Coup De Main's Best Albums of 2021

The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.

“This whole album is in questions,” Jack Antonoff tells Apple Music about the meaning behind *Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night*, his third album as Bleachers. “I kept going back to these really dark stories that somehow spin you around and you\'re in this character, and you don\'t know why this hope exists. I was trying to access that part of myself.” The much-in-demand singer-songwriter and producer—whose credits in the past year alone include work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and St. Vincent—is awash in joy and optimism as he lets things fall into place on these 10 tracks, trading the synth-pop glitz of his previous albums for sweeping, sax-tinged anthems and intimate acoustic confessionals. Antonoff wrote the songs in bits and pieces over the course of four years, though it wasn\'t until early 2020 that he began to record the album—mostly live in a studio with his touring bandmates. “I\'m always writing, and then at some point, an album will form or it won\'t—and when it starts to form, that\'s when I chase it,” he says. “It\'s a window into how I hear music. I don\'t craft records to be instant. I don\'t craft records to be growers. I just craft what I hear and feel in myself.” Here, he tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“91”** “The song, much like a poem, which Zadie Smith helped me write, functions where every lyric is tied to every verse but from a different angle. In the first verse, there’s this child version that can\'t understand what\'s happening. And you only recognize that you\'re here, but you\'re not, through the anxiety of your mother. In the second verse, it\'s a little bit more about anger. You\'re recognizing this part of yourself that you don\'t like through someone else, which is a pretty intense way of understanding it. If you have a feeling that\'s pretty harsh about someone else, there\'s a good chance it\'s really about you. And then, in the third verse, you finally get this unearned hope, and this lightness of actually having all the magic of being alive.” **“Chinatown” (feat. Bruce Springsteen)** “A lot of the music that I love to play sits in that place where it\'s doing two things: There\'s a literal and emotional thing that\'s coming from the same concept. It is going from New York over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Literally and sonically, the song does that. The music sounds a little bit New York-y in the beginning, and then it gets more innate and hopeful and becomes more New Jersey and more suburban. It feels like going home.” **“How Dare You Want More”** “‘How Dare You Want More’ is this feeling I was seeing with friends and family. Everyone\'s going through this big struggle to have more, to ask for more, and to be in control of their life. I saw it was producing so much shame in other people, and therefore, really just myself. Why is it so hard? And I\'m not talking about more square footage. I\'m not talking about more money. I\'m talking about more of who you are so you can not have that strange feeling that keeps you up at night or makes you feel all fucked up in the morning, or makes you not grab at the things you want. It\'s a question that, if you keep asking yourself over and over and over again, can start to sound silly. And that\'s a good thing, because it is silly. It was a hallmark of the album, trying to move past this shame.” **“Big Life”** “It\'s a sibling track to ‘Secret Life.’ It\'s, in the most real and non-cynical way, falling so in love where you want to have a big life. You want to have all the experiences, and you want to take them with you on all these crazy journeys. And ‘Secret Life’ was the opposite, when you want to close every door. It\'s a pretty romantic concept to me. But the song is all about posing these wants. In a funny, funny way, I think it\'s the most vulnerable song on the album, even though it might not come off as it because the music is so confident.” **“Secret Life” (feat. Lana Del Rey)** “I do this thing a few times in the album where you have a feeling and you look at it from two polar-opposite positions. ‘Big Life’ is this ‘let me go out there, let me get burned, and let the world knock me over because I\'m trying to find love,’ right? I want a secret life where you and I can get bored out of our minds. It\'s not a chase. It\'s not running out there to prove something. It\'s a very optimistic song, which is basically when the chemicals wear off and you\'re really in it with someone. At first, maybe I thought it would be a duet with Lana where it could be conversational, but then I realized that if I just put some reverb on her voice and have her kind of crest over the second verse and the chorus, she\'s more like a dream of this person I\'m talking to.” **“Stop Making This Hurt”** “This one is a sibling song to ‘How Dare You Want More.’ ‘Stop Making This Hurt’ is just sort of a more petulant, pissed-off version. There\'s all this joy and hope about the next phase of your life. But then there\'s all this frustration about ‘I can\'t get through this doorway. Whatever I\'m carrying does not let me through.’ I was able to access this rage by talking about other people: my dad, my friends and their kids, the world, and a whole new generation of people that are inheriting so much crap. But at the end of the day, I\'m right in that struggle with all of them.” **“Don’t Go Dark”** “I\'d never written a song like this. It\'s not \'I love you.\' It\'s not \'I hate you.\' It\'s \'you\'ve got to get off my back. You\'ve got to let me go.\' I can\'t be me for new people who I\'m trying to love if I\'m holding your darkness. I can hold you and I can hold our past and all these things, but it can\'t happen. That\'s why the song is so tense. It feels like this plea and this release. I just didn\'t know what else to do besides write that song. It\'s probably the angriest song I\'ve ever written.” **“45”** “There\'s these pieces of us that, to the world, are gone. They\'re not gone—the people we love see them. When you meet someone new, or someone has been in your life for a while, they\'re bringing these pieces that, even if you know this person, you don\'t know and can learn to love them. It\'s exonerating. I can walk back into it in one second, even though no one else can see it.” **“Strange Behavior”** “I wrote the song a long time ago. I wanted to put it on the album because it’s the only song I\'ve ever written in the past that feels like it\'s still in the future for me. And at the time when I wrote it, I made it really loud and bombastic. I think I was a little bit afraid of it. I wanted to reapproach it with the confidence and vulnerability of how I feel now.” **“What’d I Do With All This Faith?”** “It\'s in many ways the most important song in the album, because the past two Bleachers albums I\'ve closed with this idea of being ready to move on. It\'s a literal lyric I\'ve put in the titles. They\'re these sort of ending pieces. And what I really came to is, that\'s it. I don\'t have God. I don\'t have a sureness about certain things in my personal life that I wish I did. But for some reason I\'m spilling over with faith, and I don\'t even know where to put it. That is the biggest question of the album: What do I do with all this faith?”

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

“I think the idea of sexiness or being calm and collected is a pretty stifling thing as a musician,” Dijon explains to Apple Music. “I\'ve wrestled with why you\'re supposed to make music if you\'re going to do it, and I think just the longer I\'ve been trying, I\'ve gotten pretty disenchanted with sort of the casualness and the informality.” This is the existential question at the heart of *Absolutely*, his debut album. If the prior EPs—2019\'s *Sci Fi 1* and 2020\'s *How Do You Feel About Getting Married?*—were for figuring out who he was as an artist through collages of ideas, then this is about figuring out who he can be, with regard to the expectations leveled at him from outsiders and those he has for himself. Of course, to hear him tell it, the process of creating this music wasn\'t nearly as deep. At the beginning of the pandemic, he visited a friend in Wyoming, where he began tinkering with bits and pieces of demos. He returned to Los Angeles, his home since he relocated from Maryland in 2016, and wrote one song, “Scratching,” and didn’t make anything else for months. That is, until he met fellow singer-songwriter Mk.gee (Michael Gordon) at a studio session. “He and I developed a bizarre language together that sort of spilled into the rest of the record,” he says. “With the pandemic, I just wasn\'t sure if I was going to make a record, how long it would take, or if it was even useful to make music. The records that we made together just sprang out of boredom and out of this kind of conversation—it was just a conversational way to exist.” *Absolutely* is Dijon’s most collaborative release to date, an exercise in surrendering to his own creative impulses as he also makes room for others’. Out of that comes an album that highlights the intimacy of candor, of offering oneself without dressing the parts up. In many of the songs, there’s ambient room noise—people laughing, talking, and reacting to the music—that positions the listener as a kind of fly on the wall for a private jam session. It’s raw and untouched in a way that runs counter to conventional ideas of what a debut album often is or should be. Life that feels as though it\'s coming apart requires music that is the same—the process of deconstruction and rebuilding animated through sound. Which brings us back to his original question. Over the better part of a decade, he\'s earned fans and a profile, and just as that means other people are asking things of him, he\'s asking new things of himself. *Absolutely* is some version of an answer that reimagines his artistry at a time that required he reimagine his life. “It just seems strange that the moment you get a little platform, people start to tidy up a little bit and they start to perfect their lane,” he says. “I just kind of wanted to destroy it and build a new one.” Below, he explains how each of the songs came to be. **“Big Mike’s”** “‘Big Mike\'s’ is the first song that Mk.gee and I made together. He came to the house, I had a drum loop playing, I had a couple of friends milling about. We\'d met a few times but we didn\'t really talk, and he picked up a guitar and he played a little, and it was so natural for us to build the track together. It was a complete freestyle, lyrically and melodically, and we sort of wrapped everything harmonically around it. I played some bass way after that I\'m pretty sure it\'s not the same key as what Mike was playing. And we just listened back, and we just felt like if this is on an album, I\'d want to hear this first because I can decide if I want to be here or not. We wanted it to be hypnotic, and I wanted to be as confrontational as possible.” **“Scratching”** “‘Scratching’ was the first song I actually ever made for the record, and it was a product of me trying to learn piano. I just played a couple of things and wrote a song around a midi piano part that I was just working on. It was super simple. I thought that there was this Springsteen-y thing to it that was an accident, so I was just like, well, how do I kind of pay homage in that way? Everything to me is post-realization—I never really know what I\'m doing when I\'m doing it.” **“Many Times”** “‘Many Times’ was the first time I\'d ever not controlled or been engineering my own session. I went with a very good friend, somebody I respect a lot named Andrew Sarlo—he works with some people I really love. Andrew has a patented recording technique or an exercise that I won\'t reveal, but we were just trying to get over a hump and trying to be productive. A lot of my records are nocturnal, and this was a bright coffee thing. We just wanted to make something that we thought was quite fun—everything is sort of operating with a little bit of humor, and Mike\'s solo exists relative to the intensity and the mania of the song as potentially a little hat tip.” **“Annie”** “I left to go upstate \[New York\] and brought a few friends, and a person I\'ve collaborated with a lot, Jack Karaszewski, ended up being there. We tried for a few nights just to hang out and make music around this table, and ‘Annie’ ended up being this pretty manic campfire thing. I picked up an acoustic guitar, and it was tuned in some really crazy way. I was just kind of sitting at the table and started mumbling and humming a little thing. Then Mike slotted in, picked up a bass, and we just made the song. The Band was always in the back of everybody\'s head. I had never really heard of them until I went to upstate New York and got extremely obsessed. I was trying to make some sort of demented version of a The Band song or something, and it happened really quickly.” **“Noah’s Highlight Reel”** “This is my favorite song on the record. We were sitting at this long dining room table, and our buddy Noah who\'s from Wyoming was there with us. He\'s played slide and occasional guitar on a couple of the songs and he\'s helped with the general vibe and thrown a couple lyrics in on this record. But Mike and I were cranking through super fast, a bunch of ideas per day, when we were in upstate New York. Things calmed down, we had a few beers, and I believe it was Mike\'s idea—he said, ‘Noah, you should write a song.’ I started playing a guitar part, some chords, and Mike slotted in with some bass and some other things, and my buddy Noah actually wrote a song and we asked him to sing it. We sang backup for him. I also lost the file, so that\'s the only version of the song that exists.” **“The Dress”** “I borrowed a drum machine and just laid down this thing, and a friend of mine named John Keek played some chords. He has a very sort of gospelly touch, and it started off as kind of a little gag, but obviously the chords he played were quite inspiring. I was experimenting a lot with noise on this album, and ‘The Dress’ was a way for me to kind of internally be like, can you actually just write a song? Because I didn\'t know if I could. And yeah, there\'s a little bit of an homage to Bonnie Raitt, but it was really an exercise in me trying to push myself out of a comfort zone. You can get really comfortable around like a wall of sonic trickery and fuzz.” **“God in Wilson”** “‘God in Wilson’ is a tough one, because that was a pretty early one. When I was in Wyoming—it\'s referencing Wilson, Wyoming—there was this attempt to kind of explore guilt and shame, and it was an interesting idea that I had. It was a pretty early demo idea that I never really fleshed out and just thought it could provide some sort of contrast on the record, I guess. I was really fascinated with priests and kind of thought about, I don\'t know, a little priest guy. But yeah, it\'s just an exploration, lyrically, of guilt and shame, and I kept it on there just because I thought it sounded pretty.” **“Did You See It?”** “It\'s a modular, like, Eurorack experiment that I was doing, and I wanted to see if I could write a song around it. It\'s about aliens.” **“Talk Down”** “On hip-hop records, you can kind of quote—like JAY-Z quotes Biggie all the time and stuff like that. I never really understood how to do that in more of a singer-songwriter thing, but ‘Talk Down’ was part two of ‘Annie.’ Same day, same table, same people. I was listening to a lot of Gillian Welch—I think I said her name wrong on the record—but a lot of the imagery that floated around the record was really based on the three-day drive from LA to New York. There\'s tension, there\'s excitement, there\'s anger. There\'s also monotony, it\'s a lot of boredom. I heard a chord that my friend John played. And I started freestyling this thing, and I just kept quoting ‘Look at Miss Ohio,’ and that became the basis of the song. It was me listing off songs I was listening to while driving and trying to contrast a little bit. I wanted to do a little homage to Baltimore club. I tried to do a few Baltimore club songs that failed, and this is the closest that we got.” **“Rodeo Clown”** “I was just kind of playing some chords and we were a little burned out after making ‘Big Mike\'s,’ just me, Mike, and Noah. But in effort of stretching what the performer is supposed to sound like, I just wanted to explore R&B melodic stuff. It\'s part of my DNA, but I just wanted to present it in a way that isn\'t clean. I get very frustrated by how cool everybody is, and I wanted to just see what happens if you try to make a song that\'s very earnest. I sort of blacked out a little bit and let it go and then listened back to it the next day, and I was like, \'Yeah, that sounds pretty good.\' I feel like it\'s very boring to think that just because you have a guitar, that you can\'t try to reinterpret how you\'re supposed to perform. I don\'t know if it was a successful experiment, but yeah.” **“End of Record”** “In an effort of making a debut record, you toss and turn a lot of ideas of how you\'re supposed to make it perfect, and ‘End of Record’ was a personal message to myself. It was done in upstate New York, around the table with a lot of people. I think it was on Halloween of \[2020\]. That song specifically—it\'s for me and the people on the record, like a little postcard from a time and all the emotion that was around that house at the time.” **“Credits!”** “I think that I have the tendency to sort of give off this impression that I\'m hyper-serious all the time and the music is emotionally weighty to people, but there\'s a lot of jokes that I think I\'ve been trying to get a little bit more effective at displaying on my music. And ‘Credits!’ is also just kind of another thing for me on there. I thought it was kind of fun. After you hear a lot of these ups and downs on this record, I couldn\'t think of a funnier and I think more obnoxious way to kind of put a bow on all of this weight. There were a lot of different variations of that energy, and ‘Credits!’ just sounded silly enough to be the one.”

Just over halfway through “lush,” the largely acoustic backdrop gives way to a majestic arrangement of strings and choral harmonies that feels like ascension. Where there was once selfish posturing—“I\'m the best you\'ll ever have, so don\'t leave,” boylife declares in the first verse—the generosity of release takes its place: “And since I couldn\'t say \'don\'t leave,\' I hope the future you prepared and the dreams you couldn\'t share all come true.” The strings signal the transformation within the song and, likewise, marked a turning point for the singer-songwriter. “This was my first time recording a string section. I cried,” boylife tells Apple Music of making “lush.” “Recording strings was the first time I ever felt joy in my life.” They appear in generous measure on his debut album *gelato*, imbuing moments of tender vulnerability with drama and offsetting moments of brash dissonance with beauty. Single “peas” is a song of nurture that crescendos into an anthem amid a flurry of cello, violin, and viola, while on the breathtaking “baddreams,” he\'s at the mercy of an ex-lover as the strings beneath him swell in tandem with his desperation. The details of the musicality here stun again and again, but perhaps most remarkable about *gelato* is all that boylife shares of himself. Evidence of his Korean American heritage is peppered throughout and comes to a head on the noise-rap of “superpretty.” Elsewhere, his sense of humor shines on the playfully horny “amphetamine” (“nobody needs to listen to this unless they are sexually frustrated and want to hear ’50s music in their 1984 Cadillac DeVille,” he told Apple Music), but a touching interlude tacked onto the end features a friend encouraging him away from any shame that plagues him due to his bipolar diagnosis. A couple songs later, “lush2” offers a glimpse of the inner turmoil that can manifest as a result of the disorder as he oscillates between thoughts of self-harm and self-preservation. boylife\'s knack for experimentation holds the range of narratives and emotions together while keeping the journey of *gelato* full of twists and turns. If the layers, distortion, and vocal effects that mutate his own sentimental tone are meant to simulate the restless sea of the human experience, then the honesty conveyed in his lyrics is the lifeboat offering a way through.

“When I listen to it, it’s sort of a reminder that I am lovable,” Claud tells Apple Music of their sparkling debut LP, the first release on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label. “I deserve to feel love. Sometimes people forget that they\'re capable of giving and receiving it.” Deeply melodic and deeply felt, *Super Monster* is a set of genre-agnostic bedroom pop that surveys the entire spectrum of romantic feeling. “I wrote this record to be very visible, in the sense that I am a multifaceted human being and my story is not shown in coming-of-age movies or these huge shows that are always about straight cis couples,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter says. “I\'ll write music for the rest of my life, but I don\'t have to put it out. The only reason why I want to put it out is because there\'s so little representation of queer and trans and nonbinary people falling in love and having well-rounded lives that don\'t just revolve around the hardships of being queer.” Here, they guide us through the album track by track. **Overnight** “I liked the idea of a warning as a first song. Like, ‘Here\'s a heads-up: A lot of these songs are love songs, and I tend to jump into things.’ It\'s about any time that I felt I was falling in love or starting something new.” **Gold** “I was really angry when I wrote this song. I felt super betrayed, not just by one person, but by a series of things that had happened. It’s almost recognizing and sort of breaking the news to myself that this person was not there for you when you needed them, or these people were not there for you when you need them. Sometimes I just need to get the anger out and then I can move on.” **Soft Spot** “I was at a party and I was thinking a lot about one specific person, and everywhere I looked, it felt like I was seeing them. But it wasn\'t them, and anytime somebody brought them up it felt I got all mushy and soft and I would blush. I approached the song as ‘This is sad and this sucks.’ But one thing that I came to terms with as the song was developing was that maybe it doesn’t suck—maybe it\'s nice to be able to just smile whenever you want because you can think of somebody.” **In or In-Between** “I\'m so bad at reading social cues, and I never believe that somebody is into me, just because I feel like I\'m conditioned to assume that they\'re not. It\'s a song about unachievable or unrequited love. Feeling like you\'re never going to know what this person is thinking, you\'re never going to know if they actually are into you the way that you\'re into them.” **Cuff Your Jeans** “I had a dream where I was trying to get on a train to go see a friend and the train kept getting delayed or the train wasn\'t showing up or my ticket would blow away in the wind. It felt like I would never be able to see this person again. Which was a real feeling that I was feeling in real life—like, what if I never get to see this person again? What if, by the time I see them again, they\'ve moved on or something?” **Ana (feat. Nick Hakim)** “I was at a point in my writing where I was getting sort of sick of writing about my own life. So I imagined myself as this 40-year-old man who decides that he needs to leave his wife to go find himself. The whole story is like a letter to his wife, who I named Ana. I think I was trying to say that if you really love somebody then you will work on yourself. Because if you love somebody then you know that they deserve the best.” **Guard Down** “When I get in a nervous situation or when I get protective of myself or my feelings, there\'s a voice in my head that says, ‘Don’t let your guard down, don\'t make yourself vulnerable.’ And this song is about that feeling, and confessing, ‘Holy shit, I’m going to be an adult in a few months. I\'m going to be turning 21, and what do I have figured out? And what do I not have figured out? And I\'ve been spending all this time alone—is isolating myself really helping me? Or is it just making it worse?’” **This Town** “I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and it felt like a small town because generations of the same families stay there. I think for the longest time I really wanted to leave, and I did it, and that was the best feeling ever. But this song isn’t talking about any town in particular—it’s more alluding to the fact that I want to run away from a problem, and right now.” **Jordan** “Growing up, my grandparents lived in the same town as I did and I lived in their house a few different times throughout my childhood. But the house behind theirs was Michael Jordan\'s, and it had 23 on the gate. My grandpa and I used to always walk the dog past and he’d always point out the gate because he thought it was so cool, but Michael Jordan was never there—the house always seemed empty. I think it turned into some type of love song, not for Michael Jordan, but for someone else. I don\'t want any headlines being like, ‘Claud writes a love song for Michael Jordan.’ It\'s just not true.” **That’s Mr. Bitch to You (feat. Melanie Faye)** “Somebody called me a bitch, and I was so offended that I responded, ‘That\'s Mr. Bitch to you.’ And then my friend overheard the conversation and he just jumped in to say, ‘Hi, sorry to interrupt this argument, but Claud, did you write that down? That\'s a really great song title.’ I just feel like one of the most offensive words that a man could call somebody who\'s essentially not a man is a bitch. So the song sort of turned into a fuck-the-patriarchy-type song.” **Pepsi** “It\'s pretty straightforward: I told somebody that I had feelings for them and she just responded in a really rude way. It was brutal. I think she was half joking, but we never talked about it ever again, so I\'m not really sure. I feel like I wrote so many songs about that person, but it wasn\'t capturing what actually happened, so I just decided to say it. I thought it was such a hilariously tragic thing that I had to write about it. Because it\'s just so ridiculous. I\'m hoping that she hears the song.” **Rocks at Your Window** “Maybe it was \[John Cusack\] with the boombox standing at somebody\'s window like, ‘I love you, come down here.’ I was thinking about that and how big and beautiful a romantic gesture that is, but also how annoying and invasive it is as well. It\'s like, \'Okay, get out of here. You\'re embarrassing me.’ I\'ve never actually thrown rocks at anybody\'s window, but I am the type of person to do that.” **Falling With the Rain (feat. Shelly)** “My mom was really sick last year. I found out that she had to get a big surgery, and it really scared me and I was just really, really, really sad. I was going through a really dark period. I wanted it to conclude the record because I like that sentiment: I’m feeling down right now, but I\'m going to bounce back.”

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”