Alternative Press's 50 Best Albums of 2020

On their eighth studio album, *Wake Up, Sunshine*, All Time Low has perfected their hook-heavy pop-punk formula—and they’ve done so without falling into the seductive trappings of nostalgia. “There’s a big distinction,” frontman Alex Gaskarth told Apple Music. “We weren’t trying to sound like we sounded 12 years ago. But some of that energy shines through. It’s a really cool amalgamation of everything that’s come before it.” Just don’t for a second think they’ve run out of tricks. The band’s new album runs the gamut of their career, centering on optimistic songs as luminous and unclouded as the title suggests. There’s the self-referential fan service of “Some Kind of Disaster,” the Y2K-era blink-182-channeling “Sleeping In,” and the pulsating palm-muted power chords of “Safe.” Then there are moments of unexpected innovation: the rhythmic structure of “Trouble Is,” the country influence of “Favorite Place,” and All Time Low’s first foray into hip-hop on “Monsters.” “I hope that when people listen to the album, it’s a reminder of why they fell in love with the band in the first place,” guitarist Jack Bakarat says. “The focus all along has been to get back to the basics—capturing that magic again.” Below, Gaskarth breaks down each song on *Wake Up, Sunshine*, track by track. “There’s a lot of hope on the album,” he says. “There\'s a lot of looking forward to a brighter future. And I think that shines through.” **Some Kind of Disaster** “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the record. When we finished it, we all paused for a second and said, ‘Hey, that seems like it would be an amazing way to open a show.’ That conversation evolved into, ‘Well, if we\'d open a show with it, why not open a record with it?’ It feels like it\'s this declaration of our return and an anthemic call-to-arms song. I\'d say that it\'s autobiographical about the band in the chorus: ‘It\'s all my fault that I\'m still the one you want/So what are you after?/Some kind of disaster.’ I ask the fans if they\'re ready to do this all over again and take this ride again.” **Sleeping In** “When you\'re with the person you like, you just never want to go to sleep, because it\'s just too good of a time. You’re still up at 7 am and the next good idea is to put on Britney Spears and have a dance party. I’ve certainly done that many times. I think we’ve all been there. And I love a good pop reference.” **Getaway Green** “I wanted there to be a lot of color throughout this record. I wanted this to feel very vivid and bright. ‘Getaway Green’ is really about a sense of escapism, but also a SoCal Romeo and Juliet situation, where it\'s not meant to be but they want it to be, and eventually it\'s going to be.” **Melancholy Kaleidoscope** “It was a weird day in the studio. Nothing really seemed to be clicking and I was in a weather-induced funk. I was feeling some crazy seasonal depression. I wasn\'t in the mood to write uplifting music. And Zakk Cervini, our producer, came in with this idea for a fast, uptempo, Warped Tour-esque song. It\'s just not where my head was, so I made it a challenge for myself to make it work. In doing so, I started to take steps towards getting my head in a better place. ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope’ was maybe the second \[song\] we wrote. It shaped the tone of the album, once I got over that hurdle.” **Trouble Is** “This was a fun one from beginning to end, because we challenged ourselves to do something with a weird, rhythmic cadence. It\'s these intervals of six and then seven, which is not an easy time signature to write a pop melody around. It actually ended up working really, really well. And then the song settles into 6/8 for the chorus, which just always feels big. It became this fun little math project. It\'s not like we\'re a sophisticated, techy math rock band, anyway. We\'re playing pop rock here at the end of the day.” **Wake Up, Sunshine** “It is the overall idea that in a world that feels like it\'s falling apart, and in a situation where it\'s very easy to self-doubt and become your own worst enemy, hanging on to the idea that someone out there is all about you is something that can really help pull you through. Knowing that all it really takes is just a connection with one other person out there can sometimes be the thing that gets you moving in the right direction again. And I think that sentiment echoes throughout the entire album.” **Monsters (feat. blackbear)** “We\'ve never really gone there before as a band, we\'ve never really featured a rapper on anything. And so it’s like, 15 years into a career, there\'s still some new things to try, and that happened to be the right one in the moment. It was really cool and special.” **Pretty Venom (Interlude)** “\[This is a\] 3 am-er. We write our dark songs late at night. The song\'s very reflective. I think it hearkens back to some of the woes throughout our career where we felt resentful towards people who didn\'t have the band\'s best interest in mind, and I got to speak to some of those things—just about how someone else\'s poison can poison you and it changes you as a person, and suddenly their toxicity is making you toxic.” **Favorite Place (feat. The Band CAMINO)** “When we wrote ‘Favorite Place,’ we all recognized that we were pulling some of \[The Band CAMINO’s\] influence. And so it only felt right to reach out to them and see if they wanted to be a part of it. Because it felt like, in some way, they had contributed to the writing of the song. They ended up enjoying the song and wanted to be a part of it. It was really fun. I love when you see some camaraderie between labelmates.” **Safe** “We all jokingly said that the songs we wrote in Nashville have a bit of a Nashville \[sound\] playing throughout them in some way, like ‘Safe,’ ‘Favorite Place,’ and ‘Getaway Green.’ They could all easily translate to what I think would be pretty rad country songs. So eventually we\'re going to have to make a Y\'all Time Low record.” **January Gloom (Seasons, Pt. 1)** “This was written during the session in Nashville in January \[2019\]. It was cold, rainy, miserable. It was just a difficult time. I felt myself really weighed down by it all. I felt a little bit aimless and I didn\'t have a ton of direction. Similar to ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope,’ my lack of inspiration served as inspiration. And so, in this song, I\'m talking about sitting alone with the voice in my head, saying, ‘Give me something.’” **Clumsy** “‘Clumsy’ feels like a really staple All Time Low song that speaks to the legacy of the band. You could put it on almost any All Time Low record at any time in All Time\'s history and it would make sense, even though it sounds like the 2020 version of All Time Low. The lyrics of this song are all about loneliness and why you end up lonely.” **Glitter & Crimson** “To me, this song is about two characters who are deeply in love, whose love is not allowed to be that by \[a certain\] society. They\'re gay, and they don\'t feel like they\'re accepted in their own skin for who they are, or for who they want to love. It’s a cry out to seize that power back and saying, ‘No. You don\'t get to dictate how we live our lives.’ Obviously, I can\'t speak to that, being a straight guy, but I know a lot of people who live that experience every day. And it was something that felt very meaningful that I wanted to address for them because they can’t \[in this way\]. They aren\'t songwriters.” **Summer Daze (Seasons, Pt. 2)** “‘Summer Daze’ is a song about that celebratory feeling of elation that you get from, like, a summer camp romance. It’s that honeymoon phase where you know it\'s probably going to come to an end because it has to, but at the time, it was just everything.” **Basement Noise** “That’s how it all wraps up—an ode and a tribute to our humble beginnings, having this big dream of hopefully getting out on the road someday and making a go of it. If you\'d told us back then that we would be doing this 15 years later, record number eight, I don\'t think we would have ever believed you.”

Pennsylvania metalcore stars and two-time Grammy nominees August Burns Red didn’t plan to have a theme for their eighth album, but that was before co-lyricists Brent Rambler (guitar) and Matt Greiner (drums) discovered that they were writing about similar ideas. “Matt and I don’t write lyrics together,” Rambler tells Apple Music. “When we were reading through them, we noticed the theme of the Good Samaritan helping someone, or reaching out in a time of need. So that’s where the title *Guardians* came from, and it’s a loose theme that appears throughout the record.” You’ll hear it specifically among the hammering grooves of “Defender,” the winding guitar lines of “Paramount,” and the soaring vocal melodies of “Lighthouse,” though it creeps into other songs as well. Rambler breaks it down for us below. **The Narrative** “‘The Narrative’ is more of a political song than we\'d normally write, but it doesn\'t pick a side. It\'s about how today you get pandered to, I think, more than we ever used to. You can just go online and the only things that\'ll show up in your news feed are things that you agree with—because if you don\'t agree with something, you\'re not going to click on it. So the song is encouraging people to maybe go outside of their personal box a little bit more and dig deeper into things, because you might learn something more than what you are currently comfortable with.” **Bones** “This is a really cool, thrashy song—I think it’s a little bit different for August Burns Red. The idea behind the lyrics is that a lot of times you tend to look at the way other people live and think that your version of life is better than theirs. Sometimes we’ll send people to other parts of the world to try and make the people more like us, without taking in the fact that most people are really happy with their existence. From colonialism to the way we came in and took over the Native Americans, we have a human history of it. But I think having different cultures is cool. I’d like to see other cultures celebrated versus constantly assimilating.” **Paramount** “The song ‘Paramount’ is about finding hope in a situation when you’re really struggling. Sometimes you can feel indifferent towards things that used to make you really happy, so it\'s about relighting that fire and trying to get yourself excited about the things in life that you may have put by the wayside. It’s about finding the person who will guide you through that and who can reinvigorate your life.” **Defender** “Matt wrote that one, and it’s about him going through his divorce and how he reached out to his father in that specific time of need and his father ended up being a big beacon of hope for him. He was the one who helped keep Matt grounded throughout the entire process. He was, for lack of better words, his defender—the one who was there for him, to make sure he was levelheaded and making good choices and not letting anger guide him through an extremely difficult part of his life. We actually kicked around the idea of calling the record *Defender* for a while, but then we tend to not like title tracks.” **Lighthouse** “‘Lighthouse’ is a song that is critical towards the church, which is supposed to be compassionate towards those in need. It’s also about how you don’t have to throw money at something to be generous—it’s more important to give your heart to something than it is to just throw money at it and hope it goes away. And it’s about how the people in your life who you view as heroes generally aren’t people who are famous. Nowadays you see a lot of people, when they do a good deed, it’s posted all over the internet. Was the point of that good deed to actually help someone or to gratify yourself?” **Dismembered Memory** “This song is about someone I know who was going through depression and other things that maybe they didn\'t understand at the time. You trust your doctors to take care of you and make good decisions based on what your current situation is, but in this sad and unfortunate story, the person got taken advantage of because the doctor just wasn’t paying attention to their specific needs. Because of that, the doctor ended up doing more harm than good.” **Ties That Bind** “This is an uplifting song about how the hardest battles in your life, if you go through them with somebody else, can make your relationships stronger. In general, I think the strongest relationships you see or that you have in life are with people that you’ve probably argued with and fought with or gone through a really tough time with. With the guys in the band, we’ve been through so much together and overcome so much that it’s only helped us maintain a stronger relationship.” **Bloodletter** “‘Bloodletter’ is probably the most brutal song on the record, so the lyrics needed to fit the bill. So it’s about how, within the music industry, there’s so many people who take advantage of artists. I think sometimes artists and people who are chasing a dream are easier prey, because when someone comes along saying, ‘I’ll help you fulfill your dreams—you’ve just got to give me my cut,’ most people think that sounds great. With August Burns Red, we’ve been lucky to have a great team of people surrounding us, but so many other bands have gotten taken advantage of.” **Extinct by Instinct** “This song is about how sometimes you have to make a really stressful decision that could be good for you personally but not good for somebody else. Sometimes you need to take care of yourself even though it might be hurtful for other people. It sounds selfish, but I think it can also be really hurtful and detrimental if you’re the one who’s constantly giving and giving in a relationship and you’re not really getting anything in return. So sometimes you have to do what’s right for you, and maybe in the end it’ll be right for everyone.” **Empty Heaven** “Obviously the title sounds terrible, but it goes back to when I was a kid. I grew up in a semi-religious home, and you always heard about how when you die and go to heaven, all of your relatives will be there waiting for you. And I remember thinking, ‘Wait, what if my grandparents are still alive? My mom and dad are still alive. All my friends are still alive. What if I’m the first person to go?’ So it’s about what heaven would be like if it’s just you.” **Three Fountains** “This is about how things in life aren’t as black and white as they seem. It’s about how sometimes you need to take a step back to view things from the right perspective. Sometimes you’re so deep in something that you can’t make the right choice. So it’s okay to take a big step back and reevaluate your choices and decisions from afar. I think we all need to do that sometimes. It can provide a whole new perspective on life.”

For blackbear, the stakes are clear for *everything means nothing*, his fifth full-length. “I really want this to be a No. 1 album,” he tells Apple Music. “If I have one, it\'s this one. If I get a Grammy, I want it to be for this one. It\'s my life\'s work in a way—it shows my versatility as an artist.” After 2019’s *ANONYMOUS*, the 29-year-old (born Matthew Tyler Musto) was determined to make a more balanced and uplifting record—a set of alt-leaning pop songs that people could dance to even at their lowest. To get there, he and co-producer Andrew Goldstein placed an emphasis on tempo and organics: The drums are live, the snaps and claps real, the BPMs heightened. “No artist should really feel those things,” he says of striving for commercial success. “But at the same time, this is my career and it\'s how I pay my bills and it\'s how I\'m going to put my son through college. I wanted to make it a little less about me and more about the fans and making them feel good. I just wanted to do better. I was like, ‘You know what, I\'m going to make sure that there\'s not even one bad note.’” Here, he guides us through the album track by track. **hot girl bummer** “I mean, it\'s obviously a satire record, and the approach is basically like, ‘Fuck this.’ Maybe not ‘fuck *you*,’ but ‘fuck you’ to the situation, really. The whole idea is I\'m out in Hollywood, I\'m at a club, I\'m in the corner, and this kind of sucks. Personally, I don\'t drink. I\'m drinking my Red Bull, so it\'s even more boring for me. That\'s kind of what the \'fuck you\' is for. It\'s just a funny look at what it\'s like to go out nowadays and be around people in their twenties.” **me & ur ghost** “I feel like it\'s basically a song about the loss of someone and you\'re kind stuck there with memories. You know, I still find clothes from my ex in my closet and stuff like that, and it\'s just weird ghostly vibes. It\'s like a sense of nostalgia—and I know that that word is really hot right now—that is kind of just in the rearview. The kind of feeling you get when you pass an ex-girlfriend\'s make and model of car, and you think it\'s them and you just get butterflies in your stomach. You don\'t want to particularly see them or even say sorry, or talk to them or anything like that. But you just kind of get this weird nostalgic feeling.” **queen of broken hearts** “I think social media breaks hearts in a way. We put so much emphasis on where our profiles are and where we\'re sitting and what our friends are doing and a fear of missing out. And I just feel like my heart gets broken every day. When I see a friend of mine in Cabo, I’m like, ‘Well, we\'re taking quarantine seriously. I want to be in Cabo right now.’ And my heart\'s broken. Every day I check my phone and I go on Instagram before I even text back my mom, and it\'s just like, ‘Damn, where\'s my heart actually?’ I made ‘hot girl bummer,’ ‘me & ur ghost,’ and ‘queen of broken hearts’ in the same three days, so I feel like I had a lot to say about how I was feeling that week. Maybe I was stalking an ex or something. I don\'t know what was going on, but that\'s probably what happened.” **i feel bad** “I feel bad. I struggle with this medical condition called necrotizing chronic pancreatitis. And I have to get surgeries every two months because I have this stricture in my small intestines. I have to actually get these tubes replaced and all this stuff in my body. There’s medications I have to take, and those don’t make me feel particularly good and they kind of ruin anything creatively. I have chronic pain all the time. If I have a bad day where I\'m having pain, it sucks up the day. But that\'s just what it is. I feel bad about feeling bad. I feel bad that I don\'t even feel good, you know?” **i feel 2 much** “‘i feel bad,’ ‘i feel 2 much,’ and ‘i felt that’—we did those three songs in a row, in a week\'s time. I feel like I was feeling emo that week and I just wanted to make some, like, \[2015’s\] ‘Idfc’-type blackbear records. ‘i feel 2 much’ was my stab at making a blackbear ballad again, and it goes back to me just not feeling good, feeling too much, and I just don\'t want to feel at all. It’s like a rollercoaster with pancreatitis: I’ll have some weeks where I make ‘why are girls?’-type records, and then some weeks where I write ‘Idfc’ after ‘Idfc.’ You can tell from my Twitter account that it\'s pretty all over the place. One out of ten tweets are funny, and then the rest are just sad.” **i felt that** “It\'s just the aftermath of listening to those two records. Stylistically, it comes third because I\'m going to dance through the pain and I\'m going to cry through the ‘fuck you.’ I wanted people to just smile through the pain.” **sobbing in cabo** “My current girlfriend now—my son\'s mother, Michele—she called me from Mexico and she was crying. She was in her past relationship and she was like, ‘I\'m just so unhappy and you make me happy. And I want to talk to you and I don\'t want to call my boyfriend right now.’ She was crying in Cabo, and I was like, ‘You know what, I\'m going to make a song for you.’ It’s one of the few times where one of my songs is a true story. But it\'s my favorite song on the album, I think because it\'s just reminiscent of music I grew up on. Like the melody is somewhere between Saves The Day, New Found Glory, and Pitbull. There\'s parts that are crunk, and then there\'s parts that are just completely alt-leaning emo. It\'s just who I am as a person, so I love that song. I think she loved it, and if she doesn\'t love it, she usually lies to me and says, like, ‘It\'s cool, babe.’” **clown** “Just kind of like smiling when you\'re bored at a date or pretending that you\'re happy because you don\'t want to make the other person feel bad. It\'s very clown culture, the different masks that people put on. I find myself doing that. The chorus was actually written by Andrew. I wrote the verses and I helped Trevor \[Daniels\] write his part. He was amazing to work with too: I just felt like he was the right energy for the record and his voice fit really perfect on it.” **half alive** “It\'s basically ‘me & ur ghost’ on crack. It\'s a song of nostalgia. It\'s like, ‘I\'m going to these places that we used to go together.’ This time I wanted to team up with Marshmello. I played the bass on it and Marshmello was just like, ‘Dude, that\'s it. That\'s going to be the chorus.’ That wasn\'t the original idea—the bass, the funky bassline, was just in the verses, and Marshmello pasted it and we really made it a cool dance record. He brings a very cool, a very fresh young vibe to any situation. Like when you hear him in Juice WRLD’s new record ‘Come & Go,’ you just feel like you\'re fricking 17 again.” **if i were u** “I don\'t even know what this song\'s about. It’s like a daydream of a record, and it was really hard for me to actually write because it\'s confusing. It’s like an easygoing easy-listening record, and listening back to it, it sounds brainless. But it took a lot of brain power for me to write that record. Lauv brought the most famous line of the song: ‘You went back to your ex, I effin’ hate that.’ Which for the rest of the two weeks after that song was made, my Postmates would screw up an order and I\'d be like, ‘I frickin hate that.’ I kept singing it. He provided a month of comedy for me and my friends and my family.” **why are girls?** “I see things on social media—specifically on Twitter—where people will post a picture of a girl and it\'ll be like, ‘Why are girls so hot?’ I saw this trend going around for a while and it\'s true. It\'s like, ‘Why are women just so much better than men? Why were they made just so perfectly?’ And I think women and men agree that women are, you know? I sound like a simp, but women are top-tier human. And I let hot girls just come in and just take anything they want from me emotionally and physically. That\'s all it\'s really about. Just an easygoing song.” **smile again** “I really wanted a slower song to be the last song and we didn\'t have it yet. Finally I got this hook idea sent from my friend Joe Kirkland—he wrote a bunch of Dua Lipa songs, Nick Jonas, Dixie D\'Amelio. He\'s a great writer, and he had this idea for ‘smile again,’ but it wasn\'t called ‘smile again.’ It was a song about his breakup that he was going through, and it was a really depressing record. And I was like, ‘You know what? This could be an uplifting record about loss, about grief, about losing someone, losing a time in your life.’ I think of songs like \[1997\]s ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ by Green Day, just a strong acoustic record that means ten different things to ten different people. And this song was that for me. I pulled from places where in the past year I\'ve had a bunch of friends pass away from either suicide or drug abuse or things like that. So this one\'s special to me. It’s the good last chapter of a book, the icing on the cake that is this emotional rollercoaster of an album.”

Playing video games has served as a reprieve for many during the lockdown, but for Oli Sykes, these virtual post-apocalyptic adventures also influenced the shaping of Bring Me The Horizon\'s new EP. Drawing inspiration mainly from DOOM Eternal, the Sheffield quintet tapped Mick Gordon, who composed that game\'s soundtrack, to produce this collection and capture the spirit of a big-budget video game. The angsty \"Dear Diary,\" begins the record with an airing of grievances, the LINKIN PARK-leaning \"Teardrops\" channels nu-metal\'s glory days, and tracks like \"Parasite Eve\" and \"Ludens\" build off the heavier moments from 2019\'s *amo*. The EP features collaborators that span multiple genres: \"Kingslayer\" fuses *Suicide Season*-era deathcore with BABYMETAL\'s kawaii metal stylings, while \"Obey\" weaponizes YUNGBLUD\'s raspy vocals alongside Sykes\' menacing growl to tackle societal oppression and corruption. And the haunting kiss-off \"One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death\" features a chilling duet between Sykes and Evanescence\'s Amy Lee, the track\'s glacial funeral march offering nothing more than a bleak look into the future.

Code Orange vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Jami Morgan says his band’s fourth album is all about duality. “It’s about societal introspection and looking at where we’re at as a youth culture,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s also about looking at yourself as a person—and what you present to the world in this digital age versus what’s inside.” On *Underneath*, the unclassifiable Pittsburgh band—equal parts hardcore crew and groove metal enthusiasts, punk rabble-rousers and industrial technicians—imbue their hyper-modern musical style with cold-eyed sociological observations and deep existential malaise. “There’s a journey down this rabbit hole of anxiety and fear and all these regrets and pain,” Morgan explains. “You’re looking at the world and looking at the bitterness and negative stuff you have and trying to work through it and see where it’s leading us in this very noisy world where it’s very hard to stand out but everyone’s constantly talking.” Below, Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers guide us through their new underworld. **(Deeperthanbefore)** Jami Morgan: “This intro is a trailer, in some ways—or the scene before the opening titles. It’s introducing a little bit of our narrative voice and setting up a feeling of dread. And it starts off with the theme from the end of our last record, which we continued on some of the EPs that came in between. It’s the theme song, in a lot of ways, for the last era of our career that phased out and this new voice phased in.” **Swallowing the Rabbit Whole** JM: “This is about taking that first step into the realization that you\'re going to have to go on an internal journey—going down the rabbit hole of success and hurt and envy and self-worth. And you can continue to live in shame, or decide to confront this monster that\'s been depicted in our last three albums, and that\'s on the cover of this album as well.” Reba Meyers: “It took us a really long time to put this song together. It was like we were trying to figure out what kind of album we wanted to write. But once we were able to put that song together, it was the centerpiece to everything. It made everything else fall into place. It was almost a testing ground for a lot of the glitchier guitars and layering and overdubs and bringing in the pianos and synths and everything that would really take the main stage on a lot of the verses and everything of the song. It gave us a place to work off of for the other songs.” **In Fear** JM: “In some ways it’s about this culture we have of throwing each other to the wolves, where the jury of public opinion is almost the most important thing. We have to live in fear now of what we do and say and how we behave. And that’s good in some ways. But in some ways you can be stripped of what makes you an individual. So this isn’t anti-callout-culture, because some of that is important. It’s about how important social currency is, and how it’s our most important currency in a lot of ways.” **You and You Alone** JM: “‘You and You Alone’ is the first real touch of bitterness and anger on the record. We find ourselves at odds with all this hate and resentment we have towards those around us. It\'s looking at this bitterness and saying, ‘Is it totally justified, or in my mind? Or even if it is justified, is this something that I need to hang on to?’ But on the other end, I’m saying this to myself: If I have to carry this burden, what’s my part in it?” RM: “Creating this was like bringing back the old-school chaos of the style of writing we did in our riffs. But we then took it to another dimension almost with bringing in all these digital clippings and glitches. The verses started out as a simple chaotic guitar riff, but we gave it to our keyboard player, Shade, and he looped them and added all these accents and spit it back out. Then we went back and relearned the riff that way. So it was a very cool, very modern back-and-forth process.” **Who I Am** JM: “This is an observation on obsession through the lens of stalkers, and how that was looked at in the past, versus how people present themselves through social media. It\'s this unrequited idealization. In the past—and still, obviously—it’s driven people mad and they\'ve done horrible things. But now it’s something that\'s just totally normal: constantly looking at people; stalking them. And using that new media to make excuses for our shortcomings.” **Cold.Metal.Place** JM: “‘Cold.Metal.Place’ is like the environment of the record. It\'s where I\'m envisioning the birthplace of our main character—or our main antagonist, if you\'re thinking of it that way. It\'s like this merciless, barren, glass world—a machine world. This world we\'re depicting inside the record layout and on the cover. It\'s this environmental embodiment of our own self-destructive thoughts and ideas. We’re abused by this echoing noise of criticism that is sometimes necessary and sometimes just pushes you deeper into your own head. And you go into the cold metal place.” RM: “We, as a unit, have all felt like we’re in that landscape and we’re able to relate in that way—which made it so much easier to connect on writing these songs. It\'s almost like being able to see it visualized has helped me, especially, be able to get through that trial of pointed fingers at all of us. And it\'s a very special thing to feel and have gone through that as a unit through our whole journey of all these albums and coming to this one.” **Sulfur Surrounding** JM: “This is about how we manipulate each other without even meaning to. And sometimes, people mean to. Are you corroding your group by making everyone so connected and having to go on? That’s something I’ve struggled with. Is this the wrong thing for these people who are my friends? I want to do the right thing, but these feelings take over. And I feel everyone can relate to that in a way.” **The Easy Way** JM: “This song is like the bridge between the two halves of the album. We had a song called ‘Only One Way’ that we put out a year or two ago, and this is the sequel. And there\'s a part at the end of ‘Only One Way,’ melodically, that actually is the chorus of this song. Reba sings ‘Only One Way’—it\'s awesome—and then at the end, I creep in with this vocal melody, and that\'s the chorus of this song.” RM: “I think all of us knew when we were writing ‘Only One Way’ that it was going to come back around, just because of how strong the melody was at the end. It didn’t feel like it got its full time in the spotlight. And we always like having things connect and weave together so it doesn\'t just feel like a bunch of songs slapped together on an album. We always try to make it more of a journey—not just through this album, but through our whole trajectory as a band. And I think a lot of people who like our band like us because of that. We\'re all very obsessive about music that has more of an overall vision to it. And obviously, you can see Jami has planned all of this out.” **Erasure Scan** JM: “‘Erasure Scan’ is probably the darkest song on the album. Lyrically, it\'s about the school shooting epidemic, and maybe the events and brain trauma that turn people to committing these horrible atrocities. It gets into some light, probably bullshit, very poorly researched psychology, but I was just looking into the Triune Brain theory—about how the three brains can become rigidly locked. That\'s been seen in a lot of school shooters under psychological evaluation. They become very fixated on the external goal and mission that they\'re unable to divert from. We also talk about this parasite that we get deeper into later on ‘Back Inside the Glass,’ but it’s this aquatic worm that exists in grasshoppers, fucks with their brain and controls them and influences their behavior. So I was relating that to these shootings and talking about the government swaying public opinion with pointless gun and freedom debates, but nothing is really done to help reduce it.” **Last Ones Left** JM: “Other than ‘You and You Alone,’ I would say ‘Last Ones Left’ is pretty much the most bitter-ass fucking song on the album. It\'s about pride and it\'s about social climbing. It\'s pretty much saying we\'re the last ones left on the surface of real bands that have worked and climbed that fucking ladder through hard work and not through bootlicking.” RM: “We\'ve always needed to have that song on every record that empowers us. And for me, and I know the other guys, when we play that song, it definitely has that feeling to it—even at shows when we feel like it\'s us against the world, and no one there even cares or wants to see us—we can use that as an empowering song, and we\'re almost screaming it and singing it to ourselves at times.” **Autumn and Carbine** JM: “On the surface, the song is about the quick lives and deaths of these flavor-of-the-year new artists that are being propped up by corporations. They\'re told to be bombastic and loud, and their demise is very similar. It\'s quick and it\'s loud and then it\'s gone.” **Back Inside the Glass** JM: “Sonically, this song is very sci-fi hardcore in a lot of ways. Our main character, the monster on the front cover that we call The Cutter, is trapped inside this glass shell of how the world sees him—and how maybe even you envision yourself, for better or worse. And it’s that monster trying to get out. It’s your own mania getting the best of you. So you want to kill this thing inside you, but it’s going to come out like that monster. So you want it to go back inside the glass.” **A Sliver** JM: “Thematically, ‘A Sliver’ is the culmination of years of overexposure and noise that almost leads us to become deaf to the cries of everyone around us. Because we all watch these tragedies like they\'re a TV show. But it seems in the past, everything matters only for a sliver of time, and then it’s on to the next thing. We’re lost in the rat race, and it’s all been engineered by corporations for this exact purpose. So we all keep posting; we keep promising. But it\'s really for nothing. We\'re not heard at all. You\'re just a dollar or another voice in a sea of voices. Even that only matters for a second, and then people move on.” **Underneath** JM: ‘‘Underneath’ is really about being in that final, most important moment, facing this monster—whether that be proverbial or inner self. It’s the most positive song on the record, I think, because a lot of it is about redemption. It doesn’t really give you a clear ending as to what happened, but there’s a truth and you’re going to find out what it is. So we have to shed who we are and remove that machine inside. We either stand up to it or just disappear and become it.”

Welcome to Calvary Falls, where the world of one quiet, snowy American town is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious man…to catastrophic results. Creeper has never been a band to accept limitations on their ambitious designs; 2017’s debut album, *Eternity, In Your Arms*, took broad brushstrokes of Peter Pan, weaved in the fantastical story of a paranormal investigator’s disappearance, and set it, as one would fully expect, in Southampton. On *Sex, Death & the Infinite Void*, their second full-length concept album, such scale and vision isn’t simply confined to their storytelling. “Creating this record was about ignoring the things that had trapped us in the past,” frontman Will Gould tells Apple Music. “I wanted to ignore what had come before, and prove wrong everyone that said no band could advance their sound so dramatically without alienating your fanbase.” And so this love-triangle tale of lust, envy, and wrath plays out to a soundtrack of British glam rock, Americana country, 1950s doo-wop, and their stock-in-trade: emo punk hooks. A first visit to any strange place requires a good tour guide to uncover its true depths, however, so who better to show you the sights of Calvary Falls than Gould himself? **Hallelujah!** “Our opening is spoken by Patricia Morrison, from The Sisters of Mercy and The Damned, who we met at the Kerrang! magazine awards show in London last year \[2019\]. A little while later I had this spoken-word idea to open the record, and asked Patricia. We sat inside this studio in London and did all of the dialogue between us. I described how I wanted a sort of Madame Leota character from Disney’s The Haunted Mansion \[ride\], and she knew exactly what I meant. This opens our whole story, and sets up the marriage of Annabelle, who Patricia voices throughout the album’s interludes, and the villain of our piece, Buddy.” **Be My End** “It took a long time to decide what the first song proper on the album should be. It isn’t a drastic departure in sound for us, which I felt important on an album that otherwise is a big change for us, while it also lays out the apocalyptic nature of the prophecy brought forward by our main character, Roe, who arrives in Calvary Falls with the message that the world as people know it will end in seven days. The whole piece is summarized by the opening lyric: ‘Will you be my Armageddon?’ It has a very Creeper chorus—over the top and vaudevillian—while the bridge contains a theremin, which we recreated the sound of on an emulator as none of us could play the actual thing.” **Born Cold** “This was the very first song we wrote for the record—it’s the nucleus of the whole piece. I already had the narrative for this album before even writing this song, which introduces the character of Roe, a man who can’t feel and has fallen to Earth. A lot of this record in fact was based on Marilyn Manson’s interpretation of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, on Manson’s *Mechanical Animals* album. I was obsessed with that record when I was younger.” **Cyanide** “This song was the result of a very difficult time. My songwriting partner, Ian \[Miles, guitar\], was very sick for a time. He was receiving treatment in Brighton when we were supposed to be writing together in Los Angeles, so we found ourselves trying to write via FaceTime. Nothing was working. I went for breakfast one day off the Sunset Strip, and T. Rex came on over the speakers. ‘This is what we should be doing!’ I started saying. ‘People think Creeper are a pop-punk band with eyeliner, but we’re a glam rock band!’ My manager was eating his food in silence opposite me and—I’ll never forget it—he calmly put his cutlery down, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, just go and do it, then.’ We went back to the studio and the whole song came together in about 30 minutes. It’s my real life seeping into this album; I was writing this song about Annabelle and Roe’s attraction to each other, but also about myself and what I was going through personally. It’s half reality, half fantasy, and that’s when Creeper is at its best.” **Annabelle** “I was obsessed with Suede when I was younger, and the opening beat here pays homage to their song ‘Trash.’ It was something intentionally English on a very American record. It’s a Britpop song, yet when it comes into the first lyrics, it might as well be a Green Day song. This introduces Annabelle further, while Roe is learning that sinning is part of being human: ‘God can’t save us, so let’s live like sinners.’ That went back to when we played the Warped Tour one year and had a run-in with the Westboro Baptist Church, who were picketing the event.” **Paradise** “This is written from the point of view of our villain, Buddy Calvary. Roy Orbison was a really big influence on the country elements of this record, and when we were working on ‘Paradise’ we were watching the video to his song ‘I Drove All Night.’ The visual picture of the world we’re creating is something I always have in my mind when writing music, and this song was actually born from us muting that video and saying, ‘Let’s write a song to go with this.’ I always want lyrics to give you just enough for the listener to work with in imagining the place and characters, and then the music does the rest.” **Poisoned Heart** “Ian and myself wrote a number of songs in this alternative country vein, and this one stuck due to the chorus, which I love. It’s a song that will really divide people, I’m sure. There are similarities in our narrative to the first time you meet Roe and the first time you meet Buddy, and both have a poison heart in their own sense—Roe because he can’t feel anything, and Buddy because he’s had everything given to him; he may have loved Annabelle at one point, but his controlling nature has ruined their relationship. If this was a musical—and I really wish it was!—I would have both characters sing it, one verse each.” **Thorns of Love** “A long time ago, I was writing a musical called *Cosmic Love*, about a woman who fell to Earth and fell in love with a man from the 1980s. Some of the lyrics in the second verse are actually from the musical I wrote all those years ago—‘Lennon was shot in December time/Curtis was hung by washing line/1980s lovers died in twos.’ This is a doo-wop song in the vein of ‘Drive-In Saturday’ from the David Bowie record *Aladdin Sane*. Even though I wrote this song myself, it’s the contributions of other people that really make it: Ian with that Avenged Sevenfold-style solo, Patricia’s middle section that sounds like *The Rocky Horror Picture Show*, and Hannah’s \[Greenwood, keyboards and vocals\] ridiculous intro.” **Four Years Ago** “This is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra-style duet; a very delicate, feminine vocal meets the baritone male. I spent a long time trying to write a song for me and Hannah to sing, and it presents the disintegration of Annabelle and Buddy’s relationship. It’s opening up to the listener about how messed up this relationship is, after only giving little hints previously.” **Napalm Girls** “‘Napalm Girls’ is the coolest name for a song that anyone has ever come up with—and I didn’t even mean to call it that originally. This is where the road to the end of our story begins, and describes Roe and Annabelle getting together for the first time before running away to the top of a mountain for Roe to go back to whence he came. The lyric ‘She is a war in me/Her kiss is violence’ could sum up the last two years of my life, when you’re obsessed with someone and you’re first falling in love. I also hid a reference to my girlfriend’s favorite My Chemical Romance song in this.” **Black Moon** “Welcome to our album’s ‘death’ song, where Roe meets his demise at Buddy’s hands. At this point, Roe has become completely obsessed with Annabelle, and he’s a sinner now. He’s not the man from the start of the album who was ‘Born Cold’—he’s now transformed and has now become just as sinful as anyone. He is martyring himself and dying for the sins of this town—and closing our messed-up story. The title honors a long-standing tradition in our band of having the word ‘Black’ in the title of a song on each of our releases.” **All My Friends** “‘All My Friends’ is a departure from our narrative, and wasn’t meant to be on the album at all. I had originally written another ballad for this point, called ‘Shattered,’ which was really dramatic and about our character’s death. But I had also written this song late one night, while drunk, after Ian had fallen very sick, and it just so happened that some other people also heard it and encouraged me to develop it. It captures the darkest moment in my life. There’s a lot of realism in this record—the main romance; reflecting my own feelings of being an alien and an outsider in the music scene—but this song is the most real Creeper has ever been.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

“Rock ’n’ roll has become so tame,” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong told Apple Music in late 2019, just after unveiling “Father of All…,” the opening track and semi-titular single on his punk outfit’s 13th full-length. “A lot of rock acts are always trying to look for the feel-good song of the year. I think rock music should make you feel bad.” The irony was that the Motown-inspired “Father of All…”—all handclaps, blistering guitars, and Armstrong singing in an unrecognizable falsetto—was nothing if not feel-good. Green Day has become a cross-generational punk band by pairing bright, unshakable melodies with thoughts on death, war, anxiety, insomnia, masturbation, the fall of empires, masturbation, and so on. Imagine how they’d respond to the Trump era. *Father of All...* finds them at their most succinct, clocking in at just 26 minutes—less than it’d take you to listen to “Jesus of Suburbia” just three times. (“I realized I hate long songs,” Armstrong said.) Though 2004’s *American Idiot* is channeled in spirit—its iconic album art is referenced on the cover here, just behind the unicorn puking up a rainbow—Green Day trades operatics for dystopian jukebox fare. There are slightly ominous calls to the dance floor (“Meet Me on the Roof”) and tales of love gone violent (“Stab You in the Heart”) and Springsteenian scenes of crumbling cities, each gifted the natural bounce of an early rock ’n’ roll or R&B single. “Oh Yeah!”—itself a psychedelic skewering of social media addiction and American gun violence—lifts its opening notes from Joan Jett’s 1981 take on now-disgraced glam artist Gary Glitter’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” It feels highly intentional—a provocation wrapped up in a catchy riff. “There’s a lot of depression, but with a sense of humor,” Armstrong said of the record’s balance between light and dark. “I think we live in just a time of complete and total chaos—or else we’ve always been, but now it’s turned up to Trump. So it’s just trying to reflect what’s going on. And it’s not really writing political songs, but just writing the shit that you see every day.”

”My personal life is a disaster,” Halsey tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, reflecting on the consequence of her meteoric rise from indie outsider to pop superstar. Many of the songs on the 25-year-old’s emotional third album *Manic* were written from the eye of the storm. “I’m impulsive, uncensored, leading with emotion rather than logic, zipping all over the place like, ‘What if this song sounded like The Beach Boys? What if six of them don\'t have any drums?’” The result is a poetic and courageous work that traces heartbreak, health, and personal growth. “This whole album isn’t about Gerald,” she says, anticipating that the public’s attention will inevitably zero in on her breakup with rapper G-Eazy. \"A lot of it is a reconnaissance of things I never got to work through because I was 19 and I was Halsey. I didn\'t have time for self-care because I had to be composed. And I got too composed —that was part of the problem.” Below, she shares the inside story behind some of the album’s most personal songs. **Ashley** “Starting the album with my real name is a comfortable entry point for people, like saying, \'Hey, I\'m still here, but I\'m going to take you down on a different journey right now.\' A lot of this album was written as I became more aware of my mortality. Sometimes I\'m on top of the world and I\'ve never felt better in my life. Other days I\'m like, \'If I keep doing this, I\'m going to die.’ This song is an introduction and a warning: It’s saying, ‘Here\'s this album that I had to cut myself open to make, and will continue to cut myself open to tour, promote, and explain, but I don\'t know how many more of these you\'re going to get.\'” **Forever ... (is a long time)** \"Every album of mine has what we call a trio: three songs smack in the middle that serve as a transition and are meant to be listened to in succession. On *Manic*, it’s \'Forever ... (is a long time),\' \'Dominic\'s Interlude,\' and \'I HATE EVERYBODY.’ On this song, I\'m falling in love. The instrumental is major, all these beautiful twinkling tones, and birds are singing, everything’s sweet, it\'s Cinderella. And then I start getting in my own head. The piano comes in and it\'s this stream-of-consciousness train of thought that modulates from major to minor to show my mood shifting from optimistic to anxious. And now I\'m sabotaging this relationship and feeling paranoid, this is going to be bad. And then \[singer-songwriter\] Dominic \[Fike, on \"Dominic\'s Interlude\"\] tells me I’d better go tell my man he’s got bad news coming.” **I HATE EVERYBODY** “At some point I kind of put my foot down and was like, ‘Here\'s what we\'re not going to do is make all my music about whoever I\'m dating. This album is about me. I should matter enough on my own. I shouldn\'t be desirable because some rock star you think is cool thinks I’m desirable. That\'s not what this is anymore, and it never should have been.\' But when you\'re young, your insecurities get the best of you sometimes, and \'I HATE EVERYBODY’ is about that. It’s thinking, ‘Well, they respect his opinion, so if he likes me, they will too.\' Whoa. Wrong. No-no-no. This should be about me.” **Finally** “I was like, ‘I need a wedding song. I need a first dance song.’ I wrote it at home in my living room at two in the morning when I was dating Dom \[YUNGBLUD\]. I’d been thinking about the night we met—I had told the story so many times and every time it got more romantic—and realized I’d never written a love song before, not one without a punchline. And it’s just a very nice, sweet song. At first, I was kind of like, eh… It wasn’t crazy enough. But I sent it to a couple friends, who said it was the best song I’d ever written. I was like, ‘What? It’s just me and a guitar.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s the point.’” **Alanis’ Interlude** “A big flex. The biggest flex. I wrote her a letter and she was nine months pregnant, maybe a little less, and I tried to tell her what an irrevocable impact she’d had on my life. I told her I would never have been brave enough to say the things I’ve said if she hadn’t said them first, and that I was making a record about all the important parts of me and I couldn’t imagine making it without her. And she said yes. The interludes represent different relationships in my life: Dom represents brotherly love and Alanis represents sexual and professional empowerment.” **killing boys** “It’s about being so enraged that you’re like, I\'m going to break into his house, go in his room, sit him down, and be like, \'Listen, motherfucker, you\'re going to talk to me right now.\' Like, I\'m going to wear a black hoodie. My friend\'s going to drive. It\'s pseudo based on a real story of when I actually did bust into somebody\'s house looking for answers about something. It was back in a time when I was really manic and would be like, \'No, my only option is to go over there and cause a scene.\' It goes: \'I climb up to the window and I break in the glass/But I stop \'cause I don\'t want to Uma Thurman your ass.\' It’s satirical, but I’m mad.” **More** \"I\'ve been really open about my struggles with reproductive health, about wanting to freeze my eggs and having endometriosis and things like that. For a long time, I didn\'t think that having a family was something I was going to be able to do, and it’s very, very important to me. Then one day my OB-GYN tells me it\'s looking like I maybe can, and I was so moved. It felt like this ascension into a different kind of womanhood. All of a sudden, everything is different. I\'m not going to go tour myself to death because I have nothing else to do and I\'m overcompensating for not being able to have this other thing that I really want. Now, I have a choice. I\'ve never had a choice before. Lido \[the producer Peder Losnegård\] and I built the fading instrumental at the end of the song to sound like a sonogram, like you were hearing the sounds from inside a womb. It\'s one of the most special songs I\'ve ever made.”

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”

The intertwining concepts of motherhood and Mother Earth are just two of the reasons LA alt-metal stars In This Moment decided to title their seventh album *Mother*. “My own mother is so sacred to me, and mothers in general are powerful things,” vocalist Maria Brink tells Apple Music. “And my fans started calling me Mother Maria, so in a way they kind of named it, too.” In addition to the album’s nine original songs and two interludes, *Mother* includes an almost accidental cover of the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” a haunting version of Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust,” and a rousing rendition of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” the latter of which features guest shots from Lzzy Hale of Halestorm and Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless. Brink explains all below. **The Beginning (Interlude)** “I love movies and soundtracks, so we just wanted to create that kind of feeling for the intro. I think there’s something special about the art of listening to something from the beginning to the end, and I think the interludes take you on a journey in and out of the songs.” **Fly Like an Eagle** “I love this song—obviously, it’s such an amazing song—but it wasn’t even meant to be covered. We actually wrote all the music that you’re hearing to that song without singing on it at all. So it was completely separate. We were trying some things, but it wasn’t quite there yet. And I don’t know if we heard the song that day or how it came up, but we just heard the melody and started singing over it. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ So we mixed our music with their \[vocal\] melody and it was so beautiful. It just felt very empowering and uplifting.” **The Red Crusade (Interlude)** “This basically has the same idea behind it as the other interlude. It helps you get into the zone and go on the experience. But it’s really just the intro to the next song.” **The In-Between** “I’m always about balance, and that’s what ‘The In-Between’ is about. We all have to find a healthy balance and learn how to understand that the things that are maybe part of your darker side—or darker things we’ve been through or are drawn to—they’re blessings and they make you stronger. It’s okay to embrace those things.” **Legacy** “My grandfather was a World War II hero, and he played the role of my father in my life because my mother was a single mother. And then my son didn\'t have a father either, so he really played the role to my son as well. He passed with his entire family around him—all of us holding his hand and singing to him. It was so sacred and so special. And right around the same time, Chris \[Howorth\], our guitar player—his father passed away. And then our other guitar player’s father passed. So there was this feeling that we needed to honor them. The album is called *Mother*, but I thought we should reflect on that beautiful father love as well.” **We Will Rock You (feat. Lzzy Hale and Taylor Momsen)** “It\'s one of the best songs ever. It\'s the all-empowering anthem. And I wanted to really see if we could pull together these powerful voices and these beautiful women that represent our community. They\'re so different and unique in their own ways, but they all have this power, and I thought it would be really cool for us to all just come together and spread that kind of energy. It was a real big honor to work with both of them. I have a lot of respect for them and they’re both so very, very talented.” **Mother** “I’m not someone who always writes super literally, but this song is about my mother. My grandfather, who I just talked about, was my mother’s world. She took care of him. She was holding his hand as he passed. So this song is me letting her know that I’ll be there for her and always take care of her. And actually, I have two mothers—I’m double gifted. My mother has been with her wife for a really long time, and she’s been a big part of raising me. They’re beautiful singers, so they’re both singing on this song with me, doing the backup vocals and harmonies.” **As Above, So Below** “This is another song about balance. This album has a lot of that kind of back-and-forth play and embracing the organic wild side. The song is also about not selling your soul for something you don’t believe in. Whatever you’re passionate about, it can’t be about money or fame or whatever. People should hold on to their souls.” **Born in Flames** “This song is for my son. He was struggling with just being. I saw him growing into something and kind of having to go through a little bit of a hard time. And then I saw him power through and become who he is, which is just so beautiful and bright and strong. So it’s about how I watched him go through a kind of struggle and heartache before blossoming and becoming who he is. And I’m just so proud of him.” **God Is She** “This song is about how I think everything is connected in this beautiful feminine energy, which is mother and god and deity. To me, God isn’t just a he or she—it’s an energy. But I see it in this song in a very feminine way. It’s also tied to Mother Earth and my hippie ways. We’ve got to take care of the Earth or she will attack back.” **Holy Man** “I wrote this song when I was going through a hard time and I was just needing to feel some sort of sacred something. I was needing a sign. It was just a vulnerable moment for me, and I was saying, ‘Show me a sign of kindness and love and understanding.’ It’s ‘Holy Man’ because the album is not just about women—I believe in holiness and godliness within everything—men, women, animals—equally.” **Hunting Grounds (feat. Joe Cotela of DED)** “This is about when you’re magnetically drawn to something—no matter how hard you fight it, it’s going to happen regardless. So it’s kind of this fight and this hunting and this awakening, but something inevitable is going to happen. I wanted Joe on this because I love his voice so much. He has a new album coming out that shows this whole other side of his voice that people haven’t really heard tons of yet, and I wanted him to use that type of voice on this song. It sounds perfect, and it was an honor to have him on here.” **Lay Me Down** “This song is about how you just can’t let other people’s perceptions or energy put your fire out or stop you. I had an experience where somebody tried to hurt me really badly, and that tended to hold me down. But you have to learn that your power comes from within yourself. You have to just worry about yourself and not other people’s ideas about you or who they think you are. So this is about not giving them that power and not being held back.” **Into Dust** “I love Mazzy Star, and this particular song has been my song for so many years. If I’m sad or I have to go into my deeper self or when I paint, I put on this song. I paint to that song on repeat sometimes for a few hours. I zone out on that song. There’s something about it. So I figured I’d just do my interpretation of it because it’s meant so much to me for so long. And it felt like a nice way to end the album.”

The follow-up to 2018’s *BALLADS 1* builds on the Japanese singer’s daring aesthetic—an arty blur of bedroom trip-hop, alt-R&B, and slow-winding IDM that always seems to zig when you think it\'ll zag. *Nectar*, his sophomore effort, feels designed for bigger stages, with more muscular vocals, riskier production, and an impressive spectrum of instrumentation. But don’t mistake bigger for safer; these songs are immersive and resolutely strange. Even his expertly curated guests—a who’s who of experimentalists like Yves Tumor, Diplo, and Lil Yachty—have been pulled into Joji’s magnetic field. Here, they bend to meet his sound, not the other way around. Joji\'s affinity for reverb and warped electronic textures allows *Nectar* to spread widely and retain a sense of flow and consistency, as if the songs have all been run through the same lo-fi Instagram filter. There are explosions of soul and electric guitar, off-kilter psychedelic lullabies, and atmospheric ballads that unfold into abstractions. “Run” blends watery James Blake-style coos with the thrust of Tame Impala, and “777” rattles along with PC Music\'s Auto-Tuned delirium. The final track, “Your Man”—a pulsing ode to eyes-closed, four-on-the-floor escapism and another left-turn for the low-key artist—is a fitting end to an album that feels like a head rush: You’re walking out of the venue, body still tingling, trying to reacclimate to the world around you.

Pop-punk, emo revival, all-ages indie rock: How one files Southern California’s Joyce Manor depends more on where the listener is coming from than the band, necessarily. Compiled from home recordings circa 2008 to 2010, *Songs From Northern Torrance* is a succinct evolution: acoustic guitar-and-drums duo (“F\*\*k Koalacaust”) to joyful full-band noise (“Constant Nothing”), imagistic fragments (“Dhfp”) to heartbreaking flash fiction (“House Warning Party”), songs that barely last a minute to songs with the nerve to push past two. Lyrically, frontman Barry Johnson was already who he’d become: chronicler of semi-suburban dramas between parties you can’t identify but relationships you can readily feel. “At the driving range/You shouted ‘fire away’/I started feeling strange/Thought of taking my life,” he yells during the climactic “Five Beer Plan,” splurging on an extra three seconds for the essential caveat: “I fucking told you so.”

\"I think that we just collectively just wanted to take a step back and just do it for fun again, and try to make something that our listeners will feel good listening to,\" guitarist/vocalist Nick Casasanto tells Apple Music when describing Knuckle Puck\'s third album. While past records had more introspective songs about failed relationships, *20/20* highlights a brighter outlook on life, as uplifting anthems like \"Tune You Out\" and \"Breathe\" focus on maintaining a healthier attitude within those very relationships. \"The world is in a strange place. But I think that it is very good timing for some of these themes on the record,\" explains Casasanto. \"I\'m just grateful that we chose to go in a positive direction, because I do think that it\'s what people need now more than ever.\" Here, Casasanto walks us through *20/20*. **20/20** “As soon as I heard that song, I thought, ‘This is the opener of the record.’ It just has that get-up-and-go feeling. Just that sort of vibe that you turn on a record and it just kind of goes. The whole meaning behind it is essentially about having a lot of growing pains and feeling the need to grow up a little bit.” **Tune You Out** “The funny thing about this song is, it had one chorus, lyrically, for the entire year and a half that it was a song. In the last couple weeks of recording, I stepped into the vocal booth to lay down some scratch vocals, and when \[producer\] Seth \[Henderson\] hit record, I just started singing a different melody that I had. They thought it was going to be one thing, and they just stopped it and he was like, ‘Bro. Forget whatever you had, that is it.’ It\'s one of my favorite songs we\'ve ever written, actually. It\'s so simple, so classic KP.” **Sidechain** “I feel like this song is going to be a sleeper. I started writing that song before I moved out to Los Angeles. In the process of moving, finished it lyrically, after I had already settled into my place in Los Angeles. I guess what I was going through at that time was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear, like, ‘Is this the right decision?’ Every time I listen to the song, I credit my mentality in writing that song for how much I really embraced the move.” **Earthquake** “When we first started writing it, we had the idea for the song structurally—we wanted the song to have a hook like \[Third Eye Blind’s\] ‘Never Let You Go’ does. I think the song came out much more straightforward and much more verse, pre-chorus, chorus. I\'m pretty sure that that song is the first love song that KP has ever written. Because we\'ve never really been that band. But, you know, I wanted to take a shot at it. I was feeling really good about life and in my relationship, and still do. I found myself being like, why have I not written a song about the person that means the most to me, in a positive light?” **RSVP** “I guess the song in general is about outgrowing someone, plain and simple. Not feeling like you need to respond to somebody, whether it\'s something they say or tactics that they use against you. I don\'t need to continue to stoop to this person\'s level.” **Breathe (feat. Derek Sanders)** “We really wanted to have a feature on the record, and we were in the studio, we had talked about it a few times. But we didn\'t know who it should be, what part it should be, what song it should be. But we had thrown Derek\'s name around quite a bit, ever since we had toured with them a couple years prior. And he\'s such a good singer, and he\'s such a good guy. We did get pretty close with him and with Mayday Parade as a band. I really love his voice, and I think he brought a lot to the song and it really made it a lot more interesting.” **What Took You So Long?** “I guess I don\'t like to say that I was tired or uninspired, because I think that can very easily come across as ungrateful. But the truth was that at that point, I was tired and I was uninspired, and I was having a lot of trouble finishing that song and knowing what to write about. I probably wrote three songs worth of lyrics for that song, and trying to find the right combination of words and melodies. Eventually, I just threw my hands in the air, a classic moment of letting go when you write a song and you think about it too hard and the answer comes to you when you finally let go. I was like, \'Honestly, I\'m just going to write this song about being uninspired, about wanting to finish the song but not being able to.\' I was very out of love with music in general at that time of my life. And I think that in writing it, I was able to make my way back and to fall back in love with music.” **Into the Blue** “The guitar on that song is so fucking cool, and I can say that because I barely wrote any guitar for that song. Joe \[Taylor, singer\] and Kevin \[Maida, guitarist\] met up one day and jammed, and one of them had that opening riff. I remember them sending that to me later that night, and being like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ This is what new KP sounds like, you know. Just that chorus slams in and the guitars just feel really heavy, there\'s so much weight behind them.” **Green Eyes (Polarized)** “This was also very Third Eye Blind-inspired—even threw the ‘third eye’ lyric in there to pay some homage. Another inspiration for this track was ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ by Radiohead—more so lyrically. After I had moved to Los Angeles, I went for a sunset hike, and I just was hearing that opening guitar riff vibe in my head, and sort of the drum feel. I remember getting home and immediately firing up my computer. I had the drum idea first. I programmed that first drum part—it just kind of chills on the snare and hi-hat—and threw the guitar part over it.” **True North** “We took so many different approaches to coming up with vocal ideas for it. I remember meeting up with Joe at his house and playing the song and just playing piano over the song to try and find some cool melodies. We tracked a bunch of stuff on piano over it, which is funny. In the end, the piano melodies became the guitar leads, and Joe came up with some totally original melodies to go over it. Yeah, that song kind of just unfolded very organically, and everyone threw in their two cents, and it\'s a rocker.” **Miles Away** “I think we knew pretty early on that we wanted it to be a closer. It just had that big, anthemic feeling, I guess. It’s about not being present and trying to be present. I feel like nowadays there\'s so much noise, whether it\'s political noise or social media, just all this unnecessary material floating through the airways that people have to process, nonstop, all the time these days. I just found myself falling victim to that, just always reading the negative news, always scrolling through Twitter and being upset. I just felt very removed. I think that song helped me realize that, and helped me appreciate what I do and the time that I have on this earth.”

Colson Baker, the rapper turned pop-punk provocateur known as Machine Gun Kelly, has a somewhat cynical view of fame. At a certain point, he has said in interviews, fans stop rooting *for* you and start rooting against you. Here, on *Tickets to My Downfall*, his fifth LP, he attempts to capture—and potentially reclaim—his crash-and-burn moment. To give the people what he thinks they want. Although the subject matter doesn’t stray too far from Baker’s past releases, musically it’s a sharp left turn. *Downfall* is his project that trades rapping for early-2000s-era pop punk, and was executive produced by blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. It’s littered with middle-finger-in-the-air moments—proud proclamations of recklessness, like going off his meds and \"back on all those drugs I quit\"—but they’re delivered with a certain youthful insouciance. “If I’m a painter, I’d be a depressionist,” he sings on “title track,” a frenetic F-U to his ticket buyers. It feels, at times, like he’s framing the album to be a pile-up of self-pity and angst, but that\'s an undersell; *Downfall* is also emotionally generous, fiercely hyperactive, and ultimately very relatable, full of moments of tenderness and surprising vulnerability. More often than not, Baker is digging around in his pain. “lonely” finds him missing his father, who passed away a few months before the album’s release. “kiss kiss” and “forget me too” are about struggling to break bad habits, be them toxic relationships, booze, or drugs. On the project’s lead single “bloody valentine,” he almost misses a flight because he’s so caught up in love, a tone that calls to mind the boyish romance that underlined many of blink-182’s hits. “There’s a renaissance of guitar-driven music happening in the mainstream,” he tells Apple Music. “This song has been kicking down the door.” The other influence who can be felt throughout these songs is Kurt Cobain, Baker’s childhood idol and rock’s most devoted outsider. Even though *Downfall* is hardly alienating or inaccessible—there’s a song with Halsey, after all—it doesn’t shy away from insecurity or the uglier sides of life. The closing track, “play this when i’m gone,” is a goodbye letter to his daughter, just in case. “I\'m 29, my anxiety\'s eating me alive/I\'m fighting with myself and my sobriety every night/And last time I couldn\'t barely open my eyes/I apologize.”

There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to make a Marilyn Manson album feel, well, nice. Released during a year where practically everything feels upsetting and uncomfortable, it’s oddly cathartic to listen to an artist who once reveled in exactly those things. While the soaring title track sing-along may have been written in 2018, it feels like something of a 2020 anthem: “We are sick, fucked up and complicated/We are chaos, we can’t be cured.” *WE ARE CHAOS* was produced in collaboration with outlaw country artist Shooter Jennings, his influence immediate, obvious, and exciting. The album carries all the musical hallmarks of Manson’s twisted persona, forged over 25-plus years—huge riffs, heavily distorted vocals, industrial sound effects—and the controversial rocker’s long-favored themes of death, discord, Satan, etc. However, it’s all balanced out by tender acoustic guitars (“BROKEN NEEDLE”), glammy melodies (“DON’T CHASE THE DEAD”), and even the odd positive affirmation (“Don’t try changing someone else, you’ll just end up changing yourself,” he sings on the Brian Jonestown Massacre-goes-darkwave highlight “KEEP MY HEAD TOGETHER”). The album’s not without pounding drums and epic howls (particularly the one towards the end of “PAINT YOU WITH MY LOVE”) that’d give *Mechanical Animals*-era Manson a run for his money, but it’s the other, more surprising moments that stand out the most. It’s that perfect storm of old meets new, and diabolical meets rather lovely, that makes *WE ARE CHAOS* such an enjoyable ride amidst a definitively unenjoyable year.

\"We never want to be pigeonholed into a band that only can do one thing,\" Movements vocalist Patrick Miranda tells Apple Music. \"And I think that people who want bands to stay the same forever, in my opinion, it\'s a selfish way of thinking about things.\" Produced by Will Yip, *No Good Left to Give* showcases the California-based quartet expanding into darker territory on their second full-length, both socially and thematically. Tracks like \"In My Blood\" and \"Don\'t Give Up Your Ghost\" introduce a Cure-like wrinkle to the band\'s post-hardcore sound, while \"Skin to Skin\" and \"Santiago Peak\" highlight Miranda\'s improved vocals. \"If fans don\'t like how we\'ve changed, that\'s fine,\" Miranda says. \"But you can\'t expect us to continue to do the same thing just because it\'s what they like.\" Here, Miranda takes us through *No Good Left to Give* track by track. **In My Blood** “I think a lot of bands try and hit the ground running right off the bat with their openers being a really banging, upbeat, fast-paced song, and we were like, let\'s do the opposite, and kind of like a slow burn, because there is one part where it does open up into a cool upbeat part, but you expect there to be more, and then you actually end up getting less, because it just goes back into this drone.” **Skin to Skin** “I think it\'s to me it\'s the most entertaining, it\'s the catchiest in my opinion, and it just gives off a fun, cool vibe to me. I find myself getting that song stuck in my head all the time, which is crazy because I usually can\'t stand to listen to my own music, and I\'m like, \'This is crazy, I wrote this, why am I singing it like it\'s a fucking song on the radio.\'” **Don\'t Give Up Your Ghost** “This was another one of those scenarios in which we were like, ‘You know what, let\'s do something that goes against the grain of what you would expect.’ We wanted the first look of the album to be, again, not like your typical first single. Everybody always drops the first single being a banger that\'s upbeat, fast, and boppy. And we were like, no. Let\'s do the opposite, let\'s release the slowest song on the record as the first single, because it\'s so different and so cool. We wanted the first single of the album to be something weird, and we knew going into that that it was going to be something where fans were going to be like, \'What the fuck is this?\' We knew people were going to talk about it, we knew people were going to be kind of weirded out by it. In my opinion, that\'s the best way to get hype started about your new record.” **Tunnel Vision** “This is the crowd-pleaser. It is very much like its roots are still very much in vintage Movements. You got the screaming in it, you have the heavier kind of chorus, and it\'s very much like sort of paying homage to what Movements has always been.” **Garden Eyes** “We co-wrote that song with Andrew Goldstein, and he\'s more into the pop realm of things. He writes with artists like blackbear, All Time Low, Katy Perry—he\'s done some really big stuff in the pop world. The melody choices were very much inspired by early-2000s kind of rock and stuff that was on the radio at the time. And that to me was really cool because it was a new perspective that we didn\'t necessarily have on *Feel Something*, because we didn\'t really do many co-writes for that record, and this record we got to explore that realm a little bit more.” **12 Weeks** “This is a different one for sure. That\'s one of the songs that to me feels very fresh and different as far as anything that Movements has done before. It\'s a song about, again, grappling with these ideas of \'would things be better if you were gone?\' Would life be different for someone else in a more positive way if you had never existed or you died, or if you never were a part of their life, that sort of idea.” **Living Apology** “What we’re trying to accomplish is to make sure that each one of our songs is distinct in some way or another. That song originally was extremely upbeat. It had a fast kind of driving chorus to begin with; the verses were in a higher register. And the more that we listen to it and the more that we listen to the record as a whole, we were like, ‘This almost feels out of place, because it seems like it\'s already been accomplished on the record.’ That\'s when we came up with the idea of taking that chorus and instead of having it be a typical driving chorus, we decided to give it a swing and downtempo. It\'s almost to me hip-hop-inspired in some ways. And I know that sounds weird, because it doesn\'t sound like hip-hop at all, but just the vibe of it feels kind of like R&B kind of vibey different sort of sound.” **Santiago Peak** “There\'s always the fucking punks that are like, \'Oh, I hate my hometown, I want to get out.\' And I think for a while when I was writing music, that was a theme that I also agreed with was, man, I just feel so stuck where I am. It wasn\'t until we started touring that I started to really have a better appreciation and understanding for how good I had it where I grew up. I grew up extremely privileged, I grew up in a really nice area, I had a good upbringing and a good childhood, and that\'s so much more than what so many people can say about their own childhood, and to me, doing anything that talked ill or would be speaking badly about the place where I grew up just feels so disrespectful.” **Seneca** “Everybody has that one person who is the one that got away, and there was a theme that one of my friends was telling me about, like a term for that person. And he calls the one who got away a white buffalo. And I liked that sentiment, but I hated ‘buffalo.’ It\'s such a dumb word to put into a song. I came across an article about a specific breed of deer called the Seneca white deer. The fact that they were white deer, which kind of goes along the same vibe as the white buffalo, it was a cool-sounding name, it was something I could incorporate into the song.” **Moonlight Lines** “This is another song that I think shows our progression, or at least my progression as a vocalist. The things that I was writing about when I was 19 are not the same things that I experience today. And as I\'ve gotten older, and as I\'ve become more of an adult, I\'ve had different experiences—whether that be with people or just in general, I\'ve had more experiences. And this particular song is essentially about a one-night stand, and the feeling of shame or regret that comes after it.” **No Good Left to Give/Love Took the Last of It** “The entire idea is that they go hand in hand. The lyrics in ‘No Good Left to Give’ are the title and the theme of the next song. That interlude was part of the final, and we were like, that\'s going to make this song six minutes long, we should switch it up, we should make it a little different, we should have this song be its own song, which is cool, because it\'s only a minute and a half and it works really well. It\'s just a really cool interlude into the final track of the album, which to me is the perfect closer. I feel like \'Love Took the Last of It\' has such a strong epic chorus to end the album on. It feels very fucking \'roll the credits,\' you know?”

\"This record\'s been such a strange, strange ordeal. I mean, every record we\'ve always done, it has some kind of tragic story with it,\" vocalist/guitarist Domenic Palermo tells Apple Music about his Philadelphia-based band Nothing\'s fourth album. \"And this one I wasn\'t expecting to kind of have that, but lo and behold, here we are: The globe is on fire right now.\" Inspired by a 2019 *New York Times* photo of a black hole, *The Great Dismal* is a 10-track odyssey set for the end of the world. \"You can\'t ignore what\'s going on anywhere,\" says Palermo. \"The world has this like apocalyptic vibe. There\'s not a lot of uplifting things to keep your eyes on at this point.\" It\'s a dominant theme throughout the record, whether in the Alex G-featuring \"April Ha Ha,\" which marvels at trying to escape the inescapable, or in \"Ask the Rust,\" a reminder that the past is never far behind. It\'s echoed in the album\'s sonics, which toggle between Nothing\'s eerie slowcore tendencies and a constant onslaught of shoegazey squall: Where the opening track\'s grim beauty is aided by cellist/violinist Shelley Weiss and harpist Mary Lattimore, Cloakroom\'s Doyle Martin adds atmospheric guitar layers to songs like the fuzzed-out \"Famine Asylum\" and sprawling \"In Blueberry Memories.\" Here, Palermo meditates on our existence while guiding us through each track of *The Great Dismal*. **A Fabricated Life** “I had that song written and I didn\'t really know exactly how I was going to approach it, whether I wanted to make it a heavier song or keep it more acoustic-sounding. I finally just leaned in on it—like the way it is now, kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting of guitar tones, like really abstract, wanting to create this wall of sound. Just this mixture of guitars and string sounds, and then adding Mary Lattimore\'s harp, and putting a weird treatment of delays and reverbs on it. And then adding Shelley Weiss is just unbelievable. It turned into more of a cinematic thing. Everyone fought with me about putting it as track one, but for me it was really important to set the pace of the record, because the whole record feels cinematic anyway.” **Say Less** “It\'s funny because \'Fabricated\' is about being born into a body that you had no control over and then dealing with those circumstances and everything that comes with that. It constitutes exactly what you\'re going to do in your life. It\'s everything. To go in with something like that to basically rolling into a song where it\'s like, ‘I don\'t really have anything to say about any of this, I don\'t really care to think about it anymore’—it\'s kind of a quick on/off switch between the two. The music kind of reflects that same thing.” **April Ha Ha** “I’m a big fan of Alex G. We had plans to have him come in the studio and do some guitar work with me and maybe even write a song together. He\'s so self-conscious. He\'s just like me about vocals. He hates the way he sounds just the same as I do. So he was like, \'Oh, man. I don\'t want to do a vocal thing.\' I was like, \'Look, man. You have to. I\'m not giving you a choice. I have this part for you and I think it\'s great; you have to hear you singing these words.\' And he did it and we were all really happy with it. I love it because it\'s just like it really just creeps up on you, and if you don\'t really understand what\'s there or don\'t know, it\'s a pleasant surprise.” **Catch a Fade** “It’s about dealing with the need to create and the need to do what you need to do to survive. This song is really special for me because it was the one song that was a demo that Doyle had, and that was our first attempt at writing together. To me, it really shows. He sent me this really lo-fi demo of this track, and it was real direct, a really beautiful vocal melody, and just a clean song all the way through. Me and Kyle \[Kimball, drummer\] flew to Indiana to kind of massage some of the stuff we had and then work on a couple of things that he had, and we were able to at least get the one track done. We just reworked it from the ground up.” **Famine Asylum** “This is our call to Nothing fans that we\'re writing the best version of Nothing songs yet still. The song is about what people are starting to see now, and just that humanity has really stacked the odds against itself. It\'s kind of getting easier to see now where the blame for everything that\'s happening is, and that there could be a peacefulness in extinction in some cases. And then, it\'s a fine line of sounding like a psychopath and just being realistic. But there\'s a lot of *Dr. Strangelove* tied up into that song, which really speaks to exactly what I\'m saying, just in a less poetic way.” **Bernie Sanders** “I wanted to show what this band is capable of doing—kind of let loose a little bit. Just not be so hung up on what I think I need to do and what I think people want me to do, which is kind of a cruel thing musicians go through that\'s not really ever spoken about. It\'s just there\'s this bar to clear and then there\'s these critics and there\'s a lot of the things that just weigh on your decisions on what you want to do. It\'s sad because I feel like we lose a lot of important things because of that. The OG \'Bernie Sanders\' demo was real strange. When I got the secondary demo down, people were just like, \'This is absolutely going to be the highlight of this record.\' I stuck with it, and when we were recording with Will \[Yip, producer\], I finally became a believer in it. It\'s just nice to take yourself out on that limb and not injure yourself fatally.” **In Blueberry Memories** “I\'ve never done anything as detailed as this and as precise. This thing just became like a symbiote, you know what I mean? Like, it attached itself to me. And, like I said, in the process of achieving this courage to get past the self-doubt. \[2018\'s\] *Dance on the Blacktop* did great, but it felt like a linear move to me in a lot of senses. I feel like we just got comfortable making what we thought was a Nothing record. And with that, there\'s just a lot of things that I was fighting against. Everything I\'m doing on this has just been so calculated so that at the end of the day, if this blew up in my face and it was just a complete disaster, then I could say to myself, \'Well, you did everything that you could, and you made the record that you wanted to make.\' For me, that would be like any way that this comes across is going to be a success to me, and myself, just knowing that I did what I wanted to do, being a person that wasn\'t really supposed to be in this position that I\'m in right now, making this music and stuff. Every day is a win for me because I don\'t feel like I was meant to be here at all.” **Blue Mecca** “This song really sets the tone. If you didn\'t feel like the record had a cinematic feel to it, I think that this one really nailed it. The song\'s about my dad and kind of going through this point in time when he was trying to rehabilitate himself and he chose the route of going through Christianity and it really not being the best way for him to deal with what he was dealing with inside, which was years of PTSD, two tours of Vietnam, drug addiction, bad DNA—a lot of things that religion wasn\'t just going to help. There needed to be some other help, and it wasn\'t there. It kind of created its own storm.” **Just a Story** “This song is literally just about the day that John Lennon was killed, essentially. For some reason, when we were in the studio, we were just sitting there and there was all these Beatles posters all over the wall, because Studio 4 \[outside of Philadelphia\] has done work with John Lennon and The Beatles before. Just being in those same walls for five weeks with all this, the ghost of all these people moving through the studio. It was just this reoccurring thing with John Lennon.” **Ask the Rust** “The song itself is about the readjustment factor of coming home from that time I spent \[in prison\] and to this day just still having dreams about being there. You kind of think that you\'re past something but your past isn\'t always done with you. I think that rings true in these dreams that I have, where I wake up and I did something wrong and I\'m back in prison again. I\'m saying goodbye to people, and there\'s this crushing feeling inside my stomach. Like I fucked everything up. And then, I\'m back again. To me, that\'s why this record is so important in general. That\'s what this whole thing entails. It wasn\'t about me 10 years ago writing *Guilty of Everything* and just seeing all these things that were such a potent factor in my life and how we\'ve addressed them and we\'re good to go. No, it doesn\'t work like that. And I see that now. It\'s how you use them to move forward that is the key. It\'s not about getting past them. It\'s about learning to live with them.”

“I’m 71 and I don’t fuckin’ understand how I got there,” Ozzy Osbourne tells Apple Music. “I can remember times when I\'ve fuckin’ woken up, puke down me. I’ve fuckin’ woken up with a bed full of blood, when I’ve fallen down and banged my head.” It’s not like Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t tackled the subject of death before. Fifty years and one week prior to the release of this album, on the very first song on Black Sabbath’s debut LP, he asked Satan: “Is it the end?” Here, though, on his 12th solo album, and first in a decade, he’s thinking about it a little more seriously. On “Holy for Tonight,” he ponders: “What will I think of when I speak my final words? … What will I think of when I take my final breath?” On the title track, a soaring ballad featuring Elton John, live strings, and a choir, he admits, “Don’t know why I’m still alive/Yes, the truth is I don’t wanna die an ordinary man.” Let’s get one thing straight: There is zero chance of Ozzy Osbourne dying an ordinary man. Nor Elton, for that matter—or anybody else involved in making this record. At the helm is Andrew Watt, a guitarist who got to know Osbourne while working on Post Malone’s track “Take What You Want” (which you’ll also find at the end of this record). Watt enlisted some famous friends to help, and the first call was to Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. “I was like, ‘Ozzy wants us to make an album,’ and he was like, ‘When? When are we doing it? Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it,’” Watt says. “I was like, ‘Wow, okay. He really wants to do it, and we need a bass player.’ So I called Duff \[McKagan\] up, from Guns N\' Roses…and Duff was like, ‘When? When? When? When?’ Same thing, same enthusiasm.” The result is an epic release that stares time and mortality squarely in the face, but still has time for toilet humor, aliens, cannibals, and that time in 1972 when Osbourne did so much cocaine he accidentally called the police on himself. (“I thought it was an air conditioning button,” said Osbourne of the story behind the punky “It’s a Raid.” “It was a fucking Bel Air patrol.”) Considering Osbourne has publicly battled health issues for decades, and in 2019 was diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, the mere existence of *Ordinary Man* is quite extraordinary. Watt, Smith, and McKagan have nailed the balance of heavy-as-hell riffs (notably opener “Straight to Hell”) and heartstring-tugging rock ballads (“Under the Graveyard” and the title track in particular), while “Today Is the End” hits like a snarling Metallica/Alice in Chains hybrid—both bands he inspired. Meanwhile, the massive drums and pitch-shifted voice intro on “Goodbye” are a clear nod to “Iron Man.” After singing, “Sitting here in purgatory, not afraid to burn in hell/All my friends are waiting for me, I can hear them crying out for help,” the Prince of Darkness ends the song with a crucial question: “Do they sell tea in heaven?”

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

For PVRIS frontwoman Lynn Gunn, her band’s third album *Use Me* marked “a line in the sand.” Sonically, that meant stepping away from the expansive rock that defined the Massachussetts trio’s previous two albums and embracing altogether more hook-heavy, dark-edged electro-pop. “This is where we’re at now, and we’re not going back from here,” says the singer of PVRIS’ new dawn, which Gunn honed with US producer and Paper Route frontman JT Daly. “You can hop on or you can hop off. I follow my taste and my interests, and I never want to compromise that for nostalgia or for the comfort of preserving old expectations.” But *Use Me* also represented another clear-cut change: the moment Gunn—for years reluctant to take full credit for PVRIS’ output—allowed herself to step out of the shadows and into the foreground. “The process of this album was a very singular, solo endeavor,” she says. “Things were naturally happening that way anyway, but we never really had the direct conversation about it. Everyone was down for this, because it’s a healthier, easier method. Finally being like, ‘This is actually how it’s operated,’ and having that conversation has been a really positive shift for us. It allows more freedom.” It’s not hard to see why *Use Me* catalyzed that new direction: This is an intensely personal record on which Gunn documents—and exhales—the turbulence of her life during the years leading up to its creation. “It was a really overwhelming time,” says the singer of the period after the release of 2017’s *All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell* and into 2019, when she began to write *Use Me*. That turmoil is spread across the record, from the pent-up ferocity of opener “Gimme a Minute”—a shuddering anthem which sees Gunn desperately placing a protective layer around herself—to “Good to Be Alive,” on which the singer ruminates on her ill health, sarcastically wondering, “Is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive but I hate my life.” But amid all that restless energy, there’s also release; as the album reaches its close, Gunn sails into noticeably calmer waters. That shift you can hear, she says, was “internal healing. It’s funny, because while we were making the album, I still felt I was holding on to a lot of things. The chaos was just very, very present. But speaking about it now, I feel healed from a lot of it.” Here, let Gunn walk you through the exhilarating *Use Me*, one song at a time. **Gimme a Minute** “This song feels like a really good start, especially if you’re looking at the album as a storyline. There was a lot of change during this album: personal changes, mental changes, physical changes. And I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as well as Crohn\'s disease around this time, so it\'s navigating a lot of health factors within that chaos. I also have a hard time setting boundaries and asking for help or time off. The song is a cry out and just a catharsis of what I really wanted to say, which was just, ‘Give me a minute. I need a minute. I need to process what has happened in the last few years. I need to process what is happening to my body. I need to process what\'s happening to my heart.’ It was just a lot. Sonically, the song emulates that stirring stress and anxiety, and it eventually leads to this explosive breakdown and the ultimate freak-out.” **Dead Weight** “Again, this was about reflecting on being a people-pleaser and always putting others’ feelings and expectations before mine. The song is about wanting to shed those habits and patterns. But also about shedding people who don\'t understand that and won\'t allow you to set those boundaries—old friendships, old relationships, old anything that don’t allow you to be your best self. The dynamic of the song really ties into the sonics; they reflect this dance that I feel I am always having. I always want to be straightforward and transparent with the people around me, but I always want to do that with love and do that in a way that\'s not going to upset anybody. But sometimes the truth is you need to just set that boundary and do it unapologetically and not worry about it.” **Stay Gold** “‘Stay Gold’ just flew out—it was a really quick song to write. The message of the song is wanting to write a song for somebody, but also not wanting to, because when you write a song about somebody, they\'re immortalized. They can be consumed by a listener in whatever way they want, whether that\'s to put them up on this grand pedestal or to tear them down. And this person just felt so special that I didn\'t even want to give the chance for either of those things to happen. I just wanted to keep them safe. I didn’t want to let their greatness die as we would play the song over and over. So, ironically, I ended up writing a song about them, which is the song about not wanting to write a song about them.” **Good to Be Alive** “The line in this—‘It feels good to be alive but I hate my life’—is supposed to be a little cheeky and a little bit funny. But it’s also supposed to be completely honest. JT had set up a little miniature writing camp with some awesome writers. And there was one day we were just working alone, and during this time, I was having a really bad flare-up in my stomach and in my body. I just wasn\'t feeling good, and it was really hard to just show up to the session and be on and be present. I was feeling a lot of the weight of those health issues, which was ironic because mentally I was in excellent health—the best place I\'ve been in my adult life and in our career. What I think music is really great for is delivering the deep, honest, and maybe difficult message, but if you can make someone dance to it or sing along to it, it just feels so much better.” **Death of Me** “This is about that fine line you dance right when you are interested in somebody and you realize you really care about them and like them. And you have to surrender in a way, or at least for me. I\'m go hard or go home. If I\'m going to commit to somebody, I\'m fully committed and ready to just dive in (that’s definitely a good indication of the no boundaries thing). It’s about the risk you take when you are connecting with somebody and putting it all out there. Sonically, it\'s similar to ‘Good to Be Alive,’ where I feel like if you just read the lyrics straight out, it can sound pretty dark and maybe not the most positive. I knew I would need somebody who could bring that perfect element of a little bit dark, but a little bit fun, and I chose Daniel Armbruster from Joywave. He helped like really capture that dark energy, but also a little bit of a cheeky wink in there.” **Hallucinations** “It\'s funny, I didn\'t think the song would make the album. I was reading this book at the time about hallucinating, and it just kind of felt like I was living in a weird little dream. There were a lot of areas of my life where I was kind of contemplating what was real and what was something I was thinking up or projecting, and trying to identify and really pin those things down. The book really lined up with how I felt at that point in my life. A fan actually gave me that book, too, so whoever it was, I owe them a huge thank you.” **Old Wounds** “I think this is the most directly I\'ve ever written about love. It feels like a love song—it’s about that all-or-nothing mentality and that willingness to get hurt again from somebody the second time around. I wrote it about three or four years ago. I had this really short-term but really special connection with somebody, and it just ended very abruptly. And there was a time when they had come back just to talk about it and for us to process something, and I remember one of my friends just said to me, ‘Don’t open up old wounds, don\'t do it.’ I was like, ‘That\'s a good lyric, that\'s a good song idea.’ At the time I was staying in a hotel in New York and I just went back to my room and blurted the song out in a day. And I had the demo for a really long time; I just wanted to finish it and wanted to get it out. I showed it to JT one day and a couple of people on our team, and everybody was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. I thought so.’ I\'m definitely a hopeless romantic, and this captures that.” **Loveless** “When I wrote this, I was dealing with a breakup and I just didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to give it any more attention or energy, I guess. But I knew, deep down, that I needed to write about it and get it out. So I very reluctantly wrote about it. But I think making the song allowed for that final release and that final acceptance and just surrendering to it for a moment. Once that energy was pulled out, it allowed for this breath, which I think the end of the album has. It feels lighter, it doesn\'t feel as chaotic, even if there is still a little bit of sadness. The song is about admitting that you\'ve been defeated and admitting that somebody hurt you and that you\'re giving them this salute. Like, ‘You hurt me, dude, you hurt me real bad.’ I feel like this is the first song where I\'ve just fully laid that out there. Something about admitting that takes the power back.” **January Rain** “A much more retrospective reflection on that same situation. JT and I were just finishing everything and finishing tracking, and just kind of getting everything together. But I woke up one morning with the vocal melody for this song and the chorus in my head and I just jumped to my computer immediately. I wrote the track and got the melody before it ran away and I brought it to him. I didn’t have the lyrics and I didn’t know what I was feeling. But ‘January rain’ just kept popping up. It was looking back on that relationship a year later and reflecting on what it all felt like, which was it was really special to me. But which, very early on, I knew was doomed. I just remember there was one week where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, and that\'s when that feeling felt the heaviest.” **Use Me** “There\'s harp in here, plus strings. This was one of the songs, along with \'Stay Gold,\' which we were fighting really hard to get onto the album. I was watching *Euphoria* and I just really loved the soundtrack for it. I loved the dynamics between Rue and Jules and just the concept of using a person as your escape or your medicine—whether it\'s good or bad. You can see it as a really healthy thing or unhealthy, it just depends on the situation. I tend to get very singular and solo in my own life. I almost wrote it as a love letter or a love song from someone else\'s perspective, and the dialogue or message that I wish someone would be able to speak to me and sing to me. So it was like this weird backwards love song and kind of putting that into the universe. Maybe one day somebody will be able to be that for me and be that person to lean on. But there’s a double-sided energy to it. Because you could almost look at the song as a kind of funny, passive-aggressive, ironic message of just saying, ‘Just go ahead, use me. Do whatever you need.’ It’s very empowered. There\'s also an empowering component to it as well, if you\'re looking at it from that angle.” **Wish You Well** “I never want to burn bridges with people. I never want people to be hurt. Even if a situation was toxic or wasn\'t healthy, I still always just want the best for somebody. But sometimes you need to let things go and you got to let certain people go. I feel it\'s right to have this at the end of the album. It just really captures that no matter what somebody\'s put me through, I\'m not going to hold that against you. I\'m always going to hope that you can grow from this and heal. But I also love a good four on the floor, really groovy bass, fun song. So it was the first time we\'ve really gotten to make something like that. It had to be on the album.”

Twenty years in and Burlington, Ontario, post-hardcore quintet Silverstein has clearly learned nothing from nine previous albums’ worth of detailed self-therapy. “I keep chasing bad feelings,” concedes frontman Shane Told with familiar hair-trigger torment on *A Beautiful Place to Drown*’s opener, “Bad Habits.” “I keep breaking down and never deal with it… I’m good with bad habits.” There’s much to satisfy a protracted Silverstein habit here: All the confessional anguish and slick melodies mingled with eruptions of metallic violence one has come to expect from the band are still firmly in place. But Silverstein’s brand of post-hardcore has always had hints of pop-hardcore buried within its folds, and this album’s polish only makes that clearer, particularly on the synth-y, sax-streaked “All on Me” or the veiled bubblegum ditties “Say Yes!” and “Take What You Give.” Yet what continues to make the band so unique after two decades is how easily they can flit from those easier-to-approach tunes to absolute crushers like “Stop” or the Princess Nokia-featuring “Madness.”

“We always want to push ourselves and we always think things can be better,” singer and guitarist Bonnie Fraser tells Apple Music of Stand Atlantic\'s second full-length, *Pink Elephant*, the follow-up to 2018\'s successful debut *Skinny Dipping*. “None of us were expecting it to go as well as it did. So it was just like, \'Oh shit. Okay. Now we\'ve got to pull our socks off once again and just deliver.\'” *Pink Elephant* plays with that idea of tripping on your own problems and overcoming that hysteria with honest, open, and often tough conversations. Whether it\'s the pulsating New Wave energy of \"Blurry,\" the explosive \"Jurassic Park,\" or the melancholy \"Drink to Drown,\" the Australian-based quartet delivers 11 tracks that expand Stand Atlantic\'s sound beyond any one particular genre. \"It\'s just about breaking that box that other people put us in there, which is fine, everyone\'s going to do that,\" explains Fraser. \"But this record was particularly important for us to break the barrier and prove to not only ourselves, but to everyone else that we\'re capable of doing anything.\" Below, Fraser takes us through *Pink Elephant* track by track. **Like That** “So ‘Like That’ is just an over-embellishment of having a huge crush on someone and you have that connection that you can\'t really describe. And so that is even how the lyric came about. \'Cause I couldn\'t describe it to a producer when I was trying to write it. I\'m like, \'It\'s just like that, like that.\' And that\'s literally how the song, how the hook came about. It\'s just attempting to describe that indescribable feeling between like two people.” **Shh!** “‘Shh!’ is about feeling like you\'re not speaking up for yourself and letting other people talk over you or talk for you and kind of realizing that and going, ‘Wow, okay. Fuck that. I\'m not going to do that. Why would I ever let someone else say something for me when I\'m the only one that knows what\'s best for me?’ It\'s just taking control of your own conversation—taking control of what you want to say and what you want to do.” **Blurry** “‘Blurry’ essentially is about a toxic relationship, or just toxicity in general. That kind of push and pull of ‘I love you, but I hate you, but I need you, but I don\'t want you.’ Like just the back-and-forth, not knowing where you stand, and it puts you in a haze, like blurry, no pun intended.” **Jurassic Park** “So everyone thinks this is like a party song. And it\'s just so not about that. I read the lyrics back then, like, ‘Oh my god, it does sound like a party.’ Obviously everyone talks about mental health and how important that is. And that is great in its own right. But growing up, I was in a very dysfunctional family and I was around mental illness quite a bit. And substance abuse and addiction. And my mom was a partner to a person with those struggles. And it\'s so sad to see that person kind of start crumbling, but then it\'s also really sad when your own mom has to deal with this and pick up the pieces and be hurt over and over. And I just wanted to put more emphasis on partners or loved ones who care so much for this person but that person won\'t get help unless they help themselves.” **Eviligo** “This song is the first time I\'ve ever just made up shit. Obviously I do take it from some kind of elements of a real place, but the entire story of it is completely made up. I am not a stalker by any means, but it is about the kind of obsessive mentality that you can sometimes find yourself maybe flipping into at one stage or another and just put up to 11. And basically having a crush on someone so big that you want to wear their skin, essentially. We were just playing around with lyrics in that one.” **Wavelength** “‘Wavelength’ is about like trying to talk to someone and sometimes you feel like you\'re speaking a different language, because they have a different way of seeing things or saying things to you. And you\'re literally just not on their wavelength and sometimes take it really horribly when really I didn\'t mean that at all. And that\'s okay. Like, everyone has different ways to see things, obviously, but just that concept and just not taking it lightly and feeling like everyone\'s against you, but when really they\'re just not speaking your language.” **Drink to Drown** “I find it really hard to write about relationships, and I know it\'s so corny, but this one was just about feeling like you\'ve given your all to someone and it\'s just not being reciprocated. Everyone has a different love language. Just because you\'re not feeling it doesn\'t mean they\'re not showing it in their own way. And I think the whole song can just be summed up in that one line that says, \'If you love me, saturate me.\' It\'s just like, you feel like they\'re not giving you enough and you need it all. Because you\'re a greedy motherfucker.” **DWYW** “I kind of lost sight of what I even wanted because I was just hearing so many opinions and there was a lot of pressure to do well, and I obviously didn\'t want to fail at all. And it kind of got to the point where I just felt like a dog lying on its back, just being like, \'Just take me. Just throw your knives. I\'m done.\' There\'s a line that says, \'Take me close to the sun/I\'m just hanging from your silver tongue.\' And that\'s talking about how you can let people do anything if they\'re like complimenting you and treating you nicely. It covers it up, in a way. It’s basically feeling like you want to give up and let people have their way.” **Silk & Satin** “Fun fact: We wrote that for *Skinny Dipping*, but it didn\'t fit on the album. It also used to be like a full-on rock song and we still really liked it. So we revisited it and just kind of completely changed the whole vibe, essentially. It was written a few years ago, at a time where I just felt super alone and I didn\'t have anyone to turn to or talk to, which was totally not the case at all. Just sometimes the brain eats away at you. It was just that feeling of helplessness, not really knowing who to turn to, and also feeling guilty for even feeling bad when only great things are going on in your life.” **Soap** “That is just talking about everyone having their own vices—it doesn\'t have to be like a substance or anything like that, but everyone has their ways of dealing with it. Some people love to buy clothes or read books, even. You can have healthy vices, but I guess at the time I was wanting something to fill whatever void I felt like I had. And I was kind of just doing anything I wanted to my body and not knowing where you stand in life.” **Hate Me (Sometimes)** “You think it\'s about a relationship, but it is not—it\'s actually a song just talking to myself, basically. It got me through writer\'s block, because I was feeling like everything was going really well. And I thought I didn\'t have anything to write about. I was like, \'What the fuck am I supposed to write about when I actually feel good?\' And so I wished that I could go back to hating myself because at least I got songs out of it. So at the time I was literally just like, \'I don\'t know what to write about. So I guess I\'ll write about not knowing what to write about and wanting to hate myself.\'”

You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of \[2018 album *A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. Fucking hell. What are we going to do?’” The way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest. “Go back to when we were wearing Spider-Man T-shirts,” says Healy, “and the reason I wanted Ross \[MacDonald\] to play bass was not because we could eventually be in some culturally informative, cool thing but because that noise sounded cool with this noise.” On an album that begins with an address by Greta Thunberg and winds down with a song written by Healy’s dad, Tim, the noises that sound cool together include folk, UK garage, Max Martin-inspired pop, and hazy, discolored indie. Over that questing backdrop, Healy digs further into his inner self. “It has a lot of heart, this record,” he says. “A lot of the ideas have evolved. There was stuff like \[2015 single\] ‘Love Me,’ earlier work, which was about ego; those ideas are still there, but it’s now more about self-love in the truest sense—that people only change when it’s too hard not to. You’ve got to look out for yourself, accept that you’re not a Superman. There’s a lot of self-reflection. It’s the most me record. It’s the truest.” Here, he talks us through that truth track by track. **The 1975** “We were talking about how we were going to do *that* statement—the same statement that we always make musically—and we wanted it to be us at our most modern. That first track always has to be us checking in. That got us into the conversation of what is the most modern statement, or who has the most modern statement, and Greta was the decision. I think it sounds like how a lot of us feel. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it’s quite a somber piece of music. It’s very 1975 in the way that it’s quite beautiful superficially but also quite sad, quite pretty but also quite ominous. Greta has a lot of reach, but I really wanted to see her exist formally in pop culture, not just as an anecdote of somebody.” **People** “This song is right back to where we came from—almost what we were like in our first incarnation of the band. Very inspired by bands like Refused and Converge and stuff like that. It was around the time of the Alabama abortion bill and we’d just played a show in Alabama. It was the feeling of oppressive, conservative religion. It happened up on the tour bus. It was kind of like our ‘Youth Against Fascism’—\[UK journalist\] Dorian Lynskey said that. I was definitely thinking about that Sonic Youth song. I think that it’s about fear and apathy and referencing how annoying responsibility can feel. I wanted there to be like a slapstick madness to its urgency.” **The End (Music for Cars)** “The actual reason that it\'s called ‘(Music for Cars)’ is because...I wasn\'t going to tell anybody, but there was a song called ‘Hnscc,’ which was an ambient piece of music about death, the death of one of my family members, that was on the \[2013\] EP *Music for Cars*. And ‘The End’ is a reinvention of that, basically an orchestral version. And yeah, ‘Music for Cars’ has kind of become the umbrella title for this whole era.” **Frail State of Mind** “\[During our early teens\], we were super into hardcore and making noise and, like most people in the UK, super into dance music. I think Burial is quite an obvious one that you can hear on this, and even people like MJ Cole. That darker side of garage is something that I’ve always really loved. It’s very dreamy and sounds like driving down the M25 at night with the passing of lights and the smoking of stuff. Mike Skinner spoke about how garage clubs and the actual garage scene was always a bit intimidating to him as a late teen, so he would experience these things at his mates’ houses or in cars with his mates smoking weed. That’s what my experience was—with so much time spent in my car listening to music and then going home and making music with George \[Daniel, drummer and co-producer\] and then going out in my car and listening to it for context. That was one of the happiest times of my life.” **Streaming** “Sonically, it’s a tribute to our formative years and what we were into–Cult of Luna and Godspeed \[You! Black Emperor\] and Sigur Rós, all of these big ambient artists. And UK garage music. This record is like a bit of that with a bit of Midwest emo thrown in. What we love in ambient music, we call it Pinocchio-ing: It’s stuff that’s trying to sound like a real boy. Sigur Rós sounds like it’s striving to sound like a river or a landscape. All of the kind of visuals that you get with that kind of music. It really takes you back to one’s relationship with nature and texture and temperature. To be honest with you, we took quite a lot of that off. A lot of that made way for more actual songs.” **The Birthday Party** “It was the first thing that I wrote for this album that I knew was great. And it was the first thing that we got excited about. Inherently, excitement equals projection, \[so it was originally going to be the first single\]. And then we went off on tour and I wrote ‘People.’ And we were like, ‘Right, well. If we don’t start with this, where are we going to put it?’” **Yeah I Know** “I fucking love ‘Yeah I Know.’ I don\'t know what it reminds me of. It\'s kind of like Hyperdub. I remember super, super minimal ravehead music when I was growing up. It was just a synth and a drum kit. We’re also big Thom Yorke fans, outside of Radiohead, so I think there\'s probably a bit of that.” **Then Because She Goes** “It doesn\'t have a bridge or anything. It’s just this little moment. But this is how I feel about life. There’s so many fleeting moments of beauty on the record, which was really important because most of my favorite records always have them. Especially if we’re talking about shoegaze records. I think a lot of that comes from the slacker mid-’90s thing of Pavement or Liz Phair. There’s a lot of Life Without Buildings and stuff like that, especially in this song. And it’s like faded splendor, as I always call it. I love pop songs that sound like they’re drowning. Like My Bloody Valentine. Like a Polaroid that’s gasping for air. That really sunny but sun-flared feeling is quite across the record because—for the time and for the kind of person that I am, and my political views—it’s inherently quite a warm record.” **Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America** “This song happened quite early in the record. It reminded me of America so much in its ambience. It even goes back to \[*A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\]—I think I wrote it around that time. There’s quite a bit of folk music on the record. I’ve never really collaborated with anybody before, and it was so easy making music with \[guest vocalist\] Phoebe \[Bridgers\] that every time I had an idea or I wanted a slightly different texture to the vocals, I just got her to do it. Phoebe does all the backup vocals on ‘Roadkill’ and then ‘Playing on My Mind.’” **Roadkill** “‘Roadkill’ is about touring America, it’s about getting burnt out and searching for things. Anecdotal things that happen on the road—pissing myself on a Texan intersection, all those kind of things. I don\'t know what it sounds like—maybe like Pinegrove, or there’s a band called Limbeck that I used to love.” **Me & You Together Song** “We’ve gone full circle–this album is very like the early EPs: dreamy, hazy, and quite broken and deconstructed. A lot of our hardcore fans emotionally relate to our EPs and see them as our first albums, so it’s nice that we’ve ended up back there. Our favorite music is music that’s kind of inherently beautiful. It’s not pretty but kind of fractured or a bit jangly or overly distorted. I think the whole record is like that, and this is a stark example of that idea.” **I Think There\'s Something You Should Know** “It’s explicitly about impostor syndrome, depression, that kind of a sense of isolation. I think there’s a lot of that in this record. I think it’s also about the lack of desire to communicate about those things as well—like, if I’m talking to someone close to me who’s not aware of what’s going on. And I think the reason for that is normally because it’s exhausting to take it out of your head and put it on the table.” **Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied** “It’s quite a lo-fi hip-hop track. It came from George jamming on the piano, and I was putting a really low-resolution breakbeat over the top of it. Stuff like that is really fun for us sometimes. If it’s really simple and you’ve got a loop to work with, you can kind of just go into producer mode. And—like any producer normally is—we’re huge J Dilla fans and all that kind of stuff. Lyrically, it’s just more self-reflection. I think it’s about also doing your bit as an artist—if you give people nothing to work with, if you say nothing, then you leave room for people to project anything. I find that a lot of people who are out there doing their thing musically, who aren’t challenging any ideas, are only made interesting through association or projection. I don’t feel like a lot of people stand by stuff.” **Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)** “This is the anomaly on the record for me. I don\'t know where it came from. That was me fucking around when the record was feeling really, really relaxed. It reminds me of all the kind of proper pop music that I grew up listening to, like Backstreet Boys. And it’s like an ode to early Max Martin, late-\'90s pop. I don\'t think we ever do anything retro. We never do anything pastiche-y. But there’s definitely a reflection on a certain time of our musical upbringing. And that was very much part of that. And it’s got a great Temptations sample at the beginning, and kind of reminds me of Kanye or something.” **Shiny Collarbone** “Cutty Ranks did all those vocals for us. It started out as a sample, but then we spoke to him to clear it and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it again.’ That’s Manchester, that tune, to me, man. That just sounds like going to town—that kind of dreamy, deep, dreamy, slow deep house music. Again, it’s like a fractured shard. There’s so many shards on this record. A lot of that is George. George always talks about how I’m quite expressive, how I have the ability, or even the desire, to express myself outside of music. And that can be in lyrics or in conversation. Whereas, because he’s not like that, he takes a really big responsibility on himself to express himself through sonics. That’s a really good way of explaining why a lot of our records are almost OCD in their detail. It’s because that’s George’s language.” **If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)** “If your vibe is instilled in people’s brain from what your earlier work is like, then probably \[it is the most 1975 song on the record\]. When I hear bands that are sounding—or are trying to sound—like The 1975, it’s normally *that* 1975 that they’re trying to sound like—that reference to post-punk pop, ’80s pop. And that does come out quite naturally in \[the album\] sometimes, because that’s very much in our blood. This song is very on-the-nose for this album. But I like that, because it’s another completely different tone to the album and it kind of comes out of nowhere.” **Playing on My Mind** “This takes us back into that American, James Taylor-y, Jackson Browne-y kind of sound. Again, Phoebe is just great to have there. As soon as I write something, if I get her to put a harmony on it or to just do something over the top of it, it completely changes. And that was really easy and really natural. I think this is my funniest record; there’s some lines in there that still make me smile when I listen to it. \[With\] ‘Playing on My Mind,’ there’s one line I really like: ’I won’t get clothes online ’cause I get worried about the fit/That rule don’t apply concerning my relationships.’ I thought that summed up me really, really well.” **Having No Head** “This is George, man. All George. It’s the only thing that George titled as well; he\'s very much into his Eastern philosophy. You can ask him what it\'s about. I don\'t fucking know. That\'s just George meditating. That\'s what that sounds like to me. That is how George gets it out, this big, sprawling ambience, his artwork, like tapestries.” **What Should I Say** “Bane of my fucking life. Honestly, for two years. This was going to be on *A Brief Inquiry*. It was just this piece of house music that we never really quite got right. I think it\'s about social media. It was kind of like Manchester again; we always thought about New Order when we were making this, for some reason. I’ve seen New Order, I’ve been a couple of times during the making of this record. I mean, we even met Brian Eno recently. The reality that we get to fuck with these people now: Whether it gives you a confidence...it gives you a *something*.” **Bagsy Not in Net** “We finished \[the album\] and after we’d done all of our deliberations, the record came down to 21 tracks. Now, we were looking at it and thinking, ‘But hold on: It *was* 22 tracks.’ It’s not that we didn\'t want to lose the preorders, it’s just that it didn\'t really make sense to me. But we weren’t just going to make up an interlude or something for the sake of it and put it on what we want to be our best album. We’d been with Mike Skinner recently, and I was talking to him about this tune, which is basically using that string sample. The conversation just turned to that, and then George started doing it, making the beat, and it was so fucking exciting. So we set the mic up and recorded the whole thing in, like, a day. It’s about wanting to die with your partner. Don\'t want to lose someone that I love. If somebody wanted to know what the album sounded like in a clip, I would play them this. We knew exactly what \[the album\] was just at the very end, whereas during the creation of it, we just didn’t.” **Don’t Worry** “‘Don’t Worry’ is the first song that I ever heard, I think. In 1989, 1990, our dad was in a band, just a fuck-around band, and he had this song that he wrote for my mum about her postnatal depression. It’s a song that I remember because my dad would play it on the piano. Looking back, in the way that \[this album\] is about me and my family and my life, it just felt right \[to do a version of the song\]. It was written 30 years ago, and it’s me and my dad singing—that was just a really special moment. He’s a good songwriter, my dad. It’s a very 1975 interpretation of his work. And he loves that. He’s very, very proud to be on the record.” **Guys** “There\'s not many love songs about some of the most beautiful, powerful relationships in your life. Especially straight guys or whatever in rock music, \[they\] tend not to write about how much they love their mates, or how this would be impossible and frivolous and completely pointless if we weren\'t all doing it together. One of the things we say to each other all the time is ‘Imagine being a solo artist. Imagine being here, now, on your fourth day in Brisbane, waiting to go…’ It’s hard out here if you’re just constantly traveling. And we’ve been a band since we were 13, and they’re my best friends. And we\'ve never fallen out. It’s a really true song. They’re the thing that gives me purpose.”

For post-hardcore legends The Used, nearly two decades into their career, growing older doesn’t mean growing apathetic—it means developing a new, pragmatic language for aggression. The Utah band’s eighth full-length LP, *Heartwork*, has them reconnected with pop-punk producer and paragon John “Feldy” Feldmann (5 Seconds of Summer, Good Charlotte) for a self-referential album that pays homage to their previous work (“Paradise Lost, a poem by John Milton,” “Darkness Bleeds, FOTF”) while traversing new musical styles (pop-electronica on “Clean Cut Heals,” grunge on “The Lighthouse,” and an unexpected Michael Jackson influence on “Cathedral Bell”). Contained throughout are hearty literary references meant to transform complicated symbology into accessible therapy. “A good story is a pathway to understanding,” frontman Bert McCracken tells Apple Music. “As an adult, my fulfillment lies in being able to force-feed my love of books into our music.” Here, McCracken breaks down each song on *Heartwork*. “After 20 years, we’re comfortable with our musicianship,” he says. “And now we’re just having the time of our lives.” **Paradise Lost, a poem by John Milton** “Milton’s poem opened up my mind to the possibility of metaphors that are deep and soaked in with meaning, and I loved the idea of talking about a failed revolution. But the song is really about the struggles within the personality of who you think you are and who you know you are—those demons we fight. It’s along the same lines as some Used classics, like ‘The Bird and the Worm.’ There’s a hidden backstory of The Used that\'s in the entirety of this record.” **Blow Me (feat. Jason Aalon Butler)** “I’ve known Jason \[letlive., FEVER 333\] for maybe 18 years. He’s a hero of the heavy music scene. This song is almost a sister song to ‘Box Full of Sharp Objects’ and many others in our catalog that are about what happens after you get punched in the face, what happens after you fall down.” **BIG, WANNA BE** “If you listen deep, you’ll hear a lot of lines in the song that could come straight out of an orange president\'s mouth. It’s about the flex of influence and the devastating situation of social media, but it’s also sardonic, almost like Jonathan Swift. He wrote a proposition for the king about a way to cure poverty, and his idea was to eat all the poor people. It’s this really sharp, double-edged sword.” **Bloody Nose** “The record is full of different production, different feelings, and different textures. ‘Bloody Nose’ is like standing in a small club and hearing the band play directly out of the speakers. There are no tricks. It is, as well, a song about where we go when we fail and what we do with our mistakes.” **Wow, I Hate This Song** “My relationship with music is a tumultuous one. This started out as an idea to write a song about how I hate every song, but it took on a really sentimental second meaning. When you spend time with music during a difficult period, those records become solidified with a painful memory. There are records in my life that I can’t listen to nowadays without going back to that time, and it’s painful. Music is so powerful like that.” **My Cocoon** “It’s too early for an intermission, but this forces you to take a breath on the record. One record that I always go back to and love so much is The Beatles\' White Album. It has so many different little interludes and little snippets of songs that just create for such a fun listening experience, but also heighten the emotion to this other level.” **Cathedral Bell** “This song echoes my childhood completely, feeling terrified about bedtime because I\'ve never been able to sleep. It’s so much worse when you\'re a kid; the nighttime\'s so daunting. Not only that, but the musical inspiration as well, this feels like everything that was in my Discman when I was 10 or 11 and 12. It’s Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, all delicious \'80s pop that is still some of the best pop that\'s ever existed.” **1984 (infinite jest)** “Those two books \[*1984* and *Infinite Jest*\] were there for me in a time of my life when I needed art as a compass, a savior. I read *Infinite Jest* when I was in rehab. There\'s not another piece of art in the world that sums up addiction and depression the way that David Foster Wallace does. This started out as a song about the human experience, where our phones are handcuffed to our wrists like George Orwell’s telescreen hanging from every wall in *1984*. The telescreen’s a villain, and in *Infinite Jest*, the telescreen is a drug. This song starts with anger, my frustrations toward social media and marketing and art in general.” **Gravity’s Rainbow** “Thomas Pynchon\'s book is so dangerous. In \'Gravity’s Rainbow,\' the fire we\'re talking about is modern society, the billionaires who run things. It\'s not for me to warn everybody about the evils of social media, because the information\'s all out there, everybody knows—it\'s about how much longer will we allow them to literally take everything from us before it\'s too late.” **Clean Cut Heals** “There were a lot of moments on this record where having fun in the studio would lead to ‘Maybe that\'s not funny, maybe that\'s really cool?’ On this song in particular, \[bassist\] Jeph \[Howard\] had never played slap bass, and we were like, \'Why don’t you try to play slap bass?\' His first take is what you hear on the record. When we were jamming this song out, it felt so different and far removed from the entire record. This is a far-reaching moment for The Used, as far as dancy electronic pop sounds go. And this song is about me leaving the Mormon church.” **Heartwork** “This poem was written after a really bad night in a really messy period of my life, but the song sums up the record’s positivity. It’s easier to write about a devastating moment when you are in a clear headspace. When you write about darkness when you’re in a bright place, you get a different color. That’s not something you’d normally get from The Used. I don’t think we’ve been in this good of a place for the entire 20 years of our career.” **The Lighthouse (feat. Mark Hoppus)** “John Feldmann has been working with blink-182 for the past five years or something, so those guys were in and out of his studio all day long, and he\'s like, \'Do you want to work with the Blink guys?\' We\'re like, \'100% hell yes.\' Mark is a quick writer, he\'s a lyrical genius, and this song really felt like a different experience for The Used—there’s a lot of nostalgia for ’90s grunge.” **Obvious Blasé (feat. Travis Barker)** “People know that it\'s Travis Barker \[drumming on this song\] right away—how cool is that? There are only a few artists who, when you hear them do their thing, you know it\'s them right away, so it puts him in this other world of musicians. This song hearkens back to where The Used actually came from; it\'s this Warped Tour punk-rock sound with a big, huge, catchy chorus.” **The Lottery (feat. Caleb Shomo)** “We reached out to Bryan from Knocked Loose and he was working on the song, but problems with scheduling made everything fall through. So, very, very last minute, we needed someone quick, driven, and smart, because we wanted to make ‘The Lottery’ a co-write. Caleb from Beartooth sent back lyrics in 12 hours. He recorded the track right before he went onstage in New York City and sent it to us as soon as he possibly could. He killed it. He has such an amazing, growly scream and a singing voice that’s so beautiful and melodic. It’s rare to meet an artist that’s that driven and passionate.” **Darkness Bleeds, FOTF** “Fiona \[Bevan\], this amazing singer from the UK, sings with me. When I listen to the song, there\'s a little bit of musical influence from the past 20 years: I hear a little bit of Warped Tour punk, I hear a little bit of LINKIN PARK-type rock, I hear a little bit of a classic Used catchy chorus. It feels like the whole progression of the band, as grown and weathered and tested musicians.” **To Feel Something** “This is an emotionally charged message, direct and to the point. Everybody wants to feel like they fit in and everybody wants to feel like they\'re part of something. It’s something that David Foster Wallace said that really stuck out to me: \'Everybody is identical in their own personal belief that they are truly different from everyone else.\'”

For his third solo album, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee assembled a collection of rappers and singers—some known, some unknown—to bring his creations to life. The first part of *Andro* features male guests like rapper Mickey Avalon, *Rock Star: Supernova* winner Lukas Rossi, and newcomer Killvein, while the second part boasts pansexual polymath Brooke Candy, King Elle Noir, and South African rapper Push Push. “One side is male energy and one side is female energy,” Lee tells Apple Music. “That\'s why I titled it *Andro*—it’s short for androgyny.” All of the songs are true collaborations as well: The guest vocalists wrote their own lyrics. “I would never, ever force my or somebody else\'s lyrics on an artist that\'s about to sing on my track,” Lee explains. “It’s not authentic. I wanted the artists to do what the songs made them feel.” Below, Lee shows us both sides of *Andro*. **Knock Me Down (feat. Killvein)** “When I play this, I kind of want to break shit. It\'s one of those tracks that gets you super rowdy. I hit Killvein up on Instagram because I’d been following him and I really liked his stuff. He said when he first saw my message, he was like, ‘Oh, this is some bullshit. This isn\'t even Tommy.’ About two days later, he was down here in my studio and away we went. He smashed it.” **You Dancy (feat. Lukas Rossi)** “I had this track kicking around and I felt like it had a Prince vibe, and Lukas was the first guy that came to mind. You know when people say, ‘Oh man, look at you—you fancy.’ I just called it ‘You Dancy’ as a little play on words, but basically the track is about being all fancy and shit.” **Ain\'t Tellin Me Nothing (feat. PAV4N)** “PAV4N is from an insane hip-hop duo from the UK called the Foreign Beggars, and those guys are just fucking beasts. I’ve been a big fan of theirs for a long time. He’s got this really cool Eminem vibe, but with a UK swagger like Dizzee Rascal. He recorded it over there, and I love the matter-of-fact of this track. ‘Oh, you got beats? Yeah, whatever. You got girls in the back? Yeah, whatever.’ It’s just like, you ain’t telling me nothing I haven’t heard yet. I love his sarcastic British style on this.” **Soma Coma (feat. Shotty Horroh)** “I’m a massive fan of Shotty Horroh. His battle skills are just insane. I don\'t think anybody\'s ever beat the guy. He\'s just super witty and fast and the guy that just spits crazy knowledge. His style is unmatched. The first time I actually heard him was through my buddy deadmau5. They did a track together and it was fucking unbelievable. So I reached out to Shotty and he\'s a big Crüe fan. I had no idea. He\'d come to see us play in the UK. He\'s got Conor McGregor in there, and he\'s just basically fucking with everybody.” **When You Were Mine (feat. Lukas Rossi)** “If you’re going to cover a Prince song, man, you better fucking do it right. Lukas actually came up with the idea of doing this one. The original is a quick, happy, uptempo pop song, but we slowed it down and made it dark. And when you listen to the words now, at the speed and vibe I created, it gives me goosebumps, man. It’s almost creepy.” **Hot Fudge Sundae (feat. Josh Todd)** “This is an ongoing thing that Josh and I do. We leave each other voice notes on our phones, and it\'s always something totally fucking random and stupid. This one in particular, it just segued perfectly into ‘Caviar on a Paper Plate,’ which is the super ghetto-fabulous track that’s coming up next. So I asked him if I could use this on the record. It’s done with all good intentions—it’s just him being silly.” **Caviar on a Paper Plate (feat. Mickey Avalon)** “Who doesn\'t love Mickey, bro? That song ‘My Dick’ is still one of my favorite songs to crank. I just think it\'s hilarious, and nobody else sounds like Mickey. It’s basically a big play on all these stupid hip-hop videos where everybody’s just flossing way too hard.” **Leave Me Alone (feat. Killvein)** “Killvein had this track that he wanted me to hear, and I was like, ‘Dude, this track is so fucking rad.’ The beats were cool, the 808s were bumping, it was shaking the studio in here. And I was like, ‘I\'d love to put it on my record. Let\'s finish it.’ So it was one of those last-minute tracks that came through that was undeniable for me. It just bumps. And I love the lyrical content about being left alone, man. So he was living up to his name, Killvein: He killed it.” **Demon Bitches (feat. Brooke Candy & Moon Bounce)** “We had a couple jam sessions here in the studio—me and Brooke and Danny Lohner, the guitar player for Nine Inch Nails. We were doing some stuff for another project—she was rehearsing for LA Pride. During that rehearsal time, we recorded some rough ideas that were super cool, and ‘Demon Bitches’ ended up being one of the tracks I started messing with. I’m going to say that it’s probably some of the best programming and beatmaking I’ve ever done, because it’s complicated but still super funky and cool. Moon Bounce did a great job on this with his falsetto, and Brooke just melts the microphone.” **P.R.E.T.T.Y. (feat. King Elle Noir)** “King Elle Noir is an incredibly talented girl with a beautiful voice, and she’s super hot. She’s been on my list of people that I’ve been wanting to collaborate with, and you’ll hear her again a couple of tracks later. I’ve actually had this song kicking around for a couple of years, and she came in and nailed it. The way she says ‘pretty’ on the chorus, it’s spelled out without actually saying the word, which I think is a really clever way of doing it. And the song is basically about a guy who keeps telling this girl she’s pretty, but he doesn’t really treat her like he’s supposed to.” **Tops (feat. Push Push)** “For what seems like forever now, I’ve been wanting to make a track with no instruments—I wanted the drums to play the melody. So if you listen to this track, the bass drum is playing the melody. I’d been following Push Push for a while—she’s super talented, and there’s something really unique about her voice. This one is kind of a slow to midtempo banger that’s got her South African firecracker swagger all over it. There’s something special about the South African accent—it’s just kind of sexy and fiery.” **Make This Storm (feat. King Elle Noir)** “We did this one after ‘P.R.E.T.T.Y.’ because I knew what she would do with it. I sent her the song and she sent me an idea of what she was hearing, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, dude. Stop it.’ She’s amazing, man. So she ended up back over here a few days later, and she did an exceptional job on this track.” **Make It Back (feat. PLYA)** “This one has a goosebumps story that will freak you out. I’d been following PLYA for a while—Julie’s voice is incredible, and this song’s got her flavor all over it. But before we started to record, I made a demo of the track that had vocals on it. I took an a cappella from another girl and just sort of Frankensteined it in and tuned the vocal to how I heard it in my head. When Julie came over, I wanted to play it for her, but she’s like, ‘No, don’t play it, because I don’t want anything to sway the ideas I have in my head.’ So she goes into the studio and starts to sing, and she’s singing fucking 98.9% exactly what I had in the demo version with somebody else’s a cappella! Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my entire life, dude. She was on an almost identical plane. It was phenomenal.” **Tommy Lee (feat. Post Malone) \[Tommy Lee Remix\]** “I played on Post Malone\'s *beerbongs & bentleys* record a couple of years ago. I get this call that him and Tyla \[Yaweh\] did a song called ‘Tommy Lee’ and they want me to do a remix. First, I can’t believe the fucking song is called ‘Tommy Lee’—and it’s dope. So I remixed it, smashed some drums on it, and my buddy John 5 who plays guitar for Rob Zombie did guitars on it. And my son Dylan co-produced it with me, so that was super fun. And then I got a call from Tyla on my birthday saying he’s got a gold record coming for me because of the track. So I hope everyone digs this version.”

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

“My first record was almost like a phone call asking, ‘Is there anyone out there who’s like me?’” YUNGBLUD tells Apple Music. “And it turned out there were millions of people. I found a community where I belong. And *weird!* is about them.” If that debut, 2018’s *21st Century Liability*, was propelled forward by the Doncaster artist’s anger at being misunderstood, *weird!* is an ode to optimism, as YUNGBLUD celebrates the healing power of finding your people across 13 songs inspired by his own. But *weird!*—a dizzingly diverse album influenced by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Amy Winehouse and the Arctic Monkeys—is also a deeply personal exploration of coming home to yourself after troubled times. “It was written after the weirdest 18 months of my entire existence,” says YUNGBLUD, whose real name is Dominic Harrison. “I nearly lost my mum in a car accident; \[YUNGBLUD\] got really fucking big, really fucking quickly; I fell in love and it was all over the internet, and then, when it didn’t work out, that was all over the internet, too.” Coming home in late 2019—and playing a sold-out show at London’s Brixton Academy—switched the lights back on after a period of heartbreak-induced depression. “After the show, at about four in the morning, I went up to Primrose Hill,” he recalls. “In the freezing cold, the lyrics to ‘weird!’ just came out. And that\'s when I knew what this album was going to be about. It was going to be an album of overcoming the weirdest, hardest times of your life. And knowing that you\'re going to be all right in the end.” Read on as YUNGBLUD talks us through the exhilarating *weird!*, one song at a time. **teresa** “I was in the studio and remembered that a girl told me about her boyfriend passing away. They had come to the shows together. I wanted to write a song about this girl and her boyfriend being on the other side, watching over her. But there was also a resemblance between me and my fanbase—that no matter what happens to us, we\'re always looking out for each other. I wanted this song to start soft and then be like, ‘Bang, the album’s off.’ It has four tempo changes; the middle eight is like The Beatles and then it sounds like Queen at the end. I produced the album with \[US songwriter\] Chris Greatti, who is so unashamedly pretentious. I was like, ‘I’m going to match your pretentiousness.’ The end of this song was just us trying to top each other.” **cotton candy** “I see this as a plaster for the punch in the gut from the ending of ‘teresa.’ I wrote this with Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, and Omer Fedi, while Chris and Zakk Cervini produced it. I was like, ‘I wanted to write a song about sex,’ and I literally stripped down to my underpants—consensually, of course—and did the whole session in my underpants. It\'s like the most bubblegum YUNGBLUD song ever, but it\'s naughty. It was written and produced in three hours. Take your clothes off, sing about sex, and it’s done!” **strawberry lipstick** “The opening of this song says, ‘This is a song about a person I love.’ It’s talking about yourself. I fucking hated myself when I wrote that song. I was fighting with people about my sound. And I was like, ‘All right. You want to fucking normalize me? I\'m going to dye my hair red, I\'m going to write a fucking punk song, and I\'m going to wear a Union Jack dress on its cover.’ That\'s what I\'m like. I had the \[Channel 4 show\] *Fresh Meat* on repeat when I was writing this song, as well as the Oasis documentary *Supersonic*, because I was locked down in LA and craving England. The song came out—and was written, recorded, and finished—in one night.” **mars** “This was the hardest song on this album—it took a year for me to get it right. It’s about a young trans girl I met in Maryland. She told me that her parents couldn’t fathom the idea of her being trans. They thought it was just some sort of phase. All she wanted to do was get her parents to a YUNGBLUD show, because maybe they\'d see other people like her. So she saved up and came with her parents. They saw the passion, the energy, the noise, and the sheer reluctance to be anything other than who \[my fans\] are, and they accepted her as their baby girl. I can\'t find her, and I don\'t know if I want to. My dream is to go to Maryland one day and play some arena. I’ll know it\'s about her, she\'ll know it\'s about her, but no one else does. And that’s just the most magic thing in the world.” **superdeadfriends** “I wanted this to feel like the Beastie Boys meets Happy Mondays. But then we put the 808 drums on and my voice to make it modern. The song is about drugs and about losing my peers to drugs. I’m not going to be naive and tell people not to take drugs. But it\'s just a song about doing it safely, because the high ain\'t worth losing your life or a friend. It\'s a song about wanting to escape. Be free, have fun, let loose—but do it with caution.” **love song** “The first YUNGBLUD love song. I don’t say this very often, but I had a lot of violence in my house growing up. I was always very loved as a kid, but my idea of love—and what it meant to fall in love—got skewed. It was like, ‘If this is love, fuck that shit. I\'m going to be all right on my own, thank you very much.’ But then I met someone and I fell in love and I realized I\'d never been more wrong in my life. I learned so much—she was incredible and we were incredible together. But I didn’t just want to write a song about falling in love or being heartbroken, because no one can prepare you for the pain of heartbreak. It’s about falling in and out of love—with your arms open.” **god save me, but don\'t drown me out** “I wrote this in June 2020, at 4 am. We were in the studio doing finishing touches before playing the album to my label the next day. I could feel about nine months of bottled emotion crawling up my back. I just looked at everyone and I was like, ‘Yo, put the kettle on.’ And I went in the booth to record and I just started crying my eyes out. I grew up two years in about 20 minutes. I think you can hear my crying in the song. I just needed help. Not from anyone else—I needed help from myself. It was like, ‘Come on, we’re going to be all right.’ And I think my body went, ‘Yeah, I think we are.’ This song is about overcoming anything. The world is yours if you want it.” **ice cream man** “This is a song that I\'ve been playing on the road for two years, that I wrote for a little bit of fun. This song makes me go, ‘I’m English, no one ever forget that.’ There’s a line in this song about hating myself and marrying my cousin. It’s about small towns and just about Donny \[Doncaster\]. It’s like, ‘I’m going to be my cross-dressing, lipstick-wearing self, even if it fucking kills you.’ I\'m not literally talking about marrying my cousin, obviously. But we may as well all be cousins, because we\'ve been here in the same fucking village for the past 100 years.” **weird!** “Almost everything I’ve said here, in one song. It’s about trying to catch smoke and feeling like the floor\'s going to move under you. And it has one of the most emotional lines on the album—‘I want luck. I want love. Sharing earphones on the bus, and wake up next to you in Glasgow.’ I just saw me in Fred Perry, with my Fred Perry-matching girlfriend or boyfriend on a bus that\'s condensated as fuck, sharing earphones listening to ‘A Certain Romance’ by the Arctic Monkeys. I wanted it to be a cinematic song. I want it to be like a series of *Skins* within an album. This became the title track because this is an album for the weirdest years of our lives. And I wanted to redefine what weird meant. I\'ve been called weird my whole life. And I used to hate the idea of being weird, but now I love it. Weird is about being different and celebrating individuality. I think to be weird is what it means to be truly free.” **charity** “Again, I wanted to make a song about being yourself. But I also wanted to make a song where I could pretend I was in every band I want to be in. I wanted to be Mike Skinner or Liam Gallagher or Lily Allen. The middle eight is like \[The Fratellis’ 2006 single\] ‘Chelsea Dagger’ 2.0. The lyric here is ‘Donate my brain to charity.’ It’s like, ‘If you don\'t like it, fucking give it away. Take me to a charity shop because some fucking cool kid is going to pick me up and put me on.’” **acting like that (feat. Machine Gun Kelly)** “This song is a direct representation of mine and Machine Gun Kelly’s relationship. We wanted the song to just make people lose control. We wrote it on a night where we were both sad because we had lost a colleague. And we were just like, ‘You’re way too cool to be acting sad tonight.’ We wanted to resonate the idea of you being at your favorite show, with your best friends, going absolutely crazy.” **it’s quiet in beverly hills** “I didn’t really think, ‘I’m going to do an acoustic song.’ I was in Hollywood, and I’m so English—I like Yorkshire tea and Hobnobs and I want people to tell the truth. But I just got caught up in Hollywood bollocks and in the paparazzi and the game that everyone plays to try and top each other. And I was like, I don\'t want to do this. I got into music to build a community. And now I\'m stood with a load of wankers talking about how their songs did last week on the radio chart. I was surrounding myself with friends who weren\'t really my friends, and I got lost. When I say, ‘I will love you for the rest of my life until you close your eyes for good,’ I\'m talking to my fanbase. Because they pull me out every time.” **the freak show** “This was like, ‘OK, I’ve given you an album, now I’m going to do something for myself.’ I wanted a \'Bohemian Rhapsody.’ There are four key changes, five time changes, and a big, dramatic ending. It’s every YUNGBLUD song squeezed into one. And it literally goes from a minor verse to a major chorus, it goes minor in the middle, then back to major, then back to minor again. Towards the end of the song, there is a line that says, ‘Times will change and you might break.’ I recorded it with no music—just to a click track. And I said, ‘Build on top of that. If the music tops my passion, I’ll record it again. But I dare you to try and top the passion of that vocal take.’ This song is a message to my fanbase. Times will change and you might break, but I will spend the rest of my life believing in you.”