Chorus.fm's Top 30 Albums of 2020

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

Surprise-dropping a career-redefining album in the midst of a paralyzing global pandemic is an admirable flex; doing it *again* barely five months later is a display of confidence and concentration so audacious that you’re within your rights to feel personally chastised. Like *folklore*, *evermore* is a team-up with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon, making the most of cozy home-studio vibes for more bare-bones arrangements and bared-soul lyrics, casually intimate and narratively rich. There is an expanded guest roster here—HAIM appears on “no body, no crime,” which seems to place Este Haim in the center of a small-town murder mystery, while Dessner’s bandmates in The National are on “coney island”—but they fit themselves into the mood rather than distract from it. (The percussive “long story short” sounds like it could have been on any National album in the past decade.) Elsewhere, “\'tis the damn season” is the elegaic home-for-the-holidays ballad this busted year didn’t realize it needed. But while so much of *folklore*’s appeal involved marveling at how this setting seemed to have unlocked something in Swift, the only real shock here is the timing of the release itself. Beyond that, it’s an extension and confirmation of its predecessor’s promises and charms, less a novelty driven by unprecedented circumstances and instead simply a thing she happens to do and do well.

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

"I’ll Figure This Out", Barely Civil’s sophomore full-length, offers temporary solutions to this existential concern. With Chris Teti (TWIABP, Fiddlehead) joining as producer, the band’s massive live energy translates into concise, yet expansive arrangements. “Box for My Organs” slams sonic triumph against plainspoken self-doubt. Grief and guilt are on the same plane in “Bottom of the Lake,” while the band contemplates the sustainability of burning their twenties at both ends on “The Worst Part of December.” “I feel like our music revolves around the process of analyzing who we are and where we come from,” Erickson explains. “Possibly, even, where we belong.” I’ll Figure This Out attempts to answer those questions while turning completely inward. It’s a darker chapter in a constantly evolving discography. The only way out, it seems, is through.

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

“Who likes to hear someone ramble?” Ruston Kelly asks Apple Music, rhetorically. “I just think that if you have something to say, you just get it said.” The Nashville-based, emo-influenced folk-rock singer-songwriter utilized artful economy on his second album, *Shape & Destroy*. Most of its 13 tracks resolve abruptly and clock in under three and a half minutes. But Kelly also made room for confessional thoroughness in downhearted but tuneful vignettes examining self-destructive behavior and its toll on relationships. “Typically, ‘search and destroy’ is a war term, and ‘shape and destroy’ is maybe like a philosopher\'s war term,” he muses. It came to him as he sat alone in his hotel room at a music festival, newly sober and reading an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I just ran to my notebook and wrote that statement, ‘Shape the life you want.’ I was like, ‘Okay, now I have a mission statement.’ And I left the next day and flew to New York and we cut this record.” Working with Kelly was producer Jarrad K (who’d also been on board for Kelly’s head-turning 2018 debut *Dying Star*), Kelly’s steel guitarist dad Tim Kelly, bassist Eli Beaird, drummer Eric Slick, and a few guest vocalists, including Kelly’s sister Abby Kelly and then-spouse Kacey Musgraves. Here Kelly tells the stories that shaped each song on *Shape & Destroy*. **In the Blue** “That song declares something important, which was ‘This is who I am. This is what\'s happening right now. Sometimes it\'s good, sometimes it\'s bad, and that\'s okay. We\'re going to push through. We\'re going to try to understand it. We\'re going to try to mend what I tore many times in my life, whether it was through relationships, drug abuse, self-abuse.’ It\'s a positive kind of war cry to start the record out.” **Radio Cloud** “I\'m a huge Beat literature fan. There was this school of stream-of-consciousness writing, to write from the subconscious to reveal the truth to yourself that your conscious mind never could. ‘Radio Cloud’ is one of those songs for sure. My way to understand it is just to let the wheel kind of turn. That song, in hindsight, showed me really simple what it is. Moses, Exodus: You have to leave what you\'ve known. You have to grow, and to grow, there\'s change, and you have to accept who you are, not who you wish you were.” **Alive** “That song, specifically, was written for my wife at the time to say, ‘Without your encouragement, without you sometimes having to pull me off the fucking ground, I don\'t know where I would be.’ Or my dad—the fact that my dad and my family, they never gave up and they let me fail. If you have people like that in your life, then you have to say something like ‘It is because of you.’ I mean, no man is an island. You can\'t do it alone. Even though my marriage ended, that song to me rings even more true now, and I think it might be the first real love song I\'ve ever had that I can completely dedicate to one person.” **Changes** “Sometimes sadness or despair has to have a backbeat. ‘Changes,’ it was the statement of, ‘Look, this may be difficult for me, but it could be doubly difficult for you, and I understand that.’” **Mid-Morning Lament** “To me that\'s where the battleground \[of addiction\] is—it\'s while you\'re making coffee or folding your clothes and you\'re like, ‘Damn, I wish I wasn\'t feeling the way I felt right now.’ What I think every addict craves is bliss. I think joy is kind of the prerequisite to bliss, and we all knew that when we were children. It\'s a lament about the fact that those things get harder and harder to find the more you cover them up when you get older.” **Brave** “To be brave, I think it has to do with the union of you being masculine and feminine. There\'s a place for masculinity, but there\'s a much-needed place, I feel like, for men in this day and age to embrace what the feminine side has to empower you. To courageously say, ‘I want to live by my words. I want to make promises. I want to keep those promises. I want to be everything that I can be.’ That isn\'t just physical strength. To be brave, to me, is to live up to the principles in the face of an easier route.” **Clean** “It’s more of a positive claim that remembering your youth, not as something lost, but as something absorbed into what you are now, is what\'s going to mature you and bring you that joy. A lot of this record is to remind yourself that the beauty, the joy, the freedom, the wide-openness of your spirit when you\'re young can apply now.” **Rubber** “What I was up to with that one was really trying to come to terms with the fact that sometimes in your life, when you aren\'t so sure of yourself yet and you\'re pulled in many directions, you don\'t really own your own substance. You\'re too malleable. It\'s not that you are weak, but you haven\'t decided how to move forward yet, so all you do is get pulled in a multitude of ways that aren\'t your own ways.” **Jubilee** “‘Jubilee’ was written at Mother Maybelle\'s house. I\'m a huge Carter Family fan. John Carter Cash was a friend of mine. He would just call me to check in and be like, ‘Hey, man. You know my grandmother\'s house is open. It\'s just kind of sitting there out in Virginia.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, Mother Maybelle is one of my biggest influences of all time.’ So I went out there, and it\'s like being in a museum without glass. It was pretty crazy. Little notes in the junk drawer that Johnny Cash wrote to Kris Kristofferson on directions of how to get to the house, shit like that. I didn\'t know what I needed until I got to that house, when it comes to spiritual matters. ‘Jubilee’ was this kind of exaltation to something greater than myself and my internal insecurities, struggles, blockades I put up.” **Closest Thing** “That\'s the only song that\'s co-written on the record—me and my buddy Ashley Ray. It came out in 20 minutes because it just was that honest: ‘This is the biggest statement of love I can make, is an approximation to these fantastical things.’ No one hung the moon. No one created the brightness in the stars. But they remind you of it so deeply, it\'s almost as if they did. Saying, ‘I love you in that way. You are the closest thing to that on Earth I\'ve ever experienced,’ I think that\'s an even bigger statement of love than saying, ‘You *are* those things.’” **Pressure** “I like to juxtapose. This song has a super heavy sentiment of physical force to it, and it\'s this little, light folk song. If you can lighten the mood somehow but still mean it, then I feel like it gives you power over what that thing is. To fingerpick this song with one of the heavier-hitting themes on the record was to say, ‘I can be with this feeling and sing through it, and do it calmly because I\'m in control of it.’” **Under the Sun** “That one was like, ‘Okay, we are a band and we are going to take this shit so hard on the road, so let\'s make it sound like that.’ That song is always going to be this anthemic thing. I wanted elements of this record to feel like there was some not internal aggression in a negative sense, but a fuel that needed to be lit. And I feel like that song was when the fuse was lit.” **Hallelujah Anyway** “That song is the song that if I lived on an island and I only wrote that song, I feel like it would be the best song that I\'ve ever written, because it\'s the most important song for me. I needed that song. I want to live by that song. Even the engineer came in and sang the high soprano part. We wanted something ancient about it, in a way, and I don\'t think there\'s anything more musically ancient than a collection of voices singing to the same effect.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

Please note vinyl has been slightly delayed arriving to us, so those orders will ship in early June. Thanks for your patience.

With “Prom Queen”—the homespun breakthrough from her 2018 EP of the same name—Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio became a sort of Liz Phair for the TikTok generation, inspiring a wealth of fan-made videos that speak to the sheer relatability and emotional charge in every line, no matter how ordinary. (“Shut up, count your calories/I never looked good in mom jeans,” she sings, amid a grid of power chords. “Wish I was like you/Blue-eyed blondie, perfect body.”) On *Honeymoon*, her Chicago outfit’s first full-length, she sounds like a songwriter quickly coming into her own, even as her best songs capture what it is to feel forever inadequate. Trifilio has a natural way with melody, and everything here sparkles—from quiet-LOUD slow-burns (“Rearview”) to jangly love letters (“Dream Boy”) and well-disguised anthems (“Ms. California”). On the late highlight “Racetrack,” she sits alone at a Wurlitzer piano and offers quiet, definitive heartbreak: “Even the moon can’t maintain the same face/I always wind up in second place.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **Promises** “That song is interesting. It was supposed to be on this EP called *Crybaby*, which I released even before I had a band. I was going through a breakup at the time, so I couldn\'t play it live because it was super personal and it would just make me upset singing it. I had it in the back of my head and I was like, ‘I’m going to rework this later on,’ and I\'m happy we waited—I think the song feels more complete. The lyrics are the most honest out of all the songs on the record, and it\'s definitely about a specific person at a specific time in my life—my first love, kind of breakup situation. When it was initially written, it was more slow-paced and I think what I\'m trying to say in the song is a little more aggressive. Now, it\'s really fun to play live.” **Cuffing Season** “\[Cuffing\] is getting into a relationship during the colder months of the year, like holiday season through Valentine\'s Day. And then in the summer you\'re like, ‘Oh, I want to be free.’ This song is about really experiencing doubt, when the rose-colored glasses kind of come off and you start seeing problems and you\'re not sure. It’s kind of similar to ‘Promises’ in the sense that it\'s like juggling two feelings and kind of feeling them at the same time. Pretty much all these songs are about the same boyfriend. It was like a breakup and then get back together and then a breakup again. I tried to organize the album in a way that kind of had sort of a really upsetting beginning.” **April** “‘April’ was a super weird song, because originally, the first two verses I was trying to write like a sad Christmas song. The lyrics originally were like, ‘Christmastime, snow is falling/I wish you\'re under the tree with me.’ Some dumb shit. But I really liked the melody, so I kept it like in my back pocket. And then I was feeling pretty blue one day and I was like, ‘All right, let\'s just mess around on guitar with the same melody but change all the lyrics.’ There\'s no way I could have predicted this, but I wrote it probably like a year prior, but I did end up going through the breakup with this person last April. So it was kind of like while we were recording in my head I was like, ‘Great, this really relates to my life now. Didn\'t mean for it to.’ But I do think that ‘April’ has kind of a friendly connotation, the blooming in springtime and then October, especially in Chicago, is basically winter—and winter here is not the greatest.” **Rearview** “I feel like it\'s less about the other person and more about an internal dialogue I was having with myself at the time, where I just didn\'t feel good enough or didn\'t feel worthy of love and was kind of beating myself up for it. And kind of needed some way to vent it. I think going through a breakup, my ego was not in the best place, and my self-esteem more so. Pretty much all the songs in our entire discography are me trying to process something and kind of using music as a healthy outlet. It’s great because usually after a song’s done I do feel better. But I also feel kind of less attached to a certain emotion—it really does help me let go of something. It\'s a little uncomfortable sometimes when people hear words you\'re writing about them, but it is what it is.” **Ms. California** “I’ve always loved California—I honestly would love to move there one day. I wanted to use that perspective of California as this haven of greatness, as a metaphor for someone that\'s super, super appealing. The song’s about jealousy. So, getting upset that someone else who seemingly is better than you is a threat to your relationship. Like, ‘I’m just a Midwest girl. She\'s the California girl. Wish I was her.’ I guess I kind of romanticize California in my head a lot just because I don\'t live there. And it\'s warmer and there\'s cooler people there.” **Colorblind** “My friend from college made this chill beats track and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to sing over this just for fun?’ Though we never put it out or did anything with it, I had those lyrics at the back of my head because they were kind of applicable to where I was at at that time. In a way, I think it\'s a little bit more of like a confidence check, where it\'s like, ‘Look, you\'re saying sorry, but I\'m setting boundaries for myself. We\'re just not on good terms, and you need to accept that.’” **Racetrack** “One of the most evil ones, for sure. This song was written in a very sad period of my life, kind of the breaking point of everything. And I guess the lyric\'s not really directly inspired, but the only thing that was kind of keeping me sane during that period—when I wasn\'t really sure if we were going to break up or not—was I would just go on really, really long jogs. And there are different phases of the moon. And no matter what, it\'s going to have to eventually alter to the next phase over the duration of a month. So that was a metaphor for, like, ‘I can only kind of keep pretending I\'m okay for so long. Eventually, I\'m going to crack.’” **Dream Boy** “‘Dream Boy’ is a nice one, because it\'s sort of seeing the more positive aspects of things. Like, ‘All right, we have this shitty path and things aren\'t always good, but let\'s just move past that.’ But it\'s also demanding a little bit of a respect, and not being walked over. In a sense I feel like I wrote it during a period where that\'s kind of what I wanted to happen—it\'s almost like I was trying to manifest that. But looking back on it, it\'s kind of cool ’cause it\'s sort of like segues into new experiences with new people, too. I think the whole ‘Let\'s meet after midnight’ thing, I was just sort of borrowing from media and movies and just kind of like all those romcoms where you see someone holding a radio up by the window or throwing a rock at the window. And then she sees him and he serenades her or something like that.” **Cloud 9** “I think ‘Cloud 9’ is unlike pretty much any other Beach Bunny song where they\'re sort of like a constant pattern of ‘I love you, but…’ This one is just straight-up a nice love song. Or maybe not even love song, but a crush song. Having feelings for someone and it\'s just kind of unapologetic and not overly analytical. Like, ‘This is how I feel when things are good.’ And I like that it ends on a positive note. I don\'t want people to leave the album crying. I mean, I guess you could listen to it from the bottom to the top and then it could get pretty bad. This just kind of feels like closing a chapter in my life, having this album. And it\'s going to be exciting to move on to different topics and hopefully more positive topics.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

NO DREAM is the 4th studio record from the Death Rosenstock band full of chords, words, beats and more! Tracked live in a big room for that classic "is that a mistake?" sound by Grammy-nominated recorded "Grammy Jack" Shirley, you are GUARANTEED to have not heard this record before you've listened to it! We hope it makes you feel good, but if it doesn't, that's on you sorry.

Take one listen to Dogleg’s debut LP, *Melee*, and their simple mission statement becomes abundantly clear: “Play fast.” The Michigan-based band began as a bedroom project of singer/guitarist Alex Stoitsiadis, but quickly morphed into a four-piece known for ferocious live shows at which the band’s mantra was taped onto Stoitsiadis’ guitar like a warning. On *Melee*, the band plays fast but does so with remarkable precision and subtlety. The emo strains remain, but the band meets the genre somewhere closer to post-punk than pop. Opener “Kawasaki Backflip” propulses around a dance-inflected drum beat, while “Fox” is built around a chorus that remains long after the album ends. Lyrics are never sung, only yelled. It’s a feat few achieve, but a spin through the album feels like an hour in a mosh pit.

Dogleg is: Alex Stoitsiadis - guitars, main vocals Chase Macinski - bass, backing vocals Parker Grissom - drums, backing vocals

When Aaron Maine began work on *Ricky Music*—his fourth LP under the Porches alias—he’d just “fallen madly in love” and just moved into an apartment in New York’s Chinatown. “I was getting acquainted to my new surroundings and new scenery and my new place, the new people I was meeting,” he tells Apple Music. “Feeling everything really intensely, like so much that I felt dizzy at times. It was a whirlwind.” Recorded almost entirely in that same apartment—with outside contributions from Mitski, Dev Hynes, Zsela, and co-producer Jacob Portrait—*Ricky Music* documents the span of Maine’s relationship with a set of songs that’s every bit as mercurial as new love, from ecstatic dance music to downcast punk to introspective but off-kilter pop. “I\'ve really been thinking about this album as an offering,” he says. “Something that I really wanted to pour as much love and humor and attention and care into as I could, to really consider like the sharing part of it. I felt like this kind of fire under my ass to give people something that is really special, that hopefully they could relate to. *Ricky Music* is me loosening up and acting with more care and deliberation, and still being kind of a freak—and sharing that too.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Patience** “This one definitely was a no-brainer as an opening track. I really liked the build, the idea of easing into a record and all these layers slowly coming on. It\'s a soft entry, and by the end I feel like you\'re kind of in the world \[of the album\]—you’re introduced to all these sounds and the drums. The lyrical content as well seems to touch on a few of the themes of the record in a way, like the overarching outline of what to expect if you listen.” **Do U Wanna** “That one is about is the ongoing back-and-forth between the version of you that you find fun and outgoing and confident and sociable, and the you that\'s manic and at home and isolating and scared to interact with anyone. It\'s like bullying yourself when you\'re frustrated. You really wish you wanted to dance and you wish you wanted to experience these things, yet you feel like it\'s impossible. I think you kind of put this self forward that\'s super excited and charged up and down to just run around into anything, and then, without fail, that other person creeps back in.” **Lipstick Song** “I specifically remember being in Los Angeles and I rode a Razor scooter to Sunset Boulevard, to the Sephora, and picked out a lipstick for this person and just wrote this poem about it. It\'s such a small gesture, but something about it felt like a good metaphor for like how you can just pack all of this meaning into the smallest thing, and kind of go into a trance. You\'re just so in love that the most menial task—like riding a scooter to the mall—could just be this beautiful moment. And that was what I was trying to capture: this really dramatic song about the most basic thing, like getting a small gift for someone you cared about.” **PFB** “There\'s no effort to gain any perspective or look at the bright side or step back to get a better view. It\'s just kind of feeling like you\'re in the shit and singing about it, making a song, just going crazy in my room. I don\'t think things were looking good that day, probably safe to say. It’s kind of nasty-sounding, but I feel like the other part of it is, you can sing along to that with a room full of people or put it on the headphones. It becomes a comforting thing rather than a hopeless thing.” **I Wanna Ride** “I was really into the idea of, you want to ride with someone, you want to be with someone, you want to have these experiences with someone, and at a certain point you kind of lose track. If you\'re pining over someone, if you step back, it\'s almost like you\'re more in love with the idea of companionship than actually assessing the situation or the person you think you\'re thinking about. It’s like admitting that you\'re more in love with the idea than reality.” **Madonna** “When I was first making it, the track sounded like something off *Ray of Light*, with these unabashed, stabbing synths. It\'s kind of over the top in a way that I associate with Madonna, and that was the working title, and I just stuck with it throughout. It’s about jealousy and how I find it to be the most ugly, suffocating feeling. I have to try to avoid it at all costs. I’ve tried to acknowledge that and apologize for feeling that way sometimes. I was making this kind of ecstasy song, then singing about jealousy—the opposite of ecstasy. It’s obviously a lower moment. I remember feeling like the moon was taunting me, like when everything is just ‘you piece of shit.’” **I Can’t Even Think** “That one I remember making in the summer when I felt like my brain was just cooking in the heat and they\'ve been building the building directly across the street from me for like two years now and just kind of feeling a little crazy in the city, sweaty and unsettled. It’s a reflection. Like all the sounds are pretty harsh, and singing ‘everybody goes outside’: That’s the same voice asking, ‘Do you want to dance?’ Everyone else is enjoying their summer and going to the beach and soaking it up—why can\'t you do the same thing?” **Hair** “I feel like it\'s a nice trope, this idea of crying and sharing. We can sort of grieve together or whatever; it doesn\'t have to be this isolated thing. And I\'ve always liked repeating lyrics or referencing other songs. I think it\'s kind of exciting when you connect the dots if you do listen to it all the way through. People call me Ron. People have called me Ronnie or Ronald, Ron, for like six years now. I refer to myself as that name maybe for the first time in a song, which felt right because it is kind of a more personal, endearing name that my friends will use for me. I think I was trying to be easy on myself and used that name to that reason.” **Fuck\_3** “Dev \[Hynes\] sings on ‘Fuck\_3,’ as well as Zsela. I had them both over and they came up with those harmonies. It\'s so special to have these people\'s voices appear on the album, even if it\'s a background vocal or a countermelody or something like that. When I don\'t hear my voice and I hear the voice of someone I love, like a friend, it feels right. On ‘I Can\'t Even Think’ my friend Jenny sings on the chorus, and I don\'t think she\'s ever recorded herself singing. The idea for me is to portray my life and what I feel and how I experience the world and share that with people—what makes more sense than actually including the voices of the people that you spend time with and that you care about? Just to get a little bit of their essence on the album makes it feel even more personal.” **Wrote Some Songs** “The ultimate, zoomed-out picture of myself. If I really think about my life, and what I\'ve dedicated it to this far, it kind of boils down to writing a bunch of songs. I sing it half with pride and half just, ‘Look at the reality, bro, you just wrote some songs, you can relax. Everyone is out there going through their own shit, going through a lot more shit than you will ever experience.’ I was trying to step out of the moment and look at it for what it is, kind of laughing at it and also feeling kind of desperate about it at the same time. It seems like a good way to end the record. Like, if you’re concerned, if you feel like this heaviness, just call it for what it is—you made an album. It\'s kind of comforting.” **rangerover (Bonus Track)** “I really wanted to put something out before the album came out ’cause it had been a long time since I had released any music and I was in New York feeling kind of crazy sitting on this album and all these new songs. It’s a bonus track but it was after the fact, after the whole *Ricky Music* world that I had worked on the song. There\'s this girl that I went to high school with named Julie that drove a Range Rover. We never dated, we were friends, but I\'ve always thought about that car, and for that song it feels kind of romantic. Driving back from the beach is what I had in mind, summer romance coming to an end, and something about how melodramatic it all feels reminded me of myself as a teenager, when you really feel stuff in the most unjaded way and it\'s very romantic and colorful.”

Featuring contributions from Zsela, and Dev Hynes, and with co-production by Jacob Portrait, Ricky Music expands on previous Porches albums (The House, 2018; Pool, 2016; Slow Dance In The Cosmos, 2013) by delivering 11 emotionally open, cracked-glass pop songs.

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

For PVRIS frontwoman Lynn Gunn, her band’s third album *Use Me* marked “a line in the sand.” Sonically, that meant stepping away from the expansive rock that defined the Massachussetts trio’s previous two albums and embracing altogether more hook-heavy, dark-edged electro-pop. “This is where we’re at now, and we’re not going back from here,” says the singer of PVRIS’ new dawn, which Gunn honed with US producer and Paper Route frontman JT Daly. “You can hop on or you can hop off. I follow my taste and my interests, and I never want to compromise that for nostalgia or for the comfort of preserving old expectations.” But *Use Me* also represented another clear-cut change: the moment Gunn—for years reluctant to take full credit for PVRIS’ output—allowed herself to step out of the shadows and into the foreground. “The process of this album was a very singular, solo endeavor,” she says. “Things were naturally happening that way anyway, but we never really had the direct conversation about it. Everyone was down for this, because it’s a healthier, easier method. Finally being like, ‘This is actually how it’s operated,’ and having that conversation has been a really positive shift for us. It allows more freedom.” It’s not hard to see why *Use Me* catalyzed that new direction: This is an intensely personal record on which Gunn documents—and exhales—the turbulence of her life during the years leading up to its creation. “It was a really overwhelming time,” says the singer of the period after the release of 2017’s *All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell* and into 2019, when she began to write *Use Me*. That turmoil is spread across the record, from the pent-up ferocity of opener “Gimme a Minute”—a shuddering anthem which sees Gunn desperately placing a protective layer around herself—to “Good to Be Alive,” on which the singer ruminates on her ill health, sarcastically wondering, “Is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive but I hate my life.” But amid all that restless energy, there’s also release; as the album reaches its close, Gunn sails into noticeably calmer waters. That shift you can hear, she says, was “internal healing. It’s funny, because while we were making the album, I still felt I was holding on to a lot of things. The chaos was just very, very present. But speaking about it now, I feel healed from a lot of it.” Here, let Gunn walk you through the exhilarating *Use Me*, one song at a time. **Gimme a Minute** “This song feels like a really good start, especially if you’re looking at the album as a storyline. There was a lot of change during this album: personal changes, mental changes, physical changes. And I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as well as Crohn\'s disease around this time, so it\'s navigating a lot of health factors within that chaos. I also have a hard time setting boundaries and asking for help or time off. The song is a cry out and just a catharsis of what I really wanted to say, which was just, ‘Give me a minute. I need a minute. I need to process what has happened in the last few years. I need to process what is happening to my body. I need to process what\'s happening to my heart.’ It was just a lot. Sonically, the song emulates that stirring stress and anxiety, and it eventually leads to this explosive breakdown and the ultimate freak-out.” **Dead Weight** “Again, this was about reflecting on being a people-pleaser and always putting others’ feelings and expectations before mine. The song is about wanting to shed those habits and patterns. But also about shedding people who don\'t understand that and won\'t allow you to set those boundaries—old friendships, old relationships, old anything that don’t allow you to be your best self. The dynamic of the song really ties into the sonics; they reflect this dance that I feel I am always having. I always want to be straightforward and transparent with the people around me, but I always want to do that with love and do that in a way that\'s not going to upset anybody. But sometimes the truth is you need to just set that boundary and do it unapologetically and not worry about it.” **Stay Gold** “‘Stay Gold’ just flew out—it was a really quick song to write. The message of the song is wanting to write a song for somebody, but also not wanting to, because when you write a song about somebody, they\'re immortalized. They can be consumed by a listener in whatever way they want, whether that\'s to put them up on this grand pedestal or to tear them down. And this person just felt so special that I didn\'t even want to give the chance for either of those things to happen. I just wanted to keep them safe. I didn’t want to let their greatness die as we would play the song over and over. So, ironically, I ended up writing a song about them, which is the song about not wanting to write a song about them.” **Good to Be Alive** “The line in this—‘It feels good to be alive but I hate my life’—is supposed to be a little cheeky and a little bit funny. But it’s also supposed to be completely honest. JT had set up a little miniature writing camp with some awesome writers. And there was one day we were just working alone, and during this time, I was having a really bad flare-up in my stomach and in my body. I just wasn\'t feeling good, and it was really hard to just show up to the session and be on and be present. I was feeling a lot of the weight of those health issues, which was ironic because mentally I was in excellent health—the best place I\'ve been in my adult life and in our career. What I think music is really great for is delivering the deep, honest, and maybe difficult message, but if you can make someone dance to it or sing along to it, it just feels so much better.” **Death of Me** “This is about that fine line you dance right when you are interested in somebody and you realize you really care about them and like them. And you have to surrender in a way, or at least for me. I\'m go hard or go home. If I\'m going to commit to somebody, I\'m fully committed and ready to just dive in (that’s definitely a good indication of the no boundaries thing). It’s about the risk you take when you are connecting with somebody and putting it all out there. Sonically, it\'s similar to ‘Good to Be Alive,’ where I feel like if you just read the lyrics straight out, it can sound pretty dark and maybe not the most positive. I knew I would need somebody who could bring that perfect element of a little bit dark, but a little bit fun, and I chose Daniel Armbruster from Joywave. He helped like really capture that dark energy, but also a little bit of a cheeky wink in there.” **Hallucinations** “It\'s funny, I didn\'t think the song would make the album. I was reading this book at the time about hallucinating, and it just kind of felt like I was living in a weird little dream. There were a lot of areas of my life where I was kind of contemplating what was real and what was something I was thinking up or projecting, and trying to identify and really pin those things down. The book really lined up with how I felt at that point in my life. A fan actually gave me that book, too, so whoever it was, I owe them a huge thank you.” **Old Wounds** “I think this is the most directly I\'ve ever written about love. It feels like a love song—it’s about that all-or-nothing mentality and that willingness to get hurt again from somebody the second time around. I wrote it about three or four years ago. I had this really short-term but really special connection with somebody, and it just ended very abruptly. And there was a time when they had come back just to talk about it and for us to process something, and I remember one of my friends just said to me, ‘Don’t open up old wounds, don\'t do it.’ I was like, ‘That\'s a good lyric, that\'s a good song idea.’ At the time I was staying in a hotel in New York and I just went back to my room and blurted the song out in a day. And I had the demo for a really long time; I just wanted to finish it and wanted to get it out. I showed it to JT one day and a couple of people on our team, and everybody was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. I thought so.’ I\'m definitely a hopeless romantic, and this captures that.” **Loveless** “When I wrote this, I was dealing with a breakup and I just didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to give it any more attention or energy, I guess. But I knew, deep down, that I needed to write about it and get it out. So I very reluctantly wrote about it. But I think making the song allowed for that final release and that final acceptance and just surrendering to it for a moment. Once that energy was pulled out, it allowed for this breath, which I think the end of the album has. It feels lighter, it doesn\'t feel as chaotic, even if there is still a little bit of sadness. The song is about admitting that you\'ve been defeated and admitting that somebody hurt you and that you\'re giving them this salute. Like, ‘You hurt me, dude, you hurt me real bad.’ I feel like this is the first song where I\'ve just fully laid that out there. Something about admitting that takes the power back.” **January Rain** “A much more retrospective reflection on that same situation. JT and I were just finishing everything and finishing tracking, and just kind of getting everything together. But I woke up one morning with the vocal melody for this song and the chorus in my head and I just jumped to my computer immediately. I wrote the track and got the melody before it ran away and I brought it to him. I didn’t have the lyrics and I didn’t know what I was feeling. But ‘January rain’ just kept popping up. It was looking back on that relationship a year later and reflecting on what it all felt like, which was it was really special to me. But which, very early on, I knew was doomed. I just remember there was one week where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, and that\'s when that feeling felt the heaviest.” **Use Me** “There\'s harp in here, plus strings. This was one of the songs, along with \'Stay Gold,\' which we were fighting really hard to get onto the album. I was watching *Euphoria* and I just really loved the soundtrack for it. I loved the dynamics between Rue and Jules and just the concept of using a person as your escape or your medicine—whether it\'s good or bad. You can see it as a really healthy thing or unhealthy, it just depends on the situation. I tend to get very singular and solo in my own life. I almost wrote it as a love letter or a love song from someone else\'s perspective, and the dialogue or message that I wish someone would be able to speak to me and sing to me. So it was like this weird backwards love song and kind of putting that into the universe. Maybe one day somebody will be able to be that for me and be that person to lean on. But there’s a double-sided energy to it. Because you could almost look at the song as a kind of funny, passive-aggressive, ironic message of just saying, ‘Just go ahead, use me. Do whatever you need.’ It’s very empowered. There\'s also an empowering component to it as well, if you\'re looking at it from that angle.” **Wish You Well** “I never want to burn bridges with people. I never want people to be hurt. Even if a situation was toxic or wasn\'t healthy, I still always just want the best for somebody. But sometimes you need to let things go and you got to let certain people go. I feel it\'s right to have this at the end of the album. It just really captures that no matter what somebody\'s put me through, I\'m not going to hold that against you. I\'m always going to hope that you can grow from this and heal. But I also love a good four on the floor, really groovy bass, fun song. So it was the first time we\'ve really gotten to make something like that. It had to be on the album.”

A lump forms in the back of your throat at the beginning of Chris Stapleton’s exquisite fourth album, and basically hovers there until the final strum. It isn’t that there are bombshell moments about his afflictions or personal tragedies; he’s just singing about the small ways life catches him by surprise. But it’s the *way* he does it—sentimental and observant, like a misty-eyed gentle giant—that makes even his simplest songs overwhelmingly emotional to listen to. By making everyday stories feel weighty and profound—the temptation of a highway, the sting of getting older, the yearning for a better life—he teases tangled, complex emotions right up to the surface. Here, guilt, wonder, disappointment, and hope feel as clear as joy and pain. *Starting Over* traces a period of intense self-reflection. After a string of hugely successful albums and high-profile collaborations (Justin Timberlake, John Mayer), Stapleton had reached a level of fame that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He moved his family out of Nashville and tried to mix things up, briefly trading RCA Studio A for Muscle Shoals. In the end, the LP was recorded in both places, with added support from Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. They helped him assemble hard-rocking stompers like “Arkansas,” about road-tripping through the Ozarks, and “Watch You Burn,” a pointed song about the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Among the album\'s three covers are “Old Friends” and “Worry B Gone” by Guy Clark and John Fogerty’s “Joy of My Life.” But Stapleton just hits different when he’s singing Stapleton. Maybe it’s his devastatingly specific lyrics, recalling, in “Maggie’s Song,” how the family dog placed her head on his hands before passing away (there’s that lump). Or perhaps it’s the way he makes sweeping observations about ineffable things like love and America and still manages to strike a nerve. “I’m 40 years old and it looks like the end of the rainbow/Ain’t no pot of gold,” he sings on “When I’m With You,” a slow-burning song to his wife and singing partner Morgane Stapleton. The album’s final number, a graceful farewell to Nashville, captures the way that cities inevitably let you down. “You build me up, you set me free/You tore down my memories,” he sings with the heartache of someone leaving a first love. “You’re not who you used to be/So long, Nashville, Tennessee.”

On their eighth studio album, *Wake Up, Sunshine*, All Time Low has perfected their hook-heavy pop-punk formula—and they’ve done so without falling into the seductive trappings of nostalgia. “There’s a big distinction,” frontman Alex Gaskarth told Apple Music. “We weren’t trying to sound like we sounded 12 years ago. But some of that energy shines through. It’s a really cool amalgamation of everything that’s come before it.” Just don’t for a second think they’ve run out of tricks. The band’s new album runs the gamut of their career, centering on optimistic songs as luminous and unclouded as the title suggests. There’s the self-referential fan service of “Some Kind of Disaster,” the Y2K-era blink-182-channeling “Sleeping In,” and the pulsating palm-muted power chords of “Safe.” Then there are moments of unexpected innovation: the rhythmic structure of “Trouble Is,” the country influence of “Favorite Place,” and All Time Low’s first foray into hip-hop on “Monsters.” “I hope that when people listen to the album, it’s a reminder of why they fell in love with the band in the first place,” guitarist Jack Bakarat says. “The focus all along has been to get back to the basics—capturing that magic again.” Below, Gaskarth breaks down each song on *Wake Up, Sunshine*, track by track. “There’s a lot of hope on the album,” he says. “There\'s a lot of looking forward to a brighter future. And I think that shines through.” **Some Kind of Disaster** “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the record. When we finished it, we all paused for a second and said, ‘Hey, that seems like it would be an amazing way to open a show.’ That conversation evolved into, ‘Well, if we\'d open a show with it, why not open a record with it?’ It feels like it\'s this declaration of our return and an anthemic call-to-arms song. I\'d say that it\'s autobiographical about the band in the chorus: ‘It\'s all my fault that I\'m still the one you want/So what are you after?/Some kind of disaster.’ I ask the fans if they\'re ready to do this all over again and take this ride again.” **Sleeping In** “When you\'re with the person you like, you just never want to go to sleep, because it\'s just too good of a time. You’re still up at 7 am and the next good idea is to put on Britney Spears and have a dance party. I’ve certainly done that many times. I think we’ve all been there. And I love a good pop reference.” **Getaway Green** “I wanted there to be a lot of color throughout this record. I wanted this to feel very vivid and bright. ‘Getaway Green’ is really about a sense of escapism, but also a SoCal Romeo and Juliet situation, where it\'s not meant to be but they want it to be, and eventually it\'s going to be.” **Melancholy Kaleidoscope** “It was a weird day in the studio. Nothing really seemed to be clicking and I was in a weather-induced funk. I was feeling some crazy seasonal depression. I wasn\'t in the mood to write uplifting music. And Zakk Cervini, our producer, came in with this idea for a fast, uptempo, Warped Tour-esque song. It\'s just not where my head was, so I made it a challenge for myself to make it work. In doing so, I started to take steps towards getting my head in a better place. ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope’ was maybe the second \[song\] we wrote. It shaped the tone of the album, once I got over that hurdle.” **Trouble Is** “This was a fun one from beginning to end, because we challenged ourselves to do something with a weird, rhythmic cadence. It\'s these intervals of six and then seven, which is not an easy time signature to write a pop melody around. It actually ended up working really, really well. And then the song settles into 6/8 for the chorus, which just always feels big. It became this fun little math project. It\'s not like we\'re a sophisticated, techy math rock band, anyway. We\'re playing pop rock here at the end of the day.” **Wake Up, Sunshine** “It is the overall idea that in a world that feels like it\'s falling apart, and in a situation where it\'s very easy to self-doubt and become your own worst enemy, hanging on to the idea that someone out there is all about you is something that can really help pull you through. Knowing that all it really takes is just a connection with one other person out there can sometimes be the thing that gets you moving in the right direction again. And I think that sentiment echoes throughout the entire album.” **Monsters (feat. blackbear)** “We\'ve never really gone there before as a band, we\'ve never really featured a rapper on anything. And so it’s like, 15 years into a career, there\'s still some new things to try, and that happened to be the right one in the moment. It was really cool and special.” **Pretty Venom (Interlude)** “\[This is a\] 3 am-er. We write our dark songs late at night. The song\'s very reflective. I think it hearkens back to some of the woes throughout our career where we felt resentful towards people who didn\'t have the band\'s best interest in mind, and I got to speak to some of those things—just about how someone else\'s poison can poison you and it changes you as a person, and suddenly their toxicity is making you toxic.” **Favorite Place (feat. The Band CAMINO)** “When we wrote ‘Favorite Place,’ we all recognized that we were pulling some of \[The Band CAMINO’s\] influence. And so it only felt right to reach out to them and see if they wanted to be a part of it. Because it felt like, in some way, they had contributed to the writing of the song. They ended up enjoying the song and wanted to be a part of it. It was really fun. I love when you see some camaraderie between labelmates.” **Safe** “We all jokingly said that the songs we wrote in Nashville have a bit of a Nashville \[sound\] playing throughout them in some way, like ‘Safe,’ ‘Favorite Place,’ and ‘Getaway Green.’ They could all easily translate to what I think would be pretty rad country songs. So eventually we\'re going to have to make a Y\'all Time Low record.” **January Gloom (Seasons, Pt. 1)** “This was written during the session in Nashville in January \[2019\]. It was cold, rainy, miserable. It was just a difficult time. I felt myself really weighed down by it all. I felt a little bit aimless and I didn\'t have a ton of direction. Similar to ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope,’ my lack of inspiration served as inspiration. And so, in this song, I\'m talking about sitting alone with the voice in my head, saying, ‘Give me something.’” **Clumsy** “‘Clumsy’ feels like a really staple All Time Low song that speaks to the legacy of the band. You could put it on almost any All Time Low record at any time in All Time\'s history and it would make sense, even though it sounds like the 2020 version of All Time Low. The lyrics of this song are all about loneliness and why you end up lonely.” **Glitter & Crimson** “To me, this song is about two characters who are deeply in love, whose love is not allowed to be that by \[a certain\] society. They\'re gay, and they don\'t feel like they\'re accepted in their own skin for who they are, or for who they want to love. It’s a cry out to seize that power back and saying, ‘No. You don\'t get to dictate how we live our lives.’ Obviously, I can\'t speak to that, being a straight guy, but I know a lot of people who live that experience every day. And it was something that felt very meaningful that I wanted to address for them because they can’t \[in this way\]. They aren\'t songwriters.” **Summer Daze (Seasons, Pt. 2)** “‘Summer Daze’ is a song about that celebratory feeling of elation that you get from, like, a summer camp romance. It’s that honeymoon phase where you know it\'s probably going to come to an end because it has to, but at the time, it was just everything.” **Basement Noise** “That’s how it all wraps up—an ode and a tribute to our humble beginnings, having this big dream of hopefully getting out on the road someday and making a go of it. If you\'d told us back then that we would be doing this 15 years later, record number eight, I don\'t think we would have ever believed you.”

As The Killers began work on their sixth full-length, Brandon Flowers had a single visual in mind: the album’s eventual cover art, illustrator Thomas Blackshear’s *Dance of the Wind and Storm*. “We wanted to make sure that the songs fit underneath the banner of what that image was saying,” Flowers tells Apple Music of the drawing, which he hung on the wall of the studio. “Blackshear typically does Western landscapes, or he does spiritual art. But on this particular one he combined them, and that\'s exactly what I wanted to capture. Songs that didn\'t fit, they had to get cut. We’d never done anything like that, but it ended up being a real beacon for us.” As intended, *Imploding the Mirage* evokes the scale and natural majesty of the American West, like The E Street Band playing Monument Valley. And at its heart are a series of synth-lined, often Springsteenian tales of love and salvation, inspired by Flowers’ recent move from Las Vegas to Utah—and the effect it had on his wife’s mental health. (“Las Vegas is a tainted and haunted place,” he says. “Talk about a clean slate.”) It’s the band’s first LP without founding guitarist Dave Keuning, whose departure made space for a list of collaborators that includes k.d. lang, Weyes Blood, The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s also meant to be a companion to 2017’s unabashedly grand *Wonderful Wonderful*. “I\'m very interested in the optimistic side of things,” Flowers says. “I was brought up to have that kind of a perspective, and I think you hear it in the songs: It feels triumphant, like there are angels present.” Here, Flowers details a few of its key tracks. **My Own Soul’s Warning** “It\'s strange to write a song about repentance. It\'s not a typical subject in a pop or a rock song. And I felt like, to be able to go into that territory and write something that was meaningful to myself and that felt like it was going to transcend and resonate with a lot of people in a stadium or inside their headphones—that’s kind of the Holy Grail. It\'s just one of those songs for me.” **Blowback** “The producer of the record, Shawn Everett, he\'s producing the new War on Drugs, and he produced the last one. I think Adam \[Granduciel\] and I share a lot of the same musical landmarks and touchstones—we just follow along through our own experiences, usually Las Vegas. It just kind of happened pretty organically.” **Dying Breed** “Shawn, he’s a wizard in the studio, kind of a mad scientist. And he just will throw things at a song that you were just not envisioning at all. The song was already good, and then Shawn disappeared into a B room for about an hour and came back all excited, and played us that \[Can and Neu!\] loop over the song. And it was like, ‘Yeah.’ It\'s frustrating that it wasn\'t our loop in the beginning, but then we just embraced it and got permission. And when Ronnie \[Vannucci, drummer\] and the full band come in halfway through the song, it just goes to this other level. Now I love that song.” **Caution** “Sometimes they talk. That’s what you hear about, when you hear about great guitar solos—how they speak, how they’re singable. And, man, Lindsey just delivered in a big way, and I love that. I love that you can kind of memorize that solo and sing along.” **Imploding the Mirage** “In \[1977’s\] ‘Solsbury Hill,’ Peter Gabriel talks about walking out of the machinery—and I think he\'s talking about Genesis. It’s kind of like that. It\'s like getting out from underneath the weight of what it is to be in The Killers and what is expected of you, and just doing what you love. That\'s a huge part of it, for sure. I mean, I can\'t pretend like everything\'s just hunky-dory and that we\'re firing on all cylinders. It\'s just not. I\'m obviously using the imagery of Las Vegas—we implode things, we have a casino called The Mirage—and just the idea of this facade that we can put on and how stressful that can be. I think getting rid of it and replacing it with what\'s real can be such a relief and can be something that we could all strive to do.”

Twenty years in and Burlington, Ontario, post-hardcore quintet Silverstein has clearly learned nothing from nine previous albums’ worth of detailed self-therapy. “I keep chasing bad feelings,” concedes frontman Shane Told with familiar hair-trigger torment on *A Beautiful Place to Drown*’s opener, “Bad Habits.” “I keep breaking down and never deal with it… I’m good with bad habits.” There’s much to satisfy a protracted Silverstein habit here: All the confessional anguish and slick melodies mingled with eruptions of metallic violence one has come to expect from the band are still firmly in place. But Silverstein’s brand of post-hardcore has always had hints of pop-hardcore buried within its folds, and this album’s polish only makes that clearer, particularly on the synth-y, sax-streaked “All on Me” or the veiled bubblegum ditties “Say Yes!” and “Take What You Give.” Yet what continues to make the band so unique after two decades is how easily they can flit from those easier-to-approach tunes to absolute crushers like “Stop” or the Princess Nokia-featuring “Madness.”

Artists who take an approach as acutely personal and unambiguously confessional as Katie Pruitt does on her debut album often revel in rawness. But the Georgia-bred, Nashville-based singer-songwriter treats refinement as a complement to self-expression. The 10 songs on *Expectations*—most of which she wrote solo, and all of which she co-produced with fellow first-timer Michael Robinson—employ lyrical precision in the service of emotional lucidity. Pruitt captures a contrast in outlooks—between fearing the rejection that might come with disobeying conventional codes and bending them to make space for living openly. The elegant contours of her melodies draw from familiar folk, rock, and pop forms, and they hold their shapes even as she applies freewheeling dynamics; the acrobatic intimacy of her singing and the reverb-glazed, guitar-driven arrangements amplify her ebbs and flows in feeling.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.