Crack Magazine's Top 50 Albums of 2021

“My biggest fear with this album is that people consume it like a compilation,” Justin Clarke—better known as Ghetts—tells Apple Music. “Just looking at the tracklist and spotting features, thinking that they can jump the tracks. This is a journey. It makes complete sense when you listen to it the way it’s supposed to be listened to.” For the east London rhymer—whose early story was one of countless pirate radio sets, sticky rave rooms and viral freestyles—the fight to be heard and respected on his own terms is nothing new. *Conflict of Interest* dropped with Ghetts aged 36 and is only his third studio album in a career that burst into life through cult early 2000s DVD series Risky Roadz. But this is one of grime’s most prolific, impactful and interesting artists. The teenage Ghetts (originally performing under “Ghetto”) helped embody the new scene and its infectious, unpredictable energy. A member of two seminal grime collectives (NASTY Crew and The Movement), Ghetts sharpened himself into a supremely versatile rhyming juggernaut, but somehow missed the mainstream acclaim afforded former teammates including Kano and Wretch 32 in the late 2000s. But as controversy, commercial limitation and censorship caught up with grime’s first wave, Ghetts was compelled to reclaim authorship of his story. “Tupac was a conflicted individual,” he says. “I felt that way for so long, too. I didn’t even understand my ting. I’m a black sheep in my family.” On *Conflict Of Interest*, all sides that make the man are laid bare for the first time. It’s an exhaustive-and-exhilarating cycle through the cavernous reaches of the MC’s mind. “Where I’m at now is that everything has to sound amazing,” he says. Whether it’s warm, throwback flows on garage tempos (“Good Hearts”), brutally honest chronicling of a past life in petty crime (“Hop Out”), crossover hits-in-waiting (the Ed Sheeran-starring “10,000 Tears”) or long-awaited reunions with former adversaries (“IC3” with Skepta)), this is the complete record Ghetts has been threatening to pull together for two decades. “I’m not here to compete with people that just want to make microwave music,” he says. “I want to be taken in on a worldwide level.” Below, Ghetts walks us through its story, track by track. **Fine Wine** “Wretch 32 titled this for me, I originally had it as ‘Intro’. I brought him by the studio as I was wrapping up the project: he’s someone whose opinion I rate and he’s got a great ear. This one stood out to him immediately, and at the end he said to me: ‘You know what? Your ting is like just like fine wine...and that should be the title!’” **Mozambique (feat. Jaykae & Moonchild Sanelly)** “This is a little different to the single version—we added some strings on at the beginning here to give a more special feel to the sound, and get some flow to the sequencing. When you listen to this album—particularly the flow and feel of the first few tracks, it’s meant to feel continuous, like a set.” **Fire and Brimstone** “In a way I guess this track is about my PTSD. In some situations it still comes to me, like when I’m in the car and the feds pull in behind me. I’m moving nervous. I’m fully insured and there’s nothing in the car; I have a license, but still, a bit nervous!” **Hop Out** “Writing this track was fun, running through my past life and all of my adventures. I’ve been noticing for a while now that nobody was really talking about other kinds of moves you could do on the roads. It wasn’t all about trapping in my days. Even though it’s all in my past, I’m being *very* real here, I’ll say that.” **IC3 (feat. Skepta)** “The fans have been asking me for this one for years! They really, really wanted me and Skepta to get one off together, after so long. I’m especially happy because we’re talking some real substance on this too. The clip at the end is taken from a set with Kano and Skepta on Logan’s \[Kiss FM\] show back in 2008. We’re all older, and Skepta and I are now fathers—but I always reflect on how we have such a long and deep history in this game together.” **Autobiography** “‘I know you’ve been through hell so I’ve got heaven for you/If you don’t tell your story they gon’ tell it for you.’ One thing about me: when I’m writing, I’ll just go with it and tell the whole story. It’s is the longest track \[on the album\] but the length is never that important to me. I had a lot to say here, so I said it all.” **Good Hearts (feat. Aida Lae)** “I had to have Mighty Moe \[from Heartless Crew\] open this track and he was kind enough to do so. I still remember seeing Heartless shut down Ive Farm—my first festival experience. It was just a tent in Leyton. It wasn’t even massive, but to a 15 year old, it kinda was. I saw Heartless going crazy in this tent in patterned Moschino outfits. They looked great and I remember the vibes in this place was like no other. I had this overwhelming feeling like *this* is what I want to do. Now, whenever I see or hear Heartless Crew—I’m not Ghetts—I’m that little boy.” **Dead To Me** “This song came about from an Insta live session I had. I was messing around at first, trying to get people to understand the levels. I asked someone to throw me a concept and I’d return in an hour, with the song done. People were telling me it was impossible but I came back in an hour with a finished track. The blogs started posting it up and eventually people pressed for it to make the album.” **10,000 Tears (feat. Ed Sheeran)** “Let’s be real: Ed is top three in the world. It’s Drizzy, Beyoncé, Ed. So when I wrote this track, I reached out to him and he turned around a verse in no time for me—that meant a lot. He loved what I was on and, honestly, to have one of the biggest artists in the world singing a chorus that I wrote is no small feat. I’m sure to the average, surface-level listener, they won’t believe it was me that wrote this song at first.” **Sonya (feat. Emeli Sandé)** “I wanted to write a song about escorts, but not from a male, judgmental perspective. I understand that in this life I’ve done things that can be judged harshly, so I’m not sitting here judging anybody. Are some of the things I’ve done for money in my life any better than escorting? In whose eyes? Who’s judging? That’s the perspective; I wanted to touch on subjects people are not speaking about on this album. And this is one of them.” **Proud Family** “When you’re putting together a solid body of work, I feel like you have to paint the *full* picture and that includes my family. This was one of the last tunes made for this album and it was the missing piece to the puzzle. I’m really tight with my family and making them proud means so much to me, on the day of filming this video with my them: my nan died. I had to shoot a block of videos the whole day and that was the hardest day of shooting I’ve had. I’ve never lost somebody as important to me as my nan, and my head was in such a weird space, but I was zoning in and found the strength to pull through. Now that I’m having my own children, I’m thinking about what I can do today that will affect my great-grandchildren—just experiencing a whole new range of feelings about family.” Skengman (feat. Stormzy) “Stormzy and I first worked together on \[2017 album\] *Gang Signs & Prayer* \[for ‘Bad Boys’\] but we also recorded another track for \[2018 album\] *Ghetto Gospel: The New Testament*. It just wasn’t leveling with ‘Bad Boys’ though, and I couldn’t bring myself to release it. It was sub-par. This time, I could feel I had something different. I was writing the track and forming the whole concept of the video in mind. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is crazy. And Stormz owes me a verse. Where’s Big Mike at?’ So, he’s come through, done the verse, and \[album producer\] TJ’s gone to work on post-production. If you listen carefully when Stormzy comes in, there’s a note going through it playing \[2018 freestyle\] ‘WICKEDSKENGMAN’.” **No Mercy (feat. Pa Salieu & BackRoad Gee)** “The studio session on this day was crazy, I’ve not had many sessions like that. The energy was wild. Pa is a lovely soul—he’s just one of those man you want to see win. As soon as I bucked him, it was like something that was meant to be. He told me that his friend was a big fan of mine, and once, when I was doing an open video shoot, they both pulled up. That was maybe three years ago. And that friend has now passed, but that’s something that I wasn’t even aware of and a nice moment for it came back full circle, for me and him.” **Crud (feat. Giggs)** “This was recorded in lockdown and, as soon as I made it, I could hear Giggs on it. He’s a man that loves music as much I do. We’re both so passionate about the art form of MCing. And we both gas our own ting equally! ‘I murdered that’: that energy. This might be our sixth or seventh track together. I’ve been working with the bro for at least 15 years now. And every time, we’ll argue about whose verse won on the riddim. For years and years after.” **Squeeze (feat. Miraa May)** “I’ll be honest. I couldn’t get from ‘Crud’ to ‘Little Bo Peep’ and make it make sense! Sonically, concept wise, I didn’t know how. For all of us involved in this album, we look at ‘Squeeze’ as an interlude—a long interlude—just to paint the picture and get us to the next track.” **Little Bo Peep (feat. Dave, Hamzaa & Wretch 32)** “I went round to my mum’s house and heard something playing from upstairs. It was my brother making a loop. It was kinda crazy and I was impressed. So I ran upstairs, laid down a quick idea and we slept on it for ages. After we made \[Hamzaa’s 2019 single\] ‘Breathing, Pt. 2,’ I knew this was the right track to call on Hamzaa and Wretch 32. I wanted my own version, or something in that vein and they absolutely smashed it. The track’s about being led astray. You might be addicted to something and that’s your Little Bo Peep. You’re a sheep to that, whatever it is.”

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

In Claire Rousay’s music, a field recording is never just a record of a place—it also represents a trace of a personal memory, perhaps even a portal to another world. The Texas experimental musician is constantly recording, translating the murmurs and footfalls of the world around her into dreamy abstractions. Unlike some of her records, where she has run personal correspondence through text-to-speech generators—rendering the most intimate details in surreal, robotic tones—language does not play a central role on *A Softer Focus*. Yet this short, enveloping album is among her most lyrical, emotionally direct works to date. It begins with clatter—fingers tapping on an iPhone, perhaps the rustle of dishes being cleared—but with “Discrete (The Market),” uncharacteristically harmonic sounds rise in the mix, suffusing everything with a warm glow. The reassuringly consonant piano, cello, and synthesizer constitute the record’s nostalgic through line, recalling post-classical composers like Sarah Davachi. But no matter how lulling Rousay’s melodies become, the line between music and sound remains provocatively fuzzy. In “Diluted Dreams,” sparkling drones are shot through with the sounds of passing traffic and kids playing on the street; “Stoned Gesture” flickers in the light of fireworks exploding overhead. Only Rousay knows the precise meaning of these sounds, but for the rest of us, they are suggestive triggers, as evocative as the scent of a freshly cut lawn or hot pavement after a summer rain.

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

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

“Quivering in Time” is the debut album by DJ and producer Eris Drew on T4T LUV NRG, the label she runs with partner Octo Octa. In 2020, after the release of Trans Love Vibration (NAIVE, 2018) and Transcendental Access Point (Interdimensional Transmissions, 2020), Eris moved from her hometown of Chicago to rural New Hampshire and recorded the nine beautiful songs featured here. Her first album feels something like her DJ sets, with stacked layers of vinyl samples and turntable manipulations serving as a fast-moving foundation for hand-played keyboard riffs, walls of percussion and sampled, scratched and strummed guitar tones. On each song for the album Eris expresses the anxiety and hope of her present. She wrote, recorded, and mixed the album as she stared into the forest through her studio window, collapsing present and past into future, her memories and body literally quivering in time. The songs are cast with Eris’s experiences and intentions. The plucky progressive Loving Clav is in the form of an evocation (“good times come to me now....”), while the tracks Time to Move Close and Show U LUV express Eris’s longing for togetherness. The hardcore Pick ‘Em Up (“...and it might be a different story”) and organ-heavy Ride Free are funky odes to psychedelics, hard dancing and the subjectivity of real lived experience. The twinkling house of Howling Wind and the tempo-shifting bop of Sensation capture the mystery of the forest cabin where Eris spent most of the last 15 months. Two booming hip house dubs round out the album, Baby and Quivering in Time, each an itchy track about hope and personal resilience. As with her prior work, Eris’s approach to music making is unique and genre-dissolving. Ultimately, her special sound is a metaphor for her main message, which is that every person deserves to be themself.

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

The second album from Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek asks the big questions in slippery ways, with poetic ripples of mantra-like vocals, or field recordings that take on a mystical significance (a roommate singing, a hand-clapping game). The layered, nonlinear soundscapes on *Fatigue* feel totally uncategorizable yet inexplicably comforting as Cheek—who plays bass, guitar, piano, synth, and percussion here, in addition to her vocals and personal recordings—guides herself down a winding path of discovery. “Make a way out of no way,” she repeats on the kaleidoscopic “Find It”; the wondrous almost-songs that follow use that sentiment as a guiding light.

Like so much of our lives, M1llionz’s debut mixtape, *Provisional License*, didn’t go entirely to plan. Born Miguel Rahiece Cunningham, the rapper’s early career almost entirely spanned a pandemic. To build up over a year’s worth of thriving material and never perform live is a bizarre turn of events, but fortunately, for M1llionz, it’s been the making of him. “Coming through in the last few years means you don\'t know what to expect,” M1llionz tells Apple Music. “People tell you, but you need to experience it for yourself. You\'re seeing all these people that know your songs and everybody\'s been indoors for like two years listening and taking note of what\'s going on.” Even in the booth, he had to learn quickly. He confesses that it wasn’t until April 2020’s “Y PREE” (his fifth solo single and sixth overall) that he felt confident enough to pursue music as anything more than a hobby. This, it has to be mentioned, was three months *after* he delivered one of the most swaggering, self-assured freestyles for Kenny Allstar’s Voice of the Streets series. It’s tempting to wonder whether that confidence stems from being so vividly different from his UK rap contemporaries. Everything from his flow to the beat selections to the way he carries himself seems unique. Does he feel part of the drill scene? “I don\'t think so at all,” he says. “The beats have that drill influence, but my flow and my content? Not at all.” The influence of drill does ring through this tape—thanks in part to the influence of producers including Bkay, Ghosty, Honeywoodsix, and Jevon—but just like the garage-owing “B1llionz” and the dancehall-soaked “Y PREE,” there’s so much more to M1llionz’s *Provisional License* than 808s and hi-hats. Here he walks us through his debut mixtape, track by track. **“Intro”** “This was produced by Jevon and Honeywoodsix. I had most of the songs for the tape, but everybody was saying I needed an intro. So I went in and wrote it there and then. We switched up the beat a couple of times—at first, the intro is slower, the second beat\'s a bit more jumpy, then by the third beat, it gets even crazier. I wanted it to build up to lead into the second song.” **“Pedestrian”** “This track was produced by H1K at the end of 2019. So, to be fair, I can\'t remember specifically, remember how that went, but I do remember that when I did record it, everybody liked it, but I just didn\'t end up releasing it. So, obviously, I saved it and for whatever reason I held on to it all this time, and it turned out to be the right decision.” **“Bando Spot”** “This is one of the more catchy tracks. It\'s jumpy, there\'s a lot of flow changes, and it\'s a bit different for me as well, because my personality comes out on this one. It’s a nice one to get the party going as well. As for the 50 Cent \[‘Candy Shop’\] sample, that was my idea. I was in the studio with Honeywood and I started singing the hook, he said, ‘Yo, you might as well just sample that,’ and it just worked.” **“Air BnB” (feat. Headie One)** “I was in the studio and decided I wanted Headie One on a song. So I did my bits in the day and I linked him later in the night and he filled in his bits. It’s a natural one when you hear that one. In the studio, it sounded mad. Everyone says it’s one of the best songs on here, but I don\'t know.” **“Badnis”** “I started recording this a little while ago, but it wasn’t quite there, something was missing. Then, when we got the voice note of the yard man talking about guns and placed that at the start of the intro, I think that sealed the song. The intro adds a bit of character to it and sets the scene for what I’m talking about.” **“Mobbin”** “I want this one to be like \[2020 single\] ‘Lagga,’ basically. Obviously, it’s not on here, so I haven’t got a mad, head-banging, crazy go-nuts song; hopefully that\'s what this does. It’s something for people to smash up the house to, basically. I didn’t want to recreate it exactly, but I wanted something similar for this tape.” **“Provisional License” (feat. AJ Tracey)** “The sample alone brings the tune up, but the lyrics and the hook are very catchy, too. There\'s a bit more meaning to this one. I’m saying my mum wants me to be surrounded by different people, positive people, but I\'m obviously doing what I\'m doing. Don’t get me wrong, she’s happy for me, but she was unsure at first. Obviously, every parent\'s going to be like that, but I think it\'s more the content of what I’m saying. After a while, she realized it’s just entertainment, isn\'t it? So she\'s going to be happy either way.” **“Jail Brain”** “I wrote some of this in jail, the first bit at least. So it would have been like 2019. I like the beat and I feel like I’m just flowing for ages. I only recorded the first bit, but \[British producer\] Bkay was like, ‘Yo, you need to finish it, finish it, finish it.’ So when I went to America at the end of 2020, I ended up finishing it. It\'s aimed at the ladies, but at the same time, men can relate to it also. It’s just life.” **“How Many Times” (feat. Lotto Ash)** “I was sent this track with the chorus already on it. So once I heard it, I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I need this.’ And I ended up recording it—it’s one of my favorites because it\'s a lot deeper than it appears. It\'s like people won’t realize how many times you\'ve done something or how many times you\'ve tried to elevate...it could be anything. People don\'t walk in your shoes, and you don\'t walk in other people’s. So neither side are really ever going to understand. You’ve just got to keep persevering and keep it going.” **“Adrenaline”** “I don\'t know, everyone thinks this track is mad, except for me. I just think it\'s a normal song. I did this ages ago, and even recorded a video in Dubai for it last year. Obviously, that didn\'t end up coming out, but I was convinced to have it on here.” **“Regular Bag”** “That was Jevon and Honeywood again. I think the flow change here is crazy. Each sequence I\'d do like a four-bar, change it to a completely different flow, and switch it again. The hook\'s catchy as well. It\'s like on ‘Adrenaline,’ but I think the verses are more lyrical.” **“Hometown” (feat. Jevon)** “This one’s definitely my favorite. It’s produced by Jevon, again, and it’s a deeper one to end on, to balance things out, and the hook from Jevon\'s really catchy.”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

A few years ago, Don Zilla was sat alone in an internet cafe teaching himself FL Studio, dreaming of becoming one of Africa’s greatest music producers. These early experiments evolved into 2019’s “From the Cave to the World”, an EP that showcased Zilla’s rare fusion of eerie industrial electronics, lurching bass and constantly shifting East African rhythms. Now the manager of Kampala’s Boutiq Studios, Zilla returns to Hakuna Kulala with his eagerly-awaited debut album “Ekizikiza Mubwengula”, a labyrinthine album that weaves freewheeling dance sub-genres into a bejewelled tapestry, signalling a path to the future. There’s the cybernetic ‘nuum funk of dBridge, Empty-set’s overdriven, cacophonous anxiety, the hyper-paced airlock club of Shanghai’s Hyph11E and the confrontational intensity of Dreamcrusher; everything is melted into a groove-fwd whole that’s tough to resist. Tangling trap into slippery, atmospheric doom-step on ‘Buziba’, experimenting with uptempo, Slikback-es-que rhythmic complexity on ‘Tension’ and reshaping noisy industrial ambience on ‘Shots’, Zilla uses the album to continuously challenge expectations, folding sounds in on themselves Inception-style and allowing fresh rhythms, textures and forms to peek through. It’s a bold step from a central character in East Africa’s rapidly-growing stable of paradigm-shifting experimental club producers.

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

“I’m devoted to letting my voice be heard,” Shaybo tells Apple Music. “I’ll always tell it how it is. I’m not tolerating any rubbish or submitting to no one—and my music represents that.” On her debut mixtape, *Queen of the South*, the South London MC presents an unapologetic ode to Black womanhood and self-discovery. In her early teens, she connected with rap crews around London, which brought her into contact with Brixton MC Sneakbo, from whom she derived her stage name. She then followed her own path, underscored by releases including “Anger” and “Dobale”—a track celebrating her Nigerian roots—while confirming her pen game and earning co-signs from industry tastemakers. *Queen of the South* reflects both her hard exterior and a more sensitive side. “I’m speaking about everything women go through,” she says. “From domestic violence and abuse to heartbreak.” Written and recorded during lockdown, the collection chronicles Shaybo’s experiences during a time of transition—in the world and her personal life. “Making this music was about me understanding my journey and understanding me as a person,” she explains. “That’s why this tape is very raw. It’s very Shaybo from back in the day, before I got into the music industry and got a deal. It’s me before I changed and transitioned my life. I think that’s why it means so much.” Here, she guides us through her debut release, track by track. **“Real One”** “This track is all about the idea that guys need to be in charge, and they always have to run the show. I’m saying, ‘You guys are little boys to me.’ I’m all about female dominance and I wanted to start the project off with that message.” **“Friendly” (feat. Haile)** “I wrote this last year during lockdown with \[UK singer-songwriter\] Haile, about how I’m in the club. I’m not friendly. I see guys as temporary—unless you’re trying to be my husband and put a ring on it. Until then, there’s no point for me. That’s just my personality. I’m friendly to the right person, but until then, I’m fine standing alone. Society expects women to be quiet, submissive, and in the house. But you don’t have to. I’m trying to break society’s expectations and rules.” **“Bad Gyal”** “I can’t be tamed, so I want someone who understands that and can handle me. I only want real people around. I want people that will understand I can’t be silenced. You’re not going to teach me how to behave. I’m a bad girl, for real. This song is something girls can dance to in the club also. Lockdown is over now, and we’re out here. There’s going to be festivals, so I wanted a track that people can vibe to and feel the music.” **“Broke Boyz” (feat. DreamDoll)** “I’m a feminist, so this is another song on women empowerment. DreamDoll and I didn’t get the chance to meet as we made this song during lockdown. Shout-out to her, though—she’s definitely a real one and we bonded on that. It was also a pleasure to have an American feature because, I think, sometimes when we \[UK artists\] make music with Americans, they don’t share it, so I was just happy to see that my art was embraced from her end as well. She did *the most* for me, so I really appreciate that.” **“Dem Blues”** “This track is just me rapping and being cocky about it. I’m believing in my own sauce. I believe I’m the Queen of the South, I believe I’m hard, so it’s just me telling everyone, ‘Look at me now!’ I feel proud to have been able to change my situation. I’m such a workaholic and where I’m trying to take \[my music\] is bigger than just the UK, so I still have a lot more work to do. But I haven’t had time to just sit back and reflect on my journey and think, ‘Wow, look how much I’ve accomplished’ because I’ve been so busy trying to get this tape out.” **“Mud”** “I’m speaking about my pain on this song. I’m going through a transition period right now, and I’m not used to certain things that I’m dealing with. I’m not in the same environment that I used to be in, but that’s still where I come from. I made this to say, ‘I used to be a certain way, but I’m changing, I’m evolving, and I have to focus.’ My reasons for doing music are much bigger than myself. I’m trying to change my life and a lot of other people’s lives in the process.” **“My Sister” (feat. Jorja Smith)** “Jorja is my twin. We naturally get along and understand each other, so making this song was such a vibe. It wasn’t a difficult process whatsoever. I feel like every woman can relate to the things that I’m saying on this song, because women don’t speak about domestic violence, abuse, and the pain they\'ve gone through. We don’t explain why we have trust issues or why we’re traumatized, especially in the Black community. It’s not something that is spoken about enough, so I wanted to use my voice to put that out there.” **“No Worries” (feat. Wale)** “You know when you get to meet the people you look up to? This was that for me. Wale is an amazing person. He’s been so supportive of me throughout my journey. We met through my A&R, DJ Semtex, who he knows very well. So, we all sat in the studio and he loved ‘No Worries’ when he heard it, so it happened naturally. In the song, I’m reflecting on how much life has changed. I’m at peace now, and that’s something that he could relate to.” **“Carry & Go”** “I embrace my Nigerian culture, so I wanted to make a song that spoke to that. I’m speaking Yoruba in the song and experimenting with different things for a pop and Afrobeat sound. Again, I’m speaking on my heartbreak in a long-term relationship, where I went through so much disrespect and abuse, and then changing it and turning all of that into something happy. Women going through a breakup can just listen to this track and be reminded of their strength and be able to move on and do your own thing.” **“Good Time”** “I’m such a workaholic, and in lockdown I had to work ten times harder. I had to keep going through all of the restrictions. So, I wanted to make a song about the way I was feeling. I just want to live my life and be able to let go and be me. It’s crazy because, as I’m going through these songs, I’m realizing how much I’ve been writing about my experiences and what I’ve gone through in the past year.”

For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”

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

“I can only work by being really open,” Welsh electronic producer Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless, tells Apple Music. “If I don’t start a piece of music by being inquisitive and playful, I lose interest very quickly.” This inherent curiosity forms the basis of his shape-shifting releases. Coming to prominence with his post-dubstep-influenced debut EP, 2011’s *4D*, and then working with labelmate Sampha before releasing its synth-heavy follow-up, *Yugen*, in 2013, Koreless has spent the past six years without any solo releases. Instead, he collaborated with Sharon Eyal’s groundbreaking dance company L-E-V for 2019’s Bold Tendencies festival, produced for FKA twigs’ acclaimed album *MAGDALENE*, and endlessly refined his long-awaited debut album—the aptly titled *Agor*, which means “open” in Welsh. Throughout its rigorously edited 10 tracks, Koreless toys with notions of tension and release, building expectations through crescendos of intensity before thwarting the cathartic payout with an immediate cut to blissful spaciousness. “You can accelerate a rhythm so much that it stops being heard as rhythm and, instead, becomes a single tone,” he explains. “That’s what I’m doing with these arrangements—pushing you to a threshold point until you burst through the chaos into an entirely new feeling and experience.” Here, he dives deeper into each of *Agor*’s tracks. **“Yonder”** “‘Yonder’ is a prelude to the record, like the lights coming up for a moment before we begin. It feels like an empty stage where nothing is really happening yet; it’s just providing a general feel. It was important to start like this, because the rest of the record can be quite melody-heavy, so I wanted something to welcome the listener in first.” **“Black Rainbow”** “I wanted ‘Black Rainbow’ to be a digital folk song. It builds in intensity as I’m squeezing every drop out of it. But then we reach a threshold that we break through, and it just becomes very blissful. The song is like taking off and accelerating into total bliss rather than into chaos. That’s one of the aims behind the record—to enable these ruptures and then to accelerate into a peaceful state.” **“Primes”** “This track is my homage to someone like Oren Ambarchi, since it’s just made of sine waves, which are the perfect, irreducible sound. You can’t get any simpler than a sine wave; it’s what you’re left with when you strip everything else away. I really like working with sines because they’re very general and there’s something comforting about their generality. I used to work a lot more with them, and this is probably their only place on the record. It plays like shards of sine wave dust.” **“White Picket Fence”** “I like using vocals almost like instruments and capturing the material quality of them, rather than having an artist feature. I like an anonymous, slightly inhuman vocal, which is why these vocals are just played through a keyboard. There’s a comforting safety to a vocal that sounds like it’s been grown in a lab, and on this track, I’m trying to separate them from any personality as much as possible and just keep them as these angelic, general voices.” **“Act(S)”** “This was the same tune as ‘White Picket Fence,’ but I decided to chop it halfway. It felt like ‘White Picket Fence’ needed to finish there and that this ending had a certain sculptural difference to it. I love when albums have extra sections tagged on at the end of a song. They aren’t interludes but rather a moment to breathe.” **“Joy Squad”** “I like when you’re in a club and you hear a song that is a bit of a roller-coaster and that can take you on a wild and unexpected ride without ruining everyone’s night. I was trying to find a version of that with ‘Joy Squad.’ I think of it as being a giant in terms of visualizing the sonic scale, because it’s quite an empty soundworld, so everything fills up much bigger in that space—it doesn’t just feel like microtones.” **“Frozen”** “I was exploring how you can use a vocal to get it to sound like percussion. Both this and ‘Joy Squad’ are using vocals in that way to make very short, percussive sounds. This is about finding that moment of beauty before failure—like having blind faith just before everything falls apart—and that was the structure of the song. I wanted to create a digital, sugary sweetness and I was getting there through very heavy-handed vocal processing.” **“Shellshock”** “The themes of ‘Shellshock’ are similar to ‘Frozen’ in trying to tread this line between something super-sweet and sincere and then some kind of creeping fear underneath. All of this builds to create that same sense of rupture and disassembly we find in ‘Black Rainbow.’” **“Hance”** “This one’s a little machine—it feels like a Heath Robinson device, a bionic music box. This is a short track, but it might have been one of the ones that took the longest to make. With a lot of these shorter ideas, I didn’t want to make them into full songs—they are enough however long they are. It’s a nice palate cleanser before we end.” **“Strangers”** “This was the last track to be written for the record. It felt like a lot of the previous songs had been really labored over and almost strangled tight, whereas ‘Strangers’ came together really quickly. It feels less constrained and like there’s more life to it because of that. It was fun to make and it works really well to tie everything together as the final tune. It is a joyful ending.”

Where Lana Del Rey’s previous 2021 album *Chemtrails Over the Country Club* made no reference to the global pandemic in which it was partly created, *Blue Banisters* is steeped in it. From bringing up Black Lives Matter protests in “Text Book” to facing the loneliness of isolation during quarantine in “Black Bathing Suit,” there’s no shortage of references to the year that kept us all inside. “And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend/Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television,” she sings. When not singing about girls in summer dresses dancing with their masks off, Lana ruminates on her family. She mentions her sister Chuck in the title track and regales with tales about her parents in “Wildflower Wildfire.”

It’s perhaps fitting that Dave’s second album opens with the familiar flicker and countdown of a movie projector sequence. Its title was handed to him by iconic film composer Hans Zimmer in a FaceTime chat, and *We’re All Alone in This Together* sets evocative scenes that laud the power of being able to determine your future. On his 2019 debut *PSYCHODRAMA*, the Streatham rapper revealed himself to be an exhilarating, genre-defying artist attempting to extricate himself from the hazy whirlwind of his own mind. Two years on, Dave’s work feels more ambitious, more widescreen, and doubles down on his superpower—that ability to absorb perspectives around him within his otherworldly rhymes and ideas. He’s addressing deeply personal themes from a sharp, shifting lens. “My life’s full of plot holes,” he declares on “We’re All Alone.” “And I’m filling them up.” As it has been since his emergence, Dave is skilled, mature, and honest enough to both lay bare and uplift the Black British experience. “In the Fire” recruits four sons of immigrant UK families—Fredo, Meekz, Giggs, and Ghetts (all uncredited, all lending incendiary bars)—and closes on a spirited Dave verse touching on early threats of deportation and homelessness. With these moments in the can, the earned boasts of rare kicks and timepieces alongside Stormzy for “Clash” are justified moments of relief from past struggles. And these loose threads tie together on “Three Rivers”—a somber, piano-led track that salutes the contributions of Britain’s Windrush generation and survivors of war-torn scenarios, from the Middle East to Africa. In exploring migration—and the questions it asks of us—Dave is inevitably led to his Nigerian heritage. Lagos newcomer Boj puts down a spirited, instructional hook in Yoruba for “Lazarus,” while Wizkid steps in to form a smooth double act on “System.” “Twenty to One,” meanwhile, is “Toosie Slide” catchy and precedes “Heart Attack”—arguably the showstopper at 10 minutes and loaded with blistering home truths on youth violence. On *PSYCHODRAMA* Dave showed how music was his private sanctuary from a life studded by tragedy. *We’re All Alone in This Together* suggests that relationship might have changed. Dave is now using his platform to share past pains and unique stories of migration in times of growing isolation. This music keeps him—and us—connected.

K-house, K-pop, hip-hop, electronic: Call it what you want—Hye Jin Park’s debut ignores those boundaries, anyway. The Korea-born, LA-based producer’s debut album, *Before I Die*, is a personal exploration of everything from living overseas and missing her family to sex, the music industry, and childhood nostalgia. It’s sung, rapped, and spoken, in Korean and English, over a sound that takes elements of hip-hop, techno, house, indie, and lo-fi beats, and creates something new, immersive, and totally unique. Below, Park walks us through each track on her self-produced, self-recorded LP. **“Let’s Sing Let’s Dance”** “In my life, when I’m really sad, I just sing and dance. If there are times when others feel sad, too, I want them to just sing and dance and leave everything behind for a while.” **“I Need You”** “Up to this point, I have endured all of this road alone and survived. I just really needed someone who had my back.” **“Before I Die”** “It’s been so long since I left Korea and last saw my family. I couldn’t get in touch with my family properly, because I was moving around the country on my own and dealing with all of these things that were happening to me. Of course, now, the coronavirus and everything that is happening in the US has affected my ability to see them. Words can never, ever, ever express how much I miss my family.” **“Good Morning Good Night”** “At the beginning of the day, I wanted to tell myself to have a good day. At the end of the day, I wanted to tell myself that I had also worked hard today.” **“Me Trust Me”** “I believe in myself and trust myself. But I wanted to protect myself from people who don’t believe in me or in themselves. They try to take me down like they take themselves down.” **“Where Did I Go”** “I’m thinking back to when I was a kid. I used to draw on the walls of my room. I miss that little kid.” **“Never Give Up”** “I left my country when I was 24, because I thought I did everything I could in Korea to pursue my dream. First, I moved to Melbourne, Australia by myself, because I thought easily get a visa for as a Korean. And then I moved from Australia to the UK and then to Los Angeles, California. I’ve gotten fucked over a lot. Twice in a row, I was seriously fucked over in this industry and by its people. They threatened me and were racist towards me. How many crooks I’ve met, country by country. How many times I’ve had to go through creepy guys, country by country. There’s a lot of people who wanted to try and take me down and be disrespectful towards me. I wanted to show them and tell them that I’ll never give up.” **“Can I Get Your Number”** “When you like someone, you ask them, ‘Can I get your number?’” **“Whatchu Doin Later”** “Then, you could text them and say, ‘Whatchu doin later?’” **“Sex With Me (DEFG)”** “And then, you could tell them, ‘Sex with me.’” **“Where Are You Think”** “I was talking to myself, saying, ‘Wake up. You need to make money.’” **“Never Die”** “I’ll never die.” **“Hey, Hey, Hey”** “Try listening to this song when y’all jogging. It’s gonna hit different.” **“Sunday ASAP”** “I wanted Sunday to come as soon as possible. It’s the only time I can let myself be lazy. I usually pressure myself to work harder than anyone else. So, soothing myself is like candy.” **“i jus wanna be happy”** “Originally, this song was called ‘I Hate Myself.’ But then, I deleted all of the ‘I Hate Myself’ parts I recorded. Instead, I rerecorded ‘i jus wanna be happy’ in Korean.”

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

Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.

After an impressive, self-titled 2021 EP that placed her among the vanguard of rising Nigerian pop stars, Ayra Starr delivers her official debut album. Exploring relationships, betrayal, and self-assurance on *19 & Dangerous*, the artist chronicles the transition from adolescence to adulthood. “One day, it just struck me that I’m not scared of failing, I’m not scared of mistakes—I’m ready to work hard to get to where I want to,” she tells Apple Music. “No matter how much I fall, I’m prepared for it. When you know that you’re not scared of mistakes, you become dangerous, because you have nothing to lose, really. I’m 19 and I’m dangerous. I’m ready for everything.” Throughout *19 & Dangerous*, Starr remains bold and unapologetic, whether exhibiting her grandeur in banging earworms or acknowledging her vulnerabilities in heartfelt ballads. She showcases her vocal and emotional range as the project’s mood shifts from sunny to gloomy when her lyrics dictate. Ranging from R&B to pop, soul, and Afropop, the album features production by London, Kel-P Vibes, and Don Jazzy while Ayra and her brother, Dami Aderibigbe (aka Milar), penned most of the songs. Here, she takes us through her coming-of-age story, track by track. **“Cast (Gen Z Anthem)”** “In Nigeria, when we say somebody is ‘cast,’ it’s like, ‘Everybody knows her. She’s been around.’ So, I always get a lot of advice: ‘Ayra, don’t go and cast.’ Even with the smallest thing, a woman has to be a hundred times more careful than a guy. She can’t go to this place; she can’t do that because she doesn’t want to cast. The smallest thing can ruin a woman’s reputation. But I’ve come to this industry to break boundaries. So, if I cast, let me cast. In the beginning of the song, I used an Eartha Kitt interview, one of my favorite interviews of all time. She said, ‘Life is not problematic. We make it problematic.’” **“Fashion Killer”** “I wrote this song with my brother. We are fashion-obsessed. My brother is an A$AP Rocky fan, I’m a Rihanna fan, so we grew up with a lot of fashion. ‘Fashion Killa’ by A$AP Rocky, we loved that song. So, when London sent us the beat, we wanted something hard, something people would feel themselves, too. I could just see people on the runway to this beat.” **“Lonely”** “‘Lonely’ is a sweet love song. The album has different moods: You have the badass, ‘Cast,’ then you have the vulnerability—that’s where ‘Lonely’ comes in. ‘Lonely’ is me telling a guy, ‘If you don’t like me back, remember that I’m only human. Watch the way you talk to me and all that. Let’s vibe and all that.’ So, ‘Lonely’ is like a lost-love heartbreak song.” **“Snitch” (feat. Fousheé)** “‘Snitch’ features one of my favorite artists, Fousheé. I love her with all my heart. She’s such an amazing musician. The whole song was a freestyle. She had sent me a DM that she thinks I’m dope. Just imagine me seeing a DM from one of my favorite artists of all time. I was like, ‘I have this song that I really want you on.’ I shot my shot and she was down with it, so that was great.” **“Toxic”** “I wrote the song with my brother and posted it in December 2019. Don Jazzy saw it and he was like, ‘Come to the studio and let me see what you can do.’ I recorded it in studio properly in January 2020. The song is about genuine heartbreak, the type of love that breaks you. When you become obsessed with someone but don’t know how obsessed you are until the person leaves you and you can’t function without this person. Growing up, I moved from one place to another, \[and\] I experienced that, leaving friends behind and all that. I also watched a lot of people’s experiences. I put that pain into the music.” **“In Between”** “I wrote ‘In Between’ in my sleep. I was depressed and I remember I was singing it in my head. I was like, ‘Two feet and I’m under/I feel my body.’ It was around 3 am. I got up and I took my phone and I recorded the whole thing from the beginning to the end, without a beat. I was just pouring my emotions out. I went to the studio the next day, and London and I made a beat to the song.” **“Beggie Beggie” (feat. Ckay)** “‘Beggie Beggie’ is almost like ‘Lonely.’ It’s almost the same topic. The chorus means, ‘See the way I’m begging you. Do I look like those people on the streets begging for money? You’re making me feel like I’m one of those people because of the way I’m begging you. And I know you are a fine guy and all the girls like you, but I’m also a badass—some other guys like me. So, don’t use me.’ It’s a from-friends-to-lovers type of story. And I remember when I was in the studio recording it. I was like, ‘I want, like, a male POV on this story.’” **“Karma”** “My brother and I wrote this song in 2018 when we were still in school. This was one of the first songs we finished writing. Just thinking about it now, back then, we didn’t know that this was going to be our life. We didn’t even know we were going to record it one day. It was just something we did for fun. My brother wrote the first verse, I wrote the second one. We would imagine that he featured me on the song. We would write the whole music video treatments. Then, when Don Jazzy signed me, the first day in the studio, I started to record ‘Karma’ and I was like, this song is such an amazing song. It’s my love story with karma. Karma is such a good lover, because I didn’t ask him to do the revenge—he did it for me.” **“Bloody Samaritan”** “I’m used to very slow beats and all that. I’m just singing my heart out. But when it comes to ‘Bloody Samaritan,’ it was a whole different case. I had this beat for six months and I kept begging the producer, ‘London, please don’t give it to anybody. I’m sure I can do this. I’m sure I can work on this beat.’ We know the story of the good Samaritan. Bloody Samaritan is the opposite—people that pretend to be good Samaritans, but they’re hypocrites, people that judge you and criticize you. So, it’s like, you can’t kill my vibe. I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m dangerous. Nobody should come to me with bad energy.” **“Bridgertn”** “‘Bridgertn’ was inspired by the series *Bridgerton*. Seeing a Black queen ruling and all that, we didn’t get to see that growing up. As a teenager now, watching that and how I even put it in a song, I can just imagine how confident I would have been if I’d seen it when I was younger. **“Amin”** “‘Amin’ means ‘amen’ in Islam, and also in Yoruba, which is one of the native tongues in Nigeria. I wrote this song last year before I ever knew what it meant. It was just something I wrote and just recorded. But now, listening to the song, it speaks so much to me. It’s just like, ‘Don’t let the fame take you away. Just always pray for what you want.’ It’s also like my future self is speaking to me in the verse. It’s like, ‘Do you really want it all? Say you have it all. Say you have all the things you want. Do you really need it?’ Because I remember when I was younger, wanting and that. Then, growing up, you realize life is not about that. Life is not about these materialistic things. It’s just about love and just who you love.”

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

Car Culture presents Dead Rock: smooth sounds for end times. Written over the course of a decade, Dead Rock is a tender ten-tracker of electroacoustic ego dissolution, consciously uncoupling with planetary regret. Suspended tones and frictionless glide for long drives, delayed flights and carbon credits. The record features three collaborations with Great Skin (Steven Phillips-Horst), as well as instrumentation from Maxime Robillard and Dan Bodan. Their contributions help sketch open road songs for the lonesome, crowded self. Car Culture is the most hypnagogic alias of Physical Therapy. Lighthead Records is a new sub-label to Allergy Season, run by Physical Therapy, releasing music for listening. Dead Rock is out digitally May 4th on Lighthead Records with physical release to follow. Vinyl and digital pre-orders are available now.

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

The debut album from DJ Pitch For darkening nights For a world that is ending That has ended For what comes after For that which we might make For that to which we can give no words To those words that we hold close /// Towards a feeling An opening, ineffable There, a blurring Some smear at the edge of perception For a moment, Permanence is lost The outside reaches in We find ourselves A sound finds us /// A quiet breath We are resigned We remain hopeful Mastered by Mor Air Artwork by Alex Buchan and Eliza Credits: Text and Spoken Word (2,7,10)- Rafael Lubner Vocals & Additional Production (9) - Organ Tapes Saxophone (8) - Stephen Venning Saxophone (10) - Gbeke Akinkugbe

Part of a four-album drop released virtually simultaneously in late 2021, *KICK ii* showcases Arca at her fiercest. Each album in the series has its own distinct flavor, and *KICK ii* focuses largely on reggaetón. Picking up the thread from *KiCk i* cuts like “Mequetrefe” and “KLK,” early-album highlights “Prada,” “Rakata,” and “Tiro” swing and snap with taut elastic energy, brittle dembow drums bobbing in empty space. Coproduced with Venezuelan-born DJ Cardopusher (Boys Noize also contributed to “Tiro”), the three songs are smeared with glassy trance synths that play up Arca’s own chopped-and-twisted vocal processing. Not everything is so upfront, though: “Luna Llena” and “Lethargy” dip into softer, more shadowy hues, while Arca’s experimental instincts come to the fore on “Araña,” “Femme,” and “Muñecas,” where synths and manipulated vocals seem to dissolve into oily, iridescent pools. Ultimately, she saves her biggest surprise for near the end: “Born Yesterday” pairs soaring vocals from Sia with a glitchy electronic ballad that shifts into a four-on-the-floor stormer before crumbling to dust once again, rolling up triumph and tragedy into one blazing fireball of an anthem.

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