Chorus.fm's Top 30 Albums of 2022

With the second installment of their *Vaxis* story arc, emo-prog wizards Coheed and Cambria continue the highly ambitious *Amory Wars* sci-fi epic that has defined their musical career. *Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind* is an intricate cinematic narrative following a couple on the run from tyrannical forces while trying to find a cure for their young son’s mysterious condition. For Coheed vocalist, guitarist, and conceptual mastermind Claudio Sanchez, the story is a highly personal one cloaked in futuristic fantasy. “That’s kind of why I created the concept 20 years ago,” he tells Apple Music. “As the singer, it’s really hard for me to be the center of attention, the one where the messages are coming from. So, it was easier for me to construct this thing to hide behind. That’s why Coheed has been primarily shrouded in a story called *The Amory Wars*.” Below, he discusses each song on the album. **“The Embers of Fire”** “This is the intro to the record, and it hearkens back to a theme that came on the record before it, which was a track called ‘Old Flames.’ The thing that I really enjoy about this piece is that my son got to sing on it—he was five at the time. The idea of the character of Vaxis is that he’s this omnipresent sort of being that lives in all states of his life. So, I thought it would be interesting to have the child voice as well as the adult singing on the same track, singing the same lines, kind of stretching across time in a way. I really love that piece.” **“Beautiful Losers”** “A lot of these songs are directly inspired by my life, but I utilize them to inform the fiction. ‘Beautiful Losers’ came from the idea that Coheed was coming into its 20th year, and for a long time, there’s been this sense of and feeling within the band of being the underdog, and I find that there’s kind of a beauty in that. Being able to put 20 years of history behind us, I made ‘Beautiful Losers’ as sort of an anthem and tribute to that. Of course, it has its place within the fiction, but truly I think the roots of the song are that.” **“Comatose”** “Some of these songs were written pre-pandemic and were then sort of given their identity during the pandemic. ‘Comatose’ is one of them. The music has been around for a moment, but when I started to pen the lyrics to it, we had been trapped in isolation. My wife and I may have gotten into an argument, and I think that fueled the identity of that song. The line about being comatose comes from something my mother would jokingly say about my father when he was relaxing on the couch after work—she’d say he was comatose.” **“Shoulders”** “‘Shoulders’ is kind of in the same department as ‘Beautiful Losers,’ where it’s feeling the pride of history behind us, but also the sense of feeling the weight of things that I might not have accomplished during that time. But it’s also about coming out of that tunnel and feeling empowered by it. It’s also a little bit of a play on my son’s name being Atlas. So, again, there are these very personal themes that I’m utilizing to inform the story of Vaxis.” **“A Disappearing Act”** “When I started to actually solidify what this song was about, I started thinking about losing all that time during the pandemic. I was living inside my own head during the lockdown period, and then came out at the other end realizing that all this time had disappeared. People have disappeared. I lost my grandfather at the top of the pandemic without the chance to say goodbye. My wife had the same thing with her grandmother. It felt strange to come out of this period where it felt like nothing changed, but a shit ton really has.” **“Love Murder One”** “This one falls into the department of ‘Comatose.’ My wife and I have been together now almost 20 years but not married the entire time. I think we’re pretty rock-solid, but when you get imprisoned in your own confines, like during lockdown, things happen and you can struggle. ‘Love Murder One’ was an opportunity for me to exercise an emotion that I was having and just leave it in the song and not take it into reality. I got to experiment on this one, too. I explored synths on this song and also played an eight-string guitar.” **“Blood”** “For me, this has a lot to do with feeling misunderstood most of my life—and seeing that maybe that might be the same for my son. So, it’s a message to my son, Atlas, really. I’ve written a lot of songs for him. Going back a couple of years, I wrote the song ‘Atlas’ in anticipation of his birth. But with ‘Blood,’ I just want him to understand that if you experience the things I have, you’re not alone in those experiences.” **“The Liars Club”** “Right after we finished the first *Vaxis* album, *The Unheavenly Creatures*, I wrote ‘The Liars Club.’ But like a lot of songs on this record, the lyrics took form during the pandemic. Life just felt a little uncertain and a little scary. It came from the idea that maybe a false reality would be better. Who doesn’t want to live the better side of everything we experienced, even if ignoring the rest is like living a lie? That was the loose theme when I wrote this one.” **“Bad Man”** “This is a funny one because I was high as shit when I wrote it. I’m a very paranoid, introverted person, so aside from having a few drinks, I don’t really participate in that kind of thing a whole lot. But when we were in lockdown, I figured, ‘Why not? It’s been a long time.’ I think the last time I wrote music and got high like that was probably for \[2003’s\] *In Keeping Secrets*. My wife had some stuff, so I got into a certain headspace and attacked the vocals in a way that I haven’t in a long time. That whole verse section, I’m under the influence and doing my best to imitate Michael Jackson.” **“Our Love”** “At the top of lockdown, I got a Korg ARP 2600 \[synth\] and started fooling around with it. ‘Our Love’ came out of one of those ideas, but I didn’t really do much with it at first. When I came back to it a few months later, I thought it would be a good segue piece because it’s this moment where our characters have decided to sort of enter the lion’s den to acquire the thing that they feel could help their son. In that moment, they have this sentimental moment of, ‘Our love will persevere. We will get through this.’ I felt the same way with my wife during lockdown.” **“Ladders of Supremacy”** “This song was originally going to open *The Unheavenly Creatures* album, so it’s been around for a while. I held onto it because, lyrically, it wasn’t there yet. But at this point on the album, our characters are entering the lion’s den. It’s maximum security. It’s fear. It’s chaos. That was the visual I had in my head when I started writing the lyrics. Then all the stuff happened around George Floyd, and it started giving me this perspective that I’ve never had before, so I started to explore that in the song as well.” **“Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)”** “That’s another one in the ‘Blood’ sort of world, geared towards my son. It’s saying that I’ll always be there for him, regardless of if I’m here or not. I’m saying, ‘You’re going to have me forever, and I’ll do whatever I can to protect you.’” **“Window of the Waking Mind”** “Before I started working on the concept of the *Vaxis* records, I read a little bit of this book called *NeuroTribes*, which is about neurodiversity. When you have a child and they’re developing, there are all these milestones in place for what is the typical mind. I just found it fascinating because I saw so many connections to myself and my son. This idea of strict normality really helped create the character of Vaxis. In the album’s story, these two people are trying to find something that they think could help cure their child, but in actuality, their child is a higher consciousness—a being far beyond their comprehension. In later stories, that will be important for *The Amory Wars*.”

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

As the child of an Air Force engineer, Bartees Strange moved around a lot; as an adult, he’s exhibited a similar propensity for uprooting his life, as he’s shifted his career course from college football prospect to press secretary in the Obama administration to indie-rock raconteur. But even as the D.C.-based singer/songwriter/producer has found his true calling in music, he’s remained a restless soul. His 2020 debut, *Live Forever*, introduced an artist equally comfortable with bedroom-pop confessionals, scrappy punk-powered salvos, synthesizer experimentation, and trap-schooled flows. But those discrete elements were skillfully threaded together by Bartees’ outsized emotionalism and lyrical oversharing. With his inaugural album for the iconic 4AD imprint, *Farm to Table*, Bartees doubles down on his mission to make you feel it all, all at once. In true write-what-you-know fashion, the album is a document of Bartees’ sudden entry into the spotlight, as a touring musician longing to be with his partner and as a Black man navigating both the largely white world of indie rock and the tumultuous racial politics of 2020s America. “What I\'m trying to say with all these feelings, and all these sounds, and all these thoughts, is I\'m just a person,” Bartees tells Apple Music. “All of it is coming from one vessel. What I\'m asking for is people to just listen to me fully, and hear what I\'m trying to say with all of this—because you may find something in it that relates to you.” Here, Bartees takes us through *Farm to Table*, one course at a time. **“Heavy Heart”** “When *Live Forever* came out, I was feeling a weird survivor\'s guilt around the success of the album, because it happened right as everything was just taking a huge downturn: The stock market crashed, and then the pandemic happened, and then my granddad died, and then all my friends were losing their jobs and getting COVID and there were no vaccines out...and I was experiencing the greatest moment of my life! I couldn\'t talk about it to anyone without feeling horrible. So this song is saying, ‘You\'ve got to let the guilt go. You got to let the heavy heart go. Life is bigger than that—you can enjoy it even when things are dark.’” **“Mulholland Dr.”** “I wrote this song when I was in LA, and I felt like I went through the full stages of grief with LA. I was like, ‘Damn, LA is the greatest city in the world! The weather\'s perfect! Everyone\'s so pretty!’ And the whole way that LA functions is ruining LA—you have the forest fires, extreme heat, the droughts, and people pumping water from Colorado up into the Hollywood Hills for their mansions, and you have all these homeless folks. This place is so pretty and so dark and evil at the same time. These people don\'t care about shit, and I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad, but they seem happy—and I\'m not!” **“Wretched”** “This song is basically a thank-you to the people who stood by me and always supported me, even when I was just kind of figuring it out and I didn\'t know who I was or what I was doing. But there were always people who said to me, \'Trust your gut—go with what you think works. Life is short, be happy.\' Even when I thought I wasn’t worth anything and I thought I was wretched, there were some people who would always check in with me. It\'s a big thank-you in a huge dance track.” **“Cosigns”** “There\'s two sides to success. People will be like, \'Yo, Bartees is crushing it!\' And I feel the same way: \'Yo, I\'m out here with the people I\'ve always looked up to and admired for years as songwriters, and I\'m finally getting to meet them and party with them and write with them and tour with them.\' But at the same time, it awakens this other side of me, which is fiercely competitive—I\'m wanting what they have, and more. And I kind of always worry, \'Will I ever be satisfied? What do I really want? Do I really want to be the biggest thing I possibly can be? Do I really want to tour 320 days a year?\' Those are things you have to weigh against the competitiveness and the drive.” **“Tours”** “This song is kind of about turning into your parents. My dad was in the military, and he would go on tour—he\'d be gone for a couple months, and we would all miss him. And I remember just thinking, \'Damn, when I grow up, I\'m never gonna be gone this much!\' And now, I look at my life, and it’s like, I\'m going to be gone more. I\'ll probably have a family and I\'ll be like my dad, saying, ‘Goodbye—see you in a couple of months,\' and rolling out. But as I\'ve gotten older, I understand why he did it—because he loves it. He wanted us to see him doing something that he loves to do, and I appreciate that more now.” **“Hold the Line”** “With this song, I knew I didn\'t have anything new to offer \[about the murder of George Floyd\]. That\'s kind of the point of the song: I don\'t have a solution. I don\'t know what it looks like in a world where things like this don\'t happen anymore, because I, nor anyone, has ever seen it. But I do know that it\'s wrong, and that it\'s hard, and it hurts every single time. And I remember seeing that young girl, Gianna Floyd, talking to the media about how her dad died. A lot of Black kids don\'t get to be kids—it\'s taken away so early. And my heart just went out to her in that moment, because I was watching her childhood just dissipate before our very eyes, knowing her life is never going to be the same, in so many ways. I live in D.C. and I was watching all of the protesters marching together, trying to hold the line. But we don\'t even know what we\'re really fighting for. We\'re just all hurting. And that\'s what that song is about: It\'s just a collective feeling of pain and sorrow, but knowing that we have to stick together no matter what. Even if we don\'t know what it looks like when it is all better, we do know that we all need to be together for it to get better.” **“We Were Only Close for Like Two Weeks”** “I was in LA, and I met this girl, and we were talking about this artist. And she\'s like, \'Oh, my god—I love him. We were soooo close, for, like, two weeks.\' And I was like, \'What? Is that even real?\' So I started thinking and realized, ‘I guess there are some people I can say in my life where, for a month, we were tight.’ And I was just kind of meditating on that and created a song that happens in a different time period to where I am currently.” **“Escape This Circus”** “This song is a kissing cousin to \'Mulholland Dr.\' That song is calling out all these issues and being like, ‘I don\'t really know what to do with all this, but the world is falling apart and some people are dancing in the sun.’ I end the song by saying, with all this stuff going on, the only thing you can do to change the world is to start with yourself—start with your community. I\'m saying, ‘That\'s why I really can\'t fuck with you all.’ I don\'t want to act that I care about going to the march or donating money to the Sierra Club—all these things that we think are changing the world is not going to do more than you taking like an active role in your community and in your own life and with your own mental health and the things that you could actually control.” **“Black Gold”** “This is about when I left Oklahoma and moved to the East Coast. And it was just a moment where nobody wanted me to leave, but I knew I had to leave. I don\'t think I understood what I had when I left, I was just kind of pissed off—like, ‘Why am I here? I fucking hate this!’ But everything that was there is what made me who I am, and the more that I learned to appreciate my gifts, and who I was, the more I felt bad about how I left town, and the things I said and how I made people feel about staying there. I wasn\'t very thoughtful. This song is me looking back and reflecting on something I wish I would have handled better.” **“Hennessy”** “You go through all these peaks and valleys of the album, some of which are very personal and some of which are very glassy and super-produced. And you get to the end with this song, and it\'s just kind of a torn-up, broken little thing. It\'s very human, and I wanted it to be that way, because I feel like it\'s so easy for people to look at Black artists and say, \'Oh, he\'s one thing—he\'s a rock person,\' or \'he\'s a rapper.\' And I\'m kind of playing with this idea by singing, \'And they say Black folks drink Hennessy\'—like, this is what they do. And I\'m saying, I want you to see me for who I really am: a person that contains just as many feelings as you may feel.”

In mid-2020, Chris Carrabba got into a motorcycle accident that nearly paralyzed him—the veteran singer-songwriter was forced to relearn his instrument, unable to play guitar for more than five minutes a day before the pain hit. And yet, somehow, less than two years later comes *All the Truth That I Can Tell*. Carrabba’s approach has always been diaristic: the rawness of punk mixed with the self-searching vulnerability of the folk singer. But the key to his songwriting is its unerring sense of optimism and resilience—a quality that has bonded his fans to him for more than 20 years. “It’s funny, I thought for a bit there I’d never be able to deal,” he sings on “Here’s to Moving On,” an early highlight. “But I make some coffee and I take a shower and I start to heal.”

Death Cab’s mix of youthful fragility and deep, romantic yearning is one of the hallmarks of modern rock. Even at their most melodramatic, they maintain composure in ways their emo ancestors didn’t, and their 10th album in a now-25-year career is no exception. But like the imagery behind its title, *Asphalt Meadows* is a rougher sound than the sometimes porcelain smoothness of their 2010s albums, mining similar tender—brisk New Wave (“I Miss Strangers,” “Asphalt Meadows”), gentle Americana (“Rand McNally”), and big, atmospheric ballads (“I’ll Never Give Up On You”). As always, Ben Gibbard reaches to make specifics feel universal (“We lived on whiskey and Twizzlers”) and universals (“These days I miss strangers more than I miss my friends”) feel like he somehow wrote them just for you.

New 11-track album 'Asphalt Meadows' out now.

True to its title, Carly Rae Jepsen’s sixth album is an examination of solitude through catchy, chatty pop cuts like the spiky, synthy \"Talking to Yourself\" and the sweetly wary \"So Nice,\" as well as quite a few tracks that feel very *of* Jepsen\'s catalog. Take its title track, a thumping yet wistful duet with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright that, thanks to its disco strings and Jepsen\'s spoken-word interlude, squarely falls under the \"sad banger\" category. \"This song is very much about that fantasy of going over to your ex\'s in the middle of the night and pouring rain to rekindle what was not finished,\" Jepsen tells Apple Music. \"It\'s just a terrible idea in real life, but it\'s really fun to sing about.\" But the Canadian singer also spreads her wings with the poison-pen online-dating chronicle \"Beach House\" showing off her sardonic side and the California chronicle \"Western Wind\" possessing dream-pop vibes. \"Go Find Yourself or Whatever,\" which Jepsen co-wrote with frequent collaborator Rostam Batmanglij, is the starkest sonic departure—a downcast ode to a restless lover, with a country vibe. \"I definitely have been in love with the traveler before,\" she says. \"Looking back on the song when I perform it live now, there are elements of this song that just speak to me, too, as the traveler: \'You feel safe in sorrow/You feel safe on an open road/Go find yourself or whatever.\'\" Jepsen recalls that Batmanglij reminding her of \"Go Find Yourself\" helped her blow open the idea of her sound: \"Rostam sent me an email, being like, \'Remember this?\' I listened, and I was like, \'Huh. Am I allowed to do songs like that?\' Challenging that question and answering with an absolute \'yeah, there are no rules\' is really what this album\'s about. That rebellion led me to fit songs like \'Beach House\' and \'Go Find Yourself or Whatever\' on the same album. It\'s an old idea that a pop artist has to be one thing. We contain multitudes. Why can\'t this album allow that exploration a little bit?\"

Twenty years into their time together as a band—and approaching the 10-year milestone of being a hugely successful one—The 1975 felt in better shape than ever. Self-reflection, sobriety, even fatherhood have influenced the way the four-piece, assisted by producer Jack Antonoff, approached the creation of their fifth studio album, resulting in 11 songs that distill the essence of The 1975 without ever feeling like they’re treading old ground. “The working title, up until I chickened out, was *At Their Very Best*,” singer/guitarist Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “But I knew we were coming out in sunglasses and suits, and it could look like a bit of a joke. I’m not joking.” It wouldn’t have been an unfair assumption. Healy has carved out a reputation for building to a punchline—in his lyrics, in conversation, on social media. But he has (mostly) put that defensive reflex aside for this album, dialing back the sardonic interrogations of society that dominated previous records in favor of more soul-baring tracks. “My work has been defined by postmodernism, nihilism, individualism, addiction, need, all that kind of stuff,” says Healy. “As you get a bit older, life starts presenting you with different ideas, such as responsibility? Family? Growing up in general? But they’re less sexy, less transgressive ideas. It would be easy to do another record where I’m being clever and funny. What’s hard to do is just be real and super open.” *Being Funny in a Foreign Language* is indisputable evidence that those 20 years together and the experience gained has paid off. “This is the first time that we’ve been really good artists *and* really good producers *and* grown men at the same time,” Healy says. “It was the right time for this album to not just reaffirm, but almost celebrate who we are. It was a self-analysis and then a reinvention.” Here, he guides us through that reinvention, track by track. **“The 1975”** “On the first three albums, ‘The 1975’ was a rework of the same piece of music. It came from video games, like how you would turn on a Sega Mega Drive, and it had a check-in, load-up sound. The purpose it serves on this album, apart from being this conceptual thing that we’ve done, is to be like the status update. On our previous albums, the whole record has been about the cultural environment, but here I’m setting that scene up right at the beginning, and then the rest of the album is about me living in this environment and talking about how it makes these bigger ideas of love and home and growing up and things like that really difficult.” **“Happiness”** “‘Happiness’ is where we acknowledged that there was a certain lyrical and sonic identity to what The 1975 was. We felt like it wouldn’t be a ’75 record if we didn’t have a song that owned what we did best. The thing is, we weren’t actually very ’80s; we just used loads of sounds that grunge and Britpop made unfashionable because they were associated with Phil Collins or whoever, but we were like, ‘No, that sounds better than *that*.’ It’s a live record, so there’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of repetition, because we were in the room, jamming.” **“Looking for Somebody (To Love)”** “If I’m going to talk about guns, it’s probably good for me to talk about the thing that I probably understand or empathize with the most, which is that the only vocabulary or lexicon that we provide for young boys to assert their dominance in any position is one of such violence and destruction. There’s a line that says, ‘You’ve got to show me how to push/If you don’t want a shove,’ which is me saying we have to try and figure this crisis out because there are so many young men that don’t really have guidance, and a toxic masculinity is inevitable if we don’t address the way we communicate with them.” **“Part of the Band”** “I really just trusted my instinct. As a narrative, I don’t know what the song is about. It was just this belief that I could talk, and that was OK, and it made sense, and I didn’t have to qualify it that much. I have a friend who is much more articulate than me, and there’s been so many times that he’s explained my lyrics back to me better than I ever could. So, I’ve learned I can sit there and spend five hours articulating what I mean, but I don’t think I need to. A movie doesn’t start by explaining what’s going to happen; it opens on a conversation, and you get what’s going on straight away. So, there’s a level of abstraction in this song where I’m giving the audience the benefit of the doubt.” **“Oh Caroline”** “The chorus of this song came first—‘Oh Caroline/I wanna get it right this time/’Cos you’re always on my mind’—and it just felt really, really universal. I was like, ‘OK, this doesn’t have to be about me. It doesn’t have to be “I was in Manchester in my skinny jeans.”’ You don’t need to have lived a story to write one. Caroline is whoever you want it to be—you can change that name in your head. Sometimes we call songs like this ‘“song” songs’ because they can be covered by other people and still make sense. Well, ‘“getting cucked,” I don’t need it’ would be a weird line for someone, but it’s close enough.” **“I’m in Love With You”** “I was trying to make it like a traditional 1975 song. I wanted to debase the sincerity. But \[guitarist, Adam\] Hann and George \[Daniel, drummer\] really challenged me on it, so I was like, ‘OK, fuck it. I’ll just write a song about being in love.’ At the time, I was in a relationship with a Black girl who was so beautiful, and I was in love with, and there were all these things that came up—especially with the political climate over the last two years—that you can only really learn from experience and living together. Like, our bathroom was full of specific products for skincare and stuff like that. Things you can’t just get at \[UK high-street drugstore\] Boots. So, there’s the line that goes ‘You show me your Black girl thing/Pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening),’ which came from this moment when she was talking about something that I had no cultural understanding of, and all I was thinking was, ‘I’m in love with you.’ And maybe I should have been focusing on what it was, but in that moment, I didn’t care about anything cultural or political. I just loved her.” **“All I Need to Hear”** “Thinking objectively as a songwriter, ‘All I Need to Hear’ is maybe one of my best songs. I was in a big Paul Simon phase, and I was kind of trying to do something similar to what he did on ‘Still Crazy \[After All These Years\].’ He can be as verbose as me, but that song was really, really tight. Almost lullaby-esque. I wanted to write something that was earnest and sincere and didn’t require me, specifically, to deliver it. I almost hope it will be covered by someone else, and that will become the definitive version.” **“Wintering”** “This is very much a vignette, a little story in the middle that paints a picture but doesn’t really tell you much of where I’m at. It’s kind of about my family, and it’s kind of a Christmas song, but it’s also that thing of relatable specificity because everyone knows that feeling of getting home for Christmas and the wanting to, but the not wanting to, but the needing to, and having to do all the driving and that whole thing. Other parts of the record have a bit more purpose, even though they’re slightly more abstract, but ‘Wintering’ is just this moment of brevity, and I think it’s really nice.” **“Human Too”** “There’s lines on the record where I talk about being canceled and acknowledge that it was something that I was dealing with. There’s no insane smear campaign. No one is going to the trouble of ruining my life for a hobby like they do with Meghan Markle. But it does sting when it happens, and this is the first time I’m saying, ‘It does affect me *a bit*. I totally get it, I’m a messy person...but I’m a good person. Give me a break *a bit*.’ I was worried about this song because I didn’t want to sound self-pitying, but it works because it’s really just about empathy and giving each other the benefit of the doubt as humans. We’re all people—let’s not pretend that we’re not going to make mistakes.” **“About You”** “Warren Ellis from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came in to do the arrangement for this song. It was really simple—it sounded like ‘With or Without You’ essentially—and he made it all weird and shoegazey. Even though it’s major key, he gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent. I think this has a similar vibe to ‘Inside Your Mind’ from the third album. I’ve always loved those kinds of \[David\] Cronenberg, body-horror analogies, the tension between death and sex. I think that the morose can be quite sensual, and there’s quite a bit of that in my work.” **“When We Are Together”** “The album was finished with. ‘About You’ was Track 11 and there was a Track 10 called ‘This Feeling.’ But because of what the song was about, and also sonic reasons, I was like, ‘That song can’t be on the album.’ But we had to deliver it in four days. So, I said if I could get to New York tomorrow, and Jack \[Antonoff\] was around, with a drum kit and a bass, I had a half-finished acoustic song that would be better for the record. It needed to finish, and at that moment, it didn’t—there was no emotional resolve. So, I went out there, a bit heartbroken post-breakup, and this was written, recorded, and mixed in 30 hours, which is the perfect example of what making this album was like. There’s always been this ‘will they/won’t they?’ question with The 1975. Are they going to split up? Will Matty go mental? That sort of thing. Totally created by me. But I’ve stopped doing that, and I think of it more as installments of your favorite thing. Or like seasons from a TV show. ‘When We Are Together’ is the end of this season.”

The 1975 return with new album, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’, released on 14th October via Dirty Hit. The band’s fifth studio album was written by Matthew Healy & George Daniel and recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, United Kingdom and Electric Lady Studios in New York. Formed in Manchester in 2002, The 1975 have established themselves as one of the defining bands of their generation with their distinctive aesthetic, ardent fanbase and unique sonic approach. The band’s previous album, 2020’s ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’, became their fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK. The band were named NME’s ‘Band of the Decade’ in 2020 after being crowned ‘Best Group’ at the BRIT Awards in both 2017 & 2019. Their third studio album, ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’, also won ‘Mastercard British Album of the Year’ at the 2019 ceremony.

Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe’s life was turned upside down in 2018 when his beloved father, Tattersall, passed away. Dealing with his dad’s loss was one thing—uncovering the secrets that came to light in the wake of his passing was another. His father was born in Samoa in 1938, not New Zealand in 1948, as Le’aupepe had believed. Tattersall also had two sons in New Zealand before faking his death and moving to Australia—half-brothers that Le’aupepe was, until his father’s passing, unaware he had. “\[These\] were things that my dad hid or made sure that we didn’t find out about because, I think, there was a lot of guilt and sadness and scandal around his life before he came to Australia,” Le’aupepe tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. The singer wasn’t, however, angry when these revelations came to light. “My dad was amazing, but he was a complicated man,” says Le’aupepe. “He was my hero. And naturally, when you find out more about your hero, you get excited. Also, I wanted big brothers growing up, and I just supplemented them with the band and people from church and stuff like that. So, I was actually able to claim a part of myself, a part of my heritage, a part of all this stuff, while also simultaneously reconnecting with these two blokes who I just loved instantly. It was a really, really cool thing.” Tattersall’s passing is a lyrical theme that binds Gang of Youths’ third album together (“I prayed the day you passed/But the heavens didn’t listen,” begins Le’aupepe on opener “you in everything”), but the events of his life and death are captured most concisely in the sparse, poetic piano ballad “brothers.” “There’s a sense of the storytelling traditions of old,” says Le’aupepe of the song. “I listen to a lot of Paul Kelly, Archie Roach—the greatest songwriters who wrote and told stories. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Cactus Tree’ is another one. I love a cinematic slow reveal of what the story’s about. And obviously, cinema’s played a huge role in influencing where this album’s gone visually and sonically.” So, too, has the singer’s Polynesian heritage. While songs such as “the angel of 8th ave.” and “the man himself” merge the band’s penchant for big-tent indie rock with a distinct hint of Britpop (“spirit boy”), and “the kingdom is within you” flirts with UK garage, the album is rich with a mélange of Polynesian musical influences. Witness the presence of Cook Islands drum group the Nuanua Drummers and the Auckland Gospel Choir on “in the wake of your leave,” or the spoken-word verse in “spirit boy,” delivered in the Māori language te reo. “the man himself,” meanwhile, features samples of Pacific Island hymns, captured by British composer David Fanshawe. “There was a sense of wanting to make the record feel like it wasn’t just us mining my people’s past or our people’s collective past for inspiration,” says Le’aupepe, “but that we were in a mode of wanting to move forward and \[take\] what’s happening now in terms of a creative direction.” That the London-based, Sydney-born band managed to largely self-produce (with occasional coproduction from Peter Katis and Peter Hutchings) such an expansive album in their rehearsal room in the East London suburb of Hackney is nothing short of remarkable. “It felt like this anarchic confluence of values,” says Le’aupepe. “It was really, really interesting seeing how together we are, and working in that close, confined space has given us a unity of opinion, or a unity of ‘this is where we’re going to go with it.’ And I think that was all cultivated in the sessions for *angel in realtime.*”

Gang of Youths David Le'aupepe – lead vocals, production, engineering (all tracks); guitar (1, 2, 5, 6); backing vocals, piano (2, 6); bass (3), keyboards (3, 5, 6), synthesizer (6) Donnie Borzestowski – drums, production, engineering (all tracks); percussion (1, 5, 6), piano (1), backing vocals (2, 4, 6–13) Max Dunn – production, engineering (all tracks); bass (1, 2, 4–13), banjo (1, 5), piano (1, 6), backing vocals (2), guitar (3); autoharp, keyboards (5), Tom Hobden – production, engineering (all tracks); backing vocals (2, 5), viola (2, 4–6, 11), violin (2–6, 11), piano (4, 7, 9–13) Jung Kim – guitar, production, engineering (all tracks);, backing vocals (2), piano (3, 8) Additional musicians Daniel Ricciardo – backing vocals (2, 11) Auckland Gospel Choir – backing vocals (2, 11) Seumanu Simon Matāfai – music direction (2), piano (6) Anuanua Drummers – percussion (2, 6) Ian Burdge – cello (5, 11) Johnny Griffiths – clarinet, flute, saxophone (5) Ilid Jones – cor anglais, oboe (5) Nick Etwell – flugelhorn, trumpet (5, 11) Matt Gunner – French horn (5, 11) Dave Williamson – trombone (5, 11) Indiana Dunn – backing vocals, percussion (6) James Larter – marimba (6) Kaumātua – spoken voice (6) Tony Gibbs – spoken voice (6) Aemon Beech - percussion (1) Anna Pamin – percussion (11) Blake Friend – percussion (11) Peter Hutchings – synthesizer (11) Technical Peter Hutchings – production (2, 11), engineering (2, 3, 6, 11), mixing (11) Peter Katis – production (2), mixing (5) Count – mastering (1, 2, 5, 6), mixing (1, 2, 6) Joe LaPorta – mastering (3) Craig Silvey – mixing (3, 11) Richard Woodcraft – engineering (1, 5, 6, 11) Gergő Láposi – orchestral engineering (1) Péter Barabás – orchestral engineering (1) Dani Bennett Spragg – mixing assistance (11) Emily Wheatcroft Snape – engineering assistance (2, 11) Jamie Sprosen – engineering assistance (2, 11) Luke O'Dea – engineering assistance (3) Tess Dunn – engineering assistance (6)

While crafting Anxious’ new album, Little Green House, the Connecticut five-piece were afforded a luxury so few bands are when making their debut album: time. With extensive touring plans halted and regular life on pause, the band—vocalist Grady Allen, guitarists Dante Melucci and Ryan Savitski, bassist Sam Allen, and drummer Jonny Camner—headed into Allen’s mom’s basement and reflected on each part of the material that would turn into their first record over and over again. The result is an artistic leap that, had the band’s plans to spend much of 2020 on the road actually been feasible, maybe wouldn’t have happened. Formed in 2016 while members were still in high school, Anxious’ early releases were indebted to the urgent freneticism and heart-on-sleeve lyrics of post-hardcore acts like Texas Is The Reason, Samiam, and Turning Point, allowing Anxious to immediately grab the attention of the hardcore scene. The band’s DIY roots and dedication to craft were equally as essential to their rising profile—early releases were accompanied with band-dubbed cassettes, made-to-order zines, and even self-dyed shirts—each part of Anxious was laid out in meticulous detail from day one. Having almost immediately surpassed Allen’s modest ambitions of “playing a couple of shows,” Anxious quickly found a home on Triple B Records, gaining the attention and adulation of both the hardcore and emo scenes on the back of two seven-inch EPs and a pair of demos, getting them coveted spots on tours with genre-bending acts like Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, before landing on Run For Cover. Named after the space in which the material was written, Little Green House sees Allen and Melucci exploring what it feels like to enter adulthood in unflinching detail. The pair unpack their struggles, joys, and hard-earned realizations in a way that makes them each feel wise beyond their years. “I think a lot of the record is a coming-to-terms, interpretive record about relationships with people and thinking introspectively,” says Allen. “I’m sure it’ll be a cliché very soon to say, ‘With all the time spent away, I was able to really think about things,’ but having that time ot sit and be introspective really does give you perspective on yourself, the relationships you have with other people, and that recognition that while you might all be interconnected—whether it’s your parents, your friends from high school, people you know through music—it’s bound to happen that you all have deeply individual and separate paths, and that’s okay.” Recorded and produced by Chris Teti at Silver Bullet Studios, the diversity of perspectives on Little Green House is matched by the album’s ability to jump between sounds without ever feeling disjointed. The band’s commitment to their creative vision and exacting attention to detail is apparent, with Anxious going so far as to completely re-record the vocals until Little Green House was exactly the statement they wanted to make. That devotion is clear from the very first notes of opener, “Your One Way Street.” Anxious sounds more deliberate than ever, with each riff pounding like a powerful declaration as Allen works through the emotions of watching one of his oldest friendships breaking apart, “I beg you, one last time as a friend / How did we get here and why does this have to end?” On “More Than A Letter” the band explores what it was like to watch a potential romantic relationship fall away because of outside pressures, and the energetic “Let Me” is a show of support from a child to a parent while watching them go through a painful divorce and features guest vocals from Pat Flynn of Fiddlehead. “I guess the idea behind the record is that coming to terms with who you are and accepting that,” says Allen. “Struggle, sadness, and pain aren’t necessarily negative things, but they are necessary things. There’s no shame or sadness put onto these feelings that you’re already experiencing. But there are positive, triumphant elements running through the album, too,” a feeling that’s best exemplified by the triumphant, and aptly titled, “Growing Up Song.” While fans are used to Anxious’ infectious energy spilling into every song, the closing track “You When You’re Gone” shows a totally new side of the band. Where the raucous parts of the album recall Lifetime and Sense Field, this one’s pure dream pop bliss. Joined by vocalist Stella Branstool on the track, it gives Little Green House an expanded scope, one that showcases a band taking big swings and landing every single one of them. “The goal wasn’t to create something that perfectly replicates a sound or an era,” says Allen. “It was just about us wholeheartedly trying to create something that felt distinctly like us and not worry for a second if it feels unfamiliar—we just wanted to create something that was unabashedly us.” On Little Green House, that’s exactly what Anxious did. They’ve made a record that captures the bittersweet feeling of returning to a place you grew up and realizing how the passing of time has changed you - a musical snapshot of who they were in an exact moment, and who they want to become now that they’re ready to move on.

After the release of PUP’s 2019 album, *Morbid Stuff*, vocalist and guitarist Stefan Babcock began to consider whether they should push and open up their sound without fundamentally altering it. “The line we’re always trying to straddle is, ‘How can we do something a bit weird without totally alienating our fans?’” Babcock tells Apple Music. “The goal with the guy who made the first three records, Dave Schiffman, was always like, ‘Here are the songs. Let’s try to make it sound like we’re literally playing the best live show we’ve ever played.’ We love what he brought to the table, but with this one, we wanted to push it and see what would happen if we had more time in the studio.” The Toronto punks stationed themselves for five weeks at producer/engineer Peter Katis’ residential Tarquin Studios in Connecticut to record their fourth full-length, *THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND*. Katis—whose credits include working with The National, Japandroids, and Interpol—distills the band’s essence with a little more kick. “It was a natural and unnatural fit at the same time,” Babcock says. “I think he was put in a position that he’s not used to—it was just a new challenge for him and that was an unnatural part, and the natural part was that we all think about music in the same way and appreciate the same types of qualities in music.” Here, Babcock guides us through songs from the album. **“Four Chords”** “It’s funny because there’s never been any piano on any PUP record, or keys or synthesizers of any kind, and we started this record with the stupidest piano ballad of all time. In one sense, it’s so un-PUP to have a piano ballad, but in another sense, it’s incredibly PUP to do something that dumb to start a record. I wrote the song as a joke after I bought a piano during the pandemic. I sent it to my bandmates, and we never talked about it again after. The last week in the studio, Nestor \[Chumak, PUP bassist/keyboardist\] was like, ‘You should record it and that should start the record.’ I slept on it, and the more that I thought about it, the more I thought he was really onto something. As soon as we embraced this idea that this was going to be the first song, the whole record started to make sense to me. It became more than just a collection of songs. I could almost see the forest for the trees.” **“Totally Fine”** “After ‘Four Chords,’ we had to go into a song that was very quintessentially PUP. It’s the same mentality we had on the second record when we started with a song called ‘If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will,’ which is a slow, mellow song, and then it goes into the most high-energy song on the record. So, there’s a little bit of not trying to recreate that, but a little bit of taking the elements that we liked—that dynamic between quiet and really ruckus—and shoving them together to start a record.” **“Robot Writes a Love Song”** “It’s a weird song for me because the vast majority of PUP songs are written from my first-person perspective. ‘Robot’ is not, but I was legitimately trying to see if I could write a really heartfelt love song, and it being just earnest, without any humor in it. So, this love song that I was trying to write, it just felt so yucky. It was so contrived, and it felt very not me and not PUP. When I decided to try and change the perspective, it worked so well. Suddenly, all of these things that I was saying, that I felt were so cheesy, were a little bit humorous and had more weight and impact to them. Hiding behind humor, for me, is a little bit of a crutch that I use, but I think that song turned out better because I was willing to take it to a place that wasn’t just entirely serious and super emotionally draining.” **“Matilda”** “This song is me trying to figure out why there’s such a strong emotional connection to an object, or what is it that ties you to this object? And usually, for me, it’s a very specific time in my life. On the first record, I wrote a song about my car, which I was very emotionally attached to. I did so much growing up in that car. I drove it across the country and I kissed a girl for the first time—all of these memories. So, this one is about my guitar, Matilda, and it’s the same sort of thing: Why am I so attached to this guitar? And it’s because it’s so connected to a time in my life that was so emotionally turbulent and also kind of wonderful. The first time that we ever went on tour, and we were trying to be a real band, everything was really new and exciting and weird. We were broke and loving it. That time in my life was almost like what I feel falling in love the first time, when everything is more vibrant. You feel every emotion so much harder than you normally would.” **“Relentless”** “Sarah \[Tudzin\], from the band illuminati hotties, sings on the chorus and in the bridge, and she’s awesome. There’s two sides to what I’m talking about here: One is trying to get ahead, being ambitious, pushing forward and trying to fight off the dread that comes with that, and the other side is this dread that you keep trying to get ahead of in life. I just feel like there’s always a demon over my shoulder and that’s how the world feels too. It’s so overwhelming; there’s no time or emotional or mental energy to look backwards or to look forward. You’re just dealing with what’s in front of you, and that’s a tough place for our world to be in.” **“Waiting”** “I asked Nestor to send me this running document of guitar riffs that he has. He sent me these five pretty heavy riffs, and from that we used one on ‘Waiting’ that I really love. I thought the best way to make it feel like a PUP song, rather than a metal song or a hardcore song, was the simplest, most uplifting chorus that I could write onto the really heavy guitar riff, and it worked in a very PUP way. There’s always this contrast in our music, the lyrics versus the actual music. If the lyrics are really serious, we try to make the music sound pretty fun and vice versa. I think we found that combination of heavy and joy that we’re always kind of looking for.” **“Habits”** “When I originally wrote the song, it was just guitar and voice, and it felt like a good PUP song. It wasn’t going to change the game for us, but we were like, ‘Yes, this sounds like us and it’s cool and it’s fun.’ But we kind of put it aside, and then one day Zack \[Mykula, PUP drummer\] came in and was like, ‘Hey, I made this thing for “Habits.” It’s kind of out there, but maybe it works.’ He was the one who crafted that synthy intro, which we also sprinkled elements of that throughout. I think we all really gravitated to what he did. For me, it took a song that we all liked and thought was pretty standard, but not in a bad way, into a new territory for us that made it so much more exciting.” **“Cutting Off the Corners”** “With most PUP songs—even when I’m writing the real dark and serious things—I’m always trying to find that little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, some silver lining or just some cathartic joy, and I very purposely avoided that as a crutch on this song. I don’t know how deep I want to get into it, but I wrote it three days after I lost an old friend. So, that was a song that poured out at me all at once, and it was very emotionally charged. We talked about adding some joy, some energy, some good vibes, and that felt like a disservice to what the song was about. So, it’s a strange one. That song is on the album for me and for her, and I just wanted to make something for them that didn\'t hide behind the humor.” **“Grim Reaping”** “I wouldn’t say we’re a traditionally political band, but the four of us all have very strong political convictions that we express in other ways—whether it’s through our social media or at live shows. It makes up for the fact that we don’t really talk politics too much in our songs, and the reason that we don’t is because I really struggle with making it sound genuine without it sounding super contrived. Like, ‘Fuck the man.’ I feel like every time I’ve tried to write those songs, I sound like a bad impersonation of OFF! or Bad Religion. I was trying to write about the state of the world but through a really personal lens, trying to express how myself and the band have been coping with those challenges. I’m pretty good at speaking eloquently about my emotions and less eloquently about other things, so I try to bring it into my universe.” **“PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing for Bankruptcy”** “This is truly an example of the unraveling of PUP, the band. This song is just so true to who we are as humans in terms of the lyrics, but also the way the music is arranged. It’s our version of being truly self-indulgent. If we were a prog-rock band, this would be our 14-minute epic. Also, part of the decisions that were made—the saxophone solo and then right after where there’s a room recording of me playing through the shitty PA that we found—came about because this was the last song that we recorded for the record. If it were during week one, we would’ve said, ‘No, that’s stupid. Let’s stay focused.’ And at that point, we’d been in the studio—where we were also living and sharing the same space together—for five weeks and were starting to get a little bit crazy. We were like, ‘That’s a great idea. What other stupid shit can we do?’”

All Songs by PUP Produced by Peter Katis and PUP Recorded by Peter Katis and Greg Giorgio Additional recording by Nestor Chumak and Kurt Leon Assistant engineers: Erik Paulson, Jake Gray Mixed by Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound Additional keyboards by Thomas Bartlett and Peter Katis Additional Vocals by Sarah Tudzin (“Relentless”), Melanie Gail St-Pierre (“Totally Fine”), Kathryn Mccaughey (“Waiting”), and Erik Paulson (“Cutting Off The Corners” and “Grim Reaping”) Trumpet on “Four Chords” and “Grim Reaping” by Marie Goudy Trombone on “Grim Reaping” by Paul Tarussov Saxophone on “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy” by Colin Fisher PUP is: Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski

“I loved it immediately because you know exactly what it means, but it’s not a real word.” That’s Underoath drummer, co-lyricist, and co-vocalist Aaron Gillespie talking about the title of the Floridian metalcore band’s ninth album. “Almost everyone living today scrolls through social media, living vicariously through each other in this sort of sad way. It’s even weirder when you’re watching people you don’t even know.” That observation prompted Gillespie to pose deeper questions about our collective relationship with social media: “What does that do to your psyche?” he asks Apple Music. “How does that help create the you that you are now?” It all became a jumping-off point for the lyrical self-reflection and human examination on *Voyeurist*, an album that Underoath recorded and produced themselves for the first time in their 20-plus year career. Below, Gillespie comments on each song. **“Damn Excuses”** “This is an angry, cathartic song that’s steady and fast, and it’s over before you know what happened. Lyrically, it’s kind of a frustrating moment. We all grew up in organized religion-centered homes. Many of us have deconstructed how we were raised, but your family is still your family. You’ve changed, but the people in your life haven’t, and you’ve still got to love and respect them. But it gets harder as you get older and you become more self-aware.” **“Hallelujah”** “The title is sort of sarcastic. We have a song called ‘It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door,’ from our 2004 album, and it’s got this choir part in the bridge. We had the idea to do something like that on the chorus of this song, as opposed to \[vocalist\] Spencer \[Chamberlain\] or I making a typical Underoath chorus. So, we called some friends over to our studio one night and just made sort of a mock choir. It felt very DIY, and I like to think that we still try and do things that way when it comes to crafting music after 20 years of being a band.” **“I’m Pretty Sure I’m Out of Luck and Have No Friends”** “We wrote this one together in an Airbnb in Florida during the height of the 2020 mayhem, which is not usually how we do things these days. Usually, songs start on a computer, you know. I really like the sample in the beginning with the 911 call. Maybe this guy is doing drugs and coming in and out of consciousness, or maybe he’s just in some kind of weird headspace. We found it on YouTube and recorded it into a cheap handheld microphone, and then I chopped it up to make the sample you hear.” **“Cycle” (feat. Ghostemane)** “Have you ever seen the Netflix show *Dark*? It’s incredible—and ‘Dark’ was the working title for this song. The lyrics were kind of written around the idea of that show: How do you know what’s real and what’s not? Around the time we talked about getting Ghostemane on the track, I randomly got a direct message from him saying, ‘I just wanted to thank the people that I grew up listening to. Thank you for your music.’ And I was like, ‘Well, actually, thank *you*. But also, I require your services, sir.’ Such a crazy coincidence.” **“Thorn”** “I love this song so much. The lyric has to do with explaining yourself to someone with a bit of an apology, like, ‘I’m a thorn in your side,’ but you’re also saying, ‘I can’t help it—this is who I am.’ It was weird because this song took so many iterations to get where it is. When you make your own music, you inevitably self-edit, which I think is healthy right up to the point when it’s not. Then you just start going in circles. This song felt like that at times, but I feel like we got it in the end.” **“(No Oasis)”** “We had the idea of doing an interlude but making it more of a song. I love when Trent Reznor puts a record out and there’s something on there that might be noise for three minutes, but it feels really purposeful. This was an attempt at that, but we gave it two verses and a chorus. That part where you hear someone walking down the stairs is actually Spencer walking down the stairs, and we recorded him laughing too. These days it’s easy to create stuff like that digitally, but we did it the old-fashioned way.” **“Take a Breath”** “This was one of the first songs written for the album. I want to say we did it in February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. At first, the opening riff was exactly like a Deftones song, until our guitar player came in and pointed it out. But he already had the fix, which is what you hear now. I love this song because the bridge kind of feels like Tool. Listening to their latest album, *Fear Inoculum*, I got really inspired by that rolling tom thing they do on the drums.” **“We’re All Gonna Die”** “Again, the lyrics reference the really conservative religious background we all come from, where people always say, ‘I’m praying for you.’ I’ve been guilty of saying that to people when I was in high school or in my twenties, and it wasn’t true. It’s something you say that’s almost like a pat on the head. This isn’t a knock on anyone’s religion—it’s more like calling out people who are disingenuous. The song is saying that we’re all in this together. We’re all gonna pass away at some point. Don’t say you’re going to pray for me.” **“Numb”** “This one started with our keyboard player, Chris \[Dudley\]. He brought in that drum and bass thing in the beginning, and we wrote the song around it. Most of the song is one drumbeat, which is really rare for Underoath. I do topline songwriting stuff for other artists, and the chorus lyric is a line I wrote for Glitch Mob two or three years ago that they ended up not using. We had tried writing the chorus for ‘Numb’ so many different ways, but that was the one that stuck.” **“Pneumonia”** “I think this is my favorite Underoath song ever. Our guitar player, Tim \[McTague\], his dad had been sick with cancer and ended up passing away from pneumonia, which was a complication of his original ailment. His dad was a real pillar of the band in the early days—we practiced in their garage and everything. Tim was really close with his dad and wanted to memorialize him. He wrote the lyrics to the back half of the song, which he’s never done before. Usually, Spencer and I write all the lyrics, but Tim wrote these from his dad’s perspective. It’s really powerful and special.”

Like most people on this embattled earth, Maggie Rogers spent the better part of 2020 in isolation—in her case, in Maine, where *Surrender* took shape. “I started this record there,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was really drawn to big drums and distorted guitar, because I missed music that made me feel something physically. I missed the physicality of being at a festival”: a big feeling, she says—a little overwhelming, a little cold, a little drunk. The noise was a symbol of chaos, but also of liberation. “Like, in all the craziness in the world, being able to play with something like that,” she says, “it was as if it could make my body let go of the tension I was feeling.” So think of the album’s title as a possibility, or even a goal: that even at her most commanding—the electro-pop of “Shatter,” the country swagger of “Begging for Rain” and barroom folk of “I’ve Got a Friend”—Rogers can explore what it means to relinquish control without sacrificing the polish and muscle that makes her music pop. “When we’re cheek to cheek, I feel it in my teeth,” she sings on “Want Want”: an arthouse on paper, a blockbuster in sound. When Rogers started the album, she was so burned out from touring she could barely talk. “I hadn’t been to a grocery store in four years,” she says. “I was ready to bite. And this record is the bite. But when I listen back, there’s so much joy. I think that’s the thing that surprised me more than anything—that *that* was the place I escaped to, and it was the thing that became the way I survived it, or the way I worked through it. This idea of joy as a form of rebellion, as something that can be radical and contagious and connective and angry.” “Are you ready to start?” she sings on “Anywhere With You.” And then she repeats herself, a little louder each time.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

For any band, signing to a major label at the beginning of your career is a dream come true. For LGBTQ+ Los Angeles power pop-rock trio MUNA (musicians Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson all identify as queer), it was merely their first milestone. Great freedom and success came later, when they were dropped by their label after releasing two albums and just as quickly picked up by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Now an independent band on their self-titled third full-length, they never sounded more confident. “\[*MUNA*\] has a lot to do with identity and agency and self-definition, the ideas that we project onto other people,” Maskin tells Apple Music. “It’s an interrogation of interpersonal relationships, and sexuality, and desire, and just trying to be a person in the world and present in your life.” Those complicated ideas are articulated with an eclectic musical nuance, from the country-folk of “Kind of Girl” and the Peter Gabriel-indebted “Solid” to the jagged, Robyn-esque synth-pop of “What I Want” and the playful pop of “Silk Chiffon.” “Music helps us feel less alone in our human experience, and I think we want people to feel that,” Gavin says. “There’s a hope that these songs can foster moments of connection and joy for people, like for our queer community—we want these songs to be a soundtrack to new experiences that aren\'t full of torment.” Below, MUNA walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Silk Chiffon” feat. Phoebe Bridgers** Naomi McPherson: “The song has been kicking about since the end of 2019. Katie wrote it, and at the time it was just the pre-chorus. The bridge lyrics were in the place of the chorus. It was synth-ier, but Jo and I had the instinct to make it feel like opening credits of a late-\'90s, early-aughts rom-com. We had been kicking around the idea of having someone feature on the second verse, and Phoebe came to mind—this was prior to us signing to her label. She loved the song and was so stoked to hop on it, which made us feel so, so good.” **“What I Want”** Katie Gavin: “This was a song that started as actually a Zoom co-write. I did it with Leland, who is an amazing songwriter and artist in his own right, and who has also done a lot of work on songs in the universe of *RuPaul\'s Drag Race*. I had a couple beats from Naomi, and I took them into the session and we both liked that one. After the session, I sent a demo to Naomi and Jo, and I remember Naomi freaking out and knowing that it was going to be a banger and wanting to work on it. I was a little bit scared of the song initially because of how much of a banger it is. There are strings in the chorus that were very inspired by \'Toxic,\' the classic Britney song.” **“Runner’s High”** NM: “MUNA’s anti-running song. The funny thing about this track is, I think, that the beat came about in the most peculiar way. During 2020, a friend of ours was letting us use her studio for very cheap, and we were trying to take making music very seriously. We wanted to do something where it\'s like, we had no songs that we were currently working on, so we came up with a game called \'the five-minute game,\' where each of us had to make a part in a five-minute period, and then someone else adds a part on top. The start of this song came from that game. And I don\'t think I\'ve ever heard a song that has this specific metaphor; obviously, it is one of a kind and the song slaps. So, you can run to it. We won\'t, but we hope that people do.” **“Home by Now”** Josette Maskin: “This came about in a pretty classic MUNA way. All the songs have different trajectories and paths, but this one was something that Katie wrote when we were on tour with Phoebe in the fall of 2021. We sometimes find that being on the road can be pretty inspiring. When you\'re away from your stuff and you don\'t have the obligation to work on an album that has a pending deadline, it can take you out of your element and inspire you in a way.” **“Kind of Girl”** KG: “For songs that I start on my own, there\'s two categories: I did it on Ableton, which was \'Home by Now,\' or I did it on an acoustic guitar, which is \'Kind of Girl.\' \'Kind of Girl\' I wrote in a bathtub. I wrote it from start to finish, chronologically, first the pre-chorus, then the chorus. I was thinking about the power that the words we choose to identify with have on the way that our story unfolds. How those affect what we think is possible and not possible and what we think is fixed or unfixed. We recorded just a bunch of layers of acoustic guitar and Josette\'s slide through a toy amp and built this world out.” **“Handle Me”** JM: “Katie wrote this song in January 2020. When we first did this song, Naomi and I were thinking a lot about, funny enough, 311—there’s a guitar part based on those early-2000s songs, something that would be on *The O.C.* Naomi felt really inspired about changing the drums and then I played the guitar part slightly differently and we tried to make it more of a lo-fi sexy track. I really fought for the song to be on the record, because I was like, ‘Oh, we don\'t really have a song in our discography that is sexy in this specific way.\' It shows a different side of MUNA.” **“No Idea”** NM: “‘No Idea’ started at the top of 2020. At the time we were toying with the idea of the third record being an alternative reimagining of the past wherein we were the biggest boy band in the late \'90s and early 2000s. But we are ourselves, and gay, we cast ourselves into that canon. I think of \'No Idea\' as our \'90s Max Martin moment meets a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk. Katie had written the song, it was pretty finished, but there wasn\'t a second verse. We had a session with Mitski; she came over to me and Jo’s apartment at the time, and we talked about disco. She thought the song was hot and fun to work on; she gave us a kick into the direction that the song found itself in.” **“Solid”** NM: “‘Solid’ has been around since 2018, 2017, I think. It just didn\'t have a place on the second record. It was in the archive for a bit and then it reappeared. It is one of my favorites. We’re always super inspired by \'80s music. I mean, who doesn\'t, that makes pop music nowadays? That artistic innovation, computerized sound, and synthesized sound. It was just fun to work on after all these years. It bops.” **“Anything But Me”** KG: “I wrote this song in my car. I had my laptop, and I was eating a burrito, and I came up with the first lines of the song and I was just like, ‘That\'s so stupid, but it\'s stupid in a way that\'s almost brilliant.’ This song is in 12/8, a really specific groove, and it has a buoyant energy. I had written the verse and the pre-chorus and had the basic groove down, and I sent it to Naomi and Jo. Naomi was like, \'There needs to be a section after the pre-chorus where you\'re doing something very like Shania \[Twain\] with the word “me,” holding it out and having a moment with it.\' We fleshed it out from there. When Jo and Naomi were working on it, they had some influence from Mariah Carey.” **“Loose Garment”** NM: “‘Loose Garment’ started because I was looking at furniture and I made a beat and called it ‘Teak Wood Nine.’ I sent Katie a bunch of beats that had wood and furniture names. We all love Imogen Heap and her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth. The band Frou Frou, they\'re a touchstone for us, both her solo project and that band; it felt like maybe \[the song\] could live in that universe. We switched the beat up and gave it a pulsating feel that motivated the song. It’s definitely a sad one. Cynthia Tolson killed it. She played strings on it and just went off.” **“Shooting Star”** KG: “This song was written literal weeks before we turned in the album. That\'s very MUNA. I always write until it is pencils down. I had written this on acoustic guitar, and it was this folky bassline guitar part that really turned Josette off, and I remember I wanted it. We always intended for this to be a 10-song record. There\'s a certain kind of guitar that we got obsessed with using, and I feel like we associate it a lot with the sound of music in LA: It\'s a rubber-bridge, vintage acoustic guitar, and Jo reworked the guitar part into something that was better. It was Naomi\'s idea to have kind of this Coldplay moment at the end where the song explodes into this more cathartic beat and arrangement, and that was really, I think, a big moment for that song as well.”

MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss. MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.

Pool Kids are energy. Raw, sporadic, and indisputably authentic, the four piece group originally hails from Tallahassee, FL. Pool Kids, the band’s masterful self-titled album, fuses fan-favorite math and art rock familiarities with a tide of emotional and technical growth, engulfing the listener in a wave of impassioned indie rock angst. ‘Pool Kids’ is the first studio album to include writing contributions from new additions Nicolette Alvarez and Andy Anaya, seeing the band at their final, most kinetic form. Recorded in Seattle by producer Mike Vernon Davis, the latest LP is more crisp and polished than ever before, blending synth layers with post-hardcore guitar riffs and indie-pop textures with hot-tempered vocals. While the universal pain we all feel as we stumble into adulthood serves as the connective thread that runs through each of the songs on the album, the individual songs subject matter cover a dynamic emotional range. From everything to coping with trauma, the dissolution of romantic relationships, disillusionment with and shedding of friendships, and more, all while maintaining the power, humor, and resilience that defines the band Writing, recording, manufacturing, and promoting this record would be impossible without the assistance, support, and hard work of numerous people behind the scenes. It’s a team effort and we would like to express our most sincere gratitude toward the following: Sean and Morgan Hermann for all of your sacrifices, dedication, and undying love and support from the very beginning. We love you. Mike Vernon Davis for your guidance, commitment, technical savvy, and heart; your exceptional creative vision lives inside each song. Jake Barrow for your assistance, and diligence; thank you for the innumerable hours of laughs. Sam Rosson for swooping in at our absolute lowest and reigniting our creative flame with your warmth and skill. This record could not have been completed without you three pushing us to heights we were unsure we could reach. We feel so lucky to call you our forever family. Mom Jeans + HTV Crew, The Wonder Years, and Dikembe for believing in us, giving us a chance, and sharing your platforms with us before you had any real reason to. Big love and thanks to: Lon Beshiri; Nick Nottebaum; Maria Maldonado; Ron Harrell; Ryan Baldoz; Chris Walla; Joel Kirschenbaum; Charlie Wagers; Jamie Coletta; Hannah Schmidt; Alex Mayweather; Nic Kelbasa; Jaake Margo; Jess LaFever; The Teds; Stack Your Roster; Jer Hunter; Tim Dove; Jason Klein; Nathan Deutsch; Brendan Glowacki; Jack Roe; Mike and Reggie Thompson; Tom Laffey; Roommate McKayla; Roommate Elaina; the Alvarez family, the Anaya family, the Maldonado family, the Clinton family, the Goodwyne family, and all our friends near and far. To every person that has patiently stuck with us over the past four years, to everyone that has shown us hospitality on the road, and to everyone that donated to help us recover from the studio flood: thank you, thank you, thank you. You help to keep this dream alive. We dedicate this record in loving memory of Lynda Marie Thompson Clinton.

Since completing their farewell tour in 2012, Southern Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire have done a pretty terrible job of staying apart. Even as its members committed themselves to other bands—singer/guitarist Dallas Green with City and Colour, resident screamer George Pettit with Dead Tired, guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil with Gallows, drummer Jordan Hastings with Billy Talent—the everlasting power of what they created as Alexisonfire kept pulling them back together. Festival reunion dates in 2015 had, by decade’s end, given way to a string of stand-alone singles. Still, the prospect of a new full-length Alexisonfire album—following 2009’s *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*—was never a sure thing. That is, until COVID shutdowns presented them with a rare opportunity to make music without deadline pressures or looming tour dates. “This was just a bunch of guys getting back together and just creating for the sake of it,” Pettit tells Apple Music. “We\'re all very different people than when we wrote *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*, but I think that benefited us in a lot of ways, because there\'s been 10 years of us consuming different music and being inspired by different things.” Arriving 20 years after their self-titled debut album, *Otherness* reintroduces a band that’s lost none of its intensity, and shortens the aesthetic distance between Alexisonfire’s circle-pit strikes and the graceful balladry of City and Colour. And that’s not just Green’s doing—for the first time, Pettit eases up on the throat-shredding to actually sing a handful of verses and harmonize with his bandmates. “This album came to us without a lot of struggles,” Pettit says proudly. “On *Otherness*, we\'re all pulling in the same direction.” Here, Pettit gives us the track-by-track rundown of Alexisonfire’s new beginning. **“Commited to the Con”** “The con is conservatism. It\'s this notion that if we dismantle government for the sake of giving tax breaks or funneling money into billionaires’ pockets without regulation, that\'s somehow going to deliver us to some new utopia of freedom. That\'s just horseshit, and a lot of people are buying it. There are people out there that are committed to this con, this thing with no working models in the world. But when we band together, our tax dollars can prop up the cornerstone of civilized society—they pay for hospitals and schools and emergency services and infrastructure. So when we ask, ‘Which side are you on?’ it\'s like: Are you on the side of working together as people to make things better for everyone, or are you on the side of every-man-for-himself libertarian hypothetical nonsense?” **“Sweet Dreams of Otherness”** “The idea of \'otherness\' can be interpreted in any sort of way. The way that it applies to Alexisonfire is that we were all kids who grew up trying to find the secret corners of culture. I grew up in Southern Ontario, a third-generation Canadian with no ties to any sort of real culture from my ancestry. So you have to make it yourself and figure out the things that you want to represent your generation. And the things that were being presented to us through major media didn\'t appeal to us—we had to go and find those weird spaces. It could have been a CAW \[Canadian Auto Workers\] union hall where there was a punk show happening, or an independent record store, or the indie cinema that was coming out at the time. So the song is kind of about that, but it also has all sorts of implications for people who are nonbinary, or people who are LGBTQ. It\'s about finding strength in the fact that you\'re very different.” **“Sans Soleil”** “I\'m kind of a key component to Alexisonfire with all my screaming, but there have been times where we\'ve shoehorned that into songs just to kind of keep me in the band. But this is a beautiful song, and there\'d be no point in trying to have me scream for the purposes of keeping that in. So I took a back seat—I was just doing backup vocals with Dallas on this one. It\'s the type of song that we might not have put on one of our earlier records, but we felt like it was an Alexis song, for sure.” **“Conditional Love”** “This is about love as a choice, as opposed to it being some uncontrollable thing. And in some ways, that, to me, is better: the idea of being an active participant in my love and not have it be something that I\'m being dragged around by. That\'s the sentiment of the lyrics—but they just kind of fell into this ripper kind of rock song.” **“Blue Spade”** “\[Bassist\] Chris Steele started contributing lyrics on this record. Chris is a very remarkable individual who has been through a considerable amount, so having his perspective on a song felt right. Dallas took a section of his lyrics and found a way to turn it into a chorus. We have demos of the song where I’m screaming the verses, but when we got into the studio, I thought, \'I\'m gonna attempt to sing this.\' I\'m not quite confident in my ability as a singer, so I was like, \'Is this good?\' And then Wade walked in the room and was like, \'That\'s it! That\'s what this song needs.\' We had a really intense moment where we were just like, \'Okay, well, now there\'s nothing that we can\'t do!\' It just felt like we had unlocked a new gear within the band and found a new way to inject me into a song.” **“Dark Night of the Soul”** “The lyrical content is about Wade having a psychedelic experience on DMT, and the song matches the lyrics. We were really expanding this song, and there\'s that moment in the bridge—where it goes to that shuffle beat—and I thought, \'Let\'s do something jazzy here.\' We found a way to really make that song unique—it goes full Goblin. There were grand designs at one point to approach the remaining members of Rush to do like a 15-minute bridge for the song.” **“Mistaken Information”** “Dallas is the best singer that I\'ve ever known, so it was nice to actually sing \[harmonies\] on a track with him. After I was done recording my vocals for this, I was almost sad, because I was enjoying it so much. I think this song was actually in play for City and Colour’s new record, but Dallas was discussing it with his wife, and she was like, \'I feel like this is an Alexisonfire song.\' It\'s about the war on the truth, and how it\'s hard to understand what the truth is now because there\'s so much misinformation out there. But when we were recording it, I remember Dallas saying, \'Are people just going to think this is a breakup song?\' And I said, \'If they interpret it that way, it\'s valid.’ I feel like it works that way as well.” **“Survivor’s Guilt”** “I work in emergency services, and this song is naming a phenomenon that I see, where you see something horrible and then you go about the rest of your day like nothing happened. You have the ability to kind of detach, and it\'s not a particularly heroic quality, but it is, in some ways, a very necessary quality. I\'m not sure that necessarily comes through in the lyrics—I purposely tried to make it a bit more open for interpretation, but that\'s where the ‘survivor’s guilt’ sentiment came from.” **“Reverse the Curse”** \"We had a version of this \[for *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*\] that was extremely Kyuss-heavy, and at the time, we were uncomfortable with that—we felt like we were doing something that wasn\'t us. As a group of people who have great respect for the stoner-rock world, we didn’t want to disrespect it. It\'s the same reason why I would never make a reggae album, even though I love Jamaican music. But now, in the \'Dark Night of the Soul\' era of Alexisonfire, things are a little more open and we can kind of do whatever we feel like now. \[City and Colour touring member\] Matt Kelly got to play Hammond on it, and that really leveled the song up in a way that we hadn\'t been anticipating.” **“World Stops Turning”** “This is a love song Dallas wrote about his band, Alexisonfire. We had the most beautiful moment where he brought us up to his cottage and we sat at his dining room table and for three hours, we just talked, and discussed the history of the band. He let us in on things that had been going on in his life, and it was just a very introspective moment for all of us. And at the end of it, he presented us with a demo he\'d been working on of this song, and we just knew that this is going to be the new set-closer. We’ve always ended our set with \[2004\'s\] \'Happiness by the Kilowatt,\' and we turn it into this 12-minute version. And this song felt like the new version of that—we\'re gonna have this big sprawling epic, and I could envision it just blowing everyone’s hair back. It\'s a perfect album-ender—we went full Floyd on this one.”

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

Pale Waves’ third album is the sound of a band unafraid—and more importantly, unapologetic—about who they are. *Who Am I?*, released in 2021, saw lead vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie open up a more personal side to her songwriting, but its follow-up *Unwanted* delves even deeper, exploring betrayal, jealousy, depression, rage, addiction, loss—and on the heartbreaking “The Hard Way,” the suicide of a schoolmate. “It’s from me maturing and becoming more comfortable within my own skin that I can be more confident and open,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I feel like with the first album, and even slightly with the second album, I was still so timid. As I grow up, I become more sure of myself and that\'s displayed through how much I\'m able to put out there for everyone to see and hear.” Sonically, too, *Unwanted* is a far tougher proposition than its predecessors. Tracks such as the middle-finger-up pop-punk of the title track and the classic-rock crunch of “Jealousy” hold back some of the Manchester quartet’s more ethereal synth-pop trademarks to deliver a heavier kick. “That was 100% a conscious decision,” Baron-Gracie says. “When the pandemic happened, we were so upset that we couldn\'t play live, and that definitely influenced the direction we went in with this record, because we knew that when we stepped back onstage, we wanted to have the best time. We wanted to have that more heavy sound sonically; we didn\'t want to play these slow, sad songs.” That’s not to say *Unwanted* is short on poignant moments (you can practically taste the grief that powers the epic ballad “Without You,” for instance), yet the roar that breaks through the pain is one of defiance. Read on as Baron-Gracie walks us through her band’s album. **“Lies”** “We’re easing fans into the transition—we’re placing them in the swimming pool, and we were putting them in the shallow end. Even though there’s something quite dark about the subject matter, it puts people in a good mood because it’s got this drive running through it. It’s so fun to watch people dance to it when we play live.” **“Unwanted”** “‘Unwanted’ really summarizes the overall record, too—the dark, traumatic themes that run throughout. Feelings of neglect, anger, vanity, jealousy, sadness, depression…a lot of worlds that I think Pale Waves haven\'t tapped into before. It was really important that we made this record because I feel as a woman in today\'s society, when we project these feelings, we get labeled crazy. If a man\'s angry, they’re seen as more confident because they know their point, they know what they want. Whereas when a woman\'s angry, she\'s a crazy bitch. I wanted to show other women that it’s OK to feel these things.” **“The Hard Way”** “It\'s such a traumatic story about an amazing young girl at my school who had so much potential, but she was being bullied and took her own life because of it. She couldn\'t take any more of the abuse. I feel partly responsible that I didn\'t step up when I was a child and I saw that happening. It’s something that’s really affected me throughout my life. I hope that me telling her story in some form will influence other people and show them that everyone\'s fragile and to be careful with your words and be careful with your actions, because you never know when you\'re pushing someone too far.” **“Jealousy”** “I wrote ‘Jealousy’ with Whakaio Taahi from Tonight Alive. I’d written a few songs with him and a lot of them were very soft and mellow and they just weren\'t sitting right with me. I didn\'t feel like this was the next Pale Waves record. And then one day I came in and he played the ‘Jealousy’ riff and I was like, ‘Oh my god, you genius. That is amazing. That is exactly the direction that I want to go in! Forget all these soppy songs that we\'re writing. Let\'s write about jealousy and make it this sexy, aggressive song!’” **“Alone”** “’I don\'t think I\'ve ever been as brutal as I am on this track. It’s about when you say no to someone and they just don\'t leave you alone. So many times—in clubs, in bars, in goddamn Tesco—where someone comes up to you and they\'re like, ‘Can I buy you a drink? Can I get your number?’ And you say, ‘Sorry, I\'m not interested.’ And they still get all handsy and physical with you. Do you not get the message? Don\'t touch me. It\'s as simple as that. Leave me alone. I\'m absolutely fine by myself without you. It’s the ultimate rejection song. I just channeled all those nights where I\'ve said no but they\'ve continued to harass me.” **“Clean”** “Even though there\'s a lot of negative emotions on the record, I really wanted a moment or two where there was some kind of positivity or some kind of hopeful agenda. I wanted to write a cheesy love song. Like a song that they would play in a movie when the couple was falling in love and decide to run away together. I wanted to capture those moments that you feel when you\'re falling in love. There\'s nothing quite like that thrill of the very start of a relationship where those feelings are growing.” **“Without You”** “I knew that I wanted a huge ballad on the record. I feel like this record, because it\'s so loud and it\'s so in-your-face, that this ballad had to be on the same level as tracks like ‘You\'re So Vain.’ It couldn\'t just be a ballad where I\'m on my guitar or on the piano again. It had to be dynamic and flow through the emotions. ‘Without You’ is about me losing someone so close to my heart that I struggle to comprehend how I can live life without them. It\'s the sad realization of you have to find a way to get through it and cope with it and realize that they aren\'t coming back.” **“Only Problem”** “‘Only Problem’ is about me having this constant thing in my life that I was always battling with and was always pulling me down. It was always something that I relied on in my states of feeling fragile and it brought me back up, but then it would always drop me back down. I had to learn and come to terms of removing that from my life for good. Alcohol would give me that fake confidence that you need when you feel insecure. There can be such reliance on that, and people in this industry normalize it, and it shouldn\'t be normalized. It can be abused, and I wanted to learn to live a life without it. So I removed it completely, and now I\'m much happier.” **“You’re So Vain”** “There\'s a lot of pop-punk on the record, which I love, but then you get to ‘You\'re So Vain’ and it\'s almost more classic rock and roll in a way. I wanted to push it more in this direction. We came up with the riff first and I was like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’ And then I was like, ‘OK, we need a subject matter that is going to work with this. It needs to be badass. It needs to be confident. It needs to be unapologetic…’ I feel like there\'s a lot of egotistical people in the music industry, people that I may have looked up to that I\'ve met and I\'ve figured out that they’re an awful person. I channeled my anger towards people\'s egos with this song. I wanted to take them down a step.” **“Reasons to Live”** “This has the dark and it has the light. The chorus is the light and verses are the dark. It\'s about when I was really struggling with my mental health. I felt like it was deteriorating and I felt really fragile, and then I found love that enabled me to see the light. Love pulled me back and showed me a new perspective on things. It helped me get healthier and helped me to really fall in love with things. Even to really fall in love with music again.” **“Numb”** “I go through periods in life where I hit this wall of depression and it can last days. I don\'t want to move out of bed, I don\'t care about anything, I don\'t care about anyone. I know that a lot of people feel this way and go through the same thing, and I feel it\'s important when you get to that point to know that other people go through it too, and to be able to relate to something. So I wanted to write a song about the way I feel when I get like that. I wanted it to be really stripped back, just me, an electric guitar, and some harmonies. I didn\'t want any other distractions, I just wanted everyone to focus on what I was saying.” **“Act My Age”** “It is about growing older. It’s a battle between being like, ‘Shit, I need to grow up,’ but then also, ‘Oh, shit, I miss when I was a child and I didn\'t have to worry about anything.’ It’s that realization that everyone gets older and everyone needs to get their shit together. I was turning a page in my life where I was wanting to remove a lot of toxic things out of my life and I was reflecting on childhood and that innocence that we have and wanting to channel some of that into where I am right now.” **“So Sick (Of Missing You)”** “I wrote this because I was tired of writing about myself or other people that I knew in my life. I was watching *Sex Education* at the time, and I wrote this about the period where Maeve and Otis aren’t talking and they\'re missing one another and they’re both like, ‘How could you be so mean to me and just cut me off like that?’ I related to that so much, and I love their relationship. I think it\'s so interesting and *Sex Education* is such a good show. After listening through various track listings for the record, it felt like this could be the only closing act. No other track felt right. I didn\'t want to do the typical Pale Waves thing and finish on the classic ballad, because we\'ve already done that twice.”

A fiery, confident kick-back against convention, Pale Waves’ third record Unwanted sees the group building on the promise of last year’s UK Top 3 album Who Am I?, and staking their claim as British rock’s most dynamic young group. “It’s bold and unapologetic, and that’s what the Pale Waves community is about,” says frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie herself. “We don’t need to fit a perfect mould, we don’t need to apologise for being ourselves, and we won’t change for anyone. That acceptance is what connects us.” Led by riotous lead single “Lies”, Unwanted is a record that reaches out to the passionate community of misfits and LGBTQI+ fans around the band, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while also striking a fresh tone of defiance.

The irony of Sophie Allison calling her second Soccer Mommy album *color theory* is that the title would be a better fit for her third, *Sometimes, Forever*. Not only is this record more stylistically varied on a track-to-track level—the flinty, classic indie rock of “Bones” and “Following Eyes,” the industrial tilt of “Darkness Forever,” the country vibe of “Feel It All the Time”—but it amplifies the internal mixings that make Allison’s songs vivid: beauty and dissonance (“Unholy Affliction”), romance and violence (“I cut a piece out of my thigh/And felt my heart go skydiving” on “Still”), bitter wisdom and wide-eyed innocence (“Feel It All the Time”). She’s a devoted student of the ’90s, to be sure—but one who’s rapidly outgrowing her influences, too.

Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.

Post-hardcore lifers Silverstein don’t sugarcoat hard truths. That’s been true across the Canadian band’s previous studio albums, but it’s especially so on this new music. On the fist-pumping leadoff track “Our Song,” vocalist Shane Told speaks directly to anyone feeling downtrodden and hopeless: “Misery made me/Nothing can break me down.” *Misery Made Me*’s guest vocalists are just as reluctant to find a silver lining. Comeback Kid vocalist Andrew Neufeld adds a cynical tone to the bracing hardcore highlight “Die Alone,” while the Massachusetts rapper nothing,nowhere. voices anxiety on the thrashing screamo chaos of “Live Like This.” Yet *Misery Made Me* also proves that Silverstein understands there are many ways beyond punk and hardcore to express misery. “The Altar/Mary” includes howling breakdowns, trap beats, and a solemn outro with distorted vocals, while “Cold Blood” is meditative emo-pop heavy on keyboards.

sore thumb was made in February 2021 at Two Worlds Recording Studio Produced by Jade Lilitri, Billy Mannino and Tavish Maloney Mixed by Mike Sapone Mastered by Mike Kalajian Engineered by Billy Mannino Additional production by Daniel Maddalone and Gianni Gambuzza Songs written and composed by oso oso Cover photo taken by Alfred Barzykowski Jade Lilitri – vocals, guitar, bass, drums, aux percussion Tavish Maloney – guitar, aux percussion, vocals on “carousel” Billy Mannion – piano Josh Knowles – violin on “describe you” The making of this record is now a memory of a time that i holder closer to my heart than anything. Regardless of how I feel about these songs in the years to come, I am so happy this exists. Thanks for listening. Be decent. SPE Tavish Sloan Maloney

When Thursday drummer Tucker Rule sent Circa Survive and Saosin vocalist Anthony Green some songs to check out during COVID lockdown, the singer wasn’t aware that he was being recruited for an emo supergroup. “When the pandemic hit, every band out there was trying to figure out how to stay alive,” Green tells Apple Music. “I was freaking out, so I was trying to stay busy. Tucker said he had a project with a couple friends and asked me to sing on it. The songs were really good, so I went for it.” It wasn’t until after Green had recorded vocals for a few songs that Rule revealed the rest of the band’s lineup: My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever, and Thursday bassist Tim Payne. “I’m glad he didn’t tell me,” Green says. “I would’ve felt so much more pressure.” Below, the singer details each track on L.S. Dunes’ debut. **“2022”** “It’s definitely one of the most personal songs I’ve ever written. I guess all the songs are personal, but the heaviness of that song is about wondering if I would’ve been better off dead than alive. I know a lot of people go through that—it’s not just me—but it’s a hard song for me to play because it makes me feel all the feelings I had when I wrote it. All that insecurity and all that fucking heaviness comes back. If I could not play it, I would, but the band really loves that song.” **“Antibodies”** “That was one of the first songs I put vocals to for Dunes. It was at the beginning of quarantine, everyone was isolated, and there was a rift between people who were like, ‘I’ll do whatever I can to try to make this thing less brutal on people with compromised immune systems and people that are more susceptible to getting bad COVID’ and people who were like, ‘I don’t give a shit, and I don’t think it’s that bad.’ So, the song comes from feeling isolated and trying to get my head around the idea that some people didn’t give a shit if someone’s grandma or father or mother was gonna die.” **“Grey Veins”** “I’ve been in a lot of projects with a lot of people, and when I sat down to write this song, I was thinking a lot about whether or not I was doing too much. Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I going to make people sick of me? Am I doing too many things?’ I kind of answered that question with this song being like, ‘Fuck, no.’ I’m just going to fucking play and make as much music as I can here, and I don’t have to explain it to anybody or to live up to anybody else’s standards. I just need to do what makes me happy and to do it as fearlessly as I possibly can.” **“Like Forever”** “I’ve been going through addiction stuff my entire life. As you get older and the more you work on it, you get a little time clean and then something happens, and you relapse. That’s not part of everybody’s story, but it was part of my journey—and man, it sucks. Having to explain it to somebody, having to deal with the hurt and confusion you cause other people when you relapse…maybe some people don’t want to talk to you after that. They don’t want to be in your life because they don’t want to deal with the stress of loving you. This song deals with that shame and trying to figure out how to get back on a healthy path.” **“Blender”** “This song is so stoney and heavy. Lyrically, it has to do with my mental health issues and being bipolar. It’s funny because the song is bipolar in and of itself because the verses are very low, and then the choruses are at the very top of my range. It’s not an accident that it goes from one extreme to the other. It very much symbolizes the theme of the song, which is me wrestling and coming to grips with the nature of my mood swings, my personality, and my fears.” **“Past Lives”** “This song was inspired by the statues of Confederate soldiers and Christopher Columbus coming down, and the idea of history writing itself rather than going down this lane of total bullshit. Being able to change the narrative in schools so that people are learning the truth about the foundation of this country and the violence at the core of it. It should be taught in school that we massacred people and decimated cultures. I have to deal with parents in my kids\' school who think that it’s bad to teach kids about slavery. It’s wild that people don’t want to teach the truth about something.” **“It Takes Time”** “I wrote this song about Frank. He was in an accident and really fucked up his wrist and hand, and he had to get surgery during the recording of the album. We had to take a big break from sharing music because he couldn’t play guitar. I don’t think he knew if he was ever going to be able to play again. So, I was thinking about him and his relationship with his instrument. The song opens up with, ‘Hello? I’m not sure if you remember, we connected a long time ago.’ That’s him talking to his guitar and his muse. I don’t always write a song for someone else from their perspective, but I did that with this.” **“Bombsquad”** “This is another one that came up around politics during COVID. I was thinking about how people were lying through their teeth about stuff just to save face—just making shit up, essentially. And the ability that some people had to just detach from reality and pretend that their shithead president was actually helping. It has a lot to do with QAnon and some of the people in my life that were falling for that shit.” **“Grifter”** “This is one of my favorites. I wrote this song about trying to start over. With each of these projects that I’m doing, I’m digging and I’m trying to find something. Music is a religion to me, and I think that ‘Grifter’ is questioning whether I’ve made it into a religion in a way that’s unhealthy. I center everything around music and rely on it a lot, and it’s turned into something I worship. I’m sort of questioning whether or not that’s a healthy thing.” **“Permanent Rebellion”** “This is another song that’s 100 percent about trying to drop the baggage of our old bands and trying to do something a little bit different with different people.” **“Sleep Cult”** “I did an interview where I talked a little bit about suicide, and then I realized that my kids were going to see that. There’re things that I’m realizing my kids are going to see and hear, and I want to jump in front of it and go to them and explain myself and really let them know me, so they don’t ever see or hear anything where they’re like, ‘Oh shit, this is really heavy.’ I just want to make sure I’m creating an environment for them where they know me and they can talk to me about anything they need, so they don’t ever feel like they’re alone in this world.”

Luminaries from rock's thriving post-punk, and hardcore scenes, guitarist Frank Iero (My Chemical Romance), guitarist Travis Stever (Coheed and Cambria), vocalist Anthony Green (Circa Survive), bassist Tim Payne (Thursday), and drummer Tucker Rule (Thursday) have joined forces to create L.S. DUNES. Unshackled from the expectations and aesthetics of their already successful careers, L.S. DUNES super-charge their heavy anthems with punk energy into a sound unlike anything that has come before it. From the gripping, theatrical opener "2022," and the crunchy, frenetic earworm "Like Forever," to the pummeling, expansive "Permanent Rebellion,” and the disarming album closer, "Sleep Cult," Past Lives is an electrifying and emotional ride. Past Lives was produced by Will Yip (Turnstile, Circa Survive, Quicksand) and recorded at his Studio 4 Recording in Philadelphia, PA. Going deep on issues of fearlessness, dependency, nonconformity, and impermanence, writing for the album was a collaborative effort. After the shock of the pandemic shutdown, the close friends and mutual admirers urgently realized that ‘tomorrow’ is not promised. “We never knew if we would ever get to play these songs together, in fact none of us lifelong musicians really knew if we’d ever be able to play music for a live audience ever again,” Iero recounted. “Permanent Rebellion” is about taking back what is rightfully yours.” Rule added, “We wanted to do something where you can hear all our bands in it and yet, not have it sound like any one in particular. Our roots are punk rock and hardcore, and the vibe is hope for all the lost souls.” The seeds of L.S. DUNES were planted during rehearsals for Thursday's Christmas livestream event in 2020 which included friends and acquaintances from some of their favorite bands. The chemistry at the serendipitous, impromptu jam sessions was instantaneous. With the addition of Circa Survive vocalist Anthony Green, it was organically clear, this time, the music formed the band. Original, aggressive, and intense, L.S. DUNES is the next great leap in rock's grand evolution.

*“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms. Scared? Don’t worry. We’ll be there to hold your hand and guide you through this painless transition. But what’s the rush? Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial ‘free yourself’ music on 103.5 Dawn FM. Tune in.”* The Weeknd\'s previous album *After Hours* was released right as the world was falling into the throes of the pandemic; after scrapping material that he felt was wallowing in the depression he was feeling at the time, *Dawn FM* arrives as a by-product of—and answer to—that turmoil. Here, he replaces woeful introspection with a bit of upbeat fantasy—the result of creatively searching for a way out of the claustrophobic reality of the previous two years. With the experience of hosting and curating music for his very own MEMENTO MORI radio show on Apple Music as his guiding light, *Dawn FM* is crafted in a similar fashion, complete with a DJ to set the tone for the segments within. “It’s time to walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms,” the host, voiced by Jim Carrey, declares on the opening track. “Scared? Don\'t worry.” Indeed, there is nothing to fear. The Weeknd packs the first half with euphoric bursts that include the Swedish House Mafia-assisted “How Do I Make You Love Me?” and “Sacrifice.” On the back half, he moves into the more serene waters of “Is There Someone Else?” and “Starry Eyes.” Despite the somewhat morose album cover, which reflects what many feel like as they wade through the seemingly endless purgatory of a life dictated by a virus, he’s aiming for something akin to hope in all of this gloom.