Dummy's 25 Best Albums of 2020

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

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

Of the many meanings behind *Dark Matter*—London jazz drummer Moses Boyd’s debut LP—the most vital comes from above. “It’s astronomy,” Boyd tells Apple Music, “this invisible fabric that brings us all together. *Dark Matter* isn’t meant to be a negative record; it\'s meant to unify, to make people think.” It’s also the rare political record that doesn’t lean entirely on lyrics. As both a producer and bandleader—contributors include Poppy Ajudha, Obongjayar, Joe Armon-Jones, and Nonku Phiri—Boyd wanted to capture the gravity of our current moment in both rhythm and atmosphere, by combining elements of Bjork’s *Vespertine* and Aphex Twin’s *Selected Ambient Works* with the funk of James Brown and Tony Allen. “I wanted nuance,” he says of the album\'s many textures. “That air and earth feeling. Floaty bits that are kind of beautiful, but thickness and weight, where it\'s like, if I put this on, it\'s going to hit me right in my stomach, and it\'s going to move me. I don\'t see myself as overtly political, but I guess I am. I\'m just responding to what\'s going on around, which maybe all art should do.” Here, he walks us through his debut, track by track. **Stranger Than Fiction** “I had just come back from holiday in Sri Lanka with my family to what was going on in the UK—so from palm trees and beaches to Brexit. At the moment, in the world, you can pick a country and look at what’s happening and just be like, ‘Is this actually real?’ I wanted to mirror what\'s going on around me musically. When you listen to it, it’s like, ‘What is real, what\'s not? Is that a real drum kit? Is that not a real drum kit?’ I wanted to really blur the lines and make people have to really listen carefully to decipher what\'s real and what\'s not. That was my musical metaphor for something stranger than fiction, which is also just referencing what\'s going on in politics, in nature, in life—full stop.” **Hard Food (Interlude)** “Amongst all of this craziness, you realize there\'s so much you have in common with the person next to you. Hard food is a Jamaican term—it\'s a type of dish that might consist of boiled dumplings, boiled plantains, a really hearty meal that brings people together. I’d reached out to \[jazz composer/bassist\] Gary Crosby, one of my mentors. That recording is our conversation. He\'s grown up with his own struggles and challenges in the UK. He used this analogy of ‘I’m from West Indian background and I defy anyone, from anywhere in the world, whether they know about my food or not: If they\'re hungry they\'re going to eat it, and they\'re going to enjoy it, and it will fill them up.’ He was trying to say, ‘Look, we\'re all similar. We all want the same things in life. We\'re not different to each other. There\'s far more that unites us than separates us.’” **BTB** “‘BTB’ is one of only two tracks that are complete live takes. BTB stands for ‘blacker than black,’ another play on dark matter. Just being me, and my experience being a young black person in England—it’s a celebration of culture. I\'m from the West Indies, and I really wanted to have my sort of take on those sounds and those rhythms. So it\'s very sort of soca, calypso-driven. Also quite dark—you couldn\'t play that at carnival, but it makes sense to me, as somebody that\'s grown up in that culture, but not necessarily born in it and from it. It might be like being born in New York, but your family is from Puerto Rico. You have a very different reference in the way you visualize and present your culture.“ **Y.O.Y.O** “‘Y.O.Y.O’ stands for ‘you\'re on your own,’ and ‘yo-yo’ in the sense of just like a yo-yo goes up and down and round and round, and if you listen to the drum beat, it\'s like a cycle of a loop. But when I was making this music, I was thinking like, \'Man, all of this is going on. You really are on your own in this world.\' And I don\'t necessarily think that\'s a bad thing. When it sort of hit me, it was like, ‘That at first is very sad, but it\'s also very liberating.’ You are in control. You go as far, or as close, as you want to go. You can\'t rely on anyone but your own brain and yourself, and in that there is power. It was influenced by sad things I was seeing around me, but out of that came positivity.\" **Shades of You** “I had the bassline and the drum beat, but I felt I’d given as much as I could to the song and it wasn\'t done yet. I was thinking about vocalists, and I\'m quite good at kind of hearing somebody\'s voice on it. That was it—I heard Poppy’s voice. I just knew she\'d understand it musically. And as I sort of explained it to her, she went away and came back without any direction from me. I’ve known her for a long time, I’m a big fan of what she does, and I wanted to try and push to see if she could try something different to maybe what you\'ve heard from her, because I\'ve seen her do loads of interesting things that aren\'t recorded or aren\'t on YouTube, and I just wanted to kind of get somebody that would get it, and I think she did.” **Dancing in the Dark** “What\'s the word when someone can read your mind? Telepathic. I had this loop, and even before I exhausted my part on it, I just heard Steven Obongjayar. He’s got this kind of raspy tone that could just cut through and make it kind of feel almost like Afrobeat and punk rock. We got in a studio together, and I played it to him, and then after two seconds he was like, ‘Man, can I have this for my album?’ After about an hour arguing: ‘No, you can\'t have it.’ What was crazy was that I had not explained anything to do with *Dark Matter*, or the subjects. He just got it. I was like, ‘Man, look at that. There\'s something going on. There\'s something in the air.’” **Only You** “I was talking to Theon Cross, who\'s a tuba player, and I remember playing him some sketches. He’s like, ‘Moses, man, why do you never feature on your music?’ And I think because I write it, because I produce it, because I help mix it, because I\'m putting it together, to me, it just feels a bit weird to then have solo stuff. And also, I don\'t want it to sound like a drummer\'s record. I don\'t want it to sound like you can tell who I am on the record. But he managed to convince me. I was in the club and I had an idea: I love listening to techno and garage, but why do I never hear a drum? I know it sounds weird, a drum solo through a sound system. But I didn\'t want it to be like a typical feature—here’s the song and it\'s framed just for me. I wanted it to kind of exist in its own sort of texture, to take you on this journey. Like you could close your eyes and sort of vibe to in a club. Maybe I got it, maybe I didn\'t. But that was the vibe.” **2 Far Gone** “There\'s an album by Herbie Hancock called *Inventions & Dimensions*, and Herbie doesn\'t need help, but it just showcases him so well. It\'s got these incredible grooves, and he\'s just going at it on the piano. I was like, ‘How do I do that with my thing?’ I remember going around to \[composer/producer\] Joe \[Armon-Jones’\] house and he had recently got a little upright piano in his front room. Typically, if you go to a studio and you record piano, they\'ll have really good stereo mics, and it\'s really pristine, and everything\'s got to be good. What was great about this one was he just had this one microphone and it wasn\'t the best microphone. He just put it somewhere and did one take at this upright. People were walking around the house—it was so rough and ready. But it worked so perfectly. Even when I was trying to mix it, the rawness of it sounded so great.” **Nommos Descent** “A lot of this stuff started as me really experimenting with loops. That one wanted a vocal. On a trip to South Africa last year, I was working with a friend of mine, Nonku Phiri. She\'s from Cape Town, but she lives in Jo’burg, and her father was a musician on *Graceland*, back with Paul Simon, so she knows everybody. While I was hanging out with her, a lot of the music she was showing me, people like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a lot of folk music, vocal music, really fit the sound I was going for when I was experimenting. So when I got back to England, I sent her the track. Even if I took all the music away—I might do that one day—and just release her vocals, it would be so beautiful. It’s referencing the Nommos people, really talking on the element, the metaphor. \'Dark matter\' is a reference for the plight of the diaspora, black people, and sort of how we\'ve come from greatness and whether you choose to do with that what you will. What was cool: We\'re never actually in the same room. I sent the music to her and she did her thing, and it just worked.” **What Now?** “It\'s easy to feel helpless, but I\'m not really like that—I’m very solution-based. There\'s no point in sort of posing the statement without thinking about a solution. \[\'What Now\'\] was a nice summary for me, because I wanted it to be very meditative. It’s that real strong mix of trying to have the acoustic and the electronic worlds coexist without battling each other. You’ve got this 808 sort of vibe going, as well as horns that sound like they\'re almost suffocated. I was messing a lot with modular synths, and I think I sampled a note on a piano and sort of held it and saturated it a bit. I remember just listening to it in my home setup, and it just put me in this real trance. I think music has that power to cleanse and make you recollect, think, hope—all that stuff. Across the whole album, I could\'ve just recorded things in a very normal, clean fashion, but it was more about how do I get that vibration? How do I get that texture, that tone? And I wanted to end the record on that sort of note: ‘Well, where are we going from here?’”

Not long after Kamohelo Khoaripe moved to Stockholm from his nascent Johannesburg he met Adrian Lux, Carli Löf and Måns Glaeser, three local DJ-producers, all veterans of the small, tightly-knit, constantly evolving Swedish club scene. At that point in 2013, Adrian, Carli and Måns were already longtime studio partners, shifting in and out of varying constellations, turning out everything from stone-cold Scandi-grime to straight-up Eurovision goodness in the process. Adrian had followed his 2010 proto-EDM monster Teenage Crime with years of febrile activity, constantly developing his songwriting skills together with an ever-shifting cast of vocal talent and production partners, on a mission to prove that the melancholy heart of Swedish pop can be felt in any amount of beats per minute. Meanwhile, Savage Skulls – the bass-squelchin', blog-housin' duo of Carli and Måns – were busy churning out a string of rapid-fire singles, one more gloriously bonkers than the other, providing festival-blitzing DJs like A-Trak and Diplo with their heaviest ammunition at the time. Even with all this going on you'd still regularly find Adrian mixing a fresh batch of acid wax at some Stockholm warehouse rave, or Måns getting caught up in the inner workings of Sweden's rap scene, or Carli providing labels like Born Free with charming little rave-disco oddities every now and then. What really brought these music makers together was their mutual state of constant searching – working on everything with everyone but never truly belonging anywhere – that is until Kamo showed up in town. Although a life-long music aficionado, Kamo never thought about making music before arriving in Sweden, expressing himself instead through work in photography, taking pictures of the lively Johannesburg club scene he found himself embedded into. In Stockholm he kept similar surroundings, and one late night student flat after party situation involving a microphone led to a recording of Kamo's voice (a freestyle he doesn't recollect performing) being played in a studio where Adrian, Carli and Måns happened to be. Kamo was soon invited to a joint session, resulting in the first proper Off The Meds recording: Low-slung, Ethio-jazz sampling hip-house gem Currency Low, one of the standouts on Axel Boman, Kornél Kovács and Petter Nordkvist's 2018 label compilation Studio Barnhus Volym 1. These things were clear from the start: Kamo had been quietly nurturing an exceptional lyrical talent for who knows how long – his focused, strangely melodic Zulu-Tsotsitaal-English flow delivering the same kind of wry but warm-hearted observations his photography had brought about – and also, that in Kamo and his voice, our elusive trio of producers had found the pièce de résistance that enabled them to start a Real Band and finally belong somewhere. The band's Studio Barnhus Volym 1 appearance was followed by a 2019 solo release on the label – the ravey smash single Belter, which came paired with a much-lauded remix by London top selector Joy Orbison. Their self-titled debut album arrives on Studio Barnhus in late 2020. First album single Karlaplan was recently played by Four Tet on Benji B's show on BBC Radio 1, while second single Wena got included in hotly tipped UK garage reformist Conducta's Resident Advisor podcast. Off The Meds have also proven to be an exceptionally entertaining live act – the members' diverse musical talents fully displayed on stage, Kamo half-naked and beaming with energy – shouting, whispering and whistling from on top of a bass speaker, perhaps his favourite of all those places he calls home. Off The Meds - Karlaplan / Karlaplan (Remix) release September 4. Off The Meds - Wena / Wena (Ciel Remix) release October 2. Off The Meds – Off The Meds release November 20. --- Album credits: All tracks written and produced by Adrian Hynne, Carli Löf, Kamohelo Khoaripe & Måns Glaeser. All vocals written and performed by Kamohelo Khoaripe. Karlaplan co-written by Krister Linder & Samir Kedidi. Factory Workers and Dr. Silencer co-written and co-produced by Cari Lekebusch. Hiccups co-written by Marcus Price. Wanting co-performed by Jelly Crystal. Mastered by Beau at Ten Eight Seven. Design by Laurenz Brunner.

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

“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.

for audio stream or download : awal.ffm.to/galore 1 - little one 2 - fall 3 - unearth me 4 - god's chariots 5 - galore 6 - nightime 7 - asturias (ft. Zero) 8 - rosebud 9 - girl on my throne (ft. Casey MQ) 10 - another night 11 - I didn't give up on you

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

“When you hear the music, I think the title explains itself,” Nines tells Apple Music of his third album *Crabs in a Bucket*. “I just felt like when I look back on recent situations I had, they all made me feel that way.” An artist who has always depicted the transition from life on the road (2015 mixtape *One Foot In*) to being a high-profile rapper and entrepreneur (2017’s *One Foot Out*), his absence from the forefront of the music scene since his acclaimed 2018 album *Crop Circle* has brought around a slew of online rumors, as well as heightened anticipation for his next release. On *Crabs in a Bucket*, Nines—born Courtney Freckleton—explains where he’s been, exploring the impact of his stabbing in the summer of 2019, during a time when he was also supporting his father through cancer. The incident left the North-West Londoner requiring surgery and a recovery period abroad—time away that allowed him to find solace, and regain a passion for music. All of which ignited his ambition to put together his most polished work yet. “I was in different countries—Spain, Paris, Dubai—when I was making this album. That’s why it took a bit of time. I would go sometimes three months without recording. But you know what they say: When you’re uninspired, the best thing is to do other things.” Over 52 minutes, and with guest spots from Nafe Smallz, NSG, and Headie One to name a few, Nines relights his fire by doubling down on witty rap references, big-time boasts, and smooth trap talk. Elsewhere, he hones his storytelling prowess—and allows himself the room to be more introspective than ever (see “Intro” and “NIC” especially). Walk with Nines as he breaks down *Crabs in a Bucket*, one track at a time. **Intro** “I didn’t intend for this to be the intro to the album, but everyone I’ve played the album to said this was the one. Normally you hear me get busy with the trap talk, the flavors, just popping that fly shit, but I went deeper and addressed a lot. It set the tone for the album; when the fans ask ‘Where has Nines been?’ you can listen to this and connect the dots. When I made this, I was bored on a plane. I’ve been flying a lot in the last year and I’ve been going through beats on YouTube. I heard this beat on there by an American producer, and once I played it, I had to track him down. At the end that’s me chatting to \[UK producer\] Quincy. I poured out my pain and just let it flow.” **Energy (feat. Skrapz)** “This was produced by Beatfreakz. I made it when I was driving around in my car—it just sounds like one of those tracks you can cruise to. I phoned up Skrapz and told him that I’ve got some fire that I need him on; that’s family so it was really that simple.” **Clout** “I consider ‘Airplane Mode’ to be the lead single, but it came out after ‘Clout.’ This wasn’t even meant to be a single. When I was playing tracks to the young guns, they said this was the one. My guy 1st Born produced this. You already know what I’m about when I make a song, you hear the wordplay—I can’t call really call it bragging, because I live it. The inspiration for the video was just some of the albums that have influenced me when I was growing up. When I get an idea, my guy \[director\] Charlie Di Placido helps me bring it to life. We directed the video together and I feel like we did it justice.” **Realist (feat. Nafe Smallz and Fundz)** “Come on, man, this one was inevitable! Nafe has been family for a minute, so it was only right that we linked up properly on a track. On *One Foot In*, he was only on a bonus track, but this time we just had to make it happen for real. On this song I kinda stepped into his world with the instrumental. We were at a coffee shop in Amsterdam and the guy who owns the shop has a studio in there, so Quincy hit me up and was like, ‘Yo, I’ve got something that was made for you,’ and we just took it from there. Quincy is family as well, I’ve been fucking with him for a while now. This was one of the most organic sessions I had for the album.” **Monster** “1st Born produced this also. He’s got a few joints on here. He laced me with this eerie-sounding beat so it was easy to get into that mindset when I was recording. ‘I swear these streets turned me to a monster, I swear these streets turned me to a—’ This track explains itself, you know what I come from already. I was in Dubai when I made this.” **Airplane Mode (feat. NSG)** “Shout out KZ and Rudimental. When I was making the album, I was thinking about the clubs for real, and I wanted a club song. Before COVID stopped everything, I would hit the clubs and DJs would play \[Nines’ 2017 track\] ‘Trapper of the Year.’ I know they wouldn’t play that if I wasn’t here. It’s homage, but it’s not a club song, you get me? So I feel like I needed an ‘Airplane Mode’ on the album. I fuck with NSG, I reached out to them, invited them to the studio, and the rest was history. We all played PlayStation, blew trees, it was a good time! We actually made three songs in that session, but ‘Airplane Mode’ was the one for me because I had my eye on the commercial side.” **NIC (feat. Tiggs Da Author)** “Tiggs has been on all of my studio albums, he’s a natural with it. Whenever I say I’m working on an album, he’ll always come around like, ‘I’ve got something for your album, bro.’ \[Producer\] Show N Prove is the same too. He’s actually produced all the songs that me and Tiggs have done together. When I heard the beat, I already knew I wanted to go into story mode. It has that vintage feel to it. Some of my inspiration comes from how 50 Cent, Hov, and those guys used to tell stories. I feel like you can hear it here, just the come-up story from my school days. That influence is why there\'s three verses. I felt like it was too long, but when I play it to people, they would beg me not to cut it to two.” **Don’t Change (feat. Northsidebenji)** “This is definitely one for the ladies, so I had to get \[Canadian rapper\] Benji on here. Carlos produced this one–he’s my go-to engineer, but he’s been getting in his bag lately with production. He’ll chop up samples for me that I’ll take to him. Here it was the ‘Don’t Change’ sample that I wanted someone to sing over. I hit up Benji and he laid his melodies and done his thing on it. I really enjoy helping to develop artists. Looking after other artists as the head of an imprint when you’re an artist as well is tricky; your natural instinct is to protect your own interests. With Benji, I co-manage him and I wanted to help him out.” **Lights (feat. Louis Rei)** “Again, that is me and Carlos in collab mode. I would say we both produced it, but it’s more him because he chopped the sample. Shout out to the boy Louis, man, people always try to take him out of the rapper conversation because he’s the vibes guy. But even when Akelle went away, he stepped up and held it down for WSTRN. People act like LB is not the guy, but it was good to get a joint with him where we’re both rapping nice.” **Money Ain’t a Thing (feat. Roy Woods)** “I think this one was worked on by three different producers: Quincy, Steel Banglez, and my guy Sean. Shout out to my OVO family Roy Woods, he’s good peoples. He wanted to be on the hook rather than drop a verse, and he came through with that. Since before I signed the deal, I could say money weren’t a thing. Could’ve been in *Top Boy* but I turned it down. Come on: *Crop Circle*, baby! It would have been a good look but off-brand given the fact I’m doing my own thing with *Crop Circle*.” **Ringaling (feat. Headie One and Odeal)** “Headie has been one of my favorites for a while now. Headie and K-Trap go in on drill. And M1llionz is trying to run away with it right now, too. He’s been on a good run, but those three are killing it. The Elements and Steel Banglez co-produced ‘Ringaling’—it doesn’t sound like any song I’ve done before. Again, this track was done with an eye on the club. You can’t be playing ‘Trapper of the Year’ in the clubs, we all know what that is. You thought that ‘Don’t Change’ was the girl song, but this is it for me. I talk about the love I have for bae, but I let her know that I gotta leave her when the money calls!” **Flavours** “You know I’ve been the tree guy from early, from the beginning, so I had to make a weed song. My favorite strains right now are Skittles, or Biscotti—that’s that good Cali right there. Billy Kimber as well—all the others don’t compare. We only keep exotic flavors around here, bro!” **Flex (feat. Northsidebenji and REID B2WN)** “This was produced by my guy, the young Nav Michael, who produced Drake’s ‘Back to Back.’ He’s the same as Show N Prove with me—when I’m trying to make an album he’ll always come through with something for me. Benji wrapped up his part effortlessly and I tried to match his energy with a smooth flow and flex a little.” **Stalker Interlude (feat. Cherrie)** “True stories: I really had stalkers following me at one point—ringing my phone, showing up at random shows. One time we were in Croatia for a festival and this girl showed up there and hit me up. Cherrie is a Swedish singer that I met through a mutual friend. She came through to the studio and I played her a few beats and she took to this one the most. When I was writing this one, I was influenced by my Fire in the Booth and also JAY-Z’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’” **Movie Knights** “I had to hop on a hometown beat, so I hollered at my guy MK, a young producer from the ends. The reason for this is because when I go to my studio I see all the plaques I have, but the studio in ends doesn’t have a single plaque in there. So hopefully we get a plaque for this one. You know I’m about my films—throughout the song you hear me reference some of my favorites. Funnily enough, I was with Leon \[Palmer, the creative behind the Movie Knights brand\] in the studio when I made that and had some fun with it. Leon is a cool guy. I’ll never forget when he came to the ends on his ones just to meet me. I thought he was mad! But we’re alike—we see something we want and go for it.” **All Stars 2 (feat. Clavish, Frosty, Q2T and Chappo CSB)** “I had to show the young Gs some love on the album, let them get their shine on. Clavish picked the beat, and I don’t usually rap on beats at this tempo, but that’s what the youngers were doing. We done our thing, and I’m not dissing the song… I just wish Clavish picked a different beat.” **Outro** “Just like the intro, this one came from the heart. I rapped from the heart and poured my pain over the beat. By the time you get to the end of the album, what I want people—especially the youngers—to take from this is that you can be in the hood, and born into it, but do see other things in life. I’m not saying leave the hood, but there’s levels to life. I was turning down festivals and not doing shows so I can stand around in the hood—that doesn’t make any sense. Start thinking about the long game, you have to.”

Zora Jones debut album ‘Ten Billion Angels’ - out now

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

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

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

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

The debut album from Al Wootton. Taking the strands of his influences such as UK Garage, dub, jungle/drum and bass, techno and house music, Al Wootton has weaved together an album that stands together as a deep listen while maintaining high dance floor energy.

Minor Science presents his debut album 'Second Language', out on the 3rd April 2020. The LP gives us a widescreen view of a musical world previously glimpsed through the producer’s series of 12" releases. A kaleidoscope of tempos and intensities, the record is often fast but rarely heavy, fizzing with detail but full of space, euphoric in places but frequently blue in mood. As the title suggests, the album takes translation as a guiding principle, putting an idiomatic spin on familiar styles - from Detroit-ish techno and hyperspeed electro to twilit electronica, musique concrete and sour modal jazz. Minor Science's language is a knotty one, packed with odd time-signatures, brain-bending sound design and a playful palette of switch-ups, fake-outs and digital hiccups. But it's also soft and emotive, and shot through with vibrant melody. Minor Science’s relationship with languages is a strong feature of the record. More precisely the relationship between a second and third language, and a mother tongue. It signals an effort to get out of familiar habits, echoing the relationship he has with his own music writing and music making. Regardless of attempts to be precise, a translation can never fully capture the original meaning. “Parce que c'est plus facile d'écrire sans style” - Samuel Beckett The cover of ‘Second Language’ devised by Alex McCullough, shows the handling of a tablet carved in Portuguese Limestone (and later painted) by architectural sculptor George Edwards. Immortalising the phrasing of Samuel Beckett alongside the album title. The stone artefact was photographed by Oskar Proctor directly after completion, documented in transit whilst being manoeuvred. Sleeve credits: Design and art direction by Alex McCullough Limestone tablet carved by George Edwards Photograph courtesy of Oskar Proctor

On his fourth studio album, Wizkid invokes a strong continental impulse across 14 tracks. With melody at the heart of his sonics, he enlists Burna Boy, Ella Mai, H.E.R., Damian Marley and more to capture the rhythmic essence of Afrofusion. *Made In Lagos* is rooted in Africa—with instrumentation, lingo and vibes inspired by Wiz’s Nigerian origins—and offers worldwide appeal.

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

Even guitar gods sometimes get bored. In his years with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante became known as one of the world’s most formidable players, while his shape-shifting solo music explored the breadth of the instrument’s capabilities: psychedelic shredding, power-pop crunch, full-on noise. “I love rock music,” Frusciante tells Apple Music. “It’s very meaningful to me, and I’ve studied it quite a bit more than most rock musicians.” But he reached a point where the surprise wore off. “The things I think are the best, I know how to play all of them,” he says. “I’ve learned them multiple times throughout my life. Whereas electronic music still feels to me the way rock music felt when I was a teenager. I’m still constantly learning from it.” A tribute to ’90s jungle and the frenetic sounds of IDM musicians like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Luke Vibert, *Maya*, his 13th solo album, is a thrilling testament to Frusciante’s passion—and also to his aptitude for new skills. *Maya* isn’t Frusciante’s first electronic outing. In 2010, he teamed up with Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk in the breakcore group Speed Dealer Moms, then paired drill ’n’ bass with grunge on 2012’s *PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone*. He began putting out stripped-down acid tracks under his Trickfinger alias in 2015—“mainly just because it seemed simple enough,” he says—but *Maya* immediately stands out, both in style and assuredness. From the chiming synths and chock-a-block percussion of the opening “Brand E,” it would be easy to mistake the album for a lost classic from the peak years of Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. Sped-up breaks give the acidic “Usbrup Pensul” (even the titles are authentically IDM) the feel of a pinball game played back on fast-forward; “Pleasure Explanation” flips Wagon Christ-like trip-hop into jump-up drum ’n’ bass; and “Blind Aim,” glowing like a sunrise, channels all the exuberance of early breakbeat hardcore. Those IDM references are no accident, says Frusciante: Aphex and his ilk constitute his most listened-to music, though while he was recording the album, he immersed himself in ’90s jungle pioneers like Doc Scott and Dillinja. “Between that and my love for abstract things like Mark Fell and Pita,” he says, “I was trying to make the drums more abstract than jungle, to take it to points where the rhythm starts to feel like it’s falling apart.” If *Maya* sounds like a major step up in ambition, that’s no accident. “I wanted to spend a year just making things as hard as for myself as possible,” he says. “I started programming in specific ways that were challenging, and focusing on specific machines that were the hardest to use. After a year of that, I developed enough skills where when I started doing *Maya*, I could make tracks as quickly as I ever made them.” Much of the album’s cohesiveness derives from his relatively stripped-down toolbox of modular synths, a Yamaha DX7 keyboard, and just one drum machine per track. “There’s a certain power that comes out of trying to get the most out of one drum machine,” he says. “Each drum machine has its own capacity to receive human energy.” There were exceptions, however. The dizzying breaks of “Reach Out” were cobbled together out of so many different samples that even Frusciante can’t quite untangle his Frankenstein’s monster. “It gets to the point you don\'t even know what breaks you\'re using anymore,” he laughs, “because you\'re putting so many together and you\'ve mangled them so much.” But for all the album’s high-tech experiments and dazzling formal complexity, the colorful leads of tracks like “Brand E” and “Flying,” which nod to Jean-Michel Jarre and Art of Noise, underscore Frusciante’s emphasis on musicality. “I have a thing with melody and rhythm,” he says, “and *Maya* was really just me making music that I would want to listen to.” Perhaps for that reason, it’s named after his cat, who died after 15 years with Frusciante. (“She’d sit in the studio and listen,” he recalls. “She’d knead my stomach while I practiced guitar, and while I was programming machines, she was in my lap.”) The result is an album that is as emotional as the most vulnerable singer-songwriter records in his catalog—just cut from different cloth. “I don\'t think music is better just because it\'s more complex,” Frusciante says. “It\'s really about the soul.”

John Frusciante releases the first instrumental electronic album under his own name on Aaron Funk's Timesig label. The record is dedicated to his cat Maya who recently passed away, a fellow traveller in his otherwise solitary music making sessions. He says "Maya was with me as I made music for 15 years, so I wanted to name it after her. She loved music, and with such a personal title, it didn't seem right to call myself Trickfinger, somehow, so it's by John Frusciante." 'Maya' is inspired by his favourite music: '91 to'96 UK breakbeat hardcore and jungle. It’s a varied and personal take with sophisticated, authentic production balanced against John’s acute sense of melody, an inspired blending of machines and samples infused with a joyful energy. After discovering early UK rave music, John started dancing at drum & bass club nights in Los Angeles. He then got into Venetian Snares' music at the Autechre curated ATP in 2003, eventually becoming friends with Aaron resulting in the Speed Dealer Moms collaboration which boosted his confidence in making electronic music. The process of making his tracks changed over time as John explains; “For a full year before I started this record, I worked within self-imposed limitations and rules that made the music-making process as difficult as possible, programming for programming's sake. After a full year of that, I decided to make things easier, to the degree that I could regularly finish tracks I enjoyed listening to, while continuing many of the practices I‘d developed. Throughout the recording of Maya, I would prepare to make each track very slowly, but would finish tracks very quickly. I'd spend weeks making breakbeats, souping up a drum machine, making DX7 patches, and so on. By the time an idea came up that seemed like the beginning of a tune, I had a lot of fresh elements ready to go." John says his solo music has changed; "I don't have that interest in singing or writing lyrics like I used to. The natural thing when I'm by myself now, is to just make music like the stuff being released this year. I really love the back and forth with machines and the computer." The fun he’s having on 'Maya' is infectious.