Coup De Main's Best Albums of 2023

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

Since pushing back on attempts to mold him into a mainstream teen sensation during the early 2010s, Ryan Beatty has been taking control of his own horizons, ever ready to explore new forms of expression. A collaborator of BROCKHAMPTON and Tyler, The Creator, the LA singer-songwriter gave us open-hearted, electronically powered pop on 2018’s *Boy in Jeans* before presenting the liberated experimentation of 2020’s *Dreaming of David*. Encouraged by the purity and honesty of a favorite record, Joni Mitchell’s *Hejira*, that intrepid spirit takes him into folkier territory for this third album. His unhurried songs are still appealingly fluid, liable to glide into unexpected but elegant turns, but they largely unfurl on guitars and pianos, enriched but never overwhelmed by a visceral tug of strings or a soft hum of electronics. Shorn of the synthesized shrouds and treatments of *Dreaming of David*, Beatty’s voice is close and clear, drawing you in with emotion and candor. On opener “Ribbons,” the line “It’s brave to be nothing to no one at all” introduces a central theme of the album: The safety of isolation and Beatty’s struggles with the vulnerability needed to embrace the love being offered to him. Like *Hejira*, *Calico* also carries a vivid feeling of place. His stories drop us into forests, lead us onto barroom dance floors, and drive us up highways to hear reflections rendered in poetic metaphors (“I cut all the bruises off the peach/Not as beautiful but still as sweet” on “Bruises off the Peach”) and the sort of personal detail—“My sister’s raising a baby/In the house where my mother grew up” (“Andromeda”)—that only emboldens the record’s ring of honesty. There’s an inescapable sense of an artist uncovering more of his truth on these songs, and the beauty of *Calico* is that he pulls us close as he does it.

Chappell Roan is not afraid to tell you—or, really, sing at you—about how she\'s feeling, in vivid detail. On her debut album, the Missouri-born upstart, who has been making waves since the 2017 release of her intense debut single “Good Hurt,” collects tales of debauchery and despair as it chronicles her realization of being queer and coming into her own. *The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess* opens with Roan singing mournfully about a dastardly ex-boyfriend over trembling pianos and starlit choirs; an insistent beat rises up gradually at first, then overtakes the song as she realizes she needs to be part of a “Femininomenon” that demands pleasure and respect from anyone lucky enough to be in her orbit. Left turns like that abound over the next 13 songs. Take the synth-pop “Casual,” which dissects a friends-with-benefits relationship in brutally specific detail, or the euphoric club cut “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” an insouciant dismissal of “hyper mega bummer boys” that opens with a sardonic mini-monologue and closes with a triumphant sing-along. Roan still traffics in ballads, too: “California” grapples with homesickness and frustration, Roan dipping down into her voice\'s low reaches, while the plush “Coffee” examines the idea of fully closing the loop with an ex, with the reality of its impossibility closing in as the music swells. There\'s a hunger that drives Roan\'s music, even in its more introspective moments. It isn\'t just sexual, although songs like the smirking poison-pen letter “My Kink Is Karma” and the flirty electro-psych come-on “Red Wine Supernova” show off how Roan\'s erotic awakening has helped her whole outlook on life come into sharp relief. Her willingness to take pop in unexpected directions, combined with her frankness about the tangled feelings that arise even when good things seem to be happening, make her debut compulsively listenable.

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

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

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

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

Since self-releasing the track “3 Nights” in the late 2010s, Dominic Fike has become a multi-platform star. Not only have his closely felt songs made him a bona fide pop phenomenon worthy of a Paul McCartney co-sign, he’s also appeared in the HBO series *Euphoria*, which allowed him to flex his skills as an actor without breaking his momentum with his music. “I have been recording songs every day, or writing them,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every time I make a song, I feel like it\'s my best song. It\'s hard not to want to put it out as soon as you make it. I think a lot of artists will feel me when I say that.” That drive to constantly be creating is why his third album is a bit of a flashback for him. Songs like the reggae-tinged “Dancing in the Courthouse” throw to his youth in Naples, Florida, and his scrapes with the law there, while the groove-forward, surrealistic “Ant Pile” has its roots in the music he made three years ago—when he was in a very different place in his life. “I made it when I was in active addiction and I was in no place to make music,” said Fike. “I had to spend a couple years in rehabs and things like that. When I came back, I was able to finish it—and it was exhausting. I had to take a look inside myself. There were so many emotional talks with producers, with people that were mentors or people I work with. It was just a heavy load on my shoulders that I\'m grateful to be done with.”

Amber Bain—the East London-based singer-songwriter who goes by The Japanese House—took her time with her second album (four years, to be precise, passed between her 2019 debut *Good at Falling* and the arrival of *In the End It Always Does*). “It was this weird, really expansive time where I was like, ‘I can’t think of anything to say,’” Bain tells Apple Music. “I’d write the odd song here and there, but I’d moved out of London, gone to \[English coastal town\] Margate and was living this slowed-down version of life, both because of lockdown and because I was out of the city.” Then, Bain broke up with her girlfriend and moved back to the capital—events which finally provided the catalyst for her second record. “It felt like my life was kind of restarting simultaneously with the ending \[of the relationship\],” she says. “It’s a very inspiring place to be, when you’re on the edge. It’s really easy to engage with ideas and your core emotions and wants when you’re not in a very stable place.” *In the End It Always Does* is an album—as its cover art suggests—about circularity (it’s not lost on Bain that its predecessor was also about a breakup), how distance can grow to become an uncrossable void in a relationship, and endings, whether that’s a split or the gradual fade of the pain you feel after one, something Bain found herself just as devastated by. All of which is set against “classic sounds: really nice guitars, really nice strings, really nice pianos” and, often, an embrace of Bain’s poppier side. Stepping away from her computer, she says, was creatively liberating. As was the cast of people she surrounded herself with, including long-term friend and collaborator George Daniel of The 1975, and producer Chloe Kraemer (who’s worked with Rina Sawayama, LAVA LA RUE, and more). “Working with a queer woman really opened up the emotion,” says Bain of working with Kraemer. “The conversations Chloe and I had during this record I wouldn’t have had with anyone else, because no one really gets it the same as she does. I just do think that communication between two women is different. And queer people—there’s a level of understanding there that you can\'t get really otherwise.” Below, Bain takes us inside her raw, honest, and beautiful second album, one track at a time. **“Spot Dog”** “As soon as I wrote the piano introduction to this, I knew it would start the album. My ex and I loved the film *One Hundred and One Dalmatians* and it’s a direct ode to a song called ‘A Beautiful Spring Day’ by George Bruns from the \[1961\] film’s soundtrack. I was using the song as an experiment: What do I want to be in my record? Do I want pianos and strings? Do I want synths? Do I want guitar-y bits? And this covers all bases on the album. I was really using the song as a palette to throw everything at in the beginning and see where I landed.” **“Touching Yourself”** “I’ll often write half a song when I’m in one place and then, when I try and finish it, I’ll be in a completely different place. So it ends up taking on a whole new meaning. For the first half of this, I was in the throes of romance and thought it was fun to write a song about sexting. It ended up being about someone being far away from you. Obviously, at the beginning I was far away from this person a lot—I was always touring. And then suddenly I was close to them all the time because it was lockdown, yet felt so far away from them. I feel like I’m really embracing a more poppy side of myself—often I hold myself back on that front. Originally, I was trying to write a chorus around this weird time signature, and in the end I gave up and was like, ‘I’m just going to write a really fun, simple pop chorus.’ It was a good lesson—the most simple songs are often my favorites.” **“Sad to Breathe”** “I wrote this when Marika \[Hackman, Bain’s ex, who *Good at Falling* is about\] and I broke up. We’re really good friends now and have sorted everything out—we’re very close. When I think about how completely depressed and destroyed I was from that breakup, I almost find it cute and funny. I think that’s why I decided to make the rest of that song euphoric and in double time. I guess in some ways it’s me looking back positively on this really sad time, and telling my former self that it’s going to be OK.” **“Over There”** “This is about when I was living in a throuple and one of them left. Then, in lockdown, she’d found another partner and ended up going to live with them. I felt really sad about that. The song is talking about how something beautiful so nearly happened, and how that feels such a loss when it doesn’t. My favorite line in it is, ‘She keeps her coat on/There’s not a lot to go on/She used to dote on me.’ It’s that feeling that you used to be so close to someone and now they don’t even take their coat off when they come round because they know they’re about to leave. That feeling—it’s like someone’s punching your chest. Musically, I was in a bit of a rut and \[US producer\] BJ Burton sent me something that he and \[Bon Iver’s\] Justin Vernon had been working on. I started writing over the little loop he sent me—luckily they said I could keep using the chords, because that would have really thrown a spanner in the works!” **“Morning Pages”** “There’s this book called *The Artist’s Way* where you write every morning. It’s meant to be a way of opening your brain and you’re supposed to throw away \[what you’ve written\] and not read it afterwards. I only ever did it once and it became the lyrics to this song. I sent Katie \[Gavin of MUNA\] the song and she wrote a verse on it. I fell in love with what she wrote—she’s great at completely understanding what a song is about. We’ve been friends with MUNA for so long and I really like the way our voices sound together. I think we’re drawn to this style of song, where the theme is sad and gay. I think it’s perfect.” **“Boyhood”** “I wasn’t in a particularly good place when I wrote the early version of this song. I was thinking about trauma and things that happen to you in your life—how you become the summation of those things and how that feels unfair in a way. I was also thinking about gender in terms of me not having had a boyhood. The word ‘girlhood’ doesn’t really even exist. I was thinking about how different it would be had I had a boyhood because a lot of the time I felt like I was a boy and would dress as a boy, asked to be called a boy’s name. It’s taken me a long time to accept certain aspects of my gender. In some ways, it’s about embracing the things that have happened to you and about letting go of others in order to become someone that you feel you are intrinsically. The demo was really electronic, then we experimented with stripping everything back and it becoming a completely acoustic organic song. We watched this video of a gay dance group dancing in cowboy hats and boots in front of the White House—I think it’s in the early noughties at Pride—and it’s exactly the same BPM as ‘Boyhood.’ We wanted to encapsulate a definite cowboy twang but also \[have\] a campness to it. It’s a dance song in a weird way—just a stripped-back, acoustic dance song.” **“Indexical reminder of a morning well spent”** “In lockdown, my then girlfriend and I were reading outside and having a really lovely morning. We were eating croissants or jam on toast and I accidentally got something on one of her books—a little fingerprint of jam or something. I was like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She said, ‘It’s OK, it’s an indexical reminder of a morning well spent.’ She just made that up! And I wrote it down immediately. The song is about giving in to love and solitude and repetitive life. It’s a little map of things that were going on over the period of lockdown.” **“Friends”** “I had a much slower version of this originally. George and I were both pretty depressed at this point and I think we sped it up just to make a dance tune to cheer us up. I think we were a bit sick of listening to all these sad songs. George is an amazing sound designer when it comes to writing drum parts and creating rhythms. And I’m good at making basslines. We were collaborating in this new way, and it was really fun to explore that. Later, we ended up adding these Paul Simon-y guitars and making slightly less electronic. I don’t even know what genre this is, but it’s fun to have a sexy song about threesomes.” **“Sunshine Baby”** “I would call my ex and my dog my ‘sunshine babies.’ My dog is obsessed with the sun, and me and my ex are the same—probably some of the best moments of our relationship were just lying on the beach in Margate. The song started as an attempt to find a way to stop fighting, but at the end it became sort of a resignation about the relationship ending. That speaks to what the whole album is about. Do you resign to being in something that you’re not completely happy with, or do you resign to it ending? And which one’s worse? There’s relief in giving up. And you can hear that in the music—there’s catharsis in the outro, the sax, and lying back on a beach in the sand looking up at the sun like, ‘OK, fine.’” **“Baby goes again”** “This is inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Honey Hi’ or ‘Tusk.’ I think it’s about the feeling like you’re always on the cusp of fixing everything. Then I’d often feel like I’d just go and fuck everything up, or one of us would. Just when you’re starting to feel great again, someone’s done something stupid. There’s the lyric in there, ‘I keep circling/You can’t stop a circle, but I keep coming back around, at least I can’t keep coming back around.’ That again links to the title and the album art so clearly. It was: ‘I’m aware that I keep repeating myself and making the same mistakes, but at least I keep coming back around.’ I was wondering if that can be enough. And it wasn’t. But I think the song was the last glimpse of hope for my relationship in a lot of ways.” **“You always get what you want”** “I wrote this song when I was 17 or 18. It’s the oldest song on the record, and I really liked it. It was about when my girlfriend left me for a boy, and I was bitter. I was just like, you always get everything you want. Now, that person is one of my best friends because we were so young when we were together. But she makes a joke that I’ve cursed her and that, ever since I wrote that, things keep going wrong for her. The original version of the song was so embarrassing, but I really like the bass of it. We did all the production for it in one day.” **“One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones”** “I had this instrumental thing written with the piano and strings, and I had this idea that we’d have some sort of lyrical rambling over the top of it, kind of like an ode to Joni Mitchell. Obviously I love her so much and I named my dog after her. I went into the studio and said I’d written this weird thing—a poem I’d written hungover that morning after seeing a Charli XCX show—and that maybe it could be the lyrical rambling. Katie Gavin came in and sung pretty much the exact melody we have for it now. It was just so magical watching her do that—she was kind of laughing and crying and me and Chloe were both sobbing. It’s just one of the most honest and pure things I’ve ever written. It’s on the cusp of being embarrassing because it’s radical honesty. But I think it pulls back at the right moments. It’s talking about how it’s so sad that you think your life’s going to end \[after a breakup\], but actually day to day, you’re just going to be walking in the park with your little dog and everything’s going to be pretty much the same. This is definitely the most raw and real thing I’ve ever released.”