“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.”
By the time Declan McKenna finished touring his first album *What Do You Think About the Car?*, there was nothing left in the tank. “We did this really long tour in America,” the North London singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “And it pretty much put me and my whole band in therapy. We’d been working so hard for so long.” McKenna’s 2017 debut revealed a songwriter who, on tracks such as “Brazil” and “Paracetamol,” could fuse complex, topical issues with easygoing indie-pop. But as he began to write the follow-up, he found himself reflecting on matters closer to home. “I feel like I was talking about the stuff I’d learned about myself,” he says. “The stuff that I struggle with, the stuff that I do that can negatively impact me, the patterns of behavior you get into where you let yourself down.” The resultant record, *Zeros*, is a reflection of the scope and imagination of its creator. It is bombastic (the careening classic rock of opener “You Better Believe!!!” and Bowie-style balladeering of “Be an Astronaut”) while feeling confessional; expansive (the ’70s-style stomp of “Twice Your Size”) but still tethered to the ground. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town), these songs take in themes of space, the future, the environment, and the dread of modern life and document how McKenna found his way out of the abyss. “The story of the record is this young character becoming lost in the world, seeing people falling into dark corners,” he says. “In a way, it’s a dramatized version of what I was going through at the time. I did start beginning to feel lost, but also this sense of discovery helped me to understand it all.” All aboard Starship McKenna for a journey through *Zeros*, his cosmic odyssey. **You Better Believe!!!** “I wrote this and I was like, ‘I want it to be the start of the album.’ It felt like it was describing a world. I had a vague idea of a few different concepts and ideas I was thinking about. I was reading *Homo Deus*, the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and there was a lot of ideas of the future and stuff that I\'d been thinking about. I just thought it kind of thrust you into this world. It’s this damaging world; it\'s foreboding in a sense, where it\'s like you\'re going to get yourself killed. It is the start of someone being pushed away, and I think that is the story of the album. I wrote it with my friend Jake Passmore. He came up with the line ‘Fastest gun in the solar system,’ which is one of my favorite lines on the record.” **Be an Astronaut** “This was when I was really deep into making things as big and extended as they could be. I was obsessed with *The Age of Adz* by Sufjan Stevens, where it\'s just these huge songs. I also knew this would be the second song on the album. After that thrust in, it\'s this throwback and it\'s recalling something, recalling thoughts of a childhood, thoughts of growing up and experiencing hardships and experiencing grief. It became quite central to giving the album its spaciness, or at least an aspiration to go to space. I think the album maybe exists in a world not far from our own, but definitely dreams of something bigger. And I think that the whole thing in ‘Be an Astronaut’ is that dreams can be damaging and can often be unattainable, and I think that\'s the thing.” **The Key to Life on Earth** “I came up with this when I was on the train. I was on the way back from Hertfordshire, where I\'m from and where my family is, and getting the train into Finsbury Park, London, where I lived at the time. When I was growing up, the juxtapositions between those places weren’t apparent, it was just life and normal, but now the conflict of ideas between working-class people or people living in suburban areas is amplified. Everyone thinks they know what is right, but really they just don\'t understand each other. I wrote two of the key melodies on a xylophone. I think that’s the first time that a xylophone has been used as a writing tool. It\'s weird playing an instrument that you\'re so not comfortable or used to playing—the first thing you play is often the best thing you\'ll even play on that instrument.” **Beautiful Faces** “I had to build this song around the chorus. I was living in West London—I lived there for two months while I was writing the album. I was writing with \[UK producer\] Max Marlow, and I got the melodies and the chorus together and then the verses took so, so long. I was writing about spending an awful lot of time on my phone and thinking about the futuristic stuff I\'d been reading about—where social media, technology is going and the future of inequality, how technology is going to impact that. It\'s kind of this weird Big Brother thing, the feeling of being watched. I didn\'t really finish writing the verses until I was in the studio, and I had a verse that was actually loads better than the one that\'s in the actual song, but it didn\'t serve the chorus. I\'ll probably use that for a different song.” **Daniel, You’re Still a Child** “I think of it in a similar vein to ‘The Key to Life on Earth.’ I think it\'s fairly simple in that it tells the story of the album—someone being pushed away and someone becoming lost or being thought to be something they\'re not. It ties into the stuff that I felt like I was observing all around the world. People being misunderstood, people becoming flat-earthers, or anti-vaxxers, or anti-maskers. Just people finding a dark corner for themselves, but oftentimes being pushed into it. I guess this is understanding what\'s behind the human being and what is behind their actions.” **Emily** “‘Emily’ is like a letter or a conversation. It was one of those strange moments where I literally sat down and knew what I wanted to do. I listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac and wanted to do a Lindsey Buckingham-style guitar part, something really muted and acoustic and but very simple. I think the character of Emily represents the toxicity on a personal level—where it\'s not the big world anymore, it\'s actually quite direct.” **Twice Your Size** “This is an environmentalist jam. I talk directly about this quite grim end-of-days thing, where it\'s this stuff melting and turning to dust, and all of that imagery was based around setting the tone for the end of the world. At one point, I thought I was writing an album for each way the world could end, like each song would be a way the world could end. And the last few songs are that, so ‘Twice Your Size’ seems to be some kind of environmental collapse, or like the sun has gotten too big and everyone\'s trying to get off Earth. It also represents the way that discourse happens now. Like, it only means half as much when you say it twice, and that relates to so many things right now, where whoever\'s talking the loudest gets heard, but it doesn\'t mean as much if you keep repeating yourself.” **Rapture** “This was one I sat down and wrote very quickly. It leads in from that end-of-days thing, and it\'s a bit more direct than ‘Twice Your Size.’ It\'s a similar vein, but a bit more scary, but also more danceable. It’s talking about fear of the future, because it\'s this torment and being told that stuff isn\'t real by some and that\'s it\'s an ever-present threat by others, and it\'s like the rapture\'s in your head. It\'s both this dread for the future but also this personal torment and personal struggle. It all ties in, all the stresses of going through all of this stuff and worrying so much about it.” **Sagittarius A\*** “I\'d just read that Sagittarius A\* was the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, so it\'s like this big massive thing that\'s just pulling everything in and downward. And unless some other crazy shit in the universe happens, it\'s inevitable that one day we\'re going to be sucked into it. I guess the simplest way of describing it is like, ‘I\'m Sagittarius, I\'m a star, I am this thing that is going to pull you all down with me.’ I was seeing a lot of people in very powerful positions ignore the concerns of people who were in much less powerful positions, worried about the environment and worried about injustices and worried about things, and it\'s just almost like, ‘I am bigger than the world, even though we are limited to our resources and we know we\'re limited to our world. I don\'t care, and I\'m going to pull you down with me.’” **Eventually, Darling** “I guess, in a way, this is the song that sparked the album. I wrote it not long after I released the first album. Even though I didn\'t really have a concept at that point, there were certain things that were once normal becoming lost, and certain things changing so much. The song itself is this big transition, and it made sense once I\'d recorded the album to fit on the end, because the story ends up at loss. That was the simplest thing I was talking about, that change can be brutal, and it fits into the narrative of the album. It\'s just a very simple idea that life is always changing and the modern world is changing at a faster rate than we can keep up with. All of that change was really, really affecting me. My life was changing, and in some ways it was better, some ways it was worse. It\'s complicated, I guess. That\'s why you write songs about things, because they are complicated and you\'re trying to kind of make sense of them.”
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.”
Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"
“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”
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.
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.”
You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of \[2018 album *A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. Fucking hell. What are we going to do?’” The way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest. “Go back to when we were wearing Spider-Man T-shirts,” says Healy, “and the reason I wanted Ross \[MacDonald\] to play bass was not because we could eventually be in some culturally informative, cool thing but because that noise sounded cool with this noise.” On an album that begins with an address by Greta Thunberg and winds down with a song written by Healy’s dad, Tim, the noises that sound cool together include folk, UK garage, Max Martin-inspired pop, and hazy, discolored indie. Over that questing backdrop, Healy digs further into his inner self. “It has a lot of heart, this record,” he says. “A lot of the ideas have evolved. There was stuff like \[2015 single\] ‘Love Me,’ earlier work, which was about ego; those ideas are still there, but it’s now more about self-love in the truest sense—that people only change when it’s too hard not to. You’ve got to look out for yourself, accept that you’re not a Superman. There’s a lot of self-reflection. It’s the most me record. It’s the truest.” Here, he talks us through that truth track by track. **The 1975** “We were talking about how we were going to do *that* statement—the same statement that we always make musically—and we wanted it to be us at our most modern. That first track always has to be us checking in. That got us into the conversation of what is the most modern statement, or who has the most modern statement, and Greta was the decision. I think it sounds like how a lot of us feel. There’s a lot of hope in it, but it’s quite a somber piece of music. It’s very 1975 in the way that it’s quite beautiful superficially but also quite sad, quite pretty but also quite ominous. Greta has a lot of reach, but I really wanted to see her exist formally in pop culture, not just as an anecdote of somebody.” **People** “This song is right back to where we came from—almost what we were like in our first incarnation of the band. Very inspired by bands like Refused and Converge and stuff like that. It was around the time of the Alabama abortion bill and we’d just played a show in Alabama. It was the feeling of oppressive, conservative religion. It happened up on the tour bus. It was kind of like our ‘Youth Against Fascism’—\[UK journalist\] Dorian Lynskey said that. I was definitely thinking about that Sonic Youth song. I think that it’s about fear and apathy and referencing how annoying responsibility can feel. I wanted there to be like a slapstick madness to its urgency.” **The End (Music for Cars)** “The actual reason that it\'s called ‘(Music for Cars)’ is because...I wasn\'t going to tell anybody, but there was a song called ‘Hnscc,’ which was an ambient piece of music about death, the death of one of my family members, that was on the \[2013\] EP *Music for Cars*. And ‘The End’ is a reinvention of that, basically an orchestral version. And yeah, ‘Music for Cars’ has kind of become the umbrella title for this whole era.” **Frail State of Mind** “\[During our early teens\], we were super into hardcore and making noise and, like most people in the UK, super into dance music. I think Burial is quite an obvious one that you can hear on this, and even people like MJ Cole. That darker side of garage is something that I’ve always really loved. It’s very dreamy and sounds like driving down the M25 at night with the passing of lights and the smoking of stuff. Mike Skinner spoke about how garage clubs and the actual garage scene was always a bit intimidating to him as a late teen, so he would experience these things at his mates’ houses or in cars with his mates smoking weed. That’s what my experience was—with so much time spent in my car listening to music and then going home and making music with George \[Daniel, drummer and co-producer\] and then going out in my car and listening to it for context. That was one of the happiest times of my life.” **Streaming** “Sonically, it’s a tribute to our formative years and what we were into–Cult of Luna and Godspeed \[You! Black Emperor\] and Sigur Rós, all of these big ambient artists. And UK garage music. This record is like a bit of that with a bit of Midwest emo thrown in. What we love in ambient music, we call it Pinocchio-ing: It’s stuff that’s trying to sound like a real boy. Sigur Rós sounds like it’s striving to sound like a river or a landscape. All of the kind of visuals that you get with that kind of music. It really takes you back to one’s relationship with nature and texture and temperature. To be honest with you, we took quite a lot of that off. A lot of that made way for more actual songs.” **The Birthday Party** “It was the first thing that I wrote for this album that I knew was great. And it was the first thing that we got excited about. Inherently, excitement equals projection, \[so it was originally going to be the first single\]. And then we went off on tour and I wrote ‘People.’ And we were like, ‘Right, well. If we don’t start with this, where are we going to put it?’” **Yeah I Know** “I fucking love ‘Yeah I Know.’ I don\'t know what it reminds me of. It\'s kind of like Hyperdub. I remember super, super minimal ravehead music when I was growing up. It was just a synth and a drum kit. We’re also big Thom Yorke fans, outside of Radiohead, so I think there\'s probably a bit of that.” **Then Because She Goes** “It doesn\'t have a bridge or anything. It’s just this little moment. But this is how I feel about life. There’s so many fleeting moments of beauty on the record, which was really important because most of my favorite records always have them. Especially if we’re talking about shoegaze records. I think a lot of that comes from the slacker mid-’90s thing of Pavement or Liz Phair. There’s a lot of Life Without Buildings and stuff like that, especially in this song. And it’s like faded splendor, as I always call it. I love pop songs that sound like they’re drowning. Like My Bloody Valentine. Like a Polaroid that’s gasping for air. That really sunny but sun-flared feeling is quite across the record because—for the time and for the kind of person that I am, and my political views—it’s inherently quite a warm record.” **Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America** “This song happened quite early in the record. It reminded me of America so much in its ambience. It even goes back to \[*A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships*\]—I think I wrote it around that time. There’s quite a bit of folk music on the record. I’ve never really collaborated with anybody before, and it was so easy making music with \[guest vocalist\] Phoebe \[Bridgers\] that every time I had an idea or I wanted a slightly different texture to the vocals, I just got her to do it. Phoebe does all the backup vocals on ‘Roadkill’ and then ‘Playing on My Mind.’” **Roadkill** “‘Roadkill’ is about touring America, it’s about getting burnt out and searching for things. Anecdotal things that happen on the road—pissing myself on a Texan intersection, all those kind of things. I don\'t know what it sounds like—maybe like Pinegrove, or there’s a band called Limbeck that I used to love.” **Me & You Together Song** “We’ve gone full circle–this album is very like the early EPs: dreamy, hazy, and quite broken and deconstructed. A lot of our hardcore fans emotionally relate to our EPs and see them as our first albums, so it’s nice that we’ve ended up back there. Our favorite music is music that’s kind of inherently beautiful. It’s not pretty but kind of fractured or a bit jangly or overly distorted. I think the whole record is like that, and this is a stark example of that idea.” **I Think There\'s Something You Should Know** “It’s explicitly about impostor syndrome, depression, that kind of a sense of isolation. I think there’s a lot of that in this record. I think it’s also about the lack of desire to communicate about those things as well—like, if I’m talking to someone close to me who’s not aware of what’s going on. And I think the reason for that is normally because it’s exhausting to take it out of your head and put it on the table.” **Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied** “It’s quite a lo-fi hip-hop track. It came from George jamming on the piano, and I was putting a really low-resolution breakbeat over the top of it. Stuff like that is really fun for us sometimes. If it’s really simple and you’ve got a loop to work with, you can kind of just go into producer mode. And—like any producer normally is—we’re huge J Dilla fans and all that kind of stuff. Lyrically, it’s just more self-reflection. I think it’s about also doing your bit as an artist—if you give people nothing to work with, if you say nothing, then you leave room for people to project anything. I find that a lot of people who are out there doing their thing musically, who aren’t challenging any ideas, are only made interesting through association or projection. I don’t feel like a lot of people stand by stuff.” **Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)** “This is the anomaly on the record for me. I don\'t know where it came from. That was me fucking around when the record was feeling really, really relaxed. It reminds me of all the kind of proper pop music that I grew up listening to, like Backstreet Boys. And it’s like an ode to early Max Martin, late-\'90s pop. I don\'t think we ever do anything retro. We never do anything pastiche-y. But there’s definitely a reflection on a certain time of our musical upbringing. And that was very much part of that. And it’s got a great Temptations sample at the beginning, and kind of reminds me of Kanye or something.” **Shiny Collarbone** “Cutty Ranks did all those vocals for us. It started out as a sample, but then we spoke to him to clear it and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it again.’ That’s Manchester, that tune, to me, man. That just sounds like going to town—that kind of dreamy, deep, dreamy, slow deep house music. Again, it’s like a fractured shard. There’s so many shards on this record. A lot of that is George. George always talks about how I’m quite expressive, how I have the ability, or even the desire, to express myself outside of music. And that can be in lyrics or in conversation. Whereas, because he’s not like that, he takes a really big responsibility on himself to express himself through sonics. That’s a really good way of explaining why a lot of our records are almost OCD in their detail. It’s because that’s George’s language.” **If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)** “If your vibe is instilled in people’s brain from what your earlier work is like, then probably \[it is the most 1975 song on the record\]. When I hear bands that are sounding—or are trying to sound—like The 1975, it’s normally *that* 1975 that they’re trying to sound like—that reference to post-punk pop, ’80s pop. And that does come out quite naturally in \[the album\] sometimes, because that’s very much in our blood. This song is very on-the-nose for this album. But I like that, because it’s another completely different tone to the album and it kind of comes out of nowhere.” **Playing on My Mind** “This takes us back into that American, James Taylor-y, Jackson Browne-y kind of sound. Again, Phoebe is just great to have there. As soon as I write something, if I get her to put a harmony on it or to just do something over the top of it, it completely changes. And that was really easy and really natural. I think this is my funniest record; there’s some lines in there that still make me smile when I listen to it. \[With\] ‘Playing on My Mind,’ there’s one line I really like: ’I won’t get clothes online ’cause I get worried about the fit/That rule don’t apply concerning my relationships.’ I thought that summed up me really, really well.” **Having No Head** “This is George, man. All George. It’s the only thing that George titled as well; he\'s very much into his Eastern philosophy. You can ask him what it\'s about. I don\'t fucking know. That\'s just George meditating. That\'s what that sounds like to me. That is how George gets it out, this big, sprawling ambience, his artwork, like tapestries.” **What Should I Say** “Bane of my fucking life. Honestly, for two years. This was going to be on *A Brief Inquiry*. It was just this piece of house music that we never really quite got right. I think it\'s about social media. It was kind of like Manchester again; we always thought about New Order when we were making this, for some reason. I’ve seen New Order, I’ve been a couple of times during the making of this record. I mean, we even met Brian Eno recently. The reality that we get to fuck with these people now: Whether it gives you a confidence...it gives you a *something*.” **Bagsy Not in Net** “We finished \[the album\] and after we’d done all of our deliberations, the record came down to 21 tracks. Now, we were looking at it and thinking, ‘But hold on: It *was* 22 tracks.’ It’s not that we didn\'t want to lose the preorders, it’s just that it didn\'t really make sense to me. But we weren’t just going to make up an interlude or something for the sake of it and put it on what we want to be our best album. We’d been with Mike Skinner recently, and I was talking to him about this tune, which is basically using that string sample. The conversation just turned to that, and then George started doing it, making the beat, and it was so fucking exciting. So we set the mic up and recorded the whole thing in, like, a day. It’s about wanting to die with your partner. Don\'t want to lose someone that I love. If somebody wanted to know what the album sounded like in a clip, I would play them this. We knew exactly what \[the album\] was just at the very end, whereas during the creation of it, we just didn’t.” **Don’t Worry** “‘Don’t Worry’ is the first song that I ever heard, I think. In 1989, 1990, our dad was in a band, just a fuck-around band, and he had this song that he wrote for my mum about her postnatal depression. It’s a song that I remember because my dad would play it on the piano. Looking back, in the way that \[this album\] is about me and my family and my life, it just felt right \[to do a version of the song\]. It was written 30 years ago, and it’s me and my dad singing—that was just a really special moment. He’s a good songwriter, my dad. It’s a very 1975 interpretation of his work. And he loves that. He’s very, very proud to be on the record.” **Guys** “There\'s not many love songs about some of the most beautiful, powerful relationships in your life. Especially straight guys or whatever in rock music, \[they\] tend not to write about how much they love their mates, or how this would be impossible and frivolous and completely pointless if we weren\'t all doing it together. One of the things we say to each other all the time is ‘Imagine being a solo artist. Imagine being here, now, on your fourth day in Brisbane, waiting to go…’ It’s hard out here if you’re just constantly traveling. And we’ve been a band since we were 13, and they’re my best friends. And we\'ve never fallen out. It’s a really true song. They’re the thing that gives me purpose.”
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.”
The Big Moon’s debut album, *Love in the 4th Dimension*, was an ebullient account of falling in love that earned the London band a Mercury nomination in 2017. By the time singer/guitarist Juliette Jackson began to write songs for the follow-up, she was coming back down to an earth in turmoil. Heavy political, social, and environmental turbulence accompanied personal changes as she watched friends’ lives suddenly shift in new directions. “A lot of this album is about feeling lost and unstable, like there’s this constant feeling that anything could happen,” she tells Apple Music. “I’d love to tell you that we made an album to distract you from the scary things in the real world, but it’s more about facing up to them and finding your strength in turbulent times.” While retaining their gift for crisp melodies, the band enriched their indie rock by plugging in synths and samplers and picking up flutes and trumpets. “We didn’t go full Pet Shop Boys, though,” Jackson says. “I’d just been to a couple of raves and had decided sub-bass and straight-up 4/4 beats were the best and purest thing in the world. You can do a lot with a guitar, but you can\'t get the same sonic depth and width that you can from some electronic sounds. Especially bass. We wanted to be bold.” Here, she guides us through the album, track by track. **It’s Easy Then** “This last couple of years, I feel like I’ve been always looking for ways to find strength. We are living through strange times—we work too much, we think too much, we know too much, so we all worry too much. Our anxieties are stoked every day. Music has this incredible way of helping us see with a new perspective and ties up your feelings in a way that language by itself never could. I wanted to write a song that made me feel better—something that captured the frustrations but also the hope and joy all at the same time.” **Your Light** “I was thinking about how hard it is to tell if things are worse now or if they have always been this way and I just grew up and started paying attention. It feels like we are at this unprecedented tipping point, but then it occurred to me that every generation before us probably had a moment when they thought they were going to be the last generation on earth. This song is about freeing yourself from all of it, just for a moment. It’s a thanks to the one person or thing in your life that knows how to come in and open your curtains and light up the darkness—and restore your strength so that when you clatter back down into the real world, you have the strength to fight your battles, whatever they are.” **Dog Eat Dog** “I wrote this song a couple of days after the fire at Grenfell. I think that what happened really affected London for a long time and we are still grieving and trying to process it. It still stands there as a reminder. It became such a devastating symbol for the huge divisions between rich and poor in our country. There’s a line: ‘I guess tailored suits don’t grow on trees, but tragedies eventually turn into memes.’ I wrote that after reading an article that talked about how much Theresa May\'s election wardrobe cost—it was in the thousands—and later reading how much it would have cost to install fireproof cladding on Grenfell Tower. I think it was literally something like £2. This whole thing could so easily have been avoided, but nobody cared or listened enough to fix it before it happened. Theresa May came out in a nice suit and apologized, and the next day that\'s a shareable video that exists in the same format as cute cat memes and it all gets swept along in the tide of the internet.” **Why** “A lot of this album ended up being about growing up and moving on. This song came about after I met up with an old friend who’d moved to the coast and I suddenly realized how much they’d moved on. I saw my friends’ trainers on the sand on the beach before I saw her, and it just felt like such a poignant image of the loss I felt.” **Don’t Think** “I go to a lot of festivals, and I wanted to capture that magical feeling of running around a field at night with your mates. The flashing lights, the dancing round a pile of bags, the elbowed drinks, the way coincidences seem to happen more often. Something special happens when a lot of people go to one place just to be silly and have fun. It’s like playtime. We turn into kids again. I met my partner at a festival, and I’d always wanted to write a song about taking your chances with a stranger and not always letting your brain talk you out of doing something that seems foolish.” **Waves** “It’s so easy to not notice the signs of a relationship failing, or to ignore them when you do. Sometimes all you have to go on are those signs and little clues around you, and how can you ever tell when they add up to something bigger? It can be a change that’s imperceptible to the human eye, just like the tide coming in. This song was such a pleasure to record. We were all a bit hung over and it was just a whole day of making fuzz and drones on guitar and everyone sat with their hoods up in a trance.” **Holy Roller** “I’ve always been jealous of the devoutly religious: Imagine believing so truly in something so huge, so expansive, that explained everything you couldn’t and gave you a reason for everything that happened, good or bad. I was sick of hearing about the millennial limbo we are all stuck in—yeah, maybe we’ll never own a house, maybe AI will make our jobs redundant, maybe we are all struggling with our mental health...but hey, why don’t we start our own religion where we drink Coke instead of wine and worship our own idols. Like contour kits and payday loans and porn. I love singing this song—it’s simultaneously so dark and so funny, it just makes me laugh.” **Take a Piece** “I initially wrote this song for someone else, speculatively—for a pop star. I’d already written an album’s worth of songs, but a lot of them felt similar to our first album and I wanted to try something different. I’d just watched a documentary about this pop star and seen how insane their life was and their intense relationship with their fans. I was blown away by how much of themselves they’d had to give up to have the life they had. It was a bit of a turning point in the writing process: Sometimes you have to pretend to be someone else to change things up and say things in ways you didn’t know you could. This mega pop star’s life was literally nothing like mine, but I could really identify with the vulnerability of being a performer and feeling the eyes of an audience, which can feel grounding and unifying or—occasionally—scary and isolating. It also has a lot to do with how it felt to write this second album: trying to get out of your head, figuring out which voices to listen to and which to ignore, and ultimately wanting to pour yourself into the thing you’re creating and make something honest and meaningful that might connect with someone else and mean something to them as well.” **Barcelona** “There’s a moment in your twenties where suddenly everything changes, and this last couple of years I’ve really hit that moment—my friends are moving on, moving away, starting to have babies and buy houses and go on new adventures. In a band you can kind of get a bit stuck: You go away on tour for long periods, and each time you come home you find things have changed again. You start to feel left behind. I feel like an overgrown teenager. You’re simultaneously happy for them but also a bit sad that they left you behind—it’s bittersweet.” **A Hundred Ways to Land** “This is about finding confidence in the face of what feels like endless uncertainty—standing tall in your boots even if you\'re completely lost. Things feel unstable these days, and it’s easy to feel powerless. But we aren’t. We all have the ability to make a difference in our own space, our own neighborhood. I guess I wanted to remind myself of my own strength, of the powers we do have.” **ADHD** “This is a song for a close friend who was late-diagnosed with ADHD. We had a late-night conversation and she told me all about her past regrets and things she thought she’d done wrong in her life because of it. I was trying to tell her that she’s always been wonderful and she doesn’t need to regret, she doesn’t have to worry about what other people think. *Is It You, Is It Me, Is It ADHD?* is the name of a book she said she saw on the shelf in a therapist’s office, and for some reason it really stuck with me.”
“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.”
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.”
For Blossoms frontman Tom Ogden, songwriting opportunities are all around us. His attention is constantly catching on words or phrases in books, films, or conversation that would make intriguing song titles. On the UK band’s previous two albums, these collected snippets were often inspiration points for songs that expressed his own experiences and emotions. This time, though, he freed his imagination. “I pushed myself into corners which I wouldn\'t normally go to,” he tells Apple Music. “‘Your Girlfriend’ and ‘If You Think This Is Real Life’ are really narrative-based—trying to come up with a story from scratch and do a different take on a traditional kind of love song.” In terms of ideas, sounds, and angles, *Foolish Loving Spaces* is the band’s richest album to date, adding knotty art-funk, gospel euphoria, and brooding grooves to their luminous indie pop. “We love listening to a band like ABBA and that kind of pop music,” says Ogden. “We’ve never been really ones to go off into a 10-minute jam. There’s no room for missing a hook. You want your verse to be almost as catchy as your chorus.” In this track-by-track guide, he reveals how showering, staring out the window, and politely asking his mum to leave his house fed into *Foolish Loving Spaces*. **If You Think This Is Real Life** “I wanted to get ‘real life’ into a song. My mum had come round to my house and I was speaking to her but using this song name generator on my phone at the same time. It came up with ‘If You Think This Is Real Life’ and the melody came to my head immediately. I was like, ‘Mum, you\'re going to have to go home. I\'ve got a song coming to me right now.’ The song is just a basic conversation that people would have in a relationship but turned into a bit of a story. None of it was from personal experience, you just start painting pictures. It was my imagination running away with itself.” **Your Girlfriend** “Talking Heads have got a song called ‘Girlfriend Is Better,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, “girlfriend” looks strong in a song title.’ I already had the idea to write a song about someone else’s girlfriend, and I was in the shower and just got the \[line\] ‘Now “your girlfriend” is ringing in my ear again’—it’s a story about my head in the shower. I got out the shower, picked up my guitar, and figured out the chords. Then I started Googling ‘I’m in love with a friend\'s girlfriend’ and this blog came up with this guy saying, ‘We rent a place and she comes round to stay.’ That just set up the whole song then. Your imagination starts running. That one really came to life when the rest of the band got on the song as well.” **The Keeper** “You know how you hear songwriters talking about songs falling from the sky? I literally just sat at the piano, just played the riff, it just all came out. I remember playing it over and over again: ‘I\'ve got to chase this a bit more. There’s something here and it sounds so different and euphoric—a bit U2, a bit like Primal Scream.’ I had the song title from a book or something. Once I started getting melodies to that piano part, I just came out with the ‘You are the keeper’ and it was like, ‘Right, what\'s the keeper? It\'s someone you’re in love with, and I’m in a great relationship with my girlfriend.’ I wanted to do an all-out love song.” **My Swimming Brain** “I went to New York with my girlfriend and we were staying on the Lower East Side with the Mercury Lounge on the corner of our street. So we were like, ‘Let’s see who’s on tonight.’ It was this band Ceramic Animal. They sounded great, and I wrote ‘My Swimming Brain’ off the back of listening to this random band I’d seen. The guitar sounds they had were just a bit different. It’s a little moment where you listen to something that you would never normally listen to and it inspires you in a way that you wouldn\'t have got to on your own.” **Sunday Was a Friend of Mine** “This was written after listening to a lot of The Strokes. Coming out of a relationship, Sundays seem extra miserable when you’re a bit heartbroken. You go out on a Saturday, forget all about it, but then you wake up on Sunday and you’re like, ‘Urgh!’ It all floods back to you. ‘Sunday *Was* a Friend of Mine’ is channeling into that.” **Oh No (I Think I’m in Love)** “I’ve always tried to put quirky spins on the love aspect of songwriting. We’ve all been there, where you say you’re not going to fall for someone and you feel yourself falling for them and you\'re like, ‘Oh no! I think I’m in love.’ The little ‘Oh No’ is a bit of humor I think everyone will relate to. This is the one on the album which is most like other Blossoms songs. I think I was listening to ‘Lovefool’ by The Cardigans when I wrote it. It was actually written on the piano, but it ended up sounding nothing like that when we did a demo and tried to beef it up a bit more.” **Romance, Eh?** “This was written about a friend who wasn’t sure whether they wanted to be in a relationship, and then they changed their mind and were like, ‘Yeah, let\'s stay together’—romance, eh? \[The phrase\] is quite Northern. It was from a book… I think it was one that I’d discovered Morrissey had read and I was just like, ‘I want to get some stuff from here.’ Musically, it\'s a bit more jangly, a bit more like ‘Blown Rose,’ a song we\'d done before. It’s got a bit of a Scouse feel to it, jangly guitars, it’s kind of whimsical.” **My Vacant Days** “I wanted to write a song about having been on tour—you’ve had all these highs, played to all these people. You get such a rush, and then you come home, where things have changed a bit and people are getting married. You’re just looking out your window, speaking to your mum on the phone, you talk about the weather, watching everyday life. The lyrics are very to-the-point, but I like that in songwriting sometimes—it’s quite Carole King. I’ve referenced pinching little lines from books on other songs, but this song was literally just from me.” **Falling for Someone** “This was the first song that I wrote in my new house once I’d got all my stuff there. I sat down on the floor with the keyboard and it just came out immediately. I had ‘Falling for Someone’ as a title and then I chipped away at the song a little bit, lived with the chords. I was walking the dog in a field near my house and just got the ‘Ooooooh-oh, falling for someone.’ U2 was a big influence on that bit; we’ve never really done a ‘Ooooooh-oh’ bit. I tried to write a big celebration of love—put your heart on your sleeve and say, ‘You make my life better.’” **Like Gravity** “This actually sounded quite different on the demo; it was all like the chorus, basically. \[Producer and The Coral frontman\] James Skelly was like, ‘Can’t we make it moodier on the verse?’ and suggested changing the chords. It’s an insight into what the fourth album will sound like. The next bunch of songs, which were written alongside all the songs for *Foolish Loving Spaces*, are darker and a bit moodier. Which is crazy to talk about when you’re just releasing your third album, but if you’re in a good place and you’re writing songs, you’re just going to get on with it, aren’t you?”
The title of Conan Gray’s debut LP could also be the 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s superhero name. “My friends have always joked that if I were an animal I would be a crow,” Gray tells Apple Music. “All of my friends and my fans know that I\'m a cynical person. I had a dark enough past as a kid, and so in my teen years and adult years, I just kind of laugh at the things that go wrong in my life.” Gray’s personality is on full display throughout *Kid Krow*, a set of post-genre bedroom pop that has all the candor and content of a good diary. “I feel like I write in a way that\'s very conversational,” Gray says. “It sounds the same way that I speak normally. These are all songs that I wrote completely by myself in my room, and I feel like anyone who listens to the record can hear my voice in every one. I think what binds them all together in my head is just that they\'re all me.” Here, Gray tells us the stories behind every song on the album. **Comfort Crowd** “I\'m from a small town in Texas called Georgetown, like an hour away from Austin. And then I moved to LA to go to UCLA. To go from this small town to a massive city with tons of people from all across the world: It was a total realignment of who I was, everything that I wasn\'t used to. I was so homesick and I missed my friends back home so much. They\'re the ones who keep me sane, so I just wanted to be with them and hang out with them the way we used to. We would just sit around on the couch and show each other stupid things on our phones and enjoy each other\'s company without even having to talk at all. The second I wrote it, I was like, this feels so much like me as a person, so that\'s also why it\'s the first track on the album and it\'s the oldest one that I\'ve written that\'s on the album.” **Wish You Were Sober** “It\'s a song that I ended up sticking on the album last minute ’cause it was so much fun when I was making it. I wrote it about this person who I really, really liked and I wrote a lot of songs on my album about them and they just wouldn\'t tell me that they liked me back or would never tell me their true feelings unless they were blackout drunk. It was a weird, bittersweet feeling, because on one side you\'re thinking, ‘Yay, they like me and they have feelings for me and they like me back.’ On the other side you\'re thinking, ‘Why can\'t you tell me this when you\'re sober? Why can\'t you tell me this in daylight?’ I think the song is about all those mixed emotions and all the craziness behind being young and getting super drunk and calling someone and telling them that you love them.” **Maniac** “‘Maniac’ is a song that I wrote in the shower. I was in New York. I had just gotten this crazy text from someone that I hadn\'t talked to in months. It was like, ‘Oh, Conan, you\'re so manipulative and crazy and you\'ve been telling all my friends this and you\'ve been saying this and this and that.’ I was just so confused. Like, ‘What’s going on in your head? I don\'t know what you\'re talking about, and you\'re calling me insane, but let\'s get this clear: You are the crazy one in the situation. Like, you\'re the maniac, you\'re insane.’ I\'ve had a few people think that it\'s about me, and I\'m like, ‘No.’ For once in my life, I am not being the insane one.” **(Online Love)** “I was really raised by the internet, and so a lot of those relationships that I built and have built in the past few years have happened solely over the internet. There was someone that I really liked—I was always curious what would have happened to us if we weren\'t just an online love. What would have happened if you lived next door and we actually got to go to cafes and see each other? Would we have worked out? Because it\'s never worked out. I\'ve never dated anyone before, and I think anyone from my generation, any one of me and my friends can relate to love these days just fully happens online and that\'s just how it is.” **Checkmate** “The stage of grief where you\'re just angry, like pure rage: That was when I wrote ‘Checkmate.’ I was just like, ‘Oh man, fuck you.’ It’s a song that I wrote in a moment of pure seething anger. ‘I want to rip your head off, you are the worst person I\'ve ever met.’ It was this person who was always playing games with me all the time, always playing games with my heart, and I figured if you want to play games with me, if you\'re going to play games with my heart and if you\'re going to treat love like it\'s some kind of game, then I\'m going to win the game and I\'m going to ruin your life.” **The Cut That Always Bleeds** “I was at a point in this relationship where there was no point in being in the relationship and I was trying so hard to get over this person, but every single time, the second that I was just about to get over it, the second I was just starting to feel good and normal again, they would pop back in my life and just tear my heart into a million pieces again and then disappear. It was like no matter what I did, I was just trapped. They were this cut on my body that I was trying so hard to let heal over and they would just come back in and it would just bleed and bleed and bleed. I wrote it in a stage of misery, in Chicago. I was sitting in my hotel room and I was actually supposed to see the person, but instead I got this insane flu and I was just sitting in bed with a really high fever and I sang the first line of the song to my phone and that\'s how the whole entire song came out.” **Fight or Flight** “‘Fight or Flight’ is the one that I kind of wanted to have a bit of fun with. I wanted it to be this super chaotic, melodramatic song about finding out that someone has cheated on you, or finding out that someone has multiple people in their lives that you just didn\'t know about. It was my response to getting put in that situation, and also meeting someone and finding out that maybe they\'re not the person that you think they are. Like you\'re definitely talking to a bit of a player.” **Affluenza** “I grew up with financial ups and downs my whole entire life. We didn\'t know how we were going to survive, and I was so used to not having money that when I was young, I always thought that money would solve all of my issues. Then I moved to LA and I discovered this whole other side of the world where there\'s these kids who grew up insanely rich. I started hanging out with them and going to their parties and seeing this other side of the world, and I discovered that even these people who grew up with tons of money are absolutely miserable. I figured out that it doesn\'t matter who you are, doesn\'t matter how much money you have. We all have a lot of the same problems.” **(Can We Be Friends?)** “Both of the interludes I wrote just for the fans, for the people who listen to the album from top to bottom. It was another way of talking to the listener and being like, ‘Hey, thank you for listening to my album. This is everything you ever need to know about me. These are all of my deepest, darkest secrets, and I would love to be your best friend. Just thank you for caring.’ It\'s also a song that I wrote from the perspective of what I would say to my best friends back home, a love letter towards platonic friendship. I feel like friendship is something that is never really talked about in music ever. It\'s always love, and there\'s no one on earth that I love more than my friends.” **Heather** “‘Heather’ is the song on the album that I always cry to. I think it\'s the most honest recount of my love life at the moment. It’s about a girl named Heather—I think everyone has a Heather in their life. The person that I really, really liked was in love with Heather. They were not in love with me, and because of that, I fucking hated Heather. I hated Heather with all of my heart and soul. I had no reason to hate Heather. Heather is a perfectly nice girl. She\'s sweet and she\'s pure and she smells like daisies—she’s perfect, but I hate her. It\'s this humiliating thing to admit, but it\'s just true. I\'m scared to see how people are going to react, because it isn\'t a good thing to think something like that, but I also think it\'s something that I\'ve never really heard anyone admit. I\'m sorry, Heather. You’re a wonderful person.” **Little League** “I wasn\'t a Little League player at all. I think for me, Little League was always a signifier of my youth. We would go to see my friends’ Little League games and we\'d all buy popsicles from the concession stand and watch it and cheer and get super sunburned. When you\'re young and then you get older and then all of a sudden you\'re in the big leagues and you\'re like, ‘How the hell do I handle anything that\'s going on ever?’ It\'s so scary to get older. ‘Little League’ is my song talking about the fear of growing up, and it\'s also just about my best friend back home. I miss her all the time, and her name\'s Ashley. I wear a necklace with her name on it every single day, and it\'s me just missing her and missing times when life was so much simpler.” **The Story** “The album is so chaotic, and it can be pretty sad and dark at times in the middle. I wanted to end on a more hopeful note. I had a pretty rough childhood; a lot of it was just really unsafe. There were times as a kid that I wished so badly that I just didn\'t exist anymore. I wanted so badly for my pain to stop, and I wanted to just stop existing. Every single time that I would hit those rock-bottom moments, something would just tell me to keep going. I wanted to write a song talking about all those moments in my life and all the things that happened to me and my friends growing up where we thought that life was just going to stop, but with the smallest amount of courage—and with people who can show you that they love you—you can keep going and it\'s never really the end.”
“Coming up we never felt part of a scene,” Bombay Bicycle Club vocalist and chief songwriter Jack Steadman tells Apple Music. “Probably because we were always quite an antisocial band. Well, shy—we were five years younger than everyone else. Looking back, aligning yourself with a scene can be dangerous anyway as scenes always move on. So perhaps we’ve been reasonably savvy.” The North Londoners’ savviness meant knowing that a hiatus was required in 2016 after a decade together and four albums in five years. Steadman and bassist Ed Nash both scratched solo itches, drummer Suren de Saram sought fresh musical inspiration with session work, and guitarist Jamie MacColl returned to education. “We started meeting up again and talking about the band because we were thinking about doing something around the 10-year anniversary of our debut album,” Nash says. Steadman wasn’t convinced. “I immediately thought it made us feel like an ’80s heritage act,” he laughs. “So that gave me some drive to see if we could make some new music and be a bit more forward-thinking.” Staggered sessions in Cornwall and LA with producer John Congleton yielded a body of dynamic, expressive, and restorative guitar music that resets the band’s bar. “We realized comfort or solace in music and friendship when things are going wrong and having something to fall back on are the themes that run throughout this record,” Nash says. “The more we thought about it, the more it summed everything up for us as people this album.” Read on for Nash and Steadman’s track-by-track guide. **Get Up** Ed Nash: “We do agonize over track listings in general, but both thematically and structurally, this couldn\'t really go anywhere else on the record. It\'s called ‘Get Up,’ you know! The rest of the songs? Not so much.” Jack Steadman: “The song originated from my Mr Jukes days \[Steadman released the 2017 album *God First* under his Mr Jukes moniker\]. It started with the sax sample, but I wrote it back then and put it to one side, half thinking that if the band ever did cement itself again, this would be perfect.” EN: “As there’s now an outlet for Jack’s jazzier songwriting in Mr Jukes, it’s allowed Bombay to come back to our \[the band’s 2011 third album\] *A Different Kind of Fix* sound.” JS: “There was a nice moment in the studio watching Ed and Suren play live in the room. We’ve always historically been a band that recorded separately before making everything perfect through editing, so it was lovely to see John just hit record, and that’s what you hear on the record.” **Is It Real** JS: “This was one of the last to be written. Lyrically, it’s the only backwards-looking song on the album. We want to make forward-thinking music, but you have to be true to those feelings, too. This is also an example of me doing *a lot* of computer checks. I was recording guitars, but then you can hear me changing the pitches on the computer. I’m just experimenting away from an instrument and fully immersed in the editing world to try and be creative and help the song in that way.” **Everything Else Has Gone Wrong** JS: “When you’ve spent a year writing the record and you reach the end, there’s that feeling of relief because it is such an emotional rollercoaster. So when we hit this song and had a sense that it might be the last piece of the puzzle, we were just so excited. The ‘I think I’ve found my second wind’ lyric captures that excitement, and my lack of subtlety.” **I Can Hardly Speak** EN: “It was written in about 2014, and I think when something’s a bit old, it becomes unexciting. But I made it one of my battles, so I would slip it into every conversation, mention it in emails. Fortunately, John agreed with me.” JS: “It’s quite an unusual groove, because it sounds a bit like a marching band. It sounds to me like an old folk melody—like a shanty people would sing. On paper, it doesn’t really make any sense and should sound quite awful, but somehow it works.” **Good Day** EN: “This I wrote at the beginning of 2019 in Cornwall when I was working on another album for my solo project, Toothless, and helping Jack when he needed a hand with Bombay music. The lyrics really spoke to Jamie, our guitarist, who was doing a degree at the time and really worrying about a lot of stuff. The concerns raised in the song are raised in a positive and funny way, but are rooted in *some* truth. When I was doing my solo project, I was occasionally tormented by ‘how come all these other people are doing well’ thoughts. It’s entirely natural to worry about other people’s success and compare yourself to them.” **Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You)** EN: “When Jack said he was going to at least try and write some new music for the band, we took a couple of trips and agreed that if it wasn’t working then we’d call it a day. This came from the second trip. Jack sent it around and you could feel the excitement from everyone. We knew it was as good as anything we’ve done.” JS: “When you know you’ve got *something* to work from, there’s not a feeling like it. And when you get a phone call from your manager, that’s when you know it’s good. Usually it’s an encouraging email, but when they pick up the phone, you know you’ve got the single, or a very special song. It really was the turning point of the whole process. Writing music and making records is all about confidence, and it takes a song like this to give you that confidence to keep going. You take the swagger it gives you forward.” **I Worry Bout You** JS: “People seem to like the intro to this song. The thing is, I find it easy to start songs. I’ve got thousands of intros on my computer, and the hardest thing is to make it into a full song. We have always been a band comfortable making electronic and guitar music, so a lot of our songs start quite electronically because I am fascinated with production—and then we dust off the guitars and add to it. Lyrically, it’s an anxious song. We couldn’t have returned with another album about girls and young love—we wanted to speak to people our age, approaching their thirties.” EN: “It’s the in-between: You’re not young, but you’re not old either. You’re finding yourself.” JS: “This is up there with the songs I’m excited to play live. There’s a lot of energy to it, and it’s got a beautiful brass melody at the end which Suren wrote. Which was a first for him: coming into the studio with the confidence from the break we took to present his own brilliant ideas.” **People People (feat. Liz Lawrence)** EN: “I’ve been writing music with Liz for four years, and she sang with us throughout 2014. We were thinking about making an EP together, and she wrote this song and sent it over for me to finish. I wrote the bridge and rearranged it into a more complete song, but her solo work began doing better and better, so the EP was put on the back burner. I felt the song had a place on this album. I think she originally wrote it about her dad, but I thought it might be weird for us to be singing about our fathers, so we changed the meaning. So it’s now more about finding your place in the world with companionship and someone to stand there by your side, in a non-romantic way.” JS: “I enjoy singing with other people. It tends to be female singers. I always write really high parts for my voice, and rather than me sound like a eunuch, I think it’s nice to get in other people who can actually hit those notes.” **Do You Feel Loved?** EN: “If you put a lot of distortion on this, it would be the best metal track. Perhaps fortunately, we took the distortion off, and for me it feels very us. A mix of some world music influences with electronics and a whole band put behind it.” JS: “It’s a song about our relationship with social media. To justify what you’re doing, you need to put it out there and for people to say, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ It brings up an interesting discussion about music and why people make it. It obviously starts with you writing songs for yourself in your bedroom as a kid, but you’d be lying if you said that’s all you were doing now. You are writing with a fanbase, and you want people to love it, because that brings you so much joy.” **Let You Go** JS: “I have this snyth called an OP-1 and it has an FM radio in it. So when you’re touring you can sample straight from the radio and pick up local sounds. We were in the States and this totally unknown song came on—and it’s so chopped up now you’d never be able to really find out what it is. I love writing music in that way because you’re playing a keyboard but instead of the notes that you’re used to, there’s a childlike surprise and excitement every time you hit something. There’s nothing cerebral about it. It’s quite a weird-sounding track. There are lots of little production flourishes from John, which we love.” **Racing Stripes** JS: “I think it’s my favorite song on the record. It’s a very intimate moment and makes it unambiguous that the album is an optimistic one and its title should be interpreted that way. It was written on a 200-year-old harmonium, and I’d never played one before. When you come across something new to you like that, the first thing you write is always going to be quite interesting. People are always searching for those experiences, which is why there are so many musicians learning so many weird instruments. The first thing is always very precious. Ending on the words ‘This light will keep me going’ captures what the record is about. It’s the ideal way to close things.”
We’re thrilled to say that our 5th album, Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, is out now. When we started discussing the possibility of making another record after our a few years away as a band, we said we’d only release an album if we were confident that it stood up to our previous work. We’ve ended up with an album we’re really proud of, and we hope you agree that it’s been worth the 6-year wait. Recording this one was definitely one of the most enjoyable recording processes we’ve had as a band. Working with John Congleton, we had an initial session in London in early Spring last year at Konk studio, where we’d done our first and fourth albums. We then went to LA in late Summer to record the majority of it with John. Spending 3 weeks in LA was an unforgettable experience for the four of us. It was the first extended period of time we’d spent together in a long while and reinforced what we’d been missing during these few years. We hope that positive energy that was there during those 3 weeks has translated onto the record. We’ve touched previously on how the album is about the comfort that music can provide in times of need. Hopefully, this record can give you that escape should you ever need it. We want to get to as many places as possible to play these new songs for you. Wherever you are in the world, fingers crossed we’ll see you soon. Lots of love Bombay x
There aren’t many bands who undergo drastic sonic transformations *before* they’ve released their debut album. But Working Men’s Club’s music reflects the restless, push-it-forward energy of their leader Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. Originally a trio dealing in jerky New Wave, the band’s direction was diverted when Minsky-Sargeant took charge of the creative reins during the making of this self-titled debut. “I wanted to make a dance record, but I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as just being a dance record,” Minsky-Sargeant tells Apple Music. The frontman’s knack for snarling melodies remains, now beefed up with a sound that harks back to the dance floors of late-’80s Manchester, a heady mix of pulsing beats, acid house pianos, and bold synths. “I started off writing music on my own, then it became more collaborative, then back to being solo again,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “I’m grateful that I was given a chance to do it on my own, because that was always the route it was going.” Here, Minsky-Sargeant makes sense of the record, track by track. **Valleys** “The way that it starts very barren, selectively adding overt components and instrumentation, I thought it was a good buildup to the start of the record and a good opening track. It\'s about where I\'m from and how isolating it can feel to be in a small town in the North of England sometimes. It\'s quite a secluded, claustrophobic place sometimes. But I think everyone can relate to that in some way, wherever you live.” **A.A.A.A.** “It’s a funny tune. It blew me away how Ross Orton \[producer\] interpreted it and then how he made it. It was just a bass guitar and the same drumbeat, but with more brutal and normal-sounding drums. All the elements were there, but we chose to interpret it more electronically. Ross was using the synths to make drum sounds, and then we basically made that tune all on one synthesizer, which was really cool, and showed how minimal it could be.” **John Cooper Clarke** “I think John Cooper Clarke is a Northern icon. One of the last survivors of that era, going back into that period of time where he lived with Nico and lived in Hebden Bridge, which is down the road from me. He\'s just a proper punk, and one of the last remaining punks there is. Now Andrew Weatherall\'s dead, and people like that have fallen, he\'s still going. He just does it how he wants to do it, and I think that\'s quite admirable, as a creative.” **White Rooms and People** “It’s the poppiest, most indie-sounding tune on the record. It\'s hooky and captures that era of what we were doing when we started—but it\'s reinterpreted and much glossier. It feels like an older song to me. We did go back and reimagine it and put electronic drums on it, which I think really beefed it up and made it fit with the record.” **Outside** “This was an old demo of mine and we just made it sound better. It was the first tune that we did because we didn\'t know how to tackle it. We sped it up and just tried to really produce it, and it worked. It\'s quite a joyous tune, when the rest of the album is quite dark.” **Be My Guest** “I feel like there\'s two sides to this record and this is the first tune on the B-side. It’s the side of the record where it becomes more aggressive in stages. And this, I guess, is the most kind of nasty, brutal tune that there is on the record. It\'s all about the guitars for me, because I was really set on making sure that, especially that bit after the chorus where it goes into that big drop into those really high-pitched guitars, it just had to really carry.” **Tomorrow** “It\'s one of the last tunes I wrote before recording. It’s quite repetitive, maybe obnoxiously repetitive. I think when you\'re making that sort of repetitive music, it has to build throughout the backing. I guess it’s quite a polished, nice song in regard to the rest of the album. It’s more on the poppier side of things.” **Cook a Coffee** “We had to come back to this because the initial recording we did was really bare. I\'m pretty sure even the guitars might have been out of tune or something, so we went back and redid all the guitars, and put more synths on. We had to revisit it and beef it up. But we definitely got there in the end. Those synths at the end make it more anthemic and pulled it all together.” **Teeth** “When we put ‘Teeth’ out as a single, there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion over which mix would go out. Me and Ross had worked quite closely on this tune together, and for me and him, the wrong mix went out. So as soon as we got in the studio, it was like, ‘We\'ve got to change that mix for the record.’ And we did. It just drives it a lot more. It makes it a lot more cinematic than just guitars on top of synths. When we do stuff it\'s all so finely tuned, everything has its own place.” **Angel** “We play this second to last when we play it live, but in terms of the album, it had to be the last tune. I think it\'s just quite a pompous way to end it, isn\'t it? It\'s quite ridiculous. Whenever you read books about records and how they were done, it always seems that the last song\'s the last song that they recorded. And it felt like during the process of recording the album, we were putting it back–we knew it was maybe going to be a bit harder to capture. But it was actually fine. It was a nice way to end the recording process.”
“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”
Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.
In July 2018, Glass Animals drummer Joe Seaward was riding his bicycle in Dublin when he was hit by a truck and nearly died. After spending weeks in the hospital unable to speak or move, he learned how to walk, talk, and read again while his body healed. For his bandmates, the experience was excruciating and profound, the kind that made frontman Dave Bayley “zoom out” and ask existential questions about trauma, art, and mortality. “I started thinking back to stories from my childhood in Texas before my family moved to England,” he tells Apple Music. The experience wasn’t necessarily pleasant. “Your brain goes to weird places.” Bayley doesn’t particularly enjoy writing about himself, but wound up circling his own memories for the band’s introspective third album—specifically, those emotionally charged moments when innocence is lost. Strung together by interludes ripped from his family’s home videos and production inspired by early-aughts hip-hop (the soundtrack of his youth), *Dreamland* is a deeply personal account of Bayley’s journey into adulthood that chases an ever-looming question: “How did I get here?” Below, the London-based musician opens up about the stories behind a few standout songs. **Space Ghost Coast to Coast** “I’ve tried to tell this story somewhat vaguely because I hate the idea of revealing someone\'s identity, and this person in particular has rebuilt themselves, which is an incredible thing. This song is about a very good friend I had growing up, back in those formative years when I was first discovering hip-hop—Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, all of whom I tried to channel in the production—and also discovering myself. We went to camp together, we got into trouble together, but we were both always nervous and shy about everything. There was gentleness to it all. When my family moved to England, we fell out of touch, and a couple of years later I found out that he’d brought a gun to school and tried to do a shooting. He got caught on the way in, no one died, but it affected me. It didn\'t add up in my head. He was the person I watched cartoons with and played kickball with... I couldn’t understand it. It was the first time I really understood how much things can change, that people you love can do things that you won\'t understand. It was a breaking of innocence.” **It\'s All So Incredibly Loud** “This song is about saying something that you know is going to really hurt somebody—something they\'ll never forgive you for and that will probably make them hate you—and the three seconds right after you say those words. That silence that feels like the loudest fucking thing ever. I began with a particular moment in mind, but then I just started thinking back on all the times I\'ve been...well, maybe not a dick, but close. All the times I\'ve hurt somebody, and sitting with what that felt like. It’s quite abstract compared to the rest of the songs on the record because I wanted it to apply to a lot of situations.” **Domestic Bliss** “This song was sparked by one of my very first memories—the first where I can trace the whole sequence of events. I was maybe six. I went to my friend’s house after school one day, and it was a weird place. There were dogs in cages, wild cats in cages; I didn\'t really understand it. We weren’t allowed in the house—we always played in this woodsy area nearby—but sometimes there’d be loud shouting from inside. My friend would turn to me and be like, \'Oh god, she\'s going to come out crying.\' And his mom would come out of the house in tears with blood on her nose and things like that. I remember it hitting me, just that it was so bad. And then we\'d all get back in the truck and she\'d take me home. I guess the song is about the helplessness you feel in situations like that. When you know it’s bad but also that you’re too young to really get it.” **Heat Waves** “It began with a personal experience that everyone has had: A friend starts dating someone and slowly, they change the way they dress. And then the way they talk. And then everything. Eventually it gets to the point where you’re like, ‘Who is that? Where did my friend go?’ Well, this song is about realizing that it’s happened to you, that it\'s *you* that\'s changed. You\'ve become someone that you aren\'t. I was trying to figure out whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately I think it\'s about hitting a wall—a point where you can\'t change anymore or you’ll lose the foundation of who you are. You’ll become an attachment for this other person. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to so many friends. And there’s a moment when you see your reflection and you\'re like, ‘Oh, fuck.’ All of the lyrics play into that—mirages, hallucinations, things like that.” **Helium** “This is the only song that gets at any resolution and isn’t groundbreaking. It basically says that we have to accept that we\'re all doing the best we can. We\'re doing it on top of tattered foundations with all these rocky cracks—because it’s never perfect, right?—but we’re trying. We build what we can, we make a life, we do our best. And that’s just fine. By this point in the writing process, I had become more comfortable being confused about everything. I had stopped searching for answers or wishing I’d done everything differently. It was a relief to get to that point. There are plenty of times when you look back and realize you got it wrong, but you have to forgive yourself, because you’ve probably, hopefully, become a better person for it. People spend so much time trying to be a kid forever or go back to their youth, but the whole reason these memories even matter to us is because of the wisdom we’ve gained from them. Even if we could go back, we probably wouldn’t, because they’ve made us who we are.”
“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.’”
“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”
In early 2019, Dominic Fike—then a still relatively unknown singer from Naples, Florida, with curious face tattoos and a bleached blond buzz cut—announced that he was at work on his first official full-length. In the 18 months that followed, he became a Gen Z household name. He was showered with praise on social media by several Kardashians and DJ Khaled, starred in a short film by BROCKHAMPTON, and appeared on high-profile collaborations with Omar Apollo, Kevin Abstract, and Halsey, the latter of whom named an interlude on her blockbuster album *Manic* after him. And yet, despite all the hype, Fike retained a sense of mystery; beyond the *GQ* fashion spreads, psychedelic cameos, and confusing comparisons to Jack Johnson and Post Malone, not much was known about the 24-year-old behind the mic. *What Could Possibly Go Wrong*, his imaginative and lightly sarcastic debut album, feels like the first proper introduction to Fike’s nostalgic, colorful, and genre-less worldview. Swerving between brooding, billowing indie ballads (“Politics & Violence”) and sardonic cultural commentary housed in conversational rap (“Cancel Me”), Fike takes trendy pop stylings—tuneful melodies, easygoing rhythms, and a certain stoner listlessness—and twists them into freewheeling mash-ups and fringe abstractions. It’s at once daydreamy and hyperactive, full of conflicting tones and energies: “10x Stronger” is a flourish of orchestral strings and la-di-da harmonies, “Florida” is woozy and strung-out, and the chopped-up and free-form “Joe Blazey” feels like a front-row seat to someone else’s acid trip with vocals pitched and warped to get under your skin. His taste for surf-rock textures and sturdy hooks affords the project aesthetic consistency; even when he drifts far out, you know exactly where you are. Fike credits some of this to occasional co-writer Jim-E Stack, whose recent credits include Bon Iver and Charli XCX. “He’s taught me so much in our sessions, because we just work,” Fike tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, explaining that they both have similarly introspective methods. “He’ll take a project home by himself and no one’s looking at him, and then he’ll send you what his thoughts are. And I love that, because I need the same thing.”
For PVRIS frontwoman Lynn Gunn, her band’s third album *Use Me* marked “a line in the sand.” Sonically, that meant stepping away from the expansive rock that defined the Massachussetts trio’s previous two albums and embracing altogether more hook-heavy, dark-edged electro-pop. “This is where we’re at now, and we’re not going back from here,” says the singer of PVRIS’ new dawn, which Gunn honed with US producer and Paper Route frontman JT Daly. “You can hop on or you can hop off. I follow my taste and my interests, and I never want to compromise that for nostalgia or for the comfort of preserving old expectations.” But *Use Me* also represented another clear-cut change: the moment Gunn—for years reluctant to take full credit for PVRIS’ output—allowed herself to step out of the shadows and into the foreground. “The process of this album was a very singular, solo endeavor,” she says. “Things were naturally happening that way anyway, but we never really had the direct conversation about it. Everyone was down for this, because it’s a healthier, easier method. Finally being like, ‘This is actually how it’s operated,’ and having that conversation has been a really positive shift for us. It allows more freedom.” It’s not hard to see why *Use Me* catalyzed that new direction: This is an intensely personal record on which Gunn documents—and exhales—the turbulence of her life during the years leading up to its creation. “It was a really overwhelming time,” says the singer of the period after the release of 2017’s *All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell* and into 2019, when she began to write *Use Me*. That turmoil is spread across the record, from the pent-up ferocity of opener “Gimme a Minute”—a shuddering anthem which sees Gunn desperately placing a protective layer around herself—to “Good to Be Alive,” on which the singer ruminates on her ill health, sarcastically wondering, “Is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive but I hate my life.” But amid all that restless energy, there’s also release; as the album reaches its close, Gunn sails into noticeably calmer waters. That shift you can hear, she says, was “internal healing. It’s funny, because while we were making the album, I still felt I was holding on to a lot of things. The chaos was just very, very present. But speaking about it now, I feel healed from a lot of it.” Here, let Gunn walk you through the exhilarating *Use Me*, one song at a time. **Gimme a Minute** “This song feels like a really good start, especially if you’re looking at the album as a storyline. There was a lot of change during this album: personal changes, mental changes, physical changes. And I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as well as Crohn\'s disease around this time, so it\'s navigating a lot of health factors within that chaos. I also have a hard time setting boundaries and asking for help or time off. The song is a cry out and just a catharsis of what I really wanted to say, which was just, ‘Give me a minute. I need a minute. I need to process what has happened in the last few years. I need to process what is happening to my body. I need to process what\'s happening to my heart.’ It was just a lot. Sonically, the song emulates that stirring stress and anxiety, and it eventually leads to this explosive breakdown and the ultimate freak-out.” **Dead Weight** “Again, this was about reflecting on being a people-pleaser and always putting others’ feelings and expectations before mine. The song is about wanting to shed those habits and patterns. But also about shedding people who don\'t understand that and won\'t allow you to set those boundaries—old friendships, old relationships, old anything that don’t allow you to be your best self. The dynamic of the song really ties into the sonics; they reflect this dance that I feel I am always having. I always want to be straightforward and transparent with the people around me, but I always want to do that with love and do that in a way that\'s not going to upset anybody. But sometimes the truth is you need to just set that boundary and do it unapologetically and not worry about it.” **Stay Gold** “‘Stay Gold’ just flew out—it was a really quick song to write. The message of the song is wanting to write a song for somebody, but also not wanting to, because when you write a song about somebody, they\'re immortalized. They can be consumed by a listener in whatever way they want, whether that\'s to put them up on this grand pedestal or to tear them down. And this person just felt so special that I didn\'t even want to give the chance for either of those things to happen. I just wanted to keep them safe. I didn’t want to let their greatness die as we would play the song over and over. So, ironically, I ended up writing a song about them, which is the song about not wanting to write a song about them.” **Good to Be Alive** “The line in this—‘It feels good to be alive but I hate my life’—is supposed to be a little cheeky and a little bit funny. But it’s also supposed to be completely honest. JT had set up a little miniature writing camp with some awesome writers. And there was one day we were just working alone, and during this time, I was having a really bad flare-up in my stomach and in my body. I just wasn\'t feeling good, and it was really hard to just show up to the session and be on and be present. I was feeling a lot of the weight of those health issues, which was ironic because mentally I was in excellent health—the best place I\'ve been in my adult life and in our career. What I think music is really great for is delivering the deep, honest, and maybe difficult message, but if you can make someone dance to it or sing along to it, it just feels so much better.” **Death of Me** “This is about that fine line you dance right when you are interested in somebody and you realize you really care about them and like them. And you have to surrender in a way, or at least for me. I\'m go hard or go home. If I\'m going to commit to somebody, I\'m fully committed and ready to just dive in (that’s definitely a good indication of the no boundaries thing). It’s about the risk you take when you are connecting with somebody and putting it all out there. Sonically, it\'s similar to ‘Good to Be Alive,’ where I feel like if you just read the lyrics straight out, it can sound pretty dark and maybe not the most positive. I knew I would need somebody who could bring that perfect element of a little bit dark, but a little bit fun, and I chose Daniel Armbruster from Joywave. He helped like really capture that dark energy, but also a little bit of a cheeky wink in there.” **Hallucinations** “It\'s funny, I didn\'t think the song would make the album. I was reading this book at the time about hallucinating, and it just kind of felt like I was living in a weird little dream. There were a lot of areas of my life where I was kind of contemplating what was real and what was something I was thinking up or projecting, and trying to identify and really pin those things down. The book really lined up with how I felt at that point in my life. A fan actually gave me that book, too, so whoever it was, I owe them a huge thank you.” **Old Wounds** “I think this is the most directly I\'ve ever written about love. It feels like a love song—it’s about that all-or-nothing mentality and that willingness to get hurt again from somebody the second time around. I wrote it about three or four years ago. I had this really short-term but really special connection with somebody, and it just ended very abruptly. And there was a time when they had come back just to talk about it and for us to process something, and I remember one of my friends just said to me, ‘Don’t open up old wounds, don\'t do it.’ I was like, ‘That\'s a good lyric, that\'s a good song idea.’ At the time I was staying in a hotel in New York and I just went back to my room and blurted the song out in a day. And I had the demo for a really long time; I just wanted to finish it and wanted to get it out. I showed it to JT one day and a couple of people on our team, and everybody was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. I thought so.’ I\'m definitely a hopeless romantic, and this captures that.” **Loveless** “When I wrote this, I was dealing with a breakup and I just didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to give it any more attention or energy, I guess. But I knew, deep down, that I needed to write about it and get it out. So I very reluctantly wrote about it. But I think making the song allowed for that final release and that final acceptance and just surrendering to it for a moment. Once that energy was pulled out, it allowed for this breath, which I think the end of the album has. It feels lighter, it doesn\'t feel as chaotic, even if there is still a little bit of sadness. The song is about admitting that you\'ve been defeated and admitting that somebody hurt you and that you\'re giving them this salute. Like, ‘You hurt me, dude, you hurt me real bad.’ I feel like this is the first song where I\'ve just fully laid that out there. Something about admitting that takes the power back.” **January Rain** “A much more retrospective reflection on that same situation. JT and I were just finishing everything and finishing tracking, and just kind of getting everything together. But I woke up one morning with the vocal melody for this song and the chorus in my head and I just jumped to my computer immediately. I wrote the track and got the melody before it ran away and I brought it to him. I didn’t have the lyrics and I didn’t know what I was feeling. But ‘January rain’ just kept popping up. It was looking back on that relationship a year later and reflecting on what it all felt like, which was it was really special to me. But which, very early on, I knew was doomed. I just remember there was one week where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, and that\'s when that feeling felt the heaviest.” **Use Me** “There\'s harp in here, plus strings. This was one of the songs, along with \'Stay Gold,\' which we were fighting really hard to get onto the album. I was watching *Euphoria* and I just really loved the soundtrack for it. I loved the dynamics between Rue and Jules and just the concept of using a person as your escape or your medicine—whether it\'s good or bad. You can see it as a really healthy thing or unhealthy, it just depends on the situation. I tend to get very singular and solo in my own life. I almost wrote it as a love letter or a love song from someone else\'s perspective, and the dialogue or message that I wish someone would be able to speak to me and sing to me. So it was like this weird backwards love song and kind of putting that into the universe. Maybe one day somebody will be able to be that for me and be that person to lean on. But there’s a double-sided energy to it. Because you could almost look at the song as a kind of funny, passive-aggressive, ironic message of just saying, ‘Just go ahead, use me. Do whatever you need.’ It’s very empowered. There\'s also an empowering component to it as well, if you\'re looking at it from that angle.” **Wish You Well** “I never want to burn bridges with people. I never want people to be hurt. Even if a situation was toxic or wasn\'t healthy, I still always just want the best for somebody. But sometimes you need to let things go and you got to let certain people go. I feel it\'s right to have this at the end of the album. It just really captures that no matter what somebody\'s put me through, I\'m not going to hold that against you. I\'m always going to hope that you can grow from this and heal. But I also love a good four on the floor, really groovy bass, fun song. So it was the first time we\'ve really gotten to make something like that. It had to be on the album.”
“I think what helps me to be so vulnerable with my writing is that I don\'t think about who\'s going to be listening to it,” BENEE tells Apple Music. “If I did, I\'d freak out. It’s weird because I release it for all these people to listen to, yet I can\'t talk to my closest friends about it.” The New Zealand singer and songwriter’s debut album, *Hey u x*, is filled with honesty and anxiety and mental health and heartbreak, and all those little thoughts that wiggle around in our heads and keep us up at night. Though we all experience it, most of us can’t harness those feelings and turn them into lovely, innovative, thoughtful alt-pop songs. But for BENEE, it’s more of a necessity than anything else. “I\'m really terrible at telling people if I\'m feeling poo. I just won\'t talk about my feelings or emotions. I bottle it up and vomit it onto a page when I\'m writing,” she says. “Then I think about, ‘Oh shit, I have to release this, now people are going to hear what I\'ve been thinking.’ But it usually doesn’t stop me—I want my music-making to be super honest and raw.” Here, she takes us through each track on *Hey u x*. **Happen to Me** “This is probably is my favorite track on the album, possibly my favorite song that I\'ve made. I sing about my anxiety, which I\'ve only had to deal with in the last few years. I can\'t go to a shop by myself without freaking out. I write about my fear of flying, about someone kidnapping me or me burning in fire, all these terrible things that could possibly happen. It’s really silly.” **Same Effect** “I wrote it about my ex-boyfriend, the same one I\'ve written most of my relationship songs about. I\'ve struggled with this one dude, being completely in love with him since I was 17 in a long-distance, on-and-off relationship. I broke up with him midway through last year. I was frustrated with myself because I knew I deserved someone who treated me better and he wasn\'t for me, but at the same time, nobody else had the same effect for a long time. I was stuck in this weird mindset which I think a lot of people can relate to. Someone can do terrible things and be really horrible, but you still don\'t feel like you’ll find better.” **Sheesh (feat. Grimes)** “I’d joked around about making a drum-and-bassy EDM song. Then I was in a session with my producer Josh \[Fountain\], and I was like, ‘It\'s time. I want to make a really upbeat, crazy one. I want Auto-Tune everywhere, I want to sound like a robot.’ I wrote it about this guy I maybe know, who’s really nice, they\'re really great for me. But when it\'s not there, it\'s not there. You can\'t force yourself to like someone. And for some reason Grimes wanted to do something on it, which is insane, because I\'m such a huge fan of hers. Apparently she was a fan, and somehow it worked out. I\'m still shocked. I have no idea what she’s talking about in her lyrics, but I love that.” **Supalonely (feat. Gus Dapperton)** “I’d broken up with that dude maybe a week before leaving to LA for a month to make music. It was the first session of the trip and I just vented to this woman I was working with. I was just like, ‘I\'m heartbroken, but I know I\'ve made the right decision. I just feel lonely as heck.’ I knew I\'d be making very sad songs for the rest of the trip. I decided to put a spin on it and be super self-deprecating, and make a song that made me feel happy in the session. It ended up being really, really fun. Sometimes it\'s nice to laugh off the times when you\'re really, really sad.” **Snail** “This was a song that I wrote coming out of the first lockdown in New Zealand. I, for some reason, was fascinated by snails during lockdown. I lived with my parents at the time and they were *everywhere* outside my room. I was watching them, wondering what a snail thinks. And when I got into the studio a week after \[lockdown\], I wrote a little tale of a snail and a person, and the snail wondering why the human isn\'t coming outside or doing anything. It’s because of a global pandemic, but the snail doesn\'t know. Well, maybe it does. Maybe I\'m just assuming.” **Plain (feat. Lily Allen & Flo Milli)** “Sometimes, the music I like to listen to when I\'m sad about an ex is mean, bad-bitch stuff that makes you feel really good at the same time. My mum hates the song because it sounds like I\'m putting down another woman in it, but I would never actually do that in real life. I wanted a song that made me feel better about someone fucking me around and me being sad at home because I\'m still obsessed with them. And I got Lily and Flo Milli on it because I feel like they\'re both pros at being sassy.” **Kool** “I was imagining this woman walking into a party scene with a red velvet coat or something glamorous, and everyone\'s like, ‘Oh my god, she’s amazing.’ It was inspired by a couple artists I follow who come off as effortlessly cool and so confident, and they always say the right things in interviews. Maybe it’s a response to someone saying they think I\'m cool and me being like, ‘You have no idea.’ At times I feel like the most uncool thing—not that being cool even matters, but I wish I didn\'t have this anxious bloody head that overthinks everything. I often say the wrong things and do things that embarrass myself. I just wish I didn’t have to be like that.” **Winter (feat. Mallrat)** “I made ‘Winter’ in the middle of my LA trip, but I completely ran out of steam. It was like, ‘All right, it\'s time for me to go home. I\'ve had enough. I don\'t feel like making music right now.’ Which was a really horrible space to be in, because music is my way of venting and when I don\'t feel like making it, there\'s something wrong. It’s happened twice, and both times I needed to step out and get some help. You feel very small and alone when you\'re in a place like that and you don\'t know anyone. I was singing about how I wanted to go home—the winter suits me better.” **A Little While** “This is one that I made in lockdown. I produced it, which was new for me. It’s a romantic love story that I made up because I’d had enough of singing about my ex. It was more fun to make up a story about being in the car with a new love interest. But it’s also about the real feeling of being afraid to say something to someone who you like.” **Night Garden (feat. Kenny Beats & Bakar)** “I did this during a session with Kenny in LA. It was my first time meeting him and my first time working with a different producer, which was interesting, but really cool. It was the fastest I\'ve ever had to write a song, because the guy was chopping up these drum samples that he had recorded in maybe 20 minutes. I wrote about a similar story to another song of mine, ‘Monsta,’ about a fear I have of someone being outside my room or in the garden while I\'m trying to go to sleep. I went in and freestyled my lyric ideas and melodies. It was really sick, I was so happy with it. And I got Bakar because I wanted a husky, almost scary-sounding vocal and thought a British accent would sound really sick on it.” **All the Time (feat. Muroki)** “It’s about being spacey, maybe you\'re a bit drunk or a bit high, and you’re in a room with someone and you’re the only two on the same buzz. They get exactly where you are right now. It\'s also about how you can get into this routine of also using alcohol and drugs to cope, which is a horrible thing to fall into, but it’s pretty common. It’s just a trippy song. I wanted that beachy, surfy sound. I was definitely inspired by a lot of the more indie and reggae bands that come out of New Zealand. I met Muroki at a really small techno and house festival in New Zealand. I found one of his songs called ‘For Better or Worse’ and was just in love with his voice.” **If I Get to Meet You** “This song is more about speaking to people in the last couple of years who I didn\'t know before the music thing, and now I\'m talking to them more than normal. I feel like it\'s this weird thing of, like, do I know if your intentions are genuine? I also made up that maybe I have a thing with this person and it\'s like, ‘What are you going to say to people around you? Are you going to say you’re talking to this singer?’” **C U** “It\'s like ‘A Little While’ in that I was thinking up this story. I’m at a beach house with someone who I am really getting along well with, and then I have to go because reality calls, I have to work. And as much as I’d like to stay and live on the beach for the rest of my life and just be one with the bloody earth and not have to worry about anything else, I also have to work. I love to work and love to make music, and I love to meet people and work with people. Sometimes I think I really could do it—move to a farm and live there for the rest of my life. But I think I just want to go on holiday.”
Dream Wife isn\'t the kind of band to do things at half pace. See, for evidence, 2018’s fizzing self-titled debut, which the former Brighton University students—guitarist Alice Go, bassist Bella Podpadec, and singer Rakel Mjöll—recorded in just one week (squeezing in two high-octane live dates for good measure). But after two years of nonstop touring, the punk rock trio hit the pause button when it came to recording its follow-up, *So When You Gonna...*. “We had this moment to collect ourselves separately, and come back as sisters and as a well-oiled machine,” Go tells Apple Music. “We wrote this record in about six months, and it was the polar opposite of the experience of the first album. This time, we could just sit still with the songs and actually reflect.” Slowing down, however, meant burning no less brightly—the frenetic melodies and fearless lyrics that defined Dream Wife’s triumphant debut are all present and correct—but it did enable the band to showcase something of a softer side. As such, Dream Wife fully, as they put it, “lean into” their pop influences (think Blondie and Robyn) alongside helpings of indie, shoegaze, and even balladry. “There’s this light and shade in the body of work which is different to the first album,” admits Go. “We were really proud of the sounds we’ve been able to make, because there were a lot of things that we’ve been wanting to try for a really long time.” Between the unabashed, tongue-in-cheek fun of “Sports!” and empowered anthems about owning your desire (“Homesick,” “So When You Gonna...”), the band also gets personal—delving into the discombobulating nature of touring and relationships coming to an end. Then, in *So When You Gonna...*\'s most powerful, bare moments, they move into miscarriage and abortion. It’s a mix indebted to Rakel’s grandmother, who once told the band, “You’ve got to make them laugh before you can make them cry.” But such honesty is also the product of the all-female team Dream Wife assembled around them, led by producer Marta Salogni (Björk, FKA twigs). “This was a safe space. It didn’t feel like we were exposed,” says Go. \"It felt like we could push ourselves in these new ways and go to those difficult places.\" Below, let Dream Wife guide you through that process, one song at a time. **Sports!** Rakel Mjöll: “This song happened after a game of badminton. We had been touring a lot prior to writing and we just weren’t used to sitting down to play music. We needed some way of running about, so we took a lot of breaks. Often they’d lead to us playing badminton in the garden at Bella’s family home, where we wrote a lot of the album. None of us have really taken the time to learn the rules of badminton, so we kind of made our own rules. The only rule was never to apologize.” Alice Go: “It was about making your own rules and doing things on your own terms. Also: Sports have existed in this kind of macho environment. With us playing this rock song about sports, it was totally about taking ownership and doing things your way. I was fed a lie at school that sports were the only legitimate way to engage with your body. Through music, I’ve found profound and exciting other ways to do that. You don’t have to play by the rigid rules of school in order to be physical and active in your body.” **Hasta La Vista** AG: “I think of us as a rock band, but we really like pop music. With this album, it was about leaning into those pop sensibilities. There’s a lot of Blondie inspiration in the mix.” Bella Podpadec: “Our love of Blondie is especially prevalent here. This song is about being still enough to take stock of how your life is and what needs to be there and what needs to change or go.” RM: “This was the first song we wrote after touring. We’d had a few weeks off and realized that the people around us, the relationships, the places—everything—had changed. And so had we. It was a good song to be the first we wrote because we were sort of saying good bye to that time, and saying thank you in a way. When we finished writing it, we were like, ‘All right, thank you. Thank you for that time. Thank you for the change.’ So it was nice.” **Homesick** AG: “This track is kind of us hopping back to the more spiky sound from the first record, but with a pop sensibility. It’s us elevating that sound further. My memories of writing this and playing it are about being present in a sweaty room and just playing it and it’s kind of chugging and you’re riding it. It’s really nice that we’ve got a track like this in the mix. Lyrically, we thought of the Blondie song ‘Picture This’ and her lyric ‘I will give you my finest hour/The one I spent watching you shower.’ It’s a woman claiming her sexuality and being like, ‘I’m telling you, I’m looking at you. And I like it.’ There’s something so bold about that. It\'s all about women observing something that she finds sexy. It’s so powerful.” RM: “That conversation about those Blondie lyrics gave way to the line ‘Tongue, cheek, nip, clit, take a peek and then come up for air.’ It’s basically teaching you about oral sex. Our label manager was listening to the songs and was like, ‘You do realize there\'s two songs on this record with the word “clit” in it.’ I\'m like, ‘Yeah, duh. Is that going to be a problem for radio?’” **Validation** AG: “I love the way Rakel wrote the lyrics on this, because it weaves in a lot of those moments about coming back from touring. We were coming back into contact with our friends, with our community, and to me, the song is like this little story of those moments of coming back to land and finding our place again. And acknowledging it and being grateful for it.” RM: “It’s also about this instant, absurd validation you have from being on stage for an hour a day. And then leaving that and reentering your world. The song goes into questioning yourself as a musician and ends with the validation of a lover. At the end, it talks about the different types of validation we have in our community. Sonically, there’s not really a chorus and it has one kind of tempo—one beat—and it doesn’t drop. It was so great to have that sort of song in the middle of the album.” BP: “Validation is kind of a really necessary part of human experience in a lot of ways. We need to have our humanity witnessed by others. I feel that is a really fundamental need, but like Rakel was saying, it\'s about questioning the places that you get validation from, and how it can be destructive as well as constructive.” **Temporary** AG: “We were talking about The Smiths while making this album. Here, we lean into a slightly softer guitar over a rougher guitar—those bittersweet Johnny Marr-type sounds. There’s an interplay here: The song is sad, but there’s also an element of hope in it. And the way it all pieces together is quite swift and catchy, which is yet another tone we\'ve been able broaden our palette out to on this record. This is a really simple pop song in many ways, and it was about letting that happen rather than pushing the punk thing or the live show thing so much.” RM: “We found the idea of pop songs tackling difficult subjects really interesting. The song is talking about the stigma behind miscarriages and going through heartbreak again and again, which is what a miscarriage is. It was written for a friend of ours who had multiple miscarriages in a short amount of time. The lyrical content is about putting your body through so much, and your heart through so much, and doing it again and again. It’s about having that strength. Something I’m not sure I would have personally. The song was written when that friend became pregnant for the third time. It was a prayer in a way, hoping that this might be the one, but that if it’s not, I’m here for you. We have your back, however it goes. She is due any day now. Third time\'s a charm.” **U Do U** AG: “There aren’t actually any guitar strings being played on this song. It’s pushing the sound a guitar can make. Honestly, it’s kind of about me rebelling against my guitar style in a way. It’s experimental, it’s almost shoegaze, it’s poppy. It feels really exciting to go into these territories. This song is about our shared experience on the road and knowing how that feels in this weird little unit traveling around and how lonely that can be.” RM: “I call this song a love letter to the touring musician. It’s about the camaraderie of musicians. You’re all away from your loved ones. You’re all living this life of having one foot at home and one foot in the tour van. You’re not living the same life that many of your friends back home are living. But you’re all thankful for being able to perform. This isn’t a breakup song, but it’s about the idea of accepting who you are and what you feel at the time. You can’t be a perfect partner at home when you want to play on that festival stage. I also just really wanted a ballad on this album. It was about pulling back and saying, ‘No, let’s not change this into a punk song.’ So it was also about exploring that side and exploring the silence too.” BP: “I think it really speaks to the importance of autonomy, centering your own experiences and feeding your own emotions. And that\'s a kind of weird thing to do when you\'re leaving big parts of your heart and other parts of the world, but it is absolutely fundamentally important and you can\'t live for other people.” **Rh Rn** AG: “The song is about the present moment. On tour, all you can do is be present, and it’s kind of about carrying that through into the writing space. The ‘right here right now’ part slightly drops in tempo. It’s kind of this magnetized thing—the song itself pulls you into the moment by just slowing down. This song has quite a luscious guitar backdrop, but also at its heart it’s an indie banger. It’s the combination of us being able to push it in the studio, but also, as a live band at our core, we need to be able to lock in and play a tight set. So the song feels like a crossbreed between us as a live band and how much we were able to dig in in the studio with Marta.” RM: “I really love that Alice called this song an indie banger. Because when we were writing that, we were like, ‘This is like an indie banger, isn\'t it? I didn\'t know we were indie, that’s exciting.’ We had gone on tour with The Vaccines and we were like, ‘We\'ve been influenced.’ And that came out in this song, our little indie banger.” **Old Flame** RM: “Like with ‘Rh Rn,’ this song was about grabbing you in the moment to feel present. But with this song, the most important part was to get into that tempo of excitement, similar to Robyn and how some of her songs are. The song is talking about something that is familiar but also extremely exciting at the same time.” AG: “When we wrote it, we knew we wanted this pulsating synth. We were talking a lot about Prince, and the idea of the synth that never ends. It kind of speaks to this old flame. And again, it was about elevating it in the studio, and, actually, it’s a bit of an unashamed synth-pop banger. I used EBows on the guitar to create this warm atmosphere. There’s an element of this song that reminds me of Fleetwood Mac. It’s kind of classic. It feels to me like the more sophisticated songwriting—like a level up in our ability as songwriters.” **So When You Gonna...** RM: “This whole song is a buildup, which I love. There’s an excitement. It’s like, ‘Is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? Come on. I\'ve been waiting forever.’ And then the end, everything cuts loose because it happened, it actually happened. And then I love the fact that the song ends by saying, ‘It was all right.’ It’s often about the buildup rather than the event itself. And it was just so fun to write a song about that, especially as the female voice that\'s like, ‘So when are you going to stop talking? You\'ve been talking for nine hours.’” AG: “We played this song live, and when we recorded it, the energy of it was just instant. It absolutely popped off in the room. And I think yet again this one is another song that kind of does hark back to what we were trying to do on the first record, getting a raw live energy on track. And it\'s a real sort of homage to the live show and to the first record, I think.” RM: “We realized it was a good song when we played it live during festival season last year. Because people went absolutely nuts for it. There were mosh pits, people would be smiling and screaming and clapping. And we were like, ‘You\'ve never heard this song before.’” **Hold on Me** BP: “When we\'re relating closely to people, especially in sexual environments or sexual situations, there is often a perceived sense of ownership, whether that\'s real or imaginary, whether that\'s stemming from the other person or is internal. And I think, for me, this song is kind of questioning that sense of ownership and those systems of ownership.” RM: “Musically, the song is looping quite a lot. And the repetitiveness of the question ‘Why do you have this hold on me?’—I didn’t originally think about it that way, but after we wrote it, I connected those two things together. The whole song is a conflict between your inner thoughts.” AG: “I think as a song, it\'s amazing how it can kind of cut through many different situations. It feels very emotional to me, and that kind of feeling is reflected in the form of the song in the circular nature of the back-and-forth with the inner mind, for sure.” **After the Rain** AG: “The last minute of the album is rain. I went up Blythe Hill \[in South East London\] to record it. People were actually setting off fireworks, and Marta meticulously edited this to edit them all out. It felt really important to end on this really still, reflective moment. It felt like giving the song, and its message, the moment it deserved. We wrote the song in a bit of a different way because it felt important to create the tapestry to let the lyrics and meaning of the song shine. We had to deliver that message in a respectful way.” RM: “The song was originally a voice memo I recorded. Lyrically, I don\'t think it changed from that at all. It\'s that kind of sincerity and melody of me having a conversation with my sister, and her going through the difficult stages of shock of realizing that she\'s pregnant and that she didn’t want to have the child. Going through these multiple waves of community shame, and lack of trust, of also being disconnected from your own body. And not being able to articulate those feelings. We were talking and I picked up the phone and sort of wrote what she was saying to me, but in song format. And then I sent it to her, shortly after our conversation. And she felt like I was being able to speak the words she could not say. She used the voice memo as a kind of mantra of healing. We spoke a lot about the silence on this song. That was important, because the silence is also an instrument. It was a really beautiful way of approaching something, of keeping it close to the voice memo of the initial feeling, and then have it turn into a song.”
Dream Wife (Alice Go, Bella Podpadec and Rakel Mjöll) are back with their second album and just like the title suggests, this is a record brimming with adrenaline and playful excitement (“It’s an invitation, a challenge, a call to action,” says Rakel). From the jagged, CSS-like guitar of “So When You Gonna…” to the hooky brightness of album opener “Sports!” and the whip-smart lyrical asides of “Validation”, these are moreish, pumped up, sparkling tracks that feel like newer, dynamic evolutions of debut standouts, like “F.U.U.” and “Hey Heartbreaker.” But they often lean into sweeter, softer, more emotional moments too. “Temporary” and “After the Rain” in particular – songs about miscarriage and abortion, respectively – are complicated, painful stories told through a soft and hopeful lens. These were difficult subjects to write about, but Dream Wife think it’s important to bring these conversations into the public sphere, to refuse to brush things under the rug, to empower and support others in the process. Dream Wife have always been outspoken about holding up other womxn and non-binary people in the creative industries, but these aren’t just words or sentiments. With a gender divide in music production currently estimated at around ninety-five percent male to five percent female, the band are proud to have worked with an all-female recording team for So When You Gonna..., including producer and mixer Marta Salogni (Björk, Holly Herndon, FKA Twigs) engineer Grace Banks (David Wrench, Marika Hackman) and mastering engineer Heba Kadry (Princess Nokia, Alex G, Beach House). “It was a way of us practicing what we preach,” says Alice, “It felt like an honour to be able to deliver this baby with these three amazing midwives.” “Put your money where your mouth is!” adds Rakel, quoting the lyrics of “Sports!”
Welcome to Calvary Falls, where the world of one quiet, snowy American town is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious man…to catastrophic results. Creeper has never been a band to accept limitations on their ambitious designs; 2017’s debut album, *Eternity, In Your Arms*, took broad brushstrokes of Peter Pan, weaved in the fantastical story of a paranormal investigator’s disappearance, and set it, as one would fully expect, in Southampton. On *Sex, Death & the Infinite Void*, their second full-length concept album, such scale and vision isn’t simply confined to their storytelling. “Creating this record was about ignoring the things that had trapped us in the past,” frontman Will Gould tells Apple Music. “I wanted to ignore what had come before, and prove wrong everyone that said no band could advance their sound so dramatically without alienating your fanbase.” And so this love-triangle tale of lust, envy, and wrath plays out to a soundtrack of British glam rock, Americana country, 1950s doo-wop, and their stock-in-trade: emo punk hooks. A first visit to any strange place requires a good tour guide to uncover its true depths, however, so who better to show you the sights of Calvary Falls than Gould himself? **Hallelujah!** “Our opening is spoken by Patricia Morrison, from The Sisters of Mercy and The Damned, who we met at the Kerrang! magazine awards show in London last year \[2019\]. A little while later I had this spoken-word idea to open the record, and asked Patricia. We sat inside this studio in London and did all of the dialogue between us. I described how I wanted a sort of Madame Leota character from Disney’s The Haunted Mansion \[ride\], and she knew exactly what I meant. This opens our whole story, and sets up the marriage of Annabelle, who Patricia voices throughout the album’s interludes, and the villain of our piece, Buddy.” **Be My End** “It took a long time to decide what the first song proper on the album should be. It isn’t a drastic departure in sound for us, which I felt important on an album that otherwise is a big change for us, while it also lays out the apocalyptic nature of the prophecy brought forward by our main character, Roe, who arrives in Calvary Falls with the message that the world as people know it will end in seven days. The whole piece is summarized by the opening lyric: ‘Will you be my Armageddon?’ It has a very Creeper chorus—over the top and vaudevillian—while the bridge contains a theremin, which we recreated the sound of on an emulator as none of us could play the actual thing.” **Born Cold** “This was the very first song we wrote for the record—it’s the nucleus of the whole piece. I already had the narrative for this album before even writing this song, which introduces the character of Roe, a man who can’t feel and has fallen to Earth. A lot of this record in fact was based on Marilyn Manson’s interpretation of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, on Manson’s *Mechanical Animals* album. I was obsessed with that record when I was younger.” **Cyanide** “This song was the result of a very difficult time. My songwriting partner, Ian \[Miles, guitar\], was very sick for a time. He was receiving treatment in Brighton when we were supposed to be writing together in Los Angeles, so we found ourselves trying to write via FaceTime. Nothing was working. I went for breakfast one day off the Sunset Strip, and T. Rex came on over the speakers. ‘This is what we should be doing!’ I started saying. ‘People think Creeper are a pop-punk band with eyeliner, but we’re a glam rock band!’ My manager was eating his food in silence opposite me and—I’ll never forget it—he calmly put his cutlery down, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, just go and do it, then.’ We went back to the studio and the whole song came together in about 30 minutes. It’s my real life seeping into this album; I was writing this song about Annabelle and Roe’s attraction to each other, but also about myself and what I was going through personally. It’s half reality, half fantasy, and that’s when Creeper is at its best.” **Annabelle** “I was obsessed with Suede when I was younger, and the opening beat here pays homage to their song ‘Trash.’ It was something intentionally English on a very American record. It’s a Britpop song, yet when it comes into the first lyrics, it might as well be a Green Day song. This introduces Annabelle further, while Roe is learning that sinning is part of being human: ‘God can’t save us, so let’s live like sinners.’ That went back to when we played the Warped Tour one year and had a run-in with the Westboro Baptist Church, who were picketing the event.” **Paradise** “This is written from the point of view of our villain, Buddy Calvary. Roy Orbison was a really big influence on the country elements of this record, and when we were working on ‘Paradise’ we were watching the video to his song ‘I Drove All Night.’ The visual picture of the world we’re creating is something I always have in my mind when writing music, and this song was actually born from us muting that video and saying, ‘Let’s write a song to go with this.’ I always want lyrics to give you just enough for the listener to work with in imagining the place and characters, and then the music does the rest.” **Poisoned Heart** “Ian and myself wrote a number of songs in this alternative country vein, and this one stuck due to the chorus, which I love. It’s a song that will really divide people, I’m sure. There are similarities in our narrative to the first time you meet Roe and the first time you meet Buddy, and both have a poison heart in their own sense—Roe because he can’t feel anything, and Buddy because he’s had everything given to him; he may have loved Annabelle at one point, but his controlling nature has ruined their relationship. If this was a musical—and I really wish it was!—I would have both characters sing it, one verse each.” **Thorns of Love** “A long time ago, I was writing a musical called *Cosmic Love*, about a woman who fell to Earth and fell in love with a man from the 1980s. Some of the lyrics in the second verse are actually from the musical I wrote all those years ago—‘Lennon was shot in December time/Curtis was hung by washing line/1980s lovers died in twos.’ This is a doo-wop song in the vein of ‘Drive-In Saturday’ from the David Bowie record *Aladdin Sane*. Even though I wrote this song myself, it’s the contributions of other people that really make it: Ian with that Avenged Sevenfold-style solo, Patricia’s middle section that sounds like *The Rocky Horror Picture Show*, and Hannah’s \[Greenwood, keyboards and vocals\] ridiculous intro.” **Four Years Ago** “This is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra-style duet; a very delicate, feminine vocal meets the baritone male. I spent a long time trying to write a song for me and Hannah to sing, and it presents the disintegration of Annabelle and Buddy’s relationship. It’s opening up to the listener about how messed up this relationship is, after only giving little hints previously.” **Napalm Girls** “‘Napalm Girls’ is the coolest name for a song that anyone has ever come up with—and I didn’t even mean to call it that originally. This is where the road to the end of our story begins, and describes Roe and Annabelle getting together for the first time before running away to the top of a mountain for Roe to go back to whence he came. The lyric ‘She is a war in me/Her kiss is violence’ could sum up the last two years of my life, when you’re obsessed with someone and you’re first falling in love. I also hid a reference to my girlfriend’s favorite My Chemical Romance song in this.” **Black Moon** “Welcome to our album’s ‘death’ song, where Roe meets his demise at Buddy’s hands. At this point, Roe has become completely obsessed with Annabelle, and he’s a sinner now. He’s not the man from the start of the album who was ‘Born Cold’—he’s now transformed and has now become just as sinful as anyone. He is martyring himself and dying for the sins of this town—and closing our messed-up story. The title honors a long-standing tradition in our band of having the word ‘Black’ in the title of a song on each of our releases.” **All My Friends** “‘All My Friends’ is a departure from our narrative, and wasn’t meant to be on the album at all. I had originally written another ballad for this point, called ‘Shattered,’ which was really dramatic and about our character’s death. But I had also written this song late one night, while drunk, after Ian had fallen very sick, and it just so happened that some other people also heard it and encouraged me to develop it. It captures the darkest moment in my life. There’s a lot of realism in this record—the main romance; reflecting my own feelings of being an alien and an outsider in the music scene—but this song is the most real Creeper has ever been.”
“My first record was almost like a phone call asking, ‘Is there anyone out there who’s like me?’” YUNGBLUD tells Apple Music. “And it turned out there were millions of people. I found a community where I belong. And *weird!* is about them.” If that debut, 2018’s *21st Century Liability*, was propelled forward by the Doncaster artist’s anger at being misunderstood, *weird!* is an ode to optimism, as YUNGBLUD celebrates the healing power of finding your people across 13 songs inspired by his own. But *weird!*—a dizzingly diverse album influenced by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Amy Winehouse and the Arctic Monkeys—is also a deeply personal exploration of coming home to yourself after troubled times. “It was written after the weirdest 18 months of my entire existence,” says YUNGBLUD, whose real name is Dominic Harrison. “I nearly lost my mum in a car accident; \[YUNGBLUD\] got really fucking big, really fucking quickly; I fell in love and it was all over the internet, and then, when it didn’t work out, that was all over the internet, too.” Coming home in late 2019—and playing a sold-out show at London’s Brixton Academy—switched the lights back on after a period of heartbreak-induced depression. “After the show, at about four in the morning, I went up to Primrose Hill,” he recalls. “In the freezing cold, the lyrics to ‘weird!’ just came out. And that\'s when I knew what this album was going to be about. It was going to be an album of overcoming the weirdest, hardest times of your life. And knowing that you\'re going to be all right in the end.” Read on as YUNGBLUD talks us through the exhilarating *weird!*, one song at a time. **teresa** “I was in the studio and remembered that a girl told me about her boyfriend passing away. They had come to the shows together. I wanted to write a song about this girl and her boyfriend being on the other side, watching over her. But there was also a resemblance between me and my fanbase—that no matter what happens to us, we\'re always looking out for each other. I wanted this song to start soft and then be like, ‘Bang, the album’s off.’ It has four tempo changes; the middle eight is like The Beatles and then it sounds like Queen at the end. I produced the album with \[US songwriter\] Chris Greatti, who is so unashamedly pretentious. I was like, ‘I’m going to match your pretentiousness.’ The end of this song was just us trying to top each other.” **cotton candy** “I see this as a plaster for the punch in the gut from the ending of ‘teresa.’ I wrote this with Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, and Omer Fedi, while Chris and Zakk Cervini produced it. I was like, ‘I wanted to write a song about sex,’ and I literally stripped down to my underpants—consensually, of course—and did the whole session in my underpants. It\'s like the most bubblegum YUNGBLUD song ever, but it\'s naughty. It was written and produced in three hours. Take your clothes off, sing about sex, and it’s done!” **strawberry lipstick** “The opening of this song says, ‘This is a song about a person I love.’ It’s talking about yourself. I fucking hated myself when I wrote that song. I was fighting with people about my sound. And I was like, ‘All right. You want to fucking normalize me? I\'m going to dye my hair red, I\'m going to write a fucking punk song, and I\'m going to wear a Union Jack dress on its cover.’ That\'s what I\'m like. I had the \[Channel 4 show\] *Fresh Meat* on repeat when I was writing this song, as well as the Oasis documentary *Supersonic*, because I was locked down in LA and craving England. The song came out—and was written, recorded, and finished—in one night.” **mars** “This was the hardest song on this album—it took a year for me to get it right. It’s about a young trans girl I met in Maryland. She told me that her parents couldn’t fathom the idea of her being trans. They thought it was just some sort of phase. All she wanted to do was get her parents to a YUNGBLUD show, because maybe they\'d see other people like her. So she saved up and came with her parents. They saw the passion, the energy, the noise, and the sheer reluctance to be anything other than who \[my fans\] are, and they accepted her as their baby girl. I can\'t find her, and I don\'t know if I want to. My dream is to go to Maryland one day and play some arena. I’ll know it\'s about her, she\'ll know it\'s about her, but no one else does. And that’s just the most magic thing in the world.” **superdeadfriends** “I wanted this to feel like the Beastie Boys meets Happy Mondays. But then we put the 808 drums on and my voice to make it modern. The song is about drugs and about losing my peers to drugs. I’m not going to be naive and tell people not to take drugs. But it\'s just a song about doing it safely, because the high ain\'t worth losing your life or a friend. It\'s a song about wanting to escape. Be free, have fun, let loose—but do it with caution.” **love song** “The first YUNGBLUD love song. I don’t say this very often, but I had a lot of violence in my house growing up. I was always very loved as a kid, but my idea of love—and what it meant to fall in love—got skewed. It was like, ‘If this is love, fuck that shit. I\'m going to be all right on my own, thank you very much.’ But then I met someone and I fell in love and I realized I\'d never been more wrong in my life. I learned so much—she was incredible and we were incredible together. But I didn’t just want to write a song about falling in love or being heartbroken, because no one can prepare you for the pain of heartbreak. It’s about falling in and out of love—with your arms open.” **god save me, but don\'t drown me out** “I wrote this in June 2020, at 4 am. We were in the studio doing finishing touches before playing the album to my label the next day. I could feel about nine months of bottled emotion crawling up my back. I just looked at everyone and I was like, ‘Yo, put the kettle on.’ And I went in the booth to record and I just started crying my eyes out. I grew up two years in about 20 minutes. I think you can hear my crying in the song. I just needed help. Not from anyone else—I needed help from myself. It was like, ‘Come on, we’re going to be all right.’ And I think my body went, ‘Yeah, I think we are.’ This song is about overcoming anything. The world is yours if you want it.” **ice cream man** “This is a song that I\'ve been playing on the road for two years, that I wrote for a little bit of fun. This song makes me go, ‘I’m English, no one ever forget that.’ There’s a line in this song about hating myself and marrying my cousin. It’s about small towns and just about Donny \[Doncaster\]. It’s like, ‘I’m going to be my cross-dressing, lipstick-wearing self, even if it fucking kills you.’ I\'m not literally talking about marrying my cousin, obviously. But we may as well all be cousins, because we\'ve been here in the same fucking village for the past 100 years.” **weird!** “Almost everything I’ve said here, in one song. It’s about trying to catch smoke and feeling like the floor\'s going to move under you. And it has one of the most emotional lines on the album—‘I want luck. I want love. Sharing earphones on the bus, and wake up next to you in Glasgow.’ I just saw me in Fred Perry, with my Fred Perry-matching girlfriend or boyfriend on a bus that\'s condensated as fuck, sharing earphones listening to ‘A Certain Romance’ by the Arctic Monkeys. I wanted it to be a cinematic song. I want it to be like a series of *Skins* within an album. This became the title track because this is an album for the weirdest years of our lives. And I wanted to redefine what weird meant. I\'ve been called weird my whole life. And I used to hate the idea of being weird, but now I love it. Weird is about being different and celebrating individuality. I think to be weird is what it means to be truly free.” **charity** “Again, I wanted to make a song about being yourself. But I also wanted to make a song where I could pretend I was in every band I want to be in. I wanted to be Mike Skinner or Liam Gallagher or Lily Allen. The middle eight is like \[The Fratellis’ 2006 single\] ‘Chelsea Dagger’ 2.0. The lyric here is ‘Donate my brain to charity.’ It’s like, ‘If you don\'t like it, fucking give it away. Take me to a charity shop because some fucking cool kid is going to pick me up and put me on.’” **acting like that (feat. Machine Gun Kelly)** “This song is a direct representation of mine and Machine Gun Kelly’s relationship. We wanted the song to just make people lose control. We wrote it on a night where we were both sad because we had lost a colleague. And we were just like, ‘You’re way too cool to be acting sad tonight.’ We wanted to resonate the idea of you being at your favorite show, with your best friends, going absolutely crazy.” **it’s quiet in beverly hills** “I didn’t really think, ‘I’m going to do an acoustic song.’ I was in Hollywood, and I’m so English—I like Yorkshire tea and Hobnobs and I want people to tell the truth. But I just got caught up in Hollywood bollocks and in the paparazzi and the game that everyone plays to try and top each other. And I was like, I don\'t want to do this. I got into music to build a community. And now I\'m stood with a load of wankers talking about how their songs did last week on the radio chart. I was surrounding myself with friends who weren\'t really my friends, and I got lost. When I say, ‘I will love you for the rest of my life until you close your eyes for good,’ I\'m talking to my fanbase. Because they pull me out every time.” **the freak show** “This was like, ‘OK, I’ve given you an album, now I’m going to do something for myself.’ I wanted a \'Bohemian Rhapsody.’ There are four key changes, five time changes, and a big, dramatic ending. It’s every YUNGBLUD song squeezed into one. And it literally goes from a minor verse to a major chorus, it goes minor in the middle, then back to major, then back to minor again. Towards the end of the song, there is a line that says, ‘Times will change and you might break.’ I recorded it with no music—just to a click track. And I said, ‘Build on top of that. If the music tops my passion, I’ll record it again. But I dare you to try and top the passion of that vocal take.’ This song is a message to my fanbase. Times will change and you might break, but I will spend the rest of my life believing in you.”
Many fans first met Aluna through AlunaGeorge, the London electronic duo she formed with George Reid. On *Renaissance*, the singer-songwriter and producer strikes out on her own with a collection of brightly hued electro-pop that bewitches as it evolves. From the outset, the album is nothing but bottled ecstasy. “I\'ve Been Starting to Love All the Things I Hate,” the opening track, is a triumphant blast of optimism in the face of adversity: “Throw it all out, it\'s a new day/Doesn\'t matter if you can\'t, do it anyway,” she urges in a honeyed voice. Thematically, many of the songs hinge on the ups and downs of romance, but it never feels like anything less than joy. What\'s most captivating about *Renaissance*, though, is the range Aluna displays across the album: She\'s nimble, as she inhabits just the right tone for whatever style of production lies before her. Whether nestled in the pulsating bass of splashy dance pop (“Warrior,” “Envious,” “Body Pump”), simmering trap-R&B (“Off Guard”), or the intoxicating diasporic sounds of dancehall (“Get Paid”), reggae (“Surrender”), and Afropop (“The Recipe,” “Pressure”), she injects her own soulful magic to charming effect, a gift that keeps on giving.
The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”
