DIY's Albums of 2020

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

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.

HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

“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.”

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

“It is a reflection of the highs and lows of my own journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation, and reflection across the past two years,” Zach Choy, drummer, vocalist, and de facto spokesperson for Crack Cloud, tells Apple Music about the Canadian collective’s debut full-length. “I can hear where I was when it started, and I can hear where I was when we ended it.” Crack Cloud has been described as its members’ “recovery program” from their own personal battles, and Choy assesses *Pain Olympics*’ blend of post-punk, hip-hop, electronica, and industrial sounds as being a concept album of sorts, fundamentally about “finding your way through the world with a lot of baggage and trauma in tow. The medium is the message. Each individual song operates as an organ upon which the others rely.” Allow him, then, to act as your guide through the labyrinthine world of *Pain Olympics*. **Post Truth (Birth of a Nation)** “We wanted to create a world for the album, and to set the tone in a really grandiose, melodramatic way. This is that world’s ‘big bang’—it was a very visual concept. A frame of reference was the original Willy Wonka movie—going down that tunnel that Willy Wonka guides the children down, with its psychedelic nightmare sequence and range of emotions. The joy of working with a collective of people is that everyone specializes in and is geared towards different things. Here, a lot of the string arrangements were facilitated by one of our members who’s a connoisseur of that sort of thing—similarly, the industrial section. You hear these different elements and you hear the different people in our collective. This track is one of the best representations of the stitching-together that takes place within the collective and how things are pooled together based on one fundamental idea.” **Bastard Basket** “‘Bastard Basket’ felt like the natural antithesis to ‘Post Truth.’ It’s pensive and brooding where ‘Post Truth’ is big and bombastic. We wanted to strip away the magnificence and extravagance and sober the listener down. The general concept for reference for all of us while constructing the album was the idea of the rise and fall of a society, all of the discovery and contention and plateaus that you’ll read about in history. We wanted to represent those plateaus and draw parallels with personal life. I think anyone can relate to retaining an ambition and aspiration, and then waking up the next day and feeling the complete opposite. COVID even is a very tangible manifestation of that. One day you have your trajectory for 2020—and the next it’s out the window.” **Somethings Gotta Give** “This retains a despondency, but with a chorus that delivers more aggression and frustration. Musically, every song reveals the microscopic influence of what we were listening to along that two-year timeline. This was our attempt at an homage to the pop music we were listening to at the time, everything from The Tea Party to The Cure to blink-182. *Pain Olympics* as a whole concept took direct influence from Pink Floyd’s *The Wall*, The Beatles’ *Sgt. Pepper’s*, and Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly*. Those albums were lifesavers for me. They showed me how far you can take music and how visual it can actually be, and how emotionally engaging it can become when there’s a story that lasts not three minutes, but 45. As an artist, I want to tell stories that are informed by my personal experiences and hopefully resonate with people who have gone through similar things.” **The Next Fix** “This is a particularly personal song for me, and I think it came out onto the page in only 20 minutes. Daniel \[Robertson, multi-instrumentalist\] came with a riff and a rhythm, and the lyrics just poured out of me. I generally find lyrical inspiration to be very sporadic. This album was my first attempt at being more personal and more vulnerable as a songwriter; in the past I’ve written in a more abstract and broader manner. That was perhaps more to fit the niche of the genre we were operating within—a lot of punk music is steered by broader politics, whereas we approached this album without any sort of stylistic limitations. I’ve found it exciting to learn how to translate thoughts and emotions without hiding behind abstraction.” **Favour Your Fortune** “‘The Next Fix’ and ‘Favour Your Fortune’ are companion pieces—the two songs directly feed off one another, in terms of their conflicting energy, and I very much thrive off exploring those dichotomies. They’re two sides of the same coin, and I find it hard to manifest one side but not the other. I think there was a bit of a subliminal link in the songs’ creation, a certain residual headspace that carried into ‘The Next Fix’ from writing ‘Favour Your Fortune’ first. They were flipped in their positioning on the record to meet the album’s flow of high-low-high-low. Presenting the alternation in that way is a projection of my own personality and navigation of the world. I think I’m a pretty motivated person, but I supress a lot of anxieties and doubts. There’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows—and it’s not consistent, either.” **Ouster Stew** “I wanted this song to be really funny—and I thought it would be really funny to have a drum solo in the middle. That one’s an anthem. Musically it’s a ‘high’ moment, but it’s balanced by lyrics that are pretty sardonic, pretty cynical. If there’s any song on the album that has an equilibrium, it’s ‘Ouster Stew.’ It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—it’s manufactured as the ‘radio song’ but deals with conflict, morality, the world’s dog-eat-dog nature. I think it’s direct projection of the contention within our culture when it comes to all politics, and I thought it’d be opportunistic to cloak that within a pop song.” **Tunnel Vision** “For all intents and purposes, ‘Tunnel Vision’ is a classic climax: It has a meandering jam in the middle, and its lyricism and use of dual vocalists with back-and-forth lines is there to fully realize the contention and duality that is such a major theme on the album. It was the most straightforward track, and one of the earliest we wrote for the album. I felt like I didn’t want to end the album with a rock song, though, which is ultimately why it wasn’t positioned to close the album.” **Angel Dust (Eternal Peace)** “We end with a pseudo resolution to an otherwise chaotic story, to bring the cyclical nature of *Pain Olympics* across. This isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning. *The Wall* and *To Pimp a Butterfly* were heavily influential on the narrative device of closing an album and yet trying to leave it open-ended. We want to leave the listener in a state of mind where they are compelled to consider what they have just heard. Art can be such a profound experience when you abandon any societal or cultural hindrances that would otherwise prevent you from being able to experience a record or a painting in a pure, instinctual way. It’s about open-mindedness, and letting the music drive you on a spiritual level, as opposed to letting your own analysis drive your interpretation.”

Written and recorded between July 2017 and December 2019 Produced by Crack Cloud Engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart Mastering Christian Wright Logo by Wei Huang Cover by Marc Gabbana

“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.’”

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

Willie J Healey is back with his second album, the stunningly brilliant ‘Twin Heavy’. Recorded in a couple of wildly productive weeks at Echo Zoo Studios in Eastbourne with producer Loren Humphries (Florence And The Machine, Last Shadow Puppets, Arctic Monkeys, Tame Impala), the 12 tracks were performed live to tape, an organic, old school approach which complements Willie’s creative ethos. Tracklist: 1. Fashun 2. True Stereo 3. Big Nothing 4. Songs For Joanna 5. Twin Heavy 6. Sweeter Than Most 7. Condo 8. For You 9. Heavy Traffic 10. Why You Gotta Do It 11. Thousand Reasons 12. Caroline Needs