BrooklynVegan's 40 Favorite Albums of 2023 So Far

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

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

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

To call *Fuse* Everything But the Girl’s first album in 24 years is to downplay everything the husband-and-wife duo of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have been busy with since—the partial sum of which includes seven solo albums, three children, five memoirs, and three record labels. “We were very much on our separate tracks until the pandemic,” Watt tells Apple Music. “When things started getting back to normal, we both realized we had been changed a lot by the whole experience, and wondered if a change and a new direction could be a good idea.” But for as much of a contextual shift as the project might’ve been for Watt and Thorn personally, their music has always been both of its time and slightly out of it in ways that make *Fuse* feel as singular and natural as anything they’ve done before. Certain tracks bear obvious markers of the 2020s, whether it’s the 2-step beat of “Nothing Left to Lose” or Thorn’s duet with her eerily Auto-Tuned self on “When You Mess Up.” But others—like the quiet desperation of “Run a Red Light” or the after-hours bliss of “No One Knows We’re Dancing”—tap into the same small, oblique sophistications that have driven their music since before they discovered drum machines. “We had more time on our hands and more with each other,” Watt says of making their first record together since 1999’s *Temperamental*. “Tracey just said, ‘Maybe now is the time; if not now, then when?’ When we began—after the first tentative steps—we realized we still had so much in common. A common language. A love of economy, direct emotion, space.” Here Watt and Thorn talk through the album, track by track. **“Nothing Left to Lose”** Tracey Thorn: “This was the last track we wrote and recorded. I think we could only do it once we had got our confidence levels up. We were buzzing off the tracks we had already done, and thought we just needed one more to really nail it. When Ben put the backing track together, with that beat and the heavy tremolo bass and loads of space for my vocal, it felt like a nod to our past but fresh. It was so atmospheric and it inspired this really raw, heartfelt lyric.” **“Run a Red Light”** Ben Watt: “We were a few songs into recording when one evening I played Tracey some songs I’d demoed a few years back. This was one of them, and Tracey picked it out immediately, saying, ‘That is a killer song, you must let me sing it.’ The ‘run a red light’ lines only appeared once, as a coda at the end, but we turned it into the chorus instead and sang the lines together, with my vocal heavily Auto-Tuned so that it has a bit of what Mark Ronson calls that ‘sad robot’ quality. The lyric is a portrait of the kind of guy I often met at the end of the night during my DJ days, the guy who thinks he just needs one break and he could turn everything around.” **“Caution to the Wind”** TT: “It’s quite an unusual track for us in that it’s house tempo but almost euphoric. Usually we inject sadness into this musical mood, but this one has a proper celebratory lyric: the stars, the sky like a cathedral, the idea of a person coming home, and throwing caution to the wind, demanding to get close to someone. The ‘caution to the wind’ lines made me think of Stevie Nicks while I was singing them. It’s got a slight ravey Fleetwood Mac vibe to it—big tom fills and floaty scarves.” **“When You Mess Up”** BW: “This was the first song we wrote together since 1999. I had recorded a series of piano improvisations on my iPhone—just playing, without imagining I was writing a song, trying to free myself from any pressures and expectations. And using slightly unusual chord voicings, 4ths and 6ths, etc. Tracey wrote this lyric about how that transitional stage between middle age and the future reminds you of all the tension and uncertainty of being young. But she’s trying to be forgiving of herself, saying, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, we all mess up, life is difficult.’ We messed around a bit with Tracey’s vocal on some of the lines, pitching it higher, bending its tone, so it sounds like a little devil on her shoulder, or some internal voice digging at her.” **“Time and Time Again”** TT: “This is the kind of song where you can’t quite tell which is the verse and which is the chorus, it’s more circular than linear. The lyrics are about someone looking at a friend who can’t get out of a relationship, imagining that at some point they’re gonna have to come and save them. Ben and I are singing together on the verses, really nice downbeat kind of vocals. And then my voice is sped up again and used as a kind of effect in the middle section. The feel reminds us a bit of our earliest forays into electronic music in the ’80s, where some tracks on *Idlewild* were inspired by Jam & Lewis productions, that pop/R&B vibe of the time.” **\"No One Knows We’re Dancing”** BW: “The lyric is a kind of homage to Lazy Dog, the club night I ran in Notting Hill with Jay Hannan for several years from the late ’90s onwards. It took place on Sundays, starting in the afternoon and ending at midnight, and the song captures—with a bit of added color—some of the regulars who turned up or people who worked there. It’s about that secret, self-enclosed world of the club, magnified by this sense that you’re down in the dark basement dancing at 5 pm, while outside in the street normal life is just going on, and the sun is blazing. Ewan Pearson added some extra synth and drum programming, and it turned into a real dubby Italo-disco vibe.” **“Lost”** TT: “This was an early piece of music that Ben had created, recording it at home during lockdown. A hypnotic, arpeggiated repetitive cycle of a song. He had typed the words ‘I lost…’ into Google and followed all the suggestions which came up to create the lyric: I lost my mind, I lost my bags, I lost my perfect job. It seems quite random and almost detached, but then you are hit by the line ‘I lost my mother’ and you realize that it is about loss of all kinds, and how it hits you. I then improvised singing another set of lyrics as a kind of counterpoint in the background, and they are exhortations not to give up in the face of loss, to keep going, and not to call yourself a loser.” **“Forever”** BW: “This was the first track on this project where I added a four-on-the-floor beat, and I remember Tracey running into the room going, ‘I like this!’ But it isn’t really a dance track, and we quite like that. It’s got quite a dark, pulsing arpeggiator going through it, and a kind of intense mood. The lyrics are about trying to work out what’s important—letting go of game playing and time wasting, trying to work out who’d be there for you in a crisis…as the lyric says, ‘When everything burns down.’” **“Interior Space”** TT: “This started as another one of Ben’s piano improvisations, and is layered up with a sonic landscape of drones and swooshes and a field recording our engineer Bruno had made of a beach in Wales while on holiday with his family. It also features some of the only guitar on the album from Ben. My vocal is heavily treated so it sounds like the inside of my head, woozy and psychedelic, a little bit out of it. The lyric is about not understanding yourself, feeling unknowable, and the arrangement tries to dramatize that feeling, make it vivid and real.” **“Karaoke”** BW: “A slow empty groove to end the album—distorted organ, CS-80, West Coast Moog. The verse lyrics are about a trip I made to a karaoke bar in San Francisco some years ago. The early evening was fairly humdrum, then the regulars arrived and a woman sang Jennifer Hudson’s ‘Spotlight’ and brought the house down. It inspired Tracey to add the chorus lyrics, which introduce another idea into the song, asking, ‘What is singing for? Do you sing to heal the brokenhearted or get the party started?’ Both, is the obvious answer.”

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

Physical copies at Convulserecords.com

Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” the Bronx-born MC’s biggest hit to date and the song that has soundtracked an unknowable number of after-school hangs, almost wasn’t. “The song was really a throwaway for me,” Spice told Apple Music’s Ebro. “I made it, and I was like, ‘All right, let me put that away.’ And the people I was playing it for—I played it for a bunch of people, and \[they\] was just like, ‘Oh. OK, cool.’” But the song was not to be denied. By the time “Munch (Feelin’ U)” hit streaming platforms in August 2022, Ice had accumulated a legion of local fans eagerly awaiting its release, having heard a snippet she’d uploaded to socials earlier that summer. Once the phrase “You thought I was feelin’ you?” made it to TikTok, the rest was history. Or as Spice herself puts it on January’s *Like..?* EP, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana.” Twenty-three-year-old Ice Spice was born Isis Gaston and got an early start at rapping. “I had little raps and shit since I was a kid,” she says. “I never made full songs, though.” She began recording properly in 2021, with things really revving up after meeting producer and frequent collaborator RIOTUSA while in college at SUNY Purchase. Though her popularity rose fast, her first and likely most important fan was her father, an MC in his own right who, Spice says, used to run with DJ Doo Wop in the early 2000s. “In the crib or on the way to school and everything, he would be on some, ‘Let me hear something’ and always trying to film me, pushing me to do something,” she says. “Or if I would tell him about girls that I didn’t really fuck with in school, he would be like, ‘Write a rap about them.’” He likely couldn’t be prouder of his little star upon the release of *Like..?*, a six-track EP that was, at its arrival, already 50 percent hits. “Munch (Feelin’ U)” is, of course, here, as are the instantly viral “Bikini Bottom” and “In Ha Mood.” Add to those the NYC drill-expressive “Princess Diana,” the P. Diddy “I Need a Girl, Pt. 2”-sampling “Gangsta Boo,” and the Jersey club-indebted “Actin a Smoochie,” and you’ve got a picture of a young talent who is just getting warmed up. “Those are six songs that I already made,” Spice says of *Like..?*. “Fans going to eat that up. And then there’s always time to evolve and grow as an artist. So, I’m not rushing to jump into another sound or rushing to do some different shit. If it happens, it happens. I just want everything to be natural.”

Like…? is Bronx, New York newcomer Ice Spice’s debut EP. Following up the success of “Munch (Feelin' U)” and “Bikini Bottom,” on November 16, 2022, during an interview with RapCaviar, Ice Spice announced that she was working on an EP, stating: I’m excited for this new music. I’m about to put out an EP. It’s about to be like six songs. ‘Bikini Bottom’ is on there, and then there’s some that people haven’t heard. It’s about to be a vibe. Visuals coming with it, too. Yeah, a bunch of content around it. It’s lit. On December 25, 2022, Ice Spice released the EP’s third single, “In Ha Mood.” Although no other information about the EP was announced, the day before it’s release, Ice Spice took to social media revealing the cover art and tracklist. Lil Tjay serves as the sole feature.

제가 지금 누리고 있는 것들이 언제 사라질지, 언제 사람들이 제 곁을 떠날지 항상 두렵습니다. 모든 것들이 잠깐동안 밝게 빛났다가 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼 사라지는 일종의 마법이라고 생각합니다. 2집 발매 이후 제가 꾼 꿈들을 엮어서 만든 앨범입니다. 도움을 주신 전 세계 사람들에게 감사의 말씀을 드립니다. I'm always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened. This is an album that I made with my dreams I dreamed after my 2nd album. Thanks to people all over the world for the help.

“No, I\'m not the same/I think I done changed,” Janelle Monáe raps with a swagger on “Float,” the opener for her fourth LP, *The Age of Pleasure*. Over powerful brass—courtesy of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—and heavy-lidded 808s, the singer-songwriter introduces listeners to another side of herself where she embraces the present. “Those lyrics for \'Float,\' I was like, I have to put this out now,” she tells Apple Music. “This is exactly, how do I honor how I\'m feeling and who I am now. I\'m not thinking about the future, but right now, because this is all we have right now.” Where Monáe\'s previous records were character-driven—set in a complex futuristic world filled with androids—and explored themes about power, race, and humanity, *The Age of Pleasure* highlights a new era of liberation that sheds her Afrofuturist persona in favor of an unmasked exploration of her own sensuality and deservedness to feel good above all else. Monáe creates a safe space within the album\'s 14 tracks where people can relax into themselves and express their queer identities, sexuality, and unapologetic Blackness. “We had an Everyday People Wondaland party, and I was like, *Oh, this is who I want to make music for*,” she says. “This moment right here, I want to make the soundtrack to this lifestyle. They get it. This is what we fight to protect. All of my work that centers around protecting my communities that I\'m a part of, from the LGBTQIA+ communities to being Black to all of that.” *The Age of Pleasure* is a love letter to the Pan-African diaspora. Monáe trades in her previous albums\' New Wave indie-electronic beats for an effortless fusion of jazz, dancehall, reggae, trap, and Afrobeats. The first half features tightly produced jazz- and funk-inspired tempos and rhythms over which she flexes her accomplishments (“Champagne Shit”) and proudly celebrates herself (“Float,” “Phenomenal,” “Haute”). The album\'s second half switches gears with midtempo, reggae-influenced sounds and Monáe indulging her carnal desires. “I like lipstick on my neck/Hands around my waist so you know what\'s coming next/I wanna feel your lips on mine/I just wanna feel/A little tongue, we don\'t have a long time,” she sings on “Lipstick Lover,” a seductive, summery groove that is a joyous celebration of queer Black sexual liberation. She uses water metaphors to underscore her euphoric pleasure-seeking on “The Rush” and “Water Slide,” while “Only Have Eyes 42” is an ode to polyamory, with more than one lover at the center of Monáe\'s affections. Ultimately, on *The Age of Pleasure*, Monáe taps into her “free-ass motherfucking spirit,” as she calls it, and delivers an album that honors the space that she\'s currently in—unabashed and proud of who she is. “My friends have gotten an opportunity to see a different side of me that nobody gets to see, and this album, this moment that I\'m having, I\'m allowing myself to show that version of Janelle that friends get to see all the time,” she says. “I want to own all of me and be all of me.”

In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

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

Since the release of 2011’s *Aesthethica*, Brooklyn’s Liturgy have positioned themselves as a kind of black-metal band for listeners indifferent to the conventions of black metal—a stance no doubt aggravated by the self-consciously obscure philosophies of frontperson Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, who has done as much to poke the genre as she has to expand it. At 82 minutes, *93696* probably isn’t the kind of album you’ll listen to in one sitting, but its weird juxtapositions of flute fragments (“Red Crown II”), choral arrangements (“Angel of Sovereignty”), and black-metal comfort food (“Djennaration”) are provocative in any measure. Ambitious, but immediate, too.

Some years ago, there was a magazine piece wherein the writer meditated on the concept of the “Cosmic Southerner”: the late Pharoah Sanders, André 3000 and Col. Bruce Hampton (on whom the piece was ultimately focused) were all mentioned. Somehow, Alabama-born, Atlanta-based self-taught artist Lonnie Holley was left out of the piece. But Holley, 72, has improvised — nay, conjured! — ecstatic, baffling and heavy moments that can often only be described as “cosmic.” In a mere two lines of a song, Holley can zoom in on the pores of one’s skin and pull back to encompass the whole of the Milky Way. All that said, Holley’s music and visual art (for which he has shown at The Met, The Smithsonian and is represented by the illustrious Blum & Poe) is much more about our place in the cosmos than the cosmos itself. It’s about how we overcome adversity and tremendous pain; about how we develop and maintain an affection for our fellow travelers; about how we stop wishing for some “beyond” and start caring for the one rock we have. Holley has never delivered this message as clear, as concise and as exhilaratingly as he does on his new album ‘Oh Me Oh My.’ ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is both elegant and ferocious, sharpening the work contained on his 2018 Jagjaguwar debut ‘MITH’. It is stirring in one moment and a balm the next. It details histories both global and personal. Holley’s harrowing youth and young manhood in the Jim Crow South are well-told at this point — his sale into a different home as a child for just a bottle of whiskey; his abuse at the infamous Mount Meigs correctional facility for boys; the destruction of his art environment by the Birmingham airport expansion. But, as mentioned, Holley’s music is less a performance of pain endured and more a display of perseverance, of relentless hope, of Thumbs Up For Mother Universe. Intricately and lovingly produced by LA’s Jacknife Lee (The Cure, REM, Modest Mouse), ‘Oh Me Oh My’ features both kinetic, shortwave funk that calls to mind Brian Eno’s ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ and the deep space satellite sounds of Eno’s ambient works. There are also elements of Laurie Anderson’s meditations, elements of Gil Scott-Heron’s profound longform soul, elements of John Lurie’s grabbag jazz, and yes, elements of Sun Ra’s bold afrofuturism. But ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is a triumphant sonic achievement of its own. Acclaimed collaborators like Michael Stipe (“Oh Me, Oh My”), Sharon Van Etten (“None of Us Will Have But a Little While”), Moor Mother (“I Am Part of the Wonder,” “Earth Will Be There”), Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (“Kindness Will Follow Your Tears”) and Rokia Koné (“If We Get Lost They Will Find Us”) serve as choirs of angels and co-pilots, giving Lonnie’s message flight, and reaffirming him as a galvanizing, iconoclastic force across the music community. Holley reflects, “My art and my music are always closely tied to what is happening around me, and the last few years have given me a lot to thoughtsmith about. When I listen back to these songs I can feel the times we were living through. I’m deeply appreciative of the collaborators, especially Jacknife, who helped the songs take shape and really inspired me to dig deeper within myself.” ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is also an achievement in the refinement of Holley’s impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. During each session, Holley and Lee would discuss the essence of the songs and distill Holley’s words to their most immediate center. On the title track, which deals with mutual human understanding, Holley is as profound as ever in far fewer phrases: “The deeper we go, the more chances there are, for us to understand the oh-me’s and understand the oh-my’s.”

Dogsbody, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Model/Actriz (vocalist Cole Haden, guitarist Jack Wetmore, drummer Ruben Radlauer, and bassist Aaron Shapiro), is a coming-of-age album set between the hours of dusk and dawn. It is as much an exploration of love and loss as it is a sharp, piercing, and violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive - the overwhelming brightness of staring at the sun.

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

“The origin of all this goes back years,” Peso Pluma tells Apple Music. “My musicians, my team and I started this dream called Peso Pluma.” For Hassan Kabande Laija, 2023 has been sweet:. He has become one of the brightest stars and flag bearers for música mexicana’s incredible rise. In short order, he’s gone from local to global, with songs so popular that they’ve transcended into the collective subconscious. Peso Pluma became internationally known for hits like “Ella Baila Sola,” “La Bebé (Remix),” “PRC,” and “El Azul.” But *GÉNESIS*, his third studio album, clearly portrays the artist as someone more concerned with the longevity and legacy of his craft than with the momentary thrills that come from viral successes. “The title of the album represents the beginning of a new era,” says the Zapopan-born artist, referring to its release as a deliberate turning point both in his life and in his career. After such an impressive run, often in collaboration with other Latin hitmakers, *GÉNESIS* feels undeniably like a fresh albeit raw statement befitting his arrival on a new level. The album presents 14 corrido tracks across música mexicana’s spectrum, from the most romantic to the most *bélicos* and back again. On the instantly memorable “LUNA” with Junior H, he delivers a love letter in ballad form dedicated to the one who got away. “I made this song for a very special person, so that the moon could communicate the things that I cannot say to that person,” he says. The rest of the album’s stacked guest list includes his cousin Tito Double P, corridos tumbados master Natanael Cano, and previous collaborator Gabito Ballesteros, as well as artists as seemingly disparate as Luis R Conriquez and Eladio Carrión. “We are very happy to globalize Mexican music and the music we grew up with,” he says. “That has always been the goal and the same objective: to expand what we like to do and the type of music we listen to and globalize it to every corner of the world.” Having opened the ears of the world to música mexicana, he wanted to emphasize the idea that his work is not regional, but rather universal. The requinto and the bajoloche are now part of the world’s sonic tapestry, thanks in no small part to his efforts. “I\'m 23 and I\'m already out and about,” he says on “NUEVA VIDA,” a song that gives greater meaning to the album’s concept. Overall, *GÉNESIS* is a work that explores the artistic and conceptual capacities of the corrido in 2023, at the exact moment in which Peso Pluma has all eyes on him. “We are very happy with everything that is happening to us,” he says. “There are many blessings that are raining down on us, and I think that little by little, we have learned how to take the bull by the horns.”

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

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