Complex's Best Albums of 2021

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

For athletes of both the professional and amateur ranks, the time between seasons is an opportunity to recuperate and to sharpen their tool set for the next run. Superstar MC J. Cole, whose career has long been informed by both basketball metaphor and actual basketball playing (in May 2021, ESPN reported that Cole had joined the Basketball Africa League\'s Rwanda Patriots BBC), has crafted his *The Off-Season* mixtape in the same mold, affirming that if he’s done anything in the time since 2018’s *KOD* album, it’s get even better at what he does. The 12-track tape is at once a testament to his actual rhyme skill and the reverence he’s earned within hip-hop. He’s sourced production from Boi-1da, Timbaland, Jake One, and T-Minus, among others, and has words—but not verses—from Cam’ron, Damian Lillard, and a man he admits to having once had an actual physical alteration with, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. Though he takes time to shout out both Chief Keef and Dave East—conspicuously opposite forces in the realm of contemporary rap—proper features here come from fellow Fayetteville native Morray and “a lot” collaborator 21 Savage. Over the course of his career, Cole’s been known as something of a lone wolf—J CoLe wEnT pLaTiNuM WiTh nO fEaTuReS. But in the scope of the energy we get from him on *The Off-Season*, it’s less likely that he’s been avoiding other rappers than that he\'s just left them all behind.

“Right then, I’m ready,” Adele says quietly at the close of *30*’s opening track, “Strangers By Nature.” It feels like a moment of gentle—but firm—self-encouragement. This album is something that clearly required a few deep breaths for Tottenham’s most celebrated export. “There were moments when I was writing these songs, and even when I was mixing them and stuff like that, where I was like, ‘Maybe I don\'t need to put this album out,’” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Like, ‘Maybe I should write another.’ Just because music is my therapy. I\'m never going into the studio to be like, ‘Right, I need another hit.’ It\'s not like that for me. When something is more powerful and overwhelming \[to\] me, I like to go to a studio, because it\'s normally a basement and there\'s no fucking windows and no reception, so no one can get ahold of me. So I\'m basically running away. And no one would\'ve known I\'d written that record. Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.” But, almost two years after much of it was completed, Adele did release *30*. And remarkably, considering the world has been using her back catalog to channel its rawest emotions since 2008, this is easily Adele’s most vulnerable record. It concerns itself with Big Things Only—crippling guilt over her 2019 divorce, motherhood, daring to date as one of the world’s most famous people, falling in love—capturing perfectly the wobbly resolve of a broken heart in repair. Its songs often feel sentimental in a way that’s unusually warm and inviting, very California, and crucially: *earned*. “The album is for my son, for Angelo,” she says. “I knew I had to tell his story in a song because it was very clear he was feeling it, even though I thought I was doing a very good job of being like, ‘Everything’s fine.’ But I also knew I wasn’t being as present. I was just so consumed by so many different feelings. And he plucked up the courage to very articulately say to me, ‘You’re basically a ghost. You might as well not be here.’ What kind of poet is that? For him to be little and say ‘I can’t see you’ to my face broke my heart.” This is also Adele’s most confident album sonically. She fancied paying tribute to Judy Garland with Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (“Strangers By Nature”), so she did. “I’d watched the Judy Garland biopic,” she says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why did everyone stop writing such incredible melodies and cadences and harmonies?’” She felt comfortable working heartbreaking bedside chats with her young son and a voice memo documenting her own fragile mental state into her music on “My Little Love.” “While I was writing it, I just remember thinking of any child that’s been through divorce or any person that has been though a divorce themselves, or anyone that wants to leave a relationship and never will,” she says. “I thought about all of them, because my divorce really humanized my parents for me.” The album does not steep in sorrow and regret, however: There’s a Max Martin blockbuster with a whistled chorus (“Can I Get It”), a twinkling interlude sampling iconic jazz pianist Erroll Garner (“All Night Parking”), and the fruits of a new creative partnership with Dean Josiah Cover—aka Michael Kiwanuka, Sault, and Little Simz producer Inflo. “The minute I realized he \[Inflo\] was from North London, I wouldn’t stop talking to him,” she says. “We got no work done. It was only a couple of months after I’d left my marriage, and we got on so well, but he could feel that something was wrong. He knew that something dark was happening in me. I just opened up. I was dying for someone to ask me how I was.” One of the Inflo tracks, “Hold On,” is the album’s centerpiece. Rolling through self-loathing (“I swear to god, I am such a mess/The harder that I try, I regress”) into instantly quotable revelations (“Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get”) before reaching show-stopping defiance (“Let time be patient, let pain be gracious/Love will soon come, if you just hold on”), the song accesses something like final-form Adele. It’s a rainbow of emotions, it’s got a choir (“I got my friends to come and sing,” she tells Apple Music), and she hits notes we’ll all only dare tackle in cars, solo. “I definitely lost hope a number of times that I’d ever find my joy again,” she says. “I remember I didn’t barely laugh for about a year. But I didn’t realize I was making progress until I wrote ‘Hold On’ and listened to it back. Later, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’ve really learned a lot. I’ve really come a long way.’” So, after all this, is Adele happy that *30* found its way to the world? “It really helped me, this album,” she says. “I really think that some of the songs on this album could really help people, really change people’s lives. A song like ‘Hold On’ could actually save a few lives.” It’s also an album she feels could support fellow artists. “I think it’s an important record for them to hear,” she says. “The ones that I feel are being encouraged not to value their own art, and that everything should be massive and everything should be ‘get it while you can’… I just wanted to remind them that you don’t need to be in everyone’s faces all the time. And also, you can really write from your stomach, if you want.”

Pop music is, by design, kaleidoscopic, and Doja Cat\'s third album takes full advantage of its fluidity. *Planet Her* is ushered in on the euphoric Afropop of “Woman” and moves seamlessly into the reggaetón-kissed “Naked,” the hip-hop-meets-hyperpop of “Payday,” and the whimsical ad-lib trap of “Get Into It (Yuh)”—and that\'s just the first four songs. Later, R&B ballads and club-ready anthems also materialize from the ether, encompassing the spectrum of contemporary capital-P Pop and also the multihued sounds that are simply just popular, even if only in their corners of the internet for now. This is Doja\'s strength. She\'s long understood how mainstream sensibility interacts with counterculture (or what\'s left of it anyway, for better and worse), and she\'s nimbly able to translate both. *Planet Her* checks all the right boxes and accentuates her talent for shape-shifting—she sounds just as comfortable rapping next to Young Thug or JID as she does crooning alongside The Weeknd or Ariana Grande—but it\'s so pristine, so in tune with the music of the moment that it almost verges on parody. Is this Doja\'s own reflection or her reflecting her fans back to themselves? Her brilliance lies in the fact that the answer doesn\'t much matter. The best pop music is nothing if not a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, its brightest stars so uniquely themselves and yet whatever else they need to be, too.

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

“Take this opportunity to learn from my mistakes. You don’t have to guess if something is love. Love is shown through actions. Stop making excuses for people who don’t show up for you. Don’t ignore the red flags. And don’t think you have to stay somewhere ’cause you can’t find better—you can and you will. Don’t settle for less—you don’t deserve it and neither does your family.” —Summer Walker, in an exclusive message she provided to Apple Music about her second album

There’s a liquid, surreal feeling that runs through *Pray for Haiti*, a sense of touching solid ground only to leave it just as fast. Between the bars of Newark rapper Mach-Hommy\'s dusty, fragmented beats (many courtesy of the production regulars of Griselda Records), he glimpses thousand-dollar brunches (“Au Revoir”), bloodshed (“Folie Á Deux”), and the ghosts of his ancestors (“Kriminel”) with spectral detachment—not uncaring so much as stoic, the oracle at the outskirts who moves silently through a crowd. He likes it grimy (“Magnum Band,” “Makrel Jaxon”) and isn’t above materialism or punchlines (“Watch out, I ain’t pulling no punches/So real I make Meghan Markle hop out and get the Dutches”), but is, above all, a spiritualist, driven by history (like a lot of his albums, this one is peppered with Haitian Creole), feel, and a quiet ability to turn street rap into meditation. “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and Ebonics,” he raps on “The 26th Letter”—a joke because he knows it’s not that simple, and a flex because, for him, it is.

By the time he was ready to drop *Life of a DON*, Houston MC Don Toliver (an alum of Apple Music’s Up Next initiative) had already notched two wins in the long-playing project column (2018’s *Donny Womack* and 2020’s *Heaven or Hell*). Still, *Life of a DON* meant something different for Toliver, who spoke to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about the process of putting it together. “\[I’m\] very proud of this album in particular, because I just went full-fledged Don mode and just took it upon myself to try to make this album as best as I could,” he says. Within *Life of a DON*, that means very little interference from his Cactus Jack boss (Travis Scott appears on two tracks, “Flocky Flocky” and “You”) and plenty of Toliver’s distorted wail through stories about how extravagant his life has become (“Way Bigger”), what he can do for a potential lover (“What You Need”), and some of Toliver\'s favorite pursuits (“Drugs N Hella Melodies”). He sounds plenty in touch with his vices across the project, but maybe more pertinent is how frequently he volunteers that living fast and chasing women has changed his perspective on the world, expecting nothing in return for his efforts. “You\'ll hear all type of emotions, and different little stories or renditions throughout this album,” Toliver says. “*Life of a DON* is just me giving you whatever I can possibly give you for my life in 16 songs, and whatever you take from it is what you take from it.”

In the five years between Shelley FKA DRAM\'s debut album, *Big Baby DRAM*, and its follow-up, *Shelley FKA DRAM*, the singer ascended through music\'s ranks (and the charts, thanks to smash hit “Broccoli”) with a radiant smile and a preternatural knack for levity in song, and then seemingly left as quickly as he\'d arrived. His rise also set off his spiral as he battled through addiction, largely going quiet after 2018, before getting sober in 2020. His rebrand from DRAM to Shelley was, at least in part, an effort to separate the bubbly demeanor that became his staple from the sensual lover that steers *Shelley FKA DRAM*. To that end, much of what has always made Shelley compelling remains intact here: His vocals are agile and opulent, slipping easily between buttery tones (as on “Something About Us”) and soaring falsettos (as on “Married Woman”), while his personality shines in moments of playful flirtation and earnest romance that especially come to life on the album\'s duets. There\'s a lushness to the instrumentation and arrangements that allows him to shine as not only a singer but a showman. The pacing of songs like “Exposure” or “Beautiful” has the improvisational feel of both a pulpit and a jazz lounge; others have spoken intros and outros as if recorded straight from the stage. It all combines to create an at once modern yet old-school collection—little innuendo is shrouded in abstraction, but he has a winking charm that calls to mind male R&B singers of the \'80s, whose ways of melding genuine sex appeal and lighthearted banter captured the era. It\'s a niche that few of his peers are capable of inhabiting (and certainly not with such conviction), and on *Shelley FKA DRAM*, he emphasizes the sublime style that\'s always been behind the smile.

When *The Plugs I Met* dropped in June of 2019, Benny the Butcher was a promising if somewhat secondary member of the then-burgeoning Griselda Records empire. Upon the release of *The Plugs I Met 2*, composed with New York production stalwart Harry Fraud, he’s a certified star, so comfortable in his personal trajectory that’s he’s had the time—and resources—to launch BSF Records, a label comprising members of his Black Soprano Family crew. Save for Rick Hyde on “Survivor’s Remorse,” BSF is largely absent from *The Plugs I Met 2*, Benny having reserved the majority of the project’s guest spots for NYC rap legends French Montana, Fat Joe, Jim Jones, and the dearly departed Chinx. But no Griselda project is about the guests, and *The Plugs I Met 2* is no different in that regard, Benny painting vivid pictures of street life as he sees it. “For street n\*\*\*as I’m the new catalyst, but who fathomed it?/My heroes in federal sweatsuits and New Balances,” he raps on “When Tony Met Sosa.” The project on the whole is something akin to getting reps up in an empty gym: impressive, to be sure, but also exactly what we know he’s capable of.

A combination of toxic masculinity and acceptance of truth which is inevitably heartbreaking. Executive produced by me, Noah “40” Shebib, Oliver El-Khatib, and Noel Cadastre. Dedicated to Nadia Ntuli and Mercedes Morr. RIP 💖 —Drake

What does an MC from Las Vegas sound like? It’s a funny question to not have an obvious answer for in 2021, but one that seems that much sillier when you consider who it is that will likely become one of the city’s first reference points. Across his debut album *The Melodic Blue*, 20-year-old Vegas native Baby Keem sounds firstly like a combination of his biggest influences (Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Kendrick Lamar), but also, maybe more notably, like he could be from anywhere, because that’s what an emergent MC sounds like in 2021. What other emergent MCs don’t have, however, are Keem’s dedication to airing out multiple flows over the course of a single song, his gift for spellbinding non sequitur, or the fearlessness with which he approaches song-making. They likely aren’t cousins with Kendrick Lamar either, but if Lamar’s scarcity between projects tells us anything, it’s that he’s not stepping to the mic for just anybody. In fact, it is Lamar who sounds like he’s doing his best to keep up with Keem over the course of their *The Melodic Blue* collaborations (“range brothers,” “family ties”). But keeping up with Keem is no easy task. He’s hilarious, even when he’s trying to get a point across (“I must confess, I am a mess, I cannot fix it/Lil baby thick, Margiela sweats, look at my dick print,” he raps on “vent”), and he switches flows so often you’d think he had some kind of tic. The album’s only other guests are Travis Scott (“durag activity”) and Don Toliver (“cocoa”). Which just leaves that much more room for Keem to dance across octaves, drop into a whisper, deadpan, shift to double-time, and sing, all of which he does over the course of just “trademark usa.” One song into his debut and Keem has unloaded a display so excessive that a forward-thinking manager might ask him to save something for a deluxe version. But there’s not likely much you could say to someone tasked with putting Las Vegas back on the map.

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”

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

When it’s all said and done, there’s no telling how COVID-19 will have affected the artistry of some of our favorite music-makers—except in the case of Moneybagg Yo, who tells Apple Music very plainly that it made him a more focused MC. “I just feel like a lot of my old music the fans didn\'t accept how I wanted them to accept it,” he says. “I just was in a different stage of my life and I was moving around a lot. The COVID situation had to happen, and by that happening, I sat down and thought about everything and I made the biggest songs of my career—of my life—in the pandemic.” Here, Yo might be referring to the lead single from his fourth album *A Gangsta’s Pain*, the Future collaboration and instantaneous smash hit “Hard for the Next.” Or maybe he’s referring to an altogether trippy exploration of relationships through the eyes of a lean addict called “Wockesha.” Maybe he’s just that proud of the hard-charging “Shottas,” where he debuts a completely new flow. But regardless of which songs he’s referring to, the M-town representer claims that the break in action the world was forced to observe showed him exactly who he is. “I feel like by me sitting down and just figuring it out, I\'m going to go back to the roots,” he says. “I\'m giving them everything they love about Moneybagg Yo.” Below, the Memphis MC breaks down how we got the best of him on his favorite tracks from *A Gangsta’s Pain*. **“Hard for the Next”** “Me and Future, every time we get in the kitchen, the chemistry is always there, so I feel like this kind of happened naturally. When he gets you in there, he\'s going to lock you in and play all of what he\'s been working on. So, he played me everything and he kept skipping by stuff. I’m like, \'Bruh, go back! Go back to that. You\'re trying to hide this joint from me.\' He was like, \'Nah, bruh, you can have whatever you want.\' So my engineer got the session, I went back and recorded it, sent it to him, and the rest was history.” **“GO!” feat. BIG30** “I felt like I got to do one of them songs on here to where like I\'m just giving it to them. I\'m just on it. I ain\'t let up off the beat, just tempo. I got to lace BIG30 up on it because that\'s my artist, I want to see him win.” **“Projects”** “I was going through like, ‘What am I missing?’ And then I get the call that Pharrell wants to lock in for two days straight, so I was a little— you know how it be. Then, I came to the studio and I just laced it.” **“Certified Neptunes” feat. Pharrell Williams** “Pharrell had the chorus already laced up when I walked in. And then he was like, ‘Look, this is how I do it. My stuff, when I cook up, it be like a skit, so this is where I want to go with it. Just go in and then we\'re going to draw around it.’ It\'s like the trap energy, gutter-type Pharrell on that one.” **“Change Da Subject”** “This the type of song, you go in the booth and you just close your eyes, and you think about everything. You think about everything like how it started, where you\'re trying to go, who you do it for; all your accomplishments. You probably heard me saying something like, \'No more pain and suffering.\' It\'s a good feeling to be there.” **“Wockesha”** “‘Wockesha’ was just was like one of them songs like, you rap about your habits, you rap about what you got going on in your personal life. Because you know, sometimes when you\'re in a relationship with a girl and you got stuff going on, it\'s like you be back and forth: You can say, ‘It\'s not gon\' be this,’ and it ends up being that again. It\'s like relapsing. And that\'s the same thing people do with drugs and other stuff. They\'ll say, \'I\'m through doing this, I\'m through doing that,\' but then they\'ll get back on it. So, I just went off the concept of that. I\'m just painting pictures.” **“One of Dem Nights”** “Jhené \[Aiko\] is one of my favorites. And then I was in the studio, the first beat that YC played, it was on point. I told him where I wanted to go, who I wanted to put on it. As soon as he went that way, it was crazy. I just started mumbling the words and I went in there and did it. I sent it to her, they sent it back. Real classic.” **“Shottas (Lala)”** “I was in the studio just joking around. It was me and the guys, we was just in there just kicking it and YC just comes in there playing beats. I was like, ‘Man, what the hell is this?’ This is one of them type of vibes you just—it don\'t matter what you say, just go in that joint and just say whatever comes to mind.”

“Hopefully this is the start of something new—no more five-year gaps,” Isaiah Rashad tells Apple Music of his long-awaited third album. It’s been that long between *The House Is Burning* and 2016’s *The Sun’s Tirade*, but the Chattanooga rapper easily proves why he’s worth waiting for. The songs here are kinetic even in their nocturnal wooziness and precise even in their unpretentiousness. Many of them, he says, were born from “scratches” or songs he just made on a whim with a minimal amount of time invested alongside Dallas producer Kal Banx, who’s credited on most of the tracks. True to Rashad’s geographic background, there’s a decidedly Southern and soulful aura that informs the album’s momentum and references. Tucked beneath the layers of syrupy melodies are nods to Pimp C, Goodie Mob, Three 6 Mafia, and Anthony Hamilton. Within the sounds and lyrics, he lights up a map to his musical roots and the proud Dirty South lineage in which he operates. “I tried to hone in on the energy of all the types of music I grew up listening to—Texas bounce, Louisiana bounce, a little bit of neo-soul in there,” he says. “I tried to update it, flip it, and make it apply to how I be feeling nowadays.” Below, he shares a bit of background about a handful of the album’s standouts. **“From the Garden”** “Originally, the beat was something else. I\'d made it at my mom\'s crib about four years ago, and we just switched the beat because it still sounded cool. We were like, \'Why waste it? Why have it just sitting to the side?\' So we put Uzi on it. He said he was going to do some s\*\*t for me if I asked him, so we asked him, and he did it.” **“Lay Wit Ya”** “‘Lay Wit Ya’ came from a lockout that we had had like last January. Again, it was just a scratch—a scratch idea that we turned full once we had listened to it a couple of times. Hollywood Cole threw us the beat. Made it in about 10 minutes. That was it. I just liked it.” **“Claymore”** “I made that song for Smino. And if I didn\'t use it, I was going to try to give it to him. And then he finally got on it, but I think his album was about done and he didn\'t really need it, so we used it. Most everybody on my album I listen to, so most of the tracks were made like \'oh, this would be a tight Smino song\' or that type of s\*\*t if it\'s fitting. I be having that type of stuff in mind.” **“Headshots”** “People say \[this reminds them of\] Outkast, but I was doing an Anthony Hamilton impression more than anything else. The verses is just— maybe I can get how they get some Outkast in that, but that was a whole bunch of Zay right there. But the inspiration behind the track was really Anthony Hamilton, honestly.” **“All Herb”** “\[Amindi and I\] got a nice little chemistry. We got a couple of songs on the project—she did the intro with me too, and another one, ‘True Story.’ But yeah, we made that on the spot. Me and Devin \[Malik\] made the beat. It was like a simple loop. We added a drum, and then I started like mumbling the hook. Once I came up with the hook, the cadence for the verses was easy. But I didn\'t really want to finish the verses, because I was like, \'It sounds like a whole bunch of me.\' So I called Amindi, and she came and she wrote. It\'s pretty quick when we\'re in a zone.” **“Hey Mista”** “Me and Kal \[Banx\] were at his house, and our whole plan was to freestyle—just make a beat and whatever comes to mind. It\'s like trusting the whole idea of \'I don\'t really make nothing bad. I\'m incapable of making something bad, so let me just trust in this.\' We went into it with that type of mentality, and we freestyled that whole motherf\*\*king thing. Like the whole track, it\'s really a big-ass joke. The second verse is a whole joke—every line is some s\*\*t that made me laugh and it just sounded funny.” **“Wat U Sed”** “‘Wat U Sed’ is another homage to the South—I\'m just now realizing that I do those a lot. I didn\'t want to do a whole bunch of tracks with cowbells, but that was one that was like, hell yeah. This sounds like some of that—there\'s this producer named ICYTWAT who has this very specific type of sound. And it kind of gave me some of that old *Kush & Orange Juice* vibes from Wiz, too, like \'Mezmorized\' and s\*\*t.” **“Score”** “For me ‘Score’ is probably one of my favorite songs out the whole album, just because of how f\*\*king different it is. I think I really got off an R&B song, and I hadn\'t got one off for real on the other ones. So I think I\'m probably most proud of that one.” **“THIB”** “That was probably the first track I made for my album. Towards the end of the whole s\*\*t, I was thinking about changing the title to something else, but it was like, nah, we can’t leave that off. It was definitely like the inspiration behind just about the whole soundscape of the album. I wanted it to be like dark and winding, sounds like two or three in the morning. That\'s a pretty constant theme with my music anyway. I like to listen to s\*\*t at night—when all my obligations are done, I\'m a night person. When I\'m in the mix, I\'m an early riser, but when I\'m just enjoying music on some vacay s\*\*t, definitely nighttime. So that\'s the type of stuff I like to make.”

Westside Gunn has said he doesn\'t plan to rap forever, eyeing instead a more behind-the-scenes, executive-producer kind of role for his future. Thus it\'s fitting that *Hitler Wears Hermes 8: Sincerely Adolf*, the first half of a double-volume project, is as much an exercise in curation as it is a display of his own prowess. He selects some of the finest beats of his career; soulful loops abound, but there\'s also a refined, cinematic quality to them that lays a smooth path for the rapper and his features to skate on. And skate they do: With features from the likes of Mach-Hommy, Boldy James, Jadakiss, and Lil Wayne as well as his Griselda counterparts Benny the Butcher and Conway the Machine, Westside Gunn brings out the best of guests just as they do him, and they fill the album with enough one-liners and high-fashion coke raps to last a lifetime. If the second half resembles this one—and if, indeed, the Buffalo rapper is stepping back from the spotlight on wax—his parting gift will be the way he and his associates have cornered the market for brash, mafioso-style rhymes that remind of bygone eras yet are perfectly suited for a modern landscape where trap rap reigns. The Flygod does it like no other.

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

On 2020’s *Changes*, the newly married pop star extolled the healing powers of love and faith, serving up sensual, clear-eyed R&B ballads about devotion, commitment, and inner peace. Justin Bieber’s sixth album *Justice* continues that narrative, but finds inspiration in something arguably even more novel for one of the world’s most in-demand pop stars: downtime. Like all of us, Bieber spent 2020 holed up in lockdown, unable to travel or tour due to the global pandemic. But rather than doom-scrolling social media, he embraced the relative quiet: He got rid of his cell phone, dedicated himself to therapy, and cut off work at 6 pm each night to hang out with his wife Hailey. The change proved to be nothing short of transformative, and the resulting songs—a mix of soft-focus romantic reverie that recalls ’80s pop (“Deserve You,” “Anyone”) and reflective, confessional ballads about searching for forgiveness (“Hold On,” “Lonely”)—exude the contentment of someone who’s come out on the other side. Bieber tends to use his marriage as a symbol of all his blessings, but these feel like more than wide-eyed love songs; he could be singing about any number of things—religion, perspective, peace and quiet—that ultimately brought him back from the brink. (In a 2020 documentary, he confessed to having endured a mental health crisis in which he felt, in his words, “really suicidal.”) Now, overflowing with gratitude and modesty, he sounds acutely aware of his good fortune. “Never know when my mind\'s gonna turn on me/But you\'re the one I call for security,” he sings on “Unstable,” a contemplative duet with The Kid LAROI. “Through everything you’ve been my rock/I think you\'re the only thing I didn\'t get wrong.” In track after track of heart-on-sleeve pop songs—with Khalid (“As I Am”), Dominic Fike (“Die for You”), BEAM (“Love You Different”), and Burna Boy (“Loved by You”)—he apologizes for acting selfishly and promises to do better. “I still relive the second I met my biggest blessing,” he sings on “2 Much.” “Prayed for you/And look what God has done.”

Snoh Aalegra\'s songs about romantic love tend to feel at once sensual and wounded. But even in the most downtrodden moments of her third full-length album *TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES*, her voice still draws you closer even as the lyrics suggest pulling away. The singer continues to assert her presence on an R&B stage that welcomes both the soulful contours of her voice and the nuance of her lyrics.

“I think that there is always reward in choosing to be the most vulnerable,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “I have to remind myself that that\'s one of the strongest things you can do, is to be witness to being vulnerable. So I’m just trying to lean into that, and all the emotions that come with that. The whole point of it is human connection.” With 2018’s crossover breakthrough *Golden Hour*, Musgraves guided listeners through a Technicolor vision of falling in love, documenting the early stages of a romantic relationship and the blissed-out, dreamy feelings that often come with them. But the rose-colored glasses are off on *star-crossed*, which chronicles the eventual dissolution of that same relationship and the ensuing fallout. Presented as a tragedy in three acts, *star-crossed* moves through sadness, anger, and, eventually, hopeful redemption, with Musgraves and collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk broadening the already spacey soundscape of *Golden Hour* into something truly deserving of the descriptors “lush” and “cinematic.” (To boot, the album releases in tandem with an accompanying film.) Below, Musgraves shares insight into several of *star-crossed*’s key tracks. **“star-crossed”** \"\[Guided psychedelic trips\] are incredible. At the beginning of this year, I was like, \'I want the chance to transform my trauma into something else, and I want to give myself that opportunity, even if it\'s painful.\' And man, it was completely life-changing in so many ways, but it also triggered this whole big bang of not only the album title, but the song \'star-crossed,\' the concept, me looking into the structure of tragedies themselves as an art form throughout time. It brought me closer to myself, the living thread that moves through all living things, to my creativity, the muse.\" **“if this was a movie..”** \"I remember being in the house, things had just completely fallen apart in the relationship. And I remember thinking, \'Man, if this was a movie, it wouldn\'t be like this at all.\' Like, I\'d hear his car, he\'d be running up the stairs and grabbing my face and say we\'re being stupid and we\'d just go back to normal. And it\'s just not like that. I think I can be an idealist, like an optimist in relationships, but I also love logic. I do well with someone who can also recognize common sense and logic, and doesn\'t get, like, lost in like these lofty emotions.\" **“camera roll”** \"I thought I was fine. I was on an upswing of confidence. I\'m feeling good about these life changes, where I\'m at; I made the right decision and we\'re moving forward. And then, in a moment of, I don\'t know, I guess boredom and weakness, I found myself just way back in the camera roll, just one night alone in my bedroom. Now I\'m back in 2018, now I\'m in 2017. And what\'s crazy is that we never take pictures of the bad times. There\'s no documentation of the fight that you had where, I don\'t know, you just pushed it a little too far.\" **“hookup scene”** \"So it was actually on Thanksgiving Day, and I had been let down by someone who was going to come visit me. And it was kind of my first few steps into exploring being a single 30-something-year-old person, after a marriage and after a huge point in my career, more notoriety. It was a really naked place. We live in this hookup culture; I\'m for it. I\'m for whatever makes you feel happy, as long as it\'s safe, doesn\'t hurt other people, fine. But I\'ve just never experienced that, the dating app culture and all that. It was a little shocking. And it made me just think that we all have flaws.\" **“gracias a la vida”** \"It was written by Violeta Parra, and I just think it\'s kind of astounding that she wrote that song. It was on her last release, and then she committed suicide. And this was basically, in a sense, her suicide note to the world, saying, \'Thank you, life. You have given me so much. You\'ve given me the beautiful and the terrible, and that has made up my song.\' Then you have Mercedes Sosa, who rerecords the song. Rereleases it. It finds new life. And then here I am. I\'m this random Texan girl. I\'m in Nashville. I\'m out in outer space. I\'m on a mushroom trip. And this song finds me in that state and inspires me to record it. It keeps reaching through time and living on, and I wanted to apply that sonically to the song, too.\"

“So when my brother died, probably like three days after, I hopped right back in the studio,” Maxo Kream tells Apple Music. “Not on no super rushing shit, but just tryna catch my vibe. Because he always told me, ‘Never stop this music shit.’ He always told me to keep going, so I was like, I gotta turn it up for bro.” This, in a nutshell, is the driving force behind Maxo Kream’s *WEIGHT OF THE WORLD* project. It comes to fans two years after 2019’s acclaimed *Brandon Banks* and after some serious soul-searching spurred by the murder of Maxo’s brother, an MC in his own right called Money Madu—and then the COVID-19 pandemic. Maxo will say that the pandemic did little to affect his day-to-day, but the time he had to reflect—coupled with the passing of one of the most important people in his life—wrenched from him his most honest and autobiographical work to date. The MC unfurls details about the life experiences that built him on songs like “11:59,” “FRFR,” and a particularly heavy late-album stretch that features “GREENER KNOTS,” “MAMA’S PURSE,” and “TRIPS.” He can be so open on record that you might assume it difficult for him to give more insight into his thought process, but he’s taken time below to talk us through some of the standout tracks on *WEIGHT OF THE WORLD*. **“CRIPSTIAN”** “‘CRIPSTIAN’ was a song I already had, but it felt like it was a good intro song. Very serious, very mature, very on topic. I felt like I needed to start my project with that because even though I got a big persona and shit and I be having fun, I still gotta cater to my core fanbase.” **“11:59”** “I just be wanting people to know that shit that they think they doing, I really did that shit. But ain’t nothing wrong with growing your standards, getting your mind right, getting your frame right. It’s life lessons.” **“BIG PERSONA”** “Persona is what we push. That’s like the clique, that’s like the gang. RIP my brother—after he passed away, we really started to embrace the persona shit. The song is actually—I don\'t want to say the only, but one of the few positive songs I did in a long time at that time. No killing, no robbing, no drug dealing, no trauma, just balling and being positive.” **“DON’T PLAY WITH SHAWTY ASS”** “When I heard that beat, I was like, this shit stupid, super crazy. I liked it ’cause ain’t nothing else like that on the tape. I’ll try new types of beats: soulful beats, real guitars, real piano—not just like acoustic, trap beats. Really experiment. And like, my whole process I brought in Dom, Teej, Reginald Helms, Monte Booker, Guru, Bankroll Gotti, I was having a workshop. Like producers working, all that shit. I had like a real camp, like a real workshop for the tape.” **“LOCAL JOKER”** “I felt like COVID humbled a n\*\*\*a so many ways. I ain\'t talking about financing—it stopped shows, it ain’t really nothing financially—but like accessibility, being around people. It really made me get more down to earth. At the same time I might be contradicting myself ’cause I am local. Like you can come to Houston and catch me at a sneaker store, a restaurant. I really just be outside.” **“WORTHLESS”** “So the zone I was in for this was the same zone I was in for every song because I took Adderall on every fucking song. Like I think I made this shit during a comedown. \[The title is\] probably like a little exaggeration, because I\'m not strung out on Adderall. I don\'t even take Adderall if I\'m not rapping. Like, how many people do you know that take Adderall to pass college tests or to finish papers? I just be using it to make music. Same thing.” **“GREENER KNOTS”** “I\'m just being real, I don\'t know what to tell you. I\'m different. I ain\'t like anybody else. If it’s anything I’m rapping about, that shit comes from the heart. Especially with this tape. I put blood, sweat, and tears in this. I ain’t gon\' say tears, but shit, it was some tears, though.” **“TRIPS”** “I was going through it when my brother passed away. I felt like I needed to get something off my chest. I felt like I wasn’t gonna be able to rap about it again. I don’t even listen to the song, for real. The only song I don\'t go back and jam is \'TRIPS.\'”

Over the last few years, IDK has earned a reputation for looking at the world from a different angle, whether he’s crafting dense and detailed concept albums about the existence of God (2019’s *Is He Real?*), starting business programs at Harvard, or helping people in prison get their GEDs. On his second LP, the London-born, Maryland-raised rapper (whose name stands for Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge) channels the crossover eclecticism of peak Kanye West, shifting comfortably between warped soul (“Dogs Don’t Lie”) and off-kilter, Young Thug-enriched trap (“PradadaBang”), always allowing for the deeply personal (“Cry in Church”) to shine through.

Samples have long been part of the lifeblood of Wale\'s catalog, but on *Folarin II*, they are prominent, offering insights about who and what has inspired the D.C. rapper. “I give flowers to my inspirations, my OGs, my contemporaries, my peers, and myself,” he tells Apple Music\'s Nadeska of the album, his seventh. The three lead singles were the first hint. “Angles,” “Down South,” and “Poke It Out” all are built around the familiarity of their samples: Diddy’s 2002 “I Need a Girl (Pt. 1),” Mike Jones\' 2004 “Still Tippin\',” and Q-Tip\'s 1999 “Vivrant Thing,” respectively. Each one is designed to play on nostalgia, while also spotlighting Wale\'s dexterity. Other gems include the regret-tinged “Dearly Beloved,” which features a dazzling loop of Jamie Foxx\'s performance on his eponymous TV show, and the flirtatious “Caramel,” which functions as an homage to legendary producer (and D.C. native) Chucky Thompson, who died in August of 2021 from COVID complications. “He produced the original \'Caramel Kisses\' by Faith \[Evans\],” Wale says. “I just want to send a special shout-out to him, because our last conversation was about that record and sampling it, so that\'s a special piece to the project for me.” But for as much as Wale (deservedly) places himself in dialogue with greats past and present, the thing that separates him remains his ability to bring the lively sound of his hometown to wider audiences. It\'s in the subtle go-go textures of “More Love” and the outright bounce beat of “Jump In,” as the rapper glides across the percussion. *Folarin II* may have been made as a way for Wale to dole out the respect he\'s craved for himself, but it\'s high time to give it back.

The week before Yebba released her debut, she got one powerful boost from none other than Drake, who gave the Memphis singer an interlude on his *Certified Lover Boy* album, and named it after her to boot (“Yebba’s Heartbreak”). Her brief inclusion was a sample of her charms, but *Dawn*, which was lovingly produced by Mark Ronson, offers a more robust idea of one of her greatest strengths—her breathy, soulful voice, which she uses to bring emotional depth and texture to her lyrics. A song like “October Sky” becomes a dazzling yet devastating ballad of grief honoring her mother. “Now I work in the city and I blend into the crowd/And the pеople grieve with mе since the towers came down,” she sings, filling the final syllables of each line with soul. “You could cut the pollution with a butter knife/You could wake up at two and then party all night/But I\'m missin\' my mama, so I stand on the street and get high.” It\'s poetry as is, but Yebba makes it magic. Such heart-wrenching tenderness is her sweet spot—see, for example, the mellow opener “How Many Years” and closer “Paranoia Purple”—but alongside a rapper like A$AP Rocky or against more throbbing, danceable beats like on “Love Came Down,” we are able to hear her voice in all of its soaring glory. Enchantment seems to come easy for Yebba, as she soothes and stuns all at once.

The first step of listening to Young Thug is to discard any and all expectations. The next is to prepare. For what? One can never be entirely certain. At minimum, brace for a reintroduction to the polymathic Atlanta rapper—over 20 projects in, and he remains incalculable. There\'s a tiny bit of precedent for *Punk* in the country melodies of 2017\'s *BEAUTIFUL THUGGER GIRLS*, but even its title is a bait-and-switch. There\'s plenty of guitars, though they are acoustic rather than electric, and they tend to pulse more than thrash. From the outset, his aim is to disarm. An air of solemnity hangs over the album. Sometimes it makes sense, as on “Contagious,” a reflection on the highs and lows of fame, or “Stupid/Asking,” a two-part lovesick ballad that doubles as a display of Thug\'s singular vocal charisma. At other points, it seems almost opposed to the subject matter—the flex-filled “Insure My Wrist,” the gorgeously sappy standout “Love You More”—because Thug has always intrinsically understood the power of contrasting tones as a means of drawing out a range of emotions. Perhaps the biggest testament to his shape-shifting finesse, though, is the way the thunderous roar of songs like “Rich N\*\*\*a Shit” and “Bubbly” doesn\'t interrupt the concept but instead feels essential to it; the range is as much the point as the aesthetic. Still. In the end, any words that could describe *Punk*—pensive but playful, measured yet mercurial, bluesy folk music dressed up as trap rap—feel woefully inadequate to capture Thug\'s present essence, let alone his past, and certainly never his future. Perhaps that\'s the most punk thing of all.

If the first *King’s Disease* project was Nas reveling in the legacy he’d sown over three-plus decades in the game, its sequel—arriving just short of a year later—is the legendary MC settling that much further into what he thinks great rap should sound like in 2021. In this case, that’s another full-length project co-executive-produced by celebrated Fontana, California-hailing beatsmith Hit-Boy, this time featuring a handful of eyebrow-raising moments like the pairing of hip-hop legends EPMD and Eminem (“EPMD 2”), a revisitation of the static—and eventual reconciliation—he shared with 2Pac (“Death Row East”), and a brand-new rap verse from the illustrious Ms. Lauryn Hill (“Nobody”). Not unlike its predecessor, *King’s Disease II* features a small handful of guests, something Nas saw fit to acknowledge in rhyme on “Moments”: “My whole career I steered away from features/But I figured it’s perfect timing to embrace the leaders.” While that first statement is a bit of revisionist history, we won’t pretend that sharing airspace with the don hasn’t always been—and isn’t still—something of an honor, one he’s chosen to bestow here upon A Boogie wit da Hoodie, YG, and Hit-Boy. He contextualizes this particularly well toward that same song’s end, reminding us of his impact when he cites “moments you can’t relive/Like your first time bugging from something that Nas said.”

“Fifth records are actually a lot of people’s best records,” James Blake tells Apple Music. “You’ve had all the practice of making albums, taken a few different directions, and by then have usually reached your thirties where you’ve got a bunch of stuff out of your system. So you finally decide to just be yourself. And suddenly, everyone’s thrilled.” *Friends That Break Your Heart* is Blake’s fifth album. While he’s too coy to personally anoint it his best work, the record does feel invigoratingly apart from the North London-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first four. There’s the emotional payload of any Blake enterprise, but here he detonates through an earthier and more unguarded sonic arsenal. “It’s the most direct songwriting of anything I’ve done,” he says. “Whether it’s a sad song or an uplifting song, each emotion I’ve gone for is a more raw version of that thing on at least the last two records. I was working stuff out on those records, and I am here, too, but at 32, I’m starting to become more sure of myself in lots of ways. This record is very sure of itself.” The title here suggests a twist on a classic breakup album—a documentation of how we negotiate non-romantic partings. “There doesn’t seem to be a protocol for how to treat someone who’s breaking up with a friend,” he says. “We’re expected to move on pretty quick from deep lifelong friendships. But you can’t make old friends, as they say.” Can the COVID-inspired events of 2020 and 2021 take the blame for the demise of certain relationships? “I think what’s happened partly makes the topic of this album so pertinent,” he says. “We lost some of the parameters that kept friendships together. And it’s been a time for analyzing and reflecting what the qualities in friends that you actually need in your life are—and facing up to your own failings as one. Being an infantilized C-list pop star doesn’t really set you up to be the best friend in the world. But also, when I needed them and help most, I realized that most of those people just didn’t know what to do.” Blake has been candid about requiring that help in the past, and fortunately, the various COVID lockdowns proved beneficial to the creation of this record—which had a positive knock-on effect for his mental health. “I realized that I actually have a lot of control over my mental health,” he says. “What the lockdowns did was force me to say, ‘I can actually do this. I can actually block this out, and actually lift myself out of certain things.’ Previously I’d relied on other means. And I think that allows music to flow easier because being present and overcoming mental ill health is good for creativity.” Below, Blake takes us through his beautiful album, track by track. **“Famous Last Words”** “I don\'t agonize over tracklisting. I think it\'s like a DJ set, and a DJ set needs its peaks and troughs and moments of reflection. I spend so long writing the actual song and producing the song, by the time it comes to sequencing the tracklist, I\'m like, ‘Oh god, just put it in an order, man.’ This isn\'t a love song. But it is kind of a love song. It\'s kind of a breakup song. It\'s weird. I think it blurs the line between friendship and romance. With friendships, it’s not necessarily that the feelings are romantic, but you can genuinely love someone and it hurt like that.” **“Life Is Not the Same”** “You meet some people and they can just have an effect on you. It could be that they just sparkle, and you’ve got no idea why, but you’re doing things differently, or saying different stuff to impress them, and it doesn’t mean you’re weak or easily influenced—well, maybe it means you’re easily influenced a little bit—but it takes a special person to do that. I can take accountability for being willing to bend for someone. Certain people, for example, have taught me that I needed to develop a thicker skin and that I was too ready to give up control to someone else. I clearly needed to have more self-belief, because if I was so easily swayed then maybe I’d miscalculated my own self-worth.” **“Coming Back” (feat. SZA)** “I was doing a session with \[US artist and songwriter\] Starrah, who casually mentioned SZA was going to come by the studio. So I played her a bunch of stuff, she sang over it, and we hit it off straight away. It took a while to figure out how to produce what we landed on, though. Long story short: My production wasn’t hitting. You could hear that SZA and I sounded good together—but I hadn’t figured out how to best support her vocal because it was a song with no chorus. We are used to those structures as a society, so when you start taking apart those structures, you’ve really got to replace it properly. A bit like gluten-free bread. I realized I needed to put a donk on it, essentially. I just had to make it more banger-y. I tried doing the ambient thing, I tried making it really beautiful, and it didn’t work. I have it in my locker, and occasionally that power needs to be drawn upon.” **“Funeral”** “This song is all me, done on a very sunny but slightly miserable day. I was thinking about how it feels not to be heard, and to worry that people have given up on you. During lockdown I specifically felt that. It had been many years since I had really popped up and done forward-facing stuff like interviews.” **“Frozen” (feat. JID & SwaVay)** “Quite a spooky instrumental, and my vocals come in a little off-kilter, a little creepy. JID and SwaVay kill it over a beat I actually originally wrote for JID. It ended up not really fitting his record, which I found very lucky because secretly I wanted it for myself. It felt a bit like when you set someone up to cancel on you—my favorite feeling. Jameela \[Jamil, Blake’s partner and co-producer on the album\] suggested putting SwaVay on it because I’d been working with him for a couple of years. Totally right. Good A&R instincts.” **“I\'m So Blessed You\'re Mine”** “The album is sort of split between these Frankenstein’s monsters that were very exciting to put together and songs that happened very quickly. This was somewhere in the middle, and I got to work with some of my favorite people on it—Khushi, Dominic Maker, Josh Stadlen, Jameela. I want to get out of the way so we end up with the best piece of music we can make. And maybe have a nice chat about something before we start. There was no chatting back on album one, say, because I had way too much social anxiety.” **“Foot Forward”** “Metro Boomin is back! He knows I’m often into his more esoteric stuff so played me this piano sample he’d made on the MPC \[music production center\] that sounded like it was from the ’70s but had this Metro-y bounce on it. I started improvising in the studio, and I remember seeing him dancing in the booth because it sounded so up. It felt very anthemic. Eventually I turned it into a song with Frank Dukes and Ali Tamposi—another genius who wrote the chorus melody.” **“Show Me” (feat. Monica Martin)** “Monica is an incredible singer and incredible person—she’s fucking hilarious, and we’ve become friends. The song felt quite bare without her. It needed someone to step in, and it had to be exactly the right person, otherwise it’s not going to work. Again, Jameela made the suggestion. She came into the studio with Khushi and I, did the take in exactly the way I imagined, and it was glorious. I was just so excited, she was excited, it was a lovely moment.” **“Say What You Will”** “Ah, those those dreamy ’60s vibes. This is my favorite song I’ve written in years. It’s the song that carries the most meaning in terms of my overall life. It’s more representative of my headspace as a whole, and I like songs that have a wider commentary baked into them. I was pleased with the reaction to it because I really tried to communicate where I am right now in an authentic way. At this point in my career, it can’t be any other way. The formula to putting a song out has never changed. A good song will out in every single scenario. It needs to resonate with people, or it will disappear. And I know that feeling—I have released songs that for whatever reason have not resonated with people.” **“Lost Angel Nights”** “It’s about a lot of things, but primarily it’s about worrying that you’ve missed your shot. And *maybe* there’s a little bit of finger-pointing in there as well. The way people take your original essence, copy it and move on, really. I’ve been super lucky in my career, but I think there was a time where there was a lot of looking at what the shiny new thing is, doing that, then moving on. You don’t need them anymore. It happens to a lot of people, but you have to contend with being a permanent person, a permanent artist. I want to be here for as long as I can and be as naturalistic and true to myself as I can be, and what other people do doesn’t affect that.” **“Friends That Break Your Heart”** “Perhaps weirdly, it was album title first, then this song. I wrote the melody in the car on the way to meet \[US songwriter and producer\] Rick Nowels. There were a couple of others that we didn’t put onto the record, but this one was just standout right away. It was a really fun process, because he just played the keys and I was left to singer-songwriter duties for once. The line ‘I have haunted many photographs’ is something we can hopefully all relate to—well, hopefully not, actually, because that would be terrible, but I feel like that’s a common feeling.” **“If I\'m Insecure”** “I like to go out on something either where it’s all harmonies or it just feels huge. This is the latter. It’s an apocalyptic love song—the world is ending, but you’re in love, so it’s all right. Which maybe captures where we are as a society in 2021, so perhaps I’ll come to think of this record as one big externalization of my COVID experience, but that wasn’t the original intention. I make a load of music and then eventually realize, ‘Oh, yes, roughly, it was about this.’”

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

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

A quarter-century is a milestone worth celebrating in any timeline, but for beloved Chicago MC G Herbo, age 25 hits different. “Where I come from, that\'s a big milestone for everybody,” he tells Apple Music. “A lot of my closest friends and family members didn\'t really see 25 years old. So it\'s bittersweet for me because I\'m here: I\'m at a point in my life where I reached my most success. And beating the system in a way where I\'m not a statistic, I\'m not in prison or my life wasn\'t cut short due to gun violence. We literally call n\*\*\*as OGs when they turn 25 years old. So I want my music to reflect that, to reflect my headspace and the mode that I\'m in.” *25* follows 2020’s *PTSD*, a project that stamped him as one of Chicago’s most impactful MCs and also one of the most revered voices in hip-hop. With *25*, Herbo continues to build his legacy, reflecting on art and life in a way he hopes will draw him closer to some of his biggest inspirations. “I just feel like I got in this to go down as somebody that\'s legendary,” Herbo says. “One of the artists that will be remembered for generations to come, like a Nas, like a JAY-Z, like a Kiss, like DMX, like a Wayne, Fab—those are the people who I looked up to. I work hard enough to feel like I\'m a star, but I feel like my ceiling is so much higher and I got so much further to go.” Below, the esteem-focused MC breaks down five tracks from *25* that show his range. **“I Don’t Wanna Die”** “I\'m a hip-hop artist, so my intro always got to feel like the hardest, one of the songs with the most substance of the whole project. And \'I Don\'t Wanna Die,\' for me, is how I explain the album in a whole, just becoming 25 years old and just beating the streets. It\'s about me reflecting on the gun violence and the killing in my city—not only from my perspective, but from a mother\'s perspective, from a child\'s perspective. It\'s one of those records where I\'m just going all the way in, there\'s no hook on it, I\'m just letting all my feelings and emotions come out.” **“Cry No More” (feat. Polo G & Lil Tjay)** \"Polo and TJ, they my dogs, both of them my boys. And they was just really speaking on the trauma and the stuff that we endure every day, and not wanting to feel that way no more. \[From\] being in the streets, or this industry, or dealing with life in general—I feel like a lot of people can relate to it, because it\'s been a lot of change dealing with the pandemic and a lot of the stuff that\'s going on. A lot of the trauma that I endured was from street violence, but we just talking about life in general on that song.” **“T.O.P.” (feat. 21 Savage)** “A lot of these records, the energy that you feel is because I\'m actually connecting with these people. I\'m connecting with the producers, I\'m connecting with my peers, we all together in the studio when we getting all this stuff done. For \'T.O.P.\' I was having fun in the studio with Hitmaka. It’s a record where I was letting my hair down in a sense. I always speak about my story and being in the streets, or what I deal with on a day-to-day basis, but I still have fun with my music, too.” **“You Can’t” (feat. The Kid LAROI & Gunna)** “I was in the studio with Turbo and we was just vibing. We recorded a bunch of songs, and that was actually the last song that we did before we left. He just played the beat, and the shit was so hard, I\'m like, I\'m about to just lay it right now. I didn\'t even really have no direction. I just got on the beat and started rapping. And that\'s why I come in first before the hook. And then LAROI, that\'s my little brother. He pulled up on me in the studio, and I just played that record like, \'Man, put a hook on this for me.\' I feel like it\'s one of those \'indexing records\' that\'s going to be on a bunch of playlists that I probably usually wouldn\'t be on.” **“Demands”** “‘Demands’ is one of those records where I feel like it\'s going to cause a little controversy. I always wanted to be known as a conscious rapper since I started. I came out doing music in the drill era, and I never really wanted to be known as that kind of artist. I’m talking about bringing change and shedding light on the situation by saying, \'Hey, this is what I feel we need to do to make a difference, and to put ourselves in a better position.\' I’m not pointing the finger at anyone. I’m holding us accountable as a people as well.”

Fayetteville singer Morray is here to help: “What don’t kill you make you stronger,” he says during the intro to “Trenches,” the second song from his debut mixtape, *Street Sermons*. “And what don’t break your pockets make your money longer.” The Apple Music Up Next alum’s project is packed with these kinds of platitudes, along with drawn-out testimonies of struggle, the singer recounting—track after track—the hardships he saw growing up poor and proud in the South. His flow is notably influenced by gospel harmonies, Morray having grown up around the church, but he’s got a unique command of the pocket, weaving in and out in the 808-heavy production he favors to sing about faith (“That’s On God”), being wary of the people close to him (“Big Decisions”), and also of romantic interests gone awry (“Nothing Now”). If Morray is anything throughout *Street Sermons*, he’s grateful, both for the life experience that informs his music and for the fact that sewing it into song has taken him this far. He’s only just begun, but if “Kingdom” is to be believed, he’s not far from obtaining the kind of stability that will really put his mind at ease: “I just want a kingdom for my queen/A castle for my team/Money for the baby’s college fund/Flat-out flexing on ’em, one on one.”

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

“I’ve had a lot of controversies in my short period being an artist,” slowthai tells Apple Music. “But I always try making a statement.” In 2019, there was the Northampton rapper’s establishment-rattling appearance at the Mercury Prize ceremony, hoisting of an effigy of Boris Johnson’s severed head. A few months later, sexualized comments he made to comedian Katherine Ryan at the 2020 NME Awards caused a fierce Twitter backlash and prompted the Record Store Day 2020 campaign to withdraw an invitation for slowthai to be its UK ambassador. Ryan labeled their exchange “pantomime” but it led to a confrontation with an audience member and slowthai’s apology for his “shameful actions.” Since releasing his 2019 debut *Nothing Great About Britain*, then, the artist born Tyron Frampton has known the unforgiving heat of public judgment. It’s helped forge *TYRON*, a follow-up demarcated into two seven-track sides. The first is brash, incendiary, and energized, continuing to draw a through line between punk and UK rap. The second is vulnerable and introspective, its beats more contemplative and searching. The overarching message is that there are two sides to every story, and even more to every human being. “We all have the side that we don’t show, and the side we show,” he says. “Living up to expectations—and then not giving a fuck and just being honest with yourself.” Featuring guests including Skepta, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, and Denzel Curry, these songs, he hopes, will offer help to others feeling penned in by judgment, stereotypes, or a lack of self-confidence. “I just want them to realize they’re not alone and can be themselves,” he says. “I know that when shit gets dark, you need a little bit of light.” Explore all of slowthai’s sides with his track-by-track guide. **45 SMOKE** “‘Rise and shine, let’s get it/Bumbaclart dickhead/Bumbaclart dickhead.’ It’s like the wake-up call for myself. It’s how you feel when you’re making constant mistakes, or you’re in a rut and you wake up like, ‘I really don’t want to wake up, I’d rather just sleep all day.’ It’s explaining where I’m from, and the same routine of doing this bullshit life that I don’t want to do—but I’m doing it just for the sake of doing it or because this is what’s expected of me.” **CANCELLED** “This song’s a fuck-you to the cancel culture, to people trying to tear you down and make it like you’re a bad person—because all I’ve done my whole life is try and escape that stereotype, and try and better myself. You can call me what you want, you can say what you think happened, but most of all I know myself. Through doing this, I’ve figured it out on a deeper level. When we made this, I was in a dark place because of everything going on. And Skep \[Skepta, co-MC on this track\] was guiding me out. He was saying, ‘Yo, man, this isn’t your defining moment. If anything, it pushes you to prove your point even more.’” **MAZZA** “Mazza is ‘mazzalean,’ which is my own word... It\'s just a mad thing. It’s for the people that have mad ADHD \[slowthai lives with the disorder\], ADD, and can’t focus on something—like how everything comes and it’s so quick, and it’s a rush. It’s where my head was at—be it that I was drinking a lot, or traveling a lot, and seeing a lot of things and doing a lot of dumb shit. Mad time. As soon as I made it, I FaceTimed \[A$AP\] Rocky because I was that gassed. We’d been working here and there, doing little bits. He was like, ‘This is hard. Come link up.’ He was in London and I went down there and \[we\] just patterned it out.” **VEX** “It’s just about being angry at social media, at the fakeness, how everyone’s trying to be someone they’re not and showing the good parts of their lives. You just end up feeling shit, because even if your life’s the best it could be, it just puts in your head that, ‘Ah, it could always be better.’ Most of these people aren’t even happy—that’s why they\'re looking for validation on the internet.” **WOT** “I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot \[for ‘My High’\] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. \[slowthai’s part\] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like \[Pop Smoke’s\] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn\'t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.” **DEAD** “We say ‘That’s dead’ as in it’s not good, it’s shit. So I was like, ‘Yo, every one of these things is dead to me.’ There’s a line, ‘People change for money/What’s money with no time?’ That’s aimed at people saying I changed because I gained success. It’s not that I’ve changed, but I’ve grown or grown out of certain things. It’s not the money that changed me, it’s understanding that doing certain things is not making me any better. If I’m spending all my time working on bettering myself and trying to better my craft, the money’s irrelevant. I don’t even have the time to spend it. So it’s just like saying everything’s dead. I’m focusing on living forever through my music and my art.” **PLAY WITH FIRE** “Even though we want to move far away from situations and circumstances, we keep toying with the idea \[of them\]. It plays on your mind that you want to be in that position. ‘PLAY WITH FIRE’ is the letting go as well as trying to hold on to these things. When it goes into \[next track\] ‘i tried,’ it’s like, ‘I tried to do all these things, live up to these expectations and be this person, but it wasn’t working for me.’ And on the other foot, I *tried* all these things. I can’t die saying I didn’t. You have to love everything for how it is to understand it, and try and move on. You’ve got to understand something for the negative before you can really understand the positive.” **i tried** “‘Long road/Tumble down this black hole/Stuck in Sunday league/But I’m on levels with Ronaldo.’ It’s saying it’s been a struggle to get here. And even still, I feel like I’m traveling into a void. You feel like you’re sinking into yourself—be it through taking too many drugs or drinking too much and burying yourself in a hole, just being on autopilot. It’s coming to that understanding, and dealing with those problems. It’s \[about\] boosting my confidence and my true self: ‘Yo, man, you’re the best. If this was football, you’d be the Ballon d’Or winner.’ We always look at what we think we should be like. We never actually look at who we are, and what our qualities are. ‘I’ve got a sickness/And I’m dealing with it.’ I’m trying. I\'m trying every avenue, and with a bit of hope and a bit of luck, I can become who I want to be.” **focus** “From the beginning, even though I’m in this pocket of people and this way of life, I’ve always known to go against that grain. I didn’t ever want to end up in jail. You either get a trade or you end doing shit and potentially you end in jail. A lot of people around me, they’re still in that cycle. And this is me saying, ‘Focus on some other shit.’ I come from the shit, and I pushed and I got there. And it was through maintaining that focus.” **terms** “It’s the terms and conditions that come with popularity and...fame. I don’t like that word. I hate words like ‘fad’ and ‘fame.’ They make me cringe so much. Maybe I’ve got something against words that begin with F. But it’s just dealing with what comes with it and how it’s not what you expected it to be. The headache of being judged for being a human being. Once you get any recognition for your art, you’re no longer a human—you’re a product. Dominic \[Fike, guest vocalist\] sums it up beautifully in the hook.” **push** “‘Push’ is an acronym for ‘praying until something happens.’ When you’re in a corner, you’ve got to keep pushing. Even when you’re at your lowest. That’s all life is, right? It’s a push. Being pulled is the easy route, but when you’re pushing for something, the hard work conditions your mind, strengthens you physically and spiritually, and you come out on top. I used to be religious—when my brother passed, when I was young. I asked for a Bible for my birthday, which was some weird shit. Through this project…it’s not faith in God, but my faith in people, it’s been kind of restored, my faith in myself. Everyone I work with on this, they’re my friends, and they’re all people that have helped me through something. And Deb \[Never, guest vocalist\]—we call each other twins. She’s my sister that I’ve known my whole life but I haven’t known my whole life.” **nhs** “It’s all about appreciation. The NHS—something that’s been doing work for generations, to save people—it’s been so taken for granted. It’s a place where everyone’s equal and everyone’s treated the same. It takes this \[pandemic\] for us to applaud people who have been giving their lives to help others. They should have constant applause at the end of every shift. We’re out here complaining and always wanting more. I don’t know if it’s a human defect or just consumerism, but you get one thing and then you always want the next best thing. I do it a lot. And there’s never a best one, because there’s always another one. Just be happy with what you’ve got. You\'ll end up having an aneurysm.” **feel away** “Dom \[Maker, co-producer and one half of Mount Kimbie\] works with James \[Blake\] a lot. They record a bunch of stuff, chop it up and create loops. I was going through all these loops, and I was like, ‘This one’s the one.’ As soon as we played it, I had lyrics and recorded my bit. I’ve loved James from when I was a kid at school and was like, ‘We should get James.’ We sent it to him, and in my head, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s not going to record on it.’ But the next day, we had the tune. I was just so gassed. I dedicated it to my brother passing. But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” **adhd** “When I was really young, my mum and people around me didn’t really believe in \[ADHD\]—like, ‘It’s a hyperactive kid, they just want attention.’ They didn’t ever see it as a disorder. And I think this is my way of summarizing the whole album: This is something that I’ve dealt with, and people around me have dealt with. It’s hard for people to understand because they don’t get why it’s the impulses, or how it might just be a reaction to something that you can’t control. You try to, but it’s embedded in you. It’s just my conclusion—like at the end of the book, when you get to the bit where everything starts making sense. I feel like this is the most connected I’ve been to a song. It’s the clearest depiction of what my voice naturally sounds like, without me pushing it out, or projecting it in any way, or being aggressive. It’s just softly spoken, and then it gets to that anger at the end. And then a kiss—just to sweeten it all up.”

The 49-year-old Brownsville rapper cuts a mythic figure: Raised on the mean streets of ’70s Brooklyn, he now splits his time between being a NYC fire captain and crafting dense rap allegories that touch on Greek mythology and the code of the samurai. But on *A Martyr’s Reward*, Ka strips down everything—the mythology, the production—to tell his own story, unembellished, over hauntingly minimalist (and mostly self-produced) beats. But it isn’t just his story; it’s the story of surviving being Black in America—or, in the cases of too many of his friends, not surviving. And on “I Need All That,” he demands retribution: “I want back everything they took/My culture, my music, my look.”

Rod Wave knows exactly who he is. “I got skills in other things, but rich off rapping pain,” he admits in the title track from his third album, *SoulFly*. That title contains multitudes in that Wave’s music obviously comes from his soul, and he is objectively fly, and then there is the fact that he’s continuously singing about the time after his eventual passing when his soul can *actually* fly free. In fact, Wave is remarkably productive for someone who’d have you believe he’s constantly in the throes of anguish. (The singer has released at least one project a year since 2016’s *Hunger Games*, amassing a fanbase whose penchant for making jokes about the glumness of his music is dwarfed only by their dedication to streaming it.) “If you can’t feel my pain, this ain’t for you anyways,” Wave sings on “Don’t Forget.” You’d think that the hard times he saw as a child, the constant betrayals he’d know as an adult, or the pressure he’s under as his family’s breadwinner might actually come close to breaking him, but Wave sounds like he is in a better space than he’s been in a long time. “I just be telling ’bout my pain,” he says on “Calling.” “I just be thinking, reminiscing ’bout that shit/I numb the pain with the money/I don’t feel pain, too much money.”

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album *The 1st*, and more prominently on her 2020 album *THE ANXIETY*. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album. Created and recorded during quarantine, *lately I feel EVERYTHING* is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne, and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick,” “don’t SAVE ME,” or “Come Home,” showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.

It’s likely that only diehard Boldy James fans understand how perfect a complement he is to the Griselda Records roster. The Detroit MC’s focus has always been lyrically proficient street rap, but in 2020 alone, his ear for production would manifest collaborative tapes with beloved Mobb Deep collaborator The Alchemist (*The Price of Tea in China*), jazz musician Sterling Toles (*Manger on McNichols*), social media content creator Jay Versace (*The Versace Tape*), and fashion label/production collective Real Bad Man. The man likes to rap. And if there’s one thing Griselda doesn’t do, it’s hold back projects where their MCs go off. James’ first release of 2021, *Bo Jackson*, clearly fits the mold. Look no further than the album opener “Double Hockey Sticks” for Donald Goines-vivid streetlife scenarios unfurled in James’ signature deadpan: “My bitch scored and hit a game-changer/I made her transport the work in her Keyshia Ka\'oir waist trainer/Say she gon\' leave me and I can’t blame her/’Cause I was cutting up my side bitch raw with the same razor,” he raps. The Alchemist is, here, who he was for *The Price of Tea in China* and the James/Alc collaborative project that preceded that, 2019’s *Boldface*: a producer whose one-of-a-kind loops bring the best out of an MC who never really needed the help.

With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”

“I used to hear speculation: I\'m not really keeping up in music,” Meek Mill told Zane Lowe ahead of the release of his fifth album. “That\'s why I\'m trying to bring my best music and really showcase my talent for the people that really give me my credit. Because I\'ve been in this game for 10 years, man. I felt like this is the year that I really want mine because I sit in the studio by myself with a producer and try to remain a top artist.” *Expensive Pain* is where Meek Mill\'s effort pays off. Long heralded as one of the most preternaturally talented MCs in rap, Meek is bars-up consistently across *Expensive Pain*, delivering the kind of endless couplets that people who rewatch Funkmaster Flex freestyles live for. But he’s also expanded his repertoire to include the kind of Auto-Tuned harmonizing (see “On My Soul,” “Love Train,” and “Love Money”) that dominates contemporary hip-hop playlists. Getting there, he admits, was no small task. “Through quarantine, I sat back—even through a big writer\'s block—just trying to learn melody for months and months until I got confident enough,” he says. “And when I got back into the studio, my confidence just took me in a way where I felt like I could do anything in the booth.” What he does across *Expensive Pain* is tell us what life is like for Meek Mill in 2021. “How would you feel/When you so lit that you can’t tell if the love real,” he asks on Lil Uzi Vert collaboration “Blue Notes 2.” In addition to Vert, he’s called on Lil Baby and Lil Durk, A$AP Ferg, Moneybagg Yo, Kehlani, Brent Faiyaz, and, maybe most notably, London MC Giggs, to help him talk about how being rich and famous isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. But while “mo money, mo problems” is a concept at least as old as the Notorious B.I.G. song, Meek also needs us to know that he’s never far from what made him. “I always try to stay close to my hood,” he says. “Not hang in the hood, because I can\'t, but just to get the feeling and the understanding of never forgetting where I come from and what the people go through, so when I deliver my music, it\'s still got real feel to it that people can actually feel inside instead of just dance to.”

“I wanted to show myself as a human being,” J Balvin tells Apple Music about his new album. “I wanted to show the things that Jose has gone through to be where I’m at right now.” After breaking past both musical and language barriers with 2018’s *Vibras* and subsequently sharing his artistic brilliance with the follow-up *Colores*, global superstar J Balvin returns with the decidedly more personal *JOSE*. A revelatory blend of personal reflections and peak nightclub vibes, his namesake project shares more of himself and his expansive pop music vision than ever before through forthright and even confessional cuts like “7 De Mayo” and the deeply moving “La Familia.” From the seductive sounds of “Una Nota” to the entrancingly tropical “Que Locura,” he’s pushing forward without abandoning his reggaetón roots. This becomes most evident on the album’s dance-floor-centric moments, such as the irresistibly salacious “Perra” with Dominican rising star Tokischa and the house music throwback “In Da Getto” with Skrillex. “That was really important because that’s what I love to hear,” Balvin says about this vital and gratifying aspect of the project. “*JOSE* is like my own playlist,” he adds. And, as such, he’s brought on an impressively curated selection of guests, with Latin titans Ozuna and Zion & Lennox joining his fellow pop adventurers Dua Lipa and Khalid on this sonic journey into his ever-expanding musical universe. Below, read some of J Balvin’s thoughts on a few of *JOSE*’s noteworthy collaborative tracks. **“Una Nota” (feat. Sech)** “Sech sent me an idea, like a year ago. I was looking for a vibe that I’d been missing from the album. That is the one I found and was like, ‘Yes! This is the one.’” **“Te Acuerdas De Mí” (feat. Yandel)** “It’s me giving respect to one of the pioneers of the genre, giving him just one track by himself.” **“Billetes De 100” (feat. Myke Towers)** “Myke Towers is one of my favorite MCs, and it’s really cool to be with him on a rap song in his style. I love the way we sound together.” **“La Venganza” (feat. Jhay Cortez)** “Jhay Cortez is like my little brother. We have each other’s backs and we elevate each other. So it’s really cool every time we work together.” **“Qué Más Pues?” (feat. Maria Becerra)** “I’m a big fan of looking for new artists. I heard all the buzz about Maria Becerra in Argentina. I checked and found out she was so talented that I wanted to have her on my album. I did this song especially for her.”

*This album includes content in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos.* Before they dropped *Culture III*, Atlanta’s Migos declared it the final entry in the franchise. They’d long established themselves as hip-hop trendsetters and needed only to complete the trilogy before moving on to the next phase of their near decade-long chart domination. And with this last installment, Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff made sure fans understood that they’re fully in tune with everything that’s happening in rap. *Culture III* is 19 songs of the world they oversee, packed with the most beloved voices in contemporary rap—besides their own, of course. The’ve amassed features from Drake, Cardi B, Future, Justin Bieber (less of a surprise than it once was), and two of hip-hop’s most revered fallen stars, Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD. If you’re surprised that a group of three would create space for that many guests on a project where their own voices get near equal run time, you’re clearly unfamiliar with how self-assured the group is. “Last time I checked we were running the globe,” Quavo raps on “Modern Day.” If the excitement drummed up by lead single “Straightenin” was any indication, this is unlikely to change before the next time he checks. *All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos Music tracks using any headphones. When listening with compatible\* Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos Music will play back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set the Dolby Atmos switch to “Always On.” You can also hear Dolby Atmos Music using the built-in speakers on compatible\*\* iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or AV receiver. Android is coming soon. \*AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro \*\*Works with iPhone 7 or later with the latest version of iOS; 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation or later), 11-inch iPad Pro, iPad (6th generation or later), iPad Air (3rd generation), and iPad mini (5th generation) with the latest version of iPadOS; and MacBook (2018 model and later).*