bursting through Koreatown to first kisses in dimly lit dive bars, this is about my life.” It’s all told, of course, with the poetic, diary-entry lyricism that made *Collapsed in Sunbeams* so special—and which catapulted Parks to voice-of-a-generation status. Here, Parks also allows her indie-pop sound to unfurl, with embraces of synths, scuzzy guitars (see “Devotion,” the album’s most electrifying and unexpected moment), jazz, gorgeous harmonies (on the sweet, Phoebe Bridgers-guested “Pegasus”), electronic music, and more. That came, she says, in part from the team she assembled for the album, who allowed her to be more “fluid” (*My Soft Machine* was worked on with names including BROCKHAMPTON producer Romil Hemnani, the prolific US songwriter/producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and Frank Ocean collaborator Baird). “The community that organically formed around the album is one of my favorite things about it,” says Parks. “I think there is a confidence to the work. There is a looseness and an energy. There was a sense of sculpting that went beyond the more instinctive and immediate process of making album one. I am very proud of this.” Read on for the singer-songwriter’s track-by-track guide to *My Soft Machine*. **“Bruiseless”** “This song is about childhood abandon and the growing pains. It was inspired by a conversation I had with \[American poet\] Ocean Vuong where he said he was constantly trying to capture the unadulterated joy of cycling up to a friend’s house and abandoning the bike on the grass, wheels spinning, whilst you race up to their door—the softness and purity of that moment.” **“Impurities”** “I wrote this song the first time I met my dear friend Romil from BROCKHAMPTON. My friends and I were party-hopping and every time we called an Uber it was a Cadillac Escalade, which we thought was hilarious at the time. This is a song that is simply about being happy and feeling truly accepted.” **“Devotion”** “Romil, Baird and I were driving to a coffee shop called Maru in the Arts District of LA in Baird’s Suzuki Vitara that I nicknamed the ‘Red Rocket.’ We were blasting ‘17 Days’ by Prince. The three of us decided two things during that 15-minute round trip: that we had to fully commit to drama and that we were a rock band for the day.” **“Blades”** “The reference to the aquarium scene in Baz Luhrmann’s *Romeo + Juliet* refers to the idea of looking at a person you once knew so intimately and something indescribable has changed—as if you’re looking at each other through ocean water or obscure glass.” **“Purple Phase”** “The guitars you hear on this song are Paul \[Epworth, the British producer who also worked on *Collapsed in Sunbeams*\] and I just improvising. It was the last day of a long working week, we were feeling free and connected and our heads were cleared by exhaustion—we didn’t even have the capacity to overthink. This song has one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written: ‘I just want to see you iridescent charming cats down from trees/Mugler aviators hiding eyes that laugh when concealed.’” **“Weightless”** “Making ‘Weightless’ was a defining moment in the album process. I felt completely unchained from *Collapsed in Sunbeams*. Anything was possible, Paul \[Epworth\] and I were just chaos-dancing around the room and giggling. This one is very special to me and gave me so much creative confidence.” **“Pegasus (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”** “Of course ‘Pegasus’ features lovely Phoebe \[Bridgers\]. The inspirations for the sparseness melting into the light, dancy beat were ‘White Ferrari’ by Frank Ocean, ‘Talk Down’ by Dijon, and ‘Grieve Not the Spirit’ by AIR. This is the first song I’ve written being so candid about how tricky it can be to accept someone being unbelievably kind.” **“Dog Rose”** “The original demo for this song was recorded in a hotel room in Toronto. I had the idea for the riff in the chorus and I was lying wide awake at 3 am just letting it drive me insane. Then I got up and ran about 15 blocks, through parks and across bridges, to get my guitar from the bus and get the idea down. It was very dramatic.” **“Puppy”** “I had always wanted to capture that half-spoken, half-melodic cadence—kind of like Frank Ocean in ‘In My Room’—and I was so pleased when I achieved it. The fuzzed-out guitar-sounding instrument is actually this little synth that \[producer\] Buddy \[Ross\] has. We were trying to recreate the energy of \[my bloody valentine’s\] *Loveless*.” **“I’m Sorry”** “Garrett Ray from Vampire Weekend’s touring band is on drums and David Longstreth \[the lead singer and guitarist\] from Dirty Projectors is on guitar for this one. Sculpting the right sonic treatment for this song took what felt like years, but it’s definitely my favorite song on the record from a textural and feel point of view.” **“Room (Red Wings)”** “‘Red Wings’ is a reference to the book *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. The main character has distinctive red wings; his home life is tumultuous and he finds comfort in photography and falls deeply in love with a man called Herakles. The fragility and heart-rending nature of this book mirrors the broken quality of the song.” **“Ghost”** “This is the oldest song on the record. I demoed it in the winter of 2020 in my childhood bedroom. At the core of the song is a sense of embracing help, embracing human touch, learning not to suffer in solitude, learning to let people in.”

Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer’s uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. “I make music to help myself get through things,” she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it’s a journey that’s still ongoing. “If I’m going to leave anything behind, it’s going to be getting people back to themselves,” she says. “As I get back to myself, it’s a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be.” You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose’s upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic “Fight Club.” Over the track’s simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, “I don’t need no one else to show me the way.” She describes the song as a “breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks.” Therein lies Baby Rose’s strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. “I’m not just a singer with a unique voice,” she says. “I’m somebody that has something to say.” Growing up in Washington DC, the artist born Jasmine Rose Wilson first realized the power of her voice by reading aloud original poems at family gatherings. Despite being bullied for her lower vocal register throughout her childhood and teen years, she ultimately found comfort in songwriting and singing while playing her piano, inspired by the likes of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Janis Joplin—strong women who also possessed unique voices. She moved to Fayetteville, N.C for middle and high school. In 2013, Rose moved to Atlanta for college and quickly became immersed in the city’s music scene and which also nourished the gift inside of her. With the release of her seminal projects, From Dusk Til Dawn and To Myself, Rose earned early co-signs from SZA, J. Cole, James Blake, Kehlani, and LeBron James to name a few. Her explosive To Myself project saw Rose channeling immense grief into a body of work that revealed her gift for soul-baring and universally relatable songwriting. The project received large critical acclaim from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vogue, NPR, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Complex, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE and many more. Rose’s meteoric rise birthed a one-of-a-kind, stirring NPR Tiny Desk performance, a sold-out headlining worldwide tour and major placements on HBO’s ‘Insecure’ and Kenya Barris’ award-winning ‘Grownish’. In late 2020, Baby Rose made her late night TV debut with an arresting performance of her breakout song “Show You” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Additionally, Rose was featured on Cole’s Dreamville compilation, Revenge of the Dreamers III (“Self-Love”), after finding her way into a studio, sitting at the piano, and grabbing the attention of J. Cole by writing and producing records for the album. “I just felt, after living in Fayetteville, NC as well for so long, I deserved to be there,” she says. In the years since releasing To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It’s a subtle merging of new sounds—stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads—, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It’s also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover—and love—who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She’s nowhere near done writing her story. “I think as long as I’m being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding,” she says. “I don’t want to be the type that doesn’t take risks because I’m afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."

Bethany Cosentino delivered her debut solo album *Natural Disaster* and the climate cooperated. “This is the hottest summer I can ever remember,” she declares on the title track, a refrain that hits especially close to home during a season of record-breaking temperatures everywhere. It’s also a fitting introduction to a collection of songs about facing down an uncertain future, which for Cosentino includes questioning her attitude toward love, motherhood, and her newfound solo career. Earlier this year, the singer-songwriter announced that Best Coast, the indie-pop duo she formed in 2009 with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno, would be going on an indefinite hiatus. The decision presumably demanded some soul-searching. “Growing up is easy when you’re 17,” she sings on “Easy,” a standout piano ballad, “but now I’m 35 and I don’t quite know what it means.” Most of *Natural Disaster* was written during the pandemic, but Cosentino never sounds like she’s catastrophizing. The doomscrolling gets mixed with some *sha la la*s. Fans of Best Coast already know her knack for disguising existential despair within the palm-tree breeze of her native California. Over the course of the band’s four lo-fi, reverb-heavy albums, she wrote about getting high (2010 debut *Crazy for You*), getting sober (2020’s *Always Tomorrow*), and being pleasantly depressed regardless. Still, she might have needed to get a little distance from her sunbaked reputation, hence ditching Los Angeles for Nashville to record with producer Butch Walker (Taylor Swift, Weezer). The opening songs on *Natural Disaster* proudly follow in the footsteps of one of Cosentino’s personal heroes, Sheryl Crow. Vibrant ’90s-era guitar hooks amplify catchy, head-out-the-window choruses. “I know I’m not the only one/Can someone out there back me up?” she belts on the deeply Crow-esque “Outta Time.” Elsewhere, on “Real Life,” she opts for a ruminative, driving-down-the-highway-at-midnight vibe, lost in thought about the girl she used to be. She keeps with the confessionals until the beautifully spare closer, “I’ve Got News for You,” an unmistakable love letter to a potential life partner: “I’m so used to being lied to/It was all chaos before you.” But, of course, the person she is really making promises to has been with her all along. “I have worked so hard to find myself,” she sings in the last few seconds of the album. “I don’t want to give up on it now.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Brandy Clark’s rise through the ranks of country music from songwriter for hire to celebrated solo artist has been a marvel to watch. Clark, whose early career as a songwriter yielded hits for Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, is one of the genre’s finest craftspersons, writing image-rich, masterfully told story-songs and nuanced snapshots of relationships gone wrong in equally great measure. She first showed off her solo artist chops with 2013’s *12 Stories*, a critically acclaimed collection that led to a record deal with Warner Records. Now on her fourth studio outing, Clark has found a way to combine the intimacy of her early solo material with the savvy sensibilities she developed behind the scenes. Helmed by producer Brandi Carlile, *Brandy Clark* is Clark’s most cohesive project yet, a largely quiet, raw affair imbued with a greater sense of vulnerability than her earlier work. Carlile’s spare production gives Clark ample room to showcase her singing voice especially, as on the forthright and plainspoken “Tell Her You Don’t Love Her,” the soulful “All Over Again,” and closer “Take Mine,” on which Clark serves up crystalline couplets of compassion, sharing her sense of hope with anyone lacking their own. Guests on the album include Derek Trucks, Lucius, and Carlile herself, who joins Clark on the LP’s emotional centerpiece, “Dear Insecurity.”

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

Mélusine features a mix of five originals and interpretations of nine songs, dating as far back as the twelfth century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyol. The new album’s songs tell the story of the European folkloric legend of Mélusine, a woman who turns into a half-snake each Saturday as a result of a childhood curse by her mother. Mélusine later agrees to marry Raymondin on the condition that he never see her on Saturdays. He agrees but is ultimately convinced by his brother to break his promise, piercing his wife’s door with his sword and finding her naked in the bath, half snake, half woman. When she catches him spying on her, she turns into a dragon and flies out the window, only to reappear every time one of her descendants is on their deathbed. “I think what I try to do is more akin to revealing secrets than telling stories,” Salvant says. “Revealing secrets is also the snake’s role in the Garden [of Eden]. The snake brings secrets, knowledge, pain, and mayhem.” She continues, “The story of Mélusine is also the story of the destructive power of the gaze. Raymondin’s sword pierces a hole into her iron door. His gaze does too. The gaze is transformative and combustible. She sees that he is secretly seeing her. Her secret is revealed. This double gaze turns her into a dragon. She can now breathe fire.” Salvant, whose parents are French and Haitian, says Mélusine is also “partly about that feeling of being a hybrid, a mixture of different cultures, which I’ve experienced not only as the American-born child of two first generation immigrants, but as someone raised in a family that is racially mixed, from several different countries, with different languages spoken in the home.” “‘Dame Iseut,’ the last song of the album, was translated into Haitian Kreyol with my dad from the Occitan, which is an ancient language spoken in the south of France. My grandmother spoke a little, and her brother used to teach it,” Salvant says. “This album combines elements from French mythology, Haitian Vaudoo, and apocrypha.”

Sixteen albums into his genre-breaking career, UK producer Clark is learning to trust his voice. “Sometimes you can overly finesse tracks but there is a vulnerability in vocals and in the moment of creating music that makes it,” he tells Apple Music. “Everything else can feel like gilding the lily.” Since his 2001 debut *Clarence Park*, Clark has traversed everything from melodic electronica to thumping, degraded techno and mechanically layered rhythms. On *Sus Dog*, Clark looked to Radiohead bandleader Thom Yorke for creative collaboration, ultimately leading him to put his own voice at the forefront of his productions for the first time. The resulting 12 tracks of the album are a moving commitment to unguarded musical expression. From the earsplitting grind of “Town Crank” to the hopeful love song of “Wedding” and the woozy orchestrations of “Ladder,” *Sus Dog* is always anchored in the soft falsetto of Clark’s own vocals, driving his compositions eternally forward. “Writing the album and collaborating with Thom has been such a joyous time,” Clark says. “It has created music that feels so alive.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Alyosha”** “This track is about the utility of self-doubt and accepting that even though we might not always know everything, we can be open while thinking we’re lost. It’s also inspired by the madness of the internet, where you’re never sure what’s simulated or what to believe and it all ends up reflecting your own internal chaos. There’s so much layered on this track—I must have three hours of music in takes—but at its heart it’s drum machines and synths, forming a connection to my older work.” **“Town Crank”** “In my head this is a Wet Leg song, but it doesn’t sound like them at all—it’s gone through the Clark grinder instead. I recorded live drums with a jazz player, Richard Spaven, forcing him to play metric patterns and then processing the results. It pushes right to the edge of your ears as it’s so thumping and I wrote lots of harmonies to go with it, since the instrumental screamed, ‘Sing over me,’ which is always nice.” **“Sus Dog” (feat. Anika)”** “The title could mean anything, as I mainly chose it for its sound, although it has references to being suspicious or the musical interval of the major second, which features in many of the album’s tracks. Musically, I was interested in how electronics can meld with the piano for this track and so I recorded an acoustic piano in a church, along with these crazy pads of granular synthesis. Anika’s performance really grounds it, letting the pressure out after the force of ‘Town Crank.’” **“Clutch Pearlers”** “I bought a massive xylophone when I was working on the album, thinking I’d use it lots, but it only ended up on about six bars of this track! Here the mood shifts again to become weirdly leisurely, playing through a buoyant, fizzing energy and tempo. I made a version that was more hard-edged and electronic, but Thom liked the percussion, so we stuck with that to reflect the lyrical themes of letting go.” **“Over Empty Streets”** “Sometimes a visual is all I need to plant the seeds for a track, and on this one, I had an idea for a bird’s-eye video taken of the hill I live on, swooping down over the city and into the sea. That image gave me the inspiration for this instrumental, capturing the feeling of moving over those empty streets.” **“Wedding”** “I wrote this song for my wife as it was meant to be a joyous, upbeat track that could be played at our wedding. On the day itself, though, we were distracted by everything else going on and the DJ ended up going for mainly techno tracks instead. Perhaps it can be played at everyone else’s weddings now, although it might not be the most typical choice!” **“Forest”** “This is another track inspired by an imagined visual. I was thinking that if we could make time-lapse pictures of a single street going back thousands of years, we would end up with everywhere returning to nature and forests, meaning that we’re now living among these ghosts of the past too. When you zoom back in time that far, it can feel scary or humbling, making us feel like a small part of an enormous, continuing entity.” **“Dolgoch Tape”** “I captured this track really quickly and then ended up making loads of different mixes of it, fleshing out the kick drum or trying to make a club banger version. I put in a lot of work to make it slicker and it started to become really hard to let go of. But it ended up being a great example of the ethos of the record that sometimes your initial feeling is best and, after all that work, it led me right back to the beginning.” **“Bully”** “This is my favorite track on the album. When I was making it I had this eureka moment where I managed to make the chords keep modulating to create the sense of a constant ascent, while the vocal lines pitch higher and higher too. Thom then played a role in swapping bits of the arrangement around and I’m really happy with how it has turned out—I still always enjoy listening to it.” **“Dismissive”** “The chorus of ‘Dismissive’ is around five years old—I always liked it but it was a bit strident and I wasn’t sure where it could go musically. When I was playing around with it while I was writing the record, though, I ended up creating a midsection that allows other emotions to come through. The track became quite an odyssey, condensing a lot of complex meaning into an effervescent pop formula—or my idea of that.” **“Medicine” (feat. Thom Yorke)** “This was a real example of a track that took place in the ‘zone,’ where each part was played in one take and hardly changed. I initially couldn’t find the vocal tone for the lyrics, so I took a power nap, woke up and then sang it straight into my iPhone, which is what you hear on the finished version since it was perfect. I then sent it to Thom, who added a fantastic bassline and rounded it out.” **“Ladder”** “‘Ladder’ was one of the first tracks I sent to Thom around three years ago, which sparked our process of working together. I love how it builds to this orchestral release, which is an amazing part I recorded \[with an orchestra\] in Budapest, creating strings that sound like they’ve had a woozy my bloody valentine treatment. Right at the end there’s also a reference to the *Better Call Saul* theme, which I really enjoy listening to. It’s an unusual ending to the album.”

With over 50 hit singles and more than 100 million records sold, English synth-pop masters Depeche Mode could still play sold-out stadiums if they had stopped releasing music in the mid-’90s. “We could easily, if we wanted to, just go out and play the hits,” vocalist Dave Gahan tells Apple Music. “But that’s not what we’re about.” Depeche Mode’s 15th studio album is their first without co-founder and keyboardist Andy Fletcher, who passed away in 2022. This sad and hugely significant event in the band’s history is reflected in the album’s title. “*Memento Mori*—‘remember that you must die,’” Gahan says, translating the Latin phrase. “The music really will outlive all of us.” Main songwriter Martin Gore started working on the record early in the pandemic—well before Fletcher’s death—but recalls the moment when he played his demos for Gahan. “It’s always a tough moment when you have to present your songs for the first time to Dave,” he tells Apple Music. “I would’ve been presenting them to Andy as well, obviously. He passed away just days before I was about to send him the songs. And that’s one of the very sad parts about it, because he used to love getting the songs.” *Memento Mori* is notable for another big reason: It marks the first time Gore has worked with a songwriter outside of Depeche Mode. He teamed up with Psychedelic Furs vocalist Richard Butler on several tracks, including “Don’t Say You Love Me,” “Caroline’s Monkey,” and the pulsing lead single “Ghosts Again.” Surprisingly, the band tracked more than just the 12 songs that appear on the album. “We actually recorded 16 songs for this album, and it was very difficult to choose the 12 that made it,” Gore says. “That’s very unlike us, but we have four in the vault. It’s a very, very small vault. It’s like a thumb drive.” Despite the melancholy inherent in some of the songs, *Memento Mori* is ultimately life-affirming—and a testament to Depeche Mode’s commitment to the creative process. “It’s music, and it’s art, and it’s something that is incredibly informing,” Gahan says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be.” Below, he and Gore comment on a few of the key tracks. **“My Cosmos Is Mine”** Dave Gahan: “It’s actually one of my favorites on the album. When Martin first sent me the demo, it didn\'t strike me. But quite often those are the ones that creep up on me later—that I most identify with for some reason—and that song was one of those. I remember going to Martin\'s house and singing it, and I knew we were capturing something. I feel like I found a meaning in the song that I identified with, and I don\'t often. When I found my place with that song, I knew it was going to be a great introduction to *Memento Mori*.” **“Ghosts Again”** Gahan: “When I first heard that song, I was like, ‘Okay. I\'m in.’ The demo made me feel instant joy. I remember dancing around my living room, and my daughter came in and she was looking at me weird, like, ‘What\'s going on?’ I was like, ‘Don\'t you love this?’ She kind of started bopping along with me and she was like, ‘I get it. It\'s a really good song.’” **“Don’t Say You Love Me”** Gahan: “It’s very Scott Walker. To me, it’s this beautiful torch, but I love those kinds of songs. I mean, it’s like a movie or something. Martin wrote that one with Richard Butler.” Martin Gore: “Which is something I’ve never done before, worked with somebody outside the band. He reached out to me around April 2020. The pandemic had hit, and he just texted and said, ‘We should write some songs together.’ And he actually said that once before, like 10 years ago or something, but nothing ever came of it. But because it was the pandemic, I thought, ‘If I’m going to do something different, now is a good time to experiment.’ So we did, and we ended up writing six songs that I really like.” **“Speak to Me”** Gahan: “Well, it\'s sort of metaphors. The loneliness, the emptiness, the void, the wanting to be with people and life—and at the same time, not wanting to be. The initial idea came to me, but the song was incredibly elevated by Martin and our producers, James \[Ford\] and Marta \[Salogni\], into a different place, another world. And that\'s exactly where I wanted the song to go as well. But it’s beyond what I could have put together myself. It’s a very simple song, but honest and real. For me, it was the key that opened the door for me to make another Depeche Mode record with Martin. It was an answer to that question for me.”

***OUT WORLDWIDE ON FEB 24th, 2023*** Parisian quintet En Attendant Ana have dazzled since day one. From the muted strains of their 2016 EP “Songs From The Cave”, to the assured 2018 TiM debut “Lost & Found”, to the sparkling refrains of “Juillet”; released just before the world collapsed around us, and which stood as the band’s rebirth and purest statement of their music ambitions - until now. “Principia” is the band’s third album and is without a doubt their best yet. Bandleader & principal songwriter Margaux Bouchaudon’s voice anchors many of the songs on “Principia”, her crystalline delivery ringing out like a bell as the band swoons & sways beneath her. The songs on “Principia” were composed from a place of confusion about the state of the world and her place in it, looking outward and inward for answers. They question our perception of others, the one they have of us and finally the one we have of ourselves in a society where the individual is king and the group is forgotten. Guitarist Max Tomasso - newly joined just before the recording of “Juillet”- feels more “moved-in” on these tunes, his sly guitar-work gliding effortlessly through. No showboating - only prickling at the precise moment necessary in suit of the song itself. New member Vincent Hivert (their touring sound man, Hivert joined the group just as touring was underway for “Juillet”, replacing founding member Antoine Vaugelade)’s bass-work is rubbery & flexible, bouncing around and thru the melodies on a rhythmic sugar-high, practically urging on drummer Adrien Pollin’s metronomic swing. The band’s secret weapon, multi-instrumentalist Camille Frechou’s trumpet & saxophone are more present & considered in the arrangements, adding a new layer of sophistication to the group’s already debonair indie pop. Her beatific harmonies add a yearning to Bouchaudon’s lilting phrases; sometimes uplifting, other times melancholic. Bouchaudon says “One of the most important points we tried to focus on was the place given to each instrument. For the first time, we withdrew parts, we were careful not to play everyone at once and I think that the result is a much lighter album in which every musician has a specific place and moment”. But this album is also the first one to have been shaped entirely by the band, from the conception to the production. The meeting of Vincent Hivert and Margaux Bouchaudon gave birth to a duet in which the technical and artistic aspects were intertwined from the very beginning of the conception of “Principia”. Apart from reshaping En Attendant Ana’s dynamic, Vincent Hivert was able to think as a musician and producer as soon as they started working on Margaux Bouchaudon’s demos which brought a new dimension to their music. The two of them recorded and mixed the album together reuniting their references and artistic goals. “Principia” is a great step forward without sacrificing the things that make the band unique. The nods to French pop (both current & classic) still permeate the proceedings, and the group’s penchant for Anglo-Saxon indie pop from The Nineties (think Electrelane, Stereolab, American Analog Set) still rings out, but there’s an air of - dare we say - maturity in “Principia”s twelve songs. The group always felt a little ‘out-of’ and ‘ahead-of’ its time, but tunes like “Wonder” “The Cutoff” and “Same Old Story” are cinematic and romantic, and absolutely feel like the next great phase of an already great band.

PRE-ORDER out 2/24/2023 Faten Kanaan's fifth LP Afterpoem is a mysterious, smudgy, bittersweet, and uniquely playful album. Deeply melodic, it continues her poignant exploration of counterpoint as a narrative tool. From the repetitive structures of modern minimalism and early music/baroque influences - to more languid textural ebbs & tides, there's a warmth in her use of electronic instruments that gives the album a curiously timeless feel. Composing intuitively, her music has often been described as 'strange', mostly because it creates its own world- one that isn't easily categorised. The album's title refers to the haze of a poem's intended meaning being abstractly fleeting and barely graspable. Glistening threads of understanding still touch us - the poetry becoming intimately personal, and no further literal explanation is needed. "I find pleasure in music as a language that nudges and hints. There's a potential that lives in things left unsaid... meanings drifting in and out of focus... hovering like spirits. It's a romantic and earnest album... of yearning for lost places and people, while still looking out at the world with tenderness and humour".

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

“I wrote it as a story,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music about *STRUGGLER*. “The album is pretty much what would this story sound like.” You can tell. The Ghanaian Australian artist born Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s second album is a surreal concept album about a protagonist—the Roach—fighting for his life in a kind of post-apocalyptic world overrun with constant physical and metaphysical threats. The antagonist, God, stops at nothing to try and bring the Roach down, to destroy him both inside and out. “The Roach character is a metaphor for we as humans,” he says, “and the God character is a metaphor for all these huge uncontrollable forces around us, natural and man-made, these systems we\'ve built around us that were supposed to make our lives better. But at some point, we started feeling like we\'ve been caged by them and they’ve slipped out of our control.” Owusu-Ansah’s story lays out three philosophical concepts that the Roach journeys through: nihilism, existentialism, and, ultimately, absurdism, the latter of which was inspired in part by the Samuel Beckett play *Waiting for Godot* and Franz Kafka’s *Metamorphosis*. The title and its character were inspired by *Berserk*, a legendary manga series by Kentaro Miura which features a character who “just gets dealt the worst hand in life”, he explains. “He has to fight through these forces so unimaginably larger than himself, to the point where it can\'t even be called a fight. The other characters call him a struggler.” Owusu-Ansah’s debut, *Smiling With No Teeth*, was a concept album as well, albeit a more personal one that explored his journey with two “black dogs”—personifications of racism and depression. “I’d poured so much of my life experience into it,” he says. “When it was time to make album two, I had to reconfigure which well to draw from and how to be inspired again.” It was that search itself—an existential hunt for purpose in a world that feels (and is) absurd—that led to the story of *STRUGGLER*. Like his debut, it’s still personal, but in a universal way; it’s a journey that Owusu-Ansah feels humanity as a whole experiences in its search for meaning, sense, and the will to live. It’s a particularly prevalent experience in 2023, while the world is reeling from a pandemic, successive environmental disasters, and a growing financial crisis. The music, recorded with a range of producers in Australia and the US, reflects those feelings: frantic and punky at times, slinky and languid at others—and the tracks with the darkest themes often have the smoothest, loftiest melodies. Read on to explore the story and concepts within this thought-provoking record. **“Leaving the Light”** “I just wanted to jump straight into it. I wanted it to be the tone-setter for the album. When I think of the story setting, it\'s almost post-apocalyptic, barren. When we started making this song, we wanted it to feel like the world was ending. There’s a huge wall of fire and debris and wind, and somehow you are trying to outrun that. That’s the pace of the opening chapter for the album.” **“The Roach”** “‘The Roach’ and ‘The Old Man’ are where I introduce and give context to the two main characters. ‘The Roach’ is the story of this flawed antihero character that\'s just trying to move through life at this pace, but starting to question what the point is. We get a sense of their mentality and why they\'re doing what they\'re doing. Some lines in the second verse: ‘Feeling like Gregor Samsa, a bug in the cog of a gray-walled cancer/I’m trying to break free with a penciled stanza/So are we human, or are we dancer?/I\'ma waste a life trying to chase an answer.’ It’s like they\'re moving through life at a survivor\'s pace because they have to or they\'ll get crushed. But in their mind, they\'re starting to question the point. It\'s indicative of how we can feel at our lowest. There\'s this absurd whirlwind of chaos around you, but you just got to keep stepping and get to the next day.” **“The Old Man”** “I think the verses of ‘The Old Man’ also give more context to the Roach character, but then the choruses talk about this looming figure up in the sky that\'s dealing the bad hands, trying to mess up your life. The passages at the end are where we get the context to what the God character actually is. ‘Your master is a system. Your master is a suit, a dollar. Your master is a planet. Your master is chaos itself. Your master is absurdity itself.’” **“See Ya There”** “You have your ups and your downs, your peaks and your valleys. This is the abyss. This is the character at their low point. They\'ve been struggling, running through and fighting to figure it all out, and it\'s like, ‘What is the point of all of this turmoil and struggle that I\'ve been going through?’ Throughout the album, the three main philosophies it touches on are nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. This is definitely the point of nihilism. It\'s the scary and depressing realization, but the abyss inevitably comes before the transformation.” **“Freak Boy”** “This is stepping out of the existential crisis for a bit. This is the point where the character acknowledges they don\'t have the answers, they keep moving. Even if they don\'t have the answers, they don\'t want to fall into this pit of despair. The chorus goes, ‘Don\'t wanna turn out just like you, hating everything that you do/I hope I figure out a thing or two.’ On we forge. It’s almost a rejection of the abyss and all of that. It would be easy to want to close your eyes to everything that\'s going on around you and just live an ‘ignorance is bliss’ mentality, but maybe that\'s not the healthiest way to go. You gotta figure out how to do this right.” **“Tied Up!”** “I feel like it\'s easy to identify qualities when you put it into a character or a piece of fiction, but in reality, it’s all drawn from how I\'m seeing human beings. It\'s all of these qualities I see in everyday people that we don\'t acknowledge in ourselves every day. We don\'t give ourselves enough credit for it. ‘Tied Up!’ is a continuation of that. I feel like there\'s a point in giving up the need to feel in control of external circumstances and focusing more inward. Maybe, if I can\'t control the things around me, I can control my perspective of how those things look and how those things are. Maybe that will help me in my journey. Maybe there is some light somewhere, but maybe that comes from me first, not outside.” **“That\'s Life (A Swamp)”** “This one\'s kind of a journey. It\'s the two-part banger. I feel like it’s almost a step back into reality. With ‘Freak Boy’ and ‘Tied Up!’ you don\'t really get any conclusive answers; you never really will. I feel like it\'s the character trying different things to make their experience easier. ‘Tied Up!’ ended with the character being like, ‘Maybe if I can change my perspective on things, things will be easier.’ But that\'s a process that I feel puts a lot of onus and responsibility on you, and when the world is falling apart, I don\'t think you can really do that. That’s where the chorus comes from: ‘I said, baby, it’s not about me,’ and then in the second part, ‘My arms are tired from carrying the weight of your shit.’ It\'s a step back into the reality of the situation.” **“Balthazar”** “If ‘See Ya There’ was nihilism, then ‘Balthazar’ is existentialism. So ‘See Ya There’ was like, ‘There’s no meaning—oh *fuck*.’ Here, it’s like, ‘There’s no meaning. *Fuck yeah*, this is amazing.’ Maybe there’s no inherent meaning, but maybe all that means is we\'re not shackled by this predetermined thing we\'re supposed to do. Maybe that means we can make our own meaning. One of the first lines is about taking the power back into your own hands, and the second verse turns it into a battle against time. Maybe we can have control over ourselves and our destinies, but we gotta do it before time runs out. The second verse is almost paraphrasing a monologue from *Waiting for Godot*: ‘In one day we go blind… In one day we go deaf… We can fly, fall in love, waste aside, be the one.’ We can achieve or complete all of this in one day, and yet we choose to wait. Why? It opens up this idea where you can take control and do it now. Stop waiting. The time is now.” **“Stay Blessed”** “‘Stay Blessed’ is keeping on with this newfound empowerment through the realization that all of these things might have a negative side, but there\'s also a side of immense possibility, a ‘we\'re all in this together’ vibe. The Roach is everyone, and there are a million roaches out there because that\'s all of us. And that goes back to that line, ‘If you kill me now, you\'re gonna deal with roach number two.’ It\'s like, we can\'t be stopped. The song starts delving into that third and last philosophy of absurdism. Maybe there\'s no inherent meaning, and maybe we don\'t need to make our own meaning at all. We\'ve come this far in the journey, and we\'ve grown so much that maybe that\'s the gift itself. Maybe the fact that the sun rises and falls every day, and we get to see that from this magical distance where it\'s this giant ball of fire. It\'s far away enough where we get to feel its warmth, but it doesn\'t burn us to death. And we get to hug our friends every day, see cute little birds flying through the sky. It’s such a one-in-a-billion chance that this has all happened and we get to experience it. That’s absurdism to me. We exist in this world, and we can\'t buy or earn our way out of absurdity.” **“What Comes Will Come”** “It\'s a solidification of the journey so far. We go through these hardships and trials and tribulations, and maybe it\'s because of Hollywood media or just a naive sense of whatever, we expect the outcomes to be based on how good we are or how well we did. But we just live in this absurd reality. What comes will come, and that\'s not a bad thing. It\'s not a good thing, either. It\'s just a thing. Rollercoasters need their ups and their downs to make the full experience fun and exciting.” **“Stuck to the Fan”** “It’s not a happy ending. It\'s not a sad ending. It\'s not really even an ending. It\'s the point of acceptance. The Hollywood story arc is like, you climb the big mountain, and then there\'s a field of flowers for you to frolic in after your hard journey. In reality, you climb the mountain, and then there\'s another huge mountain waiting to be climbed. But the good thing about that is after you climb a new mountain, you become a better climber to get ready for the next big challenge and the next big hurdle. And I think that\'s just kind of indicative of life, which I wanted this story to be. I just wanted it to be an honest portrayal. Shit has hit the fan for so long that it\'s stuck there, and that\'s just the way it goes.”

On her transcendent new record, Workin' On A World, Iris DeMent faces the modern world — as it is right now — with its climate catastrophe, pandemic illness, and epidemic of violence and social injustice — and not only asks us how we can keep working towards a better world, but implores us to love each other, despite our very different ways of seeing. Her songs are her way of healing our broken inner and outer spaces. With an inimitable voice as John Prine described, "like you've heard, but not really," and unforgettable melodies rooted in hymns, gospel, and old country music, she's simply one of the finest singer-songwriters in America as well as one of our fiercest advocates for human rights. Her debut record Infamous Angel, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, was recently named one of the “greatest country albums of all time” by Rolling Stone, and the two albums that followed, My Life and The Way I Should, were both nominated for GRAMMYs. From there, DeMent released three records on her own label, Flariella Records, the most recent of which, The Trackless Woods (2015), was hailed as “a quietly powerful triumph” by The Guardian. DeMent’s songs have also been featured in film (True Grit) and television (The Leftovers) and recorded by numerous artists. Fittingly, she received the Americana Music Trailblazer Award in 2017. Workin' On A World, her seventh album, started with the worry that woke DeMent up after the 2016 elections: how can we survive this? “Every day some new trauma was being added to the old ones that kept repeating themselves, and like everybody else, I was just trying to bear up under it all,” she recalls. She returned to a truth she had known since childhood: music is medicine. “My mom always had a way of finding the song that would prove equal to whatever situation we were facing. Throughout my life, songs have been lending me a hand. Writing songs, singing songs, putting them on records, has been a way for me to extend that hand to others.” With grace, courage, and soul, Iris shares 13 anthems — love songs, really — to and for our broken inner and outer worlds. DeMent sets the stage for the album with the title track in which she moves from a sense of despair towards a place of promise. “Now I’m workin’ on a world I may never see / Joinin’ forces with the warriors of love / Who came before and will follow you and me.” She summons various social justice warriors, both past and present, to deliver messages of optimism. “How Long” references Martin Luther King, while “Warriors of Love” includes John Lewis and Rachel Corrie. “Goin’ Down To Sing in Texas” is an ode not only to gun control, but also to the brave folks who speak out against tyranny and endure the consequences in an unjust world. “I kept hearing a lot of talk about the arc of history that Dr. King so famously said bends towards justice,” she recalls. “I was having my doubts. But, then it dawned on me, he never said the arc would magically bend itself. Songs, over the course of history, have proven to be pretty good arc benders.” Bending inward, DeMent reaches agilely under the slippery surface of politics. She grapples with loss on the deeply honest “I Won’t Ask You Why,” while encouraging compassion over hate in the awe-inspiring “Say A Good Word.” Album closer “Waycross, Georgia,” encompasses the end of the journey, thanking those along the way. As she approaches subjects of aging, loss, suicide, and service, an arc of compassion elevated to something far beyond words is transmitted. The delicate fierceness encompassed in the riveting power of her voice has somehow only grown over time. Stalled partway through by the pandemic, the record took six years to make with the help of three friends and co-producers: Richard Bennett, Pieta Brown, and Jim Rooney. It was Pieta Brown who gave the record its final push. “Pieta asked me what had come of the recordings I’d done with Jim and Richard in 2019 and 2020. I told her I’d pretty much given up on trying to make a record. She asked would I mind if she had a listen. So, I had everything we’d done sent over to her, and not long after that I got a text, bouncing with exclamation marks: ‘You have a record and it’s called Workin’ On A World!’” With Bennett back in the studio with them, Brown and DeMent recorded several more songs and put the final touches on the record in Nashville in April of 2022. The result is a hopeful album — shimmering with brilliant flashes of poignant humor and uplifting tenderness — that speaks the truth, “in the way that truth is always hopeful,” she explains. Reflecting on the lyrics of the song “The Sacred Now” (“see these walls/ let’s bring ‘em on down / it’s not a dream; it’s the sacred now”), DeMent is reminded of Jesus saying the Kingdom of God is within you and the Buddhist activist monk Thich Nhat Hanh saying the rose is in the compost; the compost is in the rose. On Workin’ On A World, Iris DeMent demonstrates that songs are the healing and the healing arises through song.

제가 지금 누리고 있는 것들이 언제 사라질지, 언제 사람들이 제 곁을 떠날지 항상 두렵습니다. 모든 것들이 잠깐동안 밝게 빛났다가 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼 사라지는 일종의 마법이라고 생각합니다. 2집 발매 이후 제가 꾼 꿈들을 엮어서 만든 앨범입니다. 도움을 주신 전 세계 사람들에게 감사의 말씀을 드립니다. I'm always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened. This is an album that I made with my dreams I dreamed after my 2nd album. Thanks to people all over the world for the help.

Yorkston and Sweden’s The Second Hand Orchestra had no real plans to do a follow up, but as James visited his studio in Cellardyke, Fife everyday in early 2021, he began to start writing songs on the piano as opposed to his usual guitar as he gazed upon the sea outside his window. After sending the first five or six songs to Karl-Jonas Winqvist (the leader/conductor of TSHO), they began to discuss working on the music together. With Yorkston’s shift from guitar to piano, they thought about what other changes they could make to their process which led to the involvement of a guest singer and the legendary Nina Persson (The Cardigans) was brought into the fold.

“It’s seemingly about relationships with other people, but I think it’s more about a relationship with the higher power,” Jenny Lewis tells Apple Music about her fifth solo full-length. “And I’m not even talking about God—it’s the *details*.” By that, Lewis means the sort of simple, quotidian texture we might normally have overlooked before the pandemic took hold, when the world stood still long enough for us to truly appreciate them. At the time, the LA singer-songwriter had already written a number of songs that would end up on *Joy’All*. But like anything else, they evolved, Lewis continuing to edit and write on her own, at home alone in Laurel Canyon (or as part of a virtual songwriting workshop hosted by Beck) with the windows and doors open. “It was like, suddenly, there were no airplanes overhead, no cars on the street, no hikers even. The animals emerged from the canyon, and the house next to me was empty, so I could make a lot of noise.” Once lockdowns had loosened, she took to Nashville, where she recorded with acclaimed producer (and Apple Music Radio host) Dave Cobb, a perfect fit for Lewis’ work if there ever was one. “The songs pre-pandemic are a little more persons, places, and things, and then the songs post- are a little more existential musing,” she says. “Certainly, one element of *Joy’All* is gratitude and a sort of witnessing of the moment, because the moment was so traumatic for so many of us. It’s having a little breath and reflecting on the whole thing with gratitude. I personally had a profound shift. I can’t say if it’s a positive one, but it’s definitely a shift.” Here, Lewis zooms in on the details of a few songs. **“Psychos”** “‘Psychos’ has been around for a minute—it’s had a couple incarnations. It started out as a bossa nova, on a keyboard I have in Nashville, a CP-70 Yamaha. Then I recorded a version with my friend in the Midwest, kind of a remix version. And then I demoed it on GarageBand, on my iPhone, and took it to Dave. So, it had all these lives so far. If it’s a solid song, it can sort of exist in all the worlds. Some songs don’t translate from the album to a live setting or vice versa, but some are very fluid.” **“Joy’All”** “This one started out with a Purdie shuffle. Bernard Purdie is this famous session drummer, and he would do this thing with his fingers on the snare drum, and that’s fingers on the snare—so that set the tone. And I was so free on top of that rhythm. There’s a little bit of a blue note in there, too, but that’s intentional.” **“Puppy and a Truck”** “I was prompted in the Beck songwriting workshop, and this had been something I really had been living, because I actually do have a puppy and a truck, so it was pretty easy to write. But having the deadline in the workshop was crucial—I’d been thinking about it for a month, but I actually wrote it in 24 hours, and it was done. I wrote every line with my puppy by my side. And I played it every night opening for Harry Styles, and every night my production manager would bring Bobby \[Rhubarb\] out, with little doggy headphones on, and she knew—she knew it was me up there.” **“Apples and Oranges”** “It’s about a skateboarder. It was a waltz, and it had been around for a minute, and I was going to cut it for *On the Line*, but I didn’t for some reason. And I put it aside, and then I revisited my voice notes—which is my most valuable thing, all the stuff in my voice notes, thousands of bits of things—and I went back to it, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me change the time signature and the key, and then rework the bridge and demo it on my phone.’ And it was just a totally new song.” **“Giddy Up”** “It has a De La Soul reference: ‘The stakes is high, the whistle blows,’ which is kind of a #MeToo nod as well. There’s a lot going on in that song as far as it’s a plea for intimacy, but not without peril or potential peril. It’s like the risk of putting yourself out there. It’s really about cognitive dissonance, that song. Like, get on your pony and ride—you know this isn’t the thing.” **“Chain of Tears”** “It ends with the line, ‘If it ain’t right, it’s wrong.’ So, back on that cognitive-dissonance tip and the same plea in ‘Giddy Up,’ to get on the pony and get out there. I think it’s like, we have the facts, and we’re voting no.”

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

“I spent a lot of moments in my life trying to represent that I was a *bichota*—a boss girl—but I wasn’t feeling that way completely,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “It’s good and normal sometimes, feeling not that good and not in that mood—but that tomorrow is going to be beautiful.” That sentiment resonates from the first few moments of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*, on the lively opener “MIENTRAS ME CURO DEL CORA.” After dramatically impacting the very landscape of global Latin music with 2021’s career-defining *KG0516*, the Colombian superstar is now focused on what the future holds. If KAROL G’s phenomenal 2022 run of hit singles, from “PROVENZA” to “GATÚBELA” to “CAIRO,” whet her fans’ appetites, the bold and confessional *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* provides them with a downright decadent musical feast. Boasting an eclectic series of collaborations with the likes of Carla Morrison, Sean Paul, and Sech, to name a few, her latest album intrepidly explores sounds both familiar and previously unexplored as she further refines and even redefines her artistry. From the FINNEAS-produced alt-pop of “TUS GAFITAS” to the música mexicana stylings of “GUCCI LOS PAÑOS,” *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* sets a high bar across genres. All the while, she delivers powerhouse vocal performances with deeply personal lyrics bound to resonate with listeners. “I was scared to just show that vulnerability,” she says. “But this is the way my album came out, and now I just feel proud.” Among its numerous highlights, the undeniable centerpiece of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* is the momentous Shakira team-up “TQG,” an intergenerational and empowering single that unites these Colombian superstars at long last. “I was just seeing what was happening with Shakira in her personal life, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me contact her,’” she says of the track, one that had been shelved prior to recording this historic feature. “It was worth it for me to launch it again, for girls to represent that moment of the life.” Read more about some of KAROL G’s favorite *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* songs below. **“X SI VOLVEMOS”** “I believe that this duet with Romeo was, in fact, destined. The story of choosing Romeo began when I had originally finished the song. For a long period, I found myself unsatisfied with the end result, as if it was a recipe missing its final ingredient. After replaying the song, the thought of duetting with Romeo felt like the perfect idea. I felt that his voice, charisma, and undeniable sensuality would give life to this passionate track. Days after, I decided to post the track on social media, and coincidentally \[in\] what felt like destiny, Romeo reached out to say he loved the song and that he wanted to join. He was the secret ingredient, and this song wouldn’t be complete without his ‘so nasty’ spice.” **“TQG”** “My collaboration with Shakira is a dream come true. She has always been a reference for me, besides being Colombian. She is the kind of artist that you follow throughout their career and dream about how, one day, you want to represent your country in the incredible way that she has done. Working with her has been an enriching experience, and I have learned a lot from her. My admiration is profound. After Shakira sang about her own breakup, I shared the lyrics of ‘TQG’ with her, a song about that stage when you are ready to rip the bandages off and get back on your feet. She loved the lyrics and felt they represented her; in the end, we finished the song together.” **“TUS GAFITAS”** “‘TUS GAFITAS’ represents something special for me; I got to work with FINNEAS on this track, which also happened to be the first love song I wrote for *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*. I was heading to Cairo to shoot a video clip when I wrote the lyrics, which I think was symbolic of where I was on my healing journey. It was a fulfilling experience at many levels, personally and creatively, as I was also involved in the production process.” **“OJOS FERRARI”** “I love blending different genres together, and introducing dembow as an eccentric, upbeat track was essential to deliver my idea of a diverse album. My favorite part about the creative process is being able to collaborate with talent that have fresh ideas. Angel Dior and \[Justin\] Quiles brought that energy to the song. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be sad or profound but can also be a source of joy and excitement.” **“DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD”** “I always have a great time working with Sech; he is incredibly talented. In “DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD,” our styles fuse together perfectly to create a unique sound with its own flow and energy. We are thrilled with the final product and hope our fans will be too.” **“MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO”** “The album’s name is a phrase I repeated to myself when I saw or felt that things were wrong. I felt like I was going through a grand moment in my career, but I was very disconnected from myself and my surroundings. Sometimes, despite so many blessings that life had given me, I didn’t feel happy. So, every day I would say to myself, ‘No matter what, tomorrow it will be nice, tomorrow it will be nice.’ And that’s the message I want to convey to you, that even though life sometimes puts us in situations that no matter how bad they hurt us or how cloudy it gets, the next day, the sun will come out, and everything will be beautiful.”

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share. It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020. But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro, Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his songwriting impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand. “I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects. And so, Thomas seized upon his memories, creating what he calls “an album about love and nature and youth.” The result is Smalltown Stardust, a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalog. On Smalltown Stardust, Thomas takes us on his journey to a place where past and present collide, where he can be a dreamer in love with all that he sees. Images of his youth abound: from Route 91 which runs through his hometown (in “Smalltown Stardust”); to Redtooth, a spectre who used to roam the streets (“Bandits Of Blue Sky”); to old friends, old haunts and old dreams (“Always Find Me”); to Vermont’s Rock River, which gave its name to a song of a torch still burning for past love: “Those days are gone and we can’t rewind/ Cuz people grow and places change/ But my love for you will never fade away.” But at the core of Smalltown Stardust is Thomas’s desire to commune with nature on a spiritual level. Images of the natural world, from blizzards to green mountains to cloudy days, fill the songs and create a setting unmistakably far away from Los Angeles. “I consider nature to be my religion,” he explains, and Smalltown Stardust is nothing if not a spiritual exploration. Thomas’s identification as a sort of eternal spiritual seeker is underscored in one of the album’s sweetest moments, “A Meditation,” which features a home audio recording of Thomas as an eight year old, trying his hand at leading a meditation. It’s a journey that he continues to this day, as he intones on “Portrait of God”: “Walking in the woods, wading in the river” and “breathing in the mountain air” before heading back to a place where he finds himself “Oil painting in my garage/ Let my colors flow/ I’m working on my portrait of God.” While so much of Smalltown Stardust invokes idealized traces and places of Thomas’s past, the album’s recording process made his communal vision a reality. Thomas’s Los Angeles home in 2020 formed a micro-scene of sorts, with housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth recording their own heralded albums (2021’s Fun House and 2022’s Squeeze, respectively) at the same time. A shared spirit dominated an era spent largely on the premises, with Thomas serving as engineer and contributor to both records, and Ashworth working as co-producer on Smalltown Stardust. Thomas describes the time with a fitting metaphor: “I’ve always thrived around other people making things. You want to bloom with each other.” Ashworth’s contributions are vital to the album: she co-wrote a majority of the record and contributed vocals, arrangements, and instrumentation to each song. As Thomas notes, “I tried to follow her vision a lot. It helps to open your world to collaborators. You always get something completely different than you would have expected.” With the gorgeous orchestral tones of “Love Letter to Plants,” it’s immediately clear that Thomas is declaring a wider vision of what his music can be. Gone are many of the squalling guitars of previous King Tuff records, replaced with thoughtful, tender touches of cello and violin on “Love Letter to Plants,” “Pebbles In A Stream” and “The Bandits Of Blue Sky”; a plaintive saxophone on “Always Find Me”; and orchestral vocal harmonies with Ashworth that lift the songs to a celestial plane. (Though the rollicking, joyous leads on “Portrait of God” show Thomas hasn’t lost his touch on guitar.) On “How I Love,” Thomas makes clear that all of this is by design: “So lost in nothing but noise for so many years, I forgot to love.” In the end, Smalltown Stardust is not merely a nostalgia trip. In making the record, Thomas not only conjured a special time in his life, he found new inspiration, surrounded by a small circle of collaborators and a sense of love and wonder for nature. If the first King Tuff record was content to merely state Thomas was no longer dead, Smalltown Stardust is a paean to what that life means. A statement of belief and a hymnal to the magic still to behold all around us. “I’m a different person now than I was 20 years ago when I first started it. But oddly, when I first started the band, it was more like this,” he says. Which is to say, things have come full circle. Or as Thomas intones on “The Wheel”: “Ooh we were just kids then… Caught up in the turning of the wheel…. And it’s coming ‘round again.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what sets *Tension* apart from other Kylie Minogue albums. Everything we’ve come to expect from Minogue in the 35 years she’s been an integral force in pop culture—immaculate pop melodies infused with rapturous *joie de vivre* and a flirty attitude—is present. And yet, there *is* an intangible quality permeating *Tension*, making the familiar sound fresh and new. “I think it’s a natural confidence and acceptance of where I am,” Minogue tells Apple Music. “I’ve got more to say and I feel at ease to say much of it.” After 2018’s country-inspired *Golden* and 2020’s lockdown-blues-busting *Disco*, the Australian pop icon started work on what would become her 16th studio album, with “no vision,” just the guiding principle: “As long as it’s not boring.” Richard “Biff” Stannard, the Spice Girls producer who has worked with Minogue since her triumphant return to pop music on 2000’s *Light Years*, was her first port of call. “Biff knows pop, he knows indie, he knows cool, he knows me, and we love flitting around different sounds and genres, so it’s such a great place for me to start,” says Minogue. “Tentatively, no pressure. We try to just make it play, in the beginning.” That playful energy is at the core of *Tension*, perhaps best captured in the erotically charged title track, as well as “Things We Do for Love”—a high-octane blast of effervescent dance-pop—and “Hands,” on which Minogue raps (yes, really). This deluxe edition also features three extra tracks, including “Somebody to Love,” a tender, synth-led midtempo that emerged from the project’s earliest sessions. “We unearthed it for the bonus tracks and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we love this song!’ It’s like a hug,” Minogue says. Then there’s “Padam Padam,” the pulsing floor-filler that sent the world into a viral state of pop emergency, affectionately dubbed “the Padam-ic,” when it was released in May 2023. “Who knew it would kick off in this manner? That’s just been the icing on top of the cake,” says Minogue of “Padam Padam.” But it should come as no surprise to anyone loosely familiar with Minogue’s tendency to shatter expectations—something she admits is no accident. “It’s determination and belief and inspiration from real-life human stories that my music has played a part in,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, there are days where I just don’t know how I’m going to do it. The balance of that is the struggle. But I am determined and I love it.” Read on to find out more about each song on *Tension*, in her own words. **“Padam Padam”** “I heard the demo and loved it. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ And then once I’d self-recorded my vocals and put them in, I thought, ‘What’s more, this is amazing for me.’ I really felt like I was almost fused to this song, and we became greater than the sum of our parts.” **“Hold on to Now”** “I deeply, deeply love this song. The ‘na-na-na’ melody is from a voice note I sent to Biff \[Stannard\] in 2021, and a few months later, we built it up from there. Sonically, I think it’s beautiful. I heard it on some amazing speakers recently and I was fully transported—it felt connected and ‘other’ to me. I just really allowed myself to swim in it. I love that I feel like I’m asking the existential and immediate questions in one. But it’s about searching—when you’re so busy searching for answers, you forget being in the present. That’s why that speaks to me. I’m really very fond of it.” **“Things We Do for Love”** “The word this song brings to mind is ‘cardio.’ It’s got a bit of a *Footloose* feel. There’s no respite, it just keeps going and going, and the energy builds. ‘Things We Do for Love’ was written on the same day as ‘Tension,’ when \[UK songwriters and producers\] Kamille and Anya \[Jones\] came in. It took quite a bit of time at the back end in finishing the song, working out how to shape it so that the drive keeps going. It’s a weird structure, but I think it worked out really well.” **“Tension”** “The initial version was really out of place, and I wasn’t sure it would make the album. The lyrics were pretty edgy, the robo-voice was much more exaggerated—it just sounded very deep club. As it evolved, it was softened and finessed. Again, it was the shaping of the song that really stood out to me—it’s like a roller coaster ride, there are little diffusers that balance the song. You get on in the intro, with the piano stabs, it takes you up and up, closer and closer to the climax, it gets so edgy…then it drops. The bass comes in and you fly down that first big dipper. Then the second time it’s about to happen, you know what to expect, and your excitement level is even higher, because you know how thrilling it was.” **“One More Time”** “This started as another song. We parked it, but I really liked the track and I didn’t want to waste it. The week we were in Surrey \[for a writing camp with Minogue’s ‘bezzies’ Duck Blackwell (Halsey) and Jon Green (Paloma Faith)\], I had another idea—the ‘Slow down/Work it on out’ part—which was opposite to what we had already written. Jon came in with ‘I know your star sign/What’s on your bedside’ and there was a real cute attitude with it. It’s light and fun. The lyrics are revisiting, if not a relationship, at least a dalliance—it may or may not be romantic. There’s nothing deep in there, but it’s got a freedom to it.” **“You Still Get Me High”** “This started with Biff and Jon, and it was slower, more indulgent. I wanted to see if there was any potential with it, so I mentioned it to Duck one day and said, ‘I’d love you to be part of it and get your take on it.’ I think the combination of Biff, Duck, Jon, and myself—we just enhance each other. A lot of the euphoria comes from Jon, who is ‘the feels’; Biff’s got his pop brain permanently on. Then Duck brought it into line with what the album was becoming. It’s a bit of a split-personality song—I particularly love the end, with all the ad-libs.” **“Hands”** “My A&R manager Jamie Nelson prefaced sending me the demo of ‘Hands’ with, ‘I know you’re not a rapper, but I’ve got this idea…’ And of course, I’m way too curious and willing to give it a try, but I had to work a lot on trying to morph it to be ‘me.’ I wish I’d known earlier that the vocal \[on the demo\] was a male voice pitched to be in a ‘woman’s’ register, because that made me feel a bit better about how I couldn’t quite access the start of it. So the very beginning of the first verse is not me—we just left \[the demo vocal\] on the track—but the rest is, and I think I got my syncopation down fine. It’s the kind of fun, sunny-day song where, if anyone starts singing one segment, you have to keep going. You really can’t stop. I first listened to the demo in the car with my friend—windows down, sun shining—and it made perfect sense.” **“Green Light”** “‘Green Light’ is quite surprising to me. I think it might be a cousin to ‘Spinning Around’—it’s not as overt, it’s quite breezy and chill. But I did a listening party in a club in New York and before we played this song I said, ‘There aren’t that many relaxed, chill moments on the album, but this might be one of them.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sometimes you don’t know. ‘Green Light’ slapped, as I believe they say. It definitely sits in the groove.” **“Vegas High”** “I knew I was doing the Vegas residency, so I went with Biff and Duck to meet \[artist and writer\] Gerard O’Connell for the first time, and the four of us squashed into this tiny little studio to do a song related to Vegas. That was the mission for the day. We were talking about a romanticized, cinematic version of Vegas—driving to Vegas, when the roads get a bit more dusty and there’s a glimmering, almost like an oasis, or if you’re flying in at night and it’s much of nothing, and then there’s that little wonderland of Vegas—and the story unfolded really quickly. ‘Capture the magic and hold it in your hand.’ I recorded it there and then.” **“10 Out of 10” (Oliver Heldens feat. Kylie Minogue)** “This was originally just going to be for \[Dutch DJ\] Oliver. His team randomly reached out to my team and I thought, ‘This is fun, I can see people strutting along to this track.’ It’s another one that was quite difficult for me to get access to. The girl who did the demo has a wild voice—very different to mine—and a natural attitude. I never want to sound like a bad carbon copy, but because I can self-record now, I often will. I’m free to be a bad carbon copy and take on the best of what they’ve done, then wean myself off and find out where I fit. It wasn’t intended for my album, but we embraced it and I think it’s a nice addition.” **“Story”** “It meant so much to me to write this song. I don’t get into what the difficulty was, but I had to overcome some things and get through a difficult period, and I’m acknowledging that for my sake. There’s something about the dichotomy of the aloneness you feel and the help you get from people who will support you through any difficulty that I can’t put in words as well as I put it in the lyrics. Once you get through it, you appreciate that the people who were helping you will never know how much they are part of your story and how much they have helped you, in ways that you can never repay them. I was so delighted by the number of people who came up to me at the listening parties to say that they love ‘Story.’ I felt so moved, and vindicated really, that it’s not just speaking to me and the people I love, but to others as well. And they’ll take from it what they will.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.