Business Insider's Best Albums of 2023

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.

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

“This is about me telling the stories I want to tell, in the order I want to tell them, through the sonic landscape I want to tell them,” RAYE tells Apple Music of her debut album, *My 21st Century Blues*. The South London singer-songwriter, born Rachel Keen, had to wait longer than most to do that. In June 2021, she claimed on social media that she hadn’t been “allowed” to release a debut LP, despite having signed a four-album deal seven years earlier, and that she was “sick of being slept on.” (She left her label shortly after and released this LP as an independent artist.) “There really did have to be quite a lot of soul searching and therapy and forgiveness and reflection,” says RAYE of the aftermath. “I wanted to go back to the songs that I was passionate about.” Those were tracks that RAYE had written years earlier, and which, revisited and reworked, make up half of *My 21st Century Blues*. Most of the others were written fresh, after she escaped to a cabin in Utah with producer and friend Mike Sabath, armed with a laundry list of topics to dig into (reflected in some of the album’s meatier song titles, such as “Body Dysmorphia.” and “Environmental Anxiety.”). *My 21st Century Blues* can sometimes be a difficult listen: RAYE unflinchingly processes traumatic experiences including sexual violence, substance abuse, disordered eating, and the suffocation she has felt as a woman in music, with embraces of everything from trip-hop to hypnotic dance, dancehall, cinematic pop, gospel, blues, and more. Getting to this point, she says, feels like “the most beautiful validation,” as well as something close to healing. “Everything for me on this is so medicinal,” she says. “I’m so excited for the artist now I get to become. This has set the tone for me, knowing how much potential there is in what I can say and what stories I can tell.” Read on as RAYE talks us through every track on her long-awaited debut. **“Introduction.”** “Before synths and electronic stuff, it was just a show. It was a real band. The singer would come on and sing for you in a nice dress or a nice suit. I really wanted listeners to feel like they’re in this little blues club or a jazz club, taking in all the songs as they go on a wild tangent far away from that.” **“Oscar Winning Tears.”** “The version you hear now has really taken on its own form since the original demo. When the situation with the spiking happened \[RAYE’s drink was spiked by a man she knew and trusted\], the man was just crying tears in my face. He was the victim. I was like, ‘Wow, I have a song for this.’ It was liberating. And when we finished it, I knew this had to be the start. I think the initial concept and then the story ended up just merging so perfectly into just a beautiful piece of medicine for me.” **“Hard Out Here.”** “When the story or feeling is burning at my chest, it has to force its way out. It was just rage and pain flowing out. For the line about CEOs and white privilege \[‘All the white men CEOs, fuck your privilege/Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth/Fuck you think this is?’\], my engineer turned and looked at me, but I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going there!’ This song was me promising myself that I will bounce back. It’s hard to put the story of what I’ve been through into words because it’s so much over so long. In my opinion, I really did such a good job of holding it down and in. Some of the things that were said and the way I was emotionally manipulated, it’s so dark. Coming out the other side of it, I just needed to remind myself that I will bounce back.” **“Black Mascara.”** “I’d just come back from where these assaults took place and was very much not good. It was just after ‘BED’ \[RAYE’s 2021 hit with Joel Corry and David Guetta\] came out, so I was having to sell the pop-girl image. At that time, I had the green light to do an album before they changed their mind for the last time. I played some chords, and they were very vampire-y and medieval. I had the phrase ‘Once you see my black mascara/Run from you’ on the way there, and so I was just building the lyrics. We had a session the next day, but I canceled it—I just wasn’t there—and didn’t listen to the song until maybe three weeks after I was sent it. I pressed play, and it sounds like what you hear now. I put it on repeat.” **“Escapism.” \[with 070 Shake\]** “I think when I was on my way out of the darker chapters in my life, I needed this song. It gives me hope. Mike played me this beat in the car, and I was rapping all this aggressive stuff. I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell on this. When we got to Utah, I went into the toilet and said a little prayer: ‘Dear God, help me find the best lyrics for the song.’ Then I got on the mic, and it came together so quickly—maybe in an hour and a half. I’m still processing the success of this song because I just did not expect it at all. I’m not doing this to gun for mainstream success. I’m not doing this to have the biggest chart records. These songs aren’t about that.” **“Mary Jane.”** “I’m an all-or-nothing person in every aspect of my life. So, when something dangerous is introduced \[substances\], it can get really bad—really, really bad. The lyrics in this song are dark, but substance abuse can really, really take you there. It’s a love song married with a slightly uneasy feeling behind the music. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable.” **“The Thrill Is Gone.”** “This song existed for years but was completely different in the beginning. I always wanted to take it back in time. We recorded it on tape and made it in the Valentine Studio in LA. It’s all carpeted walls, and it felt like a real taste of how music used to be created. Recording it was a beautiful experience. The story feels so classical, but the picture in my head is so distorted and modern and weird. I really love where we took it.” **“Ice Cream Man.”** “This is the hardest song on the album for me. There are so many layers of what’s taken and what’s affected and changed after trauma and sexual violence. So much is stolen. You battle so many minefields of, ‘Is this my fault? Did I put myself in the wrong position? Am I blowing something out of proportion?’ It just becomes this ugly thing that I’m having to deal with for the rest of my life because of someone else’s stupid, disgusting actions. And I think that, at the very least, this is me proclaiming what I am and that these things shouldn’t be allowed to define what we become. It’s as much for me as whoever might be listening who needs to hear it. I wanted it to just feel super intimate, with that hum that comes in at the beginning and these filtered drums. And at the end, you get this moment to feel beautiful with your tears, to stand up and walk out the room and continue with your day.” **“Flip a Switch.”** “I did this with Stephen McGregor \[aka producer Di Genius\], who’s a dancehall legend. He produced so many of the songs I grew up listening to, so he really brought his flair and flavors to the sound. I was in a budding relationship, and I had just decided to let my walls down. I felt it was safe, and then it was like, *bang*. I would have been fine if \[he\] hadn’t given me all this false hope. I was so angry, and it was like, ‘You know what! This song is going to be about you now. Let’s get all the drama out.’ It was very empowering and me saying all the things that I would love to say to his face. But instead, I just put it in the song and proceeded to listen to it all week.” **“Body Dysmorphia.”** “I’d been putting this one off for a while. It was the last day in Utah, and I felt I had to do it. I wanted it to feel sexy, in a weird way. So, we started with these scratchy, really uncomfortable strings, and then you have these smooth drums, which—if you were ignoring the lyrics—you’d probably have a little slow vibe to. It was a stream of consciousness. \[The things I talked about in this song\] can manifest in such ugly ways and hold really intense power over you. I think half of the power of this song is just saying them out loud.” **“Environmental Anxiety.”** “I’m a musician, but we know the state of the world, and you can see so clearly that things are just evidently flipping wrong. But \[the climate crisis\] is out of the control of an average citizen. It requires governments to pull their flipping pants up and put laws in place to better impact the climate. Banning plastic forks is all well and good, but you lot \[politicians\] are doing real serious damage. I thought I’d make a song about it, and I wanted to take the piss because that’s what the government does out of us. I wanted this eerie, childlike energy that brings you in, but also a punky, weird drum thing.” **“Five Star Hotels.” (feat. Mahalia)** “This song existed for a long time, and I always loved it. It was just a way of feeling sexy. We sent it to Mahalia, and when she sent me her verse, it was like, ‘Yes!’ We’re two girls who have dreams and have worked really hard from young ages. She just felt like the right person. Creating music to feel \[sexy\] has been empowering for me.” **“Worth It.”** “I wanted to release this a long time ago. Sometimes there are moments where it’s like, ‘Here comes someone—let’s make all of the shit things feel really cool. And all this work that I’m supposed to be doing on myself, I might pause for a section and start putting some work into this other thing because it feels really nice.’ I wanted to have this near the end of the album—a warm hug as you are leaving some of those darker earlier things. The irony is in putting it just before ‘Buss It Down.’ because it didn’t fucking work out!” **“Buss It Down.”** “It’s the juxtaposition between gospel feelings and a song about getting down. The choice to be single is empowering, and I think this is something for the single girls. It’s all right to be single and be joyous about it. It can be a good thing.” **“Fin.”** “I wanted to have the audience cheer at the end of ‘Buss It Down.’, and I want this thank-you moment. It’s a personal closing—I’m so proud of this album, I’m so grateful that people will even listen to this outro. I’m a human who’s put some stories together, and I’m excited for next time. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but we’re here. And the joy of being able to share this moment is really exciting. It’s been a long time coming.”

Hip-hop free spirits Aminé and KAYTRANADA broke through around the same time, their respective mid-2010s album debuts having dropped within roughly a year of one another. As such, few should be all that surprised to see their amalgamated KAYTRAMINÉ come to fruition. The sweet soul sensations and razor-sharpened verbiage of initial singles “Rebuke” and the Pharrell-assisted “4EVA” accurately previewed their full-length’s scenic purview, a POV of a righteous escapade through the post-Neptunes/post-Timbaland lineage. Hyper sexual exploits, luxury smackdowns, and much more await listeners on “letstalkaboutit” and “Ugh Ugh,” as well as the aggressively funky cuts “STFU3” and “Who He Iz.” Formidable rapper guests Big Sean and Freddie Gibbs raise the pressure considerably, while Snoop Dogg himself brings his experience in similar sonic spaces to the sparse and synthy “Eye.”

“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.”

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

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.

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

One of the toughest things to do as an artist is a feat of transfiguration whereby a songwriter changes the individual into the universal. It’s a rare accomplishment, and even rarer for an artist as young as Reneé Rapp to do it. “I write a lot from specificity,” she tells Apple Music. “So many of these songs have to come from real things that are happening in my life. Friendships end, relationships end. Sometimes you just have to sit with your feelings.” The 23-year old actor and musician blazed through Charlotte, North Carolina’s thriving theater scene before taking on the roles of Regina George in the *Mean Girls* musical, both on Broadway and in the upcoming movie adaptation, and Leighton on the HBO Max series *The Sex Lives of College Girls*. Through all that success, Rapp also somehow found the time to develop into a preternaturally talented songwriter. On her full-length debut *Snow Angel*, she fuses the raw catharsis of Olivia Rodrigo with the scenic storytelling of Maggie Rogers, bouncing back and forth between stadium-ready hooks (“Talk Too Much,” “The Wedding Song”) and intimate, slinky crooning (“I Wish,” “Willow”). Rapp enlisted her longtime collaborator, the Grammy-nominated producer Alexander 23, to work on *Snow Angel*, and you can sense his guiding hand throughout the record, helping Rapp channel and focus her emotions—heartbreak, anxiety, venom, and hope in equal measures—into personal stories that also feel like they’re for everyone. Below, she tells the stories behind those stories on *Snow Angel*. **“Talk Too Much”** “I have a lot of stress dreams, and one night I had a dream that I killed my girlfriend. I was so stressed out and I was so confused. The relationship was very new, and I got really overwhelmed. I ended up confessing and asked her how she felt. They were like, ‘What is wrong with you?!’ Then I just decided to write ‘Talk Too Much’ because I don\'t think I should have told them that, but also I did tell you this. It’s about the spiraling of being in a new relationship and wondering if it\'s good or bad.” **“I Hate Boston”** “This song comes from two different places. It started because I was in a session with some of my friends and I was talking about this show I played in Boston. The fans were just so awesome and it was a great gig by all accounts, but I was sick and I felt like shit. I also wore these faux leather pants and big boots and a fuzzy sweater, and the venue was so hot and I was suffocating. It was awful. The other side was that I wanted to use Boston as an alias because the word sings beautifully. The lyrics are about a city that an ex tainted for me, and I wanted to make sure that it felt really close to the hyper-specific situations that I went through in this relationship. Boston was sort of a cover-up.” **“Poison Poison”** “This is probably the most sarcastic, cynical song that I have on this record. I had a friendship with another girl that ended really horribly. I think as a woman and as women, it sucks when we get in a fight with another woman. We don\'t want to be a girl that takes down another girl. I wanted to write a song about it because I cared about this person so much and we were such good friends and I felt really betrayed. I wanted to deal with my feelings in a way that was comedic and sarcastic and kind of coped with it in a different way than how I actually felt about it, which was extremely hurt and betrayed and really confused and very sad.” **“Gemini Moon”** “This song is so fucking funny because actually I\'m a Pisces moon. But I wrote \'Gemini Moon\' because I had a really tough breakup a couple years ago which started as us taking a break—this in-between thing where you\'re feeling two states at once. I walked outside after this happened and I looked up and, of course, it\'s a full fucking moon. That shit always happens to me on a full moon. I always have full moons on my birthdays, and it sucked. Then I wondered if the moon is in Gemini right now. And through tears, I looked it up, and sure enough, it was Gemini moon. Then I was in the studio one day and fresh into a new relationship and I was experiencing being in love with someone again after having that fallout. I hadn\'t felt that intensely for someone in a long time, and I was really scared. I was criticizing every little thing I did. So I was like, wow, I wonder if it\'s a Gemini moon right now. I looked it up and it was a Gemini moon, and I was like, are you fucking kidding? It was almost exactly two years apart.” **“Snow Angel”** “I went through a really shitty experience in early 2022. I was extremely sad, and I was involved with the wrong people. I had recounted the situation so many times to friends over and over again. It was something that I think I had just stored in a place that I was never really going to process it the way that other people did. Then one day I was sitting with Alexander and he was like, ‘We really should write that snow song.’ And everybody else on my team was like, ‘We\'re so happy. Oh my god, this is the code for this album, we\'ve cracked it.’ In my brain I\'m like, ‘Well, this was one of the worst experiences in my life, so glad that it could turn into something like this.’” **“So What Now”** “I was seeing this person and we had a really quick in-and-out kind of thing. It was just so intense and I was so mad. So after the situation had subsided, I was like, ‘Are you going to ever speak to me again? Am I supposed to speak to you?’ ‘So What Now’ is just the culmination of this overarching thought of ‘you\'re treating me like shit’ but also ‘I\'m not mad at you, but what are we supposed to do?’” **“The Wedding Song”** “I was living in New Jersey for work for a few months when I wrote this. I was in a relationship at one point with someone who I thought I was going to marry, and that was the first time that had ever happened to me. And I thought that it would be so just gut-wrenching to be like, ‘I wrote you a wedding song because I thought I was going to be with you forever and I never played it for you, and now you\'re never going to hear it because we don\'t speak anymore.’ It\'s meant to be this really soul-sucking kind of song that\'s so happy and beautiful in the chorus, then it\'s just so sad in the verses because it\'s like, ‘Well, this is what I would\'ve said had you stuck around, but you decided to not and that\'s just now something that I have to deal with.’” **“Pretty Girls”** “I think ‘Pretty Girls’ is the universal gay-girl experience, in my opinion. Ever since I became more publicly out, so many straight girls are like, ‘I couldn\'t be with a girl, but wow, if I did...’ So it\'s just the gay-girl experience of all these straight girls being like, ‘I am either a closeted gay in a way that I don\'t understand or I\'m just kind of using you as a little prop.’ And that sucks any way you slice it. But in a really sick and twisted way, it’s kind of flattering. I love to be hit on. I\'m so sorry, but I do.” **“Tummy Hurts”** “This was the last song we wrote that ended up making the album. It started because I wrote down in my notes one day the sentence ‘My tummy hurts, he\'s in love with her.’ It wasn\'t really about any specific situation, which is usually where I write from. I love this almost childlike way of saying I have a stomach ache and then this really adult feeling of someone is in love with somebody else. I liked how it felt and I liked how it was worded. And it all came from there.” **“I Wish”** “I wrote this when I was living in New Jersey. I was writing with some of my friends and they had come up with a different kind of concept for the chorus and some of the lyrics. They said, ‘Oh, this is like writing a song to your childhood self.’ But for me, it\'s reading in a different way. It was more about how I remember my first taste of mortality when I realized my parents were going to die when I was 10. I remember not being able to sleep for such a long time because I was like, holy shit, my parents are not invincible. I was just so shocked by it and I was so confused. I was young and it was really jarring and I struggled with it for a long time. I think I still do. And so I just wanted to make \'I Wish\' this sort of love letter to the idea that I wish I didn\'t know about the concept of death.” **“Willow”** “‘Willow’ is two things. Frank Ocean is my favorite songwriter of all time. I didn\'t feel like I had any songs on my project that took any lyrical inspiration from him and his projects, and I really wanted there to be. I also loved willow trees as a kid. As I got older, I also thought there was something so interesting about it being called a weeping willow. I felt like I kind of had a lot of similar qualities to this tree, which sounds crazy, but I just always felt that way. I ended up framing it as my little self sitting under a willow tree talking to my current self. It was me personifying the tree as my younger self, which sounds kind of crazy, but it\'s one of my favorite songs on the whole album.” **“23”** “I think it’s the first song that Alexander and I did together. I was having full birthday panic the day before I turned 23. I was like, ‘Wow, it\'s my birthday, but I feel like all my friends hate me and I feel extremely alone.’ I thought that these feelings would be gone by now, but here I am, a young adult about to be in my Jordan year, and I still feel like shit. It’s a birthday blues kind of song. Then the outro is this hopeful message that I don\'t feel that same way when I\'m 24 next year. So the kind of annual terror that comes around your birthday, it\'s like wishing that away.”

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

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.

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

After Maisie Peters released her 2021 debut, *You Signed Up for This*, she was hit by a feeling of anticlimax. “It was honestly a bit of a strange time for me,” she tells Apple Music. “I’d been so proud of the album. I’d worked so hard on it, but it was done and I found it very difficult to fathom that. I didn’t know what to do, actually physically, with myself.” Naturally, Peters—who’s always been a prolific songwriter—got straight back into the studio. And it soon turned out she had a lot to write about: There was a big breakup, the slow and careful process of piecing herself together again, and, in 2022, a tour, with Peters writing the rest of her second LP in between live dates. “I had so much to say because I was going through a personal crisis, one could say,” she says. “I just wanted to have it down on paper, how I felt, what had happened. I was trying to be honest.” When Peters says that, you know she means it. This is a singer-songwriter whose trademark is radical candor. Here, you can expect songs about crushing insecurity (the superb “Body Better”), missing someone even though they’ve hurt you (“Want You Back”), and wishing you could go back to before any of this happened (“Two Weeks Ago”). But there are also clear-skies moments, as Peters slowly moves on (see “There It Goes,” a poignant moment about the healing power of time passing) and realizes she’s better off without. And it’s all set against assured, infectious, and often synth-led pop laced with tender piano ballads and sassy anthems inspired by Shania Twain or Britney Spears. “This is my big life lesson of 2022,” adds Peters of the material here. Read on as the singer lets us in on the record’s creation—and what it, and the 12 months that inspired it, taught her. **You know what you’re doing more with album two.** “After the first album, I felt like I’d done a round of the track in my F1 car. This time it was like, ‘OK, I know what I’m doing a little bit now. I’ve done this before.’ I was touring so much that I just didn’t have time to think about it—I just had to make it. But there was a pressure for myself. I loved my first album and know it meant so much to my fans. I just felt this huge pressure to make something else that meant as much. When people ask me who I’m making music for, it’s primarily me, but there are also about 30 girls on Instagram too. I think about them constantly. But there was a point when I was probably doing it too much and had to say, ‘I can’t have these people on my mind.’ They love me because it’s me, so I need to trust that.” **Going to Sweden taught me about pushing boundaries.** “After the first album came out, I went to Sweden for the first time in October 2021. I worked with Fat Max Gsus (Tove Lo, Lewis Capaldi, Zara Larsson), Oscar Görres (Troye Sivan, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears), and First Aid Kit’s Klara Söderberg. It was a game changer for me, and I was so in love with the way these guys write music. The cliché of Sweden is that it’s pop by numbers—and obviously they’ve written some of the biggest hits in the world. But out of everyone I’ve ever worked with, the Swedish crew were the most open and the most interested in pushing boundaries. It’s easy to feel like you have to work within a set of guidelines—and I very much learned not to do that.” **You don’t realize how lyrically honest you can be until you go there.** “With a song like ‘Body Better,’ we’re sat there dissecting my innermost insecurities and deepest fears. There is a separation between feeling something deeply and writing it—I don’t write songs sitting there and sobbing. But this album taught me that I could do that \[be so lyrically honest\] and that I could go to those places.” **It also taught me that I won’t feel like this forever.** “There’s a Lucy Dacus song, ‘Night Shift,’ where she goes, ‘In five years, I hope the songs feel like covers.’ At some stage, it does—and you can’t believe you once felt like that. When I released ‘Two Weeks Ago,’ it was a year on from when I wrote it. It was an accurate reflection of who I was then, just a transcript of my brain. It was interesting to release it when I was in such a different place. I can recognize who I was and I’m very fond of the girl who wrote that song. It’s sort of like a shadow you have that’s walked off on its own. This album is the coolest reminder of what’s passed—it was an era of my life that I’m out of now and grateful for, but I don’t miss it.” **I needed a song to tie the bow.** “‘There It Goes’ is almost a sister song to ‘Two Weeks Ago.’ It was another screenshot of my mind. I’d just gone back to London after touring, we’d thrown a house party and I’d gone to a yoga class to try to get better. We were hanging up art. I was going on dates. And that song was so important to me, because this whole album was a reflection of my life, and I needed a song that tied the bow. I couldn’t let this record exist without a song that reminds me—and tells everyone else—that there is an ending to this. There’s a lyric on the song: ‘The comedown of closure/The girls and I do yoga/I wake up and it’s October/The loss is yours.’ Suddenly everything is a bit boring in the nicest way ever. You’re not angry. You’re not bitter. You’re just going to yoga or going on a walk. I find it really moving to talk about that song. I also learned that you can dig your heels in and think, ‘I refuse to feel anything apart from this. I only want to feel this way forever, for good or for bad.’ But the fact is, you just can’t. One day you will just wake up and you won’t feel the way you did. And that’s a good thing. It’s good to move along with the tide.” **The person you love isn’t your whole world.** “There’s a song on this album called ‘Coming of Age,’ which is a song about the fact that—how to put this?—sometimes I give magic to people. I think they’re magic, but they’re not: I just wrote them that way or I created them that way. You pin all your hopes and dreams on them. And the song, to me, is about seeing that actually I was the magic. The other person was there, but it was me that made this what it was and made this so special and shiny and glittery and beautiful. There’s another lyric on this album I think of a lot, which is on ‘BSC,’ where I go, ‘I can write you out the way I wrote you in.’ It doesn’t mean the person wasn’t great and didn’t teach me something. But it’s also knowing the person isn’t your whole world. You are your whole world.” **If a man tells you he wants you in his life forever, run!** “I’d had a conversation with another friend where one of us said, ‘Next time a man says I want you in my life forever—and then proceeds to act in the most atrocious way any man has ever acted ever—we’re out.’ I wrote the song ‘Run’ in January/February 2022, just after that conversation, with one of my best friends, \[songwriter\] Ines Dunn. We had that line going. In my own heart, I was no longer sad about it—I was just trying to take the lesson from it. I really tried to get that song right. I kept referencing Britney Spears and ‘If U Seek Amy.’ I wanted to do a song like Britney did, or like Gwen Stefani did.” **There are some songs that can only be written once about a moment in your life.** “On the first album, that was ‘Brooklyn,’ and on this one, it’s ‘The Band and I.’ It was almost ‘Brooklyn Part Two’ for me, because I remember when I was trying to put that song on my first record, I had someone I worked with say, ‘It’s so specific. I’m not sure it’s for an album—who can understand this?’ But those are the most important songs. For me, I had to have ‘The Band and I’ on this album because \[touring\] was such an integral part of my year. It just captured a moment in time that I’ll never be able to do again.” **I learned how special it is to be doing what you dreamed of when you were nine.** “There’s a lyric on ‘The Band and I’ where I say, ‘It was a far-flung wish when we were young/Now we’re living the dream and I hope we never wake up.’ I think about all of us \[Peters and her band\] on these tour buses and how it’s absolutely ludicrous that we’re allowed to do this. It’s such a one-in-a-billion chance to do music the way I do it. And I feel crushed under the weight of that sometimes—of how lucky I am. How dare I live my dream? That song is, I think, my favorite on the album, because of exactly that.” **I don’t know if I’d recommend writing an album to get over a breakup. But I’d do it all again.** “I definitely don’t write for catharsis. I do it for documentation purposes, which is kind of useful. Plus—and I’m sorry to say this, I *really* am—but there’s no breakup hack. You can’t speed yourself through it. At the time, it feels difficult and sad and you wonder what that was for. But, in \[the relationship\] not going like I wanted it to, I made this album. I learned innumerable things about myself. You grow for the better. Every time I write something that I really deeply love and believe in, I learn something about myself. And that’s the greatest, coolest gift ever. That’s why I’d do it all again.”