Dazed's 20 Best Albums of 2020

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

For Sega Bodega, acclaim for spearheading the sound of London-based electronic label and collective NUXXE has helped to fuel his evolution. On 2018’s EP *self\*care*, he laid his own vocals onto jet-black pop-R&B, setting the way for *Salvador*, a full debut album that cuts close to the heart of the Glaswegian. “It\'s basically an autobiography,” Salvador Navarette tells Apple Music. Best captured in the whirring tension of lead single “Salv Goes to Hollywood” or the hymnal refrains that close out “Raising Hell,” *Salvador* breaks structure on a whim, offering instead a glitchy ride through human emotion. Here, he offers a track-by-track tour. **2 Strong** “Out of all the songs, it was the most like, ‘Okay, listen to this album.’ I think starting with just a dry vocal felt really strong, since it\'s like I\'m trying to be like, \'Me, me, me!\'” **Masochism** “That\'s an apology to my mum, and a love letter to alcohol. It\'s kind of a conversation with my mum while I simultaneously stick up for how much I love fucking drinks. Or how much I *loved* drinks—past tense, I guess.” **Raising Hell** “The fucking DM’s I get, ugh—I didn\'t think I could write a whole song about it, but it turns out I can write a *whole* song about it! Just getting harassed for dick pics by fucking strangers. Like...why would I do that?” **U Got the Fever** “It\'s a breakup song. I mean, it\'s about a relationship I had, but it\'s also about hearing of other people\'s relationships and the common theme of severe paranoia, just making someone go fucking crazy. So like, in a lot of ways, the fever is paranoia. I had the line and I was like, \'That feels like a good analogy to paranoia.’” **Heaven Knows** “This is just a completely fictional thing about the person listening to the song killing me. The end at the very last bit of the track, it’s supposed to be the person who’s killed me talking to themselves. Talking to the voice in their head. Fun trick: If you listen to the end of it in mono, the lyrics change. I figured out how to completely make something disappear when you put it on mono. I had this idea of having lyrics that in stereo were one thing and then in mono had a completely different meaning. Been wanting to do that for a very long time.” **Salv Goes to Hollywood** “I\'ve been playing this song for about two years now, and even when people didn\'t know it they still felt it. It\'s a really old song, from like 2016. It was the first time I ever vocaled a song, so it felt like a really nice way to start on the record. Kinda like, all the ways I\'ve tried to do this whole vocal thing. Yeah, back then I knew it would be the single, but the video was all Jade \[Jackman\], the director. That was all her thing and I was happy to let her go crazy with it. If you\'ve seen the video, there\'s these glasses in it. I brought them.” **Knox (Interlude)** “I feel like there\'s gonna be a bunch of people who listen to this who might just maybe want instrumental club stuff, which I\'ve done for quite a long time, and this was sort of like, ‘Here\'s that.’ But you\'re not getting a lot of it! I tried to make a full song out of it, but that bit, the 30 seconds that are in it, just *felt* like enough. I couldn\'t make anything go past that without it getting boring. It took 10 minutes.” **Smell of the Rubber** “Do you ever date someone and they\'re giving off red flags everywhere, but you\'re just ignoring every single one of them? It\'s about that. And then at the end it\'s about…I\'m sure you know.” **U Suck** “It was originally stemming from an argument I was having with someone, and then I got over it and I really liked the song and I didn\'t want the song to be this thing that reminded me of it, every time. So I was like, I can switch this up. Then it became about the ways that you can say \'fuck you\' but actually mean so many different things. At the end, that vocal, it\'s a girl called Mimi Wade and she sings back a different way that you can say \'fuck you.\' So I liked that way of having the same line but several different ways of interpreting it all in one song. Just kind of basic shit.” **Calvin** “This is about my best friend who killed himself a couple of years ago. The first part of the song is me talking to him now. The first verse is me talking to him. And then the middle bit is him talking back to me. Again, listen to that on mono. I wanted to symbolize the fact that the voice wasn\'t even there.” **Kuvasz in Snow** “‘We hide in plain sight like Kuvasz in snow.’ That lyric is about being emotionally detached. There\'s nothing much to that, it\'s just I really liked the song and then it feels like an ending.”

The debut album Salvador, out now on NUXXE. Includes the singles U Suck, Salv Goes To Hollywood and Raising Hell.

The harmonies that Chloe and Halle Bailey conjure sound like heaven. It\'s what got them tens of millions of views on YouTube; it\'s what eventually attracted Beyoncé\'s attention; and it\'s what continues to make them a force on their second album, *Ungodly Hour*. The duo experiments with a multitude of sounds and textures—many of their own making—while keeping their voices centered and striking as ever. Where their 2018 debut *The Kids Are Alright* played up an almost angelism that connected that moment to their origins as child stars, this new project is about maturation—both musically and otherwise. “I feel like we were more sure of ourselves, more sure of our messaging and what we wanted to get across in just showing that it\'s okay to have flaws and insecurities and show all the layers of what makes you beautiful,” Halle tells Apple Music. “I feel like we\'ve come a long way and in our growth as young women, and you\'d definitely be able to hear that in the music.” This time around, they\'re owning their sexuality and, along with it, the messiness that comes with being an adult and trying to figure out your place. On its face, *Ungodly Hour* is an uplifting album, but it doesn\'t shy away from the darker feelings that come along the way. “A lot of the world sees us as like little perfect angels, and we want to show the different layers of us,” Chloe says. “We\'re not perfect. We\'re growing into grown women, and we wanted to show all of that.” Here the sisters break down each song on their second album. **Intro** Halle: “This intro was made after we had finished making ‘Forgive Me.’ We thought about how we wanted to open this album, because our musicianship and musical integrity is always super-duper important to us, and we never want to lose the essence of who we are in trying to also make some songs that are a bit more mainstream. It felt like us being us completely and just drowning everyone in harmonies like we love to and just playing around. That was our time to play and to open the album with something that will make people\'s ears perk up as well as allow us to have so much fun creatively.” Chloe: “And the reason why we wanted to say the phrase ‘Don\'t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness’ is because that was a statement that wrapped and concluded the whole album. We should never have to apologize for being ourselves. You should never apologize for who you are or any of your imperfections, and you don\'t need to get permission from the world to be yourself.” **Forgive Me** Chloe: “I love it because it\'s so badass, and it\'s taking your power back and not feeling like your self-worth is in the trash. I remember we were all in the studio with \[songwriter\] Nija \[Charles\] and \[producer\] Sounwave, and for me personally, I was going through a situation where I was dealing with a guy and he picked someone else over me, and it really bothered me because I felt like it wasn\'t done in the most honest light. I like to be told things up front. And so when we were all in the session, this had just happened to me. I went in the booth and laid down some melodies, and some of the words came in, and then Halle went in and she sang ‘forgive me,’ and I thought that was so strong and powerful, and Nija laid down some melodies. We kind of constructed it as a puzzle in a way. It felt so good—it felt like we were taking our power back, like, ‘Forgive me for not caring and giving you that energy to control me and make me sad.’” **Baby Girl** Halle: “‘Baby Girl’ is a girl empowerment song, but our perspective when we were writing the song, personally, for me, it was a message that I needed to remind myself of. I remember we wrote this song in Malibu. We decided for the day after Christmas, we wanted to rent an Airbnb, and we wanted to just go out there with no parents and be by the beach and bring our gear and just create. And I remember at that time I was just feeling a little bit down, and I just needed that pick-me-up. So I started writing these lyrics about how I was feeling, how everybody makes it looks so easy and how everything that you see—it seems real, but is it really? So that was definitely an encouraging, empowering song that we wanted other girls to relate to and play when they needed that messaging—when you\'re feeling overwhelmed and insecure and you\'re just like, \'Okay, what\'s next?\' Like, nope, snap out of it. You\'re amazing.” **Do It** Chloe: “We just love the energy of that record. It feels so lighthearted and fun but simple and complex at the same time. We worked with Victoria Monét and Scott Storch on this one, and when we were creating it, we were just vibing out and feeling good. Our intention whenever we create is never to make that hit song or that single, because whenever you kind of go into that mindset, that\'s when you kind of stifle your creativity, and there\'s really nowhere to go. So we were just all having fun and vibing out, and we were just going to throw whatever to the wall and see what sticks. After we created the song, about two weeks later, we were listening to it and we were like, \'Uh-oh, we\'re really kind of feeling this. It feels really, really good.\' And we decided that that would be one that we would shoot a video to, and it just kind of made a life of its own. I\'m always happy when our music is well received, and it just makes us happy also seeing people online dancing to it and doing the dance we did in the music video. It\'s really exceeding all of our expectations.” **Tipsy** Halle: “‘Tipsy’ was such a fun record to write. My beautiful sister did this amazing production that just brought it to a whole nother level. I remember when we were first starting out the song, I was playing like these sort of country-sounding guitar chords that kind of had a little cool swing to it, and then we just started writing. We were thinking about when we\'re so in love, how our hearts are just open and how the other person in the relationship really has the power to break your heart. They have that power, and you\'re open and you\'re hoping nothing goes wrong. It\'s kind of like a warning to them: If you break my heart, if you don\'t do what you\'re supposed to do, yes, I will go after you, and yes, this will happen. Of course it\'s an exaggeration—we would never actually kill somebody over that. But we just wanted to voice how it\'s very important to take care of our hearts and that when we give a piece of ourselves, we want them to give a piece of themselves as well. It\'s a playful song, so we think a lot of people will have fun with that one.” **Ungodly Hour** Chloe: “I believe it was Christmas of 2018, and we knew that we wanted to start on this album. With anything, we\'re very visual, so we got a bunch of magazines, and we got like three posters we duct-taped together, and we made our mood board. There was a phrase that we found in a magazine that said \'the trouble with angels\' that really stuck out with us. We put that on the board, and we put a lot of women on there who didn\'t really have many clothes on because we wanted this album to express our sexuality. Halle\'s 20, I\'m 22. We just wanted to show that we can own our sexuality in a beautiful way as young women and it\'s okay to own that. So fast-forward a few months, and we were in the session with Disclosure. Whenever my sister and I create lyrics, sometimes we\'re inspired randomly on the day and we\'ll hear a phrase or something. I forgot what I was doing or what I was watching, but I heard the phrase \'ungodly hour\' and I wrote it in my notes really quick. So when we were all in a session together, we were putting our minds together, like, what can we say with that? And we came up with the phrase \'Love me at the ungodly hour.\' Love me at my worst. Love me when I\'m not the best version of myself. And the song kind of wrote itself really fast. It\'s about being in a situationship with someone who isn\'t ready to fully commit or settle down with you, but the connection is there, the chemistry is there, it\'s so electric. But being the woman, you know your self-worth and you know what you won\'t accept. So it\'s like, if you want all of me, then you need to come correct. And I love how simple and groovy the beat feels, and how the vocals kind of just rock on top of it. It feels so vibey.” **Busy Boy** Halle: “So ‘Busy Boy’ is another very playful love song. The inspiration for it basically came from our experiences, kiki-ing with our girls, when we have those moments where we\'re all gossiping and talking about what\'s going on in our lives. This one dude comes up, and we all know him because he is so fine and he\'s tried to holler at all of us. It was such a fun story to ride off of, because we have had those moments where—\'cause we\'re friends with a lot of beautiful black girls, and we\'re all doing our thing, and the same guy who is really successful or cute will hop around trying to get at each of us. So that was really funny to talk about, and also to talk about the bonding of sisterhood, of just saying all this stuff about this guy to make ourselves feel better. I mean, because at the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that even though you may be cute, even though you may be trying to get my attention, I know that you\'re just a busy boy, and I\'m going to keep it moving.” **Overwhelmed** Chloe: “Halle and I really wanted to have interludes on this album, and we were kind of going through all of the projects and files that were on my hard drive listening on our speakers in our studio. This came up and we were like, wow. The lyrics really resonated with us, and we forgot we even wrote it. We went and reopened the project and laid down so many more harmonies on top of it. We just wanted it to kind of feel like that breath in the album, because there\'s so many times when you feel overwhelmed and sometimes you\'re even scared to admit it because you don\'t want to come off as weak or seeming like you can\'t do something, but we\'re all human. There have been so many times when Halle and I feel overwhelmed, and I\'ll play this song and feel so much better. It\'s okay to just lay in that and not feel pressured to know what\'s next and just kind of accept, and once you accept it, then you could start moving forward and planning ahead. But we all have those moments where we kind of just need to admit it and just live in it.” **Lonely** Halle: “This song is so very important to us. We did this with Scott Storch, and it ended up just kind of writing itself. I think one friend that we had in particular was kind of going through something in their life, and sometimes, a lot of the situations that we\'re around we take inspiration from to write about. We were also feeling just stuck in a way, and we wanted to write something that would uplift whoever it was out there who felt the same way we did, whether it was just being lonely and knowing that it\'s okay to be alone. And when you are alone, owning how beautiful you are and knowing that it\'s okay to be by yourself. We kind of just wrote the story that way, thinking about us alone in our apartment and what we do, what we think when we\'re in our room, and what they think when they go home. I mean, what is everybody thinking about in all of this? When people are waiting by the phone, waiting for somebody to call them, and the call never comes—you don\'t have to let that discourage you. At the end of the day, you are a beautiful soul inside and out, and as long as you\'re okay with loving yourself wholeheartedly, then you can be whoever you want to be, and you can thrive.” **Don\'t Make It Harder on Me** Chloe: “We wrote this with our good friend Nasri and this amazing producer Gitty, and we were all in the studio, and I believe Halle really inspired this song. She was going through a situation where she was involved with someone, and there was also someone else trying to get her attention, and we kind of just painted that story through the lyrics: You\'re in this wonderful relationship, but there\'s this guy who just keeps getting your attention, and you don\'t want to be tempted, you want to be faithful. And it\'s like, \'Look, you had your chance with me. Don\'t come around now that I\'m taken. Don\'t make it harder on me.\' I love it because it feels so old-school. We wanted the background to feel so nostalgic. Afterwards, we added actual strings on the record. It just feels so good—every time I listen to it, I just feel really light and free and happy.” **Wonder What She Thinks of Me** Halle: “I was really inspired for this song because of a story that was kind of happening in my life. I mean, the themes of \'Don\'t Make It Harder on Me\' and this song as well are kind of hand in hand. There was this amazing guy who\'s so sweet, and it just talks about this bond that you have with somebody and how this person came out of nowhere. And then all of a sudden, you kind of find yourself wanting that person, but they\'re in a situation and you\'re in a situation, and you don\'t want to seem like you\'re trying to take this girl\'s man. We spun it into this story of being the other woman—even though, just so you know, Chloe and I were never that. So we pushed that story so far, and it was really fun and exciting to talk about, because I don\'t think we had ever experienced or heard another song that was talking about the perspective of the other woman—the woman who is on the side or the girl who wishes so badly that she could be with him and is always there for him. So we flipped it into this drama-filled song, which we really feel like it\'s so exciting and so adventurous. The melodies and the lyrics and the beautiful production my sister did, it just really turned out amazing.” **ROYL** Chloe: “I love \'Rest of Your Life\' because it kind of feels like an ode to our debut album, *The Kids Are Alright*, with the anthemic backgrounds and feeling so youthful and grungy. With this song, we just wanted to wrap this album up by saying, \'It doesn\'t matter what mistakes you make, just live your life, go for it, have fun. You don\'t know when your time to leave this earth is, so just live out for the rest of your life.\' And even though we are in the ungodly hour right now, and we\'re learning ourselves through our mistakes and our imperfections, so what? That\'s what makes us who we are. Live it out.”

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

“I had a lot to write about,” beabadoobee tells Apple Music of her debut album *Fake It Flowers*. “I’m just a girl with girl problems, and I feel like there are a lot of girls who have the same problems.” Over 12 songs, Beatrice Laus explores those issues in what she calls “diary entries,” written in her bedroom over just a couple of months in late 2019. Here, she shakes off what people think of her (“Further Away,” the hook-laden “Care”), screams out her sadness (“Charlie Brown”), and gives way to the abandon of young love (the woozy, self-aware “Horen Sarrison”). “I made sure that there was a song for every mood and for every Bea that exists,” says the Philippines-born, London-raised singer. “This is a very personal album. It was everything I was supposed to tell someone but couldn’t, or just, like, never did.” The songs here are an unabashed love letter to the \'90s artists—and movies—she was devoted to growing up. (“Everyone glorifies the past,” says Laus of her obsession with a decade that ended a year before her birth.) Only three years after the first song she ever wrote, the hushed, ultra-lo-fi “Coffee,” earmarked beabadoobee as a name to know, the singer wants *Fake It Flowers* to do for other young women what those artists—from The Cardigans to Oasis, via Elliott Smith and Alanis Morissette—did for her. “When I’m really sad, I like to dance in my underpants in front of my mirror,” she says. “I always pick a good album to dance to. And I want *Fake It Flowers* to be that album for someone.” Hairbrushes at the ready: Let beabadoobee take you through her raw debut, track by track. **Care** “As soon as this came to life, I was like, ‘This is the first song.’ It describes the whole sound of *Fake It Flowers*—the big guitars, that nostalgic feeling. And lyrically the song talks about the fact that no one is ever going to get me. But it’s the idea that I\'m going to sing my heart out and not give a fuck if you don\'t like it. I just wanted a really good radio pop song, something that could end \[1999 rom-com\] *10 Things I Hate About You*.” **Worth It** “This song is about the temptations you get when you\'re on tour and when you\'re away—the stupid things you can do when you\'re alone in a hotel room. It was hard to get through it, but I\'m glad I wrote it because it was like an ending of that bit of my life. But sonically, it’s something good out of a bad situation. I wanted to make an album for people to dance to in their bedrooms, despite how depressing the songs are.” **Dye It Red** “This song isn’t actually about me. It\'s stories I\'ve heard from other people, and it’s about stupid boys. I have no filter with the lyrics. It’s also about being comfortable with who you are. At times, I feel like a hypocrite for singing this song, because I always care about what my boyfriend thinks. But I shouldn\'t, right? I wanted ‘Dye It Red’ to fizzle out into a beautiful mess at the end, especially around the lyrics where I\'m like, ‘You\'re not even that cute, that cute.’ I thought it was funny and sassy.” **Back to Mars** “I feel like this is where the album takes a shift into a darker-sounding side. ‘Care’ and ‘Worth It’ are the surface level of my problems. This is where it gets really deep into, like, ‘This is why I\'m fucked up.’ This song pays homage to the space theme of my EP *Space Cadet*, which this song was originally supposed to be for. This was the second take I did—it was just me and my guitar, and then Pete \[Robertson\] put all these amazing atmospheric sounds around it. It was meant to be a really fast-paced track with loads of drums, but it’s a very innocent song.” **Charlie Brown** “This is very heavy! And screaming on this song was probably the funnest moment of recording this album. They asked, ‘Are you sure you can scream?’ But I scream so much in my bedroom when I’m alone, so I was like: ‘I was born ready.’ I wanted to talk about a situation in my life as if I was just taking it out of my system. And what better way to do that than scream? I have a Charlie Brown strip tattooed on my arm—I was obsessed with Snoopy when I was a kid.” **Emo Song** “Originally, this was going to be another heavy one, but Pete suggested making it a super sad and slow one. The songs at this point all bleed into one another. And I did that on purpose, because they were all made together. The song talks about my childhood and how it affected me during my teenage life and what I did to kind of just drag myself of everything that happened to me.” **Sorry** “If my voice sounds vulnerable in this song, it’s because I was half crying while I was singing it. And it was a hard one to sing, because it is just so honest. It speaks about a really sad situation with someone I know and someone I really love. I had a pretty wild teenage life. I think me and my friendship group did what college kids did when we were 15. Anything in excess is bad. And we just did a bit too many drugs, really. And for some, \[it was\] too much—to the point they had to get \[involuntarily hospitalized\]. It\'s just sad to watch someone\'s life kind of wither away, especially knowing that they could have had an amazing life ahead of them. I wish I was more involved. But when something\'s too hard to watch, you just kind of separate yourself from it. Getting all of that off my chest was so relieving. And I said sorry. At least, in my head, I apologized.” **Further Away** “I\'ve always wanted to be a Disney princess. The strings come into play and I wanted to feel like a princess. This is where the positivity comes in the album—there’s a feeling of hope. This song is about all the people who were really mean to me growing up, and I’m just saying how dumb they were. But really, nothing’s real. They were going through the same shit.” **Horen Sarrison** “Literally a six-minute love song of me saying, ‘I\'m in love.’ It\'s supposed to be ridiculous. It\'s supposed to be very outwardly Disney Princess vibes. I was playing it to Pete and I was like, ‘And then the strings go like this,’ humming how I wanted it to sound. And he really brought it to life, and I owe it to him. It definitely is the most grand song on the album. And it’s really fun to play as well, because it just is me talking about how in love I am. I wanted a song for every mood, and this is definitely for that happy mood. And it\'s about Soren Harrison. I thought it was kind of funny to switch the two letters and call it ‘Horen Sarrison.’ It’s just so stupid.” **How Was Your Day?** “I recorded it in my boyfriend’s garden. Lyrically, it talks about my journey and about how hard it was being away from home and missing people. And I feel like it only made sense to go back to my roots on the way I recorded it, on a really shitty four-track, just me and my guitar with a missing string. It was really refreshing. There was always talk about doing a ‘Coffee’ moment on this album. Like, ‘Let\'s strip it back to just you and your guitar.’ And I really wanted it, but we didn\'t know how we were going to do it. Then lockdown happened and I was like, ‘I\'m going to do it, Daniel Johnston style.’” **Together** “This is paying homage to chicks who rock onstage. Like Veruca Salt and Hole. Writing this song made me realize a lot of things—for example, that I have this dependency thing as a person. But ‘Together’ made me realize that sometimes it\'s okay to be by yourself. Togetherness is cool, but being together all the time is kind of unhealthy. Again, I guess it was taking a sad situation and pouring my heart out into a song, and screaming it. And that felt pretty empowering.” **Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene** “The name of this song is simply the names I want to call my children. I\'m literally saying in the song, ‘You\'ll never leave me because you think I\'m pretty, so we\'ll have lots of babies called Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene.’ And it\'s supposed to be really stupid and fun to finish the album off on a positive note. I wanted it to be very messy—like so disgustingly distorted that you can\'t even hear a sound. We recorded it live in Wandsworth in a studio. There were two drum kits and we were just bashing the drums. It was fun, and very Flaming Lips-inspired. The last mood of this album is the really strange, weird Bea. And I think that’s my favorite one.”

“This album for me was one of those experiences that helped shape me as a person,” Rico Nasty tells Apple Music of the creation of her debut album, *Nightmare Vacation*. “I feel like I haven\'t gone through something like this since my son.” All the best qualities of the DMV-born and -bred rapper are perfected and blown out to make for some of her most punk yet polished work—a fully formed vision that took a bit of self-reflection and self-assurance to create. “I feel like when you\'re working on music and makeup and merch and all these other different avenues, you get swamped; I think that\'s the reason why I chose to name it *Nightmare Vacation*, too,” she says. “I was overwhelmed and I caught myself several times letting other people set goals for me and tell me where I should be going instead of just following the path that I was already on.” Songs like “Candy” and “No Debate” reflect a more assured Rico, confident of her abilities and her place as one of rap\'s most unique talents. Her willingness to experiment across *Nightmare Vacation*, and how, each time, she emerges with a result that fits her well, is further proof of the magic of gift meeting grit. “I didn\'t rush myself to complete a song or to catch a certain wave of music. I didn\'t try to blend into whatever was out,” she shares. “Being your own person can be scary sometimes because you don\'t know if people are going to love it or hate it, but I feel the way I dress prepared me for this as well. I don\'t care about the naysayers.” **Candy** “I feel like a lot of times when I rap, it\'s over crazy beats. Even though this is also a super sick beat, it\'s usually either a rock beat or some type of super hard bass-swamping shit. A lot of times I\'m just vibing, trying to be as humble as I can, but I feel I\'ve been humble for too long. This is my shit, and I just wanted to own it.” **Don’t Like Me** “That collab flew out of the sky, but I feel like that\'s how a lot of great songs happen, and I\'m very happy to have \[Don Toliver and Gucci Mane\] on the song. They\'re both very talented, legendary people. But yeah, these bitches don\'t fucking like me. They really don\'t. That\'s what\'s crazy. I don\'t know if I scare them or what, but they\'re not fucking with me.” **Check Me Out** “‘Check Me Out’ is for the bitches who get double takes everywhere we go, like you break necks everywhere you go, people asking you where you got that. It\'s all about feeling yourself. For this song in particular, I don\'t want people to think about Rico Nasty—when you sing along to it, it\'s more so for you. You could have been in the bed all day, but you hear this song and you want to get up, you want to do something, you want to feel like a bad bitch, aggressively.” **IPHONE** “The mindset was the future, which oddly enough came true. It was a little bit of the future and the past, because I have Myspace references, but I talk about smoking so much gas, I forgot to put my mask on. I wrote that in 2019 and everybody in 2020 had to wear a mask, and I just find that super creepy, but we\'re just going to rock with that.” **STFU** “I just want people to shut the fuck up, honestly. I feel like, due to the internet, people give their opinion where it\'s really not needed, wanted, asked for, and it gets a little uncomfortable sometimes as an artist. Obviously, you can\'t respond back to everybody individually and tell them \'shut the fuck up,\' so I tried to make my haters feel special and I gave them their own personal song.” **Back & Forth** “Yo, every time I fucking think about this song, I just think about Aminé doing his verse and my verse not having anything to do with what he\'s talking about. It was just very hilarious. I love Aminé. He helped me come out of my box a little bit, because I was never comfortable talking about shit like that. He helped pick the beat, and that night, we was with CashMoneyAp and stuff. He\'s fucking fire. I love Aminé. That\'s one of my top three favorite rappers of this generation.” **Girl Scouts** “The inspiration behind that was I was sitting back, going through my DMs, going through my mentions, and in my text photos, there\'s always girls dressing up like me, recreating my makeup looks and just going full-out Rico Nasty. I will call them Sugar Soldiers and the Nasty Mob—I think of them like Girl Scouts now, because there was a point in time where I was doing things and when I would see people do them, I would get offended or I\'d be super territorial. I remember somebody got the same exact tattoo as me, and I was just pissed off. I feel that\'s another thing that comes with growing up and this being a really big turning point in my life because I learned how to take my power back. We are an army. We are Girl Scouts. We at your fucking door. You come for one, you gotta deal with all of us. I love them so much.” **Let It Out** “It kinda tells the story of just my whole career. I love this verse because I just feel like I was having the most fun with that. It be the craziest beats that I just get on it and I feel the most lit for some reason. On the melodic ones, I\'d be a little bit scared, but on this one—I think I made this song super fast, and I didn\'t really like it at first. And everybody on my team and my manager leaked it on Twitter to see if they would like it, and they were like, \'Please drop this,\' and I was like, \'Damn, they fuck with it.\' That was one of the fun ones.” **Loser** “I wouldn\'t call myself the queen of surprises, but I never like to give people what they expect. Trippie \[Redd\]\'s amazing. Hopefully we get to work again. He was really fast giving me my song back, and he even came to the studio when I did his song—he\'s really awesome. I\'m looking forward to that punk shit, that crazy rock-screaming shit. We both have haters. We both have people who, I guess, call us weird or say we dress weird, and then we have the other half who dress like us. I just thought about this like *Mean Girls*. \'Everybody\'s going to want to be like us, but they can\'t sit with us\' type vibe. We\'re going to call Trippie \'Trippie Lohan.\' He\'s got the red hair like Lindsay Lohan, so it\'s really funny. It\'s hella flowy, hella melodic but also heavy-hitting.” **No Debate** “I talk about giving energy and power back to my fans with this album, and I just want to give them shit that puts them in a good mood and just makes them feel real bouncy. This song, I will say, was definitely inspired by the *Nasty* era. When I made this song, I was listening to a lot of my *Nasty* mixtape, and I feel this is a flavor from that era that was missed on the album.” **Pussy Poppin** “People don\'t really know, but I\'m very shy about talking about stuff like that. Whenever I make a song about that type of shit prior to this, I\'m like, \'Get out of the studio. Please leave.\' I\'m nervous as fuck, palms sweating, trying to rap about sex. And this night, bro, I don\'t know what had got into me. I wanted to have some fun. Obviously we talk about how these n\*\*\*as ain\'t shit, but I feel some of the best songs are the ones where it\'s like we\'re celebrating how our n\*\*\*a actually is fire. I feel we don\'t have that many songs like that, and I just wanted to make that song for all the girls with boyfriends out there who don\'t really talk about that shit but want to.” **OHFR?** “It was just one of those days where I remember it was hella gloomy and the song was made very fast. Dylan \[Brady\] was there, and the exhausting part with this song was the fucking beat. When we had tried to set it up, there was something wrong with the BPM. It was weird, like people were like, \'I don\'t know if you can even get on it because of the way that the beat is set up\' or whatever. But I still got on it. We still went crazy. \'OHFR?\' is definitely an anthem for people to put they middle fingers up, and it\'s just in your face.” **T0Fo** “It\'s like I\'m talking to myself on that song. I feel like that\'s the devil on your shoulder doing reckless-ass shit. Obviously, I\'m not trying to make people go out and fuck shit up, but when I wrote the song, it was definitely in a time where I was angry, and I wanted to get my power back so I just talked my shit. I was a little bit hesitant about really releasing the song, because I don\'t ever want nobody to do no wild-ass shit listening to me. But this one of the ones—it just made me feel like breaking shit, going out, whoever did me wrong, fucking they shit up. I don\'t care. It\'s the soundtrack to beating a n\*\*\*a\'s ass. We were smacking bitches before, but I feel like this song in particular is definitely about getting back at a guy.” **Own It** “I feel like with ‘Own It,’ I was trying to hone that vacation vibe but still Rico Nasty type of vacation—very glamorous, spooky, weird, still out there in its own way. I feel ‘Own It’ is also about owning your shit, owning my island. And it\'s also for bitches to be feeling they need to own it and that they\'re that bitch, because we need one big room full of bad bitches. Shout-out Kreayshawn.” **Smack a Bitch (Remix)** “Well, I felt like all of the girls that I put on this song are very avid people that are great contenders for smacking bitches. Sukihana will smack a bitch in an instant, ppcocaine will smack a bitch in an instant, and I definitely feel like Rubi Rose would smack a bitch or a n\*\*\*a in an instant. I also put them on the song because I feel one way or another, they\'ve inspired me to go hard just by the shit they go through on a daily basis. Suki\'s a mom. ppcocaine is a rising TikTok star and shit, and it\'s hectic on TikTok because they be hella rude on there. And then Rubi Rose is somebody who has been a beautiful girl that was well-known, and so many people try to underplay her as a rapper, and I fucking hate when people do that. I feel like the female rap scene right now is hella punk. We don\'t give a fuck. We showing ass, showing titties. We talk about what we want. Obviously, this has always been hip-hop, but in my head, we just look like a bunch of rock stars.” **Smack a Bitch (Bonus)** “I don\'t know what it is about that song. Obviously, I would like to think just because of the circumstance and how it came out, that\'s why people gravitate to it. It probably makes people feel like fighting and all that really goofy-ass shit. But I feel over time, it\'s just become one of those songs. It\'s a fun song. It\'s fun to put on. It\'s probably the fastest song I ever made, the most fun I had in the studio. I\'m very thankful for everybody that was a part of it, because I feel like it pushed me to do my own thing even more.”

A. G. Cook gave people just seven days to digest *7G*—his 49-track first solo album— before unveiling *Apple*, a leaner set of 10 songs he described as his “second debut” on social media. “I knew it’d be a slightly troll moment giving people so much music and then announcing my debut,” Cook tells Apple Music. “But nothing would really explain my artist approach better than these two contrasting albums.” Having founded influential UK label PC Music back in 2013, Cook has spent close to a decade as one of leftfield pop’s most pioneering and sought-out figures, lending production to boundary-breaking artists including Charli XCX and Hannah Diamond. And yet, until 2020, he rarely seemed willing to step out. “I’d been avoiding doing some kind of debut album,” he says. “But I think it would almost feel strange after a while not to do my own version. I’d be selling the whole thing a bit short if I didn’t try it.” *Apple*, says Cook, is like a “radio-dial experience,” with a track listing that he describes as “in your face, swinging between acoustic and electronic.” Here, lo-fi guitars, dreamy melodies, and Cook’s vocals get twisted and distorted through Auto-Tune, before *Apple* U-turns towards thudding, thrilling instrumentals (see: “Xxoplex,” “Airhead,” or “Stargon”). And while those bedroom guitars might come as a surprise to early PC fans, *Apple*’s boundless spirit certainly won’t. This is an album questioning, as the scene Cook helped establish always has, what can be created in the outskirts and the spaces in between. “There’s a sense of breaking down some of those barriers and being on the cusp of two different things or genres,” he says. “All of the tracks have an element of that freedom to move between things that would be considered a binary. It’s disregarding that completely and replacing it with something as much fluid.” Here, Cook walks us through *Apple*, one track at a time. **Oh Yeah** “The lightness in this song sounds like the beginning of something. Even when I’m working with other artists, I try and always avoid things that are, like, a grand opening. I was listening to a lot of Shania Twain, and it’s hard to think of any influence for this song that’s clearer. Especially those really enormous Shania albums, like *Up!* or *Come On Over*, which were produced by her husband at the time, Robert Lange. He’s famous for making these sort of slick rock recordings. The bit when this song comes together at the end with that vocal guitar solo is something I’ve played around with on other PC tracks. But I think it was really nice to do something that starts in a relatively straightforward way, but which is then clearly being tricky with the different instruments.” **Xxoplex** “I like that the title of this song encourages an alien-sounding word, because we were sort of imagining it as a kind of alien presence. It’s playing a bit with EDM and the crazy titles that that kind of stuff can have. But it’s also quite literal, because I was actually staying at Charli’s house \[when I did it\], and I think that’s why I just typed the extra X. It’s really playful—like anything could happen at any point. I don’t know if it was subconscious or something that I was really thinking about, but the main rhythm is sort of this England football chant. For me, it’s making some tie between anthemic hooligan energy, mixed with something that’s really overt like EDM in America.” **Beautiful Superstar** “I’m making what I’m somewhat jokingly calling ‘extreme vocals.’ But it’s doing these slightly prosthetic things to my voice that wouldn’t really be possible, and then doing it with someone—Alaska Reid, who’s on here in a backing vocal sense—who can sing in a much purer way. ‘Beautiful Superstar’ is sort of the most traditional song in some ways, including structurally. As I was fleshing out the lyrics, I couldn\'t resist referencing ‘Beautiful,’ the first single I did, and ‘Superstar,’ the second. And it’s just funny for me that the two track names—both track names I like individually anyway—combine in a way that actually has some logic. Whenever I do a slightly more structured song, I’ll play with these weirdly long outros that are kind of dreamlike.” **Animals** “This is a cover of ‘Animals’ by Oneohtrix Point Never. Originally I intended to have way more covers on this album, and obviously some of those found themselves on *7G*. I’m quite an intense listener of things and often try to figure out other people’s songs, whether it’s chord progressions or productions or sounds. With this one, I was working at Oneohtrix Point Never’s studio for a little bit when he was away. I’m known for being someone who is supposedly an avatar, and for making things electronic or whatever, but I could see a really cool way to humanize that track. I’m sort of doing the reverse process to it—really extrapolating it and trying to stay really true to it, but also singing it in my own range. The Vocaloid could just do those infinitely long notes no problem. I’m really trying to do them properly and I’m doing every little blip and breath in an analog way. I was trying to reference a lot of the more psychedelic ’60s, ’70s pop music when people were first trying to put electronic sounds over a guitar.” **Airhead** “The genesis of this song is quite confusing. I made parts of it for a DJ show at this really massive virtual festival by Porter Robinson that I supported. And I just wanted an intro which would sound completely brutal on massive speakers. I was also playing with this pluck synth sound that kind of started sounding like guitar to me, even though it’s very particular and precise. So I was already interested in a distorted synth and a synth that sounded like a plucked guitar. Then I started using material from an unreleased project—a song my friend Finn Keane wrote. And then my friend Hayden Dunham \[aka singer QT\] and I were working on a project and we redid some of the lyrics so it would work on this version. It’s using as many songs in one, including a sample of a song that doesn’t exist yet. It doesn’t fully make sense, apart from the fact that every bit of music gradually feels more euphoric.” **Haunted** “Definitely one of my favorites in terms of how nicely it came together. I was recording it in a shed in Montana. After playing around with guitar tricks and things like that, I was just in this small room recording this one very simple progression and the vocals, which are just demo vocals—the wordless raw lyrics that I did to figure out a melody over that. And then I got Alaska to sing these individual cut-up versions of the exact thing I was playing on guitar. It’s clearly dipping quite heavily into acoustic kind of sounds, but then it’s also elevating them. It starts to feel definitely like some kind of computer arrangement—my voice is raw but it’s all just super heavy Auto-Tune. Compositionally, it sort of goes around and gets slightly more intense the second time. In retrospect, I was definitely influenced by Dirty Projectors, who I used to listen to a lot.” **The Darkness** “An outlier, in a nice way, to the rest of the album. And it was funny putting a track name like ‘The Darkness’ after ‘Haunted.’ This is probably one that was most in that headspace \[of writing pop music for other people\] in the way that, rhythmically, it sounds a bit more synthy and the vocal lines are a little bit closer to the pop music stuff that I would come up with. But I also didn’t want to take it to that full, pop music, concise, hook conclusion. There was a Hannah Diamond-ish quality to some of the lyrics here, and it was this funny thing where I was working with her on her album part of the time, so I was also thinking of my own interpretation of ‘Reflections.’ These are perhaps the most real lyrics to me—thinking about old relationships and how I can be trying to look at things too positively. Hannah’s kind of like an enabler sometimes in the way of trying to see the positive light in things in a kind of dark place. So I think it’s really about that.” **Jumper** “This was a collaboration with my friend Nico, who produces under the name Nömak and also Ö, who is involved in a bunch of the Charli productions. He’s an amazing sound manipulator. He was like, ‘Let’s put the entire guitar through Auto-Tune and listen to it screw up.’ And then we were recording each other’s vocals—I’m doing the verses and he’s doing the choruses, which is why the accent changes. I really wanted it to all feel like topsy-turvy—like a misstep, this falling around. There’s a double meaning of ‘jumper.’ In British English, it’s a sweatshirt, but can also be literally jumping around and spinning away. All the words and lyrics were written really fast and have this slightly surreal sense of confusion and excitement. This song is very nostalgic in a way, but it’s also very literally in the blender. I was born in 1990, and I can remember bits of the initial base of the internet, where everyone was creative. And now the idea is that you’re supposed to upload things from your day-to-day real life. And your name should be your legal name, and all these things. It seemed to be a good moment to just talk about how janky all of our own personal representation is.” **Stargon** “As an instrumental track, I was already really enjoying how ‘Xxoplex’ and ‘Airhead’ had worked amongst everything. But there was one stone that was still unturned—the Supersaw, saw wave, synthy tuning. I realized that if you detuned the Supersaw to the maximum, you actually get these really beautiful chords. I wanted to write an entire track around that idea. It’s about these harsh sounds that can actually be opened up in something really gentle and then tighten up really extreme and then opened up again. I constantly try not to make PC stuff political, but I think one of the reasons it’s maybe also struck a bit of a political chord in general is that sense of breaking down some of those barriers and being on the cusp of two different things or genres, or of the underground and mainstream.” **Lifeline** “This was the official start of the campaign. It felt like the right time to plant the seed of me doing something as an artist’s project, without giving away that I’d be doing an album. ‘Lifeline’ is a really old demo, and I just sung that lyric over that funny progression. I really overworked it, actually, with so many versions and attempts at it. People have told me that it’s like a power ballad, and I do really enjoy that style of music and weird tempos and the sort of drums and melody combinations you can get away with. ‘Lifeline’ is almost about trying to make a song, trying to finish a song and having a weird connection to it. It feels like a nice moment where you could potentially loop back to track one.”

Who could’ve seen them coming—a K-pop girl group reaching total global ubiquity and instantaneous virality without a full-length album to their name? And yet BLACKPINK has been announcing their plans for world domination since their first single, 2016’s “Boombayah,” when rapper Jennie Kim opened the song with the quartet’s now-illustrious slogan, “BLACKPINK in your area!” It was not a request or a demand—it was a declaration of arrival. Jennie, Lisa (Lalisa Manoban), Rosé (Chae-young Park), and Jisoo (Ji-soo Kim) have been meticulously preparing for this moment since meeting as trainees in 2011: the release of their long-awaited debut LP, appropriately titled *THE ALBUM*. (If most new artists go the eponymous route for their definitive work, BLACKPINK has taken it a step further, claiming the format as a whole.) From their A-list collaborations (2018’s “Kiss and Make Up” with Dua Lipa, 2020’s “Sour Candy” with Lady Gaga) to their world-record-breaking hits “DDU-DU DDU-DU” and “Kill This Love,” BLACKPINK has worked hard with their longtime producer, YG Entertainment’s Teddy Park, to establish their sonic signatures: big, brassy production; sprightly raps; stacked multilingual harmonies; and genre-ambivalent transitions. On *THE ALBUM*, they’ve perfected the equation, offering saccharine girl-crush confections (“Ice Cream” with Selena Gomez, cowritten by Ariana Grande and Victoria Monét—their “pink” side) and fierce, no-nonsense empowerment messaging (“Pretty Savage”—their “black”) in equal measure. Across eight tracks, *THE ALBUM* is expansive. “Bet You Wanna,” cowritten by OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and BTS songwriter Melanie Joy Fontana, is BLACKPINK’s first collaboration with a rapper, the preeminent Cardi B. “Lovesick Girls” echoes big, loud, and feminist Icona Pop-esque dance music, and “Love to Hate Me” is Y2K-era R&B pop worship. Even *THE ALBUM*’s closer “You Never Know” traverses unexpected territory: an anti-judgment anthem, a ballad for their beloved Blinks. *How you like that?*

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

Kamixlo has experienced a lot of loss in the last two-and-a-half years. His long-awaited debut LP, Cicatriz, is named after the Spanish word for “scar”, taking its intense and energetic tone from the tough times in the Brixton-based producer’s life. An extremely personal album that follows 11 songs with titles like “Sick”, “Poison” and “Destruction”, it pitches soft and hard sonics against each other to create an urgent and exciting tension as the track listing hurtles through its own emotional rollercoaster. It runs from the lurching drone and monstrously distorted vocal samples of opener “The Coldest Hello (Live From The Russian Spiral)” to the bright and melodic kosmiche-reggaeton closer of “Azucar” (‘sugar’), produced with Swedish cloud rap producer Woesum. Only just past his mid-20s, Kamixlo has been making a name for himself with his dembow and bass-influenced dance deconstructions, releasing three EPs since 2015, as well as running the recently defunct Bala Club party and label, named after Japanese pro wrestling group Bullet Club. The night was an inclusive operation that established its own unique style of cross-genre post club music for the margins, while allowing Kamixlo the space to develop his sound—one that was imbued with its own pop immediacy, as well as smatterings of emo, electro and hardcore. British-Chilean Kamixlo’s Cicatriz is rife with surprising references. These include the thumping industrial of “The Burning Hammer Bop”—taking its title from one of the most dangerous professional wrestling moves ever invented—and the growling sub bass of “DKD Lethal”—named after DJ Lethal of famous nu metal band Limp Bizkit. Meanwhile, long-time collaborator, producer and Endless party founder Felix Lee appears on the scrambled rhythm and cut-up sampling of “Demonic Y”. As the saying goes, there’s no pleasure without pain, no resurrection without destruction, and Cicatriz is all these things at once.

“Everything was stripped away from me,” Unknown T tells Apple Music. “I’ve been waiting to set the record straight for a while now about everything and I’ve had to wait. I’ve had to hear slander and lies on my name and my character.” To accurately measure the loss described by the London MC (real name Daniel Lena), you’d have to first trip back to 2018, where he landed one of the surprise hits of the year with ‘Homerton B’ and helped usher in drill’s status as the sound of the UK streets. Pairing wildly imaginative bars with a gruff, deep-voiced delivery, the east Londoner unearthed a style that suggested he held all the keys to a glittering future. However, eight months after his arrival, he was arrested and charged with murder and violent disorder. Consistently maintaining his innocence while remanded in custody, Lena was cleared of all charges in February 2020. *Rise Above Hate* is a deep-coloured and courageous exploration of his journey piecing together the threads of what happened to him. “The music is the best way I know how to get things off my chest whenever I’m going through it,” he says. “If it wasn’t for that I’m not sure where I’d be or how I would have coped. I know who I am so that was the message to myself the whole time. To just keep my head above all the bullshit and eventually rise above and beyond it all.” Here, Unknown T guides you through his debut release, track by track. **Steppy**
“I wanted to start the tape off with ‘Steppy’ because it takes me right back to the start of this. I didn’t know for sure it would be used as the intro but I see it as the start of me dealing with this situation through music, so it made sense. It was in the cell on the night I was arrested. That night, no lie, that’s when I started writing ‘Steppy’. All of the anger, the hurt and the confusion that was inside of me at the time, I was putting it all into the bars. When I was released on bail conditions, I called my manager and said, ‘Yo, I need to get all of this energy out of me now!’ I got to the studio and laid this.” **Deh Deh**
“This song’s a reflection of my area. Homerton is one of those areas where, even though it’s small, there’s also that sense of community. Also, in another sense, it’s still different and fragmented wherever you go. I drew up the concept of the video, so if you pay attention, you can see I tried to portray some of that there. The easiest way to explain ‘Deh Deh’? It’s a yard ting. It’s like a point of direction.” **Addicts (feat. M Huncho)**
“I recorded this in Paris with M Huncho and we recorded non-stop out there. All day, all night. Just baking off and working and I really got to know the real Huncho, away from the music. It was easy from then. I enjoy making music, now it just comes naturally to us. I wanted to do something a little different because I feel like the project couldn’t have just been drill, drill, drill the whole way, and this song is part of what I really love to do with my raps. I love to add that imagery and it was all tied into the concepts here.” **Tug Boy** 
“I wrote this just before I went to prison and I remember how the flow came to me. It’s always been within me, this style, even when I went away, and I was working on it and adapting it. I had the session with the producer, 169. I was going through his beats and I caught a vibe to this one and immediately started building the song. The session’s memorable to me because Dave ended up coming by and we all got to sit down and have some grown conversation that day.” **Prison**
“A day before I had to go to court, I went to the studio and made this. I said to myself: ‘Look, you might have to go away for a bit so let’s get in and get these emotions out.’ It was almost like they wanted to hold me back because they could see my potential and they could see how close I was and that’s the picture I tried to paint. I love to put little details in my lyrics and really get to that deep imagery. When I listen to this, obviously, it brings back memories of my time there and it’s not a nice place, prison. It’s a cold place and that’s why it hurts to see what happens when you’re still trapped in the system and you can still be recalled for anything. It hurts when I see what’s happening to Digga D and so many others. I’ll use my voice and my story to really shed light on all of that.” **Fresh Home**
“I was aware of the stories about me reaching the papers the whole time I was inside and my legal team would update me on the internet and press talk. I just kept my faith up and waited for my day I was free. This tune is the celebration of that. I’ve had situations in my life prior that have made me realise the presence of God but my trial was like the confirmation. There is a God out there, because miracles don’t happen twice. Every single person, even if you don’t know their life, I can tell you they’ve experienced God in some way that they can’t properly explain or quantify.” **Main Squeeze (feat. Young T & Bugsey)** 
“I really rate Young T & Bugsey for how they worked with me on this track. We were going back and forth on it and they were just real with me. I was trying to do the vocal thing at first but they made me understand it’s not about trying a Young T & Bugsey ting on an Unknown T track. So I changed up my verse. It was simple advice but it worked for the track. Those guys are very underrated, and I feel like if they were from south London, they’d get twice as much recognition as they do. So I’m happy to see their success and really get their shine on Billboard this year.” **Jail Call**
“Maybe once or twice a day when you’re inside, you’ve got a 10-minute call—depending on the prison—and, obviously, it has to be a collect call. So this is a recording of a convo with my girl. She really held me down the whole time and I’m just preparing her here for the worst-case scenario.” **SS Interlude** 
“This carries it on from the skit and it’s like a goodbye to my girl. When I was writing this in prison, obviously, at that time coming home wasn’t 100 per cent. It’s tough when you know you’re in a strong, stable relationship but it’s the system that’s gonna end up breaking you apart. We already know what happens to innocent people in this system. So this was to say if worst comes to worst: go and live your life. Be happy even if I’m not around. Subliminally, I’d say it was also a message for my own mental health too. I didn’t even really want fans or anyone writing to me because I knew how hard it would get for me.” **LV (feat. Young Adz)**
“When we made this Adz was already at the studio with the producer, Remedee, and he didn’t know I was about to pull up, so Rem really helped to make that connection. He already had the tune set too, so big him up for helping to pattern that and play the middle man. I definitely wanted to have something on here about the fly fashion and style and it’s obviously something I’m into. I’ve shot a few campaigns with brands like Trapstar and Places + Faces. It’s definitely something I would want to get into more but I’m fully on music right now.” **Mortal Kombat**
“This is a tune that people have been wanting for a while. From back in the day, before I was established and I was just grinding. When I made this, that night I was flexing with Not3s and Nana Rogues in the studio. They told me to just anticipate the buzz, put a bit out and give it to the fans. I dropped the snippet and everything went mad. From then I knew this is something the fans want so I just needed to find the right time to give it to them. Now it’s time. What I’ve learnt so far in this game, is that the right time to drop music really truly is when the Olympic torch is with you. You get me? How it goes around and around but there’s only one. Naturally, in the scene, the heat shifts. So when the eyes are on you, you’ve got to keep releasing and coming hard and that’s how you’ve got to keep it. When I was fresh home that’s what I was on. I just kept on dropping. ‘Squeeze & Buss’, ‘Dumpa’, a remix here, a tune here, GRM Daily Duppy... you know? I’m back and I’m in everyone’s faces. That’s the way you got to keep it with your artistry. If you slip, there’s always a few who want to take your spot.” **Leave dat Trap (feat. AJ Tracey)**
“When this tune dropped last year, it was building up nicely after my first single and the numbers were looking similar until I was arrested. People forget that. As an artist, that was painful to have that taken away from me. But big up AJ Tracey, man! AJ was showing me love from early. He was rating my music and supporting me and it meant a lot because he’s established. From the jump, he showed organic love and continued to when I went jail.” **Squeeze & Buss**
“I made this when I came out. If you look at the tracklist from ‘Fresh Home’ onwards, it’s my life from the time I was released. It’s expressed through the music and the styles that I’m using. I’m keeping it as trill as it is. I gave the audience what they want. The energy and the pain behind this song actually reflects that. The way I’ve been stigmatised, this is me saying, ‘Fuck it’, now. This is how they labelled me, so you know what? *This* is what I’ll give to you. It was trending on Twitter two nights in a row when it played on No Signal Radio. I’ve trended more times than I have fingers now! Big up the fans.” **One Time**
“DJ Swish produced this one. He’s from America but we linked up out in France at an artist camp. It was a camp for artists from different countries to connect and write together. I had a session with Swish and also M Huncho and Headie One. Overall the camp was really useful for me and it helped my writing. That was the first time being around guys like Headie, and Huncho. I’m in the younger age group but I saw it as an opportunity for me to work hard and see how the older guys do it. When I’m in those situations, the best way for me is just being myself. I don’t have an ego when I’m in the studio. When man’s in the studio, I’m in my own bubble, and if it’s lit, then it’s lit.” **AVEN9ERS (feat. KO & V9)**
“Recently I’ve been locking in a lot more with the crew and we’ve been recording. We know it’s what the fans really want and it’s what they’ve been waiting on but we don’t wanna give out too much honestly. They’re waiting on that tape from us as a trio, but we’re not stressing—we’re taking our time. Between us the chemistry has always been great, and it’s organic. If I think up an idea, we’ll just go with that, but then the next day, it could come from V, or it could be K. It\'s like a relay baton.” **Ambition**
“I made this before I went to jail and I wanted this to be the final track to send a message out. Over the years, as my life has changed, so have my ambitions so I wanted to tell the younger generation around me to stay focused on their dreams and ambitions in life. It’s a little something different from me but I think it’s good to end on a positive and motivational note. I didn’t grow up wanting to be rapper, it was just what I was doing at that time. But when ‘Homerton B’ blew up it changed my life and it’s opened my eyes to bigger things and new experiences. Now I’m reaching for the skies because there’s no limits to this. I’ve been to the edge and back.”