Alternative Press's 50 Best Albums of 2023

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

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

With their first album since 2016, Avenged Sevenfold takes an unexpected turn into existentialism. Written over a span of four years that included the pandemic, *Life Is But a Dream…* was inspired by the philosophy and writings of French author and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus. The hypnotic lead single “Nobody” sets a reflective and pensive tone with orchestral strings as singer M. Shadows delivers snaky, overlapping vocal lines. Follow-up “We Love You” is an abrupt change of pace, with dissonant guitar bursts and a frenetic, Mr. Bungle-like arrangement that smashes dizzying old-school thrash into a slide guitar interlude. The entire album is all over the place—ragtime piano (title track), chamber music (part of “Game Over”), electro-pop (a few songs)—but for A7X, it’s a good place to be.

℗ 2023 BABYMETAL RECORDS / Amuse Inc. under exclusive licence to Cooking Vinyl America Inc. / 5B Records

After breaking through with the platinum-selling, London-in-the-summer anthem “Hell N Back” in 2019, Camden songwriter/singer/producer Bakar quickly showed he had more musical strings to his bow than that song’s dusty breaks and Amy Winehouse/Lily Allen vibes let on. His full debut album, 2022’s *Nobody’s Home*, presented a lo-fi R&B/nocturnal hip-hop hybrid and this follow-up turns sharply away from that sound, towards something bigger, brighter, and even more diverse. As you might expect from an artist simultaneously raised on leftfield hip-hop and scrappy 2000s indie rock, *Halo* skips between sounds and moods in a way that makes any notion of pigeonholing laughable. From opener “OneInOneOut” and its Prince-meets-Frank Ocean jam to The Strokes-like chug of “Alive!” through the club beats of “Invisible” and the widescreen ’80s rock of “All Night,” the album zigzags across the musical map. Yet it still retains its own distinct character and cohesion by staying true to the realism and lyrical honesty that’s always run through Bakar’s songwriting. “I always want to move on and try something new,” he tells Apple Music. “That’s just the nature of what I do. I’m so proud of *Nobody’s Home*, but I felt we were done with those sounds. I wanted to make something brighter. After COVID, we didn’t want to be in the studio as much, we wanted to be in spaces that had a lot of light, so we rented out houses and would record there. We were traveling around a lot, which you can hear. That’s what gives the songs a relationship with each other—they were made in these similar surroundings.” Here, Bakar takes us through the record, track by track. **“OneInOneOut”** “I had this almost Springsteen-like vision of opening the album, like, *bang*! Almost like you would open a show. I love the storytelling in this song, in particular the first verse where I’m explaining where I was at in 32 bars. That’s why I thought it was such a great opener. The first vocal you hear on that song is Little Simz. She starts the whole album off just by saying, ‘Halo,’ and then we begin.” **“Alive!”** “‘Alive!’ was the first thing we made for this record. I always try and avoid genre and putting things in a box, but I know there’s a section of my support base that would get a kick out of me calling that my indie-rock song or whatever. I love doing songs that have this duality to them. They feel bright and happy-go-lucky, but when you lift the lid on them, it’s a lot deeper than you thought and there’s a real story there. I like masking darkness with light. Sometimes things resonate better like that.” **“Facts\_Situations”** “I made that song in LA in a house that we had rented out. We had these shit speakers in the kitchen and we started making it in the middle of the night. I don’t even think we had a bass, we were being resourceful and using what we had. That story just came to me, it was stream of consciousness. I wrote it all in my head and then just vomited it out. Most stuff on the record came after a conversation. That’s the beauty of being able to create in a home environment, that you can have a conversation and then, whether intentionally or not, those conversations seep into the song.” **“All Night”** “It’s so funny to me that ‘Facts\_Situations’ is jammed between ‘Alive!’ and ‘All Night.’ It’s like it wakes you up—BAM! OK, cool, we’re back. I wanted to go back to the daytime from the night. I love this song. It sounds ‘big.’ And I don’t mean in terms of the industry big, just how it sounds. It’s larger than life. The guitars sound really fat, that’s what I love about it. We were just trying to make a funky little jam with that song and it came out great.” **“Selling Biscuits”** “I love specifics about life in storytelling and that’s why I love ‘Selling Biscuits’ because it’s real. Me and my friends really used to be at festivals and doing what we needed to do to get by—selling biscuits to all the rich kids. I don’t want to be glorifying anything, but it’s just the realness of the scenario. It’s about having this moment where I realized, ‘Oh my god, they’re not that different from us and we’re not that different from them…’ That’s what led me to make the kind of music that I make. We were the urban kids who climbed in there to graffiti and make money but then we ended up getting into certain types of bands that we would never have found in our life and connecting to people that we would never connect with. There was a togetherness and a bringing together in that.” **“I’m Done”** “I really feel like I merged quite a few of my tastebuds in that one song. It’s got this R&B vibe to it and then this new jack swing thing happens with the drums and then—*slap*—you’re into the next part which has this indie/Talking Heads guitar and it feels really fresh. I’m from Tanzania and whenever I heard Talking Heads I always thought they sounded like African guitar playing.” **“Right Here, For Now”** “‘Right Here…’ and ‘I’m Done’ were recorded at Electric Lady in New York, which was unbelievable. You hear about some places and you put too many expectations onto something, but Electric Lady lived up to all those expectations. ‘Right Here…’ was all done live, using stuff in the room at the time. The guitar has a sort of Strokes thing to it. I could even imagine Julian Casablancas singing it. I didn’t want to try and make a Strokes song, I’m not even a massive Strokes fan, but I could actually hear him singing that in his tone. I love that song.” **“Hate the Sun”** “That song is just a reflection of a situation and of a time. The whole song is a metaphor. I’m just telling a story and it’s really impartial in that sense. It’s similar to ‘Facts\_Situations.’ I’m just telling the story as I see it. I’m not trying to have an opinion on who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not that kind of a song. I’m just saying what my feelings are. When you’re saying what your feelings are, there’s no real right or wrong, it’s just how you feel. I like the tone of that song too, I’ve always thought of it like a mahogany table.” **“Invisible”** “There were a million ways we could have made that song. It just wanted to be made like that. We’re from London. We grew up on bass music. We grew up on electronic music. We grew up on DJs. That was what we came up on, \[London nightclubs\] Plastic People and Corsica Studios and London being an electronic powerhouse. That’s just us, we’re always going to have to get that out. ‘Invisible’ is one of my favorite songs I ever wrote in the songwriting sense, also. I really hope that people understand it in that sense because, and I sound crazy saying this, it’s such an incredibly written song from all aspects, instrumentally and lyrically.” **“To Open My Heart”** “This song is like a mirror on the wall and I’m talking to myself. It’s like a reminder to myself: Try and be who you are. It’s a song where I’m trying to display all the different things that I do, but without trying to try too hard or trying to fit too many pieces of the puzzle in. I made it in a day. It felt like a good full stop, because it felt like the one song on the record where I’m really addressing myself after all these different tales about other people in my life. Sonically, it feels like a crescendo, this grand closing to the album.” **“Hell N Back” (feat. Summer Walker)** “I’ve had such a love-hate relationship with this song over the years. I’ve fallen out of love with it and shunned it, but I’ve grown to just love it. As a song it’s one of my favorites I ever made, but just because of what it’s become. I never wanted to be an artist who had this one beacon shining so brightly that it could potentially smother out its siblings, but I’ve ended up coming to terms with it and I’m grateful for it. The only way I wanted it to be part of *Halo* was to find someone to do a remix and give it something else. Summer Walker wrote a verse and sung the chorus with me on this. She’s done it so well and she’s the only person I could see doing it. She represents so much of what I was trying to put across on this song. There’s something very Amy Winehouse about her to me.”

blink-182’s ninth album—and first in 12 years with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge in the lineup—is far from a self-satisfied victory lap. Even after all these years, the band’s irrepressible cheekiness animates their insouciant riffs, whirlwind drums, and yelped vocals. They may be elder statesmen of punk rock at this point, but they’re still kicking against anyone who might get in their way. The reunion of DeLonge with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker (who produced *ONE MORE TIME...*) grew out of the members dropping their past differences in the wake of Hoppus’ cancer diagnosis. “I feel like there’s a real sense of brotherhood with us,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during a full-band interview. “Like any brothers, you have your little spats over the years, and you grow apart. You come back together. You’ve always got a foundation, you’re connected. You’re still inseparable energetically.” That connection is apparent throughout *ONE MORE TIME...*, which Barker calls “very collaborative.” It calls back to blink’s past at its outset, opening with the speedy “ANTHEM PART 3”—the third part of a trilogy that dates back to the band’s *Enema of the State* era, although this time out, things are more optimistic than the angst-filled first two installments: “If I fall, on some nails/If I win or set sail/I won’t fail, I won’t fail,” DeLonge wails as the song comes crashing to an end. *ONE MORE TIME...* has other moments of introspection: The title track is a very blink-182 take on a power ballad, with DeLonge and Hoppus musing about life being too short to not get over past differences. The anthemic “WHEN WE WERE YOUNG” turns the old phrase about youth being wasted on the young into fuel for one last trip to the mosh pit and closing track “CHILDHOOD” pivots on the always pertinent question, “What’s going on with me?” Not that *ONE MORE TIME...* is exclusively built on self-affirmations and serious business. “DANCE WITH ME” opens with a gag about self-pleasure before jumping off into a peppy chronicle of lust, while the bouncy “EDGING” channels love-’em-leave-’em brashness into a giddy power-pop jam. The brief interlude “TURN THIS OFF!” manages to channel gags about bad sex and old scolds into 23 seconds of blissful riffing. *ONE MORE TIME...* represents a new era of blink-182, although the most important aspect of the music Barker, DeLonge, and Hoppus make remains the same: “Every single time that we’ve just put our heads down and done our own thing,” said Hoppus, “and write music that the three of us love, that’s important to us—it has served us well.”

Blonde Redhead return with ‘Sit Down for Dinner,’ their first album in nine years and debut for section1. Its title a nod to the often-sacred communal ritual of sharing a meal with those you love, this immersive, meticulously crafted album appropriately serves an expression of persistent togetherness, a testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence. Understated yet visceral melodies charge each song, creating a foil to lyrics about the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Ultimately, ‘Sit Down for Dinner’ lands as perhaps the strongest record in catalog that’s already as illustrious as it is varied. Blonde Redhead's 'Sit Down for Dinner' is out on 29th September 2023 on section1.

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

Chappell Roan is not afraid to tell you—or, really, sing at you—about how she\'s feeling, in vivid detail. On her debut album, the Missouri-born upstart, who has been making waves since the 2017 release of her intense debut single “Good Hurt,” collects tales of debauchery and despair as it chronicles her realization of being queer and coming into her own. *The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess* opens with Roan singing mournfully about a dastardly ex-boyfriend over trembling pianos and starlit choirs; an insistent beat rises up gradually at first, then overtakes the song as she realizes she needs to be part of a “Femininomenon” that demands pleasure and respect from anyone lucky enough to be in her orbit. Left turns like that abound over the next 13 songs. Take the synth-pop “Casual,” which dissects a friends-with-benefits relationship in brutally specific detail, or the euphoric club cut “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” an insouciant dismissal of “hyper mega bummer boys” that opens with a sardonic mini-monologue and closes with a triumphant sing-along. Roan still traffics in ballads, too: “California” grapples with homesickness and frustration, Roan dipping down into her voice\'s low reaches, while the plush “Coffee” examines the idea of fully closing the loop with an ex, with the reality of its impossibility closing in as the music swells. There\'s a hunger that drives Roan\'s music, even in its more introspective moments. It isn\'t just sexual, although songs like the smirking poison-pen letter “My Kink Is Karma” and the flirty electro-psych come-on “Red Wine Supernova” show off how Roan\'s erotic awakening has helped her whole outlook on life come into sharp relief. Her willingness to take pop in unexpected directions, combined with her frankness about the tangled feelings that arise even when good things seem to be happening, make her debut compulsively listenable.

It’s no coincidence that Code Orange’s fifth album is called *The Above*; as the follow-up to 2020’s *Underneath*, there’s a direct juxtaposition. “Where I feel *Underneath* and *The Above* coincide is like there’s almost this door between them,” vocalist and conceptual mastermind Jami Morgan tells Apple Music. “It’s the door of moment and choice. To me, it’s the thin, reflective line between things and feelings that feel very far apart but are often very close, like the inverse, the question and the answer, darkness and light. A lot of *The Above*’s themes are different ideas of light—the light of self versus the light of acceptance and want.” Musically, Morgan and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers, keyboardist/programmer Eric “Shade” Balderose, bassist Joe Goldman, guitarist Dominic Landolina, and drummer Max Portnoy—gave priority to traditional rock instruments over electronics in this incarnation of their genre-defying style. “We wanted things to be a little bit more open and human but still have this digital backbone, whereas on *Underneath*, the digital element is to the front,” Morgan explains. “I feel like we also tightened up the songwriting and maybe painted within the lines a little bit more but challenged ourselves to be as avant-garde as possible within those lines.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Never Far Apart”** “I feel like this song really sets up the juxtaposition of the two opposing moods of the album. It’s like the verses are this dark, internal monologue of somebody that’s trapped in their own prison. It’s like this justification of failure and an exposing of your true nature, especially as the song explodes at the end. The chorus is, to me, almost the opposite. They’re in this almost cartoonish, faraway, unreachable, dreamlike voice, but it’s idyllically beautiful. It’s like a Disney musical or something. We felt like it was a good way to open because it exposes the different paintbrushes of the album all within one song.” **“Theatre of Cruelty”** “This continues to set up those two fields that are the through line of the record. It’s like the harder parts of the song introduce a looser but buggy and parasitic riff style that we utilize throughout the whole record. Then there’s these more ethereal parts that are kind of heavenly and smooth but still have this digital, glitchy backbone. The song is about drive. It’s about obsession. It’s about trying to present as one thing while the theater of the mind is always playing something a lot more sinister and a lot more cruel.” **“Take Shape” (feat. Billy Corgan)** “It was awesome working with Billy on this. He was obviously a big inspiration to us in general, and he almost plays a little bit of a narrator role in the song. ‘Take Shape’ is really about feeling like you’re being pushed through a stage play of your life that you really can’t control, like some *Truman Show* shit, like you’re just a puppet on strings being controlled by your own subconscious or your goals or whatever.” **“The Mask of Sanity Slips”** “Lyrically, this is a grungy, heavy take on somebody dealing with internal resentment, loneliness, feeling like a square peg in a round hole—something, I think, we feel as a group a lot, something I definitely feel a lot, trying to hide behind either confidence or feebleness. I even created this mask of my own face that I was calling the Mask of Sanity. Sonically, our plan was quiet/loud grunge dynamics, but with some death-metal double kick, which I’ve never heard on a grunge song, and some electronics. There’s even a bouncy mosh drop that we thought would subvert genre rules a little bit and make it more our style.” **“Mirror”** “Dynamically, this is one of the softest songs we’ve ever done, but I think it’s really powerful. Reba’s amazingly powerful on it. It’s disparate, it’s kind of lush, it’s pretty, but it also has a little bit of a dark underbelly. It was definitely influenced by trip-hop, Björk, even Tori Amos, but it has our modern production and some Code Orange darkness in there. I also think it’s cool because me and Reba both wrote the song. It’s really reflective—pun intended—of what the song is. It’s like the same words but two points of view.” **“A Drone Opting Out of the Hive”** “I wanted this song to feel like a fucking David Fincher interrogation room scene. The album has these two battling aesthetics, and one of them is like that: noir, fucking serial killer, buggy crime. To me, that’s our heaviness, our hardness, and our darkness. Then there’s this brighter, almost poppier thing that has a little bit of this digital element to it, like an impressionist painting where something’s just a little bit off. But this is where the album gets darker and veers into the underbelly. The beat is made of teeth chattering and whispers and all kinds of weird shit. It was really fun to make.” **“I Fly”** “This is one of the first songs on the album that me and Reba go bar-for-bar on, going back and forth to tell the story together, which I think is really cool. We wanted it to feel dark and heavy but have a big, soaring chorus. We were thinking almost like Alice In Chains meets industrial. There’s this robotic voice that says, ‘This is real’ over and over again, and it’s a reminder that we’re in the real world and not a dream. I wrote the lyrics based on this book of old epitaphs, things that people wrote about their own deaths for their relatives to read at their funerals. There’s a real twisted humor to a lot of them.” **“Splinter the Soul”** “Musically, this is a little bit Nine Inch Nails, a little bit Pantera, with an Alice \[In Chains\] chorus. We thought that would be a cool hybrid, sonically. It’s about the struggle of always trying to get to the next lily pad, about how it might feel better to just splinter the soul to take back control, like death by suicide as opposed to getting killed. I think we all have that human impulse in us to take it away from ourselves so no one can take it away from us.” **“The Game”** “It’s definitely one of our most psychotic, heavier songs to date. I visualize the pinch harmonics as the buzzing needles of a lie detector test when they go up and down. To me, the lyrics are from the point of view of a character I call the Manipulator, the one prying at you to take the path of most resistance instead of least. It’s frustration bubbling up to a head. You hear all these sounds from earlier in the record, like ripped duct tape, laughter, knife scrapes. The end definitely gets the most *Underneath*-ish in the sense that it’s super controlled chaos.” **“Grooming My Replacement”** “People were like, ‘You sure you want to use the word “grooming”?’ But it’s not like that. Words can’t mean more than one fucking thing? I’m like, ‘I’m not changing that shit.’ The song is about feeling like you’re being used to train your successor. It’s definitely where we started to discover this album’s version of heavy and how it would distinguish from previous albums—looser, groovier, corrosive, kind of snarling, thick, not as outwardly calculated as *Underneath*, but precise, like the perfect fucking crime.” **“Snapshot”** “Stylistically, this almost feels like a heavier indie song or something. It’s definitely totally different than anything we’ve done. The metaphor of the first line is from the movie *One Hour Photo*, starring Robin Williams. He’s this lonely photo printer in a Walmart. I just like the metaphor of the snapshot—a brief moment in time that can last forever. It’s like shit that never goes away. The lyrics have the theme of the movie, as well as fantasizing about capturing your captor, turning your own predator into prey.” **“Circle Through”** “This is definitely one of the most poppy songs we’ve ever done. It’s where, in my opinion, the light starts to shine through, almost like the crack under the door. We start to get to the other side, get to where it is we’re going. It’s about your negative thoughts and your never-haves, and manifesting bad things, and just asking yourself to walk that circle through. Is this really what you want? Is this what you want to create? Is that the life that you want, or are you presenting yourself to it in this circle of desire and negative self-talk or talk about others?” **“But a Dream...”** “This is kind of like the final passageway. It’s a bit existential. It’s about choice, about free will, about things that have been talked about to death a million times. I visualize it as these two doors with two blinding lights—the door of being accepted, and the door of going wherever yourself leads you to go. That might be you by yourself forever. Can you live with that? Can you face that, or do you have to keep chasing desire and chasing adoration? That’s something I struggle with a lot.” **“The Above”** “This is definitely one of my favorite songs. It’s one of the most personal songs, for me, that I’ve ever written. When Shade first came up with this melody, and we started utilizing it in different ways, it really clicked for me as the melody that represents what the album is. The song itself is like the other side of the hill. It’s like the end of one journey and, hopefully, the beginning of another. It’s coming full circle with yourself. It’s about being able to live with who you are, and not just your accomplishments, your wins or losses, your friends, the car you drive, the money you have, or whatever. Can you live with who you really are as a person, how you’ve treated other people? To me, it’s one of the coolest, most emotional songs we’ve ever done.”

Since self-releasing the track “3 Nights” in the late 2010s, Dominic Fike has become a multi-platform star. Not only have his closely felt songs made him a bona fide pop phenomenon worthy of a Paul McCartney co-sign, he’s also appeared in the HBO series *Euphoria*, which allowed him to flex his skills as an actor without breaking his momentum with his music. “I have been recording songs every day, or writing them,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every time I make a song, I feel like it\'s my best song. It\'s hard not to want to put it out as soon as you make it. I think a lot of artists will feel me when I say that.” That drive to constantly be creating is why his third album is a bit of a flashback for him. Songs like the reggae-tinged “Dancing in the Courthouse” throw to his youth in Naples, Florida, and his scrapes with the law there, while the groove-forward, surrealistic “Ant Pile” has its roots in the music he made three years ago—when he was in a very different place in his life. “I made it when I was in active addiction and I was in no place to make music,” said Fike. “I had to spend a couple years in rehabs and things like that. When I came back, I was able to finish it—and it was exhausting. I had to take a look inside myself. There were so many emotional talks with producers, with people that were mentors or people I work with. It was just a heavy load on my shoulders that I\'m grateful to be done with.”

If the combination of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds appropriate to the current queasy moment, there\'s a good reason for that. *So Much (For) Stardust* was conceived in the spirit of 2008\'s *Folie à Deux*, one of the most ornate and possibly divisive entries in the band\'s catalog. “There was a feeling that I kind of wanted to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I don\'t want it to sound anything like that record, but I wanted to get back to this feeling that we had when we were making it, which was ‘I don\'t know how much longer this\'ll last.’” *So Much (For) Stardust*, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether on the speedy opener “Love From the Other Side” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof chorus that gives its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz\'s lyrics are drolly on point, with quotable one-liners like “Every lover\'s got a little dagger in their hand” (on “Love From the Other Side”) and “One day every candle\'s gotta run out of wax/One day no one will remember me when they look back” (on “Flu Game”) scattered throughout. At times, though, they have a tenderness to them that belies the nearly two decades he\'s spent in the spotlight, as well as his elder-statesman status. “I\'m my dad\'s age when I thought he had it all figured out, and my parents are starting to look like my grandparents, and my kids are the age that I was,” Wentz says. “And this, I guess, is how the world goes on.” These thoughts reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke gives in the 1994 slacker comedy *Reality Bites*, which is sampled at the record\'s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all the answers in the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I guess there are no answers,’” says Wentz. “There\'s the idea that nothing matters—and that was a weird message for me. I was like, ‘I don\'t think we can bake that into the whole record.’” Instead he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia *Field of Dreams*, in which Kevin Costner\'s character is guided by the mantra “if you build it, they will come.” “He went out and built the field in the grass because he was doing a crazy thing,” said Wentz. “We all should be doing stuff like that.”

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

Physical copies at Convulserecords.com

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

The music that Jordan Benjamin creates as grandson has always felt like a live news dispatch from the middle of a societal breakdown, as he hot-wires together mosh-rock riffs, trap beats, industrial noise, and searing social commentary into tracks that feel as volatile as a homemade bomb. But on his second album, the chaos is largely confined to his head. As its title unsubtly suggests, *I Love You, I’m Trying* is a more personal and vulnerable work than 2020’s pandemic-era address *Death of an Optimist*, as Benjamin comes clean about addictions (of both the substance and social-media varieties), career insecurities, and past experiences with suicidal ideation. “This album for me was, first and foremost, an acknowledgment that I’ve had a problem with my mental health for a while that I’ve been kind of running away from, or pushing down in some ways,” Benjamin tells Apple Music. “I needed to address it as directly and bluntly as I could.” Sharing his darkest thoughts with his fans has been a healthy, therapeutic process that’s ultimately brought him to a happier place in life. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” he says. “I’ve managed to take these little songs that I’ve been writing and turn it into a lifelong connection with people across the world.” Here’s his 12-step program to finding inner peace. **“Two Along Their Way”** “The main recording is actually my father when he was my age. He was signed to a record label, but it got bought by another label, and my father’s record never got to come out. But this is a beautiful song about heartbreak and reminiscing on the way things were versus how they are. So, I recontextualized it and worked with a producer to bring it to life and then had my partner and girlfriend Wafia—who sang across the whole album—add some harmonies on it. The focus was setting up this kind of fantasy: We’re going to be looking backwards while moving forwards.” **“Eulogy”** “The song speaks to this overwhelmed feeling that I have and that I share with so many people right now, where everything is all being delivered in the same place. When I swipe through my phone, I can go from this horrifying demonstration of police brutality, and then swipe to some couple that’s managing to backpack around the world in 45 days. All these things just culminate in this fantasy of just kind of opting out of the whole thing.” **“Something to Hide”** “It’s an exploration of my own personal relationships to the themes that my music covers, as it relates to addiction, mental health, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation. In many ways, we come across as a happy, healthy family, but this is what families are going through. As the youngest sibling, I was always the peacemaker, the class clown, and I think that’s where my desire to perform came from. We’d be in the middle of a really awkward family dinner, and there was this impulse to not address the problem. That’s what inspired this song.” **“Drones”** “The line that sticks out in this song is ‘Just tell me one good lie.’ We have these secrets, and would you rather try and address them and then move through the world with this anxiety and unease? Or do you bury it and deal with those consequences somewhere down the line. ‘Drones’ is about that bomb going off in the distance and saying, ‘Oh, that’s just fireworks’—like the sort of thing a father might tell their child to keep them from knowing just how unforgiving the world can sometimes be.” **“I Love You, I’m Trying”** “All I wanted was for things to feel easy, and easy just couldn’t come, between dealing with my own mental health and the various temptations that come with living on a tour bus. Long-distance relationships are just hard to navigate. Whether or not you’ve been through what I’ve been through, you can understand this feeling of desperation: ‘I want to be there for you, and I’m doing my best, but I’m really in over my head here.’” **“Half My Heart”** “It speaks to the cyclical nature of falling apart, only to have to build it back up again—like, you’re only hurting yourself by throwing these tantrums. If I want to throw a plate at the wall, at some point, I’m going to be the one that has to sweep it up. This is when I begin to reflect on this album: Is this productive? And if not, then what is the point of getting so worked up about the world at large if you’re not going to do anything about it?” **“When the Bomb Goes”** “I have my own relationship to substance abuse and, frankly, it’s kind of worked out for me so far—knock on wood. Especially on tour, it feels like pressure builds up inside of me, and then one of the ways that I can release that tension is to get blackout drunk and make a mess. I’ve just had these nights that I barely remember. And it’s not a good feeling the next day, but there’s some sort of clarity that comes from being really, really hungover and trying to find my wallet, and my phone is dead.” **“Enough”** “In the verses, I’ve got this kind of back-and-forth conversation going on. Again, the vocals are supplied by Wafia, who provides this subconscious voice where I’m admitting to myself, ‘This party sucks,’ but out loud, I’m saying, ‘This is awesome!’ And again, this is when I start to ask, ‘If not now, when am I going to be the kind of person I want to be, make the album I want to make, and live the life I want to live?’ I think this song is meant to be this unifying call to a certain action in your personal life.” **“Murderer”** “I wrote this exaggerated homage to narrative hip-hop songs like ‘Stan’ by Eminem. I wanted to tell this story of a one-hit wonder who loses his mind. And I wanted it to be contextually relevant to my life, and I wanted to give it a sense of urgency. Thankfully, it isn’t based on a true story. But there’s absolutely truth in the frustration that I felt during the pandemic, with this onset explosion of pop-punk music, which I felt was super derivative and detached from soul. And I just wanted to make something that was fun and poke the bear a bit.” **“I Will Be Here When You’re Ready to Wake Up” (feat. Wafia)** “Amidst all of this turmoil in my personal life, and these fantasies of annihilation, I’ve been in a loving relationship. And I think we all have someone who would be really sad to see us go, or who will be there on the other side of these episodic breakdowns that I suffer from. And so, I wanted to give this sort of reassuring lullaby that I’m so fortunate to have to somebody else that might not have it.” **“Heather”** “A really necessary step in getting out of your own way is being there for somebody else and realizing that it’s not all about you. I’ve had fans now for years, and sometimes those early super-fans grow up and move on—they used to message you every day, and you’re left wondering what happened to them. And so, ‘Heather’ is about a fan who ultimately committed suicide, and it will serve for the rest of my career as this promise to myself—and hopefully to my fans—that we can be there for one another as we continue to move through life together.” **“Stuck Here With Me”** “‘Stuck Here With Me’ poses the question ‘If this is the one life that we do have, are you going to waste it wishing you had somebody else’s?’ At the end of the day, I have so much to be grateful for, and it’s a life that’s really worth living. We took all of these human experiences—laughing, crying, fucking—and turned them into a hundred voices shouting at you, and it just ends with this big cathartic release, and then the sound of me crying. And that’s what it’s all about: You get up and wipe your tears and you go to sleep, and you wake up the next day and keep doing it. That’s my second album.”

Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”

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

On Kevin Abstract’s debut album, 2016’s *American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story*, the former BROCKHAMPTON leader conjured up alt-pop songs of adolescent love, heartbreak, and every emotion in between. His 2019 sophomore effort *ARIZONA BABY* was deeply inspired by Southern rap and the chopped and screwed stylings of Texas legends like DJ Screw. The Corpus Christi-born singer, rapper, and producer returned home for the project, dealing with his upbringing, sexuality, and the difficulties of managing a band of friends when money, fame, and success enter the picture. His third covers many of the same themes, though from the vantage point of someone wiser, more worn, and less susceptible to the whirlwinds of love and love lost, soundtracked by ’90s-vintage guitar rock. “I’ve been trying to make a solo album for the past two and a half years, and I finally found the confidence to make something that I would actually listen to and share with the world,” he tells Apple Music. Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“When the Rope Post 2 Break”** “This just felt like an intro to me. As soon as we made it, I knew it would be the way to get people into the album. There are some samples of kids playing, which I recorded in the neighborhood. I was interested in capturing the ambience around me. All the details on the album are to help bring the world together.” **“Blanket”** “This is a song to play when everyone’s just pissing you off or something. You could jump around in your room to it, or bump it on the bus. It’s one of those songs. You close your door and play it loud, or put it on your headphones and drown out the world.” **“Running Out”** “I like how there are whispers on this track—that feels like the way I communicate with a lot of my friends. It represents secrets, the idea of hiding something. It represents intimacy for me. That’s what I think of when I hear this song. It’s one of the sadder songs on the record, but it sounds upbeat. I had to write from that perspective.” **“The Greys”** “I wanted to make something sexy, something you could dance to, or look in the mirror and sing along with. You imagine being on stage, but you’re really somewhere, broke and probably struggling. You got that look in your eye, and you’re going to make it one day. It’s a message for the people, but I was that way, too. Once I put this out, it’s no longer mine; it’s a cliché, but it’s real. I really do mean all the stuff I say because when I was younger, any interview I saw with any artist I was looking up to meant a lot if they were encouraging younger people. That helped me get through so much and it helped me trust myself. I’m not capping when I say, ‘Lean into what you feel and follow your heart.’ That shit is real to me.” **“Voyager”** “This song is pure beauty. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t have a soul. It’s the ballad on the album.” **“Madonna”** “Madonna represents being up. Why not want to be Madonna? Madonna, Tupac, and Michael Jackson: Those are the icons that came before us. I wasn’t always allowed to see certain things, but that made me want to see it more. There was always some sort of danger around her art. I didn’t start listening to her until I got older and I started researching all the greats that came before me. I didn’t really discover her until I started actually making music.” **“Today I Gave Up”** “I was extremely sad when I made this. Need I say more? Writing and recording can be cathartic, but I only feel better when it’s a good song. So since a song is fire, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is lit. I gotta play it for friends, and it\'ll be a good confidence boost to show this track off.’ More seriously, though, the feelings don\'t really go away.” **“What Should I Do?”** “Every spring and every fall feels the same to me. If I could put those two seasons together, it would be the feeling of this song.” **“Mr. Edwards”** “This is an intermission. It’s all connected.” **“Scream”** “I’m obsessed with R&B music. I feel like the biggest BROCKHAMPTON songs had some element of R&B in them. I’m going into every album trying to make one song that reminds me of ’90s R&B. The challenge is trying to fit that within the vibe and aesthetic of the album. R&B features some of the best melodies in the world. And I love melody more than anything.” **“Real To Me”** “This is another little dance track. It’s not just a crush.” **“Heights, Spiders, and the Dark”** “I really did all I could to keep all of who this song is about, and it didn’t work. He left me.” **“My Friend”** “Someone showed me MJ Lenderman’s music and I thought it was beautiful, beautiful music. Listening to his shit made me realize that was the bar. He gave me a lot of guidance, and then I sent him this song with my chorus on it and I asked him to re-sing the chorus. I like his voice so much. Then I brought Kara Jackson in to sing some parts. I wrote this song about going to Disneyland with my friends. This one is called ‘My Friend,’ but it’s about all my friends.”

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

Meet Me @ The Altar, the pop-punk trio of lead vocalist Edith Victoria, drummer Ada Juarez, and guitarist Téa Campbell, met on the internet—from different corners of the United States, all three knew they wanted to start a band, and they wanted to do it with other women of color, a rarity in their chosen musical genre. Not only did they serve to move the once progress-proof scene forward, but they also reminded listeners why they fell in love with it in the first place: earworm hooks, shout-along melodies, and caffeinated riffs. Their EPs, all self-released (with the exception of 2021’s *Model Citizen* on Fueled by Ramen), confirmed their talent. But it\'s their debut LP, *Past // Present // Future*, that amplifies their songwriting, from the industry-plant kiss-off “Say It (To My Face)” to the Disney Channel 2000s-pop-rock-inspired closer “King of Everything.” With the guidance of producer John Fields (Demi Lovato, Jonas Brothers, P!nk), the album is 11 tracks of full-speed mall-punk adrenaline, palm-muted power chords, and self-esteem-boosting lyrics.

CONVR61 is the debut LP from Hattiesburg's MSPAINT, Post-American. While it may be tempting to pin MSPAINT down stylistically, with labels like "synth-punk," these attempts fail to capture a band that transcends the sum of its parts and the hardcore and punk communities it occupies. Most of the records we release critique the world as it is. MSPAINT go a step further. This record is a triumph because it presents us a future of connection and light and allows us all to imagine living Post-American. Canadians - do not order a copy of the LP from our Bandcamp or store - order at northernscene.net PRESSING INFO: FIRST PRESS 100 copies on White with Blue and Purple Splatter (Convulse Exclusive-only available at convulserecords.com) 100 copies on Yellow vinyl (RevHQ exclusive) 100 copies on Orange Vinyl (Northern Scene Exclusive) 200 copies on Purple Vinyl 300 copies on Bubblegum Pink Vinyl

Truly great pop songs do not require a cheery outlook in order to work, nor do they pander to expectations of syrupy sweet easy-listening. Rather, the best pop music is a matter of refinement and pure intention, of dialing groove to melody so that the two might puncture the malaise of everyday living in unison, revealing some brief, sober truth about our shared human condition. On their third LP, Moments of Clarity (Run for Cover), Narrow Head have achieved precisely this feat. Traversing the depths of massive, churning riffs, often distorted to the point of violence, bouncing, lock-grooved rhythms, and crystalline, gorgeously constructed hooks, the Houston-based outfit puts on a masterclass in the art of writing songs that match the pain, pleasure, and confusion of modern living. Each track is sentimental without being precious, heavy without unnecessary griminess, pop-forward without letting the listener off the hook easy: these songs ask for some form of hurt or desire to be paid back to them in return, some promise that the listener is putting equal skin into the game. The record’s title came to vocalist/guitarist Jacob Duarte in an ambient, almost haunting fashion. The months surrounding the release of their prior record, 12th House Rock (Run For Cover, 2020), were marked by a series of personal losses and spiritual trials. Throughout the writing process of this most recent record, the turn of phrase “moments of clarity” appeared to materialize wherever Duarte looked in an almost serendipitous fashion, be it while listening to the radio or talking with friends at the bar. The notion of moments clarity seemed to coalesce as if it were a totem to the desire to keep on living, a counterweight to the self-inflected damage and depravity that defined much of 12th House Rock’s lyrics. “The phrase created a space for me to reflect upon my own life,” Duarte admits, “since our last record I’ve had plenty of moments of realization like that… when you experience friends dying, you’re forced to see life a little differently.” Moments of Clarity reflects this matured sense of purpose. Longtime Narrow Head fans will undoubtedly still recognize the band’s signature marriage of brutality and grace, and many of the core themes of desolation, loss, and self-medication that the band established on their prior records Satisfaction (2016, re-issued by Run for Cover in 2021) and 12th House Rock (2020, Run for Cover) continue to haunt the edges of Moments of Clarity. All the same, Moment of Clarity rises above the darkness with a sense of elegant repose, like a butterfly-winged figure-skater skimming the hardened rim of a freezing black lake. While not exactly optimistic in outlook, these songs simmer with a certain life affirming desire, a burning passion to transcend pure cynicism and self-destruction, if only for even a few seconds. The record’s opening track, “The Real,” wastes no time establishing Moments of Clarity’s overarching themes, diving headfirst into the pains and pleasures of carrying on living, as well as the unending struggle of attempting to approach honest self-reflection. The song’s streamlined chorus, “how good does it feel, to be you, to be real?,” strikes like a double-entendre, reading equally as a dose of softened, self-deprecating cynicism, as well as a sigh of ecstatic relief at having reached a temporary state of weightlessness. These are the competing thematic poles which the ensuing entirety of Moments of Clarity straddles: bleak solitude gushing into the sudden tranquility of an unexpected oasis, loneliness becoming communion, communion becoming loneliness once more. The title track evokes images of numbed psyches and deep loathing, yet all the while holds out a sense of forgiveness in not knowing how to get better, a sense of forgiveness in the fact that, “it’s ok to say you want more.” Certain tracks carve out space to celebrate the faith and recognition found in the company of others (“You fall into me, Caroline, don’t go” – “Caroline”), while others plunge the listener back into the thickets of desperate reclusiveness (“Alone again is time well spent, alone forever falling” – “Gearhead”), dashing any sense of permanent bliss, yet without moralizing the desire to want this bliss all the same. A sense of cold stillness permeates the record’s lyrics, evoking the learned grace one inherits from staring down the pains of living without fully succumbing to them. As Duarte sings on the penultimate track “The Comedown”: “For what it’s worth I’m turning over, and you should know I’m growing older. I lost myself, and it feels so good.” This newfound lust for life is baked into the essence of the songs themselves. Each riff, melody, and drum fill has been rigorously constructed and pushed towards its most simplified, base instinct. There are no frills or unnecessary ornamentation, only pure sensation in the absence of conscious thought. Duarte credits the presence of Sonny DiPerri (NIN, Protomartyr, My Bloody Valentine), who recorded, mixed, and produced the record, with elevating Narrow Head’s sound. Prior to recording, the band spent a week with DiPerri at a house in Sherman, TX, reworking and refining the record with a sense of surgical intent, sculpting each melody and hook until it had reached its logical conclusion. “Sonny really pushed us early on,” Duarte notes, “he’d sit us down and say, ‘you guys are heavy, these choruses are good, but you shouldn’t be afraid to take this all the way and make it an actual pop song.’” The band then relocated with DiPerri to Jeff Friedl’s (Devo, A Perfect Circle) home-studio in Los Angeles, where they completed the tracking of the record under the reprieve of an uncharacteristically mild Californian late-summer. The addition of Kora Puckett (Solo, Bugg, Sheer Mag), who was promoted from touring guitarist to permanent band member following the release of 12th House Rock, further bolstered the writing process, expanding the band’s traditional songwriting trio of Duarte, guitarist William Menjivar, and drummer Carson Wilcox and pushing the songs towards a broader-minded, arrangement-by-committee register. An ecstatic sense of group cohesion shines through in each individual performance. The songs on Moments of Clarity lurch and pulse with a sense of breathless, single-minded determination, reflecting the fine-tuned tightness of a band coming off of a heavy touring cycle for 12th House Rock that saw them play alongside the likes of Quicksand, Turnstile, Gatecreeper, Chubby and the Gang, Young Guv, and Fury. The band eschews any sort of overt reliance upon studio effects in order to convey dynamic shifts, leaning instead upon the strength of the songwriting itself, as well as their intimate familiarities with one another as musicians, to carry the momentum of each track directly. Both the band’s collective synergy and intense sense of purpose help to propel the songs on Moments of Clarity to soaring new highs. The title track tunnels through a thick morass of sticky rhythms like a mechanical worm before finally emptying out into the light of day, exposing a melody so triumphant and stadium-sized in its confidence that it almost seems to channel the ghosts of Knebworth 1996. “Caroline” captures the band at their most nakedly pop-inflected moment yet, washes of melodics and A/B song-structures subsumed in an ocean-spray of glimmering distortion, creating an effect akin to a teenage emo kid on trucker speed discovering the primal joy of The Cleaners From Venus for the first time. On the other end of Moments of Clarity’s sonic spectrum, “Gearhead” finds Narrow Head approaching new depths of heaviness. Fueled by a massive riff that nods towards the pure evil, “everything is bigger in Texas” attitude of their friends in Power Trip, Iron Age, and Mammoth Grinder, the band unravels syncopated bursts of pummeling kinetic energy, weaving between subtly gripping melodies and utterly bleak breakdowns in unison like a cracking digital whip. Solitude, melancholy, and revelation bleed into each other throughout the LP, transporting the listener through a vast terrain of emotional spaces, from industrial drum samples and erotic self-sabotage (“Flesh and Solitude”), to drawling Midwestern-inflected depression and acoustic guitars that evoke the hum of dawn as it breaks in a freezing living room (“Breakup Song”; “The Comedown”), to synth lines that sound like a ghost fizzing through the speakers of an empty Coney Island parking lot (“The World”) and melon-twisting drum machine pulses (“Soft to Touch”). With Moments of Clarity, Narrow Head dashes away any shadow of romantic nostalgia or indulgent self-deprecation. Channeling equal parts pop-star cockiness and weathered sobriety, the band has, in the truest and most basic sense, arrived at a record that only they could have written. Moments of Clarity does not speak to or build upon the past. Rather, it cuts straight to the heart of the matter, taking the struggle, brilliance, and mystery of contemporary life as its direct subject.

Field of Appearances is the full-length debut from Los Angeles-based band OBJECT OF AFFECTION, which contains members of renowned acts Fury, Death Bells, and LOCK. Meticulously crafted with Grammy-nominated producer Alex Newport and emerging engineer Phillip Odom, Field of Appearances is an exceedingly memorable, precisely cohesive, and importantly, a refreshing addition to the alternative music landscape. With the inclusion of drum machines, synthesizers, acoustic guitars, and auxiliary percussion, Field of Appearances highlights the band's sophisticated evolution and experimentation from previous single Through and Through (Suicide Squeeze) and their self-titled tape. The result: ten songs exploding in character, contrast, and excitement. Exploring themes of reflection, insufficiency, and Déjà vu as well as additional contributions from Bre Morell (Temple of Angels, Crushed) and Brittney Beppu, each track on Field of Appearances simultaneously plays a role in making it a more significant sum than its parts while also standing out individually. OBJECT OF AFFECTION taps into the primitivism of said members’ other projects while elevating their capacity for atmosphere and melody. Hints of gloomy post-punk, forlorn new wave, and down-and-out Regan-era alternative rock reverberate in their sound, not as pastiche but in sonic kinship to the austerity and fatalism embedded in the previous generation’s desperate and dejected anthems. Already sharing the stage with accomplished bands including Ceremony, Fiddlehead, Gulch, These Arms Are Snakes, and Special Interest, the band is a welcome addition to the Profound Lore family. Make sure to catch Object of Affection around North America following Field of Appearances’ March 03 release.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

“When we started making this record and throughout a lot of it, I was feeling like life was trying to devour me.” That’s what Pierce the Veil vocalist/guitarist Vic Fuentes says about the San Diego post-hardcore band’s fifth album. “It was testing me, really seeing what I was made of. I had that feeling of being sort of trapped or stuck, or like something was eating me.” It’s a feeling that Fuentes and his bandmates—bassist Jaime Preciado and guitarist Tony Perry—know a lot of people can relate to after suffering through the pandemic. “I think this record was the thing that got us through all that personally—and also as a band,” he tells Apple Music. “The process was what brought us back into the light. A lot of it is about fighting your way back to feeling better again. Not just moving there calmly, but actually clawing your way, digging your way, scratching your way back to feeling like a human again.” All of which goes a long way toward explaining the album’s title. “The Jaws of Life is a machine that’s meant to save people’s lives, to pry them out of things,” he offers. Below, Fuentes comments on each song. **“Death of an Executioner”** “The visual of this song, to me, is a car that’s following you—like the video for ‘Karma Police’ by Radiohead. It’s got its headlights on your back, and it’s just kind of slowly creeping on you. To me, it represents social media and people expecting perfection out of you and always waiting for you to make a mistake so they can run you down and destroy you. I like the title ‘Death of an Executioner’ because it describes killing the person who’s trying to kill you.” **“Pass the Nirvana”** “Every time we’ve played this song live, I’ve dedicated it to all the youth in the crowd who didn’t get a graduation or a prom. It’s describing how the youth of America went through so much in such a small amount of time. I just feel like they’re going to be traumatized forever because of COVID and insurrection and all these school shootings. It’s just too much. ‘Pass the Nirvana’ is about trying to find a good feeling after all of that.” **“Even When I’m Not With You”** “This started with a text that my manager sent me. She wrote, ‘Even when I’m not with you, I’m still with you.’ I was going through a rough time, and she was consoling me with these beautiful words. It hit me so hard that I wrote it down, and it all just naturally fell together into a song about devotion and staying connected through love, even over long distances. I dedicated it to my wife, and it’s a reminder that we’re always connected no matter where I am in the world.” **“Emergency Contact”** “When you’re young and you go to the doctor, you always put down your mom or dad or guardian as your emergency contact. And then there’s this funny moment when you get older, and your emergency contact becomes your wife or your partner. God forbid something happens to me; my wife will be the one to help me. I got to record this one when I was staying up in Seattle at this amazing 100-year-old house owned by Mike \[Herrera\] from MxPx.” **“Flawless Execution”** “This one’s kind of hard to describe. I feel like it’s about people blurring the lines between love and sex and vice versa. It’s almost about when you’re OK with being used because you want to be close to the person so badly. You want love so badly that you’re actually OK with being used or abused, kind of like the Bill Withers song ‘Use Me.’ So, it’s about those extremes that we go to just to be validated. If you’re always desiring someone’s approval, it can go to some toxic places.” **“The Jaws of Life”** “It’s about trying to get released from life’s grip and finding your way. There’s a line in it where I say I’m having the time of my life rotting in the sun, inside the jaws of life. It’s trying to be OK with where you are and starting to feel happy again—I’m making my way, and I know that I can see some light. There’s a lot of ’90s influence in this song musically, which I’m super stoked on. The verse feels like Tripping Daisy or Superdrag—I was thinking about their song ‘Sucked Out’ a lot when I was writing this one.” **“Damn the Man, Save the Empire”** “I’ve been trying to use this title for years, but it’s never felt right until now. It’s a quote from one of my favorite movies, *Empire Records*. Lyrically, it’s about how no one can really know who you are until they’ve really spent some time with you. I feel that way sometimes when people follow our band on social media and think they have me pegged, but you’re seeing what I want you to see, not who I fully am. So, it’s just reminding people about that superficial experience.” **“Resilience”** “With this song, I had this vision of that classic scene in the movies when the hand pops out of the dirt after they’ve been buried alive, and the person starts pulling their body up to the surface. It’s like when you’re digging your way out of this hole, and your eyes finally see the sun and they adjust. Also, one of my most proud moments on this record is that we got to use a quote from *Dazed and Confused* to start the song. We actually had to have the actors approve that. It was such a win for the album.” **“Irrational Fears”** “This is an interlude that sets up the next song. It was inspired by that first scene in the movie *Garden State*, with Zach Braff, where he’s on a plane that’s going down and everyone is freaking out around him, but he’s perfectly calm. We wanted to set the scene with this British flight attendant being all chipper but saying really dark things. Jaime made the music, and then my friend who’s a voice actor recorded the voiceover in London. It was a fun challenge, and I’m really proud of how it came out.” **“Shared Trauma”** “The title kind of speaks for itself. I’ve always felt that shared trauma and going through a traumatic experience with somebody can be one of the strongest bonds in human existence. Knowing that you’ve both been through something together will always connect you in such a powerful way. I think that’s beautiful—it’s the good that can come out of the bad. Musically, it was very much a collaborative band effort that came out of this loopy analog beat that Jaime sent me. It was really fun to write.” **“So Far So Fake”** “This song was written in 2017, so we’ve had it for a long time. It was one of the only ones that made it from some of the first writing sessions we did before the pandemic. It’s about if you’ve ever been betrayed by somebody you felt was a friend, and the wound never really mended—where even an apology doesn’t feel like it’s enough. It feels like it can never really be resolved. So, it’s a bit angry, a bit sour, a bit difficult to think about. But I always want to write about things that are affecting my life.” **“12 Fractures” (feat. chloe moriondo)** “The song was called ‘12 Fractures’ before it became the 12th song on the album. We didn’t plan it like that. I’m glad it worked out that way, but it also makes things confusing. I’m actually looking at our vinyl right now to make sure it doesn’t just say ‘Fractures.’ But this one came from a deeply personal story about a friend of mine who went through a divorce. I watched two of my favorite people in the world just fall apart. When friends break apart like that, it’s like losing a family member. It’s super difficult, even as a bystander. It was cool to get Chloe on the song to bring the story to life. I’m a big fan of hers, and I think she did an amazing job.”

The third album from the masked, anonymous Brits of Sleep Token is also the third in a conceptual trilogy that began with their 2019 debut, *Sundowning*. Introduced with the stirring and dramatic leadoff single “Chokehold,” *Take Me Back to Eden* is another genre-defying exploration of music’s outer limits, incorporating elements of techno and tech-metal alongside R&B, post-rock, and pop—often in the same song. “Vore” spins out in Meshuggah djent-isms before swelling with the kind of strings that recall a battle scene from *Game of Thrones*. “Ascensionism” is an inventive and often bizarre mix of piano ballad, gospel, and ultra-modern metal. Closer “Euclid” sounds like a Lana Del Rey tune performed by an R&B singer and a chorus of aliens. Along the way, there are love songs (“The Apparition”), suicide ballads (“Are You Really Okay?”), and songs about loss (the title track). As always, mastermind Vessel’s vocals soar over the proceedings, offering lyrical mysteries in service to the nocturnal muse he calls Sleep. It’s as bewildering as it is impressive.

“Does anyone even know you?/Does anyone even care?” That’s just one of the many existential questions put forth by The Armed on *Perfect Saviors*. This time around, the multifaceted, multitasking, multicultural, willfully mysterious collective peer through the cracked lens of everyone’s smartphone to examine the cultural chaos, social media narcissism, virtue signaling, and performative blah-blah-blah of our current moment. You know: the Modern Malaise. On songs like “Sport of Measure” and “Sport of Form,” they’re not talking about Monday Night Football or the UFC or even (necessarily) the endless public humiliations of celebrity athletes. No, it’s a much nastier blood sport The Armed are interested in: The daily *Lord of the Flies* competition for likes, followers, and views. They even issued a press release about it: “*Perfect Saviors* is the soundtrack to a single movie with 7.5 billion roles.” According to vocalist and spokesperson Tony Wolski (who may or may not have formerly been known as Adam Vallely), the single “Everything’s Glitter” was inspired by David Bowie’s first US press tour. It looks at what Wolski—who directed the video for the track and co-produced *Perfect Saviors*—calls “the razor’s edge between icon and clown.” The song itself sounds like The Strokes being calmly fed into a Vitamix. So does “Clone,” which appears two songs earlier. Between them is “Modern Vanity,” which sounds like a seasick, drug-induced fantasy headache written by stone-cold teetotalers. Meanwhile, “Liar 2” is a dance track about being hopelessly depressed. Probably. The point here—and on “Modern Vanity,” and elsewhere on *Perfect Saviors*—seems to be the juxtaposition, the pairing of opposites. It’s what The Armed have thrived upon since their inception in 2009 but elevated to an art form on their celebrated 2021 album, *Ultrapop*. In fact, most of *Perfect Saviors* is a seesawing mashup of indie rock, post-hardcore, and strobe-effect electronics, but (usually) without the abrupt stylistic U-turns many of their sonically schizophrenic peers go in for. Toward the end of the record, we get some melancholy sax (“In Heaven”) and a Radiohead-style mood piece complete with free-jazz skronk, sad piano, sadder strings, and a slow fade into oblivion. That one’s called “Public Grieving.” As on the band’s previous outings, *Perfect Saviors* has cameos. But this time, the guest list is more crowded than usual. Featuring appearances from indie darling Julien Baker, avant-garde saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, and Chavez/ex-Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney alongside dudes from Jane’s Addiction, Queens of the Stone Age, and Red Hot Chili Peppers—plus too many more to list here—the album is crammed with people from other bands. At the same time, The Armed will put Iggy Pop in one of their videos (“Sport of Form”) without getting him to perform on the song itself. It’s the equivalent of taking a selfie with a rock star whose music you’re not actually familiar with. Which is probably the point.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.