AllMusic's Best of 2021

*Pink Noise*, Laura Mvula’s third full-length project, is a sexy album. “It really is,” Mvula tells Apple Music. “And I wanted it to be. I needed it to be.” Having felt boxed in by the success of her first two records, what she calls the “serious music” of 2013 debut *Sing to the Moon* and 2016’s *The Dreaming Room*, the UK singer-songwriter allowed herself to “paint using more colors than perhaps I let myself use before,” resulting in a vibrant, ’80s-influenced soundscape, shot through with rediscovered confidence and unabashed desire. Indebted to the era of MTV icons—Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince—this is sophisticated, luxurious, kinetic pop music. It demands that you dance. Mvula is deeply respected as an artist—classically trained, nominated twice for the Mercury Prize, the recipient of an Ivor Novello award—but *Pink Noise*, by deliberate design, presents her as not just a talent, but a superstar. “I had gotten so comfortable with everything being so focused on the music as its own thing, and somehow I was sort of separate from that,” she says. “This time I wanted to be front and center.” Here, Mvula walks us through *Pink Noise*, track by track. **“Safe Passage”** “\'Safe Passage\' was the first song I made that felt like the beginning of something. There’s a \[1988\] song by BeBe & CeCe Winans called ‘Heaven.’ And I knew I just needed to capture that sound, because that song was always played on a Sunday after church. And if I hear it now, I can smell Sunday dinner. I can go back there. I was creating the palette that this was going to be nostalgia. This body of work was going to be nostalgia, but brought into the present moment. It needed to make me and us feel good and safe and celebrated.” **“Conditional”** “I instinctively knew that ‘Conditional\' was going to be the most far-left thing that I\'d written or put out to that point. I didn’t grow up with hip-hop, so discovering it now in my own world, in my own way, since I started listening to Kanye, I\'ve just been floored by his level of creativity. A lot of what he does sounds like symphonies to me. The idea that you can make something so hypnotic and rich from the simplicity of a cyclical beat. There\'s so many thousands and millions of versions of how you can manipulate just one frequency. I remember messing around with that beat and then Dann Hume, who co-produced the album, took it to another level with the sounds that we were using.” **“Church Girl”** “Chris Martin FaceTimed me to tell me that this was his standout song. I\'d done it randomly on the train. And then I wrote the chorus chords like six months later, but didn\'t really have a melody or a verse for it. But the fact that the verse and the chorus lived in two different tonalities was always going to be the thing. The shifting gears is really important to me for the story of this song and letting go of the devils, so to speak, and figuring out how to dance. It\'s like looking back as well as looking forward all at the same time.” **“Remedy”** “I wanted to offer something direct to the struggle. It was during the time where people were taking to the streets and protesting. It needed to kick the way it did, it needed to slap the way it did, because I was pissed and tired and confused. I think that\'s all in that song. It was a direct point to Janet Jackson\'s *Rhythm Nation* and that whole era. The militant-ness of it was important for me. There\'s only so many times we can have the same conversation. My people are tired.” **“Magical”** “I only used to have a verse and chorus chords for this song for so long. I hated it. I rewrote the chorus, and once the chorus came, that’s when we knew it was a game-changer. My brother, my sister, my adopted brother from another mother came through, played guitar and sang on it. And we just basically put the song to bed. I can\'t describe to you the feeling when something becomes what it is: the mystery of music-making.” **“Pink Noise”** “The simplicity of this being a dance moment meant that I needed to draw, access things, tools I hadn\'t used before. I had to chip away at it slowly. It\'s not the kind of music where you play nine notes in a chord and it sounds lush. This is the kind of thing where if you put a few too many grains of whatever seasoning, it fucks the whole thing up. But you put it on and instantly you move, which is different for me. This is where the word ‘bop’ actually truly shines, because it is an actual bop.” **“Golden Ashes”** “My cry for help for anyone that feels like they suffer in silence. Which is unfortunately a universal truth, a very universal reality. I’ve always been good at crying and I’ve always been good at expressing my woes. I needed, in the midst of all this triumph, a space to do that on this record. Just towards the end where it peters out and you have this very strange dissonant harmony and the pulsating sort of circular breathing, it’s supposed to feel hypnotic, like \'Are we still here? Are we still in this moment?\' I\'m super proud of this song.” **“What Matters” (feat. Simon Neil)** “I don\'t think I\'ve said this before, but for me, this wasn\'t really going on the album. This was truly just for me, the Laura who doesn’t know what radio is, what streaming is—they don’t exist to me. It was like an afterthought, but then it became this lullaby anthem. Simon \[Neil, of Biffy Clyro\] is one of the most special humans I think I\'ll probably ever meet or work with, so reverent for music and the art of collaboration.” **“Got Me”** “I\'d been trying to pander to this picture of innocence and purity—all things that I do value on some level, but unfortunately, at a cost to ignoring a large part of who I am. I just needed a moment and an outlet to put into that. I feel like it serves a different purpose to any other song on the record. I don’t have to hide anymore in that way, and it’s really liberating.” **“Before the Dawn”** “When you are at a point where you\'re struggling and you feel like you\'re going through a moment in life where it\'s like, how on earth do you navigate this crisis? And you go back to the simple truths. My best friend said it to me first: ‘The night comes before the dawn.’ Which we all know, but it\'s just being reminded and reminding myself and singing to myself. Once I\'m in that and I reflect or meditate on that and it seeps more deeply into my subconscious, I find that I move with way more purpose and with less baggage.”

Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”

Most Mastodon fans probably knew it was only a matter of time before the band dropped a double album. The Atlanta metal squad’s intricate songs and dazzling prog tendencies have been begging for the Pink Floyd treatment for years—and the pandemic’s enforced downtime provided them with the window to do it. “With the extra time to work on material, we just kept writing,” Mastodon drummer, co-vocalist, and lyricist Brann Dailor tells Apple Music. “When we got to the point where we had 20 ideas that were pretty fleshed out, we said, ‘We need to stop now.’ From there, it was hard even narrowing it down to 15 songs, so I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we’d needed to make a single album.” Thematically, *Hushed and Grim* largely deals with the death of Mastodon’s longtime friend and manager Nick John, who was taken by cancer in 2018. “It’s definitely a representation of the time period we went through,” Dailor says. “The pandemic, Nick John’s passing, and other things that transpired for us during that time.” Below, he details some key tracks from the record. **“Pain With an Anchor”** “I think that\'s probably one of the first songs that came about for the album. I strung a couple of riffs together, and then \[guitarist\] Bill \[Kelliher\] and I sat down in his basement and combined a few more. He came up with that big, heavy riff at the end and all that cool stuff in the bridge. I added these weird vocal swells—and some thunderclaps—underneath to make it more evil and sinister. The drum intro didn’t come until much later, when we were about to cut it for real. I just had this idea to do this quads intro thing, which sort of cemented it as being the first song on the record.” **“More Than I Could Chew”** “That’s a big Bill riff. I really drove it straight on the drums and I didn’t deviate too much from that, which is a little bit different for me. I’m more of a frantic player, usually. The kick pattern also opened up a lane for me to sing over the top of it. I don’t think Bill was really expecting there to be this higher, soaring vocal over that. \[Bassist\] Troy \[Sanders\] came up with that last riff, the one that \[guitarist\] Brent \[Hinds\] solos over. I just love that part. Troy hasn’t really been a big writer in the band, but this time around he wrote four or five tracks.” **“The Beast”** “This is one of Brent’s, and I wrote some lyrics for him. It’s got that opening country guitar lick and then it goes into what seems like a blues shuffle to me. Brent’s voice is just awesome there—I think it’s really soulful and bluesy. And then it moves into sort of a proggy King Crimson-type part that leads into Marcus King’s solo, which I love. Brent and Marcus are good friends, so it was cool to bring Marcus in to do that. To me, it’s a real proggy-sounding solo and it really flexes Marcus’ talents as a masterful guitar player. And it’s cool for Brent to hand the reins over like that, being an amazing soloist himself.” **“Teardrinker”** “This is a simple two-part guitar thing I came up with on an acoustic. I’m not the most talented guitar player, so most of what I write is pretty simple—and then I turn it over to Bill to get the magic happening. I wrote this at a time when it wasn’t going well for me. I was in a dark place. I was actually living in this apartment that had no sofa, no TV—just an acoustic guitar and a bed. I was hijacking a bit of service off my phone so I could try to watch some shows on my iPad. It was a rough time, but I’m okay now. So it’s a big emotional song, but it turned out pretty catchy.” **“Pushing the Tides”** “There’s not a lot of rippers on this album, but this is a ripper that just feels good to play. It’s another one that came from sitting in Bill’s basement. The first riff reminds me of early AmRep stuff like Chokebore, Guzzard, or early-’90s Barkmarket maybe. There’s some prog influence there, some Killing Joke—all that stuff we’re into, being kids of the ’90s. We sort of came from that whole scene of underground, mathy stuff that was below the upper echelons of grunge. So it’s cool when that stuff pops up. It’s a fun song with a big chorus.” **“Dagger”** “Once you’ve decided that you’re making a double album, you can sprawl out a bit. I don’t know that this song would’ve been as cool as it ended up being if we didn’t go down the rabbit hole with it. We got a sarangi player, and my friend Dave Witte from Municipal Waste came in to do some percussion on these tribal drums and hunks of metal. Then we had our buddy come in and play some crazy Moog at the end. I’m stoked on it, but if it wasn’t for Troy’s voice, you’d have a hard time convincing even a Mastodon fan that this was a Mastodon song.” **“Had It All”** “This is an important song, and very Nick John-centric. He probably shows up in the lyrics of every song, but this one is specifically aimed at his situation. To have Kim Thayil do the solo was amazing, because Soundgarden was one of Nick’s favorite bands. And what a cool turn of events that Troy’s mom got to virtually jam on French horn with Kim on this one. Kim did a really beautiful, heart-wrenching solo, and then Troy’s mom added another beautiful texture with a nice little horn arrangement. This is the closest I think we’ve come to a ballad, I think, but it’s an emotional song for us. The only bummer is that Nick isn’t here to hear it.” **“Gigantium”** “This is another one I wrote when I was in that apartment. I call it the Sadness Hole. I don’t want to get into why I was there, but just to be clear, I wasn’t strung out on drugs or anything like that. It was a personal time. But the last riff really sounded like the end of something. It’s sad-sounding, but there’s also some hope there. So we put some string arrangements on it and Brent did this really beautiful guitar solo. The last line is for Nick John: ‘The mountains we made in the distance will be with us forever.’ I think it’s a beautiful farewell.”

German baritone Matthias Goerne’s burnished voice is perfect for this collection of rich, late-Romantic Austro-German songs. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dark, sensual harmonies of Wagner’s *Wesendonck Lieder*, forerunner to his great operatic masterpiece, *Tristan und Isolde*. There’s beauty and anguish, too, in the songs by Richard Strauss—the jubilant “Morgen!” (“Tomorrow!”) and valedictory “Im Abendrot” (“At Sunset” from *Four Last Songs*), for instance, are especially heartbreaking. The real discovery here, however, are Pfitzner’s songs on themes of love and loss. Abundantly expressive and melodically compelling, his swirling “Stimme der Sehnsucht” (“Voice of Longing”) is a haunting, troubled portrait of mental torment. Seong-Jin Cho is a superb piano partner whose playing has an orchestral depth without ever dominating.

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

Following up his score for the japanese Netflix Anime series “Carole & Tuesday”, Mocky returns to album mode with his new orchestral opus “Overtones For The Omniverse”. Just days before the first Covid lockdowns, Mocky brought a 16 person orchestra comprising of his usual who’s who of underground talent into LA’s Barefoot Studios (and into the same room where Stevie Wonder recorded “Songs in the Key of Life”) to record a pile of scores he had come up with during his previous year’s sabbatical in Portugal. The result is a stunning orchestral album recorded in 36 hours in one or two takes straight off the written page. Shunning the “possible perfection” of today's recording techniques, Mocky looked back as a way to find an alternate future. According to Mocky: “We had to do it quick with no rehearsal to capture that big open sound of people working together in a room - in all its imperfect glory. In the imperfections you find the humanity. And in today’s tech driven spaces you have to fight to preserve a space for humanity. I felt a deep desire to create a sonic trajectory path for us to follow as we ascend and evolve our understanding of love and what it means to be human. This is the inspiration for „Overtones for the Omniverse“”. The album runs the gamut from Steve Reich infused minimalism overlaid with Dorothy Ashby style harp runs (“Overtures”) to atonal analogue synth sounds over Martin Denny style percussion (“Bora!”). There's a classic Mocky crooning number that gives a Jim Henson-esque take on the state of “Humans” and the album as a whole captures Mocky's skill of bringing together the joyful energy of a unique cast of LA collaborators.

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”

In the two years following the August 2018 announcement of Playboi Carti’s *Whole Lotta Red*, you could have gauged any given Carti fan’s investment in the project by which song leak they claimed to have liked the most. One the internet took to calling “Kid Cudi” had a unique sort of staying power. That song does not appear on *Whole Lotta Red*, but Kid Cudi himself does, on “M3tamorphosis.” Of the project’s 24 songs, Cudi is one of three featured guests, appearing alongside likewise stylistic innovators Kanye West and Future. And so goes the story of the project: *Whole Lotta Red* is likely pretty close to what fans were expecting, but better. The production—provided by names like Pi’erre Bourne, Art Dealer, F1lthy, Juberlee, Richie Souf, Maaly Raw, and Wheezy—is consistently forward-thinking, toeing the line between 808-heavy post-trap rumble and the perpetually weird and increasingly popular avant-pop sound known as PC Music. There is less “baby voice” here than fans of *Die Lit* may have wanted, but the rapping (and singing) is some of Carti’s most impassioned and sharpest. Fans hung up on those early leaks might do well to consider them accidental gifts, because when it was time to deliver the album, Carti made sure we got the best of him. He just needed us to be patient.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ 2007 collaborative album *Raising Sand* remains, nearly a decade and a half after its release, a landmark record in roots music. The LP earned Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, and reigning bluegrass queen Krauss five Grammys at the 2009 ceremony, including the coveted Album of the Year trophy, among many other accolades. The album also offered a new vision for how artists could work within an already nebulous genre, with the two recording favorite songs new and old for a collection that still sounds timeless. Plant and Krauss reconvene on *Raise the Roof*, seeming, somehow, to pick right back up where they left off. Still present are the pair’s intimacy, their contrasting but complementary vocal styles, and, notably, the gentle hand of producer T Bone Burnett, who also helmed *Raising Sand*. While much remains the same, *Raise the Roof* is a decidedly larger affair than its predecessor, even in its quieter moments, thanks likely to each artist’s growth via work with other projects (Band of Joy and Sensational Space Shifters for Plant; longtime band Union Station for Krauss) in the intervening decade-plus. Covered artists include Calexico (“Quattro \[World Drifts In\]”), Allen Toussaint (“Trouble With My Lover”), and Merle Haggard (“Going Where the Lonely Go”), with the album’s tracklist revealing a catholic breadth of influences. The duo is backed by some of Nashville’s finest players, including guitarists Buddy Miller and Bill Frisell.

Saint Etienne’s 10th studio album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. By early 2020, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell had almost completed a different set of songs. But as lockdown took hold, there was no way to mix them and work paused. While they waited, the trio picked up an idea that was easier to explore from their own homes, one first investigated on 2018’s Christmas giveaway *Surrey North EP*. A few years earlier, Stanley had become drawn to vaporwave, a sound he’d found on YouTube. Bedroom producers were warping and tranquilizing ’80s R&B and setting it to images of abandoned buildings. The hazy sense of nostalgia intrigued Stanley. “The music that gets sampled and images that get used are American or Japanese,” he tells Apple Music. “So, we thought, ‘What if we use British imagery and samples to try to evoke a period in recent British history?’” They settled on 1997 to 2001, a period beginning with the installation of the Labour government and ending with 9/11. It felt like the last time Britain had been buoyed by widespread optimism and was an age that people were increasingly looking back on with yearning. “A lot of the problems we have at the moment, like social media, barely existed,” says Stanley. “The internet barely existed. The climate catastrophe—everyone knew it was possibly going to happen, but no one realized it would accelerate as fast as it has.” Exchanging files and thoughts across email and video calls, the trio foraged samples from the era’s R&B and pop, stretching and reshaping them into eight hypnotic pieces full of summery warmth and reflection. Melodies take hold slowly but doggedly, melancholy occasionally draws in like evening shade, and a gauzy sense of reverie acknowledges how nostalgia can blur details. “The whole point is memory is a very unreliable narrator,” says Stanley. “Every period has its grimness but, with the ’90s, it’s easy to see how people are focusing on the positivity. When we were teenagers, we really looked back at the ’60s and thought what an amazing period that was. But what we were looking at was The Monkees rather than people being lynched in the South.” Here, Stanley guides us along a journey through a half-remembered past, track by track. **“Music Again”** “It’s basically Pete’s work. We just found the samples together and he extended that and made it into a hypnotic, repetitive pattern, and Sarah wrote her lyric over the top. I like the fact that when I’ve mentioned that there’s a Honeyz sample \[‘Love of a Lifetime’\], people are like ‘obscure R&B band’ or whatever. But they obviously weren’t. At the time, they were all over Radio 2; I think they had a couple of Top 10 hits. We really wanted it to be something you might remember hearing, so it might actually jog a genuine memory from the time. So, the samples \[on the album\] were all from mainstream acts, just not the most obvious songs.” **“Pond House”** “\[The sampled track, Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Beauty on the Fire’\] got in the Top 30. With a lot of the samples, we were listening to albums from that period and just hearing if there was a snippet of something that we could use and expand. It’s almost like trying out a new instrument, trying out a guitar pedal, just seeing if there was something we could do with it. We were looking for good productions from the time, relatively smooth. I have playlists of all the ones that we never ended up using. There’s a song called ‘Sky’ by Sonique, a couple of Jamelia things—‘Antidote,’ ‘Life.’ Maybe we’ll use them in the future. Mel B’s solo stuff, Martine McCutcheon, Lutricia McNeal.” **“Fonteyn”** “\[The sample is\] a Lighthouse Family song, but it’s not the biggest hit, ‘Lifted’; it’s a relatively minor single \[‘Raincloud’\]. I remember hearing them on Radio 2 at the time, and I always really liked the bottom end of the piano working as a bassline, so that’s what we used.” **“Little K”** “We were just going back and forth, but basically Pete was sending us things that were essentially finished. It was like, ‘Well, this is terrific.’ Then Sarah would write lyrics and come up with the topline, then he’d fit them in and cut it up a bit like he did here on ‘Little K.’” **“Blue Kite”** “Pete did this in his studio at home. It was using bits of our own songs, from the early ’90s I think. That kind of abstraction reminds me of My Bloody Valentine, even though there’s no obvious guitars on it. I think it’s sad they never made another album 18 months after *Loveless*. Because I remember Colm, the drummer, was getting really into jungle, and I think they probably recorded stuff. I was thinking, ‘Wow, where’s this going to go?’ Then they just don’t make a record for 20-odd years instead. There were so many directions you could go in the early ’90s and so much music being made where you could take inspiration from it, from contemporary stuff. I think that really gave us a palette that we could use, as well as stuff from the past that we already liked—psychedelia, Northern Soul, or whatever.” **“I Remember It Well”** “I worked with a guy called Gus Bousfield, who does a lot of TV and film work. He’s an engineer, producer, and a multi-instrumentalist. That’s the kind of person I need to work with because I can barely play ‘Chopsticks.’ It’s great to have someone who can do everything you want. Gus recorded \[the sampled conversations here\] in an indoor market in Bradford. They’re heavily distorted and it sounds like human language, but you really can’t work out a single word. He plays guitar on this, which has a slight *Twin Peaks* feel.” **“Penlop”** “I think this probably had the most time spent on it. Pete did a version that was about eight minutes long. It got more distorted towards the end. I just love the way it has a part where it drops down, then comes crashing in. And then it goes up another level after that.” **“Broad River”** “The piano part is the intro to a Tasmin Archer song \[‘Ripped Inside’\]. That’s all we took from that, I think, a bar of piano or whatever, two bars. It’s funny because a lot of people have said, ‘Oh, this is the first time you did sampling since \[1993 album\] *So Tough*.’ And it isn’t. I suppose we’ve just not used it as obviously. There’s plenty of things we’ve recorded over the years which have samples on them, but you can take a bit of an existing song and make something completely new, with a completely new atmosphere. I think this is one of the cases, because I love the way it sounds on ‘Broad River’ and the Tasmin Archer song is obviously a fair bit darker.”

GET TAPES AT: explodinginsoundrecords.bandcamp.com/album/bye-for-now Vocals, guitars, drums, bass by Jordyn Blakely Recorded and engineered by Dan Francia and Jordyn Blakely Mixed by Nick Dooley Mastered by Amar Lal Keyboards on "Pretty Today" by Isabella Mingione Lead guitars on "Pretty Today" engineered by Devin McKnight Keyboards on "Snail S(h)ell" by Emma Witmer Lead guitars on "Shit Apple" engineered by Devin McKnight and Jim Hill Artwork by Steve Hartlett and Jordyn Blakely Layout by Brant Louck and Jordyn Blakely

“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.” Since their 2013 debut LP *Burn*, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene—deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music. On *Black to the Future*, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet is at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message—welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s *Your Queen Is a Reptile*) to further contextualize the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory. If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem—a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn\'t meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it\'s descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that\'s more than what you\'d have if you considered the music or the line separately.” Here, Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks. **“Field Negus” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “This track was written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, and it was a time that was charged with an energy of searching for meaning. People were actually starting to talk about Black experience and Black history as it related to the present, in a way that hadn\'t really been done in Britain before. The point of artists is to be able to document these moments in history and time, and be able to actually find a way of contextualizing them in a way that\'s poetic. The aim of this track is to keep that conversation going and keep the reflections happening. I\'ve been working with Joshua for 15 years and I really appreciate his perspective on the political realm. He\'s got a way of describing reality in a manner which makes you think deeply. He never loses humor and he never loses his sense of sharpness.” **“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (feat. Moor Mother & Angel Bat Dawid)** “It started off with me writing the bassline, which I thought was going to be a grime bassline. But then in the pandemic lockdown, I added layers of horns and woodwinds. It took it completely out of the grime space and put it more in that Antillean-Caribbean atmosphere. It really showed me that there\'s a lot of intersecting links between these musics that sometimes you\'re not even aware of until you start really diving into their potential and start adding and taking away things. It was really great to actually discover that the tune had more to offer than I envisioned in the beginning. Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother are both on this one, and the only thing I asked them to do was to listen to the track and just give their honest interpretation of what the music brings out of them.” **“Think of Home”** “If you\'re thinking poetically, you\'ve got that frantic energy of \'Burning Cross,\' which signifies dealing with those issues of oppression. Then at the end of that process of dealing with them, you\'ve got to still remember the place that you come from. You\'ve got to think about the utopia, think about that serene tranquil place so that you\'re not consumed in the battle. It\'s not really trying to be a Caribbean track per se, but I was trying to get that feeling of when I think back to my days growing up in Barbados. This is the feeling I had when I remember the music that was made at that time.” **“Hustle” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “The title of the track links back to the title of our second album, *Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do*. The answer to that question is to hustle. Our grandparents came and migrated to Britain, not to just be British per se, but so that they could then create a better life for themselves and their families and have the future be one with dignity and pride. I gave these words to Kojey and he said that he finds it difficult to depict these types of struggles considering that he\'s not in the present moment within the same struggle that he grew up in. He felt it was disingenuous for him to talk about the struggle. I told him that he\'s a storyteller, and storytelling isn\'t always autobiographical. His gift is to be able to tell stories for his community, and to remember that he\'s also an orator of their history regardless of where his personal journey has led him.” **“For the Culture” (feat. D Double E)** “Originally, we\'d intended D Double E to be on \'Pick Up Your Burning Cross.\' But he came into the studio and it really wasn\'t the vibe that he was in. We played him the demo of this track and his face lit up. He was like, \'Let\'s go into the studio. I know what to do.\' It was one take and that was it. I think this might be one of my favorite tunes on the album. The reason I called it \'For the Culture\' is that it puts me back into what it felt like to be a teenager in Barbados in the \'90s, going into the dance halls and really learning what it is to dance. It\'s not just all about it being hard and struggling and striving; there is that fun element of celebrating what it is to be sensual and to be alive and love music and partying and just joyfulness.” **“To Never Forget the Source”** “I gave this really short melody to the band, maybe like four bars for the melody and a very repeated bassline. We played it for about half an hour, where the drums and bass entered slowly and I played the melody again and again. The idea of this, when we recorded in the studio, is that it needs to be the vibe and spirit of how we are playing together. So it wasn\'t about stopping and starting and being anxious. We need to play it until the feeling is right. The clarinets and the flutes on this one is maybe the one I\'m most proud of in terms of adding a counterpoint line, which really offsets and emphasizes the original saxophone and tuba line.” **“In Remembrance of Those Fallen”** “The idea of \'In Remembrance of Those Fallen\' is to give homage to those people that have been fighting for liberation and freedom within all those anti-colonial movements, and remember the ongoing struggle for dignity within especially the Black world in Africa. It\'s trying to get that feeling of \'We can do this. We can go forward, regardless of what hurdles have been done and of what hurdles we\'ve encountered.\' But, musically, there\'s so many layers to this. I was excited with how, on one side, the drums are doing what you\'d describe as Afro-jazz, and on the other one, it\'s doing a really primal sound—but mixing it in a way where you feel the impact of those two contrasting drum patterns. This is at the heart of what I like about the drums in Kemet. Regardless of what they\'re doing, the end result becomes one pulsating, forward-moving machine.” **“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”** “I was listening to a lot of \[Brazilian composer\] Hermeto Pascoal while making the album, and my mind was going onto those beautiful melodies that Hermeto sometimes makes. Songs that feel like you remember them, but they\'ve got a level of harmonic intricacy, which means that there\'s something disorienting too. It\'s like you\'re hearing a nursery rhyme in a dream, hearing the basic contour of the melody, but there\'s just something below the surface that disorientates you and throws you off what you know of it. It\'s one of the only times I\'ve ever heard that midtempo soca descend into brutal free jazz.” **“Envision Yourself Levitating”** “This one also features one of my heroes on the saxophone, Kebbi Williams, who does the first saxophone solo on the track. His music has got that real New Orleans communal vibe to it. For me, this is the height of music making—when you can make music that\'s easy enough to play its constituent parts, but when it all pieces together, it becomes a complex tapestry. It\'s the first point in the album where I do an actual solo with backing parts. This is, in essence, what a lot of calypso bands do in Barbados. So when you\'ve got traditional calypso music, you\'ll get a performer who is singing their melody and then you\'ve got these horn section parts that intersect and interact with the melody that the calypsonian is singing. It\'s that idea of an interchange between the band backing the chief melodic line.” **“Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong”** “It\'s about optimism, but not an optimism where you have a smile on your face. An optimism where you\'re resigned to the place of defeat within the big spectrum of things. It\'s having to actually resign yourself to what has happened in the continued dismantling of Black civilization, and how Black people are regarded as a whole in the world within a certain light; but then understanding that it\'s part of a broader process of rising to something else, rising to a new era. Also, on the more technical side of the recording of this tune, this was the first tune that we recorded for the whole session. It\'s the first take of the first tune on the first day.” **“Black” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “There was a point where we all got into the studio and I asked that we go into these breathing exercises where we essentially just breathe in really deeply about 30 times, and at the end of 30, we breathe out and hold it for as long as you can with nothing inside. We did one of these exercises while lying on the floor with our eyes shut in pitch blackness. I asked everyone to scream as hard as we can, really just let it out. No one could have anything in their ears apart from the track, so no one was aware of how anyone else sounded. It was complete no-self-awareness, no shyness. It\'s like a cathartic ritual to really just let it out, however you want.”

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

Steve Gunn thought he was ready to begin recording his sixth solo LP in early 2020. “In retrospect,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter tells Apple Music, “I wasn’t. I was trying to force it.” As the pandemic scuttled all plans to record and tour, he began “immersing” himself in his demos, refining his work, trading ideas with longtime collaborator Justin Tripp, a key player on 2014’s *Way Out Weather*. “It was transformative,” Gunn says of the experience, which saw him embrace writing on piano and classical guitar. “We talked a lot about how we wanted to make the music more melodic, to give the music more space, to not overdo it, to let the songs live and breathe in a more simple way. I think I cracked through a certain shell of myself or something. I just calmed down.” You can certainly hear that in *Other You*, an iridescent set of bottomless folk and gentle rock that Gunn eventually recorded in a bubble, in LA, with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck, Guided By Voices) later that year. It’s a record that’s rooted in empathy, in stepping outside of yourself. And following the loss of a close friend to COVID in the early stages of the pandemic, it came at a crucial moment for Gunn. “It was a shock,” he says of his friend’s death. “I went through a really hard time in the beginning. But I did a lot of work to pull myself out of it, really relying on this record, on the process of making it. It was a real letting-go period for me—I started accepting a lot of things and I started feeling a lot better. Partially, I think that’s what it’s about.” Here, Gunn tells us the stories behind some of the album’s songs. **“Other You”** “I was doing a lot of harmonizing, which was new to me. I couldn’t get this one note and Rob was trying to help me, playing the note on the piano. He opened this program and replicated my voice to sing the note, and he played it back to me through headphones. It was pretty incredible—it was me, but it sounded like a robot. He was like, ‘Do you hear that? Sing to that. Sing to the other you.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God. The other you: That’s the title of the record.’ It just made so much sense. That’s essentially what the song is—finding a different space, different sorts of inspirations, a different sound.” **“Fulton”** “Walking is very important to me, in particular when I was writing this record. I was wandering around my neighborhood, thinking about the people that are near and dear to me, how supportive they’ve been, and how sometimes joy and happiness can be just tapping you on the shoulder. I was thinking of me, shutting down and sitting in silence, letting a lot of things go, releasing a lot of stuff that I was holding onto really tightly. There was a particular moment that I reference in the song where I was listening to news radio, and the station just shut off. It represented what I’d been trying to achieve in enjoying silence and realizing how powerful that can be.” **“Circuit Rider”** “I came up with this riff, and it’s circular—goes backwards and then it goes the other way. It’s a reel or, in modern terms, a loop. It came from a British folk style that I learned how to play a lot of and, lyrically, I feel like we’re living in a time of real science fiction. I was trying to write a song from the perspective of a cyborg, the circuit rider, who’s observing someone in modern times, who’s in a current situation, and being super distraught as they’re observing. I feel like there are a lot of detriments to the way that people interact and socialize, and the way that people perceive reality and ego. It’s dangerous territory. I was imagining this creaky robot telling us, ‘You don’t have to submit yourself to this.’” **“Protection”** “In 2019, I was all over the world, and I just came back completely empty, feeling like I needed a break to figure out a lot of things in my life. I was thinking about how you can rely on a lighthouse to get back to where you’re going if you’re lost. It’s a hopeful song about trying to find your path and it’s not just about myself—it’s an empathetic song for others as well. And I have to say, it coincided with the heightened level of anxiety that we’ve been in—how unprotected we’ve all felt. There’s a new sense of vulnerability with everything.” **“Reflection”** “Originally, it was just this super-simple piano thing, and it helped me sing differently, in a more emphatic way, and really use my voice. I was thinking a lot about Robert Wyatt: It almost sounds like he’s visualizing certain things, playing these chords, almost doing some free-associative language. He’s very playful with his words, and it almost feels like he’s being spontaneous as he’s composing. I just did this off-the-cuff, in a style that, perhaps, Robert Wyatt would. It feels really free and not precious. It paints a picture.” **“Ever Feel That Way”** “There was this incident that happened in Atlanta—this young man, Rayshard Brooks, was murdered by the police. I was so heartbroken to read about it. He basically asked them for help. He was driving home to see his family, and he was drunk in a parking lot, trying to sober up. There’s this Tibetan exercise called Tonglen, which is where you sit and meditate and you think about others—the people you love, but also everyone that’s surrounding you and what they’re going through. This guy, he just needed a little bit of help. I was thinking about him, and turning it back on the cop to say, ‘Hey, man. Have you ever felt this way? You definitely have.’ I was just trying to convey the fact that I’ve certainly been there, and everyone I know has been there. Everyone needs help.”

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”

\"I have this idea that if the record was a movie poster there\'d be a tagline that was like, \'Power, Wealth, and Mental Health,\'\" Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn tells Apple Music. \"It felt like a heavy time in 2019 to write all this stuff, and then 2020 came and just kind of like put a bow on it.\" With their eighth studio album, the Brooklyn-based sextet tackles subjects like technology, consumerism, and income inequality over a sonic palette that broadens the band\'s dose of heady alternative rock. *Open Door Policy* is the second release since keyboardist Franz Nicolay rejoined the band, laying the foundation for tracks like the burnt-out \"Heavy Covenant\" and sleek \"Hanover Camera,\" solidifying what Finn calls the best collection of Hold Steady tracks yet. \"I think The Hold Steady 3.0 feels sort of like a Super Steady,\" he says. \"The thing I\'m really psyched about this record is the story of \[guitarist\] Steve \[Selvidge\] and Franz finding space for each other and kind of defining the sound of this version of The Hold Steady. It\'s a huge part of the success of this version of the band.\" Here, Finn and Nicolay guide us through *Open Door Policy*\'s 11 tracks. **The Feelers** Craig Finn: \"I felt like this song\'s kind of an invitation into the story. This could be a dramatic opener in the sense of a drama or a play or a musical or something, something that kind of starts soft and builds up.\'\" Franz Nicolay: \"It announces that this is the kind of record that\'s going to be on this sort of grander scope and dealing with these darker themes.\" **Spices** CF: \"I\'ve got a phone that saves your contacts even when you change phones. And so like if I look through my phone I have so many people in here and each one of them could pop up at any moment, each one I could get a text from. And I was obsessed with that as sort of like your phone is this device that might lead you into a situation or story. There\'s this disembodied connection to it that we didn\'t have with landlines as much.\" **Lanyards** CF: \"This is a song about someone going out to California to follow their dreams. It relays the parallel stories in the choruses when he talks about lanyards and laminates and wristbands. All these things that we use to get access to like the VIP area, or trying to get into the party where the free drinks are or whatever. So it kind of was a meditation on that, of pursuing that kind of access and going and trying to find it and it not working out.\" FN: \"This for me is really the heart of the record. There\'s a real texture, like this sort of carpet of guitars and the keyboards, and it\'s just like all melded together with these amazing lyrics. It\'s not showy, but it\'s got all the parts in their place.\" **Family Farm** CF: \"The lyrics mention the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo in \'Eruption,\' and here we are when the record\'s released and Eddie Van Halen has passed. And I think that the reason I love this and why I bring this up is because a lot of people talk about things like Springsteen or The Replacements when they talk about The Hold Steady. But in some ways, Van Halen was also a big influence. There\'s one guy who\'s kind of talking or yelling, and there\'s another guy playing a lot of guitar solos.\" **Unpleasant Breakfast** CF: \"I think this is a song that we might not have done a few years back. But we just did these shows at the Brooklyn Bowl in December \[2020\] and Franz informed us that we have like 119 songs. So when you have 119 songs, you can kind of be like, \'Well, this one\'s going to have a drum machine.\' It\'s possibly my favorite song on the record because it tells a really good and a really sad story and I love that it\'s unique to our catalog. It may be something that people weren\'t expecting.\" FN: \"I think Craig has said before the thing that he brings to the table is he\'s not really a hard-rock guy. He\'s much more in this sort of midtempo groovy jam-band world, and so he\'s really drawn to a song like this that puts us a little more out of our comfort zone in a productive way.\" **Heavy Covenant** FN: \"When we were down in Nashville for our shows a couple years ago, I stayed in the hotel room and did computer demos. And this came from two of those. Basically the verse and the chorus were one song and the bridge was an entirely different song that Craig and Josh \[Kaufman, producer\] were like, \'What if we just take the beginning of that second demo and plop it right in the middle of the first demo?\' And it worked.\" **The Prior Procedure** CF: \"This track has to do with people who are kind of displaced, wandering the desert, so to speak, and go to a place that a really rich guy owns and is making available to anyone who wants to. So there\'s your open-door policy. But the idea is that this guy\'s really rich. He still has control over it and he still won\'t give up the control, and I think that that\'s a thing we find a lot with like really rich guys having their own charities, et cetera. It still has a thumb on it.\" **Riptown** CF: \"This might have been the last song that came together. And there\'s kind of a fast-talking thing that I just tried to do. But mainly, it just rides that groove and it\'s one of those that I think that benefited from not overthinking or pushing too hard on it.\" FN: \"Every time we were on a break, \[guitarist\] Tad \[Kubler\] would just walk around with an acoustic guitar playing this riff. And eventually we were like, ‘I guess that\'s a song that has some creative energy right now behind it.’ There was an idea about doing it like a Guided By Voices thing with that sort of blown-out acoustic guitar vibe.\" **Me & Magdalena** CF: \"When we got done with this and the record was all turned in, I somehow came across another song called ‘Me & Magdalena’ by The Monkees. And what\'s weirder is it\'s a new record by The Monkees which Adam Schlesinger produced and Ben Gibbard wrote the song. And then I listened to the song and it\'s a great song. And I know I\'ve never heard that song before, because I would have known it because I like it so much. But that said, I must have seen the song title and like subconsciously internalized it, because it seems like too much of a coincidence to come up with the first line of the song and then name the song that. So apologies to everyone, but it\'s a totally different song.\" **Hanover Camera** FN: \"Kind of a creepy song, right? Again, it\'s that expectation of, like, \'Oh, here\'s where the solo\'s going to go in,\' and then it\'s like there\'s this gaping absence where it might be that I think is really evocative.\" **Parade Days (Bonus Track)** CF: \"This is a bonus track rather than an album cut because thematically I think it\'s set aside. It\'s about someone like myself who grew up in Minneapolis, and it\'s about the changes that the city\'s made during their lifetime. If we recorded like eight more, maybe we\'d hold on to them and wait for the bonus edition down the line. But it just felt like we should let people hear the other song recorded, especially with the digital platform these days.\"

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”

“This is the first record I’ve made where I had a clear vision of where I wanted it to go from start to finish,” trumpeter and composer Theo Croker tells Apple Music. “It plays like a movie soundtrack, following an astral traveler through a reconnection with his ancestral history.” Coming to prominence with his 2014 major-label debut, *AfroPhysicist*, Croker has since gone on to receive a Grammy nomination for 2019’s *Star People Nation* and has lent his uniquely lyrical trumpet melodies to the likes of rappers Common and J. Cole, as well as singer Ari Lennox. For his sixth album, *BLK2LIFE // A FUTURE PAST*, Croker imagines a fantastical, Afrofuturist sonic landscape that encompasses the broken-beat polyrhythms of “Lucid Dream,” the funk thump of “Soul Call // Vibrate,” and the soulful balladry of “No More Maybe”—all tied together by his piercing horn tone. “It’s a hero’s story, with the trumpet as the main character,” he says. Here, Croker walks us through each scene. **“4KNOWLEDGE”** “This is the beginning of the movie, where the mothership drops off myself and my other musicians on Earth and charges us to go out and raise some vibrations. It’s us being given our message and our purpose. I’m setting up the listener for the rest of the record, musically, with these ethereal sounds of the ship landing in the center of a jungle.” **“Soul Call // Vibrate”** “This is a call to action. It’s us moving around the planet, inserting vibrations in the people we’ve come across, and drawing energy from the environment. You can hear the water, the birds, and the air moving. It’s really connecting with the planet and all the different elements to call your soul home and to raise your vibration.” **“Just Be (Prelude)”** “‘Just Be’ was meant to be an orchestral interlude, but COVID didn’t allow such a large session to happen. Instead, we just performed it as a trio with trumpet, piano, and bass in only one or two takes, and it ended up as a beautiful prelude, setting up ‘Every Part of Me’ sonically.” **“Every Part of Me” (feat. Ari Lennox)** “‘Every Part of Me’ was a really collaborative track. I recorded a bunch of melodies with Ari Lennox and then we sent it to Ego Ella May, who wrote these beautiful lyrics on what it means to be accepted as a nuanced person—as a woman of color—in the world. I really wanted to get a woman of color to tell a story that you might not normally hear in my music, to give her freedom with her lyricism and melodies.” **“Anthem” (feat. Gary Bartz)** “Gary and I have worked together a few times and he’s a great mentor of mine. We ended up recording a whole bunch of songs, but only this one made this album. There’s hardly any improvisation on the track, since we had Gary overdubbing himself to create this amazing, anthemic horn section. Once it was finished, we both agreed that there was no need for him to solo, since this record is about melody, rhythm, and harmony.” **“Lucid Dream” (feat. Charlotte Dos Santos)** “This is a great tune and it’s got an odd form to it. The drums are supposed to be super active, while the harmony floats over it. It’s supposed to feel like a lucid dream or an astral travel, since it’s the spiritual awakening of our hero. Charlotte Dos Santos is a composer and singer that I really admire, and she did a magnificent job nailing the melodies in a way that worked so intuitively with what I had played.” **“Where Will You Go” (feat. Kassa Overall)** “I’ve worked and studied with Kassa for over 15 years, and there’s always a lot of intention when we collaborate—it has to be unique. He brought in this idea based on a Chopin piece that we chopped up and sampled. We then recorded live takes of it with him doing these vocal effects and MCing. It’s lyrically about understanding that there is no way to go but inward when you want to cultivate the hero inside of yourself.” **“No More Maybe” (feat. Iman Omari)** “I sent Iman Omari a take of us playing the melody of this track live, and he sampled it and then wrote and recorded these lyrics. Musically, the trumpet starts off in a very ethereal plane, almost like it’s outside of planet Earth, and Iman Omari is inside the sphere and I’m trying to get his soul to wake up and come out to see the bigger picture, to transcend, which he does beautifully.” **“Happy Feet (for dancers)” (feat. Malaya)** “This song is about Black joy and feeling good in the love that you have for yourself. It’s the scene in the movie where the hero gets to party a little before going into his final battles. Malaya is a great up-and-coming singer and lyricist, and she has the ability to write lyrics to any melody that I create, which is so unique. Melodically, I was incorporating the Detroit house style of Moodymann and Tall Black Guy, which brings so much joy.” **“Imperishable Star”** “This is the self-reflective moment of the hero’s journey, where he’s in deep meditation. We’re all made of stardust and the imperishable star is the one that doesn’t waver, that you can always find and follow. At this moment, the hero is tapping into his imperishable star and aligning himself before his final test.” **“State of the Union 444” (feat. Wyclef Jean)** “‘State of the Union’ came about after the record was finished. I was playing what I had worked on for Wyclef and he really wanted to get on ‘Hero Stomp,’ but that wouldn’t have worked in terms of the narrative of the record. So, I called Kassa Overall, who flipped all those samples and stems to create this introduction to ‘Hero Stomp,’ where the mothership returns and sends down an emissary to address the planet. Wyclef is that emissary and he delivers this immense state of the union with some of his finest bars.” **“Hero Stomp // A Future Past”** “‘Hero Stomp’ is a call and answer. It’s the part of the story where the hero is proving his worth and going through his rite of passage to then receive the strength and power of his ancestors. Only then can he transcend into his highest self. It has over 20 tracks of horns layered on it to create the effect of me facing my demons and raising up my spirit through the music.” **“Pathways”** “This is a continuation from ‘Hero Stomp.’ It is the final movement of the journey and the acceptance of the hero by his ancestors. He has received their blessing, and so this is the celebratory moment where everyone is partying to a mission accomplished. It is a joyous end to the journey.”

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

For Valerie June, spirituality and creativity are one and the same. The acclaimed singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist offered cosmic wisdom on her 2017 sophomore album *The Order of Time*, a collection of folk-leaning tracks that also significantly raised the profile of the Tennessee native. On her follow-up *The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers*, June leans further into her spiritually driven songwriting, telling Apple Music that the impetus of the album was, in part, to inspire others to use their gifts to make the world a better place. “There’s a creative space that you go to inside yourself,” she says, adding that it’s important to “begin to work with the elements in that space and to keep that space sacred and not let people take it.” Opening track “Stay” reminds the listener of the importance of staying present in a given moment, while also introducing the lush, more complex sound that June built alongside co-producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend). “Call Me a Fool,” which features legendary Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas, and “Fallin’” muse on the power and risk inherent in following a dream. And “Home Inside” channels the transformative power of introspection for an open-minded, open-hearted ode to spirituality. Below, June talks Apple Music through a few of the key tracks. **You and I** “You\'ll notice there\'s two of everything on the record: two drummers, two guitars. We were able to build the sound and take it and make it just that much crazier to meet what I was hearing in my head. The first layering of it I was like, ‘No, I hear it more dimensional, I hear more sonic madness.’ And it\'s a song for sharing, it\'s a song for friendship, for discovery. And for realizing that our thoughts and our intentions, when we join them together with others, that\'s what\'s creating the world we see. And we can\'t have anything without each other.” **Call Me a Fool (feat. Carla Thomas)** “The fool card in the tarot deck represents new beginnings. It represents being on edge and adventurous and crazy and daring. So ‘Call Me a Fool’ is a song for taking the leap. It\'s for being afraid of failure and having the confidence to say, ‘Yeah, I know society might not be ready for my dream of peace and love or whatever the hell it is, or my relationship or whatever, however you relate to it.’ By the end of the song, Carla, the one who was the warning and wise fairy godmother \[in previous track ‘African Proverb’\], she\'s like, ‘Well, I\'m glad you did it, baby.’ And she sings along with you.” **Smile** “It’s a song of transcendence, a song of hope and possibilities and being reborn. And as a Black woman, looking at my people, we\'ve had to continue to be reborn. And sometimes there have been times where all we had was a smile and just to say that that\'s not going to be taken. And for each person, no matter what race they are, to realize that your joy and your positivity and your beauty and the way you see the world—it is a power and it is a tool and it can be manipulated if you let it. But if you don\'t let it, it\'s one of your greatest gifts.” **Within You** “It\'s a mantra song. It is a song for carving out sacred space in your life, inside of yourself, every day.” **Starlight Ethereal Silence** “Jack and I decided that we needed 30 seconds of silence on the record, because I believe that silence is music and that no moment is ever completely silent. And I realized that we, as humans, can\'t hear everything. Your dog can hear things that you can\'t hear, or a dolphin can hear things that humans can\'t hear. So I just wanted to have that moment carved out of silence but then enter into the realm where we\'re being mindful, and we realize that, ‘Hey, yeah, we\'re humans and we\'re special, but we\'re not the only thing on this Earth, making music.’”

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

After Yola signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye recordings and released *Walk Through Fire*, her genre-melding full-length debut that earned her four Grammy nominations (including a 2020 nod for Best New Artist), she found herself facing a stubborn foe: writer’s block. Her increasingly demanding career yielded accolades and an ever-growing fanbase that included artists like The Highwomen and director Baz Luhrmann, but she found herself struggling to write at the height of it. “I had ideas right the way through, from 2013, when I was learning to play guitar, through to when I first started doing shows in late 2015,” she tells Apple Music. “But I hadn\'t had a single idea from 2019 into the pandemic—just nothing. That level of being busy just completely poached my ability to write. I started deconstructing my process of how my brain likes to function when I\'m creating.” If she started humming a tune while straightening up the house, she wouldn\'t immediately try to interrogate it. She sought out stillness and space, a contrast to what she calls the “excessively conscious” state she often found herself in. “When that part of my brain was off, ideas would appear almost instantly,” she says. “I clearly had inspiration, but there were situations that stopped the ideas coming to the fore, stopped me being able to access them.” Eventually, Yola wrote her way out of writer’s block and into *Stand for Myself*, an album that meets the high standard she set with *Walk Through Fire* while drawing in new sounds (namely disco, which drives the groove of “Dancing Away in Tears”) and doubling down on vintage vibes (notably the ’70s soul of “Starlight”) and declarations of self-empowerment. New collaborators came along for the soulful journey, too: Joy Oladokun, Ruby Amanfu, and Natalie Hemby co-wrote songs for the album (as did Auerbach, who produced the album, along with *Walk Through Fire*), and Brandi Carlile lends her voice to “Be My Friend,” an all-too-timely celebration of allyship. Below, Yola talks through a few of the songs on the album and how they helped get her back on track. **“Barely Alive”** “The first song on the record, ‘Barely Alive,’ is co-written by Joy Oladokun. We were talking about what it\'s like to be Africans and isolated, and playing guitar, and singing songs, and being into a very broad spectrum of music—and growing up having to explain our existence, and ourselves. You are so often called on to minimize yourself. It can be that your life experience is uncomfortable to somebody and it\'s triggering their white fragility, so they\'re encouraging you to speak less on it, or better still, not at all, and to suffer in silence. If you can\'t speak on your life, then you can\'t address what\'s right and wrong with it. That\'s where the album jumps off from: It\'s a very concise narrative on my journey, from that place of being a doormat to having some agency over my own life.” **“Break the Bough”** “‘Break the Bough’ dates back to 2013, and was started on the evening of my mother\'s funeral. It doesn\'t sound like a song that was written on the horns of a funeral; it\'s a real party song. In that moment I realized that none of us are getting out of this thing called life alive, and so whatever we think we\'re doing with our lives, we better do a better job of it—just manifest the things that you want to manifest, and be the you that you most want to be. I\'d been in a writing block up until that point, and that sparked me to decide to learn to play guitar and inexorably start writing songs again—and that led me here.” **“Be My Friend”** “‘Be My Friend’ was one of the songs to arrive in my mind almost complete. That was a real moment, when I was able to come up with something that felt really real, really true, really about the time I was in, but also about my journey. It was as much about allyship \[as\] it was the idea of what I needed to get to this point in the first place. I thought it was important to call Brandi to sing with me: She\'d had the same conversation with me pertaining to queerness, and the pursuit of not being a token, and to manifest your most true self in your art so you don\'t feel like you\'re apologizing for yourself or hiding yourself in your art.” **“Stand for Myself”** “The song ‘Stand for Myself’ is the ultimate conclusion of a concept. It starts with referencing the \'Barely Alive\' version of myself: \'I understand why you\'re essentially burying your head in the sand: You want to feel nothing.\' But also, it can speak on people that are experiencing white fragility. It\'s like, I get it, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don\'t want to have to feel empathy for people that aren\'t like you, because it feels like work. But then it\'s saying, \'I was like that, I was an absolute parrot, and I didn\'t have any sets of perspective of what I might stand to gain from not being such an anxious twonk.\' That\'s really where we get to: But I did do it, because I was left without choice. Now I feel like I\'m actually alive, and it\'s really great. You can have this, too, if you\'re actually willing to do the work—go and take the implicit test, find out what your biases are, work on them, feel things for other people that aren\'t clones of you—and that\'s really everything. When someone goes, \'Hey, this album should be called *Don\'t Mess With Yola!*,\' I\'m like, you\'ve missed the point of this record. It\'s not a *don\'t mess with*. It\'s not *I\'m a strong Black woman*. It\'s the deserving of softness and a measure of kindness and of support and friendship and love. And that\'s really all encapsulated in \'Stand for Myself.\'”