Chorus.fm's Top 30 Albums of 2021

“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

When The Killers couldn’t tour their 2020 album *Imploding the Mirage* because of the pandemic, lead singer Brandon Flowers didn’t sit around waiting for a chance to get back on the road. Instead, he came up with an idea during quarantine that would eventually become the band’s seventh studio album, where he also reunited with founding member Dave Keuning on guitar. For Flowers, the introspection that came from lockdown kept leading him to the town of Nephi, Utah, where he grew up. “There was some trepidation at first,” he tells Apple Music. “Because it’s such a small town, and you wonder how that’s going to resonate with people all over the world. And it’s such a specific place in the Southwest. But then I couldn’t escape it. Every time I went to the keyboard, these ideas kept coming out, all based on characters that I grew up observing, or experiences that I had in town, or memories. So I went with it.” *Pressure Machine* is unlike anything in The Killers’ repertoire. From the use of instruments like harmonica and fiddle to the deeply personal storytelling and interviews with people who still live in the town, the album is a love letter to the places you grew up and the people you left behind—anchored in melancholy and dotted with hope. “Tragedy and religious disenchantment were the launchpads,” Flowers explains. “When you’re a kid, you’re getting new experiences all the time, so when something shocking or tragic happens, it really resonates. Those experiences are the things I was gravitating towards.” Flowers explains more about those experiences and how they influenced each track on *Pressure Machine* below. **“West Hills”** “There\'s a whole subculture in Utah, in my experience, because we associate Utah with Mormonism. Having grown up there, a lot of people \[outside of Utah\] aren\'t aware of people that don\'t adhere to religion. There’s this whole thing of dirt bikes and four-wheelers and beer and finding different ways to find your salvation, other than in a church pew on Sunday. I took some liberties on the song, but it\'s based on a real story.” **“Quiet Town”** “I was in eighth grade when two seniors got hit by a train. Their names were Raymond and Tiffany. I was surprised to find 25 years later how much I was still affected by it. I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness. A lot of times we talk about stagnation with snarky terms, and I think it’s one of the things that\'s associated with towns like Nephi, but it can also be a beautiful thing, because it\'s these people that are holding on to ideals and traditions. I hope that it never changes in that respect.” **“Terrible Thing”** “Years after high school, you hear about a kid you went to school with that was gay and nobody knew. It\'s just such a cowboy, football, hunting country town. I tried to work through this person\'s experience in town and how hard it must be to be in a culture like that. To not even feel safe to tell anyone who you are. Because when you were a kid or you\'re in high school, you don\'t have that courage, and I don\'t blame them.” **“Cody”** “‘Cody’ is a culmination of a bunch of my friends\' big brothers. I had two friends that had older brothers that seemed particularly dangerous. And so, again, those memories stand out, that you might\'ve been afraid of them, or you hear stories about what they\'re doing, or getting arrested, or whatever it is. And so I was able to sort of melt them into this one character.” **“Sleepwalker”** “The first line that I knew was good in that song was ‘It doesn\'t come from without/It comes from within.’ So I built all the rest of the lyrics around that. I had just recently moved back to Utah and was experiencing seasons again. Because in Vegas, it gets hot and then it gets cold, that’s it. You don\'t get to go through the beauty and the sometimes stark changes of the weather. I was caught up in that, the anticipation for spring and new life. I was able to use that sort of analogy for a person becoming a new creature and coming back to life.” **“Runaway Horses” (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)** “Life\'s going to be hard for whatever choice or whatever road you take. There\'s going to be obstacles and hurdles. In this case, it\'s about two people that think that they\'re going to finish the race together, and then they end up sort of going in different paths. It’s also about coming home. No matter where you go, how far you drift, you’re always trying to get home.” **“In the Car Outside”** “This song started really quickly, and it was one of those moments that you\'re always waiting for. One of the reasons why you get in the garage in the first place is just this communal experience that you can share with people. And it was born really fast, and it was really exciting to be a part of it.” **“In Another Life”** “I think everyone goes through things like wondering what life would\'ve been like if we\'d done things differently. Or if not, at least you wonder if your significant other is going through that. And I think this guy\'s just questioning the choices that he\'s made and wondering if he\'s measuring up to what his wife had hoped that he would be. It’s definitely a sad song, seeped in melancholy.” **“Desperate Things”** “This was a little scandal that took place \[in Nephi\] that I took some liberties with in the third verse, where I take it off the rails. I like telling stories, and there\'s people like Nick Cave and Johnny Cash and people that are great storytellers who are really influential to me. You don\'t get a lot of third verses in pop songs, and it\'s not something you associate with a typical Killers song, but I needed that third verse to tell the story. This is probably as dark as I\'ve ever gotten.” **“Pressure Machine”** “I think there\'s a sadness to how quickly we grow up, and being a parent and watching that. Everybody tells you when you have a kid, ‘Make the most of it. They\'re going to grow up before you know it.’ And it sort of gets redundant, and then it really is true and it\'s kind of a heartbreaker.” **“The Getting By”** “Even though there is struggle, and even though there is strife and toiling, there\'s still hope. That\'s what makes these people who they are. They get up and go to work every day. I have a lot of respect for them, and I don\'t feel that far removed from them. And I thought about people like my uncles and my dad and my nephews and my cousins. And really wanted to capture what I saw in their lives.”

“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”

As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

While 2020\'s solo debut *Petals for Armor* indulged in R&B, funk, and pop, the Paramore singer\'s latest collection deconstructs her loneliest and darkest feelings with a heavy dose of acoustic compositions, melancholy piano melodies, and well-placed electric guitar flourishes. Williams wrote and performed the entirety of *FLOWERS for VASES / descansos* and recorded it in her Nashville home, and it serves as an ode to the suffering that precluded *Petals for Armor*\'s arc of self-discovery. Williams\' voice once again takes center stage, intertwined within the record\'s pensive compositions, varying from barely a whisper (\"First Thing to Go\") to a simmering rage (\"Trigger\"). \"My Limb\" dabbles in the macabre (\"If you gotta amputate/Don\'t give me the tourniquet\"), the delicate \"Asystole\" compares a past relationship to the most fatal form of cardiac arrest, and the folk-tinged \"Good Grief\" focuses on how love slowly dissolves. This 14-track postmortem adds another chapter of honest reflection to Williams\' ever-growing repertoire, laying her past demons to rest.

After rerecording her 2008 album *Fearless* as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes—or at least create new ones—Taylor Swift presents *Red (Taylor’s Version)*, an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. “Musically and lyrically, *Red* resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. She wrestles with change on “Nothing New,” an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers; contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”); and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. Longtime fans will be especially glad to see an extended cut of “All Too Well,” the project’s emotional centerpiece. It features new production from hitmaker Jack Antonoff, but Swift’s original lyrical genius is still remarkable. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she sings. It’s the line she’s always said she’s most proud of from this album and era. Ten years on, it still cuts deep.

Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”

Ahead of its release, Vince Staples told Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe that his eponymous album was a more personal work than those that came before. The Long Beach rapper has never shied away from bringing the fullness of his personality to his music—it\'s what makes him such a consistently entertaining listen—but *Vince Staples*, aided by Kenny Beats, who produced the project, is more clear-eyed than ever. Opener “ARE YOU WITH THAT?” is immediate: “Whenever I miss those days/Visit my Crips that lay/Under the ground, runnin\' around, we was them kids that played/All in the street, followin\' leads of n\*\*\*as who lost they ways,” he muses in the second verse, assessing the misguided aspirations that marked his childhood even as the threat of violence and death loomed. It\'s not that Staples hasn\'t broached these topics before—it\'s that he\'s rarely been this explicit regarding his own feelings about them. His sharp matter-of-factness and acerbic humor have often masked criticism in piercing barbs and commentary in unflinching bravado. Here, he\'s direct. The songs, like a series of vignettes that don\'t even reach the three-minute mark, feel intimately autobiographical. “SUNDOWN TOWN” reflects on the distrustful mentality that comes with taking losses and having the rug pulled out from under you one too many times (“When I see my fans, I\'m too paranoid to shake their hands”); “TAKE ME HOME” illuminates how the pull of the past, of “home,” can still linger even after you\'ve escaped it (“Been all across this atlas but keep coming back to this place \'cause it trapped us”). Some might call this an album of maturation, but it ultimately seems more like an invitation—Staples finally allowing his fans to know him just a bit more.

When *Strangers to Ourselves* arrived in 2015, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock let on that he actually had another LP’s worth of material ready for release, if only his label would let him. “These are not those songs,” he tells Apple Music of *The Golden Casket*. “I went into the studio with \[producer-composer\] Dave Sardy and a blank slate. One plan was just to not touch a guitar, but that didn\'t last long—the guitar is fun. Another plan was to make a kalimba record, but I knew that that wasn\'t realistic—I’m talking out of my ass now, as I was then.” What Brock did record, ultimately, was an album he’d enjoy making and listening to—a thick collage of spidery riffs, woozy synths, and the odd snippet of found sound, the opening of cans or the cracking of his knuckles included. Lyrically, he took inspiration from a line he loved in the song “Private Execution,” from Australian rock outfit The Drones’ 2016 LP *Feelin Kinda Free*: “What do fish know about water?” It is, he says, “a very simple, concise way of saying we don\'t know what we don\'t know and there\'s a lot we don\'t fucking know. I\'m a proponent of psychedelics, and there\'s more to the universe than we understand. That\'s not even an existential question.” But in light of that, there is a real sense of gratitude and optimism coursing through *The Golden Casket*, from “We’re Lucky” to “The Sun Hasn’t Left,” a reassuring response to the tumult of 2020. Much of that can be traced to Brock’s recent embrace of parenthood. “Everything I do is influenced by this now,” he says. “Unless you\'re an asshole, once you\'ve brought people into the world, it\'s necessary to figure out ways to make things better for your brood, to make things work. You can\'t be too fucking cynical—it’s only right.” Below, Brock walks us through some of the album’s key tracks. **“F\*\*k Your Acid Trip”** “It\'s just kind of a lot of fun. It’s not too heady. I\'m not making people get deep into the thickets too quick or anything. That\'s why it\'s the opener, you know? That song could be as basic as a story about an acid trip—which it kind of is—but it\'s also about any ride you didn\'t agree to take, any conversation or situation where your participation wasn\'t asked of you.” **“We Are Between”** “I don\'t know where it began, but I know where it ended up. It\'s just about how lucky it is to be here—you know? How lucky we are to get to live in an ocean of oxygen, how lucky we are just to even get between a rock and a hard place. Fuck. There\'s a limit to feeling good about life on earth, I\'m sure, but most of the time, it shouldn\'t be there.” **“We’re Lucky”** “That just one fell out—I don\'t know that I ever had to put pen to paper. It’s kind of a love song, for getting to be here in the fucking universe, against all odds. Probably one of my favorite moments on the record, because it just feels right.” **“The Sun Hasn’t Left”** “That one kind of culminated because of the riots going on at the same time as a pandemic and the fucking sky was blacked out basically for parts of the days from forest fires and shit up here in Portland. I *had* to write that song. For no other reason, as a reminder. I saw a lot of people I knew really, really get pretty fucking bummed out and I felt like I needed to say something encouraging.” **“Never F\*\*k a Spider on the Fly”** “It ended up being a gentle reminder to trolls and anyone who is trying to fuck with other people\'s rights or whatnot: All this negative shit, it usually actually ends up preying on them too. There are no fucking winners. Yelp reviews are like a really pedestrian version of this. Yes, everyone fucking has an opinion, everyone fucking should be allowed an opinion, but the way you feel about your fucking meal is now like an act of war. It’s a bummer to see how bad we are at getting along or even just dealing with a bad sandwich like it wasn\'t some sort of personal assault.” **“Leave a Light On”** “Everyone got to spend a lot of time in their homes and whatnot. I got to think about everyone\'s looking at their same four walls over and over again and what that was. And then I got to thinking about how other people\'s walls are new. It’s a song of being welcoming and being welcomed.” **“Back to the Middle”** “I love this song. It’s one that was around before the recording session, around the time of the last record. I\'ve always really liked it. My mom, believe it or not, is the reason this is on this record, because she\'s very politically charged and felt like it was a strong statement for just getting closer to a centered place.”

“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

When Heather Baron-Gracie looks back at Pale Waves’ 2018 debut album, *My Mind Makes Noises*, the singer and guitarist feels like it was a period when she didn’t really know herself at all. The Manchester four-piece achieved breakthrough success with their coming-of-age anthems and jubilant, ’80s-influenced synth-pop, but behind closed doors, the group’s leader was going through an internal struggle. “I was still growing up at that point,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I was 23 years old, but I felt a lot younger when it comes to maturity.” It’s led to the sense of self-discovery that runs right through Pale Waves’ exhilarating second record *Who Am I?*. Produced by Muse and Biffy Clyro collaborator Rich Costey, it mixes alt-rock dynamism with razor-sharp pop hooks and marks a huge leap forward for the quartet. These are songs that tackle personal, intimate topics in a universal way, their themes taking in sexuality, society, sexism, mental health, and love. “I wanted it to connect with people,” explains Baron-Gracie. “I wanted it to bring them understanding and comfort, be a piece of music that will be timeless to them.” Heather Baron-Gracie has put every inch of her soul into *Who Am I?*. Here she guides us through it, track by track. **Change** “I didn’t really know this was going to be the opener at all, but most people around me in my life did, and I felt like, ‘OK, maybe I should listen to other people for once.’ I had the majority of the album written and I realized I didn’t have a song about heartbreak. Personally, I feel like I’ve never truly been completely heartbroken, so I channeled two emotions. I channeled frustration from my life and being disappointed and frustrated with people in general and having high expectations of them and them never delivering. Then I spoke to people in my life about their experiences of being heartbroken. I combined the two and that’s how it came about.” **Fall to Pieces** “At the start of the relationship I’m in, my mental health was really all over the place and I was having a tough time with a lot of things in my life, and I was sort of putting my partner through it. Luckily, they’re amazing and they stuck by me and they pulled me through it. But it had an impact on our relationship. I created this argument and we went through it again and again, because at the time I wasn’t completely stable. Anything that troubles me, I feel like I need to get out.” **She’s My Religion** “I’ve been open about my sexuality for a while, but I’ve never put it into a song. I wanted to do it justice and I needed someone to write about. I didn’t want to just write a song that said ’I like girls’ or something. It’s basically me saying, ‘To love someone entirely, you have to love every inch of them and take the bad side, take the darkness to them.’ So the chorus may say, ‘She’s cold, she’s dark, she’s cynical’—well, for me, you have to love every single part, and I do for my partner.” **Easy** “It’s just a feel-good little song. I feel like love is the most universal and most powerful emotion we experience. Love can drive you to do crazy things. It’s about how euphoric and uplifting love made me feel. I wanted to put that into a form of a song because I wanted people to experience that if they haven’t already. I just wanted to talk about how good love can be when it’s right.” **Wish U Were Here** “We finished the album and I had 10 songs on there. And then Rich Costey said, ‘Oh, we have some extra time in the studio if you want to try and do another song.’ So I did ‘Wish U Were Here.’ It was half-written at that point. I’m really grateful that it’s on the album because it is my favorite now—maybe because I knew it wasn’t going to go on there. It was fate that it was meant to be on this album, and for me there’s something so raw to this song in comparison to anything. I said to Rich, ‘I want it to sound like I’ve recorded this in my bedroom,’ and I think we captured an element to that.” **Tomorrow** “‘Tomorrow’ is the first song I wrote for the album. It paved the way for this record, and I wanted a song that was there for fans, because I see a lot of our fans online and they struggle with mental health or they struggle with their sexuality. Life is tough. Life is hard. So I wanted a song that represented strength, and sometimes you do need that voice to give you the strength to persevere through whatever you’re going through. You do need someone to say, ‘Carry on going because you are loved.’” **You Don’t Own Me** “This is a really powerful song. It’s so tough trying to summarize what it’s like to be a woman in this world within three minutes and whatever, but it was a subject that was really important to me. I feel as women we’ve come a long way over the years, but there’s still not complete equality and this is still a journey that we have to go on.” **I Just Needed You** “This is me realizing that I realigned a lot of my priorities within this last year and a half. I look at social media and society and the conversations that I’ve had with people and realize that sometimes we get it so wrong in life. The Ferrari is not going to buy us long-term happiness—we can get caught up in the materialistic things as people. You have to find happiness within, you have to learn to love yourself, you have to find the right sort of people that love you for who you truly are.” **Odd Ones Out** “‘Odd Ones Out’ is me watching a lot of people’s relationships fall apart. I find it really interesting how a couple can be so obsessed with each other and then, a few months later, they hate each other and go from knowing everything about each other to complete strangers. This song is me saying, ‘Hey, I want to be the odd ones out. I don’t want to fall into that pattern. Can we please be different, because I don’t want to ever become that. And I will always fight for us.’” **Run To** “This is a letter that I would write to my mum. It’s basically me saying, ‘Hey, I know you worry, you probably worry too much, but I am OK. Life can be hard, but I know that you’re always there for me and I know that that love as a mother that you give to me as a daughter will never die and I can always come to you for anything and I appreciate that. But you don’t need to worry about me 24/7.’ I wanted it to be like a really thrashy song, a bit messy. It doesn’t sound perfect. I wanted it to sound real and quite rough around the edges.” **Who Am I?** “This came at the very end. We’d started recording the album and then we took a break and went on tour. I didn’t have the album title at that time. Whilst you’re on tour, you really need to get away from that environment and go on a walk by yourself. I’ve learned that now, but I didn’t at the time, and on this one particular day, I just felt super low and upset. So I took my guitar to the bathroom and wrote ‘Who Am I?’ Within an hour and a half, it was done. It summarized the album completely. The album is all about emotional growth and finding your way in life and finding what makes you truly happy. I knew it had to be the album title and I knew it had to be the closing act.”

Taking its name from a computer virus developed by the NSA and leaked by hackers in 2017, the debut album from Canadian alt-metal trio Spiritbox has nothing to do with cyberattacks. Instead, vocalist Courtney LaPlante uses the term to describe the mood that permeates the record. “The story of the computer virus is fascinating—especially how it came into existence and how much it messed with people’s stuff,” she tells Apple Music. “But I latched onto it because of how cool the phrase is. Now, the words mean something completely different to me than when I first heard them.” Below, she describes each track on *Eternal Blue*. **“Sun Killer”** “We wrote this in January of 2020, and we instantly knew that it would be the intro of the album. This has the drama that I look for when I’m listening to an opening of an album—it’s like when the band is walking out onstage for a show. When I hear this, I’m surprised by the flexibility of my voice because I’ve had a vocal cord injury for a long time. It’s finally healed itself up in the last couple of years, so this performance is like a mini-celebration that I feel like myself again.” **“Hurt You”** “All of our songs have a narrative, but they’re more about the feeling of the song. To me, this feels like the ups and downs of a toxic relationship. We always write the music first in this band, but I think it’s fun when you can have the lyrical content mimic the vibe of the music. The working title of this was ‘Heavy Clown,’ like Clown from Slipknot, because a lot of our favorite nu-metal references made it into this song.” **“Yellowjacket” (feat. Sam Carter)** “This is one of my favorites on the record. I think it’s a double drop-D guitar tuning, so it’s inhumanly heavy. I don’t do a lot of screaming on this song, but it definitely has some of the lowest, scariest screams I’ve ever gotten out of me. The rest of the song is me talking, and my inspiration for that was a lot of the alternative music of the ’90s—bands like Butthole Surfers, that had all this weird spoken-word stuff in their songs. And then, we had Sam Carter from Architects do some vocals on it, which sound amazing.” **“The Summit”** “I have this fantasy in my mind where there’s this new genre of music that doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like the parameters are pulled off some genres that I like. And that’s where ‘The Summit’ lives. It’s hard to classify it as a metal song, but the guitar is so low and clear. Vocally, I took a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd and Charli XCX, especially the way she lets the last line of a chorus descend in a really playful way.” **“Secret Garden”** “This is one of the first ones we wrote back in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t quite ready back then. The working title was ‘Chino’ because it reminded us a little bit of Deftones, who we are very inspired by. I think the song has such a nice vibe to it—it feels romantically sorrowful. Lyrically, it’s me being introspective and advocating for myself. I think a lot of musicians fear losing who they are as their star rises, but I think anyone who’s in any transition period in their life can understand that feeling.” **“Silk in the Strings”** “A lot of the songs on this album are heavy and open and slow, but all the more intense songs—like this one—were written later. When \[guitarist\] Michael \[Stringer\] first showed me this one, I wasn’t sure what to do because I always feel like the vocals need to match the energy of the song. So, whenever there’s something bouncy, I try not to think about what a metal vocalist would do. I look more to what I think good rappers would do. For this song, I was like, ‘How would the Wu-Tang Clan do this song?’ I would absolutely never be able to rap, but I really admire how important the flow is.” **“Holy Roller”** “We don’t really have a lot of other music that sounds like this song, but we just wanted something selfishly heavy. The narrator in this song is clearly not a good person. A lot of times in metal music, a song about a bad person is very on the nose—very graphic and explicitly violent. I wanted to explore something more insidious, like the religious cultism of someone like Jim Jones. I find those kinds of people so much scarier than a song about cutting someone’s head off or something like that.” **“Eternal Blue”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it’s my favorite. Our producer, Dan \[Braunstein\], really helped us dig a little deeper with the synth part of it, taking a lot of reference from New Wave acts from the ’80s, like Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. I just love how heavy and beautiful the song is, and it has a very rare Michael Stringer guitar solo in it, which I love. Lyrically, it’s about someone who is at rock bottom but is trying not to romanticize that. Many people seem to glamorize depression, but I think it’s important not to get caught up in that.” **“We Live in a Strange World”** “Every time I listen to this song, I feel different about it. We first wrote it before the pandemic, before the band started gaining success. When I recorded it in February 2021, I had a lot more to say about how weird the world is. It feels like I’m just watching this stuff happen to me like a viewer—rather than it actually happening to me—because I’m just sitting in my house watching all of these people online starting to know who the band is. It’s a bizarre feeling, and you worry about messing it up.” **“Halcyon”** “This one’s Michael’s favorite song. Like ‘Sun Killer,’ I just love how dramatic it is. It’s a big heavyweight of a song, and it gives me a lot of room with my singing range. Most of these songs are me thinking about not wanting to mess up and not wanting to get my little spirit crushed. This one is me looking at all those successful people and the version of me that’s going to compromise everything so that they can be one of those people.” **“Circle With Me”** “This is the newest song on the record, and it was written in the studio. Michael wrote it in an afternoon. Some of the darker and dramatic parts remind me of Evanescence, but on the chorus I took reference from Tears for Fears. So, it’s this weird little song, but it really kind of unlocked a lot of creativity in us to make all of our songs better. We ended up putting it out first because it really represents how we’re feeling about our band right now.” **“Constance”** “Just as ‘Sun Killer’ was always to be the opener and ‘Holy Roller’ was always meant as the middle point, followed by ‘Eternal Blue,’ ‘Constance’ was always meant to be the last song. But the lyrics didn’t really start to form until last year when my grandma passed away. Writing this song just helped me think about the feelings of losing someone, and it’s dedicated to her because she always wanted me to put out a song that doesn’t have screaming in it.”

Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.

In early 2020, Weezer was forced to put the release of the guitar-driven *Van Weezer* on hold when the stadium tour Hella Mega, on which they would share the bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The veteran pop-rockers turned inward and decided to release *OK Human* instead—an unplugged orchestral album centered around themes of isolation and feeling alienated that felt more appropriate during lockdown. With the possibility of live shows ever-so-slightly looming on the horizon, they crank the Marshall stack back up and serve fun, gnarly riffs on their second album of 2021. Inspired by their shared love of hard rock and heavy metal bands of the ’70s and ’80s—after all, the album’s title is an obvious nod to Van Halen—the band’s 15th LP offers a nostalgic whiff of guitar histrionics (“Beginning of the End”), stomp-clap anthems à la “Beverly Hills” with more punch (“All the Good Ones”), and palm-muted power chords (“1 More Hit”). Clocking in at a snappy 30 minutes, the 10 tracks here are all killer, no filler—recalling the catchy immediacy of the Green Album, even if, sonically, it’s the equivalent of wearing spandex and lace rather than baggy khakis. But as it is with every Weezer album, they also embrace their pop side regardless of whatever gimmick they pursue. There are sparkling odes to the underdog (“Hero”), anecdotes about overcoming stage fright (“Beginning of the End”), and adolescent memories about raging to Aerosmith (“I Need Some of That”), each guided by frontman Rivers Cuomo’s dewy-eyed ruminations and tightly crafted power-pop hooks. And for the longtime faithful, Cuomo even throws in some fan service with “Sheila Can Do It”—converting an old demo he wrote in the mid-’90s into a revved-up rocker with bubblegum New Wave flourishes.