Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2025 So Far

Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz. Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing *AR*), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “\[‘Diet Pepsi’\] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.” Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by *Addison*—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time. The songs on *Addison* are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.” As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”

Scores of Puerto Rican artists have used their music to express love and pride in their island, but few do so with the same purposeful vigor as Bad Bunny. The superstar from Vega Baja is responsible for numerous songs that center his homeland, from unofficial national anthems like “Estamos Bien” and “El Apagón” to powerful posse cuts like “ACHO PR” with veteran reggaetón luminaries Arcángel, De La Ghetto, and Ñengo Flow. More recently, he’s been decidedly direct about his passions and concerns, expressed in vivid detail on 2024’s standalone single “Una Velita.” Positioned as his sixth proper studio album, *DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS* centers Puerto Rico in his work more so than before, celebrating various musical styles within its legacy. While 2023’s *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* validated his trapero past with a more modern take on the sound he emerged with in the 2010s, this follow-up largely diverges from hip-hop, demonstrating his apparent aversion to repeating himself from album to album. Instead, house music morphs into plena on “EL CLúB,” the latter genre resurfacing later in splendorous fashion on “CAFé CON RON” with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. Befitting its title, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR” is set to a sleek reggaetón rhythm for prime-time perreo vibes, as is also the case for “KETU TeCRÉ” and the relatively more rugged “EoO.” A bold salsa statement, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” pays apparent homage to some seminal Fania releases by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, with traces of the instrumental interplay of “Juanito Alimaña” and an irresistible coda reminiscent to that of “Periódico de Ayer.” Regardless of style, the political and the personal thematically blur throughout the album, a new year’s gloom hanging over “PIToRRO DE COCO” and a metaphorical wound left open after the poignant “TURISTA.” As before, Bad Bunny remains an excellent and inventive collaborator, linking here primarily with other Puerto Ricans as more than a mere symbolic gesture. Sociopolitically minded indie group Chuwi join for the eclectic and vibrant “WELTiTA,” its members providing melodic vocals that both complement and magnify those of their host. Carolina natives Dei V and Omar Courtz form a formidable trio for the thumping dancehall retrofuturism of “VeLDÁ,” while RaiNao proves an exceedingly worthy duet partner on “PERFuMITO NUEVO.”

After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.

Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always *felt* like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), *The Scholars* is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design. The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.

“I kind of prolonged my come-up,” Central Cee tells Apple Music. Off the success of record-breaking global hits “Doja” and “Sprinter,” not to mention the indisputable smash “Band4Band” with Lil Baby, nobody could have faulted the “Wild” West London native from hastily dropping an album to capitalize on any of those singles. But as he’d be happy to remind any of his fans, it was already an uphill battle just being a rapper out of Shepherd’s Bush, which makes his long-anticipated full-length debut, *CAN’T RUSH GREATNESS*, all the more momentous. “The first two projects were mixtapes,” he explains of his prior work. “The energy I put into them is what made it a mixtape, and the energy I premeditated to put into the album and the timing of everything is what the album is.” In line with that intent, Cee’s conflicted state of mind quickly comes to the fore on opener “No Introduction,” acknowledging and accepting the whirlwind of fame while concurrently craving a more tranquil life. Those changes manifest throughout the album, with him straddling diverging worlds on the drill dazzler “5 Star” and struggling with resonant pain on the plaintive “Limitless.” While the instantly gratifying “St. Patrick’s” indulges in familiar flagrant flexes, the album gets decidedly deeper than rap via tracks like “Don’t Know Anymore” and “Walk in Wardrobe,” with the latter’s late beat-switch raising the stakes. “It’s hard for me to rap in such a reflective wake,” he says. “I just want to look ahead at the light at the end of the tunnel and not really think about certain things.” While a substantial amount of the lyrical material skews intimately local, Cee’s worldwide reach reveals itself largely via collaborations with the likes of Lil Durk and Young Miko. Still, as good as it feels to hear him going bar for bar with 21 Savage on trap stunner “GBP,” his link with UK rap icon Skepta on “Ten” and reunion with *Split Decision* mate Dave on “CRG” just hit different, in the best way. “These songs aren’t really for the masses,” he says, “but just to touch the people, remind everyone that I’m human—that *they’re* human.”

The South Texas singer and guitarist spent his youth roaming—learning the drinking songs of the French Quarter firsthand, busking on New York City subway platforms, performing in communes in Northern California. These days, Charley Crockett seems to sublimate his restless wanderlust into endless touring and prolific recording; *Lonesome Drifter*, co-produced by Shooter Jennings, is his 16th record in nine years. Its dreamy outlaw ballads and honky-tonk numbers tell a story about hustling in America (“That old-time feeling just up and walked away/Left me with these interest rates,” he sings on “Game I Can’t Win”), and meanwhile, a story of his years spent on the road. “My age is showing in a motel mirror,” he confesses over organ chords on “Under Neon Lights.” And the wistful “Life of a Country Singer” is a ballad of a liminal existence that unfolds in-between spaces, somewhere between dusk and dawn, and between right and wrong. “There’s a long, long line of country singers, singing songs about livin’ late at night,” he drawls, admitting “I ain’t the first one, or the best—but I’m different.”

“Five is freedom, unbound by borders/Rising by lifting others/The artist, the father; the man walking two worlds.” These words, written and performed by Nigerian poet Alhanislam, not only form part of the overture to Davido’s fifth studio album, but also offer insight into the mind and methodology of an artist who’s been at the forefront of African music for over a decade. Davido frames 2025’s *5ive* as something of a victory lap, not just for his own pursuits, but for the entire contemporary African soundscape. “This is definitely about celebrating the longevity and how far we’ve come,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s been a long, long journey. Afrobeats is in an amazing place. Everybody’s doing well, all the way from South Africa to Ghana to Nigeria. For us to have risen and taken this culture and the music to such heights—we have our own categories at the Grammys, at the Billboard Awards; we have our own festivals selling out more than the festivals in America. It’s crazy. Because of the nature of the whole genre, everybody’s messing with the culture. So every album is to push Afrobeats further.” Here, he’s as intentional as ever about eliminating gaps between cultures and sounds altogether, employing even more of the sonic fusions that permeated his 2023 album *Timeless*. The distinctive log drum of South Africa’s amapiano again features heavily here, along with fusions incorporating Caribbean and Latin styles—woven together with the red thread of Afrobeats and clever nods to African classics. “I love bringing different worlds to mine,” Davido explains, and he does so here through collaborations with Victoria Monét, Shenseea, Tayc, and Dadju; recurring guest stars Chris Brown, Musa Keys, and producers Shizzi, Marvey Muzique, and DJ Maphorisa; rising Jamaican star 450; and homegrown Nigerian heroes like ODUMODUBLVCK, Omah Lay, and Chike. Here, he talks through key tracks from *5ive*. **“Anything”** “This is a song you play before you run the Olympics. That’s a song you play before you get on a soccer pitch, the finals, Champions League. That’s a song you play before you do a final exam as a lawyer—it’s an inspirational song just to motivate you to action. Apart from inspirational stuff that we’re talking about on the record, it also kind of solidifies my longevity in the game and how long I’ve been here and how long I’ve still been able to do it. I’ve seen artists come and go and I’m still able to be here.” **“Be There Still”** “Shout-out to \[co-producer\] DJ Maphorisa; shout-out to South Africa; shout-out to my boy \[co-producer\] Marvey Muzique. I’ve always had a strong place in my heart for South Africa, because apart from Nigeria, South Africa was one of the countries to accept my music and push me, put money in my pocket, book me. ‘Be There Still’ is definitely about my longevity in the game, how long we’ve been here. Anywhere the money is going to be, anywhere success is going to be, I’m going to be there. Anywhere you see good things, anywhere you’re looking for n\*\*\*as at the top, you’re going to see me.” **“Offa Me” (feat. Victoria Monét)** “If you ask me, it’s going to be one of the biggest records on the album. Victoria Monét—I met her at the 2024 Grammys, and she won three awards that night. She was on fire. And I feel like this record is the perfect matchup of what she does and what I do.” **“R&B” (feat. Shenseea & 450)** “I love the Caribbean, and I’ve done a lot of shows there. ‘R&B’ is produced by my boy Jonn P. I know people know Shenseea, but a lot of people back home might not have heard of 450. But he’s the new guy. He’s the new hot guy going crazy; he’s amazing. I’m excited to show him to Africa and to the world and just mix our worlds together.” **“Awuke” (with YG Marley)** “Shout-out to Jamaica, YG Marley. Like I said, I love bringing the two worlds together. What I loved about that record was the process, the making of the song and the making of the video. YG came to Nigeria for the first time; \[it was his\] first time being in Africa, him and his uncles, and I think his brother. I love when these artists come to my home and I show them, like, ‘Yo, this place is not that bad.’ You know what I’m saying? It’s kind of lit. And every time they come, they end up not even wanting to leave.” **“Holy Water” (feat. Victony & Musa Keys)** “Me and Musa Keys together \[on 2023’s ‘UNAVAILABLE’\]—we probably have the biggest songs of our career. For me, apart from collaborating with these people, they’re actually family. Musa ended up laying some ideas on the beat, and then me and Victony finished up the song. They’re just two strong, hardworking individuals that are going crazy right now. There’s nothing wrong in learning stuff from the newer generation. Look how Drake has done it. Even DJ Maphorisa, he’s still tapping in with the new producers. So I’ve never had a problem, and that’s probably why I’ve lasted so long, because a lot of people have a problem with tapping in. Just because I’ve done stadiums around the world, it doesn’t mean I don’t have a listening ear or don’t mean I still can’t learn. So I’m always open, and I never feel too big, because the music is bigger than all of us. What we’re trying to attain is bigger than all of us.” **“Nuttin Dey”** “This is a typical Nigerian record—it’s like my version of ‘Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright’ \[Bob Marley’s 1977 hit “Three Little Birds”\]. When we say ‘nuttin dey’ in my country, it means ‘no problem.’ It’s like, ‘We’re good; everything is chill, everything is nice.’ So that’s the vibe of that record. And shout-out to Selebobo, an OG music producer from Nigeria that hasn’t been active in a while, and I met up with him in America. And then we got back in the studio and did that.” **“Titanium” (feat. Chris Brown)** “You know what’s crazy? Chris Brown has been on my last four albums. That’s my brother. When you do music with your brothers, with your family that you both care about, nah, it’s always going to work. Just that moment with me and him in South Africa performing to the biggest crowds of our careers \[in 2024\]…it’s crazy. **“Lately”** “You know when you sing depressing songs, but the songs are so good you have to dance? It’s really talking about a lot of things I was going through—a lot of smiling through sadness—and it was really talking about, ‘God, please save me. I have to be strong for everybody.’ And I’ve been in those type of situations where I’m not really strong mentally at that point, but then I have to act like everything is okay, for everybody else to be okay. It’s really a depressing record that bangs heavy.” **“Funds” (feat. ODUMODUBLVCK & Chike)** “I remember when they first played me the sample \[of Brenda Fassie’s 1997 hit ‘Vuli Ndlela’\] and I was like, ‘How we’re going to flip this?’ I’m not really a big fan of sampling music, but sampling Brenda Fassie is legendary. It was just amazing to see how we could just bring two worlds together. I’m Yoruba, and then Chike is Igbo, and then you bring in Brenda Fassie’s \[South African\] spice into that too—nah, I always knew it was going to *go*.” **“With You” (feat. Omah Lay)** “I remember when Kai Cenat came to Nigeria \[in 2024\], he was on a livestream, and then I took him out in my car. And when he was in the car, he was like, ‘Oh, what song is this?’ And it was Omah Lay’s song playing. I think the next day Omah Lay tweeted, ‘Wow, I thought Davido hated me.’ I’m like, ‘Hated you? Why would you think I hate you? I love your music. What you talking about?’ He was like, ‘Oh,’ he didn’t know. So I was like, ‘Yo, we got to get in studio.’ I don’t put no ego before my music. And I know this one is top three for me. So shout-out to Omah Lay. I feel like that’s going to be a big record for us.”

“I try to focus on the present,” Ela Minus tells Apple Music as she explores the songs of *DÍA*. “I’m never thinking about the past or the future. I try not to compare past experiences with anything that followed them. I simply spend my days making new music.” On her previous releases, the singer and multi-instrumentalist born in Bogotá and based in Brooklyn attempted to manifest a safe and comfortable space where people could listen to her songs. Her 2020 breakout debut, *acts of rebellion*, felt like someone communicating electronic pop to you in secret, with warm analog synth squiggles and a delightfully brittle feel, not unlike coldwave’s minimalist steeliness or the punkish, romantic sound of ’80s synth-pop. On *DÍA*, Minus cranks up her stylistic tics to max volume: The synths crash and her voice soars above the music instead of lying in wait in the shadows. The saucer-eyed wobbles of opener “ABRIR MONTE” immediately recall the lush rave waves of Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” while “ONWARDS” conjures peak-era electroclash, right down to Minus’ excellently disaffected and cool-to-the-touch vocal take. “I’m not a simple person,” she admits. “I decided to be honest on this album and paint a more accurate picture of myself. This is why the opening track is titled ‘ABRIR MONTE’ \[‘TO CROSS THE HILL’\]. Recording it felt like opening up a new pathway into my inner world.” Here, she walks us through the album, track by track. **“ABRIR MONTE”** “It’s the first track that I recorded for the album. The first chord progression that seemed interesting enough to define the sound of *DÍA*. It’s like a mantra that envelops you. I’d like it to sound like I’m jumping off the speakers and embracing you, literally. I’m inviting you to step in and follow the road that’s outlined on the rest of the record.” **“BROKEN”** “This song is like a complement to ‘ABRIR MONTE,’ and it appeared in the same order. It’s an anthem that celebrates every person’s current emotional state, because we should accept that every single moment is valid.” **“IDOLS”** “This is my favorite song on the album. The definition of what I’m feeling like these days, and how I would characterize the music industry. I’d love for artists from all disciplines to listen and internalize the lyrics. I hope it inspires people to do whatever they please instead of chasing blindly after the pop idols of the moment.” **“IDK”** “Perhaps I should have left this one out. It’s a little too honest, and it makes me uncomfortable. I attempted to drop it in every possible manner, but the album never felt complete without it. If there’s a song that defines my emotional state at the time—and how thoroughly lost I felt—it’s this one. It’s the heart of the entire record. Something that I cherish in music is the relationship between tension and resolution. ‘IDK’ is the crux of all the tension that percolates in this project.” **“QQQQ”** “A moment of euphoria. I had developed bits of this song for the longest time: pieces of lyrics, beats, and melodies. But I couldn’t quite bring it all together into a cohesive song. I envisioned it as a bonus track, but just as I was wrapping up the album, I felt that it was missing a moment of pure euphoria for the concerts, the clubs, or wherever you experience this project in a live setting. The night before mixing, I revisited this one from scratch. I told myself, ‘I have to make the most joyful song of my career, so that it becomes a symbol of complete liberation.’ That’s what this is, or at least I hope it is.” **“I WANT TO BE BETTER”** “This may well be the only love song I’ve ever written. The lyrics are very literal. I feel relationships force you to question who you really are, and how you interact with the world. I had never examined that, until I fell in love. This song speaks of love as surrender—that moment, like a mirror, when there’s someone else in your life. You can almost see yourself through their eyes, and evidently you strive to become a better person.” **“ONWARDS”** “I don’t know what else to add here—the lyrics say it all. I wrote it when I felt frustrated with my life. The perception that we’re always meant to be wanting more, pursuing our ambitions. As time goes by, the pressure is on to prove your worth, and that feeling makes me desperate. This song is a response to those questions, so that I can get rid of my fears and insecurities. I want to follow my own path, calm and focused. I just need to continue being myself.” **“AND”** “It’s the track that connects ‘ONWARDS’ with ‘UPWARDS,’ but also a very intimate moment on the album. One of my parents had passed away, I was experiencing a massive amount of pain, and I recorded a voice memo where you can hear things falling around the house—a negative ambiance. I thought that brief moment of pain was meant to become something else, and I developed this piece.” **“UPWARDS”** “It marks the resolution of ‘AND.’ It’s the one piece of advice that I’m always expecting from my friends, no matter what the situation. Life has taught me that even though we wish we could change things for other people, the truth of the matter is that we can only be responsible for our own lives, our own wellbeing and goals. I’d like this song to become an anthem about this uncomfortable truth.” **“COMBAT”** “This is a very moving song for me, because it’s the first time that I recorded with instruments other than synths. I wrote an arrangement for a wind quartet, and ‘COMBAT’ signals the resolution of the entire album. It feels like we’re standing on terrain that has burned to the ground, and now the rebuilding begins. It has the spirit of a new life—an invitation to be born again.”

“I’ve been singing with Elton all my life—he just didn’t know it until about 10 or 20 years ago,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about working with the storied singer-songwriter Sir Elton John. Featuring compositions co-written by John and Carlile along with John’s longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt, their collaborative album *Who Believes in Angels?* is a triumphant collection that celebrates the eternal promise held by music. For John, after ending his touring career in 2023 on the highest note possible with performances at Dodger Stadium and Glastonbury, he was seeking a project that would be forward-looking and feel different from his usual collaboration with Taupin. “If I’d just made another Elton John record, I would’ve killed myself,” he says. “I needed her. I needed her talent, her energy, her humor, and her brilliant lyrics. I’ve got two of the greatest lyric writers in the world, Bernie Taupin and Brandi Carlile, and the lyrics in front of me. When we got going, it was like, *whoosh*—like an express train.” The album was done in three weeks, start to finish. *Who Believes in Angels?* opens with back-to-back salutes to two other titans of queer pop—the emotionally charged singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and the fiery soul-preacher Little Richard. While Carlile credits John as one of her heroes and biggest influences, the project is a true team effort, with cuts like the raucous “The River Man” and “Someone to Belong To” feeling inspired simultaneously by John’s carousing, hooky rock and Carlile’s meticulously crafted Americana. It is, as John notes, a proper “duet album,” with both their voices harmonizing through each song. The prospects of getting real and celebrating differences recur throughout; the questioning title track tackles the idea of true friendship where people “set the pleasantries aside,” while the joyful “Swing for the Fences” highlights those who resemble “a heartbeat cannon in a quiet spot.” *Who Believes in Angels?* is structured like an old-fashioned vinyl record even in its digital release, with definitive closing tracks for each five-song “side.” Both tracks—one by a solo Carlile, the other by John—have a sense of bittersweetness. Carlile’s hushed ballad “You Without Me” preemptively looks at how her life will change when her children leave the nest. John’s sweeping “When This Old World Is Done with Me” comes to terms with his mortality and looks back on his life—“I’ve had clouds with silver linings, complicated mornings,” he sings—with a brass band providing its mournful yet hopeful coda. Together, they make a resounding statement about life’s perpetual motion—one that began from a place of frustration and ended up in one of gratitude. I was in such a horrible mood when I started making this record,“ John says. ”I was really tired. I was irritable. The world was going crazy. I needed her to push me. I knew she could just go along with anything. She’s that talented.”

Though its tracklist is compact in comparison, Eric Church’s follow-up to his ambitious 2021 triple album *Heart & Soul* is no less potent than its predecessor. *Evangeline vs. The Machine*, produced by longtime collaborator Jay Joyce, finds country music’s favorite Chief fearlessly commenting on current events and sharing vulnerable moments, doing so with all the style and swagger that fans have come to love and expect. Church tells Apple Music he believes *Evangeline vs. The Machine* is “the most creative album” he’s ever made, thanks in part to his decision to bring an orchestra into the recording studio. The resulting sound is rich and often surprising, with an expansive nature that mimics the big, complex themes Church explores in his lyrics. “There’s a tension that strings and vocals provide that you can’t get from a guitar, you can’t get from a keyboard, just because of the mechanism of the way they’re moving their arms,” he says. “There’s a tension. They can create drama. And a lot of this record has drama. I think that it almost sounds like a soundtrack. It sounds like a movie soundtrack.” Opening track “Hands of Time,” an ode to the healing power of music and a rebuke of outgrowing youthful abandon, takes that cinematic feel and infuses it with the kind of crunchy heartland sound that made songs like “Drink in My Hand” and “Springsteen” smash hits. “Johnny” refers not to Cash but to the hell-fighting hero of Charlie Daniels’ classic “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” with Church pleading for the fictional fiddler to grab his bow and “send him to hell again.” Church wrote the emotional ballad, which makes the most of Church’s orchestra, after the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which claimed the lives of three children and three adults. “Darkest Hour” also finds Church responding to recent events, as he released the poignant song ahead of the album to raise funds for victims of Hurricane Helene in 2024. And “Evangeline” is Church’s personification of the creative muse, who is ever at odds with the machine of capitalism. Below, Church shares insight into several key tracks. **“Bleed on Paper”** “‘Bleed on paper,’ that is selling your soul. You’re never going to get that back. A lot of young artists, they don’t know that. They don’t have a choice. And I think that that’s what gets hard. Staying true to \[yourself\] is the biggest challenge, I think for not just country music, but for music as we go forward in this river that is just so flooded with crap. How do you swim in that? And I think that that’s the hardest thing. If I was a young artist right now, that would be a challenge.” **“Johnny”** “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life as a parent was dropping my kids off the day after the shooting. They went to school and everybody thought it was good to go back to school and get the kids. And I understood that, but that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I sat in the parking lot a while. I was about to drive back home, and ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came on. There’s that line, ‘Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard/Hell’s broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals the cards/And if you win, you get a shiny fiddle made of gold/If you lose, the devil gets your soul.’ And I remember that line hit and I was like, ‘God, we need Johnny, because the devil’s not in Georgia, he’s here. He’s everywhere and he’s winning.’” **“Darkest Hour”** “In ‘Darkest Hour,’ first time we went through it, in the back half of that song, there’s a flute. And it’s a flute that sounds like a baby elephant is throwing his trunk from the right to the left. The track was going really well, and all of a sudden that came in and I lost it. I stopped the entire orchestra. I said, ‘Was that a flute?’ And then there’s a girl that was playing and I said, ‘No, that’s great.’ I said, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ And so it’s just one of those things where you have these moments that I would never have conceived, I would never have thought about, but you’re actually going to these people who are really talented people and you’re playing the song and you’re going, ‘Okay, now you paint on this picture.’” **“Evangeline”** “Evangeline, to me, in this record represents creativity, and the machine is the things we deal with now that push against or round off that creativity. Evangeline is the muse for creativity in this album. And everything in our world right now is going to push against that. And it does, even for people who are pretty creative: ‘It can’t be this long, this is the only snippet that you can put on YouTube.’ So everything that you have commercially with what the machine is, it pushes against that. And that’s a fight. And this record’s a fight in that way. I’m trying to let this record, which is the most creative I’ve ever done, be a beacon for that creativity.”

Released back when Eslabon Armado were still emerging música mexicana talents, the original *Vibras de Noche* from 2020 embodied the essence of after-dark lonesome listening experienced by teenagers such as themselves. The abundance of love songs contained within, including “Dame Tu Calor” and “Te Quiero A Ti,” contrasted with the modernized corridos of their prior work, endearing themselves further to what soon became a massive fanbase. Revisiting that aesthetic with another five years’ worth of experience under their belts, both musically and presumably in matters of the heart, Pedro Tovar’s group makes this sequel truly worthy of its predecessor’s imprimatur. To call *Vibras de Noche II* a return to form would undermine just how far Eslabon Armado has come creatively. There’s evident nuance in the instrumental arrangements on songs like “Eres Arte <3” and “NO VOY A JUGAR,” showcasing not only artistic growth but greater aspirations. Tovar’s voice feels somewhat more lived-in as well, his delivery on “OTRAS 24 HORAS” and the deliberately messy “TE ODIO!” both particularly arresting. Bearing a world-weariness that’s fundamentally relatable, “KE DIABLOS HICE II” calls back to 2022’s *NOSTALGIA*. A rare guest on this explicitly intimate outing, freshly viral sensation Macario Martínez brings a genuinely devastating energy to the dour “Esa noche.” At times, things reach a point where listeners may feel like they’re eavesdropping, particularly during interludes and non-musical segues like the ones at the tail end of “M & D.” On the other hand, the album isn’t entirely fixated on romantic themes, with the vibrant corrido “El Alegre” extolling the virtues of quality time with the boys.

Música mexicana superstars Fuerza Regida took their sound in an ambitious new direction on 2024’s *PERO NO TE ENAMORES*. Empowered by the success of their prior Marshmello team-up “HARLEY QUINN,” group leader Jesus Ortiz Paz (aka JOP) and his cohorts embraced the opportunity to infuse their style with seemingly disparate genres like Jersey club, resulting in a risk-taking album that will forever stand out in their high-quality discography. Yet not long thereafter came *MALA MÍA*, a surprise joint-EP release with Grupo Frontera that inherently hinted at a potential pivot away from the dance-floor thump. By the time the riveting corrido “Por Esos Ojos” arrived a couple months later, it became clear that JOP intended for their next project to change course once more. That said, anyone who’d dare presume that *111XPANTIA* is somehow backtracking or retreating from the boldness of *PERO NO TE ENAMORES* simply fails to understand the breadth of Fuerza Regida’s artistry. While the self-described Jersey corridos side of their work is conspicuously absent here, what remains are a dozen tracks that burst and blossom with fearless lyricism and intricate arrangements. Evoking the iconically cinematic Nino Rota score, opener “GodFather” distills mafioso-epic intensity into an unapologetically sordid account of luxe hedonism. JOP sounds arguably more profane than ever on the riveting crime-story corrido “ayy weyy” and the sexually explicit “peliculiando.” Electronic elements play a subtler role than before, present as a warming drone at the start of “caperuza” and via synth bass swells underneath the lush “Nocturno.”

Is there anything Jane Remover *can’t* do? The 21-year-old rapper, singer, and producer’s surprise-released third album, *Revengeseekerz*, arrives just a few months after their striking and contemplative album *Ghostholding* under their Venturing alias. If that album dove deep into the tangled guitars and complex emotions of Midwestern emo, then *Revengeseekerz* finds Jane Remover fully leaving behind the gauzy anti-rock of 2023’s *Census Designated* and blasting off into the realm of rage music. It’s impossible to hear the bitcrushed synths of “Dreamflasher” and the lurching trap beats of “Experimental Skin” without conjuring images of current rage titans like Yeat and Playboi Carti. But nothing is ever that simple in Jane Remover’s world, as their dizzying and flashy approach to production means that even the catchiest *Revengeseekerz* material is densely packed with sonic bells and whistles. Amid a plethora of sonic gestures tilted towards the neon crags of modern rap, Jane Remover still finds the space to execute a few shocking left turns across these 12 tracks. Danny Brown lends his always elastic voice to the endless-ladder electroclash of “Psychoboost,” while “Professional Vengeance” bounces like a pop-punk Super Mario across a landscape of video-game lasers and pummeling bass. *Revengeseekerz* is the strongest statement yet from a true prodigy at the height of their powers.

Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.

Jennie Kim debuted as a K-pop performer in BLACKPINK in 2016 and released her first solo song, the finger-snapping “Solo,” two years later. But it wasn’t until her debut solo album, 2025’s *Ruby*, that she got a more profound chance to self-reflect through her music. “The greatest part of this solo project for me was that I had time with myself,” JENNIE tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I really got to dig deep inside of who I am and what I am.” The 15-track, primarily English-language album was JENNIE’s first music release since leaving YG Entertainment as a soloist to launch her own label, Odd Atelier, and it’s a declaration of her musical identity as a solo singer and rapper. The album’s name, *Ruby*, is a reference to the alter ego (Jennie Ruby Jane) that the musician created for herself when she moved to New Zealand by herself as a child to learn English. “When I was like 11,” she says, “I knew that I wanted to create this identity for myself, like ‘Jennie’ wasn\'t doing justice for me, and I was like, ‘I want a longer name.’” The persona has carried over into adulthood and her creative expression on *Ruby*. From the hip-hop-driven swagger of tracks like “like JENNIE,” “ExtraL,” and “Damn Right” to confessional-style songs like “F.T.S.,” “twin,” and “start a war,” JENNIE opens up about fame, protecting the ones she loves, and staying true to herself. She taps an eclectic cadre of established and rising Western musicians for help, including Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis (“Damn Right”), Doechii (“ExtraL”), Dominic Fike (“Love Hangover”), FKJ (“JANE”), and Dua Lipa (“Handlebars”). “Now, I\'m not afraid to challenge myself,” JENNIE says of what she learned in the album-creation process. “Understanding my value was the biggest lesson.”

The cover of Jessie Reyez’s third album features a questionnaire she answered as an eighth grader, and in a section titled favorite hobbies, she writes, “Rapping/singing/dancing.” In a sense, *PAID IN MEMORIES* makes good on those interests. She recruits hip-hop icons like Lil Wayne and Big Sean, alongside peers such as Lil Yachty, to help formulate some of these rap-leaning ideas. Despite the prevalence of these moments, though, she still offers up plenty of alt-pop songs for fans of her first two efforts: 2020’s *BEFORE LOVE CAME TO KILLS US* and 2022’s *YESSIE*. “PSILOCYBIN & DAISIES” flips the guitar riff from The Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” and turns it into a hard-charging pop cut. Elsewhere, she displays her versatility with the downtempo neo-soul of “TORONTO SHORDIE” and the reggaetón-inspired groove of “PALO SANTO,” creating an album that pays tribute to all her passions.

“Here’s what I know: I’ve never been good at playing games, but I’m great at telling the truth,” Joanna “JoJo” Levesque writes in the introduction to her 2024 memoir, *Over the Influence*. She underlines that assertion on her energetic fourth EP, where she takes stock of her last two-plus decades in the pop spotlight and shows how her versatile soprano can take on any beat thrown at it. JoJo made a splash in 2004 with the petulant “Leave (Get Out),” an airy pop-R&B cut that showcased her preternatural ability to deliver real-talking lyrics in a candy-sweet fashion. In the 20-plus years since, through professional and personal struggles, the Massachusetts singer has only sharpened that talent, as this eight-track release appealingly proves. “Nobody,” the groove-forward track that opens *NGL*, is defiant, with JoJo declaring, “Nobody gon’ love me like me/Settlin’ don’t make no sense” over synth horns and a beat that recalls the most bounce-minded new jack swing cuts. *NGL* finds JoJo unbound by others’ expectations; the anxiety-riddled “Too Much to Say” frames her declarations of being “imperfect but a real thing” in insistent guitar licks, while on the skittering “Porcelain” she explores her voice’s highest reaches as she notes how any troubles she’s had in the past have only made her more resilient in the present. The EP’s genre-shifting, which includes a stripped-down piano reimagining of “Porcelain,” shows how they’ve also made her more curious and confident as an artist. Once tied up in label red tape, she’s now free to use her voice in any context she deems appropriate, whether it’s the *TRL*-era throwback confection “Ready to Love” or the stretched-out sunshine-soul cut “One Last Time.” On *NGL*, JoJo is calling the shots with intention and honesty—as well as the pop savvy she displayed as a young teen on the come-up.

“I’ve been realizing that I really made the album that I needed to heal myself,” Kali Uchis tells Apple Music about *Sincerely,* perhaps her most liberating work yet. The Colombian American singer-songwriter’s catalog has never felt slight or frivolous, whether in English or in Spanish. Yet this full-length follow-up to her 2024 *ORQUÍDEAS* dyad presents as something truly unique, arriving roughly a decade after her promising EP debut *Por Vida*. The majority of the songs here began simply as voice notes, fortuitously captured in inspired moments outside of the confines or pressures of a studio setting. “Messages would just feel like they were directly coming through me, and I just had to get them out,” she says. Given such natural creative origins, it should come as little surprise that the actual process behind the album eschewed industry norms altogether, favoring home recording and unconventional settings. And despite the demonstrated level of guest vocal talent at her fingertips, she opted out of features, too. “When you’re making emotional music, you have to actually dig into difficult subjects,” she says, marking a clear distinction between this piece and its star-powered predecessor. As a result, *Sincerely,* feels disarmingly intimate for what is ostensibly a pop album, even one from as consistently adventurous an artist as Uchis. The evocative moments of opener “Heaven Is a Home…” and closer “ILYSMIH” speak on love in grand and sweeping gestures, the passing of her mother and the birth of her son making understandably profound impacts on the work. Influences like Cocteau Twins and Fiona Apple can be felt in all that comes between those bookends. “There’s a lot of grief, but there’s a lot of joy,” she says, describing what seeps through the veil of “Silk Lingerie,” or the vamps of “Territorial.” Excess punctuation on titles like “Lose My Cool,” and “For: You” hint at the flowing prose of her lyrics as it contributes to an even greater whole. “I think it is a celebration of life in its own way,” she says, “in the sense of finding beauty in the pain and taking the good.”

“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

Even on her major-label debut, 2016’s *Hero*, Maren Morris bent the rules of traditional country radio: She cursed, read men for filth, and, on breakthrough single “My Church,” bucked the title’s pious implication by declaring the radio, not the church, as her salvation. Since then, the Texas-born singer-songwriter (who moved to Nashville in her twenties at the behest of her pal Kacey Musgraves) has purposefully distanced herself from the Music City machine, mocking the industry’s conservatism on 2023’s “The Tree” and promoting 2024’s *Intermission* EP explicitly as pop. The five tracks from that EP appear alongside nine new ones on Morris’ fourth album, *D R E A M S I C L E*—an even bolder departure from her country roots. For both *Intermission* and *D R E A M S I C L E*, Morris veered away from Music Row and towards a crack team of pop songwriters (among them Julia Michaels, Tobias Jesso Jr., and MUNA). There’s no mistaking lead single “people still show up” for anything like country; instead, Morris sounds funkier than ever over a slow-simmering Jack Antonoff groove in celebration of the safety net friends provide after a breakup. “I wrote it back in early 2023, before a lot of my personal life stuff was imploding,” Morris tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, referring in part to her 2024 divorce. “So it was almost like this premonition of a song.” Catharsis comes up often: On the ’80s R&B throwback “cry in the car,” Morris extols the virtues of weeping at the wheel, and on the Julia Michaels duet “cut!” all the therapy and yoga in the world can’t match the release of a good scream session. And though “too good” might be the record’s twangiest moment, it’s also the pettiest: “Bitch, you still owe me rent!” Morris yowls to an ex, hoping that the couch they’re crashing on these days is comfy. “I don’t want perfection from my idols,” she tells Lowe. “I want them to be honest, as much as they’re willing to be. I want it to be a little bit human and messy.”

When Miley Cyrus won her first Grammys in 2024 (Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for “Flowers” from 2023’s *Endless Summer Vacation*), something shifted. “I think somewhere inside of me, I needed to hold a trophy and just feel for a moment that I have something that I can hold in my hands that feels like a true achievement,” the 32-year-old child star turned pop icon tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “After every album, I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, I made the album I set out to make, and that’s enough.’ Somewhere, I was avoiding the fact that it did matter to me.” Having finally achieved the validation she’d been longing to feel since childhood, Cyrus says she “felt free to make the album that I’ve really been craving my whole adult career to create.” The name of the resulting album, her ninth, emerged out of the ether while riffing in the studio with producer Max Taylor-Sheppard and Cyrus’ boyfriend/collaborator, Liily drummer Maxx Morando. “As soon as \[Taylor-Sheppard\] played the first chord, I just said, ‘Tell me something beautiful tonight.’ It was so easy, but I have no idea where it came from. The chord he played was so beautiful that what needed to be said had to be beautiful.” In the title track, a Sunday morning soul jam erupts with a “flash, bang, spark” into post-apocalyptic prog-rock distortion. That clash of sensuality and chaos extends through *Something Beautiful*, whose ’80s-inspired melodrama swings for the fences in sound and theme. The deceptively sparkly-sounding “End of the World” celebrates one last blowout bash before the sky falls. “This, to me, is pop music in its fullest form,” Cyrus says. “Pop gets given a bad name by manufactured label creations, and that’s just not what it is.” She’s thinking of legendary pop innovators who evolved with the times: David Bowie, Madonna, Elton John. The ultra-funky “Easy Lover” was intended for another such icon: Cyrus originally wrote it circa 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*, then refurbished it for placement on Beyoncé’s *COWBOY CARTER*. When Bey went with “II MOST WANTED” instead, Cyrus kept the slinky number for herself, recruiting Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard to play electric guitar—though the “Tell ’em, B!” ad-lib stays. Cyrus’ inimitable voice has never sounded more soulful, though that has not come without a price. She tells Apple Music she has Reinke’s edema, a rare condition which causes fluid to build up in the outer layer of the vocal folds—hence her trademark rasp. “So I have this very large polyp on my vocal cord, which has given me a lot of the tone and the texture that has made me who I am,” she says. “But it’s extremely difficult to perform with, because it’s like running a marathon with ankle weights on.” It could be removed surgically, but for Cyrus, the benefit isn’t worth the risk, “because the chance of waking up from surgery and not sounding like myself is a probability.” Throughout a career that’s spanned two-thirds of her life, Cyrus has felt lost in the static. “White noise is essentially everything happening all at the same time, and I feel like that was what the last 20 years of my career felt like,” she says. But while recording *Something Beautiful*, she found herself coming to terms with everything that’s come before. Over the heavy disco groove of “Reborn,” she delivers a mission statement: “If heaven exists/I’ve been there before/Kill my ego/Let’s be reborn.”

He may be the biggest star in country music at a time when country music’s bigger than it’s been this century, but Morgan Wallen remembers when he was the underdog. “Once you get to know me, I’m a coyote in a field of wolves,” he sings in his raspy twang on “I’m a Little Crazy,” a tale of moonshine runs and late-night paranoia that closes out his fourth album, *I’m the Problem*. Speaking to Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen, the 32-year-old Tennessee native singled out the line as his favorite. “At times in my life, I haven’t felt like I was invited,” he admits. “To me, that\'s what that line says: ‘Hey, I know I wasn’t invited, but I’m still eating, and I’m still fed.’” Since his sophomore album, 2021’s 30-track *Dangerous: The Double Album*, Wallen’s hyper-prolific bent has become a winning strategy. His 36-track follow-up, 2023’s *One Thing at a Time*, spawned eight singles (including the inescapable “Last Night”) and broke Garth Brooks’ Billboard record for most weeks at No. 1 by a country album. Not to be outdone, *I’m the Problem* clocks in at 37 tracks and nearly two hours long. But those hours fly by like a summer evening on the porch with a cooler of cold ones: No one crafts hooky, aerodynamic country anthems like Wallen and his longtime crew of co-writers and producers (HARDY, Ernest Keith Smith, Charlie Handsome, Ashley Gorley, Joey Moi). There are the requisite odes to whiskey, women, bucks, and trucks, and Wallen’s in his sweet spot when he’s probing his own conscience, which he does with surprising nuance on songs like “Kick Myself,” a roots-rock exploration of vice and accountability: “Nothing’s changed/In a way it’s getting way, way worse,” he concludes after kicking his bad habits and realizing his problems remain. Themes of addiction and temptation continue through “Genesis,” which Wallen wrote from the top down; rather than starting with the hook like usual, he relished the challenge of flipping the first book of the Bible into something catchy and cool: “I’m like, ‘How would you write a Genesis song? What would it mean? How do you do that without sounding cheesy?’” You’d expect the crossover country star of the 2020s to be running a victory lap, but the prevailing mood on *I’m the Problem* is heartbreak—served up with extra salt on the breakup banger “I Got Better,” but more often with whiskey-soaked regret on singles like “Lies Lies Lies” and “Just in Case.” (“I think there’s a lot of feelings on this album,” he says. “Happy is not the one I do best, normally.”) But the emotional centerpiece is “Superman,” the first song he’s written for his young son, on which Wallen admits his imperfections to the little guy: “I don’t always save the day,” he sings, “but you know for you, I’ll always try.” “There’s a lot of different things that I felt like I was trying to do,” he says of the deeply personal track. “Not only let him know where I fall short, but also give him advice, let him know I’m protecting him.” Generation-defining country juggernauts have feelings, too, y’know.

For over two decades, Natalia Lafourcade’s catalog has showcased her magnificent voice across a variety of styles, both as a stunning soloist and at the helm of skilled ensembles. Reuniting with her *De Todas las Flores* co-producer Adan Jodorowsky, the Veracruz-raised singer-songwriter taps into her home region’s musical history while drawing upon her wider discography for *Cancionera*. Perhaps most impressively, she recorded it entirely in one take, a feat that becomes more and more meaningful as the album persists. After a tone-setting instrumental introduction, she begins to shape the album’s fantastical broad narrative with the title track, portraying herself as an almost supernatural spirit of song. What follows is a series of memorable moments like the rumba-y-mezcal-enhanced “El Palomo y La Negra” and the fragile yet firm “Mascaritas de Cristal,” as well as moving duets like “Como Quisiera Quererte” with El David Aguilar and “Amor Clandestino” with flamenco singer Israel Fernández.

Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavors from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.” “This record” is *Sinister Grift*, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s *Buoys*. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.” Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people,’ we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album. **“Praise”** “It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.” **“Anywhere but Here”** “I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a \[The\] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real,’ where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.” **“Ends Meet”** “This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash.’ It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” **“Just as Well”** “I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg,’ which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.” **“Ferry Lady”** “There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.” **“Venom’s In”** “‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.” **“Elegy for Noah Lou”** “That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.” **“Defense”** “I was a huge fan of Patrick \[Flegel\]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before *Diamond Jubilee* came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”

The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

Playboi Carti has hardly been absent in the roughly four years since *Whole Lotta Red*, appearing alongside the likes of Future, Latto, and Trippie Redd in the interim. Still, that didn’t keep his enormous fanbase from persistently clamoring over the prospect of *I AM MUSIC*, ultimately released with the truncated title of, simply, *MUSIC*. Its substantial length seems to acknowledge the wait, opening with a flurry of rage-rap tracks like “POP OUT” and “CRUSH” that herald the raconteur’s welcome arrival. Over its 30-track, 77-minute runtime, his sonics shift between the aggressively blown-out, synth-heavy post-trap he became infamous for and something markedly poppier, yet all of it undeniably within his stylistic range. Carti initially kept his choice of guests close to the vest, as has become custom for high-profile album drops. Yet it would be impossible not to recognize Kendrick Lamar spitting on “GOOD CREDIT,” Future emoting over “TRIM,” or collaborative career mainstay Lil Uzi Vert gliding triumphantly through “TWIN TRIM.” The Weeknd’s prominent feature on “RATHER LIE” makes for perhaps the most overt example of his envelope-pushing here, though appearances by Travis Scott on “PHILLY” and the tag team of Young Thug and Ty Dolla $ign on “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES” make the pivot even more plausible. Even with friends like these, Carti shines brighter on his own, his breathy near-falsetto vocal booming through the escalating video game arpeggios of “I SEEEEEE YOU BABY BOI” and his raspy snarl swerving around the cinematic noise of “COCAINE NOSE.” Not exclusively looking towards the future, there’s an almost nostalgic appreciation for Atlanta’s early 2010s sound evoked on “RADAR,” its beat reminiscent of classic 1017 Brick Squad tapes.

For Rose Gray, the club has always represented freedom. “If you’re going to the right places, all inhibitions are dropped and no one cares what you do,” the East London-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “There’s something primal about lots of people in a room listening to heavy drums.” Gray would know. Ever since her late teens, she’s spent every available moment immersed in nightlife, building a community of go-go dancers, promoters, and DJs who not only love clubbing but respect it, too. The music she makes is similarly reverent: scooping into the vast melting pot of dance music, she welds together everything from *Screamadelica*-inspired acid house, delectable nu-disco, subterranean future garage, and psychedelic trance. “I think there’s a real bond with anyone that makes dance music that means you’re allowed to take and borrow sounds and melodies and it’s celebrated,” she says. With this debut album, though, Gray set out to refine a sound that felt her own. Inspired by pop icons such as Kylie Minogue, Robyn, and *Ray of Light*-era Madonna, she recruited some best-in-biz collaborators, including songwriting master Justin Tranter, who signed Gray to their publishing house, Sega Bodega, Sam Homaee, Zhone, Sur Back, Uffie, and Alex Metric. The result is *Louder, Please*, a euphoric and chest-achingly candid distillation of British club culture and turn-of-the-millennium pop. “I had to really grab that sound by the horns,” Gray says. “I think this record is the most pop out of anything that I’ve done. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do this.’” The album title itself is another representation of Gray’s personality. “I’ve probably grown up being dangerously obsessed with loud music,” she says. “But the ‘please’ at the end is very me. I’m quite maximalist and I can be brash, but I will always be polite, which I think feels like some of the record. It’s heavy, but there’s a sweetness to it.” Read on for Rose Gray’s track-by-track guide to *Louder, Please*. **“Damn”** “I was writing with \[The Blessed Madonna collaborator\] Pat Alvarez and Caitlin Stubbs \[Dom Dolla, Bebe Rexha\]. We’d actually written a completely different song, but it went into this quite industrial techno record. The song is basically a stream of consciousness of me just blurting out all the things I do to keep myself sane. It has this introduction energy, to me. It feels like, ‘I have arrived.’ It’s maximalist and in your face. Also, if you pick apart the lyrics, there are Easter eggs to other songs on the album.” **“Free”** “I don’t like the word ‘spiritual,’ but this song feels connected. I was in LA when I wrote it and, lyrically, I definitely wanted to play on this idea that you might have everything, but really what matters is how you feel in yourself. I used to get goosebumps when I listened to it. It feels a bit more grounded than the rest of the album. I like that it comes after ‘Damn’ because it’s like the devil and then the angel as I bring in the sweet-summer, window-down, sun-kissing-your-skin vibes.” **“Wet & Wild”** “I’ve had moments, more so when I was a little bit younger, of leaving the club in a drunken state in a bit of a mic-drop moment. Maybe you’ve had a row or maybe the guy you’re with is flirting with someone else. So you’re just out the club, maybe you’re crying and sort of expecting your group of friends to know that you’ve left and want them to follow you. But that doesn’t happen because everyone’s having a great night and just thinks you’ve gone to the toilet or something. That’s what ‘Wet & Wild’ means. It’s a bit of an eff you! I’m going to run in the streets of the city, feel myself, and have a little cry.” **“Just Two”** “I worked on this song with Uffie, who has become a very good friend. I think she’s the coolest human ever. I’m in awe of her. I had actually written the chorus of the melody and had that on my phone, but I wanted to do something upbeat and have really ’90s chords. Having Uffie in the room just shaped it to become a little bit more underground. Lyrically, the song is about how, when you’ve found your person, there’s nothing better than being with them and sharing a life with them and all the things that you do just for a kiss. It’s quite cheeky.” **“Tectonic”** “I’m in a relationship with someone who is away a lot, and I wanted to use nature to describe that feeling of separation. I feel like we are connected, but when we’re away from each other, there’s a crashing of tectonic plates. I really enjoy the soundscape. Alex Metric, who I wrote it with, is such a little tech wizard that he has a lot of these synths from the ’90s. I think he actually bought some stuff off of William Orbit, who produced *Ray of Light*, which is one of my favorite albums ever. I could make a whole album in the world of this song.” **“Party People”** “Writing this song was a whirlwind. I met Sega Bodega a few times and he said I should come to Paris to write with him. People say they want to work with you, and it’s like, ‘Is it actually happening?’ We wrote three songs, including ‘Party People.’ It’s kind of a nursery rhyme. I feel like I am surrounded by party people and I’m fascinated by them, honestly. I have this group of friends, and if they were living in the late ’80s and ’90s, they would’ve been at every rave. I based the song on them and how they’re all very free. I think ‘Party People’ feels like I’m sat on the edges of a club or at some warehouse and I’m watching everything that’s happening. I’m obsessed with people that party.” **“Angel of Satisfaction”** “For the last couple of years, I’ve seen real success happen to friends. I’ve been at these industry things and you see the people that you grew up idolizing and who, in my eyes, have made it. And then I just always think, ‘Is that really what I want?’ There are a lot of questions I’m always asking myself. I definitely think that there are very healthy ways of doing it. But it’s quite a scary world out there. I wanted to create a song that was my debate on that subject, and I did have some sort of visualization of it in a dream. I explained that to Justin Tranter, and they were able to help make it digestible. In the end, we wrote it very quickly.” **“Switch”** “This song was written the first time I worked with Justin. It felt like things were aligning for me, and I felt a sort of switch personally that I had become the artist I envisioned I’d become as a 17-year-old. I just said, ‘I feel like things are really switching up for me.’ I knew that ‘switch’ was a great lyric. Justin and I talked for quite a while about what switch can mean, and we formed the song. I remember when I first wrote it, I thought it sounded like a game: bouncy, fun, candyfloss pop, but also quite sexy and hot if you look at the lyrics.” **“Hackney Wick”** “With this song, we had made the instrumental kind of roughly what it is now. I was trying lots of different vocal things on it and they just weren’t working. Then I said, ‘Can I just talk about some nights out on the mic?’ I used to go to these mad parties in Hackney Wick. We’d go from one party to the next, and then you’re on the canal and you’re having a beer and then you’re cuddling someone and the sun’s coming up. It was just such a fun time. I just felt the music really captures the energy of Hackney Wick. Then Caroline Sur Back \[Caroline Sans, aka experimental pop artist Sur Back\] created this beautiful string section, and I was like, ‘Why not? Why can it not now go into something really ethereal and romantic?’ That’s kind of how I feel about that whole time in my life, really.” **“First”** “I’m a very competitive person. Painfully competitive, in fact. I’ve got so much Capricorn in me and I’m working on it, but I’m always at the starting line, ready to go, and that kind of falls into relationships as well. It’s not a personal thing and I notice it with couples where they’re often competing with each other. I wanted to try and capture that in a song. I really enjoy the production. It’s another sprinkle of drum ’n’ bass. It’s a bit garage-y. I feel like the middle eight goes a bit dubstep.” **“Everything Changes (But I Won’t)”** “Obviously, I absolutely love the club, but there’s a whole side of me that’s very alternative and listens to lots of different music. I wanted to have at least one song that was bringing you down. I have probably been in love with the same person for most of my adult life. It’s very interesting growing up with someone and seeing us both change so much, yet still kind of remain the same. I would say that this is the only complete love song on the album. I wanted to create the feeling of me being in the middle of a storm where so much is happening around me, but I’m still very much grounded. I remember when Sean Wasabi, the producer, played the synth loop. I was like, ‘Wow, that really captures that feeling.’” **“Louder, Please”** “I created this with Caroline. I had written a song called ‘Louder’ that I really enjoyed the chorus for, and then I sung it through on a vocoder, just with piano. We sent it to Caroline with a few references, and, honestly, she sent back basically what the song is now. Similar to how ‘Damn’ was like an introduction, this feels like a closing. It’s like a warm hug. I got my little cousin, who, bless her, is just like a fairy, to say, ‘Can you play it a little louder, please?’ It felt cathartic to finish the album with a child’s voice. I think underneath it all, I just remember being little and asking my dad to play music louder.”

SAILORR, aka Jacksonville, Florida-raised Kayla Le, has built a world that is equal parts vulnerable and protected—sacred but open for visitors. On her full-length debut, she bridges these conflicting tendencies with ease, placing her diaristic songwriting and hilarious social commentary against a backdrop of smooth R&B and alt-pop. She moves from delicate croons that touch on her refusal to shave her legs for a bum partner to a Florida-inspired rap flow about soft-girl summers. Highs, lows, and seemingly every emotion in between: SAILORR owns them all on *FROM FLORIDA’S FINEST*. Her ability to convey these feelings so honestly and relatably comes from her unique perspective as a cultural commentator. “I think that, in general, memes play a large role in how we communicate with others,” she tells Apple Music. “It\'s a very universal thing. I really, really love just being able to be vulnerable with what I’m saying, but also kind of mask it with comedy.” Many of the lowest points of the album find SAILORR employing this “laugh to keep from crying” mentality. “That’s just how I deal with my own emotions. And so, if I can find a fun way to say something, I’ll do that,” she explains. SAILORR is never one to wallow in her despair, though, even on tracks like “DOWN BAD.” “I feel like genuinely that song just perfectly encapsulates what real love will do to a person,” she says. Despite the ecstasy of love, it was a real challenge for her to embody this mindset, which helps illustrate just how much SAILORR has grown since her emergence in 2023: “It’s actually so much easier to write a heartbreak song over a love song. I feel like it’s so much harder to be vulnerable in that way, to be like, ‘Oh, I’m in love, and I’m happy now.’”

It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.

When you have a voice as pure as Cleo Sol’s, you can sing about nearly anything and have it sound otherworldly. Sol, however, doesn’t take lightly the responsibility of her instrument, treating each opportunity—both in and outside of her role as lead vocalist for Sault—as an opportunity to spread joy, foster hope, and offer up praise to the most high. Sault’s mission across *10*—actually their 12th full-length project—lies squarely inside those ramparts, with Sol working alongside the group’s production engine, Inflo, alongside a slew of other collaborators (dancehall singjay Chronixx, legendary bassist Pino Palladino, rising pianist NIJE) to offer a balm for increasingly trying times. The titles alone—“The Healing,” “Know That You Will Survive,” “We Are Living”—telegraph their psalmic intention. So does Sol’s voice, which sails over Ohio funk in “Power,” recalls the radiance of disco queen Donna Summer on “Real Love,” and anchors uptempo jazz on “The Sound of Healing,” breathing life into relentless optimism. Sault has been nothing if not celebrated over the course of their elusive career, but that adulation notwithstanding, *10* reminds us there’s still hope for us all.

The tale of Sonny Moore’s career is a long and unpredictable one: Emo kid from LA makes a name as leader of a screamo band, then pivots in the late 2000s to effectively redefine dubstep for millions of raging revelers at the exact moment the EDM economy exploded. Early 2010s EPs like *Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites* are now considered canon; along the way, he had a hand in some of the best pure pop tunes of the decade, scored a Harmony Korine film (2012’s *Spring Breakers*), and circled back to reunite with his old band, From First to Last. But for his outsized impact on the past two decades of pop culture, his studio albums have been few and, well, not always far between. Nine years passed between his full-length debut, 2014’s *Recess*, and his second album, 2023’s *Quest for Fire*; one day later, he released his third album, *Don’t Get Too Close*. Naturally, it follows that the roguish superproducer would drop his fourth album out of the sky with no warning on April Fools’ Day. But the appeal of the so-called “brostep” disrupter has long been his ability to balance his prankster impulses with technical wizardry and boundary-pushing ideas. And though the title’s all-caps rant is delivered with a wink, there is a case for *F\*CK U SKRILLEX...* as a work of bona fide pop art. In this case, replace soup cans with DJ drops, which Skrillex incorporates gratuitously in a way you might call avant-garde as the album’s 34 tracks gallop into one another, then disappear just as you’ve started to wrap your head around them. Cacophonous Brazilian phonk wails into classic dubstep, hardcore techno, trance, and less-than-a-minute bursts of pop-EDM perfection. Meanwhile, increasingly unhinged Trap-A-holics-type DJ drops hint playfully at Skrillex’s mindset at this juncture in his career. “REJECT SOCIETY! RETURN TO NATURE!” bellows one such drop over the mystic-sounding “KORABU,” which crams six collaborators into two minutes (among them Drain Gang affiliates Whitearmor and Varg2™). “I SOLD MY SOUL TO GIVE YOU THIS SONG!” proclaims another one on “ZEET NOISE,” whose breakneck beat is co-produced by Boys Noize and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. “THIS BEAT DROP HAS BEEN SEIZED BY ATLANTIC RECORDS AND HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH SILENCE!” the cartoonish voice announces a minute into “BIGGY BAP” before the build-up ratchets back and the narration continues: “MY LIFE IS IN SHAMBLES! I HAVE SEVERE DEPRESSION!” Yet on “VOLTAGE,” the Platonic ideal of “filthy dubstep” erupts into a sentimental chorus: “Gotta believe there’s something more!” Of course, that’s before our ringleader brings things back to earth on closing track “AZASU” with a hearty thank-you to “the unknown graffiti artist who vandalized our wall,” as pictured on the album cover. These days, you never know where you might stumble upon a bold new work of pop art.

The 21-year-old Canadian multi-hyphenate has barely stopped to take a breath since kindergarten: She began intensive dance training at age six, scored a record deal at 16, and tied for top nominee for the 2025 JUNO Awards. Her third studio album arrives just a few months after the end of her 2024 world tour in support of her sophomore album, 2023’s *THINK LATER*. “Being on tour for a year feels like a million years—you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I have been gone for a lifetime,’” McRae tells Apple Music, though naturally she used the time as a learning opportunity. “Being onstage every night and analyzing yourself that much, you become uber-aware of yourself and what’s going on.” She began paying closer attention to exactly what kind of songs inspired her to move, what beats triggered her dancers to get—in a word—“nasty.” *So Close to What* is not exactly a club record—more like a pop record you can viscerally feel, conducive to the kind of choreo that makes a killer stage show. Prominent on McRae’s mood board were Timbaland and The Neptunes, whose kinetic productions made the aughts feel like the future. Echoes of sparkly, club-friendly 2000s R&B abound: “bloodonmyhands” recruits Flo Milli for a Miami bass throwback, while “Purple lace bra” lands somewhere between The-Dream’s *Love vs. Money* and Lana Del Rey’s *Born to Die* (which checks out, given the latter album’s producer, Emile Haynie, among the credits). And on “Sports car,” McRae and co-writer Julia Michaels found unlikely inspiration in a 2005 crunk classic. “\[Michaels\] had been dying to reference the Ying Yang Twins’ ‘The Whisper Song,’ and I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” she says. Sure enough, the concept worked. The secret to writing her most grown-up album to date, as McRae explains, was a writer’s room that skewed heavily towards women (including Michaels and songwriter Amy Allen). “With music and finding perspective on situations, no one quite understands like another girl,” McRae explains. “You need another girl to know exactly what we’ve gone through and to know what it actually feels like in order to write a song. When you’re in a writing session, you have to be one brain together, and if it’s not that, that’s when chaos happens,” she went on. “It is so liberating to be with other girls and talk about things that are so frustrating and then feel so satisfied and accomplished after.”

After several years building a following on YouTube with his inventive cover songs (as well as a viral *America’s Got Talent* appearance alongside Journey’s Neal Schon), Georgia-hailing singer-songwriter Teddy Swims burst onto the global pop scene in 2023 with *I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1)*, which featured the chart-topping single “Lose Control” and showcased his innovative blend of country’s open-hearted melodicism and the soulful textures of vintage R&B. The sequel to that record finds Swims diving headlong into the latter genre more than ever before, with a few guests to accentuate his loverboy stylings; GIVĒON lends his impressive lower range to the slow jam “Are You Even Real,” while Coco Jones and GloRilla make for perfect foils on the swaggering, low-slung “She Got It?” But as with its predecessor, *ITEBT (Part 2)* is above all a testament to Swims’ adventurousness; single “Bad Dreams” combines modern-production touches with a retro-rock sound favored by contemporaries like Black Pumas and Leon Bridges, while the sweeping chorus of “Guilty” finds Swims tipping a cowboy hat towards his recent work with artists like Thomas Rhett and Luke Bryan. Swims’ wide-ranging approach continues to ensure that there’s something for everyone in his music, even as he retains his sense of self throughout.

On what was meant to be the last date of his 2022 tour, The Weeknd took the stage at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium, but when he opened his mouth to sing for 80,000 screaming fans, nothing came out. Over the past 14 years, Abel Tesfaye has experienced what you might call pop’s glow-up of the century: When he emerged from obscurity as the faceless voice behind 2011’s noir-ish *House of Balloons* mixtape, nobody could have guessed that he’d be headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show a decade later. But that moment onstage triggered what Tesfaye has since described as a breakdown, inspiring a period of intense reflection on his life and career—and *Hurry Up Tomorrow*, his sixth studio album. Tesfaye has called *Tomorrow* the final chapter in the trilogy he began with 2020’s *After Hours*, the album that launched him into a new stratosphere of pop success, and continued with 2022’s high-concept *Dawn FM*. Continuing the narrative of its semi-autobiographical narrator’s journey through a dark night of the soul, *Tomorrow* doubles as an allegory about fame’s power to destroy: The curtain rises, and it’s all downhill from there. He longs for a time “when my blood never tasted like wine,” he wails over the night-drive synth-pop of “Take Me Back to LA,” and diagnoses fame as a disease on the glittering “Drive.” He’s ready to leave it all behind on “Wake Me Up,” a collaboration with French duo Justice: “No afterlife, no other side,” he sings, sounding entranced by the thought. Its 22 tracks play out like the swan song to end all swan songs, joined by a murderer’s row of guests: Future lends a layer of scuzz to the deceptively sweet R&B slow-burner “Enjoy the Show,” Anitta taps in for the nocturnal baile funk of “São Paulo,” and frequent collaborator Lana Del Rey makes an appearance on “The Abyss,” where ominous lyrics like, “What’s the point of staying? It’s going up in flames” hit even harder after LA’s devastating fires in January 2025. Tesfaye has dropped repeated hints that this album won’t just close out the trilogy, but also his existence as The Weeknd. If that’s the case, “Without a Warning” encapsulates the arc of an artist who never let success get in the way of his ambition: “Take me to a time/When I was young/And my heart could take the drugs and heartache without loss/But now my bones are frail/And my voice fails/And my tears fall without a warning/Either way, the crowd will scream my name.”

Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”

Just shy of his 92nd birthday, the legendary American songwriter shows no signs of stopping: *Oh What a Beautiful World* is Nelson’s 77th solo studio album. This one continues his hallowed tradition of interpreting the work of his own favorite songwriters—in this case, its 12 songs were either written or co-written by fellow Texan Rodney Crowell, who also appears to sing backup on the title track. Nelson has been recording Crowell’s songs for decades (including on 2024’s *The Border*), but here the tracks he’s selected are poignant in their focus on the mundane sweetness of life: quiet mornings, rainstorms, old clothes that fit just right. Bittersweet memories of simple childhood pleasures resurface on “Banks of the Old Bandera,” though the rope they used to swing on over the swimming hole has long since tattered and frayed. All the more moving, then, when Nelson sings on “The Fly Boy & the Kid,” “May you always stay in touch with the things that keep you young/When you’re staring at injustice, may you never bite your tongue.”