Clash's Albums of the Year 2023

On his Mercury Prize-winning debut album, 2017’s *Process*, Sampha Sisay often cut an isolated figure. As the Londoner’s songs contended with loss—particularly the passing of his parents—and anxieties about his health and relationships, a sense of insularity and detachment haunted his poignant, experimental electro-soul. Arriving six years later, this follow-up presents a man reestablishing and strengthening connections. Lifted by warm synths and strings, songs are energized by the busy rhythms of jungle, broken beat, and West African Wassoulou music. Images of flight dominate as Sampha zooms out from everyday preoccupations to take a bird’s-eye view of the world and his place in it as a father, a friend, a brother, a son. “I feel sometimes making an album is like a manifesto for how I should be living, or that all the answers are in what I’m saying,” he tells Apple Music. “I don’t necessarily *live* by what I’m saying but there’s times where I recognize that I need to reconnect to family and friends—times where I can really lose connection by being too busy with my own things.” So where *Process* ended with Sampha ruefully noting, “I should visit my brother/But I haven’t been there in months/I’ve lost connection, signal/To how we were” on “What Shouldn’t I Be?” *Lahai* concludes in the fireside glow of “Rose Tint,” a song celebrating the salve of good company: “I’m needy, don’t you know?/But the fam beside me/Is what I needed most.” Before then, *Lahai* examines Sampha’s sense of self and his relationships through his interests in science, time, therapy, spirituality, and philosophy. “I became more confident with being OK with what I’m interested in, and not feeling like I have to be an expert,” he says. “So even if it comes off as pretentious at times, I was more comfortable with putting things out there. That’s an important process: Even in the political sphere, a lot of people don’t speak about things because they’re worried about how people will react or that they’re not expert enough to talk on certain things. I’m into my science, my sci-fi, my philosophy. Even if I’m not an expert, I could still share my feelings and thoughts and let that become a source of dialogue that will hopefully improve my understanding of those things.” Started in 2019 and gradually brought together as Sampha negotiated the restrictions of the pandemic and the demands and joys of fatherhood, the songs, he says, present “a photograph of my mental, spiritual, physical state.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“Stereo Colour Cloud (Shaman’s Dream)”** “I wanted to make something that felt like animation and so the instrumentation is quite colorful. What started it off was me experimenting with new kinds of production. I was using a mechanical, MIDI-controlled acoustic piano and playing over it. Same thing with the drums—I built a robotic acoustic drummer to build these jungle breaks. So, it’s all these acoustic instruments that I programmed via MIDI, and also playing over them with humans, with myself.” **“Spirit 2.0”** “It’s a song I started in my bedroom, a song I wrote walking through parks in solitude, a song I wrote at a time I felt I needed to hear for myself. It took probably a year from start to finish for that song to come together. I had the chords and the modular synths going for a while and then eventually I wrote a melody. Then I had an idea for the drums and I recorded the drums. It was also influenced by West African folk music, Wassoulou music. I guess that isn’t maybe quite obvious to everyone, but I’ve made quite a thing of talking about it—it’s influenced the way I write rhythmically.” **“Dancing Circles”** “This also came from this kind of acoustic/MIDI jamming. I wrote this pulsing, slightly clash-y metronomic piano and wrote over and jammed over it. I put the song together with a producer called Pablo Díaz-Reixa \[Spanish artist/producer El Guincho\], who helped arrange the song. I sort of freestyled some lyrics and came up with the dancing refrain, and then had this idea of someone having a conversation with someone they hadn’t seen in a long time, and just remembering how good it is, how good it felt to dance with them.” **“Suspended”** “I feel like a lot of what I’ve written goes between this dreamlike state and me drawing on real-life scenarios. This is a song about someone who’s reminiscing again, but also feeling like they’re kind of going in and out of different time periods. I guess it was inspired by thinking about all the people, and all the women especially, in my life that I’ve been lifted up by, even though I frame it as if I’m speaking about one person. The feeling behind it is me recognizing how supported I’ve been by people, even if it’s not been always an easy or straightforward journey.” **“Satellite Business”** “This feels like the midpoint of the record. I guess in this record I was interrogating spirituality and recognizing I hadn’t really codified, or been able to put my finger on, any sort of metaphysical experience, per se—me somewhat trying to connect to life via a different view. The song is about me recognizing my own finitude and thinking about the people I’ve lost and recognizing, through becoming a father myself, that not all is done and I’m part of a journey and I can see my parents or even my brothers, my daughter. \[It’s\] about connection—to the past and to the future and to the present. Any existential crisis I was having about myself has now been offloaded to me thinking about how long I’m going to be around to see and protect and help guide someone else.” **“Jonathan L. Seagull”** “I speak a lot about flying \[on the album\] and I actually mention \[Richard Bach’s novella\] *Jonathan Livingston Seagull* in ‘Spirit 2.0.’ For me, the question was sometimes thinking about limits, the search for perfection. I don’t agree with everything in *Jonathan Livingston Seagull* as a book, it was more a bit of a memory to me \[Sampha’s brother read the story to him when he was a child\], the feeling of memory as opposed to the actual details of the book. I guess throughout the record, I talk about relationships in my own slightly zoomed-out way. I had this question in my mind, ‘Oh, how high can you actually go?’ Just thinking about limits and thinking sometimes that can be comforting and sometimes it can be scary.” **“Inclination Compass (Tenderness)”** “Birds, like butterflies, use the Earth’s magnetic field to migrate, to be able to navigate themselves to where they need to get to \[this internal compass is known as an inclination compass\]. I feel that there’s times where love can be simpler than I let it be. As you grow up, sometimes you might get into an argument with someone and you’re really stubborn, you might just need to hug it out and then everything is fine—say something nice or let something go. Anger’s a complicated emotion, and there’s lots of different thoughts and theories about how you should deal with it. For me personally, this is leaning into the fact that sometimes it’s OK to switch to a bit more of an understanding or empathetic stance—and I can sometimes tend to not do that.” **“Only”** “It’s probably the song that sticks out the most in the record in terms of the sonic aesthetic. It’s probably less impressionistic than the rest of the record. I think because of that it felt like it was something to share \[as the second single\]. Thematically as well, it just felt relevant to me in terms of trying to follow the beat of my own drum or finding a place where you’re confident in yourself—recognizing that other people are important but that I can also help myself. It’s a bit of a juxtaposition because there’s times where it feels like it’s only you who can really change yourself, but at the same time, you’re not alone.” **“Time Piece”** “Time is just an interesting concept because there’s so many different theories. And does it even exist? \[The lyrics translate as ‘Time does not exist/A time machine.’\] But we’re really tied to it, it’s such an important facet of our lives, how we measure things. It was just an interesting tie into the next song.” **“Can’t Go Back”** “I feel like there’s a lot of times I just step over my clothes instead of pick them up. I’m so preoccupied with thinking about something else or thinking about the future, there’s times where I could have actually just been a bit more present at certain moments or just, ‘It’s OK to just do simple things, doing the dishes.’ The amount \[of\] my life \[in\] which I’m just so preoccupied in my mind…Not to say that there isn’t space for that, there’s space for all of it, but this is just a reminder that there’s times where I could just take a moment out, five to 10 minutes to do something. And it can feel so difficult to spend such short periods of time without a device or without thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow. This is just a reminder of that kind of practice.” **“Evidence”** “I think there’s times where it just feels like I have ‘sliding door’ moments or glimpses or feelings. This is hinting \[at\] that. Again, the feeling of maybe not having that metaphysical connection, but then feeling some sort of connection to the physical world, whatever that might be.” **“Wave Therapy”** “I recorded a bit of extra strings for ‘Spirit 2.0,’ which I wanted to use as an interlude after that, but then I ended up reversing the strings that \[Canadian composer and violinist\] Owen Pallett helped arrange. I called it ‘Wave Therapy’ because, for some of the record, I went out to Miami for a week to work with El Guincho and before each session, I’d go to the beach and listen to what we had done the day before and that was therapeutic.” **“What if You Hypnotise Me?” (feat. Léa Sen)** “I was having a conversation with someone about therapy and then they were like, ‘Oh, I don’t even do talking therapy, I just get hypnotized, I haven’t got time for that.’ I thought that was an interesting perspective, so I wrote a song about hypnotizing, just to get over some of these things that I’m preoccupied with. I guess it’s about being in that place, recognizing I need something. Therapy can be part of that. As I say, nothing has a 100 percent success rate. You need a bit of everything.” **“Rose Tint”** “Sometimes I get preoccupied with my own hurt, my own emotions, and sometimes connecting to love is so complicated, yet so simple. It’s easy to call someone up really and truly, but there’s all these psychological barriers that you put up and this kind of headspace you feel like you don’t have. Family and friends or just people—I feel like there’s just connection to people. You can be more supported than you think at times, because there’s times where it feels like a problem shared can feel like a problem doubled, so you can kind of keep things in. But I do think it can be the other way round.”

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

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

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

Young Fathers occupy a unique place in British music. The Mercury Prize-winning trio are as adept at envelope-pushing sonic experimentalism and opaque lyrical impressionism as they are at soulful pop hooks and festival-primed choruses—frequently, in the space of the same song. Coming off the back of an extended hiatus following 2018’s acclaimed *Cocoa Sugar*, the Edinburgh threesome entered their basement studio with no grand plan for their fourth studio album other than to reconnect to the creative process, and each other. Little was explicitly discussed. Instead, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and Graham “G” Hastings—all friends since their school days—intuitively reacted to a lyric, a piece of music, or a beat that one of them had conceived to create multifaceted pieces of work that, for all their complexities and contradictions, hit home with soul-lifting, often spiritual, directness. Through the joyous clatter of opener “Rice,” the electro-glam battle cry “I Saw,” the epic “Tell Somebody,” and the shape-shifting sonic explosion of closer “Be Your Lady,” Young Fathers express every peak and trough of the human condition within often-dense tapestries of sounds and words. “Each song serves an integral purpose to create something that feels cohesive,” says Bankole. “You can find joy in silence, you can find happiness in pain. You can find all these intricate feelings and diverse feelings that reflect reality in the best possible way within these songs.” Across 10 dazzling tracks, *Heavy Heavy* has all that and more, making it the band’s most fully realized and affecting work to date. Let Massaquoi and Bankole guide you through it, track by track. **“Rice”** Alloysious Massaquoi: “What we’re great at doing is attaching ourselves to what the feeling of the track is and then building from that, so the lyrics start to come from that point of view. \[On ‘Rice’\] that feeling of it being joyous was what we were connecting to. It was the feeling of fresh morning air. You’re on a journey, you’re moving towards something, it feels like you’re coming home to find it again. For me, it was finding that feeling of, ‘OK, I love music again,’ because during COVID it felt redundant to me. What mattered to me was looking after my family.” **“I Saw”** AM: “We’d been talking about Brexit, colonialism, about forgetting the contributions of other countries and nations so that was in the air. And when we attached ourselves to the feeling of the song, it had that call-to-arms feeling to it, it’s like a march.” Kayus Bankole: “It touches on Brexit, but it also touches on how effective turning a blind eye can be, that idea that there’s nothing really you can do. It’s a call to arms, but there’s also this massive question mark. I get super-buzzed by leaving question marks so you can engage in some form of conversation afterwards.” **“Drum”** AM: “It’s got that sort of gospel spiritual aspect to it. There’s an intensity in that. It’s almost like a sermon is happening.” KB: “The intensity of it is like a possession. A good, spiritual thing. For me, speaking in my native tongue \[Yoruba\] is like channeling a part of me that the Western world can’t express. I sometimes feel like the English language fails me, and in the Western world not a lot of people speak my language or understand what I’m saying, so it’s connecting to my true self and expressing myself in a true way.” **“Tell Somebody”** AM: “It was so big, so epic that we just needed to be direct. The lyrics had to be relatable. It’s about having that balance. You have to really boil it down and think, ‘What is it I’m trying to say here?’ You have 20 lines and you cut it down to just five and that’s what makes it powerful. I think it might mean something different to everyone in the group, but I know what it means to me, through my experiences, and that’s what I was channeling. The more you lean into yourself, the more relatable it is.” **“Geronimo”** AM: “It’s talking about relationships: ‘Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide/My mama said, “You’ll never ever please your woman/But you’ll have a good time trying.”’ It’s relatable again, but then you have this nihilistic cynicism from Graham: ‘Nobody goes anywhere really/Dressed up just to go in the dirt.’ It’s a bit nihilistic, but given the reality of the world and how things are, I think you need the balance of those things. Jump on, jump off. It’s like: *decide*. You’re either hot or you’re cold. Don’t be lukewarm. You either go for it or you don’t. Then encapsulating all that within Geronimo, this Native American hero.” **“Shoot Me Down”** AM: “‘Shoot Me Down’ is definitely steeped in humanity. You’ve got everything in there. You’ve got the insecurities, the cynicism, you’ve got the joy, the pain, the indifference. You’ve got all those things churning around in this cauldron. There’s a level of regret in there as well. Again, when you lean into yourself, it becomes more relatable to everybody else.” **“Ululation”** KB: “It’s the first time we’ve ever used anyone else on a track. A really close friend of mine, who I call a sister, called me while we were making ‘Uluation’: ‘I need a place to stay, I’m having a difficult time with my husband, I’m really angry at him…’ I said if you need a place to chill just come down to the studio and listen to us while we work but you mustn’t say a word because we’re working. We’re working on the track and she started humming in the background. Alloy picked up on it and was like, ‘Give her a mic!’ She’s singing about gratitude. In the midst of feeling very angry, feeling like shit and that life’s not fair, she still had that emotion that she can practice gratitude. I think that’s a beautiful contrast of emotions.” **“Sink Or Swim”** AM: “It says a similar thing to what we’re saying on ‘Geronimo’ but with more panache. The music has that feeling of a carousel, you’re jumping on and jumping off. If you watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe \[film anthology\], in *Lovers Rock*, when they’re in the house party before the fire starts—this fits perfectly to that. It’s that intensity, the sweat and the smoke, but with these direct lines thrown in: ‘Oh baby, won’t you let me in?’ and ‘Don’t always have to be so deep.’ Sometimes you need a bit of directness, you need to call a spade a spade.” **“Holy Moly”** AM: “It’s a contrast between light and dark. You’re forcing two things that don’t make sense together. You have a pop song and some weird beat, and you’re forcing them to have this conversation, to do something, and then ‘Holy Moly’ comes out of that. It’s two different worlds coming together and what cements it is the lyrics.” **“Be Your Lady”** KB: “It’s the perfect loop back to the first track so you could stay in the loop of the album for decades, centuries, and millenniums and just bask in these intricate parts. ‘Be Your Lady’ is a nice wave goodbye, but it’s also radical as fuck. That last line ‘Can I take 10 pounds’ worth of loving out of the bank please?’ I’m repeating it and I’m switching the accents of it as well because I switch accents in conversation. I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Washington, D.C. \[where Bankole has previously lived\], or someone who’s lived in the Southside of Edinburgh, and I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Lagos in Nigeria.” AM: “I wasn’t convinced about that track initially. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” KB: “That’s good, though. That’s the feeling that you want. That’s why I feel it’s radical. It’s something that only we can do, it comes together and it feels right.”

WIN ACCESS TO A SOUNDCHECK AND TICKETS TO A UK HEADLINE SHOW OF YOUR CHOOSING BY PRE-ORDERING* ANY ALBUM FORMAT OF 'HEAVY HEAVY' BY 6PM GMT ON TUESDAY 31ST JANUARY. PREVIOUS ORDERS WILL BE COUNTED AS ENTRIES. OPEN TO UK PURCHASES ONLY. FAQ young-fathers.com/comp/faq Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach. Alongside the announcement ‘Heavy Heavy’, Young Fathers will make their much anticipated return to stages across the UK and Europe beginning February 2023 - known for their electrifying performances, their shows are a blur of ritualistic frenzy, marking them as one of the most must-see acts operating today. The tour will include shows at the Roundhouse in London, Elysee Montmartre in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam, O2 Academy in Leeds and Glasgow, Olympia in Dublin, Astra in Berlin, Albert Hall in Manchester, Trix in Antwerp, Mojo Club in Hamburg and more (full dates below) To mark news of the album and the tour, Young Fathers today release a brand new single, “I Saw”. It’s the second track to be released from the album (following standalone single “Geronimo” in July) and brims with everything fans have come to love from a group known for their multi-genre versatility - kinetic rhythms, controlled chaos and unbridled soul. Accompanied by a video created by 23 year old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu, the track demonstrates the ambitious ideas that lay at the heart of this highly-anticipated record. Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes. “You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.” For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.

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

The lead track on Loraine James’ *Gentle Confrontation* opens with a brooding wash of strings fit for an art-house drama, then explodes into thrashing, distorted drum programming. In that contrast lies the essence of the London electronic musician’s fourth official album, which follows both 2021’s *Reflection* and the 2022 eponymous debut of her ambient side project Whatever the Weather. Much as its title suggests, *Gentle Confrontation* thrives on clashing energies. In many ways, it is James’ most richly nuanced album yet, suffused in hazy clouds of synthesizer, electric piano, and vaporized samples, yet her glitched-out drums have never sounded more desperate. In “Déjà Vu,” her beats tangle and contort beneath RiTchie’s deeply soulful vocal harmonies; in “I DM U,” her cut-up breaks approximate the drill ’n’ bass of vintage Squarepusher, yet her synths have rarely sounded more ethereal. In many songs, she makes the most of her guests’ distinctive voices: Set against the chaotic syncopations of “While They Were Singing,” Catalan singer-songwriter Marina Herlop’s crystalline vocal harmonies sound even eerier than usual. But James herself frequently provides the emotional center in her half-murmured, half-rapped delivery—even when her verses are only half intelligible. “We like to think on and think on it,” she muses in “Tired of Me,” and then, in “Disjointed (Feeling Like a Kid Again),” she picks up the theme: “Lately I’ve been thinking about it,” she begins, before looping back in a halting voice: “Lately I should stop/And just think…” Songs like this make *Gentle Confrontation* feel like a self-portrait of a searching, doubtful mind.

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

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

The question of whether you want an MC like Earl Sweatshirt and a producer like The Alchemist to test each other’s limits is on some level an existential one: Like, isn’t the fact that the dreamlike flights of *VOIR DIRE* feel like comfort food a testament to how much they’ve already stretched our conception of hip-hop? Ten years out from his first “real” album (2013’s *Doris*), Earl sounds grateful, fulfilled, and yet no less enigmatic than when he was a kid, holding space for a history of Black diasporic art from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire to the Swazi-Xhosa South African pop legend Miriam Makeba without sacrificing the hermetic quality that made him so appealing in the first place. In Vince Staples, he continues to find the straight-talking foil he needs (“The Caliphate,” “Mancala”), and in Al a producer who can nudge him just a little closer to the hallelujahs he’s either too cool or evasive to embrace (“Mancala”). And at 26 minutes, the whole thing easily asks to be played again.

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

Laurel Halo’s 2018 album, *Raw Silk Uncut Wood*, marked a shift in her work, pulverizing the avant-techno rhythms of records like *In Situ* and *Dust* into choppy electro-acoustic textures flecked with jazz piano. On *Atlas*, her first major album in five years, her music continues to dissolve. Across these 10 elusive, enigmatic tracks, there are few melodies, no rhythms, no fixed points at all—just a hazy swirl of strings and piano that sounds like it was recorded underwater and from a great distance. Yet for all the music’s softness, it bears little in common with ambient as it’s typically conceived. An air of disquiet permeates the pastel haze; her atmospheres frequently feel both consonant and dissonant at the same time. Even at its most abstract, however, *Atlas* radiates unmistakable grace. In “Naked to the Light,” melancholy piano carves a path halfway between Erik Satie and mid-century jazz balladry; in “Belleville”—a distant tribute, perhaps, to the Detroit techno that influenced her—a languid keyboard figure echoes *Blade Runner*’s rain-slicked noir before a wordless choir briefly raises the specter of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz. But those reference points are fleeting: For the most part, *Atlas* is a closed world, a universe unto itself, in which blurry shapes tremble in a fluid expanse of deep, abiding melancholy.

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

“This isn’t a concept album,” Yazmin Lacey tells Apple Music. “This is a sound collage that represents where I am right now. I worked on this project for over two years. There’s more collaboration here, I’ve worked with more people compared to any other project I’ve put out. The music-making process has been similar in some ways, though. I’m a creature of comfort. If things aren’t comfortable for me, I don’t do them. So, in terms of the way we recorded, it was similar. I laid down a lot of the vocals on my own.” The East London-born singer-songwriter’s story is anything but conventional. While working blue-collar jobs for many years, hazy, fume-filled open mic nights and late bars are where Yazmin Lacey found her calling. Using the improvisation of ’40s bebop, hip-hop word spirals, and neo-soul-driven melodies, Lacey would carve out rousing performances from loose freestyles, sharing this across a debut EP, *Black Moon*, her bold introduction to the alternative jazz circuit in 2017. The following year, a second EP, *When the Sun Dips 90 Degrees*, served up genre-bending mysticism, encompassing the past and future with every groove as slow-burning cuts recalled Ella Fitzgerald, Sweetback, and early Amy Winehouse in tonality and tempo. Tapping beatsmiths David Okumu, Melo-Zed, and JD. Reid for her full-length debut LP, the album is structured just as it’s titled—a digital sketchbook with an analog feel. Recorded over a two-year span, *Voice Notes* is an expansive exploration of Yazmin’s personal and musical hallmarks. Reflecting on small-hours excursions (“Late Night People”), scenic waterfronts (“Sea Glass”), and foggy, early-morning bus rides (“Where Did You Go?”), *Voice Notes* finds Yazmin wrestling with her subconscious. “I think this album took so long to make because life just kept happening,” she says. “It’s a collection of my life.” Read on for her track-by-track guide. **“Flylo Tweet”** “This began life as an eight-and-a-half-minute freestyle, a literal stream of consciousness. As the title suggests, a legendary tweet from Flying Lotus—aka FlyLo—inspired the song. I practiced free-form writing for half an hour for this song to clear my mind. At the end of the freestyle, I talked with one of my best friends, Stella. I vividly remember telling her about this tweet I’d seen. The conversation spawned into a discussion about FlyLo’s philosophy of self-consciousness and its role as a creativity killer. I knew starting the album with eight full minutes would’ve been too much. Because of that, the final version of the song you hear is actually a conversation between me and one of the album’s producers, Zach Cayenne-Elliott, aka Melo-Zed. We’re not talking about music specifically throughout; it’s more of a window into my chaotic mind.” **“Bad Company”** “This song explores duality. \[Producer and leader of The Invisible\] Dave Okumu and I had fun with this track. This track is the spiritual successor to ‘Flylo Tweet.’ Here’s where things get introspective for me. I start to ask critical questions about myself. My demons were personified as a character called Priscilla. It’s a real self-reflective session where I wrestle with life’s ills. Priscilla’s impact is felt throughout the rest of the album too.” **“Late Night People”** “I love nocturnal things. My whole creative process for this track was inspired by the night sky, being outside, and clubbing culture. The track is really symbolic for me because I got my first gig in the smoking area of a pub. When I first started singing, I had a full-time job, so the only time I had an opportunity to make music was at night. Because the night guided so much of my early music, it also embedded itself in my creativity. This song represents all those late-night house parties, clubbing and 4 am adventures.” **“Fool’s Gold”** “This song is raw. I love it because ‘Fool’s Gold’ was a jam session that morphed into a track. This was inspired by a late-night conversation I had with a stranger at a bus stop. What’s amazing about this track is that many lyrical themes and \[the\] structure are pretty much unchanged from our jam session—there’s real beauty in that.” **“Where Did You Go?”** “This song is like a mental pit stop. ‘Flylo Tweet’ is the opener, setting up my creative process; ‘Bad Company’ deals with my inner-demon Priscilla, which leads to my decisions on ‘Late Night People.’ After burning the midnight oil, I head to my bus stop at 1 am on ‘Fool’s Gold,’ and now this track is kind of me reflecting and asking myself what’s next. I’m soul-searching.” **“Sign and Signal”** “Like the previous track, ‘Sign And Signal’ was about the changes in my life at the time. It might sound cheesy, but I was looking for clues in sentimental things, things my friends would say, or what I’d see on the street. The day I made this song, I was on the way to the studio and saw a flyer that said, ‘If you can dream it, you can believe it,’ or something along those lines. When I was in the studio, Zak already had the track demo with the switch in it. From there, I just started harmonizing with the mantra I saw on the street in the forefront of my mind. After we tweaked the track with Dave’s sauce, we went into executive-producer mode and started stitching the album together. This track really bought everything together.” **“From a Lover”** “This sits in a world I’ve never really inhabited before. When I made this record, so many things—good and bad—were happening in my life. While recording the album, I spent time with my dad and brother, sifting through their old records. I guess their records inspired how I wrote, especially their Caribbean records and vintage lovers rock. It’s real authentic.” **“Eye to Eye”** “I always try and use my voice as an instrument. ‘Eye to Eye’ is the perfect example of this. This song is sincere and vulnerable—emotionally speaking. It’s all fun and games when you’re in the studio, just spilling out your heart, but then it’s crazy to think people listen to experiences. The song is all about intimacy. It’s about connecting with someone sensually, binding the mind, body, and spirit together. The song is an ode to connectivity. My voice is real smooth and silky on this.” **“Pieces”** “This is a continuation of the previous track. It’s an open goodbye letter, probably one of the most personal tracks I’ve made. It summarizes my feelings. When dealing with a breakup, you’re all over the place. A song like ‘Pieces’ is like making sense of my thoughts. I remember going back and forth with my manager, discussing this track’s fate. After a while, something came over me and I said, ‘I have to put this out.’ It was so important to me that it eventually became *Voice Notes*’ first single.” **“Pass It Back”** “This one is really cool. I roughly talk about a particular thing in my life. It was something that I’d been carrying on my shoulders for a few years, and this track was like me finally letting go of it all.” **“Tomorrow’s Child”** “Thematically, this track is connected to ‘From a Lover.’ It was a freestyle that spawned from hearing a record in my dad’s collection. My mind had moved on from the album’s whirlwind: the emotional relationship stuff. My mind was pondering the world and everything going on right now. I’m an auntie and a godmother. Loads of my friends have children, and then you have COVID-19 in the back of everyone’s mind too. I’m not trying to say I’m some eco-warrior, but I think this song is a time lapse of the changes I’ve seen.” **“Match in my Pocket”** “This is a conversation between me and my girlfriends. We’re talking about the fact that we’re proud to be Black—it’s deep and carries a huge sense of pride. I don’t often write about things that come under the realm of politics because I write in such a borderless way. Normally, if I were tackling something socially conscious, I would feel like I’d have to think about it and structure it concisely. Luckily, everything came out naturally with this song. I hummed the bits out to Zak in a voice note before I left for London. When I got to the studio, Zak had the perfect drums, and the song came together just like that. It’s just a love letter to us. The song’s overall sentiment is that each generation will be stronger than the one that came before.” **“Legacy”** “Simply put, this one’s about my Nanny Mary—my mum’s mum. She passed away quite a long time ago, but I think the dynamics in my family are changing, and Nanny Mary is a big part of me looking back on how things used to be. My path into music was a quick left and out of the blue. I often think about where that confidence comes from, from my nan. She was very much the head of our family. I’m sad she never heard me sing, so this song’s dedicated to her. JD. Reid put the song together and helped me focus. We wrote this in one sitting.” **“Sea Glass”** “I’m a Cancerian: We love water. We’re also deep thinkers, overthinkers, deep dwellers, and storytellers. I wrote a lot of this track by the sea. I go there on my own, just randomly. I’ve been doing it for years. I just like being by the water. I voice noted a lot and listened to a lot of the album by the sea. The record starts so chaotic before it simmers down—that’s how I am. This is the culmination of everything. It’s me reflecting on my time at sea. Even though it\'s melancholic, the song has a real sense of finality. After Zak and I finished, we hugged, and it was such a special moment. This track capped off two years of recording. It’s the perfect bookend for the album.”

Yazmin Lacey is a singer-songwriter who knows something about coming into her own. She came to music late, she says – “It's never late, but late in the perspective of that I'm doing it now,” – almost as if by fate. And throughout her time in the music scene, the 33-year-old has used her music as an exercise in capturing those moments and putting them into song, as if a snapshot of the intimate parts of her own life. Debut album Voice Notes is yet another record of those moments. It follows on from three stunning EP’s; Black Moon (2017), When The Sun Dips 90 Degrees (2018) and Morning Matters (2020), a trilogy of sorts, named in part by the settings in which they were written. Voice Notes is similarly inspired by something that helped the album spring to life. A long-held tool of her music-making and way of sharing melodies with collaborators, it’s a method of communication deeply special to her. “For me, a voice note represents an immediate reaction to something,” she says. “[It’s] unfiltered and raw in the way that you can hear it. Made out of studio jam sessions alongside collaborators like Craigie Dodds, JD.REID, Melo-Zed and executive producer Dave Okumu, the recording process intentionally captured the beauty of imperfection. Lacey opted to forego a polished sound to give way for rawness, the chance to “hear someone's pauses, their stops or the cracks in their voice” much like the album’s namesake. Sonically she is uncategorisable, made up of many styles and influences. “There's lots of different flavours in there in terms of different ways I express myself,” she shares. “The things that I listen to, music that I love – it’s hard to place it. In some ways I would call it soul because that's where it comes from, my own soul. But I always avoid that; it's all perception.” She has gained support from Evening Standard, The Guardian and BBC Radio 6 Music, holds fans in the likes of Questlove and notably appeared on COLORS in 2020 with song On Your Own. But besides those wider accolades, it is the smaller, unseen parts of her life that become the story of Voice Notes, and the intimate personal observations Lacey chooses to share with listeners. “For me, it's my reactions to my lived experiences,” she says. “It's the next chapter of all I've learned musically and in life through making those three EP's, and me letting go of a lot of stuff that has happened over the last few years.” It is those experiences captured in the moment – “breakups, moving, starting again, making mistakes, losing yourself, finding yourself, and being able to tap back into the wider picture of what's important” – that come to the forefront, imperfections and all.

Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.

Like it did for listeners, Polly Jean Harvey’s 10th album came to her by surprise. “I\'d come off tour after \[2016’s\] *Hope Six Demolition Project*, and I was taking some time where I was just reassessing everything,” she tells Apple Music of what would become a seven-year break between records, during which it was rumored the iconic singer-songwriter might retire altogether. “Maybe something that we all do in our early fifties, but I\'d really wanted to see if I still felt I was doing the best that I could be with my life. Not wanting to sound doom-laden, but at 50, you do start thinking about a finite amount of time and maximizing what you do with that. I wanted to see what arose in me, see where I felt I needed to go with this last chapter of my life.” Harvey turned her attention to soundtrack work and poetry. In 2022, she published *Orlam*, a magical realist novel-in-verse set in the western English countryside where she grew up, written in a rare regional dialect. To stay sharp, she’d make time to practice scales on piano and guitar, to dig into theory. “Then I just started,” she says. “Melodies would arise, and instead of making up vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I\'d just pull at some of the poems. I wasn\'t trying to write a song, but then I had all these poems everywhere, overflowing out of my brain and on tables everywhere, bits of paper and drawings. Everything got mixed up together.” Written over the course of three weeks—one song a day—*I Inside the Old Year Dying* combines Harvey’s latest disciplines, lacing 12 of *Orlam*’s poems through similarly dreamy and atmospheric backdrops. The language is obscure but evocative, the arrangements (longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish produced) often vaporous and spare. But the feeling in her voice (especially on the title track and opener “Prayer at the Gate”) is inescapable. “I stopped thinking about songs in terms of traditional song structure or having to meet certain expectations, and I viewed them like I do the freedom of soundtrack work—it was just to create the right emotional underscore to the scene,” she says. “It was almost like the songs were just there, really wanting to come out. It fell out of me very easily. I felt a lot freer as a writer—from this album and hopefully onwards from now.”

“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”

Progressive development as an artist isn’t as easy as it looks, but Jessy Lanza’s *Love Hallucination* has all the hallmarks of a leap forward. The Canadian producer and musician has always drawn from a catalog of dance music spiked with a sly pop sensibility. Part of this comes from the ferment Lanza draws from as a member of UK label Hyperdub, a singular incubator of unique electronic artists since the 1990s. But influences and collaborators can only do so much. Lanza has a voracious appetite for sounds, a musical magpie building something unique from the shimmering parts of techno, gqom, house, and drum ’n’ bass. You could hear that foundation being built on her 2021 *DJ-Kicks* installment, where considerate experimenting is the rule. But where her mix was built of ready-made parts fused together, *Love Hallucination* is all Lanza—though that almost wasn’t the case, as these songs were originally written for other artists before she decided to record them herself. By taking these tracks in-house, Lanza has channeled her anxieties, desires, and tastes into a musical vector, giving *Love Hallucination* heft and velocity. “Don’t Cry on My Pillow” mixes familiar jabs of romantic resentment with the thrum of industrial drums. The twin tracks “Drive” and “I Hate Myself” are breathy anti-mantras cradled by louche downtempo, the sound of a mind that can’t let go as the world swirls around it. On “Marathon,” Lanza nearly snarls under a glittery Y2K-era R&B beat to underline her pursuit of unapologetic physical pleasure.

LA-based, Dallas-raised artist Liv.e, announces her sophomore album 'Girl In The Half Pearl' due February 10th via In Real Life. 'Girl In The Half Pearl' seizes on both the creative and personal liberation Liv.e has experienced in the time since her 2020 debut album 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'. The album's 17 tracks are a document of self-examination, as she works through realizations prompted by grief and grapples with the dynamics of her role in the relationships in her life. Building upon the foundation she laid with CWTTY, 'Girl In The Half Pearl' bares her process of growth, forgiveness and reclamation of her sense of womanhood across an immersive soundscape. The album's artistic shifts developed during her time experimenting with live performance in London earlier this year while under residency at London's Laylow. The 24-year-old artist first garnered attention with her 2017 EP, FRANK, and 2018's Hoopdreams EP. Over the past year, Liv.e shared the standalone Mndsgn-produced single "Bout It," along with a COLORS performance and released 'CWTTY+', the deluxe version of her 2020 critically-acclaimed debut album. She's since performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae. Liv.e's unique sensibilities have also caught the eye of the fashion world, marked by an appearance in a Miu Miu ad campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon. Most recently, she was featured on the new Mount Kimbie single titled "a deities encore."

It's been a long long time coming, but we are delighted to finally announce the release of our new album False Lankum, along with the premiere of the first single, Go Dig My Grave.  The album was recorded across 2021 & 2022 by our longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy in Hellfire Studio and Guerilla Studios in Ireland. The cover was shot by Steve Gullick, famed for photographing Nirvana amongst many greats, with a Gustav Doré illustration featured in the lower third, designed and laid out by Alison Fielding. It is our most ambitious record to date and we are very proud to finally unleash it upon the world. As well as the standard black vinyl, we will be releasing a Limited Edition Burnt Orange Transparent Double LP & CD. There will be an opportunity to obtain four limited edition prints, by legendary photographer Steve Gullick. The individual prints will be available across the world, with a signed edition available from Bandcamp.

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

For drummer Yussef Dayes, music is a family affair. Getting his first taste of performance as a teen by playing with his older brothers in the jazz group United Vibrations, Dayes has gone on to build a formidable family of collaborators. From working with pianist Kamaal Williams as Yussef Kamaal and kick-starting a new London jazz scene with the release of 2016’s *Black Focus* to duetting with guitarist Tom Misch on 2020’s *What Kinda Music*, Dayes channels an intuitive connection when it comes to his energetic, improvised music. Now releasing his debut solo album, *Black Classical Music*, Dayes places family front and center. “I became a father in 2020 and it led me to reflect on the amazing influence of my own parents,” he tells Apple Music. “My mum passed away in 2015 and this album is guided by her healing spirit. It’s my tribute to all those I love, in music and beyond.” The result is a creatively boundless 19 tracks, traversing epic jazz harmonies on the title track, Bahian beats on “Chasing the Drum,” head-nodding hip-hop on “Presidential,” and orchestral expansions on “Tioga Pass,” all anchored in the foundation of Dayes’ innate groove. “Genres are restrictive when it comes to what I play,” he says. “I’m just chasing the rhythm, tapping into the Black classical music.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Black Classical Music” (feat. Venna & Charlie Stacey)** “We wanted to kick off the album with a jazz epic, something to reference the lineage of improvised music I’ve grown up on. It features my live band with Charlie Stacey on keys and Venna on saxophone, and it’s the tune we always open our shows with. It never fails to get everyone dancing, which is exactly what jazz has always done.” **“Afro Cubanism”** “In 2019, I took a trip to Havana and worked with some great musicians to learn the technicalities of Cuban rhythms and the clave groove. We came up with this tune on the spot in the studio, jamming after ‘Black Classical Music.’ It instantly took me back to my time in Cuba. Plus, it’s ‘Afro’ since I have a huge one on the album cover!” **“Raisins Under the Sun” (feat. Shabaka Hutchings)** “I’ve known Shabaka since I was a kid. He lived in my area and I always remembered seeing him as this super-tall guy getting on the train with his instrument cases. I later started playing with him and was on the drums for some of his Sons of Kemet shows. He is one of a kind, a person full of wisdom and artistry, and I knew I had to have him on the record. He’s on bass clarinet for this tune, which takes its name from the Sidney Poitier film, and is simply perfect.” **“Rust” (feat. Tom Misch)** “Ever since me and Tom started playing together in 2018, it’s always been a vibe. We’re both independent artists who keep our playing free and we’ve never been in the studio and not had a wicked idea. He takes me out of my comfort zone and provides a great fusion between styles. It only felt right to continue our collaboration on this album.” **“Turquoise Galaxy”** “We invested in a Moog One synth for the album and created a new patch for this track that I played a shuffle beat to. For some reason, that combination took me to another place, to the summer and the sky and the color of turquoise, which was my mum’s favorite and is still all over my family house.” **“The Light” (feat. Bahia Dayes)** “This track was first recorded in 2019. I used to play it to my daughter Bahia as a lullaby while she was a newborn. When it came to making the album, I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s *Songs in the Key of Life* and got inspired by how he uses his daughter’s voice in his tracks. I decided to do the same thing for Bahia’s favorite tune, so you hear her throughout this.” **“Pon di Plaza” (feat. Chronixx)** “My dad’s Jamaican and, recently, I’ve wanted to tap into my Caribbean heritage more. I’ve known and loved \[Jamaican reggae star\] Chronixx’s music for ages and this ended up being a beautiful Jamaican collaboration after we got in touch during lockdown. He sent over the vocals and arrangements and it was so fun to put together and produce. I’m really pleased we managed to make it happen.” **“Magnolia Symphony”** “I recently took a trip to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, and was so struck by the music on every street corner there, as well as the gorgeous magnolia trees that are all over the city. This track became an ode to that beauty, chopped from an outtake the Chineke! Orchestra played when they were in to record the track ‘Tioga Pass.’” **“Early Dayes”** “This is a little family skit, taken from a VHS my dad filmed when I was a kid and you can hear me in the background playing the drums. It’s a link back to those childhood days of being free, as well as an appreciation for my parents—you have to have patience when there’s a drummer in the family!” **“Chasing the Drum”** “I’m always chasing rhythms and trying to find different drums native to each place I’m traveling to. This track is dedicated to the rhythms I picked up in Salvador in Brazil. It’s an ode to my time there and my interpretation of the way those incredible people express themselves through their drums.” **“Birds of Paradise”** “‘Birds of Paradise’ is one of the first sessions I laid down at \[one of the album’s co-producers\] Malcom Catto’s studio back in 2021, with my core band of Rocco Palladino on bass, Charlie Stacey on keys, and Venna on sax. It’s a lover’s song that reminds me of the beauty of nature and how we need to take care to protect it.” **“Gelato”** “I love listening to funky house and dance music, and ‘Gelato’ is inspired by that vibe, creating a little dance riddim in the album to get the people moving. It’s a tune for driving along to, named after a nice strain of one of my favorite herbal remedies.” **“Marching Band” (feat. Masego)** “I met \[Jamaican American singer-songwriter\] Masego in 2022 and we really got along, he’s such good vibes. He invited me over to his house to record and we had a conversation about my love of Brazil and how he was starting to learn Portuguese. Once he got in the booth, he freestyled what we were speaking about in one take, on the spot. It was amazing to watch and be a part of.” **“Crystal Palace Park” (feat. Elijah Fox)** “\[Pianist/producer/songwriter\] Elijah joined the live band in summer 2022 and we soon started working together in the studio. This is his interlude and space for him to shine. He’s from North Carolina, where John Coltrane and Nina Simone are from, and he channels this contagious, positive energy that really comes through when he plays.” **“Presidential” (feat. Jahaan Sweet)** “Jahaan Sweet is an incredible producer from the US who I worked with when we were in a session for Kehlani. This is a tune we came up with then that showcases my love of rap music. Listening to it makes you feel presidential, it gives you such confidence, and it has perfect space in it for a vocal feature, which hopefully could come through in the future.” **“Jukebox”** “I grew up listening to records played on an old 7-inch vinyl jukebox my dad has. Over the lockdowns, my brother repaired it and this track is dedicated to the sounds and feeling of those records being loaded and played. It’s also a collaboration with my good friend, the producer and guitarist Miles James, as it references his love of West-Coast G-funk and ’80s drum machines. It was my chance to bruk out with him on his flex.” **“Woman’s Touch” (feat. Jamilah Barry)** “\[UK singer-songwriter\] Jamilah joined us on our 2021 UK tour, and she has such incredible talent. I wanted to give her a moment to shine on the record. ‘Woman’s Touch’ has a great Sade feel to it and spotlights Jamilah’s beautiful voice. It’s amazing to be able to curate a record like this and to collaborate with so many great artists I know and love.” **“Tioga Pass” (feat. Rocco Palladino)** “The bass and drums combination is super important, from Sly & Robbie to The Wailers and The Headhunters, it’s the foundation. Rocco and I had the same upbringing in music and we essentially have a telepathic connection when we play—he knows exactly what I’m going to do. This track is his moment to play beautiful lines and it reminded me of the epic nature of Yosemite, which is the last family holiday I took with my mum in 2014. It also features the incredible Chineke! Orchestra, who are a blessing to have on the album.” **“Cowrie Charms” (feat. Leon Thomas and Barbara Hicks)** “I wanted to end on a note of healing and peace, so this track features a recording of one of my mum’s yoga classes, where she’s guiding us in a shavasana. It was always my favorite part of her practice, as you can just lay down and relax. The track also features the amazing vocalist Leon Thomas, who I linked up with in 2022. It’s really special to be able to collaborate with my mum in this way and it also channels the good energy of the cowrie-shell necklace that I got given in Senegal and that features in the artwork.”

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

In early 2021, Tom and Ed Russell were working on a mix for the iconic London club fabric. They knew they wanted a particular tune included, but simply couldn’t find the track anywhere or remember its name. Faced with a deadline and an endless dig through disc logs, the pair changed their approach: They would themselves write the song they could hear. The track became June 2021 single “So U Kno”—an insidious, addictive banger that’s a cornerstone of the Russells’ debut album as Overmono. It’s an anecdote that reveals a great deal about the brothers’ practical mindset and prodigious abilities. Veterans of the UK dance scene (Tom, the elder Russell, released techno as Truss, while Ed put out drum ’n’ bass as Tessela), the Welsh-raised producers combine for something special here. *Good Lies* is an extraordinary electronic record: a genre-defying set glistening with purpose, poise, and dance-floor delirium. “The main anchor for the album isn’t genre-based, it’s an emotional place,” Ed tells Apple Music. “It’s a particular emotional sense that we try and achieve with a lot of our music—depending on what mood you’re in on that day, you could interpret that state in a few different ways.” Tom is able to pinpoint the origins to that “emotional ambiguity.” “I think our formative experiences of partying in the Welsh countryside had a massive impact on us,” he says. “When you have the sun going down and the sun coming up, and those emotions of somewhere between euphoria, slight sadness that the night’s coming an end but a real sense of optimism that you’re going into a new day. These sorts of weird crossover points are what we try and find in how we put our music together.” Read on for the brothers’ track-by-track guide. **“Feelings Plain”** Ed Russell: “It was originally going to close the album. We wanted to see if we could make a sort of plainsong piece of music—13th-century church music, where someone would be singing one note over and over and then someone else joins in, and everyone’s singing these cyclical things. But when it all comes together, they start cycling differently and you get this big wash of voices. But we wanted to try and do a sort of R&B take on plainsong—it was one of the songs that had a more conceptual start to it.” Tom Russell: “It was the furthest we’d gotten in terms of direct new avenues that we might explore. It’s a bold statement of intent to start.” **“Arla Fearn”** ER: “When did you first write this bassline, Tom?” TR: “About 1976. No, I think it was about 15 years ago.” ER: “I would tell Tom it’s the best thing he’d ever written. It’s got so much mood and character and just sounds so satisfying to me.” TR: “I know Ed meant it as a compliment but I kept on taking it as a bit of a diss really. But I finally gave in.” ER: “We spent ages processing the drums and then Tom sampled the Geovarn vocal and came up with the insane outro. The track is at 135 BPM, and by the end it’s at 170 BPM, but you never really notice it’s changed—it just flips the vocal into a different spot. We really wanted the album to be a place where tracks would often morph into something completely different. That it’s bubbling over with ideas.” **“Good Lies”** ER: “We went through a phase of trying not to sample every Smerz song because they just had so many good hooks. They’re incredible at writing these top lines that sound straight off early-2000s garage records, but not in a pastiche way. We had the vocal from \[2018 Smerz track\] “No harm” and spent a lot of time chopping it into the phrasing we wanted and creating a hook out of this little section that had jumped out at us. The demo for the instrumental then came together in a day, but there was an 18-month, almost two-year period from writing the demo to coming back and starting to really chip away at it.” **“Good Lies (Outro)”** TR: “When we were writing the ‘Good Lies’ instrumental, we thought we’d see if we could flip it and turn the vibe on its head into something moodier. It’s always going back to that ambiguity with us. There’s something of that in the *Good Lies* title. What constitutes a good lie?” **“Walk Thru Water” (feat. St. Panther)** TR: “Ed was at my studio in February \[2022\], and we were battening down the hatches for Storm Eunice.” ER: “It was this quite nice feeling of, ‘All right, there’s a storm coming, we’ve got loads of snacks and a few drinks, the place to ourselves, and we can’t go anywhere.’ Tom had written these really beautiful chords and I’d kept saying I wanted to do something with them. We got really stoned while the rain was coming down, listening to these chords, and we came across the St. Panther vocal.” TR: “I then started doing the beat on the Pulsar—which is a drum machine that’s quite difficult to tame but on certain things it just works beautifully.” **“Cold Blooded”** TR: “This started out as something quite different. It dawned on us that we’d written this massive IDM tune.” ER: “It was a bit too nice, wasn’t it?” TR: “It was this late-’90s breakdance thing—not really the vibe we should be going for.” ER: “I had this Kindora sample that I’d wanted to use for ages, and then Tom sent me this slowed-down version of ‘Cold Blooded’ with the new drums and I realized it’d be fucking killer. It then became a month of last-minute adjustments, which we sometimes get ourselves into a bit of a hole with. Tweaking everything until the last.” **“Skulled”** ER: “We had the Kelly Erez sample put away into our sample folder. And then we built a drum machine—a copy of a ’70s drum machine called the Syncussion, made by Pearl, the drum kit manufacturer. It \[the Syncussion\] was meant to sound like a normal drum kit, and it sounds so far away from real drums it’s insane. We spent a couple of weeks trying to make our version sound like we’d soldered it not quite right. It has this weird, sort of dry, alien, ’80s vibe to it. Like with all our stuff, it’s processed so heavily.” TR: “Ed has come up with this mad compression chain, which you can basically put any sort of drums into and you get this massive wall of noise.” ER: “I said earlier the best thing Tom has written was the bassline on ‘Arla Fearn,’ but I’ve changed my mind now: It’s the piano outro to ‘Skulled.’ We both loved the idea of the song ending like a classic ballad—a Céline Dion tune.” **“Sugarushhh”** TR: “We liked the idea of trying to shoehorn in a screaming 303 to the album somewhere.” ER: “Tom’s good at doing these quite irregular things that you don’t immediately notice. This, if you actually count it out, is in some weird time signature and it’s cycling every nine bars. It was also really important that we had this abrasive, aggressive 303 line being offset completely with a really beautiful vocal.” **“Calon”** ER: “Tom played me the first iteration of this in the back of a van on the way to a festival in Minehead. We’ve sampled Joe Trufant a few times before and we liked the idea of there being a few familiar voices on the album.” TR: “We then hired a studio in Ibiza and Ed had the idea of making the beat much slower. It became this big, slowed-down house tune—it dropped to something like 110 BPM.” ER: “We were in a US club sound-checking and played through some tunes from the album. Hearing it on the club system we were like, ‘Fuck me!’ It’s this sneaky banger.” **“Is U”** ER: “We’ve both been massive Tirzah fans since the start, and one day the ‘All I want is you’ line from ‘Gladly’ just jumped out of the speaker at us. We then spent ages trying to make the beat on this mono machine we have, which has all these really shit ’80s drum samples. We just mangled them until we had the beat, and then chopped up the vocal to get what we felt was a really strong and more confrontational delivery. Tom then put these lush chords in the breakdown and it opens the track up, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.” TR: “It’s amazing when a track starts to take on a life of its own. Playing this out and seeing the reaction gives me goosebumps every time.” **“Vermonly”** ER: “A lot of our tracks will be written on just one piece of gear and we see what you can do with it. I had bought Tom a synth for his birthday, but when I gave it to him he said he wasn’t going to be in the studio for a few days, so I asked if I could take the synth I had just given him. I sent him a really rough 16-bar loop with the main melodic ideas, and he did the rest, really.” TR: “Tracks like this are really important to us. They might get lost on an EP. It’s not always about writing dance-floor bangers.” **“So U Kno”** ER: “We were doing this mix for fabric and we both knew we wanted a very particular tune in the mix but couldn’t find it. So we basically just thought, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be quicker to write something ourselves.’ I had a chopped-up vocal and a rough beat going, played it to Tom, who went straight over to a Jupiter-6 synth and immediately played the bassline before doing the same with the chords.” **“Calling Out”** TR: “Ed had suggested to try and sample something by slowthai and I managed to find this little \[section\] I really liked from quite an obscure track called ‘Dead Leaves.’ I loved the line ‘I’m like the sun, I rise up and then gone.’ Then we combined it with a CASISDEAD and d’Eon sample and it really started to make sense. I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, but Ed is often able to say, ‘We don’t need that,’ or ‘Change a snare from there to there.’ A tiny idea or decision can make such a huge difference.” ER: “I remember when Tom sent me the chords for the end and I felt like it reminded me of old Radiohead—the perfect way to close the album.”

“I never learned to superstar from a textbook,” Doja Cat snarls towards the end of “Attention,” a song that’s all at once a boom-bap showcase, an R&B slow-burner, and a canny summary of her against-the-odds success. Those who remember Doja’s breakthrough (a viral 2018 joke song, “Mooo!”, whose DIY video had her shoving french fries in her nose in front of a homemade green screen) probably wouldn’t have predicted that a few years later, the girl in the cow suit would be a household name. But for Doja, being an internet goofball and a multiplatinum pop star aren’t just compatible, they’re complementary—a duality attuned to her audience’s craving for realness. With her fourth album, *Scarlet*, the maverick adds “formidable rapper” to her growing list of distinctions. In since-deleted tweets from April 2023, Doja made a pledge: “no more pop,” she wrote, following up with a vow to prove wrong the naysayers doubting her rap skills. *Scarlet* makes good on that promise, particularly its first half, a far cry from the sugary bops on 2021’s star-making *Planet Her*. Instead she hops between hard-edged beats that evoke NYC in ’94 or Chicago in 2012, crowing over the spoils of her mainstream success while playfully rejecting its terms. “I’m a puppet, I’m a sheep, I’m a cash cow/I’m the fastest-growing bitch on all your apps now,” she deadpans on “Demons,” thumbing her nose at anyone who conflates glowing up with selling out. And on “97,” the album’s best pure rap performance, she embraces the troll’s mantra that all clicks are good clicks, spitting, “That’s a comment, that’s a view, and that’s a rating/That’s some hating, and that’s engagement I could use.” Behind the provocations, though, is an artist with the idiosyncratic chops to back them up. That’s as true in *Scarlet*’s lusty midsection as it is on its gulliest rap tracks: No one else would interrupt a dreamy love song (“Agora Hills”) to giggle in Valley Girl vocal fry, “Sorry, just taking a sip of my root beer!” (No one, that is, but Nicki Minaj, Doja’s clearest influence, who paved the way for women who juggle art-pop with hip-hop bona fides.) As catchy as it is contrarian, *Scarlet* offers a suggestion: Maybe it’s Doja’s willingness to reject the premise of being a pop star that makes her such a compelling one. On the album’s sweetest track, “Love Life,” she takes in her view from the top—still the weirdo her fans met in a cow suit but more confident in her contradictions. “They love when I embrace my flaws/I love it when they doin’ the same,” she raps softly. “I love it when my fans love change/That’s how we change the game.”

Irish singer-songwriter CMAT had a very clear idea of what her second record was going to be about when she started making it, but somewhere along the line, it morphed into something else. “It’s about the breakup and the fallout of a breakup,” Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson tells Apple Music. “I was in a relationship with someone who’s much older than me, and it was about trying to look at that as objectively as possible, and give time and space to my feelings about it.” CMAT set out to write what she describes as “a record of forgiveness,” but as she put that into practice, she discovered it wasn’t the album she needed to make. “As I was making the record, I realized I’m actually just still really fucking angry about everything that happened, and I became more \[so\] as I went on and went through it. So it’s not really an album about forgiveness, it’s an album about the fact that shit happens, these things happen, and it doesn’t make any sense and there’s no point to it.” The end result is *Crazymad, for Me*, a second record that builds on the country-pop sway of her debut with lush strings, ’70s grooves, melodious hooks, uplifting harmonies (a glorious duet with John Grant on “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” will have you shimmying your way to the dance floor), and an Americana twang. Somewhere inside these songs of anger, sadness, and contemplation, CMAT started to make sense of everything. “Nothing good comes from suffering,” she says. “But it has to happen and you just have to learn how to move on with it.” These things happen, but at least they’ve got a great soundtrack. Read on as CMAT guides us through *Crazymad, for Me*, track by track. **“California”** “Every time I started on the topic and every time I started writing about it, I had this voice in the back of my head that was like, ‘Everybody that was there is going to know that you’re exaggerating and everybody is going to think you’re so sad. Him, and all of his friends, and everyone that knows you is going to think you’re such a pathetic loser for even talking about this in the first place.’ I probably should have made this album before my first record. I’ve wanted to make this record for six or seven years, but it really took a lot of pep-talking—and this song is me going through all of that and trying to be like, ‘I need to do it anyway.’” **“Phone Me”** “This is about the paranoia of feeling like you’re being cheated on, but the other person isn’t admitting to it. I was making up really weird images in my head, like, ‘What lengths would I have gone to to figure out if this person’s cheating on me?’ One of them was raising a Greek goddess from the dead, Cassandra, the goddess of prophecy. Her curse was that she was always going to tell the truth and know the truth and know what was coming before it happened, but nobody was ever going to believe her. I also make reference to the Rebekah Vardy incident, where Coleen Rooney had to remove everyone off her \[Instagram\] stories except for Rebekah Vardy, and plant fake stories to figure out if she was the person leaking her stories. I liked taking those two things and matching them together. In my head, there is a conference of girls all standing around trying to figure out the truth about something, and it’s me, Coleen Rooney, and Cassandra, the Greek goddess of prophecy.” **“Vincent Kompany”** “This is about the fact that I tend to have a relationship with myself and my own mental illnesses, where time is a very important thing. I like to tell stories about terrible, scary, maybe worrying things that I did when I was very mentally ill, but only if they happened three years ago, so that I can be, ‘I was crazy back then, but I’d never do that now.’ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m always doing something insane, and it’s only time and foresight and whatever else that makes me realize that I was always the crazy person. There’s a line in it where I say, ‘Cut all my hair off trying to look like Vincent Kompany.’ I wrote this song with my friend Declan McKenna and we spent maybe two hours going through a list of bald celebrities that I could use in the simile. Eventually, he was like, ‘\[Burnley FC manager\] Vincent Kompany!’ I was like, ‘Oh, if he’s a dodgy bastard, I don’t really want to put him in a song,’ so I had to research him very thoroughly. Turns out, lovely man. Family guy.” **“Such a Miranda”** “When I first really started a relationship with this person, I was 18 and I’d moved to Denmark. I moved back to Ireland to be in a relationship with him and I also stopped watching *Sex and the City*; I stopped doing all of these things that were for me and that I was supposed to be doing for me. I look back on that time with a lot of regret. It’s not a very profound \[or\] logical song, or anything, it’s just literally me talking about how much I regret doing that.” **“Rent”** “This song is kind of the second part to ‘Such a Miranda’ in the sense that it fast-forwards into the middle of the relationship and is me telling the story of being in it. It’s probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. It’s about being in a relationship with someone and realizing you’ve dedicated your whole life to someone who doesn’t even know you, and you don’t even know them, and how isolating and awful that feeling is, and how chaotic it is as well; how your life looks a bit different every day because you don’t know who you’re getting.” **“Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” (feat. John Grant)** “This is a song about realizing that I’ve turned into my mother. For me, there are three scenes on the record. The first sequence of songs is a bit angry, the second sequence of songs \[where this one sits\] is very reflective and ‘Maybe I’ve done something wrong,’ and then the third sequence is trying to make peace and move on. ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’ is a song about the passing of time and how quickly it’s gone, because I feel like people often get to their mid to late twenties and they’re like, ‘Fuck, I was 12 two weeks ago. What the fuck happened?!’” **“Can’t Make up My Mind”** “I wanted to really capture that fuzzy-headedness of indecisiveness and lack of commitment, because I’m definitely a commitment-phobe in life. I don’t know how people buy houses, I don’t know how people get married. That concept to me is very confusing. I don’t even know how people decide where they’re going to live for the rest of their life. I have specifically chosen a path where I move around all the time, and that suits me perfectly well, because I need to be constantly stimulated, like a toddler with an iPad. I need to be constantly scrolling or something. And I can’t make up my mind.” **“Whatever’s Inconvenient”** “This one is about being bad at romance and human relationships. I’m definitely a bit of a Madame Bovary about things. I always think something could be a bit better and a bit more romantic and a bit more crazy and a bit more wild, and that will fuck me up and put me into terrible, terrible positions. I’m definitely guilty of going for the craziest or the most rebellious, wild option, even into my adulthood, and it just runs a train through your life. You have to just not be a narcissist, and take people for what they are and enjoy them and commit to them and see the best in them—instead of always picking the worst option possible to live on the edge.” **“I…Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny”** “I wanted to put this feeling into a song because I had never heard anyone else ever talk about it in a poetic sense. I have so many friends that have been very hurt and confused by their own feelings towards someone they love. They’ll love this person and be so committed to this person, but after a while, the sexual attraction completely leaves them and they find anything new attractive. Quite a lot of my friends who are gay men suffered a lot in their early to mid twenties or thirties with this exact same feeling, where they’ve found someone and they love them, but they just want to have sex with anyone else. I think there’s a lot of shame associated with this feeling, and there’s a lot of shame associated with sex in general. But if I was to add a positive note, I would say there are other solutions to the problem rather than hating yourself. As a very famous drag queen, Trixie Mattel, once said, ‘If having sex with someone who isn’t my husband is illegal, then lock me up and throw away the key.’” **“Torn Apart”** “This is going back to the Cassandra prophecy thing, but it’s the other end of the prophecy here, where shit has hit the fan and everything has gone wrong, and you’re at the end of the relationship and there’s always a feeling of, ‘Well, I knew it was always going to happen, so why did I even bother?’ It’s about running through the past and looking for signs that it was always going to end. But if you look for that in anything, you’ll find it.” **“Stay for Something”** “‘Stay for Something’ is also about running back through the minutiae of a relationship that you’ve exited and looking to make sense out of it. I think this is also a very important song in the record for me because it really sums up that super-chaotic feeling of something terrible has happened, so I have to find reasoning for it, and I have to make sense out of it and it has to be a chapter that factors into the story of my life overall. I can’t have suffered for nothing, I can’t have stayed for nothing, I can’t have just stayed in this terrible relationship and not benefited from it in some way, but the truth is that I did and I think, in general, people do. There’s no reason for suffering, there’s no point to it, and these things don’t really make sense.” **“Have Fun!”** “I think the minute that it was written, I remember thinking it sounds like the last song on an album. It sounds like the exit song from a sitcom or something, it’s quite a jovial, jaunty number. I liked the idea of ending on something uplifting when I knew so much of the record was going to be so dramatic. Thematically, it makes sense as well because it’s the closest thing to a forgiveness song on the record. It’s not even really about forgiving and forgetting, but it’s more just about being like, ‘Well, that happened and now it’s not happening anymore, so I’m going to go have some fun,’ because that was what was missing for the last five years or whatever it was. I think it’s nice to end on a hopeful note.”

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

“I set myself certain parameters,” Joshua Mainnie, aka Barry Can’t Swim, tells Apple Music about his approach to creating his debut album. “I don’t like albums which are too long so it had to be around 10 tracks. And every track needed to flow and blend nicely with the one before. But I had an idea of what I wanted it to sound like before I began and it actually ended up being something completely different.” Building a reputation for creating deeply emotive dance music which pulls at the heartstrings as much as it moves the feet, the Edinburgh-born, London-based producer might have set out with self-imposed limits but his debut pushes further at the boundaries of his sound. Taking influence from everything from Pink Floyd’s *The Dark Side of the Moon* to Dev Hynes’ drum sounds, *When Will We Land?* moves effortlessly from the cinematic title track to the Sébastien Tellier-esque balladry of “Woman” via the joyous piano house of “Sunsleeper.” “Releasing a debut album is the pinnacle of things so far for me,” says Mainnie. “You only ever get to do it once so you really have to put yourself into it. There’s loads of voice recordings of my family and friends in there and I hope it works as the perfect snapshot of me as an artist right now.” Here, he takes us through that portrait, track by track. **“When Will We Land?”** “This started with me wanting to write a tune in an odd time signature. I was inspired by Pink Floyd’s *The Dark Side of the Moon* on the album and there’s a lot of odd time signatures on that. Most dance music is in 4/4 but this track’s in 7/4. There’s also little nods to space and interstellar stuff on the samples in there.” **“Deadbeat Gospel” (feat. somedeadbeat)** “This has quite a mad story. I was playing a show in Dublin and a friend from uni, who I hadn’t seen for a few years, came along. After the show, we were sitting by the canal having a wee drink and he just started reciting this poem about our time going clubbing during uni. I was like, ‘Wait, stop!’ I got my phone out and recorded it straightaway thinking it would be brilliant to use as a sample. I chopped it up and put it over this beat which is a bit more upbeat than the opening track. I was inspired quite a lot by the Arab Strap track ‘The First Big Weekend’ and I think both songs are about how your early clubbing experiences can be quite religious.” **“Sonder”** “‘Sonder’ is on my *More Content* EP from 2022 and it’s probably my favorite tune I’ve made so I really wanted it on the album. It’s a really emotive track and one people seem to get quite emotionally attached to. I didn’t want to fill the record with loads of music that had already been released but I felt this really needed to be on there.” **“How It Feels”** “This track was originally intended to be a short interlude but when I played it to the record company, they felt it was one of the strongest tracks and asked me to flesh it out. It came together effortlessly. I started it and it was finished in two hours, and there’s a certain magic when a track comes together that easily and just clicks.” **“Sunsleeper”** “‘Sunsleeper’ is the first single from the album and I feel like it’s the one people want to hear when they come and see me play. It gets a massive reaction. I went into it with the intention of making a big, bouncy, piano house tune—and that’s exactly what I ended up with.” **“Woman”** “I started this track with a vocal sample but it became difficult to clear. So I got in touch with Låpsley and she recorded this amazing vocal which sounds 10 times better than the original sample. It’s quite downtempo and chilled and I’d been listening to a lot of late-’90s electronic music. I think an album needs these more chilled, reflective moments to break things up.” **“I Won’t Let You Down” (feat. Falle Nioke & Blackboxx)** “This is another track where I wanted to incorporate elements of my friends into it. I sampled a good friend of mine called Blackboxx, who I studied music with at uni. He had this tune with a really beautiful opening section and I sampled it and put some breakbeat in there and ’90s-style drums. I’d been listening to things like Moby and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Then Blackboxx pulled the sample so we could feature him on the track instead. I’d been sent some a cappellas from an artist called Falle Nioke who’s from \[Republic of\] Guinea in Africa but lives in Margate \[on England’s Southeast coast\] now. I chopped one of them up and it just worked beautifully over the beat.” **“Always Get Through to You”** “Originally, this track was going to feature a sample of ‘Nobody Knows’ by Pastor T.L. Barrett \[& The Youth for Christ Choir\]. I’d been sitting on the sample for four years and by complete coincidence, on the day I sent the track to Ninja Tune, Loyle Carner released his track ‘Nobody Knows (Ladas Road),’ which features the exact same sample! Obviously, I couldn’t use it after that or everyone’s going to think I’m just copying him so I recorded something similar with a choir and reworked the whole track. Originally, I was going to use a rapper on the track but once I’d recorded with the choir, we ended up with this amazing lead vocal instead.” **“Tell Me What You Need” (feat. just lil)** “This tune started during a session with Biig Piig. I came in to write some music for her and we wrote this tune together. By the time it came to think about releasing it, she’d already done a lot of collaborations so it didn’t quite work out, but I reached out to \[UK artist\] just lil, who did a brilliant job of rerecording the vocals. Stylistically, the track’s quite influenced by Dev Hynes. I’d been listening a lot to ‘Everything is Embarrassing,’ the track he did with Sky Ferreira. He does an amazing job of sampling these old drum loops from the ’80s, but then layering them with effects and textures, so they have this amazing modern sound that harks back to music from an earlier era.” **“Dance of the Crab”** “This track samples a song called ‘A Gira’ by a Brazilian group called Trio Ternura. I’ve been a fan for ages and played it in my sets loads. Originally, I just wanted to sample it and make a track to play in my DJ sets but it turned out really well. My manager \[tracked\] down the writer’s granddaughter on Facebook and we managed to get in touch with him to clear it through that. It’s amazing because they’re all guys in their eighties in a tiny village in Brazil somewhere, but now they know their song has this other life. I was listening to a lot of amapiano at the time too, which fed into the track stylistically.” **“Define Dancing”** “This is the first track I wrote for the album and indicates what I originally intended the album to be. In the end, it generally went in a different direction but I wanted it to be a bit psychedelic but also have this really emotive, floaty darkness underpinning everything. *The Dark Side of the Moon* and *In Colour* by Jamie xx were key touchpoints for this track. I put this as the final track as it feels like a really rewarding, emotive moment and ends the journey really nicely if you’ve come all the way to the end.”

Victoria Monét is known throughout the industry for her songwriting skills, the brains behind hits for Ariana Grande, BLACKPINK, Chloe x Halle, and many more. “I moved to LA to pursue artistry and just all of the things that I dreamed for myself, and life takes you in different turns, so I ended up songwriting a lot more than recording my own music,” she tells Apple Music. Although the Sacramento native spent most of her career writing, she still released music independently with her 2014 and 2018 EP series *Nightmares & Lullabies* and *Life After Love*, but it wasn’t until 2020’s *JAGUAR* that Monét came into her own as an artist of the same stature as the ones she’d worked for. Named after the fierce jungle cat—known for lurking undetected until they’re ready to pounce—the project introduced a motif that Monét created to show her transition from illustrious songwriter to full-fledged R&B star. “*JAGUAR I* and *II* are relatives, but you see, *JAGUAR II* is an older, more developed, voluptuous older sister,” she says. “I just really wanted to make it in my eyes better than *JAGUAR I*, which I feel like I’ve done.” Co-produced by longtime collaborator D’Mile, *JAGUAR II* is a seamless continuation enlisting live musicians and delving further into the psychedelic sounds of the 1970s—an era that influenced and inspired both albums. Still, Monét takes it further by guiding listeners through different soundscapes of funk, pop, R&B, and reggae while capturing the different moods she wanted to create. Instead of songs about her experiences as a new mom and being in love, Monét decided to showcase the full spectrum of emotions that women feel, whether she’s singing about her affinity for cannabis on the Lucky Daye-assisted “Smoke,” being outside on the flirty party anthem “Party Girls,” or women’s empowerment on “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem).” “I\'m trying to listen to it from a fan\'s perspective, and I would think that people would be like, oh, she\'s going to talk about just being completely in love and wanting to get married and having kids, this white-picket-fence life,” she says. “And it\'s not that I feel like even making the album with my relationship, I had the freedom to discuss things that I may not feel currently, but they came up in the making of this album, even though I\'m not necessarily in that mindset right now.” On the swaggering “On My Mama,” Monét adds some Southern twang, interpolating Texas rapper Chalie Boy\'s 2009 track “I Look Good” for an infectious hook that makes it a soundtrack to positive affirmations about not just looking good but feeling good as well, while the follow-up “I\'m the One” continues that cocky persona over a pop-leaning track. Monét reflects on her stardom on the retro track “Hollywood,” which features legendary funk group Earth, Wind & Fire and her daughter Hazel. “Philip Bailey came in and did his vocals, but then Verdine came in on a different day to play the bass,” she explains. “Just knowing that I\'m inspired by them so much from the inception of *JAGUAR* to have them on it as an exclamation point for *JAGUAR II*, it just means so much.\"

As much as Romy Madley Croft’s debut solo album is an absorbingly personal record, its roots lie in music intended for other people. In 2019, The xx singer/guitarist met—and immediately gelled with—Fred again.. during a period of creative exploration that lead her to Los Angeles to try writing chart-topping pop songs for other artists. “I ended up writing some quite honest songs about myself, thinking someone else was going to sing them, and realizing, ‘Actually, maybe these are my songs…’” Romy tells Apple Music. Arriving in 2020, airy, anthemic debut solo single “Lifetime” was written to uplift herself during the pandemic. In stark contrast to the hush and restraint of The xx, the song leaned into the rapturous dance music influences of Romy’s youth, and it’s a direction continued on *Mid Air*. “At the time \[that The xx emerged\], I was genuinely just suited to feeling more shy and being more guarded,” she says. “It was nice to share a different side, and it definitely opened up a lot more doors in terms of the way people see me. I wanted to find a way to balance melodic, storytelling pop writing with club-referenced music, and Robyn was a big reference. She makes very emotional songs within a dance/electronic sphere. Robyn is someone that I really admire. I’ve met her a few times and I’ve sort of mentioned to her that I’m on this journey with it and she’s been really encouraging and supportive.” Co-produced with Fred again.., bandmate Jamie xx and veteran hitmaker Stuart Price, *Mid Air* succeeds in building a dance floor on which Romy can shake out her feelings. The joy and freedom of the shiny synths and skyscraping melodies serve as a misdirect to the lyrical themes of grief and heartbreak, rooted in the loss of both her parents at a young age and, recently, another very close family member. “I wrote \[lead single\] ‘Strong’ and ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as part of an ongoing ambition to remember to check in and talk to people and let things out,” she says. “I’ve had to talk about grief and my parents way more than I would if the whole album was just love songs. I’m ready to talk about it more. It’s been amazing having conversations with people that I wouldn’t normally have, and hearing and learning and connecting. People come up to me in a club to talk to me about grief and I’m like, ‘Wow, actually, this is very special.’ The fact that people feel like they can talk to me means a lot.” Let Romy guide you through *Mid Air* track by track. **“Loveher”** “This is the first song that I made with Fred after writing these songs for other people, the first track that I wrote thinking, ‘This actually is my song to sing.’ Very much the first tentative steps into this project. It opens the album because I can hear that slight nervousness in it and I shed that as the tracks go on. I had done a songwriting session with King Princess and she was like, ‘This is who I love, I’m writing a song about a girl, there’s no question.’ I was really inspired by the way that she was very comfortable with that. I thought about myself at that similar age and I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel comfortable or reassured that it would be chill for me to say that. Maybe it would’ve been fine, but in my head I was worried about it. The more young, queer artists I hear talking about their exact experiences and being really amazing, visible, inspiring people, the more I’m inspired to do my own thing and talk about my actual experiences in a clear way.” **“Weightless”** “This song is about realizing, ‘Wow, I’m really feeling all these things and that’s OK,’ and really embracing that. It still feels like it’s from the earlier, tentative time, lyrically. It was originally written as an acoustic ballad, and I wanted it to become more than that, so I went on a journey to take it into an electronic space. It was a challenge I set myself—I still wanted it to work when you take it off the track and take it back to the guitar. That’s something I admire about a well-written song.” **“The Sea”** “The lyrics for ‘The Sea’ are inspired by a trip to Ibiza. Or my vision of what it would have been like in the early 2000s—the dream of Ibiza. I went for the first time for Oliver’s \[Sim, The xx bandmate\] 30th birthday. We went out clubbing and we went on a boat and it was exactly what I had hoped it was. I’ve been back since, for my honeymoon. I also got to play Pacha in 2022, which was really amazing. But that first time, I was listening to the instrumental while I was driving around and I was thinking, ‘I want this song to feel connected to this place. I want it to feel like a home in a summer situation.’ So that’s how I framed it, lyrically.” **“One Last Time”** “I wrote this thinking it was for someone else—I didn’t have anyone specifically in mind, but just as a fan, if I had to pick someone, Beyoncé is my number-one person. Thinking it wasn’t going to be me singing pushed me to try out something new, vocally. Just pushing my voice. It was fun to come back to it and sing it in my own way. It’s one of my favorites to sing.” **“DMC”** “I love an interlude. I feel like that’s quite a pop-album thing. My friend always says that she loves a DMC corner in the club—I don’t know if everyone knows DMC is a deep, meaningful conversation, but that’s what it means to me. Those moments where you have a kind of emotional exchange somewhere that ends up being the right place, even though it’s not typically the place you have those chats. This is just a little moment of stepping outside of where we’ve been, like we’re outside the club. You have a little reset and you carry on.” **“Strong”** “I wrote this one for myself, using songwriting as a way of processing grief and my relationship to it and putting it out there. I internalized a lot of things for a long time and thought I’d put it out of sight, out of mind. I think having time off tour and being in a good place in a relationship was when it all started to come up and I had to face those things. ‘Strong’ was me just reflecting on that at that point, and just feeling it out, and trying to write around that. It was great to put it in a song that is quite uplifting and high tempo. It keeps giving different meanings to me in different contexts.” **“Twice”** “I worked on this with an amazing songwriter called Ilsey, who co-wrote ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’ \[by Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus\]. I’d been writing for other people for a while and finding it hard to make connections. I wanted something a bit more real. Ilsey has got quite a country style, so when I got paired up with her, I opened up and said, ‘This is what I’m going through,’ and she helped me write this very storytelling-like song. I’d never had a songwriter help me lyrically before, but it was really cool. It’s another one that started as a guitar ballad, but I didn’t want it to stay that way. Stuart worked on it and it evolved into what it is now—echoes of a club and then building into being a big club-experience track.” **“Did I”** “This was sonically created around the same time as ‘Strong.’ I’ve written a lot of acoustic music and I wanted to put it into a different frame, so I was playing a lot of early-2000s trance to Fred. There’s already a blueprint embedded in trance—a haunting vocal and huge chords and builds and euphoria. It’s one of my favorites, so I’ve been playing it out in clubs recently. Lyrically it reflects a part of my relationship \[with my wife\], from back when we were younger and we broke up.” **“Mid Air” (feat. Beverly Glenn-Copeland)** “I consider this to be a transitional moment on the album. The fact that Fred and I made this piece of music together is a reflection of a weird moment we were both in—it’s more winding and introspective than everything else we did together. Although there’s a lot of euphoric sounds on the album, I’m not always super upbeat, there’s times when I have a bit of a weird time mentally. It’s kind of the aftermath of the night out: ‘Twice’ and ‘Did I’ connect as a mix and ‘Mid Air’ is the musical comedown. \[American singer and composer\] Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s voice comes in as a reminder, a self check-in. Then you come back into ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as a reaction to that.” **“Enjoy Your Life”** “This was probably the most challenging song to make because it contains a lot of different elements. I’m trying to say quite a lot in it and make it danceable and contain lots of samples. Finding the balance took quite a long time. When I heard \[Beverly Glenn-Copeland\] say, ‘My mother says to me/Enjoy your life,’ I thought it was such a beautifully simple disarming sentence, but I didn’t want to just say, ‘Yeah, life’s amazing.’ I wanted there to be a journey in the song. In the verses, I’m processing some stuff, I’m having a bit of a weird time, but I’m reminding myself: Life is short, enjoy your life. I wanted there to be enough of a narrative to give that context. Just to acknowledge and then also celebrate.” **“She’s on My Mind”** “I wanted to end the album with this because it feels like the end of the night when you’re at a party and someone puts a disco song on and everyone just has their hands in their air. It’s a fun one to end on. Just embracing and accepting how you feel. From the way that I start the album—the more tentative way of singing—to the end where the last thing I sing is, ‘I don’t care anymore,’ it’s a bit of a release of pressure.”

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