Far Out Magazine's 50 Best Albums of 2023

H.Hawkline (Huw Evans) has today announced details of the release of his fifth album, Milk For Flowers. Released on Friday 10th March 2023 via Heavenly Recordings, the album was produced and features musical contributions from long-time collaborator and celebrated solo artist Cate Le Bon. The album will be available as black vinyl, signed CD and digital pre-order. It follows the 2017 album 'I Romanticize' and 2015's 'In The Pink of Condition.' Recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, the album features a host of musical collaborators - Davey Newington [Boy Azooga] on drums, Paul Jones [Group Listening] on piano, Tim Presley [White Fence, DRINKS, The Fall] on guitar, Stephen Black [Sweet Baboo] and Euan Hinshelwood [Younghusband, Cate Le Bon] on sax, Harry Bohay [Aldous Harding] on pedal steel and John Parish [PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding] on infrequent bongo. The record was then engineered by Joe Jones [Aldous Harding, Parquet Courts] and mixed, after an unlikely and fortuitous crossing of paths, by the Grammy-nominated Patrik Berger [Charli XCX, Robyn, Lana Del Rey], and mastered by Heba Kadry [Deerhunter, Cass McCombs, Cate Le Bon]. ⦿ On Milk For Flowers, beauty flourishes in the corners of grief’s desecrated church; jewelling the cobwebs, gilding the dust, and making a relic of its creator’s arrow-shot heart. Brought to being in Huw Evans’ hometown of Cardiff, the writing of the album served as the outlet for several dances with the violence of life — a spate of significant events which took his “spectrum of emotion and experience suddenly widescreen”. Where 2017’s I Romanticize and 2015’s In the Pink of Condition might be thought of as dadaist art objects — feeling and meaning obfuscated by the absurd — Milk For Flowers belongs firmly in the realm of the divine; not only for the auspices, saints, and holy bakers that populate its lyrics, but also for its exquisite torment; the gateway to a newfound profundity of voice. “I’m not so good at showing vulnerability and I think that’s why, in the past, there’s been a tendency to obscure or make abstract any real emotion, either lyrically or musically” Evans reflects. “I think this was most apparent with the way I sang, keeping everything as flat and emotionless as possible. It was impossible to do any of those things with this album: I had to sing.” Milk for Flowers is at once visceral and enlightened, its soundscapes verdant yet delicately rendered, and with this latest, most intimate work, H. Hawkline beautifully bares his blood, bones and soul. And quietly, along with the entrails and rubble held in Milk For Flowers’ reliquary, there hides a small, green kernel of life; hope, perhaps, that today’s decay might nourish tomorrow’s blooms.

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

During the pandemic, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten returned to Skerries, the town on Ireland’s East Coast where he’d spent his teenage years. One night, walking along the beach, something came to him. “It was when the moon conjures a strip of light along the horizon towards you, like a path to heaven,” he tells Apple Music. “And there’s the gentle ebb and flow of an invisible ocean around it.” As he looked to sea, new music seeped into his head—a sort of pier-end lounge pop played out on brass and strings. It didn’t really fit with the ideas Fontaines had been fermenting for their next record; instead it opened up inspiration for a solo album. There were, thought Chatten, stories to be told about lives being etched out in coastal areas like Skerries. “The whole atmosphere of the place, there’s something slightly set about it,” he says. “I’m really into fantasy, the Muppets movies and *The Dark Crystal*, or even *Sweeney Todd*, where they demand a slight suspension of disbelief of the audience in order to achieve, or embellish on, a very human emotion. I wanted to live the town through those kind of lenses.” By late 2022, as Chatten endured some heavy personal turbulence, the songs he was writing helped process his own experiences. “It was like, ‘How do I actually feel right now?’” he says. “Just by painting a picture of the darkness, I gleaned an understanding from it. I was then able to cordon it off.” Unsurprisingly then, *Chaos for the Fly* is as intimate as Chatten has sounded on record. Built from mostly acoustic foundations, the songs explore grief, isolation, betrayal, and escapism—but their intensity is a little more insidious and measured than on Fontaines’ sinewy music. Even the corrosively jaundiced “All of the People” is delivered with steady calm, Chatten warning, “People are scum/I will say it again” under a soft shroud of piano and precisely picked guitar. “There’s probably times on the record where it becomes almost self-indulgent, the personal nature of it,” he says. “It’s a startlingly fair reflection of me, I suppose. I didn’t really realize that was possible.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“The Score”** “I had a 10-day break in between two tours. I find it very difficult to switch off, and my manager said, ‘You need to go off somewhere,’ so I went to Madrid. I got antsy without being able to write music—the whole point, really, of me being away—and I actually asked Carlotta \[Cosials, singer/guitarist\] from Hinds if she knew any good guitar shops, so I could grab a Spanish guitar, a nylon. She sent me the name of a place that was just around the corner, and I had ‘The Score’ later on that day. When it comes to the second chord, I think that opens the curtain a bit. There’s a sort of subverted cabaret about it, which I really like. And there’s also a misdirection of the modalities of the chords. It goes to a kind of surprising chord. There’s a nice sleight of hand to the first few seconds of it. I really wanted that to be the tone-setter of the album.” **“Last Time Every Time Forever”** “This was inspired by the sound of these fruit machines and slot machines that I grew up with. There was this casino in town, called Bob’s Casino. It’s about addiction or dependence on something, and I’m not really talking specifically about drugs and booze or anything like that. I’m just talking about compulsive behavior and escapism, which are things that kind of shift my gears—I can relate to the pursuit of another world. It has that weird push that it does in the drums. I think it sounds kind of like stunted growth, like it’s glitching.” **“Fairlies”** “After Madrid, we went down to a town called Jerez, which was the birthplace of flamenco, I believe. We were going to go out to get a beer or something, myself and my fiancée. She was getting ready and I wrote that tune. There’s loads of bootleg recordings of The La’s, and I think they really affected me when I was slightly younger, when we were setting off the band. There’s a tune, ‘Tears in the Rain.’ There’s something about the way Lee Mavers does all that weird stuff with his vocals that really affected the way I write a lot of melodies. The snappy, jaunty, almost poke-y, edgy melody of the chorus, that was inspired by Lee Mavers. The verses are more Lee Hazlewood and Leonard Cohen, maybe.” **“Bob’s Casino”** “I heard the intro to ‘Bob’s Casino’ \[that night on the beach\]. Similar to ‘Last Time Every Time Forever,’ ‘Bob’s Casino’ is a tune about a kind of addiction and inertia and isolation. I wanted it to sound as beautiful as it sounds in the addict’s head, or the isolated person’s head, when they achieve those moments of respite. I think that’s a much more realistic picture than a tune that sounds scared straight or something. A play, or any good piece of screenwriting, is usually helped by the bad guys or the antagonist being relatable, or seeing a side of them that makes you empathize with them, or even love them, briefly. It creates this nice 3D effect. I enjoyed writing from that character’s perspective because I feel like I’m expressing something. I’m not saying that I am that character. But the character has a good chance of winning sometimes within me. The more I write about it and express it, then maybe the less chance that character has of taking over.” **“All of the People”** “This is probably my proudest moment from the album. I’m giving myself compliments here, but I think there’s a surgical kind of precision to it. There’s nothing wasted. I really like the natural swells. I like how it swells when the lyric swells. I really do feel that fucking shit sometimes, as do a lot of people. I’m grateful for that song, for what it did for my head when I wrote it. I can stand back and look at it now. It’s like I’ve blown that poison into a bottle and I’ve sealed the bottle, and now I’ve put it on a shelf.” **“East Coast Bed”** “‘East Coast Bed’ is about the death of my beloved hurling coach, who was like a second mother to me growing up, a woman called Ronnie Fay. The whole idea of the East Coast bed is firstly this refuge that she offered me when I was growing up. And then eventually, we laid her in her own East Coast bed when we buried her. The song is essentially about death. Not necessarily in a grim way, but in a sad, melancholic, moving-on way. That synth part that Dan Carey \[producer\] did sounds like the soul moving on for me. That was him exercising his great sympathy for the music that he works on.” **“Salt Throwers off a Truck”** “I remember the title coming to me when we were writing \[2022 Fontaines D.C. album\] *Skinty Fia*. There were lads on the back of a truck, salting the road outside the rehearsal space. I thought that was an interesting sight: ‘Oh, that’s a good title to have to justify with a good lyric.’ I like the fact that it scours the world a little bit. There’s New York in there and, although they’re not mentioned explicitly, other places too. The last verse is inspired by my own granddad’s death last year in Barrow-in-Furness. It’s different people at different stages. To me, it feels like when a director puts the audience in the eyes of a bird. There’s an omnipresence to it that I really like. It’s like when Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Future, and he gets to fly around, and visit all of these different vignettes, or all these different families in their houses.” **“I Am so Far”** “I wrote that one during the dreaded and not-very-aesthetic-to-talk-about lockdown. It was this kind of bleak and beautiful, ‘all the time in the world and nothing to do’ sort of thing that interested me then. That’s why there’s so much drudgery on the track. I wrote that on the East Coast again. It does sound to me a little bit like water, with light on it.” **“Season for Pain”** “I think it’s an abdication. It’s like cutting something you love out of your life. It sounds sad, and it is sad, and it is dark, but it’s putting up a necessary wall. It’s terminating a friendship or relationship with someone that you truly love. It’s not going to be easy for anyone, but it’s gone too far. I think there’s something about the production that slightly isolates it from the album. It feels slightly afterthought-ish, which I like. I like the end, which came from a jam. We’d finished recording the track, the tape was still rolling, and we just started playing, and then that became the outro. The song is about moving on and it sounds like I’m moving on at the end.”

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.

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.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

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.

There are rock bands and then there are Rock Bands—groups who embody a particular and baldly mythological definition of the term so completely that it’s difficult to imagine them doing normal things like taking the garbage out or wearing shorts. (This is why people have spent years marveling at a photo of Glenn Danzig buying cat litter.) And few bands have embodied this ideal more than The Hives have across three decades. Which is why the most shocking moment on the Swedish garage-punk traditionalists’ first album in over 11 years is on “Rigor Mortis Radio,” when Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist sneers, “I got your emails, yeah/Delete, delete.” With their matching custom suits and quasi-supervillain alter egos—bassist Dr. Matt Destruction is no longer in the band, but that name is forever—the whole idea of The Hives is rooted in timelessness, and breaking character feels like a record scratch. “It’s very much on purpose,” Almqvist tells Apple Music. “It\'s been 11 years, but in The Hives\' world, it\'s the same.” While so many of the bands they were lumped in with during the great Rock Is Back! bonanza of the early 2000s are gone or diminished, The Hives have doubled down on their Hivesness, right down to the title referencing the demise of their mysterious Svengali and mentor (who may not have been alive to begin with). “We\'re five individuals who are in the band, but The Hives are something different than that. It\'s not a sum of its parts at all,” Almqvist says. “We wanted to invent our favorite band and then become that band. We have too much respect for what we do onstage to treat it like it\'s a fucking living room. We\'re like The Last Samurai or something.” Below, Howlin\' Pelle talks through each of the songs on his favorite band\'s comeback album. **“Bogus Operandi”** “I think it was always a favorite of ours when we were rehearsing. And even in the demo stage, it always felt like a thing; the riffs felt great. It had a bunch of different verse things, or a bunch of different choruses at some point, but we decided to use them all. We have a lot of songs where we\'re not even in agreement on what is the chorus. That\'s also a thing The Misfits and ABBA have in common, where you think this is where the chorus ends and then there\'s another fucking chorus.” **“Trapdoor Solution”** “We always have those songs that are really, really fast and really, really short. It\'s like to put a shot of adrenaline into the record. And we love playing that stuff live, where it\'s like, \'Oh, it\'s a cool song. Oh, it ended. Okay, well, play it twice.\' We\'ve always loved that type of song, and most of our records have one or two of them. It seems like a thing that some of our favorite bands were doing a long time ago, but I don\'t think anyone\'s really doing that anymore.\" **“Countdown to Shutdown”** “It was actually two songs from the beginning; we took the chorus from one and the verse from one and just like, ‘Oh, this sits together really well.’ It all just fell together in an afternoon. So I think it\'s the one we spent the least amount of time on. But it\'s also one of the best ones, I think.” **“Rigor Mortis Radio”** “Amy Winehouse did this thing where the music\'s super retro and old-soul, it sounds like it could be the ’40s or something, but she\'s singing about getting Slick Rick tickets. And it\'s such a cool mood, we wanted to use that. Because otherwise in song lyrics it ends at \'magazine\' and \'telephone.\' Nobody sings about anything more modern than that. But it\'s so fun to go just like, \'I\'m going to delete your email.\' It\'s such a lame burn.” **“Stick Up”** “To me, it sounds very traditional, like a blues thing almost, like a crooner. There\'s probably an early YouTube recording of it from maybe 2015. The demo is all piano and voice, but we wanted to play it live so much that we made that version. We even had a weird version of it where it was a soft version in one headphone and the energetic version through one headphone. It was so bizarre to listen to them at the same time.” **“Smoke & Mirrors”** “It\'s way more pop in structure, chords, melodies, and that kind of thing. It\'s not riff-based. And usually there\'s some fight in putting some of those songs on the record. It\'s a great change of pace, I think. It reminds me of Ramones or power-pop or something.” **“Crash Into the Weekend”** “Even though the music\'s at times pretty extreme, we still want there to be a tune somewhere in there. But \'Crash Into the Weekend\' was also like, \'Oh, this weekend\'s going to be fun, but it\'s also getting kind of weird.\' It wasn\'t just a fun weekend, there was also something scary about it. The Damned, The Cramps, and The Misfits were some of the first bands we really loved together and we always thought that aesthetic was kind of cool. I guess it just kind of came out more on this album and the title. And that\'s as dark as we\'ve been.” **“Two Kinds of Trouble”** “It\'s one of the oldest songs of the record, but it\'s also kind of a style. It feels like it belongs more on like \[2004\'s\] *Tyrannosaurus Hives*—really robotic, almost like we were trying to play synth music or program music on instruments, which we did a lot of on that album. So it was cool to put it after \'Crash Into the Weekend.\' It\'s like a juxtaposition, if you would.” **“That’s the Way the Story Goes”** “It always sounded good in our heads, but it was hard to get it to sound that way when we recorded it. I guess that riff was kind of inspired by Ty Segall or something like that. At first it was kind of really rocking, and it was kind of all over the place. There was a version that sounded a lot like Saul Williams’ ‘List of Demands (Reparations),’ where it was just kind of the beat and a bass. And then we went back to the rocking thing, and put a lot of reverb on it, and then we liked it again.” **“The Bomb”** “It\'s a dumb idea and then we did it. But we spent years trying to make that what it is. In the beginning it was, \'What do you want to do? Party. What do you not want to do? Not party.\' It\'s one of the ones we put the most effort into, but most bands wouldn\'t even have put it on the record. It\'s kind of self-referencing a little bit—it\'s what the Ramones did and Motörhead did, like, *Grow some confidence, man*.” **“What Did I Ever Do to You?”** “When we were making that, we were not sure that The Hives were going to do anything. We weren\'t getting anything to float and it just kind of felt boring. And we stopped rehearsing and stopped trying for a bit, to see if something came out of that. I bought this thing on Swedish Craigslist, an organ connected to a guitar, connected to a microphone, connected to a drum machine. Some guy built this one-man-band machine, and he sold it to me for 300 bucks with the patent. This was the first thing we wrote when we got that. It\'s almost not meant for The Hives, but the album needed a palate cleanser.” **“Step Out of the Way”** “We always had a fast short blast at the beginning of the record, at the top of the record. What was the last song? ‘What Did I Ever Do to You,’ right? So that one feels like it\'s the end of the record, but then it was cool to just, like, \'Oh no, we got another one.\'”

The Murder Capital’s second studio album Gigi’s Recovery, produced by John Congleton, will be released on January 20, 2023 via Human Season Records. Painting by Peter Doyle and designed by Aidan Cochrane.

“I\'ve always written from a place of fiction,” Andy Shauf tells Apple Music. “When I was making \[2016’s\] *The Party*, I was going to a lot of parties. When I was writing \[2020’s\] *The Neon Skyline*, I was drinking at a bar called the Skyline. It feels now like it was a bit unimaginative, but I think I was trying to do the thing that people tell you to do, which is write what you know. I came to this realization that if I want to take a step forward, I need to write something that\'s outside of writing what I know.” Like its forebears, *Norm*, the Toronto singer-songwriter\'s eighth solo LP, takes a magnifying glass to its central character, but its stories are told through a series of narrators. That’s partly because when Shauf started writing it, there wasn’t a concept at all. “I was going to call the album *Norm*, and it was just going to be a normal album—like a normal batch of songs,” he says. But once he wrote “Telephone,” the seed for a storyline was planted. “It was about someone longing to be on the phone,” he says. “Then it flips to show the perspective of this person looking in the window while they\'re calling, and it has this stalker vibe to it. I just made a mental note that this could be a character and I could call them Norm.” With the help of a friend—Shauf writes, plays all the instruments, and records on his own—he sewed the narrative together, coloring in the detail of Norm’s increasing creepiness while constantly in God’s presence. (Shauf was raised Christian in small-town Saskatchewan, but doesn’t consider himself religious now.) “I think Norm is a pretty normal guy,” he says. “He\'s a bit of a fuck-up, and he has a side of him that\'s really disconnected from reality. And he\'s got some pretty serious problems. He\'s introduced very relatably, but at a certain point there\'s a shift that can change your perspective on everything that\'s happened before.” Here Shauf talks through how Norm’s story takes shape, track by track. **“Wasted on You”** “I was reading the Old Testament and looking for stories where I could flip the perspective so that God was narrating them, so that you heard this sort of imperfect God explaining his side of it. I was picturing this conversation between God and Jesus. My familiarity with Christianity—or just cartoon Christianity—made me feel like this was the most spoon-fed, \'Here\'s God as a narrator’ story, but I like that it\'s a little bit vague.” **“Catch Your Eye”** “This is the first introduction to Norm. We\'re in his head, and we are just getting a picture of that longing. It\'s a gentle introduction. I think by the end of the song, you\'re going to realize that something is a little bit off with what he\'s doing.” **“Telephone”** “I wrote it kind of as a joke, where it was the pandemic and I was trying to connect with someone and we were talking on the telephone a lot. And there was a lot of running out of things to talk about. I was starting to dread it. I decided I would write a song that at first seemed like I really loved the telephone, and by the end of it, it just had a lot of questions or it just turned on its side. I think you could still read that song as a love song—maybe if you aren\'t paying attention for the second half.” **“You Didn\'t See”** “I needed to have a point where the relationship between Norm and God was explained. You get a glimpse into why Norm is getting away with what he\'s doing, to a certain extent, while he\'s under the eye of God—so this is a song from God\'s perspective.” **“Paradise Cinema”** “You go from God\'s perspective of Norm standing behind a tree and God\'s just continuing to keep an eye on him to this. It\'s a lazy…maybe it\'s a Sunday afternoon stroll to the cinema—for more than one person.” **“Norm”** “Originally I wrote it about Norm standing in line to buy a sandwich, and then I realized that the story in that song sucked. But it was also because in any story involving God, I think there\'s the need for a divine intervention of sorts, or God needs to make himself known. So on one instance, he helped Norm, and on this instance, he needs to tell Norm that he\'s no longer okay with what he is doing. And at the same time, it\'s just Norm grazing around, watching some *Price Is Right*.” **“Halloween Store”** “I thought that my next record was going to be a disco record. At a certain point, I just realized that I was making—I don\'t know—like cartoon music. It was like I was becoming a caricature of myself making this weird, throwback...cartoon music is the best way I can say it. But this song, I wrote it with those songs and it\'s got this super-fast triangle and like a four-on-the-floor, dancy beat. I had the first two verses of it for a long time, and it just stuck around until I found a place for it in the Norm universe. This is the point in the story where the thing that Norm has been waiting for is finally happening, and he\'s not even sure if it\'s happening.” **“Sunset”** “It’s the furthering of the event in ‘Halloween Store’—it\'s too good to be true, and it\'s too easy. I wanted it to be so simple that you\'re wondering why it\'s even possible, or it\'s a terrible thing that\'s happening and it\'s the result of something that was not intended to be terrible or was not intended to have any weight at all, which is what happens in the next song—the flipped perspective of it.” **“Daylight Dreaming”** “This was the hardest part of the record for me. This is essentially someone just trying to play a joke on someone else, and there\'s history between these people, and there\'s a history of this joke specifically. But this time it turns into something that\'s completely unintended and gives Norm his opportunity.” **“Long Throw”** “We\'re sticking with the same perspective. I struggled with this story in how to tie it together, and I had this weird thing happen where I was watching *Mulholland Drive*, looking for some inspiration, and a certain scene in the movie froze. I watched it for about five minutes thinking that I was watching an insane creative choice, and I took a lot of meaning from it in the plot of the movie. It made me realize that this story has an ending that doesn\'t really need to be in the lyrics or in the story at all. And it\'s a very simple story, and this song is the ending of it, where the third perspective is just not getting a phone call.” **“Don\'t Let It Get to You”** “I was writing a lot with the synthesizer, and just trying to use atmosphere as much as possible. This song is a summary of the story, where there\'s a lot of chance happenings, certain decisions affecting other decisions. This is the sentiment of a cruel God just saying, \'All these things happen and you just can\'t let it get to you.\' But something that I was trying to do with this record a little bit more was to let almost an improvisation guide melodies. I would play a line and then that would be the line, instead of writing a melody. I would just play it until the moment was gone, and then I\'d recreate that and maybe harmonize to it.” **“All of My Love”** “This is kind of all three perspectives on the record. If there\'s a theme to the story, it\'s this idea of a really flawed love or a really flawed perspective of what love is or what love could be. Each of these perspectives are asking the same question. It\'s essentially the same structure as the first song, musically, but it\'s shifted to a very dark version of that. If the story of Norm is showed to you in a gradually darkening way, the music is doing the same thing—where at first, it sounds really nice, and probably by the second half of the second side, the music has also gone a bit sideways—it\'s got a sinister element to it.”

In spring 2022, Ben Howard was in his garden in Ibiza when he suddenly found himself unable to speak for an hour. It was a terrifying experience—one that recurred a month later. It eventually transpired that Howard had suffered two transient ischemic attacks—also known as mini strokes—caused when the blood flow to the brain becomes temporarily restricted. These episodes dramatically shaped the songs he was working on for his fifth album, *Is It?*. “My emotional approach to the songs changed,” the London singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “My acceptance of the songs for what they were, rather than pondering them too much. It was a great opportunity to just get the songs down and realize that each record is a picture of where you are at a time and a place. And if you can be honest with that, then often it’s a better record that comes out, rather than picking it to pieces.” This more relaxed approach has resulted in perhaps the most fluid, sonically adventurous record of Howard’s career. Recorded with producer Nathan Jenkins, aka Bullion (Orlando Weeks, Westerman), *Is It?* shines and shimmers with a newfound spaciousness and light—its surfaces reflecting influences one might not have heard on Howard’s more guitar-driven records, including The Blue Nile, Arthur Russell, and Brian Eno and John Cale’s 1990 collaboration, *Wrong Way Up*. From opener “Couldn’t Make It Up” (which directly references Howard’s first mini stroke) via the mechanic tessellations of “Life in the Time” to the reflective ambience of “Spirit,” Howard has reached a place where he sounds more at ease and creatively free than ever before. Here, he talks us through the record, track by track. **“Couldn’t Make It Up”** “I wanted to make a song on the harmonium—it feels like bringing sunshine to a room sometimes. They’re quite simple arrangements on this album. I think I was less precious, melodically. I was more free, melodically, and was singing more. That’s a feature on this album, a letting go of that serious singer-songwriter thing that always rears its ugly head.” **“Walking Backwards”** “The stuttering guitar part with the double delay on it was the basis of this. It had this endless delay on it that had such an urgency to it that I thought really played against the nature of the song, which is a mantra to sitting still and having acceptance, being able to settle into your own ways. After that it seemed that every instrument we put on this record had to be either affected by delay or have some sort of stutter or punctuated time signature to it.” **“Days of Lantana”** “I think this song in a nutshell is about trying to find a gentle peace with yourself. The vocal sample on this song is Linda Thompson singing \[‘Les Troix Beaux Oiseaux de Paradis’\]. I felt it was great umbrella of my day-to-day life, the beauty and wonder around us, and then the restlessness that comes and goes. I live in Ibiza, and lantana is sort of like the flowering weed of Spain. They call it the flag of Spain because of its colors.” **“Life in the Time”** “This was written in full before I recorded it, but there was a scattering of couplets throughout the verses that were constantly being interchanged and moved around, and you can hear that on the record. I quite like that you can hear this really decisive but also indecisive and interchangeable thing. It’s a monologue essentially, but I’ve hacked a few verses out of it because it could have gone on forever.” **“Moonraker”** “I was climbing the mountains in the Sierra Nevada \[in Spain\] with my sister, but it’s not necessarily about climbing, more that vantage or viewpoint. Moonraker is a reference to people bootlegging liquor. There’s an old Wiltshire folk tale of guys who told the police they were raking the moon out of the lake in the middle of the night when they were actually bootlegging liquor. The policeman let them off and thought they were just foolish, but actually there was a point to their endeavors. It’s about the joy of fruitless things. So many things in this life are pointless and futile, but in the end seem to have a great reason or a great impact on us.” **“Richmond Avenue”** “It’s a song very much about nostalgia. I grew up in West London and it really sings to me that song about hot summer days. For some reason, London for me in the heat is more nostalgic than anywhere else. When the heat grows in the city, it’s such a palpable thing. Michael McGoldrick plays uilleann pipes on it. We were so lucky to get that on the record—it’s an incredible instrument.” **“Interim of Sense”** “I wanted to call this ‘Byzantium Leaving’ but changed the title at the last minute. I did feel unsure about what had happened to me, and I think often when you tune in, you realize that these holes and gaps appear anyway. You make so many decisions of such great intentions and then as time moves, as those plates shift, you realize the true intentions or the reasons you made those decisions weren’t necessarily what you thought they were on surface level. I often find myself in that state.” **“Total Eclipse”** “The notes I had for this one were about the minor stroke, this black-hole repetition of nothingness. It’s not replicating that moment, but the feeling. All these songs are grasping at feelings. I try and write about feelings, not about specifics. I’m just trying to touch on feelings. I’m trying to explain feelings all the way through. I guess some people are a bit more specific than others, but you’re always trying to allude to something that you can’t quite put your finger on.” **“Spirit”** “Arthur Russell has always been a big influence for me, and, if anything, we almost shied away from the string arpeggio on this because it was perhaps *too* similar to him, but it took a hold and you couldn’t get away from it. But there’s always Arthur Russell there somewhere. I’m always trying to find my own little space in music and inevitably you step on toes. Credit to Nathan \[Jenkins, aka producer Bullion\]: He took the song into a beautiful new world and away from potentially being just another modern act ripping off Arthur Russell.” **“Little Plant”** “This song is the slow down, the cooling off at the end of the record. It was quite a straight-up song, there’s not too much running around on this one. Three chords and happy days. Maybe a slight pitch shift in the middle. It’s about reality versus expectation and a grappling with the constant spark in lives of other people. In my head, there was also the idea of a young man joining the army, and why we’re pressured to do anything. Why we’re always in this constant movement towards achievement and goals and being encouraged to send ourselves over the front in various different ways—why on earth we do that, what it means and how does it make us feel? That’s only one line, though, all these songs have a lot of different interpretations. I never want to close someone’s interpretation of a song by giving them a definition. That’s my greatest fear.”

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

For The Nude Party, nearly a decade has flown by in the blink of an eye. In that time, the New York-based band has released a pair of well-received albums, an EP and played numerous shows. The band has historically worked with a producer to help them create a distinct sound in their records but with their latest effort, Rides On, the band decided to handle production duties by themselves. The hands-on approach allowed the band to have as much fun creating as they ever had at any other point in their career. They recorded over 20 songs, including some that dabbled in electro-pop and stripped-down country before settling on the final 14 songs containing the best elements of ‘70s-driven blues rock. The relaxed vibe of the session also unleashed a diverse sonic texture compared to their previous releases. Sonically, the album is reminiscent of Sticky Fingers-era Stones, but the lyrics are mini-vignettes that embody the spirit of what The Nude Party are going for — and their growth as a band. Rides On, the band confidently says, is their best record. It’s also the most homegrown and organic record The Nude Party has created to date.

Pre-order the album before 5PM GMT on Monday December 5th to receive exclusive pre-sale access for Baaba's upcoming headline gig at The Barbican, London on May 30th, 2023. Pre-sale tickets will be live from 10am GMT on Wednesday 7th December, access codes will be sent by email on Wednesday 7th December at 9am, so please make sure to accept the request to be added to Baaba's mailing list at the point of purchase. No purchase necessary, for full terms and conditions please visit www.marathonartists.com/baaba-maal-preorder-tcs.

Angel Numbers is the latest studio album which was released on February 3, 2023.

Ivorian-born Malian artist Fatoumata Diawara’s soothing, Grammy-nominated vocals have continued the magic of Malian music traditions since her debut, 2011’s *Fatou*. By staying close to her Wassoulou music style origins, the supremely cool superstar retains her pan-Africanness, but manages to incorporate new influences on her fourth studio album, *London Ko*. On \"Nsera\", shadows of Afrobeat icons Tony Allen and Fela Kuti grease the wheels for their fellow West African, who sings mesmerisingly in Bambara to open the show. English singer-songwriter Damon Albarn features here, while Ghanaian rapper M.anifest appears on “Mogokan”—reuniting Diawara with two of her collaborators from the 2012 Afrobeat album, *Rocket Juice and the Moon*. Elswhere, Cuban jazz pianist Robert Fonseca (”Blues”), African-American vocalist Angie Stone (“Somaw”) and Nigerian songstress Yemi Alade (“Tolon”) complete the clan with assured guest performances. Across the album, experiments with Afrofunk and jazz cement Diawara\'s status as an unmistakable genre-bender whose sound is nearly unclassifiable. But \"Maya\", a soulful ode that evokes memories of *Fatou* as it closes out the album, is a timely reminder that she is undeniable music royalty.

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

As musicians across the world have watched the last decade systematically eating away at the infrastructure by which they pursue their art, triumphs against adversity have sometimes entered the realm of cliche .Yet few bands have undergone quite the travails that Perm, Russia’s Gnoomes have on the road to the release of their fourth release on Rocket Recordings, Ax Ox. From such traumatic circumstances, with the band having overcome the stress of a pandemic, illness, depression and serious turmoil in their home country to reach a point where they can offer their music to the world, have arrived a kaleidoscopic and questing vision shot through with potent melancholia and strident optimism. Ax Ox runs through a gamut of vibrant emotion across its eleven tracks, from the elemental blast of kraut-pop that is ‘The Neighbour’ to the crystalline and techno-fied ‘Loops’, and across moments of jarring and skewed ambience such as ‘Mirror’ and ‘The Bridge’. Here the component parts that have always made up Gnoomes’ fresh and wide-eyed aesthetic - dreampop radiance, bold electronic experimentation and the propulsive motorik drive which moves them onward –are rendered still more vivid and transcendent, the product of a band unafraid to cross boundaries in pursuit of catharsis by any means necessary, and one still hopeful in spite of all that fate can throw at them. This album also chronicles a fractious relationship which the band have with their home country -on the one hand, this is perhaps their most explicitly Russian album to date, and the first one in which they’ve sung in their native tongue - a decision they made as a means of supporting a rapidly evolving and inspiring scene in Russia. “Feeling yourself as a part of something bigger is a great inspiration. That’s why the intention to sing in Russian was very organic. We saw that our audience is getting older with us and our music could have had more connections with these people, if we sing in Russian” says the band’s Sasha Piankov. “The last five years before the pandemic are considered to be the golden times for our music community” he adds “It was a beautiful embryo, which could grow into a very interesting creature, but it was simply killed by the stupid plans of the particular people. Many artists have already spoken out, and they’re not supporting this senseless war, but they get quickly shut up by the government.The list of artists who are not allowed to play in Russia anymore is growing up every day. It’s very painful to watch this process unfolding in front of our eyes”. As with many other Russian artists and musicians, Sasha and his wife Masha Piankova have both been forced to leave the country when mobilisation was announced in pursuit of safety, but this album still bears the hallmarks of an album influenced by the very specific experience of living in Russia in the last three decades. “In our opinion this album could be a psychedelic musical about growing up and living in the Post Soviet Russia” relates Sasha “If you watched(Adam Curtis’ documentary series) Traumazone, it’s not complicated really to imagine the visual part of the musical!” Ax Ox ultimately reflects something of an odyssey for a complex and inhospitable modern era, and perhaps the centrepiece of the record - the moment which most sums up the continuum reflected inits heartfelt yet pragmatic nature - is the uplifting kosmische travelogue of ‘Eternal Trans Siberian’. As Sasha points out, this has become “Some sort of manifesto, pretty much inspired by Stereolab. It’s a metaphor of what’s going on to our country. It feels like we’re traveling on a rusty and wrecked train through space and time. The epochs change, but the problems stay the same and we don’t know how it’s possible, but the train is still moving”. ---

Part of the fun of hearing a new Sparks album in 2023 is realizing just how deep their influence continues to run, whether through the meticulous theatricality of artists like Jack Antonoff (Fun., Bleachers) and Phoenix or the sheer overload of hyperpop. The imagery is still funny and immediate (the bored but overemotional protagonist of the title track, the baby trying to climb back into its mother’s womb on “Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is”), and the music wound so tightly it sounds like its buttons are about to pop off (“We Go Dancing”). And while the brotherly duo’s blend of bitter irony and wide-eyed novelty might’ve seemed misanthropic 50 years ago, now it sounds like a familiar prognosis: Just listen to “Gee, That Was Fun,” where an ever-swelling din of voices lists off all the other things they could’ve done instead of being with you before a lonely Russell Mael concedes he had a pretty good time after all.

For his 19th solo album, punk godfather and infamous Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop teamed up with superproducer Andrew Watt and an all-star band. Featuring appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, and blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—among others—the songs on *EVERY LOSER* are essentially played by famous musicians who grew up listening to Iggy Pop. “Andrew is very all-star-oriented in general,” Iggy says of the young producer. “It\'s like a fetish with him. Amusingly, he has an incredible collection of mint-condition rock star T-shirts. Once we started working together, he started wearing Iggy Pop T-shirts. Every day I got to see a new one.” Lyrically, *EVERY LOSER* sees Iggy seesawing from stream-of-consciousness bitch-fests (“Modern Day Ripoff,” “All the Way Down”) and love songs to Miami (“New Atlantis”) to reading the classifieds as a way to honor a decades-old suggestion from Andy Warhol (“The News for Andy”). The title of the album comes from a line in the social-media-inspired track “Comments” in which Pop says, “Every loser needs a bit of joy.” “Andrew suggested that whole line as the title,” he tells Apple Music. “If I was Pink Floyd, maybe I could get away with that. But I’m not, so I came back with *EVERY LOSER*.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Frenzy”** “There’s some name-calling there, but it’s just one particular dick and prick who gave me the ammo for those lines. No, you can’t ask who it is—but I’m sure he knows. It’s not a total rant, but it’s in the tradition of ‘Leader of the Pack’ or something like that. There’s some aggro there, but once it’s in motion you’re thinking about all sorts of things—the sharks in the sea that are out get you—but you’re also thinking about, ‘Shut up and love me, will you?’ Many things are ping-ponging in your mind. It’s a very tough little three minutes of rock music.” **“Strung Out Johnny”** “Andrew is a producer who’s also a top-flight musician and a good writer. When he sent me this song, he put a little provisional title on it—‘Strung Out Johnny.’ I thought, ‘I know something about that subject. I could sing on that.’ So we kept the title. I’m singing it to the archetypal Johnny, the universal young man. I wanted to sing to him about how it goes—step one, step two, step three, and then you’re fucked. But I wanted to put myself in there too, so the song would be a little warmer and more sincere.” **“New Atlantis”** “It\'s a love song to Miami and an homage to Donovan, who had a song called ‘Atlantis.’ Things are sinking here in Miami. I’ve experienced it because I’ve been here 24 years. But I do love this place. I’ve had the best years of my life here. I remember talking to Andrew about the song while he was on a boat in the Bahamas. I said, ‘You know Atlantis, the lost civilization, is right under you? Have you heard the song by Donovan?’ I don’t think he had. So he started blasting it out all over the sea on the boat speaker system.” **“Modern Day Ripoff”** “This came at a point in the record when I was starting to get cranky because I’m like 45 years older than Andrew and his energy doesn’t stop. I told him, ‘In The Stooges, we’d just do seven songs and an instrumental. Isn’t that enough?’ But no, he said we needed more, more, more. So, for the last three songs—starting with this one—I started writing bitchy lyrics. It’s just a standard middle-aged-white-guy-complaining song, but tongue-in-cheek. At one point it says, ‘Why can’t I do blow anymore? I can’t smoke a joint because I’m too paranoid? What the fuck?’” **“Morning Show”** “Andrew asked me if I was interested in doing a ballad, and I said yes. This was something he already had in his pocket. It’s like a Stones-type ballad. I never talked to him about it, but I’m guessing that was the inspiration. But I approached it more like a mature country singer would. A lot of people imagine it might be about, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to wake up and be Iggy Pop again,’ but it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just about feeling down and depressed but putting as good a face on it as you can. Kinda like ‘Tears of a Clown’ by Smokey Robinson.” **“The News for Andy (Interlude)”** “When I was making *Funhouse* with The Stooges, we shared a motel with Andy Warhol and his entourage, who were making the film *Heat* at the time. At one point, Andy suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you just read the newspaper and let that be the vocal of the song?’ I never did anything about it, but I told the story to Andrew and he was dying. He said we should do it. So what I’m saying here is from three different advertisements that were in the free handout paper that was laying around the studio that day. You know, the local spreadsheet that’s sponsored by strip bars and usually run by leftists.” **“Neo Punk”** “Travis Barker is playing on this, and I guess he walked right into that one. But he plays so well on it. The way he plays on the choruses sounds like he listened to ‘I Got a Right’ by The Stooges. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the way that punk started out as one music and then became many musics and then ultimately seeped into the fashion world, into ethics, sexual orientations, all sorts of things. And suddenly people are making very quick, very large money out of doing things in a punky way. That’s kind of what it’s about.” **“All the Way Down”** “This is another one of the songs where I was getting crankier during the sessions. The guitarist in my band had posted a little footage of me from our last tour. I was dismantling the mic stand and she titled it ‘Full beast mode.’ I was quite proud that I could still manage the full beast mode. So, the song is basically saying, ‘I’m gonna go full on, and then complain a little bit.’ Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam plays on this one. I opened some shows for them many years ago, and their fans weren’t interested. They just wanna see Pearl Jam.” **“Comments”** “The music has a beautiful, lonely vibe to it, but then the chorus is so happy. What makes me happy these days is getting a giant check for doing something easy. And the loneliness part, that comes from Zuckerberg and Musk. I will look at the comments \[on social media\] until I get a general picture, but then I just sort of feel like I’m going to puke. Even if they’re positive—because it’s just one after the next after the next. And it’s always ‘You’re great!’ or ‘You’re a piece of shit!’ There’s not much in the middle, generally.” **“My Animus (Interlude)”** “What I\'m trying to say there is that I have a certain pride in the idea that my front, when I want to put it forward, is not dependent on being some kind of multimillionaire, or chart-topper, or stadium king, or any of that. It comes from me, and it comes from what I think is just a healthy ability I have—and I\'ve maintained—to be able to seek out the important pleasures in life. That’s how I’d put it.” **“The Regency”** “There’s a very interesting relationship between the parking business, the banks, and the stadium business. The real money is in that parking lot. It’s a really big business. That’s sort of what this song is talking about. And Taylor Hawkins played on this and ‘Comments.’ He really makes them come alive. I had met Taylor when I opened for the Foo Fighters, and then he played me in the CBGB movie. His abs were the movie poster, presumably as my abs.”