Double J's 50 Best Albums of 2024

Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.

When KAYTRANADA left the 2021 Grammys with two awards (Best Dance/Electronic Album for 2019’s *BUBBA* and Best Dance Recording for “10%”), he made history as the first Black and first openly gay artist to win the former category. The industry recognition was long overdue for the producer, who had been building a devout following for nearly a decade. “In my mind I was finally a true artist,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. After relocating to Los Angeles, he channeled that confidence into making his third solo album, *TIMELESS*: “It felt more serious—more legit. I was still having fun making *TIMELESS*, but making *BUBBA* was another type of fun where I didn’t really take it seriously.” Like its predecessor, *TIMELESS* is a collection of club grooves for catching a vibe. It’s packed with guests who effortlessly acclimate to KAYTRANADA’s singular sound while imprinting their own touch. PinkPantheress’ saccharine voice is richer on the squiggly house beat of “Snap My Finger,” Ravyn Lenae offers breathy seductions on the hard-edged R&B of “Video,” and Thundercat delivers comical disses in soothing falsetto on the jazzy hip-hop of “Wasted Words.” Back-to-back tracks “Do 2 Me” (featuring Anderson .Paak and SiR) and “Witchy” (featuring Childish Gambino) hit an energy peak, their tales of late-night infatuation framed by sultry, body-enveloping production. If *BUBBA* was about finding KAYTRANADA’s sound, *TIMELESS* expands it. The producer is in what he calls his “experimental bag,” and Channel Tres joins him in it on the incendiary “Drip Sweat.” Channel’s trademark baritone drifts in and out of disembodied Auto-Tune, dropping bars over punchy drums and breaks sampled from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” “We were just making the funkiest thing, like how it would sound if we did new jack swing today,” KAYTRANADA says. “What is that Bobby Brown energy? We were trying to give it that.” He tries out AI sampling on the breezy instrumental “Seemingly.” He also sings on a track for the first time on the Weeknd-inspired “Stepped On,” creating his version of ’80s New Wave with strobing synths and a dark disposition. With a new skill unlocked, *TIMELESS* makes room for another KAYTRANADA evolution.

“I wanted the album to feel really fun,” Amyl and The Sniffers vocalist Amy Taylor tells Apple Music of *Cartoon Darkness*, the Australian quartet’s third full-length. That goal does, however, come with a caveat: “I wanted it to feel fun without putting up the blinkers and being like, everything’s sweet, all good. Things are really weird and things are pretty bad and there’s a lot of things to be stressed about, but there’s the balance of it. Not to encourage people to ignore the bad, but to try and find more of a balance.” So while *Cartoon Darkness* finds Taylor confronting issues such as body positivity, the ills of social media, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s impact on society and people’s wellbeing, she does so with an unrelenting lust for life and an indefatigable spirit that, on songs such as “Jerkin’” and “Motorbike Song,” adheres to the adage that life is for the living. Recorded with Nick Launay (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which boasts the same mixing desk on which Nirvana recorded *Nevermind* and Fleetwood Mac did *Rumours* (“I really didn’t want to spill anything on it,” laughs Taylor), the band approached *Cartoon Darkness* with a specific sonic goal in mind. “Bryce \[Wilson, drums\] and Declan \[Martens, guitar\] were really keen to try and explore different sounds and make it feel a bit more like a studio album,” says Taylor. Adds Martens: “In the past we’ve tried to see how everything would relate to when we perform it live. And even though a lot of these songs will be included in the set, I think we just wanted to make sure the focus was on making the best listening experience at home rather than making the best songs to be taken live.” A typically fiery slice of raw punk rock, albeit one that takes a breather on the gentler “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me,” the end result is what Taylor calls “the first album we feel really proud of from the get go.” Here, Taylor and Martens walk Apple Music through *Cartoon Darkness*, track by track. **“Jerkin’”** Amy Taylor: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek poke at keyboard warriors, at the haters in general. It’s just a fuck you to anyone who’s down to accept it.” Declan Martens: “This was conceived earlier than the intense writing period. We came up with it in the early half of 2023. It has a good intensity. Despite this being our attempt at a studio album it does replicate what we do live, which is straightaway energy.” AT: “I really wanted to write a song that big-upped yourself while bringing down the haters. I wanted it to be like, ‘I’m sick, you’re shit.’” **“Chewing Gum”** AT: “So much of life is just a carrot dangled in front of your head, like you’re just around the corner from being able to take a break, or the goodness is always just around the corner. And it’s so much hard work. Under capitalism you’re just constantly working for goals you can never seem to hit. I feel that robs people of themselves and robs people of happiness and joy. Something else that robs people of those things is criticism and judgment. I think with social media, a lot of people are constantly bombarded with how they should be and what they could do and what they might be and how bad they are. I feel that robs people of the joy of making mistakes, and making mistakes is so important for growing up. I want to make the wrong decision sometimes, and I want to have fun and I want to feel love even if that’s a wrong decision, even if that’s a dumb decision, because what else is the point?” **“Tiny Bikini”** AT: “I always try and consciously surround myself with women, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Even in the studio I was the only lady of maybe eight dudes in the room. So I was just channeling that energy going, ‘Yeah it’s technically my space, but I’m the only one here in a bikini.’ I think a lot of my experience in life is being the only lady, and I feel like, for me, I love expressing myself in slutty ways. The world is a boring place, and to dress up or to be scantily clad or just be interesting is something I value, so that song is going, ‘That’s what I like.’” **“Big Dreams”** DM: “I write a whole scope of heavy and soft songs, and finding the softer songs’ place in Amyl and The Sniffers has always been a challenge; I’ve had a fear of doing it. So I showed it to Amy and she really enjoyed it and encouraged it. I think a lot of the misconception is that it’s experimenting, but I feel like these sorts of songs have always been in us. I prefer to refer to it as exploring rather than experimenting.” AT: “A lot of people in my life have really big dreams and they are really talented, and they are trying to make something of themselves. The world is a harsh place, and even if they’re super talented, it’s really difficult because of the cost of living and the oversaturation of everything. And it’s like we’re all getting older and a lot of people’s dreams may not happen, but that internal energy, it’s still swirling inside you.” **“It’s Mine”** DM: “The guitar \[has\] a really odd tuning that I’d never used before. Me and Nick \[Launay\] had worked to get this really direct, harsh, aggressive guitar sound, and that’s what makes it unique—it makes it sound like you’ve just stuck your head in a bucket of bees swarming.” AT: “Lyrically, it’s a subconscious dump trying to explore lots of different themes—the pressures of bodies to be perfect, and it’s saying it might not be perfect but it’s mine. And dipping into the confusion of consumerism and getting swept up and wanting to buy stuff. It’s a big mix of that.” **“Motorbike Song”** AT: “It’s a yearning for freedom. Life can be so stuffy, especially with screens and technology, so much of it is sitting still and looking at a screen for hours. I just saw a motorbike driving along and I wanted to embody the motorbike. I don’t want to ride it, I want to be the motorbike.” DM: “When we were working it out it felt like a So-Cal, ’80s punk song and it developed into more of a Motörhead-type thing. It’s fun, it’s got my most guitar solos on one song ever.” **“Doing in Me Head”** DM: “I was trying to write a disco song. I wanted it to be like The Gap Band. But I guess when you bring it to some Australian punks it comes out as ‘Doing in Me Head.’” AT: “This song kind of embodies the whole of *Cartoon Darkness*. Like it touches on the fact we all use our phones and social media, and they favor outrage, and subconsciously the system floods us with negative emotions and then it profits off that. It kind of dictates our life, not the other way around. You have to favor the algorithm, it won’t favor you. And talking about how spoon-fed our generation especially is and the lack of critical thinking.” **“Pigs”** AT: “Sometimes people are like, I know more so, therefore, I’m better than you and you’re an idiot. I don’t agree with that, because I’ve been on both sides of knowing stuff and not knowing stuff, and being an idiot and being a legend. So this song is saying, ‘We’re all pigs, you’re not better than me, we’re all just pigs in the mud.’” DM: “I’m really fond of the chorus. It’s a recycled riff that I wrote before our self-titled album that we jammed on but never became a song. Now, with my new knowledge in music, five or six years on, I found a way to make it interesting. I remember seeing that excitement in Amy’s face when I first started playing it differently.” **“Bailing on Me”** AT: “I was really struggling to write lyrics to it and figure out what to say and Declan was like, ‘I think it’s a sexy song, try and make it horny.’ I was trying to do that but was like, ‘I really don’t get that vibe from this song.’ So I ended up making it a heartbreak song.” DM: “I think it’s interesting that my intention was horny and Amy interprets heartbreak. I think that’s a funny way of looking at it.” **“U Should Not Be Doing That”** AT: “So much of my experience in the music world has been people trying to hold me back with their negativity and their limitations. Because they’ve made limitations for themselves that I don’t subscribe to. They might be saying you shouldn’t be doing that and I can’t believe you’re doing that, but I am doing it, and you’re not. I’m over here experiencing this with the choices that I’ve made, and you’re down in Melbourne having a bitch while you’re doing lines at 4am with other 50-year-olds, bitching about a 24-year-old. There are Facebook groups with old rockers being like, ‘I don’t like that band, she’s crap.’ Kiss my arse!” **“Do It Do It”** AT: “For some reason I always imagine some random athlete trying to listen to this to gee up, so that’s what it’s about. Someone being like, ‘Yeah I’ll fuckin’ get up and run.’” DM: “This was the last riff I came up with before moving to the US. The working title for it was ‘Pornhub Awards’ because, the night before, I found a free ticket to the Pornhub Awards. I didn’t win anything.” **“Going Somewhere”** AT: “Anyone can find dirt, but it takes hard work to find gold. It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People are just lazy, and they’re not trying hard enough to find the good in stuff. There’s no perfect world and there’s not going to be utopia, because utopia would be dystopia anyway. It’s just saying I’m going to go somewhere, hopefully you can come there too.” **“Me and The Girls”** DM: “Amy sent me this hip-hop song that had like an Eddie Van Halen sort of guitar sample in it, and I was like, ‘I’ve got a riff that’s super repetitive, almost like a sample, a loop, and I wrote it when I was 21. It’s called ‘Fry Pan Fingers,’ because I used to stick my fingers on the frying pan to callous them before gigs when I was young.’ So I was like, ‘All right, Amy, here’s this repetitive \[riff\], like a hip-hop loop that I’ve got.’” AT: “I needed a lyric for the chorus, so I was like, ‘Declan, now’s your chance, do you want to do a duet?’ I said, ‘Me and the girls are drunk at the airport,’ and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe that it’s an open bar,’ and I loved it, but everyone else was like, this is a bit weird. We’d been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys so we were like, let’s add in the vocoder \[on his voice\] and make it sound like that.”

There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.

It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn\'t really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they\'re very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.” In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s *Ghosteen*, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be. Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, *Wild God* finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marveling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don\'t matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. *Wild God* is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.” It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake,” a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it\'s just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band\'s influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We\'re not taking it too seriously in a way, although it\'s a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.” There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy,” the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn\'t necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it\'s these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record\'s full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.” While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, *Wild God* shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there\'s one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that \[wife\] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that\'s why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it\'s just full of life and it\'s full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.” Read on as Cave takes us inside a few highlights from the album: **“Wild God”** “I was actually going to call the record *Joy*, but chose *Wild God* in the end because I thought the word ‘joy’ may be misunderstood in a way. ‘Wild God’ is just two pieces of music chopped together—an edit. That song didn\'t really work quite right. So we thought, ‘Well, let\'s get someone else to mix it.’ And me and Warren thought about that for a while. I personally really loved the sound of \[producer Dave Fridmann’s work with\] MGMT, and The Flaming Lips, stuff—it had this immediacy about it that I really liked. So we went to Buffalo with the recordings and Dave did a song each day, disappeared into the control room and mixed it without inviting us in. It was the strangest thing. And then he emerges from the studio and says, ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’ When we came in it sounded so different. We were shocked. And then after we played it again, we heard that he traded in all the intricacies and stateliness of The Bad Seeds for just pure unambiguous emotion.” **“Frogs”** “Improvising and ad-libbing is still very much the way we go about making music. ‘Frogs’ is essentially a song that I had some words to, but I just walked in and started singing over the top of this piece of music that we\'d constructed without any real understanding of the song itself. There\'s no formal construction—it just keeps going, very randomly. There\'s a sort of freedom and mystery to that stuff that I find really compelling. I sang it as a guide, but listening to it back was like, ‘Wow, I don\'t know how to go and repeat that in any way, but it feels like it\'s talking about something way beyond what the song initially had to offer.’” **“Joy”** “‘Joy’ is a wholly improvised one-take without me having any real understanding of what Warren is doing musically. It’s written in that same questing way of first takes. I\'m just singing stuff over a kind of chord pattern that he\'s got. I sort of intuit it in some way that it’s a blues form to it, so I’m attempting to sing a blues vocal over the top, rhyming in a blues tradition.” **“Final Rescue Attempt”** “That was a song that we weren\'t putting on the record. It was a late addition, just hanging around. And I think Dave Fridmann actually said, ‘Look, I\'ve mixed this song. It doesn\'t seem to be on the record. What the fuck?’ It feels a little different in a way to me. But it\'s a very beautiful song, very beautiful. And I guess it was just so simple in its way, or at least the first verse literally describes the situation that I think is actually in the book, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*, where Susie decided to come back to me after eight months or so, and rode back to my house where I was living, on a bicycle. It’s a depiction of that scene, so maybe I shied away from it for that reason. I don\'t know. But I\'m really glad.” **“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”** “That song is an attempt to encapsulate what Anita Lane was like, and we all loved her very much and were all shocked to the core by her death. In her early days when we were together, she was this bright, shiny, happy, laughing, flaming thing, and we were the dark, drug-addicted men that circled around her. And I wanted to just write a song that had that. She was a laughing creature, and I wanted to work out a way of expressing that. It\'s such a beautifully innocent song in a way.”

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

When Missy Higgins wrote her acclaimed 2004 debut, *The Sound of White*, it was the work of a young artist cataloging in unflinching detail the confusing journey from her teens into adulthood. Twenty years later, *The Second Act* is a similarly confessional outing—so much so that Higgins regards it almost as a sequel to her debut—only this time the Melbourne-born singer-songwriter is standing on the cusp of middle age, reeling from the divorce from her partner and father of their two children. “There’s not really any songs about our actual relationship or even the breakup,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s all about what happened after and the rebuilding that I had to do. And I guess the feeling of having to start again and reassess everything that you stand for and your identity and how you’re going to move forward now that your old narrative has completely burned to the ground. I think a lot of the things I was trying to work through as I was writing these songs is how do I just learn to let go and accept that I am where I am and I don’t actually have any control?” The majority of those writing sessions took place at night in Higgins’ home studio once her children were asleep. “So most of the demos are very quiet, I’m almost whisper-singing into my phone,” she says. “When I went to record them, I wanted it to feel like I was still in that place where I wrote them—I wanted the songs to reflect that feeling of introspection and aloneness and quietness, and I wanted them to \[have\] the raw emotion of when I wrote them.” While there is hope to be found in the joyful folk of “Craters” and majestic closer “Blue Velvet Dress,” ultimately *The Second Act* is mired in sadness. “I would have much rather written a very ‘I am woman, hear me roar, life’s better than ever now I’m single and empowered’ kind of album, but that’s not what I was feeling at the time so it wouldn’t have been genuine,” admits Higgins. Here, the songwriter takes Apple Music through *The Second Act*, track by track. **“You Should Run”** “It was quite hard choosing the order of the songs because I would have liked to have done it chronologically, as in start with the songs about the earlier days and then finish with the songs where it felt like I’d ended up. But grief doesn’t really work like that—you’re good one day and then you’re back at the start the next. So I wanted to start with ‘You Should Run’ because I feel like it’s a quite engaging lyric and it seems to sum up quite a bit about my general headspace when I was writing this album. It’s a song about trying to move on after a big breakup and the messiness and complication of opening your heart to someone new when you still feel very broken and damaged, and you feel like your life, especially as a single parent, is a lot for someone else to take on.” **“A Complicated Truth”** “When I wrote this song, I had a day when the kids weren’t at home and it was a wintry, windy day. I was sitting at the piano just watching the gumtrees sway outside and the house felt so empty. I felt a real absence of my kids. Not long before I wrote that song, \[my daughter\] Luna had been asking about her dad and I and why we had split up and why we couldn’t all live in the same house as a family, and it was really playing on my mind that I hadn’t given her the right answers. It’s really hard to know how to answer a five-year-old in language they’ll understand. So I thought if I could put the answers to her question in a song, or at least try and explain myself a bit better, then perhaps one day she might be able to listen to it and understand what went on a bit better, and have a little bit more of an idea of what it was like from our perspective and how complicated love can be when you’re a grown-up. That, ultimately, we tried our best and there’s still so much love in the family.” **“When 4 Became 3”** “This song was written from a place of really low self-confidence and a feeling of deep shame about what went on. And again trying to have a relationship and it just really not working because of the issues I was still grappling with as far as not being able to do the thing that I promised myself I would stick at till the end and give my kids that happy ending that I had always imagined for them. When I wrote that chorus—‘You should know I hate myself’—it was such a devastating thing to sing out loud and I was like, ‘Is this too full-on?’ But then I thought, ‘Bugger it, I’m making a decision to be as honest as possible on this album even if it’s a really pathetic, unflattering view that I have of myself.’” **“Craters”** “This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album. I was assessing all the songs and I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is a super-heavy record.’ \[*Laughs*\] I also wanted to write a song from the headspace that I was finding myself in more and more, which was this kind of darkly humorous place where I was starting to get a bit more distance from it and go, ‘This is not how I imagined things would end up, and it’s a bit embarrassing that everyone seems to know, and I can’t quite escape my new reality. It’s like I’m walking around with a big hole in my chest that everyone can see through.’ I wanted to express a bit of that lightness. It is also about looking at this big hole in my life and going, it’s all just part of the story.” **“The In-Between”** “It’s about trying to accept that you’re in this uncomfortable in-between space and learning to be OK with that. Some of the more hopeful songs on the album are about trying to look at my situation and see the positives in it and accept the unknown. Musically, I was listening to Angie McMahon’s album \[2023’s *Light, Dark, Light Again*\] quite a lot and that inspired this song. I picked up the guitar not long after.” **“The Second Act”** “This song was probably the first turning point for me when I had written a bunch of the more somber songs on the album, when I was really indulging my sadder side. I made a conscious decision to look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘What are the potential positives of this, and how can we look at this a different way?’ That’s when I realized, I’m 40, so I’m at the beginning of the second act of my life, and we don’t get many chances for reinventions in this life, or new beginnings. And I realized I was probably ready to close the last chapter and start looking ahead and trying to see things in a more optimistic way. I badly needed to let go of a lot of the guilt and shame I was holding onto and admit to myself that I was merely human, and we’re all just fumbling through life trying to figure out how the hell to do all the right things.” **“Don’t Make Me Love You”** “I wrote this song on the baritone guitar. It has a little bit of an alt-country feel to me, and I wanted it to sound a little bit Cowboy Junkies, like there was just a few people in the room with some reverb, playing the song live. It turned out to be one of my favorite feels on the album. There’s just an effortlessness to this song.” **“The Broken Ones”** “I was quite obsessed with figuring out how I could not keep making the same mistakes and how I managed to keep falling for people who were obviously not right for me in the long term. It occurred to me that I’m always drawn to people who are a little bit broken and a little bit unhinged, and that I find that quality really alluring. Then I thought, ‘I’ve never felt like I was particularly normal or conventional either,’ so I guess it’s a song about realizing that that’s my pattern and trying to figure out how to break that pattern because like I say in the song, ‘I’m a life jacket made of concrete.’ These people that I’m attracted to are probably looking at me to save them, and I have absolutely no ability to because I’m just as messed up as they are.” **“Story for the Ages”** “This is the first one I wrote for the album. And it took me a long time to write, because it had taken me about a year after the relationship ended to be able to write at all. I felt like I didn’t know how to articulate what I was going through and where I was. It took me a long time to realize how strong a narrative I must have written for myself and that I was still very much in denial that I couldn’t make that story work. It’s a song mourning the loss of the future I thought I was going to have. It was a real exorcism that had to happen, to get those words out of me, because that was a really hard thing to admit to myself.” **“Hush Now”** “It’s for my son. This is the only song on the album that was written a little while ago; I wrote this a few years ago. It just felt like it fit on this album. I wrote it about that feeling that your kids are growing up so fast, and year by year they slowly drift away. And me being the emotional person that I am I started looking into the future and realizing that he’ll be his own person one day and completely independent, and hoping he still likes me and wants to come and visit. Parenting is a very slow letting go of your children, and it’s devastating to think about sometimes.” **“Blue Velvet Dress”** “‘Blue Velvet Dress’ is the story of the night that my partner and I broke up. I was playing the ABC New Year’s Eve broadcast, and we’d broken up and I had to play on live television for millions of people across Australia. I’d been crying all day and I had almost no voice by the time I went onstage. Then afterwards, as the fireworks were going off over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, my band and I just huddled and hugged each other and I cried. It was beautiful. It made me realize that life goes on and I still have these amazing friendships. It felt very much like the fireworks were bringing in a new beginning for me and I was letting go of the old chapter. It’s called ‘Blue Velvet Dress’ because I was wearing a blue velvet dress that night, and that dress came to represent the old version of me that I needed to let go of.”

Jamie Smith’s 2015 debut solo album *In Colour* set the tone for an entire decade of left-of-center electronic music, but his long-awaited follow-up harbors zero pretension when it comes to trend-watching. Nine years later, *In Waves* sets its sights on the dance floor with glorious aplomb, the perfect complement to a string of body-moving singles that the iconic British producer has released in the preceding year and a half. “The collaboration element was helping me push things forward without having to think too much about myself on my own,” Smith tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. From there, the rest of *In Waves* came together in quick succession—and, suitably, the record’s rowdy and in-a-crowd feel was largely inspired by the solitude of the lockdown era, as well as dreams of how it would feel to play big tunes for huge audiences again. “I was starting to get excited about the idea of playing shows again,” Smith says. The guest list for this party is overflowing: Along with a practical reunion of his main outfit The xx on the dreamy “Waited All Night,” house music auteur and recent Beyoncé collaborator Honey Dijon lends her distinctive incantations to the squelch of “Baddy on the Floor,” while experimental-leaning vocalists Kelsey Lu and Panda Bear throw in on the soul-streaked and woozy “Dafodil.” But at the center of *In Waves* is a truly assured sense of confidence from Smith, who’s returned here with a set of club-ready cuts that’s truly crowd-pleasing—all without losing the distinctive touch that’s brought him so much deserved acclaim to this point. “One of the most inspiring things is to go out clubbing,” he says. “And I think you can have quite profound thoughts even in an altered state on the dance floor.”

“What’s more important than sharing your story?” sings Emily Wurramara on her second album. Arriving six years after her 2018 debut, it finds the Warnindhilyagwa songwriter in a markedly different place. She’s now a mother and a published author—thanks to her 2024 children’s book *Marringa Lullaby*, co-written with Sylvia Wurramarrba Tkac—and she lost her Brisbane home in a devastating fire in 2019. Taking its title from the Anindilyakwa word for “nothing,” *NARA* finds strength in that hard-earned life experience. It also branches out from the folk/roots direction heard on 2018’s *Milyakburra*, making fruitful forays into several other genres. Clubby beats and a disco hook punctuate “DTMN” (shorthand for “Don’t tell me nothin’”), while “Lordy Lordy” sees Gumbaynggirr man Tasman Keith add heavily treated vocals to a soul-searching dance anthem with the affecting refrain “Lordy, Lordy, what do we do now?” Other guests include Lisa Mitchell on the Pacific Islands-influenced “See Me There,” Wiradjuri man Zeppelin Hamilton (Velvet Trip) on the low-lit ballad “WWGBH” (“When we go back home”), and Wurramara’s younger brother Arringarri, making his musical debut on the duet “STFAFM” (“Stay the fuck away from me”). Other tunes incorporate ska guitar licks (“Boom Biddy Bye”), romantic neo-soul (“It’s You”), and rumbling rock catharsis (“FRIEND”). Everything here feels deeply personal, especially “Magic Woman Dancing”—penned when Wurramara was in high school—and the opening “Midnight Blues,” a tribute to her supportive mother. “I’ve been there,” she sings knowingly on the latter. “We’ve all been there before.”

Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.

There was a point early in the creation of the swaggering second record by Yard Act when the Leeds quartet realized they were holding themselves back and needed to let go. “We were putting some drones and synths on the track ‘Fizzy Fish,’ which was the first one we wrote for the record, and someone raised the point that we weren’t going to be able to do it live,” vocalist James Smith tells Apple Music. “But we quickly agreed we’d worry about that later. Once we cut our losses with the idea of how we could do it, there was no real discussion on the areas the album went to.” That sense of daring is at the heart of *Where’s My Utopia?*. The four-piece has emerged with a kaleidoscopic pop record that dramatically builds upon the playful post-punk of their 2022 debut *The Overload*, its expansive sound taking in Gorillaz-meets-Ian Dury future funk, art-rock wigouts, orchestral epics, careening disco punk, and explosive indie sing-alongs. *The Overload* earned them a Mercury nomination and the chance to rerecord 2022 single “100% Endurance” with star fan Elton John, and its follow-up finds Smith searching for meaning in the wake of all his dreams coming true. “The record is about me realizing that the thing I’d wanted since being a teenager wasn’t going to magically solve all the problems that I live with,” Smith explains, “and the idea that everyone just has problems regardless of what position they’re in. I’m starting to wonder now if we just create them for ourselves because it shouldn’t be this hard.” It’s a narrative arc delivered with Smith’s trademark humor but always laced with poignancy, their anthemic hooks even sharper than those that fired their debut to success. *Where’s My Utopia?* is a bold, brilliant second album from one of the decade’s most imaginative bands. Smith guides us through it, track by track. **“An Illusion”** “This song definitely sets the score for ‘This isn’t a minimalist guitar post-punk album this time.’ The chorus lyric really sets up the whole premise of the situation I ended up in—that I’m in love with an illusion—and the idea that being in a successful band would solve my problems. Then, whilst my head was so buried in this world that I couldn’t get out of because of how much energy and time it was sucking out of me, all my other principles fell by the wayside. This song’s probably harder on myself than most are. The verses are about me being pissed, which I was for 18 months, and basically being just a bit useless, which I’ve got out of now. I stopped drinking off the back of the touring, I learned that I had to.” **“We Make Hits”** “This was one of the last songs written. We wrote it in Ryan \[Needham, bassist\]’s spare bedroom in a break from touring. I think Ryan had been going for that kind of French disco, Daft Punk, Justice vibes and everything fell out of me quite fast. I started by writing the story of me and Ryan and how we started the band. With this song, we were acknowledging that we’d always had ambition and we’d always wanted to do something bigger with music. Even though, at our core, all we wanted to do was make music, we always knew we would quite like to see what it was like on the other side and achieve something.” **“Down by the Stream”** “This was written in Turin. Everyone else had gone out for a meal and I decided to stay in the hotel room and wrote it using Jay \[Russell, drummer\]’s laptop. I’ve been looking back on my childhood a little bit more since my son was born and projecting him into scenarios I was in, even though historical truth and accuracy is a vague thing in terms of songwriting. It’s not literal, but it draws on my childhood. I was framing myself as this struggling person who was having a bit of a rough time, doing the woe-is-me thing about being in a successful band. I realized that if I was going to ask that empathy of the listener, then I should make sure that there was some corruption within me as well and highlight that I’m not some innocent person. It’s me dragging myself through the mud to let people know that I’m capable of being a dickhead just like everyone else.” **“The Undertow”** “‘Down by the Stream’ starts by the stream and then the stream leads to the sea, and that’s where the sharks start circling. We’ve ended up at sea on ‘The Undertow.’ The stream is the journey into adulthood and the sea is the murky open waters of adulthood and being out on your own in the big, bad world, then getting caught by the undertow of the industry. This is a thank-you note to my wife, really, who’s supported me through this entire caper that I’ve ended up on and been solid as a rock through it. There’s a part of me that’ll never be able to understand why I was selfish enough to do this for a living and leave my family behind to do it, so I’ll always live with that.” **“Dream Job”** “I caught myself writing the chorus in an interview when we were in Europe. Someone asked how it felt to have done a song with Elton John and have a Mercury nomination and all these things and I wasn’t really in the room and I just went, ‘Yeah, it’s ace, it’s wicked.’ I just started listing all these positive words without actually taking stock of what they were saying. It’s funny because I don’t really know how those things have affected me. I definitely wanted them and I’m glad I got them but they just happen and you move on. You get asked about them a lot, and the truth is that you don’t really think of them. I feel like the second you start wearing your achievements with pride, you’re dead in the water. I think the whole album is trying to strike that balance between being cynical and maybe a bit arsey, but also going, at the same time, ‘Things are great!’ It can be both, and it is both for us, and that’s life, even if it’s your life or my life in this band I’m in.” **“Fizzy Fish”** “The lyrics changed a lot on this one—I was literally writing about Fizzy Fish sweets for about three verses originally. With those seeds, you don’t really know where you’re going with them a lot of the time, but you let your mind chase after it and see where it goes. The Fizzy Fish, it was nostalgia, it was going back to the playground and that’s me having a conversation with another version of me from my childhood or a parallel universe. Again, it’s set in a lake, going with the water theme, because that’s a stagnant body of water that’s separate from the sea. It stands alone from the rest of the album. It’s set in my subconscious. ‘The Undertow’ through to ‘Grifter’s Grief’ is one narrative arc that follows me going into this successful Yard Act. ‘Fizzy Fish’ is me learning to cope with this newfound spotlight and who I am, whether I’ve changed from who I was, whether that’s positive or negative and the fact you have to create new masks to deal with a public-facing job because you don’t want to give too much of yourself away but, ultimately, to connect with people is the entire reason you’re making music.” **“Petroleum”** “This is based on an incident that happened at a gig at Bognor Regis at the start of 2023, the point within the story where I hit the bottom. I bottled the gig. Not anything drastic, we got through a set, but I was really disappointed in myself and my performance that night. I told the audience I was bored and I didn’t want to be there. We’d bitten off more than we could chew and I hadn’t had a break in 18 months, and I had a bad gig. This looks at the idea of what is expected of musicians when they perform live and this consumerist demand that they deliver. I realized that people don’t actually want honesty, they want the version of honesty they’ve paid to see. It’s learning to deal with these extra masks that we develop. I was trying to get to the core of ‘How can I channel a true version of how I’m feeling into an enjoyable performance that people deserve to see?’ This whole song reignited my passion for playing live and I’ve since learned how to process my emotions and funnel them into a performance that creates something that I’m proud of.” **“When the Laughter Stops” (feat. Katy J Pearson)** “It’s maybe a reaction to a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, Yard Act is the fun band, the jokers, and they don’t take it too seriously,’ and we don’t—because you can’t—but it’s that whole sad-clown complex. We’re not base level: We feel things just the same as everyone else! A lot of this album is rooted in that paranoia of not being able to maintain this—because it felt like I couldn’t do it if what it took to make a living from this job was those first 18 months over and over again. Fortunately, it’s changed, it’s fine but it has to stay at this level for it to be OK. If it drops back below, it’s hard work being in a band.” **“Grifter’s Grief”** “This is to do with the fact that my entire job now is based around sucking electricity out of giant venues and getting on aeroplanes and constantly burning up road miles and air miles and sea miles just to selfishly make a living whilst the planet burns. I spoke to my dad about it and he was kicking off about something and I was like, ‘Yeah but, Dad, I do that, I get on planes all the time.’ He went, ‘Yeah, but you need to do it to work.’ And I was like, ‘But I don’t. I could get a job that doesn’t involve that.’ It’s that everyone’s selfish inherently, I think.” **“Blackpool Illuminations”** “This is probably the most important song on the album. When we do the zany and comical stuff, we’re always trying to do it so you can pull the rug from under people with a song like this and prove what we’re capable of if we really put our minds to it. We supported Foals in Blackpool in May 2022. I had such nostalgic memories of Blackpool from going as a kid. My wife and son came and joined us for those two nights with Foals, and we had a couple of days and weekend in Blackpool because I wanted to show my baby where I had holidays as a child. Seeing him walking along the promenade, I saw myself in him and realized that he was just following the exact same footsteps that I did when I was a kid. \[The song\] follows my journey through childhood to that moment, really—these footprints of the past that we leave and then the future treads over them in a very similar way.” **“A Vineyard for the North”** “This is the note of hope that comes at the end. Climate change punctuates the album but I didn’t want to write too heavily about it. I read an article that French vineyard owners are starting to buy land in the south of England—because of the rising temperature, the south of England is now \[in\] prime condition for growing grapes for champagne. I was thinking how, as it gets hotter, it works its way up the country. It’s clutching at straws in a sense but it’s more to do with human nature and our ability to adapt and problem solve. I don’t think the answer is that everyone in the north starts buying vineyards and growing grapes. But, in essence, it is that things will change and we’ll have to adapt, and there’s hope and there are avenues we can always take.”

It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”

If there were any remaining doubts as to hip-hop’s MVP, consider the decision stamped: Kendrick Lamar officially won 2024. There were whispers that Compton’s finest was working on an album in the wake of his feud with Drake, a once-in-a-generation beef that kept jaws dropped for months. (Perhaps you’ve heard of a little song called “Not Like Us,” an immediate entry into the canon of all-time great diss tracks.) After a sold-out celebration at the Kia Forum, an armful of Grammy nods and streaming records, and the headlining slot at next year’s Super Bowl, Lamar ties up his biggest year yet with a bow with his sixth album, *GNX*, the most legitimately surprising surprise drop since *BEYONCÉ* in 2013. Named for his beloved classic Buick, *GNX* finds Kendrick wielding a hatchet he’s by no means ready to bury, still channeling this summer’s cranked-to-11 energy. On “wacced out murals,” he’s riding around listening to Anita Baker, plotting on several downfalls: “It used to be fuck that n\*\*\*a, but now it’s plural/Fuck everybody, that’s on my body.” (Yes, there’s a nod to his Super Bowl drama with Lil Wayne.) If you’ve been holding your breath for Jack Antonoff to link with Mustard, wait no more—the seemingly odd couple share production credits on multiple tracks, the explosive “tv off” among them. Still, K.Dot keeps you guessing: It’s not quite 12 tracks of straight venom over world-conquering West Coast beats. SZA helps cool things down on the Luther Vandross-sampling “luther,” while Lamar snatches back a borrowed title on “heart pt. 6” to remember the early days of TDE: “Grinding with my brothers, it was us against them, no one above us/Bless our hearts.” He cycles through past lives over a flip of 2Pac’s “Made N\*\*\*\*z” on “reincarnated” before getting real with his father about war, peace, addiction, and ego death, and on “man at the garden,” he outlines his qualifications for the position of GOAT. Here’s another bullet point to add to that CV: On *GNX*, Lamar still surprises while giving the people exactly what they want.

“I knew from the start of making this album that it would be honoring \[Australia’s largest river system\] the Murray-Darling Basin, and more specifically the Barwon River that runs through Brewarrina,” DOBBY, aka Wollongong-born Filipino and Murrawarri/Ngemba artist Rhyan Clapham, tells Apple Music. “As I went on and started talking to certain people who guided me, it started becoming about the Bogan River and the Culgoa River. It was the story of these three rivers meeting within a kilometer of each other.” *Warrangu: River Story* explores the interconnectedness of these waterways and their cultural significance to First Nations people, while also examining the man-made ecological devastation that is destroying the Murray-Darling Basin due to over-irrigation, redirection of the waterways, and water theft. To tell this story, DOBBY ventured to his ancestral home—his grandmother was born and raised near Brewarrina; her father was born under a birthing tree on Murrawarri land on the Culgoa at Corella Station—to speak with relatives and First Nations community members. Recording their stories and piecing them into a narrative that flows across the album, DOBBY wrote a score to accompany the interviews, inspired by the rhythm, melody, and inflection of his subjects’ voices. He also incorporated found sounds, such as the crack of sticks and stones in the dry riverbeds, flowing water, and native birds like the pied butcherbird. Interspersed among these tracks is DOBBY’s organic, free-flowing hip-hop, which nods to Dilla in songs like “Language Is in the Land,” and features him rapping in English as well as local Aboriginal dialects Ngemba and Muruwari (“Dirrpi Yuin Patjulinya”). “This is very much an inner learning and a constant journey for me personally, to be able to connect and engage with my language and my culture, and what a way to be able to do it through hip-hop music,” he says. Here, DOBBY unravels the story of *Warrangu: River Story*, an album seven years in the making, track by track. **“River”** “\[Artist\] Brad Steadman is walking me through a dry riverbed, telling me what the Bogan River means in terms of its connection to the Barwon River, and how that connects to the Culgoa, and what that means for us Mob, for us Blackfellas, for us Indigenous peoples. He said, ‘If you stand in this river \[the Bogan\], and I stand in the Barwon River, the pattern in that water that my feet make will meet up with yours. It’s all interconnected.’” **“Dirrpi Yuin Patjulinya”** “‘Dirrpi Yuin Patjulinya’ means ‘the bird names himself.’ I recorded the \[pied butcherbird\] early morning at my Aunty Noeleen Shearer’s house in Brewarrina. That bird is completely unedited. The tempo is not touched, the melody is not touched. So it’s already singing that song. I just wanted to provide the music around it rather than shape the bird to me. It’s my amplification of that bird’s story as it overlooks the river.” **“NGAANDU”** “Aunty Josie Byno is a proud Murrawarri woman up in Weilmoringle. She’s talking to me at the waterhole at the Culgoa River in Brewarrina. She’s telling the story of what the waterhole meant to her as a kid, and again, I’m just providing what I’m hearing musically and responding underneath her with a bit of piano and a bit of a symphonic soundbed. What she’s talking about is also very part and parcel of what Brad’s talking about with the Bogan River—these rivers are connected.” **“Water”** “This is what we as community members and small towns throughout the Murray-Darling Basin feel about the entrapment of our water; the privatization of our water; the over-irrigation; the taking away of water from our community, from our farmers. We are seeing fish die in the tens of millions; we’re absolutely being greedy. Corporate greed is taking over this beautiful Murray-Darling Basin that continues to sustain us, but is under direct threat.” **“Matter of Time”** “‘Matter of Time’ is my heightened moment of doom and gloom. It’s the realization that if we don’t pay enough attention and hold these people accountable, then it’s only a matter of time before we’re going to lose this beautiful river system. We’re going to see much more ecological disaster and environmental catastrophe. How much can this river system take before we’ve done irreparable damage?” **“BOGARI”** “We’ve returned back to the Bogan River. Bogari is the word for the Bogan River. For me personally, it’s that eureka moment, when everything starts to click together. You can hear me say it in this track, because I had this moment when I’m listening to Brad \[Steadman\] speak and I go, ‘It’s all interconnected.’ There’s a couple of things musically happening as well. The beautiful piano that’s laid underneath his voice starts to click into the same rhythm and pattern that I had underneath Aunty Josie \[in ‘NGAANDU’\]. So I’m musically connecting the Bogan River, the Bogari, to the Ngaandu, the Culgoa River. Because the patterns in that river will meet up with your pattern in that river.” **“Ancestor”** “I wanted to use this moment, this platform as a hip-hop artist, to look inwards and have my journey; go into what it means to be connected. A lot of these tracks are about me learning from the community—‘Matter of Time’ is about me outputting to the listener as a call to action—but what was missing was that inward journey. That’s what ‘Ancestor’ represents: What does this all mean to me?” **“Rivers Run Dry”** “This is my cousin singing, Kelsey Iris. Her story talks about the river in a way that I can’t as a hip-hop artist. Her song is more in her folk style, and she’s singing so beautifully and sadly about ‘the river runs dry, and I cry and I cry and I cry.’” **“WAHWANGU”** “This feels like the final puzzle piece. We are back in the Barwon River. That’s the name for that river. We start off in the Bogari, go to the Ngaandu, and I come home to Wahwangu, where my family lives. Brad Steadman’s talking about a story of Old King Clyde. \[At the end\] it’s like credits—it has Aunty Lily Shearer’s voice, Brad Gordon, Uncle Tommy Barker, and my Aunty Josie Byno. Finally, it’s got my grandmother in it, Mary Clapham Nee Shearer. A very, very heartfelt moment.” **“Language Is in the Land”** “‘Language Is in the Land’ is like the centerpiece of this entire project. It’s the amalgamation of all the knowledge that I’ve learned along the way, the stories that I’ve been told, and how I react to them, finally packaged into a call to action: What do I want to leave the listener with? It’s about fighting for these rivers, and it’s about knowing how to be proud and how to take care of our land and waterways. Even if you’re not an Aboriginal person, we all have a right to be proud of this country. What does that look like? It means listening to our First Nations peoples, it means listening to these small towns that are not given their rights to water.” **“Story”** “It comes back full circle, literally—we went north, east, and then back down south, back to the Bogan River, where the story starts. It comes back to Brad and I just continuing that walk down the dry riverbed. You can hear the birds and you can hear that crackling of the empty river. He says to me, ‘You get a story,’ which is exactly how he starts at the beginning of the album. And then it finishes.”

Given that it evolved from an urge to do something—anything—creative during the pandemic, The Smile has turned out to be one of the most liberating and fruitful projects of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s latter-day career. *Cutouts* is the third record in little more than two years from the trio, which also includes Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, and follows just 10 months after their captivating second album *Wall of Eyes*. Its creation mirrors the cross-pollination that occurred between a pair of classic Radiohead albums. In much the same way that 2000’s *Kid A* and 2001’s *Amnesiac* were made during the same recording sessions but inhabited different sonic spaces and textures, *Cutouts* contains songs committed to tape at the same time as *Wall of Eyes* in Oxford and London’s Abbey Road Studios with producer Sam Petts-Davies. Whereas *Wall of Eyes* mesmerized with a tightly wound, autumnal restraint, there’s an unfurling expanse at work on *Cutouts*’ 10 tracks. With its cascading riffs, soulful piano chords, and yearning vocals, “Eyes & Mouth” is the epic center around which everything else revolves. The record never settles in one spot for too long: “Instant Psalm,” featuring beatific strings from the London Contemporary Orchestra, is a hazy folk gem, and “The Slip” is a synth-laden banger, while the frantic punk-funk grooves of “Zero Sum” sound like they’re trying to wriggle out of themselves. It remains to be seen whether anything can be read into the trio clearing the decks with this collection of songs, some of which were played live around the time of their 2022 debut *A Light for Attracting Attention* (or in some cases, even deeper into the past—the title of contemplative closer “Bodies Laughing” can be traced back to Radiohead rehearsals in the mid-2000s). But if *Cutouts* is the end of an era for The Smile, it caps off a prolific, potent period for Yorke, Greenwood, and Skinner.

Sporting one of the most outsized personalities in all of hip-hop history, LL COOL J made rap braggadocio into an art form. During his mid-’80s emergence, the Queens-bred MC used his inherently aggressive delivery to prove himself bigger and deffer than the competition. In the ’90s, he channeled that tenacity even more effectively on the seminal *Mama Said Knock You Out* and its gritty successor *14 Shots to the Dome* while increasingly amplifying his libidinous loverman side to great commercial effect. It worked so well that, by the time he popularized the term “GOAT” on his sexually charged 2000 album of the same name, few could argue he wasn’t a contender for that prestigious title. Yet those who arrived during James Todd Smith’s R&B crossover era, or the many more who’ve come to know him primarily as an actor on television and in film, may not know what a tremendous rapper he was—and remains. His first studio album in some 11 years, *THE FORCE* shows his microphone prowess has in no way waned over the past decade. There’s a core combativeness to his contemporary approach, unquestionably bolstered by the distressing and galvanizing events of recent years. Out the gate, on the Snoop Dogg-assisted “Spirit of Cyrus,” he conjures a vivid Black vigilante fantasy where racists receive their comeuppances in brutal fashion. With a similarly vibrant Busta Rhymes in his corner, he outlines a revolutionary mindset on the thunderous “Huey in the Chair.” As should be expected with an artist with his tenure, he also reveals a sentimentally nostalgic streak in a number of instances here, calling back to his come-up on “Basquiat Energy” and realizing that the you-can’t-go-home-again axiom rings truer than expected on “30 Decembers.” “Black Code Suite” synthesizes his tendencies quite beautifully, its Afrocentric bent mixing memory with militancy. Part of what makes *THE FORCE* such a tremendous record comes from producer Q-Tip. Rather than chase trends, the Natives Tongues veteran gives LL a series of instrumentals (and, on more than one occasion, hooks) that veer far from legacy-act stagnation and instead towards a mature yet rugged vibe. This translates to the laidback synth slap of the Saweetie duet “Proclivities” as much as the far squirmier funk of his Eminem collab “Murdergram Deux.” From the reconfigured throwbacks of “Passion” and “Post Modern” to the timeless grooves of “Runnit Back” and “Saturday Night Special,” their robust artist pairing ensures that *THE FORCE* is an album to reckon with.

IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”

Jordan Rakei’s dreamily delicate voice is as poised as ever on his fifth album, even on tracks where more than 40 people might be contributing. Those sheer numbers are thanks to robust string and horn sections and a smaller choir, lending scope to *The Loop*’s self-produced majesty. Yet for all of the bravura flourishes here, Rakei sounds every bit as intimate as he did when he was cutting tracks in his humble bedroom. “Hopes and Dreams” especially hinges on his confiding vocals, unfolding against a sparse backdrop featuring no drums. It’s one of several songs inspired by Rakei settling into fatherhood, and even the album title comes from the idea that his son may someday have children of his own. Elsewhere, the Brisbane-raised, London-based multi-instrumentalist takes notes from classic soul of several eras, from Marvin Gaye to D’Angelo and beyond. The arrangements are impeccable throughout, whether it’s the warmly dusty breakbeats on opener “Flowers” or the rustling loops and handclaps on “Cages.” There’s a live-in-the-room quality to it all, even when a track like “Everything Everything” bolsters Rakei’s heavenly vocal flutter and a cool rhythmic snap with lively tides of celestial layering. As he meditates on the subtle complexities of parenthood and friendship alike, the instrumentation remains transfixing right alongside his words of wisdom.

The White Stripes were nothing if not a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of self-imposed limitation—in instrumentation, in color scheme, in verifiable biographical information. Since the duo’s dissolution in 2011, Jack White has continued playing with form (and color schemes), from the just-one-of-the-boys-in-the-band vibes of The Raconteurs to 2022’s sonically experimental *Fear of the Dawn* and its more restrained companion *Entering Heaven Alive*. Despite—or perhaps *to* spite—those who longed for a simpler, noisier, more monochromatic time, White tinkered away. The rollout for *No Name*, White’s sixth solo album, was characteristically mischievous: It first appeared as a white-label LP given away at Third Man Records before being posted online without song titles, sparking an excitement that felt fresh, largely because the sound did not. Meg White is not walking through that door anytime soon, but the 13 tracks here channel the unadorned, wild-eyed ferocity of the band that made him famous more efficiently and consistently than anything he’s done since. There’s plenty of swagger from top to bottom, but most of all there’s *hooks*: big, fat, noisy guitars played in the catchiest combinations possible. “That’s How I’m Feeling” may not relieve “Seven Nation Army” of its ubiquity anytime soon, but it is a ready-made capital-A anthem with a euphoric jump-scare chorus that sticks on first listen and doesn’t get unstuck. “Bless Yourself,” “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago),” and “Number One With a Bullet” are just as infectious, while “Bombing Out” may be the fastest, heaviest thing White has ever put out in any of his many guises. The casualness of it all is a flex—as meticulous and exacting as White can be, *No Name*’s modest arrival is a reminder of how easily he could have kept churning out earworm White Stripes songs. Good for him that he didn’t want to; good for us that he does now.

The title is no accident: Samantha Poulter, aka Logic1000, wrote and recorded her debut album at home with producer Tom McAlister after they became parents. That domestic setting might seem unusual for a record that daydreams about dance-floor escape, but Poulter’s self-described “love letter to house music” indeed feels warm and assuring. Raised in Sydney and now living in Berlin, the dynamic DJ/producer knows how to draw us in with cozy familiarity, from the breakbeat-laden opener “From Within” to the half-submerged siren song that is “All U Like.” Poulter chooses her vocal samples especially well, and her collaborators even better: Jamaican British singer Rochelle Jordan exudes vulnerability like a club diva mid-comedown on “Promises,” while “Every Lil’” leads Miami singer/producer MJ Nebreda through a delightfully wonky rhythmic workout assisted by Melbourne’s DJ Plead. Poulter has displayed a deft hand for self-aware club cuts since day one, but *Mother* shows off more sides of her personality while still thriving as a blissful, body-moving affair.

More than 20 years into his career, Dan Snaith continues to shape-shift as an artist. His sixth proper album as Caribou finds the 46-year-old electronic pop polymath diving headlong into big-room dance sounds, more so than ever before: French-touch-indebted synths, city-flattening wub-wub basslines, and the type of clipped-vocal UK garage melodies that pop artists like PinkPantheress have favored as of late. Snaith is taking clear inspiration from his acclaimed full-length under his dance-floor-focused Daphni moniker, 2022’s *Cherry*, as well as the recent stadium-pleasing gestures from left-of-center contemporaries Jamie xx and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. The result is the sound of an artist newly invigorated and truly having fun with the music they’re making. *Honey* isn’t the first time that Snaith has turned his attention towards body-moving music. 2010’s *Swim* fused techno’s intensity with his career-long penchant for all things psychedelic and heady, while *Our Love* from 2014 found Snaith rubbing elbows with the melodic bass music explosion that marked much of early-2010s electronic music, all the while applying his intimate and resolutely human songwriting point of view. If those albums felt like a combination of his established tendencies with dance music, then *Honey* feels like a complete breakthrough into pure pop territory. The warm synth waves of “Come Find Me” sound lovingly ripped from Daft Punk’s astral playbook, while Snaith’s soft-focus vocals on “Over Now” are centered in the midst of a spangly disco beat that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dua Lipa record. Of course, this is a Caribou record, so he has plenty of dazzling and trippy tricks up his sleeve regardless; bear witness to the perpetually ascendant “Dear Life,” which chops up vocal samples in a flurry of glistening synth trickles, or the endless melodic ziggurats of “Climbing,” which recall Nordic space-disco greats like Todd Terje and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. Every time Snaith seems like he might be touching terra firma, he seemingly blasts off thousands of miles into the stratosphere instead—a dazzling bait-and-switch that makes *Honey* endlessly replayable, as well as one of his most pure and potent works to date.

“We made this album in probably the busiest time in our lives,” King Stingray guitarist Roy Kellaway tells Apple Music. Indeed, the relentless touring the band embarked on following the success of their 2022 self-titled debut impacted its follow-up in several ways. Logistically, it meant they were having to seize studio time between gigs, booking local studios in whatever part of Australia they happened to find themselves in. Thematically, its influence was also profound. “A lot of the songs have a philosophical sentiment about life,” says Kellaway. “There are some introspective themes where we’re thinking about what’s passing by and what’s happening around us in this busy time, trying to process that.” The rush of the past few years, and appreciation of simple living during such a hectic period, is invoked in “Soon As” and “What’s the Hurry?” while “Southerly” harks nostalgically back to their roots in the Northern Territory, “when we were just a couple of kids, with a couple of big ideas.” As with King Stingray’s debut, the lyrics are split between English and the ancestral Yolŋu language of vocalist Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu and guitarist Dimathaya Burarrwanga, only this time the choruses are sung entirely in English to make them more inclusive, particularly in the live space. The band also continues to incorporate the ancient Indigenous tradition of manikay (song/songlines) into their spirited indie rock, lending each track myriad thematic nuances. “A lot of our songs have a sentiment that extends in more than one meaning, and that’s pretty characteristic of Yolŋu culture and the many layers of meaning behind Yolŋu Matha,” says Kellaway, referring to the collection of languages spoken by the Yolŋu people of northeast Arnhem Land. Here, the guitarist, songwriter, and producer unravels some of those layers, track by track. **“Light Up the Path”** “We were like, ‘Let’s start this new album with a song that feels King Sting-like, but then it has some newer moments that maybe people haven’t heard before.’ The sentiment for ‘Light Up’ is about seizing the moment, so that’s why we wanted to crack in with a bit of a belter to begin with. It felt like a nice one to start with.” **“Best Bits”** “It’s about all the best bits of life poured into one moment, and it’s inspired by a particular moment in time where we had a day that just had all the right ingredients: friends, family, good weather, sunshine, and you’re with your loved ones and you’re in a beautiful place where Mother Earth is turning it on. I guess it’s about simple living in a complex digital world; sometimes all the best bits are already around us, we just need to recognize them.” **“Southerly”** “We’ve been musos for years, but it was quite a quick turnaround from putting out our first song to having fans. We just found ourselves thinking about how nothing’s changed—we’re still the same people, we’re still mates having fun playing music. The only thing that’s different is that there’s lots more people listening to us. We come from pretty humble beginnings and we’d never forget our roots and who we are. Integrity is really important for us.” **“Lookin’ Out”** “It’s easy as humans to put a lot of pressure on making the right decision and navigating things in life. That song’s about being at peace with making the best decision you can. We love big things—the big sky and the big blue ocean—so we’re always marveling at the vastness of the world, and looking out into the big ocean creates a lot of feeling for us. Simple living is something we love.” **“Scoreboard”** “We hit the ground running with the record and wanted a bit of a breather. There’s some wonderful pedal steel guitar on there. We often play that live as an atmospheric part leading into ‘Lookin’ Out,’ but we decided to put it after ‘Lookin’ Out,’ this time as a breather.” **“Nostalgic”** “This was inspired by when we were in the US for South by Southwest in 2023. We had this beautiful home and we were staying up late because we were excited, telling stories. It’s that concept of reminiscing, but at the same time you’re making new memories.” **“Day Off”** “It’s about taking the day off. We’re calling in sick, we’re all going to have some fun and take the day off, and I’ve called your boss and got you one too, so let’s hang out together. Then the chorus opens up—‘picking up the keys to a better life’ is the line, and it’s just about perspective and having your priorities right, because there’s lots of distractions in life and it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important. We always want to be mindful that joy and happiness is really important for us as individuals.” **“Through the Trees”** “It’s inspired by a particular place in Arnhem Land—you come up this big sand dune and you get to the top and you can see this big canopy of trees, almost like a tunnel, and through the trees the deep blue sea is straight in front of you. It’s about not wasting time and seizing the moment. The traditional songline sung in the bridge is an ancient melody, and that humming sound is the sound of a bee, where an old man’s walking through the bush, and he’s following the sound of a bee and it’s guiding him towards the light, towards people and community. ‘Through the Trees’ has got that multilayered meaning.” **“Soon As”** “It’s about coming back home. It’s a big relief. This album is explaining our journey over the last few years. We’ve covered lots of places, and this one’s about getting both feet on the ground, back on Country, wherever that may be for you.” **“What’s the Hurry?”** “It’s about slowing down. We all come from small towns throughout Australia, and you come to the city and everyone’s in a rush, and we find ourselves in a rush as well. It’s also got a sustainability wink. ‘Can we tread light to sustain?’ is one of the lines in the chorus, and it’s talking about, can we tread a bit lighter on Earth to sustain our beautiful Mother Earth? It’s definitely on our mind because Yolŋu people see firsthand a lot of really bad environmental effects on the northeast coast.” **“Come to the Surface”** “It’s a bit ethereal. It’s about popping out from underneath the water and getting that fresh air hit you in the face. You’ve got that big sort of relieving moment.” **“Cat 5 (Cyclone)”** “This one’s got a multi meaning. On the surface, it’s a love song—life might feel a bit chaotic sometimes, it can feel a bit like a cyclone, but when you’re with that special person, you look into their eyes and you see a blue sky up ahead. We grew up in the tropics, so we’re used to cyclones, and we used to always get the cyclone warnings show up on the TV. In the chorus where it says, ‘you know I’m trying/To pick up the signs,’ that’s the warning signs of the cyclone coming. We never got frightened of them as kids, we’d surf in the cyclone. It’s part of living in the Top End.”

Hiatus Kaiyote’s fourth album finds the Melbourne quartet in a playful mood. “BMO Is Beautiful” is a 41-second appreciation of the *Adventure Time* character BMO, featuring its voice actor Niki Yang on vocals. “Longcat” is a woozy tribute to “the longest cat in the world.” It’s fitting, then, that the band’s trademark jazz/R&B/future soul excursions are unshackled from traditional song structure in favor of a looser, more improvised form that emerged from late-night jam sessions, steering the album from cacophonous freak-outs like closer “White Rabbit” to the celestial opener “Dreamboat” and elastic jazz of “Make Friends.” Vocalist Nai Palm draws her lyrical inspiration from a diverse well. The Brazilian and sambalike rhythms of “Telescope” lay the foundation for a journey into space, the song inspired by photographs from the Hubble telescope on each band member’s birthday. “Cinnamon Temple,” a schizophrenic, head-bending mélange of noise, funk, and jazz that’s been in the band’s live set since 2015, takes its title from the mud-brick mosques in Mali, which look like they have cinnamon stuck in them, while “Make Friends” riffs on deep platonic love, with its one verse repeated three times, each from a different gender perspective. Acclaimed Brazilian producer Mario Caldato Jr. (Beastie Boys, Björk, Beck) proves himself a willing accomplice, harnessing the band’s devil-may-care, genre-bending approach to arrive at a record that is equal parts engrossing, befuddling, and intoxicating, but never, ever dull.

After nearly two decades in the game, Rapsody’s left no room for doubt when it comes to her formidable pen. But it wasn’t until 2020, when she began piecing together her fourth studio album, *Please Don’t Cry*, that Marlanna Evans realized that she’d shared very little of herself beyond her mic skills. “People had to put up a mirror for me,” she admitted to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, recalling a pivotal conversation with the producer No ID. “He was like, ‘Everybody knows you can rap, but I can’t tell you five things that I know about you.’” Thus began the North Carolina native’s journey inward: Before she could reintroduce herself to her fans, she’d have to know herself first. The result of that journey, *Please Don’t Cry*, is Rapsody’s deepest and boldest work yet. “Who are you in your rawest state?” asks the gentle voice of the album’s narrator, Phylicia Rashad. Making the record, Rapsody found her mind wandering towards *The Matrix*, in particular the relationship between Neo and the Oracle. “He’s trying to find his way, trying to find himself…and she’s kind of his guiding voice,” she tells Darden. “I was like, ‘That’s kind of what this journey has been for me, but who would be my Oracle?’” Rashad was the first name that came to mind. Through interludes, the Tony Award winner nudges Rapsody further down the path of vulnerability: “Who are you when you’re joyful? What makes you sad? Why do you cry?” Rapsody doesn’t hold back her answers on tracks like “Diary of a Mad Bitch,” a cathartic shit-talking session, or the bittersweet “Loose Rocks,” where she grapples with a loved one’s dementia diagnosis with backup vocals from Alex Isley (yes, that Isley). Intense emotions are countered with airy, meditative beats on the gorgeous “3:AM,” a late-night love song with a hook from Erykah Badu, and the balmy reggae jam “Never Enough.” By the closing track “Forget Me Not,” her fear of vulnerability feels like a distant memory as she raps: “I want to know everything/I want to feel, I want to be alive/It’s too good.”

It was instant bromance when Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé met at a house party in early-2000s Paris: two young French graphic designers who loved good old American rock ’n’ roll. What they lacked in technical expertise, they made up for in taste—and not exactly the “good taste” of the French artists du jour. “When we started, French house music was really about precision, and we arrived and had no idea what we were doing,” de Rosnay tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. To the world of groovy French filter house, the duo known as Justice brought AC/DC energy, punishing distortion, and a giant neon cross that towered over Marshall speaker stacks at their famously wild live shows. Three studio albums, three live albums, and two Grammys later, the Justice boys have traded their skintight leather jackets for sharply tailored suits, but though the songs on their fourth album, *Hyperdrama*, are generally less punishing than early eardrum-destroyers like “Waters of Nazareth” or “Stress,” the duo have yet to lose their edge. Eight years after their last studio release, 2016’s unprecedentedly tender *Woman*, Augé and de Rosnay return to the tensions that animated their 2007 debut. “\[Contrast\] has been the motor of what we do since the beginning, because there is some kind of radicality and violence that we love in electronic music, and we are also blue-eyed soul and yacht rock fans.” On *Hyperdrama*, saccharine disco and blistering electronics don’t just coexist—they duke it out, often within the same track, as on “One Night/All Night,” whose stomping beat tugs against plaintive vocals from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. “Generator” nods to the brutalism of their early hits, the sax-forward “Moonlight Rendez-vous” evokes the camp of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and “Dear Alan” (named for French electronic legend Alan Braxe) is the kind of blissful filter house they once stood out from like two leather-clad sore thumbs. The duo’s songwriting has aged like fine French wine, but as always, they lead with their gut. “Really often we find that decisions in production and engineering are on the side of style and sensation more than, ‘Does it sound perfect by the standards of hi-fi?’” Augé explains. “If the good thing is that thing that was ripped 10 times and is so downgraded that it has this sort of bitcrush and glow to it, then we should go for that.”

Emma Donovan returns to her childhood love of country music on her second solo album, following a trio of outings backed by funk/soul ensemble The Putbacks. After all, the Australian singer-songwriter joined her family’s country band The Donovans when she was just 11, before collaborating widely across subsequent decades. Despite its central focus on one particular genre, *Til My Song Is Done* casts Donovan’s deeply moving vocals and unmistakably personal lyrics in a variety of contexts. Opener “Change Is Coming” is a bluegrass barnstormer featuring guest vocalist Liz Stringer, “Blak Nation” is a funky statement about the future of First Nations people in Australia, and “Lovin’ Looks Like” provides earnest advice about manifesting love within yourself before giving it to someone else. Paul Kelly joins in for the slow waltz “Sing You Over,” which honors the passing of life in much the same way as the closing “Yibaanga Gangaa,” a version of the Christian hymn “Sweet By & By” transposed to the Gumbaynggirr language. And, in a lovely bout of levity amid so many profound songs about family and community, “Liquid Gold” tackles those same themes within an affectionate flashback to 1980s country radio.

Having previously partnered with some of hip-hop’s most iconic producers, not the least of whom being J Dilla, Common built a career on securing superb beats to suit his agile rhymes. While many rappers of his generation hopped from trend to trend, repeat and reliable collaboration proved core to his discography, with several of the same studio figures from his early albums now fixtures in his circle decades later. It’s the native Chicagoan’s characteristic consistency, perhaps, that makes *The Auditorium, Vol. 1* such a momentous album event. A hip-hop artist indisputably worthy of the word “legend,” Pete Rock comes to this joint effort with the rare distinction of both defining and embodying Golden Era greatness. Though relatively selective about who he deems dope enough to form a duo with since the C.L. Smooth days, the Bronx-born producer generated goodwill and critical respect for his 2010s efforts opposite his city’s Skyzoo and Smoke DZA. As such, he makes a formidable complement for Common, evident from the jump on the exquisite intro “Dreamin’.” His timeless instrumentals conjure certain nostalgic tendencies from the MC, his verses on “We’re on Our Way” and “This Man” laden with old-school references and lyrical memorabilia. From the jazzy swing of “Everything’s So Grand” to the enlightened gospel groove of “A GOD (There Is),” the pair deliver on the promise of their premise, delivering theatrical thrills befitting their skills. And not that an album of this caliber requires special rapper guests, but Posdnuos of De La Soul is a naturally welcome addition to “When the Sun Shines Again.” Furthermore, Rock lays down some refreshing bars of his own on “All Kind of Ideas,” thus providing Common with a worthy foil on the mic as well as off and increasing anticipation for a presumed second volume.

“This album is actually an album of questioning. There\'s a lot of introspection, and within that, I\'m answering questions that I\'ve never had the space or capacity to ask,” Brittany Howard tells Apple Music about *What Now*, the Alabama Shakes singer-guitarist’s second solo album. “I was always so busy, I was always running around, I was on tour, I was preparing this, preparing that. This time I told myself when I would go in there and make songs in my little demo room, ‘No one\'s ever going to hear this,’ and it was very freeing.” Of course, people would end up hearing those songs, but that mindset helped Howard write from a brave new perspective. She dives into her personal history and guiding philosophy in a vulnerable way, like she did on 2019’s *Jaime*, but this time, the instrumental choices are bolder and more unexpected than ever before. “Power to Undo” is a folk-rock tune that showcases the album’s central theme. “You have the power to undo everything that I want/But I won\'t let you,” she sings. Once that’s revealed, the song descends into an acid-funk freakout, built around scratchy guitars and ramshackle drums. “‘Power to Undo’ is actually about freedoms,” she says. “A lot of people can experience this feeling of ‘I know I shouldn\'t do that. I know I need to keep moving in this direction.’ It\'s just about this thing chasing you down, and you\'re like, ‘No, you\'re not going to get me, I\'m not going to change directions.’” Elsewhere, on “Prove It to You,” Howard cues up gauzy synths and a dance-floor drum groove that’s made for an after-hours. It’s the furthest from the rootsy rock Howard rose to fame with, but the creative risks of *What Now* suggest an artist more interested in following a muse than replicating past successes. “I am always expanding and evolving and trying new things,” Howard says. “That\'s the most fun about being a creative person—trying things that challenge you and you don\'t know anything about.”

Grinspoon’s capacity for high-impact riffing and vocal catharsis is undiminished on the band’s first full-length in a dozen years. Considering that the quartet emerged from Lismore, New South Wales as grunge bled into alt-metal in the mid 1990s, this eighth studio album impressively continues the kinetic potential they found in the overlap. Singer/guitarist Phil Jamieson wastes little time before pushing his delivery to the limit, alternately screaming and singing through lead guitarist Pat Davern’s rapid-fire punk and stoner-rock flourishes of “(ILYSM).” That song also picks up where 2012’s *Black Rabbits*—named after rhyming slang for “bad habits”—left off in terms of celebrating the band’s chaotic lust for life. “We’re together and we’re drunk as fuck,” repeats Jamieson in an unabashed rallying cry. But despite all the snideness and swagger here, Grinspoon makes sure to balance muscular throwbacks with proper ballads like “4, 5 & 7” and “Underground,” not just giving Jamieson’s vocal cords a rest but injecting some corrective vulnerability. The production from Holy Holy’s Oscar Dawson, who contributed to Jamieson’s 2022 solo debut *Somebody Else*, also deepens the textural offerings, from the Sabbath-y vocal effects on “This Love” to the mellower psych wobble of “Blood on the Snow.” “Never Say Never” even has it both ways, sneaking in a moment of damning self-judgment with the line “I’m a lonely clown with no makeup” before Grinspoon launches right back into its throttling attack.

“Every now and then, the old fellas, they send you signs,” rapper Nooky (aka Corey Webster) tells Apple Music. When he, Dallas Woods, and Angus Field were working on their debut album as 3%, the First Nations artists approached the project without preconceived notions of sound and style, instead letting the songs come together organically. As Nooky tells it, they had some ancestral help. “They send you a signal. It was me, Dallas, and Angus sitting there and creating in that moment with no plan, just letting the old people guide the vision. And this is what happened in that moment.” “This” is *KILL THE DEAD*, the trio’s powerful debut album. Composed over a handful of sessions stretching back to Woods’ and Nooky’s initial get-together on January 26, 2022, the project delivers its potent messages around reclaiming stolen land, Indigenous deaths in custody, and closing the gap with a blunt-force-trauma approach to rap, while Field’s rich, soulful vocals offer a sweet melodic hit. That the record also takes in surprise elements such as pop, soul, and R&B, and incorporates deeply vulnerable lyrics around family (“Higher”) and mental health (“Coming Home”), is proof of the trio’s chemistry and comfort as a unit. “Us three lads sitting in a room together, it was just Black men sitting there expressing ourselves and our lives, the good and the bad,” says Nooky. “We had some pretty vulnerable moments together. Working with Angus and Dallas brought out a side of me I’ve never really felt comfortable \[showing\]. It’s a testament to what happened in that moment.” Named 3% to reflect the fact that First Nations people make up only three percent of the Australian population, the album’s title speaks to the resilience, strength, and courage of First Nations people and their survival in the face of white settlement. The cover art, a Daniel Boyd dot painting of AFL player Nicky Winmar famously pointing to the colour of his skin while playing, is indicative of the Blak ’N’ Proud sentiment that fuels the album. Here, Nooky, Woods, and Field take Apple Music through *KILL THE DEAD*, track by track. **“Kids You Couldn’t Kill”** Woods: “I chose it for the first track because it’s like the statement that leads on from the album title. The fact that we still exist is not only power to the fact that they couldn’t kill us, but it’s also like me, Angus, and Nooky—we stand here as descendants of powerful warriors that they tried to annihilate and abolish, fighting the fight in the Western world. We are proof that they failed. This sets the tone for the whole album. We’re smacking you in the face with some truth.” **“BNP”** Nooky: “‘BNP’ is an extension of what Dallas said. Being the kids of the ancestors that they couldn’t kill instills a real sense of strength and pride. BNP stands for Blak ’N’ Proud—when we were kids down in Nowra, we used to write it on all our school books and on the tables. So it’s a nod to us and how we talk, our slang. It was a moment to just stand in your skin, stand in your blackness, and point to your skin like Uncle Nicky Winmar does on the front cover.” **“Land Back” (with Say True God? & DENNI)** Nooky: “Getting our land back would be mad. We’re manifesting!” Woods: “I think the one thing we can all agree on in this country, as First Nations brothers and sisters, is just give us our fucking land back. It’s the most self-explanatory song you could ever find, I promise you that.” **“Pay the Rent”** Nooky: “As you progress through the album, the songs may be very different sonically, but they all tie together, whether it’s the sentiment behind it, or the messaging, the light and the dark moments, the ups and the downs.” Woods: “This land is stolen. But we’re still here hustling, and that’s the one thing you’ll never stop. We’re going to hustle until we get our land back. It’s all about empowering Mob to realize that we can do this.” Nooky: “It’s time to pay the rent.” **“Invasion”** Woods: “This song is about the First Fleet invasion, but done in a *Star Wars* setting, like this is an alien invasion. That’s what they were to us, they were aliens. The whole concept is like, we’re here, just chilling, living on our planet, and then all of a sudden, these weird-looking, bald-headed things come through, with all these wigs on, very colorful shirts, red, white, and blue flag. And we’re like, what the hell’s going on? And they start shooting us. It’s trying to relate to what it would be like back in the day to see someone that you’ve never seen before, different skin color—it would have been very alien for them.” **“Blak Australia Policy” (with Marlon Motlop)** Nooky: “We’re kind of looking back at the history of this country and the history that we all share. There was that White Australia Policy. All the things that they’ve done to erase our way of living. Not letting us manage the land—mismanagement of the land leads to those bushfires we have every couple of years. We were sitting in the studio and I was just like, man, what if we did go back to our way? What if we did take control and it reverted back to our way of living, and we got that harmony and that unity back? We called it the Blak Australia Policy.” **“Prisoner”** Field: “We feel like we’re a prisoner in our own home, our own country. We had our own beliefs, our own way of doing it, and now we can’t do what we want. We can’t do what the old people did. We can’t do what our people did for hundreds of thousands of years. We’re stuck in this way where we have to do what we’re told, and we don’t want to do what we’re told.” **“Die by the Sword”** Woods: “There’s a lot of people in the industry that love to take aim and take shots and act like they’re hard done by, but don’t want to get up and do the work. It’s just about, hey, if you’re going to complain, die on that hill; die by that sword. Because we’re not going out. We’re going to keep going to the top.” **“Lovin’ on Me”** Field: “When this song was getting made, Nooky was like, ‘Oh man, I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ 3% has brought out a different side to him. The song brings such a contrast to the album, because it’s almost a pop song. I feel like it shows we can do everything. We’ve got the hard-hitting rap tracks like ‘Invasion,’ but then we’re also swinging to this pop side and showing that Blakfellas don’t just stop at one thing. We can do it all.” Woods: “It’s also a nod to our beautiful Black queens out there.” **“Sleezy Steezy Cool” (with Tia Gostelow)** Woods: “Being in the studio with that sis \[Gostelow\]; absolutely amazing talent. It was good to get in that studio and just have fun for a change. I think that sort of shows in the song. We all got to really show our personality.” Nooky: “Tia was vibing it straightaway. And she goes, ‘What if we write a song about when someone’s sleazy, but they’re cool?’ Dallas is sitting next to her and he goes, ‘Yeah, and they’re steezy too.’ And then there’s the name! As Dallas said, it’s just us having fun.” **“Coming Home” (feat. Calula Webster)** Nooky: “There was a period in my life where substance abuse was a big thing. Mental health was a hard thing to deal with; crippling anxiety, depression, you name it, and trying to climb out of that, it’s a hard climb. I found myself in this position where I’d been clean for two years, and things were starting to go good for me. I just kept having these thoughts, telling myself I don’t deserve it. I’m not worth it. Fuck it up. Start drinking, disappear for a week. I was sitting in the studio working on some songs, and this is what was going on in my head. I was thinking about my daughters. I was like, I’ve gotta get home, but something was trying to take me away from that. But this moment in particular, I won the fucking battle. I don’t always win the battle. And I get home and my young daughter’s there, she goes to me, ‘Dad, I know what your favorite song is.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she goes, ‘Royal Telephone’ \[the Jimmy Little song, which is sampled on ‘Coming Home’\]. And she started singing that. It just really hit me. That was the reward for coming home. I asked, ‘Will you sing this song with Dad?’ And she sang it, and she’s on the song.” **“Higher”** Nooky: “‘Higher’ is also about \[raising my daughters\]. Everyone knew me as the wild fucking rapper from Nowra. But with this they get to see who that person protects—that persona is a part of me, but it’s not all of me. He’s a part of me that is like a fear side, the warrior who protected the vulnerable side; he wouldn’t allow it to come out. But it came out that day, and I’m fucking grateful it did.” **“Won’t Stop” (with Jessica Mauboy)** Field: “Having Jessica on that track is a dream come true.” Woods: “That song was always destined for Jessica Mauboy. And luckily Jess is a fan of me and Nooky through many years of being on the same stage at festivals and her just being the legend that she is, always supporting Mob. That feeling of her actually wanting to do it, and not being a forced thing, led to the song sounding the way it is.” **“OUR PEOPLE”** Nooky: “This was the song that launched 3% and it’s the perfect way to end the album, because this song sums up everything we said throughout the album. I was doing a workshop in one of the youth justice centers in Sydney. That day, there was an intake of kids, and there was a bunch of 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and 12-year-olds in there. Seeing kids that young behind bars, it’s a heavy thing. I finished the workshop, I jumped in the car, and I was feeling a bit fucking heavy. There’s moments when you need to go to the studio and let shit out. This was one of the moments.”

Woodland Studios is the cultural anchor of East Nashville’s Five Points, a bustling district of restaurants, bars, and vintage shops that some consider the heart of the greater artistic enclave found east of downtown Music City. Woodland is the home studio of musical and life partners David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, as well as the headquarters for the duo’s Acony Records. Nearly destroyed by the deadly March 2020 tornadoes that devastated much of Nashville (the pair actually rushed out mid-storm to rescue master recordings), Woodland is still standing, though only after substantial repairs. That close call inspired Welch and Rawlings to celebrate their musical home with this album, which also notably bears both artists’ names. (The pair has a tendency to alternate album billing for their always-collaborative projects, like Rawlings’ credit for 2017’s *Poor David’s Almanack* and Welch’s for 2011’s celebrated *The Harrow & The Harvest*.) Accordingly, *Woodland* is as crackling and alive an album as the pair has made, leaning into the warmth of its homey origins and the ease of the duo’s fruitful and supportive creative partnership. Production is lusher and more complex, though never distractingly so—as always, the pair’s ultimate reverence is for songcraft, as heard on the evocatively titled opening track “Empty Trainload of Sky,” which could hint at the awestruck horror wrought by a tornado, or “The Day the Mississippi Died,” a clever bit of social commentary that also breaks the fourth wall (“I’m thinking that this melody has lasted long enough/The subject’s entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough”). Other highlights include “Hashtag,” which avoids hollow social media commentary in favor of acknowledging the plight of artists whose names only become media fodder in death, and closer “Howdy Howdy,” a sweet encapsulation of the pair’s unbreakable connection.

*Dotr* is LP Giobbi’s way of capturing home. The title nods to a running joke in the Oregon-born artist’s family: It’s how she used to sign notes to her parents as a child because she couldn’t spell “daughter.” Her second album is also a product of celebration and grief—a reflection of what she’s gained and lost across life’s changing seasons. In the wake of Giobbi’s post-pandemic ascent, heavy touring left her little time at home before departing once more. Listening to “Brokedown Palace” by the Grateful Dead (her parents’ favorite band) while she boarded planes was a bittersweet ritual as she left behind her source of comfort and anticipated the possibilities ahead. Then, in the weeks leading up to her 2023 debut album *Light Places*, Giobbi lost three prominent women in her life: Patricia Lynn, her mother-in-law; Carolyn Horn, her longtime piano teacher; and Suse Millemann, a family friend who was Giobbi’s first exposure to a professional artist. As Giobbi examines her familial identity on *Dotr*, she honors these women who, despite not sharing blood, had become part of her tribe. A birthday voicemail from Lynn opens the album; elsewhere, Millemann appears through an interlude of her final work, and Horn, in one of her last conversations with Giobbi, emphasizes the importance of making music for oneself. These emotional tributes imbue the remainder of *Dotr* with appreciation for life itself, ups and downs both. It’s how “Feel,” a blushing serenade, can veer into Brittany Howard’s spiraling relationship angst on “Until There’s Nothing Left,” or how Panama emerges from a difficult period of change with gratitude on “Love Come Through,” a crescendo of lively drums and soaring strings. If *Dotr* is Giobbi’s path back home, it’s led her back to the song that reminds her most of it: “Brokedown Palace.” On the album’s closing track, she puts her voice on record for the first time by singing one of its most poignant lyrics: “Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come/Since I first left home.”

A band doesn’t reach the 26-album mark without its members feeling incredibly comfortable with each other. So it makes sense that Melbourne psych ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard set aside their usual album-corralling concepts this time to just capture six mates playing together in a room. More than that, leader Stu Mackenzie encouraged a pass-the-mic approach that sees every band member sing, including the vocal debut of drummer Michael Cavanagh on “Le Risque.” Fun little improvisations make the round-robin vibe feel all the more spontaneous—check out the scat section at the end of “Rats in the Sky”—as does each song launching into the next with no space in between. Musically, this material is more jaunty than heavy: Even when “Hog Calling Contest” shows off the band’s signature hairpin shifts, it’s in the service of a rustic romp. Equally rootsy is opener “Mirage City,” whose communal harmonies and twang evoke The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers alike. Yet, darker themes lurk behind the band’s sunny exterior, as that first track finds solidarity in escapism via lyrics about parents fighting at home and being desperate to “leave this nightmare behind.” The closing “Daily Blues” similarly offsets its harmonica-licked roadhouse flair with the ominous refrain “Gettin’ fucked up daily.” Just because King Gizz is doubling down on camaraderie doesn’t mean Mackenzie and co can’t air their troubles for each other. In fact, isn’t that the essence of friendship?