Atwood Magazine's Albums of the Year 2022

Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.

Grammy and Americana-award-winning singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires has pushed the reset button with 'Take It Like A Man', releasing a record that is so unlike anything she has ever recorded that you would be tempted to think it’s her debut album instead of her seventh. Shires, who also plays in The Highwomen, worked with producer Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Kim Gordon) to make a fearless confessional, showing the world what turning 40 looks like in 10 emotionally raw tracks.

After recording *The Car*, there was, for “quite a long time, a real edit in process,” Arctic Monkeys leader Alex Turner tells Apple Music. Indeed, his UK rock outfit’s daring seventh LP sounds nothing if not *composed*—a set of subtle and stupendously well-mannered mid-century pop that feels light years away from the youthful turbulence of their historic 2006 debut, *Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not*. If, back then, they were writing songs with the intention of uncorking them onstage, they’re now fully in the business of craft—editing, shaping, teasing out the sort of sumptuous detail that reveals itself over repeated listens. “It’s obviously 10 songs, but, even more than we have done before, it just feels like it’s a whole,” he says. “It’s its own.” The aim was to pay more attention to dynamics, to economy and space. “Everything,” Turner says, “has its chance to come in and out of focus,” whether it’s a brushed snare or a feline guitar line, a feathered vocal melody or devastating turn of phrase. Where an earlier Monkeys song may have detonated outward, a blast of guitars and drums and syllables, these are quiet, controlled, middle-aged explosions: “It doesn\'t feel as if there\'s too many times on this record where everything\'s all going on at once.” On album opener “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” Turner vaults from a bed of enigmatic, opening-credit-like keys and strings (all arranged with longtime collaborator James Ford and composer Bridget Samuels) into scenes of a prolonged farewell. So much of its pain—its romance, its dramatic tension—is in what’s not said. “The feel of that minute-or-so introduction was what feels like the foundation of the whole thing,” he says. “And it really was about finding what could hang out with that or what could be built around the feel of that. The moment when I found a way to bridge it into something that is a pop song by the end was exciting, because I felt like we had somewhere to go.” For years, Turner has maintained a steady diet of side work, experimenting with orchestral, Morricone-like epics in The Last Shadow Puppets as well as lamplit bedroom folk on 2011’s *Submarine* EP, written for the film of the same name. But listen closely to *The Car* (and 2018’s *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino* before it) and you’ll hear the walls between the band and his interests outside it begin to dissolve—the string arrangements throughout (but especially on “The Car”), the gently fingerpicked guitars (“Mr Schwartz”), the use of negative space (the slightly Reznor-y “Sculptures of Anything Goes”). “I think I was naive,” he says. “I think the first time I stepped out to do anything else was the first Puppets record, and at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is totally in its own place and it\'s going to have nothing to do with the Monkeys and what that was going to turn into.’ And I realize now that I don\'t know if that\'s really possible, for me anyway. It feels as if everything you do has an effect on the next thing.”

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.

black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.

Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.

Three albums into her career as a solo artist, country singer-songwriter Caitlyn Smith continues coming into her own with *High*, the follow-up to 2020\'s *Supernova* and the first album she has self-produced. A songwriter for artists like Miley Cyrus and Garth Brooks, Smith is known for writing melody-driven pop-country with a heavy dose of emotion. Accordingly, *High* is often a moving listen, like the soulful heartbreak of the title track (which was originally recorded by Cyrus for 2020\'s *Plastic Hearts*) and the vulnerable closing love song \"I Don\'t Like the World Without You.\"

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Montreal singer Claudia Bouvette likes to keep things spontaneous and intuitive. “I can’t say what I’m going to do for my next album,” she tells Apple Music. \"With me, things always come naturally.” That might explain how, after first appearing on the musical reality-TV series *Mixmania* in 2011, she took a detour through acting for the next few years, before she met producer Connor Seidel (Charlotte Cardin, Matt Holubowski, Les sœurs Boulay), who proved to be the perfect creative partner. “From the first time we met, our relationship has always been intense,” she says. \"Connor has a knack for making you feel comfortable.” Before beginning the creative process, the two had to submit to a work discipline: “In 2017-2018, we decided to create 30 demo tapes of songs to help us find the right tone, the style best suited to me,” she says. They chose 10 tracks to flesh out her debut EP, 2019’s *Cool It*. Once their collaboration was underway, the idea of an album soon became a given. “For me, an album is more serious,” Bouvette says of *The Paradise Club*. \"It’s a complete universe: From the lyrics to the music to the visuals, I wanted everything to come together.” The singer-songwriter chronicles her often difficult relationships over electro-pop production that\'s danceable and festive, divulging a good deal about her personal world along the way. “I’m pleased to have delved this deep into the intimate,” she adds. \"Listening to it again, I see a genuine narrative arc and I realize just how much I have evolved,” she explains. Here she walks us through that evolution, track by track. **\"Welcome to the Paradise Club\"** “I felt like letting people into my universe through this short musical intro. The title makes you dream and evokes a glamourous place by the beach, but ‘Paradise Club’ is the name I’d given to my old apartment in \[Montreal neighbourhood\] Hochelaga. People who pay attention to the lyrics will see that, behind the rather light-hearted music, things are not always going well. The drum loop that sounds a bit tinny, the out-of-tune synthesizer—it creates a certain discomfort that sets the tone for what follows.” **\"BBZ\"** “I think this was the hardest one to produce, probably because we knew it was one of the stronger tracks on the album and we wanted to do it justice. At one point, we were working on five different versions at the same time. It was inspired by a love-at-first-sight experience I had when travelling. There’s something magical about encounters when you’re on vacation, and I now realize that I idealized that person, who I didn’t know before and never saw again after.” **\"Flowers\"** “The first words were improvised using onomatopoeia that I usually sing on a beat, but I was unable to finish it. So I asked my friend \[composer and rapper\] Emma Beko to help me with the lyrics. I had this image of flowers in my pockets as a starting point, and I clearly remember the moment when I finished the track with Emma. It was a rainy winter day, and we’d gone to work under the roof of the Japanese Pavilion at the Montreal Botanical Garden. It was magical.” **\"Douchebag\"** “It’s a word I use all the time and which has the advantage of being unequivocal. Okay, so not all my exes are douchebags, but let’s just say I’m drawn to a certain type… I’ve allowed myself to express what I hadn’t been able to say when I was in an uncomfortable situation. To do so in song is truly liberating; it enabled me to expunge all the bad stuff. That being said, even though there’s a very personal side to the whole album, I’m not going to reveal any names or talk about specific people. I sing for myself because it makes me feel good.” **\"Miss Blumenfeld\"** “Probably the song that came to me the most naturally. I was at home and I’d started off with a little drum loop and then I added different instruments one by one using my synthesizer. The melody just came to me on its own, and I ended up with an almost complete track. I finished it on Île d’Orléans, where I spent some time during lockdown, in the middle of winter. There was something apocalyptic about that landscape of ice, which was constantly changing, but it was magical. We were in our own little world, far from the imposed curfews. It’s a song that talks about a rebirth at a time when I was febrile, fragile. I needed to be alone, even though I didn’t feel like being alone.” **\"Pardon Me\"** “We wrote it at the very beginning of the process, when I was at the very height of my discomfort. I wasn’t doing well and it shows in the lyrics: it talks about the desire to be loved, even in a toxic relationship. The music is epic and grandiose, there’s a huge crescendo, but it contrasts with the more somber lyrics.” **\"I Don’t Wanna Say Goodbye\"** “It’s undoubtedly the most personal track of the entire project. I have a really hard time saying goodbye to people, and that’s precisely what the title conveys. It’s perhaps the most stripped-back song in terms of the production but there are amusing little details. Connor and I peppered the entire album with all kinds of little guilty pleasures, including the Auto-Tune you can hear here, which reminds me of tunes by Akon that I listened to as a kid. A processed, manipulated voice, like Imogen Heap or Bon Iver, really moves me.” **\"Mamie Lise\"** “I was at my grandmother’s place in Montmagny. We were spending some relaxing quality time together, chatting and doing jigsaw puzzles. She started talking about the beauty of wildflowers and I found it so lovely, so poetic, that I turned on my Dictaphone and asked her to repeat the sentence: That’s what you can hear in this short interlude. She’s had a totally amazing life, and she inspires me by the way she handles adversity with such serenity.” **\"Solo Night\"** “It refers to a really mediocre date with someone who spends the evening bragging. It led me to this conclusion: Sometimes, all you want is to be alone with yourself or with your girlfriends. I realized that I didn’t fundamentally need a boyfriend and that the moments when I feel my best are the ones when I’m alone. What’s nice about being single isn’t having the freedom to flirt left, right and centre—it’s having the option of being alone with yourself and accepting yourself.” **\"Solo Girl\"** “The first time we jammed to ‘G-GIRL’—Connor, my keyboardist Caulder \[Nash\], and I—in 2019, I recorded the session on my phone. We ended up deciding to use the demo as a transition between ‘Solo Night’ and ‘G-GIRL’, and it formed a whole. The rest of the album is very staged, so I thought it would be fun to draw the listener into the original, raw version of the song. There’s something very intimate about it; it’s like we’re inviting people into our creative process.” **\"G-GIRL\"** “We’d had the demo tape kicking around for a long time, but ultimately it was the last song we produced for the album. It came really naturally, in a single day, and the only thing I remember was that I wanted a heavy, dirty bass. It’s not very serious. It talks about acting like a ‘good girl’, just for an evening, to seduce someone from a completely different background. The title is also a nod to the superhero character played by Uma Thurman in the film *My Super Ex-Girlfriend*.” **\"Touchée-Coulée\"** “This one stems from a jam with my friend \[composer\] Kodakludo. I’d had it in my files for a while and then one day, I got it back out because I wanted to tell a story which, unlike the other songs, isn’t about me. It talks about a friend who was stuck in an extremely toxic relationship with a narcissistic pervert but who, thankfully, managed to get out of it.” **\"1000 Bornes\"** “Another collaboration with Kodakludo. Initially, it was a very intense trap song. I had the voice and melody but something didn’t seem quite right, so Connor suggested a simpler, more stripped-back approach, and we started playing it, just guitar and vocals. I think it’s well suited to the lyrics, which talk about choosing yourself, of never letting the flame go out. That sort of creaking noise you can hear throughout the song is the sound of ice moving on the river, which I recorded while I was staying on Île d’Orléans.” **\"I Lost My Keys & My Manners\"** “It’s a strange coincidence, but the last three songs are all collaborations with Kodakludo. We have such a great time playing together; it’s always very spontaneous. I remember I’d just come out of a dark period in my life and I didn’t really care about anything, I was completely nonchalant, but there was nothing negative about it. Sometimes, it’s good to just let yourself drift.”

The Paradise Club is a showstopper, an album where outbursts are brilliantly paired with dance steps; where frank and raw language, skilfully shifting from English to French, sails on seminal rhythms. Claudia sings about her failed and fallen loves, the drama of devastating relationships and the emotional turmoil surrounding her life, but it is above all a moving work of reconstruction, where from distress we move towards emancipation. Co-written and co-produced by Claudia and Connor Seidel, The Paradise Club is the album of a young woman asserting herself. It is both intense and festive, introspective and playful, carried at arm's length by the exemplary verve of an artist in full possession of her means.

Death Cab’s mix of youthful fragility and deep, romantic yearning is one of the hallmarks of modern rock. Even at their most melodramatic, they maintain composure in ways their emo ancestors didn’t, and their 10th album in a now-25-year career is no exception. But like the imagery behind its title, *Asphalt Meadows* is a rougher sound than the sometimes porcelain smoothness of their 2010s albums, mining similar tender—brisk New Wave (“I Miss Strangers,” “Asphalt Meadows”), gentle Americana (“Rand McNally”), and big, atmospheric ballads (“I’ll Never Give Up On You”). As always, Ben Gibbard reaches to make specifics feel universal (“We lived on whiskey and Twizzlers”) and universals (“These days I miss strangers more than I miss my friends”) feel like he somehow wrote them just for you.

New 11-track album 'Asphalt Meadows' out now.

Even before easy life released their debut album, *life’s a beach*, in May 2021, leader Murray Matravers was writing songs that would become the core of this follow-up. When the UK’s lockdowns paused the five-piece’s operations, Matravers found rare opportunities to take stock. “When you leave school, you’re like, ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’” he tells Apple Music. “A thousand miles an hour. I don’t really think you’ve dealt with any of the shit in your childhood because you’ve just been trying to get through it. All of a sudden, I had this decompression where I looked back at everything that had happened, and I wrote this album about it. It’s a lot about growing up, and I don’t think anyone feels really at ease and happy with the way they grew up, so it’s no wonder it feels rawer.” That rawness manifests itself not just in the honesty of Matravers’ lyrics, but also in a sonic saturation and distortion. As the group patches intriguing new sounds together from influences as divergent as Randy Newman, ’90s hip-hop, indie rock, New Orleans funeral marches, and The Beach Boys, there’s often a static and tension that taps into the turbulence of life. That’s not to say *MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE...* is a dark record: Matravers’ reflections generate plenty of optimism and arm-around-the-shoulder empathy for anyone struggling, and easy life often frames his meditations within invigorating beats and uplifting pop melodies. Nevertheless, Matravers is well-aware that he’s revealing more of himself than ever. “I feel vulnerable a few times on this album,” he says. “But you can be empowered. We’re all vulnerable, and if you allow that, if you champion it rather than shy away from it, it can feel good.” Here, he takes us through his journey, track by track. **“MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE…”** “The first song we wrote for the album was ‘DEAR MISS HOLLOWAY,’ and it had this chorus, ‘Maybe in another life.’ That felt like exactly where I was. So, I had Sam \[Hewitt, bassist\], who is the resident musical genius, make these weird jingles. This was the first. It helps you step into the world, and you’re like, ‘OK, this is a fairy tale,’ the sonics of it are kind of cute and cozy, and it has glockenspiel and nice harmony. We produced seven or eight jingles, but the rest of the band were like, ‘Dude, this is too much. There’s more jingle than song.’ So, only two of them made it—this and one at the end of ‘ANTIFREEZE.’” **“GROWING PAINS”** “I wrote this, and a lot of the album, with my friends Gianluca and Alessandro Buccellati. I wrote ‘have a great day’ on the first album with them, and we became really close. This is set within a relationship. It’s quite easy in songwriting to put things in a romantic context because they’re more easily digestible. The relationship I have with my girlfriend’s pretty much the only functioning one; the rest of them are all fucked. So, bless her—she bears a lot of the songwriting. I was actually writing about the state of the band and where we are. Growing up and wondering, ‘How did I get here? Is this where I wanted to be?’” **“BASEMENT”** “It’s literally about going out to a nightclub called The Basement \[in Leicester\] and getting fucked up. There is a darker edge to it where it’s like, ‘I feel the wheels coming off.’ It’s like you haven’t really got your shit together, and you’re going out and partying to remedy or forget about that. It’s a big part of British culture: We don’t talk about how we feel. Instead, we get pissed and then it spills out in these drunken slurs that you are forgiven for, and you can blame on being intoxicated. Heaven forbid you actually have to say those things for real.” **“DEAR MISS HOLLOWAY”** “I wrote this about being infatuated with a teacher, which is something that all of us go through. I’ve been saying this in front of audiences, and there’s always this weird or awkward silence. I’m like, ‘Come on. Is that not a thing?’ You’re an adolescent teenager full of hormones, you do have these weird fantasies with your teachers. She’s a fictional character; there’s not an 80-year-old geography teacher thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is really creepy.’ It’s about unrequited love in general. It feels wistful and like a fairy tale. It feels very, very old-school Disney. I was watching a lot of old Disney and listening to loads of old Randy Newman when I was making this album.” **“BUBBLE WRAP”** “Releasing the first album was a bit of a whirlwind. I’d just come out of that and was moving house and didn’t give myself time to reflect on anything. I didn’t really know where I was. And it was COVID, so a lot of stuff was going wrong. I got this studio in London, but it was completely empty. I ended up in there, getting really drunk on my own—for all those reasons I talked about with ‘BASEMENT’—and wrote ‘BUBBLE WRAP.’ The recording is so bad—I used all the wrong mics, and all the vocals were so out of tune and distorted because I’d accidentally driven the pre-amps too hard. Or maybe it was a conscious decision. But there’s a lot of raw emotion in this song. We’d just done a Justin Bieber cover for a Radio 1 *Live Lounge* and got it all wrong. Honestly, it was terrible. Sam left me a voicemail \[checking in on Matravers\] that weekend, and I stuck it in this because it encapsulated the whole message of the song.” **“OTT”** “We’ve spent our whole career trying not to be put in the ‘indie’ bracket just because we’re British dudes that play guitars. On this, we’re like, ‘You know what? This is our indie anthem.’ easy life’s about experimenting and enjoying it. It has my first-ever guitar solo at the end. I made this shitty solo in my bedroom, in my pants. It’s, like, three notes. When I play it live, I feel so embarrassed, like, ‘Oh my god, as if I’ve got to play this solo for the rest of my life.’ ‘OTT’ is uplifting and feels good, but it’s actually about addiction. We all encounter addiction in our lives, and it’s the saddest illness I’ve ever come across. It’s one where it’s too raw to put it down in its entirety. So, we just try and make people smile while doing so.” **“MEMORY LOSS”** “This is the rawest one. When you go through your life, especially your early twenties, trying to get somewhere and achieve some shit, you never actually look back and deal with the stuff that’s affected or defined you. This was my time to reflect on that. It’s me recounting a few things that had happened, but I can’t remember anything. I have the worst memory. It’s really annoying, and I wanted to write a song about it. I did a lot of reading into how trauma victims can’t remember anything because it’s a defense mechanism. I was trying to think, ‘Right, so what is it that I’m scared of remembering?’” **“SILVER LININGS”** “I felt like we needed some light relief from the heaviness. I wrote this in New York with Rob \[Milton\], who produced a lot of *life’s a beach*. This is inspired by ’90s hip-hop, the sound selection, the drums, the flow, everything. That’s the shit I grew up on. It’s literally about having a really nice time in New York, and everything’s going to be great. It has that half-glass-full energy. Despite all the misery and nostalgia of this album, there’s a lot of hope in there, and we are positive people.” **“CROCODILE TEARS”** “This was written drunkenly with some friends of mine, \[producers\] Bekon & The Donuts. They did a couple of tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*. We basically used to nail absinthe. And because they’re on hip-hop time, the sessions would start at 8 in the evening and go on until 4 in the morning—and I was already jet-lagged because we were in LA. We just ended up getting hammered and messing around. Bekon’s a huge Beach Boys fan. So, we nerded out about how they recorded. We placed a mic in the middle of the room and recorded different harmonies from different proximities and positions. It’s inspired by New Orleans funeral marches as well. It has the ‘maybe in another life’ in the lyric again. It’s just about what could have been.” **“MORAL SUPPORT”** I wrote this with Luca and Sandro in LA. It’s a conventional love song. I spent so much time away from home over the last few years. I miss my family and my girlfriend. I miss being in one place. ‘MORAL SUPPORT’ is me saying, ‘I miss you and thanks for having my back.’ It has those sort of bossa nova, samba chords. Very, very Bee Gees. Even the first three chords are—different key and slightly different inversion—the same three chords from ‘How Deep Is Your Love.’ It just wrote itself, and I’m now bonded to Luca and Sandro, in a way, for eternity because we shared this moment together. It’s almost like having sex with someone, like, ‘Wow, we did this thing, and it can never be undone.’” **“CALLING IN SICK”** “This one was just for us. I was very inspired by Randy Newman. ‘Short People,’ one of his hits, has this piano thing where it’s like, *ding, ding, ding*. I was like, ‘I’m having that because that’s such a fucking vibe.’ We just wanted to jam. I think people are going to skip this, but if you’re a true fan, listen to this because this is what gets us really excited. It has this key change into a minute-long instrumental horn outro, which is the most self-indulgent moment on the album. We started as muso nerds, so it’s nice to embrace that from time to time.” **“BEESWAX”** “Coming out of lockdown, everyone was a little bit, ‘Whoa!’ Stepping out into the world, it’s a lot: ‘I’m having to share a lot of stuff with people, and I’m not used to this.’ ‘BEESWAX’ is a reaction to that. The lyrics are quite arrogant and cocky. I become a lot more confident. You hear the real me on ‘MEMORY LOSS’ and ‘MORAL SUPPORT.’ I’m insecure and scared and humble and sweet, and that can get a bit boring. So, I was like, ‘You need to turn up and go crazy.’ So, I used the vocal processing to be able to become like this rapper for a minute.” **“BUGGIN”** “Luca threw this house party, and we were all getting stoned and drunk and whatever, and this really coke-y and weird dude turned up. He was really tall, and I’m really short, so that already was an issue. And he was dressed in this kind of traditional African dress, a play on that. He was telling us he was a wanted man who’d escaped his country, that he was the prince of this place, and his face was on all the money there. I had to run away from him because he was following me around. The next day, we wrote ‘BUGGIN’ about him, an unwelcome guest just bugging you out. We finished the song and went for food, and the same guy was at the restaurant. We were all hiding our faces, pulling our hats down over our eyes. It was super weird.” **“ANTIFREEZE”** “Gus \[Dapperton\] and I have been friends since we supported him on his UK tour in 2017. We were just chatting one day and decided to write a song over FaceTime. I was in England, and it was fucking freezing because it was January. He was in New York, and it was freezing there. So, we just started writing about how cold it was. Wrote it in a day, super simple.” **“FORTUNE COOKIE”** “This really is my ode to Randy Newman. It was written about someone in the band who was going through a really hard time. I sent it to him, and I remember him calling me back in tears. We had a real heart-to-heart. There’s certain things you can say in a song that you can’t really say to your mate in the pub. And music has a funny way of saying a thousand things with just one line. This song really helped us open up the floor, to actually have this conversation as a band. It had to be the last one because it ends on ‘take care.’ Our first album ends on ‘goodnight.’ We’re just trying to make a theme of saying goodbye at the end of each project.”

On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”

The way *Florist* comes on is so quiet and unassuming, you might wonder if the band is actually playing music. That is, of course, until it’s obvious that they are, and that the rain and breeze and crickets that so unassumingly complement their songs aren’t just accessories but foundational: This is music about rivers that wants to make you pay more attention to rivers. Some songs stand out—“Red Bird Pt. 2,” “Sci - Fi Silence,” “Spring in Hours,” “Organ’s Drone”—but they’re best absorbed in the same casual, front-porch mode in which it sounds like the music was made, and through which vocalist Emily Sprague’s naive wisdom transmits.

19 tracks that culminate the decade-long journey of friendship and collaboration

In 2019, James Bay was wrestling with contrasts. Released the previous year, his second album *Electric Light* had revealed a singer-songwriter in adventurous mood, stretching his blend of rock, blues, and gospel into funk, R&B, and electro-pop. Subsequent live dates, including three months supporting Ed Sheeran, then took him across Europe, Australia, and North America. But for all the joys of living the rock ’n’ roll life, darkness was also creeping in. “I was presented with a pretty low low,” he tells Apple Music. “I was going through a chapter of insecurity, sadness, and anxiety; it was a lot to take on. On the surface, I was traveling, I was touring, and it was a very difficult, complex two things to deal with—this sort of paradox of smiling on the outside and struggling on the inside.” He eventually found solace and a way to help process his feelings by writing for his third album. A songwriter who’d regularly explored heartache and despair, Bay initially dug into his sadness and anxiety. But he began to produce more satisfying results when focusing on sources of light. “To write songs is its own therapy,” he says, “but also I looked to the really special people in my life, who are so close to me and so important to me, and I wanted to emphasize in my writing just how they keep my chin above water when I need it the most.” As a result, optimism resonates throughout *Leap*, its title taken from the words of American nature writer John Burroughs: “Leap, and the net will appear.” Bay’s celebrating the love of his long-term partner on “One Life,” trusting in companionship on “Everybody Needs Someone,” and handing down some hard-won wisdom on “Save Your Love,” produced by FINNEAS. The gently plucked “Better” ends the album by cherishing the restorative support of a loved one: “’Cause everything’s better as soon as you’re next to me/I know I fall apart, but you fix me with your heart.” Rendered in crisply melodic rock, these songs might be less sonically intrepid than *Electric Light*, but here, Bay’s exploration is within. He’s rarely sounded so emotionally open—or positive. “The last two years \[during the pandemic\] have taught me that no matter what you do for a living or how lucky you feel, life will deal you all sorts of different things, sometimes at random,” he says. “As cheesy as it may sound, tomorrow is always on the way. Tomorrow brings a fresh perspective, a second chance, a possibility to start again. It’s been a really important thing for me to be reminded of and to have learned in recent years.”

Listening to Atlanta MC JID’s third studio album *The Forever Story*, it’s hard to imagine the Dreamville signee pursuing a career in anything other than rap, but according to the man born Destin Choice Route, establishing himself as one of his generation’s most clever wordsmiths was plan B. “I ain\'t always want to be a rapper, artist, or nothing like this,” he told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden ahead of the album’s release. “This wasn\'t my dream. This was just like, ‘I’m really fire at this. I\'m really gifted at this.’ I always wanted to be a football player, you feel me? That was my whole shit.” Though he’s long ago moved on from any delusions of playing the sport professionally, the voicemail tacked on to the end of album intro “Galaxy” reveals a closeness to the sport, and more specifically those who helped him learn it. “That\'s my old football coach,” JID says of the voice we hear chewing him out for not answering the phone. “He was just giving me shit. That was his whole demeanor, but it was always for the better. He was my father away from home. He was just a big part of the whole story.” *The Forever Story*, to be specific, is a deep dive into the MC’s family lore and an exploration of what growing up the youngest of seven meant for his outlook. If JID’s last proper album, *The Never Story*, was an introduction to his lyrical prowess and a declaration that he had a story to tell, *The Forever Story* is an expansion of that universe. “*Never* came from a very humble mindset,” he says. “It was coming from, I *never* had shit. *The Forever Story*\'s just the evolved origin story, really just giving you more of who I am—more family stories, where I\'m from, why I am kind of how I am.” He tells these stories in grave detail on songs like “Raydar,” “Can’t Punk Me,” “Kody Blu 31,” and “Can’t Make U Change” and then includes collaborations with heroes-turned-peers (“Stars” featuring Yasiin Bey, “Just in Time” with Lil Wayne) that acknowledge a reverence for his craft. He raps about his siblings on songs like “Bruddanem” and “Sistanem,” but it’s “Crack Sandwich,” a song where the MC details an encounter in which his family fought together, that seems the most like a story JID will enjoy telling forever. “We were all together like Avengers and shit,” he says. “Back-to-back brawling in New Orleans. It was crazy.”

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

If there’s anything Lauran Hibberd likes to do, it’s to confound people. Born and raised on the Isle of Wight but with an unshakable affection for ’90s power-punk, her music gives off a noticeable duality, sharing stories both angsty and insecure. “There’s been a lot of labels flying around: indie rock, pop punk, power pop, slacker-pop,” she tells Apple Music. “But I have kind of grown to love the fact that nobody can really settle on what it is. Especially in the lockdown, having that much time and listening to so much music, I was like, ‘Why limit yourself? I’m just going to squeeze my brain and see what comes out.’” What has come out feels something like resilience. Building on her previous EPs, 2019’s *Everything Is Dogs* and 2021’s *Goober*, her debut album, *Garageband Superstar*, introduces an array of vivid characters, from an endearingly clueless gamer guy to various iterations of Hibberd herself, working through anxiety, heartbreak, and issues of body image with Day-Glo charisma and teen-movie humor. If a debut album can mark a cinematic coming of age, Hibberd makes for a deeply relatable hero, finding scrappy new ways to strike gold in the everyday. “I’m not out here changing the world,” she says. “I’m not writing ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. Most of us are just at work, looking out our windows, watching a movie when we get home. I’m just saying what I see and what’s in my weird head, and it feels good to let it out.” Let Hibberd talk you through the inspiration behind each track. **“Rollercoaster”** “For me, the perfect place to open any album is to talk about falling off a roller coaster and ringing your mum off a Motorola. I very much write how I speak—very easily distracted and taken off with different things, like a dog who’s caught a scent. So, it feels like a good place to start for that reason alone, but it’s really about the pressure on women to look and act a certain way, how tiring that can be, but still trying to laugh in the face of it all. It has that opening-credits feel, like it could soundtrack a montage of me trying on different outfits in the mirror for my first day at high school, even though I’m way past that.” **“Still Running (5K)”** “Getting DJ Lethal \[Limp Bizkit, House of Pain\] to scratch on this track is probably the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. I slid into his DMs not expecting anything back. When he replied the next day, I literally threw my phone across the room because I was so excited. When you’re recording an album, you get so in your own head, so for one of my heroes to say that he loved the track and wanted to be on it, it was like nothing else mattered from that point. It’s probably the proudest I’ve ever been.” **“Step Mum”** “Maybe a week before I was due to record the album, I felt like I was missing a fast-paced, really punky, throw-everything-out-the-window kind of song. My favorite movie growing up was *A Cinderella Story*, so I had this idea of writing this angsty song about stepmums, how they’re villainized in movies as these really awful people. Growing up with my own stepmum and seeing my mum be one, I’ve realized it’s actually not like that at all, but it was a fun idea to write about.” **“Average Joe”** “‘Average Joe’ is based on a group of people, and not even people that I know personally—just an overall genre of male, taking all their worst and best habits and putting them into this one person. Even though it feels like I’m mocking him, laughing at the fact that he thinks a leg day at the gym is unmissable or that he loves taking pictures of his car, there’s a real sympathy in it, and an envy too. I feel like my mind is so complicated all the time—maybe if I was content with everyday, simple things like Average Joe, I would be happier.” **“Hot Boys” (feat. Viji)** “This started out as a joke. I never intended it to make the album. I’ve always been so worried about being credible, and then I remembered that my favorite band is Weezer, and I grew up loving Katy Perry. If I want to lean into the pop curve, I should let myself. The female character is calling the shots and moving from guy to guy—it was quite refreshing to celebrate that. It feels like a summer track where you’ve just been dumped, your friends have dragged you on a plane to Ibiza, and you say you don’t want to go but, low-key, you really do. It’s ‘I’m too cool to go on holiday to get over a man, but also, while I’m here, I may as well have a look…’” **“That Was a Joke”** “More roller coasters. When I was demoing this one, I was imagining myself at a circus theme park with a Coke bigger than my head—more sugar than I should ever consume. That’s kind of where I feel I fit musically. But I do love a happy-sad contrast. This is about being in denial over being left, being like, ‘I’m so fine, I’m so happy’ when, deep down, you’re being sick in your mouth. It’s inevitable that most people will feel like that at some point in our lives, but I do think it’s how you look back and laugh at yourself afterwards that counts.” **“Get Some”** “Halfway through the album, I stopped listening to all the things that I grew up on, the Weezer- and Courtney Barnett-style songs, and started listening to a lot of hip-hop. I was listening to a lot of A Tribe Called Quest and got really obsessed with the first Kanye album. I think it’s evident in songs like ‘Get Some’ that there were other influences creeping in because I just started talking really fast, almost like a rapper would. I ended up writing a really wordy album.” **“Garageband Superstar” (feat. Wheatus)** “When I first started out, I’d sit and play on GarageBand for hours, not really knowing what I was doing but being like, ‘Wow, Mum, check this out!’ It’s about that weird delusional feeling you have when you’re a kid and you’ve learnt something new for the first time and you’re showing everyone and they don’t really care, but you feel amazing. I had the name ‘Garageband Superstar’ in my head for ages. I loved the way it sounded, like a tour from the ‘Teenage Dirtbag,’ ‘Stacy’s Mom’ era—all these loser kids getting their redemption. I’ve always loved songs like that.” **“Hole in the Head”** “I nearly had a breakdown recording this. It’s the furthest I’ve had to push my voice, but when I finally got it, it felt great to be able to scream and shout like that. It’s about being in a relationship with someone who’s in a relationship with their Xbox. I was trying to go on tour and make myself a successful musician, and he was at home playing Zelda on Nintendo Switch. And I was jealous! He was so relaxed and content. After realizing how stupid the whole thing was, I bought a PS4 and tried it for myself, but I just can’t concentrate long enough to get past hard levels. That said, I do love Animal Crossing. I think my house on there might be better than my real-life one.” **“I’m Insecure”** “Comparing yourself to people, being on Instagram and seeing other people that you feel are doing better than you—I think I’ll always have those moments where I go in on myself and worry how I’m doing. But writing about it normalizes it to everyone, and I feel so lucky to be a musician now because we truly talk about that stuff. If people can listen in and feel even a little bit better, that’s great.” **“Slimming Down”** “I always wanted a bit of a spotlight moment towards the end of the record where I go back to basics a little bit. The song is just about falling in love for the first time, being so attached to someone that you’re almost eaten up by them, and then, when they’re gone, you feel like they’ve taken a good chunk of you. But then, there’s always that dark, rubbish humor in there as well, like, ‘I’m heartbroken, but at least I’ve lost a bit of weight because of it.’ It was all recorded live in one take, so it was nice to just capture the moment.” **“Last Song Ever”** “I feel like I spend the whole album talking about all these deep things but ultimately brushing them off with bizarre jokes. ‘Last Song Ever’ is where I cut all the shit and admit I’m about to lose it. It’s just about feeling sick of the way you feel. Sometimes you’ve just got to tell the people who don’t add anything to your life to fuck off, have the rant on Facebook, have those moments where you just scream into your pillow, and throw a party just for yourself.”

While Luke Combs burst onto the scene as a fully fledged artist, fans have still had the privilege of watching him transcend his status as a regional cult favorite in North Carolina to become one of country music’s biggest superstars, all in the matter of a few years. It’s appropriate, then, that Combs would title his third studio album *Growin’ Up*, as the LP is a portrait of an artist reaching new heights in his career. “It\'s time to get it together at this point,” Combs tells Apple Music. “It\'s like you\'re growing up into this. You\'re going from one thing to the next. I think, sonically, this album is a lot of that for me.” The album is peppered with hits, like the long-running country No. 1 “Doin’ This” and the contemplative “Tomorrow Me.” There are also tracks that dig a little deeper into Combs’ personal life, like standout “Middle of Somewhere,” a loving tribute to the small town outside of Nashville where Combs lives with his family. Below, Combs shares insight into several key tracks on *Growin’ Up*. **“The Kind of Love We Make”** “My guitar tech, Jamie Davis, he\'s a super talented singer and super great guitar player. That was a song that Jamie had started with Dan and Reid Isbell and I guess they really loved the melody. Dan and Reid came out to Montana. I was out there. I had rented a house out there for a couple weeks to write, and they brought that thing in there and I was like, ‘Man, I love this.’ We finished that thing and it was awesome. I love that song. It\'s just different, melody-wise, than anything I have.” **“Outrunnin’ Your Memory” (feat. Miranda Lambert)** “Miranda and I had never met more than really in passing at that time. And so I said, ‘You know, eventually, we got to get down to like what are we going to write?’ And there was no plan of, like, ‘Let\'s write a duet.’ There was no that. It was almost like we were both just staff writers and going, ‘Let\'s write a good song that somebody will like.’ That was the idea. It was never like, ‘Let\'s write a song for me or let\'s write a song for you.’ It was none of that. It was just like, ‘Let\'s write the best song in the room and that\'ll be a win.’” **“Middle of Somewhere”** “Where that song came from was this feeling of being connected to this little town that we live in and the people that live there and how great they\'ve been to me and my wife and the respect that they have for our privacy. They have become protective even, in a way, of us a little bit. They want to help us out and they don\'t ask for anything in return. Nobody\'s like, ‘Dude, let\'s be buddies, and give me tickets.’ They think it\'s awesome that we are there, and I feel super grateful to be there and to feel like a part of that community, to feel like people are proud that we live there, because they are so proud of that place that they feel like, ‘This guy would move here, of all places? He could move anywhere.’”

In 2014, the premiere recording of Max Richter’s *Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons* was released by Deutsche Grammophon. Featuring stellar performances by violinist Daniel Hope and the Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin, the work boldly set out to reimagine one of classical music’s best-loved and treasured masterpieces: Vivaldi’s *The Four Seasons*, a set of four violin concertos first published in 1725. The album was a master class of conservation and revolution—and rightly took the classical music world by storm. Eight years later, Richter made the bold decision to re-record his version of *The Four Seasons* (released once again on DG), using period instruments strung with gut strings, and performed by soloist Elena Urioste and Chineke! Orchestra. “It was a bit of a no-brainer,” Richter tells Apple Music. “There’s an agility and a lightness to period instruments, and they can make fast, dynamic shifts and execute more detailed articulation. Yes, the sound is smaller, but in a way it’s a more human sound. It’s more chamber music-like, more intimate.” The digital sounds that Richter weaves into the original 2014 recording to give basslines more weight have been replaced here with the dirtier, grainier heft of early synths, including one of the very first: the iconic and rare Minimoog from the 1970s. (“I organized an internet search party, and we tracked one down,” Richter says of getting his hands on one.) The question still remains, however: why reinvent Vivaldi? “Like many of us, *The Four Seasons* was probably the first piece of classical music I got to know as a young child,” says Richter. “I fell in love with its wonderful melodies, the drama, the story, the ideas, everything about it. But as an adult, I grew irritated by the music because I kept hearing it in jingles and adverts. For me, *Recomposed* was an attempt to recapture that affection and sense of wonder I had about the original.” Read on as Richter walks us through each concerto on *The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed*. **Spring** “The whole piece begins with a kind of overture—‘Spring 0’ is a scene-setting moment after which ‘Spring 1’ starts with Vivaldi’s birdsong material. But we’re living in the 21st century, and we’ve heard a lot of different kinds of birdsong music, whether at the start of Stravinsky’s *The Rite of Spring* or Messiaen’s piano music. Instead of there being just two or three birds as in the Vivaldi, there’s this big cloud of eight birds. Underneath it, you get this slow, sustained music, which appears to have nothing to do with Vivaldi. But it does in a way: it’s a period thing to do compositionally. The slow movement is built around a four-bar Vivaldi phrase, which I’ve reharmonized and reconfigured and recontextualized. And then you have the fast last movement, which is built out of just seven Vivaldi notes. That’s something which happens in the original, but I just thought, ‘Well, that’s a great little nugget.’ And so, I wrote new material underneath it, ignoring the rest of the movement.” **Summer** “The two outer movements of ‘Summer’ are very much pattern music, out of which I’ve made the most dance-music bits of *Recomposed*. They take Vivaldi’s principle of making music out of patterns and they turn up all the parameters. Instead of the first movement being a fast sequence of semiquavers, then a pause, and then another fast sequence of semiquavers, as in the Vivaldi, I made a perpetual motion machine out of it. I turned up the propulsive aspect of the original Vivaldi. In the slow movement of ‘Summer,’ I’ve taken a couple of fragments of the Vivaldi and made a larger structure by just isolating them and repeating and recontextualizing them. The final movement, like the first, has that driving dance energy to it.” **Autumn** “With ‘Autumn,’ I put lots of trapped doors into Vivaldi’s material. You have this very four-square, pulsed material in the ensemble, and I subverted it. Instead of it being in four beats to a bar, it’s in seven and five and three. It’s familiar but unfamiliar, and it’s quite a playful little game that plays with our memory. It makes you wonder what just happened a lot of the time, which I really enjoy. It’s fun—and it’s fun to play. I haven’t done anything with the slow movement other than to realize the continuo part. I wanted it to just be steady quavers: It’s a sort of backwards reference to the Beatles song ‘Because’ on *Abbey Road* with its clavinet accompaniment of straight quavers. The pulsating textures of the final movement of ‘Autumn’ are built up from one bar of the violin in the original Vivaldi score.” **Winter** “The first movement of ‘Winter’ is quite faithful to the original, except that I’ve put it into seven beats in a bar, which gives it an off-kilter compulsiveness, which I really enjoy. It’s got some very fast playing on the solo violin—a kind of Jimi Hendrix moment. It’s great fun. In the slow movement, I’ve used Vivaldi’s melody and replaced the accompaniment with an icy harmonic resonance, which came out beautifully on the gut strings. I wasn’t expecting it to work as well as it did. The last movement of ‘Winter’ is built around two bars of violin semiquavers. Otherwise, there’s no other Vivaldi in it, just a lot of pulsating falling lines. The violin goes up all the time, and the orchestra goes down, so you get this sense of everything expanding and getting bigger.”

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

Plastic Mermaids announce their second full-length album ‘It’s Not Comfortable to Grow’, due for release by Sunday Best on the 30th September. The remarkable album is a profound and emotional exploration of the many facets of heartbreak, seen through the eyes of frontman and lyricist Douglas Richards. The sun-bleached, sauntering ‘Disposable Love’ is the first official single to be revealed from the album and one of the moments that finds Douglas exploring moments of passing relief, as he explains “it’s about wanting to get back to a younger place, a freer place; a feeling of not having much worth, but being nostalgic for that.” Tracks were written from the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 and recorded in the band’s self-built studio at Douglas and Jamie’s father’s house in Gurnard (Doug, Chris and Jamie live nearby in Cowes, bassist Tom is in Newport and drummer Chris in freshwater).

Silky-smooth vocals and alt-R&B jams ignite an assured debut LP.

From their masterfully titled, anthemic “Shit Opus,” to their growling, distorted guitar, Shutups could be effectively described as a group of anti-establishment California indie punks with a vested interest in encouraging capitalism’s implosion. Leaving it there would also be a disservice to the deliberation, complexity, and artistry in their music. The groups’ new album holds true to the distinctive niches they carved out to begin with, from bedroom pandemic production to post-isolation DIY maximalism. I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit presents a very human expression of reality in spite of what is, overwhelmingly, a bad time––serving us a sort of seething, technicolor alternative sound that’s both intimate, furious, and inarguably cool.

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

Twenty years into their time together as a band—and approaching the 10-year milestone of being a hugely successful one—The 1975 felt in better shape than ever. Self-reflection, sobriety, even fatherhood have influenced the way the four-piece, assisted by producer Jack Antonoff, approached the creation of their fifth studio album, resulting in 11 songs that distill the essence of The 1975 without ever feeling like they’re treading old ground. “The working title, up until I chickened out, was *At Their Very Best*,” singer/guitarist Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “But I knew we were coming out in sunglasses and suits, and it could look like a bit of a joke. I’m not joking.” It wouldn’t have been an unfair assumption. Healy has carved out a reputation for building to a punchline—in his lyrics, in conversation, on social media. But he has (mostly) put that defensive reflex aside for this album, dialing back the sardonic interrogations of society that dominated previous records in favor of more soul-baring tracks. “My work has been defined by postmodernism, nihilism, individualism, addiction, need, all that kind of stuff,” says Healy. “As you get a bit older, life starts presenting you with different ideas, such as responsibility? Family? Growing up in general? But they’re less sexy, less transgressive ideas. It would be easy to do another record where I’m being clever and funny. What’s hard to do is just be real and super open.” *Being Funny in a Foreign Language* is indisputable evidence that those 20 years together and the experience gained has paid off. “This is the first time that we’ve been really good artists *and* really good producers *and* grown men at the same time,” Healy says. “It was the right time for this album to not just reaffirm, but almost celebrate who we are. It was a self-analysis and then a reinvention.” Here, he guides us through that reinvention, track by track. **“The 1975”** “On the first three albums, ‘The 1975’ was a rework of the same piece of music. It came from video games, like how you would turn on a Sega Mega Drive, and it had a check-in, load-up sound. The purpose it serves on this album, apart from being this conceptual thing that we’ve done, is to be like the status update. On our previous albums, the whole record has been about the cultural environment, but here I’m setting that scene up right at the beginning, and then the rest of the album is about me living in this environment and talking about how it makes these bigger ideas of love and home and growing up and things like that really difficult.” **“Happiness”** “‘Happiness’ is where we acknowledged that there was a certain lyrical and sonic identity to what The 1975 was. We felt like it wouldn’t be a ’75 record if we didn’t have a song that owned what we did best. The thing is, we weren’t actually very ’80s; we just used loads of sounds that grunge and Britpop made unfashionable because they were associated with Phil Collins or whoever, but we were like, ‘No, that sounds better than *that*.’ It’s a live record, so there’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of repetition, because we were in the room, jamming.” **“Looking for Somebody (To Love)”** “If I’m going to talk about guns, it’s probably good for me to talk about the thing that I probably understand or empathize with the most, which is that the only vocabulary or lexicon that we provide for young boys to assert their dominance in any position is one of such violence and destruction. There’s a line that says, ‘You’ve got to show me how to push/If you don’t want a shove,’ which is me saying we have to try and figure this crisis out because there are so many young men that don’t really have guidance, and a toxic masculinity is inevitable if we don’t address the way we communicate with them.” **“Part of the Band”** “I really just trusted my instinct. As a narrative, I don’t know what the song is about. It was just this belief that I could talk, and that was OK, and it made sense, and I didn’t have to qualify it that much. I have a friend who is much more articulate than me, and there’s been so many times that he’s explained my lyrics back to me better than I ever could. So, I’ve learned I can sit there and spend five hours articulating what I mean, but I don’t think I need to. A movie doesn’t start by explaining what’s going to happen; it opens on a conversation, and you get what’s going on straight away. So, there’s a level of abstraction in this song where I’m giving the audience the benefit of the doubt.” **“Oh Caroline”** “The chorus of this song came first—‘Oh Caroline/I wanna get it right this time/’Cos you’re always on my mind’—and it just felt really, really universal. I was like, ‘OK, this doesn’t have to be about me. It doesn’t have to be “I was in Manchester in my skinny jeans.”’ You don’t need to have lived a story to write one. Caroline is whoever you want it to be—you can change that name in your head. Sometimes we call songs like this ‘“song” songs’ because they can be covered by other people and still make sense. Well, ‘“getting cucked,” I don’t need it’ would be a weird line for someone, but it’s close enough.” **“I’m in Love With You”** “I was trying to make it like a traditional 1975 song. I wanted to debase the sincerity. But \[guitarist, Adam\] Hann and George \[Daniel, drummer\] really challenged me on it, so I was like, ‘OK, fuck it. I’ll just write a song about being in love.’ At the time, I was in a relationship with a Black girl who was so beautiful, and I was in love with, and there were all these things that came up—especially with the political climate over the last two years—that you can only really learn from experience and living together. Like, our bathroom was full of specific products for skincare and stuff like that. Things you can’t just get at \[UK high-street drugstore\] Boots. So, there’s the line that goes ‘You show me your Black girl thing/Pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening),’ which came from this moment when she was talking about something that I had no cultural understanding of, and all I was thinking was, ‘I’m in love with you.’ And maybe I should have been focusing on what it was, but in that moment, I didn’t care about anything cultural or political. I just loved her.” **“All I Need to Hear”** “Thinking objectively as a songwriter, ‘All I Need to Hear’ is maybe one of my best songs. I was in a big Paul Simon phase, and I was kind of trying to do something similar to what he did on ‘Still Crazy \[After All These Years\].’ He can be as verbose as me, but that song was really, really tight. Almost lullaby-esque. I wanted to write something that was earnest and sincere and didn’t require me, specifically, to deliver it. I almost hope it will be covered by someone else, and that will become the definitive version.” **“Wintering”** “This is very much a vignette, a little story in the middle that paints a picture but doesn’t really tell you much of where I’m at. It’s kind of about my family, and it’s kind of a Christmas song, but it’s also that thing of relatable specificity because everyone knows that feeling of getting home for Christmas and the wanting to, but the not wanting to, but the needing to, and having to do all the driving and that whole thing. Other parts of the record have a bit more purpose, even though they’re slightly more abstract, but ‘Wintering’ is just this moment of brevity, and I think it’s really nice.” **“Human Too”** “There’s lines on the record where I talk about being canceled and acknowledge that it was something that I was dealing with. There’s no insane smear campaign. No one is going to the trouble of ruining my life for a hobby like they do with Meghan Markle. But it does sting when it happens, and this is the first time I’m saying, ‘It does affect me *a bit*. I totally get it, I’m a messy person...but I’m a good person. Give me a break *a bit*.’ I was worried about this song because I didn’t want to sound self-pitying, but it works because it’s really just about empathy and giving each other the benefit of the doubt as humans. We’re all people—let’s not pretend that we’re not going to make mistakes.” **“About You”** “Warren Ellis from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came in to do the arrangement for this song. It was really simple—it sounded like ‘With or Without You’ essentially—and he made it all weird and shoegazey. Even though it’s major key, he gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent. I think this has a similar vibe to ‘Inside Your Mind’ from the third album. I’ve always loved those kinds of \[David\] Cronenberg, body-horror analogies, the tension between death and sex. I think that the morose can be quite sensual, and there’s quite a bit of that in my work.” **“When We Are Together”** “The album was finished with. ‘About You’ was Track 11 and there was a Track 10 called ‘This Feeling.’ But because of what the song was about, and also sonic reasons, I was like, ‘That song can’t be on the album.’ But we had to deliver it in four days. So, I said if I could get to New York tomorrow, and Jack \[Antonoff\] was around, with a drum kit and a bass, I had a half-finished acoustic song that would be better for the record. It needed to finish, and at that moment, it didn’t—there was no emotional resolve. So, I went out there, a bit heartbroken post-breakup, and this was written, recorded, and mixed in 30 hours, which is the perfect example of what making this album was like. There’s always been this ‘will they/won’t they?’ question with The 1975. Are they going to split up? Will Matty go mental? That sort of thing. Totally created by me. But I’ve stopped doing that, and I think of it more as installments of your favorite thing. Or like seasons from a TV show. ‘When We Are Together’ is the end of this season.”

The 1975 return with new album, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’, released on 14th October via Dirty Hit. The band’s fifth studio album was written by Matthew Healy & George Daniel and recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, United Kingdom and Electric Lady Studios in New York. Formed in Manchester in 2002, The 1975 have established themselves as one of the defining bands of their generation with their distinctive aesthetic, ardent fanbase and unique sonic approach. The band’s previous album, 2020’s ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’, became their fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK. The band were named NME’s ‘Band of the Decade’ in 2020 after being crowned ‘Best Group’ at the BRIT Awards in both 2017 & 2019. Their third studio album, ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’, also won ‘Mastercard British Album of the Year’ at the 2019 ceremony.

There are many reasons why you might be left *reeling*, not all of them positive. It’s the perfect word to describe the people and events that knock us off our axis. As the tracks on The Mysterines’ debut album help to reveal, singer/guitarist Lia Metcalfe knows them well. A fan of The Doors with a passion for poetry like her hero Jim Morrison, she started writing songs at the age of nine. Her teenage years provided more meaningful material to write about, much of which formed a basis for songs on *Reeling*. Completed by guitarist Callum Thompson, bassist George Favager, and drummer Paul Crilly, Liverpool’s The Mysterines specialize in an emotive brand of garage rock that takes inspiration from a variety of sources. Musically, the debut albums by The Strokes and Arcade Fire were the blueprint for youthful swagger and experimentalism, respectively; the films of directors Alejandro Jodorowsky and Terrence Malick provided canvases on which the quartet could imagine new soundtracks. *Reeling* was produced by Catherine Marks, who, having worked with PJ Harvey and Wolf Alice, is adept at pairing dynamic instrumentals and a voice imbued with a soulful sense of lived experience. “It got pretty intense at times,” Metcalfe tells Apple Music. “It’s such a chunk of my life and represents many big moments.” Here, she and Crilly take us through the album, track by track. **“Life’s a Bitch (But I Like It So Much)”** Lia Metcalfe: “It’s a pretty energetic song and a good introduction to the record because we’re all together in this one moment that’s over before you know it. It’s similar to previous stuff that we’ve done, so we guess that people’s ears are already attuned to this sound of ours. Almost everything else on the record took about 15 to 20 takes, but on this, we did three or four, and Catherine Marks said we had done enough. We knew that we wanted it to be a single but couldn’t due to the frequent uses of the word ‘bitch.’” **“Hung Up”** LM: “I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily about revenge, but it’s a song that was written to stop me from *being* vengeful, I guess. Lyrically, it’s one of my favorite songs on the record and it’s pretty intimate. While some of the record is made up of stories rather than things that have happened in real life, this one is quite personal and, listening to the lyrics, it’s fairly self-explanatory what it’s about.” **“Reeling”** LM: “It’s probably the best summary, lyrically, of what I experienced when we made the album. I did this strange demo that sounds super different to how the song turned out. I watched a film called *Santa Sangre* \[Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989\], which has this sort of circus theme running through it. So, when I did the demo, I wanted it to sound like it had come from a circus. It was pretty weird, and when I played it to everyone else, they didn’t really understand how we’d frame it in a Mysterines sense.” Paul Crilly: “It was one of the first songs we recorded for the album, so set the tone for where we wanted to go with everything. Having not met Catherine before, it was a good way for us to sum up what we wanted to do, and she got on board with it fairly quickly.” **“Old Friends / Die Hard”** LM: “It’s about a friendship between two people that goes a bit wrong and ends in murder. We wanted the song to have a humorous aspect, rather than it be taken seriously and everyone think we’re mass murderers. Being from the north, you’re born with a natural sarcasm. Humor is, therefore, a big part of the band and our lives, so it’s really fun to write something like this, especially when people take it literally. It’s a moment of chaotic madness on the record—in a good way.” PC: “The initial demo was just Lia and a guitar. Then it slowly evolved because we wanted it to be funny, and so there were no limits. We threw all this crazy stuff on it, such as the whistling in the introduction.” **“Dangerous”** LM: “It’s one of the songs that has a lot of emotion attached to it, especially for me. I’ve always seen it as the gateway song. When I played it to the lads, we were all pretty sure it was going to be a single. It came together so naturally, with everyone knowing exactly what to do for the song, so when we came together to play it, it was already in place.” PC: “For me, it was probably the hardest to record because we were trying to recreate that moment, that spark, from when we first demoed it and it wasn’t quite working. Eventually, we got there though.” **“On the Run”** LM: “I watched the film *Badlands* \[Terrence Malick, 1973\] and really admired the intensity of the story, even though it feels like nothing really moves or happens. It definitely inspired the lyrics to ‘On the Run’ because that’s what Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek’s characters are doing. When we demoed ‘On the Run,’ I made this trailer for *Badlands* and kept putting the song over it until I thought the song was right and fitted with the visuals.” **“Under Your Skin”** LM: “I wrote the riff for this when I was 17 and the words came to me almost immediately. Around that time, I wasn’t writing anything else like that, so it was a bit of a fluke and a prediction of what was to come. I had the song for years and didn’t really know what to do with it. I needed to figure it out in order to present it to the band. A big reference was a song by The Doors called ‘My Wild Love.’ Once I had that, it made sense to put this song on the record, but the original version I played them is so different from how it has turned out.” **“The Bad Thing”** LM: “It’s essentially about digging someone you used to love up from a grave. It’s pretty fun to play and the poem is fun to sing, though I hope no one takes it seriously, as I’m not digging any bodies up…yet. The recording of this seemed to go on for ages. It was difficult because we wanted to ensure the intensity came through and there were no overdubs, so we had to make sure it was perfect.” PC: “I had to listen to some motivational speeches to get me to go back in and do more takes. The first couple were purely running on energy, but then when you get past a certain point, you start to overthink things and become more self-critical. And after all that, I think we ended up going with one of the first takes.” **“In My Head”** LM: “This was pretty simple. It was one of the last tracks we took to the studio. I showed it to the lads about two weeks before we went, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be the first single. There are some interesting touches to it, such as getting to scream down the mic and the feedback that runs all the way through it, which I created by running a drumstick up and down guitar strings for a whole song.” **“Means to Bleed”** LM: “It came out of nowhere. It’s largely based around the riff, but lyrically, it has reflections of other tracks \[on the album\]. We definitely referenced a \[Josh Homme project\] Desert Sessions tune when we were developing it. Callum came up with the riff and I already had these words, in the form of a poem, which had the same flow and were right for it. Many of the songs came from poems I’d written before and found again later on.” **“All These Things”** PC: “It took a while to warm to it because, musically, it strays away from the overall sound of the album quite a bit. It’s a bit happier as a track. It’s not that I’m miserable, but I felt that it interrupted the flow of a fairly serious album with this Wembley Stadium moment. After some time away from it, I realized it works. I’ve grown accustomed to it and it’s a great song.” **“Still Call You Home”** LM: “I wrote it when I was 17, and it was definitely necessary for me to write it at the time. For a while, when we played it live, I had to detach myself from what it actually meant, as it became difficult for me to put myself there. If I’m honest, I didn’t know if it was going to be on the record. It ended up feeling right though. The moment of recording it was weird, knowing that the band weren’t going to be on the song with me. It was me with one mic and a guitar. It was me and Catherine in the room, which made for an emotionally intimate moment together and drove me to do the song in a certain way. I also didn’t want to record it during the day—it had to be at night—because I was reliving the emotion of what it’s about. It was pretty hard, but that’s why people write music and listen to it, so it was necessary too.” **“Confession Song”** LM: “I think it was only me and Paul who agreed we wanted this on the record, and it always felt to us like the track to finish with. Everyone else didn’t really get it. It’s a summary of everything, sort of like the credits for the album. Me and Paul had some fun doing the demo, getting drunk on red wine, and listening to loads of Tom Waits beforehand, before throwing sticks at the wall and recording the results. We also put some reversed drums on it too.”

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.

Before becoming a progenitor in the microgenre chillwave—defined by a 2000s indie rock culture obsessed with 1980s electro-synth sounds and nostalgic, dreamy bedroom pop—Toro y Moi (Chazwick Bradley “Chaz Bear” Bundick) was known for his experimental production, leading to a long run of widely lauded albums. *MAHAL* is his seventh, its title taken from the Tagalog word for “expensive.” It\'s also a good time in 13 songs, from the Parliament funk of “Postman” and the psychedelic percussion of “Clarity” to the garage-psych of “The Medium” featuring New Zealand band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and the smoky “Mississippi.” If chillwave was a flash-in-the-pan moment, Toro Y Moi has long since survived it.

The 13-track project marks the seventh studio album from Bear under the Toro y Moi moniker. To celebrate the announcement, Toro y Moi shares two singles from the forthcoming record "Postman" b/w "Magazine." Each of the new singles arrives with accompanying visuals. "Postman," directed by Kid. Studio, sees Toro and friends riding around the colorful San Francisco landscape in his Filipino jeepney, seen on the cover of MAHAL. "Magazine," directed by Arlington Lowell, sees Toro and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who supplies vocals on the track, dressed vibrantly in a photo studio spliced with various colorful graphics and playful edits. MAHAL's announcement and singles arrive on the heels of Toro's highly celebrated 2019 album Outer Peace, which Pitchfork described as "one of his best albums in years" along with his Grammy-nominated 2020 collaboration with Flume, "The Difference," which was also featured in a global campaign for Apple's Airpods. Today's releases mark the first from Toro y Moi since signing to Secretly Group label Dead Oceans. Dead Oceans is an independent record label established in 2007 featuring luminaries like Japanese Breakfast, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, Mitski, Slowdive and more. Toro y Moi is the 12+ year project of South Carolina-reared, Bay Area-based Chaz Bear. In the wake 2008’s global economic collapse, Toro y Moi emerged as a figurehead of the beloved sub-genre widely known as chillwave, the sparkling fumes of which still heavily influence musicians all over today. Over the subsequent decade, his music and graphic design has far, far surpassed that particular designation. Across 9 albums (6 studio as Toro y Moi along with a live album, compilation and mixtape) with the great Carpark label, he has explored psych-rock, deep house, UK hip-hop; R&B and well-beyond without losing that rather iconic, bright and shimmering Toro y Moi fingerprint. As a graphic designer, Bear has collaborated with brands like Nike, Dublab and Van’s. And as a songwriter and producer, he’s collaborated with other artists like Tyler, The Creator, Flume, Travis Scott, HAIM, and Caroline Polachek.

A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”