Chorus.fm’s Top 25 Albums of 2019

Never let it be said that successful bands have less at stake once they get two decades deep into their career—or at least never say it to Arizona emo pioneers Jimmy Eat World. “The standard that we\'ve set for ourselves now gets higher and higher every album we do,” frontman Jim Adkins tells Apple Music. “You\'re not only making an album, you\'re basically adding to your catalog. So anything we do has to be as good as the best thing we\'ve done so far. Otherwise, why are we doing it?” The simple answer, as evidenced by their 10th album, *Surviving*, is that they are extremely good at it—guitar-driven anthems that feel keenly suited to this moment in Adkins\' life. “It\'s like the time capsule of everything I\'ve been thinking about for the last couple of years,” he says, “which is basically the blocks that we put in our own way that keep us from really experiencing life in as meaningful a way as it can be.” Here he talks through a handful of key tracks that best show how Jimmy Eat World have managed to challenge themselves while still feeling true to everything they\'ve done and meant for over 25 years. **Surviving** “It\'s this tune that doesn\'t have a real discernible chorus to it. It\'s a good example of us being us, but also trying to push ourselves in a way, but also trying to work within some framework of restraint. There\'s usually a basic template or a basic parameter we give ourselves. The lines that we color within are something that feels like a traditional pop song, where sections of the tune are recognizable and it has an arc to it. And then we like to see how much we can get away with while it still resembles that. \'Surviving\' steps a little bit out—it has the arc that I think is interesting to write, but it doesn\'t have any of the interior or outline parts, like a normal pop song would. It\'s more of a crescendo, and it\'s more or less one riff the whole song. How little do you need to really fully communicate what you want to do, what you want to say?” **All the Way (Stay)** “One thing that we were thinking about for that—and for everything, really—the album should have less things doing more. If you listen to a Van Halen album, there\'s not a lot of overdubs—if any. It\'s just four dudes, each of them playing their own role, with the exception of maybe backup vocals. If you put a ton of loud things happening and it\'s just loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, it loses the effectiveness of the loudness. It doesn\'t sound louder anymore. It sounds like synth. When you start taking things away, then things feel heavier. So with \'All the Way (Stay),\' there\'s sections of the song where you\'re just listening to the snare drum decaying in the room. There\'s literally nothing happening for a section of that song—you\'re listening to air. But it makes what\'s happening around it, when that comes back in, a lot more heavy. There\'s a lot of musical devices that are counterintuitive, but when you employ them, it really makes a big effect. And in general, we wanted to take things away as a default position.” **555** “One of the reasons we wanted to work with \[producer\] Justin Meldal-Johnsen is because he just brings such a wide palette of musical influences and information. Way more than what we have. I have a very surface knowledge of MIDI and synth things, so I can explain to him what I want to try to get or I can lay down something that\'s a really rough amateur version of what I want and he just knows exactly what to do. It\'s hard to pin down one exact thing, other than maybe the synth sound in \'555\' would not be nearly as cool without Justin\'s knowledge.” **Criminal Energy** “It\'s just such a heavy guitar song. I mean, that\'s a part of what we do, for sure, but it\'s so borderline metal in a stoner way. I wouldn\'t say it\'s a risk and I wouldn\'t say it\'s totally out of character, but I feel like it\'s pushing our self-perception just enough into that arena of active rock that is not where we live all the time. So I know I\'m on the right track when I feel like, \'I don\'t know if I should do this.\' There\'s definitely a parameter that you need to work within and you need to set for yourself. You can\'t push your self-perception so far that it doesn\'t resemble you anymore.”

With the DIY video for her 2017 track “Pretty Girl,” Clairo became the premier case study for how the internet can instantly blow up homespun artists. But with her full-length debut album, the Massachusetts indie-pop phenom betrays a bold artistic vision that can no longer be contained by her bedroom walls. Co-produced by the artist with ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, *Immunity* achieves just the right balance of focus and fuzz, expanding Clairo’s sonic vocabulary with neo-soul vibes, jazzy piano lines, and boom-bapped drum breaks while framing her most brutally honest tracks—like the breakup lament “Bags” and same-sex-love anthem “Sofia”—with gritty intensity and blown-out distortion. Throughout the album, Clairo tries to reconcile her desire for independence with her need for intimacy, an emotional tug-of-war that reaches its zenith on the momentous closer “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” a stark, defiant piano ballad that cedes to the warm embrace of its ecstatic chillwave outro.

“Laying in the grass, we were dragging on loud/Got my hand in your hand and my head in the clouds.” This is the scene, set with acoustic atmospherics and frontman Jade Lilitri’s familiar, layered, honey-sweet-but-burnt-around-the-edges vocals, that flickers to life at the start of oso oso’s new full-length, basking in the glow. The track, simply called “intro,” is just that: an intimate, humble, and hopeful prologue that prefaces a record radically committed to letting the light in—because Lilitri knows the darkness like the back of his hand. The spacious opening proposition of “intro” gives way to “the view,” an electric, invigorating indie rock banger that showcases Lilitri’s slick, effortless melodic excellence and lyrical precision (“I’ll grow, we’ll see/There’s something good in me”). The title track follows, driving home the record’s thesis on a chorus like a roman candle cracking a mid-July night sky: “These days, it feels like all I know is this phase/I hope I’m basking in the glow of something bigger I don’t know.” Lead single “dig” rounds out this first act with rainy-day riffing and hushed, staccato vocal delivery on the verse before its tense, charged chorus: “There’s this hole in my soul/So how far do you wanna go?” Lilitri asks, his voice ethereal and couched in bubblegum harmony. It’s a slow build, twining the best parts of emo around pop punk sensibilities and, eventually, wide-open alt-rock anthemics at the track’s climax before sinking back, in a slow-motion fall, to a deserted shoegaze outro. It’s an ambitious, complex scheme, and one that captures the spirit of the record: clutching tight to the unbridled glee of the short, sunny, major-key moments before they dissolve. basking in the glow is a wrestle, and it is hard work; it is the sound of refusing to capitulate to darkness, every goddamn day. It is a practice, or perhaps a battle plan (“I see my demise, I feel it coming/I got one sick plan to save me from it,” Lilitri sings, his voice and hurried guitar crackling as if they’re coming through a bedroom tape recorder.) It is filled with the delightful, subtle melodic imagination that characterizes the sound Lilitri has perfected with oso oso, but this time out, he’s put this sound to use declaring happiness (“I got a glimpse of this feeling, I’m trying to stay in that lane,” on “impossible game”) and sketching out, with keen, desperate detail, warm memories to hold onto (“‘Oh c’mon Charlie, a little louder’/I say as I hear her singing out from the shower,” on “charlie”). This “one sick plan” and its bright disposition does falter and fade. The darkness does return—it always will—but Lilitri has come to terms with it, armoring himself with the good he’s found. Even as the record ends with a relationship’s demise, Lilitri is clear-eyed, leaving us squarely in the sunlight: “And in the end I think that’s fine/Cause you and I had a very nice time.”

There are musicians who suffer for their art, and then there’s Stefan Babcock. The guitarist and lead screamer for Toronto pop-punk ragers PUP has often used his music as a bullhorn to address the physical and mental toll of being in a touring rock band. The band’s 2016 album *The Dream Is Over* was inspired by Babcock seeking treatment for his ravaged vocal cords and being told by a doctor he’d never be able to sing again. Now, with that scare behind him, he’s using the aptly titled *Morbid Stuff* to address a more insidious ailment: depression. “*The Dream Is Over* was riddled with anxiety and uncertainties, but I think I was expressing myself in a more immature way,” Babcock tells Apple Music. “I feel I’ve found the language to better express those things.” Certainly, *Morbid Stuff* pulls no punches: This is an album whose idea of an opening line is “I was bored as fuck/Sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff/Like if anyone I slept with is dead.” But of course, this being PUP—a band that built their fervent fan base through their wonderfully absurd high-concept videos—they can’t help but make a little light of the darkest subject matter. “I’m pretty aware of the fact I’m making money off my own misery—what Phoebe Bridgers called ‘the commodification of depression,’” Babcock says. “It’s a weird thing to talk about mood disorders for a living. But my intention with this record was to explore the darker things with a bit of humor, and try to make people feel less alone while they listen to it.” To that end, Babcock often directs his most scathing one-liners at himself. On the instant shout-along anthem “Free at Last,” he issues a self-diagnosis that hits like a glass of cold water in the face: “Just because you’re sad again/It doesn’t make you special at all.” “The conversation around mental health that’s happening now is such a positive thing,” Babcock says, “but one of the small drawbacks is that people are now so sympathetic to it that some people who suffer from mood disorders—and I speak from experience here—tend to use it as a crutch. I can sometimes say something to my bandmates or my girlfriend that’s pretty shitty, and they’ll be like, ‘It’s okay, Stefan’s in a different headspace right now’—and that’s *not* okay. It’s important to remind myself and other people that being depressed and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive.” Complementing Babcock’s fearless lyricism is the band’s growing confidence to step outside of the circle pit: “Scorpion Hill” begins as a lonesome barstool serenade before kicking into a dusty cowpunk gallop, while the power-pop rave-up “Closure” simmers into a sweet psychedelic breakdown that nods to one of Babcock’s all-time favorite bands, Built to Spill. And the closing “City” is PUP’s most vulnerable statement to date, a pulverizing power ballad where Babcock takes stock of his conflicted relationship with Toronto, his lifelong home. “The beginning of ‘Scorpion Hill’ and ‘City’ are by far the most mellow, softest moments we’ve ever created as a band,” Babcock says. “And I think on the last two records, we never would’ve gone there—not because we didn’t want to, but just because we didn’t think people would accept PUP if PUP wasn’t always cranked up to 10. And this time, we felt a bit more confident to dial it back in certain parts when it felt right. I feel like we’ve grown a lot as a band and shed some of our inhibitions.”

There’s a reason Taylor Swift sounds so confident and cool on *Lover*, her seventh album and the most free-spirited yet. She’s in *love*—pure, steady, starry-eyed, shout-it-from-the-rooftops love. Arriving 13 years after her eponymous debut album—and following a string of songs that sometimes felt like battle scars from public breakups and celebrity feuds—this project comes off clear-eyed, thick-skinned, and grown-up. It may be a sign that the 29-year-old has entered a new phase of her life: She’s now impressively private (she and her long-term boyfriend are rarely seen together in public), politically fired up (this album finds her fighting for queer and women’s rights), and eager to see the big picture (fans have speculated that the gut-wrenching “Soon You’ll Get Better” is about her mother’s battles with cancer). As a result, she’s never sounded stronger or more in control. She calls out dark-age bigots on the Pride anthem “You Need to Calm Down,” sends up the patriarchy on “The Man,” perfects flippant indifference on “I Forgot That You Existed,” and dares to sing her own praises on “ME!,” a duet with Brendon Urie of Panic! At the Disco. Tonally, these songs couldn’t be more different than 2017’s vengeful and self-conscious *Reputation*. Most of the album is baked in the atmospheric synths and ’80s drums favored by collaborator Jack Antonoff (“The Archer,” “Lover”). And yet some of the best moments are also the most surprising. “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” is daydreamy and delicate, illuminated with laidback strumming, twinkling trumpet, and high-pitched *ooh-ooh*s. And the percussive, playful “I Think He Knows” is a rollercoaster of a song, spiking and dipping from chatty whispers to breathy shout-singing in a matter of seconds.

Amber Bain is ready to open up. The British singer-songwriter’s stunning early EPs of ethereal pop built intrigue, critical acclaim, and—released as The Japanese House—an air of mystery. Her debut album is gorgeous and dreamy, but also extraordinarily vulnerable. “The whole point of the album is me being really honest,” she tells Apple Music. “Not really intentionally. But just for the hell of it.” Join Bain for a track-by-track guide to the album. **“went to meet her”** “It’s an intense way to start an album. I think the chaos of the drums definitely reflects the chaos of the situation. It sounds like I\'m talking about going to meet a girl in Ibiza, but the lyrics are really dark. My friend was badly attacked by this horrible man. I had to fly out to be with her because she was in the hospital. It’s quite a weird one for me to play live because it puts me back in that place.” **“Maybe You’re the Reason”** “There’s a lyric, ‘I\'ve looked within and I\'ve read but instead I keep focusing on just how thin I can get.’ It’s me asking, ‘How can I be so clever and read philosophy but actually care about how thin I am?’ Not that I think I have an eating disorder now, but I definitely did when I was younger. That was when I started to realize I\'m writing some quite personal things, and I went with it.” **“We Talk all the Time”** “This song is about lack of sex in a relationship. I think a lot of gay or queer relationships are oversexualized. People assume that if you\'re not straight you\'re having sex all the time, but it\'s definitely a massive thing—especially in lesbian relationships—to stop having sex after a couple of years. It just stops because you\'re so close with that person, it almost feels like yourself in a weird way.” **“Wild”** “I wrote this when I was 17. I used to get really angry and have tantrums—but the teenage version. I’d smash stuff up and then think, ‘Oh, everyone hates me.’ I’d come out of my body and feel that wasn\'t me. The song is about feeling detachment from a side of myself that was really destructive.” **“You Seemed so Happy”** “Death, or someone dying, used to feel very in the distance. Then my friend passed away. It’s really jarring in terms of your own concept of mortality, because you\'re suddenly aware that at any point you could die. I was taking a blood pressure monitor with me everywhere and taking my temperature 10 times a day. I felt depressed but presented myself as a very light, happy human. This song sounds happy and it\'s a metaphor for my music, because if I go somewhere in Europe on tour, they don\'t understand, they\'re not listening to the lyrics, and they think my songs are really happy.” **“Follow My Girl”** “I wrote the lyrics for this track in Wisconsin, where I was recording the album \[at Bon Iver’s Fall Creek studio\]. I was there for two months. It was just me and BJ Burton—the producer—in the middle of nowhere. Didn\'t really leave or speak to anyone for two months, and I would go to this small house down the road from the studio and write lyrics on my own.” **“somethingfartoogoodtofeel”** “This was recorded in my bedroom. We added some strings, live drums, and rerecorded the vocal, but everything else is from the demo. It was written in a couple of hours, and after I finished it I found out my friend died. It’s a really old song but I didn\'t work on it because it reminded me of that day too much. Now I love the song, but it\'s the one I\'ve listened to least.” **“Lilo”** “My friend Gemma called me and said, ‘I\'ve met someone that you\'re gonna fall in love with.’ I was really heartbroken at the time, so I thought, ‘It\'s not going to happen.’ Then I went to her gig, she was really funny onstage, and I thought, ‘F\*\*k.’ The chorus was written when we first met. The whole thing about her ‘floating like a lilo’ \[pool float\] is because it really did feel like she was just drifting around. She felt like a very singular object.” **“Everybody Hates Me”** “This song is about me being really hung over for two, three years. Every day waking up with that feeling of ‘everyone hates me and I\'ve ruined my life.’ Looking back at the time, I thought—almost jokingly—it\'s a hangover anthem. Now it\'s really sad for me to look back knowing I spent so much time hating myself because I couldn\'t stop drinking. I felt alone for that entire period of time. I stopped drinking for a while after I wrote that song. I need to stop drinking again.” **“Marika Is Sleeping”** “My girlfriend was asleep, she was really ill, and I was napping next to her. I dreamt this string arrangement, got my laptop and programmed the strings. When I saved it I was like, ‘Oh, what do I call the project?’ I find it really hard to name things. The production’s all done on a Mellotron with weird harps and me doing a choral voice because I wanted it to sound like an old Disney soundtrack.” **“Worms”** “I love working with George \[Daniel, of The 1975\]. He\'s really organized, and that\'s handy because I\'m really disorganized. A friend was dating one of the band \[The 1975\], then Matty \[Healy\] and George heard my music and wanted to produce it. Then I spent two years touring with them. It\'s weird to me that they\'re so big, because they’re just my friends. Then I see them at The O2 and I\'m like, ‘Oh, okay. You guys are huge.’” **“f a r a w a y”** “He’s \[Matt Healy\] singing on ‘f a r a w a y.’ He\'s always one of my favorite people to play songs to because he gets so excited and he\'ll openly be like, ‘That makes me jealous.’ When I listened to one of his songs I was like, ‘F\*\*k, I wish I had written that.’ I think either a lot of admiration is jealousy or a lot of jealousy is admiration. I don\'t know which way it is.” **“i saw you in a dream”** “It\'s my favorite song I\'ve ever written. My voice doesn\'t sound perfect, but it\'s a really emotional song. It\'s two live takes, and I think I was crying on one of them. It’s about my friend who passed away. I find it difficult to think of writing music as therapy because it\'s not therapeutic for me to confront certain things. I have to play this song every night on tour and sometimes I don\'t want to think about her being dead. Maybe it\'s really nice that I get to think about her every day. It\'s therapy but it\'s also emotional torture.”

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

“You can’t be positive without knowing what sadness really is,” Sigrid tells Apple Music. “You\'re not either/or, and I guess that comes from me as well.” The Norwegian’s breakthrough track, “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” perfectly captured this sentiment. A pop rocket detailing a bruising experience of being belittled as a young female writer, its DNA runs strong through her debut. There are as many middle fingers to record label execs and terrible boys as there are joyous odes to her band and self-empowerment. Join Sigrid for a tour of her head, and *Sucker Punch*. **“Sucker Punch”** “I chose this track to start the album as it was the intro for our show on tour and it felt really good. *Sucker Punch* is the album name and it summarizes it in a pretty cool way, because all of the songs are a sucker punch. Whether it\'s a ballad or a big pop song—they\'re very in your face.” **“Mine Right Now”** “This track is inspired by ’80s music. I don\'t know who, I just wanted it to be big! I was definitely imagining playing this at a huge festival on a big stage. I want people to be joyful and happy when they leave the show.” **“Basic”** “With this song I wanted to bring people down and then bring them up. It’s a song that has been in the mix for two or three years as one of the earlier demos. We wrote it on the piano and ended up just having that version. We were producing it and thought it would be nice to let people into the studio session. We had an iPhone and put on Voice Memos while I was singing—we didn\'t even have a proper microphone.” **“Strangers”** “I love romantic films, but it\'s never as it is on film. I had a personal experience where I thought something was very magical but then it wasn\'t, and that\'s okay. That’s just real life. It was a really sad ballad when we started, but I thought, ‘I don\'t want to make a soppy song, let’s make this fun.’” **“Don’t Feel Like Crying”** “I share the most on this song. It’s about going through a breakup. I prefer to stay private about my private life, but I also write about it. That\'s not my whole diary. I guess I\'ve just shared a few pages. That balance is always hard to find: How much should you share and how much do you want to keep to yourself? That\'s something that I need to be more aware of now.” **“Level Up”** “We were recording in my hometown and for some reason didn’t even go to the studio to finish. We stayed in the kitchen and wrote it there. It\'s such a kitchen song! I listen to it while cooking. It’s an homage to gaming. If you\'re going through something difficult and you get through it, that\'s when you level up and go to the next level. It doesn\'t need to just be relationships, it can be a friendship or whatever.” **“Sight of You”** “This track is about my band and the crowds at our shows. It was written with Electric Picnic in Ireland in mind. That\'s one of the best festivals we\'ve played. I had the time of my life. You can hear that it\'s not just happiness in the song. With touring, sometimes you have to wake up really early, you don\'t get enough sleep, and you\'re away from home for a long time.” **“In Vain”** “I wrote this song in London two years ago. It was never finished and was on my computer forever. I thought, ‘What the hell do I do with this song?’ It\'s so good and we were playing it so much live, but we didn’t know how to finish it. We brought the band into a studio in Norway, they just played what they play live, and it worked.” **“Don’t Kill My Vibe”** “It\'s about a writing session I was in that was difficult. I didn\'t feel welcome or like they respected me, and I thought, ‘Why the hell am I here if we\'re not going to work together?’ I was really annoyed because I didn\'t know how to let them know I wasn\'t okay with it. I called my mum, who is my biggest idol—she\'s a really cool, empowered woman. She said, \'Go back, finish the studio session, and then maybe you\'ll get something good out of it.\' She was right. I got this song.” **“Business Dinners”** “I wanted to make something that sounded like Studio Ghibli, the Japanese film company behind *Spirited Away*. That soundtrack is wonderful. It’s one of the few songs where I\'ve been very visual with my inspiration. I wanted to talk about business but in a fun, quirky way.” **“Never Mine”** “*Sucker Punch* is a roller coaster. It\'s up and down in every second. This is definitely the most ‘static’ song I’ve done. I wanted to give myself a challenge and try to make something smooth where you just get in the groove. For me, this is the last song at a school dance.” **“Dynamite”** “It\'s hard to make whatever is happening in private life work with my job. That\'s relatable to a lot of people, not just my profession. Everyone\'s so busy all the time. I always feel empowered when I listen to this song, and that\'s how I wanted to finish the album—end it on a strong note.”

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“I think on *California*, we really had an idea of what we wanted that record to sound like and it was going back to the foundation of what blink-182 is all about,” bassist Mark Hoppus tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “\[*NINE*\] is everything that blink-182 should be in 2019.” How one reads “2019” in this particular context is a question of sonics and songwriting just as much as social mores. The world has changed a lot in the three years since the kings of pop-punk reunited—with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba in place of founding guitarist Tom DeLonge—for *California*, a wild, wheelie-popping return to form that, by definition, returned to everything that made them unlikely pop stars at the turn of the century: adolescent nursery rhymes taken to almost diabolical lengths, with lines like “There’s something about you that I can’t quite put my finger in,” as heard on the vintage 30-second outburst “Brohemian Rhapsody.” By design, *NINE* finds the trio not only dispatching with dick jokes entirely, but fully embracing modern electronics and textures—as well as beats that drummer Travis Barker had originally intended for other artists. The result resembles the pop and alt-rock of the current moment more than anything they’ve recorded until now, be it in the titanic guitar swells of “Happy Days,” the skittering rhythm of “Black Rain,” or the saturated tones of “Blame It on My Youth.” On the towering “I Really Wish I Hated You,” Hoppus even makes a subtle attempt at rapping, without any wink or trace of irony. To get to this point creatively, he says it was about letting go, “just trying to write great songs and not worrying about ‘Is this the quintessential blink guitar-heavy distorted sound?’ If you plug your guitar into a computer and it sounds great, then run with it.”

Big Thief had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. – “the celestial twin” – days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album – “the earth twin” – Two Hands. 30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, Big Thief (a.k.a. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. Where U.F.O.F.layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt. In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the previous session. Two Hands had to be completely different — an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of; I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.” Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. These are political songs without political language. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. Across the album, there are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our planet. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. Engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. Sarlo teamed up with James Krivchenia to mix the album, where they sought to emphasize raw power and direct energy inherent in the takes. The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving centre as a chosen family. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. If you ask drummer James Krivchenia, bassist Max Oleartchik or guitarist Buck Meek how they write their parts, they will describe — passionately — the experience of hearing Adrianne present a new song, listening intently for hints of parts that already exist in the ether and the undertones to draw out with their respective instruments. With raw power and intimacy, Two Hands folds itself gracefully into Big Thief’s impressive discography. This body of work grows deeper and more inspiring with each new album.

With powerhouse pipes, razor-sharp wit, and a tireless commitment to self-love and self-care, Lizzo is the fearless pop star we needed. Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, the singer and classically trained flautist discovered an early gift for music (“It chose me,” she tells Apple Music) and began recording in Minneapolis shortly after high school. But her trademark self-confidence came less naturally. “I had to look deep down inside myself to a really dark place to discover it,” she says. Perhaps that’s why her third album, *Cuz I Love You*, sounds so triumphant, with explosive horns (“Cuz I Love You”), club drums (“Tempo” featuring Missy Elliott), and swaggering diva attitude (“No, I\'m not a snack at all/Look, baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she howls on the instant hit “Juice\"). But her brand is about more than mic-drop zingers and big-budget features. On songs like “Better in Color”—a stomping, woke plea for people of all stripes to get together—she offers an important message: It’s not enough to love ourselves, we also have to love each other. Read on for Lizzo’s thoughts on each of these blockbuster songs. **“Cuz I Love You”** \"I start every project I do with a big, brassy orchestral moment. And I do mean *moment*. It’s my way of saying, ‘Stand the fuck up, y’all, Lizzo’s here!’ This is just one of those songs that gets you amped from the jump. The moment you hear it, you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on.’ It’s a great fucking way to start an album.\" **“Like a Girl”** \"We wanted take the old cliché and flip it on its head, shaking out all the negative connotations and replacing them with something empowering. Serena Williams plays like a girl and she’s the greatest athlete on the planet, you know? And what if crying was empowering instead of something that makes you weak? When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren\'t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you\'re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, ‘If you feel like a girl/Then you real like a girl,\' and that\'s my favorite lyric on the whole album.\" **“Juice”** \"If you only listen to one song from *Cuz I Love You*, let it be this. It’s a banger, obviously, but it’s also a state of mind. At the end of the day, I want my music to make people feel good, I want it to help people love themselves. This song is about looking in the mirror, loving what you see, and letting everyone know. It was the second to last song that I wrote for the album, right before ‘Soulmate,\' but to me, this is everything I’m about. I wrote it with Ricky Reed, and he is a genius.” **“Soulmate”** \"I have a relationship with loneliness that is not very healthy, so I’ve been going to therapy to work on it. And I don’t mean loneliness in the \'Oh, I don\'t got a man\' type of loneliness, I mean it more on the depressive side, like an actual manic emotion that I struggle with. One day, I was like, \'I need a song to remind me that I\'m not lonely and to describe the type of person I *want* to be.\' I also wanted a New Orleans bounce song, \'cause you know I grew up listening to DJ Jubilee and twerking in the club. The fact that l got to combine both is wild.” **“Jerome”** \"This was my first song with the X Ambassadors, and \[lead singer\] Sam Harris is something else. It was one of those days where you walk into the studio with no expectations and leave glowing because you did the damn thing. The thing that I love about this song is that it’s modern. It’s about fuccboi love. There aren’t enough songs about that. There are so many songs about fairytale love and unrequited love, but there aren’t a lot of songs about fuccboi love. About when you’re in a situationship. That story needed to be told.” **“Cry Baby”** “This is one of the most musical moments on a very musical album, and it’s got that Minneapolis sound. Plus, it’s almost a power ballad, which I love. The lyrics are a direct anecdote from my life: I was sitting in a car with a guy—in a little red Corvette from the ’80s, and no, it wasn\'t Prince—and I was crying. But it wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I loved him. It was a different field of emotion. The song starts with \'Pull this car over, boy/Don\'t pretend like you don\'t know,’ and that really happened. He pulled the car over and I sat there and cried and told him everything I felt.” **“Tempo”** “‘Tempo\' almost didn\'t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but ‘Tempo’ was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy? If you don\'t put this song on the album, you\'re insane.’ Then we got Missy and the rest is history.” **“Exactly How I Feel”** “Way back when I first started writing the song, I had a line that goes, ‘All my feelings is Gucci.’ I just thought it was funny. Months and months later, I played it at Atlantic \[Records\], and when that part came up, I joked, ‘Thanks for the Gucci feature, guys!\' And this executive says, ‘We can get Gucci if you want.\' And I was like, ‘Well, why the fuck not?\' I love Gucci Mane. In my book, he\'s unproblematic, he does a good job, he adds swag to it. It doesn’t go much deeper than that, to be honest. The rest of the song has plenty of meaning: It’s an ode to being proud of your emotions, not feeling like you have to hide them or fake them, all that. But the Gucci feature was just fun.” **“Better in Color”** “This is the nerdiest song I have ever written, for real. But I love it so much. I wanted to talk about love, attraction, and sex *without* talking about the boxes we put those things in—who we feel like we’re allowed to be in love with, you know? It shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about gender or sexual orientation or skin color or economic background, because who the fuck cares? Spice it up, man. Love *is* better in color. I don’t want to see love in black and white.\" **“Heaven Help Me”** \"When I made the album, I thought: If Aretha made a rap album, what would that sound like? ‘Heaven Help Me’ is the most Aretha to me. That piano? She would\'ve smashed that. The song is about a person who’s confident and does a good job of self-care—a.k.a. me—but who has a moment of being pissed the fuck off and goes back to their defensive ways. It’s a journey through the full spectrum of my romantic emotions. It starts out like, \'I\'m too cute for you, boo, get the fuck away from me,’ to \'What\'s wrong with me? Why do I drive boys away?’ And then, finally, vulnerability, like, \'I\'m crying and I\'ve been thinking about you.’ I always say, if anyone wants to date me, they just gotta listen to this song to know what they’re getting into.\" **“Lingerie”** “I’ve never really written sexy songs before, so this was new for me. The lyrics literally made me blush. I had to just let go and let God. It’s about one of my fantasies, and it has three different chord changes, so let me tell you, it was not easy to sing. It was very ‘Love On Top’ by Beyoncé of me. Plus, you don’t expect the album to end on this note. It leaves you wanting more.”

“Members of the LGBT+ community that wouldn’t necessarily be at a country show. Mega-fans in Orville Peck masks. Couples in their 80s who are huge country fans. Drag queens. Five-year-olds!” Orville Peck is describing his average audience for Apple Music. “Maybe there are a million reasons for these people to be a room together,” he says. “But it’s lovely that I’m one of the reasons for them to be together.” It’s unsurprising that the fringe-masked, pseudonymous Toronto-based cowboy crooner’s debut album has attracted a broad church. *Pony* offers a very modern subversive spin on expertly informed country, tender torch songs of homoerotic desire and raw rock ’n’ roll decorated with his rich, sonorous voice. Peck may not want to show you his face, but here he’s happy to take you through his extraordinary debut, track by track. **Dead of Night** “This is a song about unrequited love. It\'s about being with somebody you know ultimately cannot give you what you want, and is only going to break your heart. But even just that is better than being without them, so you torture yourself with the inevitable demise. It was the first song I wrote for the album, and I wanted it to sound like something familiar, but something completely new as well. I wanted to provoke the kind of sensation of torturous nostalgia. I think we all go through somewhere where you remember a moment and you think that thinking about it is going to torture you, but you do it anyway, because we have this weird human nature of putting ourselves through emotional pain. That\'s kind of why I wanted the lonely guitar sound, and I wanted to go from very low to very high. I just wanted to give that same feeling sonically that the emotion is about in the song.” **Winds Change** “‘Winds Change’ is a song about traveling around not letting too much moss on your stone. I\'ve lived in many, many different countries, and I\'ve just felt like a drifter my entire life. The song is also about the things that you give up when you live that lifestyle. The benefits are adventure and freedom, but there are things—important things—that you have to leave behind.” **Turn to Hate** “I wrote the lyrics for this song about seven years ago when I was in a really low place. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the album. It\'s about the struggle I\'ve had feeling like an outsider and an outlaw my whole life and not letting that turn into resentment. Like I say in the song, ‘Don\'t let my sorrow turn to hate.’ Anyone who\'s ever felt like a weirdo should remember that is your power, and that\'s what makes you powerful and unique. This song is a mantra to remind myself not to let it go dark.” **Buffalo Run** “I’m not a very skilled technical musician, because I just teach myself everything I play. So I write all my music from a visual or emotive place. Here, I wanted to have my version of a driving train beat: I wanted it to feel like a stampede, essentially, so it needed to start peaceful and calm and slowly build and finally you get that release. I wanted it to feel cinematic. There’s a place in Alberta, Canada, I was thinking about called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is this huge canyon where they would do buffalo runs. Canada’s indigenous people would essentially herd the buffalo off cliffs and then gather them. Every time we play it, I genuinely am picturing buffalo stampeding.” **Queen of the Rodeo** “This is about a Canadian drag queen friend of mine called Thanks Jem. It’s funny, because when we first met, we did not get along. But interestingly, she really taught me a lot about myself. She’s from a small town in Canada and moved to Vancouver to pursue her drag artistry. I wouldn’t want to speak on her behalf about her stories, but the general theme of the song is around pursuing something you love, and even if it’s maybe not as fruitful as you’d hoped, it’s the act of chasing what you love in the face of adversity that’s important.” **Kansas (Remembers Me Now)** “This is a tricky song to talk about, as it’s the only song on the record that isn’t connected to my own life. I don’t want to give it away because I’m always proud when someone figures it out and tells me their version. But I’ll give a couple hints: It’s a song about something pretty dastardly. It’s my murder ballad. They have a very long history in country music. It’s about a real-life murder story which also involves a very interesting kind of homoerotic romance. This is my ode to that.” **Old River** “I wrote this very shortly after the death of a family member. It’s a cathartic song for me that I wrote literally driving through the mountains in winter on the way to the studio. I wanted sonically for it to be what is known in Appalachian country as a field holler, which is a mix of the old haunting Appalachian mountain music with a gospel influence. The Carter Family would do it really well. I also wanted it to be just short enough to annoy people. It’s an uncomfortable song for me, and I wanted everyone listening to it to feel uncomfortable too.” **Big Sky** “I grew up a very chatty, outgoing person and I was always performing. I’ve never felt insecure, socially. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve realized I’m a very closed person with regards to sharing things about myself—real things about myself. I never knew how closed I was for a long time. The song is about three relationships I’ve had, and the funny thing is people tend to think it’s about those people. It is, sort of, but all of the lyrics are actually me exposing my own shortcomings, exposing myself and my role in those relationships, rather than holding anyone else at fault. The second verse deals with a pretty tumultuous relationship that I was pretty fearful of and had never even talked to anybody about before. It’s a really liberating song, as somebody who internalizes a lot.” **Roses Are Falling** “A song about loving somebody so much that they drive you crazy. You know that being with them is not good for you, but at the same time maybe that’s what we all need every now and again. I wanted to give a nod to the era of Santo & Johnny—that pedal-steel Hawaiian influence which moved into country—with a cheeky twist.” **Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)** “There is a classic trope in country music that used to be known as hokum. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s—for people that don\'t really know country today—almost what gave country a stigma for being shallow. But there’s a long tradition in country to incorporate humor, wit, and Southern charm into the music. Dolly Parton is very famous for that, of course, and I love the very famous George Strait song called ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas.’ So this is my hokum song with gunshots, whip cracks, and yeehaws. It’s a rootin’-tootin’ song about leaving somebody and that great feeling of telling them you’ll never take that back.” **Hope to Die** “Although I sing a lot about relationships, this is the only song on the album that’s about true heartbreak. It took a long time to record and I kept making revisions lyrically and to the production because I really wanted to capture a feeling within it. It was that feeling when you’re so at a loss that something fell apart. For me, it was that I was so heartbroken and spent months walking in slow motion. So I wanted to capture that sensation of feeling numb and watching the world pass you but all you can do is think about whatever it may be. It’s strange, because it’s almost a divine, serene feeling, but it’s so negative. It’s very still and peaceful, but it’s so very lonely. That serene unhappiness is something that I imagine people could probably get stuck in.” **Nothing Fades Like the Light** “This song is about the feeling of knowing something is coming to an end, and how that feeling can be more painful than when it does actually end. Embarrassingly, I still really choke up and cry in this song when I perform it. Which sounds conceited, but it’s not because I’m so moved by my performance. It’s very funny, as like I said earlier, I didn’t realize how closed I was emotionally for a very long time. A friend of mine passed away when I was quite young, and I remember being at the funeral and being incapable of crying. It dawned on me, ‘You know, I don’t cry very often. What makes me cry? Should I be crying? Do I feel things? Am I crazy?’ It’s nuts, because after that moment something clicked in my brain and I didn’t cry for about five or six years, at all. I think it became a compulsion where I just could not seem to cry. I eventually did, and it was actually a moment of bliss. Now I cry all the time.”

Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze. Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots. Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past. On the campfire lullaby, “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky. Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him. And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It’s one that begins peacefully enough but soon transcends into a kinetic charge that crescendos as the buffalo are headed off the cliffside. Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.

Maggie Rogers spent the first three years of her career retracing one chance encounter: In 2016, a video of her singing a song that moved Pharrell to tears during a master class at NYU went viral, earning her a record deal, magazine features, and headlining tours (watch it and you’ll understand). But the Maryland native, then 22, was still figuring out who she was, and this sudden flood of fame was a lot to bear. Determined to take control of her own narrative, she assembled a debut album powerful enough to shift the conversation. Measured, subtle, and wise beyond her years, it feels like the introduction she always wanted to make. Like her 2017 EP, *Now That the Light Is Fading*, *Heard It In A Past Life* is a thoughtfully sewn patchwork of anthemic synth-pop, brooding acoustic folk, and soft-lit electronica, the latter of which was inspired by a year spent dancing through Berlin’s nightclub scene. But here, her vision feels both more daring and more polished. On “Retrograde,” long stretches of propulsive synths are punctuated by high-pitched *hah-hah-hah*s; “Say It” blends R&B with light, breathy indie-pop; and “The Knife” could be a sultry come-on or a daring confession. On the Greg Kurstin-produced “Light On,” Rogers seems to make peace with her surreal story. “And I am findin’ out/There’s just no other way/And I’m still dancin’ at the end of the day,” she sings, a bittersweet hat-tip to the moment that got her here. And to her fans, a promise: “If you leave the light on/Then I’ll leave the light on.”

U.F.O.F., F standing for ‘Friend’, is the name of the highly anticipated third record by Big Thief, set to be released on 3rd May 2019 via 4AD. U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios.  In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums.  Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment.  The raw material came quickly.  Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all. “Making friends with the unknown… All my songs are about this,” says Lenker; “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.”