Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2021 So Far

Long gone are the days of “Potential Breakup Song.” On their first full-length LP in 14 years, sisters Aly & AJ Michalka, beloved in the mid-2000s for their Disney-brand teenage pop-rock, have grown up. First came the EPs: 2017’s *Ten Years* and 2019’s *Sanctuary*, a new era for the duo defined by a masterful understanding of ’80s-indebted synth-pop. Now they’ve looked back even further, pulling from ’60s and ’70s rock to craft their own kind of modern classics. “We set out to make a West Coast album—this California energy,” Aly tells Apple Music. “Hopefully it gets people feeling good about the state of the world again.” “This is a self-help record,” adds AJ. “We love it.” There are pleasures to be found, from the Americana road-trip opener “Pretty Places” and the big pop drum fills of “Paradise” to the romanticism of “Slow Dancing” and the album’s surprising collaborations, including Heart’s Nancy Wilson and Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum on the sunny-sounding “Listen!!!” and Melissa Etheridge on closer “Hold Out.” Below, Aly & AJ break down their album, track by track. **“Pretty Places”** AJ: “It’s an anthem for the open road. It\'s one of the first songs that helped steer the direction of this album, and I really feel like this is a song that we\'ll look back on for many years to come and feel very proud that we wrote this. You don\'t feel that way all the time with your own music. It’s nice to feel that confidence.” **“Lost Cause”** Aly: “The thing that I really love about this song is AJ’s stacked harmonies on the verses. And then that breakdown bridge lyric is really moving to me: ‘Maybe it\'s just come to an end/Don\'t need to bring us back from the dead/Maybe it just ran its course/And trying too hard only makes it worse.’ It feels so true to those moments when you know you\'ve given it your all, but it\'s dead. It\'s over.” **“Break Yourself”** AJ: “The drums were layered three times over, so everything you hear is stacked. And we promised each other there\'s got to be a horn section at the end, and extended it out. That became one of my favorite parts on the entire record.” **“Slow Dancing”** AJ: “It\'s one of the older ones, along with \'Pretty Places.\' Originally, it was an ’80s-inspired synth-pop tune. Then we flipped it upside down. It\'s midtempo—the pandemic love song of the record.” Aly: “We knew we were going to release a lot of singles, because we felt like there were so many good songs that we wanted them to have their moment. By choosing \'Slow Dancing,\' it felt like, \'We\'re going to ease you into this, and make you slow-dance in your living room.\'” **“Paradise”** Aly: “There\'s this fantastic quote from Henry Miller\'s book *Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch* that inspired the meaning of this song. Basically, it is about the yearning of wanting paradise, but not being brave enough to stay once you\'ve actually reached it. It’s based on how visitors coming out to Big Sur don\'t really have the courage to live out a life of paradise. They go back to their own life once they\'ve been out there for a few days—where paradise is actually achievable. Paradise is tangible, we just are never brave enough to actually live it.” **“Symptom of Your Touch”** AJ: “The combination of analog synths, guitars, live drums, cello, violin, electric violin—the song has a classic feeling, but it still feels like a modern pop song. It is really hard to achieve that balance.” Aly: “This song is a great pairing with ‘Paradise.’ I also like the subject matter of it: It\'s like knowing that you\'re just doomed if you meet up and see this person, because every single time you better fall back in with them. It is toxic.” **“Lucky to Get Him”** AJ: “It’s hard to convey advice in a song, because it can come out cheesy. I like to think that this song is a character piece, because it\'s about guiding a friend. We joke that this song feels like Dolly Parton speaking to a young version of herself about what she would do differently, romantically, if she could go back in time. And so this is our Dolly Parton advice song.” **“Listen!!!”** Aly: “We’ve known Nancy \[Wilson\] for over 10 years. We’re huge fans. We sent her this song and a couple of others. She came back with these great parts, and we were super honored that she could be a part of this. And then with Jack \[Tatum\], he made the song a little bit weirder and off-sounding, which I loved.” **“Don’t Need Nothing”** Aly: “This song was written in Denver in the winter of 2019. We took the album title from the chorus lyrics. It felt like this was the pinnacle song of the record. It sums up the message, too: It’s a song with a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a response to anguish and the fact that we feel like we need so many things in life. We need our friends, our family, and the things that truly make us happy, which usually aren\'t physical possessions. It\'s usually experiences.” **“Stomach”** AJ: “We, miraculously, wrote this song entirely over Zoom in May of 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak, with our really good friend Olen Kittelsen from a band called Armors. This song hurts when you listen to it, because I think the lyrics are devastating. But funnily enough, Aly\'s husband wrote the line \'I just can’t stomach being your ex-wife,\' and they have a great relationship. It’s not reflective of them, but we\'re children of divorce. The song weaves in and out, but it doesn\'t just put you in this horrible rut. There’s hope around the corner.” **“Personal Cathedrals”** AJ: “We wanted to write a song that completely captured the feeling of Aly and I having to go to an event that we don\'t want to be at. We tend to become two wallflowers at parties in Hollywood, even though we\'re very outgoing people. We end up ordering a drink and standing in a corner with each other. That first chord you hear immediately brings you into that uncomfortable space.” **“Hold Out”** Aly: “It’s the one true ballad on the album. AJ and I are not big ballad writers, and I don\'t tend to gravitate towards straight-up ballads either, so we set out to write a ballad that we were really proud of. To me, \'Hold Out\' really encapsulates the importance of asking for help when you need it the most, and not being ashamed of that. Melissa Etheridge etched the final notes of this outro with her incredible guitar playing, just adding that perfect element to the song.”

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

For Ashnikko, the title of her debut mixtape, *DEMIDEVIL*, represents what she calls a “duality.” “There’s a side that’s a little bit more vulnerable and human,” the singer and rapper tells Apple Music. “And then there’s a devil side that\'s very tough and doesn\'t give a shit. It’s just confidence and sadness—I can’t do anything else.” It’s a neat summation of what you can expect from the 10 tracks here. There’s all the indestructibility seen on the viral hits that set Ashnikko up as a provocative new pop force—from 2019’s ex-eviscerating TikTok smash “STUPID” to 2020’s just-as-inescapable “Daisy.” But, set against her dizzyingly genre-evasive mash-up of pop, punk, and rap, the North Carolina-born artist also embraces that sadness, as she allows herself to be vulnerable in her music for the first time. “The character I’ve placed at the forefront of my music is very confident and strong, and I’m more confident now because of those songs,” says Ashnikko, real name Ashton Nicole Casey. “But it’s impossible to sustain without lying to yourself. Like all humans, I am flawed and I like to cry.” But if any of that sounds like Ashnikko’s empowering, unfiltered, and sex-positive energy has diminished, think again. On *DEMIDEVIL*, she continues to admonish toxic men and those yet to learn their way around a woman’s body (see the hilarious “Clitoris! The Musical”), all while championing female pleasure in her mission, as she puts it, to create “the opposite of the male gaze.” Buckle up as Ashnikko talks us through *DEMIDEVIL*, track by track. **Daisy** “When \[British producer\] Thomas Slinger and I wrote this, we were like, ‘This is a fucking banger. This is a hit.’ I rarely feel that way about my music. I like to have something visual to go along with the lyrics, like a character that I\'m tapping into. Here I have Daisy, who is a vigilante and who wears latex, blue diamonds, and massive, clear, icy platforms. She smashes the patriarchy and kills horrible men—think the Trump dudes of America. She looks amazing, and she leaves behind a daisy as a calling card.” **Toxic** “As a woman in music, I have definitely encountered a lot of toxic men. I always find it really difficult when people, especially men, are like, ‘I made you who you are.’ It\'s like, ‘No, actually, I worked extremely hard and you helped me with a lot of things, but I made this music.’ The unnamed man this song is about knows who he is—and he should feel bad. There are some songs that are very cathartic, and this is definitely one of them. It’s my power anthem, which is why the bass is extremely heavy. I wanted it to feel like a smack in the face.” **Deal With It (feat. Kelis)** “Kelis’ ‘Caught Out There’ is one of my favorite songs in the entire world, and I’m blown away that we got this cleared, let alone her wanting her name next to it. This is my breakup song—it wouldn’t be an Ashnikko project without one. It’s about choosing yourself, because that’s the best way to get through a breakup. Get some new sex toys, invest in yourself, learn something new, cut all your hair off if you want. Manifest your dreams, baby. This song is quite poppy. I\'m a pop girlie at the end of the day, and that\'s a side to me that I felt was very important to put on this mixtape.” **Slumber Party (feat. Princess Nokia)** “I love Princess Nokia and I\'ve been listening to her since she first started putting out music as Wavy Spice. She\'s just very unapologetically herself, and I really fuck with that. There’s an element of this song that plays on some sapphic tropes in pop music, like the ‘I Kissed a Girl’ tropes. I was kind of poking fun at it a little bit in the chorus, and then completely flipping it on its head in the verses. It’s about a girl who hurt my feelings. I always get in very messy relationship situations with taken women. The lyric is ‘She looks like the type to break it.’ Because I\'m very confident, but also I always get my heart broken.” **Drunk With My Friends** “I had a really wild few months of raving a lot, going to a lot of techno parties, and three-way kissing loads of people. And I remember spending my rent money on pills… I was in Berlin, so can you blame me? I\'m not really into it anymore because I truly can\'t do drugs—I have a mind that already sits on the precipice of disaster on any given day—so I have to sober rave. I wrote this song with \[London-based producer\] Oscar Scheller, who’s one of my best pals. We had a lot of fun writing this song.” **Little Boy** “I was dealing with some very toxic men in the music industry and toxic boys in my life and was just like, ‘I\'m over it. Don\'t treat me like shit anymore. I literally will not tolerate it.’ I was understanding what boundaries were. There’s sadness here, for sure, and I think a real disappointment with men. It\'s less ‘Go fuck yourself’ and more like ‘Please stop placing your emotional trauma onto me and just pay for therapy.’ I think the people who listen to my music will appreciate the vulnerability. It\'s very important to me that people understand that it\'s not all confidence.” **Cry (feat. Grimes)** “The context of this song is that I had a really heartbreaking moment when I was 19, when my best friend and boyfriend got together behind my back. I had just moved to London and they were my two family members. I was so sad—more with her because she was my best friend, and there\'s a certain code in friendship that shouldn’t be breached. With my boyfriend, it was like, ‘You’re a shithead, but that’s to be expected, I guess.’ I recognize that was a very problematic way of dealing with it. But I was so mad at her, to a point where I was just like, ‘We could have fought.’ I was broken. Grimes is a huge inspiration to me. I saw she followed me on Instagram and I just immediately was like, ‘Please feature on this song, I love you so much.’ And she said yes! It all happens over Instagram.” **L8r Boi** “When I was younger, I thought Avril Lavigne was a bad bitch. I knew I wanted to flip an Avril song, and when we looked at the lyrics of ‘Sk8er Boi,’ I was like, ‘Love Avril, love everything about her, but the lyrics are a bit problematic!’ Because it\'s mainly about ‘Fuck this girl. She doesn\'t appreciate my man. Fuck this girl for being into ballet.’ I wanted to update it a little bit and make it about not wanting skater boy. He\'s not the prized object in this song, whereas in the original he is.” **Good While It Lasted** “My serious song. It\'s reflecting on a relationship and being like, ‘I see now that maybe we both acted immature, and maybe I\'m not quite as blameless as I make out.’ I think it\'s a more mature approach. My favorite part is the first verse. It was a day when I was feeling really sad and very broken and it came from a really real place. It’s extremely raw and I just felt like it needed to be included because it meant a lot to me. All of my stuff is a therapy session. I\'m just bringing everyone along for a very public therapy session.” **Clitoris! The Musical”** “Putting this song next to ‘Good While It Lasted’ was a little joke of mine. Because I can’t be serious. It’s like, ‘I\'m serious, I\'m vulnerable, but also JK, I\'m not!’ This song was a skit that I wrote for my YouTube channel where I dressed up as a vagina and my face was the clitoris. I thought it was hilarious. I\'ve written a lot of songs about the cis-het man\'s journey to find the clitoris, because for some reason it’s some elusive mystery land. This song is really my little sex-education tidbit. I’m just trying to pay forward what I’ve learned.”

In 2019, BROCKHAMPTON delivered one of their most commercially successful singles in “SUGAR,” a cut from their fifth album, *GINGER*. They were riding high on the wave of its momentum when the pandemic hit, sending the band\'s members into their own bubbles of isolation even as they remained productive, releasing a handful of singles and video content. The fruits of their labor culminate with *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE*, which brims with both the political and personal tension of the time and stands out as their most clear-eyed and collaborative release to date. In addition to consulting with legendary producers RZA and Rick Rubin, the band finds complementary counterparts in rappers like Danny Brown (“BUZZCUT”) and JPEGMAFIA (“CHAIN ON”), with whom they share a similar kind of eccentric creativity. On their own, though, the sprawling group is flush with a multitude of talent that they thoughtfully showcase without sacrificing cohesion. Decidedly roused and rap-oriented tracks like “WINDOWS” and “DON\'T SHOOT UP THE PARTY” slot nicely alongside more soulful, R&B-leaning songs like “I\'LL TAKE YOU ON” and the gorgeously somber “DEAR LORD.” Together, they make a multihued collage that embodies the spirited fluidity of BROCKHAMPTON. Ahead of its release, Kevin Abstract announced on Twitter that *ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE* would be the band\'s penultimate album. If that proves true, with this release, they will exit having left few stones unturned—evolution is an infinite process, but BROCKHAMPTON\'s (near) final form still resembles actualization.

\"I kind of take you through the journey and show you that even if you have struggles or whatnot, you can get to the other side, and it\'s okay,\" the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. \"And life is meant to kind of twist and turn and sometimes surprise us.\" At age 29, Carly Pearce had a year full of milestones—some good, others less so. Her star was rising as a country singer-songwriter, but she also went through a painful divorce and lost a close friend and collaborator when beloved producer busbee died at age 43. The seven-track *29* EP, which comes on the heels of 2020\'s *Carly Pearce*, chronicles not just the events of that year but the lessons that it taught Pearce, many of which she hopes to pass on to her listeners. Opener \"Next Girl\" channels one of Pearce\'s idols, Patty Loveless, for an anthem about moving on. \"Should\'ve Known Better\" grapples with hindsight and accountability with frank compassion. And the title track challenges conventional notions of what one is supposed to achieve by the end of their twenties, reminding listeners that it\'s okay to take a unique path. Below, Pearce walks Apple Music through each of *29*\'s cathartic songs. **Next Girl** \"\'Next Girl\' was such a turning point for me, as far as just really stepping into the kind of country music that I always wanted to make. I grew up on Patty Loveless and Lee Ann Womack and Faith Hill and all of those ladies that I feel did that kind of rootsy, unapologetic female anthem so well. And it was so awesome to hear the way that we just really brought to life all of those influences that I loved. And it\'s just kind of what, to me, Patty Loveless\' \'Blame It on Your Heart\' would be in 2021.\" **Should’ve Known Better** \"That one I actually wrote with two of my dearest friends in the industry, and it came from just a really honest, vulnerable place of trying to not assign blame for things that maybe you overlooked. And I think that that song in particular was kind of my quest, to try to not do that to myself, but I hadn\'t quite allowed myself to forgive myself for that. I think we all have moments of that.\" **29** \"I\'ve played \'29\' for some of my friends, and they\'re very similarly saying to me, \'We know this is your story, but I hear myself in this.\' And I think that\'s just kind of the universal message of why I named the collection *29*, which I feel like is a pivotal year for people. You are old enough to know better, but you still have wonder, and you\'re still excited about life, but maybe things in life didn\'t turn out exactly as you thought that they might. And you kind of feel like, \'Oh my goodness, am I running out of time? Because I feel old now.\' And for me, 29 was a huge year. I lost a lot of things. I lost my producer, and I also clearly went through a super painful divorce and never thought that was going to be a part of my story.\" **Liability** \"I had that idea, the double meaning of liability, and it was kind of one of those moments where you go, \'This is either really awesome or really stupid.\' My favorite line in that song is \'The truth about a lie is it ain\'t never made to last,\' and I think that\'s true in all things in life, and not just in the relationship world, but also the lies that we tell ourselves. And I think there\'s a lot of things that I had to silence my inner voice on, in my process of writing this album, of just that thing—we\'re not always nice to ourselves.\" **Messy** \"Going through a divorce during quarantine was not pleasant. But, kind of like piggybacking on what I just said about not being good to ourselves, I think that song was me wanting people to know that when you\'re going through something difficult, you\'re going to have moments where you think you\'re fine. I think, especially in our society today—certainly in my position of being somebody in the public eye—you want to act like you\'re perfect. And I think this song was me telling myself, and also hopefully telling others, that it\'s okay to not be okay. And that you need to love yourself and love the process of grief.\" **Show Me Around** \"I flew out to busbee\'s funeral the week after I got married, and Barry Dean, who\'s a writer that just is so poetic, he started speaking of heaven like Disneyland and said that he felt like busbee was finding all of the special parts to show his daughters and his wife and all of us when we got there. And I wrote \'Show Me Around\' in my phone. And faith is a really big part of my life and it was a big part of busbee\'s, and so I had no doubt that he was in heaven and I had no doubt that this was the right messaging for him. I took it to two of his very close friends, and we wrote it and it\'s kind of taken on its own little life for other people. And I hope that it just brings people hope that loss can be something that\'s kind of bittersweet and they live on and you\'ll see them again.\" **Day One** \"Shane \[McAnally\] and Josh \[Osborne\] actually had started that idea with Matt Ramsey from Old Dominion, and they were like, \'Man, we just could never figure out what it was missing, but it was never quite right.\' You feel like there is no way you\'re ever going to get over this person, but if you can just make it through the first day, you\'re on the right track. And this song just kind of takes you through that time of trying to realize if you can just take that first step, all these other things are going to happen.\"

Songs of faith have long been part of Carrie Underwood’s live repertoire, frequently making their way into the country superstar’s touring sets and special appearances. With *My Savior*, Underwood releases her first studio gospel album, pulling together 13 of her favorite hymns and faith-based songs and reimagining them as her own. Tracks include spiritual staples like “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” as well as reprisals of some of Underwood’s best-loved live performances, like a studio version of “Softly and Tenderly,” which she famously performed at the 2017 CMA Awards following the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting. Underwood co-produced *My Savior* with David Garcia, a Dove Award-winning songwriter and producer who also co-produced Underwood’s 2018 LP *Cry Pretty*. Gospel legend CeCe Winans joins Underwood on \"Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” lending her widely beloved voice to the hymn’s second verse. Across *My Savior*, Underwood, who also arranged each song, explores a number of musical styles, showing that her reach extends far beyond country music. Below, Underwood walks Apple Music through several of the album’s key tracks. **Jesus Loves Me; Nothing but the Blood of Jesus** “‘Jesus Loves Me’ is one of the first songs I remember singing as a little girl, and now my own kids love to sing it. It’s just pure and simple and sweet, and felt like the perfect way to introduce this album, with the legendary Buddy Greene on harmonica. ‘Nothing but the Blood of Jesus’ is another song that is really special to me. It’s traditionally a bit slow, but my co-producer David Garcia and I wanted to give it some tempo and movement. From the moment we decided to record it for the album, we heard Bear \[Rinehart\]’s voice on it. The fact that we actually got to have his voice on harmonies is a thrill for me.” **Great Is Thy Faithfulness (feat. CeCe Winans)** “CeCe is simply gospel royalty. Her voice is a gift from God and she is like a ray of sunshine when she walks into the room. The message of ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’ is so powerful, and you can tell CeCe means every word when she sings it. Getting to have her on this album and getting to spend time with her is just magical.” **How Great Thou Art** “This was an easy choice for me; I knew it had to be included on this album. It’s one of my favorite hymns and has so much personal history for me, getting to perform it with Vince \[Gill\] years ago and then to revisit it now.” **The Old Rugged Cross** “When I think of ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ I can hear certain people that I can remember singing with in church when I was young. It’s another beautiful traditional song that I sing to my boys.” **Softly and Tenderly** “I sang ‘Softly and Tenderly’ on the \[2017\] CMA Awards for the ‘In Memoriam’ segment, and it was a very emotional moment in the show. I think it brought a lot of healing into the room that night, and I hope it will continue to bring peace to people who need it.” **Amazing Grace** “I almost didn’t include ‘Amazing Grace,’ because it’s a song that so many people have recorded. When we were picking the final songs, my co-producer David Garcia asked me if there was anything I thought people would be disappointed by or miss if I didn’t do it, and there was my answer. It’s special. There’s a reason people continue to record it after all these years.”

The K-pop innovator finds peace of mind with global pop.

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

Longtime fans of Drakeo the Ruler know that the Los Angeles MC doesn’t need much to create an album. He made his breakthrough project, 2017’s *Cold Devil*, over the course of 10 days following an 11-month jail stint stemming from a gun charge. The acclaimed *Thank You for Using GTL* mixtape was recorded entirely over the phone—by way of the tape’s namesake collect-call service—while Drakeo was held at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. Just a month after being released from that same jail sentence, Drakeo delivered *We Know the Truth*. The synergy of *The Truth Hurts*, which arrived some two months after *We Know the Truth*, should come as little surprise to those who know how the MC works. The unflinching menace of Drakeo projects past is fully intact across *The Truth Hurts*, the Ruler confessing that he’s in “war mode” as soon as “Intro,” threatening—among more conventional methods of attack—to pull his enemies’ teeth out with pliers. On “10” he tells us, “I grab Jenny from the block, we finna slow dance/This nina kiss a n\*\*\*a when it’s time to romance.” Drakeo’s unique sense of humor is ever-present and immediately recognizable here in the form of song titles like “It’s Sum Shit on Me,” “Engineer Scared” (as in “we got the engineer scared”), and “Pow Right in the Kisser,” where every bar is punctuated by that refrain. For beats, he’s tapped the handful of producers defining the sound of contemporary Los Angeles street rap (RonRonTheProducer, Thank You Fizzle, LowTheGreat), along with names like Wheezy, Bankroll Got It, and Duse Beatz. By the time Drake pops up for “Talk to Me,” the voice we’ve heard the most outside of Drakeo’s is that of fallen comrade Ketchy the Great, showing us that as his star rises ever higher, his priority remains the brothers who didn’t make it far enough to experience the acclaim.

In the five years between Shelley FKA DRAM\'s debut album, *Big Baby DRAM*, and its follow-up, *Shelley FKA DRAM*, the singer ascended through music\'s ranks (and the charts, thanks to smash hit “Broccoli”) with a radiant smile and a preternatural knack for levity in song, and then seemingly left as quickly as he\'d arrived. His rise also set off his spiral as he battled through addiction, largely going quiet after 2018, before getting sober in 2020. His rebrand from DRAM to Shelley was, at least in part, an effort to separate the bubbly demeanor that became his staple from the sensual lover that steers *Shelley FKA DRAM*. To that end, much of what has always made Shelley compelling remains intact here: His vocals are agile and opulent, slipping easily between buttery tones (as on “Something About Us”) and soaring falsettos (as on “Married Woman”), while his personality shines in moments of playful flirtation and earnest romance that especially come to life on the album\'s duets. There\'s a lushness to the instrumentation and arrangements that allows him to shine as not only a singer but a showman. The pacing of songs like “Exposure” or “Beautiful” has the improvisational feel of both a pulpit and a jazz lounge; others have spoken intros and outros as if recorded straight from the stage. It all combines to create an at once modern yet old-school collection—little innuendo is shrouded in abstraction, but he has a winking charm that calls to mind male R&B singers of the \'80s, whose ways of melding genuine sex appeal and lighthearted banter captured the era. It\'s a niche that few of his peers are capable of inhabiting (and certainly not with such conviction), and on *Shelley FKA DRAM*, he emphasizes the sublime style that\'s always been behind the smile.

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”

Eric Church’s *Heart & Soul* was the most ambitious work of the country star’s career—a triple album showing off his depth, versatility, and chameleonic nature as an artist. Originally a fan club exclusive, the six songs making up *&* complete the trilogy, rounding out what was already an impressive showing from the Chief. *&* opens with “Through My Ray-Bans,” an emotive, image-rich illustration of how Church sees the world. “Do Side” is a slinky, stuttering jam session, sure to become a staple of Church’s fiery live shows. “Mad Man” is a breakup song as only Church could write one, with lines like “His thumbs-up has been grounded/Now it’s that bird he loves to fly.” Closer “Lone Wolf” caps off the record in grand fashion, complete with a gospel choir and one of Church’s finest vocal performances.

“I guarantee that most musicians have that groove or that vibe somewhere within them,” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl tells Apple Music of the funk and disco rhythms that course through his band’s 10th LP. “They just may have never found the right time or place to let it out.” Recorded before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, *Medicine At Midnight* is very much the sound of Grohl letting it out—a round of fleet-footed party rock inspired, in part, by ABBA, Prince, and David Bowie’s *Let’s Dance*, the 1983 Nile Rodgers-produced classic whose drummer, Omar Hakim, contributes percussion on several tracks here. Without breaking entirely from their highly reliable brand of stadium-ready slow burns (“Waiting on a War”) and riffy joyrides (“Love Dies Young”), the Foos make space for cowbell (“Cloudspotter”) and calls from the dance floor (the soulful title cut), handclaps and *na-na-na*s (“Making a Fire”). It’s a change that should probably come as no surprise. “I’m a drummer,” Grohl says. “I explained one time to Pharrell: ‘If you listen to *Nevermind*, those are disco beats, dude.’ If you’ve been in a band for a long time, you get comfortable in that place that people are familiar with. In some sort of attempt at longevity, you just have to be able to reach out and try things you’ve never done before.”

Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”

GIVĒON says his quest to transform pain into something beautiful began with the music his mom would play while he was growing up—what he calls “Black woman heartbreak.” That included the stricken songs of Anita Baker, Mary J. Blige, and, later, Keyshia Cole. “I think that that rubbed off on me, and that\'s kind of my approach towards things at this point,” the singer tells Apple Music. *When It\'s All Said and Done... Take Time*, which combines his two previous releases and adds the gorgeous “All to Me,” is a page from that book. His voice is singular—vintage, fragile, wrenching—and he astutely chooses production that showcases it with ease. The project\'s first half, *TAKE TIME*, is a tapestry of grooves slinking towards the engulfing crawl of the back end. “Heartbreak Anniversary” is largely piano and percussion, and he soars over it, creating harmonies with himself that render a simple line like \"Don\'t want to let you out my head\" as gospel. “Like I Want You” pulls off a similar trick to create the kind of love song that sounds like it could exist in any era; some voices can be time-travelers. The bittersweet ballad “Vanish” tiptoes along a minimal melodic line, allowing the force of his vocals to propel the song forward and draw listeners into the rollercoaster of feels that make up the back. *When It\'s All Said and Done* maps the stages of a breakup through prideful posturing and palpable sorrow. By the time “Stuck on You” arrives, he sounds downright desperate in his anguish, accomplishing precisely what he set out to do—the sorrow of the lyrics combined with the aching in his tone bloom into radiance. “I kind of wanted it to be a little more elevated, because my voice is better now and I have a better understanding of what it is exactly that I want,” he says of the later songs. “I just wanted it to be a sense of an evolution, to see me growing slowly as an artist.” And with “All to Me,” a sexy stunner of a track that concludes in a bit of an emotional gray area, GIVĒON leaves us both fully satisfied and hungry for more.

For athletes of both the professional and amateur ranks, the time between seasons is an opportunity to recuperate and to sharpen their tool set for the next run. Superstar MC J. Cole, whose career has long been informed by both basketball metaphor and actual basketball playing (in May 2021, ESPN reported that Cole had joined the Basketball Africa League\'s Rwanda Patriots BBC), has crafted his *The Off-Season* mixtape in the same mold, affirming that if he’s done anything in the time since 2018’s *KOD* album, it’s get even better at what he does. The 12-track tape is at once a testament to his actual rhyme skill and the reverence he’s earned within hip-hop. He’s sourced production from Boi-1da, Timbaland, Jake One, and T-Minus, among others, and has words—but not verses—from Cam’ron, Damian Lillard, and a man he admits to having once had an actual physical alteration with, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. Though he takes time to shout out both Chief Keef and Dave East—conspicuously opposite forces in the realm of contemporary rap—proper features here come from fellow Fayetteville native Morray and “a lot” collaborator 21 Savage. Over the course of his career, Cole’s been known as something of a lone wolf—J CoLe wEnT pLaTiNuM WiTh nO fEaTuReS. But in the scope of the energy we get from him on *The Off-Season*, it’s less likely that he’s been avoiding other rappers than that he\'s just left them all behind.

Marfa, Texas, has played host to countless artists over the years, musical and otherwise. The storied West Texas town is known as much for its vast collection of fine arts as its famed Marfa lights, making it a popular destination for anyone in need of a bit of cosmic inspiration. For Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall, Marfa offered the perfect setting for songwriting retreats, so much so that the trio returned for repeat visits over the last few years. “Jon had been preaching Marfa to us for a long time and telling us how magical it was,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “We\'re all from Texas, but that\'s like a whole other state in itself over there in that area. That was the first time we\'d ever written as a trio even though we had been friends forever. It was instant chemistry, for sure.” *The Marfa Tapes* captures the magic the trio found across 15 tracks, recorded in just five days using one acoustic guitar and two microphones. Accordingly, the desert itself plays a prominent sonic role in the project, with the occasional breeze or crackle of firewood adding the kind of intimacy that can’t be created in a recording studio. In addition to a number of new and unreleased songs, the collection includes an emotional, stripped-down version of Lambert’s beloved *The Weight of These Wings* song “Tin Man” as well as an acoustic take on *Wildcard*’s “Tequila Does.” Below, the trio offers insight into two of the highlights on *The Marfa Tapes*. **“Ghost”** **Lambert:** “That was one of those moments where I was actually venting. I was telling them two things I had done recently to make myself feel better. Some of that involves burning some clothes that weren\'t mine. That\'s how the ball started rolling.” **Randall:** “We were stuck. We were sitting around a fire, and we were playing the song over and over. It never had that thing, whether it\'s a hook or just someone to make it real. That\'s when she goes, ‘And heaven knows I ain\'t afraid of ghosts.’ I started freaking out. \[Jack\] got up and danced around.” **“Amazing Grace (West Texas)”** **Lambert:** “That was all Jon Randall.” **Ingram:** “Around the mountains, you can see for a hundred miles. We saw this cloud and the storm coming in. You could see it raining and how it just looks gray all the way to the ground. It rolled into the ranch where we stayed, the bunk house. It was just beautiful. That song was just like a soundtrack to what we were seeing and the landscape, just the people and the towns and the cows. It\'s like a soundtrack to our trip.” **Randall:** “I can remember how it felt to be at that table outside writing the song. You become part of your own picture.”

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

If it wasn’t already clear from her soul-baring 2018 debut album *Lost & Found*, then perhaps her 2019 single “Be Honest” made it extra clear: Jorja Smith is, amongst others things, incredibly truthful where her music is concerned. “I was actually going to call this *This Is Not My Second Album*,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music of the EP *Be Right Back*. “Because these are songs that I love and I\'ve written in the past two years, but I\'m not yet ready to do \'the album.\' When it’s time, I want to tour that album. And also: I know that there\'s another level that I can get to—musically, creatively, and all other aspects.” The British singer-songwriter has, of course, previous experience when it comes to non-album material making a splash. Her silky, soulful appearances on Drake’s *More Life* “playlist” are arguably what opened her up to a global audience, while a slew of post-*Lost & Found* collaborations with artists including Brent Faiyaz, Popcaan, and ENNY mean Rihanna-style anticipation for an eventual album two. This eight-track set of evocative ballads—a self-described sonic “waiting room”—finds Smith continuing to thoughtfully navigate her way through a changing world. “Music\'s great,” she says. “It’s a little escape, and that\'s why I gave the project this title. I just wanted to dip in and dip out. But I want it to be a safe escape for my fans—for right now—because I know they miss me.” Perhaps fittingly, then, it’s a striking and spare collection of moods and moments. “Bussdown” is gorgeous: a sultry hookup with UK rapper Shaybo that recalls Smith’s “Blue Lights” in potent storytelling. The bracingly direct “Addicted” glides over guitar licks that wouldn’t be out of place on *In Rainbows*, while “Gone” memorializes the tragic loss of a friend. “Anyone who listens will hear it differently to what it actually means in the first place,” she says of the track. “That’s what I love.” Elsewhere, “Home” feels like chancing on Smith at an open mic night with a diary entry, and “Weekend” brings us to a dreamlike, considered climax. Smith’s falsetto on this track, by the way, has never sounded so angelic. The minimalist makeup of this music—notably trekking free of the soul and jazz borders of *Lost & Found*—hint at fresh, exciting levels to come. After being cued up as the UK’s next R&B/pop powerhouse, *Be Right Back* is the sound of an artist taking a breath before her next play. “I only dropped my first album three years ago,” she says. “And now I’ve been able to take in everything I\'ve done in the last three years. I’m actually able to look at \[plaques and records on\] my walls like, ‘Oh my god, I did this.’ I appreciate everything, but I miss my fans, and I miss \[doing\] shows. The last year and this year has been so tough. I wanted to give them something.”

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

Though his breakout moments came courtesy of the corridos tumbados king Natanael Cano, the Guanajuato-bred Junior H spent much of 2020 making a name for himself on his own terms. The oft moody and brooding songs across *Atrapado en un Sueño*, *Cruisin’ With Junior H*, and *MUSICA* earned him a fanbase more than receptive to his profoundly affecting and emotive variant of the popular new wave of regional Mexican music. *$ad Boyz 4 Life*, a 75-minute journey deep into his sonic universe, is marked by a captivating interplay of singer and musicians, and permeated with a certain sadness. The opening title track sets a tone that carries throughout the record, his distinctly forbidding voice guiding listeners through relatable experiences with a painful sense of knowing. The fatalistic longing he shares on “La Bestia” leaves devastation in its wake, its earnest confessions of love coming too late and in vain. Collaborations are scarce but substantial, with the Marca MP team-up “El Velador” and generational peer Ed Maverick joining for “Por Dentro.” While he successfully reunites here with some of the same skilled songwriters from his prior projects, the album’s most striking moments generally come from those penned by himself, further securing him a future as one of the genre’s most compelling young artists.

On 2020’s *Changes*, the newly married pop star extolled the healing powers of love and faith, serving up sensual, clear-eyed R&B ballads about devotion, commitment, and inner peace. Justin Bieber’s sixth album *Justice* continues that narrative, but finds inspiration in something arguably even more novel for one of the world’s most in-demand pop stars: downtime. Like all of us, Bieber spent 2020 holed up in lockdown, unable to travel or tour due to the global pandemic. But rather than doom-scrolling social media, he embraced the relative quiet: He got rid of his cell phone, dedicated himself to therapy, and cut off work at 6 pm each night to hang out with his wife Hailey. The change proved to be nothing short of transformative, and the resulting songs—a mix of soft-focus romantic reverie that recalls ’80s pop (“Deserve You,” “Anyone”) and reflective, confessional ballads about searching for forgiveness (“Hold On,” “Lonely”)—exude the contentment of someone who’s come out on the other side. Bieber tends to use his marriage as a symbol of all his blessings, but these feel like more than wide-eyed love songs; he could be singing about any number of things—religion, perspective, peace and quiet—that ultimately brought him back from the brink. (In a 2020 documentary, he confessed to having endured a mental health crisis in which he felt, in his words, “really suicidal.”) Now, overflowing with gratitude and modesty, he sounds acutely aware of his good fortune. “Never know when my mind\'s gonna turn on me/But you\'re the one I call for security,” he sings on “Unstable,” a contemplative duet with The Kid LAROI. “Through everything you’ve been my rock/I think you\'re the only thing I didn\'t get wrong.” In track after track of heart-on-sleeve pop songs—with Khalid (“As I Am”), Dominic Fike (“Die for You”), BEAM (“Love You Different”), and Burna Boy (“Loved by You”)—he apologizes for acting selfishly and promises to do better. “I still relive the second I met my biggest blessing,” he sings on “2 Much.” “Prayed for you/And look what God has done.”

“I always say ‘Tusa’ changed my life,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “I will always be grateful to this song and Nicki Minaj.” After outdoing herself with that outstanding 2019 international smash hit, the Colombian star transcends expectations on her new album as she bends contemporary pop music to her will. As previewed via her popular singles “Ay, DiOs Mío!” and “LOCATION,” she continues to astound as one of modern music’s biggest stars, Latin or otherwise. Her commitment to performing in Spanish speaks to how far global artistry such as hers has come since the so-called crossover days. “This has made a huge impact culturally,” she says, “and it makes us so proud that we can sing in Spanish and still reach a massive audience.” Though the album’s title explicitly refers to the date in 2006 when her parents signed her first record contract, itself a subtle nod to her endurance and longevity as an artist, she considers *KG0516* to be about much more than just a particular moment in time. “I wanted to take my fans on a flight through my musical journey,” she explains. “Each song takes you to a different place.” Indeed, the diversity of sound on *KG0516* goes further than that of its fairly eclectic predecessor *OCEAN*, building on that multi-genre affair’s strength by expanding her sonic palette. She dives headfirst into the contemporary corridos scene with “200 COPAS,” embraces reggae vibrations on the empowering “BICHOTA,” and brings it back to a summertime R&B classic with the bilingual “BEAUTIFUL BOY.” Befitting her superstar status, she’s curated an impressive set of features, from Latin power players Anuel AA and J Balvin to hip-hop legend Ludacris. She makes room for rising star Nathy Peluso on the popwise “GATO MALO” and goes toe to toe with no less than Ozuna on the ethereal “ODISEA.” Perhaps the most notable of these guests is the inimitable reggaetonera Ivy Queen, who features prominently on the stacked album closer “LEYENDAS” alongside Nicky Jam and Wisin & Yandel. “She opened the path for future female artists like me in the culture,” Karol says. “She proved that we are not limited, and we can be just as successful as the men.” In turn, she lifts up a young woman from the next generation, Miami sensation Mariah Angeliq, for the thumping “EL MAKINÓN.”

At the end of an eventful year marked by career highs and incalculable personal losses, Lil Durk remains one of the most enduring rappers around. Since breaking out nationally as one of Chicago’s drill stars, he’s dealt with the deaths of brethren while navigating a fickle music industry that hasn’t always recognized his greatness. But his tenacity paid off in 2020 in a big way with the success of his *Just Cause Y’all Waited 2* mixtape and a massive hit in “Laugh Now Cry Later” with Drake. An unexpected Christmas drop, *The Voice* finds the now Atlanta-based rapper at the top of his game yet still battling demons and coming to terms with new tragedies, not the least of which being the passing of King Von. Though a number of the project’s tracks appear to address him, his departed Southside friend makes a posthumous feature on the characteristically hard “Still Trappin\'.” On the reflective “Death Ain’t Easy,” Durk reflects on how far he’s come from the days when he made his breakout hit “Dis Ain’t What U Want” in a basement. He keeps that same energy for “Backdoor,” another shining example of how he sings through his morbid mindset. On the relatively lighter side, Young Thug and 6LACK bless the promiscuous “Stay Down” and its elegant Metro Boomin beat.

“R&B itself is never going to die, and I wanted to shine a light on women because I feel it’s time,” Lucky Daye tells Apple Music of *Table for Two*, which arrived just in time for Valentine’s Day. The EP is brief, but it packs a punch both vocally and emotionally as it explores the ins and outs of romance. For each track, the singer is paired with a female counterpart—Yebba, Tiana Major9, Mahalia, Ari Lennox, Queen Naija, and Joyce Wrice. Together, these women offer a striking snapshot of contemporary R&B’s multitude of voices and tones, and inject a feminine energy into the dialogic nature of the music. Lucky, who says the project was born out of a desire to honor them as well as his love for collaboration in general, brings a balance to the songs that is modern even as it calls up tradition. It’s part of what he sees as a push to restore the genre back to its rightful place as the center. “At the end of the day, everything comes from R&B,” he says. “It can\'t be forgotten, and that\'s my job.” Here, he talks us through how each of the project\'s tracks came about. **Ego Trip** “In my mind, the whole concept behind everything was really futuristic. And this was before quarantine and everything was going digital, I wanted the whole EP to sound digital. I wanted to pretend we were in this world of just internet, and it\'s like you enter into it and then you start dating. Maybe you\'re inside of Tinder or whatever. Because if you listen to the end of the first song, there\'s another interlude that mentions every social media platform.” **How Much Can a Heart Take** “I wanted it to feel like a book. I didn\'t want it to end with the first song. So it\'s like \'How Much Can a Heart Take\' is a question. The way that it\'s moving and the way that we did without the rules and the nonstandard activities, as far as chords and singing too much, I just wanted to bring singers. Yebba came through with it, and it had to begin with that song because that song is the first song of the show—it\'s explosive, her vocal ability and just her energy in itself.” **On Read** “It\'s kind of like how people get mad at weird stuff like being on read. So it was just like, \'All right, bet, that\'s where we at? Let\'s make this a whole thing.\' People break up over it. It\'s real life. And it\'s pointless.” **My Window** “Well, first time I heard this sample was from Missy Elliott \[‘The Rain’\], and I always loved it—that\'s one of my favorite songs. But we were able to create a UK, rainy, romantic, sad—you know that UK vibe? When you think about Europe and it\'s overcast with rain and people with black umbrellas just walking around like it ain\'t raining. I felt \[Mahalia\] could definitely emote that. Her voice is smooth, it\'s simple, it gets straight to the point, and she put some sauce on it at the same time.” **Access Denied** “I didn\'t have anybody on that track before, it was just me. And when I played it for Ari \[Lennox\], she said that it was tight and she would hop on it. I felt like it would be a great dance version of the future. Like if anybody had a futuristic dance-off, it\'d be tribal and what they remember from what real life used to be. It\'s tribal to me, but it\'s still rhythmic and it\'s still soulful. That\'s a gem.” **Dream** “It kind of reminded me of the 2000s, and I loved that. It made me feel nostalgic. It wasn\'t too much, it wasn\'t just like a little bit, but it was just enough. \[Queen Naija and I\] are singing together—it felt like Usher and Alicia Keys \'My Boo\' vibes. I ain\'t never heard her do no wrong with her voice at all. It\'s always on.” **Falling in Love** “This one came to me late because I didn\'t think \[Joyce Wrice\] wanted me to stay on the song. I wrote the song originally with Davion Farris, who\'s SiR\'s brother, and we wrote it with a girl in mind. Joyce was like, \'Ooh, I want it,\' and when we heard her voice on it, it was undeniably a yes. \[The song\] is like either we\'re going to do this or we\'re not. Once we get to this last one, it\'s like, \'My heart is all the way in it, don\'t even play with me, let\'s do this or not do this before I close this book.\'”

Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”

As Middle Kids were recording their second full-length in late 2019, they faced a serious deadline. “I was seven months pregnant,” guitarist-vocalist Hannah Joy tells Apple Music. “I was really on the clock. And it had quite a big impact on what I wrote because I was in a place of general anticipation and thoughtfulness about the next season. There was an urgency there—I felt very impassioned because it felt so important.” On *Today We’re the Greatest*, the Sydney rock outfit—including drummer Harry Day and bassist Tim Fitz, who is also Joy’s husband—dive headlong into difficult questions about who we are and what it is to be alive. Earnest and anthemic, it’s music that was meant to impart wisdom if not inspire—and Joy and Fitz’s son clearly responded to it in utero. “I\'ll be doing the vocal takes and he\'ll start kicking and it would actually trip me out because it wouldn\'t be to the beat,” she says. “I’d say, ‘Your father is a bass player and a drummer—you should have better rhythm.’” Here, Joy guides us through a few of the album’s key songs. **Bad Neighbours** “A lot of these songs are more vulnerable and more personal; and musically, they’re more dynamic and stripped back. That was something we were really excited about, but also a little bit nervous because it\'s something new. I think we were just like, ‘Fuck it, let\'s just really lean into that and have that sort of thing be the opener.’ When I\'m scared of something, I lean into that thing and just expose myself to it to try and get over it.” **Cellophane (Brain)** “It\'s dealing with my noisy brain and the things that are ticking away underneath it all. I remember when I was writing the chorus melody, I was just hitting random notes just to see how that sounded. I really ended up liking it and I didn\'t even think it was going to be the final melody because it really jumps around and I\'m swinging it like an elastic band. It\'s so fun to sing because it\'s loopy and different to usually how I would write.” R U 4 Me? “Tim and I wrote this one together from the ground up, which is a new thing for us. That bit where I laugh in the breakdown, that’s literally from the demo, because I\'m saying something wrong, and we just left it in there because it felt like the spirit of the song was in that. It’s intense but playful. It’s talking about trust issues or people trying to find their place and feeling lonely and not knowing where they belong, but also not taking yourself too seriously.” **Questions** “There\'s a lot of space in the music at the beginning—almost like when you\'re in a tense conversation it feels like there\'s too much space. It\'s painfully present and quiet except for the words. As it slowly builds and grows and then explodes: There\'s a great catharsis in that. I\'m not sure if that\'s symbolic—whether it\'s anger exploding or if it\'s the resolution of something or freedom from something—but musically, I think it really takes you on a journey of like awkwardly navigating intimacy.” **Some People Stay in Our Hearts Forever** “I still look back on experiences from when you were a kid and it\'s just crazy how they can really linger. Writing that chorus was just so from that place, almost like a wolf howling to the moon, ‘I’m sorry.’ I think part of the journey of growing up is learning how to accept who you are and what you\'ve done, and own those things and not let those ghosts haunt you. It’s not even necessarily doing anything that bad, but you\'re just dumb and don\'t know much.” **Stacking Chairs** “Tim really inspired this song. When I was growing up, I was more interested in having a good time and going to the party and then not being the person who stuck around and packed up the party after. Long-term friendship is learning how to walk with someone through life and being there in not just the fun moments, but all the messy moments. Marriage has really taught me about continually showing up every day. And that image of stacking chairs is being that person for other people who\'s going to be there when it\'s a bit shit and it\'s not the fun stuff, but it\'s part of life.” **Today We\'re the Greatest** “This song to me is a great summation of a lot of the things that I\'m singing about and wrestling with. Most of our lives, it\'s pretty mundane and you just do the same shit every day. In amongst that, we all have our pain and our loneliness, but we also have our moments of triumph and beauty. Sometimes they\'re small and sometimes they\'re big. And I feel like when we can hold all of that and live in that, that\'s when we are great—that’s living.”

When it’s all said and done, there’s no telling how COVID-19 will have affected the artistry of some of our favorite music-makers—except in the case of Moneybagg Yo, who tells Apple Music very plainly that it made him a more focused MC. “I just feel like a lot of my old music the fans didn\'t accept how I wanted them to accept it,” he says. “I just was in a different stage of my life and I was moving around a lot. The COVID situation had to happen, and by that happening, I sat down and thought about everything and I made the biggest songs of my career—of my life—in the pandemic.” Here, Yo might be referring to the lead single from his fourth album *A Gangsta’s Pain*, the Future collaboration and instantaneous smash hit “Hard for the Next.” Or maybe he’s referring to an altogether trippy exploration of relationships through the eyes of a lean addict called “Wockesha.” Maybe he’s just that proud of the hard-charging “Shottas,” where he debuts a completely new flow. But regardless of which songs he’s referring to, the M-town representer claims that the break in action the world was forced to observe showed him exactly who he is. “I feel like by me sitting down and just figuring it out, I\'m going to go back to the roots,” he says. “I\'m giving them everything they love about Moneybagg Yo.” Below, the Memphis MC breaks down how we got the best of him on his favorite tracks from *A Gangsta’s Pain*. **“Hard for the Next”** “Me and Future, every time we get in the kitchen, the chemistry is always there, so I feel like this kind of happened naturally. When he gets you in there, he\'s going to lock you in and play all of what he\'s been working on. So, he played me everything and he kept skipping by stuff. I’m like, \'Bruh, go back! Go back to that. You\'re trying to hide this joint from me.\' He was like, \'Nah, bruh, you can have whatever you want.\' So my engineer got the session, I went back and recorded it, sent it to him, and the rest was history.” **“GO!” feat. BIG30** “I felt like I got to do one of them songs on here to where like I\'m just giving it to them. I\'m just on it. I ain\'t let up off the beat, just tempo. I got to lace BIG30 up on it because that\'s my artist, I want to see him win.” **“Projects”** “I was going through like, ‘What am I missing?’ And then I get the call that Pharrell wants to lock in for two days straight, so I was a little— you know how it be. Then, I came to the studio and I just laced it.” **“Certified Neptunes” feat. Pharrell Williams** “Pharrell had the chorus already laced up when I walked in. And then he was like, ‘Look, this is how I do it. My stuff, when I cook up, it be like a skit, so this is where I want to go with it. Just go in and then we\'re going to draw around it.’ It\'s like the trap energy, gutter-type Pharrell on that one.” **“Change Da Subject”** “This the type of song, you go in the booth and you just close your eyes, and you think about everything. You think about everything like how it started, where you\'re trying to go, who you do it for; all your accomplishments. You probably heard me saying something like, \'No more pain and suffering.\' It\'s a good feeling to be there.” **“Wockesha”** “‘Wockesha’ was just was like one of them songs like, you rap about your habits, you rap about what you got going on in your personal life. Because you know, sometimes when you\'re in a relationship with a girl and you got stuff going on, it\'s like you be back and forth: You can say, ‘It\'s not gon\' be this,’ and it ends up being that again. It\'s like relapsing. And that\'s the same thing people do with drugs and other stuff. They\'ll say, \'I\'m through doing this, I\'m through doing that,\' but then they\'ll get back on it. So, I just went off the concept of that. I\'m just painting pictures.” **“One of Dem Nights”** “Jhené \[Aiko\] is one of my favorites. And then I was in the studio, the first beat that YC played, it was on point. I told him where I wanted to go, who I wanted to put on it. As soon as he went that way, it was crazy. I just started mumbling the words and I went in there and did it. I sent it to her, they sent it back. Real classic.” **“Shottas (Lala)”** “I was in the studio just joking around. It was me and the guys, we was just in there just kicking it and YC just comes in there playing beats. I was like, ‘Man, what the hell is this?’ This is one of them type of vibes you just—it don\'t matter what you say, just go in that joint and just say whatever comes to mind.”

“There are two Mykes—the commercial artist and the rapper,” Myke Towers tells Apple Music’s La Fórmula host El Guru. “And this is an album for the streets.” Having broadened considerably beyond his long-standing reputation as a credible trapero in recent years, with successful forays into reggaetón and other popwise sounds, the now massively popular Puerto Rican artist returns to the style he made his name in with *LYKE MIKE*. The gunfire opening “BALAS LOCAS” makes crystal clear that this album is a marked shift away from predecessor *Easy Money Baby*’s glossier and romantic moments. “This goes back to the Myke that used to rap bars,” he explains. “I don’t want to tell pretty stories, but my story.” Unfiltered standouts like “MÍRENME AHORA” and the Ñengo Flow-assisted “BURBERRY” reaffirm Towers’ deep affinity for, and demonstrable proficiency in, trap music in all its aggressive glory. With its 23 tracks (an unsubtle homage to basketball great Michael Jordan), *LYKE MIKE* exudes everything his day-one fans hoped he’d come back to, even as his arc towards global superstardom has become undeniable. “I keep my feet on the ground,” he says, “but I know I was born to do this.”

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

The most accurate distillation of Pooh Shiesty’s mission on debut mixtape *Shiesty Season* comes from one of the project’s guests. “I don’t wanna rap about nothing but gunplay,” 21 Savage deadpans on “Box of Churches.” Savage appears on the tape alongside fellow street-rap heavyweights Gucci Mane and Lil Durk, as well as a handful of lesser-known MCs like BIG30, Choppa Wop, and Lil Hank. If they have a single thing in common, it’s an affinity for high-powered weaponry. But it is Pooh Shiesty, of course, who set the tone. Across *Shiesty Season*’s 17 tracks, the MC consistently details, in that readily identifiable Memphis drawl, the importance of guns in his life on songs like “Back in Blood,” “50 Shots,” “Take a Life,” and “Choppa Way.” Deviations from the theme are few and far between, even on songs like the one named for pioneering musical entrepreneur and Dirty South hip-hop legend Master P (“One shot to the head, may he rest in peace/I’m the reason doctors hooked him up, I feel like Master P”). And lest you think a song called “Twerksum” was an attempt at appeasing the fairer sex, Shiesty is simply offering fair warning that the “choppa get to shaking like it twerk or something.”

Arriving seven years after his explosive debut album *Worlds*—which challenged formulaic, big-tent EDM with sensitive epics rooted in fantasy and escapism—Porter Robinson’s sophomore album *Nurture* turns, surprisingly, inward, reflecting the difficult period that followed. “After I released my first album, panic set in,” the North Carolina producer tells Apple Music. “Things got really dark.” Robinson found the pressure to prove himself overwhelming, and when his little brother was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, he retreated into isolation. “I stopped watching movies, seeing friends, even going outside,” he says. “First I felt guilty doing anything other than trying to break the creative slump. Then, suddenly I couldn’t see the point.” *Nurture* traces his gradual reemergence. “It’s me unraveling all the damage I had done to myself and finding, in its place, an appreciation for everyday things,” he says. Through billowing, earnest dance-lite tracks that relish texture, melody, and atmosphere, Robinson sketches the personal journeys—moving out of his parents’ house, visiting Japan, falling in love, helping his brother recover—that reignited his creative spark. “I didn’t want to keep writing about faraway dreamscapes,” he says. “I wanted the album to be about the beauty of the real world, because that’s what gets us through.” Below, he takes us behind the scenes into the creation of each track. **“Lifelike”** “I am obsessed with the idea of a window into nature, and this song is the window into the worldview of *Nurture*. As an artist, my vantage point into the beauty of the real world is so often, like, sitting in a recording studio, staring out my window, and feeling like I\'m in a forest. That’s what informed the creative direction of this album. To me, establishing a specific worldview was essential. It’s a lot like the process of omission. It’s saying, ‘These are the things that are worth showing here.’ ‘Lifelike’ is what takes you from the black void on the cover into all the things that I felt were worth showing.” **“Look at the Sky”** “My girlfriend Rika and I spent several months in Japan in 2016, and that’s what inspired the art direction for this album. I remember seeing this poster for Nagoya tourism that was a landscape with a blue sky and a white scribble that said something like ‘It’s still here.’ That lyric found its way into the song, and the white scribble found its way into the cover art. As for the chorus, I wanted it to serve as a mantra to myself—a message of hope and perseverance. There’s no shortage of terrible news and reasons to feel discouraged right now, but you have to maintain some sense that things can get meaningfully better.” **“Get Your Wish”** “When I started writing this album, I was wrestling with some heavy questions: Why am I killing myself over this? What do I hope is going to happen that hasn’t happened yet? Why do I need to prove myself again? The answer that I came to, which you can hear in this song, was inspired by Bon Iver’s album *22, A Million*. I found that album when my little brother had cancer. I really wasn’t able to make music at that time. But that album made me feel a few degrees brighter. More hopeful. And when I thought about how much that music meant to me, I realized that all that matters is making music that connects with people, that makes the world slightly less crappy. ‘Get Your Wish’ was the first time I was able to get back into the real state of play.” **“Wind Tempos”** “If there’s one artist who affected my worldview more than any other, it’s this Japanese pianist named Masakatsu Takagi. He’s my hero. He did the score for one of my favorite movies, *Wolf Children*. That helped me understand that all the beauty and emotion I was trying to create through music didn\'t need to come from these otherworldly dreamscapes; it could be intimate. Well, when we were in Japan, he invited me and my girlfriend to stay in his home in Hyogo. He lives in a village of like eight people and his house is covered in pianos. When he played for me, it was hard not to bawl. At the end of the trip, he gave me a disc file of Japanese ambient music from the early 2000s. I hadn’t heard of any of it, but he knew it’d be my thing. Not only did it inspire ‘Wind Tempos’ but I wound up throwing in this tiny sample of him playing a toy piano. It\'s super distorted, almost unrecognizable. I emailed him to see if I could give him credit on the song—just a little way of recognizing how much he’d influenced me. He agreed.” **“Musician”** “‘Musician’ is my favorite song on the album. It’s me when I\'m peaking on inspiration and creativity and I feel invincible. It came from a conflict between my heart and my mind: My mind told me I needed a chopped-up instrumental, kind of like ‘Flicker’ from my previous album, and my heart said it needed to be another big sing-along. At first, I followed my head and wrote the crazy instrumental; it had like ten key changes, no vocals, no repetition. But it didn’t feel right. Then I finally wrote the chorus, this huge, anthemic, vocal moment, and knew I’d hit something. It almost feels like a Justin Bieber moment, it’s so infectious and sugary and pop. But I can\'t think of anything that better captures what it feels like to be on stage. In the end, I wound up blending both versions, and the result is just boundless joy.” **“do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do”** “I wrote this song after listening to this artist Cornelius for the first time. It was one of those situations where people had told me over and over again how much I was going to love him, but it almost got overwhelming, so I sort of avoided it. Then I finally listened, and wrote this song in eight hours. It feels like rollerblading through my neighborhood—just feeling free and in this childlike state.” **“Mother”** “I wanted a song that expressed the love that I feel for my parents—as well as the grief of growing up. I felt like the minute I moved out, my youth would be over and I’d hardly ever see my family or dog again. In reality it wasn’t like that at all, I still see them all the time. But I wanted to capture the sad side of growing up—of realizing your parents aren’t infallible.” **“dullscythe”** “This is by far the most abstract and experimental song on the album, and it’s the one track that doesn’t have a standard tempo. I wanted it to feel really hard and chaotic—something at the midway point to keep people on their toes—and it makes me feel like I\'m getting smacked around in a thousand directions.” **“Sweet Time”** “This song is about being so in love with someone that, for the first time in your life, you’re scared of dying. You realize you aren’t guaranteed an eternity together. In the lyrics, I talk about going to find God to make sure she\'s okay, and it makes me cry every time. I was bawling my eyes out in the studio, I could barely get the words out. In the end, though, it’s also an expression of gratitude, because the world is lucky to have her. Rika and I have been together four years, and honestly it\'s really time for me to propose. But I wanted to wait until after the pandemic.” **“Mirror”** “This song is about my critical inner voice and how much it was affecting me. I realized I had these inner demons that were represented by the nastiest things somebody might say to me on Twitter, or the meanest things music critics might say. And they got in my head. They affected me creatively, because every time I’d write something, it was really easy to imagine someone dissing it. But if you’re just trying to avoid something mean being said about your work, that’s the least vulnerable place you could possibly be in. You’re living in fear and shrinking yourself to avoid getting hurt. ‘Mirror’ is about my confrontation with that inner voice.” **“Something Comforting”** “I wrote the main melody for this song in the back of a cab in New York in 2016. I remember listening to it over and over and over and over, feeling like, ‘All right, I need to make this into something real.’ Emotionally and lyrically, I feel like this song captures the essence of the album. It was the first thing I wrote that became the seed for everything that followed.” **“Blossom”** “I made this ballad for my girlfriend, and I remember bawling as I wrote it. It all came together very quickly and sprang from the idea of well-wishing: How much joy does it fill you with to imagine somebody you love and care about really happy? Getting everything that they want, and being surrounded by loved ones? I was imagining that for my girlfriend and picturing her as happy as she could possibly be.” **“Unfold”** “This is the only true collaboration on the album, and it came about because I’ve always loved TEED’s music. When we got into the studio to write and record, he started telling me how much he loved ‘Sea of Voices’ from my last album, *Worlds*, and how he wished he’d written it, so I started sketching a soundscape that evoked it a little bit. Then, to make the song a good fit for *Nurture*, we decided to have him sing on it—actually we sort of sing together. It was a whirlwind. For a while, I had this song early on in the tracklist because it presented some variety, but as I kept working on it, I was like, ‘No, this is an end-of-album moment. If I’m going to have this epic wall-of-sound thing, it needs to come towards the end.’” **“Trying to Feel Alive”** “This song was me trying to make sense of the whole journey, trying to figure out what has changed. What did I learn? Am I any better? Am I satisfied? It was enormously difficult to write, but ultimately, the answer I came to is that satisfaction isn’t the real goal. If you accomplish everything you’re striving for, you’ll stop looking forward. There\'s nowhere to go. This is another one where I was crying while writing it because I guess it was sort of a personal epiphany. Here I am on the other side of this, still struggling with making music, still not necessarily feeling whole, but beginning to understand that maybe that\'s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe making music is my way of trying to feel alive, over and over again.”

Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, *SoulFly*. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can *actually* fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s *Hunger Games*, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”

There’s a sense of reflection and peace on Tash Sultana’s second album, *Terra Firma*. The Melbourne singer-songwriter started writing their album in late 2019, and as the world began to change just a couple months later, they found themselves with far more time and space to sit and work on the music—and themselves—than they had in years, thanks to touring and other commitments. At the same time, there’s also a feeling of confidence and openness. In contrast to debut album *Flow State*, here Sultana was more open to new sounds and collaborations—the fingerprints of singer-songwriter Matt Corby, producer Dann Hume, and others are felt in songs that try new things and stretch beyond the musical world they’re best known for. To provide more insight into *Terra Firma*, Sultana has provided exclusive written commentary to accompany each track on the album. **Musk** “This is the communication piece from myself to the listener. You will note there are no words, because there doesn’t need to be, everything is already said. Here, I create the sonic palette and form the introduction to all the sounds you will hear across *Terra Firma*. This sets the scene for the tracks that follow. I burn incense as a ritual before I play a show or rehearse, and the aroma is called ‘Musk.’” **Crop Circles** “Where do we go? I’m not really sure, but I hope it’s somewhere full of bliss. I hope it’s somewhere where we feel no pain and know no suffering. I’m convinced that I am on my last life cycle; I somehow feel I may have been here before.” **Greed** “I once read a book called *The Little Red Hen*. It was about this little red hen who wanted to bake some bread. She went around to all the farm animals asking if anyone would like to help her bake this bread. She went over to the pig, he said no. She asked the cows, they also said no. The sheep said no too. So she was left with this task all on her own and she baked the most beautiful bread that took her fucking ages. But once all the other farm animals smelled that it was cooked, they came knocking on her door wanting a slice, and she wouldn’t let them have any.” **Beyond the Pine** “To love beyond the social norms of what is accepted and what is not. But who really cares what other people think? As if society can make laws and rules about who you fall in love with or how you should even love yourself. Love is abundant and love is free. Love is wealth, love is all the things that add meaning in between the distance of time from when we are born to when we die. And for that there is no limit, there is no race, there is no color, there is no sex, no rules. It is not anyone else’s to determine but you.” **Pretty Lady** “I ventured to the streets of Melbourne. You would’ve found me on Bourke Street many years ago with a little speaker and a whole lot of attitude. I used to freestyle this song to the passersby, trying to make a coin, trying to win them over, trying to bring them into the jam and out of the daily commute. The nine-to-five, working for the man. It worked, people thanked me for it. I paid for my whole life for a very long time just with those coins. I hid this song away because I didn’t think it was good enough to be released as time went by and I grew up. It took some encouragement to bring it to light again.” **Dream My Life Away** “The dream state is where you’ll find us. The fight for the present moment and that acknowledgment that the present has us where we always dreamed, and hell, it’s much better than we’ve ever been before.” **Maybe You’ve Changed** “And so we do as we roll on through. Adapt and change, fall in, fall out, be happy, be sad, overcome, be defeated, lose track of why we are here in the first place. Replace those things with distractions that pull us away from the core, the light, the *truth*. Inevitably, you’ll find your way back if you stray from the heart. Although we’ve all changed really, but do we recognize ourselves?” **Coma** “I wrote this song on my acoustic guitar when I was 17. I had it on my SoundCloud back in the day, but I hid all my old music because I didn’t think it was good enough, but I’ve decided that this track deserved another chance. It means the opposite. I am *awake*.” **Blame It on Society** “We can’t let one rotten fruit spoil the bunch. Throw it away and try again.” **Sweet & Dandy** “A reflection of the two-dimensional collapse of the modern day-to-day life of those of us in the 21st century. The rapid formation of technology and the ever dying, weakening, confused, infused, polluted, drowning landscape of social media’s unrealistic expectation of everything you ever do, say, think, act, or look. Put your phone down, you’ll feel better.” **Willow Tree** “What is really at the top if there is nothing in between? Whatever the climb may be, the foundation better be immaculate.” **Vanilla Honey** “A dear gift from the closest to me. Two cigars, one vanilla and one honey.” **Let the Light In** “Sunday was you, but that was back then.” **I Am Free** “One day I rolled over and I was 25 years old and I realized that I don’t give a fuck what society thinks I should be. I figured out who I’m becoming, and people-pleasing isn’t it.”

The debut album from Teniola Apata—better known as Teni—showcases the Nigerian singer’s talents for songwriting and masterful ease with subgenres from Afropop to emo-trap and house to highlife. Performed in Yoruba, English, and pidgin, *WONDALAND* is a manifestation of Teni’s strength and confidence as entertainer-in-chief; it features just one guest artist, Davido (“FOR YOU”). “I wanted to do an album that anyone from my mother’s hometown in Ondo, or my dad’s in Ekiti—even to Osaka, Japan—can pick up and be entertained, inspired, and educated,” she tells Apple Music. “You can’t record your debut album again, so I ensured *WONDALAND* will be that album I would listen to in 20 years, and it would still sound just as fresh.” She is routinely impressive on diverse subject matter—ranging from bawdy sex to the travails of stardom, expressing affection or enjoying her “triple-X life”—yet also deeply personal when she reminisces and pays homage to her late father, retired general Simeon Apata, who passed away when the singer was just three years old. (Representing her roots forms a big part of her work on this album—roots that also bore other musically inclined fruit in the form of her sister, fellow singer-songwriter Niniola.) Completed during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown, the album illustrates Teni’s bold, playful nature in both its high-octane artwork and its title, which is inspired by her love for amusement parks. “It’s a labor of love meant to take you through a rollercoaster of emotions,” she explains. “I want to see old and young people shed a tear, laugh, dance, and see themselves in the songs.” Here, she reveals the inspiration behind key tracks from the album. **MAJA** “I grew up in a big extended family and they have supported me all the way. It made sense for my aunt, who performs the *Oriki* \[an oration of praise associated with one’s lineage\] on “MAJA,” to usher me into the next phase of my career. *Oriki* is really important when it comes to Yoruba culture. It comes with a sense of pride that you are from an illustrious lineage, and keeps you motivated to continue from where your predecessors have stopped.” **FOR YOU (feat. Davido)** “‘FOR YOU’ is a record I made to celebrate the essence of love, sacrifice, and the reaffirmation to always be there for that special someone who means the world to you. I really like Davido’s love songs, especially “Aye.” He is a father of three, and he lives the essence of what this song means. He gave me an opportunity with writing ‘Like Dat’ \[in 2017\] and he has always been a big supporter.” **MOSLADO** “This is me bigging myself up like a pop star. ‘*Eru baba eru, egbe baba egbe, Oja baba oja, Teni power ranger*.’ This is me saying how much of a boss I am after dropping this album; how much I have worked hard to earn that superstar status.” **HUSTLE** “When you find success as a musician, people \[become\] entitled and feel they have access to your whole life. I got back home from a show one day and someone was really furious at me online for not saying hello at the show. I probably wasn’t in the mood for a chit-chat, but in the end you can’t satisfy everyone. Protecting my peace and happiness is my number one priority. I guard everything and anything or anyone that causes me to lose sleep; I cut them off.” **TOXIC** “This song is about living a fast-paced life, where you don’t have time for commitment because you don’t have time to dedicate to things like love. I invited a couple of producers, and we were in a house together, locked down for a few months; P.Priime was one of them. For someone to do what he does at 18 years old is outstanding. He is highly versatile, and when he played that beat, I knew I wanted it.” **100 METERS** “Fun fact: This song was a seven-minute freestyle before it was cut down. I really just wanted to do something pure and unadulterated, like a musician just singing to entertain people in their local community.” **ON** “I think we Nigerians like to explore sounds and then do a fusion of other genres. This song is a mix of amapiano, dancehall, South African house, and Afrobeats. I like how smooth and energetic it is at the same time.” **OKOCHA** “As well as being one of Nigeria’s greatest footballers, Austin Okocha was a brilliant dribbler. I hope he listens to it, and that he enjoys it.” **DADS SONG** “I always wish my dad were here to see and celebrate with me. I took time out to watch his funeral videos just to reminisce, because I was three when he passed away and I wanted the emotions to come alive in the song. He was everyone’s warrior, a man that fought for his country and for people he cared about. He had a very big heart.” **XXXL** “I’m plus-size and I love it. I just love me. Self-love and self-worth is important to me.” **BLACK (BONUS TRACK)** “This song is dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against police brutality in Nigeria.”

If 2019’s *“Let’s Rock”* allowed The Black Keys to go back to basics with their blues-smoked garage rock, then on *Delta Kream*, they honor the source. “Any chance we get to turn people on hill country blues, we want to do that, because it means that much to us,” singer-songwriter-guitarist Dan Auerbach tells Apple Music. “We love this music and definitely feel a close connection to it.” Recorded during a two-day session in Nashville with local musicians Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton, the Nashville-by-way-of-Akron, Ohio duo’s 10th LP features reworkings of North Mississippi hill country blues standards they’ve been listening to since they were in their teens. Their passion for the genre shows in their raw and effortless performances—whether they turn John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake” into a six-minute incendiary jam or give the full treatment to R.L. Burnside’s “Mellow Peaches” with a soulful guitar interplay that rises into an intense crescendo. But for the most part, Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney are not interested in adding any bells and whistles, like on “Sad Days, Lonely Nights,” where they capture the live essence of Junior Kimbrough’s 1994 original. “Some of the best roots music are those spontaneous records,” Auerbach adds. “You can just feel this kind of nervous energy, but it was just fun.”

The title of twenty one pilots’ sixth LP is a play on “scaled back and isolated,” words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph’s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. “It just felt very confined,” he tells Apple Music. “I had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my desk during the entirety of the writing process, and I just knew that when you focus on even the tiniest little detail in your room—or wherever you\'re confined—that thing can come to life and fly around your room. That dragon on the cover really represents what can be accomplished with that sort of imagination.” And as has been the case for everyone, the challenges of pandemic living had a noticeable impact on Joseph’s work—but maybe not quite how you’d expect. “I was actively trying to push against that natural inclination to come in darker,” he says. “The idea of adding to the pressure of what\'s going on in our world, it didn\'t feel right.” Instead, *Scaled and Icy* finds Joseph pushing his genre-defying alt-pop into brighter, more hopeful territory. “It felt like I needed to go the opposite direction,” he says. “I wanted to escape a little bit more and provide people with that opportunity to escape too.” Here, Joseph takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Good Day”** “I designed it to feel like something was coming to life. If you really listen to the song, it\'s so upbeat and shiny on the surface, and then lyrically I\'m talking about trying to cope with the idea of if I were to ever lose my family and friends. I would probably go through a period in the mourning process where my reaction to anyone asking me how I\'m doing would be like, ‘I\'m fine. Everything\'s great, I don\'t even know why you\'re asking me.’ Making them feel stupid, like, ‘Why would you even ask me that?’ That\'s what this song is.” **“Choker”** “I come from a basketball background, and choking is: You’re standing at the free-throw line and you need to make one of those two, and if you miss them both, you choked. I think for me, with certain friendships and relationships, there were moments that I could have risen to the occasion and I didn\'t, and that\'s something that I\'ll have to live with. I think that everyone has those moments where they feel like they choked. The song is trying to work that through and trying to figure out if that’s someone that I was born to be. Can I shape this? Is this something I can turn around?” **“Shy Away”** “My brother said, ‘Hey, I just want you to show me, from the beginning, how you start a record. How do you start writing a song?’ So I had him over at the studio. A lot of times when I sit down to start, I\'ll tap into my phone and I’ll have a bunch of voice memos of ideas that have hit me randomly. Sometimes it’s just a single word, sometimes it\'s a melody. I started to build up the track from there, and it turned out that it was talking about wanting him to pursue his dream of chasing music. Most of my songs are very inward, but this is one of the few that I feel like the message is outward, coming from me. The only thing harder than figuring out what your purpose and identity is, is watching someone that you love trying to figure out theirs.” **“Saturday”** “When you strip away what day of the week it is, you lose your rhythm. You lose your sense of what is up and what is down. And that\'s a lesson that \[drummer\] Josh \[Dun\] and I learned pretty quickly on tour, because a Friday night and a Monday night could feel the exact same, whether or not we had a show. When the pandemic happened, everything\'s shut down, everyone was starting to learn that same lesson, where the days of the week lose their meaning, and it was messing with people\'s reference of time. You feel like you\'re swirling and your feet aren\'t planted. The song is really, I\'m talking to my wife, hoping that she sticks with me, even though I\'m working through this, even though I\'m kind of tumbling into nothingness.” **“No Chances”** “I recruited my brother and a few of his friends to come over and record gang vocals. You have this microphone in the middle of the room and I have everyone in headphones and I\'m kind of directing them in what to say and what to yell. That was the first time I\'d ever really produced a room full of people. I was thinking of athletics and college sports specifically, where there\'s overwhelmingly this hometown crowd, and how intimidating that can be and powerful that is in the face of opposition. I definitely was writing from that—I felt the energy of a gymnasium or a stadium and was wanting to capture that.” **“Redecorate”** “I had a friend of mine whose son passed away and they would keep his room the same way that he had left it. I remember thinking how crazy powerful a story that is, and how it makes me wonder, like, ‘What will people do with my stuff?’ It can actually bring you back down to earth, make sure that you don\'t make any horrible decisions. I\'m realizing now how difficult it is to talk about, but this song is really important to me. I love the messaging of it, and I hope that our fans hear what it is I\'m trying to say in it. Because it is a bit delicate, but it\'s one of my favorite tracks and it\'s pretty powerful if you let it.”

Young Dolph and Key Glock had so much fun on their first collaborative album, 2019’s *Dum and Dummer*, that they went back in for a sequel. Add *Dum and Dummer 2* to the sparsely populated club of second editions that miraculously hold up to the original. Part 2 is a heaping 20 tracks deep and chock-full of the hilarious lifestyle quips that are easy work for Dolph, like on “Cheat Code” where he raps: “You a square-ass n\*\*\*a like Theo (Huxtable)/The money call, it’s time to G-O/My weed the same color as Dino (Flintstones)/Shooting dice with my 95-year-old grandmother at the casino.” Production is handled mostly by Bandplay, a producer whose ability to craft beats that are consistently trunk-rattling yet somehow sound nothing like each other is potentially the *dummest*.