Consequence's 30 Best Albums of 2024 (So Far)

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”

For the follow-up to their 2018 Grammy-winning *Electric Messiah*, stoner-metal trio High on Fire enlisted Big Business’ Coady Willis to replace longtime drummer Des Kensel. “Coady is one of our favorite drummers, and it just seemed like it would make sense musically,” bassist Jeff Matz tells Apple Music. “Once we started jamming with him, it became apparent that it was going to work out really well. He has his own style, but he understands the High on Fire aesthetic.” Despite winning the Grammy for Best Metal Performance for their last album, High on Fire felt no pressure in writing *Cometh the Storm* with a new member. “I don’t really think like that,” vocalist/guitarist Matt Pike says. “It was nice to be appreciated by our peers and such, but we didn’t really get to take full advantage of it because the world shut down not long after we won. I think we got exposed to a lot of people who hadn’t heard us prior to that, but that’s probably it. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be weird to win another one?” Below, Pike and Matz discuss each track on *Cometh the Storm*. **“Lambsbread”** Pike: “Well, I always have a song about weed. It’s basically a description of a bong hit working in a higher mental element, like what pot does to a meditative state, I guess. I don’t know how to word that correctly, but that’s just what pot does to you.” Matz: “The music for the chorus has been kicking around since probably 2010, and it reflects my obsession with Middle Eastern folk music, so we added some acoustic baglama to that part. The intro and outro just popped into my head when I was driving around, so I scat-sang it into my phone. It’s so Beavis and Butt-Head.” **“Burning Down”** Pike: “That’s more of a serious one, and it’s a tiny bit political. I’m calling out people like the World Economic Forum and the billionaires who fly around in jets and tell us if we give them a billion more dollars, they’re going to fucking fix the world for us. Who the fuck are these people?” Matz: “Musically, that was one that Matt and Coady were working on when I arrived at practice one day. That riff’s got old-school High on Fire vibes. It definitely harkens back to the early albums, but it’s got some really interesting little timing changes.” **“Trismegistus”** Pike: “The title means ‘thrice great,’ which comes from Hermes, who I always thought was an interesting character in mythology because he combined the wisdom of the material and the spiritual worlds. The music sounds kind of Egyptian, so in the lyrics, I’m talking about Osiris and Duat and Anubis. I’ve always been into esoteric mythology, but I’ve never really done one on Egypt.” Matz: “The verse riff came from when I was jamming with Coady down in LA. It reminded me of Lucifer’s Friend or something, like a weird classic-rock riff, but I tried to make it a little more like Voivod with some discordant intervals. The chorus uses a Middle Eastern scale, so I think that’s what set Matt off in that Egyptian lyrical direction.” **“Cometh the Storm”** Pike: “This is basically about nuclear war and how foolish it is. It’s kind of an elaboration of ‘Burning Down,’ how we’re just starting wars and talking about nuclear war like it’s normal.” Matz: “The track started out of a little thing I started playing at practice, just tapping on the bass, and Matt just started coming up with a vocal right on the spot. I really like the vocal melody, and it’s probably my favorite vocal performance on the whole album.” **“Karanlık Yol”** Matz: “I’ve been studying Turkish folk music pretty intensely since just before the pandemic. I’ve been studying the Turkish folk lute, the baglama, and just learning how to play different folk tunes and different styles with different teachers in Türkiye and the Philippines. So, I basically wanted to try to write something in the style of a Turkish folk dance because I think those types of sounds blend really well with the particular kind of heavy music that we play.” **“Sol’s Golden Curse”** Pike: “That’s the first song I wrote with Coady when I flew down to LA so we could feel each other out. I took something out of our riff vault, which is just hours and hours of music that me and Jeff have compiled over the years, and started working on it with Coady. Lyrically, it has more weird, esoteric shit about the Sethians and Abraxas.” **“The Beating”** Pike: “That’s our D-beat song. I’ve always been into the martial arts world, especially MMA and boxing, but I don’t do too many songs about it. This one’s pretty much about ring fighting. It seemed to take the right shape. It’s a ripper and definitely one of the faster-paced ones on the album. And I’ve got to put a \[Jeff\] Hanneman solo on every album, so this is the song.” **“Tough Guy”** Pike: “We’ve played with many hardcore bands in the past, so we were being smart-asses and wrote this hardcore breakdown about 10 years ago. It turned out really good, even though we were just joking around. But it’s got more of a metal mentality to it, just fighting and moshing, but it’s also about rebuilding our band from scratch. It’s truly violent sounding, so I went with that theme for the lyrics.” **“Lightning Beard”** Pike: “The title was kind of an inside joke between me and Jeff. I took this picture of him when he was posing all crazy with his bass, and I had this camera app, so I put all these lightning bolts all up in his beard and on his fretboard. We called it ‘Lightning Beard,’ which just sounded cool. But the song is about my El Camino. During COVID, I got it going really fast and was doing doughnuts in front of all the street racers, and they were cheering me on, so I made lyrics out of that.” Matz: “That’s another ripper that we came up with at practice. It’s got a pretty crazy freak-out section during the solo where the bass just completely goes nuts. It’s pretty fun.” **“Hunting Shadows”** Pike: “That one has some deep lyrics to me. I was just having a hard time with depression and my alcohol recovery and all sorts of stuff. I wrote that song not thinking about it, but really, I was trying to heal myself. I ate a bag of shrooms to try to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. I thought I was singing those lyrics to someone else, but I was singing them to myself, so I had this crazy conundrum. But it’s about self-reflection.” Matz: “Musically, that one’s really interesting. It’s got more of a positive, hopeful energy to it that’s definitely a little bit different for us.” **“Darker Fleece”** Pike: “Once we started writing the new record, I went over to Jeff’s to put some ideas together. I had this riff, but it was so long and complicated. Then we made it more complicated by adding subdivisions. It’s almost a lesson in timing, how you can cut up a whole note into quarter notes and 32nd notes. Lyrically, it’s just about life and war—it’s very much a war march. I’m part Scottish, and Coady’s dad plays the bagpipes, so I put a bagpipe-style guitar solo on it.” Matz: The direction that Coady took with the drums on this song really changed the character of it and made it a lot heavier and beefier sounding. It’s definitely one of my favorites on the album. With the intro and outro, it seemed like the perfect closer track.”

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

The Smile, a trio featuring Radiohead prime movers Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with ex-Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, sounds more like a proper band than a side project on their second album. Sure, they’re a proper band that unavoidably sounds a *lot* like Radiohead, but with some notable distinctions—much leaner arrangements, bass parts by Greenwood and Yorke with a very different character from what Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood might have laid down, and a formal fixation on conveying tension in their melodies and rhythms. Their debut, *A Light for Attracting Attention*, was full of tight, wrenching grooves and guitar parts that sounded as though the strings were coiling into knots. This time around they head in the opposite direction, loosening up to the point that the music often feels extremely light and airy. The guitar in the first half of “Bending Hectic” is so delicate and minimal that it sounds like it could get blown away with a slight breeze, while the warm and lightly jazzy “Friend of a Friend” feels like it’s helplessly pushed and pulled along by strong, unpredictable winds. The loping rhythm and twitchy riffs in “Read the Room” are surrounded by so much negative space that it sounds eerily hollow, like Yorke is singing through the skeletal remains of a ’70s metal song. There are some surprises along the way, too. A few songs veer into floaty lullaby sections, and more than half include orchestral tangents that recall Greenwood’s film score work for Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion. The most unexpected moment comes at the climax of “Bending Hectic,” which bursts into heavy grunge guitar, stomping percussion, and soaring vocals. Most anyone would have assumed Yorke and Greenwood had abandoned this type of catharsis sometime during the Clinton administration, but as it turns out they were just waiting for the right time to deploy it.

As important as it is to foreground the Tuareg/Nigerien heritage of Mdou Moctar’s scorching psychedelic rock, it’s just as important to note its connection to the American underground. After all, *Funeral for Justice* isn’t “folk music” in any touristic or anthropological sense, and it’s probably as (if not more) likely to appeal to fans of strictly American weirdos like Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees as anything out of West Africa. Still, anyone unfamiliar with the stutter-step rhythm of Tuareg music should visit “Imajighen” and the lullaby-like hush of “Modern Slaves” immediately, and it pleases the heart to imagine a borderless future in which moody teenage guitarists might study stuff like “Sousoume Tamacheq” the way Moctar himself studied Eddie Van Halen. As with 2021’s breakthrough *Afrique Victime*, the intensity is astonishing, the sustain hypnotic, and the combination of the two an experience most listeners probably haven’t had before.

The hip-hop polymath built a reputation on witty freestyles that befitted her Philadelphia roots, then broke through in 2017 with “MUMBO JUMBO,” a purposefully unintelligible trap ditty that brought new resonance to the term “mumble rap” with a Grammy-nominated video that should come with a warning for those with dentophobia. Her debut album, 2018’s *Whack World*, crammed an LP’s worth of ideas into the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee: 15 sharp, surrealist minute-long tracks that veered from slapstick vocal hijinks to straight-ahead spitting, each accompanied by its own micro music video. The world Whack built was carnival-esque, all funhouse mirrors and sensory overload, with a darkness lingering at the edges. Aside from a trio of three-song EPs (the tentatively titled *Rap?*, *Pop?*, and *R&B?*) released in 2021, Whack kept a puzzlingly low profile in the years that followed. The colorful critical darling who’d had so much to say in so little time had more or less gone quiet. Then, six years after *Whack World*, she announced *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, billed as the rapper’s real full-length debut. Early videos continued the high-concept ideas and cartoonish costumes, but listen awhile and you heard something new: naked vulnerability, almost shocking in its rawness. “I can show you how it feels when you lose what you love,” Whack sing-songs on the twinkling “27 CLUB,” looking like a cross between Pierrot the clown and Bootsy Collins. The hook was one word, drawn out into a wistful melody: “Suiciiiiide…” In other words, there’s more to Whack’s world than you might expect. (“Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me,” she reminds you on the minute-and-change “MOOD SWING.”) Over the 15 songs of *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, the rapper grapples with real life, where echoes of abandonment and instances of suicidal ideation coexist with bursts of cockiness, uncertainty, lust, loneliness. The constant is her voice, thoughtful and brimming with ideas as ever. “BURNING BRAINS” is an expression of depressive thinking filtered through Whack’s imagistic lens: “Soup too hot, ice too cold, grass too green, sky too blue.” And there’s a great deal of whimsy, too, as on “SHOWER SONG,” a space-funk bop on the joys of singing in the bathroom.

For their third album, Kentucky hardcore troupe Knocked Loose chose a title that resonated deeply with vocalist Bryan Garris. During an airplane takeoff that triggered Garris’ fear of flying, the woman seated next to him offered the comforting words, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” “The line struck him so strongly that it immediately occurred to him that it should be the title,” Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale tells Apple Music. “It also became a lyric in the last song, ‘Sit & Mourn.’ Like the rest of our records, this is a collection of stuff from Bryan’s personal struggles dealing with anger and loss and depression and sadness. It’s a reminder to him—and all of us—that we’re still here. We made it through all the hardships that came with the past four years of writing this.” Musically speaking, Knocked Loose entered the writing sessions for *You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To* with a very different mindset than the one that drove their 2019 breakthrough *A Different Shade of Blue* and revered 2021 concept EP *A Tear in the Fabric of Life*. “There was just way more pressure, and we had way more experience,” Hale says. “Some people view the third album as a make-or-break record. We had pressure from the fans and the outside world, but more so pressure from ourselves. We thought, ‘How can we possibly outdo what we’ve done before?’ It was tough, but I think we were able to come up with a record where every song accomplishes something unique.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Thirst”** “This was written in the first session that we ever had for this record. It was written before *A Tear in the Fabric of Life* even came out. It came from a jam session we were having where we wanted to create a really difficult song on drums to challenge our drummer Pacsun. We wanted something super short, super intense, and we just made it as complex as we could. And to start the record, it’s something we’ve never done before—a super in-your-face jump scare.” **“Piece by Piece”** “This was our attempt at doing kind of a Hatebreed-esque banger. It has a hook to it, but the hook is one of the mosh parts in the song, akin to \[Hatebreed’s\] ‘Perseverance.’ One of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to create stuff that was hooky and catchy, but at the same time crazy heavy. In many ways, I think that it’s the most hardcore song on the record, and that’s what we love about it. It’s our version of a catchy hardcore track that can really connect with people.” **“Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)** “We wrote this song after we thought we had a finished record. Before we went to record, Poppy slid into Bryan’s DMs asking if we would be interested in collaborating on some music. Me and Bryan are huge Poppy fans, so of course we said yes automatically. That same day, Bryan called me like, ‘Hey, man—I’m coming over. We need to write another song.’ We wrote the track the next day, and it was one of the smoothest writing experiences on the record because we wrote it knowing Poppy was going to be a part of it. And because of that, we were able to do some sassy parts that maybe we wouldn’t put on a normal Knocked Loose song but that really work with her voice. I think it’s one of the most special songs we’ve ever written.” **“Don’t Reach for Me”** “This was our attempt at writing a song with a more rock- or pop-oriented structure. It’s different from stuff that we\'ve done before because it has a slightly melodic chorus with a hook. It has a soft bridge with a jam part and some cleaner guitar. And a lot of it is midtempo, besides the very beginning. It only gets fast very briefly. That’s very new for us. There’s like seven mosh parts, so we needed to balance those. It took a long time to figure out, but I think the final product really succeeds in that juxtaposition.” **“Moss Covers All”** “This was written in the second writing session that we did for this record, up in Michigan. We woke up one morning, started jamming, and we were just not coming up with a lot of stuff we liked. We were pretty much just throwing paint at the wall and getting aggravated. When we took a break, I had an idea and basically wrote this entire song in my head in about a minute. I voice memo’d it briefly on my phone and then immediately started putting it down without telling the guys. When they came back, I played it for them—and what I played is pretty much exactly what’s on the record. It’s short, sweet, and super heavy, with a breakdown and a spooky lead that goes directly into the next song.” **“Take Me Home”** “‘Moss Covers All’ and ‘Take Me Home’ are very much connected songs. ‘Moss Covers All’ was written first, but then we really felt the need to have a song on here that’s meant to scare you. We didn’t worry about a mosh part or any sort of heaviness. We just wanted a scary track that’s uncomfortable and throws the listener off guard. When we were thinking about what shape that could take, I immediately thought of that spooky lead from ‘Moss Covers All,’ which we ended up looping as the blueprint for this track.” **“Slaughterhouse 2” (feat. Chris Motionless)** “This song started as an inside joke because Motionless in White was kind enough to reach out to Bryan and have him collaborate on one of their songs, ’Slaughterhouse,’ a very heavy, politically charged track. We’re all huge Motionless in White fans, so of course he accepted. And then we were able to tour with them. As soon as Bryan did that track, we were joking that we should do a song called ‘Slaughterhouse 2.’ We were just kind of laughing about it for a while, but then we thought we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t do it. Chris was down from the beginning, and his voice is amazing on this. It was a challenge to match the theme and vibe of the original song, but I think we were able to create something that’s not just a great sequel, but that really stands on its own as a highlight of the record.” **“The Calm That Keeps You Awake”** “The funny thing about this one is that the song totally revolves around the huge breakdown at the end. That part was written first, as part of another thing that was written before *A Tear in the Fabric* had even come out. So, like four years ago, we needed to write new parts because the rest of the song we’d written wasn’t up to par, but that breakdown was super necessary. In doing so, we created this really cool, Meshuggah-esque, kind of Sepultura-auxiliary-percussion vibe that’s one of the most unique parts of the record.” **“Blinding Faith”** “We definitely have some jabs at religious hypocrisy throughout the Knocked Loose discography, and this is just kind of an update on that situation. We hadn\'t done one in a while, and it was something that was feeling close to home for Bryan at the time. To me, this sounds like a mix of some of our greatest riffs that we’d written over the course of a year—it’s kind of a riff-salad song. In some ways, it’s one of the heaviest and scariest songs on the record, so we put it out as a single to say, ‘If you thought we were going to get any softer, absolutely not. And here’s proof.’” **“Sit & Mourn”** “This one revolves around the melodic lead and the kind of ambient post-rock breakdown at the end. We wrote that in the first writing session in Joshua Tree, and it took us a while to come up with more parts that we felt were that good. But the song is very, very anthemic. It sounds very dark and melancholic, but at the same time, the lyrics are positive in a way. Thematically, it’s kind of a title track in the way that the lyrics relate to the name of the record. I know it was a very cathartic song for Bryan. In many ways, it’s the saddest song on the record, but in other ways it’s the most positive. And it’s mentally exhausting from start to finish. It ends with a sound clip that I won’t disclose, but it’ll take you by surprise.”

A Top Dawg Entertainment fixture since the early 2010s, ScHoolboy Q played no small role in elevating the label to hip-hop’s upper echelon. With his Black Hippy cohorts Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock, the tremendously talented Los Angeles native made a compelling case for continuing the West Coast’s rap legacy well beyond the G-funk era or the days of Death Row dominance. Even still, his relative absence from the game after *CrasH Talk* dropped in 2019 has been hard to ignore, particularly as the most prominent member of his group departed TDE while SZA became the roster’s most undeniable hitmaker. Indeed, it’s been nearly five years since he gave us more than a loosie, which makes the arrival of his sixth full-length *BLUE LIPS* all the more auspicious. His concerns as a lyricist draw upon the micro as well as the macro level, as a parent decrying mass school shootings on “Cooties” or as a rap star operating on his own terms on “Nunu.” Elevating the drama, the *Saw* soundtrack cue nods of “THank god 4 me” accent his emboldened bars targeting snitches, haters, and fakes. Q’s guest selection reflects a more curatorial ear at work than the gratifying star-power flexes found on *CrasH Talk*. Rico Nasty righteously snarls through her portion of the menacing “Pop,” while Freddie Gibbs glides across the slow funk groove of “oHio” with scene-stealing punchlines. A producer behind TDE records by Isaiah Rashad and REASON, Devin Malik steps out from behind the boards to touch the mic on a handful of cuts, namely “Love Birds” and the booming paean “Back n Love.”

“I\'ve always wanted to be a pop star, but beyond that, I wanted to be an African pop star,” Tyla tells Apple Music. “The roots of my sound are in amapiano music, in South African and African music.” Though the megaviral 2023 single “Water” may have put the South African singer-songwriter on the proverbial map—first as a social media sensation, then as the highest-charting African female soloist ever on Billboard’s Hot 100, earning her the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance—she’s been carefully plotting her path to the top for years. “Since I started experimenting with amapiano, I just feel like it\'s really helped me get to this point where I created something that is fresh and new, but still familiar and comes from home,” she says. “It\'s a sound of Africa, and it\'s something that I couldn\'t be more proud about.” She weaves through a blend of pop, R&B, amapiano, and Afrobeats (“pop-piano sounds cute,” she admits) across *TYLA*, a coming-of-age chronicle through love, heartbreak, and self-discovery. “I’m speaking about the things that I\'ve gone through while creating the album—basically three years in the making,” she explains. “I was becoming a woman. So it was a lot of growing that happened, and me realizing my worth, and realizing how I want to be treated—and how basically, I\'m that girl, and people need to know I\'m that girl.” While the project was brought to life with the help of global producers including Sammy Soso, Mocha, Believve, Rayo, and Sir Nolan, Tyla made sure they all had a taste of her homeland. “\[It was important\] to bring some to South Africa,” she explains, “so when we get in the studio, they have context. Some people that try amapiano sound so watered down, it\'s cringey. So even though I am mixing it with pop and R&B, I didn\'t want it to sound watered down. Music is our everything in Africa. The way we speak, the way we dance, literally, our dance moves—they come so naturally. It\'s just in us. It’s our essence.” Below, Tyla talks us through her debut album. **“Intro” (Tyla & Kelvin Momo)** “I wanted to start off my album with something that was truly South African, something that showed people the root of where I started, before ‘Water,’ before all of these mixtures. I secretly recorded a voice note when I was in a session with Kelvin Momo. I loved hearing the people in the session, speaking, hearing the language, the accents. It was so raw and real. Kelvin Momo is my favorite amapiano producer—his music and his sound is my heart.” **“Safer”** “The message of the song is something that I feel like a lot of people could relate to. And the energy of the song I feel like is a strong intro to open an album.” **“Water”** “‘Water’ surpassed all expectations. I could\'ve never expected all of these accolades—a Grammy, the Billboard Hot 100, people all over the world dancing and pouring water down their back. From the time I finished recording the song, it was all that I was listening to. It was also like a step away from what I was used to, because I \[had been\] *very* PG. And with this one, I was more grown up and I was experimenting more. And even though I don\'t enjoy vulgar music, I feel like we were able to make the song speak about what it speaks about, but in a way that\'s friendly.” **“Truth or Dare”** “This was the song where I was playing more house-y with it. It’s me calling out people, being like, ‘Hey, *now* you care.’ I\'m not that type of person, but these are feelings that I felt around the time where I\'m like, ‘Where did this person come from? Out of nowhere, you want to now talk to me?’ and I literally hate it. I\'m sure a lot of people have felt that.” **“No.1” (feat. Tems)** “Tems and I had been wanting to make a song for long now. We ended up making it work, and Tems\' voice alone is so amazing, so unique. The song is for everyone, but when I had it in mind, it was really for the girls—me and Tems, girl power, African girls—and we were just really pushing that message of ‘I\'m leaving. I don\'t need anybody. If this is not serving me anymore, I’m gone, and I\'m going to be okay.’ Always put yourself before anything.” **“Breathe Me”** “It\'s a song that\'s so emotional and so real. It\'s just about love, of how strong love is, and how you don\'t even need anything else. I don\'t need anything else. You don\'t need anything else—just me, and you; just breathe me and we\'ll be fine.” **“Butterflies”** “With ‘Butterflies,’ I was in a session with \[producer and songwriter Ari PenSmith\] and he was playing me some stuff that he\'s worked on, and I was like, \'Cool, cool, cool.\' And then he played this, and I fell in love with it. It sat so perfectly with my voice. I connected with the song instantly, and it was too specific to what I was going through to not do anything with it.” **“On and On”** “This was \[an initial\] version of my sound, before ‘Water’ and everything. I made this with Corey Marlon Lindsay-Keay in South Africa. We were supposed to go out, and we didn\'t end up going out, so I was dressed up in a whole outfit in the studio session, and he was producing. I love the song so much because it\'s so nostalgic but new. I love that it feels like old-school R&B. I love that it has hints of Aaliyah\'s influence, but it\'s new, and fresh, and African—all things that are Tyla. The messaging is not so serious—it’s literally about not wanting a party to end.” **“Jump” (Tyla, Gunna & Skillibeng)** “‘Jump’ is a very different vibe. I really just wanted to tell people who I am, and I had to show my confidence through the song. And the opening line, with Skilli being like, \'Original girl, you want a replica? No.\' There\'s no replica. That intro was already perfect, and it segues to that line of me saying, \'They\'ve never had a pretty girl from Joburg/They see me now and that\'s what they prefer.\' That line is just—it’s too iconic for me, and I\'m just so excited to hear all the girls sing it, all the Joburg girls sing it, all the girls from home. And having Gunna on it, I really feel like it took me into that world further, making it even more raw and cool.” **“ART”** “When I\'m with someone that treats me so good, treats me well, treats me like art, treats me like a princess, I will be there for them. I will be their art piece. We also played with that wording where it can be ‘art piece,’ but also your peace and your comfort. As a woman, that\'s how I want to be treated, and that\'s how I would treat you if you treat me that way. It’s about being treasured.” **“On My Body” (Tyla & Becky G)** “This was such a fun one because it’s in my world, but also I played a bit with the Latin vibes. The feature came so organically—I was in studio, and she was in a session next door. She loved it, and she recorded a verse, and I absolutely died. I died. I just love her touch, and how it just broadened the audience, because now it\'s just bringing everybody into this experience. It\'s a melting pot with all these genres, and I love that I was able to expand it even further.” **“Priorities”** “This song was probably the most difficult to share, because it\'s really letting people into my heart and mind, and how I feel I\'ve been with myself. I feel like people would resonate with it, and it speaks about what a lot of people feel and may not express. \[The idea of having spread yourself too thin\] is something that\'s so raw and real, that not even just women, men, everybody feels.” **“To Last”** “I love this song with all my heart. I was in the Vaal with LuuDadeejay, and I literally finished this song in five minutes. It was based off an experience that my friend was going through at the time. About a year prior, I wrote the lines ‘You never gave us a chance, it\'s like you never wanted to last.’ And that note just came to mind, and the song just flowed out of me. I ended up going through something that made me feel that way. It was like I told the future, which is not good—but I fell in love with the song again. It’s so South African: It’s amapiano, it\'s house-y, it\'s our sound.” **“Water (Remix)” (Tyla & Travis Scott)** “Travis reached out—he loved ‘Water,’ and around the time, I was like, \'I don\'t want a remix, I\'m cool.\' But Travis Scott was so unexpected that I wanted to do it so bad, and he absolutely killed it. He added some South African shout-outs in his verse, and I just knew that people from home were going to love it—he acknowledged us, and he mentioned \[the South African telephone country code\] +27 and all those things. And I also love that he brought a different energy to the song. Everyone knows ‘Water’ to be that summer banger, and now Travis made it still the summer banger, but also more gritty. Putting him on an African-sounding song was just the perfect collab.”

Vince Staples knows his songs aren’t soundtracking too many wild Friday night parties; they sound way better on the long, contemplative walk home. “I’ve always been aware of where I fit within the ecosystem of this whole thing, and that allows me to create freely,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “No one’s coming to me from a fan standpoint looking for a single, or looking for a party record. But I do know the people who listen to my music are probably looking for thoughtfulness or creativity.” Since breaking through a decade ago with his debut EP *Hell Can Wait*, the Long Beach rapper has been the go-to guy for heady West Coast rap: songs that may not make you dance, but always make you think. Still, his sixth studio album (and the last one on his Def Jam contract) isn’t quite the downer that the title suggests. Where its predecessor, 2022’s *RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART*, looked back at his bittersweet youth, *Dark Times* is a snapshot of Staples right now: on top of the world on paper, but the reality is trickier. (“I think I’m losing it,” he raps on the bass-heavy “Black&Blue.” “Hope you’re along for the ride.”) On “Government Cheese” he grapples with survivor’s guilt, mourning his brother and lying that all’s well to his friend in prison who saw him on TV. Still, light enters through the cracks with breezy, soulful beats from frequent collaborators Michael Uzowuru and LeKen Taylor, not to mention Staples’ trademark dry wit: “Don’t be no crab in the bucket, be a Crip at the Ritz,” he quips on “Freeman.” There’s even a few tracks you could bump at the function: “Étouffée,” a love letter to New Orleans rap, and “Little Homies,” a lo-fi house jam on whose hook Staples crows, “Life hard, but I go harder.” And no matter how heavy things get, Staples is realistic about what his work means in the grand scheme of things. “They\'re just songs, man,” he says. “It doesn\'t need to go past that point. I know everybody values things differently—but for me at least, put it out, people listen to it, they like it or they don\'t. And then if you get to do it the next time, that\'s the gift that you get is the ability to do it the next time, because most people don\'t get that.”

Arooj Aftab’s star-making 2021 album *Vulture Prince* was marked by a distinct and undeniable sadness—a chronicle of grief following the death of Aftab’s younger brother Maher, whom the record was dedicated to. Despite its many contributors, *Vulture Prince* felt nearly monastic in sound and focus, conjuring images of someone processing pain alone and amidst the cosmos, and since its release, the Pakistani American singer and composer has opened up her sonic world to increasingly thrilling effect. *Love in Exile*, released in 2023, found Aftab expanding the jazz side of her sound in collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and now her fourth solo album *Night Reign* reflects her biggest leap yet. It’s the kind of record that makes you realize that Aftab can, when it comes to songwriting and style, do pretty much anything—from smoldering balladry à la the late Jeff Buckley and Sade’s endless-sounding quiet storm to trip-hop’s shadowy iridescence—without losing an ounce of raw emotion. Similar to *Vulture Prince*, *Night Reign* features a bevy of notable musicians pitching in throughout: Moor Mother delivers raw incantations over the foreboding structure of “Bolo Na,” while Iyer’s keystrokes are deeply felt across the patient tapestry of “Saaqi” and guitarist Kaki King lends her considerable talents to the refracted jazz-folk of “Last Night Reprise.” But it’s Aftab’s voice—rich, resonant, malleable, and instantly recognizable—that provides the true gravitational pull at the center of *Night Reign*’s universe, echoing through the sparse rustling of “Raat Ki Rani” and shimmering on the surface of the devastating closer “Zameen.” In the press materials for *Night Reign*, Aftab expresses a desire to “make music with and for everybody,” and this record is undoubtedly the fullest realization of those aims yet, revealing new contours in her songwriting and further cementing her as a singular talent in popular music.

For Sam Herring, the lead singer of Baltimore’s indie mainstays Future Islands, the band’s seventh album *People Who Aren’t There Anymore* doesn’t fall neatly into the pre- or post-pandemic boxes. “The first half of the album was written within the pandemic,” he told Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “The second half was written after we did our first tour back. So this really elongated space with plenty of time to forget what we\'re going through, but still being in it. I think, collectively, the world is finally coming to terms with what happened between 2020 and 2022, and the sense of how much the world has changed.” Grappling with those profound changes partially made it into the band’s previous album, 2020’s *As Long As You Are*, but they come into sharper focus here. Herring mines the end of romantic relationships and the loss of friendships, and even parts ways with past iterations of himself that no longer serve a purpose, all while trying to balance the heft of grief with hard-won optimism. First single “The Tower” serves as a lynchpin between the two albums, bridging that era of what came before and what lies ahead. In true Future Islands fashion, the track fits into a familiar mythology for the band. “Within the Future Islands canon, it works perfectly, because so many songs of ours are at the sea, standing at the sea, having those thoughts,” Herring said. “I was separated from my partner, who was in Sweden, I was in the States, couldn\'t get back there, and I was just constantly fighting myself over that part of you that wants to give up. So it is a reflection of the past, and how we continue to still have those existential breakdowns, and these pivotal moments of our lives at the sea staring into the great gulf and hoping that someone\'s there.”

Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”

Amigo the Devil occupies a space all his own in alternative roots music. The South Florida-bred singer-songwriter, also known as Danny Kiranos, writes densely narrative and allusion-rich songs that reward repeated listens, with an uncategorizable sound that lands somewhere between Lucero and Leonard Cohen. Following 2021’s critically acclaimed *Born Against*, *Yours Until the War Is Over* is a showcase for Kiranos’ storytelling: He shows it off on the rough and rowdy “Once Upon a Time at Texaco pt. 1,” which spins a tense but humorous yarn about going out for a bottle of tequila, and the addict’s lament “Cannibal Within,” which boasts the caustic lyric, “I just don’t wanna blow my brains out to ‘Hotel California.’” Kiranos serves these stories with a careful balance of theatrical bombast and folksy plainspokenness, finding and amplifying the tension in between. For those who enjoy literature with their music, or just dig the guttural growls, Amigo the Devil is a friend to all.

Faye Webster’s fifth album marks the point of full immersion when it comes to the Atlanta songwriting prodigy’s sly, shifting aesthetic. The tones are richer and deeper; the arrangements expand and breathe like massive lungs; her voice layers over itself and ripples, decadent and deeply felt. Webster’s genre-blending approach may have been slightly overstated in the past—a result of her early association with Atlanta’s rascally, defunct hip-hop crew Awful Records—but her sonic playfulness has never been more fully realized than it is on on *Underdressed at the Symphony*. Slinky, flute-dotted R&B is situated up against sumptuous country pop and grungy flips on ’50s sock-hop rock music; longtime friend and rap chameleon Lil Yachty pops up on “Lego Ring” as the pair switch off from a Weezer-esque chug to spacey, astral psych-rock. Lyrically, *Underdressed at the Symphony*—which was written and recorded coming off of a breakup—carries Webster’s now-trademarked mixture of emotional intimacy and straightforward humor. She finds potency in simple sentiments (“Thinking About You,” “He Loves Me Yeah!”), and on the sparse hyperpop “Feeling Good Today,” she details the small pleasures that come with moving through one’s daily existence. “I used to be self-conscious/Well, really, I still am/I’m just better at figuring out why,” Webster ruminates over the lush guitars of “Wanna Quit All the Time,” one of several songs that feature Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is music that’s as mesmerizing as it is disarmingly personal, and *Underdressed at the Symphony* represents an artist who, similar to cosmic kin Cass McCombs, seems increasingly intent on proving she really can do anything.