Esquire's 20 Best Albums of 2023

A decade into their career, London duo Jungle is determined to make up for lost time. Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland felt that they’d taken too long to follow up 2014’s self-titled Mercury-nominated debut, with second album *For Ever* arriving four years later. It injected their third album *Loving in Stereo*, released in 2021, with a creative restlessness, and that thrilling urgency continues on *Volcano*. “We’d just come off the road and went straight back into the studio,” Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “We got the record done between November and December 2022 and wrapped it up in January, which is one of the quickest turnarounds we’ve done. You can feel that in the music.” It’s a record that both sharpens the pair’s melodic hooks and hones their nu-disco, soulful pop swagger—pushing them further away from being a band and deeper into how they’ve always imagined themselves. “It’s going back to what is essentially a production duo,” says Lloyd-Watson. “It’s a collective—we wouldn’t be where we are without the dancers, without the incredible vocalists, without all the people that come together to make the full thing. But ultimately, it feels like bits of it are heading much more towards something like Justice or Daft Punk, more dance-y.” Exploring themes of love found, loss, heartbreak, and rediscovery, *Volcano* is also a record that insists you move to its rhythm. This is Jungle at their most vibrant and infectious. Lloyd-Watson talks us through it, track by track. **“Us Against the World”** “This starts in almost chaotic fashion. I think we like that because it bamboozles you a little bit and you can’t really work out what’s going on. It’s frantic and a bit crazy and then it settles in and takes a while to find some solid harmony that Jungle would be known for. We’re embedded deep in harmony. It’s like a breakbeat track, a little bit on edge. I suppose the track can be taken as, ‘We’re about to climb this mountain together, this volcano.’ It’s a setting-off track. It’s us against the world.” **“Holding On”** “This is one that wasn’t necessarily made for Jungle, we made it with \[Dublin DJ/producer\] Krystal Klear and \[Essex singer-songwriter/producer\] Lydia Kitto. It has a much more clubby touch to it, it’s got heavier kicks and it’s got 909 hats, which we’ve never really used. It continues that more aggy side of what we wanted to do, we wanted to have a bit more of the disco-punk element to it, à la \[the South Bronx’s early-’80s punk-funk pioneers\] ESG, something that was anti the soft, midtempo Jungle that we know and love. It’s a bit strobe-y and then eventually it releases to this refrain, which sounds like some old soul sample that we made. I suppose it’s the first time you’re like, ‘OK, this is a Jungle record. I know what’s going on here.’” **“Candle Flame” (feat. Erick the Architect)** “Track three has always been the big one for us—\[2014 breakthrough hit\] ‘Busy Earnin’’ was track three \[on their debut album\]. We had this hook for a long time. It had been sitting at 104 BPM and we eventually got a bit bored of it down at that tempo and ramped it up so you get those sped-up, soul-pitched vocals. We wanted to have something that was really fun and carefree and had this atmosphere of a party. I think ‘Candle Flame’ is about the fire and the passion in early love, essentially. Erick the Architect, of Flatbush Zombies fame, jumped on it and did a verse which reminded me of a young Snoop Dogg. It had that fiery energy and just set the thing on fire really…like a candle flame!” **“Dominoes”** “‘Dominoes’ is another song that had this old soul vibe—it was a lot slower originally, it was down at 85 BPM. ‘Dominoes’ is a metaphor for falling in love and the cataclysmic events that happen as you adapt to being deeper and deeper in love and you change your whole life. It has a sample of the \[US R&B singer\] Gloria Ann Taylor song ‘Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ which we took and then mixed with the vocals of our song, like this mashup thing. It’s got this cruising, The Avalanches vibe, a real summer jam. I suppose it’s the first time in the album when you get a little bit of respite and it’s not so explosive.” **“I’ve Been in Love” (feat. Channel Tres)** “This features Channel Tres and is from a session that we did a while back—basically before Channel Tres was even established as an artist. We wrote this over another song which was called ‘I’m Dying to Be in Your Arms,’ which you can hear in the middle of ‘I’ve Been in Love.’ We resampled the original track that he was on, which forms the middle eight. It tells the story of love past and the idea of coming out of that love.” **“Back on 74”** “The feeling of ‘Back on 74’ is a nostalgic one, it’s that feeling of having this place of your life where you grew up, where you had these really fond memories. 74 is a fictitious thing, but for us it’s like 74th Avenue or 74th Street or something, where, in your imagination or as a kid, you were playing out on the street. You’ve gone back to this place and it’s giving you this really nostalgic feeling but everything’s not quite the same. You’ve come out of something on ‘I’ve Been in Love’ and through ‘Back on 74,’ you have this desire to go home, back to a place that felt safe.” **“You Ain’t No Celebrity” (feat. Roots Manuva)** “This is probably the most raw and honest track on the record, a warning to people in your life that think they’re a bit of a princess or a bit of a diva—when they become demanding or a little bit self-righteous or a little bit expectant of certain things to fall their way. Roots Manuva was maybe relating to that feeling. He had these lyrics which were originally on another track, something we did with him way back in 2016 or something. He had these almost like nursery-rhyme, Mr Motivator-style hooks that weren’t even a verse, almost like this mantra. It explains the compromise that you have to have in a relationship with somebody, the push and pull, over easy and easy over, a constant back and forth.” **“Coming Back”** “This is a continuation of ‘You Ain’t No Celebrity’ but it’s a little bit more of a celebration. It takes the resentment and the anger and turns it into this more cheeky, throwaway, carnival vibe. It starts off with these shouted vocals, like, ‘I don’t miss you,’ these realizations about yourself, and the chorus goes on to say you keep coming back for more—once you’ve let go of somebody, somebody keeps wanting more from you. It explores the idea of expectation in relationships, but we end up with this almost carnival ending where everybody’s joining in, getting through it through fun.” **“Don’t Play” (feat. Mood Talk)** “‘Don’t Play’ is a sample from ‘Faith Is the Key,’ a really rare record by Enlightment, a Washington soul and gospel outfit. They put this record out in ’84 but then the record plant basically went under and their distributor went under, which made this record quite valuable, a holy grail for collectors. It surfaced again in 2000 and now copies are going for about £800. It had this amazing little hook in it and my cousin, who is Mood Talk, put this beat together and sampled it. We featured him on the record and we sang over the sample. ‘Don’t Play’ is, ‘Stop playing these games, I’m not bothered.’ That message can be applied at the beginning and it can be applied at the end of a relationship. There are always games on the in and the out…” **“Every Night”** “This is fun and guitar-based. We really wanted to make a song without a snare drum. It’s a fun song, a positive message about love, and it’s got gospel influences to some extent. It’s a bit of a party.” **“PROBLEMZ”** “This came out originally in 2022 and I suppose in some way, with \[its double A-side\] ‘GOOD TIMES,’ was the blueprint for the sound of the record. We left ‘GOOD TIMES’ off the record because it didn’t feel like it was right, it didn’t really feel like the production or the vibe was quite where this record was. But ‘PROBLEMZ’ is one of our favorite bits of music we’ve ever made and we didn’t want to leave it as some B-side. It’s got Latin American vibes and feels to it, especially in the flutes and the swing of the music, a classic disco feel. At the end, it goes to this place that’s almost like musical theater with the strings.” **“Good at Breaking Hearts”** “This is the first traditional ballad of the record. It’s like, ‘I’m only good at making mistakes—a bit of a juxtaposition in that you are only good at breaking hearts.’ It features \[London singer-songwriter\] JNR Williams and 33.3—which is mine and Lydia’s new project. JNR has an amazing voice and I’ve been working with him for two or three years, writing loads of songs with him. This is a song that we made for his album but he was like, ‘I don’t want it,’ and then as soon as it was done, he was like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken this!’ I said, ‘You should have trusted me, man!’ It’s a beautiful song. His voice has got touches of Nina Simone and Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder to him. He’s got an amazing voice.” **“Palm Trees”** “We made this out in LA originally. It was about this idea that you could escape to this place, like holiday-themed, ‘Here we come, palm trees!’ That feeling of ‘I’m just going to escape this and I want to go somewhere hot and I want to go somewhere where my troubles don’t affect me and I can leave all this stuff behind.’ It’s told through this story of a girl going to a club and taking a drug that sends her on this wild space disco trip.” **“Pretty Little Thing” (feat. Bas)** “This was something that got made in the same chunk of time in which ‘PROBLEMZ’ and ‘GOOD TIMES’ were made, and fans would know that it’s actually on the end of the video for ‘GOOD TIMES/PROBLEMZ’—on the credits we ran a little snippet of ‘Pretty Little Thing.’ It’s a ballad, a chance to reflect on moments and reflect on the old experience. \[Queens-via-Paris rapper\] Bas jumped on this and told his own story, which weirdly made sense of the whole thing anyway. It was serendipity.”

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

From the stark gospel soul of his 2013 breakthrough “Take Me to Church,” to the T.S. Eliot-inspired visions of 2019’s *Wasteland, Baby!*, Andrew Hozier-Byrne traverses literature, religion, and classical imagery to chart his own musical course. For the third Hozier album, *Unreal Unearth*, he’s followed that impulse further than ever before. During the pandemic Hozier found himself catching up on literature that had long been on his to-read pile, including Dante Alighieri’s *Inferno*. Not the lightest of reading, but a line from Dante stuck a chord. “There’s a passage in Dante’s *Inferno*, when he’s describing what’s above the door to Hell. The third line is: ‘Through me, you enter into the population of loss,’” the Irishman tells Apple Music. “That line just resonated with me. It felt like the world we were in. The news reports were just numbers of deaths, numbers of cases. It was a surreal moment.” It struck him that the format and themes of Dante’s 14th-century epic, in which the poet descends through the nine circles of Hell, could be the perfect prism through which to write about both the unreal experience of the pandemic and the upheavals in his personal life. “There’s such a rich tapestry there. I didn’t study classics and I’m not an academic, but for me, all those myths are happening around us all the time,” he says. “You can play with them a lot and reinterpret them and then subvert them as well.” The result is Hozier’s most ambitious and emotionally powerful album to date. It’s a remarkable journey, taking in pastoral folk, soaring epics, and tracks addressing the devastation caused by colonialism. Here, Hozier guides us through, one track at a time. **“De Selby (Part 1)”** “I didn’t know the song was going to reference de Selby until it started taking shape. He’s a character in a book by Flann O’Brien called *The Third Policeman* \[written in 1939 but not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1967\]. The book is like *Alice in Wonderland*, and it’s a classic piece of surreal Irish storytelling. De Selby is this lunatic philosopher who—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—doesn’t know he’s dead and in the afterlife. It felt like an appropriate reference for the opening track, to reflect on this darkness that he’s entering into, this infinite space.” **“De Selby (Part 2)”** “Part two comes out in a totally different place. It was always in this funk, rock place, even in the early demos. Part one ends in the Irish language, it’s basically saying: ‘You arrive to me like nightfall. Although you’re a being of great lightness, I experience you like nighttime.’ It’s that idea of ‘I don’t know where you begin and I end,’ and the song explores that a bit lyrically.” **“First Time”** “It felt like a nice place to come out of the heaviness of the previous track. It represents limbo. This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again. Alex Ryan, my buddy who is also my bass player, sent me this bassline one day and it was really colorful and light and playful to work with. I really enjoyed writing the lyrics, they’re not too structured. It’s almost like talk-singing and I hadn’t really explored that much before this album, so I wanted to try it out.” **“Francesca”** “I had written a song that was very specific to Francesca \[from the Second Circle (Lust) in Dante’s *Inferno*\], that was written from her perspective. I was even trying to write it in terza rima, which is the interlocking triplets that Dante wrote in. But that’s where I was a like, ‘OK, I have to step back a little bit from this.’ When this song came around, it started from personal experience and then I allowed those themes and some of the imagery from that character in and then let the two mix. It’s an example of letting the song have a life above ground and resonate with a life below ground in regard to that character.” **“I, Carrion (Icarian)”** “It’s trying to capture that feeling when you’re lifting off. That sometimes when you’re falling in love with somebody, you’re met with this new lightness that you haven’t experienced ever before, but it’s also terrifying. To fully experience the best of that, you have to take into account that it could all collapse inwards and that you’re OK with that. It’s trying to hold those two realities in both hands and just playing with the imagery of it. It felt appropriate to come out of the hurricane of ‘Francesca,’ where two characters are trapped in a hurricane forever, into someone who is just on the wind.” **“Eat Your Young”** “I don’t know how intentional the reference to Jonathan Swift was in this. That essay \[Swift’s 1729 satirical essay *A Modest Proposal* in which he suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food\] is such a cultural landmark that it’s just hanging in the air. I was more reflecting on what I felt now in this spirit of the times of perpetual short-term gain and a long-term blindness. The increasing levels of precarious living, poverty, job insecurity, rental crisis, property crisis, climate crisis, and a generation that’s inheriting all of that and one generation that’s enjoyed the spoils of it. The lyrics are direct, but the voice is playful. There’s this unreliable narrator who relishes in this thing which was fun to write.” **“Damage Gets Done” (feat. Brandi Carlile)** “I’ve known Brandi Carlile for years, she’s an incredible artist and I’m lucky to call her a friend. As that song was taking shape, I wanted it to be a duet. It’s kind of like a runaway song. It’s not as easy to access that joy, that sense of wonder when you’re young that captures your enjoyment for a moment and then it’s gone. Brandi has one of those voices that is powerful enough to really achieve that feeling of a classic, almost power ballad. There’s very few artists that I know that have voices like that, who can just swing at notes the way Brandi swings at notes and hit them so perfectly with this immaculate energy and optimism.” **“Who We Are”** “This song was like a sneeze. Once we had the structure down, we jammed it and I just started wailing melodies that felt right at the time, and then took that away and came back with a song very quickly. Something I wanted to get into the album was this idea of being born at night, of starting in complete darkness. It’s a song that starts in childhood in this cold and dark hour, being lost and then just scraping and carving your way through the dark. It’s an idea that I wanted to put into a song for years, but never did.” **“Son of Nyx”** “A real collaboration between my bass player Alex Ryan, \[producer\] Daniel Tannenbaum \[aka Bekon\], and myself. Alex sent me a piano piece he recorded when he was at home in County Kerry. What you hear at the beginning is the phone memo, you can hear the clock ticking in his family’s living room. Alex’s dad is called Nick, so the song’s name is a play on words. In Greek fable, Nyx is the goddess of night and one of her sons is said to be Charon, the boatman who brings people to the underworld. All those voices that you hear are the choruses or the hooks from the other songs on the album distorted or de-tuned, so you’re hearing the other songs spinning around in that space.” **“All Things End”** “‘All Things End’ started from a personal place. There was a number of songs that could have taken the place of Heresy \[the Sixth Circle\]. In the medieval or the classic sense of heresy, ‘All Things End’ took that place. In those moments as a relationship is crumbling and it’s slipping away from you, it was something that you truly believed in and you had all your faith in and you had all of your belief in. In approaching that concept of that not happening it feels like something heretical. It’s a song about accepting, about giving up your faith in something.” **“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”** “The previous song reflects upon a parting of ways. I suppose in that context, this reflects upon the great loss of this experience and making sense of love after the fact, which is very often the case. If you’ve grown up in a cold climate like Ireland, you learn to warm up the bed quickly so you’re not shivering for too long. It’s a song I wrote for somebody who is from a warm climate who had never experienced that before. \[It’s about\] the significance of something so mundane but so remarkable—to experience a bed that has been warmed by somebody else in a space that you now share now with somebody new. It’s a love song.” **“Butchered Tongue”** “This reflects upon what is lost when languages are lost off the face of the earth. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for the last 10 years, going into places that had either Native American or Australian place names—some of the places I mention in the song—and asking people what the place name means and being surprised that no one is able to tell you. The song nods to some of the actions, some of the processes that are behind the loss of culture, the loss of language. There is a legacy of terrible violence, but we have to acknowledge not just that, but also bear witness to this generosity and welcomeness that I experience in those places.” **“Anything But”** “This one falls into the circle of Fraud. It was fun working with American producers on this. They thought it was a very sweet, caring love song. The lyrics in the verses are like, ‘If I was a rip tide/I wouldn’t take you out...If I was a stampede/You wouldn’t get a kick,’ The song is saying on paper that these are kindnesses, but the actual meaning is a joke—what you’re saying is I want nothing to do with you. The third verse says, ‘If I had death’s job, you would live forever.’ So that’s where it fits into the circle of Fraud. I was having fun with that.” **“Abstract (Psychopomp)”** “As a kid I saw somebody running into traffic to try and pick up an animal that had just been hit by a car. This song looks at that memory in an abstract way and sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go. The alternate title is ‘Psychopomp,’ which is a Greek term for a spirit guide—somebody who moves somebody from one part of life into the next. Charon the boatman would be a psychopomp, so it seemed appropriate for a memory of seeing somebody pick up a dead animal off a road and then place it on the sidewalk where it dies.” **“Unknown/Nth”** “This is pretty much just me and a guitar which is what I enjoy about this. It’s very similar to the approach of my first record. I really enjoyed the space that’s in that song and then letting that space be something that had a lot of stillness and a lot of coldness in it.” **“First Light”** “It seemed like an appropriate ending song—of coming out and seeing the sunlight for the first time. Dante talks a lot about how he misses the sky, how he hasn’t seen the stars for so long. He hasn’t seen clouds, he hasn’t seen the sun. I wanted to put that feeling of being in this very oppressive space for a long time and then to see the sky, as if for the first time. I was writing this song with that feeling in mind, of this great opening, a great sense of furtherance and great open space. The record needed something like that. It needed this conclusive deep breath out, this renewing of the wind in the sails and then going on from there.”

Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”

Hip-hop free spirits Aminé and KAYTRANADA broke through around the same time, their respective mid-2010s album debuts having dropped within roughly a year of one another. As such, few should be all that surprised to see their amalgamated KAYTRAMINÉ come to fruition. The sweet soul sensations and razor-sharpened verbiage of initial singles “Rebuke” and the Pharrell-assisted “4EVA” accurately previewed their full-length’s scenic purview, a POV of a righteous escapade through the post-Neptunes/post-Timbaland lineage. Hyper sexual exploits, luxury smackdowns, and much more await listeners on “letstalkaboutit” and “Ugh Ugh,” as well as the aggressively funky cuts “STFU3” and “Who He Iz.” Formidable rapper guests Big Sean and Freddie Gibbs raise the pressure considerably, while Snoop Dogg himself brings his experience in similar sonic spaces to the sparse and synthy “Eye.”

“This is about me telling the stories I want to tell, in the order I want to tell them, through the sonic landscape I want to tell them,” RAYE tells Apple Music of her debut album, *My 21st Century Blues*. The South London singer-songwriter, born Rachel Keen, had to wait longer than most to do that. In June 2021, she claimed on social media that she hadn’t been “allowed” to release a debut LP, despite having signed a four-album deal seven years earlier, and that she was “sick of being slept on.” (She left her label shortly after and released this LP as an independent artist.) “There really did have to be quite a lot of soul searching and therapy and forgiveness and reflection,” says RAYE of the aftermath. “I wanted to go back to the songs that I was passionate about.” Those were tracks that RAYE had written years earlier, and which, revisited and reworked, make up half of *My 21st Century Blues*. Most of the others were written fresh, after she escaped to a cabin in Utah with producer and friend Mike Sabath, armed with a laundry list of topics to dig into (reflected in some of the album’s meatier song titles, such as “Body Dysmorphia.” and “Environmental Anxiety.”). *My 21st Century Blues* can sometimes be a difficult listen: RAYE unflinchingly processes traumatic experiences including sexual violence, substance abuse, disordered eating, and the suffocation she has felt as a woman in music, with embraces of everything from trip-hop to hypnotic dance, dancehall, cinematic pop, gospel, blues, and more. Getting to this point, she says, feels like “the most beautiful validation,” as well as something close to healing. “Everything for me on this is so medicinal,” she says. “I’m so excited for the artist now I get to become. This has set the tone for me, knowing how much potential there is in what I can say and what stories I can tell.” Read on as RAYE talks us through every track on her long-awaited debut. **“Introduction.”** “Before synths and electronic stuff, it was just a show. It was a real band. The singer would come on and sing for you in a nice dress or a nice suit. I really wanted listeners to feel like they’re in this little blues club or a jazz club, taking in all the songs as they go on a wild tangent far away from that.” **“Oscar Winning Tears.”** “The version you hear now has really taken on its own form since the original demo. When the situation with the spiking happened \[RAYE’s drink was spiked by a man she knew and trusted\], the man was just crying tears in my face. He was the victim. I was like, ‘Wow, I have a song for this.’ It was liberating. And when we finished it, I knew this had to be the start. I think the initial concept and then the story ended up just merging so perfectly into just a beautiful piece of medicine for me.” **“Hard Out Here.”** “When the story or feeling is burning at my chest, it has to force its way out. It was just rage and pain flowing out. For the line about CEOs and white privilege \[‘All the white men CEOs, fuck your privilege/Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth/Fuck you think this is?’\], my engineer turned and looked at me, but I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going there!’ This song was me promising myself that I will bounce back. It’s hard to put the story of what I’ve been through into words because it’s so much over so long. In my opinion, I really did such a good job of holding it down and in. Some of the things that were said and the way I was emotionally manipulated, it’s so dark. Coming out the other side of it, I just needed to remind myself that I will bounce back.” **“Black Mascara.”** “I’d just come back from where these assaults took place and was very much not good. It was just after ‘BED’ \[RAYE’s 2021 hit with Joel Corry and David Guetta\] came out, so I was having to sell the pop-girl image. At that time, I had the green light to do an album before they changed their mind for the last time. I played some chords, and they were very vampire-y and medieval. I had the phrase ‘Once you see my black mascara/Run from you’ on the way there, and so I was just building the lyrics. We had a session the next day, but I canceled it—I just wasn’t there—and didn’t listen to the song until maybe three weeks after I was sent it. I pressed play, and it sounds like what you hear now. I put it on repeat.” **“Escapism.” \[with 070 Shake\]** “I think when I was on my way out of the darker chapters in my life, I needed this song. It gives me hope. Mike played me this beat in the car, and I was rapping all this aggressive stuff. I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell on this. When we got to Utah, I went into the toilet and said a little prayer: ‘Dear God, help me find the best lyrics for the song.’ Then I got on the mic, and it came together so quickly—maybe in an hour and a half. I’m still processing the success of this song because I just did not expect it at all. I’m not doing this to gun for mainstream success. I’m not doing this to have the biggest chart records. These songs aren’t about that.” **“Mary Jane.”** “I’m an all-or-nothing person in every aspect of my life. So, when something dangerous is introduced \[substances\], it can get really bad—really, really bad. The lyrics in this song are dark, but substance abuse can really, really take you there. It’s a love song married with a slightly uneasy feeling behind the music. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable.” **“The Thrill Is Gone.”** “This song existed for years but was completely different in the beginning. I always wanted to take it back in time. We recorded it on tape and made it in the Valentine Studio in LA. It’s all carpeted walls, and it felt like a real taste of how music used to be created. Recording it was a beautiful experience. The story feels so classical, but the picture in my head is so distorted and modern and weird. I really love where we took it.” **“Ice Cream Man.”** “This is the hardest song on the album for me. There are so many layers of what’s taken and what’s affected and changed after trauma and sexual violence. So much is stolen. You battle so many minefields of, ‘Is this my fault? Did I put myself in the wrong position? Am I blowing something out of proportion?’ It just becomes this ugly thing that I’m having to deal with for the rest of my life because of someone else’s stupid, disgusting actions. And I think that, at the very least, this is me proclaiming what I am and that these things shouldn’t be allowed to define what we become. It’s as much for me as whoever might be listening who needs to hear it. I wanted it to just feel super intimate, with that hum that comes in at the beginning and these filtered drums. And at the end, you get this moment to feel beautiful with your tears, to stand up and walk out the room and continue with your day.” **“Flip a Switch.”** “I did this with Stephen McGregor \[aka producer Di Genius\], who’s a dancehall legend. He produced so many of the songs I grew up listening to, so he really brought his flair and flavors to the sound. I was in a budding relationship, and I had just decided to let my walls down. I felt it was safe, and then it was like, *bang*. I would have been fine if \[he\] hadn’t given me all this false hope. I was so angry, and it was like, ‘You know what! This song is going to be about you now. Let’s get all the drama out.’ It was very empowering and me saying all the things that I would love to say to his face. But instead, I just put it in the song and proceeded to listen to it all week.” **“Body Dysmorphia.”** “I’d been putting this one off for a while. It was the last day in Utah, and I felt I had to do it. I wanted it to feel sexy, in a weird way. So, we started with these scratchy, really uncomfortable strings, and then you have these smooth drums, which—if you were ignoring the lyrics—you’d probably have a little slow vibe to. It was a stream of consciousness. \[The things I talked about in this song\] can manifest in such ugly ways and hold really intense power over you. I think half of the power of this song is just saying them out loud.” **“Environmental Anxiety.”** “I’m a musician, but we know the state of the world, and you can see so clearly that things are just evidently flipping wrong. But \[the climate crisis\] is out of the control of an average citizen. It requires governments to pull their flipping pants up and put laws in place to better impact the climate. Banning plastic forks is all well and good, but you lot \[politicians\] are doing real serious damage. I thought I’d make a song about it, and I wanted to take the piss because that’s what the government does out of us. I wanted this eerie, childlike energy that brings you in, but also a punky, weird drum thing.” **“Five Star Hotels.” (feat. Mahalia)** “This song existed for a long time, and I always loved it. It was just a way of feeling sexy. We sent it to Mahalia, and when she sent me her verse, it was like, ‘Yes!’ We’re two girls who have dreams and have worked really hard from young ages. She just felt like the right person. Creating music to feel \[sexy\] has been empowering for me.” **“Worth It.”** “I wanted to release this a long time ago. Sometimes there are moments where it’s like, ‘Here comes someone—let’s make all of the shit things feel really cool. And all this work that I’m supposed to be doing on myself, I might pause for a section and start putting some work into this other thing because it feels really nice.’ I wanted to have this near the end of the album—a warm hug as you are leaving some of those darker earlier things. The irony is in putting it just before ‘Buss It Down.’ because it didn’t fucking work out!” **“Buss It Down.”** “It’s the juxtaposition between gospel feelings and a song about getting down. The choice to be single is empowering, and I think this is something for the single girls. It’s all right to be single and be joyous about it. It can be a good thing.” **“Fin.”** “I wanted to have the audience cheer at the end of ‘Buss It Down.’, and I want this thank-you moment. It’s a personal closing—I’m so proud of this album, I’m so grateful that people will even listen to this outro. I’m a human who’s put some stories together, and I’m excited for next time. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but we’re here. And the joy of being able to share this moment is really exciting. It’s been a long time coming.”

“I needed my audience to see that Killer Mike is something that this nine-year-old kid created to be fierce and badass and protect him from any ill,” the artist born Michael Render tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “This is my come-home moment musically. It is gospel, it is soul, it is funk, it is hip-hop. And from a moral standpoint, I was taught morality through the Black Southern Christian church, which gave us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, which gave us some of the most beautiful music ever. And I feel like I\'m honoring that and I finally figured out my place.” Released 10 years after Run The Jewels transformed Killer Mike from a workaday regional rapper to the kind of guy holding public court with national politicians, *MICHAEL* is, on some level, a celebration of just how far he has come. But it’s also an exploration of the complex personality that got him there: the son of a drug dealer who needs to mourn his childhood but struggles to let his guard down (“MOTHERLESS”), the community leader trying to elevate youth while snapping back at the perceived narrowness of their politics (“TALK’N THAT SHIT!”), the middle-aged man finally reckoning with the collateral PTSD of Black life in America (“RUN”). “My mother and grandmother left me,” he says. “‘MOTHERLESS’ is about that and about the emptiness you feel, and as a human I feel like I\'ve lost something. But if all the electricity left tomorrow, there\'d still be trees moving, there\'d still be wind grooving, and that\'s all we return to. When you close your eyes, you listen to this record, this device ain\'t how you are hearing this song. These vibrations are how you\'re hearing this song.” There’s also “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” which features fellow Atlanta legends Future and André 3000. “Artists love and respect one another,” he says. “The what, who\'s done what, it\'s literally the style. You just waiting to hear your partner\'s next style.” And on a production level, the sustained mix of slow-and-steady trap beats with gospel choirs and soaking-wet organs evokes both the humidity of his Atlanta summers and the blend of sacred and profane that has characterized Black pop from Sam Cooke to Kanye West. If he weren’t so smart and soulful, you might call him a crank. But he’s both.

It’s safe to say that Chris Stapleton has found his voice. The award-winning, widely beloved country singer-songwriter is known for being one of the greatest living singers of any genre, thanks to his soulful, gritty tone, his effortless sense of phrasing and dynamics, and his ease with blending genres and influences to create a sound all his own. Even so, Stapleton tells Apple Music that it took time, work, and experience for him to feel at home in his own voice, rather than trying to imitate artists he admired as he did during the earliest years of his career. “If you heard a demo of \[me\] back then, it’s me trying to be Vince Gill or somebody that was a hero. It’s not as a voice, as a singer with a voice. I certainly hadn’t landed on that,” he says. “I could sing—I had ability—but I was still figuring that out. I think that finds you more than you find it. When you land on it, you’re like, ‘OK, this is what I do.’ I can live a lot of places, in a lot of different kinds of music and have fun with that, but I still feel like I’m me in those things. I’m not trying to impersonate somebody else.” On his fifth solo album, Stapleton sounds as good as he ever has. Coproduced by his wife, Morgane Stapleton and longtime collaborator Dave Cobb, *Higher* is a sneakily expansive slice of country-informed Southern rock and soul, and also boasts some of Stapleton’s best lyric writing. The LP opens on a high point, the Miranda Lambert cowrite “What Am I Gonna Do.” It’s a fresh take on a heartbreak tune, with Stapleton wondering what life might look like after the hurt has faded. “Loving You on My Mind” is Stapleton at his most smoldering, with a come-hither arrangement to boot. And the record closes with “Mountains of My Mind,” a Stapleton solo write/performance bristling with vulnerability. Below, Stapleton shares insight into several of *Higher*’s key tracks. **“What Am I Gonna Do”** “I think \[Miranda Lambert\] is a wonderful artist and a wonderful writer. I don’t think people talk about what a great songwriter she is enough. She and I have written some songs over the years, and I actually called her when we were making this record. I was like, ‘Hey, do you remember that song we wrote?’ I could only remember half the song and I didn’t have a copy. She was kind enough to go digging for it, and she found it so we could cut it.” **“Loving You on My Mind”** “Some of these songs are old, and that’s one of them. That song’s on a Josh Turner record somewhere. He did a great job with it. But it’s always one that I like to play. I like the chords in it and I like the changes in it. It’s a fun one to sing. I probably haven’t done as many of those kinds of \[sexy\] songs \[as I could have\]. My wife pushes for some of that stuff. I’m just like, ‘I don’t know if people want to hear me do that.’” **“Higher”** “‘Higher’ is a song that’s off the first demo session I ever did when I moved to town. It’s a song I wrote by myself. And it was a step or a step and a half lower at that point in time than this. I think we landed at least a step or a step and a half higher on this, just because I was feeling good that day.” **“Crosswind”** “‘Crosswind’ was an idea I got driving on I-65 from Florida back to Tennessee \[when\] it was really windy. It really didn’t turn into a song until the guys were kind of jamming on this groove and \[someone\] was like, ‘Wait, this is what this is.’ And we wrote a truck-driving song in the moment.” **“Weight of Your World”** “I had been listening to a lot of Bill Withers when we wrote that, and I walked into the room thinking about ‘Lean on Me’ and what a great vibe that song is, what a great message it has. I think a lot of that song is probably derivative of that. Nobody quote me on saying that I think it’s ‘Lean on Me’—I don’t. I’m not Bill Withers, and you can only hope to write standards like that. But he had a lot of songs with wonderful messages, and that was one of them. And that was our attempt at that that day.” **“Mountains of My Mind”** “‘Mountains of my Mind’ is one I wrote by myself, and my wife was just bawling in the control room the whole time I was playing it. I just woke up one morning and wrote that one. There’s some of that ‘not being able to get through the day’ sometimes. I think everybody has those days.”

Just two weeks after the release of his 2021 debut, *times*, SG Lewis began working on what would come next. “I started to throw stuff at the wall to see what stuck,” the singer-songwriter, DJ, and producer tells Apple Music. “I may have lost my mind at some point in the process. Not in a negative way, but I really didn\'t give a shit. There was no context for it. The world was shut and there was no scene.” Where that locked-down world had led Lewis to embrace disco-indebted dance floor anthems purpose-built to bring joy and escapism on *times*, its follow-up, *AudioLust & HigherLove*, is a free-roaming affair on which Lewis pulls from euphoric ’80s pop, yacht rock, his devotion to Daft Punk, and more—while still featuring the kaleidoscopic production that’s made him a much-sought-out pop collaborator. If it confounds expectations, that’s the idea. “There\'s part of me that just wanted to show that I\'m not just a DJ/producer guy,” admits the London-based artist. “I\'m definitely trying to prove a point of some sort.” Lewis may not have set out with a concept for his second record, but one rapidly began to emerge as he was making it. *AudioLust & HigherLove* is, as its title suggests, an album about lust—explored in a “rushy, darker, more intense” first half—and love, expressed with a “floating, psychedelic, warm world” that brings the album to its close. It’s “yin and yang” and “two sides of the same coin,” says Lewis. But it also sounds like the experience of moving from a toxic, turbulent relationship into one of ease, contentment, and love. Read on as Lewis guides us through that journey, one track at a time. **“Intro”** “I feel like the intro is a palate cleanser. I wanted to set the scene sonically for the front half of the album and to immediately introduce the darkness and intensity of it. It just felt like it needed more of an introduction before going on the journey than last time.” **“Infatuation”** “I nearly called the album ‘Infatuation’ at one point—it’s such a particular emotion and it has such a darkness to it. The implication is that you’re not right of mind; there\'s a manic nature to it. I was listening to ’80s pop at the time, and I wanted to write a song that was kind of like ‘Every Breath You Take’ because it has that darkness to it. That goes a step further, though.” **“Holding On”** “In so much ’80s music and yacht rock, they don’t pull any punches. I think that\'s what’s most admirable about that era, and the reason it can be classified as cheesy at times. It was something that was so missing in pop music when I was making the album. For the ending, I did a synth solo; I did a Prince-style, pitched-down vocal speech; I did an instrumental break. But I was like, ‘Fuck it. If I\'m ever going to put a ripping guitar solo somewhere, I\'m going to do it here.’ There\'s a little wink and a nod in there. I\'m in on the joke.” **“Call On Me” \[with Tove Lo\]** “Tove Lo is one of the coolest people ever, and she’s also an unbelievable writer. I had the beat that me and Orlando \[Higginbottom, aka Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs\] \[did\] and the workings of the instrumental. I wanted to put something in front of her that I knew was good. She worked very fast and is very clinical. In the past, I’ve been a bit haphazard, but she taught me to step back and to analyze the songs and realize it can be improved. So there were about 10 versions of this song, and I genuinely feel like the best version is the song that went out.” **“Oh Laura”** “It’s such an angular song and sounds so fun, but the lyrical content is messy. This song is probably the least me in many ways, but I just really wanted to make an ’80s pop song. Both Orlando and I come from typical dance-music backgrounds, and I wanted to make a song that had nothing to do with dance music. This song isn’t a true story about someone in particular. I don’t think I would be able to put out a song that is that brutal!” **“Missing You”** “This was made the day after ‘Holding On’ and I was just chucking ’80s references into beat ideas. But I think there were still the remnants of making dance music—I wasn’t deep into the yacht-rock hole that I fell into. There was a darkness and a rustiness to this. It made me think of lots of classic ’80s references, like \[TV show\] *Knight Rider*. The idea of driving forward. I wanted a song with a synth line that, if I played it to a crowd, they might sing it back to me. I was almost trying to imagine a football crowd singing it.” **“Another Life”** “At this point, I was aware I might have scared off my entire fanbase. I wanted this to sound like a 2010s progressive house song. The world was starting to open back up and I was like, ‘Sunsets, parties.’ I just wanted to reintroduce some themes of dance music, so people didn\'t think I\'d completely lost my mind and stop listening forever. It was just me reminding myself that I like dance music. I wanted it to be cinematic with strings, and a bit dramatic.” **“Fever Dreamer” \[with Charlotte Day Wilson and Channel Tres\]** “After Charlotte and I \[worked on this song\], she texted me the next day and she was like, ‘Oh my god, I love this. It sounds like a gay club at 4 am in Berlin or something.’ I was like, ‘That\'s the best situation this song could find itself in.’ I’d have Channel Tres on every track if I could. The difference with the features on this album is that no one was allowed to put pen to paper without deciding which side of the album \[it was for\]. It was like, ‘Here\'s the album concept, here are some instrumentals from each side, pick a side.’” **“Epiphany”** “This song felt like a moment of realization. It’s meant to be an awakening from that previous state of mind. The 303 acid line came partly from Daft Punk and also from the outro of the Tame Impala song ‘Breathe Deeper.’ I just love that he introduced a 303 in the midst of this pop song. It’s jarring, but also really cool.” **“Lifetime”** “The fact that the melody of this matches up with ‘Infatuation’ isn’t something I intentionally did. But people picked up on that. If I was to pick one track from each side to summarize each \[part of the album\], I think it would be ‘Infatuation’ and ‘Lifetime.’ This song is carefree—there’s no nuance to it. It’s about \[songwriter and collaborator\] Ed Drewett and his wife. He told us the story of how, when he was 12, he walked up to his wife in a shopping center in Essex and asked for her number. Then for the best part of 15 years they were friends who grew up in the same town, but they were always dating other people. One day he was on a flight home from LA, got really drunk and texted her saying, ‘I\'ve waited my whole life to tell you, but I\'m completely in love with you.’ I knew we had to write that song immediately.” **“Plain Sailing”** “This is a real wink. Because yacht rock had been such an influence, this song ‘Plain Sailing’ was just so funny to me. It slotted into the second half of the album, but I was listening to Christopher Cross’ ‘Sailing’ a lot at the time. The fact that one of the biggest yacht rock songs ever is called ‘Sailing’ is just so fucking jokes.” **“Vibe Like This” (feat. Ty Dolla $ign) \[with Lucky Daye\]** “This is deep in the yacht rock hole. I made this beat with Conor Albert and it just had a real joy and lightness to it. Ty Dolla $ign and I worked on a song together that didn\'t end up going on a project for someone else. But we built a mutual respect from that. I had a session with Lucky and said, ‘Why don’t you join for that?’ Watching those two go back and forth on the mic was pretty incredible.” **“Different Light”** “I wanted this to be psychedelic and floaty. I wanted it to be like a daydream. It acts as an interlude of sorts, but it’s really a state of psychedelic joy and fun.” **“Something About Your Love”** “Daft Punk had retired and I really missed them—the influence they’ve had on me is very clear. I wanted to make an ode to them. It’s not melodically, chord-wise, or lyrically the same as ‘Digital Love,’ but it’s very clear what it’s meant to be. It was like, ‘I want to try and be Daft Punk today,’ but just through the decisions I make as a producer and artist, it ends up with a bit of myself in there.” **“Honest”** “This is all about the full-circle moment. I talk about the yin and yang element of the album and how sometimes that idealized, perfection version of love and romance can fall apart. There’s a danger of it being happily ever after, but I think that often isn’t the case in reality. It’s taking you back to the start of the album. I wanted it to be reflective without being depressing, and to be a state of acceptance and sadness but not heaviness. It’s a question mark.”

“I got hit by a truck, I got hit by a truck and it drove off and left me here for dead,” Labrinth sings plainly in the opening seconds of *Ends & Begins*, the savant artist-producer’s third studio album. When we last heard from Labrinth—on 2019’s *Imagination & the Misfit Kid*, a concept record that told the story of a young artist who trades his creativity to a businessman in exchange for success—he was excavating himself from underneath the pressure that had piled on him since signing to Simon Cowell’s now defunct record label Syco. *Ends & Begins* is a tight 10-track record that consolidates his experimentation years into a sound that feels wholly original, yet familiar. It draws an immediate line under those difficult times, picking up directly where *Imagination & the Misfit Kid* left off, and explores what happened next. “I was touched by a God and it fucked me up like an electric current pulsing through my veins,” he continues on “The Feels,” a floating expanse of piano plinks and swelling harmony, unsure of whether the lightning strike has been a defibrillating jolt or a finishing blow. It’s the opening chapter of a story of love as salvation—potent and all-consuming, suffocating and disorienting—and the fight to hold on to something good, no matter the challenges. The front half of the record sees Labrinth in the depths of his passion and clinging to it like a life preserver, singing of feeling “safe under your protection, your sacred embrace” on “Covering” and making zealous declarations of devotion on “Kill for Your Love” over the buzzing thrum of percussion and synth. Single “Never Felt So Alone,” a collaboration with FINNEAS and Billie Eilish (featuring vocals from Eilish), steers into the turbulence, nosediving into different, more intimate struggles and pulling up before impact. “What can they take from us when we’re already living on ground zero?” he questions rhetorically on “Only Way Is Up,” a modern take on classic ’80s rock that underscores the despairing melodrama. It’s the album’s title track “Ends & Begins” that resolves the narrative—a lyrical infinity loop over cinematic synths, with Labrinth’s vocals echoing into the spaces of the production. It sounds like approaching the end of a tunnel. Not stepping into the light, but illuminated from within; still surrounded by darkness, but keeping it at bay. Roll end credits. It’s reassuring to discover that Labrinth’s drive to innovate and refine has not diminished. Instead, his Emmy-winning time spent building the musical world of HBO’s hit drama *Euphoria* has elevated his ambition, lending his production a sense of dramatic flair that was perhaps absent from his previous records. Labrinth’s artistic strength lies in his ability to communicate a feeling—with *Ends & Begins* he treats those feelings with the gravity they deserve.

Who, exactly, *is* Miley Cyrus? Is she the country music progeny turned former child star turned pop provocateur, twerking on awards shows and throwing middle fingers to critics? Is she the hopeful young balladeer, lending her naturally emotive voice to Top 40 anthems like 2009’s “The Climb”? Or is she the rock star in hiding, getting trippy with The Flaming Lips on their collaboration *Dead Petz* and channeling her inner Joan Jett on 2020’s *Plastic Hearts*? While her shifting identities can distract from her formidable musicianship, it is exactly this restless, chameleonic nature that makes Cyrus one of our more engaging and enduring pop stars. On eighth LP *Endless Summer Vacation*, Cyrus finally finds a way to bring these seemingly disparate parts together. She tapped four producers to help helm the album, each with an ear toward one of Cyrus’ primary lanes. Greg Kurstin (Adele, Maren Morris) brings his trademark gravitas to the cutting but compassionate breakup ballad “Jaded.” Kid Harpoon, who recently took home a Grammy for Harry Styles’ *Harry’s House*, has fingerprints all over the LP, as on powerhouse opener “Flowers,” Cyrus’ biggest single since 2013’s “Wrecking Ball.” Tyler Johnson, a fellow Nashvillian with credits ranging from Taylor Swift to Toni Braxton, pairs well with Cyrus, his own catholic tastes dovetailing nicely with hers. Mike WiLL Made-It, a longtime Cyrus collaborator, jumps in on tracks like the Brandi Carlile feature “Thousand Miles,” which feels country-adjacent but ultimately transcends genre, and the dark, industrial Sia collab “Muddy Feet,” which boasts one of the LP’s most biting lyrics: “You smell like perfume that I didn’t purchase.” Lines like that may provoke curiosity into Cyrus’ personal life—she’s made no effort to conceal that much of the material was inspired by her divorce from Liam Hemsworth—but the music itself is sturdy enough to transcend tabloid fodder. There are also other notable—and at times unexpected—co-writers on the LP. Cult-favorite indie filmmaker Harmony Korine (*Spring Breakers*, *Kids*) is credited on the woozy, gauzy “Handstand,” which lyrically references one of his paintings, “Big Twitchy.” Acclaimed R&B/electronic artist James Blake joins on album highlight “Violet Chemistry,” which feels like a spiritual and sonic cousin of Taylor Swift’s *Midnights* cut “Lavender Haze.” Country artist and songwriter Caitlyn Smith, who co-wrote the *Plastic Hearts* standout “High,” contributes to “Island,” a groovy, low-key banger about the double-edged sword of independence. Cyrus closes *Endless Summer Vacation* with a demo version of “Flowers,” the kind of bonus track that can, more often than not, function as little more than filler. In this case, though, the contrast between the song in its infancy and its buoyant, assertive final form is striking and emotional. The hard-won strength of the studio version is there, but it\'s drenched in a raw, gritty sadness that sounds painfully real. In its studio incarnation, you can hear that Cyrus buys what she’s selling, that she’s not only content to be her own companion but actually prefers her own company. In this demo, though, her words seem to function more as a compass than a proclamation, a hopeful road map out of the woods of heartbreak. For an artist whose musical talent is often overshadowed by her offstage antics, this glimpse into Cyrus’ creative process is a welcome one, and a fitting way to end her most fully realized album yet.

The first song on Lil Yachty’s *Let’s Start Here.* is nearly seven minutes long and features breathy singing from Yachty, a freewheeling guitar solo, and a mostly instrumental second half that calls to mind TV depictions of astral projecting. “the BLACK seminole.” is an extremely fulfilling listen, but is this the same guy who just a few months earlier delivered the beautifully off-kilter and instantly viral “Poland”? Better yet, is this the guy who not long before that embedded himself with Detroit hip-hop culture to the point of a soft rebrand as *Michigan Boy Boat*? Sure is. It’s just that, as he puts it on “the BLACK seminole.,” he’s got “No time to joke around/The kid is now a man/And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds.” We could call the silence he’s referring to the years since his last studio album, 2020’s *Lil Boat 3*, but he’s only been slightly less visible than we’re used to, having released the aforementioned *Michigan Boy Boat* mixtape while also lending his discerning production ear to Drake and 21 Savage’s ground-shaking album *Her Loss*. Collaboration, though, is the name of the game across *Let’s Start Here.*, an album deeply indebted to some as yet undisclosed psych-rock influences, with repeated production contributions from onetime blog-rock darlings Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Patrick Wimberly, as well as multiple appearances from Diana Gordon, a Queens, New York-hailing singer who made a noise during the earliest parts of her career as Wynter Gordon. Also present are R&B singer Fousheé and Beaumont, Texas, rap weirdo Teezo Touchdown, though rapping is infrequent. In fact, none of what Yachty presents here—which includes dalliances with Parliament-indebted acid funk (“running out of time”), ’80s synthwave (“sAy sOMETHINg,” “paint THE sky”), disco (“drive ME crazy!”), symphonic prog rock (“REACH THE SUNSHINE.”), and a heady monologue called “:(failure(:”—is in any way reflective of any of Yachty’s previous output. Which begs the question, where did all of this come from? You needn’t worry about that, says Yachty on the “the ride-,” singing sternly: “Don’t ask no questions on the ride.”

Zach Bryan has very quickly achieved Ubiquitous Pop-Mythology Origin Story status. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s trajectory, from Navy cadet with a preternatural talent for storytelling and a YouTube following to honorable dischargee with a massive grassroots following to, now, major-label superstar selling out 100 or so arenas a year, was both dizzyingly fast and seemingly preordained. His self-titled follow-up to 2022’s triple-LP Warners debut *American Heartbreak* doesn’t necessarily advance Bryan’s story or status so much as cement it, moving past the introduction phase into something more permanent and more meaningful. One way or another, Zach Bryan—and *Zach Bryan*—is going to be with us for a while. The album—a lean 16 tracks compared to *Heartbreak*’s 34—begins with a double-barrel mission statement. The first is the spoken-word opening track, “Fear and Friday’s (Poem),” which distills Bryan’s everyman charm and philosophy into a benediction (“I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common/They are overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting”). This is followed immediately by a Hendrixesque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick and the shout-along bravado of “Overtime,” complete with horn section and empowered nods to his aforementioned mythology: “They said I\'s a wannabe cowboy from a cutthroat town/With tattooed skin and nobody around/Your songs sound the same, you\'ll never make a name for yourself.” Bryan’s three-year whirlwind of making a name for himself has only sharpened his eye for detail—the songs only sound the same in that they all share this quality. A slick turn of phrase like “If you need a tourniquet or if you want to turn and quit/Know that I\'ll be by your side” is delivered like someone who knows what he\'s doing. The songs comfortably inhabit traditional country, Americana, and, on relative barn burners like the veteran’s tale “East Side of Sorrow” and “Jake’s Piano - Long Island,” at least one boot in Springsteen-anthem story-song terrain. And at a moment when country music, possibly more than any other genre, is roiled by reactionary entrenchment in the face of long-overdue advancement, Bryan has managed to stake himself to the center without alienating anyone or, chiefly, himself. He preaches love and tolerance and sings about hard drinking and ’88 Fords, and they don’t sound like opposing energies, because why should they? He goes toe-to-toe with Nashville-outsider kindred spirit Kacey Musgraves on “I Remember Everything,” and even the most intimate songs, like the solo acoustic closer “Oklahoman Son,” sound built for the back row, which gets further away each tour leg. The sum of these parts is nothing less than a confident, headstrong star turn from someone who seems a little ambivalent about stardom, at least on any terms other than his own.

When Olivia Rodrigo shocked the pop music landscape with her ballad “drivers license,” she drew influence from an unexpected place: Gracie Abrams, an introspective bedroom-pop newcomer with an incredible knack for writing her interior world into a whispered hook—and who had yet to release a debut LP. *Good Riddance*, Abrams’ first full-length, is a triumph, from coming-of-age rockers (“Difficult”), mournful ruminations on past relationships (“I Know it won’t work”), and guitar ballads (“Full machine”) to the lyrical wisdom that only comes with distance (“You were there all the time/You’re the worst of my crimes/You fell hard/I thought good riddance” in the opener “Best”). Straight from the frank, lushly detailed Taylor Swift school of songwriting, Abrams has clearly learned a thing or two from her tourmate; for good measure, *Good Riddance* was co-written with one of Swift’s collaborators, Aaron Dessner of The National.

“Warning: no bars,” reads a label on the packaging of the first-ever solo album from André 3000. The idea of such a thing has haunted hip-hop fandom’s collective consciousness for nearly two decades: a full-length solo effort from Outkast’s Gemini counterpart, not counting his half of *Speakerboxxx/The Love Below*. In the Outkast years, André was known as the far-out yin to Big Boi’s earthier yang, and while the latter pursued a solo career following the duo’s 2006 hiatus, Three Stacks forged a less orthodox path. He designed clothes, produced a cartoon series, and took on a handful of acting roles, popping up every so often to rap a guest verse for Frank Ocean or Beyoncé. Meanwhile, he walked around playing the flute—a habit that, when caught on camera, was something of a meme, but had privately become a passion. The title of the first track on *New Blue Sun*, whose 87 minutes of cosmic flute experimentation are entirely wordless, is at once a caveat and a mission statement: “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a \'Rap\' Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” In a poetic sense, it’s also a truth: The instruments he and his collaborators play here (contrabass flutes, Mayan flutes, bamboo flutes) are powered by wind, or, rather, breath. And it’s reflective of the kismet which guided the album into existence: He hadn’t intended to release his flute music until a chance Erewhon run-in with Carlos Niño, the Los Angeles percussionist and producer of spiritually oriented jazz. Basement jam sessions with Niño became the series of improvised compositions that make up the eight tracks of *New Blue Sun*, along with a community of like-minded players, including guitarist Nate Mercereau and keyboardist Surya Botofasina. From the players’ deepening chemistry, transcendent songs materialized—not unlike the bonds that once inspired the Dungeon Family from which Outkast emerged in early-’90s Atlanta. And though its meandering and meditative (though often hysterically titled) compositions exist in the tradition of Alice Coltrane, Laraaji, and Yusef Lateef more than anything conceivably hip-hop-adjacent, they’re animated by a similar spirit to that which made Outkast’s music stand apart: a dauntless dedication to one’s own vision, alongside a belief in the power of creative communion. In that sense, it’s the André 3000 album we’d been waiting for all along.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

“Almost everyone that I love has been abused, and I am included,” declares Arlo Parks with arresting honesty in the first lines of her second album *My Soft Machine*. Then, almost in the same breath, she adds, “The person I love is patient with me/She’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy.” It’s an apt introduction to an album that both basks in the light—as Parks celebrates the affirming joy of falling deeply in love—and delves into darkness. “The core concept of the project is that this is reality and memory through my eyes, experienced within this body,” Parks tells Apple Music. “From the loss of innocence to the reliving of trauma to the endless nights bursting through Koreatown to first kisses in dimly lit dive bars, this is about my life.” It’s all told, of course, with the poetic, diary-entry lyricism that made *Collapsed in Sunbeams* so special—and which catapulted Parks to voice-of-a-generation status. Here, Parks also allows her indie-pop sound to unfurl, with embraces of synths, scuzzy guitars (see “Devotion,” the album’s most electrifying and unexpected moment), jazz, gorgeous harmonies (on the sweet, Phoebe Bridgers-guested “Pegasus”), electronic music, and more. That came, she says, in part from the team she assembled for the album, who allowed her to be more “fluid” (*My Soft Machine* was worked on with names including BROCKHAMPTON producer Romil Hemnani, the prolific US songwriter/producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and Frank Ocean collaborator Baird). “The community that organically formed around the album is one of my favorite things about it,” says Parks. “I think there is a confidence to the work. There is a looseness and an energy. There was a sense of sculpting that went beyond the more instinctive and immediate process of making album one. I am very proud of this.” Read on for the singer-songwriter’s track-by-track guide to *My Soft Machine*. **“Bruiseless”** “This song is about childhood abandon and the growing pains. It was inspired by a conversation I had with \[American poet\] Ocean Vuong where he said he was constantly trying to capture the unadulterated joy of cycling up to a friend’s house and abandoning the bike on the grass, wheels spinning, whilst you race up to their door—the softness and purity of that moment.” **“Impurities”** “I wrote this song the first time I met my dear friend Romil from BROCKHAMPTON. My friends and I were party-hopping and every time we called an Uber it was a Cadillac Escalade, which we thought was hilarious at the time. This is a song that is simply about being happy and feeling truly accepted.” **“Devotion”** “Romil, Baird and I were driving to a coffee shop called Maru in the Arts District of LA in Baird’s Suzuki Vitara that I nicknamed the ‘Red Rocket.’ We were blasting ‘17 Days’ by Prince. The three of us decided two things during that 15-minute round trip: that we had to fully commit to drama and that we were a rock band for the day.” **“Blades”** “The reference to the aquarium scene in Baz Luhrmann’s *Romeo + Juliet* refers to the idea of looking at a person you once knew so intimately and something indescribable has changed—as if you’re looking at each other through ocean water or obscure glass.” **“Purple Phase”** “The guitars you hear on this song are Paul \[Epworth, the British producer who also worked on *Collapsed in Sunbeams*\] and I just improvising. It was the last day of a long working week, we were feeling free and connected and our heads were cleared by exhaustion—we didn’t even have the capacity to overthink. This song has one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written: ‘I just want to see you iridescent charming cats down from trees/Mugler aviators hiding eyes that laugh when concealed.’” **“Weightless”** “Making ‘Weightless’ was a defining moment in the album process. I felt completely unchained from *Collapsed in Sunbeams*. Anything was possible, Paul \[Epworth\] and I were just chaos-dancing around the room and giggling. This one is very special to me and gave me so much creative confidence.” **“Pegasus (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”** “Of course ‘Pegasus’ features lovely Phoebe \[Bridgers\]. The inspirations for the sparseness melting into the light, dancy beat were ‘White Ferrari’ by Frank Ocean, ‘Talk Down’ by Dijon, and ‘Grieve Not the Spirit’ by AIR. This is the first song I’ve written being so candid about how tricky it can be to accept someone being unbelievably kind.” **“Dog Rose”** “The original demo for this song was recorded in a hotel room in Toronto. I had the idea for the riff in the chorus and I was lying wide awake at 3 am just letting it drive me insane. Then I got up and ran about 15 blocks, through parks and across bridges, to get my guitar from the bus and get the idea down. It was very dramatic.” **“Puppy”** “I had always wanted to capture that half-spoken, half-melodic cadence—kind of like Frank Ocean in ‘In My Room’—and I was so pleased when I achieved it. The fuzzed-out guitar-sounding instrument is actually this little synth that \[producer\] Buddy \[Ross\] has. We were trying to recreate the energy of \[my bloody valentine’s\] *Loveless*.” **“I’m Sorry”** “Garrett Ray from Vampire Weekend’s touring band is on drums and David Longstreth \[the lead singer and guitarist\] from Dirty Projectors is on guitar for this one. Sculpting the right sonic treatment for this song took what felt like years, but it’s definitely my favorite song on the record from a textural and feel point of view.” **“Room (Red Wings)”** “‘Red Wings’ is a reference to the book *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. The main character has distinctive red wings; his home life is tumultuous and he finds comfort in photography and falls deeply in love with a man called Herakles. The fragility and heart-rending nature of this book mirrors the broken quality of the song.” **“Ghost”** “This is the oldest song on the record. I demoed it in the winter of 2020 in my childhood bedroom. At the core of the song is a sense of embracing help, embracing human touch, learning not to suffer in solitude, learning to let people in.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.