Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”
Post-humanism was a passion and a coping mechanism on yeule’s breakthrough album, 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, art-pop that escaped into the simulation and drew raw emotion from its artifice. Their third full-length finds the shape-shifting musician regaining their bearings as a human being, and trading short-circuiting electronica for the fuzzy sounds of shoegaze and ‘90s alt-rock. The effect is that of an AI yearning to be flesh and blood: “If only I could be/Real enough to love,” they sing over downcast guitar chords on “ghosts” as their voice glitches into decay. On the bleakly gorgeous “software update,” yeule fantasizes about a lover downloading their mind after their body is gone, over a swelling, reverberating wall of sound. There’s a tactile quality to the album’s digital processing reminiscent of ‘90s Warp Records staples like Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin, shot through with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for a time that’s long gone and barely remembered.
On the strength of two excellent EPs—*Waves* (2021) and 2022’s *Banshee*—NewDad quickly became one of Ireland’s fastest rising acts, earning the four-piece big-gig support slots with Inhaler and Paolo Nutini in 2022. The gauzy textures of those two releases also fastened the “shoegaze” and “dream pop” tags to the Galway-formed band composed of Julie Dawson (vocals/guitar), Cara Joshi (bass), Fiachra Parslow (drums), and Sean O’Dowd (guitar). However, their own vision was always for something more divergent, something more muscular and dynamic—something they’ve forged on a debut album that adds cleaner, steelier edges to their sound while exploring their love of grunge, alt-rock, and electronic music. “It was really rock music that got us all into wanting to play in a band,” Dawson tells Apple Music. “We never really imagined that we’d make a rock record, but that’s what this ended up being. I guess deep down it was always what we wanted to do but we didn’t really have the tools to do it. When we started off, we were still figuring out our sound and then, when we started playing songs live, it was way heavier and we wanted to translate that into the recordings. When we got that guitar sound on ‘Sickly Sweet,’ we were like, ‘Nothing we’ve ever recorded sounded like that. Holy shit, that is what we want!’” The album was recorded with trusted band producer Chris Ryan at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Here, NewDad felt galvanized by the fresh air and the studio’s history—which includes incubating records by Queen, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Manic Street Preachers, Pixies, and Iggy Pop—while a downtime diet of zombie movies might, says Dawson, have added to the album’s sense of menace. As much as the sound of *MADRA*— Irish for “dog”—represents an evolution for NewDad, the lyrics are more concerned with stasis and repetition, particularly in our everyday relationships and behaviors. “It’s those things you can’t escape, or repeating unhealthy patterns,” says Dawson. “It was initially just a working title. It was probably because when we were like, ‘Oh, what will we name it?’ we saw a dog walk past the window or something. But the image of a dog following you does line up nicely with the music. It’s definitely a lot about the relationship between you and whoever—family, friends, partners.” Let Dawson explain further with her track-by-track guide. **“Angel”** “It was during lockdown and it was definitely like I was having a dry spell when it came to writing. \[TV series *Euphoria*\] is so lovely to look at and the plot lines are so crazy that it got my brain going. That whole dynamic between \[show characters\] Rue and Jules—feeling like a burden in a relationship—is something that so many people go through if you have bad mental health. It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh yeah, OK. I have an idea of something I want to write about now.’ That bassline is just such a good hook. It’s just a really strong opening. We’ve always been very bass-led, and it’s a familiar sound, so it’s a nice way to open.” **“Sickly Sweet”** “‘Sickly Sweet’ is that whole thing of repeating unhealthy patterns, maybe going back to something or someone, even though you know that it’s bad news. The line that sums it up the best is: ‘But I’m reliant on the nonsense.’ It’s like when you do things out of pure boredom and it’s completely stupid, but it’s just something you do. I love this one because it feels like a lot of ’90s records that I would’ve listened to. \[We were aiming for\] a Breeders-y kind of thing. That raw vocal is something that we don’t do that often, but was definitely necessary.” **“Where I Go”** “This was a really old one. I had never imagined it being on the album, to be honest. But a lot of other people and the rest the band were like, ‘It really does sound great,’ after we recorded it in Rockfield. I was very against it for a while but when the mix started sounding really cool, I was like, ‘OK, I’m comfortable with this.’ It’s an important song on the album because so much of it is like, ‘Meh, I hate myself,’ and this is like, ‘No, actually, fuck you to anyone who actually made me feel like shit.’ It’s a good moment, a good release of anger.” **“Change My Mind”** “‘Change My Mind,’ again, it’s that unhealthy pattern where you’re not really trying to be better and then that repeats \[something\] bad, whatever it is. The initial inspiration, sonically, was \[2020 single\] ‘Blue.’ We were like, ‘We need to do something that’s kind of like “Blue” because everyone loves “Blue” so much.’ And funnily enough, it is a similar theme, that kind of, ‘I’m bringing my partner down.’ I think it’s a nice, poppy moment on there.” **“In My Head”** “\[May 2023’s single version\] was recorded in Church Studios \[in London\] and we loved how it sounded, so we wanted to put it out, but then we actually ended up doing the album in Rockfield, so we did an album version of it. I love both.” **“Nosebleed”** “This was one that I wrote with Justin Parker \[cowriter of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’\]. It’s someone having a hold on you, a toxic relationship. It could be between friends, family, whatever. It’s that wanting to stay with that comfort even though it’s not necessarily good. But ‘Nosebleed’ was initially really high and really fast, and it was a really poppy song. I didn’t see it being on the album, but then we were doing preproduction with Chris Ryan and he was like, ‘I love this song so much. I really want to give it a go in Rockfield.’ And we were like, ‘OK, whatever. Let’s try slowing it down and making it lower,’ and then it clicked instantly. It was just like honey, just like a mushy, warm sound. I absolutely love it now.” **“Let Go”** “‘Let Go’ is way more about the instrumental and I guess I didn’t think that the vocal needed to be overly complicated, so there’s not a whole lot going on lyrically. I like that kind of swirling. It feels like you’re really stuck in something in that song. This and ‘White Ribbons’ are my two favorites on the album. I just love the chorus and the bridge and the guitars are so snarly. It’s sick.” **“Dream of Me”** “We wrote this in a session with a guy called Rob Brinkmann. I think we just had the chords. We brought it to Rob and he’s really excellent at structuring songs. The reference was actually ‘Waking Up in Vegas,’ the Katy Perry song. I guess it’s a lighter moment in the album because lyrically, as well, I’m not really saying anything profound. It’s just like, ‘Oh, when you like someone and they don’t really care about you,’ that’s it.” **“Nightmares”** “‘Nightmares’ was another song that I did with Justin and it was such a fun one to do because I went in with chords initially and we were layering it up. Then, when we had those little guitar harmonics, we were actually, ‘Just them by themselves sounds so sick.’ It was reminding me of Massive Attack and I thought that was a cool way to roll with it. So I love the electronic sounds in that song. ‘Nightmares,’ again, is that feeling of not wanting to like someone because you know it won’t work.” **“White Ribbons”** “It was very therapeutic to write and it feels like a more hopeful track on the album. We put our bodies through so much shit and they always fix us, and this is basically just a thank you \[for that\]. I actually don’t even know where it came from—one day I had that guitar line and vocals, and it’s a pretty line. I love the stripped-back moment and all the weird vocoder stuff.” **“Madra”** “‘Madra’ is really old now. It was a chord progression I was playing when we were in the studio in Belfast during *Banshee*. Once we got back from recording, we made the demo pretty quickly. We were sitting on that one for a while and we all loved it so much. The outro just felt so strong. It felt like such a cool ending, like a final scene. And all the bass licks and stuff, they’re just so sick. I feel like it sums up everything that is said in the album—about the highs and the lows and the repeating patterns.”
“\[There’s an\] eerily similar melancholy,” Luke Hemmings tells Apple Music, comparing his sophomore album, *boy*, to his 2021 debut, *When Facing the Things We Turn Away From*. “And that really propelled the emotion of *boy* and these seven songs. A lot of the stuff I write is very existential and trying to understand who I am and why I am. At this time, I was very disorientated and maybe a bit emotionally lost, even though life was moving forward in a really great way.” The two albums were conceived and recorded in vastly different circumstances. His debut came together in isolation under the cloak of COVID lockdowns, while *boy* was written as he toured the world with 5 Seconds of Summer, the Sydney band the singer/guitarist co-founded as a 15-year-old in 2011. Still, the pair have much in common: turns out you can feel just as alone spending months traversing the globe as you can sitting in your house waiting for the world to open up. Part of the reason for that disorientation was the dawning realization that he was entering his late twenties, leading Hemmings to reflect deeply on his youth while considering a potential future as a father. “You want to be the most fully realized version of yourself before stepping into that sort of role, which is a work in progress,” he explains. Taking inspiration from artists such as Damon Albarn, Beach House, LCD Soundsystem, and Richard Ashcroft, *boy* exhibits a dreamlike quality, one that bathes in melancholy without ever sinking into depression—witness the way in which opener “I’m Still Your Boy” builds from a whispered acoustic beginning into a grandiose and uplifting climax; or the sad-happy mélange of synths and dance beats that propel “Close My Eyes.” Here, Hemmings takes Apple Music through *boy*, track by track. **“I’m Still Your Boy”** “This song really encompasses the ache I wanted to get across and the growing pains it took to become a fully realized adult version of myself. It’s only until I started thinking of having children of my own that I began reflecting on the struggles I had myself as a teenager who grew up in the public eye. This song is about understanding my youth that was marred with trauma amidst beauty, whilst trying to become a good man. ‘I’m Still Your Boy’ walks on the high wire between boyhood and adulthood, looking both ways.” **“Shakes”** “‘Shakes’ was written on a dreary evening in between long periods of travel and touring, so it easily came from an incredibly melancholy place. A feeling of yearning to be back home, of feeling lonely and emotionally desperate and depleted. There is a longing for love and self-acceptance in the lyrics, and I hope it to be a song that anyone listening \[to\] can find themselves in and attach their own story.” **“Benny”** “This song is named after my brother, Ben, but in its entirety, it represents all of my loved ones and the guilt I feel being away from my family and living on the periphery of their world. It represents the mornings I wake up in a panic, anxious and worried that today will be the day I get bad news. News that would make my dreams of making music seem infantile and pointless. I’d do anything for the people I love.” **“Close My Eyes”** “I wrote ‘Close My Eyes’ as I headed into my late twenties and felt an unavoidable wave of fear and anxiety towards the inevitable death of my youth. I found myself unable to sleep because every time I tried, it was as if a film of my life was projected onto the back of my eyelids—the mistakes, successes, everything that could have been, and everything that was. I was sonically trying to tap into 2000s indie rock bands like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture.” **“Garden Life”** “I had the idea for ‘Garden Life’ when I couldn’t sleep in a hotel room somewhere in the world, sometime around 3am. The next morning, I went for a walk and wrote the lyrics on a park bench, watching life pass me by. It’s really just an existential love song to my happiest and safest place. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that sometimes the most beautiful and visceral memories in life are not the most grand and obvious ones, they can be simple and powerful. It’s not always the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Sometimes it’s a Friday night sitting on the couch listening to your favorite person laugh.” **“Close Enough to Feel You”** “This song was inspired by sounds from Cocteau Twins and my bloody valentine, who I listened to heavily during the making of *boy*. The beauty in ‘Close Enough to Feel You’ is all in the details, both sonically and lyrically. Sometimes when you suffer a big emotional loss, something so mundane and otherwise unnoticed can become earth-shattering. A glimpse of a photo out of the corner of your eye, a stain on the carpet, an old sweater, sends you into the fetal position. This song is about the willingness and desire to live in that pain in order to feel close to who or what you lost, rather than moving on.” **“Promises”** “‘Promises’ was the song written for the EP that finally made me feel like I was really onto something. It started with merely a drum beat, which I find ironic as I’m not a drummer. But I think maybe it’s that naïveté that led to this song being created. It’s about a time in my life when I saw the world through gray-colored glasses. I was a pessimist, struggling with depression and my mental health, who fell in love and started to see color for the first time.”
When you experience your musical breakthrough in the midst of a global pandemic, chances are you might develop an unusual way of working. Such was the case for Bleach Lab. Having felt the first UK lockdown descend shortly after the release of their second single, “Burnt Orange,” the London/Brighton-based four-piece had become used to piecing together their glittery brand of indie rock via virtual means. “There were points in time where we had recorded and released songs that we hadn’t yet played in a room together, which was very strange,” vocalist Jenna Kyle tells Apple Music. “There was a lot of work to do in making those songs appropriate to play live, and for \[this debut\] album, something we really discussed from the start was wanting to be together for the entire process, to capture that raw feeling.” Working with producer Catherine Marks (boygenius, Foals, Wolf Alice), Bleach Lab finally got their wish, using the studio as a place to grow closer as a unit. The fruit of their open-spirited labor is *Lost in a Rush of Emptiness*, a cinematic, unapologetically melancholy exploration of the big questions, challenges, and romantic decisions that shape early adulthood. The shoegazing sound of their early EPs has broadened out into something fuller, poetic even, taking its title from Leonard Cohen’s posthumous poetry collection *The Flame*. “Over time, it’s a phrase that just felt right, like the feeling of when you find out some awful news, that gut-dropping moment of losing control,” says Kyle of the album’s title. “A lot of the song’s themes are of those turning points in your life; the rush of conflicting emotions, dread, or emptiness which we can all seem to relate to in some way or another.” Here, she takes us through the record’s lyrical inspirations, track by track. **“All Night”** “I have a bit of a sadistic obsession with true crime. I don’t think there’s one Netflix documentary about murder or conspiracy that I haven’t watched. I am so used to writing lyrics about my very personal experiences and, although that can be cathartic in a lot of ways, it’s quite emotionally draining. So this time, I took it a little bit out of the box. It’s a song about love and not feeling wanted, but then I was like, what if she just lost her mind and killed him? My biggest concern was that people were going to think that I’m actually some sort of sadistic serial killer, but it was just a fun exercise to expand and experiment with my writing a little bit more.” **“Indigo”** “We have a lot of back-and-forth as a band when it comes to choosing singles. There’s a lot of heated debates and decisions that then get changed the next day. With a debut album it’s especially daunting, because you want the first single to really set the tone. Having gone a bit poppier on our most recent EPs, we just wanted to go straight in for something that we thought made it clear that this was going to be more of a live-sounding, raw-sounding release. ‘Indigo’ feels like one of the best examples of us—a great introduction to Bleach Lab.” **“Counting Empties”** “Josh \[Longman, bassist\] and I share a lot of the songwriting. As a singer, I really appreciate making room for his words and his thoughts because he’s got a lot to say and a lot of valuable things to explore. ‘Counting Empties’ is written from his perspective, quite a personal experience of how his past actions and alcohol usage have had an effect on his relationships and friendships. It’s a bit of a plea to your partner: feeling unlovable and weak because of your dependence, asking for patience and understanding, but also knowing that that’s probably too much to ask.” **“Saving All Your Kindness”** “This is my favorite song on the album, mostly because of how it helped me. I wrote these lyrics coming to the end of a draining and sometimes emotionally abusive relationship. It’s all about feeling so exhausted, but avoiding talking about your problems because they always end up in an argument. The person I was seeing was known for jumping from people to people quite regularly, and that sort of sparked the idea of wondering what they were holding back—are you not giving me the love and commitment and affection of a long-term relationship because you’re just saving your energy for the next person? It was a lot to work through, but looking back, I couldn’t have encapsulated how I was feeling better than I have in this song.” **“Everything at Once”** “This song had a great response from everyone we showed it to during the recording, but I will admit that the chorus is quite vocally challenging to perform. We don’t have any spoken word in any of our previous songs either, but I am here to embrace the new! Essentially, it’s about being at war with your own choices. Josh says that he sees the contrast between the verses and the chorus as being two different mindsets; the part that accepts unhealthy relationships and allows them to consume you, and then the chorus, which is about trying to talk some sense back into yourself and remember your true self. It’s an ‘angel vs devil on your shoulder’ kind of thing.” **“Nothing Left to Lose”** “We’ve had a bit of a water metaphor flowing through our songs for a while. Maybe it’s because I live by the sea, but I take a lot of inspiration from stormy days, from water being such a beautiful but terrifying body. I was very inspired by a picture I saw of ocean and freshwater meeting—this natural phenomenon where two really strong forces come together but don’t quite mix. It’s basically about the beginning of a relationship—being afraid for what’s to come so you keep your guard up and can’t quite figure out how to connect. It’s a heavier song for us as well, and really fun to play live.” **“Never Coming Back”** “This was written around the same time as the relationship in ‘Saving All Your Kindness,’ realizing the catastrophic end where you’re not quite sure that you were ever meant to be. I write a lot of my lyrics very visually, and as I was thinking about everything that was going on and that I was going through, I kept seeing a burning car flipping through the sky, which made it into the lyrics. But then I also sing another of my favorite lines on this album: ‘Your hands on my skin don’t mean a thing if they’re not in love with what I hold within.’ I like a good metaphor, but I also like to be quite literal about things sometimes too.” **“Smile for Me”** “This was definitely the most challenging song to write. I didn’t want to speak for other people, but I don’t really know many people—many women—who haven\'t had some sort of horrible experience, usually with a man, where they’ve been made to feel extremely uncomfortable and afraid. You feel like you owe them something, even if that’s a smile, just so that they don\'t turn on you and increase the level of danger. Encapsulating that feeling in just a few verses and a chorus was quite hard, but it’s basically a callout. If you’re doing any of this, if any of this relates to the way that you are acting, we are aware, and you need to change. ‘Must be hard to think/We don’t owe you anything’—I repeat that lyric in the chorus because I want it to stick. It’s an important message to stand for.” **“Leave the Light On”** “‘Leave the Light On’ is about the exhaustive experience of dating in the modern world as a monogamous person. Every short-lived whirlwind fling, you go through the same thing over and over, trying to create a long-term emotional connection but repeatedly getting disappointed. I was single for four years maybe, just searching for that little nugget of consistency or commitment in people that weren’t able to provide emotional availability. It’s a song about trying to allow yourself to be vulnerable and asking that person to stick around for you, but also trying to be accepting that they probably won’t. It’s still a poppy one though!” **“Life Gets Better”** “From start to finish, this album explores some really deep emotional dirt, bringing up a lot of dark feelings and memories. Josh wrote this one, and it’s inspired by that feeling of chatting to someone who maybe isn’t the best at giving advice, who listens to your problems but then just says, ‘Oh, never mind, things will get better.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh thanks, guess I’m sorted now!’ Closing on that note of sarcasm feels really fun for us, and it was great to record. We didn’t actually have an ending planned for it, so I just kept repeating the closing lyric and they kept playing the outro until it all felt right.” **“(coda)”** “It’s our debut album. If you can’t add an extra bit of drama now, when can you? This track really helps to round out the whole record, to create atmosphere and bring the story to a close.”
