Consequence of Sound's Top 50 Albums of 2019

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

There’s nothing all that subtle about Jamila Woods naming each of these all-caps tracks after a notable person of color. Still, that’s the point with *LEGACY! LEGACY!*—homage as overt as it is original. True to her own revolutionary spirit, the Chicago native takes this influential baker’s dozen of songs and masterfully transmutes their power for her purposes, delivering an engrossingly personal and deftly poetic follow-up to her formidable 2016 breakthrough *HEAVN*. She draws on African American icons like Miles Davis and Eartha Kitt as she coos and commands through each namesake cut, sparking flames for the bluesy rap groove of “MUDDY” and giving flowers to a legend on the electro-laced funk of “OCTAVIA.”

In the clip of an older Eartha Kitt that everyone kicks around the internet, her cheekbones are still as pronounced as many would remember them from her glory days on Broadway, and her eyes are still piercing and inviting. She sips from a metal cup. The wind blows the flowers behind her until those flowers crane their stems toward her face, and the petals tilt upward, forcing out a smile. A dog barks in the background. In the best part of the clip, Kitt throws her head back and feigns a large, sky-rattling laugh upon being asked by her interviewer whether or not she’d compromise parts of herself if a man came into her life. When the laugh dies down, Kitt insists on the same, rhetorical statement. “Compromise!?!?” she flings. “For what?” She repeats “For what?” until it grows more fierce, more unanswerable. Until it holds the very answer itself. On the hook to the song “Eartha,” Jamila Woods sings “I don’t want to compromise / can we make it through the night” and as an album, Legacy! Legacy! stakes itself on the uncompromising nature of its creator, and the histories honored within its many layers. There is a lot of talk about black people in America and lineage, and who will tell the stories of our ancestors and their ancestors and the ones before them. But there is significantly less talk about the actions taken to uphold that lineage in a country obsessed with forgetting. There are hands who built the corners of ourselves we love most, and it is good to shout something sweet at those hands from time to time. Woods, a Chicago-born poet, organizer, and consistent glory merchant, seeks to honor black people first, always. And so, Legacy! Legacy! A song for Zora! Zora, who gave so much to a culture before she died alone and longing. A song for Octavia and her huge and savage conscience! A song for Miles! One for Jean-Michel and one for my man Jimmy Baldwin! More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On “Sun Ra,” Woods sings “I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start” and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016’s HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of “Giovanni” to the psychedelic flourishes of “Sonia,” the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on “Sonia” and Saba on “Basquiat,” or the bloom of Nico Segal’s horns on “Baldwin.” Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.

What do you do when things fall apart? If you’re Ariana Grande, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and head for the studio. Her hopeful fourth album, *Sweetener*—written after the deadly attack at her concert in Manchester, England—encouraged fans to stay strong and open to love (at the time, the singer was newly engaged to Pete Davidson). Shortly after the album’s release in August 2018, things fell apart again: Grande’s ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, died from an overdose in September, and she broke off her engagement a few weeks later. Again, Grande took solace from the intense, and intensely public, melodrama in songwriting, but this time things were different. *thank u, next*, mostly recorded over those tumultuous months, sees her turning inward in an effort to cope, grieve, heal, and let go. “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head,” she confesses on “ghostin,” a gutting synth-and-strings ballad that hovers in your throat. “He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then.” Like many of the songs here, it was produced by Max Martin, who has a supernatural way of making pain and suffering sound like beams of light. The album doesn\'t arrive a minute too soon. As Grande wrestles with what she wants—distance (“NASA”) and affection (“needy”), anonymity (“fake smile\") and star power (“7 rings”), and sex without strings attached (“bloodline,” “make up”)—we learn more and more about the woman she’s becoming: complex, independent, tenacious, flawed. Surely embracing all of that is its own form of self-empowerment. But Grande also isn\'t in a rush to grow up. A week before the album’s release, she swapped out a particularly sentimental song called “Remember” with the provocative, NSYNC-sampling “break up with your girlfriend, i\'m bored.” As expected, it sent her fans into a frenzy. “I know it ain’t right/But I don’t care,” she sings. Maybe the ride is just starting.

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

With powerhouse pipes, razor-sharp wit, and a tireless commitment to self-love and self-care, Lizzo is the fearless pop star we needed. Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, the singer and classically trained flautist discovered an early gift for music (“It chose me,” she tells Apple Music) and began recording in Minneapolis shortly after high school. But her trademark self-confidence came less naturally. “I had to look deep down inside myself to a really dark place to discover it,” she says. Perhaps that’s why her third album, *Cuz I Love You*, sounds so triumphant, with explosive horns (“Cuz I Love You”), club drums (“Tempo” featuring Missy Elliott), and swaggering diva attitude (“No, I\'m not a snack at all/Look, baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she howls on the instant hit “Juice\"). But her brand is about more than mic-drop zingers and big-budget features. On songs like “Better in Color”—a stomping, woke plea for people of all stripes to get together—she offers an important message: It’s not enough to love ourselves, we also have to love each other. Read on for Lizzo’s thoughts on each of these blockbuster songs. **“Cuz I Love You”** \"I start every project I do with a big, brassy orchestral moment. And I do mean *moment*. It’s my way of saying, ‘Stand the fuck up, y’all, Lizzo’s here!’ This is just one of those songs that gets you amped from the jump. The moment you hear it, you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on.’ It’s a great fucking way to start an album.\" **“Like a Girl”** \"We wanted take the old cliché and flip it on its head, shaking out all the negative connotations and replacing them with something empowering. Serena Williams plays like a girl and she’s the greatest athlete on the planet, you know? And what if crying was empowering instead of something that makes you weak? When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren\'t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you\'re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, ‘If you feel like a girl/Then you real like a girl,\' and that\'s my favorite lyric on the whole album.\" **“Juice”** \"If you only listen to one song from *Cuz I Love You*, let it be this. It’s a banger, obviously, but it’s also a state of mind. At the end of the day, I want my music to make people feel good, I want it to help people love themselves. This song is about looking in the mirror, loving what you see, and letting everyone know. It was the second to last song that I wrote for the album, right before ‘Soulmate,\' but to me, this is everything I’m about. I wrote it with Ricky Reed, and he is a genius.” **“Soulmate”** \"I have a relationship with loneliness that is not very healthy, so I’ve been going to therapy to work on it. And I don’t mean loneliness in the \'Oh, I don\'t got a man\' type of loneliness, I mean it more on the depressive side, like an actual manic emotion that I struggle with. One day, I was like, \'I need a song to remind me that I\'m not lonely and to describe the type of person I *want* to be.\' I also wanted a New Orleans bounce song, \'cause you know I grew up listening to DJ Jubilee and twerking in the club. The fact that l got to combine both is wild.” **“Jerome”** \"This was my first song with the X Ambassadors, and \[lead singer\] Sam Harris is something else. It was one of those days where you walk into the studio with no expectations and leave glowing because you did the damn thing. The thing that I love about this song is that it’s modern. It’s about fuccboi love. There aren’t enough songs about that. There are so many songs about fairytale love and unrequited love, but there aren’t a lot of songs about fuccboi love. About when you’re in a situationship. That story needed to be told.” **“Cry Baby”** “This is one of the most musical moments on a very musical album, and it’s got that Minneapolis sound. Plus, it’s almost a power ballad, which I love. The lyrics are a direct anecdote from my life: I was sitting in a car with a guy—in a little red Corvette from the ’80s, and no, it wasn\'t Prince—and I was crying. But it wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I loved him. It was a different field of emotion. The song starts with \'Pull this car over, boy/Don\'t pretend like you don\'t know,’ and that really happened. He pulled the car over and I sat there and cried and told him everything I felt.” **“Tempo”** “‘Tempo\' almost didn\'t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but ‘Tempo’ was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy? If you don\'t put this song on the album, you\'re insane.’ Then we got Missy and the rest is history.” **“Exactly How I Feel”** “Way back when I first started writing the song, I had a line that goes, ‘All my feelings is Gucci.’ I just thought it was funny. Months and months later, I played it at Atlantic \[Records\], and when that part came up, I joked, ‘Thanks for the Gucci feature, guys!\' And this executive says, ‘We can get Gucci if you want.\' And I was like, ‘Well, why the fuck not?\' I love Gucci Mane. In my book, he\'s unproblematic, he does a good job, he adds swag to it. It doesn’t go much deeper than that, to be honest. The rest of the song has plenty of meaning: It’s an ode to being proud of your emotions, not feeling like you have to hide them or fake them, all that. But the Gucci feature was just fun.” **“Better in Color”** “This is the nerdiest song I have ever written, for real. But I love it so much. I wanted to talk about love, attraction, and sex *without* talking about the boxes we put those things in—who we feel like we’re allowed to be in love with, you know? It shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about gender or sexual orientation or skin color or economic background, because who the fuck cares? Spice it up, man. Love *is* better in color. I don’t want to see love in black and white.\" **“Heaven Help Me”** \"When I made the album, I thought: If Aretha made a rap album, what would that sound like? ‘Heaven Help Me’ is the most Aretha to me. That piano? She would\'ve smashed that. The song is about a person who’s confident and does a good job of self-care—a.k.a. me—but who has a moment of being pissed the fuck off and goes back to their defensive ways. It’s a journey through the full spectrum of my romantic emotions. It starts out like, \'I\'m too cute for you, boo, get the fuck away from me,’ to \'What\'s wrong with me? Why do I drive boys away?’ And then, finally, vulnerability, like, \'I\'m crying and I\'ve been thinking about you.’ I always say, if anyone wants to date me, they just gotta listen to this song to know what they’re getting into.\" **“Lingerie”** “I’ve never really written sexy songs before, so this was new for me. The lyrics literally made me blush. I had to just let go and let God. It’s about one of my fantasies, and it has three different chord changes, so let me tell you, it was not easy to sing. It was very ‘Love On Top’ by Beyoncé of me. Plus, you don’t expect the album to end on this note. It leaves you wanting more.”

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

We could keep agonizing over why TOOL took so long to release *Fear Inoculum*, or to put their catalog onto streaming services, or all the ways the world has changed since the alt/prog-metal band’s last album came out in 2006. But we just spent 13 years doing all that. Instead, put on the best headphones you can find. It’s time to explore the 87 minutes of music we waited thousands of hours to hear. Whether or not this album is the “grand finale… swan song and epilogue” that Maynard James Keenan alludes to in “Descending,” the first thing to say is that *Fear Inoculum* will not disappoint. On their longest-ever album (despite only containing seven songs, broken up by three brief ambient interludes), TOOL refines and expands on their greatest strengths to create a meditative, intensely complex album that may, in terms of sheer musical skill, be their most impressive yet. Danny Carey’s extraordinarily creative and technical approach to rhythm takes center stage, from assaultive double pedaling to atmospheric tablas and electronic tinkering, heard best on “Chocolate Chip Trip,” a five-minute, multidimensional percussion solo. Guitarist Adam Jones unleashes more jams and solos than ever, particularly on the 15-minute opus “7empest,” which begins by sounding like the most traditionally TOOL song of the lot—but it sure doesn’t end that way. (Plus, Jones apparently wrote part of it in 21/16 time.) Justin Chancellor’s bass riffs are hypnotizing and powerful, unique in their ability to be both repetitive, even monotonous, and completely engulfing. Keenan’s lyrics—layered, poetic, often elegiac—are as fun to analyze and interpret as ever. And though the album is easily their most drawn-out and ambient, it’s also immensely heavy. The balance is calculated and sublime. So, what’s *Fear Inoculum* actually about? Keenan deliberately evades explanation, allowing the listener to find their own meaning. But in the most lyrically lucid moments, you’ll find reflections on life, growing up and facing your fear (he’s stated it could mean giving in to *or* becoming immune to it). There’s no pretending that 13 years haven’t passed—on “Invincible,” he sings: “Age old battle, mine/Weapon out and belly in/Tales told, battles won… Once invincible, now the armor’s wearing thin.” Still, there’s no sign of weakness, just acceptance and the kind of wisdom that comes with age. “We’re not buying your dubious state of serenity,” he knowingly roars on “7empest.” “Acting all surprised when you’re caught in the lie/It’s not unlike you… We know your nature.”

An eccentric like Madlib and a straightforward guy like Freddie Gibbs—how could it possibly work? If 2014’s *Piñata* proved that the pairing—offbeat producer, no-frills street rapper—sounded better and more natural than it looked on paper, *Bandana* proves *Piñata* wasn’t a fluke. The common ground is approachability: Even at their most cinematic (the noisy soul of “Flat Tummy Tea,” the horror-movie trap of “Half Manne Half Cocaine”), Madlib’s beats remain funny, strange, decidedly at human scale, while Gibbs prefers to keep things so real he barely uses metaphor. In other words, it’s remarkable music made by artists who never pretend to be anything other than ordinary. And even when the guest spots are good (Yasiin Bey and Black Thought on “Education” especially), the core of the album is the chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib: vivid, dreamy, serious, and just a little supernatural.

U.F.O.F., F standing for ‘Friend’, is the name of the highly anticipated third record by Big Thief, set to be released on 3rd May 2019 via 4AD. U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios.  In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums.  Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment.  The raw material came quickly.  Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all. “Making friends with the unknown… All my songs are about this,” says Lenker; “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.”

There are musicians who suffer for their art, and then there’s Stefan Babcock. The guitarist and lead screamer for Toronto pop-punk ragers PUP has often used his music as a bullhorn to address the physical and mental toll of being in a touring rock band. The band’s 2016 album *The Dream Is Over* was inspired by Babcock seeking treatment for his ravaged vocal cords and being told by a doctor he’d never be able to sing again. Now, with that scare behind him, he’s using the aptly titled *Morbid Stuff* to address a more insidious ailment: depression. “*The Dream Is Over* was riddled with anxiety and uncertainties, but I think I was expressing myself in a more immature way,” Babcock tells Apple Music. “I feel I’ve found the language to better express those things.” Certainly, *Morbid Stuff* pulls no punches: This is an album whose idea of an opening line is “I was bored as fuck/Sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff/Like if anyone I slept with is dead.” But of course, this being PUP—a band that built their fervent fan base through their wonderfully absurd high-concept videos—they can’t help but make a little light of the darkest subject matter. “I’m pretty aware of the fact I’m making money off my own misery—what Phoebe Bridgers called ‘the commodification of depression,’” Babcock says. “It’s a weird thing to talk about mood disorders for a living. But my intention with this record was to explore the darker things with a bit of humor, and try to make people feel less alone while they listen to it.” To that end, Babcock often directs his most scathing one-liners at himself. On the instant shout-along anthem “Free at Last,” he issues a self-diagnosis that hits like a glass of cold water in the face: “Just because you’re sad again/It doesn’t make you special at all.” “The conversation around mental health that’s happening now is such a positive thing,” Babcock says, “but one of the small drawbacks is that people are now so sympathetic to it that some people who suffer from mood disorders—and I speak from experience here—tend to use it as a crutch. I can sometimes say something to my bandmates or my girlfriend that’s pretty shitty, and they’ll be like, ‘It’s okay, Stefan’s in a different headspace right now’—and that’s *not* okay. It’s important to remind myself and other people that being depressed and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive.” Complementing Babcock’s fearless lyricism is the band’s growing confidence to step outside of the circle pit: “Scorpion Hill” begins as a lonesome barstool serenade before kicking into a dusty cowpunk gallop, while the power-pop rave-up “Closure” simmers into a sweet psychedelic breakdown that nods to one of Babcock’s all-time favorite bands, Built to Spill. And the closing “City” is PUP’s most vulnerable statement to date, a pulverizing power ballad where Babcock takes stock of his conflicted relationship with Toronto, his lifelong home. “The beginning of ‘Scorpion Hill’ and ‘City’ are by far the most mellow, softest moments we’ve ever created as a band,” Babcock says. “And I think on the last two records, we never would’ve gone there—not because we didn’t want to, but just because we didn’t think people would accept PUP if PUP wasn’t always cranked up to 10. And this time, we felt a bit more confident to dial it back in certain parts when it felt right. I feel like we’ve grown a lot as a band and shed some of our inhibitions.”

More than a year after her breakout hit “1950,” King Princess delivers *Cheap Queen*, her soulful and reflective debut album. Balancing husky, vintage-sounding vocals with subtle flourishes (a vibraphone here, a chiming synth there), the project loosely traces a young relationship’s hopeful beginning and wounded end. Throughout, we get to see the emerging queer-pop icon, a 20-year-old Brooklyn native named Mikaela Straus, evolve: Meandering mind games (“Useless Phrases”) and self-deprecations (“Cheap Queen”) become earnest observations (\"Watching My Phone\") and confident tell-offs (“You Destroyed My Heart”). The final number—a breathtaking, pensive ballad that unfolds delicately—feels fragile and guarded: “And it might take a sec/My world’s become a mess/I’m second-guessing all the things I used to want to be,” she sings, a bit more measured than she was at the start. But she’s stronger, too, armed with the self-assurance of someone who has had their heart ripped apart and, to their own surprise, survived.

Over the decade-plus since he arrived seemingly fully formed as the platonic ideal of indie DIY made good, Justin Vernon has pushed back against the notion that he and Bon Iver are synonymous. He is quick to deflect credit to core longtime collaborators like Chris Messina and Brad Cook, while April Base, the studio and headquarters he built just outside his native Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has become a cultural hub playing host to a variety of experimental projects. The fourth Bon Iver full-length album shines a brighter light on Bon Iver as a unit with many moving parts: Renovations to April Base sent operations to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, for much of the production, but the spirit of improvisation and tinkering and revolving-door personnel that marked 2016’s out-there *22, A Million* remained intact. “This record in particular felt like a very outward record; Justin felt outward to me,” says Cook, who grew up with Vernon and has played with him through much of his career. “He felt like he was in a new place, and he was reaching out for new input in a different way. We\'re just more in the foreground inevitably because the process became just a little bit more transparent.” Vernon, Cook, and Messina talk through that process on each of *i,i*\'s 13 tracks. **“Yi”** Justin Vernon: “That was a phone recording of me and my friend Trevor screwing around in a barn, turning a radio on and off. We chopped it up for about five years, just a hundred times. There’s something in that ‘Are you recording? Are you recording?’ that felt like the spirit that flows into the next song.” **“iMi”** Brad Cook: “It was like an old friend that you didn\'t know what to do with for a long time. When we got to Texas, a lot of different people took a crack at trying to make something out of that song. And then Andrew Sarlo, who works with Big Thief and is just a badass young producer, he took the whack that broke through the wall. Once the band got their hands on it, Justin added some of the acoustic stuff to it, and it just totally blew it wide open.” **“We”** Vernon: “I was working on this idea one morning with this engineer, Josh Berg, who happened to be out with us. And this guy Bobby Raps from Minneapolis was also at my studio just kind of hanging around, and he brought this dude named Wheezy who does some Young Thug beats, some Future beats. So I had this little baritone-guitar bass loop thing, and Wheezy put his beat on there. All these songs had a life, or had a birth, before Texas, but Texas was like graduation for every single one. That\'s why we went for so long and allowed for so much perspective to sink into all the tunes. It\'s a fucking banger; I love that one.” **“Holyfields,”** Vernon: “The whole song is an improvised moment with barely any editing, and we just improv\'d moves. I sang some scratch vocals that day when we made it up, and they were weirdly close to what ended up being on the album. We didn\'t really chop away at that one—it kind of just was born with all its hair and everything.” **“Hey, Ma”** Vernon: “It just felt like a good strong song; we knew people would get it in their head. A couple of these tunes, and some of the tunes from the last album, I sort of peck around the studio with BJ Burton from time to time, and 90 percent of the stuff we make is death techno or something. So, there\'s another one that sort of just hung around with a stake in the ground, so to speak. And then our team—the three of us and the rest of everyone—just kept etching away at it, and it ended up becoming the song that felt emblematic of the record.” **\"U (Man Like)\"** Cook: “We had Bruce \[Hornsby\] come out to Justin\'s studio for a session for his *Absolute Zero* record. Bruce was playing a bunch of musical ideas that he had just sort of done at his house, and that piano figure in that song—I feel like we were tracking 15 seconds later. It was like, \'Wait, can we listen to this again?\'” Vernon: “I\'m not so good at coming up with full songs on the spot, but I can kind of map them out with my voice, or inflection. Then it takes a long time to chip away at them. Messina might have an idea for what that line should be, or Brad, or me. The melody that I sang that first day probably sounds remarkably like the melody that\'s on the album.” **“Naeem”** Vernon: “We did a collaboration with a dance group called TU Dance, and that was one of the songs. So we\'ve been performing \'Naeem\' as a part of this thing for a while. It\'s in a different state, but it\'s the finale of this big collaboration. And it just seemed very anthemic, and a very important part of whatever this record was going to be. It feels really nice to have a little bit more straightforward—not always bombastic, not always sonically trying to flip your lid or something.” **“Jelmore”** Vernon: “Basically an improvisation with me and this guy Buddy Ross. Again I probably didn\'t sing any final lyrics, but it\'s based on an improvisation, much like the song \'\_\_\_\_45\_\_\_\_\_\' from \[*22, A Million*\]. And when we were down outside El Paso, me and Chris were over on one part of this studio and Brad was with the band in a big studio across the property, and they sort of took \'Jelmore\' upon themselves and filled it in with all the lovely live-ness that\'s there. As the record goes on, it feels like there\'s a lot of these things that are sort of bare but have a lot of live energy to them.” **“Faith”** Vernon: “A basement improv that sat around for many years; maybe could have been on the last album, was for a while. I don\'t know, man—it\'s a song about having faith.” **“Marion”** Chris Messina: “I think that\'s one that Justin\'s been noodling around with for a while; for a few years, he would pick up that guitar and you would just kind of hear that riff. And we didn\'t really know what was going to happen to it. It\'s another one that exists in the TU Dance show. But what\'s cool about the version that\'s on the record is we did that as a live take with a six-piece ensemble that Rob Moose wrote for and conducted, and it was saxophone, trombone, trumpet, French horn, harmonica, and I think that\'s it that we did live. And then Justin was singing live and playing guitar live.” **“Salem”** Vernon: “OP-1 loop, weird Indigo Girls/Rickie Lee Jones vibes. I got really into acid and the Grateful Dead this year, so there\'s definitely some early psych vibes in there. The record really is supposed to be thought of as the fall record for this band, if you think of the other ones as seasons. Salem and burning leaves—these longings and these deaths, it\'s very much in there in that song, so it\'s a really autumn-y song.” **“Sh’Diah”** Vernon: “It stands for Shittiest Day in American History—the day after Trump got elected. It\'s another that sort of hung around as an improvised idea, and we finally got to figure out where we\'re going to land Mike Lewis, our favorite instrumentalist alive today in music. He gets to play over it, and the band got to do all this crazy layering over it. It\'s just one of my favorite moods on the album.” **“RABi”** Messina: “Justin\'s singing a cool thing on it, the guitar vibe is comforting and persistent, but we just weren\'t really sure where it needed to go. And then Brad and the rest of the dudes got their hands on it and it came back as just a dream sequence; it was so sick. We all kind of heard it and it was like, whoa, how can this not close out the record? This is definitely \'see you later.\'” Vernon: “Just some ‘life feels good now, don\'t it?\' There\'s a lot to be sad about, there\'s a lot to be confused about, there\'s a lot to be thankful for. And leaning on gratitude and appreciation of the people around you that make you who you are, make you feel safe, and provide that shelter so you can be who you want to be, there\'s still that impetus in life. We need that. It\'s a nice way to close the record, we all thought.”

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

JAIME I wrote this record as a process of healing. Every song, I confront something within me or beyond me. Things that are hard or impossible to change, words and music to describe what I’m not good at conveying to those I love, or a name that hurts to be said: Jaime. I dedicated the title of this record to my sister who passed away as a teenager. She was a musician too. I did this so her name would no longer bring me memories of sadness and as a way to thank her for passing on to me everything she loved: music, art, creativity. But, the record is not about her. It’s about me. It’s not as veiled as work I have done before. I’m pretty candid about myself and who I am and what I believe. Which, is why I needed to do it on my own. I wrote and arranged a lot of these songs on my laptop using Logic. Shawn Everett helped me make them worthy of listening to and players like Nate Smith, Robert Glasper, Zac Cockrell, Lloyd Buchanan, Lavinia Meijer, Paul Horton, Rob Moose and Larry Goldings provided the musicianship that was needed to share them with you. Some songs on this record are years old that were just sitting on my laptop, forgotten, waiting to come to life. Some of them I wrote in a tiny green house in Topanga, CA during a heatwave. I was inspired by traveling across the United States. I saw many beautiful things and many heartbreaking things: poverty, loneliness, discouraged people, empty and poor towns. And of course the great swathes of natural, untouched lands. Huge pink mountains, seemingly endless lakes, soaring redwoods and yellow plains that stretch for thousands of acres. There were these long moments of silence in the car when I could sit and reflect. I wondered what it was I wanted for myself next. I suppose all I want is to help others feel a bit better about being. All I can offer are my own stories in hopes of not only being seen and understood, but also to learn to love my own self as if it were an act of resistance. Resisting that annoying voice that exists in all of our heads that says we aren’t good enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, rich enough or successful enough. The voice that amplifies when we turn on our TVs or scroll on our phones. It’s empowering to me to see someone be unapologetically themselves when they don’t fit within those images. That’s what I want for myself next and that’s why I share with you, “Jaime”. Brittany Howard

The cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 17th album couldn’t feel more removed from the man once known as a snarling, terrifying prince of poetic darkness. This heavenly forest with its vibrant flowers, rays of sun, and woodland creatures feels comically opposed to anything Cave has ever represented—but perhaps that’s the point. This pastel fairy tale sets the scene for *Ghosteen*, his most minimalist, supernatural work to date, in which he slips between realms of fantasy and reality as a means to accept life and death, his past and future. In his very first post on The Red Hand Files—the website Cave uses to receive and respond to fan letters—he spoke of rebuilding his relationship with songwriting, which had been damaged while enduring the grief that followed his son Arthur’s death in 2015. He wrote, “I found with some practise the imagination could propel itself beyond the personal into a state of wonder. In doing so the colour came back to things with a renewed intensity and the world seemed clear and bright and new.” It is within that state of wonder that *Ghosteen* exists. “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents,” Cave has explained. Those eight “children” are misty, ambient stories of flaming mares, enchanted forests, flying ships, and the eponymous, beloved Ghosteen, described as a “migrating spirit.” The second album features two longer pieces, connected by the spoken-word “Fireflies.” He tells fantasy stories that allude to love and loss and letting go, and occasionally brings us back to reality with detailed memories of car rides to the beach and hotel rooms on rainy days. These themes aren’t especially new, but the feeling of this album is. There are no wild murder ballads or raucous, bluesy love songs. Though often melancholy, it doesn’t possess the absolute devastation and loneliness of 2016’s *Skeleton Tree*. Rather, these vignettes and symbolic myths are tranquil and gentle, much like the instrumentation behind them. With little more than synths and piano behind Cave’s vocals, *Ghosteen* might feel uneventful at times, but the calmness seems to help his imagination run free. On “Bright Horses,” he sings of “Horses broken free from the fields/They are horses of love, their manes full of fire.” But then he pulls back the curtain and admits, “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire/The fields are just fields, and there ain’t no lord… This world is plain to see, it don’t mean we can’t believe in something.” Through these dreamlike, surreal stories, Cave is finding his path to peace. And he’s learned that he isn’t alone on his journey. On “Galleon Ship,” he begins, “If I could sail a galleon ship, a long, lonely ride across the sky,” before realizing: “We are not alone, it seems, so many riders in the sky/The winds of longing in their sails, searching for the other side.”

There’s something almost startlingly disarming about the way Stella Donnelly can convey such immense, moving messages in songs typically anchored by bright, gentle vocals and acoustic guitars. The Western Australian singer-songwriter first made her mark in 2017 with “Boys Will be Boys,” a powerful song that is, despite its sweet melody, an all-out attack on the culture of sexual assault victim-blaming. Two years later, her debut album is a melodic collection of guitar-based songs that directly address toxic masculinity, abuse, white Australia, and the breakdown of a relationship. Of course, *Beware of the Dogs* isn’t *all* doom and gloom, but happy songs aren’t necessarily Donnelly’s cup of tea. “I struggle to write about the flowers and the birds and the bees and the blue skies,” she tells Apple Music. “There\'s gotta be a bit of grit in there somewhere.” Read about the stories and meaning behind each song on the album below. **“Old Man”** “It was really important to me that I came out with a strong statement on the first song. After putting out ‘Boys Will Be Boys,’ I received so much love, but I also got challenged by a lot of people. I had to make a decision that I wasn\'t going to back away in fear, I was going to come out, guns blazing, middle finger up. It’s my way of making sure listeners knew I wasn’t moving away from that activism or outspokenness.” **“Mosquito”** “This is probably the only love song I\'ll ever write. I find myself having to say ‘Sorry, mum’ after singing it live, sometimes. The vibrator line is the only way I could really express my love for someone. It had to be a little bit crass. It’s hard to find a way of speaking about love that isn\'t too optimistic.” **“Season’s Greetings”** “I wanted to paint a picture of a Christmas party gone wrong, where you\'re forced into a small space with people who you generally spend the rest of the year avoiding. It’s a chance to learn a little bit about ourselves, if not about someone else.” **“Allergies”** “I actually had a breakup the day I recorded this. You can hear it in my voice. I\'m all choked up and snotty and crying, and my two best friends were sitting on the couch with fried chicken, chocolate, and tissues for when I finished the song. It\'s not perfect. Some bits are shaky. But in terms of getting across that mood and that truth, I wouldn’t change anything.” **“Tricks”** “It\'s a bit of a joke song about the people who heckled me when I used to play covers. I\'d be singing ‘Wonderwall’ for the 50th time that week and then someone would yell, ‘Play Cold Chisel! Play “Khe Sanh”!’ Every weekend they’d heckle me, I’d finally play Crowded House and they\'d be happy. That\'s what I mean by the tricks. They only liked me when I played what they wanted.” **“Boys Will Be Boys”** “It was a last-minute decision to put this on the record, because it came out on the EP in 2017. Unfortunately, I feel like its message still needs to come through and be heard by more people. I spoke to my dad about it and he said, ‘A lot of people have heard that song, but a lot more people haven\'t heard that song.’ It\'s still painful to perform, it challenges me and feels powerful to be speaking out. Certain songs lose the weight they had when you first wrote it. ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ hasn\'t changed.” **“Lunch”** “It was originally meant to be just me and an acoustic guitar. One day I was playing these random chords, and my bass player, Jenny, was playing really low notes on the guitar. We ended up adding drums, keyboard, cello, and it became this beautiful thing. My guitarist, George, had the idea for the drums. He stood in the middle of the room with a snare and a tom—not even the whole drum kit—and made the part. We were all on the other side of the room cheering him on! It was a really special moment.” **“Bistro”** “‘Bistro’ was actually originally a full song with a chorus, bridge, and everything, but I was struggling to tell the story that I was trying to tell. So I cut lines and just repeated the same lyrics over and over again. It was all I needed to say, really.” **“Die”** “I wrote ‘Die’ initially because I wanted a song that I could go jogging to. None of my music is very joggable. I’ll tell you what, though: I haven’t gone jogging once since putting out the song. So that didn\'t work out very well.” **“Beware of the Dogs”** “It’s about Australian identity and what that actually means for me, as an Anglo, white Australian, and how my experience of this country can differ so much from somebody else\'s based on that privilege. It also looks at the people in power, who have all the money and protect it at the expense of others. I guess I\'m just trying to use this platform to speak up.” **“U Owe Me”** “This one\'s about my old boss at a pub I used to work at back home. Three or four years ago, I was literally pouring flat VB into warm cups. It was a real bleak scenario, but I got so many great experiences from that.” **“Watching Telly”** “I wrote this song after arriving in Dublin on the day that they voted in the right for women to seek a legal abortion. It was really scary. There were \'No\' signs everywhere, lots of protests. I felt so much for the women who had to see these signs questioning the right to make their own decisions for their bodies. I just found it so troubling that there was still such a question about that freedom.” **“Face It”** “There’s a narrative throughout the album about a relationship breakdown, and I wanted to finish by drawing the line in the sand, moving on from that experience, and going into the next record with something new. It’s my closing speech.”

When David Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009, the world stood to lose one of the best writers in indie rock, a guy who catalogued the magic and misery of everyday life with wit, heart, and the ragged glory of the occupationally down-and-out. After a 10-year break professedly spent reading books and arguing with people on Reddit, Berman enlisted members of the Brooklyn band Woods to back him on *Purple Mountains*. Berman’s pain had never been laid quite so bare, nor had it ever sounded quite so urgent. “I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion,” he sings on the swaggering “That’s Just the Way I Feel.” “Day to day, I’m neck and neck with giving in.” And “Margaritas at the Mall” turns an ordinary happy hour into a jeremiad about the cold comforts of capitalism in a godless world. That the music—country-tinged indie rock—was as polished and competent as it was only highlighted Berman’s intensity: less a rock singer than a street preacher, someone who needed to avail himself of his visions stat. But even at his most desperate, he remained achingly funny, turning statements of existential loneliness into the kind of bumper sticker Zen that made him seem like an ordinary guy no matter how highfalutin he could get. “Well, if no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he sings on the album-closing “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” sounding not all that far off from the George Strait one-twos he reportedly loved. Above all, though, his writing is beautiful, attuned to detail in ways that make ordinary scenarios shimmer with quiet magic. Just listen to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” which turns a quiet night in a big city into an allegory of finding solace in the weather of what comes to us. Shortly after the release of *Purple Mountains*, Berman died, at the age of 52, a tragic end to what felt like a triumphant return. “The dead know what they\'re doing when they leave this world behind,” he sings on “Nights That Won’t Happen.” “When the here and the hereafter momentarily align.”

David Berman comes in from the cold after ten long years. His new musical expression is a meltdown unparalleled in modern memory. He warns us that his findings might be candid, but as long as his punishment comes in such bite-sized delights of all-American jukebox fare, we'll hike the Purple Mountains with pleasure forever.

In the middle of writing his sixth album *Flamagra*, Steven Ellison—the experimental electronic producer known as Flying Lotus—took up piano lessons. “It’s never too late!” the 35-year-old tells Apple Music. “It\'s always nice to have someone checking your technique and calling you on your bullshit.” For the past decade, Ellison’s primary tool has been his laptop, but for this album, he committed to learning each instrument. “It actually made me faster,” says the artist, who is a product of LA’s beat scene and the grandnephew of John and Alice Coltrane. “Suddenly, I could hear every part.” Inspired by the destructive wildfires that swept California\'s coastline and the deadly 2016 Ghost Ship fire, which broke out at a warehouse in Oakland, *Flamagra*—a jazzy, psychedelic concept album that spans 27 tracks—imagines a world in which Los Angeles was lit by an eternal flame. “One that was contained, and good,” he says. “How would we *use* it?\'\" To explore that heady framework, he tapped some of pop culture\'s most out-of-the-box thinkers, including George Clinton, David Lynch, Anderson .Paak, and Solange—all visionary artists with specific points of view who, Ellison knows, rarely do guest features. \"The fact is, most of these artists are my friends,\" he says. \"I like to do things organically. That\'s the only way it feels right.\" Read on for the story behind each collaboration. **Anderson .Paak, \"More\"** \"I first met Andy a long time ago. He\'s a drummer and grew up around Thundercat and Ronald Bruner Jr., two amazing musicians Andy was probably inspired by. So I chased him down and we recorded the demo to \'More.\' It was dope, but it was never done. There were things both of us wanted to change. For years I\'d run into him at parties where he\'d be like, \'What\'s up with the song, man? Is it done yet? Why ain\'t it done yet?\' It became this running joke with his big ol\' toothy smile. Then, finally, we got it done. And now we don\'t have nothin\' to talk about.\" **George Clinton, \"Burning Down the House\"** \"I made this beat while I was in a big Parliament phase. One day, George came through and I threw it on. We sat next to each other working on it—the lyrics, the arrangements. And even though he\'s so brilliant, I was able to help fill in little gaps that made it work with the album\'s concept, so it was truly collaborative. It also gave me more confidence writing lyrics, which isn\'t something I normally do that often.\" **Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon, \"Spontaneous\"** \"I\'d been trying to work with Little Dragon for forever. We\'ve always been playing similar shows, passing each other at festivals, being like, \'We gotta do something! We gotta do something!\' Finally I was like, \'I\'ma reach out and get this poppin\'.\' The song was actually one of the last to get added onto the album.\" **Tierra Whack, \"Yellow Belly\"** \"Honestly, I was just a fan of hers from SoundCloud. Then, one day, Lil Dicky came over to play some music and brought her along. He didn\'t really give her the proper introduction. He was just like, \'This is my friend Tierra, she makes music.\' She didn\'t say much, but she was cool and we were vibing out. A couple hours later, Dicky was like, \'Okay, wanna listen to some of this Tierra Whack music?\' I was like, \'Wait a second, you mean, you\'re the—oh my god! I know all your songs. I mean, you\'ve only got two of them, but I know \'em both!\' I super-fanned out.\" **Denzel Curry, \"Black Balloons\"** \"The thing I love about Denzel is that he\'s got so much to prove. He\'s got a fiery spirit. He wants to show the world that he\'s the greatest rapper right now. I love that. But the difference is that he actually comes back better every time I hear him. He\'s putting in the work, not just talking shit. He cares about the craft and is such a thoughtful human. So there\'s an interesting duality there. He\'s got the turn-up spirit, but he\'s very conscious and very smart.\" **David Lynch, \"Fire Is Coming\"** \"This album has a middle point—like a chapter break moment—and David Lynch couldn\'t have been more perfect to introduce it. You know, initially I thought it should be a sound design thing, something weird and narrative and unexpected. I wasn\'t thinking about chopping David Lynch on the beat. But when I sent them a version that was basically atonal jazz—you know, weird sounds—they hit me back like, \'Hey, so we think this would be so cool if it had that Flying Lotus beat!\' I was like, \'Oh, all right, okay, I got you.\'\" **Shabazz Palaces, \"Actually Virtual\"** \"This one is special to me. He came out to my house, stayed in my guest room, and we worked on songs for three days straight. And the truth is, we made so much stuff that we forgot about this track. When I found it later, randomly, I was like, \'What the fuck is this? It needs a little TLC, but man, it could really be something.\' After I spent some time on it and sent it back over to him, he just goes, \'That\'s hardbody.\' Such an East Coast line.\" **Thundercat, \"The Climb\"** \"The thing is, Thundercat is on every track. He\'s pretty much playing on 90 percent of the album. But this is the only one he\'s singing on. We started this song the way we start everything: frustrated and depressed about the world, knowing we want to make something that reminds people that most of the chaos out there is just noise. Be above all that shit. Be above the bullshit.\" **Toro y Moi, \"9 Carrots\"** \"Toro is the person I always wind up in vans with at festivals. Somehow, I always wind up in the van with Toro. We play a lot of the same shows, we get picked up from the same hotels, and he\'s just always in the van, or on the plane, things like that. Over time, I guess I started to feel a kindred spirit thing, even though he\'s someone I don\'t know too well. But finally we were like, \'We gotta make something happen.\'\" **Solange, \"Land of Honey\"** \"I\'d been trying to make this song happen for a long time. We initially started it for a documentary film that didn\'t pan out. But I really loved the song and always thought it was special, so I kept on it. I kept working on it, kept to trying to figure out how to tie it into the universe that I was building. Eventually, we recorded it here at the house and just felt really organic, really natural. She\'s someone I\'d definitely like to keep working with.\" **Honorable Mention: Mac Miller** \"A couple songs on the album, like \'Find Your Own Way Home\' and \'Thank U Malcolm,\' were inspired by Mac. \'Thank U Malcolm\' is special to me because it\'s my way of thanking him for all the inspiration he left behind in his passing, and for all the fire he inspired in me, Thundercat, and all of our friends. He made us want to be better, to let go of the bullshit. And now, you know, none of us are out here experimenting with drugs or anything. That\'s largely because of him. After he left us, everyone was like, \'You know what? Fuck all that shit.\' In a way, in his passing, he\'s got friends of mine clean. He\'ll always mean a lot to me.\"

For a project so shrouded in mystery in the run-up to its release, the origin story behind Better Oblivion Community Center isn\'t particularly enigmatic at all: Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst started writing some songs together in Los Angeles, unclear what their final destination would be until they had enough good ones that a proper album seemed inevitable. Plus, the anonymity and secrecy allowed them to subvert any expectations that might come from news of high-profile singer-songwriter types teaming up. “We just realized that the songs were their own style and they didn\'t sound like either of us,” Bridgers tells Apple Music. “I don\'t think that they would have felt comfortable on one of my records or one of Conor\'s records. And even the band name—Conor came up with it and we didn\'t think about it as a real thing, and then people were like, \'Whoa, clearly it\'s this elaborate concept,\' and we\'re like, \'Really? Cool.\'” Let Bridgers and Oberst guide you through each track of their no-longer-enigmatic debut. **“Didn\'t Know What I Was in For”** Oberst: “When you sit down and write a song with someone, you kind of find out pretty fast—even if you\'re friends with them—if you gel on a creative level.” Bridgers: “I think it\'s really important to be able to have bad ideas in front of someone to create with them, and realizing I could do that with him was really important to our dynamic. We were able to tell each other what we actually thought about style and all that stuff, starting with that song.” **“Sleepwalkin’”** Oberst: “That was one of the first ones we started recording with a rhythm section, and I knew it was gonna be fun and actually be rock music, and I got excited for that.” Bridgers: “We did mostly real live takes of the band stuff, which was really fun. When I record my records, I overdub into oblivion because I like deleting and reworking and rethinking halfway through, so it\'s pretty different for me.” **“Dylan Thomas”** Oberst: “That was the last one we wrote, so we kind of had our method a little more dialed. It immediately felt like a good thing to put out there first, as far as people getting the whole concept quickly: that it\'s two singers and maybe more upbeat than people would think. I guess \[Dylan Thomas\] is a kind of antiquated reference for 2019, but he\'s always been one of my favorite poets.” **“Service Road”** Oberst: “That one is kind of like a heavy song, lyrically. I don\'t know if I would have been able to get to all that stuff without Phoebe\'s help—she\'s very empathetic in her writing.” Bridgers: “It\'s funny, I didn\'t really think about it like, \'Oh, helping Conor write something heavy\'; it was just immediately pretty familiar territory and I didn\'t really have to think twice about it.” Oberst: “It\'s cool when you find someone to write songs with, where a lot of it can go unsaid and you can be automatically on the same page without having to explain a bunch of stuff up front. \'Cause I feel like other times when I\'ve been in co-writing situations, if you\'re coming from super-different places, it takes a bunch of legwork to even get to a starting point.” **“Exception to the Rule”** Oberst: “That one changed the most from the demo to the actual recording. It really came into its own in the recording, with all the pulsing keyboard—that was not at all the way the demo was. That\'s always fun, when something changes in the recording process.” **“Chesapeake”** Bridgers: “I kind of started it as my own song with my friend Christian helping me out. We were getting together, ranting about music, and we were like, \'What if we wrote a song about what we think is stupid in music?\' and kind of ranted for hours over those chords. And then Conor, who was tripping on mushrooms, wanders into the room, like, \'Are you guys gonna just talk about writing this song or when are you gonna actually write it?\' We were kind of brushing him off, and then he started writing with us and then it immediately became real. And yeah, he gave us a run for our money on mushrooms.” **“My City”** Bridgers: “I think it\'s funny when people call LA \'this town.\' It\'s fucking so corny and funny, and the amount that I hear it is really disturbing. Like, \'Yeah, this town spits you out in a heartbeat.\' We started talking about that and then it became a lyric, and then weirdly kind of started being about Los Angeles. One of my favorite ways to write with Conor is just to go on a rant about something and then he spits out beautiful lyrics with whatever I said.” **“Forest Lawn”** Oberst: “Yeah, I guess there are a lot of LA references on this record. Phoebe would talk about when she was a teenager they would hang out and party and smoke weed in Forest Lawn. Every teenager in every town ends up going to a cemetery. Youth and reckless abandon amongst dead bodies—there\'s something kind of nice about that image to me.” **“Big Black Heart”** Bridgers: “I feel like—well, I know—that I subliminally stole the riff from a Tigers Jaw song. An early 2000s emo band...” Oberst: “She\'s like, \'I wanna email them and ask them if we can use it.\' And I was like, \'Damn, Phoebe, you\'re extremely ethical. I really appreciate your ethics.\'\" Bridgers: “They were very sweet, and they were like, \'What the fuck are you talking about? That\'s not stealing it.\'” Oberst: “I think Phoebe has a great scream and she never uses it, so I convinced her to bring that in, which is cool.” **“Dominos”** Oberst: “That\'s a cover. Taylor Hollingsworth is a songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama, a guy I\'ve played with a lot, that we both love as a person and as a musician. We just love that song. I had called him and got him to record those little samples on the phone of him talking. I kind of lied a little bit, like, \'Yeah, Taylor, I\'m making this sound collage for a song I\'m working on.\' When we finally played it for him, he was totally floored and got a little teary-eyed. He\'s like, \'I can\'t believe you guys recorded my song.\' So, that was really sweet.”

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.

The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”

slowthai knew the title of his album long before he wrote a single bar of it. He knew he wanted the record to speak candidly about his upbringing on the council estates of Northampton, and for it to advocate for community in a country increasingly mired in fear and insularity. Three years since the phrase first appeared in his breakout track ‘Jiggle’, Tyron Frampton presents his incendiary debut ‘Nothing Great About Britain’. Harnessing the experiences of his challenging upbringing, slowthai doesn’t dwell in self-pity. From the album’s title track he sets about systematically dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism. “Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?” ‘Nothing Great About Britain’ serves up a succession of candid snapshots of modern day British life; drugs, disaffection, depression and the threat of violence all loom in slowthai’s visceral verses, but so too does hope, love and defiance. Standing alongside righteous anger and hard truths, it’s this willingness to appear vulnerable that makes slowthai such a compelling storyteller, and this debut a vital cultural document, testament to the healing power of music. As slowthai himself explains, “Music to me is the biggest connector of people. It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together.”

Maggie Rogers spent the first three years of her career retracing one chance encounter: In 2016, a video of her singing a song that moved Pharrell to tears during a master class at NYU went viral, earning her a record deal, magazine features, and headlining tours (watch it and you’ll understand). But the Maryland native, then 22, was still figuring out who she was, and this sudden flood of fame was a lot to bear. Determined to take control of her own narrative, she assembled a debut album powerful enough to shift the conversation. Measured, subtle, and wise beyond her years, it feels like the introduction she always wanted to make. Like her 2017 EP, *Now That the Light Is Fading*, *Heard It In A Past Life* is a thoughtfully sewn patchwork of anthemic synth-pop, brooding acoustic folk, and soft-lit electronica, the latter of which was inspired by a year spent dancing through Berlin’s nightclub scene. But here, her vision feels both more daring and more polished. On “Retrograde,” long stretches of propulsive synths are punctuated by high-pitched *hah-hah-hah*s; “Say It” blends R&B with light, breathy indie-pop; and “The Knife” could be a sultry come-on or a daring confession. On the Greg Kurstin-produced “Light On,” Rogers seems to make peace with her surreal story. “And I am findin’ out/There’s just no other way/And I’m still dancin’ at the end of the day,” she sings, a bittersweet hat-tip to the moment that got her here. And to her fans, a promise: “If you leave the light on/Then I’ll leave the light on.”

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”

In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came together to record as The Highwaymen, one of the most successful supergroups in country music history. Now, like the Pistol Annies before them, four of the genre’s most powerful women—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—grab the torch. Their name is more than a play on words: “\[The men\] were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other as equals,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Brooke Reese. “This is a difficult time for women to do that because there are so few spaces for us on country radio, and in the industry in general, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we form a straight line? A shoulder-to-shoulder women’s country group?’” Their eponymous debut album puts female stories front and center—mothers, daughters, witches, lesbians, cowgirls, and more—in a celebration of American women who refuse to choose between success and family, power and love. “Making bank/Shaking hands/Driving 80/Trying to get home just to feed the baby,” they sing on lead single “Redesigning Women,” a toast to ambitious ladies “breaking every Jell-O mold.” But underneath those winking lyrics and warm, absorbing harmonies is a serious message aimed directly at Nashville’s old guard: *Hear us*. “I want to get in the door, and I want our band to get played on country radio,” Shires says. “And once we get in the door, I want to hold it open.” The songs here are daringly vulnerable (“Old Soul”), tough (“Don’t Call Me,\" “Loose Change”), and, at their core, unifying. The album standout “Crowded Table” calls for a more inclusive world: “If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seeds,” they sing in unison. “Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep.”

“A real-ass n\*gga from the 305/I was raised off of Trina, Trick, Rick, and Plies,” Denzel Curry says on “CAROLMART.” Since his days as a member of Raider Klan, the Miami MC has made it a point to forge a path distinct from the influences he shouts out here. But with *ZUU*, Curry’s fourth studio album, he returns to the well from which he sprang. The album is conspicuously street-life-oriented; Curry paints a picture of a Miami he certainly grew up in, but also one rap fans may not have associated him with previously. Within *ZUU*, there are references to the city’s storied history as a drug haven (“BIRDZ”), odes to Curry’s family (“RICKY”), and retellings of his personal come-up (“AUTOMATIC”), along with a unique exhibition of Miami slang on “YOO.” Across it all, Curry is the verbose, motormouthed MC he made his name as, a profile that is especially recognizable on the album closer “P.A.T.,” where he dips in and out of a bevy of flows over the kind of scuzzy, lo-fi production that set the table for another generation of South Florida rap stars.

Melina Duterte is a master of voice: Hers are dream pop songs that hint at a universe of her own creation. Recording as Jay Som since 2015, Duterte’s world of shy, swirling intimacies always contains a disarming ease, a sky-bent sparkle and a grounding indie-rock humility. In an era of burnout, the title track of her 2017 breakout, Everybody Works, remains a balm and an anthem. Duterte’s life became a whirlwind in the wake of Everybody Works. After spending her teen years and early 20s exploring an eclectic array of musical styles—studying jazz trumpet as a child, carrying on her Filipino family tradition of spirited karaoke, and quietly recording indie-pop songs in her bedroom alone—that accomplished album found her playing festivals around the world, sharing stages with the likes of Paramore, Death Cab for Cutie, and Mitski. In November of 2017, seeking a new environment, Duterte left her home of the Bay Area for Los Angeles. There, she demoed new songs, while also embracing opportunities to do session work and produce, engineer, and mix for other artists (like Sasami, Chastity Belt). Reckoning with the relative instability of musicianhood, Duterte turned inward, tuning ever deeper into her own emotions and desires as a way of staying centered through huge changes. She found a community; she fell in love. And for an artist whose career began after releasing her earliest collection of demos—2015's hazy but exquisitely crafted Turn Into—in a fit of drunken confidence on Thanksgiving night, she finally quit drinking for good. “I feel like a completely different person,” she reflects. Positivity was a way forward. The striking clarity of her new music reflects that shift. After months of poring over pools of demos, Duterte, now 25, essentially started over. She wrote most of her brilliant new album, Anak Ko—pronounced Anuhk-Ko—in a burst during a self-imposed week-long solo retreat to Joshua Tree. As in the past, Duterte recorded at home (in some songs, you can hear the washer/dryer near her bedroom) and remained the sole producer, engineer, and mixer. But for the first time, she recruited friends—including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, Justus Proffitt, Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick, as well as bandmates Zachary Elasser, Oliver Pinnell and Dylan Allard—to contribute additional vocals, drums, guitars, strings, and pedal steel. Honing in on simplicity and groove, refining her skills as a producer, Duterte cracked her sound open subtly, highlighting its best parts: She’s bloomed. Inspired by the lush, poppy sounds of 80s bands such as Prefab Sprout, the Cure, and Cocteau Twins—as well as the ecstatic guitarwork of contemporary Vancouver band Weed—Anak Ko sounds dazzlingly tactile, and firmly present. The result is a refreshingly precise sound. On the subtly explosive “Superbike,” Duterte aimed for the genius combination of “Cocteau Twins and Alanis Morissette”—“letting loose,” she says, over swirling shoegaze. “Night Time Drive” is a restless road song, but one with a sense of contentedness and composure, which “basically encapsulated my entire life for the past two years,” she says—always moving, but “accepting it, being a little stronger from it.” (She sings, memorably, of “shoplifting at the Whole Foods.”) Duterte focused more on bass this time: “I just wanted to make a more groovy record,” she notes. The slow-burning highlight “Tenderness” begins minimally, like a slightly muffled phone call, before flowering into a bright, jazzy earworm. Duterte calls it “a feel-good, funky, kind of sexy song” in part about “the curse of social media” and how it complicates relationships. “That’s definitely about scrolling on your phone and seeing a person and it just haunts you, you can’t escape it,” Duterte says. “I have a weird relationship to social media and how people perceive me—as this person that has a platform, as a solo artist, and this marginalized person. That was really getting to me. I wanted to express those emotions, but I felt stifled. I feel like a lot of the themes of the songs stemmed from bottled up emotions, frustration with yourself, and acceptance.” The title, Anak Ko, means “my child" in Tagalog, one of the native dialects in the Philippines. It was inspired by an unassuming text message from Duterte’s mother, who has always addressed her as such: Hi anak ko, I love you anak ko. “It’s an endearing thing to say, it feels comfortable,” Duterte reflects, likening the process of creating and releasing an album, too, to “birthing a child.” That sense of care charges Anak Ko, as does another concept Duterte has found herself circling back to: the importance of patience and kindness. “In order to change, you’ve got to make so many mistakes,” Duterte says, reflecting on her recent growth as an artist with a zen-like calm. “What’s helped me is forcing myself to be even more peaceful and kind with myself and others. You can get so caught up in attention, and the monetary value of being a musician, that you can forget to be humble. You can learn more from humility than the flashy stuff. I want kindness in my life. Kindness is the most important thing for this job, and empathy.”

*** Grammy Nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album “All forms of expression in sound are valid, as all people are… this is the mantra of Ancestral Recall.” Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah sets the tone for his new project - Ancestral Recall - with this powerful statement. In his mission to unify cultural voices and tear down the sonic and social constructs that separate based on race, class, and culture, Adjuah asserts music has historically been disseminated to people with harmony and melody prioritized over rhythm. The value distinction leads to harmful hierarchal sentiments and perpetuates the view that cultures who prioritize harmony and melody are more nuanced and sophisticated than those who prioritize rhythm. It is an inaccurate portrayal. Ancestral Recall looks to excavate and update hidden histories in sound by displaying a sonic tapestry that illuminates the har-melodic movements found within rhythm, rendering previous contexts baseless, Adjuah explains: "In its inception, Ancestral Recall was built as a map to de-colonialize sound; to challenge previously held misconceptions about some cultures of music; to codify a new folkloric tradition and begin the work of creating a national set of rhythms; rhythms rooted in the synergy between West African, First Nation, African Diaspora/Caribbean rhythms and their marriage to rhythmic templates found in trap music, alt-rock, and other modern forms. It is time we created a sound that dispels singular narratives of entire peoples and looks to finally represent the wealth of narratives found throughout the American experience. One that shows that all forms of expression in sound are valid, as all people are." The goal is to connect people in one understanding rather than dividing them by definition. The music of Ancestral Recall focuses the mind. As the ear adjusts to the shifting tapestries of rhythm, Adjuah stands firm in the mix, heralding the histories of rhythm and song. Walking hand-in-hand with listeners through his and their musical histories, clearing the way for a new reading of what all musical futures can become. Ancestral Recall is an album that might easily be misunderstood in its own time, but will certainly be seen as a moment in history that marked a momentous shift in musical and perhaps social understanding.

A successful child actor turned indie-rock sweetheart with Rilo Kiley, a solo artist beloved by the famed and famous, Jenny Lewis would appear to have led a gilded life. But her truth—and there have been intimations both in song lyrics and occasionally in interviews—is of a far darker inheritance. “I come from working-class showbiz people who ended up in jail, on drugs, both, or worse,” Lewis tells Apple Music. “I grew up in a pretty crazy, unhealthy environment, but I somehow managed to survive.” The death of her mother in 2017 (with whom she had reconnected after a 20-year estrangement) and the end of her 12-year relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice set the stage for Lewis’ fourth solo album, where she finally reconciles her public and private self. A bountiful pop record about sex, drugs, death, and regret, with references to everyone from Elliott Smith to Meryl Streep, *On the Line* is the Lewis aesthetic writ large: an autobiographical picaresque burnished by her dark sense of humor. Here, Lewis takes us through the album track by track. **“Heads Gonna Roll”** “I’m a big boxing fan, and I basically wanted to write a boxing ballad. There’s a line about ‘the nuns of Harlem\'—that’s for real. I met a priest backstage at a Dead & Company show in a cloud of pot smoke. He was a fan of my music, and we struck up a conversation and a correspondence. I’d just moved to New York at the time and was looking to do some service work. And so this priest hooked me up with the nuns in Harlem. I would go up there and get really stoned and hang out with theses nuns, who were the purest, most lovely people, and help them put together meal packages. The nuns of Harlem really helped me out.” **“Wasted Youth”** “For me, the thing that really brings this song, and the whole record, together is the people playing on it. \[Drummer\] Jim Keltner especially. He’s played on so many incredible records, he’s the heartbeat of rock and roll and you don’t even realize it. Jim and Don Was were there for so much of this record, and they were the ones that brought Ringo Starr into the sessions—playing with him was just surreal. Benmont Tench is someone I’d worked with before—he’s just so good at referencing things from the past but playing something that sounds modern and new at the same time. He created these sounds that were so melodic and weird, using the Hammond organ and a bunch of pedals. We call that ‘the fog’—Benmont adds the fog.” **“Red Bull & Hennessy”** “I was writing this song, almost predicting the breakup with my longtime partner, while he was in the room. I originally wanted to call it ‘Spark,’ ’cause when that spark goes out in a relationship it’s really hard to get it back.” **“Hollywood Lawn”** “I had this for years and recorded three or four different versions; I did a version with three female vocalists a cappella. Then I went to Jamaica with Savannah and Jimmy Buffett—I actually wrote some songs with Jimmy for the *Escape to Margaritaville* musical that didn’t get used. We didn’t use that version, but I really arranged the s\*\*\* out of it there, and some of the lyrics are about that experience.” **“Do Si Do”** “Wrote this for a friend who went off his psych meds abruptly, which is so dangerous—you have to taper off. I asked Beck to produce it for a reason: He gets in there and wants to add and change chords. And whatever he suggests is always right, of course. That’s a good thing to remember in life: Beck is always right.” “Dogwood” “This is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it on the piano even though I don’t think I’m a very good piano player. I probably should learn more, but I’m just using the instrument as a way to get the song out. This was a live vocal, too. When I’m playing and singing at the same time, I’m approaching the material more as a songwriter rather than a singer, and that changes the whole dynamic in a good way.” **“Party Clown”** “I’d have to describe this as a Faustian love song set at South by Southwest. There’s a line in there where I say, ‘Can you be my puzzle piece, baby?/When I cry like Meryl Streep?’ It’s funny, because Meryl actually did a song of mine, ‘Cold One,’ in *Ricki and the Flash*.” **“Little White Dove”** “Toward the end of the record, I would write songs at home and then visit my mom in the hospital when she was sick. I started this on bass, had the chord structure down, and wrote it at the pace it took to walk from the hospital elevator to the end of the hall. I was able to sing my mom the chorus before she passed.” **“Taffy”** “That one started out as a poem I’d written on an airplane, then it turned into a song. It’s a very specific account of a weekend spent in Wisconsin, and there are some deep Wisconsin references in there. I’m not interested in platitudes, either as a writer or especially as a listener. I want to hear details. That’s why I like hip-hop so much. All those details, names that I haven’t heard, words that have meanings that I don’t understand and have to look up later. I’m interested in those kinds of specifics. That’s also what I love about Bob Dylan songs, too—they’re very, very specific. You can paint an incredibly vivid picture or set a scene or really project a feeling that way.” **“On the Line”** “This is an important song for me. If you read the credits on this record, it says, ‘All songs by Jenny Lewis.’ Being in a band like Rilo Kiley was all about surrendering yourself to the group. And then working with Johnathan for so long, I might have lost a little bit of myself in being a collaborator. It’s nice to know I can create something that’s totally my own. I feel like this got me back to that place.” **“Rabbit Hole”** “The record was supposed to end with ‘On the Line’—the dial tone that closes the song was supposed to be the last thing you hear. But I needed to write ‘Rabbit Hole,’ almost as a mantra for myself: ‘I’m not gonna go/Down the rabbit hole with you.’ I figured the song would be for my next project, but I played it for Beck and he insisted that we put it on this record. It almost feels like a perfect postscript to this whole period of my life.”

Moved by the warm response to 2016’s *You Want It Darker*, released three weeks before his death, Leonard Cohen left his son with instructions to finish those songs they’d started together, using vocal recordings he was leaving behind. In an act of devotion—to his father, to song—Adam wrote and recorded arrangements for each, as he thought Leonard would have wanted to hear them. The result is *Thanks for the Dance*, a posthumous album of unreleased material that’s as loving and respectful as they come. “This was not meant to be about me,” Adam tells Apple Music. “I didn’t make choices that were a reflection of my taste—the exercise was to try to make choices that were a reflection of his. It’s this advantage that I have over much greater and more accomplished producers: They don’t know what he hates. I do.” Here, he tells us the story behind each track and highlights some of his favorite lines. **Happens to the Heart** “Anyone who knew Leonard Cohen at the end of his life knew that there was one song he was obsessively and compulsively writing and trying to perfect, and that was ‘Happens to the Heart.’ He was hell-bent—or heaven-bent—on completing it, and we just were unable to get a musical accompaniment that he was satisfied with. I think it\'s one in a long line of songs that have his essential thesis in life, which is the broken hallelujah: Everything cracks, and this is what happens to the heart. I had this incredible vocal that was so meaningful to him. It was a way to keep him with me, a way to sit with him—there\'s the emotional part, but more important to me than anything was just getting it right. The first task was to parse through all of the verses and assemble a vocal based on his last approved version of what the poem was going to be, and set that to chordal language that would make sense to a Leonard Cohen listener.” **Moving On** “His notion for the song was that he would repeat the same verse over and over and over again almost as a meditation. Every time we tried, it failed by his own estimation. So I had some very compelling vocals from him and the trick was to then go back to the essence, bring back the Eastern sound of the tremolo—in this case a concert mandolin player by the name of Avi Avital—and Javier Mas on his Spanish nylon string guitar, in my backyard in Los Angeles. ‘As if there ever was a you’ is the line that kills me. The whole thing feels like this nostalgic dream. When we were recording the vocal, he had just got news that Marianne \[Ihlen\] had passed away. And in recording the vocals I really did feel like he was channeling and correcting lyrics to have the song be a postscript to ‘So Long, Marianne.’ It\'s something that we had discussed while we were recording and it informed my wanting to exaggerate the Mediterranean romance of the song.” **The Night of Santiago** “‘Night of Santiago’ was always one of my favorite poems that my father had written, which is actually based on a Federico García Lorca poem that he adapted. I\'d heard it under construction for years, on the front lawn or while we were having coffee or dinner, and I\'d always begged him to attempt to write music to it. In a weakened state, he said, ‘Look, I\'ll just recite the poem to a certain tempo and you go ahead and you write the music and try to tell the story.’ And it was really, really fun to work with it. It has such voluptuous language. The song was mostly recorded in Spain, with Sílvia Pérez Cruz from Barcelona and Javier Mas and Carlos de Jacoba, to give it that flamenco twist—we very much tried to capture a kind of whimsy. When we got back to LA, Beck came over to put some Jew’s harp in the verses and laid the guitar down just to give it an extra layer of cinema.” **Thanks for the Dance** “He tried to get a version of it on *Old Ideas* and *Popular Problems*, and on *You Want It Darker*. He’d been even trying to figure out his way of doing that song for years, and I think that he would have been incredibly pleased with this particular version. It was meant to evoke things like \'Dance Me to the End of Love\' and \'Hallelujah.\' It has a certain strain of lightness and cheekiness that some of his work has: \'Stop at the surface, the surface is fine.\' To have that kind of resignation but humor really does encapsulate where his mind was at the end. Jennifer Warnes, his longtime vocal partner, came to my backyard and sang on that. When we completed it, we knew we had the record. There was something about the invocation of that union, between the feminine voice and my father’s low baritone—it just touches a nerve and makes you feel like you\'ve heard the song before. There was this sense that *You Want It Darker* had a kind of gravity and darkness, and this offering has a softer, flower-pushing-up quality and romance to it.” **It’s Torn** “‘Torn’ was started a decade ago with Sharon Robinson—with whom he had written many songs and with whom he toured—but it really took a hold in Berlin with concert pianist and composer Dustin O\'Halloran. It has chord signatures borrowed from my father’s song from decades earlier ‘Avalanche.’ Again, it\'s this incredible thesis of brokenness that he has, this consistent message, this toying with the imperfection of life: ‘It\'s torn where there\'s beauty, it\'s torn where there\'s death/It\'s torn where there\'s mercy, but torn somewhat less,’ he says. ‘It\'s torn in the highest, from kingdom to crown/The messages fly but the network is down/Bruised at the shoulder and cut at the wrist/The sea rushes home to its thimble of mist/The opposites falter, the spirals reverse/And Eve must re-enter the sleep of her birth.’ I mean, this is pseudo-biblical. I’ve never heard that from any other songwriter, not even Dylan. It\'s just so composed. It’s like King David.” **The Goal** “‘The Goal’ might be my favorite piece on the album. The zinger is at the end: ‘No one to follow and nothing to teach/Except that the goal falls short of the reach.’ That\'s an incredible line to ponder, and it very much resembles the condition that he was in at the end, where he\'d sit in his chair, look at life go by, and have and share these incredibly profound and generous thoughts. The music around his reading brings to life the humor and the emotion—the swelling and the sparseness of what I imagined to be his own emotional state. The most stirring thing that people say over and over after listening to these songs is how they feel Leonard Cohen is still among us, he\'s still alive. And this song has that quality in a powerful dose. The reading is almost thespian-like, it is so present. He was speaking from the other side for sure.” **Puppets** “Another poem that we discussed for years—or, at least, for years he heard my disappointment with the fact that it had never been turned into song. He would chuckle and say, ‘Well, write something that makes sense musically around it, and I\'d consider it.’ There is a ferocious boldness to the lyric and to the position of the narrator. And there\'s a kind of steely, church-like quality to the arrangement. The lyric: ‘German puppets burned the Jews/Jewish puppets did not choose.’ To open a song that way is frighteningly bold, so the arrangement needed to be robust. And there\'s this otherworldliness going through the entire thing. We recorded this German choir in Berlin, and then funny enough we ended up going to Montreal, to get the Jewish men\'s choir that played such an important role on *You Want It Darker*. And so there\'s literally a choir of Germans and a choir of Jews on the song blending together. The trick was to create something with as much evocation without going into sentimentality.” **The Hills** “‘Triumphant’ is a wonderful word to describe it, in the narrator’s semi-comical declaration he can\'t make the hills, one of the wonderful paradoxes of all of our existences. There’s a sort of *Secret Life of Walter Mitty* quality to this one, and at the same time it\'s the voyage—it’s what you wanted versus what you got. There\'s something stark and resigned and yet not woeful about it, which allows for this grandiose, classic feeling while at the same time being fresh and modern. Patrick Watson, who\'s one of my favorite recording artists, lent a great deal of work with horns and vocal arrangements. It\'s the only song on the record that\'s co-produced by anybody.” **Listen to the Hummingbird** “The last thing we recorded. We were struggling at the time, because we had an eight-song record and it just felt shy—we knew we needed another one. We were in Berlin and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver was in the studio next door to ours, making these incredible, really emotional, stirring sounds. And there was something about the mood that was so captivating and inspiring that it reminded me of my father’s last press conference. It was the last time he ever spoke in public, a press junket for *You Want It Darker*. Unprompted, he said, ‘Do you want to hear a new poem?’ And he recited it, into this cheap microphone in a conference room. I asked Sony for the audio, recuperated it, set it to be metronomically correct, and composed this piece of music with those atmospheric sounds from Bon Iver coming through our shared wall in Berlin. That\'s how we got it.”

Though she’d been writing songs in her head since she was six, and on the guitar since she was 12, it took a long time for Nilüfer Yanya to work up the courage to show anyone her music. “I knew I wanted to sing, but the idea of actually having to do it was really horrifying,” says the 23-year-old. When she was finally persuaded to do so, by a music teacher in West London where she grew up, she says “it was horrible. I loved it”. At 18, Nilüfer – who is of Turkish-Irish-Bajan heritage – uploaded a few demos to SoundCloud. Though she’s preternaturally shy, her music – which uniquely blends elements of soul and jazz into intimate pop songs with electronic flourishes and a newly expressed grungy guitar sound – isn’t. And it didn’t take long for it to catch people’s attention. She signed with independent New York label ATO, following three EPs on esteemed london indie label Blue Flowers, and earned a place on the BBC Sound of 2018 longlist. She also supported the likes of The xx, Interpol, Broken Social Scene and Mitski on tour. Now, Nilüfer is ready to release her debut album, Miss Universe. Though she recorded much of it in the same remote Cornwall studio she used to jam in as a much younger person, it is bigger and more ambitious than anything she has done before. ‘Angels’, with its muted, harmonic riffs, channels ideas “of paranoid thoughts and anxiety” – a theme that runs through the album, not least in its conceptual spoken word interludes which emanate from a fictional health management company WWAY HEALTH TM. “You sign up, and you pay a fee,” explains Nilüfer of the automated messages, which are littered through the album and are narrated by the titular Miss Universe. “They sort out all of your dietary requirements, and then they move onto medication, and then maybe you can get a better organ or something… and then suddenly it starts to get a bit weird. You're giving them more of you and to what end?”

“I’m always teetering on the edge of self-sabotage,” says Aly Spaltro aka Lady Lamb. “The whole idea of this new album is the push and pull between calmness and chaos, joy and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love.” Nowhere is that more clear than the title track, “Even in the Tremor,” an ecstatic panic attack unspooling with all the far-flung places Spaltro has visited throughout the course of her writing process, including Berlin, Montreal, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania and Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano, a touchstone visual for Spaltro in her conception of this latest project. “The past will kill the present / if I let it,” the singer repeats like an anxious dance party mantra for romantics and overthinkers alike. Even in the Tremor marks Spaltro’s latest full-length LP following 2015’s After and it’s a remarkable achievement because, among other things, it’s the first time in her career that Spaltro is singing explicitly about herself. “I’ve never let myself be this exposed before,” she says, “but this whole album is about facing who you are and fighting your way toward self-acceptance.” Between confessing a tantrum in a batting cage (“Little Flaws”), telling the story of her parent’s kiddie-pool baptism (“Young Disciple”) and singing openly about untangling her girlfriend’s wet hair (“Deep Love”), Even in the Tremor is deeply rooted in the people and places, extraordinary and mundane, that have shaped Spaltro into the self-determining artist she is today. Spaltro’s relentless search for meaning informs not only her creative process but also the content of the album itself. “I’ve become obsessed with trying to understand what we’re here for,” she says. “That desire to understand weaves through all my songs.” This becomes clear on “Strange Maneuvers,” a Motown-inspired freak-out song recorded live in the studio for extra impact. “I don’t want to be afraid of myself anymore,” the singer roars, and it’s like she’s exorcising her demons through a jangly pop beat. “Deep Love” is a resounding reflection on love, touching on family, intimacy and neighborhood. A late addition to the album, it was the song that threw the whole record into focus. “I had just gone into Manhattan and I felt like an alien seeing all the workers on their lunch break. When I got home I looked out the window and I started singing the first line, ‘I’m not convinced we should strive for Midtown’ and by the time I got to the verse about finding a faded photo of my mom I was crying and that’s when I knew the album was done.” The song begins humbly with an acoustic guitar and swells into a jubilant and soul-baring tribute to the love that connects us all. It took Spaltro almost a year to find the right co-producer. She initially attempted to make the record with an esteemed producer as she’d been advised but after being told that her arrangements needed rewriting by various veterans in the industry, Spaltro bravely changed direction and found a champion of her vision in Erin Tonkon, a less established producer whose six years working with Tony Visconti and later, David Bowie on his Grammy-winning Blackstar, made her more than qualified for the role. Tonkon and Spaltro instantly bonded over certain hardships they had each faced in the music industry. “Women who work in the production side of music are not taken seriously,” Spaltro recalls. “We wanted to work toward changing that.” Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic, Kimbra, Okkervil River) played bass and piano and synthesizer. Jeremy Gustin (David Byrne, Albert Hammond Jr., Rubble Bucket) played drums. The group recorded at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, New York. Known for her keen observations of others, Spaltro now turns her multifaceted ruminations inward; She calls out from dreams, peers into churches, has fits of rage, and struggles to get out of her head long enough to love herself and those around her. “It’s taken me years to get here,” she says, “but I’m sort of done with hiding myself. I want to be as honest as I can because that’s why people turn to art. Anybody can tell the difference between bullshit and real vulnerability.” This commitment to creating only what is necessary and urgently felt is the key to appreciating Spaltro's fearless songwriting, as emotional as it is philosophical. Even in the Tremor signifies the arrival of her most sonically soaring and brutally honest album to date.

With the DIY video for her 2017 track “Pretty Girl,” Clairo became the premier case study for how the internet can instantly blow up homespun artists. But with her full-length debut album, the Massachusetts indie-pop phenom betrays a bold artistic vision that can no longer be contained by her bedroom walls. Co-produced by the artist with ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, *Immunity* achieves just the right balance of focus and fuzz, expanding Clairo’s sonic vocabulary with neo-soul vibes, jazzy piano lines, and boom-bapped drum breaks while framing her most brutally honest tracks—like the breakup lament “Bags” and same-sex-love anthem “Sofia”—with gritty intensity and blown-out distortion. Throughout the album, Clairo tries to reconcile her desire for independence with her need for intimacy, an emotional tug-of-war that reaches its zenith on the momentous closer “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” a stark, defiant piano ballad that cedes to the warm embrace of its ecstatic chillwave outro.

In a lot of ways, you can map Alex Giannascoli’s story onto a broader story of music and art in the 2010s. Born outside Philadelphia in 1993, he started self-releasing albums online while still in high school, building a small but devoted cult that scrutinized his collage-like indie folk like it was scripture. His music got denser, more expressive, and more accomplished, he signed to venerated indie label Domino, and he worked with Frank Ocean, all—more or less—without leaving his bedroom. In other words, Giannascoli didn’t have to leave his dream-hive to find an audience; he brought his audience in, and on his terms, too. “Something I can never stress enough is I try and explain this stuff, but it never accurately reflects the process,” Giannascoli tells Apple Music, “because I’m not actually thinking that much when I’m doing it.” Recorded in the same building-block fashion as his previous albums (and with the same home studio setup), *House of Sugar* represents a new peak for Giannascoli—not just as a songwriter, but as a producer who can spin peculiar moods out of combinations that don’t make any immediate sense. It can be blissful (“Walk Away”), it can be ominous (“Sugar”), it can be grounded one minute (“Cow,” “Hope,” “Southern Sky”) and abstract the next (“Near,” “Project 2”)—a range that gives the overall experience the disjointed, saturated feeling of a half-remembered dream. Often, the prettier the music is, the bleaker the lives of the characters in the lyrics get, whether it’s the drug casualty of “Hope” or the gamblers of “SugarHouse,” who keep coming back to the tables no matter how often they lose—a contrast, Giannascoli says, that was inspired in part by the 2018 sci-fi film *Annihilation*. “From afar, everything looks bright and beautiful,” he says, “but the closer you get, the more violent it becomes.” Despite his rising profile, Giannascoli tries to remain intuitive, following inspiration whenever it shows up, keeping what he calls “that lens” on whenever possible. “I never say to myself, ‘This isn’t where I thought \[the music\] was going to go,’” he says. “Because usually I don’t have that thought in mind to begin with. And I never really end up getting surprised, because the music is unfolding before me as I make it.”

House of Sugar— Alex G’s ninth overall album and his third for Domino — emerges as his most meticulous, cohesive album yet: a statement of artistic purpose, showing off his ear for both persistent earworms and sonic adventurism.

“Jacknife took our brains for a walk,” Catfish and the Bottlemen’s Van McCann tells Apple Music about working with Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee. “You’d be surrounded by music all day. Every other day, you’d get a knock at the door and it would be new vinyls he’d ordered to show you new stuff. You’d be buzzing off his excitement.” These brain strolls have helped bring extra adventure and exploration to the band’s third album. *The Balance* still contains the key ingredients that have taken Catfish from indie-rock tyros to arena-fillers in a few years: exhilarating choruses, pin-sharp melodies, and relatable lyrics (on “Basically,” McCann even sings about doing housework). “Don’t write anything that isn’t worth a place on a set list some night,” says McCann. “By the end of the year, we would have done every arena in the \[UK\] and probably sold them all out. Where’s it go from there? It has to go outdoors, and you’ve got to start writing songs that are big enough for those occasions. It was always about pushing it.” Here, McCann and guitarist Johnny Bond take us through the album track by track. **“Longshot”** Van McCann: “This is the first one we played to Jacknife. When he heard it, he was like, ‘Let’s get in that room and start it.’ Later on that night, we were all in a little bar at the studio with the acoustic guitar, jumping on the table singing it. It was a great start to the recording process to have that one in the bank from the off; it set everything up.” **“Fluctuate”** VM: “It\'s very just straight and bold and four-to-the-floor. There’s a great solo in there. I think the outdoor slot, when the sun’s coming down, is when this song will come to life, big time.” Johnny Bond: “It’s an important song, like a bookmark for the album, ’cause it’s a burst of aggression that splits up other tracks. We’ve been doing it live, just after the band go off and Van plays \[acoustic track\] ‘Hourglass.’ We come back out and it\'s just a good song to burst out with \'cause it’s so immediate and so snarling.” **“2all”** VM: “This could have gone on \[previous album\] *The Ride*, but we knew it was quite a big one, we knew we needed to push it \[to playing shows\] outdoors first before we could put it in the set. It’s about the people who’ve backed you from the start. They’ve stuck around and said, ‘Go on, go for it, youse lot can really smash through these songs.’ Everyone should have those people around them. Or be that person to someone. A lot of this album’s about togetherness and putting your mind to something and going for it.” **“Conversation”** VM: “I’m speaking to me dad here: ‘I love to find myself/Looking straight up to you for the answers.’ We will still sit back and talk about music for hours, talk about new bands and old bands and gigs, he’s always been like a mate. I don’t normally tell him \[if a song’s about him\]. He doesn’t ask, he pretends he doesn’t listen to the lyrics. But my mum’s always like, ‘That’s about you and your dad, isn’t it? Why don’t you write one about me?’” **“Sidetrack”** VM: “This is one that’s been bopping about for a minute, just waiting for the right album. If you look on YouTube, you’ll find us doing a song with these lyrics from around 2015 or 2016. It was recorded in about two or three hours and we wanted it to sound like that—if you hear us play it live, it sounds exactly the same as on record.” **“Encore”** VM: “We wrote this quick. I thought the chorus was something you could hear on a dance tune: ‘Trust me, it feeeeeeeels like…’ I think it\'s gonna be one of my dad’s favorites.” **“Basically”** VM: “My dad takes over the DJ-ing when you’re having a night out and you’re playing things. He’ll be like, ‘You’ve gotta get on this one!’ It’s partly an ode to him playing old Glen Campbell tunes to me. It also gives you a day in the life of the band from the time we were recording *The Ride*.” JB: “I love how relentless this one is. It’s constantly evolving, it keeps moving into different sections. When you listen to it loud, you don’t get a moment for breath.” VM: “What a solo as well. It’s a beast. Everything drops out and Bondy takes the guitar for a walk, a big mooch.” **“Intermission”** VM: “Yeah we do ‘Intermission’…into…‘Mission.’ It’s like one song chopped into two. The ‘Intermission’ bit is a riff I had knocking about that everyone was loving and said I should put on an album. Jacknife said, ‘Why don’t you just have it as a snippet?’” **“Mission”** JB: “When we first got to the studio, Jacknife had flown over a suitcase full of these mad old fuzzboxes. And that’s when I know I’m going to get on with somebody straight away! Just plug in these insane fuzzboxes—I could do that shit for days. When it gets to the point with a song where we need a sound for a solo, that’s my forte. I did this solo on a 20-quid guitar, kicking the shit out of the pedals on the floor. You can hear them break in the middle.” **“Coincide”** VM: “That was a bit of an underdog as a song, but Bob, our drummer, was loving it. I guess I thought it was a bit E Street Band-y; it has a different energy to all the others on the album. If you put this in your headphones and went for a good run in the sun…it’s got that kind of feel to it. And I think the album needed one of them. I\'m looking forward to playing it live ’cause you can see it in your head: When that chorus drops, people will just be going…*BOMF!*” **“Overlap”** JB: “This is my favorite. It’s all over the shop, but I find it really uplifting, and the beat just forces you to fucking bolt along with it.” VM: “You can actually hear the *bu-du-dum* sound of a Bluetooth speaker turning off in the room—it sounds like a drum roll. It’s one of those little snippets on the album that are happy accidents.”

Despite an earlier stint in Brisbane quartet Go Violets, Harriette Pilbeam seemed to emerge out of nowhere with her 2018 debut EP as Hatchie. The immersive dream-pop of *Sugar & Spice* earned strong notices around the world, and the full-length follow-up *Keepsake* continued Pilbeam’s winning combination of brightly careening melodies and lush textural depth. Even when Pilbeam applies woozy washes of guitar effects, they serve to heighten her sharp pop instincts rather than obscure them. Observe how “Without a Blush” carves out a roomy atmosphere far in advance of its headily romantic chorus, or how “Secret” culminates in a shimmering latticework of overlapping vocals. Several songs hark back to the mid-’90s radio hits of The Cranberries and The Sundays, even as heavier turns point toward My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. All the while, Pilbeam’s sighing, empathic vocals capture the upending sensation of new love and other seismic emotional events. Pilbeam would tease out even more electronic elements on 2022’s *Giving the World Away*, following through on the sleepy club hook deployed here for “Stay With Me.” She would also enlist top co-writers like Olivia Rodrigo collaborator Dan Nigro to take her songwriting ever more skyward with undeniable earworms like “Quicksand.”

Released in September of 2018, Mother of My Children was the debut album from Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul. Heralded as a favorite new musician of 2018 by the likes of NPR Music, Stereogum, and Paste, the album was also named as a “Best Rock Album of 2018” by Pitchfork, and garnered further end-of-year praise from FADER, Under The Radar and more. Arriving just a year after that debut record, At the Party With My Brown Friends is a brand new full-length recording from Black Belt Eagle Scout. Where that first record was a snapshot of loss and landscape and of KP’s standing as a radical indigenous queer feminist, this new chapter finds its power in love, desire and friendship. At the Party With My Brown Friends is a profound and understated forward step. The squalling guitar anthems that shaped its predecessor are replaced by delicate vocals and soft keys, sentiments spoken and unspoken, presenting something shadowy and unsettling; a stirring of the waters. The end result presents a captivating about-face that redefines KP’s beautifully singular artistic vision.

It\'s hard to imagine Bruce Springsteen describing a project of his as a concept album—too much prog baggage, too much expectation of some big, grand, overarching *story*. But nothing he\'s done across five decades as one of rock\'s most accomplished storytellers has had the singular, specific focus and locus, lyrically and musically, as this long-gestating solo effort—a lush meditation on the landscape of the western United States and the people who are drawn there, or got stuck there. Neither a bare-bones acoustic effort like *Nebraska* nor a fully tricked-out E Street Band affair, this set of 13 largely subdued character-driven songs (his first new ones since 2014\'s *High Hopes*, following five years immersed in memoir) is ornamented with strings and horns and slide guitar and banjo that sound both dusty and Dusty. They trade in the most familiar of American iconography—trains, hitchhikers, motels, sunsets, diners, Hollywood, and, of course, wild horses—but aren\'t necessarily antiquated; the clichés are jumping-off points, aiming for timelessness as much as nostalgia. The battered stuntman of “Drive Fast” could be licking, and cataloging, his wounds in 1959 or 2019. As convulsive and pivotal as the current moment may feel, restlessness and aimlessness and disenfranchisement are evergreen, and the songs are built to feel that way. In true Springsteen fashion, the personal is elevated to the mythical.