Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2020 (So Far)

Welcome to the new era of 5 Seconds of Summer, bigger than the last. The Australian band has had two lives: First came the boy-band-adjacent pop-punk of their adolescence spent opening up for One Direction at stadiums worldwide (2014’s self-titled debut LP and 2015’s *Sounds Good Feels Good*). Then they disappeared for two years, became adults, and reemerged as one of the biggest bands on the planet—that’s 2018’s *Youngblood* and their expansive fourth full-length release, *CALM*, named after its members Calum Hood, Ashton Irwin, Luke Hemmings, and Michael Clifford. Gone are the days of their sprightly palm-muted power chords—this is 5SOS 2.0, a quartet of virtuosic musicians enthusiastically traversing pop and classic rock, drawing influence from ’70s reveries (“Red Desert”), New Order-esque ’80s synthpop (“Teeth”), and mainstream industrial rock (“Easier”). “It’s a coming-of-age album,” singer Luke Hemmings tells Apple Music. “We found our stride and just ran with it.” Growing up sounds cohesive and chaotic, like incisive cultural commentary (“No Shame”), sanguine production (“Best Years”), and hooky vocal vibrato (“Not in the Same Way”). Here, Hemmings breaks down each track on *CALM*, and how its creation was anything but. “Everyone makes mistakes in their twenties, and this \[record\] captures that in a pretty honest way,” he says. “For better or worse.” **Red Desert** “We did this cover of ‘Killer Queen’ by Queen before we wrote this song. We\'d sing a harmony all together and do it eight times, then the next harmony all together in the booth eight times, building these huge gang vocals like they would. I think that opened our eyes to what we could do vocally as a group. We wanted to show that we all sing, but we can do it in a way that\'s different from when we were younger—more of an Eagles, Crosby Stills Nash way, those big rock harmonies.” **No Shame** “I think we made it clear that although it is kind of a snapshot of how we see society and how a lot of people can see it, that we\'re all a part of it and we\'re not pointing a finger at people. Everything is online.” **Old Me** “That song, lyrically, it’s about owning mistakes and moving forward with your life and understanding that you\'re not the person that you were when you were younger, but also you have to do these things and make mistakes to move forward and grow as a person.” **Easier** “We \[wrote\] with Andrew Watt, Ali Tamposi, Ryan Tedder, and Charlie Puth. This song was one of the earlier ones, \[written\] before we started the album. We were figuring out what we wanted to do. We were very into the New Wave stuff, that Nine Inch Nails stuff. This was the first stepping stone.” **Teeth** “I love that song. It has that driving kick and that bass; we tried to make a song without having a snare. It has a few in it, but it\'s mainly kick and it\'s my breath doing all of the other beats. Tom Morello plays the guitar solo at the end. He’s almost imitating a snare with his guitar.” **Wildflower** “This is the lighter side of the album. It’s a step forward for us in that it\'s not so dark—we can do this big stadium vocal but also have it be a big, positive, euphoric anthem and not be lame.” **Best Years** “The first demo was just one guitar and my vocal. Me and Ryan \[Tedder\] wrote a bulk with the vocals on our own, and then we had The Edge from U2 play the guitar on the bridge. That was awesome. The song is a beautiful love note—something I felt I needed to get off my chest. That’s the best way songwriting can be: cathartic.” **Not in the Same Way** “This song came together in 30 minutes, except for the bridge. It was one of the most exciting in the room to write; it was almost like we couldn’t keep up with how quickly it was going. It’s a chaotic love story of the early days in a relationship and trying to figure out your counterpart.” **Lover of Mine** “I was trying to go for a Jeff Buckley vibe on this. I actually wrote this with my girlfriend \[Sierra Deaton\] and then I took it into the studio. We finished it there with everyone else.” **Thin White Lies** “I love the groove in the chorus. We were going for a Cure thing on the guitar in the verses. My favorite lyric in it is ‘I don’t think I like me anymore.’ It’s so honest, when you get to a point that you feel like a stranger to yourself—I like how this song captures that moment.” **Lonely Heart** “The song\'s really beautiful. I like the dancing metaphor in some of the verses. It kind of sounds like Depeche Mode in the chorus, which I like. It’s all pretty New Wave.” **High** “Songwriting in itself is very selfish, and this song in particular, the lyric \[‘I hope you think of me high/I hope you think of me highly’\] is very clever and very self-involved. I love the honesty. That\'s why I wanted to close the album with it. I had these chords in my head; I really wanted a Beatles-esque song with quirky chords. I like how narcissistic it is, but in such a sweet and unassuming way.”

A gateway into the pop provocateur’s technicolour daydreams.

Following 2018’s post-incarceration project *Real Hasta la Muerte* and a string of huge new hits over the subsequent two years, there were high expectations for Anuel AA’s second album. Still, nobody could have expected that the familiar sounds of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”—transmuted into the Spanish-language rock ballad “No Llores Mujer” with blink-182’s Travis Barker on the drums—would lead off the long-awaited *Emmanuel*. Nonetheless, fans surely knew that the Latin trap superstar had the pop chops to pull off such a bold move towards the mainstream, especially after all but reinventing himself with the smash Shaggy interpolation “China.” Fittingly, those two songs bookend his sophomore set, a double album that announces Anuel as more than just an urbano maestro. Willfully broadening his sonic range, he sounds downright exuberant over the uptempo tropical dance groove of “El Manual” and amid the thumping island vibes of “Que Se Joda” with Farruko and Zion. He reaches across generations of Latin music on the hopeful “Fútbol y Rumba” with the legendary Enrique Iglesias and on the J Balvin-referencing “Bandido” with Miami-bred up-and-comer Mariah. Those who come to *Emmanuel* seeking something more in the trap vein will find plenty to appreciate in cuts like “Narcos” and “Somos o No Somos.” Anuel secures no less than Lil Wayne himself for the bilingual team-up “Ferrari,” a braggadocious track that recalls his previous single “YES” with Fat Joe and Cardi B. Yet it’s the chilling “Rifles Rusos” with pioneer Tego Calderón that most recalls the grimness of Anuel’s well-respected early material. Calderón also appears on the throbbing reggaetón jam “Jangueo,” and the embrace of that vital genre’s past and present is where the album truly draws its power. Both of the Bad Bunny collaborations here tap into that rejuvenated spirit, with “Así Soy Yo” giving off that throwback perreo sound and the shinier duet “Hasta Que Dios Diga” showcasing their contemporary star power.

“That was the trick: knowing who I was before I tried to tell anybody who I was, or before I let anybody else tell me who I was,” Ashley McBryde tells Apple Music. The magnetically natural singer and down-home storyteller with biker-bar swagger who snuck up on the country mainstream in the late 2010s honed her craft playing in bars. “I would not trade over a decade of playing in bars doing that, because the way I found out if a song was good or not was: Could I make somebody listen to it? And could I sneak it in between covers? I think that made the biggest difference, was just knowing that this is who I am and this is what I sound like when I went to make my first real record.” McBryde’s latest 11-song set, *Never Will*, the follow-up to 2018’s *Girl Going Nowhere*, makes few concessions to record label priorities or radio preferences. It does, however, range through riotous Southern gothic narration, classic honky-tonk transgression, blue-collar anthems of ambition, stoic mourning, and other cleverly altered, time-tested song forms. She, her trusty road band, and their producer Jay Joyce refracted those tunes through a process of studio experimentation that gave serrated contours to the grooves. Says McBryde, “If you\'ve got like a weird, quirky idea, and if your sentence starts with ‘This might sound stupid, but let\'s try,’ Jay will let you try it.” Here McBryde talks through each track on *Never Will*. **Hang In There Girl** “I saw this girl, she might\'ve been 14 or 15, she was standing at the mailbox. This mailbox has been used as a baseball many times. It has been crunched and uncrunched and crunched and uncrunched, and it was just barely sitting on the fence post. She was doing something that I had seen myself do: She was kicking rocks, and not in a mad-at-my-mom kind of way, but in like a ‘Why am I sitting here putting my toe in these rocks? And why is the grass so tall? And why are all the clothes I own, I\'m not the first person to own them?’ I\'m the youngest of six, and not only did I have to wear hand-me-downs, I had to wear my brother\'s hand-me-downs. When I got a bicycle, it wasn\'t because they were able to get me a bicycle. It\'s because one of my older cousins was done using theirs. There\'s nothing wrong with growing up that way. I\'m proud of the way I grew up. I just wanted to pull over and say, \'In only a couple of years, you\'re going to be old enough to get a job, you\'re going to have money, and you can get a car and you can leave this place. And I promise you, you will look fondly on this place once you leave.\'” **One Night Standards** “Nicolette \[Hayford\] and I, we wrote a song called ‘Airport Hotel.’ That hook was ending with, ‘I\'m still sitting here kicking myself for treating my heart like an airport hotel,’ because that\'s not a place you want to stay for very long. We thought we would just let it sit just as a verse and a chorus because something was wrong. Our next write together we had a third, and his name was Shane McAnally. We played him what we had, and he said, ‘I don\'t think there\'s anything wrong with this. Let\'s just keep playing through it and try maybe being a little more honest.’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a reason that hotel rooms only have one nightstand in them, because they\'re one-night-standers.’ And Shane said, ‘Did you say “standards”? Make that rhyme and put that at the end as the hook.’ Then the next verse just came out. It\'s sort of like a ‘Honey. It\'s okay. Don\'t freak out. I\'m going to lay the room key down right here, and if you pick it up and you meet me later, you do. And if you don\'t, it\'s no sweat off my back.’ I did get a little bit of flack when the single first came out, people saying, ‘It\'s not the most feminine thing you could\'ve said. It\'s not the most ladylike thing.’ I\'ve been called a lot of things, but a lady is not one of them.” **Shut Up Sheila** “It was a piano and guitar demo, and I loved it the second Nicolette sent it to me. I\'d never heard a country song about a dying grandmother. And anytime you get to say something like ‘shut up’ or drop an F-bomb, that\'s usually a cool thing to me, too. But there\'s somebody in everybody\'s family, whether they are holier-than-thou or not, that either on a holiday or in times of loss like this, you really just want to look at them and go, ‘Kind of wish you would just shut up.’ So just in case you\'re sitting there biting your tongue at Thanksgiving dinner, just go listen to the song. It made me think about loss, when it came to cut the record. When I lost my brother, I was so mad, and I remember being at the funeral and everyone being like, ‘Let\'s pray together for a minute.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I don\'t want to pray right now. I want to be angry. I want to get drunk and I want to get high and I want to get away from this for a little bit.’ Everybody\'s going to deal with loss in a different way, and it\'s never okay to push how you deal with it on somebody else, so let\'s give everybody a little bit of breathing room here.” **First Thing I Reach For** “I wrote that with Randall \[Clay\] and Mick \[Holland\] in the morning. Randall came outside and poured whiskey in our coffee, and we all lit a cigarette. And we wrote it as a sad song. I get to the studio and I\'m like, ‘In my world, which is fingerpicking, midtempo songs, what if we played this one like we were a bar band but the bar is inside a bowling alley?’ My lead guitar player, he\'s got a Telecaster with a B-bender in it, and his father is a steel guitar player. So it wasn\'t hard at all for him to come up with a really cool riff there.” **Voodoo Doll** “I knew that I wanted that to be like a slow headbang on the metal side of things, and I didn\'t know how we were going to accomplish it. The band loved the song—we just weren\'t sure how we were going to do this in a studio. And I said, ‘Well, let\'s play it together and make it as big and loud as we can be and then give something small the lead. Let\'s make it a mandolin thing. Let\'s put the most traditional instrument inside the most rock ’n’ roll song. And let\'s take those really traditional sounds and make them with the overdriven guitars.’” **Sparrow** “Nicolette and I had had this idea for a song about sparrows for a long time. When I first started getting tattoos down my arms, the first two were sketches of sparrows on the backs of my arms. She had asked me, ‘Why two sparrows? Why were those the first things you put on your arms?’ And I said, ‘Because it\'s a pretty widely known fact that sparrows fly all over the world, and they never forget where home is. They have the ability to beacon themselves back to the tree they came from, and that is a quality I would love to keep in myself.’ I knew if we brought this subject up with Brandy Clark, she would be able to really help us bring it to life.” **Martha Divine** “I think this was our first song together, me and Jeremy Spillman. We were in the basement of an old church. So, I was like, ‘We should write something dark. I haven\'t written a murder song in a long time. Let\'s murder something.’ We came up with the name Martha Divine, who was an urban legend from his home state of Kentucky. We didn\'t use the actual story that surrounded Martha Divine, I just really liked the name. And I thought, ‘Well, what if it was like a Jolene situation, only the person that we\'re going to write the perspective from is this slightly psychotic, Bible-beating, overly-protective-of-her-mother little girl? Maybe she\'s 15, maybe she\'s 21. She needs to go back and forth, in my mind, between reciting Bible verses like a good little girl and smiling at you because she\'s about to hit you in the face with a shovel and she\'s so proud. I\'ve joked a couple times that cheating songs normally come from the perspective of cheating or being cheated on. Luckily, I was able to write it for the perspective of the daughter, and who knows where I got that perspective from. I\'m sure that my father will really appreciate that song on the record.” **Velvet Red** “When we first started cutting it, I was like, ‘Guys, we\'re going to have to play it as a band and then have \[Chris\] Sancho play that bass part on it, because it\'s really screwing with my head.’ It\'s a big hollow-body bass that he was playing, and he comes from a Motown and a blues background. And next thing we know is we have that \[part\], and it\'s so cool. That way you still get the traditional feel for ‘Velvet Red,’ which is what is best to let that story come through, but then you\'re not beat in the face with just the bluegrass feel either.” **Stone** “Nicolette and I, we have a pretty general rule that normally we don\'t write anything down until one of us cries, either from laughing or because we\'ve hit a nerve, and once we hit the nerve, we jump on it. Our brothers died in very, very different ways. They\'re both Army veterans, but her brother David was hit by a vehicle, and mine killed himself. So, we go outside to smoke, just chitchatting back and forth, trying to stay close to the topic and then get far enough away from it that we give ourselves some oxygen. And she said something, and I cackled, and when I cackled I went, ‘Oh my god, I laugh like him.’ It drives me nuts, and I just started bawling. And she goes, ‘There it is. You\'re so angry because you\'re so hurt, and the reason you\'re so hurt is because you didn\'t pay attention to how alike you were until he was dead. That\'s okay. Let\'s write from there.’ So it\'s not hopeless. It\'s ‘I see little bits of you in me.’ I think it needed to be on the record because it moved me farther through that process than therapy ever could have. Maybe it can help somebody else through it too.” **Never Will** “Matt \[Helmkamp\], our lead guitar player, sent over this guitar riff that he had been playing. It kind of had this cool groove to it. Mumbling around, we came up with ‘I didn\'t, I don\'t, and I never will.’ That\'s when we kind of dove into, remember those people that were mean to you because you wanted to do music? And now you\'re doing things like getting Grammy nominations and all you can do is think, \'You were so confused about the reason that we were making music and the way we were doing it and how I was only playing in bars. How the hell else do you think you get to play in arenas if you don\'t play in bars? A career is not a participation trophy.” **Styrofoam** “I used to play this writers’ night at Blue Bar \[in Nashville\]. It was called the Freakshow. Randall Clay was on stage one night and he just takes off, ‘Well, in 1941,’ and I was like, ‘What is he talking about?’ But by the time he got to the chorus, I\'m cracking up because this song is so much fun to sing, and it\'s actually educational. Randall was just one of those writers that could do that. I grew up eating gas station and truck stop food and getting my drinks from it. I know it\'s environmentally irresponsible, but things just taste better in styrofoam, and it\'s just fun to sing \'styrofoam.\' Of course, he died \[in October 2018\]. We really wanted to pay tribute to him. And there were two other of his songs that are in our live show that I wanted to put on the record that didn\'t get to be there. And on the last day of cutting, Jay goes, ‘I wish we had one more song that was just super fun to listen to.’ So I sat down and sang ‘Styrofoam.’”

“I’m honored that people have accepted these songs, that my fans enjoy and that have such feeling in them,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about the success of “Ignorantes” and “Vete,” the two hit singles that preceded the surprise Leap Day release of *YHLQMDLG*. The album’s title is an acronym for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” or “I Do What I Want,” and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio spends his highly anticipated follow-up to 2018’s *X 100PRE* living up to that promise, luxuriating in the sonic possibilities, presenting exemplary versions of Latin trap and reggaetón while expanding the genres in new directions with elements of rock and global pop. While *X 100PRE* featured a relatively small number of credited vocal guests, the follow-up embraces música urbana’s love of collaboration, pairing El Conejo Malo with an impressive array of features. Reaching back towards reggaetón’s 1990s roots, he taps veteran Yaviah for the hypnotic “Bichiyal” and the inimitable Daddy Yankee for “La Santa,” while linking up elsewhere with contemporary Latin R&B wave runners like Mora and Sech. Bad Bunny talked with Apple Music about a few of his favorites off the album and some of the people who helped make *YHLQMDLG* a reality. **Si Veo a Tu Mamá** “All of my songs come from my experience or are based on a real-life experience of mine. Everyone falls in love in life. Everyone has relationships. Everyone has had someone. There’s something so natural in writing about love, because we all feel love every day and share love.” **La Difícil** “What I like most about collaborating with \[producer duo\] Subelo NEO is how talented they are. They are such humble people who know how to work as a team. They understand the good vibes that I’ve built my fame on, because we shared them at the beginning of my career. I like what they do.” **La Santa** “This was a very special track for me. Working with Daddy Yankee is always an honor and a pleasure. I’ve learned a lot from him in the studio. This one inspired me so much. Always, always, always when I do something with Daddy Yankee, it’s just so exciting, fabulous, and makes me feel very happy and proud.” **Safaera** “This was something that I have always wanted to do. It is a very much a part of Puerto Rican culture and the roots of reggaetón. It was special because I made it with one of my best friends in my entire life, someone I started out with in music and who supported me a lot from the beginning and to this day, DJ Orma. He fell in love with this music just like me, with this type of rhythm—reggaetón, perreo old-school.” **Hablamos Mañana** “I love this one. It’s the most energetic of the album and the most different. In general, there’s a lot of strength and feeling in rock music. I’ll make whatever music that God allows me to. At some point, if I felt like making a rock en español album, I would. If I wanted to make a bachata album, I would.”

The timeless qualities of traditional tunes can carry us across oceans and eons, linking us not only to the past but to each other as well. It was under the banner of those eternal connections that the trio of Bonny Light Horseman came together. From Wisconsin festival fields and a German art hub to a snowy upstate studio and everywhere in between, the astral folk outfit—comprised of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman—is mixing the ancient, mystical medium of transatlantic traditional folk music with a contemporary, collective brush. The resulting album, Bonny Light Horseman, is an elusive kind of sonic event: a bottled blend of lightning and synergy that will excite fans of multiple genres, eras, and ages. Mitchell, the esteemed singer-songwriter whose Broadway smash Hadestown recently won “Best Musical” plus seven other trophies at the 2019 Tony Awards, met the indie rock stalwart Johnson a few years back through that thoroughly modern platform, Twitter. Best known for the Fruit Bats project he has helmed for two decades as well as for stints in The Shins and Califone, Johnson had been friends with producer and instrumentalist Kaufman (Craig Finn, Josh Ritter, The National, Bob Weir) for 10 years. Kaufman and Mitchell were already acquainted; together, the three made an unmistakable artistic connection, and had just begun experimenting when an invitation to perform at the 2018 Eaux Claires festival came from the fest’s co-founders, Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner. Encouraged by the natural ease and intuitive bond they felt while sketching musical ideas in early sessions, the Eaux Claires play provided a target of sorts and they seized upon the opportunity to form the band in an official capacity. “The conversation about starting the group and figuring out the type of music we’d play happened very quickly,” Kaufman says. “It’s like a love story: a really big fire, and the shared ideas of what we wanted the music to feel like. We wanted an openness and for it to feel emotional and personal.” Each musician brought their own musical ideas to the rehearsals and the direction toward traditional songs from the British Isles emerged quickly. “I think it’s fair to say we are all inspired by traditional music in different ways,” Mitchell says. “We wanted to rework old songs but not in a ‘research project’ way. The emotions, the feeling of momentousness, the openness—even the chords being in open tuning—we wanted everything to be wide open. It was very healing to delve into these old stories and images that have existed for so long that you can rest in them.” Following the success of the Wisconsin show, they were invited by Vernon and Dessner’s 37d03d (fka PEOPLE) collective to participate in a week-long artist residency in Berlin. Working at a venue called The Funkhaus, the trio recorded what would become the foundation of the full-length album, featuring fellow artists-in-residence Michael Lewis (bass, saxophone) and JT Bates (drums, percussion) as well as Vernon, Dessner, Kate Stables (of This Is The Kit), Lisa Hannigan, The Staves, Christian Lee Hutson, and more. Leaving Germany with roughly 60-percent of a record, the band reconvened at Dreamland Studios in Woodstock, NY, in January 2019 to finish, bringing Lewis and Bates as well as engineer Bella Blasko and mixer D. James Goodwin along with them. “We kept saying how intuitive and natural this was, some kind of alchemy that worked,” Johnson says. “I trust these guys. We can make stuff and I’m not trying to control anything but my end. It’s very collaborative and we all have complementary skill sets, different ways of working that somehow totally click. We all know this material from slightly different pathways but we meet in the weird middle with most of it.” From the first chords of the eponymous song “Bonny Light Horseman,” the band’s desire to create emotional intensity in open spaces is clear. Mitchell’s voice rises with a fevered energy over a mournful strum, and the song comes off as a lament that’s at once sad-eyed and hopeful. “Deep in Love” began as a Fruit Bats sketch, but after Kaufman recognized its uncanny (and unplanned) similarity to a certain traditional tune, the song took on new life at the hands of the band. Other numbers like “The Roving” and “Black Waterside” feature newly-written choruses sung in harmony—a fresh take on the typically chorus-less ancient ballad form. “Jane Jane” chimes along with a Johnson/Mitchell call-and-response refrain like some forgotten nursery rhyme; “Lowlands” sees Mitchell’s silvery verses cutting through the instrumental’s understated dynamics; and the record-closing duet “10,000 Miles” balances the sadness of leaving with the warmth of requited love. Nowhere on Bonny Light Horseman does the music feel staid, or burdened from the too-tight fit of a stuffy Renaissance collar. This is colorful, textured work: a lush and loving ode to the past with one eye fixed on the present. Not once did the band feel burdened by the errand of a too-faithful homage, instead reveling in a sense of freedom to take leaps and liberties as they saw fit. “The folk singer Martin Carthy once said, ‘You can’t break these songs that are hundreds if not thousands of years old; you’re not gonna hurt them by messing with them,’” Mitchell says. “The songs feel like ours, but they’re not ours. We worked on them and they feel like an authentic expression of us, but we’re also reenacting ritual.” “This record is about timeless humanity,” Johnson says. “These 500-year-old lyrics are so deeply applicable. ‘The Roving’ could be the plot of an ’80s teen movie: ‘I had a wild summer with this awesome girl then she broke my heart!’ How incredible is it that as humans we still just want to love and have sex and feel sad and fight? It’s ancient music that feels, emotionally, right now. It’s thoroughly modern.”

Newness and Strangeness This album was made from January 2015 to December 2019, starting as a collection of vague ideas that eventually turned into songs. I wanted to make something that was different from my previous records, and I struggled to figure out how to do that. I realized that because the way I listened to music had changed, I had to change the way I wrote music, as well. I was listening less and less to albums and more and more to individual songs, songs from all over the place, every few days finding a new one that seemed to have a special energy. I thought that if I could make an album full of songs that had a special energy, each one unique and different in its vision, then that would be a good thing. Andrew, Ethan, Seth and I started going into the studio to record songs that had more finished structures and jam on ideas that didn’t. Then I would mess with the recordings until I could see my way to a song. Most of the time on this album was spent shuttling between my house and Andrew’s, who did a lot of the mixing on this. He comes from an EDM school of mixing, so we built up sample-heavy beat-driven songs that could work to both of our strengths. Each track is the result of an intense battle to bring out its natural colors and transform it into a complete work. The songs contain elements of EDM, hip hop, futurism, doo-wop, soul, and of course rock and roll. But underneath all these things I think these may be folk songs, because they can be played and sung in many different ways, and they’re about things that are important to a lot of people: anger with society, sickness, loneliness, love...the way this album plays out is just our own interpretation of the tracks, with Andrew, Ethan and I forming a sort of choir of contrasting natures. I think my main hope for the world of music is that it will continue to grow by taking from the past, with a consciousness of what still works now. Exciting moments in music always form at a crossroads - a new genre emerges from the pieces of existing ones, an artist strips down a forgotten structure and makes something alien and novel. If there is a new genre emergent in our times, it has not yet been named and identified, but its threads come from new ways of listening to all types of music, of new methods of creating music at an unprecedented level of affordability and personal freedom, of new audiences rising up through the internet to embrace works that would otherwise be lost, and above all from the people whose love of music drives them to create it in the best form they possibly can. Hopefully it will remain nameless for some time, so it can be experienced with that same newness and strangeness that accompanies any and all meaningful encounters with music. "Yea but what's with the mask?" Bob Dylan said, “if someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth...if he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” He never actually wore a mask onstage so I don’t know why he said that. But I decided to start wearing a mask for a couple of reasons. One, I still get nervous being onstage with everybody looking at me. If everyone is looking at the mask instead, then it feels like we’re all looking at the same thing, and that is more honest to me. Two, music should be about enjoying yourself, especially live music, and I think of this costume as a way to remind myself and everyone else to have some fun with it. I don’t think it changes anything else about the songs or how you feel about them to be able to drop it for a second and have fun with it. If you can’t do that then you’re in a bad place... The character comes from another project Andrew and I have been working on called 1 TRAIT DANGER. This is something Andrew started doing on tour¬—recording ideas for his own songs as they came to him, and forcibly enlisting everyone else to participate. It appealed to me because it was nothing like Car Seat Headrest, and the ideas cracked me up. Before we knew it we had two albums released, a video game that was almost impossible to beat, and a growing number of people who seemed to be enjoying it all. It’s been a great outlet for weird and untenable musical experiments, and the live performances have been a blast. I play a character called TRAIT, and we’ve been working out the backstory as we go. I think he spent a lot of time in classified government facilities before getting into the music business. This is the kind of stuff that kept us going while we were working on MADLO. We were in our own little world and free to try any idea we wanted. A lot of the ideas for 1 Trait bled over to the Car Seat tracks, and vice versa. You just can’t make music without first creating your own environment around it...sound’s always gotta travel through something. This time it was a mask. —trait

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

Some three and a half decades into his recording career, Carlos Vives hasn’t lost his passion for merging traditional musical forms with contemporary pop styles. As he does on the preceding semi-eponymous *VIVES* album, he collaborates expertly here with a number of notable guests who span generations. He duets with flamenco pop star Alejandro Sanz on “For Sale” and bilingual Colombian Canadian R&B singer Jessie Reyez on the soaring “Hechicera.” Reggae royalty Ziggy Marley comes through with the island vibes on “El Hilo,” while Rubén Blades helps deliver a delightful fusion of salsa and cumbia on the self-referencing “Canción Para Rubén.”

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

The title of Conan Gray’s debut LP could also be the 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s superhero name. “My friends have always joked that if I were an animal I would be a crow,” Gray tells Apple Music. “All of my friends and my fans know that I\'m a cynical person. I had a dark enough past as a kid, and so in my teen years and adult years, I just kind of laugh at the things that go wrong in my life.” Gray’s personality is on full display throughout *Kid Krow*, a set of post-genre bedroom pop that has all the candor and content of a good diary. “I feel like I write in a way that\'s very conversational,” Gray says. “It sounds the same way that I speak normally. These are all songs that I wrote completely by myself in my room, and I feel like anyone who listens to the record can hear my voice in every one. I think what binds them all together in my head is just that they\'re all me.” Here, Gray tells us the stories behind every song on the album. **Comfort Crowd** “I\'m from a small town in Texas called Georgetown, like an hour away from Austin. And then I moved to LA to go to UCLA. To go from this small town to a massive city with tons of people from all across the world: It was a total realignment of who I was, everything that I wasn\'t used to. I was so homesick and I missed my friends back home so much. They\'re the ones who keep me sane, so I just wanted to be with them and hang out with them the way we used to. We would just sit around on the couch and show each other stupid things on our phones and enjoy each other\'s company without even having to talk at all. The second I wrote it, I was like, this feels so much like me as a person, so that\'s also why it\'s the first track on the album and it\'s the oldest one that I\'ve written that\'s on the album.” **Wish You Were Sober** “It\'s a song that I ended up sticking on the album last minute ’cause it was so much fun when I was making it. I wrote it about this person who I really, really liked and I wrote a lot of songs on my album about them and they just wouldn\'t tell me that they liked me back or would never tell me their true feelings unless they were blackout drunk. It was a weird, bittersweet feeling, because on one side you\'re thinking, ‘Yay, they like me and they have feelings for me and they like me back.’ On the other side you\'re thinking, ‘Why can\'t you tell me this when you\'re sober? Why can\'t you tell me this in daylight?’ I think the song is about all those mixed emotions and all the craziness behind being young and getting super drunk and calling someone and telling them that you love them.” **Maniac** “‘Maniac’ is a song that I wrote in the shower. I was in New York. I had just gotten this crazy text from someone that I hadn\'t talked to in months. It was like, ‘Oh, Conan, you\'re so manipulative and crazy and you\'ve been telling all my friends this and you\'ve been saying this and this and that.’ I was just so confused. Like, ‘What’s going on in your head? I don\'t know what you\'re talking about, and you\'re calling me insane, but let\'s get this clear: You are the crazy one in the situation. Like, you\'re the maniac, you\'re insane.’ I\'ve had a few people think that it\'s about me, and I\'m like, ‘No.’ For once in my life, I am not being the insane one.” **(Online Love)** “I was really raised by the internet, and so a lot of those relationships that I built and have built in the past few years have happened solely over the internet. There was someone that I really liked—I was always curious what would have happened to us if we weren\'t just an online love. What would have happened if you lived next door and we actually got to go to cafes and see each other? Would we have worked out? Because it\'s never worked out. I\'ve never dated anyone before, and I think anyone from my generation, any one of me and my friends can relate to love these days just fully happens online and that\'s just how it is.” **Checkmate** “The stage of grief where you\'re just angry, like pure rage: That was when I wrote ‘Checkmate.’ I was just like, ‘Oh man, fuck you.’ It’s a song that I wrote in a moment of pure seething anger. ‘I want to rip your head off, you are the worst person I\'ve ever met.’ It was this person who was always playing games with me all the time, always playing games with my heart, and I figured if you want to play games with me, if you\'re going to play games with my heart and if you\'re going to treat love like it\'s some kind of game, then I\'m going to win the game and I\'m going to ruin your life.” **The Cut That Always Bleeds** “I was at a point in this relationship where there was no point in being in the relationship and I was trying so hard to get over this person, but every single time, the second that I was just about to get over it, the second I was just starting to feel good and normal again, they would pop back in my life and just tear my heart into a million pieces again and then disappear. It was like no matter what I did, I was just trapped. They were this cut on my body that I was trying so hard to let heal over and they would just come back in and it would just bleed and bleed and bleed. I wrote it in a stage of misery, in Chicago. I was sitting in my hotel room and I was actually supposed to see the person, but instead I got this insane flu and I was just sitting in bed with a really high fever and I sang the first line of the song to my phone and that\'s how the whole entire song came out.” **Fight or Flight** “‘Fight or Flight’ is the one that I kind of wanted to have a bit of fun with. I wanted it to be this super chaotic, melodramatic song about finding out that someone has cheated on you, or finding out that someone has multiple people in their lives that you just didn\'t know about. It was my response to getting put in that situation, and also meeting someone and finding out that maybe they\'re not the person that you think they are. Like you\'re definitely talking to a bit of a player.” **Affluenza** “I grew up with financial ups and downs my whole entire life. We didn\'t know how we were going to survive, and I was so used to not having money that when I was young, I always thought that money would solve all of my issues. Then I moved to LA and I discovered this whole other side of the world where there\'s these kids who grew up insanely rich. I started hanging out with them and going to their parties and seeing this other side of the world, and I discovered that even these people who grew up with tons of money are absolutely miserable. I figured out that it doesn\'t matter who you are, doesn\'t matter how much money you have. We all have a lot of the same problems.” **(Can We Be Friends?)** “Both of the interludes I wrote just for the fans, for the people who listen to the album from top to bottom. It was another way of talking to the listener and being like, ‘Hey, thank you for listening to my album. This is everything you ever need to know about me. These are all of my deepest, darkest secrets, and I would love to be your best friend. Just thank you for caring.’ It\'s also a song that I wrote from the perspective of what I would say to my best friends back home, a love letter towards platonic friendship. I feel like friendship is something that is never really talked about in music ever. It\'s always love, and there\'s no one on earth that I love more than my friends.” **Heather** “‘Heather’ is the song on the album that I always cry to. I think it\'s the most honest recount of my love life at the moment. It’s about a girl named Heather—I think everyone has a Heather in their life. The person that I really, really liked was in love with Heather. They were not in love with me, and because of that, I fucking hated Heather. I hated Heather with all of my heart and soul. I had no reason to hate Heather. Heather is a perfectly nice girl. She\'s sweet and she\'s pure and she smells like daisies—she’s perfect, but I hate her. It\'s this humiliating thing to admit, but it\'s just true. I\'m scared to see how people are going to react, because it isn\'t a good thing to think something like that, but I also think it\'s something that I\'ve never really heard anyone admit. I\'m sorry, Heather. You’re a wonderful person.” **Little League** “I wasn\'t a Little League player at all. I think for me, Little League was always a signifier of my youth. We would go to see my friends’ Little League games and we\'d all buy popsicles from the concession stand and watch it and cheer and get super sunburned. When you\'re young and then you get older and then all of a sudden you\'re in the big leagues and you\'re like, ‘How the hell do I handle anything that\'s going on ever?’ It\'s so scary to get older. ‘Little League’ is my song talking about the fear of growing up, and it\'s also just about my best friend back home. I miss her all the time, and her name\'s Ashley. I wear a necklace with her name on it every single day, and it\'s me just missing her and missing times when life was so much simpler.” **The Story** “The album is so chaotic, and it can be pretty sad and dark at times in the middle. I wanted to end on a more hopeful note. I had a pretty rough childhood; a lot of it was just really unsafe. There were times as a kid that I wished so badly that I just didn\'t exist anymore. I wanted so badly for my pain to stop, and I wanted to just stop existing. Every single time that I would hit those rock-bottom moments, something would just tell me to keep going. I wanted to write a song talking about all those moments in my life and all the things that happened to me and my friends growing up where we thought that life was just going to stop, but with the smallest amount of courage—and with people who can show you that they love you—you can keep going and it\'s never really the end.”

When Drake released the dance-routine-ready “Toosie Slide” roughly a month ahead of his *Dark Lane Demo Tapes*, fans were near incredulous that he’d discovered yet another musical frontier in which to stake his claim. (Those who weren’t busy choreographing TikTok videos to the song, anyway.) With the release of *Dark Lane Demo Tapes*, Drake delivers a handful of additional forays into the sound of right now. The project, per Drake’s own Instagram, features music compiled by OVO cohorts Oliver El-Khatib and Noel Cadastre, and comprises “some leaks and some joints from SoundCloud and some new vibes.” Found within are Drake-helmed masterpieces of post-regional drill music (“Demons,” “War”), linkups with Future (“Desires”) and Chris Brown (“Not You Too”), and a Pi’erre Bourne-produced Playboi Carti collaboration (“Pain 1993”), as well as the kind of hazy, regret-steeped R&B that so many contemporary playlists are built on (“Time Flies”). In its approach to these familiar vibes, this particular collection of music is the most of-the-moment Drake has ever sounded—more present than his usual prescient.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

For someone who spent the better part of his career celebrating the chaos his drug use enabled, the title of Future’s eighth studio album, *High Off Life*, reads like an attempt at a rebrand. But it isn’t. For one, he’ll claim to still very much be getting “high off” drugs. But further to that, life as Future knows it is the same high-octane carousel ride it’s been since he began telling us his story, spinning continually through declarations of invincibility (“Touch the Sky,” “Solitaires,” “Trillionaire”), reflections of past trauma (“Posted With Demons,” “One of My,” “Pray for a Key”), encounters with beautiful and exclusive women (“Too Comfortable,” “Outer Space Bih”), and, yes, heavy drug use (“Trapped in the Sun,” “HiTek Tek”). Future on *High Off Life* is who he told us he was on the title track of his second album, *Honest*: “I\'m a rock star for life, I\'m just being honest.”

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

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

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

*J Balvin: “I always want to be a step ahead, and I think \[Spatial\] is one of those steps. Everything in the music is going to sound bigger. I think fans will really love this new experience.”* “What we’d do was we’d play the song and close our eyes, and each one of us would name the color that the song made us feel,” Colombian superstar J Balvin tells Apple Music about how he assembled his sixth solo album, whittling it down from roughly 40 potential tracks. “The color that prevailed, that was the song’s name.” Indeed, when the deliberately austere single “Blanco” first dropped last year, few could’ve anticipated it would mark the beginning of a veritable rainbow’s worth of new thematic fare, even after he named his 2019 tour Arcoiris—literally “rainbow” in Spanish. “This is practically an album of all J Balvin; it’s not a collaboration album,” he says. Where his prior projects found him paired up with everyone from Daddy Yankee and Farruko to Pharrell to ROSALÍA, this follow-up to the beloved 2019 Bad Bunny duets set *OASIS* finds him looking inward more than reaching out. At a time when so many eyes globally are fixed upon him, thanks in no small part to successful musical partnerships with artists outside of the Latin music world like the Black Eyed Peas and DJ Snake, *Colores* finds him shutting out the world while engaged in a grand creative exercise with a tight circle of producers, including his longtime studio familiar Sky Rompiendo. The neo-psychedelic floral stylings of modern pop art mastermind Takashi Murakami complement these ten vibrant dembow variations, assigning moods to an array of sonic hues, each made even more vivid and crisp through Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Furthering that message, each song has a dedicated music video directed by Colin Tilley that showcases experimental fantasias built from each part of the album’s palette. For those who’ve come to see Balvin as the face and the voice of contemporary reggaetón, *Colores* proves that, in the right hands, the genre has limitless artistic potential. Below, he breaks down each of the tracks for Apple Music. **Amarillo** “Yellow was what 80% of the people who listened to this one felt. Produced by DJ Snake and Afro Bros, it’s very energetic and made for discos. It says that I don’t complicate my life. Many people know J Balvin, but few people know about José, and the thing is that I don’t complicate myself. Let’s enjoy it. That’s why it’s the first song of the album, because as soon as people listen to it, I want them to feel connected with the color and with the song’s power.” **Azul** “We closed our eyes as a work team and the color blue prevailed. This was produced by Sky, and Justin Quiles worked with us. It’s a very refreshing song, one where we talk about a woman who lives her life the way she wants—independently. She does things her way and she can’t be controlled.” **Rojo** “The lyrics here really guided us towards passion, towards love. It had been a while since I last made a romantic reggaetón song. The lyrics say, ‘I choose you.’ When you love, you love freely, and you need to let the other person be happy. The part I like the most says, ‘They try, and they fail. They always want to buy you with money, but that treasure has its pirates. I’ll do anything for you.’ It means no matter how much they want to buy you, your heart belongs to me.” **Rosa** “This is produced by Diplo. We had a fantastic time making the song, which has a very sensual vibe. With this song, you can’t tell a woman how much you like her, and you don\'t know what to do when you are in front of her. Again, I am alone, as you can see, like with 90% of *Colores*.” **Morado** “I’d been wanting to release a classic reggaetón song for a long time, J Balvin-style. When we closed our eyes, we connected with the color purple. And when we thought of purple, we thought about royalty, the castle vibe, the king vibe. The lyrics are very funny: ‘I asked for a drink, and she asked for the bottle. She always goes too far when I’m with her. Listen to her, or else you’ll crash, yes. If there’s any problem, it’s her fault. Dance so that her butt bounces, done.’” **Verde** “There are only two collaborations in the album, and this is a very special one because it’s with my brother and right hand in music, Sky. For the first time, he shows himself as an artist. Apart from being a great producer and composer, he also raps and sings very well. This is pure 100% reggaetón. It’s made to jump, to actually jump. It’s telling people to check out the swag or the flow of everybody.” **Negro** “This is one of my favorite songs on *Colores* because it has *malianteo*, the flavor that made me fall in love with reggaetón. It reminds me of the days of Hector El Father; it makes you want to grab a bat and head out to the streets. The lyrics are brutal. The color and what the song inspires are brutal. Dee Mad made a beat that really hit it.” **Gris** “Gray was the predominant color in the voting for this one. The lyrics are about when you try to be the best for your partner, yet they don’t see any value in it. They don’t stop judging you for the mistakes you made in the past.” **Arcoíris** “This is called ‘Arcoíris’ (rainbow) because it was the song that changes the rhythm the most. The producer is Michael Brun from Haiti again, a collaboration alongside Mr Eazi of Nigeria. He samples a Cuban song by Compay Segundo. It sounds a lot like Africa, but it has a lot of our Latin flavor. We combine all colors into the rhythm, so to speak. I\'m an Afrobeats fan, and we worked with Mr Eazi in the past on *OASIS*.” **Blanco** “This was the first song that was released from the album. When everything was sounding very similar, I decided to go another way. It talks about my city Medellín, and was produced by Sky. It is different from what was happening outside. For real, made in Medellín.

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

The first verse we hear on Jay Electronica’s *A Written Testimony* comes from JAY-Z. The God MC opens “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” the second track on the album, which follows an intro comprising mostly remarks from Minister Louis Farrakhan—adding an extra four minutes to the decade-plus many fans have waited to hear Jay Electronica rap on his debut album. Having Jigga bat leadoff registers as much less of a stunt in the context of the full project, and only helps build the anticipation. JAY-Z appears on nearly every song on *A Written Testimony*, assuming a partner-in-rhyme role not unlike the one Ghostface Killah played on Raekwon’s seminal *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx*. The Jays sound likewise inspired by each other, yielding the mic for continuous intervals of elite-level MCing, delivering bars both forthright and poetic, and also steeped in phrasings uncommon outside of the written word. “If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master/I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter,” Electronica raps on “The Neverending Story.” Electronica is credited with the bulk of production on the album, with additional contributions from No I.D. and The Alchemist, along with the all-star team (Swizz Beatz, Araabmuzik, Hit-Boy, G. Ry) responsible for “The Blinding.” The MC raps in Spanish on “Fruits of the Spirit,” and though he shouts out Vince Staples, Marvel villain Thanos, and cosmetic butt injections, there are very few references on *A Written Testimony* that could date the album long-term. The goal here was very clearly to make a timeless project, one we should appreciate considering there’s no telling if or when we will get another.

In a 2019 interview with Apple Music host Nadeska Alexis, Jessie Reyez explained the source of inspiration for her profoundly personal, often political, intensely swaggering R&B: “I like to sing about shit I don’t like to talk about,” she said. The Colombian Canadian singer’s intimate 2018 EP *Being Human in Public* felt at times like a diary, wrestling with deep themes like immigration (“Imported\") and gender discrimination (“Body Count”) in a conversational Spanish-English blend while tossing out cutting one-liners with a smirk (“I dodge dick on the daily”). Here, on her first full-length, the Toronto native and Up Next alum reaches deep into her emotional core to tell you exactly who she is and how she feels—exhilaratingly heartbroken, independent, and alive—with a matter-of-factness that has become her signature. The songs here are wide-ranging and ambitious—there are slow-burning pop ballads (“LOVE IN THE DARK”) and smoldering R&B-trap send-ups (“ANKLES” featuring Rico Nasty and Melii)—showcasing her staggering vocal range and unflinching lyricism. It’s the latter, really, that makes her coy verses so indelible: “I should have fucked your friends/It would have been the best revenge,” she sings on album opener “DO YOU LOVE HER.” “If I blow your brains out/I can guarantee that you’ll forget her.” Who could forget that?

Jessie Reyez explained the source of inspiration for her profoundly personal, often political, intensely swaggering R&B: "I like to sing about shit I don't like to talk about," she said. The Colombian Canadian singers intimate 2018 EP Being Human in Public felt at times like a diary, wrestling with deep themes like immigration ("Imported") and gender discrimination ("Body Count') in a conversational Spanish-English blend while tossing out cutting one-liners with a smirk ("I dodge dick on the daily"). Here, on her first full-length, the Toronto native and Up Next alum reaches deep into her emotional core to tell you exactly who she is and how she feels-exhilaratingly heartbroken, independent, and alive with a matter-of-factness that has become her signature. The songs here are wide-ranging and ambitious-there are slow burning pop ballads ("LOVE IN THE DARK") and smoldering R&B trap send-ups ("ANKLES" featuring Rico Nasty and Melii) showcasing her staggering vocal range and unflinching lyricism. It's the latter, really, that makes her coy verses so indelible: "I should have fucked your friends/it would have been the best revenge," she sings on album opener "DO YOU LOVE HER." "If I blow your brains out/I can guarantee that you'll forget her." Who could forget that? ℗ 2020 FMLY, under exclusive license to Island Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc

To record her meditative third album, Jhené Aiko retreated to the lush hills of Hawaii and surrounded herself with crystals, incense, and singing bowls. It was an experiment in self-discovery and the healing powers of sound: Every song on *Chilombo*, which is also the R&B singer’s last name, features the transcendental tones of the ancient bowls, which are said to balance chakras and soothe anxiety. They seemed to have worked: For a project about heartbreak, these songs are impressively, and infectiously, zen. Lead singles “Triggered (freestyle)” and “None of Your Concern” (featuring Big Sean) wrap intense, defiant messages in chill lullaby beats, and “Mourning Doves,” an intimate confessional that uses wind instruments to mimic soft bird calls, toes a line between bedroom ballad and New Age hymnal. Aiko is so deep in her vibe that even her heavyweight guests—which include Nas, Ty Dolla $ign, Miguel, and Future—can’t lure her out of her peaceful, low-key center. Instead, they go to her. “Lightning & Thunder,” her dreamy duet with John Legend, is densely atmospheric and psychedelic, like a love song in a daydream.

When Justin Bieber released his debut album *My World 2.0* in 2010, he was a bashful 16-year-old YouTuber with sideswept bangs and teen-idol magnetism. What a decade it’s been. “I definitely have grown up in front of the world,” he tells Apple Music, which feels like an understatement when you consider how he’s also helped to shape it—crossing genres, borders, and language barriers long before that became standard practice for modern pop. In early 2019, he hit a breaking point and announced a hiatus from music, citing a need to work on “deep-rooted issues” and saying he wanted to focus on being a better husband to his new wife Hailey Baldwin. His confessional fifth album *Changes* is an arms-wide-open tribute to her, as well as to his faith, and describes the healing he found from each. The album is more than the end of an era—to Justin as rebellious playboy and pop maximalist—it also marks the beginning of a more focused, settled life. “Never thought I could ever be loyal to someone other than myself,” he sings on opener “All Around Me,” a clear-eyed pledge of commitment and luxury comforts, backed by delicate strings (most of the album was produced by his longtime collaborator Jason \"Poo Bear” Boyd). On the piano ballad “Confirmation,” he praises the importance of slowing down and being present: “So quick to move forward, no pressure/And we got the rest, got the rest, got the rest of our lives.” Although there are occasional nods to his slick R&B past (the bedroom cut “Yummy,” the flirtatious “Intentions” featuring Quavo), the majority of the album is acoustic, romantic, and spiritual. It wasn’t easy for the singer to regain his confidence and clarity. \"I was dealing with a lot of fear,” he says. “What am I going to talk about again? \[How\] is it going to be received?” A turning point came when he performed with Ariana Grande at the 2019 Coachella music festival as her surprise guest. “I saw how people reacted when I went onstage. It gave me a boost of confidence and reminded me, ‘Oh, this is what I do. This is what I\'m good at. I don\'t need to run away from it.’ I was running away. But when something\'s hard, it’s almost like we need to run towards the pain and run towards the hurt rather than run away from it. That’s when I think you get healing.”

“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t*. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can\'t have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I\'m alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego\'s golden saxophone lines, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedness. Taken together, it\'s a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “\'I hate you\' turns into \'I love you\' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn\'t one that is so neat or simple; the album\'s real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonetheless. Kehlani\'s rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it\'s when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I\'m kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer says, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into \[that\] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad News,” one of the album\'s most poignant performances, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she\'s vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t* arrives in May 2020 as many people remain under orders to stay at home and practice social distancing, but this music can be a vehicle to another place, even if that place is your own head. Kehlani shrewdly captures the tangled intricacies of connection in a time defined by disconnect—a hurdle not just to relationships but to productivity as well. “The biggest thing about this whole quarantine was that I impressed myself,” she says. “That\'s why no matter what happens with this album, this might be my favorite project I\'ve ever put out.”

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

Besting records by Canadian icons like Leonard Cohen and Gord Downie in a historic Polaris Music Prize win, 2016’s *La Papessa* rightfully broadened Lido Pimienta’s profile far beyond the country’s borders. For the Colombia-born and Toronto-based artist’s follow-up, she goes deeper into exploring her Afro-Indigenous and Colombian cultural identity while dismantling and reassembling cumbia, pop, and other genre forms into something all her own. (The LP’s title is a reference to the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, when host Steve Harvey misread his cue card and named Miss Colombia the winner; the real winner was Miss Philippines.) The jarring video game bleeps and squelchy bass of “No Pude” belie a poetically raw sentiment, while “Eso Que Tu Haces” treads cautiously through an emotional minefield of rhythm. Later, she adds her vital voice to the traditional sounds of Sexteto Tabala, a group from Palenque whose devotion to maintaining Afro-Colombian heritage jibes well with Pimienta’s own intentions. “Each song is a cynical love letter to my country,” she tells Apple Music as she walks us through the album, track by track. **Para Transcribir (Sol)** “This song is a question: Who am I? It’s about the feeling of not knowing if I am still the same person I was when I lived in Colombia. Every time I return to my country, I feel that I have to write something to remember how I used to be. That question is present throughout the album, and with each song, I answer it.” **Eso Que Tu Haces** “Since the album describes a cycle, this song is dawn. It’s waking up and stretching out your arms. Starting a new day to harvest the fruits that life gives us.” **Nada (feat. Li Saumet)** “This song has much to do with the cover. It\'s an analysis of the condition of being a woman and the pains we experience: pains associated with your period, with giving birth, with being a mother. Li is my best friend, and I always wanted to make a song for her and with her.” **Te Quería** “I’m talking to Colombia. Each song is a cynical love letter to my country. What’s it like to deal with that relationship? Well, I’m fine with it. I’m never gonna write a love song to a man. I’m not like that. Of course, people are gonna interpret it their own way when hearing it, and sing it to whoever they want. This is a love song because I like to write songs where the message is delivered in a way that you can enjoy it and not sound like a scolding.” **No Pude** “This is a very stressful song. It encapsulates distress. It’s like the pre-boiling point before everything explodes. It’s the point where I can’t stand it anymore: I can’t stand the violence, the corruption, the male chauvinism, the femicide. It’s an absolutely sad and dark song. As for the beat, it’s also a watershed on the album, because it’s a more experimental one.” **Coming Thru** “The whole album has a common thread, and this is the song that opens the B-side, if we think in terms of a vinyl record. It’s a very simple song, without many arrangements. For me, it’s like drinking a glass of water: It refreshes you and represents a new beginning. Starting from scratch. It’s a nice song to raise your spirits after the darkness on side A.” **Quiero Que Me Salves (Preludio) \[feat. Rafael Cassiani Cassiani\]** “This one was recorded outdoors, on a terrace. You can hear the noises of the street there. It talks about the challenges facing Colombia; it’s about giving us a new opportunity to fix the wrongs we have done to our people as a country.” **Quiero Que Me Salves (feat. Sexteto Tabala)** “Sexteto Tabala is a very important band for me since I was a teenager. They are legends. We\'re great friends now, and I knew that at some point I had to record a song with them—a song that had the roots of Colombian music. I didn\'t want to process or add anything to their sound: I wanted it to be heard as it is. It’s music that has survived the extinction of cultures, and those songs are going to continue surviving for generations until the end of humanity. For me, it’s very important that people value this music the same way they value the music of European or North American bands, since it’s even more valuable because of their history and origins.” **Pelo Cucu** “This one is another song with traditional Colombian music. I want this music to be heard like any other, without having to be presented as exotic or within a neo-colonialist framework. It’s also part of my process of reconciliation with Colombia—recognizing it in me and in my music.” **Resisto y Ya** “This is my way of playing and being revolutionary. Revolution can be carried out in different ways, and everyone carries it out in their own way, by any means necessary. In my case, I feel a lot of pressure, since practically all my actions come under question. For example, the songs I make don\'t conform to the standard of the type of songs that people expect from me, so I have been called into question. In my view, the most revolutionary act today is being a woman, a mother, and a migrant. I live in a constant struggle, not settling for being just another statistic, just another number, just another negative story about being a Latina mother in a foreign country. But in the end, I’m a revolutionary, because I have been successful in these adverse contexts.” **Para Transcribir (Luna)** “This song is a way of saying, ‘Don’t cry anymore, don’t suffer. This is you, and you can be happy.’ To achieve this, you have to let go and accept who you are, with the challenges that being Colombian implies. Accept yourself and sleep peacefully. Tomorrow is a new day.”

If we’re comparing it to the year prior, 2019 was something of a quiet one for Atlanta MC Lil Baby. Sure, he featured on singles by DaBaby, Lykke Li, and Yo Gotti, among others, but ever since 2018’s *Street Gossip*, Lil Baby seemed content simply to share the sauce with collaborators. With the release of *My Turn*, however, Baby has declared that he’s finished letting anyone else spread their wings and is ready to reclaim his spot atop hip-hop’s throne. *My Turn* is of course built on Lil Baby’s verbose and ever formidable bar construction and under-heralded wordplay. Songs like “Grace” and “No Sucker” find him in fine form, rapping, as he admits outright on track 13, that he’s still got “Sum 2 Prove.” Guests on the project lean toward animated yet high-caliber MCs like Future, Lil Uzi Vert, and Lil Wayne, while frequent collaborators Quay Global, Twysted Genius, and Tay Keith hold down the production. Songs like “Emotionally Scarred” and “Hurtin” show a more vulnerable side of the MC, but their respective follow-ups “Commercial” and “Forget That” show us that the turn-up is never far. “Woah,” the 2019 hit that gave an already popular dance a proper anthem, is here, as is the Hit-Boy-produced “Catch the Sun,” which first appeared on *Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack*—two songs Lil Baby may have included to remind us that we’ve always gotten the best of him, even when we’ve wanted more.

One of the most heralded hip-hop artists of his generation, Lil Uzi Vert built no small part of his well-deserved reputation off of the promise of a record nobody had heard. For nearly two years, fans eagerly anticipated the release of *Eternal Atake*, a maddeningly delayed project whose legend grew while tragedy befell some of the Philadelphia native’s emo rap peers, including Lil Peep and XXXTENTACION. With the wait finally over, the patient listenership that made do with running back to 2017’s *Luv Is Rage 2* again and again can take in his glittering opus. Without relying on showy features—save for one memorable duet with Syd on the otherworldly “Urgency”—Uzi does more than most of those who’ve jacked his style in the interim. He imbues the post-EDM aesthetic of “Celebration Station” and the video-game trap of “Silly Watch” alike with speedy, free-associative verses that run from gun talk to sexual exploits. An obvious influence on Uzi’s discography, Chief Keef provides the woozy beat for “Chrome Heart Tags,” reminding that there are levels to Uzi’s artistry.

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

Fresh off fostering a movement like #HotGirlSummer, one would think Megan Thee Stallion had little if anything left to prove, but her *Suga* EP tells a bit of a different story. Megan uses the moment to level up as an increasingly important voice of female empowerment and at the same time remind us how easily she can traverse some of the most beloved sounds of contemporary rap. First, she sounds extremely comfortable in a Detroit street rap vibe courtesy of producer Helluva on “Ain\'t Equal.” A little further in, she dips her toes in West Coast G-funk for the Kehlani collaboration “Hit My Phone.” She channels the legendary 2Pac on “B.I.T.C.H.,” which takes inspiration from the late MC’s “Ratha Be Ya N\*\*\*a,” and then teams up with ATL drip music innovator Gunna for “Stop Playing.” As for who she is as an MC, Thee Stallion has a couple choice ways of describing herself on “Savage” (“Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty”) which, grouped together, only remind us that this is who we need to be listening to.

*ALL ABOUT LUV* is a momentum shift for the South Korean EDM/rap/pop group, who has released some of K-pop’s most enthralling numbers (“Shoot Out,” “Hero,” “Follow,” “Alligator”). For their first all-English-language album, MONSTA X embraced a smooth Western pop style that fits them like a summer suit—stylish and modern but not too dressy. According to lead rapper I.M, they wanted to make their message of love accessible to more people during turbulent times. “There are a lot of ways to express love,” I.M tells Apple Music. “I think love is really hard to define. I think love is the best thing to do \[for\] humanity. That’s why we named it *ALL ABOUT LUV*.” The album unfolds like 11 crush notes, showing love’s highs, lows, and complexities. It’s softly lit, both in wattage and mood. The vocal unit carries the bag on ballads like “SOMEONE’S SOMEONE,” “YOU CAN’T HOLD MY HEART,” and “SHE’S THE ONE.” The rap unit gets busy on upbeat tracks like “MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT” and with collaborators Pitbull (“BESIDE U”) and French Montana (“WHO DO U LOVE?”). will.i.am adds a remix, as well. There’s also a sexual awakening in a few of the tracks. “GOT MY NUMBER” is a thirst tweet set to melodic EDM pop. “MISBEHAVE” is a ballad detailing make-up whoopee and drunken naked romps around the hotel pool. MONSTA X are K-pop innovators, and *ALL ABOUT LUV* signals the group’s confident arrival into the global pop conversation. “I want to communicate with more US fans,” lead vocalist Kihyun tells Apple Music. “The best language is music.”

When Niall Horan became the third member of One Direction to release a solo album (2017’s *Flicker*), the Irishman revealed a refreshingly low-key sound bathed in acoustic guitars and Americana melodies. For his second effort, Horan emerges from his comfort zone and cuts loose musically. See the album’s first single “Nice to Meet Ya”—an unapologetic soft-rock anthem charting the thrill of meeting someone new on a night out, featuring handclaps, rolling piano, and the kind of swagger usually reserved for his associate Harry Styles. Elsewhere on an album exploring heartbreak in all its majesty (written following his own public breakup), Horan dissects a relationship’s demise on the string-laden tearjerker “Put a Little Love on Me,” documents moving on with someone else (“Arms of a Stranger”), and commends always being there for a loved one (the Sheeran-esque “No Judgement”). Horan may not have healed his heart by “Still,” the album’s moving outro (“I’m still in love with you/Oh, we will be all right”), but this former boy-band member has never sounded so good on his own.

When Niall Horan became the third member of One Direction to release a solo album (2017’s Flicker), the Irishman revealed a refreshingly low-key sound bathed in acoustic guitars and Americana melodies. For his second effort, Horan emerges from his comfort zone and cuts loose musically. See the album’s first single “Nice to Meet Ya”—an unapologetic soft-rock anthem charting the thrill of meeting someone new on a night out, featuring handclaps, rolling piano, and the kind of swagger usually reserved for his associate Harry Styles. Elsewhere on an album exploring heartbreak in all its majesty (written following his own public breakup), Horan dissects a relationship’s demise on the string-laden tearjerker “Put a Little Love on Me,” documents moving on with someone else (“Arms of a Stranger”), and commends always being there for a loved one (the Sheeran-esque “No Judgement”). Horan may not have healed his heart by “Still,” the album’s moving outro (“I’m still in love with you/Oh, we will be all right”), but this former boy-band member has never sounded so good on his own.

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

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

When Polo G released his sophomore project *THE GOAT*, MCs declaring themselves the \"greatest of all time” was as ubiquitous in hip-hop as claiming to be desirable to the opposite sex. But within the project, the still-ascending Chicago MC presents a version of himself matured enough beyond 2019’s *Die a Legend* that he’s entitled to a little confidence. *THE GOAT* features somber piano lines throughout (“Don’t Believe the Hype,” “33,” “No Matter What,” “Be Something”), but Polo is considerably bigger here than the “pain music” descriptor his work often gets lumped in with. He is reflective storyteller on “Heartless,” smitten lover on “Martin & Gina,” and equal parts technical rap show-off and riot-starter on “Go Stupid” (which also features Stunna 4 Vegas and NLE Choppa). The album contains additional appearances from Mustard, Lil Baby, and BJ the Chicago Kid, but it’s “Flex,” a collaboration with fallen comrade Juice WRLD, that delivers some of the best rapping of Polo’s young career.

Pop Smoke opened the title track of his 2019 debut *Meet the Woo* with a series of bars that distill exactly what the Brooklyn MC is all about: “Baby girl, come and meet the Woo/She know we keep a tool/Big knockin\' on my body/Watch who you speaking to.” The album—propelled by the breakout single “Welcome to the Party”—made a star out of a previously unknown MC, at once familiarizing the rap game with this promising voice, as well as the Canarsie hood he came from. *Meet the Woo 2*, as its title suggests, is another helping of the consistently intimidating, endlessly catchy contemporary Brooklyn drill music that gave Pop Smoke his fame. Success has only served to fortify his earliest claims of citywide dominance (“Invincible,” “Christopher Walking,” “Element”), but he isn’t too self-important to share the mic with several of New York City’s most celebrated young voices (A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Fivio Foreign, Lil Tjay), spreading love in the Brooklyn tradition.

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

“I\'ve put out songs like ‘Body Like a Back Road’ or ‘Kinfolks’—they\'re just upbeat, fun songs that are hopefully universally relatable,” Sam Hunt tells Apple Music, calling out some of the hooky singles the Georgia-bred singer released ahead of *SOUTHSIDE*, the long-awaited follow-up to his star-making 2014 debut *Montevallo*. The 12-song set flexes his down-home fluency in the rhythms of pop, hip-hop, and R&B, blending beats and throwback country textures and vocal styles and the mellow brooding of his most confessional-sounding performances. “I think if you asked somebody that really knows me well which record they heard more of me on,” he says, “I would bet that those people would say, ‘I could hear you, the person that I know, in those songs, even more so than the first record.’” Here he talks through some of the tracks that reflect the album’s range. **2016** “That song is a little more vulnerable and personal. And I know a lot of my buddies who listen to music, they don\'t want to hear somebody laying in about their issues. They just want to hear something fun that\'s easy to listen to. So that song was a little bit of a risk. I\'ve talked about some of the reasons why it took me so long to put out a new record—this song touches on that a little bit. When I hear it now, I don\'t hear myself anymore, I just hear a song. People will be looking at me funny as I\'m singing it, like, ‘Man, he\'s really putting it out there on this one.’ But to me, it\'s just another song from the set. Not that I don\'t want to still get in that place when performing it and try to authentically be in the moment, but at the same time, once it\'s over with, once it\'s written, once it\'s recorded, it\'s almost like it\'s not even me anymore in terms of feeling vulnerable about singing it or playing it in front of people.” **Hard to Forget** “Luke \[Laird\] has just such a great taste in music. He knows his country music history, but he\'s also a big fan of a lot of the stuff that I grew up listening to outside the genre. I don\'t know if he had heard that Webb Pierce song \[‘There Stands the Glass’\] somewhere, or if it just came to mind. I think he sang the Webb Pierce part and then beatboxed his drum part and took it to the studio and then worked it up. I\'ve been looking for a song to sample for a while and just haven\'t been able to find the right song. I\'ve been messing with songs from like the ’80s and ’90s, but I think the trick was to go way back. To hear those things work together, it makes a little bit of a point. I didn\'t want to hit anybody over the head with it in that way, but at the same time it does make that clear, I think.” **Young Once** “Nowadays I write a lot with producers who can build a track in the room, and a lot of times they\'ll build something before I even get there, or sometimes we\'ll build something in the room. We wrote that song originally on just piano and guitar, and it sat around in my phone. I just had a voice memo of it forever. Then we put it down over at Zach \[Crowell\]\'s and started playing it and put some drums on it. We had players play on it and it just kept growing. It\'s one of those, like, I\'m old enough now to be nostalgic about my youth, and that\'s a big thing in country music, is reflecting back on the good old days. I wanted to have a song that did reflect on youth, and I\'m surprised nobody had written that, had hooked ‘Young Once’ in that way.” **Let It Down** “I remember talking to the guys and saying, ‘What if the verses sounded like an R&B song but then you drop to this chorus and it feels like a classic bluegrass or old country?’ I\'m so fascinated by that, when different genres or different worlds can come together. A lot of times, you can miss by an inch or miss by a mile and it doesn\'t work. I think my whole career, I try to blend R&B and country. I can\'t help but sing country at the end of the day, so even when I do R&B, I don\'t really do R&B. I\'m just doing a country boy\'s impression a little bit. So somehow it kind of comes together.” **Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90’s** “We remember telephones on the wall and pre-social-media relationships. So just thinking about the world and how much it\'s changed because of all those things, it was a song I wanted to write. The trick was not filling it up with a bunch of technology references and trying to find the story within it. It\'s just the world\'s so much smaller now. In a lot of ways, like the fact that I can release the record and still stay in touch with my fans, there\'s so many positives. But when it comes to relationships and navigating old relationships or new relationships and especially breakups, it can be tricky. I have a hard time focusing and organizing and really concentrating on getting something finished. There\'s something about the ninth hour that centers my focus. If I know that I have to turn something in tomorrow, I have more mental clarity on that day than I would have had combined in the months before. I sat around on those verses thinking, ‘What would you do? How would you write this? I could do this, I could do that.’ And then I had one day and it was like, ‘Okay, this is it. Boom.’” **Drinkin’ Too Much** “I didn\'t really have a place to put that song, but I decided last minute to include the songs that have been out that didn\'t really have a home. There were nine songs without the three that I put out prior to this record, and it just felt incomplete. And one day I just typed in those songs to the list and then it felt like a record all of a sudden. I just wanted them to have a home, especially just for me. Not that I\'m OCD about it, but there\'s something about looking back on it 10 years from now and feeling like, ‘This was record one, this was record two,’ without having stragglers out there. \[As for the hymn on piano\], faith is a big part of my lifestyle adjustment during those three years. So I wanted to acknowledge that somehow without being too overt about it or pushing it on anybody. That was a way to give credit for a little bit of redemption in a subtle way. And that\'s one of my favorite gospel songs. \[‘Drinkin’ Too Much’\] is such a heavy thing, and it\'s a lot to take in, so I just wanted to leave it on a hopeful note.”

“I just needed to let my old self go,\" Selena Gomez tells Apple Music. After her last album, *Revival*, the superstar weathered a rocky four years during which her love life and personal health were the subject of intense media scrutiny, eventually leading her to check into a treatment center. “I purged multiple different things, but it was specifically who I was then,” she says. Hitting rock bottom revealed a new way forward: She rid her life of toxic relationships, quit social media, and vowed to trust her gut on album three. Flanked by two of her most trusted collaborators and friends—pop hitmakers Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter—Gomez, now 27, wrote *Rare*, her third solo LP and a well-earned fresh start. The project’s back-to-back lead singles—the gutting ballad “Lose You to Love Me” and the more celebratory “Look at Her Now”—effectively bookend the highs and lows of Gomez’s adolescence and trace her journey through recovery. “Took a few years to soak up the tears/But look at her now/Watch her go,” she sings on the latter. From then on, it’s all about release: Gomez spends the rest of *Rare* relishing the joy and lightness found in finally moving on. “I kickstart the rhythm/All the drama’s in remission,” she coos on the sultry club cut “Dance Again,” which casts her newfound independence as a strobe-lit night out. “I’m high off the weight off of my shoulders.” On “Fun,” she pokes fun at her health struggles by turning them into come-ons (“My kind of trouble likes your kind of trouble,” she sings to a love interest who keeps her “higher than the medication”), flipping a perceived weakness into a power source. Crucially, *Rare* is more about self-love than anything—or anyone—else. Marked by playful, exuberant production and thoughtful assists from 6LACK and Kid Cudi, it feels confident, optimistic, and free—as if Gomez is seeing the world with fresh eyes. She may be, but the album’s power is rooted in how far she’s come. Listen to songs like “Let Me Get Me” and “Cut You Off” and find an artist who is older, wiser, stronger, and all grown up.

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

“My language for producing music is way more diverse now and allows me to create different-sounding music,” Yaeji tells Apple Music. With her mesmerizing voice and chill vibe, the New York (by way of South Korea) DJ, producer, and multimedia artist Kathy Yaeji Lee is a unique presence in dance music. Her songs are celebratory yet meditative—influenced by house, R&B, and hip-hop. They’re reflective of her dual heritage and intercontinental mindset, ranging from stunt anthems (“raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on”) to her lowercased cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit.” Recorded before inking a deal with XL (the home to Tyler, The Creator and other sonic misfits), *WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던* is a personal and intimate mixtape she likens to a musical diary. Sung-spoken in whispery tones in English and Korean, Yaeji’s observations are sharp, whether yearning for stillness (“IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로”), indulging in simple pleasures (“WAKING UP DOWN,” “MONEY CAN’T BUY”), or getting in her feelings (“WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던,” “IN THE MIRROR 거울”). It also represents a time when she soaked up new production techniques and was inspired by 2000s bossanova-influenced electronica, ’80s-’90s Korean music (curated by her parents, who live outside of Seoul), R&B, and soul. Below Yaeji walks through each song on her mixtape. “Every track is a bit different,” she says “I really hope it brings a little bit of positivity.” **MY IMAGINATION 상상** “I wrote it with the intention of warming people up to what I do. I repeat a lot in this song in Korean: ‘If you follow me in this moment I chose, right in this moment.’ And I repeat ‘my imagination’ over and over in Korean. I wanted it to feel really smooth and continuous, almost cyclical, but in a way that felt relaxing. It’s a way to ease you into the next song, which is quite emotional for me.” **WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던** “It’s one of the older songs on the mixtape. It was written at a very emotional time, when I was going through a lot of transitions and growing pains. In the midst of all that darkness, I was able to stay positive because of family around me. I think that notion of family and unconditional love is so Korean to me. Thinking of Korea gets me very emotional. My dad messaged \[himself scatting\] to me on KakaoTalk \[a Korean messaging app\] a year and a half ago. He said, ‘I have a song idea for you. Use it if it helps you in any way.’ When I finished up the mixtape, I realized it would be so perfect and meaningful for the track, so I added it in.” **IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로** “It was written around the time me and my friends were watching a video of Stevie Wonder performing live with a talk box \[a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ on *The David Frost Show* in 1972\]. We were listening to that a lot and it was stuck in my head. I loved how the talk box sounded; it’s so warm and fuzzy, his performance is so playful. It also has such a robotic quality. I wanted to create this feeling but using a completely different technique. I layered nine different vocal tracks to create that harmony you hear in the intro. It affected each layer differently and holds a similar feeling that I received when I heard Stevie Wonder. Emotionally, it was written when I didn’t want things to change. Just for a moment, I wanted things to stay still. It’s about yearning for stillness.” **WHEN I GROW UP** “It’s an idea I’ve been settling and meditating on for a long time. It’s the concept of a younger me, or a younger person, imagining what it’s like to become an adult. There’s another perspective in the song where it’s me, the adult version of myself, telling my younger self: ‘Unfortunately, when you grow older, you’re fearful for a lot of things. You don’t want to get hurt. You suppress your emotions and pretend like everything is OK.’ All these things I had no idea would happen when I was younger; it’s my reality, our reality, as adults. It’s a kind of back and forth about that.” **MONEY CAN’T BUY (feat. Nappy Nina)** “It’s the really playful one. It’s purely about friendship and being goofy and positive. The thing I repeat in Korean: ‘What I want to do is eat rice and soup.’ It’s pretty common for me. I’ll put the rice in the soup and mix it up, so it becomes like a porridge. I’m repeating that and it’s followed by ‘What I want, money can’t buy.’ Friendship isn’t something that’s quantifiable or measurable with materialism. It’s completely magical and far more special than what can be described. It’s like an appreciation song for friendship. It’s kind of perfect that Nappy Nina was featured on it. I had met her last minute. She’s a friend of my mixing engineer. She came in and recorded immediately; we realized we had mutual friends, so now we keep in touch. That lends itself well to the message of the song.” **FREE INTERLUDE (feat. Lil Fayo, Trenchcoat & Sweet Pea)** “It felt really liberating to include this in the mixtape. It was a completely natural, goofy hang with my friends. We were having fun making music together, kind of first takes of freestyles. The spirit of our hang and our friendship is really in that track. It’s a very meaningful one for me.” **SPELL 주문 (feat. YonYon & G.L.A.M.)** “It was a joy to put together. It started as a bare-bones demo that I had lyrics to. When I was writing it, I was thinking of the experience of performing onstage to a sea of people that you’ve never met before and sharing your most intimate thoughts and experiences. It’s casting a spell; you’re sharing something that only you know, and then they’re applying it in whatever way it means for themselves. I thought of YonYon because we went to the same middle school in Japan when I was living there for one year. We’ve stayed in touch since, and she’s doing great with music in Japan, so she’s always on my mind to collaborate, and this felt perfect. G.L.A.M. is a close friend of a friend. I had also played shows with her a long time ago when I moved to New York, so I thought she was also another perfect collaborator.” **WAKING UP DOWN** “Purely a feel-good song. There’s a moment of questioning and hesitation. The Korean verses embody that side of it. The parts in English are about the feeling I had when I had all of these basic life routines down and felt healthy, mentally and physically. It’s a song to groove to and hopefully feel inspired by. And also, not to get too wrapped up in the literal things: cooking, waking up, hydrating. Yes, it’s important, but the Korean lyrics remind you: Don’t forget, there are these bigger themes in life you have to think about.” **IN THE MIRROR 거울** “It’s the dramatic one. I really wanted to try singing in a way that feels like I’m unleashing pent-up energy. It was written after a difficult tour that mentally and physically stretched me quite thin. It came from a thought I had while I was looking in the mirror in the airplane bathroom. I think being up in the air makes you more emotional. I don’t know how true that is, but I definitely feel that way. I was really in my feelings and really upset.” **THE TH1NG (feat. Victoria Sin & Shy One)** “I want to credit Vic and Shy because I knew I wanted to work with them. I sent them a pretty bare-bones demo, just synth and samples. They’re partners and based in London. Vic is an incredible performing artist and Shy is an incredible DJ. Vic came up with all of the lyrics and vocals. They wrote it on their birthday, stayed at home alone in their bedroom, surrounded themselves with plants, meditated, and had an introspective stream of consciousness of what is this ‘TH1NG.’ It sounds really abstract, but they explore the concept. Shy did a lot of the production on it and built on the little things I sent them.” **THESE DAYS 요즘** “Do you know the \[anime\] genre Slice of Life? It feels like a Slice of Life song, which is, the way I understand it, it’s mundane day-to-day lifestyle about meditating on time. I would visually describe it as feeling like sitting on a stoop with your friends on a nice fall afternoon sharing stories with each other about how you’re doing. That kind of feeling. It’s not overly dramatic or purposeful; it’s a mood.” **NEVER SETTLING DOWN** “It’s a song about making a determined promise to myself to never settle. I should always stay open-minded, to continue unlearning and learning things, to shed things that felt toxic to me in the past. I say things like ‘I’m never shooting the shit,’ which is a balance of not taking myself too seriously but also that I’m not playing, I’m working every day. It’s a confident track, and I hope it brings confidence to other people that hear it. At the end, the breaks come in, and it feels like a big release, like a moment where you’re taking flight or dancing like crazy, alone in your room. That’s how I wanted to end the mixtape.”